Everything you can imagine is real.

"However, with unemployment levels rising to almost fifty percent in countries such as Kenya, there..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:33:23 +0000

“However, with unemployment levels rising to almost fifty percent in countries such as Kenya, there are still hundreds of millions of mobile phone subscribers who are unable to find consistent work. Given high rates of unemployment and marginal income sources, many of the more than 2 billion mobile phone subscribers currently living in the developing world would greatly benefit from even an extra dollar per day. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has successfully introduced “human intelligence tasks” that can be completed by individuals with a personal computer connected to the internet for small amounts of money. We apply the same principle to “txteagle”, a mobile phone-based system that untethers these tasks from the PC and offers them to the world’s billions of mobile phone users - providing an additional source of supplementary income to rural and low income populations.”

- txteagle - Learn More

Really interesting initiative; reminds me of a call-to-action Jay Walker made at TED Global in 2005…

"And they see Alistair Darling handing over £4,350 of their money to not sort out the banking crisis..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:03:57 +0000

“And they see Alistair Darling handing over £4,350 of their money to not sort out the banking crisis that he doesn’t understand because he’s a small-town solicitor,”

- Get me a rope before Mandelson wipes us all out | Jeremy Clarkson - Times Online

…well at least he doesn’t pull his punches!

Google Trader

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:18:40 +0000

Google Trader:

Nice proof positive that sometime the answer to the question “How would Google do it?” is: “Pretty damn poorly, is how!”

"If it were possible to replicate data and computation across multiple, geographically distributed..."

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:05:16 +0000

“If it were possible to replicate data and computation across multiple, geographically distributed data centers, one could reduce or eliminate UPS costs, and the failure of a single data center would not disrupt the cloud service or unduly affect its customers. Rather, requests to the service would simply be handled by one of the service replicas at another data center, perhaps with slightly greater latency due to time of flight delays. This is, of course, more easily imagined than implemented, but its viability is assessable on both economic and technical grounds.”

- Egg Baskets, Lambdas and Geo-resilience - Reed’s Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Devdutt Pattanaik: East vs. West -- the myths that mystify | Video on TED.com

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:31:13 +0000

Devdutt Pattanaik: East vs. West -- the myths that mystify | Video on TED.com:

In my opinion this was the best talk at TED India. If you want to understand our world you could do a lot worse than starting here.

"Bangladesh based Grameenphone has started trading its shares on the stock exchanges in Dhaka and..."

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:40:58 +0000

“Bangladesh based Grameenphone has started trading its shares on the stock exchanges in Dhaka and Chittagong following an oversubscribed IPO - and nearly tripled in value in early trading.”

- Grameenphone Shares Soar on Initial Day of Trading

"Two years ago the discussion was whether the enterprise will adopt any SaaS applications. Today the..."

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:59:20 +0000

“Two years ago the discussion was whether the enterprise will adopt any SaaS applications. Today the conversation is about which on-premise applications will be replaced by their SaaS equivalent. SaaS has penetrated the enterprise, is showing strong ROI which is in turn resulting in accelerating adoption.”

- Trident Capital Blog

…good to see GS is only a few months behind the Park Paradigm… lol

"Abstract: Power-law distributions occur in many situations of scientific interest and have..."

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:23:20 +0000

“Abstract: Power-law distributions occur in many situations of scientific interest and have significant consequences for our understanding of natural and man-made phenomena. Unfortunately, the empirical detection and characterization of power laws is made difficult by the large fluctuations that occur in the tail of the distribution. In particular, standard methods such as least-squares fitting are known to produce systematically biased estimates of parameters for power-law distributions and should not be used in most circumstances. Here we describe statistical techniques for making accurate parameter estimates for power-law data, based on maximum likelihood methods and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic. We also show how to tell whether the data follow a power-law distribution at all, defining quantitative measures that indicate when the power law is a reasonable fit to the data and when it is not. We demonstrate these methods by applying them to twenty-four real-world data sets from a range of different disciplines. Each of the data sets has been conjectured previously to follow a power-law distribution. In some cases we find these conjectures to be consistent with the data while in others the power law is ruled out.”

- So You Think You Have a Power Law — Well Isn’t That Special?

"Cisco is taking direct aim at Microsoft with a new corporate e-mail service called Webex Email...."

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:58:01 +0000

“Cisco is taking direct aim at Microsoft with a new corporate e-mail service called Webex Email. Cisco has combined technology from its acquisition of Postpath with its Webex conferencing service. The combined offering gives corporate users access to their Outlook e-mail from any browser. The new service puts email in the “cloud” and eliminates the need for Microsoft Exchange servers.”

