where curious minds meet
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Promoting materialism and dependency masked as empowerment, and the rise of priv-lit.
The happiness that comes with not owning things.
“The American life does not exist until it is filled up.” And how to take a walk properly.
Economic steady state, the future of developed world?
Does the Chinese economy favour its corporations and against its households?
BRIC Special
India outsourcing firms set up shop in smaller towns
latimes.com- Call centres in India have a bad reputation as the breeding ground for inter-office romances. Newer, more rural openings want to avoid that. …
EU sees solar power imported from Sahara in 5 years
Reuters- Europe will import its first solar-generated electricity from North Africa within the next five years. …
It’s all about China now, get used to it
leighdrogen.com- Focus on companies doing business in China Brazil and India, the three centers of real growth. Says Drogen. …
Smart, young, and broke
Newsweek- White-collar workers are China’s newest underclass, the ant class. …
Tech & Media
Public Press started online, now turns to print
sfgate.com- One local newspaper is bucking the trend and going back to print. …
“The whole music business infrastructure is about selling out”
37signals.com- The whole music business infrastructure, the baby boomer infrastructure anyway, is about selling out. …
Why Amazon’s Kindle will eventually win the e-Book wars
gigaom.com- If Amazon wants to keep the device around, it will have to transform it from a mere e-book reader to a content consumption device that matches the iPad in its capabilities. …
Business & Finance
Slowed food revolution
prospect.org- Obama seeks to boost demand for organic food but doesn’t offer meaningful support for the people who grow it. …
A colossal fracking mess
vanityfair.com- The dirty truth behind the new natural gas. …
Freight fright *alert*
FT Alphaville- This particular forward macro-economic indicator experienced its biggest weekly decline since 2008. …
The Rest
Why bad guys matter
foreignpolicy.com- At the core of all successful societies are procedures for blocking the advancement of bad men. …
Eye of the beholder
moreintelligentlife.com- What does it take to make a hit reality show? …
Everything you need to know about the Internet
The Guardian- In spite of all the answers the Internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. …
40,000 deaths a year due to junk food
telegraph.co.uk- More than 40,000 Britons are dying unnecessarily every year because of high levels of salt and fat in their diets. …
Online and citizen-journalism seems to have succeeded in South Korea, but not in Japan.
Japan, with its cultural disdain for those who stick out from the crowd, may be inhospitable terrain for the reader-turned-reporter model, Mr. Takeuchi said.
[A]nother reason for Japan’s resistance to alternative sites is the relative absence of social and political divisions. In politically polarized South Korea, OhmyNews thrived by appealing to young, liberal readers.
“It is only when the society sees itself as having conflicting interests that it will seek out new viewpoints and information,” said Toshinao Sasaki, the author of about two dozen books on the Internet in Japan.
Media experts say Japan has yet to see such critical questioning of its establishment press. They say most Japanese remain at least passively accepting of the nation’s big newspapers and television networks.
On top of the cultural and political differences between these two neighbours, does this also have to do with demographics?
This is South Korea’s population profile.
And this is Japan’s.
South Korea is aging fast, but it still boasts a median age that’s almost 7 years younger than Japan. A younger, politically divided, and more restless cultural undercurrent seems to be driving this battle.
In 1966, the Harvard Business Review introduced the idea of “paperless clearing houses”, in reference to the emergence of digital data storage. Since then, the microprocessor industry emerged, personal computers were introduced, and before we knew it, everyone is connected by the web. The delivery and the digitization of data is no longer a fantasy.
But the implementation and eventual realization of this inevitable “paperless” world, however, is taking longer than expected. Ten years ago, we were told that every participant in the information age is marching towards the digital world in more or less uniformity. But despite the obvious technological leaps, we are still far from a paperless world.
Paperless for some
So far, we have managed to scrape a layer off of perfunctory bookkeeping. In areas such as online tax filing and the digitization of our numerous monthly financial statements, the quick and convenient source-to-records applications have surely saved both cost and time for all parties involved. In the case of communication, personal letters are replaced by the superior email deliveries. In those cases, paper as the medium of communication has been eliminated.
Now with various access points for information, cheap storage devices, accessible scanners and various other forms of affordable technology, all of which are competing to drive paper out of our lives for good, what is the outlook for paper?
Professional uses
The term “paper-pusher” was coined for a reason. Knowing that, it should not be surprising that paper is far from disappearing, particularly within some of the older professions. In legal and business communities, for example, cyber security risks, as well as legal concerns still mandate paper record-keeping for a period of time.
From my own experience in a corporate setting, printing is not something you can move away from quickly. Most businesses operate from desktops, thus short of sharing your desktop – which many more tech savvy businesses do on a regular basis, one need to print off documents in order to discuss and demonstrate. Plus, even when performing numbers-related tasks, where computer applications are assets, printing documents for review is deemed mandatory as a last check-up.
A lot of ink has been spilt over the future of newspapers and the journalism profession. Everyone is decrying the death of newspapers and print media. Some blogs are writing daily obituaries for professional journalists, others are squaring blames. Will the century-old tradition withstand the quick sands of the internet age?
The problems with old media
The key here is of course, as Clay Shirky artfully argued, that the current publishing industry is no longer solving a problem for its consumers. That problem used to be the distribution of complex pieces of information. Now with technology playing its part in leveling the dissemination process, reaching ever-more people at an ever-faster speed, traditional means of news circulation are becoming obsolete. Nothing has worked yet to save the industry because most strategies have been aimed at preserving the industry-that-was.
The web has transformed the way we get information, to the extent where we don’t need to pay for someone to tell us about an earthquake in Italy or the bombing in India anymore. Bloggers, micro-bloggers, and wired services can do more than enough in pushing that information out. Besides, how many times can you spin the same piece of data as is? Then what? The world wants to know the why, what, how behind it. If not, what would differentiate a journalist from just another amateur blogger that can Google and milk a few quotes?
Back to the newspaper business, what’s happening, is the utter transformation and re-organization of both 1) the medium of news reporting, and 2) the way people are re-assessing the value of news. Economically, this spells disaster. This is a situation where the demand of the product is low, while the cost of supplying the product is becoming increasingly unsustainable. When the bill-paying third party disperses, this model inevitably blows up.
Sorting out financing issues
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