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2009-01-31T22:26:00.002Z

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Ambient awareness

2008-09-07T12:44:00.000+01:00

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This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.” It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.

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Financial Times, The return of the state: How government is back at the heart of economic life; By John Plender

Na Véspera de uma Revolução no Trânsito ?

2008-08-24T16:07:00.001+01:00

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In this metaphorical light, one consideration will disturb thinking readers: the more technologically efficient a network becomes, the harder it is to tell people the whole truth about it. We are on the eve of a “revolution in traffic”, Mr Vanderbilt writes, thanks to global positioning systems. Once everyone gets the same reliable, real-time information about traffic, everyone mobs the same routes. When Chicago authorities announced the closure of eight lanes of the Dan Ryan Expressway in 2006, the recommended detours moved slower than the expressway. Predictions about traffic become “self-destroying”. The scattering of traffic that used to result from imperfect information and personal idiosyncrasy is no longer the norm. It must be artificially recreated. How do you recreate it? Either by coercing drivers (assigning them to routes, in which case the car ceases to be private transport) or by lying to them. “You have to structure the information,” the German physicist and traffic expert, Michael Schreckenberg, says to Mr Vanderbilt. “Telling them the whole truth is not the best way.”
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Financial Times

Politics is now on the up

2008-08-24T14:22:00.003+01:00

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Faith in the self-equilibrating power of the market is undoubtedly at a low ebb. So while New Deal- or Great Society-type policies may be out of the question, there remains the potential for the state to impose political accountability on technocratic policymakers, inflict more regulation on aberrant bankers and extend public ownership in response to the failure of politically sensitive corporations.

In the perennial conflict between politics and markets, there can be no question that politics is now on the up.

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O Estado está de volta

2008-07-15T00:22:00.001+01:00

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Two years ago, when commercial banks were still jostling for fatter slices of the housing market, the share of outstanding mortgages Fannie and Freddie owned and guaranteed dipped below 40 percent, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Moody’s Economy.com. By the first three months of this year, Fannie and Freddie were buying more than two-thirds of all new residential mortgages.

A similar trend is playing out in the realm of student loans. As commercial banks concluded that the business of lending to college students was no longer quite so profitable, the Bush administration promised in May to buy their federally guaranteed student loans, giving the banks capital to continue lending.

In short, in a nation that holds itself up as a citadel of free enterprise, the government has transformed from a reliable guarantor into effectively the only lender for millions of Americans engaged in the largest transactions of their lives.

Before, its more modest mission was to make more loans available at lower rates. Now it is to make sure loans are made at all. The government is setting the terms and the standards of Americans’ biggest loans.

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Different Generations at War

2008-07-12T19:42:00.000+01:00

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The main people in “Generation Kill” are numerous and hard to distinguish, and even the most basic story lines are blurry and difficult to follow. It’s as if the creators wanted to resist any comparison to HBO’s classic World War II series “Band of Brothers,” by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. That could stem from a desire to stake out a different kind of wartime storytelling. But it is also a way to avoid condoning or romanticizing a war that most Americans no longer view as necessary, or even wise.

Yet no matter how flat or diffuse its affect, “Generation Kill” is at its best a tale of battle-forged camaraderie, a “Band of Brothers” set not at Agincourt or Normandy, but Iraq in 2003.

Mr. Wright’s opening conceit in the book, and it is an understandable one, is that these highly trained troops, raised on hip-hop, video games and “South Park,” are somehow a different species from the men who fought in World War II and even Vietnam. He describes them as the disenfranchised orphans of a post-Monicagate society, a generation desensitized to violence, captive to pop culture and more disaffected from authority. “Culturally, these marines would be virtually unrecognizable to their forebears in the ‘Greatest Generation,’ ” Mr. Wright wrote in his prologue.

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Reality Mining

2008-06-25T09:40:00.001+01:00

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We’re in the midst of a boom in devices that show where people are at any point in time. Global positioning systems are among the hottest consumer electronics devices ever, says Clint Wheelock, chief research officer at ABI Research, a technology market follower. And cellphones increasingly come with G.P.S. chips. All of these devices churn out data that says something about how people live.

Such data could redefine what we know about consumer behavior, giving businesses early insight into economic trends, better ways to determine sites for offices and retail stores, and more effective ways to advertise.

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It’s hard to make sense of such data, but Sense Networks, a software analytics company in New York, earlier this month released Macrosense, a tool that aims to do just that. Macrosense applies complex statistical algorithms to sift through the growing heaps of data about location and to make predictions or recommendations on various questions — where a company should put its next store, for example. Gregory Skibiski, 34, the chief executive and a co-founder of Sense, says the company has been testing its software with a major retailer, a major financial services firm and a large hedge fund.

Tony Jebara, also 34, the chief scientist and another co-founder of Sense, said, “We can predict tourism, we can tell you how confident consumers are, we can tell retailers about, say, their competitors, who’s coming in from particular neighborhoods.”

Mr. Jebara, who is also an associate professor of computer science at Columbia University, says the key to drawing such conclusions starts with having very large sets of data that go back several years. Sense’s models were developed initially from sources like taxicab companies that let it look at location data over such a period. Sense also uses publicly available data, like weather information, and other nonpublic sources that it would not disclose. “We had three-quarters of a billion data points from just one city,” Mr. Skibiski says.

Mr. Jebara’s statistical models interpret those patterns and look at whether they correlate with things in the real world, like tourism levels or retail sales. The algorithms are complex. Even so, the model doesn’t work for everything Sense tries it on, often because more data is needed. But Mr. Jebara says that when it has the data, the model works well. Several hedge funds made an investment in Sense earlier this year.

The Macrosense tool lets companies engage in “reality mining,” a phrase coined by Sandy Pentland, an M.I.T. researcher who was also a co-founder of Sense and now advises it on privacy issues.

Sense is not the only company engaged in reality mining. Inrix, a Microsoft spin-off, uses traffic data to predict traffic patterns. Path Intelligence of Britain monitors traffic flow in shopping centers by tracking cellphones.

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There’s little doubt that products we use everyday, like our cellphones or cars, will increasingly allow for us to be tracked. And after years of hype, there also seems to be demand for services built around location. Gartner, a technology researcher and consulting firm, says that the market — which includes various navigation and search devices and subscriptions and services — will nearly triple in revenue this year, to $1.3 billion from $485 million in 2007, and will reach $8 billion in 2011.

Annette Zimmermann, a Gartner analyst, says Macrosense seems to have a novel offering, one with a potentially large market.

