 |
Wired - E-Business |
– Two federal agencies are now ready to hand out $4 billion in grants and loans to help bring broadband to the people and stimulate the economy, but applicants have to promise to play fairly with whatever devices, applications and services users want to use.
 (Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:16:00 GMT) |
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Back in the '80s, Ireland was one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, with unemployment as high as 17 percent. But the scrappy nation had one advantage: It always invested in education, so while the Irish were poor, they were smart.
American tech companies like Dell and Intel eventually realized the island was full of underemployed brainiacs and opened up offices there. The Irish were soon performing tasks such as developing software and working in pharmaceutical manufacturing and research. By the late '90s, the influx of jobs turned the country around: Ireland was filled with people who were smart and also wealthy, among the richest in Europe. The Celtic Tiger was born.
Is there another country today with the same potential, one that could erupt in an intelligence-driven boom? Yep, though it's probably not one you'd expect: Cuba.
I visited Cuba a few years ago and was surprised at how much it reminded me of Ireland. Everyone was smart, skilled, and seemed hungry for opportunities to improve their lives—perhaps even more so than the Irish had been back in the '80s, because they'd spent decades under Fidel Castro's human-rights-crushing thumb. Now that President Obama is talking about opening up trade, Cuba experts predict that the country could explode with creativity and entrepreneurial innovation. "There's tremendous potential," says Gustav Ranis, an economic-development expert at Yale.
Like the '80s Irish, Cubans are eerily well educated, particularly for such an impoverished people. Education is one thing Castro has done right: 99.8 percent of adults are literate, and nearly a third have graduated from high school, many with the sort of vocational training in mechanics and farming the US foolishly let slip a generation ago. Based on UN statistics, one out of five young adults in Cuba graduates college.
Cubans also have a hacker mindset. They've needed it to handle the constant privation. They keep 50-year-old cars running with cobbled-together parts. They cadge gray-market Internet access by making friends with local officials—among the anointed few the government allows online. When Soviet food supplies vanished, Cubans turned to urban gardening.
If the US embargo ends, Cuba could become an Ireland-like high tech outsourcing resource. "They've got all the skills you need for software programming," says Kenneth Flamm, professor of international affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Cubans, many of whom study English in school, would be particularly good at "localizing" US software for Latin American markets, Flamm says. Plus, Havana is only an hour's flight from Miami, making it convenient for offshoring.
Medicine would be another potential area of growth. Cuban health care, particularly preventive care, has been amazingly good; Cuban life expectancy is on a par with that of the US. The country has poured millions into biotech, creating vaccines for meningitis B and hepatitis B. "Biotech and health tourism have really serious potential," says Vicki Huddleston, a Brookings Institute expert on Cuba.
Mind you, white-collar jobs aren't enough. Cuba has more than 11 million people, and gainfully employing that many requires tons of jobs in textiles, light industry, and agriculture. Organic farming, interestingly, could be big: Because the embargo has made it hard to get pesticides, Cuba has used comparatively little of them, which means much of the island is organic-ready, so long as it avoids the "resource curse" and stays away from too much mining and oil drilling. Retaining the social welfare net would also be crucial.
Obviously, this is blue-sky thinking. To really open up trade, the Castros will have to liberalize their repressive regime. (An independent journalist I met while visiting in January 2003 was arrested two months later.) There's no telling if or when that will happen. But let's hope it does. In sheer human potential, Cuba is an economic and technological miracle waiting to happen.
Email clive@clivethompson.net
 (Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:00:00 GMT) |
– Bing grabs a percentage point in the search wars, stealing a sliver of the search market from Google. Is it the beginning of a long march or just the product of an ad campaign?
 (Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:42:00 GMT) |
– Venture capitalists drop $100 million into the coffers of software firms seeking to make their fortune selling apps for the iPhone. Clearly, the VCs are expecting consumers to keep falling in love with mobile devices and the apps that extend their usefulness.
 (Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:37:00 GMT) |
– The $7.7 million sale of The Pirate Bay spells its end as a file sharing maverick.
 (Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:21:00 GMT) |
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Neil Young has been working on his Archives project for so long that the big news in the tech world when it was first announced was Windows 3.0. Back in 1988, the curmudgeonly musician conceived the mother of all box sets, a multimedia data dump that presents the breadth of his work—the good, the bad, and the ugly—in hi-def audio. Young envisioned Archives as not just a spiffed-up music collection but a virtual autobiography, including video footage, photos, press clips, and memorabilia such as original lyric sheets and personal correspondence, retained against all odds. To Young fans—and anyone interested in how digital media can enable new means of self-expression—this sounded pretty nifty.
But in preparing this harvest of material, Young has made even Microsoft look like a short-order cook. Year after year, Archives remained in perpetual just-about-there mode. ("It's already together," Young gushed to an interviewer back in 1991.) Then, a couple of years ago, the advent of hi-def optical formats removed a significant barrier. Larry Johnson, Young's media wizard, explains that fans could at last enjoy super hi-fidelity audio while simultaneously poring over set lists from a 1969 coffeehouse appearance and newspaper reviews of Buffalo Springfield.
