This announcement of a new phone by Motorola would obviously have been utterly unremarkable a year ago. But in the current context of the biggest financial and economic global crisis in decades, it becomes very noticeable. Engadget has the details:
"We can't remember the last time we purchased a phone because it
possessed 700+ individual components, a stainless steel housing or a
front plate that takes a fortnight to create, but Motorola's hoping you
start to care about that kind of minutiae right about now. The
admittedly gorgeous AURA (previously coined V70) is the world's first handset with a 16-million color circular display,
and aside from making / receiving calls with the utmost clarity, it
also boasts a Swiss-made main bearing, 62-carat sapphire crystal lens,
a 2-megapixel camera, stereo Bluetooth, microUSB port, quad-band GSM
connectivity, a microSD card slot, multimedia player and up to
7.3-hours of talk time (400-hours in standby). The 4.97-ounce handset
is available exclusively from the MOTO STORE for $1,999.99, with
pre-orders shipping out beginning December 4th... Read - Dedicated AURA website Read - Motorola AURA press release"
Given that Motorola is searching for the next big thing after it's phenomenal success with the RAZR a few years ago, you'd think they'd be keying up something aimed more at the mainstream market. Who knows, perhaps a mainstream version of the Aura, with only a few dozen moving parts and a more down-to-earth price may do the trick. The phone as it is does look cool, but is it cool enough for a $2,000 price tag in these times?
One of the most over-used solutions to many of our recent national problems have been met with a clarion cry by supporters from multiple constituencies to just "Go Green". The rallying cry has been pushed as the answer to so many of our problems from the environment to energy, to our currently sagging economic picture. Going Green has becoming a mainstream band-wagon, with politicians, business-folk of all stripes and sizes, the media and the scientific community, along as passengers. All this is a good thing, but we need to be careful that we don't get carried away again.
Joe Weisenthal of Clusterstock has a post that encapsulates the current situation well:
"In the years after 9/11, commentators like Thomas Friedman argued that
the "green" movement could be a force for fighting terrorism. The basic
idea: Through alternative energy, we can achieve energy Independence,
choking off cash from our enemies. Nice idea, but riddled with problems..." Fast forward, and now the big concern is the crumbling economy. Once
again it seems the solution to our problems happens to be "green". How
convenient. Both candidates for President have promised scads of green
jobs, even though the promises don't really make any sense."
Especially egregious is the way both Presidential candidates promise millions of "Green Jobs" to mainstream folks like Joe the Plumber and Joe Six-Pack, as Joe of Clusterstock notes in a post from a week ago:
In fact, jobs are just about the worst thing to focus on. Geoffrey Styles (via Knowledge Problem) takes a look at Obama's desire to see 5 million green jobs, and what that suggests about the future of the energy sector:
As of last year, the US oil and gas industry employed 1,772,000 workers in
all categories, spanning exploration & production, refining,
transportation and distribution. Nor are they all engineers and
highly-paid drilling specialists. Nearly half this figure was
associated with employment in service stations. Collectively, these 1.8
million people produced, processed and delivered fuels carrying 33 quadrillion BTUsof energy, or "quads", to US consumers and businesses. That's a third of total US energy consumption and 46% of US energy production. On average, it equates to 18.6 billion BTUs per worker, or 3,100 barrels of oil equivalent each, annually."
In
order to come up with a comparable productivity metric for renewable
energy, we need to make some assumptions about how much this sector
will produce when it reaches its anticipated employment of 5 million
Americans.
It must be a lot more than the 1% or so of electricity and
7% of gasoline currently supplied by wind, solar power and ethanol. If
we combine the 36 billion gallons per year of biofuel targeted for 2022 under the federally-mandated Renewable Fuel Standard with the 20% of net electricity generation from wind by 2030 posited by a recent DOE study,
as a proxy for all new renewable electricity, the total equates to
roughly 14 quads per year.
And that's giving the kilowatt-hours from
renewable electricity the benefit of a gas-fired turbine heat rate,
rather than the normal engineering conversion, which is 2/3 lower. The resulting productivity figure works out to 2.8 billion BTUs per green energy worker, or 470 barrels of oil equivalent per year. On that basis, we should expect that the average energy productivity of this huge new renewable energy sector would only be about 15% of the productivity of the current oil and gas industry."
