And you are here why?

Seriously - you thought that Shimmer was the greatest thing since, well, the Bassomatic , but you would be wrong! From the genii at Brookstone comes the first true competition to Shimmer - the USB Cufflinks From the product page These cufflinks feature 2GB USB storage plus they provide a WiFi hotspot to multiple devices! You can also access media servers from the host computer. Perfect for business meetings, travel and techies everywhere. Indeed - the uses are endless! (No, I'm not continuing the snark.  It speaks for itself)

Looks like Mastercard is looking to bring it to the U.S .  *Finally*!   We’re moving toward a world beyond plastic, where consumers will shop and pay in a way that best fits their needs and lifestyles with a simple tap, click or touch in-store, online or on a mobile device,” said Chris McWilton, President, U.S. Markets, MasterCard. “Our roadmap represents a transformational shift in the approach to payments and is not simply about EMV, chip and PIN. We’re focused on readying the ecosystem to drive future innovation and provide new consumer experiences to enhance the value of electronic payments. ” Whatever.  Seriously.  As long as we can finally get chip & pin into the U.S. (which means that my U.S. credit cards can finally start working in Europe!

From the Blackberry blogs, comes this InfoGraphic  Words...truly...fail...me...  Seriously, I hope that this isn't part of Thorsten Heins' new "Saving RIM" strategy.  If it is, well, <gulp>.  I mean GoGo Girl - "Saving the day with a strategy, a smile or a spatula"?  Really? Like I said, <gulp>

Karl Bode gets cheesed off at people claiming a spectrum capacity crisis Anybody who warns of an unavoidable capacity crisis on wireline or wireless networks is lying in order to sell you something. That may be a blunt assessment to some, but it's the only conclusion you can draw as we see time and time again that claims about a looming network apocalypse (remember   the Exaflood ?) violently overestimate future traffic loads and underestimate the ingenuity of modern network engineers. Fear sells. Drink orange juice or you'll die of cancer. Get more insurance or you're a bad family man. Vote for me or lose your job and see your grandma deported. Pay $2.50 per gigabyte or face   Internet brown outs . Be afraid. [...] As usual though, actually bothering to listen to and look at the data tells a different story. Nobody argues that spectrum is infinite, but buried below industry histrionics is data noting that there really isn't a spectrum   crisis   as much as a...

Why is it not a criminal offence? From the FT Alphaville , we have the story of Ravi Shankar SInha, the UK CEO of JC Flower's (huge globe-girdling P.E. firm), who ended up losing a lot of money during the financial crisis (poor guy :-(  ). As any red-blooded human being would do, he set out to rectify the situation, and make back his money. How? I'm glad you asked.  What he seems to have done is the following (for context, "Company A" is a company that JCF had invested in) He went to Company A, and claimed that they owed him advisory fees. He told Company A that JCF had authorized the payment of these advisory fees (after all, he was the CEO.  Why would they disbelieve him?) He then sent them invoices for around 1.3 Million Euros (and more!), for these 'advisory fees' (yeah, you guessed it, fake invoices) The kicker, of course, is that he basically made the whole thing up - there were no advisory fees authorized, and any work he'd done for Co...

Salesforce just launched Desk.com , their revamp of Assistly (which they bought).  As a quick recap, Assistly was a cloud-based platform that allowed businesses to do integrated customer support/management across most asynchronous modalities, viz., Twitter, Facebook, Email, Phone, IM, etc.  SalesForce bought the company last year. They've pretty significantly redone the GUI - making it vastly more mobile-friendly than it used to be (The mobile version is mostly, if not completely HTML5).  From what I understand, they've also retooled the back-end, basing it all on Heroku a-la do.com. More details from VentureBeat here .

Presenting, the 4sevens XM18. Its a bit big for a flashlight, but boy wouldn't it be bright :-) (oh, and its pricey too. $2500). Still, 15,000 Lumens! FTW!

