Egypt Unplugged or How to Switch Off the Internet

"There was no giant lever or big red button involved, but in reality it was almost as easy: the Egyptian Government simply issued an order for ISPs to shut down service."

From Gizmodo

How Egypt Turned Off the Internet

Southern Sudan - The All Say "Yes!"

"The preliminary official results from southern Sudan’s independence vote prove unsurprising to Sudan-watchers. Figures posted over the weekend on the referendum commission’s website show that more than 99 percent of voters in the south’s plebiscite want secession for their oil-rich but everything-else-poor homeland."

From The Economist Blog Baobab

Still no name. Flag anyone?

Doghouse Diaries - The Job Interview

Another great one from DOGHOUESEDIARIES

Paris - Atelier de meubles industriels.

"Il lui manque un je-ne-sais-quoi d'excitant, de viril, de brut de fonderie, de mal dégrossi. Votre appartement, il serait tout simplement parfait avec une touche d'industriel.

L'atelier 154 est situé dans une allée pavée et herbeuse du 11ème. Quand on y pénètre, on laisse la ville lisse en contreplaqué derrière nous. Tout au fond, on entre dans le Showroom et on se laisse guider par Stéphane Quatresous, le maître des lieux."

(more) from My Little Paris

Vior Atelier de meubles industriels

Atelier 154
154 rue Oberkampf, Paris 11e, Métro Ménilmontant
Tel : 06 62 32 79 06
www.atelier154.com

Avec (of course!) le dessin imbattable du site

Apple: Cash in the Bank

Apple's Insane Pile Of Cash In Context

From SAI Silicon Valley Insider

via ScribeFire

Brisbane Floods; Before and After Pictures

ABC News Australia has a series of 'before and after' pictures.

"High-resolution aerial photos taken over Brisbane last week have revealed the scale of devastation across dozens of suburbs and tens of thousands of homes and businesses.The aerial photos of the Brisbane floods were taken in flyovers on January 13 and January 14. Hover over each photo to view the devastation caused by flooding."

Brisbane floods: before and after

(part one of a two part photo series)

via ScribeFire

Steve Jobs -- A Life So Far from Gizmodo

All you ever wanted to know about Steve Jobs and Apple.

And well researched and written, as well by Gizmodo

The Life of Steve Jobs - So Far

via ScribeFire

The Tunisian Revolution - Views from the Arab Press

The Economist has this usefull roundup of extracts of Arab newspaper comments on the Tunisian or 'Jasmine' Revolution.

What the Arab Papers Say

via ScribeFire

A Movie Review with a Difference of "The King's Speech"

The Economist in it's Bagehot Blog has published a 'Very British' review of the film "The King's Speech"

The irony of this review is in the way the reviewer himself reveals all those British character traits he is reviewing, be they preposterous or not.

See

Of magic and daylight  - '“The King's Speech” is both preposterous and oddly shrewd about Britain'

via ScribeFire

(Are you) Obsessed With Facebook.

From Techi.com

 

Link to orginal article

Apparently, A Lot of People Are Obsessed With Facebook

via ScribeFire

A Selection of Economist Print Edition Covers

From the Asia Pacific Cover

 

From the North American Edition

via ScribeFire

Who Owns Facebook? They Do!

 

From SAI Business Insider Chart of the Day

via ScribeFire

Google Chrome and the Web Store

Since upgrading my Google Chrome browser after Windows 7 crash about a month ago, I find myself using the rather excellent Google  Web Store  more and more often.

The first time it appears it looks like the image below when opening browser page, assuming you have not book marked another page as your 'home' page

When coming across it for the the first time you don't really know what's behind it. Like a lot of things 'Google', there's no real instructions or indication as to what exactly one will find in this "Web Store". And, again typically Google, it's only after a while that you realise that there are in fact a number of parts or sections to the Web Store.

There are the Apps, the Extensions and The Themes.

No real need to explain what can be found in each section, as the titles say it all.  a better way is to present a screen shot of apps from the store that I am currently have access to in my opening browser screen.

The screen shot at the end of this post was taken using FireShot, an extension available in the Web Store.

