There was irony: Alibaba's Jack Ma stating his interest in acquiring Yahoo while Yahoo's Jerry Yang stood in the wings awaiting his chance to get onstage. John Roese, head of Huawei's North American R&D team, said "If you wanted to build a wireless network today in the US, your choice of vendors would be a Swedish vendor, a Finnish vendor, a French vendor and two Chinese vendors...today we build the networks for 45 of the top 50 operators in the world. The remaining five, a chunk of them, happen to be in the US."

As a survivor of the dotcom boom/bust, I kept thinking how many of the "new paradigms" promised in the halcyon 90s have become reality, and what was considered outlandish then is commonplace today. When I worked for asia.internet.com, owner Alan Meckler said on his Hong Kong visits that any industry-segment would ultimately shake out to three or four major competitors, and the Net would be no exception. The wildcard in the deck (which no one foresaw in the 90s): the business rivalry between China and the USA--a rivalry that was referenced repeatedly during AsiaD.

But the big fish was ex-USA Vice President Al Gore: the man who many feel should have been President after the 2000 election. Gore, who described himself as a "recovering politician" during a cocktail reception the night before, took the stage along with Mossberg and unspooled his considerable knowledge for the IT-centric audience. Gore has become known as an advocate for climate change post-political-career, with his film "An Inconvenient Truth" and now an iPhone app called "Our Choice," with proceeds from its sale going to the nonprofit Alliance for Climate Protection.