In a talk earlier this year to employees, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop asked a question that many were probably afraid to answer truthfully, given how Nokia is struggling to combat the iPhone. As BusinessWeek described it:

When he asks how many people in the crowd use an iPhone or Android device, few hands go up. "That upsets me, not because some of you are using iPhones, but because only a small number of people are using iPhones. I'd rather people have the intellectual curiosity to understand what we're up against."

This is refreshing statement; many executives would have berated their employees for not keeping the faith while a company faced its biggest crisis.

Think some information vendors need to read this article.

ReadWriteWeb is reporting that "Internet Archive Partners With 150 Libraries to Launch an E-Book Lending Program."

This new digital lending system will allow library patrons to borrow up to 5 e-books at a time for up to 2 weeks. People can choose to borrow either an in-browser version (that can be read via the Internet Archives' e-reader that we covered here last December) or a PDF or ePUB version. The latter will allow readers to access the borrowed books from a number of devices, including iPads, laptops, and libraries' own computers.

Everyone is busy imagining why the IBM computer Watson is so important to their own industry. Robert C. Weber writes in the National Law Journal about how great it will be when computers like Watson can perform legal research on their own.

Imagine a new kind of legal research system that can gather much of the information you need to do your job — a digital associate, if you will. With the technology underlying Watson, called Deep QA, you could have a vast, self-contained database loaded with all of the internal and external information related to your daily tasks, whether you're preparing for litigation, protecting intellectual property, writing contracts or negotiating an acquisition. Pose a question and, in milliseconds, Deep QA can analyze hundreds of millions of pages of content and mine them for facts and conclusions — in about the time it takes to answer a question on a quiz show.

Heard through Harvard Law Library on twitter