“So many companies are just sitting on data” that they can’t do much with, she says. That could make Macrosense a powerful tool.

Still, Sense’s model is not a sure thing.

“The reality is that location data is new, and we don’t have 10 years of history to work from,” says Ted Morgan, the chief executive and founder of Skyhook Wireless, which sells a service that lets people use WiFi network access points to get information about their location.

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Celebridades como motor de vendas - A mutação

2008-06-24T20:33:00.001+01:00

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BEYONCÉ is hot. Red hot. The numbers prove it.

On the Davie Brown Index, an independent online rating system that was started two years ago to track the marketing power of celebrities, the singing sensation scores 81.31 on a 100-point scale.

The index bases its score on eight metrics, including influence and trendsetting abilities, and is used by corporate marketers to pinpoint desirable boldface names. With that score, Beyoncé is 27th among the more than 1,800 celebrities that the D.B.I. tracks. (The top five are Tom Hanks, Will Smith, Michael Jordan, Morgan Freeman and George Clooney. The presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are 9th and 25th, respectively.)

One Davie Brown category in which most celebrities appear vulnerable is trust. Celebrities are recognizable and appealing, but are often viewed with skepticism. “Trust always seems to be the lowest score among celebrities,” observes Matt Fleming, a Davie Brown account director who helps brands evaluate celebrity talent.

SO if some consumers don’t really trust celebrities, why do they still run out to buy their perfumes or fashions? The answer, some analysts say, has its roots in two seismic shifts in the cultural landscape that began in the late 1990s.

First has been the emergence of Web sites and magazines that chronicle the mundane, daily activities of stars on a 24/7 basis. A voracious public eager to peek at Hollywood celebrities shopping for shoes and buying coffee wanted, in turn, to buy those shoes and drink that coffee themselves.

The other new force has been the explosive growth and mainstreaming of urban hip-hop music and marketing moves by artists like Mr. Combs, Shawn Carter (better known as Jay-Z) and Jennifer Lopez to slap their personal brands on clothing lines, fragrances and other goods. After hip-hop impresarios narrowed the divide between popular music and blatant hucksterism, other popular musicians followed suit.

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The Rise of the Commentariat

2008-06-14T13:55:00.002+01:00

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n the past, a web user’s comments were trapped on the site or blog where they posted them. Now, services are allowing commenters to establish their own identity and reputation and to aggregate in one place the remarks they make all over the web.

A new wave of software and services, including coComment, Co.mments, Commentful, Disqus, Intense Debate, MyBlogLog, Seesmic and SezWho, enable users to create profiles, earn ratings for their comments and track their contributions and those of friends across the internet.

As an example, coComment allows users to install a “plug-in” in their browser that captures any comments they add to blogs and forums. On coComment’s site, members are presented with a list of all the conversations they are involved in and can track the progress of the discussions.

“The way services like ours and others are starting to frame it is that the blogger is only the initial person starting the discussion,” says Daniel Ha, co-founder of Disqus. “Everyone else is an equal participant and commenters can be seen as bloggers without a dedicated blog to express their thoughts.”

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He expects the best commenters to establish their own brands and be treated like pundits interviewed on television. Bloggers themselves are reaping some benefits from the new services, with readers more willing to add comments in the knowledge that their thoughts will be distributed more widely.

About 150,000 commenters use Disqus and it is integrated into 17,000 blogs. Many bloggers are dedicating more time to commenting themselves. The source is also referenced, says Mr Ha. “This takes down a lot of barriers. They are able to promote their site through our entire network.”

Other users of the networks include public relations firms that track discussions about their clients and marketing experts investigating consumer opinions and the most talked-about brands. “This is the first time that you can do a pure brand measure, finding out what is the unprompted awareness of a brand,” says Mr Colbourne.

For Mr Le Meur, online conversation is now shaping every consumer choice he makes. “I am not buying any product or service without asking my friends first and based on their comments I will select this or that brand,” he says.

“We are entering a new age where the conversation is permanent, people will use it for recommendations, and brands will have to learn how to monitor all those discussions.”

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The fight to be the aggregator of your social data

2008-06-14T13:28:00.002+01:00

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A new generation of social networking sites is gaining support in Silicon Valley, challenging the established models of leaders MySpace and Facebook.

FriendFeed, a service founded by the creators of Google Maps and Gmail, is at the head of an anarchic counter movement of “lifestreaming”, where users themselves aggregate and order their online social activities from multiple sources.

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But he warns that the established larger players will not give ground easily.

“Facebook, MySpace and Google are all fighting to be the aggregator of your social data. Being that social data backbone gives the ability to monetise. I think this is going to be a big battle and in many ways it’s the battle for the future of the web.”

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Mr Buchheit admits FriendFeed’s strategy has similarities to Google’s mission to organise all of the world’s information.

”We’re looking to use social mechanisms to help organise information and to bring [attention to] new things that are interesting,” he says.

FriendFeed works by pulling in and aggregating all of a user’s online social networking activity into a feed or list of events from as many as 35 services.

Examples would be an SMS-style text ”tweet” from Twitter, a photo uploaded to the Flickr sharing service or a blog note posted.

This ”newsfeed” was first popularised by Facebook but FriendFeed also adds the ability to comment next to anything posted, touching off lively discussions.

The service has been criticised as being hard to master for mainstream users and Mr Buchheit admits it is still in its early stages of development.

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Sustaining growth is the century’s big challenge

2008-06-13T16:35:00.000+01:00

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Is it possible for the vast mass of humanity to enjoy the living standards of today’s high-income countries? This is, arguably, the biggest question confronting humanity in the 21st century. It is today’s version of the doubts expressed by Thomas Malthus, two centuries ago, about the possibility of enduring rises in living standards. On the answer depends the destiny of our progeny. It will determine whether this will be a world of hope rather than despair and of peace rather than conflict.

This – not the effectiveness of its particular prescriptions – is the biggest question raised by the report of the growth commission discussed here last week. It is also the focus of a powerful new book by Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute*.

The challenge is stark. World real incomes per head could rise 4.5 times by 2050 and world population by 40 per cent. This would mean a sixfold increase in global output, concentrated in the developing world (see charts). Is such an increase feasible?
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One might not be quite as optimistic about the cost of the solutions. But one must recognise the salience of the challenges. If economic growth halted, conflict among the world’s people would risk becoming unmanageable. If the environmental consequences proved overwhelming, the costs of growth would become unbearable. We are the masters of our planet now. The great question for the 21st century is whether we can also become masters of ourselves.

*Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (Allen Lane, 2008)

martin.wolf@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/wolf

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There is no doubt that Mr Jobs is trying to lead a third revolution in consumer technology in his lifetime.

2008-06-13T15:41:00.001+01:00

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Finland's Nokia sells the most “smartphones”, capturing 45% of the world market in the first three months of this year, and Canada's Research In Motion (RIM), the maker of the famous BlackBerry, is second, with 13%. Even in America, where Nokia is weak, RIM leads, with 42%, followed by Apple with 20%.

But Apple's impact on the industry has been greater than its market share suggests. The iPhone has set new standards in design and ease of use. A telling statistic from Mr Jobs is that 98% of users browse the web on their iPhones, 94% use it for e-mail, and 80% use ten or more features—including, of course, the built-in iPod music-player. As Mr Jobs joked, many users of other smartphones, with their clunky menus, cannot even find ten features.

This points to the ultimate role of the iPhone for Mr Jobs, Apple and the industry. There were personal computers before 1984, but it took the Macintosh, which Apple launched that year, to popularise the icon-based graphical interface that others copied, kicking off the PC era. There were digital music-players before 2001, but Apple's iPod made them both ubiquitous and user-friendly. In the same way, says Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies, an analyst who has followed Apple throughout its history, the iPhone, with its elegant touch-screen interface, seems likely to be the gadget that sets the direction that others will follow in the era of mobility.

To bring that about, Apple is now turning the iPhone into a hand-held computer and allowing other firms to write software to run on it. Other handset-makers are doing the same, but the iPhone's operating system and programming tools, on display this week, are better than theirs. There is no doubt that Mr Jobs is trying to lead a third revolution in consumer technology in his lifetime.

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Technology to the rescue... part 2

2008-06-06T11:58:00.001+01:00

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The world needs to spend $45,000bn on green technologies in the next 40 years, or 1.1 per cent of annual global economic output, to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the International Energy Agency said on Friday.

The investment – much of it needed to accelerate development of new technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells and carbon storage – is roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Italy, though the IEA said it represented “a re-direction of economic activity and employment, and not necessarily a reduction of GDP”.

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an advisory body to world leaders, concluded last year that global carbon dioxide emissions would need to fall by 50-85 per cent by 2050 to prevent average global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees centigrade.

Among the G8, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Canada – but not the US or Russia – have endorsed the goal of cutting emissions by half.

The IEA report, commissioned by G8 leaders at the Gleneagles summit in 2005, said reducing carbon emissions by half would require commercialising technologies now deemed too experimental or expensive given the present economic costs of polluting.

European emissions credits, for example, currently trade at about $30 a tonne, but under the IEA’s scenario could rise to between $200 and $500, depending on the rate of technological advance.

The agency said meeting the reduction target would require building 32 new nuclear plants and 17,500 wind turbines a year, and outfitting 35 coal-fired power stations annually with carbon capture and storage equipment. It added: “Nearly 1bn electric and fuel cell vehicles need to be on the roads by 2050.”

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Gideon Rachman, Financial Times

Technology to the rescue...

2008-06-05T09:01:00.002+01:00

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It is all very awkward. China and India are getting richer. And it appears their new middle classes want all the things we want: cars, washing machines, even meat. Here in the west, we have to restrain ourselves from saying: “Stop. You can’t live like us. The planet can’t stand it. And our wallets can’t stand it. Have you seen the price of petrol?”
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The moral quandary is made all the more tricky by the fact that the stock of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – the source of today’s global warming – is overwhelmingly the product of two centuries of western industrialisation. But now that it is the developing world’s turn, the west says it is time to stop. As one Brazilian commentator puts it: “It’s like my rich neighbours have been having a huge meal. They invite me in for coffee. And then they ask me to split the bill.”
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So – with food, as with climate change – we shall have to hope that technology rides to the rescue. It has happened before. At the beginning of the 20th century, the discovery of nitrogen-based chemical fertilisers massively expanded world food supplies – just as experts were fretting that the world’s booming population would lead to famine. In the 1960s, the “green revolution” allowed for a further leap in agricultural production.

The trouble is that the new technological fixes are elusive. Wider tolerance of genetically modified crops might help with food. But many of the technologies touted to cut global warming – such as solar power and carbon capture – are far from fruition.

Politicians can help the process by providing incentives for behaviour changes and investment in new technologies. However, there will be a very difficult transition as the world adjusts to higher food and energy prices and waits for new technologies to emerge and flourish.

But what is the alternative? Any solution that is based on asking India and China to stay poor is politically and morally unsustainable.

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Downloads Replace CD's as Revenue Streams

2008-05-25T22:54:00.003+01:00

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Songwriters and publishers for the first time earned more from broadcasts and legal downloads of their music in 2007 than from the copyright from sales of CDs, new figures show.

Despite an 11 per cent fall in rights income from physical sales, reflecting the accelerating collapse of the CD market, the main body that collects rights on behalf of UK performers and publishers reported overall growth of 2.8 per cent last year.

The figures show how such fees charged to broadcasters and online outlets for their use of music are becoming increasingly important to musicians and music companies.

They underscore a growing argument in the music industry that artists and record labels will have to adapt to the idea that recorded music sales – once the core of the business – will become just ancillary revenue streams.

The Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society and the Performing Rights Society, which together – as the MCPS-PRS Alliance – reap the rewards of musical creativity for UK artists, said income from broadcasting and online sources increased 7 per cent to £155.5m ($306.7m).

The money paid to copyright holders from CD sales, by contrast, fell 11 per cent from £170.7m to £151.8m. Overall income reported by the MCPS-PRS Alliance grew from £546.8m to £562.1m.

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The bad news about the news: Alisa Miller on TED.com

2008-05-25T21:29:00.000+01:00

Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks about why -- though we want to know more about the world than ever -- the US news media is actually showing less. Eye-opening stats and graphs. (Recorded March 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 4:29.)

Broadband may just need more time before its real benefits show through.

2008-05-25T16:46:00.001+01:00

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The OECD released its latest report on May 19th. It surveys the broadband landscape to December 2007, and tells a warm tale. The number of broadband subscribers in the world's 30 biggest countries grew by 18% to reach 235m, or one-fifth of those countries' total population. Between 2005 and 2006, prices fell by an average of 19% for DSL connections and 16% for cable lines. At the end of 2004 the average speed was 2 megabits(MB) per second; in 2007 it increased to almost 9MB.

