emconsteroids

OECD composite leading indicators (CLIs) for June 2009 point to stronger signs of improvement in the economic outlook of OECD economies compared with last month’s release. This is typified by stronger recovery signals in Italy and France and clearer signals of troughs in Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. In Japan tentative signs of improvement have also emerged. Troughs can also be observed in China and India, with tentative trough signals now appearing in Brazil and Russia.. etc.

Source: oecd.org

Good news! Details here as PDF.

Young Chuck moved to Texas and bought a Donkey from a farmer for $100. The farmer agreed to deliver the Donkey the next day. The next day the farmer drove up and said, “Sorry son, but I have some bad news, the donkey died”.

Chuck: “Well, then just give me my money back.”

The farmer: “Can’t do that. I went and spent it already.”

Chuck: “OK, then, just bring me the dead donkey.”

The farmer: “What ya gonna do with him?” Chuck: “I’m going to raffle him off.”

The farmer: “You can’t raffle off a dead donkey!”

Chuck: “Sure I can. Watch me. I just won’t tell anybody he’s dead.” A month later the farmer met up with Chuck and asked, “What happened with that dead donkey?”

Chuck: “I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars apiece and made $998.”

The farmer: “Didn’t anyone complain?”

Chuck: “Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars back.”

Chuck works in a large US investment bank.

Via e-mail.

I’m sure, all of you have heard of the new “find my iPhone” functionality which ships on the 17th of June with the new iPhone OS 3.0.

As a developer, you can download and install the final iPhone OS 3.0 already. If you do that and have a .mac (.me) account, you can go to “Settings”, select “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”, select your mac account and scroll to the bottom of the next screen. There you can switch on “Find My iPhone”.

Once you’ve done that, log in to your .me account and find a new setting at the right hand side of the “settings” section saying “find my iPhone”.

And now it’s all there: Find your phone, ping it, send it messages (you even get an e-mail if the message gets read) or if worse comes to worse, just remotely erase it. Good, if your phone gets stolen! Let’s just hope, the thugs don’t get to know this feature too soon, they may be up for a few surprise visits…

In the last couple of days, rumors have appeared claiming Apple wanted to buy Twitter. At the first glance, this doesn’t make much sense.

It just occurred to me, that there is actually a perfect reason for Apple to buy Twitter. In fact, it could turn Twitter into a massive money making machinery. Let me explain:

Three key elements lead to this perfect deal:

You probably already guessed what I’m going to write next: Twitter will replace SMS on the iPhone! Or in other words: If you have an iPhone, you can send free push notification messages (i.e. Tweets) to other iPhone users AND across the Twitter community. For free! Because of the large user base, there is no chasm to cross or no Metcalfe’s law to deal with.

Who wins? Apple! They have established a new USP for the iPhone with 25m users who can see immediate benefit: free peer-to-peer push messaging!

This is all just a hypothesis. One thing’s for sure though: The operators wouldn’t like that idea.

We have started a new blog about all the silly things you can find in the mobile industry and all its facets. Since the mobile industry is such a young industry, there are a lot of silly decisions being made. But because it’s so fast paced and the big players are holding their power and trying to stick to hold to their power, a lot of irrational things happen as well.

This blog is the attempt to capture the one or the other finding and preserve it in time. Hopefully, we will be able to read these posts with a sufficient smile on our faces thinking: “Gee, this was stupid.”

A few examples of silly or simply stupid things which happened in the mobile industry could be:

1.) The .mobi top level domain: I already blogged about this. The details about my opinion can be read from my blog or the .mobi’s post. Funnily some senior members of the .mobi top level domain people have engaged with me in a lively conversation. The success of the .mobi domain, if you want so, could have proven them right, although I am still convinced the idea is fundamentally faulty. “A lot of flies fly on shit – shit must be a good thing.” goes the saying. In my personal opinion, it reflects what happened to the .mobi domain.

2.) The Vodafone rendering engine: Often quoted as one of the most disastrous projects in the mobile history. The idea was simple, particularly for the marketers: “If you are on Vodafone, you have the Internet on your phone.”. The way it worked was, whenever you request a website via mobile phone gateway, this gateway will take the source code of the website, apply some clever logic to it and turn it into a mobile page. The images will also be resized accordingly. Sometimes, the site would even change the whole navigation. It simply does not make sense to create an engine which tries to transform the normal internet sites out there into mobile sites. It’s simply not possible. Deal with it. You’ll simply end up with unmatched expectations. For example as soon as there is some interactivity such as a login, the system breaks. To make things worse, it tried to do the same thing to already mobile-optimized sites. When doing so, the Vodafone gateway would override the original user agent (which was necessary to detect the device) the whole mobile site functionality was compromised.

The blog may also touch on topics such as the mobile strategy of device manufacturers, operators or web site and mobile service providers in general and how they would go about changing the space or being changed within the space.

Happy reading!

My colleague Nicolas has created an interesting website which compares the Dow Jones Industrial Index in the years of the Great Depression 1929 vs today.

Have a look at the chart, it is updated on a daily basis:

The days are market days.

He is not claiming today’s crisis is supposed to follow the same pattern nor is he making any statement regarding the approach and its scientific aspects. It’s just an interesting graph to look at, whatever the meaning should or could be.

The full article including the comments can be found here.

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends.

From: Ratatouille, Anton Ego’s critics speech

Not many people know that Nokia is actually also a tire manufacturer:

In fact, they started with boots.

Advertising Agency: McCann Erickson, Tel Aviv, Israel
Creative Director: Ido Ben Dor
Copywriters: Asaf Zelikovich, Elad Gabison
Art Director: Geva Gershon

The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. [...] Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.

Adam Smith, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, 1759, Part III