renaissance chambara | Ged Carroll

The biggest mistake 60-year-old men make about the economy – history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes

Obama Talks About How To Build A Rising, Thriving Middle Class – Transcript

Here’s why McDonald’s needs to slim down its menu

A Benz With a Virtual Chauffeur – NYTimes.com – interesting that Daimler-Benz engineers are skeptical of 100% driverless cars in next five years

Islam could be dominant UK religion in 10 years – census analysis — RT News – indicator of massive demographic change

SK to revamp Cyworld – but is it too late as Koreans have moved on to the likes of KakaoTalk, Twitter and Facebook?

Open 24: Politics of Things: What Art & Design do in Democracy | SKOR

Working with Chinese contractors | Guardian Professional – interesting balanced analysis of China in Africa. Classic construction industry mess-ups in terms of costing but no great conspiracy

Report: Smartphone sales up 61% in Southeast Asia, Android dominates with 70% share – The Next Web

Top 20 sites in Russia by visitors and time spent – Digital Intelligence – VKontakte still huge

Leading Security Experts Say FBI Wiretapping Proposal Would Undermine Cybersecurity | Center for Democracy & Technology

Asia-Pacific may soon have more outstanding corporate debt than the US, the euro zone and the UK combined – Quartz

The UK’s fastest growing tourist group endures the slowest visa process – Quartz

Argentina mulls opening its banks to money launderers – Quartz

Dirty medicine – Fortune Features – if I was a major pharmaceutical company I would be financing a Hollywood film and a book about Ranbaxy to put the generic competition back in the stone age

Silicon Valley’s assault on Mobile’s Gated Kingdom • The Register – interesting primer on OTT services, which is like web 2.0 for telecoms

Japan: Where medical miracles are waiting to get out of the lab – Fortune Tech

Exclusive: EU threatens trade duties against China’s Huawei, ZTE | Reuters

Senior Execs Not Convinced About Social’s Worth – expect to see similar headlines around big data in a few years when the cost | benefit analysis is done

Chinese physicists create first single-photon quantum memory, leading to quantum internet | ExtremeTech

Five Google I/O Announcements That Matter Outside Silicon Valley – Bloomberg

A Beginner’s Guide to Tom Moulton, inventor of the remix and the 12″ single – FACT Magazine – A Tom Moulton mix appearing on a disco 12″ credits was generally a sign of quality

Challenging domination of oil’s powerful few – FT.com – post LIBOR scandal investigation. Market dynamics around Brent crude could be similarly exploited (paywall)

HSBC Signals 14,000 Jobs Cuts in $3 Billion Savings Plan – Bloomberg – “You’re getting cost cuts as a means of sustaining performance and that’s not a great sign,” said Simon Maughan, an analyst at Olivetree Securities Ltd. in London. “What HSBC is showing you is that there is very little growth in the banking industry for years to come.”

Teens aren’t abandoning “social.” They’re just using the word correctly. — Food for Thought — Medium

Nearly 75% Of All Smartphones Sold In Q1 Were Android, With Samsung At 30%; Mobile Sales Overall Nearly Flat: Gartner | TechCrunch

BlackBerry bringing BBM to Android and iOS this summer | The Verge – too late? Andrew Orlowski doesn’t think so: BlackBerry Messenger unleashed: Look out Twitter and Facebook • The Register

A new forecast points to a plunge in oil and gasoline prices

Twitter: How to archive event hashtags and create an interactive visualization of the conversation Jisc CETIS MASHe

New Android Boss Finally Reveals Plans for World’s Most Popular Mobile OS | Wired Business | Wired.com

iTunes users spending at the rate of $40/yr. | asymco

Five things that made my day this week:

My personal soundtrack this week has been the vintage Japanese hip-hop sounds of Major Force.

I really liked this short 3D animation created by five Chinese animators in their spare time. All of them wanted to promote their home city of Chengdu in western China.

The video is on Youku so you need to be a bit patient with it. Chengdu is:

• Known for its opera, tea houses and apparently leisurely pace
• Considered by the Chinese to have some of the prettiest women in the country
• Part of Sichuan province: the home of China’s spiciest cuisine
• Known to have a lot of bamboo which makes it popular with the pandas who live there
• One of China’s answer to Silicon Valley
• A hub of the Chinese military industrial complex from aviation to encryption technologies

The last two explains the kind of technical savvy that the five animators could draw on.

Vice magazine put together a really good documentary on crystal methamphetamine currently gripping Athens

The ironic thing is that same narrative played out when heroin swept through the North West of England and Irish urban areas during the 1980s; crack swept through urban American areas in the 1980s and early 1990s. The song remains the same.

I revisited The Boondock Saints and the mix of Irish American gingo-ism and Tarrantino-esque violence held up really well in both installments. Looking forward to the third in the trilogy.