But the excellent report, written by Taylor Reynolds and Sacha Wunsch-Vincent, goes beyond the numbers and examines why broadband is actually useful. And here the authors face a problem: there simply is not good data to show that broadband matters.

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Ultimately, the report makes a strong case that the chief benefit of broadband is its creation of a participatory culture on the internet. This is a new form of collaboration, both for work and fun. Again, though, this is most evolved in laggard America.

All of this has public policy implications. First, it suggests that focusing on the sophistication of the infrastructure is only one part of the story. The rankings miss something crucial about how broadband is used, regardless of where a country stands. The OECD readily admits this.

Second, it is still early days. The countries that currently lead in broadband have little to show for it because the substantial uses that it can be put towards have yet to be created. So there is time for the slowpokes to catch up.

How long? Paul David, an economist at Oxford University, has shown that electric power, introduced in the 1880s, did not immediately raise productivity. Not until the late 1920s—when around half of America’s industrial machinery were finally powered by electricity—did efficiency finally climb. New technologies need a 50% adoption rate before the effects are seen, he reckons.

Broadband, too, may just need more time before its real benefits show through. After all, the top six countries only have penetration rates between 30%-35%. Although policymakers and the public might feel that super-fast broadband is essential, that view is based more on faith than fact.

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Will reading and writing remain important?

2008-05-24T17:30:00.001+01:00

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So, where in this brave new world of post-literacy are we heading? Er, not sure...

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In Mr Federman’s view, the quest for truth has given way to the quest for making sense of the world as experienced. For anyone under the age of 20, the world being experienced is one where the internet has always existed, and where everyone who matters is only a click, speed dial or text message away. “Tomorrow’s adults,” says Mr Federman, “live in a world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity.” Their direct experience of the world is wholly different from yours or mine.

So, no surprise that when we incarcerate teenagers of today in traditional classroom settings, they react with predictable disinterest and flunk their literacy tests. They are skilled in making sense not of a body of known content, but of contexts that are continually changing.

Teachers must recognise that our pedagogical tools are inconsistent with the skills needed to survive in a world where people are always connected to everyone and everything. In such a world, learning to think for oneself could well be more important than simply learning to read and write.

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Rigging the Risks: How Commercial Law Kills; Professor Janet Dine

Lenha para a Fogueira

2008-05-24T17:08:00.001+01:00

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This inaugural lecture argues three propositions:

That commercial law in a market economy allocates risks between individuals and is therefore a profound political force with crucial implications for the allocation of wealth
That international commercial law has been drafted by the powerful in order to minimise risk to major market players, especially transnational corporations
That the risks of economic globalisation therefore fall disproportionably and unjustly on the poor, killing many.

The New New World

2008-05-24T16:50:00.002+01:00

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At first blush, “The Post-American World,” by Fareed Zakaria, seems to fall into the same genre. But make no mistake. This is a relentlessly intelligent book that eschews simple-minded projections from crisis to collapse. There is certainly plenty to bemoan — from the disappearing dollar to the subprime disaster, from rampant anti-Americanism to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that will take years to win.

Yet Zakaria’s is not another exercise in declinism. His point is not the demise of Gulliver, but the “rise of the rest.” After all, how can this giant follow Rome and Britain onto the dust heap of empire if it can prosecute two wars at once without much notice at home?
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The larger point is that “higher education is America’s best industry” — never mind the creeping demise of Detroit’s Big Three. “With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States absolutely dominates higher education, having either 42 or 68 percent of the world’s top 50 universities” (depending on who is counting). In India, he adds, “universities graduate between 35 and 50 Ph.D.’s in computer science each year; in America the figure is 1,000.” Now, Beijing is pouring oodles into its universities, but so did Austin, Tex., in the oil-rich ’70s, and Stanford et al. are still on top.

In the industrial age, hardware mattered; today it is software, a k a “culture.” This is a grab bag: skills, openness, innovation, opportunity, competition. “It’s brains, stupid,” Bill Clinton might exclaim today. And youth. China, Japan and Europe are aging rapidly; the United States will remain a young country way into the 21st century. And why? Immigration is “America’s secret weapon.” In my Stanford class, the A’s regularly go to students called Kim, Zhou, Patel or Vertiz; these are not the “huddled masses,” but their children — the gifted and hungry who will slough off the old and drive the new. “First rich, then fat and lazy” will not be America’s fate.

What’s the problem, then? “America remains the global superpower today, but it is an enfeebled one.” It has blown wads of political capital, but it is still better positioned to manage the “rise of the rest” than its rivals. Europe is rich, but placid and graying. Resurgent Russia is too grabby. China is more subtle in its ambitions, but still a classic revisionist that wants more for itself and less for the whole. It craves respect but will choose bloody repression in the crunch, as in Tibet.

The United States, too, has acted the bully in recent years, and it has paid dearly. Still, why does it retain “considerable ability to set the agenda,” to quote Zakaria? How can it muster the convening power that brings 80 nations to Annapolis? The short answer (mine) is: America remains the “default power”; others may fear it, but who else will take care of global business? Maybe it takes a liberal, seafaring empire, as opposed to the Russian or the Habsburg, to temper power and self-interest with responsibility for the rest.

And maybe it takes a Bombay-born immigrant like Zakaria, who went from Yale to Harvard (where we were colleagues) and to the top of Newsweek International, to remind this faltering giant of its unique and enduring strengths. America will be in trouble only when China becomes home to tomorrow’s hungry masses yearning to be free — and to make it.

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The New York Times - THE POST-AMERICAN WORLD; By Fareed Zakaria.

O Futuro da Web 2.0. está na Ásia ?

2008-05-24T16:40:00.001+01:00

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Have you ever heard of QQ, Tudou, Mixi or CyWorld? No? But I bet you’ve heard of MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. It’s not surprising. The former social networking websites are all based in Asia – China, Japan and South Korea – while the latter three are in the Western media ad nauseam.

What you don’t know is that QQ in China, with over 300million active user accounts, is the largest instant messaging social network in the world – bigger than the population of the United States of America! Tudou, also based in China, is a video-sharing site, which streamed over 15billion minutes of video last year – almost five times more than YouTube (1). Mixi and CyWorld – social networking sites based in Japan and South Korea with 14million and 20million users respectively – have been at the global forefront of the social networking phenomenon. Indeed, CyWorld was the first - and thus remains the oldest - social networking site in the world having been established in 1999. Around 90 per cent of all Koreans aged between 20-29 spend most of their time online today at CyWorld.

