Twitter ate my RSS reader. Please tweet your blog posts! Sign of the Times?

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KGB Bar in New York (via audaciaray). Scan the QR Code and add (place) to Favorites*.




* Login to DokoDare with an ID you can get here.

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And a bit later, a link:
Highlights from TED: Tim Berners-Lee, Pattie Maes, Jacek Utko

Jacek Utko’s call to arms:

“Design can change not just your product, it can change your workflow, it can change your company. We just need inspiration, vision, and determination to operate at the highest level. To be good is not enough.”

• Children’s dictionary dumps ‘nature’ words
• Twitter Business Model Contest
• Google Books for Mobile, see here and there (mobile version)

And last but not least:
Our QR-Code Blog in the eastern part of Europe

And a DokoDare QR Code from Geneva:

Es begann gestern hier.


Größere Kartenansicht

Ist Refuge l'Espace hier bei 46.309915, 7.223961?

Mehr Links:
Foto of Refuge l'Espace
Quille du Diable on map.search.ch

“Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money”

James Fallows speaks with Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation about stock market derivatives and their role as source of evil :

If you look at every one of these [derivative] products, they make sense. But in aggregate, they are bullshit. They are crap. They serve to cheat people.

I was predicting this many years ago. In 1999 or 2000, I gave a talk to the State Council [China’s main ruling body], with Premier Zhu Rongji. They wanted me to explain about capital markets and how they worked. These were all ministers and mostly not from a financial background. So I wondered, How do I explain derivatives?, and I used the model of mirrors.

First of all, you have this book to sell. [He picks up a leather-bound book.] This is worth something, because of all the labor and so on you put in it. But then someone says, “I don’t have to sell the book itself! I have a mirror, and I can sell the mirror image of the book!” Okay. That’s a stock certificate. And then someone else says, “I have another mirror—I can sell a mirror image of that mirror.” Derivatives. That’s fine too, for a while. Then you have 10,000 mirrors, and the image is almost perfect. People start to believe that these mirrors are almost the real thing. But at some point, the image is interrupted. And all the rest will go.

When I told the State Council about the mirrors, they all started laughing. “How can you sell a mirror image! Won’t there be distortion?” But this is what happened with the American economy, and it will be a long and painful process to come down.

I think we should do an overhaul and say, “Let’s get rid of 90 percent of the derivatives.” Of course, that’s going to be very unpopular, because many people will lose jobs.

Soon it will be time to start over, again

We're now reaching the end of a cycle, we're seeing feature wars. That's what's going on between Facebook and Google, both perfectly timing the rollouts of their developer proposition to coincide with the others' -- on the very same day! I don't even have to look at them and I am sure that they're too complicated. Because I've been around this loop so many times. The solution to the problem these guys are supposedly working on won't come in this generation, it can only come when people start over. They are too mired in the complexities of the past to solve this one. Both companies are getting ready to shrink. It's the last gasp of this generation of technology.

But the next one can't be far away now. It will be exhilirating!!

All About Google by FaberNovel

Download it to your phone via QR Code (you need Wifi or a good data plan):

Before Gov 2.0, there was Campaign 2.0:
Wassup B
Will.I.Am's Yes We Can Song

Next Step for News

Last and more important stop: revenue. Fred Wilson, leading the discussion, summed up its discovery in a tweet: “clickable will sell joe the pumber a text ad that $goog will route via outside.in geotag to the boston herald.” (Translation: Clickable sells Joe an ad on Google, which will appear on a local story on the Herald site thanks to Outside.in’s ability to understand the geography of articles and target appropriately. Moral to the story: No one is any longer going to own the market alone. Revenue, like reporting, will be collaborative.)

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