I am using regularly:

• CirdBee - an easy to use Small Business Invoicing app.
• The Amazing Salon.com reader app.
• And those games - really good especially "Entanglement" which is off the screen capture.

Check out the store, as they say...

The Contrasting Opinion on the Economic Impact of the Queensland Floods

A view hot from the horses mouth, or rather from the flood plains gives rise to this type of qoute:

"Several factors suggest some of the key economic impacts may be limited."

and

"The impact is set to be greater than the floods of 2008 and will have an impact on economic activity and create a marginal risk to risk to first quarter CPI"

Quotes from an article in the Business Spectator that in term reproduces a report by the Westpac/St George Bank team of Matthew Hassan, senior economist at Westpac and Justin Smirk chief economist at St George Bank. Report is entitiled "The Big Wet"

See

A deluge of economic uncertainty (a free sign up is usually required to view)

 

However a view from the cold and in any case wet Northern Hemisphere gives rise to this contrasting quote:

"The floods’ economic impact will be harsh. Some economists reckon they could cut Australia’s growth this year by up to 1%."

"With Western Australia, Queensland has counted as one of Australia’s two commodity-rich boom states, driving a so-called “two-speed economy”. Last year, Queensland accounted for 62% of Australia’s exports of black coal."

From The Economist blog Asian View

Breaking the riverbanks

 

It's going to be intersting to see who will be right.

 

 

via ScribeFire

Watch "The Trashmaster" - A Movie made entirely from scenes in Grand Theft Auto IV.

More from Gizmodo (must be that time of year)

"French filmmaker Mathieu Weschler spent two years making The Trashmaster. And that's not the crazy thing. What's insane is that the film's footage (an epic 88-minutes of sex, drugs and violence) is made entirely from scenes in Grand Theft Auto IV."

The embed is in fact the whole movie.

I have watched about ten minutes of it and it is truly well done. Will be watching the rest (love the French sub titles).

The Trashmaster

The trashmaster (nouvelle version nouvelle voix-off !)
Uploaded by murakawa. - Discover more gaming videos.

via ScribeFire

Female Attractiveness: The More You are the More You are Not

(the) Paradox: "...when some men think you're ugly, other men are more likely to message you. And when some men think you're cute, other men become less interested. Why would this happen?"

If you bear with Gizmodo to the end, and disregard the way too hot picture comparision of Megan Fox (yes that's the link to it), their analysis of which girl is hot and which is not in the eyes of men makes instinctive sense.

There's game theory and mathamatical equations, very geeky but eminently sensible.

See

The Math of Beauty

via ScribeFire

The Daily: An iPad Electronic Only Newspaper from Steve and Rupert.

"Steve Jobs will join Rupert Murdoch on stage at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to reveal iPad newspaper The Daily.."

"The date for the event is said to be January 19..."

"The Daily is specific, especially for Murdoch’s media powerhouse News Corp., as it will have no web or print edition – the only way to get it will be on the iPad, where each edition will cost $0.99."

Tellingly most of the comments on this Mushable article say that it will be a flop.

My rating? It will depend on style and content. A big issue the app will have to overcome is an almost universal dislike by most online readers of anything that Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. does online. We have to assume that Rupert is aiming for the 'corporate' market or rather all those middle aged men who have bought an iPad to look groovey and for whom 0.99 cents a read is chump change.

My take? It's going to be a stuggle but News Corp. have deep pockets so it will not be pulled after a few months if the numbers don't look good.

And by the way, Steve comes up smelling roses all around: doing his bit for the traditional journalists, bridging the generation gap (in geek terms anyway), and Apple makes more app money.

From Musable.com

Jobs and Murdoch to Unveil “The Daily” January 19 

via ScribeFire

Facebook: It's a Waste of Time.

The number one reason people give for not signing up with Facebook is not privacy but "it's a waste of time", and there has been an increase in people citing this reason since Septemeber 2010.