It is not well known nor accepted that the social networking phenomenon we all gush about in the West was actually invented in Asia. This sounds counter-intuitive and unsettlingly unfamiliar. Innovation is assumed to be a prized Western asset, something the culturally compliant and uniform Asians cannot emulate.
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To see the future of the internet, look East

The “Washington Consensus” – stabilise, privatise and liberalise – is dead ?

2008-05-22T21:42:00.001+01:00

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The “Washington Consensus” – stabilise, privatise and liberalise – is dead. Long live the new pragmatism. That is the message of “the growth report” released this week by the commission on growth and development chaired by the Nobel laureate, Michael Spence.

No single recipe will secure sustained and rapid economic growth in poor countries, it argues. Governments have to choose from a variety of ingredients. Yet only governments can do so. They “are sometimes clumsy and sometimes errant”, but “active, pragmatic governments” are indispensable.

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They have come to two broad conclusions: first, fast and sustained growth “requires a long-term commitment by a country’s political leaders”; second, it depends on sustained engagement with the global economy, as a source of both knowledge and demand.

Beyond this, the report identifies a number of ingredients in the growth pie. No country, it notes, has sustained rapid growth without high rates of public investment in infrastructure, education and health. Furthermore, growth means profound structural change. Policy must allow this to happen, while doing what it can to protect people.

The commission also emphasises that “growth strategies cannot succeed without a commitment to equality of opportunity” and action against extreme inequality of outcomes. Meanwhile, the inclination to leave the environment aside at the early stages is a huge mistake.

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Growth challenge; Financial Times

Sex and the city and the media...

2008-05-16T22:33:00.002+01:00

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It may not take a lot to make the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch’s city tabloid, grumpy but the four actresses of Sex and the City, the new film of the television series, certainly provoked it this week.

The Post was dubious about the hat worn to the film’s premiere by Sarah Jessica Parker, who plays the lead character Carrie Bradshaw in the drama about the lives of four Manhattan women. Even worse than this faux pas, she wore the hat in London, where the film’s world premiere was held.

After London, which the Post dismissed as “the wrong city”, the quartet is hitting Berlin tonight before returning to New York for yet another glitzy launch event in two weeks. New Yorkers must make do for now with posters of Carrie and her friends plastered around the city.

Even in its absence, however, Sex and the City is part of the Zeitgeist. Both the drama itself and the way it is being marketed say a lot about the future of film and television. In fact, here is my Sex and the City guide to the entertainment industry.

First, the world is bigger than the US. Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha are jetting around Europe for the same reason that the Cannes film festival, which opened on Wednesday, includes the premiere of the planned summer blockbuster Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That is where the money is.
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Second, paid-for is bigger than free. That sounds strange in the era of the internet, but entertainment for which consumers rather than advertisers pay is growing more powerful. Americans used to spend many more hours with media such as radio and broadcast television than with DVDs and video games but they are switching.

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Third, the small screen is bigger than the big screen. Box office receipts of $9.6bn in the US last year were easily outstripped by the $23.4bn of DVD rentals and sales. Digital technology allows studios to exploit new forms of distribution, including iTunes and video-on-demand. Some 20 per cent of HBO’s revenues come from reselling its dramas.

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The rise of pay television as an artistic force is matched by a decline in the value of run-of-the-mill films in the secondary market. Three Hollywood studios broke away from a deal with Showtime last month to form their own pay television channel after the latter complained that it was paying too much for films and could make its own dramas.

Fourth, adults are bigger than teenagers. Young people have held sway over Hollywood in recent years because they can be relied upon to go to the cinema. But pay television has tapped an adult audience that has been under-served by film studios and can now watch dramas at home on high-definition televisions.

That is breathing life into dramas made for adult niche audiences rather than big teenage and college-student cohorts. Hollywood studios are responding to this. “Studios are being much more deliberate about choosing demographic targets and developing films for them,” says Geoff Sands, a consultant at McKinsey & Company.

As adult targets go, you do not get much better than SATC. It started out as a quintessentially American television series and has ended up as a film seen first by Londoners and Berliners. Romance, promiscuity, fashion and all, it is the very model of a modern media enterprise.

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A Sex and the City guide to the entertainment industry; By John Gapper; Financial Times

Change is in the air for financial superclass ? or wishful thinking ?

2008-05-16T22:27:00.001+01:00

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Of the world’s elites, none has flown higher than those who have led the financial community. The re-engineering of international finance has been one of the transformational trends of our times – in just a quarter-century, capital flows became massive, instantaneous and controlled by a new breed of traders representing a handful of major financial institutions from a few countries. Their rewards have transcended any in history as shown by an estimate by Alpha Magazine that the top hedge fund manager last year made $3bn.

The concentration of power has also steadily grown. The top 50 financial institutions control almost $50,000bn (£25,600bn) in assets, roughly a third of the global total. Ten thousand hedge funds are estimated to account for 30-50 per cent of all equities trading worldwide but the top 100 control 60 per cent of hedge fund assets. When crises arise, regulators have been forced to seek the collaboration of the heads of the biggest institutions on a more or less voluntary basis. Typically, of the few they approach, the key executives are in the US and Europe, underscoring the transatlantic nature of this elite.

Change, however, is in the air. The history of elites is one of their rising up, over-reaching, being reined in and supplanted by a new elite. Several recent developments suggest that the financial crisis could signal the high-water mark of power for this group.

First, the crisis is prompting a re-regulatory drive. The power of financial elites had been evident in their ability to argue that global financial markets and markets in new securities should remain “self-regulating” (how many of them would hop into a self-regulating taxicab?), then when crisis comes – as with mortgage-backed securities – these champions of less government involvement have then persuaded governments to cauterise their wounds.

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Second, the credit crisis is exacerbating the emerging backlash against corporate excess . Elites make billions on markets whether they go up or down and their institutions win government support while the little guy loses his home. Multinational chief executives 30 years ago made 35 times the wages of an average employee; today it is more than 350 times. The crisis has focused attention on the obscene inequities of this era – the world’s 1,100 richest people have almost twice the assets of the poorest 2.5bn. There are signs of open and growing anger at this, as we have seen this week in the Netherlands with calls to address bonuses, and the attack on the world’s financial markets as “a monster that must be tamed” from Horst Köhler, the German president.

