Four Billion

The NYT brings out the big numbers for its Olympic coverage today:

At 8 p.m. on the eighth day of the eighth month in the year 2008 -- eight being a lucky number in China -- the world looked toward Beijing and the 91,000 people inside the National Stadium, known as the Bird's Nest. The global television audience was estimated to surpass four billion viewers, though in the United States, the opening ceremonies were not carried live.

The audience inside the stadium I'm sure is right. The audience outside is, if you'll excuse me, utter crap....

Continue reading...

Email to a friend   |   Permalink   |   Comments (1)

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

Subscribe to the Daily Brief RSS feed
 

Email to a friend   |   Permalink   |   Comment

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...

Continue reading...

Email to a friend   |   Permalink   |   Comment

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...

Continue reading...

Email to a friend   |   Permalink   |   Comments (1)

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...

Continue reading...

Email to a friend   |   Permalink   |   Comment