From SAI Business Insider's Chart of the Day

The Number One Reason People Still Haven't Joined Facebook

via ScribeFire

The Sudan: Juba Boom Town

"New restaurants and bars are sprouting up everywhere. Government ministers (many of whom have swapped their uniforms for sharp business suits) like to go to Da Vinci, an Italian eatery on the banks of the Nile. Foreign aid workers prefer Logali House, known for its fast internet access. East Africans gather at Home & Away for Thai food. Ukrainian and Russian pilots can be found at Oasis Camp and Sudanese hipsters, many of them returning from abroad, go to Havana, a bar set up by some of the so-called Cuban Jubans, a group of south Sudanese who went off to see Fidel a few decades ago and are drifting back now."

Love the Cuban Jubans and the Havana Bar.

But will some please tell what they will name the place? Southern Sudan is so bland. Get inspired from those Cuban Jubans!

From The Economist Blog Baobab

Boom town

via ScribeFire

The Gabrielle Giffords Shooting - A Quote

"Our gun laws are so weak that someone who couldn't get into the military, who was kicked out of school, and who used drugs walked into a gun store and was able to immediately buy a semiautomatic weapon."

Quote by Daniel Vice, senior attorney at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Taken from the Salon.com article

Weapon in rampage was banned under Clinton-era law

via ScribeFire

Baltic Dry Index (BDI) Revisited - Same Old Same Old.

It's time for my non regular look at the Baltic Dry Index.

What's wrong with this chart?

Yep. It's same old same old, and that's the real worry.

via ScribeFire

Devil Crabs and Global Warming - They Came into the Cold

Could not resist quoting this verbatim from The Wall Street Journal's latest "Opinion Journal" by James Taranto

""Thousands of dead crabs have washed up along the Kent coast, with environmental experts believing the cold weather in Britain is to blame," London's Daily Mail reports. That can only mean one thing: global warming! Seriously, that is what these guys are claiming:

The Velvet swimming crabs--also called devil crabs--are thought to be victims of Britain's coldest December in 120 years, which left sea temperatures much lower than average. . . . Coastal warden Tony Sykes said: "We suspect that climate change and warmer weather has lured the crabs towards the shoreline. . . ."

So this isn't the same ridiculous claim we've been hearing lately, that global warming causes cold weather. Rather, the problem here seems to be that the crabs made the mistake of believing in global warming."

Original article from The Daily Mail

40,000 'devil' crabs wash up on Kent coast after dying from hypothermia in freezing sea

via ScribeFire

Shoot Your Dinner with a Bow in the Kalahari

If you are bored with bang bang when game hunting, then get a load of whosh whosh in the Kalahari with real Bushmen.

"The Zu/’hoasi Initiation Hunt, an eight-day stint as a Kalahari tribesman culminating in an all-day hunting party, taking reservations now."

Organised by the luxury travel company Urban Nomads, this particular US$11,440 itinerary seems not to be on the site but a copy of the safari can be found here under Botswana

Orginal details from UrbanDaddy.com under

The Tribe Has Spoken Bow Hunting on the Kalahari

via ScribeFire

Goldman and the $50 Billion Balloon - Facebook

"In 2009 Rolling Stone described Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, as “a great vampire squid” that likes to stick its “blood funnel” into anything that can make it money. This week the squid inked yet another high-profile deal."

From The Economist 

Is Facebook really worth $50 billion?

via ScribeFire

WikiLeaks and The DOJ subpoenas

The US DOJ, in the the usual US subtle fashion, has demanded "....information 'about all my tweets and more since November 1st 2009.'" - referring to Birgitta Jónsdóttir -- a former WikiLeaks volunteer and current member of the Icelandic Parliament.

The request "includes all mailing addresses and billing information known for the user, all connection records and session times, all IP addresses used to access Twitter, all known email accounts, as well as the 'means and source of payment,' including banking records and credit cards.  It seeks all of that information for the period beginning November 1, 2009, through the present."

Frankly a ridiculous amount of information even if her Twitter profile shows 1,126 tweets. I mean, seriously how many times has she logged on to Twitter in a year? As to 'means and source of payment' - I wish I could make money out of my Twitter account.

From Salon.com

DOJ subpoenas Twitter records of several WikiLeaks volunteers

via ScribeFire

On Getting Upsold on Wine.

