James Earl Jones
James Earl Jones has one of the most distinctive voices in the entertainment industry as you can hear in this Sesame Street clip. You might recognise from his appearance in Conan the Barbarian film, but James Earl Jones has a surprising variety in his career across film, television and stage performance. James Earl Jones has done voiceover work for everything from Disney’s The Lion King to CNN station idents.
Consumer behaviour
FRONTLINE: young & restless in china | PBS – Interesting US TV documentary on the changing face of China throough the eyes of young Chinese people that PBS followed.
apophenia: teens, dating, friendship, and school dances – interesting dissection of current thinking about social network augmented relationships for teens – common sense required
Design
Hollow Spy Coins – talk about niche businesses, this is definitely on the long tail. You have to admire their dedication to engineering this.
Economics
Boomtown of Dubai feels effects of global crisis – International Herald Tribune – Until recently, credit in Dubai was growing by 49 percent a year, according to the Emirates’ Central Bank — a rate almost double that of bank deposits’ growth. That unnerved some bankers here, who felt it could lead to a collapse. “In the U.S., the challenge is about keeping the banks going,” said Marios Maratheftis, chief economist for Standard Chartered Bank. “Here, the economy has been overheated, a correction is needed, and it’s about making sure the slowdown happens in a smooth, orderly manner.”
Klein Verzet: Freaking doomed – the premise is that the demand for shipping of raw materials like coal, bauxite and iron ore have ground to a stand still and soon even the factories of China will be a lot quieter – so the economic outlook is nothing short of ammegeddon
IT’S OVER! POP GOES THE BUBBLE. – web start-up bubble has burst as financial crisis hits the VCs
FMCG
P&G to launch washing gel that cleans at 15 degrees – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic – “According to P&G, Ariel’s Cool Clean campaign encouraged more than five times as many customers than normal to switch to low-energy washing programmes, with Ariel customers twice as likely as the average consumer to wash at a lower 30 degrees temperature (28% of Ariel customers in 2007 versus 13% of those using other brands). P&G has a partnership with the Energy Saving Trust, which encourages people to use energy efficiently and reduce their carbon footprints.”
Hong Kong
Apple Sells Unlocked 3G iPhone On Its Hong Kong Website – OMG 188 USD per month is an obscene amount for Hutchison to charge for its monthly tariff for the iPhone
Scary Shirts – WSJ.com – Hong Kong’s answer to H&M, Giordano satirised the Wall Street bloodletting in Hallowe’en-themed t-shirts
How to
How to Persuade People With Subconscious Techniques – wikiHow
Better Lenses for Less Money: How To Use Vintage Lenses with Your DSLR
Phil Windley’s Technometria | Making Screencasts in OS X
PrintWhatYouLike.com {beta}: Save money and the environment printing only what you like.
Ideas
Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity by Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero, Fang Wu of HP Labs – Web content creators do it for attention, its been proven. Or as common sense has told us for a while the currency of kudos
Rands In Repose: The Culture Chart
Innovation
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Cool Threads | PBS – multi-threaded programming increases software complexity and performance
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Data Debasement | PBS – cloud computing versus DBMS, interesting reading, I need to go back and look at it a few more times to understand it fully. But initial take is that parallel computing as well as parallel processing changes how computing works and databases have to be adapted (like Oracle’s Grid database concept from the tail end of the dot com era and cloud computing. It’s the failings of Moore’s law rather than progress that is driving this change
Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman – while I have sympathy for some of what Mr Stallman says, his argument misses the point about the benefits of social software. Open formats and APIs allow you to move from one service to another as needs must.
Ireland
logainm.ie – Placenames Database of Ireland
Japan
A leftover city of day laborers in Japan faces grim future – International Herald Tribune – Japan’s version of McAlpine’s Fusiliers
Digital World Tokyo | Massive online agony forum published in book form
Projector inc. – Tokyo’s hottest digital agency
Korea
South Korea pushes to dissolve ‘the old way’ of business culture – International Herald Tribune
For all kinds of good, clean fun, Koreans turn to bathhouses – International Herald Tribune
Media
Online Video: Why YouTube’s desperate revenue hunt is on the money
Online
Chinese surfers see red over Microsoft black-outs – Reuters
Coming in 2009: Yourname@somewhere.chinese characters – Internet standards move away from the roman language monopoly
Security
Thunder Tables Kill Microsoft 40-bit Encryption – password protected files may not be secure due to the advances of Moore’s Law and Russian ingenuity
Software
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Collateral Damage | PBS – interesting take on the mobile market, not one that I necessarily agree with, but interesting none the less. Cringely expect that Microsoft Windows Mobile software will fail and has some interesting ideas around the why. I think Microsoft has everything to play for with enterprise users and can leverage items like security authentication and Outlook email access – they might not be dominant but they could still be in with a shout
Technology
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Ctrl-Alt-Del | PBS – speculation on Apple’s hardware plans
Dork talk: Stephen Fry explains the principles of cloud computing | Technology | The Guardian
Knowingly Undersold Article – Eurogamer – nice analysis of the Nintendo Wii’s place in the gaming market
Beginning of end of megapixel marathon – Pixel count gives phones and cameras the ‘Dixons Factor’ – being able to be sold easily by some pimple-faced oik; but doesn’t mean you will have better quality pictures. I have a digital SLR which takes pictures at 5.1 megapixels and a phone camera that will do the same – no prize for which one takes the better pictures.
Telecoms
BT’s 21 Century Network Is So…Last Century – GigaOM – BT’s next-generation network provides poor shareholder value.
Web of no web
Samplify Systems — a rare semiconductor startup » VentureBeat
Second Life now offering Business Teleconferencing – I am surprised that this didn’t happen sooner, I’ve thought that this was the killer application for metaverses for a long time.