Now, it's hard to imagine that this is what Obama has in mind, and
in fairness, McCain has made very similar promises, so this isn't a
partisan issue. But it's symptomatic of a misguided focus on jobs,
rather than efficiency or productivity."
Going Green is unquestionably a very good thing for the country over the long-term, with so many advantages and benefits. Let's just not over-hype it like we did so many other good things, like the promise of the Internet, the benefits of low-interest rates, the advantages of middle-class home ownership, the use of derivatives for better, more efficient markets, and how the iPhone will really change our lives.
Just this time, let's try and not to create a "Green Bubble" like all those other Bubbles, which started with good intentions and the promise of a very good thing in the long-term. *Image source.
While the endorsement in itself is very good news to Obama supporters everywhere, what I particularly appreciated was Mr. Powell saying something that should have been said by an American leader a long time ago after those terrible days on 9/11/01. Here's what I'm talking about:
"Powell also spoke passionately against the insinuations by some Republicans that Obama is a Muslim.
"Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian.
He's always been a Christian," he said. "But the really right answer
is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this
country? The answer's no, that's not America.
Is there something wrong
with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she
could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party
drop the suggestion, 'He's a Muslim and he might be associated
terrorists.' This is not the way we should be doing it in America."
For the record, I was glad that John McCain corrected a supporter at a rally in Minnesota who suggested that Obama was an Arab. Here's a clip of the video if you missed that notable moment.
But I would have liked Senator McCain to have added that there's nothing wrong with Arab-Americans, just like there's nothing wrong with Italian Americans, Irish-Americans, or Americans that trace their origins to other nations, and hail from different religions and cultures. And that it defines one of the unique attributes of being American and pro-American.
As I've stated in the past, just in the small world of technology that I spend most of my waking hours, we wouldn't have likely had some seminally American companies without Americans from places beyond our borders.
Examples abound of course, with folks like Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo! who was born in Taiwan, Pierre Omidyar, the co-founder of eBay, who was born in France to parents from Iran and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, who was born in the former Soviet Union to Russian parents. Not to mention Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, whose biological father was an immigrant Arab from gasp, Syria.
Many of my fellow Republicans have lost their way after 9/11, on this issue of Americans from other places, and it's likely to cost us this November.
I know politics everywhere call for a glinty-eyed populism that absolutely necessitates pandering to the lowest common denominator of human emotions, especially in tough elections.
But ultimately, we're all here for a cause much larger than ourselves. The nation's long-term well-being and pre-eminence call for us being true to our unique ability to assimilate people from everywhere and anywhere into Americans.
And it's time some of our politicians start to remind us of that. Colin Powell's words in his endorsement made me proud to be his fellow Republican.
As an American and especially as a long-time moderate Republican, it's been truly painful to see how far so many of our political leaders have gone off course to try and win in this historically difficult election season. These comments by Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann from Minnesota are yet another case in point via the Chicago Sun Times:
In a matter of minutes, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) in an interview
with Chris Matthews on MSNBC's "Hardball" has gone where no other
Republican has --mentioning Barack Obama and Tony Rezko, Rev. Jeremiah
Wright, Rev. Michael Pfleger, Bill Ayers and Saul Alinsky. Bachmann
called for the media to probe members of Congress to determine who held
"anti-American" views..."
"REP. BACHMANN: What I would say -- what I would say is that the news
media should do a penetrating expose and take a look. I wish they
would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views
of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or
anti-America? I think people would love to see an expose like that."
The entire transcript of the interview is worth reading. Note how Chris Matthews got Rep. Bachmann to say what she wanted to really wanted to say, much in the style of the Tom Cruise character getting Nicholson's Colonel character to admit how he'd ordered the Code Red* in "A Few Good Men".
Here's an excerpt of the Matthews/Bachmann interview from YouTube:
These McCarthyesque trends, especially espoused by members of Congress, need to be addressed head on by all Americans as unacceptable, as early as possible, regardless of which party or House they emanate from.
Update: CBS reports that Rep. Bachmann's Democratic opponent, El Tinklenberg has received almost half a million dollars in donations from around the country, from both Democrats and Republicans, since the interview above aired.
