Nakheel PJSC’s possible non-payment of its Islamic bond due tomorrow will trigger defaults on two other securities, bringing the total of affected securities to $5.25 billion, bond documents show. [Bloomberg]
U.S. Commerce Secretary Touts Climate Change Policies — Commerce Secretary Gary Locke tells delegates at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen that nations must stop subsidizing the production and consumption of fossil fuels and create incentives for innovative solutions to clean energy. [eWeek]
Google Unveils Deforestation Monitoring Technology — Google debuts a new technology at the climate change conference in Copenhagen that helps scientists track global deforestation. [eWeek]
Google Phone May Be in Works — Google appears to be preparing to market its own smartphone, a move that would intensify the company’s rivalry with Apple, whose iPhone dominates the high-end smartphone market in the United States. [NY Times]
Household wealth has risen for two straight quarters, providing some much-needed relief for struggling US consumers. The value of American homes and investments rose during the third quarter, while debt levels fell modestly, the Federal Reserve reported Thursday. [CS Monitor]
Interest Rates Are Low, but Banks Balk at Refinancing — Banks that once handed out home loans freely are now imposing such stringent requirements that many homeowners who might want to refinance are effectively locked out. [NY Times]
For whatever reason, consumer sentiment in December has rebounded to its highest level since September, according to a preliminary report Friday from the Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers. December’s reading of 73.4 was just a hair below September’s 73.5, which was highest level this year. The surveys’ measure of current economic conditions rose to 79.1, its best showing since March 2008. [CS Monitor]
In Shift, U.S. Talks to Russia on Internet Security — The United States has begun talks with Russia and a United Nationsarms control committee about strengthening Internet security and limiting military use of cyberspace. [NY Times]
According to a study, North Americans have been staying up late to do their Internet surfing this summer, so late that the peak usage for the whole day has been at 11 p.m. Eastern time. That appears to be a shift from previous years, when most Internet activity was in the daytime. [CS Monitor]
Wind farms don’t affect property prices — SOME homeowners consider a wind farm about as appealing a neighbour as a pig farm. Contrary to popular belief, however, it seems they have no effect on house prices. [New Scientist]
Cloud computing could become mainstream with Google’s annoucement this week to release the Chrome operating system for NetBook PCs.
I believe the cloud is the platform of the future, and Google is uniquely poised with their already popular office suite, Google Docs, and their other Google Apps which do just about everything owners of netbooks would be looking for.
This is certainly an exciting announcement for consumers looking to the future, and should cause real innovation and competition within the other computer and software makers.
On a side note, Ars Technica has an article discussing the reliability issues with cloud computing, and whether or not our infrastructure is ready for Chrome. I agree, with the downtime that Google has faced earlier this year, which took down a large chunk of Internet traffic in North America, it may be too soon for firms to invest their money making ability (read: computer software) in the cloud. What happens when Google’s data center is down, and my netbook can’t open an office document that I have to send to my client because of a server issue? Well, we need to make reliability and uptime as close to 100% before people will take this service seriously.
But, SaaS and Cloud are looking brighter as we move further into the future.
Update: See this Barron’s article describing the problem with Chrome, and what they believe to be Google’s major misstep. (Editorial Note: I think they are missing the value of the cloud. They are using the old value model of standard software architecture, and are discrediting future innovation and consumer preferences changing in the open market. In short, I think they got it wrong.)
Unemployment for 16- to 19-year-olds is at its highest rate since 1992 — at 22.7 percent in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is causing some teenagers to rethink their notion of work and to embrace entrepreneurship.
“This is a generation raised to believe they can do anything, and the first to grow up with entrepreneurial celebrities like Steve Jobs of Apple and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google,” said Donna Fenn, who interviewed 150 young entrepreneurs for her forthcoming book, “Upstarts: How Gen Y Entrepreneurs Are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit From Their Success.”
[via The New York Times]
NPR has an interesting article on the switch from land-line telephone companies to wireless. This reminds me of the AP piece that talked about how cell-only households now outnumber traditional phone households.That statistic points to problem in our current method of landline national polling for elections, which was brought to everyone’s attention in 2008. As technology improves, we must ensure that industry follows suit, even if we’ve been doing it one way for years. The old adage: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” does not hold true in the Internet age.
[note: why could I only find that AP article archived on the Utah Daily Herald site? I know it’s archived elsewhere. Google let me down for the first time in my life!]
When was the last time someone called at an inconvenient hour to ask if you want to switch long-distance telephone companies? What used to be a frequent annoyance now appears to be a thing of the past because the long-distance telephone business has undergone some big changes.
On AT&T’s Web site you’ll be hard-pressed to figure out the company even offers long-distance telephone service. That’s a big change from the 1990s when Ma Bell’s pitchman Cliff Robertson was on television attempting to woo customers back from Sprint and MCI.
According to the Federal Communications Commission, the long-distance business reached its peak in 2000, when it raked in over $109 billion. By 2007, revenues were down to $58 billion.
