Excerpts from a recent AOL Board of Directors article I contributed to.

Love it or hate it — Twitter appears here to stay. The popular social networking and microblogging platform, which now boasts more than 100 million users, has become a favorite among celebrities, Justin Bieber fans, even the Dalai Lama (417,000 followers and counting!).

But many businesses are discovering that the rapid-fire medium can be a great way to connect with customers, promote new products and special offers, respond to complaints, and track what people are saying about them — and the competition.

In fact, the San Francisco startup founded by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone, is increasingly pushing the business applications of its platform, as the tech world continues to question how it will actually make money. “Twitter is a communication platform that helps businesses stay connected to their customers,” reads the Twitter 101 for Business guide on Twitter.com. “As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and other people who care about your company.”

(For those of you who don’t know an “RT” from a “DM” — Twitter allows users to post messages up to 140 characters from their computers or phones, which are then displayed on their profile pages and sent out to their subscribers, or “followers.”)

As you would imagine, the Twittershphere is littered with a lot of mindless chatter, which is one of the primary knocks against it. To tweet is easy. To tweet well is a whole other story. And it’s a question many entrepreneurs are grappling with today.

So is Twitter really worth your time and effort? Can it actually help boost the bottom line? Between them, the members of our Board of Directors have nearly 1 million followers — so they must be doing something right. We asked them to share their thoughts on all things Twitter.

Rob Adams

Director, Global Moot Corp Program at the University of Texas

“To me, Twitter is like visiting your favorite bar and catching up with your friends, only you can do it from your desk whenever you want to. I think this is a good corollary for how business gets done on Twitter too. Would you buy a car or insurance from one of your social friends? Kind of doubtful as a sustainable strategy — little bit of business bantering works, but try to scale it or turn it into a ‘marketing program’ and you won’t have many friends to catch up with.”

There’s a great event coming up on March 26, The McCombs Alumni Conference. I’ll be presenting at it along with great professors like Sandy Leeds and Jim Nolen. I’m going to avoid the free market gloom and doom apologies of my finance professor brethren and focus on two major topics. The first will be the pending introduction of Texas Venture Labs, a program to increase entrepreneurship across the UT Austin campus. The other item I’ll focus on will be the process we’ve used thus far to produce the successes of multiple UT Austin based start-ups, and that’s the process of Market Validation.

In a previous blog post I covered how Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phone operating systems were pulling away from the emerging second tier phone operating system providers Microsoft, Nokia and Intel. As these second tier players lose more and more market share these suppliers thrash their operating systems to respond to the competition.

As covered by Ashlee Vance in a well done NYT article, the stakes are high. Microsoft’s share alone moved down from 11.8% to 8.7% (according to Gartner) in a year, while smartphones with other operating systems are surging. Analysts expect more smartphones than PCs will be sold by 2012.

Microsoft’s strategy originally followed the Windows desktop in an effort to leverage the huge installed base and existing user’s “muscle memory” from using Windows every day – a great strategy in theory. The reality was a user interface that didn’t fit in the limited real estate and keyboard of a smart-phone user interface and sluggish performance based on the overhead-heavy Windows architecture. This strategy has backfired, and now Microsoft is moving to mimic it’s Zune music player.

Microsoft has its work cut out for it. Can the company develop a strategy that keeps them competitive without leveraging the installed base of Windows? Is the Zune interface really the one to mimic? Microsoft is also pushing to control the headset design that uses its operating system, a business tactic that is bound to get some push-back from smartphone suppliers.

From a strategy standpoint, Microsoft’s strict adherence to software worked well with a PC architecture, where it dominates. It does not transfer to the smartphone environment. Apple has always controlled both the hardware and operating system, giving it total control of the user experience. Google, with its Android operating system, is following the same course of action by developing its own hardware platform while making the operating system widely available to other handset suppliers.

Stay tuned. As Microsoft’s strategy unfolds I’ll continue to blog about it.

Talk about waking up and knowing you were going to have a bad day, how would you like to be in the newspaper industry these days?

First Warren Buffett, who has a large stake in the Washington Post (WPO), had some choice thoughts about the newspaper industry. Some of his better comments (sourced from an article by Alistair Barr) include the possibility of “unending losses” for the industry and that Berkshire Hathaway wouldn’t do a current investment in the industry “at any price.”

This comes on the heels of a recent and bold announcement by the New York Times (NYT) to charge for frequent access to its website. The announcement showed the leadership position the Times holds, but the fine print proved somewhat cowering; the details were not available and the policy will not go into effect until January 2011.

The print model for news is dying fast and the question is how long will it take before even stalwarts like the New York Times and Washington Post succumb? What is the next generation of content distribution? Has Google already won? Regardless of the outcome, the opportunities that will be opened up are pretty significant.

There’s been a lot of speculation in the press about the shortcomings of the iPad. This is just Apple’s execution of shipping a minimally acceptable feature set; get the product out, get people to pay for it and follow up quickly to address the shortcomings. It really reflects their entrepreneurial roots and is the right way to capture early adopters who will spread the word about the product.

To see how this has successfully worked for them in the past, look back to the first iPods. Wall Street hammered their stock (remember back when it was around $6?) for selling a “low” margin consumer product to teenagers versus their higher margin desktop machines to corporations. The first iPods were expensive, had short battery lives and a high failure rate. In hindsight it’s hard to argue with Apple’s current stock price, and the fact that 100 million iPods have been sold in the US alone. I think its safe to say the strategy worked.

Fast forward from the first iPod to the current iPhone and even today critics point to the shortcomings. Here again, it’s hard to argue with success. Arguably the iPhone is in the early phase of market demand as evidenced by the only domestic carrier is still AT&T, so they have plenty of runway left, and the US is one of the smaller markets for the product when you look at China and India. Again I’d say the strategy worked.

The bottom line here is to be entrepreneurial, you have to ship what you’ve got versus waiting for perfection. If you doubt this, look no further than Apple’s market capitalization, which is still bigger than Dell’s and HP’s combined.  The market says their strategy is working.

In a interesting change in product strategy, Verizon announced it would be supporting a version of Skype for use on its network. Skype is available on the iPhone, but can only be used when connected via 802.11. The Verizon offering allows Skype to access the Internet over the cellular network, circumventing the phone company and it’s well established revenue model.

The implications here are staggering and can’t be ignored – this is the beginning of the end of classical telecommunications services. How long it will take remains to be determined, but sometime in the next decade there will be no need for the classical cellular network as 802.11 becomes widely available. This also spells the end of the typical cell phone companies and their revenue models; AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc.

The pressure from Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone gets Microsoft, Nokia, and Intel to part with their previous phone operating systems for entirely new environments. The stakes are high in this great Technology section article from the NYT. The strategy implications are significant here – they are abandoning their installed bases to chase more promising opportunities. It will be interesting to see how they validate their markets and pursue strategies to differentiate themselves from each other and the lead dogs of Android and iPod.