Interesting article over on Satyajit Das’s blog on China and its place in the global economy today - especially the opening insight: China’s economic model is reminiscent of 17th century mercantilist policies. Thomas Mun, a Director of the East India Company, in England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade (1664), wrote that the purpose of trade was to export more than you imported. At the same time, a country should amass foreign ‘Treasure’ that would be the basis of acquiring foreign colonies to allow control of essential natural resources. The strategy required reducing domestic consumption and imports and export of goods manufactured with imported foreign raw materials. ...

Google recently created a page where they revealed government take-down requests for their services, with some interesting figures revealing Brazil topping the list of take-down requests, followed by Germany, India and the United States. Australia ranks 10th with 17 take-down requests, of which Google has complied with 52%. China however considers the take-down requests themselves state secrets and so Google cannot reveal that data without legal trouble. While this is all well and good in Google’s campaign for internet openness and freedoms, what this ultimately makes me even more curious about is the corporate take-down requests they get - where are the stats for those requests, Google? ...

It’s amazing how Apple has set the agenda in the mobile phone space, and it’s only been too evident in the last few days. Apple’s iPhone OS 4 event last week not only drew the tech media but managed to splash out headlines across what might be termed, for want of a better word, the “mainstream media”. The BBC, ABC, SMH and other generalist/unspecialised all reported on the event in a way they would never have done for Nokia. ...

Up until now, it looked like Google was chucking services out there in the hope that it would stick; Google Apps for Your Domain was mostly about getting businesses into the Google hivemind space by appealing to users who wanted to have their home experience of GMail at work too. Almost by accident they managed to pick up a bunch of micro-businesses whose only presence on the web had been a website built for them years ago but who didn’t want to bother setting up and maintaining a mail server to respond to the three emails a week they were likely to get. ...

At the Cinema Cost of two movie tickets to a standard session of latest hit: $36 Cost of a medium popcorn and two drinks: $16 (Optional) Internet booking fee to guarantee seats: $1 per ticket At Home Cost of a DVD on your giant flat-screen TV on your very comfy couch: 3 months from cinematic release date + $15 Cost of medium popcorn and multiple drinks: $3 (Optional) Seat guarantee: $0 ...