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[Commentary] Blackberry. Nokia. Best Buy. What is common to all three of these stories is the degree to which these companies came to dominate their markets and the speed and unpredictability of their falls.

This dynamic is something relatively new in business and one that we are only just beginning to understand. And while Apple, Google and Amazon have emerged as the big winners from this dynamic, they are no less vulnerable to it than Research in Motion, Nokia and Best Buy once were. Rapid change in technology is obviously a common thread running through all of these stories. While it’s difficult to figure out how new technology will develop, it’s impossible to say how it will be adapted. It is only in hindsight that Nokia looks so dumb not to have fully understood the promise of surfing the net while listening to music or for BlackBerry not to have realized that people would prefer to type their messages on a flat screen than pushing buttons with their thumbs. The key to success in such a fast-changing environment isn’t developing clairvoyance. It’s keeping a mind open to numerous possibilities, having the discipline to experiment with several conflicting strategies and moving quickly to embrace one of them when the direction of the market becomes clear. A second lesson is that as long as the technology remains unsettled, so will be the business models around that technology. The point here is that over the next decade we’re likely to see many more Nokias, RIMs and Best Buys before the technology sector settles into a more stable, predictable competitive dynamic. Until then, you should be highly skeptical of anyone who claims to know how it’s going to shake out.

An early milestone for Twitter came back in 2007, when tweets-per-day tripled virtually overnight -- to 60,000 from 20,000. Earlier this month, during the final-night telecast of the Democratic National Convention, chatter about President Barack Obama's speech alone drove up to 52,757 tweets per minute, a new record. (A week earlier, Mitt Romney clocked in at a peak of 14,289 TPM during his speech.) Overall, the 90 minutes of the convention that aired in prime time that night inspired more than 2.5 million tweets.

But beyond the B2B, back-end and app companies, who's actually making money off social TV where it really counts -- at the network level? What does it take to monetize social? Over the past year, as Nielsen has released research that correlates rising social buzz with increases in ratings, there's been plenty of debate of the chicken-and-egg variety. But the London Olympics helped convert a lot of skeptics.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit granted a stay in the long-running copyright case between the Authors Guild and Google over the search giant’s book scanning project.

In its order, the New York court agreed to stay proceedings in a lower court while it reviews Judge Denny Chin’s decision last May to certify the class action — a move that allowed authors and illustrators to go forward with claims that Google scanned their works without permission. The decision means that the overall case will be on hold for several months. If the appeals court upholds the certification order, it will likely return the case to Judge Chin (who is now on the Second Circuit too) with detailed instructions about how to proceed.

Over the last year, several labels crossed the threshold at which digital gains are making up for physical losses. Here is why:

1. Legal services are blossoming: The number of easy-to-use legal, licensed music offerings, many of them offering free music to users, is growing fast, now numbering around 500 in 78 countries. Labels and policymakers alike have long believed that attractive legal services are the best antidote to piracy – and they are finally flourishing in number.
2. Governments are supportive: In countries like the UK, France, New Zealand and South Africa, labels have won government support for introducing graduated-response measures against persistent infringers, ranging from warnings to disconnection from the internet. When Sweden introduced a law under which freeloaders’ details would be shared with copyright holders, torrent traffic plummeted, albeit temporarily.
3. Labels are winning court support: Individual court decisions are also going labels’ way. Like in the UK, Finland, Denmark and Austria, where the country’s top ISPs block The Pirate Bay. In Britain, other sites pointing to unauthorized hosts are also getting taken down via injunction.
4. Intermediaries are playing ball: Search giants like Google and Baidu, enticed by the prospect of operating their own music services, are now making efforts to filter from search results links to illegally-hosted material. Likewise, payment processors like MasterCard, PayPal and Visa are working together with police to prohibit payments to unauthorized music sellers in Russia.