Third, the accumulation of financial reserves in the Persian Gulf, Russia and China underscores that the centre of gravity in global finance is also shifting. If gas prices remain high and Asian growth strong, sovereign wealth funds, which are concentrated in these regions, are forecast to surpass $15,000bn within a few years. The top creators of great new personal fortunes are in China, India and Russia. It seems unavoidable that the transatlantic elite that have been the habitués of Davos will be rivalled in influence by the Asian contingent – a group that has as little appetite for the Alpine gabfest as for the values and priorities of the western financial superclass.

So, are we at the beginning of the end of a golden era for transatlantic financial elites? Perhaps, but elites cede power reluctantly and there are signs of an effort to stave off decline. There is now a recognition of the need to accept some global market reforms to avoid more invasive legislation. Far-sighted leaders such as Tom Russo, Lehman Brothers vice-chairman, have actively encouraged changes in the way markets are supervised. Institutional investors could play a role by demanding more sensible pay packages from money managers. The rise of Asia probably cannot be resisted. But by recognising that there are public interests to which they must respond, the financial superclass can stall the fate of previous elites. To succeed at that they must shun their arrogant “leave-it-to-the-market” explanations for the inequality they have helped foster.

The writer is author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making, and is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

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Change is in the air for financial superclass; By David Rothkopf; Financial Times

The Cognitive Age

2008-05-04T18:20:00.002+01:00

um artigo de opinião interessante que argumenta sobre quais os verdadeiros processos centrais das transformação em curso na economia, no mundo...
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The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?

The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations. These abstractions, called “the Chinese” or “the Indians,” are doing this or that. But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy — the specific processes that foster learning. It emphasizes that different societies are being stressed in similar ways by increased demands on human capital. If you understand that you are living at the beginning of a cognitive age, you’re focusing on the real source of prosperity and understand that your anxiety is not being caused by a foreigner.

It’s not that globalization and the skills revolution are contradictory processes. But which paradigm you embrace determines which facts and remedies you emphasize. Politicians, especially Democratic ones, have fallen in love with the globalization paradigm. It’s time to move beyond it.

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David Brooks, New York Times

Noção de "Classe Criativa" : mais um indicador alarmante para o futuro de Portugal

2008-04-20T17:45:00.002+01:00

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"Lisboa é uma mega-região mundial"
Existem 191 países no mundo, mas apenas 40 mega-regiões - territórios que abarcam um quinto da população, dois terços da produção da economia global e 85% da inovação. Lisboa (e a mancha litoral até à Corunha) é uma delas. Entre 50% a 60% dos seus profissionais integram a denominada classe criativa-conjunto de profissionais cuja função é gerar novas ideias, tecnologias e novos conteúdos ou solucionar problemas complexos. Encaixam-se neste critério não apenas cientistas, engenheiros e artistas, mas também profissionais da gestão, das finanças, do direito, da saúde. Já Portugal, coma país, está em último lugar no índice Global da Classe Criativa (IGCC): tem apenas 13,4% de profissionais "criativos", contrastando com países como Irlanda, Finlândia, Reina Unido, Holanda e Bélgica, com mais de 26% neste índice. Portugal é, aliás, o único país europeu que nos últimos anos, registou um crescimento negativo no número de profissionais criativos, diz Richard Florida, com base no seu estudo "Europe in the Creative Age".
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Jornal de Negócios

The Olympic torch’s journey to the Beijing Olympics is threatening to turn from triumphal progress into marathon humiliation

2008-04-06T19:14:00.001+01:00

..."The Olympic torch’s journey to the Beijing Olympics is threatening to turn from triumphal progress into marathon humiliation. Protesters are rushing like moths to the Olympic flame.

The lighting of the torch in Athens was awkward enough. It took arrests and heavy-handed policing to keep pro-Tibet demonstrators at bay. Things could get worse this weekend, when the torch will reach London to be greeted by a combustible mix of police, demonstrators and patriotic Chinese students. Other potential trouble spots on the route to the Olympic opening ceremony in August include San Francisco and New Delhi. Then there is the trip across Tibet itself. The one spot on the Olympic torch’s progress where we can be guaranteed that there will be no public demonstrations is Pyongyang.

Is the Chinese government beginning to regret its triumph in securing the Olympics for Beijing? The games were meant to be a coming-out party for modern China – playing a similar role to that of the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and the Seoul Olympics of 1988.

Unfortunately for China, the analogy that increasingly springs to mind is not Tokyo or Seoul – but the Berlin Olympics of 1936. This is not to say that the Chinese government are modern-day Nazis. Any such comparison is grotesque.

The Berlin and Beijing games are comparable for other reasons. China – like Germany in the 1930s – is an emerging superpower. Within 20 years it is likely to be the largest economy in the world. The rise of China – like the rise of Germany in the 1930s – is reshaping the world system. So the comparisons with the Tokyo and Seoul Olympics do not really capture the political impact of the Beijing games. The new China is far more than just the latest and largest Asian tiger economy.

The Beijing Olympics will be stuffed with political symbolism."
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Gideon Rachman, Financial Times

The Post-American World: Uma história a seguir e uma tendência pesada já detectada por outros

2008-04-06T18:06:00.002+01:00

Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems.

Aberto, Móvel e Lento ? - Tendências Tecnológicas do "The Economist"

2008-01-04T12:27:00.000Z

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Three fearless predictions

1. Surfing will slow

PEERING into Tech.view’s crystal ball, the one thing we can predict with at least some certainty is that 2008 will be the year we stop taking access to the internet for granted. The internet is not about to grind to a halt, but as more and more users clamber aboard to download music, video clips and games while communicating incessantly by e-mail, chat and instant messaging, the information superhighway sometimes crawls with bumper-to-bumper traffic.

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In the meantime, accept that surfing the web is going to be more like travelling the highways at holiday time. You’ll get there, eventually, but the going won’t be great.

2. Surfing will detach

Earlier this month, Google bid for the most desirable chunk (known as C-block) of the 700-megahertz wireless spectrum being auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in late January 2008. The 700-megahertz frequencies used by channels 52 to 69 of analog television are being freed up by the switch to all-digital broadcasting in February 2009.

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In short, win or lose, Google has already achieved its objective. Internet searches will doubtless be as popular among mobile-internet surfers as among their sedentary cousins. Owning at least 60% of the mobile search market is the prize Google has been after all along.

3. Surfing—and everything else computer-related—will open

Rejoice: the embrace of “openness” by firms that have grown fat on closed, proprietary technology is something we’ll see more of in 2008. Verizon is not the only one to cry uncle and reluctantly accept the inevitable.