The Federation of Irish Societies is looking to get expatriate Irish the vote in Irish elections. This is particularly interesting for two reasons:

• It would give Irish people in the UK the same rights as British people in Ireland currently enjoy
• It would put the economy into sharper focus than would otherwise be the case in Irish politics; emigrants are out of sight and out of mind once they go airside at Dublin Airport
• You will have a more worldly and smarter electorate who will have seen how things are done elsewhere. This could have implications on a wide range of areas from social issues

5 tips for building apps for Baby Boomers – iMediaConnection.com – not sure about the responsive web design comment. I think that this is more like avoid bad web design

Baby Boomers: Every Silver Lining Has a Touch of Grey – CRM Magazine

Inside the Brain of a Boomer: How Cash-Rich Demo Sees Ads | News – Advertising Age

Tranisitioning into Retirement: The MetLife Study of Baby Boomers at 65 – (PDF)

MediaPost Publications Marketing To Baby Boomer And Senior Customers – Part I 01/07/2013

Reports and Insights | Introducing Boomers: Marketing’s Most Valuable Generation | Nielsen

The Sandwich Generation | Pew Social & Demographic Trends

‘Liberator’: Proof that you CAN’T make a working gun in a 3D printer • The Register

Samsung is hurting Android – Opinion – Trusted Reviews

Why E-Mail Newsletters Won’t Die | Wired.com

Facebook’s iPhone Culture Builds An Overzealous Home On Android | TechCrunch – it is interesting that Facebook employees choose iPhone though. Says a lot about the appeal of the platform to tech early adopters

PayPal Says It’s Time to Ditch Passwords and PINs, and Apple may lead the way with iPhone 6 – Digital Lifestyle – Macworld UK

DRM in HTML5 is a victory for the open Web, not a defeat | Ars Technica

13 Ways Brands Can Boost Their Facebook Edgerank Status

Localization alone isn’t enough for overseas game studios succeed in China, says App Annie chief

Ping.it: An RSS reader that lets you create tailored feeds by keywords and popularity

Microsoft’s Bing adds Facebook commenting and Like actions to its social sidebar – interesting move to improve the user search experience, particularly for the under 25s who rely more on social. But it also is an incremental steal in advertising from Facebook

Marissa Mayer Has Turned Yahoo Into ‘A Safe Haven’ For Failed Startups – interesting contrast with 2005? Whilst Flickr broke even, Delicious was barely up and running as a business, blo.gs and Upcoming.org were burning cash (not that was bad then) and Jumpcut was more like an early project

Analyst Gene Munster Confirms One Of The Great Apple Fears, Says Margins Are Going To Drop Significantly (AAPL)

Shoppers Who Use Mobile In-Store, Spend More [Infographic]

Does Windows 8 RT Have Enough Users for Its Own iTunes App? – does it need to tie this in for Office on the Mac?

A tour of some of Japan’s coolest tech innovations, by Dentsu’s Kei Shimada – 20 years ago this wouldn’t even be needed, Japan as an innovator wouldn’t be questioned

Smart metering rollout deadline pushed back to 2020

Report shows bit torrent users pay for more content than honest consumers

Microsoft reveals only 145,000 apps in Windows Phone Store – developer interest slower

Consumption and growth – interesting consumer confidence data

Remember when the global economy was desperate for steel? That’s over – is building becoming more controlled in its pace? Construction for the Beijing olympics, particularly the Bird’s Nest

Three facts about emerging markets everyone should know

Older bankers are sticking around longer, making it harder for younger colleagues to get promoted – this should slow down financial innovation

India Outsourcing Under Scanner After $45-mn Global ATM Heist

True Religion board accepts $835-million takeover bid – latimes.com – no substance behind the brand, and consumer’s requirement for innovation

Quality vs cost in Japan ‹ Japan Today – interesting points but look at the comments

Temporary and part-time jobs are going to kill the global economy – Quartz – vicious circle

The ISS Has Ditched Windows Entirely–For Linux – decided to stop using all Windows computers aboard the ISS, in favour of Linux—to ensure it’s systems are “stable and reliable” – admittedly the ISS was using Windows XP, but this still has to hurt…

Windows 8: forget 100m licences ‘sold’, here’s how many PCs are running it | Technology | guardian.co.uk

‘Nandos Fergie Time’ on Twitter – chicken restaurant reacts to Manchester United news! #nandosfergietime – nice bit of work by Jonathan Hopkin’s team

PwC multichannel shopper survey – includes interesting data on China (PDF)

Individuals can be identified despite IP address sharing, BT says

YouTube Blog: New ways to support great content on YouTube

Nisus InfoClick – Uniquely Powerful Search for Apple Mail

The Exit Trap – I, Cringely

Things that have made my week this week:

This week I have been listening mostly to the sounds of DJ Rolando (although some old school rave slipped in there on Thursday evening)

I was a bit taken aback by Virgin’s US airline to jump on the Mad Men meme with his new marketing offering. It could go so horribly wrong, one person’s efforts to get lucky could be another person’s harrassment and you can’t go make the excuse of needing to be elsewhere in order to leave them.