Well, Archives has finally arrived. The full version includes 10 Blu-ray discs (128 songs in 24-bit/192 kHz stereo and a reissue of the seldom-viewed documentary Journey Through the Past), a 236-page hardbound book, a poster, and code for downloading the music (even though Young regards MP3s as the aural equivalent of Satan). And this is only volume 1, covering his prolific career up to 1972.
Longtime Youngophiles like me will be giddily overwhelmed from the get-go. When you follow an artist closely for many years, your own consciousness inevitably becomes intertwined with theirs, and sudden access to their personal vault of unreleased tunes, alternative mixes, and private paraphernalia is a bounty that requires a lot of unpacking. Archives drops you into the Neil Wide Web. At first I jumped from one gem to another. It thrilled me to hear gorgeous versions of tunes I'd experienced only on fuzzy bootlegs, to discover cheesy instrumentals from Young's high school band, and to view evocative items like the article his father (a well-known Canadian journalist) wrote after seeing his son play Carnegie Hall.
Eventually, though, I got frustrated. The paradox of Archives is that while it breaks ground in exploiting the relatively new Blu-ray format, the very concept of physical media is racing toward obsolescence.
Archives shares its central interface metaphor with 1970s computers: a file cabinet. That navigational trope has more miles on it than Old Black, Young's vintage Les Paul guitar. Young plans to add folders to the cabinet by letting users download additional material. Subsequent volumes of Archives will stretch the cabinet to ludicrous proportions. "It will be like a file drawer that goes on for a mile and a half," Johnson says. But this puts limits on the Neil Wide Web that don't exist in Google's world; search functionality would be a welcome addition.
Considering the rate of production at Young's digital operation, it may take a decade or two until Archives gets around to the current period of Young's oeuvre. My guess is that by then the project will quite logically move to the cloud (with access granted via subscription fee or limited-time pass), where all of Young's outtakes and memorabilia—along with photos, sound files, and reminiscences provided by his fans—will be available in an instant. (If the Internet of 2020 can't deliver top-grade audio quality and hi-def images smoothly, all will be lost anyway.) The alternative—a stack of 40 or 50 Blu-ray disks on the verge of irrelevance—would just leave us helpless.
Email steven_levy@wired.com.
 (Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT) |
– Google may be a verb that means search, but if you aren't seeing other search boxes, you are missing out. Wired.com takes a look at the rest of the search services on the net and finds some beauties.
 (Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT) |
– The Pirate Bay, the world's most notorious BitTorrent tracker, is likely to be lucrative for its new Swedish owners, Global Gaming Factory X AB. The site, which is expected to go legitimate, will probably rake in cash from its VPN venture and its YouTube-like service.
 (Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT) |
– The King of Pop is dead, but controversy over his interest in the Beatles library lives on.
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– Facebook's founder and CEO talks about the limitations of walled gardens, the evolution of privacy online and why Home Depot should "humanize" itself.
 (Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:29:00 GMT) |
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Wired - Top Stories |
– The Tour de France begins Saturday, July 4, in Monaco. Here's how to follow the three-week bike race using streaming audio and video, Twitter, Google Earth and other online tools.
 (Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:30:00 GMT) |
– Penguins, famous for the lengths they go to to protect their eggs and rear their young, may not be the most supportive couples around. When one member of a penguin couple is handicapped, the other doesn't step in to pick up the slack.
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– Delft University is back, ready to take a fifth consecutive title with Nuna 5.
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– Federal judge throws out Lori Drew's three misdemeanor convictions.
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– NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has begun producing high-resolution and wide-angle images of the moon's surface.
 (Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:30:00 GMT) |
– Sticking a battery and a motor in the Mini makes it a sweet little EV we could live with if it weren't for the stratospheric price tag.
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– When your brain is overloaded, it will often get stuck on exactly the thing you are trying to avoid thinking about, leading you to blurt out things you never meant to share.
 (Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:00:00 GMT) |
– Regina Dugan is the new top gun of the Pentagon research arm.
 (Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:00:00 GMT) |
– A tiny drone looks and flies like a hummingbird, flapping its little robotic wings to stay in the air. It could inspire other bio-imitative mini spies.
 (Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:30:00 GMT) |
– Two federal agencies are now ready to hand out $4 billion in grants and loans to help bring broadband to the people and stimulate the economy, but applicants have to promise to play fairly with whatever devices, applications and services users want to use.
 (Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:16:00 GMT) |
– Only two sizes of black holes have ever been spotted: small and super-massive. Scientists have long speculated that an intermediate version must exist, but they’ve never been able to find one. Until now.
 (Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:21:00 GMT) |
– To celebrate Independence Day, Wired.com editors Danny Dumas and Steven Leckhart roast dogs with 14,000 Btu of infrared heating power. They review the an infrared portable grill and a wireless meat thermometer.