Even Apple, long a bastion of closed systems, is coming round to the open idea. Its heavily protected iPhone was hacked within days of being launched by owners determined to run third-party software like Skype on it.

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Pundits agree: neither Microsoft nor Apple can compete at the new price points being plumbed by companies looking to cut costs. With open-source software maturing fast, Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, Evolution, Pidgin and some 23,000 other Linux applications available for free seem more than ready to fill that gap. By some reckonings, Linux fans will soon outnumber Macintosh addicts. Linus Torvalds should be rightly proud.

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The Economist

Problemas de Crescimento ?

2008-01-04T12:24:00.000Z

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O que os «rejuveniles» de agora reclamam então, precisamente, é a liberdade de «brincar», algo que teria ficado - nesta repartição de modelos e normas comportamentais - para as crianças, excluindo assim os «adultos» dessa dimensão preciosa da vida.

No caso destes «rejuveniles», não se trata, porém, de não querer crescer ou de manter uma postura irresponsável face ao ambiente circundante (mesmo se Peter Pan continua a ser, para este grupo, uma obra de referência, ela é vista, no entanto, como uma espécie de mitologia originária, em que a ideia de uma infância eterna aparece mais como uma vontade de permanecer capaz de dar expressão à imaginação e irreverência infantis de que como uma maneira de ficar para sempre jovem, sem crescer, vivendo num mundo de fantasia sem fim).

Esta vontade de brincar (que inclui não só o desejo de continuar a amar as coisas de que sempre se gostou - vivendo-as no dia-a-dia - mas também uma vocação para o jogo de um modo geral) tem vindo a ocupar um lugar crescente no mundo adulto dos negócios.

A noção de jogo como exercício criativo capaz de dotar gestores e executivos de flexibilidade, estimulando neles o engenho e a criatividade necessárias para as suas tarefas, levou ao aparecimento de empresas especializadas neste tipo de «coaching». Uma dessas empresas chama-se mesmo Play, e a sua missão é criar ambientes incomuns (espaços, situações), de modo a suscitar nos executivos participantes uma «libertação» criativa de energias que passa, no essencial, por recriar contextos favoráveis à «brincadeira». Citando Georges Bernard Shaw, estes «rejuveniles» tomaram como sua a palavra de ordem: «Nós não paramos de brincar por envelhecermos; nós envelhecemos por pararmos de brincar.»

Crescer para quê? O livro de Noxon é, claramente, um manifesto, e o que de melhor há nele é a sua capacidade de nos dar a ver a emergência de uma tendência social que, de forma bastante interessante, se vem cruzando com outras manifestações contemporâneas que lhe são, em parte, confluentes.

Embora o livro de Noxon tenha suscitado alguma controvérsia - sendo até mesmo acusado de contribuir para uma ainda maior infantilização das sociedades contemporâneas -, o facto é que delimitou um território e deu expressão a uma pulsão que hoje anima um número significativo de indivíduos: uma exigência de mais tempo livre, menos stress e mais divertimento (não «recreação», como pejorativamente Noxon chama ao entretenimento «embalado» pelo sistema comercial).

Esta é também a tónica dominante - embora de um ângulo de abordagem diferente - de um outro livro acabado de sair, intitulado Consumed - How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallows Citizens Whole.

Escrito por Benjamin R. Barber (ed. Norton, 2007), o livro critica de forma impiedosa uma indústria que elegeu, nos últimos anos, as «crianças» como consumidores-alvo das suas estratégias. «Mais do que criar produtos», diz Barber, «o que a indústria faz hoje é inventar necessidades.»

Referindo-se aos «rejuveniles» (tal como a outros movimentos, como os «twixters», de que falaremos mais adiante), Barber considera-os como sinais de uma mudança cultural de extrema magnitude, em que as forças do mercado procuram que «os adultos se mantenham tão infantis quanto possível e, ao mesmo tempo, treinam as crianças a consumir em idades cada vez mais recuadas».

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Rui Trindade, Expresso Actual

Jared Diamond - Maldição das Taxas de Consumo ?

2008-01-04T12:17:00.000Z

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We Americans may think of China’s growing consumption as a problem. But the Chinese are only reaching for the consumption rate we already have. To tell them not to try would be futile.

The only approach that China and other developing countries will accept is to aim to make consumption rates and living standards more equal around the world. But the world doesn’t have enough resources to allow for raising China’s consumption rates, let alone those of the rest of the world, to our levels. Does this mean we’re headed for disaster?

No, we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels. Americans might object: there is no way we would sacrifice our living standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.

Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures.

Other aspects of our consumption are wasteful, too. Most of the world’s fisheries are still operated non-sustainably, and many have already collapsed or fallen to low yields — even though we know how to manage them in such a way as to preserve the environment and the fish supply. If we were to operate all fisheries sustainably, we could extract fish from the oceans at maximum historical rates and carry on indefinitely.

The same is true of forests: we already know how to log them sustainably, and if we did so worldwide, we could extract enough timber to meet the world’s wood and paper needs. Yet most forests are managed non-sustainably, with decreasing yields.

Just as it is certain that within most of our lifetimes we’ll be consuming less than we do now, it is also certain that per capita consumption rates in many developing countries will one day be more nearly equal to ours. These are desirable trends, not horrible prospects. In fact, we already know how to encourage the trends; the main thing lacking has been political will.

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O Canto do Cisne ?... ;-)

2008-01-03T18:55:00.000Z

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SO THERE you are on the moon, reading The World in 2008 on disposable digital paper and waiting for the videophone to ring. But no rush, because you’re going to live for ever—and if you don’t, there’s a backed-up copy of your brain for downloading to your clone.

Yes? No? Well, that’s how the 21st century looked to some futurologists 40 or 50 years ago, and they’re having a hard time living it down now. You can still get away (as we do) with predicting trends in the world next year, but push the timeline out much further, and you might as well wear a T-shirt saying “crackpot”. Besides, since the West began obsessing a generation ago about accelerating social and technological change, people in government and industry can spend weeks each year in retreats brainstorming and scenario-building about the future of their company or their industry or their world. The only thing special about a futurologist is that he or she has no other job to do.

