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Liam Casey in China

James Fallows congratulates Liam Casey on his winning of the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. Casey was featured in the recent China special edition of the Atlantic Monthly. Fallows:

Casey informs me that in the last day or two he has received a number of congratulatory messages from contractors and business associates. These are not just about the august E&Y award but also about a long, detailed report on Casey’s company and the larger Shenzhen economy, which has just appeared in the local Guangzhou newspaper. It’s all in Chinese; it is illustrated with elegant photos by Michael Christopher Brown; in fact it is written by me; and it is a word-for-word translation of our original article. China’ cavalier approach to copyright and the whole notion of intellectual property: this time it’s personal.**

42' OLED displays

Suffice to say I can’t wait for these to come out. Samsung have roadmapped when they believe OLED models will come on the market. Laptops by 2009.

Samsung’s display operation, Samsung SDI, has a roadmap that calls for 14-15.4in, 1280 x 800 (WXGA) OLEDs for laptops and TVs in the 2009 timeframe, along with 21-23in, 1600 x 1200 (UXGA) panels for TVs.

SDI’s roadmap, posted by Nikkei’s Tech-on website, makes a distinction between the 21-23in screens and larger, 40-42in panels due the following year, in 2010. The latter are described as “full HD”, presumably becuase they’re actually widescreen panels – the UXGA’s have an aspect ratio of 4:3.

SDI began mass-production of the Active Matrix OLED (AMOLED) panels to be used in TVs and PCs this past September. That said, it’s currently churning out nothing larger than a 2in panel for phones and other handheld devices.

Google passes ITV1

Another moment to remember, when Google ad revenue outstripped ITV1 ad revenue in Britain.

Google pulled in total revenues of £327m compared with an estimated £317m for all of ITV1’s output during the same period between July and September 2007.

The report said the new figures offered a significant milestone as it was the first time Google has overtaken ITV1 in pulling in UK advertising revenue.

Last year the ubiquitous internet firm surpassed Channel 4’s total advertising bounty, with Google generating £871m in revenue from sponsored links for 2006. For the first nine months of this year, Google’s advertising revenue increased to £925m.

IBM reclaims junk silicon for solar panels

Recycling solar panels:

This new process is revolutionary won IBM the “2007 Most Valuable Pollution Prevention Award” from The National Pollution Prevention Program. IBM says that worldwide about 250,000 silicon wafers are started each day and that up to 3.3 percent of these wafers end up being discarded amounting to about three million discarded wafers each year.

In addition to merely saving the material and time used in the manufacturing of the reclaimed silicon wafers, IBM says that it sees an overall 90 percent energy savings because repurposing the scrap means IBM doesn’t have to manufacture as many new wafers to meet demands of its production process.

Talk of recession

In the run up to the Fed meeting this week, the chatter on investing websites and finance blogs is increasingly talking about recession in the US. This is linked to the subprime crisis, and going by Google Trends, talk of a recession has been gradually growing, at least with regard to searches.

Red is subprime and blue is recession. The biggest recent rise of recession talk was linked to the Fed cutting the rate 0.5%, rather than the expected 0.25%. And people in Washington DC, rather than those in New York seem more worried about recession, maybe because the DC property market has been hit hard.

Interesting statistics, at least. Let’s see what way the chatter goes this week.

Update: The Big Picture has further thoughts on recession sentiment.

The Google Cloud

Cringely again, this week covering the plan for all those Google data centres. Google have put their finger in the MySQL pie by placing extensions inside the language from 2009 onwards.

Here’s the grand plan: By working with IBM to promote cloud computing to universities, Google is accomplishing two very important goals. It will first put them in touch with every graduate student doing work Google might find interesting. So it is first a hiring tool. But by teaching students about cloud computing Google and IBM are also seeding the technology in the companies where those students will take their first jobs after graduation. Five years from now cloud computing will be ubiquitous primarily for this reason.

But Google wants us to embrace not just cloud computing but Google’s version of cloud computing, the hooks for which will be in every modern operating system by mid-2009, spread not by Google but by a trusted open source vendor, MySQL AB.

Mid-2009 will also see the culmination of Google’s huge server build-out. The company is building data centers large and small around the world and populating them with what will ultimately be millions of generic servers. THAT’s when things will get really interesting. Imagine a much more user-friendly version of Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services, only spread across 10 or more times as many machines. And as with all its services, Google will offer free versions at the bottom for consumers and paid, but still cost-effective versions nearer the top for businesses and education.

Combine that with bidding $4.6bn for the 700Mhz spectrum and what do you get? A frickin behemoth mobile provider/ISP/host/cloud/second internet/everything.

Finance question

I am somewhat confused. During the run on Northern Rock I understood that the Bank of England disclosed information because they were obliged to by EU regulations. They could not keep it secret, as apparently had happened in the past. But Charlie McCreevy made some comments today that confused me:

Mr McCreevy said in a speech that Britain’s transparency rules were too strict…The announcement of the rescue, which spurred customers to line up outside branches and withdraw more than £2 billion pounds over three days, was the fault of the UK’s “gold-plating” of EU disclosure rules, Mr McCreevy said.

If it was the BoE’s fault, why does the EU need to review transparency rules? And if the BoE were partly to blame for the run on Northern Rock by “gold plating” disclosure rules, could it be the case that an Irish bank has had to turn to the Central Bank here for funds, but this information has not been disclosed in order to prevent a run?

Maybe A Random Walk can help.

Driving licenses

So the Government has finally made a move on the precarious situation of provisional licence holders. The new rules appear to mean that from Tuesday, 455,000 people will be driving without insurance.

It also gives me a certain problem. I am on my second provisional licence, and I need to drive to and from university, and to and from work. How on earth am I going to work this?

Public transport you might say. Not after 11pm in Cork, and my shifts finish after that time. Get a full licence you might say. Applied for my driving test – in June – still waiting. So where do I find a fully licensed driver to escort me home at 11.30pm at night? God knows.

The solution? Reduce the goddam waiting lists for testing before bringing in this ridiculous rule. How am I expected to abide by the law if I can’t do my test? How do I get to and from work legally? Is it just me or is this thing very badly thought through?

So what do I do now? I guess I have two options.

Take my chances, keep the L plates up and continue as normal. Hope that garda enforcement of laws are mild at best, and wait for a garda at a checkpoint to say “You are aware of the new rules young man?”, “Yes”, “Ok, drive on”.

Or, take my L plates down and take my chances.

Both appear to be illegal, but what options do I have? I wonder what the other 455,000 people are going to do.

Comments welcome.


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