Inflationary shock + other news

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Inflationary shock

Europe faces ‘inflationary shock,’ EU says – International Herald Tribune – it will hit the poorest people hardest. Inflationary shock has been prevented due to the rise of cheaper products available through the rise of globalisation. There are underlying pressures for inflationary shock on the demand side a big factor poor wage growth performance. On the supply side inflationary shock will be driven by the rising cost of property, healthcare and tertiary education

Consumer behaviour

DDB whitepaper on social communities, brand and product marketing – or as they call it ‘digital swarms’. Are we all just giant wasps to them? ;)

KryssTal : The 30 Most Spoken Languages in the World

Culture

Jock Jams 2.0: Five Songs That Will Get Taken Out At Your Next Ballgame, Whether You Like Them Or Not – baseball grounds get into sampling cutting and blending

Design

Middle-Aged Users’ Declining Web Performance (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) – Jakob Neilsen has some interesting research on how age affects website use.

Japan

PingMag – Archive » Design & Mystique of the Japanese School Uniform – this explains a lot of things

Trends in Japan » Bottle Innovations: Instant fresh tea – Cool idea on packaging design for drinks

More related content here.

Luxury

KAWSONE – Original Fake designer back with a new shop full of fly gear

Marketing

Groove Armada sign ‘record deal’ with Bacardi – Brand Republic Login – Brand Republic – (pay wall) interesting the way artists are exploring new business models for the music industry

brandchannel.com | brandjunkie survey results – Interesting set of results by BrandChannel worth a read

Social media usage and SMB owners – interesting data points, despite being American

Online

Google sites drive a third of UK Internet traffic, says Hitwise | Technology | Guardian Unlimited – sounds a bit low given that seven out of ten internet journeys start with search

Alibaba Killer? Chinese Ministries Unveil New B2C Website

Morgan Stanley presentation on internet trends (March 18, 2007) – Meeker and Co roll out an interesting presentation

Mobile Web Trends & Products, March ’08 Update – ReadWriteWeb

Facebook vs Asia’s Top Social Networks – ReadWriteWeb

Flux » Articles » Digital Inclusion at Futurelab Research Day – interesting nuanced take on adoption and challenges of digital serivces

Retailing

Insiders: 7 Confessions Of An Apple Macintosh Specialist – the best bit is how to screw with the store manager

Security

‘Hundreds of thousands’ of Microsoft web servers hacked. FAIL | Technology | Guardian Unlimited

Shopping

3 for 2 on selected manga titles – Amazon UK’s good deals on translated manga books

Telecoms

The need for speed – Yang-May Ooi on the impact of broadband and webservices

Web of no web

Google Begins Experimenting with Image Recognition – very powerful leap forward, potentially negates the need for things like tagging in the longer term?

Coming Soon, to Any Flat Surface Near You – New York Times – they talk about the micro-projector being used by business travellers, but no discussion about home use. Big screens don’t fit all that well into smaller houses even if you can sell big LCD units out of ALDI