* In case you can't recall the scene I'm referring to, here's a clip courtesy of YouTube (Spoiler alert in case you haven't seen the movie):
A story that starts with this opening line absolutely gets my attention:
"SUNSPOT, N.M. --
It's fair to say that Dan Long has seen more of the universe than anyone but God."
It goes on to add:
"Month after month, year after year, Long has sat in a windowless room
atop a windy mountain peak, watching the heavens scroll by on 12
monitors connected to the Apache Point Observatory's 98-inch telescope.
He saw stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies banded together like
giant herds of animals on an unending savanna roll by. Less frequently,
exotic denizens of deep space would pop up -- blinding quasars and
supernovae, flaring up as brightly on the bank of TV screens as entire
galaxies."
And we get to understand the true scope of this endeavor:
"This summer, after eight years of charting the
cosmos, Long and his colleagues completed the deepest, most
comprehensive map of the heavens ever produced.
Known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey,
it is a remarkable three-dimensional model of the universe that allows
an observer to travel, as if by rocket ship, from the dwarf galaxies
hugging the skirts of the Milky Way to the frontier campfires of the
most distant quasars, blazing billions of light-years away.
In its 5 terabytes of data are 217 million individual objects,
including 800,000 galaxies (which themselves contain billions of stars
and planets) and 100,000 quasars -- creatures once so rare and strange
that they weren't even detected until 1962.
"Nobody's ever done anything like this before," said Bruce Gillespie,
administrator of the Astrophysical Research Consortium, made up of 300
astronomers who helped carry out the $100-million sky-mapping project.
"They'll still be looking at this data in 50 years."
What's interesting to note that almost every review compares the G1 to Apple's iPhone, which of course is the "Gold Standard" competitor of most mainstream interest.
And the general consensus of these reviews seems to be that the G1 is a promising start as compared to the iPhone, with more improvements to come from Google, other hardware and wireless providers. This observation by Om Malik of GigaOm on Google's software platform, stuck in my mind:
"Amazingly robust operating system with little or no lag time. It makes
Windows Mobile feel like a retiree; even the iPhone feels like a
middle-aged person compared to Android OS."
Which brings up the following observation going through most of the full-on reviews of the G1. What seems to be lacking in most of them so far, was the almost total lack of direct comparison vs. other major Smartphone platform providers like Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Palm and others.
If you look at the market share of these systems in this Wikipedia entry, the iPhone is so far a distant number five in market share, as of Q208:
Palm OS developed by PalmSource (now a subsidiary of ACCESS) (2.3% Market Share Sales Q2 2008)
As the old joke goes, when a few folks are running from a hungry bear, the survivor has to focus on
outrunning the other runners, not necessarily the bear. The list above shows that there are a whole host of runners besides just the iPhone*.
Google has a whole lot of opportunity for Android beyond the iPhone, both from a mind share and a market share perspective. With pre-orders for a few hundred thousand or morefor the T-Mobile G1, they're obviously on their way to catch a few other runners besides the iPhone.
I'd particularly be interested in seeing reviews of the new G1 Android platform against the latest Windows Mobile device and Nokia's N95 or N96, which are the ultimate "do-it-all" smartphones that serious geeks around the world have gravitated towards in the last year or so. Nokia is said to have sold over half a million unlocked N95 devices in North America alone, despite the fact that no US wireless carrier "officially" supports that uber-smartphone.
These comparisons and reviews are likely forthcoming, and for now be more relevant for Google to beat with it's Android initiative than just Apple's iPhone.
Update: Om Malik has a good post on the challenges Windows Mobile faces with the arrival of Android, with more thoughts to come on Symbian.
Speaking of politics and caricatures, it's interesting to see that attacks ads aren't just limited to the political realm this season. They've jumped to the fierce competition in cable business news, as this commercial by the recently launched Fox Business channel is running against CNBC and their star Jim Cramer:
What's interesting is that these ads are actually running on CNBC. Guess when it comes to money, it doesn't matter as long as it's green.