Lettie Teague, The Wall Street Journal Wine Critic, writes about the pain of being on the end of an aggressive upsale of wine in expensive restaurants.
"The sommelier thumbed back a few pages. There were a few wines that she liked to offer "special" people, she said and pointed to one—the 1993 Domaine Jean-Jacques Confuron, Les Vignottes, for $160. It was a Burgundy from a very good producer, from a successful year—but it was also $100 more than my original selection."
We have all been there, and would agree that in the end it's bad marketing and should be stomped on.
See
The Outrage of the Upsell

via ScribeFire

British Newspapers - Online vs Print

This blogger thinks that the efforts by New Corp and others to make people pay for access to online newspapers are doomed to failure, as put forward in the post News Online and The Paywall Debate - To Build or Not to Build?

A perhaps more balanced view is advanced by The Economist in their article Bold newspapers The crucible of print - Britain’s embattled newspapers are leading the world in innovation

Quotes of interest from the story

• "Britain’s newspaper market is the world’s most savage. It is unusually competitive: there are nine national daily papers with a circulation of more than 200,000. And advertising has migrated online more quickly than elsewhere."
• "News Corporation’s paywalls have led to a drastic drop in traffic. A survey by Mark Oliver, a consultant, finds that only 14% of regular Times readers and just 1% of non-regular ones subscribe to the website in some form: upon hitting the paywall, most head for the BBC’s free website instead."
• "The Daily Mail contends that online advertising works fine—if you are huge."

 

via ScribeFire

Hiccups from The Doghouse Diaries.

 

More like this can be found at DogHouseDiaries

via ScribeFire

Death of the Slide - Kodachrome Becomes Extinct.

"Photographer Daniel Bayer discusses his love affair with Kodachrome, and how it led him to start ‘The Kodachrome Project’ online, and to travel the country shooting more than a thousand rolls of the film before it became extinct. "

From Newsweek

via ScribeFire

Spawning - The Sons of WikiLeaks

Besides the now recognized OpenLeaks setup by former Wikileaks members Herbert Snorrason, a 25-year-old Icelandic historian and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German former hacker, the orginal site is spawning madly.

Get a crack at

• BrusselsLeaks - launched by a group of former European Union officials and journalists (note the "s")
• IndoLeaks - for Indonesia (not India)
• BalkanLeaks - for, well the Balkans (remember them?)
• TuniLeaks - no, not a Green campaign against over fishing. Tunisia this time (do they need to leak?).

And best of all

PirateLeaks - No. Wrong, nothing to do with the identity of the next customer the music business intends to sue for billions for downloading $20 worth of music.

This is the leak site of the the Czech Republic.

Must be something to do with Prague night clubs, or something like that.

From globalpost

Imitators create new WikiLeaks sites

via ScribeFire

The Largest Market in the World - The Forex or Foreign Exchange Market $7 Trillion Daily and Counting.

"...a 20% increase in global foreign exchange (FX) market activity over the past three years, bringing average daily turnover to $4 trillion"

Yes, that is a daily volume amount, and it's increased by 20% since 2007. And in spite of the comments in the article below, the foreign exchange market remains mostly unregulated and functions very well

How governments would love to get their greedy hand on it but just do not dare. It's too big, too powerful and too important.

From Vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists

Full article

The $4 trillion question: What explains FX growth since the 2007 survey?

 

Voice your Wall

Depending on what you were saying, these pictures of your voice print could make for an interesting before dinner drinks conversation.
From the Canadian company VoicePrints comes this art form of printing your voice and hanging the results on your wall.



Now is that a shout, a word or 'what were you saying?'

Original story via Thrillist.com (original link)

The All Important Revenue per User - Chart of the Day

"How much is a unique visitor worth on the Internet? Depends on who you are. Amazon (e-commerce) is generating $189 per user. Google (search) is generating $24 per user. Facebook (social networking) is only generating $4 per user according to this chart from JP Morgan's Imran Khan. "

From SAI Business Insider Chart of the Day

Here's How Much A Unique Visitor Is Worth

Queensland Floods - Who Says Financial Publications are Dull

Under the article heading 

Australian producers face huge floods bill

The Financial Times ends it's story with this photo entitled

"Emergency supplies: crates of beer are loaded on to a boat in Rockhampton, Queensland, on Tuesday "

 

News Online and The Paywall Debate - To Build or Not to Build?