"Practice Management" is a complex business - and I'm not referring to the part where you try to get clients (and their money).  There is an equally tricky bit involving not spending too much of your own money - and not losing your hair in the process - just staying in business. You need Microsoft Office of course, because frankly if you're a lawyer, you're using Word.  For sure. Email - almost certainly Outlook on the desktop, and quite possibly tied into Exchange somehow. Some kind of remote desktop thingy, because you need to get at all those documents that are on the office share. Oh, the 'office share' of course And all this before we even *begin* to get to the fun stuff like time-tracking, document management, legal research, and the like - you know, all the fun stuff that you actually need to do to be in business? Towards this, there seem to broadly be two different approaches being taken towards SaaS-ifying this business (and lets admi...

From the NY Times (an article charmingly titled "Austerity is not enough") Bowing to mounting evidence that  austerity alone cannot solve the debt crisis, European leaders are expected to conclude  this week that what the debt-laden, sclerotic countries of the Continent need are a dose of economic growth. A draft of the European Union summit meeting communiqué calls for ‘‘growth-friendly consolidation and job-friendly growth,’’ an indication that European leaders  have come to realize that austerity measures, like those being put in countries like Greece and Italy,  risk stoking a recession and plunging fragile economies into a  downward spiral.  Really? Really ? Earth to Captain Obvious - This has been somewhat remarkably and ridiculously obvious from Day 1 (or, if you're Paul Krugman, from the beginning of the Grand Experiment).  As I've mentioned elsewher e, if you don't have control over your own currency (hello EU countries), then ther...

Harry Frankfurt of Princeton attempts to answer the question that has vexed philosophers for millenia - Why is there so much Bullshit? . One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or  what functions it serves . [...] Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is relatively more of it nowadays than at other times. There is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but the proportion  that is bullshit may not have increased. Without assuming that the incidence of bullshit is actual...

Hat tip @Babelcolor

Uzi Shmilovici (of Future Simple fame) has a post up on GigaOm about making Freemium work for your business. He addresses two main issues, Customer Cost , and Free/Premium Segmentation , and addresses them well.  Go read it - it may belabor the obvious a bit, but that is worth belaboring since most people actually don't get this. While perusing this, a point that struck me was that people rarely quantify the reasons people upgrade. Of course, you need to have a product that everybody likes, etc., etc., but as Tyler found out at Letters From Santa ( in this article ), people aren't going to pay you just because they thought you are doing a good job. In any sort of product - Freemium or otherwise - people will only upgrade if there is something in it for them.  Oh yes, some might do so as a Thank You, but that is remarkably rare. In particular, when it comes to Freemium products, people will (happily) upgrade for one of the following reasons Eliminating Advertising :...

Hat tip Barclays, by way of ZeroHedge

Apart from the fact that they both end in 'a', they don't really have much in common. Or so you'd think - heres what happens when a  ringtone suddenly breaks into a viola recital in Slovakia.  After an initial wtf moment, responds Lukáš beautifully

Capers are highly under-rated Corollary Everything tastes better with Capers   Addendum Nora Ephron is wrong BTW, The Nora Ephron quote was " ...any dish that tastes good with capers in it, tastes better with capers not in it "

The NY Times discusses the publishing industry's last stand / line in the sand / save us strategy - working with B & N “That display space they have in the store is really one of the most valuable places that exists in this country for communicating to the consumer that a book is a big deal,” said Madeline McIntosh, president of sales, operations and digital for Random House.  And therein lies - potentially - the key to their salvation (to the extent that salvation is available, that is).  They do seem to be approaching this with a coherent strategy, based on market realities.  E-books are exploding, and maintaining price-levels is going to be difficult.  Deploying a regimen of enforced scarcity is not really going to help (or work) - and the bookstores are useful entities, not the least because they serve a valuable alternate function They are to books, what Starbucks is to coffee . Seriously - coffee shops sells a ton of coffee, but a huge chu...