There's a great piece in the International Herald Tribune on the power of caricature in politics, focusing on the McCain/Obama Presidential race. Here's an excerpt:
"A bumbling president, a rube candidate, a greedy politician - such
are the caricatures of political life. Whether accurate or not, they
can be more powerful than any argument.
Recall the fate of President Gerald Ford, doomed to be remembered as
an irredeemable klutz, a judgment that readily slips into assessments
of his political acumen. Why? Mainly because more than 30 years ago the
comedian Chevy Chase used an incident in which Ford stumbled and made
it the central feature of his impersonation on "Saturday Night Live."
Every Ford skit ended with disastrous pratfalls. The caricature, of
course, may have been flawed, since Ford was a star athlete in his
youth. But the image persists."
What makes this example relevant of course is how Sarah Palin has been so successfully caricatured by Saturday Night Live in the weeks before the election:
"Such is the strange influence of caricature in politics. During the
recent vice presidential debates, for example, one candidate, boasting
of a "mavericky" perspective, when asked about how to deal with the
world economic crisis, said: "We're gonna ask ourselves what would a
maverick do in this situation, and then ya know, we'll do that." That
same candidate, asked about global warming, said: "We don't know if
this climate change whosie-whatsit is man-made or if it's just a
natural part of the End of Days."
Oh, wait a minute. That wasn't Governor Sarah Palin in the debate.
That was Tina Fey doing her impression of Sarah Palin in the debate on
"Saturday Night Live," an impersonation - filled with perky winks and
folksy gosh-darn-its and a self-conscious elimination of g's at the end
of whatever word she happened to be sayin' - that was so resonant, it
almost displaced Palin's own performance as herself.
Fey's impression appeared on countless news reports, inspired
political punditry, racked up hits on YouTube and was watched in full
on the NBC Web site, nbc.com, where it had, at last check, more than
five million views."
Here's the clip on the mock Palin/Biden debate in case you missed it:
The Herald Tribune piece goes on to give a good example of the two Presidential candidates have been caricatured of late in the New York Observer:
"Another kind of political caricature appeared in last week's New York
Observer: Jason Horowitz compared the supposed emotional style of
Senator John McCain with the apparent unflappability of Senator Barack
Obama - a point, as he noted, that has been made before. But the
essay's focus came from an intellectual caricature, a portrait of
exaggerated temperaments, reproduced by Drew Friedman in a color
drawing.
The candidates - in a cloaked form of advocacy - are portrayed
as "Star Trek" archetypes: McCain the demonstrative, emotional Captain
Kirk; Obama, the coolly detached Mr. Spock."
These caricatures probably contribute to the widening gap between the candidates, as this CBS story illustrates:
"The Obama-Biden ticket now leads the McCain-Palin ticket 53 percent to
39 percent among likely voters, a 14-point margin. One week ago, prior
to the Town Hall debate that uncommitted voters saw as a win for Obama, that margin was just three points.
Among independents who are likely voters - a group that has swung
back and forth between McCain and Obama over the course of the campaign
- the Democratic ticket now leads by 18 points. McCain led among
independents last week.
McCain's campaign strategy may be hurting hurt him: Twenty-one
percent of voters say their opinion of the Republican has changed for
the worse in the last few weeks. The top two reasons cited for the
change of heart are McCain's attacks on Obama and his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate."
The power of political caricature through the ages is not new. But it's useful now and then to remind ourselves that it's power should never be taken for granted.
Looks like the markets Monday liked the prospect of governments here and abroad, moving in a somewhat coordinated manner, to invest state funds in their national banks and provide other inter-bank guarantees.
Today's record-breaking move (up 11% for a change), in our markets was certainly a respite from the relentless downward moves of the last few days. But one can not assume that we're out of the woods...far from it, and continued volatility and uncertainty will be with us for some time to come.
Watching the evolution of the Treasury and Fed's bailout program since it became law a few days ago has been interesting to say the least.
As the FT reminds us, it's breathtaking how fast the main thrust of the plan has shifted from putting $700 billion to work buying up "toxic" assets owned by financial institutions, to investing hundreds of billions of dollars directly in a large number of U.S. banks and other institutions.
As a long-time student of early stage startups, this whole process resembles how the business plans of so many start-ups change radically once they're out in the "real world"*.
