On Monday morning, everyone was talking about Amazon’s future plans to use personalized drones to deliver purchases within 30 minutes to certain destinations. Several years ago, prognosticators started proclaiming that drones would be as ubiquitous as cell phones and would be used for everything from deliveries to data collection. Indeed, last year at the Consumer Electronics Show, about 15 startups focused on consumer drone applications. The University of Alaska at Fairbanks is developing a regional entrepreneurial ecosystem around drone technology. br Ford Motor CEO Alan Mulally has been topping lists as the most desirable candidate to take the reins from Steve Ballmer at Microsoft, but the odds are going down on the 68-year-old executive leaving the automaker. Ford board director Edsel Ford II, great-grandson of company founder Henry Ford, told Bloomberg "Frankly, he has told us that his plan is to stay with Ford through the end of 2014." br Microsoft’s stock is up 47 over the past 12 months and both European and U.S. regulators have cleared the way for its purchase of Nokia. In fact if you look at the numbers, the Windows Phone is the fastest growing smartphone platform, it’s the 2nd most used OS in Latin America and India, it grew 48 year over year in EMEA and enjoyed a 366 increase for Nokia Lumia sales in the United States.