- Cisco ruffles feathers with new collaboration tools | Business Tech - CNET News

82 Billion Objects in Amazon S3 - All Things Distributed

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:40:25 +0000

82 Billion Objects in Amazon S3 - All Things Distributed

PA001 | Silvia Nayla

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:04:09 +0000

PA001 | Silvia Nayla

AT007 | Silvia Nayla love this.

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:46:43 +0000

AT007 | Silvia Nayla

love this.

PP014C | Silvia Nayla very cool.

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:45:40 +0000

PP014C | Silvia Nayla

very cool.

"Facebook, Apple and a raft of start-ups are all trying to develop a low-cost payment system, which..."

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:11:35 +0000

“Facebook, Apple and a raft of start-ups are all trying to develop a low-cost payment system, which could be a lucrative undertaking in itself. If they succeed, they may bring some relief to media firms that have seen much of their business disappear into the vacuum: many in the music and newspaper businesses, for example, are pinning their hopes on the idea that consumers can be persuaded to pay small amounts for digital wares.”

- Video games move online: A giant sucking sound | The Economist

"John S. Reed, who helped engineer the merger that created Citigroup Inc., apologized for his role in..."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:04:56 +0000

“John S. Reed, who helped engineer the merger that created Citigroup Inc., apologized for his role in building a company that has taken $45 billion in direct U.S. aid and said banks that big should be divided into separate parts.”

- Reed Says ‘I’m Sorry’ for Role in Creating Citigroup (Update1) - Bloomberg.com

Imagine if Sandy had lost instead. Muscle vs brains. Shareholders made a very poor choice (and paid for it.)

"Strictly as a fan of business hardball, you have to tip your cap to the Scandinavian team of Niklas..."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:57:31 +0000

“Strictly as a fan of business hardball, you have to tip your cap to the Scandinavian team of Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. First the founders of Skype got eBay to pay close to $3 billion for the Net telephony pioneer while somehow retaining control of its key technology. And now, after being snubbed in their attempt to buy the company back, they’ve won themselves a healthy chunk in exchange for that technology, while putting a beat-down on a friend-turned-enemy for good measure. Nicely played, gents.”

- Skype founders ring up their second big eBay payday | Good Morning Silicon Valley

…nice one.

"Seven companies received about 82 percent of those benefits, the panel estimated. General Electric..."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:31:50 +0000

“Seven companies received about 82 percent of those benefits, the panel estimated. General Electric Capital was able to reduce its borrowing costs by about $1.9 billion, while Goldman Sachs saved an estimated $606 million. The other big beneficiaries were Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo & Company.”

- Break for Companies in Bailout’s Fine Print - NYTimes.com

…and alot of this saving instead of accruing to shareholders ie recapitalizing the banks (which however unpleasant is needed/for good of all, will be subject to a 50% vig via bonuses.

"Furthermore, you lose a lot of information in a master trust pool. Because new loans are added to..."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:25:25 +0000

““Furthermore, you lose a lot of information in a master trust pool. Because new loans are added to the existing collateral pool when new bonds are issued, the performance statistics of the older loans are diluted by the new loans.””

- FT.com / UK - Recent deals signal market’s reopening in the same old style

…many of the core data quality issues in RMBS could be solved by the adoption of ZSINs (Zoopla Standard Identification Number) and thus automated access to rich data and meta-data on underlying property in each pool.

"All in all, it’s clear that the public’s hatred of the banking industry – far from easing – may just..."

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:12:21 +0000

“All in all, it’s clear that the public’s hatred of the banking industry – far from easing – may just be winding up. And next time a bank CEO heads for the White House, I’d steer clear of the snipers.”

- Want to kill some bankers? There’s an app for that - Bank Think

…pretty good for a business who’s main product is trust…way to go banking industry!

"Believe it or not, not everyone wants to build tools that can grow into large centralised solutions,..."

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:58:35 +0000

“Believe it or not, not everyone wants to build tools that can grow into large centralised solutions, which is how many people seem to define scale. No one is ever going to run a nationwide election monitoring campaign running into millions of text messages using a single laptop, cable and mobile phone. FrontlineSMS is based on “horizontal scaling”, gained by an increase in the numbers of individual users with their own systems. In other words, a hundred systems in a hundred clinics serving 10,000 people each, rather than one system adapted and “scaled up” to serve a million. We’re happy and comfortable with this approach, as are our target audience of grassroots NGOs.”

- Our “social mobile” line in the sand | Build it Kenny, and they will come…

“…horizontal scaling…” I think we’ll hear this expression more and more…