 (Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:00:00 GMT) |
– If bad eyesight ends your dreams of becoming an Air Force pilot, well, there are other ways to fly....
 (Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:00:00 GMT) |
– Want to make your summer really sizzle? Make sure you've got the right gear first. Wired highlights the best tech for fishing, golfing, beach reading and uh, whittling. Why? Because warm weather comes but once a year.
 (Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:00:00 GMT) |
– The Olympus E-620 is an inexpensive digital single-lens reflex camera that won't weigh your shoulder down, is easy to use and takes fine pictures in a wide variety of conditions. And it's
 (Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:00:00 GMT) |
– When those great balls of fire appear in the sky above you this Independence Day, grab some impressive shots — no matter what kind of camera you own. Follow this advice from Wired’s How-to Wiki.
 (Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:00:00 GMT) |
– The Swedish gaming executive who’s gambling nearly $8 million buying The Pirate Bay is convinced he can turn the 20 million users of the world’s most notorious file sharing site into well-behaved consumers — even amid a deluge of account-deletion requests.
 (Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:00:00 GMT) |
– We fill up at what's called the first gas station to sell gas blended with cellulosic ethanol.
 (Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:45:00 GMT) |
– Lawmakers want to know what's going to happen to traveler data after the best known airline fast-lane company shut down last week, while holding onto sensitive data of 165,000 fliers.
 (Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:18:00 GMT) |
– Give your ears a blast of cool summertime music. Other featured acts in this week's podcast include Indian Jewelry, Iggy Pop and Cursive.
 (Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:20:00 GMT) |
– Securities regulators are investigating potential insider trading of Global Gaming Factory before it announced plans to purchase The Pirate Bay for $7.7 million. Yo ho ho.
 (Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:00:00 GMT) |
– Bing grabs a percentage point in the search wars, stealing a sliver of the search market from Google. Is it the beginning of a long march or just the product of an ad campaign?
 (Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:42:00 GMT) |
– The king is dead, long live the king: Michael Jackson becomes the first artist to sell over a million downloads in a single week. It's a reminder of his dominance in the '80s, a heyday the music industry isn't likely to see again.
 (Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:29:00 GMT) |
– Some salamanders can regrow limbs without cells reverting all the way back to embryonic-like stem cells. Instead, the cells take a smaller step back to slightly less mature versions of themselves before growing into the many kinds of mature cells in the limb.
 (Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:00:00 GMT) |
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Wired - Macintosh News |
– Apple is making a big push to net more business users with the newest iteration of the iPhone. The company touts beefed up security and more data encryption. But Cupertino's wonder device still pales in comparison to the BlackBerry.
 (Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:28:00 GMT) |
– Live coverage of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2009 begins at 10 a.m. PT. Live blogging courtesy of Brian X. Chen and Priya Ganapati, accompanied by photographer Jon Snyder.
 (Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:26:00 GMT) |
– An analyst has suggested that it's very likely Apple will release a touchscreen tablet based on the iPhone operating system in 2010. Evidence of this is a slew of recent clues from the company and its partners.
 (Thu, 21 May 2009 04:30:00 GMT) |
– There is a default setting on your MacBook that needs to be changed ASAP: Turn off “Allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer.” I didn't, and my laptop almost fried.
 (Fri, 08 May 2009 14:37:00 GMT) |
– Avant-gardist Zoe Keating, who fuses technology and classical music, gives Wired.com a preview of her forthcoming CD.
 (Tue, 05 May 2009 04:00:00 GMT) |
– An iPhone app developer says his company stands to lose $600,000 due to Apple's refusal to give him an answer on whether his iPhone app has been accepted or not.
 (Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:46:31 GMT) |
– Apple reveals the details for its next iPhone operating system Tuesday in Cupertino and Wired.com is there, liveblogging the announcement.
 (Tue, 17 Mar 2009 04:55:00 GMT) |
– Elgato’s EyeTV Hybrid is a TV tuner USB stick that can pick up analog signals, digital broadcasts and also FM radio. It allows users to watch TV on their Mac and is popular among Mac Mini users.
 (Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:35:01 GMT) |
– Apple's upgrade to the Mac Mini is both smaller and much later than expected. Why does the company keep neglecting this diminutive desktop?
 (Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:05:00 GMT) |
– Steve Jobs plans to take medical leave until the end of June to deal with the health problems. Apple COO Tim Cook will head the company in Jobs' absence.
 (Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:54:00 GMT) |
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Forbes - E-Business |
– Searching quoted phrases makes all the difference. (Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:00:00 GMT) |
– Parlez-vous Excel? This story is for you. (Thu, 28 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT) |
– PC vendor's move to hire IBM's former acquisitions honcho could signal spending spree. (Wed, 27 May 2009 06:07:23 GMT) |
– The authoritarian nation's official news agency isn't flattered by microblogging imitation. (Wed, 27 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT) |
– Yahoo! boss says a deal is still possible, but only for ''a boatload of money.'' (Wed, 27 May 2009 16:10:00 GMT) |
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About.com - Most Popular Articles |
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