Even it's 35-year old "CEO", Treasury honcho Neel Kashkari, looks like the type of young, energetic, go-getter that would have lead a start-up in Silicon Valley in another life. It turns out he even has an IT (Information Technology) background at NASA and later at Goldman Sachs.
Thus we now have one of the largest government funded bailout "start-up" in our history.
Of course, the similarities end there, with this enterprise having all the trappings of a traditional, long-term politically motivated government program, complete with a mind-numbing list of procedures, rules, and execution time-tables, with multiple masters all over-seeing this enterprise with a microscope.
Here's hoping there's a win-win exit down the road for all the stake-holders involved for this little ambitious start-up.
Hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens eagerly await a Government's decision on an array of actions that'll define their financial security and prosperity for years to come.
No, I'm not talking about folks in America or Europe, but China.
China is poised to make some momentous choices soon that'll have a big impact on 800 million of it's 1.3 billions citizens. This BBC News item provides the headline:
"China's Communist Party leaders have agreed a package of rural
reforms that could shape the country's economic policy over the coming
years."
"Chinese leaders are expected to allow peasants to buy or sell
land-use rights for the first time, a step that could draw hundreds of
millions of farmers more firmly into the market economy, now centered
around the cities.
The new policy, which is being discussed this weekend by Communist
Party leaders and could be announced within days, would be the biggest
economic reform in many years and would mark another significant
departure from the system of collective ownership and state control
that China built after the 1949 revolution."
The heart of the matter is how rural property rights are re-defined in the years to come:
"Average income in rural areas lags far behind the average in cities,
giving China one of the starkest income gaps in the world, according to
government estimates.
Many farmers work on tiny, state-allocated plots of land for a small
fraction of the year, investing little in agriculture. While they are
entitled to 30-year land-use contracts, the state retains ownership of
rural land, and local officials often seize or reallocate it to suit
their development priorities.
Rural land disputes are perhaps the biggest source of social unrest
in China. Protests and riots in rural areas number in the thousands
each year, according to national police estimates. They are often
incited by allegations of corruption and illegal land seizures.
Many farmers leave the land to seek work in cities, but they are
still classified as farmers under the country’s population control
policies and tend to work in low-wage factory or construction jobs on a
seasonal basis.
Advocates for land reform say the proposed changes would create more
asset wealth for farmers and strengthen land security, which would in
turn encourage peasants to invest in farming and increase productivity."
Chinese citizens in urban areas have already had this financial flexibility for years:
"...rural land reform has not kept pace with urban land reform, which
partly explains while farmers have failed to capitalize on the economic
gains of the past few decades. China allows urban residents to trade or
sell their land-use contracts freely. That right has allowed people to
profit from city property in ways that farmers have not legally been
able to do."
The long-term aim here of course is to provide better economic opportunities for the rural majority, and allow them to catch up with the urban minority. As this Asia Times piece explains citing an expert in Rural Chinese issues:
"There is a lot of demand in the countryside but 70% of the population is too
poor to afford things like television sets, clothes, and so forth," he said.
"Only when reform is carried out and rural income is increased and development
speeds up, will you generate internal demand."
Rural labor constituted 40.8% of the country's total workforce last year, yet
agriculture accounted for only 11.3 % of the country's total gross domestic
product (GDP) of 24.66 trillion yuan (US$3.61 trillion), he said.
With up to 900-million rural population sharing this 11.3% of national wealth,
"how could peasants not be poor? How can they survive unless reform is
implemented?" he asked"
This is a big issue that China's neighbor India is struggling with as well for it's billion citizens, although it's land ownership policies are very different.
The big irony in all this is of course that the largest Communist nation on earth is about to privatize state assets for hundreds of millions of it's citizens, while the most successful Capitalist nations on earth are about to implement unprecedented, globally coordinated programs to make large national investments in private companies in a whole host of industries.
A smaller irony is the current state of affairs of a developed little country like Iceland, which moved a generation of it's citizens from fishing to banking, now considering a national move back to it's roots.
We're all trying to get to the same place, a better and more secure way of life for the majority of our citizens over time. It's just interesting the different roads we sometimes have to take to get there.
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