Noah gets cheezed off slightly at the upcoming "Deserve to be poor" debate , asking, "Who cares how "deserving" the poor are? Regarding the first of my questions, "Do we want to make poor people less poor", it may be that your sense of morality tells you that if someone is in a condition as a direct result of their own actions, it would be wrong to try to remove that person from that condition. Fine, good for you! But for my part, I often simply don't care. If I am getting mugged by a poor person, I quite frankly do not give a rodent's gluteal region whether that person is poor because he made bad life choices or because the circumstances of his birth made his poverty inevitable; I want him to stop mugging me , and if making him less poor will make him stop mugging me, then maybe this would be a good thing to do, regardless of whether he "deserves" it. When I witness the urban blight, violence, drug abuse, and other social ill...

From an article on the Beeb about Graphene Graphene is a form of carbon. It is a flat layer of carbon atoms tightly packed into a two-dimensional honeycomb arrangement.   Dr Nair said: "Just for a laugh, we sealed a bottle of vodka with our (graphene) membranes and found that the distilled solution became stronger and stronger with time. Neither of us drinks vodka but it was great fun to do the experiment."  Imagine the possibilities!

Scott Sellers (of Azul fame) has a post up on GigaOm about Java memory issues.  To quote An improvement in the Java virtual machine (JVM) can make a world of difference. E-commerce application failures can often be sourced back to limitations of conventional JVMs, which constrain application resources and make it challenging to scale apps beyond a few gigabytes of memory, which can effect performance under load. Conventional JVMs also suffer from stop-the-world pauses because the JVM needs to clean up its internal memory, the impact of which causes applications to freeze and become unresponsive. Programmers must tune Java to work around the JVM’s limited scalability and very carefully manage the amount of memory a given application uses. For e-tailers, this is bad news, because e-commerce applications must handle users loads that are never static and require more memory for each user and transaction to ensure consistent user response times and high sustained throughput...

Andy Budd has a long post up about the similarity between character classes in Dungeons & Dragons and roles in web-development. To summarize the thing, he draws analogies as Fighters =:= Developers Thieves =:= Front end developers Illusionists =:= Designers Clerics =:= Project Managers Rangers =:= UX Designers I'm really short-changing the article.  Seriously, go read it .  But, in the meantime, there were was one section in particular which caught my eye  Characters in Dungeons & Dragons progress by gaining experience points which relate to the complexity of the quests they undertake and the level of the foes they defeat. If they do something themselves all that learning goes to them. However if they are part of a team the experience is typically distributed amongst everybody. So the more quests you undertake, and the bigger those quests are, the more you’ll progress in your careers. If you play infrequently and only accept easy challenges it can...

No androids as far as I can see

Barry Ritholz sez - Most of the World Wants More Bank Regulation : That is what survey after survey around the globe shows that the world’s populations wants. Despite a relentless propaganda campaign of misinformation, fabricated data and false narratives, the public has not been fooled by the 1%. The best efforts of a well funded group of ideologues — Free Market absolutists, anti-Democracy and Randians — these pro-corporate radicals has not yet succeeded in fooling all of the world’s population all of the time. How do we know this? A 25 country survey last year by Edelman. They asked the question: “ When it comes to government regulation of business, do you think that your government regulates business too much, not enough or about the right amount? ” ... One major caveat : I would imagine the major events of the past few years probably has people thinking of disasters in specific industries: Banking , Energy Exploration and Nuclear Power . If the questions were asked abo...

From Peter Kurze

Seriously Mr. TSA, what on earth do you think people will do with Two Razorblades (found concealed in the frame of a carry-on bag at Sacramento ). Note, I said "will do", not "can do" (which is what your paranoid dream-fever of a brain is doing as we speak). Seriously, please do think about it...

Infinite sources (too obvious perhaps.  I bet there is a patent on this). Wikipedia sez . The quotation first came from Robert J. Hanlon of   Scranton, Pennsylvania , according to his friend Joseph Bigler, as a submission for a book compilation of various jokes related to   Murphy's law published in 1980 titled   Murphy's Law Book Two, More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong . [1]   The name was inspired by   Occam's razor . [2] A similar quotation appears in   Robert A. Heinlein 's 1941 short story " Logic of Empire " ("You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity"); this was noticed in 1996 (five years before Bigler identified the Robert J. Hanlon citation) and first referenced in version 4.0.0 of the   Jargon File , [3]   with speculation that   Hanlon's Razor   might be a corruption of "Heinlein's Razor". "Heinlein's Razor" has since been defined as variations on   Never attribute t...