Stephen Bartholomeusz, writing in the Australian Business Spectator, in an article entitled 

False iPad hope? (free sign up required to view).

This blogger finds it ironic that a writer in what is a essentially a free online publication, doing very well with it's model, needs to wonder which online model will work for traditional journalism. The following models will not work:

• The general readership, major newspaper behind a paywall a la the UK's Times online
• Specialised Magazines whereby the app costs more than the print edition a la Wired Magazine (and you can get it free on the web - how dumb is that?)
• Any combination of the above as in the proposed new Murdoch online Daily which is "...an interesting and brave experiment with a purpose-designed tablet product, with News committing an estimated $US100 million to the venture." (from the Bartholomeusz article above)

The models that do work are:

1. And one only: The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and The Economist online editions. No prizes as to why these online publications make money and actually work - the financial market participants reading them have money to burn. Very simple.

Everyone else is doomed to failure.

So get on the advert supported band wagon and stop winging about it...!

 

American Accents: All You Ever Wanted to Know and Then Some

"NORTH AMERICAN ENGLISH, like its British cousin, has many diverse dialects and sub-dialects. Did you know that residents of the San Francisco Bay area generally speak differently from other Californians? Had you heard that people from parts of New Orleans sound like New Yorkers, or that residents of North Carolina's outer banks can sound more like folks from Charleston, South Carolina than other southerners? All this information and more is available on Rick Aschmann's map of English dialects in North America."

From The Economist blog Gulliver 

What Americans sound like

The article refers mainly to Rick Aschmann's rather excellant map called that has links to YouTube video examples

North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns

Reserve Bank of Australia Commodity Index - Long Way Down

The RBA - The Reserve Bank of Australia -  released Index of Commodity Prices for December 2010.

From it's statement "Preliminary estimates for December indicate that the index rose by 3.2 per cent (on a monthly average basis) in SDR terms, after rising by 1.2 per cent in November"

SDR's are "Special Drawing Rights" essentially a basket of major currencies - see SDR Valuation from the IMF

Facebook and the Road to a $50 Billion Dollar Valuation Helped by Russians and Now Goldmans.

"Facebook is now solidly a $50 billion company, as measured by valuation from investors, thanks to its latest round of funding -- $500 million from Goldman Sachs and DST. "

So Facebook has now the valuation that Mark Zuckerberg has been saying it should have thanks to Goldman Sachs and DST.

Right, DST who? Digital Sky Technologies a Russian company that has this really interesting web site. Check it out: DST. A lot more information on this global investor into mainly US based tech companies can be found in The New York Times Deal Book article:

Russians’ Large Stake in Facebook Grows Larger

Chart from SAI Silicon Valley Investor Chart of the day

Facebook's Bumpy Road To $50 Billion 

Skin Your Furniture - Mykea for IKEA

"After a long and tedious day of shopping in a local Ikea store, we returned to the office. Tired and unwilling to do so we finally unpacked the Ikea furniture and started with the hellish job of putting them together. After we finished and looked at our assembled Ikea furniture, we came to the dire conclusion that our office would consist of three colours, or the lack thereof. White, white and black! Then someone said; wow, this looks kinda naked."

From the Mykea web site

Heads up via LifeHacker

Original article 

Mykea Offers Custom Skins to Personalize Your IKEA Furniture 

One Very Big Cave - Vietnam's Hang Son Doong Cave

From the National Geographic via i09.com 
World's largest cave is big enough to fit a skyscraper and even has its own jungle
Orginal pictures
Conquering an Infinite Cave

Lex and 3 Economic Scenarios for 2011

Named as The Crab, Disaster and Lift-Off the Lex Column in the Financial Times essentially gives fancy names to 3 probable economic outcomes for 2011.

The interesting bit is the percentage of probability or likelihood of each scenario playing out:

1. The Crab or more of the same as 2010 - 70%
2. Disaster or up the creek without a paddle - 20%
3. Lift-off or yeh! we're back to normal - 10%

See

Three scenarios for 2011