We're seeing protests everywhere. From Brazil to Turkey to Egypt.
What's going on? Here are some.
Once ignited, open source protest is hard to stamp out.
Open source protest is usually focused on a single overarching goal. In most recent cases, it's a call for a government that isn't corrupt.
“No corruption” is the type of goal everyone can get behind. To get a protest going, all there needs to be is a successful trigger event. Often, that an be as simple as a protest called by some group on Facebook that takes off virally.
Samsung gives weaker-than-expected earnings guidance and HTC posts tepid results
EXTRACT:
“The mid and entry-level smartphones are quickly picking up share, and are getting quite powerful in their capabilities,” said CK Lu, an analyst at Gartner in Taiwan. “Basically, a year ago, you didn't have many choices in low-end smartphones. But now in the China market, you can buy a 5-inch smartphone for around US$200.”
. . . . . .
“Shares are trading at a discount for smartphone makers like HTC, because investors have no idea if future models will be a success or not,” said Paul Chan, chief investment officer for Asia ex-Japan at Invesco Ltd., which holds HTC shares. “Earnings visibility for the sector is very low.”
Large-scale events leave an unquestionable mark on social media. This was true of Hurricane Sandy, for example, and is also true of the widespread protests in Egypt this week. On Wednesday, the Egyptian Military responded to the large-scale demonstrations against President Morsi by removing him from power. Can Twitter provide early warning signals of growing political tension in Egypt and elsewhere? My QCRI colleagues Ingmar Weber & Kiran Garimella and Al-Jazeera colleague Alaa Batayneh have been closely monitoring (PDF) these upheavals via Twitter since January 2013. Specifically, they developed a Political Polarization Index that provides early warning signals for increased social tensions and violence. The analysis & graphs below include the very latest data and I will keep updating this post with new data over the next 24 hours.
In the last week, two thought leaders in the sharing space, Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group and Anya Kamenetz of FastCompany, have written posts exploring the dark sides of the sharing economy.
Marco Arment the creator of Instapaper, has an excellent and provocative piece on why Google is closing down all of its RSS appendages (they just closed also the RSS feeds in Google Alerts) and the logic behind this strategy.
He writes: “Officially, Google killed Reader because “over the years usage has declined”.1 I believe that statement, especially if API clients weren’t considered “usage”, but I don’t believe that’s the entire reason.
The most common assumption I’ve seen others cite is that “Google couldn’t figure out how to monetize Reader,” or other variants about direct profitability. I don’t believe this, either. Google Reader’s operational costs likely paled in comparison to many of their other projects that don’t bring in major revenue, and I’ve heard from multiple sources that it effectively had a staff of zero for years. It was just running, quietly serving a vital role for a lot of people.”
“The bigger problem is that they’ve abandoned interoperability. RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs all enable interoperability, but the big players don’t want that — they want to lock you in, shut out competitors, and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out, it would be either useless (no alternatives to import into) or cripplingly lonely (empty social networks).
Google resisted this trend admirably for a long time and was very geek- and standards-friendly, but not since Facebook got huge enough to effectively redefine the internet and refocus Google’s plans to be all-Google+, all the time.4”
Growing up in Mexico, Juan Enriquez didn’t consider new discoveries and scientific innovations particularly important. But now, after a circuitous route from a student at Harvard University to a Mexican peace negotiator and back to Harvard as founder of the business school’s life sciences area, Enriquez stands at the forefront of some of the most fascinating innovations in life sciences today.
An active speaker and writer who serves as managing director of Excel Medical Ventures, a venture capital firm, and CEO of Biotechonomy, a life sciences research and investment firm, Enriquez spoke with me recently about why countries appear and disappear, understanding the language-of-life code and the possibility of extra-solar human life. Below are excerpts from our interview.