Small wonder that futurology as we knew it 30 or 40 years ago—the heyday of Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock”, the most popular work of prophecy since Nostradamus—is all but dead. The word “futurologist” has more or less disappeared from the business and academic world, and with it the implication that there might be some established discipline called “futurology”. Futurologists prefer to call themselves “futurists”, and they have stopped claiming to predict what “will” happen. They say that they “tell stories” about what might happen. There are plenty of them about, but they have stopped being famous. You have probably never heard of them unless you are in their world, or in the business of booking speakers for corporate dinners and retreats.

We can see now that the golden age of blockbuster futurology in the 1960s and 1970s was caused, not by the onset of profound technological and social change (as its champions claimed), but by the absence of it. The great determining technologies—electricity, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, even manned flight—were the products of a previous century, and their applications were well understood. The geopolitical fundamentals were stable, too, thanks to the cold war. Futurologists extrapolated the most obvious possibilities, with computers and nuclear weapons as their wild cards. The big difference today is that we assume our determining forces to be ones that 99% of us do not understand at all: genetic engineering, nanotechnology, climate change, clashing cultures and seemingly limitless computing power. When the popular sense of direction is baffled, there is no conventional wisdom for futurologists to appropriate or contradict.

Popcorn and prediction markets

There are still some hold-outs prophesying at the planetary level: James Canton, for example, author of “Extreme Future”. But the best advice for aspirant futurists these days is: think small. The best what-lies-ahead book of 1982 was “Megatrends”, by John Naisbitt, which prophesied the future of humanity. A quarter-century later, its counterpart for 2007 was “Microtrends”, by Mark Penn, a public-relations man who doubles as chief strategy adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. “Microtrends” looks at the prospects for niche social groups such as left-handers and vegan children. The logical next step would be a book called “Nanotrends”, save that the title already belongs to a journal of nano-engineering.

The next rule is: think short-term. An American practitioner, Faith Popcorn, showed the way with “The Popcorn Report” in 1991, applying her foresight to consumer trends instead of rocket science. The Popcornised end of the industry thrives as an adjunct of the marketing business, a research arm for its continuous innovation in consumer goods. One firm, Trendwatching of Amsterdam, predicts in its Trend Report for 2008 a list of social fads and niche markets including “eco-embedded brands” (so green they don’t even need to emphasise it) and “the next small thing” (“What happens when consumers want to be anything but the Joneses?”).

A third piece of advice: say you don’t know. Uncertainty looks smarter than ever before. Even politicians are seeing the use of it: governments that signed the Kyoto protocol on climate change said, in effect: “We don’t know for sure, but best to be on the safe side”—and they have come to look a lot smarter than countries such as America and Australia which claimed to understand climate change well enough to see no need for action.

The last great redoubt of the know-alls has been the financial markets, hedge funds claiming to have winning strategies for beating the average. But after the market panic of 2007 more humility is to be expected there too.

A fourth piece of advice for the budding futurist: get embedded in a particular industry, preferably something to do with computing or national security or global warming. All are fast-growing industries fascinated by uncertainty and with little use for generalists. Global warming, in particular, is making general-purpose futurology all but futile. When the best scientists in the field say openly that they can only guess at the long-term effects, how can a futurologist do better? “I cannot stop my life to spend the next two or ten years to become an expert on the environment,” complains Mr Naisbitt in his latest book, “Mindset” (although the rewards for Al Gore, who did just that, have been high).

A fifth piece of advice: talk less, listen more. Thanks to the internet, every intelligent person can amass the sort of information that used to need travel, networking, research assistants, access to power. It is no coincidence that the old standard work on herd instinct, Charles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, has been displaced by James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”.

The most heeded futurists these days are not individuals, but prediction markets, where the informed guesswork of many is consolidated into hard probability. Will Osama bin Laden be caught in 2008? Only a 15% chance, said Newsfutures in mid-October 2007. Would Iran have nuclear weapons by January 1st 2008? Only a 6.6% chance, said Inkling Markets. Will George Bush pardon Lewis “Scooter” Libby? A better-than-40% chance, said Intrade. There may even be a prediction market somewhere taking bets on immortality. But beware: long- and short-sellers alike will find it hard to collect.

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Financial Times - Tony Jackson

The Shock Doctrine

2007-09-16T13:29:00.000+01:00

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In her book she argues that the shock therapy prescribed by Western economists during the last 30 years could not have been imposed without political shock therapy, namely brutal repression and a suspension of democratic rights. Western countries, along with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, essentially exploited disasters — hyperinflation, the tsunami, the war in Iraq — to force through radical changes like privatization, deregulation and severe cuts in social spending. These policies, imposed by foreign and American disciples of the laissez-faire economist Milton Friedman, she maintains, caused grinding poverty and hardship for millions while often permitting multinationals to buy up a country’s most valuable assets for going-out-of-business prices.

Even the shock of 9/11, she said in an interview, was “harnessed by leaders to end the discussion of global justice.”

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Power shifts as capital continues on its global march

2007-04-30T16:13:00.000+01:00

But the long-run trend looks unstoppable. One big reason is the continuing march of privatisation. The more enterprises are sold off in Russia, China and India, the more liquid capital is drawn to those countries and the more local expertise is created in managing it.

One powerful illustration of this is the share that the developed economies hold in the world’s stock of quoted equity. Thirty years ago, the big five markets – the US, Japan, the UK, Germany and France – between them accounted for 90 per cent of the world by value. The figure is now 64 per cent and falling steeply.

One way of slowing this trend, of course, is for the older markets to shore up their credentials – that is, to ensure that a London or New York listing is a desirable badge of quality. This lies at the heart of the squabbles between the London and New York stock exchanges and gives extra edge to the debate over whether London has become too permissive in its listing requirements.

But in general, for London to imagine it has inherited New York’s former power is an illusion. That power is being distributed around the world. London’s best hope is to hang on to its share.

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The future of DRM ?

2007-04-30T14:48:00.000+01:00

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While most of today’s DRM schemes that come embedded on CDs and DVDs are likely to disappear over the next year or two, the need to protect copyrighted music and video will remain. Fortunately, there are better ways of doing this than treating customers as if they were criminals.

One of the most promising is Audible Magic’s content protection technology. Google is currently testing this to find the “fingerprints” of miscreants who have posted unauthorised television or movie clips on YouTube.

The beauty of such schemes is that they don’t actually prevent anyone from making copies of original content. Their purpose is simply to collect royalties when a breach of copyright has occurred. By being reactive rather than pre-emptive, normal law-abiding consumers are then left in peace to enjoy their music and video collections in any way they choose. Why couldn’t we have thought of that in the beginning?

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