Friday, July 29, 2005

P2P disintermediating the banks!

This new venture is an eBay-like website that lets ordinary citizens borrow money from other regular citizens. The service is open to any U.K. resident over 18 who clears a credit check. Each borrower is assigned to one of two categories: market A for people with solid credit, and market B for riskier borrowers, who pay higher rates. To dampen the effect of defaults, Zopa spreads each user's cash among at least 50 customers. The payoff for would-be J.P. Morgans? Their money works harder than it would in the best money-market accounts. Market A lenders can expect returns around 6 percent, while market B lenders get rates as high as 9 percent. Zopa, meanwhile, takes a 1 percent commission from every borrower's loan. Since the site's debut in March, more than 23,400 people have joined. "Some people hate their banks and want to borrow from real people," says CEO Richard Duvall, who's now eyeing the U.S. market. But analysts say federal and state regulations could present obstacles. Still, if Zopa can find a way around the legal hurdles as it did in the U.K. where it skirted the issue of consumer credit licensing by limiting users to £25,000 in loans outstanding.
Via Rebecca Jarvis

Monday, July 25, 2005

Fujitsu intelligent shopping trolley

Australian supermarket shoppers will soon get to road test a high tech version of the much-maligned shopping trolley. The new model has a display screen, which allows shoppers to scan items as they shop, reducing the time they need to spend at the check out counter. And a selling point for retailers is that the trolley can advertise specials in each aisle and can even remind regular customers what they might have forgotten. So, is it a time saver or big brother on wheels? This is a regular shopping trolley, but with a wireless touch-screen computer mounted on it. Once you've collected your 'smart' trolley, download your shopping list so that you don't forget what you came to buy. As you cruise the aisles, you can use the computer to give you the location and availability of what you want. If the shelf label is missing, scan the item to look the price up. The computer will advertise the specials in each aisle so you never miss a bargain. You can order in-store things (such as from the deli or the pharmacy) and receive an alert once they're ready for pick-up. Some exotic ingredient caught your fancy? Look up suitable recipes on the spot. Scan and bag your shopping as you go, and the computer gives you a running total (useful for those who always spend more than they'd intended), and hopefully, you can zip through checkout when you're done.
Via Brendan Trembath

Sunday, July 24, 2005

You've got to find what you love

Extract from the text of the commencement address by Steve Jobs at Stanford University. I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life...
The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months... I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting... Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great... None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac... You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss... I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired... I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT... In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance... And the only way to do great work is to love what you do... So keep looking until you find it.
My third story is about death... About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas... It means to say your goodbyes. I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy... I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now. This was the closest I've been to facing death... No one wants to die... Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking... Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself... Thank you all very much.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

The Net Economy wishes happy e-birthdays

Let's all celebrate this! July 16 was a big day in Amazon's history. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth in the series on schoolboy wizardry, was released with all-time record advance orders from the online store of 1.5 million. On the same day, Amazon broadcast a live concert on its website to mark the day in 1995 when it "first opened its virtual doors for business".
E-commerce is celebrating its tenth birthday this year. On the last weekend in June, online auctioneer eBay held a gala anniversary dinner in its home town of San José. Yahoo!, a portal site, can also claim this year as its tenth. Only the search engine, Google, of the firms that in the internet decade have emerged as the big four of online business, is younger. In their brief history, most online businesses have found profits harder to come by than publicity. Many early stars crumbled to dust (remember Webvan, pets.com and Boo.com?), and Amazon's string of losses (which touched $1.4 billion in 2000) only turned to profits in 2003.
Most online successes began, as the myth requires, with a couple of geeks in a garage and were then taken over, sooner or later, by professional managers. Geeks are not generally good at moving on from the ideas they give birth to. The notable exception is Amazon, where Jeff Bezos is still at the helm although a recent article in the New York Times posed a question that many others have asked: "Has Amazon Outgrown its Founder?"
What might drive the next round of e-commerce business models? Brynjolfsson says that two new technologies are already throwing up opportunities: mobile access to the internet and RFID tags, which enable the non-stop monitoring of the whereabouts of goods. Wharton's Amit says that the old-fashioned offline world was one where producers said to customers: "I've made this; buy it from me at this price." In the online world, customers are saying, "I want this; sell it to me at this price." That is why these internet birthdays really are worth celebrating.

Saturday, July 16, 2005

Pulsations Gnaoua à Essaouira

Les artistes ont ce formidable talent pour nous rappeler que l'humanisme, l'écoute, le temps et l'amour sont au centre de notre existence. Le Festival Gnaoua d’Essaouira incarne une volonté de fusion et de métissage musicaux. Cette année encore, les cris des mouettes survolant la baie d’Essaouira se mêlent aux rythmes gnaoua. L'ancienne Mogador se laisse envoûter par la mystique de ces descendants d’esclaves d’Afrique noire. Les maâlems gnaoua tenants du culte tels que Guinea, El Kasri et Boussou n'ont plus besoin d'être présentés, leur notoriété a dépassé les frontières marocaines pour faire de nombreux adeptes de la Gnaoua Attitude à travers le monde. La manifestation, créée en 1998, poursuit l’objectif qu’elle s’était donné au départ: être un laboratoire de fusions musicales. Voir la vidéo

Sunday, July 10, 2005

Une femme élégante est toujours séduisante, elle peut se passer d'être jolie

"La mode doit donc être considérée comme un symptôme du goût de l'idéal surnageant dans le cerveau humain au-dessus de tout ce que la vie naturelle y accumule de grossier, de terrestre et d'immonde, comme une déformation sublime de la nature" Charles baudelaire. Un défilé de plusieurs modèles “Robert Piguet”, grand couturier suisse de l'élégance parisienne (1933-1951), a été créé virtuellement par le laboratoire MIRALab, à partir de croquis d’Hubert de Givenchy, MarcBohan et Serge Guérin. Le Musée suisse de la Mode est fier de cette collaboration qui offre un aspect contemporain à l’exposition et met en évidence l’interaction entre science et art.

Friday, July 08, 2005

Tokyo's 1000 hot spots

As the mercury rises, "hot spots" sound like places best avoided in Tokyo during the summer months, but for those on the go who cannot survive without laptop Internet access, the growth of wireless hot spots is the coolest thing going. According to wireless information and service provider JiWire, Japan is one of the leaders in the global charge toward a ubiquitous Internet, with Tokyo's 1,000 or more hot spots second only to London's 1,200. Although some U.S. cities such as Philadelphia have suggested plans to offer wireless access citywide, the push in Marunouchi, part of what Mitsubishi Estate calls a "ubiquitous workplace" concept, may be one of the first to make it happen. Hot spot users are required to sign up for a virtual passport with NTT Communications at a cost of 500 yen (including tax) for a single day or 1,680 yen for a monthly membership. (By comparison BizPortal, which serves Shinjuku Ward, charges 500 yen a day and 1,000 yen per week). According to its site, as of April 2004 there were 700 access points in Tokyo and other cities such as Osaka, Sapporo and Yokohama, with more to follow.
Via Anthony Fensom