Daily Brief

As hard as you try, there's no way you can ignore an advertisement on your phone. And if you're attending the Beijing Olympics, you're out of luck.

Olympics attendees' phones will be spammed with Coca Cola ads thanks to China's new Bluetooth marketing campaign provided by Pioco. It's not as simple as receiving a text message, either; Pioco has hooked up areas all around Beijing and Shanghai with wireless hot spots that spit out videos, pictures and so forth to your handset.

Though this campaign has focused on the Olympics games, the official Olympic truck has already been using this Bluetooth technology -- so millions of Chinese people are already familiar with this technology.
Enjoy the games -- and grab a Coke!

-Brian X. Chen

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Is the crisis spreading?

Niall Ferguson wrote in this morning’s FT about how the crucial aspect of the economic slowdown will be when it becomes a genuinely global phenomenon:            

“No, this is not the Great Depression 2.0; the Fed and the Treasury are seeing to that. But, as in the 1930s, the critical phase is not the US phase. It is when the crisis goes global that the term “credit crunch” will no longer suffice.” 

Evidence of the severity...

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And so the madness continues

Is anyone else getting fed up of sensationalist media coverage of the property market? Well I am. I’m not disputing that house prices are falling. Of course they are. And yes, some home owners have been hurt by falling prices. But today I have decided to make a few simple points that just don’t seem to be getting through to the mass media headlines.

If you take the latest Halifax figures at face value, average house prices in July 2008 were 8.8 per cent down on the previous year. A simple Google search of the resulting...

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Lefties just don't get it

The City that is....or perhaps it's a wider problem than that, it's innovation they don't get.

John Kampfner was editor of the New Statesman so I think we can call him a fully paid up lefty. He complains about the level of regulation in the City as one of the causes of our current ills.

For years now, the hubris of the City of London has been more pronounced than that of Wall Street, Frankfurt or Tokyo. Ministers like to call it "the light touch". Others talk of the timidity and structural weaknesses of the Financial Services Authority. Whenever...

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So, so transparent

So Nicholas Sarkozy is suggesting that certain countries might share Commissioners:

The president of France, the current holder of the European Union's rotating presidency, has floated the scheme as a way of cutting the number of Commissioners, currently at 27, one for each member state.

"Countries which share a common cultural heritage, such as Germany and Austria, Great Britain and Ireland or the Benelux countries could share a common Commissioner," German newspaper Die Welt said, quoting high-level French sources.

We might add say, Finland and Estonia to that list, or the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

But guess which country we won't be able to add to that list of sharers? France of course, for no other country does indeed share a common culture with it. How appropriate for a suggestion coming from a French politician, eh?

It's just too transparent, isn't it?

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