I have been trying to organise a few conference calls and have found Doodle invaluable.

The Simons Research Foundations science news site, it is a shame that there is no RSS feed at the present time

Finally, I like the way The Onion dealt with their twitter account being hacked. Firstly addressing it and being open about how to deal with similar attacks, secondly with withering satire aimed at the hackers.

Eye-catching recruits and full bank buyout fast-tracks grocer’s push for supremacy – The Independent – interesting how Sainsbury are going for it whilst the UK banking sector licks its wounds. Don’t forget that MBNA entered and disrupted the UK credit card market at the tail-end of the recession in the mid-1990s whilst the banks worried about underwater mortgages and demutualisation

Yahoo’s Mayer Plans Search Revamp to Narrow Google Lead – Bloomberg

Facebook aims to knock Cisco down a peg with open network hardware | Ars Technica

Apple, Samsung: Smartphone profit still only a two player game | BGR

Master List of Facebook Marketing Links – JonLoomer.com

14 Facts about Mothers from Euromonitor’s Survey Research – Analyst Insight from Euromonitor International

loads.in – test how fast a webpage loads in a real browser from over 50 locations worldwide

BitTorrent introduces Bundles to help creators make money with file sharing — paidContent

Deep inside Intel’s new ARM killer: Silvermont • The Register

Tesla CEO Talking With Google About ‘Autopilot’ Systems – Bloomberg

YouTube Trends: Introducing the YouTube Trends Map

Yahoo Struggles to Find Way Out of Microsoft Web-Search Deal – WSJ.com

Foxconn may be planning to pull a Samsung on Apple

A Shift in the Goals of China’s Rich Abroad

The further you are from London, the more equal the cities are

How Silicon Valley is Hollowing Out the Economy (And Stealing From You To Boot)

French banks SocGen and Credit Agricole still look dodgy

Why Adobe’s move to the cloud is a future victory for Apple

Study on the great restructure in Europe by Ipsos France and FreeThinking | Publicis Europe – (PDF)

Google services survive if they make money, aren’t social | Ars Technica

EU Backs Apple in Google-Motorola Patent Fight |IndustryWeek

EE Times’ Top 15 Hot Technologies for 2013

Most data isn’t “big,” and businesses are wasting money pretending it is – Quartz

After nearly 10 years, Adobe abandons its Creative Suite entirely to focus on Creative Cloud – The Next Web

Adobe Debuts “Project Mighty” Smart Stylus For Tablets And “Napoleon,” A Digital Ruler And Guide | TechCrunch

Chart of the week: China’s patent / royalty disconnect | beyondbrics

Tech City – believe the hype? | guardian.co.uk – probably not

eBay, The FBI, Shawn Hogan And Brian Dunning – Business Insider

Clarification to Guardian’s Wrong Article, Again… | Socialbakers

China Magazine Floats Idea of Selling Parts of Currency Reserves – Bloomberg

China calls time on expensive watches in face of crackdown – FT.com

Surface Tension: The effect of Surface on Windows revenues | asymco

Chinese Way of Doing Business – In Cash We Trust – NYTimes.com

Samsung Marketing Advertising Budget Casts Dark Shadow Over Android | BGR – 9.2 billion dollars marketing spend, that’s one hell of a competitive advantage

Here’s the Real Reason Why Virtual Reality Doesn’t Work Yet

George Osborne faces £24bn dilemma on UK bank stakes – FT.com

Facebook’s Declining User Growth Rate – AllThingsD – law of big numbers

Five reasons why this is the worst earnings report Facebook has ever issued – Quartz

MasterCard usage is growing five times faster in emerging markets than in the US – Quartz

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Predicts the Future of Streaming Video – Peter Kafka – Media – AllThingsD

‘Facebook is dead’ among young people | PRWeek – it will be interesting to see if they can turn this around. Especially interesting that this is the message coming from BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat and 1Xtra news editor Rod McKenzie

Yahoo acquires 4 million user to-do app Astrid, service to continue as is for 90 days – The Next Web

Apple’s Share of Worldwide Tablet Shipments Falls Below 40% in 1Q 2013 – Mac Rumors

Leadership Communication Monitor | Ketchum

Deloitte’s UK Media Consumer survey ’13

Google gets people ready for Glass with new how-to video

Digital Marketers Say It’s Becoming More Important to Rank in Global Search Engines

Hotel Guests Turn Away From TV and Toward Streaming Media

Active antennas invade next-gen smartphones