That is all.

FT Alphaville reports that Fitch has gone after a bunch-a European countries. In particular Belgium went from AA+ to AA (one notch) Cyprus went from BBB to BBB- (one notch) Italy went from A+ to A- ( two notches) Slovenia went from A to AA- (two notches) Spain went from A to AA- ( two notches) Per Fitch, the only reason Italy stayed away from BBB territory (therein lies madness! beware! etc.) was that Monti seems to be doing something about reforms, and the ECB is basically providing infinite liquidity for the next three years. Personally, I don't put much stock in the Monti entertainment - Italy still needs to grow at something like 5% over the mid-term to bring things back into kilter, and, well, that's not going to happen, is it? So, credit the ECB, which begs the question - What happens in 3 years?   Seriously, Italy has something like $1-Trillion coming due over the next few years.  That isn't going anywhere, so kicking the can down the road three ye...

You're probably aware of the iBook EULA flap ( I've written about it here ).  To recap, the EULA boils down to Feel free to create anything you want with this tool If you want to give the Fruits Of Your Genius away for free , rock on.  Do it however and wherever you want. If you you want to sell it however, You must sell it through us (Apple) If we don't want to sell it, you are Shit-out-of-Luck. And there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. The latest twist in this, courtesy Max Kennerly of The Beasley Firm LLC , is that it looks like Apple may have actually overreached in their requests, making the EULA either not enforceable, or worse, enforceable but with minimal to no damages.  As he puts it ...in the end, the iBooks Author EULA leaves both Apple and the author in a strange stand-off: Apple   doesn’t  actually have the right to tell the author not to take their work somewhere else, but the author   can’t   do that without ...

There are a million crazy ideas out there - and someone to express each one of them in code Corollary The stupider the idea, the more likely someone will create an app for it  

I've been trying out the ' Use the QR code from your cell-phone ' approach for boarding passes for a while now, and at this point am firmly in the It Just Doesn't Work Well camp.  Heres a typical sequence from two weeks ago  No reception at the airport (Yes ORD - I'm looking at you).  Frantic scrambling to connect to Boingo at $14.95, 'cos I'm about 4 minutes from boarding AA app suddenly decides to bork (update last night which apparently didn't sit well with my phone) Phone reboots, QR code not coming up Reboot again.  Aha! QR Code up.  Hell-light scanner won't read it. TSAs helpful advice " scan it again " doesnt work. Step aside to reboot phone since quitting/relaunching AA app disappears the QR code again. Hell-light definitely not operational.  TSA guy moves us all to the other line. Thankfully *not* to the back. Well, you get the point.  And the above, while quite bad, was by no means the exception.  So, towards this, t...

Warning to toe-dippers: Being online ≠ going social : Most brands participate in many, many social networks. But they use them purely as a messaging tool, which isn’t what social networks are built for. There are six common myths regarding what it means to go social: Myth 1: Social media are all the same. Wrong, wrong, wrong! There are two major types of social media – networks and communities. Social networks maintain established relationships, but those relationships were initially established and strengthened in communities. Facebook is an example of a social network, while brand pages, Wikipedia and Yelp are communities. Knowing the differences between the two types of social media and what motivates customers to participate in them is important; it can help you build new campaigns that play to customers’ most durable interests and desires rather than forcing them to think or behave outside of their normal mode. Myth 2: If we go social, we have to be on every channel. No you don...

Ed Bott delves into Apple's iBook EULA (so that you don't have to).  The result is what he charmingly terms " Apple's mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement " How so? Here is the relevant (and I'd agree - quite evil) section I’ve downloaded the software and had a chance to skim the EULA. Much of it is boilerplate, but I’ve read and re-read Section 2B, and it does indeed go far beyond any license agreement I’ve ever seen: B. Distribution of your Work.   As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:  (i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means; (ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to e...