Cablegate: NZ First Worlders & Other Worlders

Glenn Greenwald does an admirable job in highlighting but a few of the Wikileak Cablegate headline grabbing revelations. In New Zealand, the US embassy cables are written in condescending, even glib, prose, and their authors appear to ready to take hearsay at face value.

The Dominision Post editorial Editorial: US diplomats need to get out more nicely summarises this.

The cables sent from Wellington to Washington offer a remarkably narrow view of this country. If the embassy is to be believed, gangs of pickpockets roam the streets waiting to prey on unsuspecting American visitors, New Zealand is “depressive”, our politicians are particularly devious and untrustworthy and the population can be divided neatly into two categories.

One – the first worlders – is composed of military, intelligence, foreign affairs and business professionals and a few politicians. The second – the other worlders – contains most politicians, the media, academics and much of the public. The first group is rational, recognises that New Zealand is too small to influence events on its own, but is keen for the country to do its share internationally.

Interview w/ Assange on Frost Over the World & AJE

David Frost at Al Jazeera English interviewed Julian Assange (JA) this week about Wikileaks (WL), the US embassy cable release, and the allegations and arrest.

Main points

1. Media has right and obligation to get information out public that is relevant and that the public needs to know about

2. There is not a single instance of evidence of anyone being harmed by what WL has done – nor any allegation of such by the Pentagon

3. JA suspects that Manning being coerced to testify (against JA).

4. State Dept. wants to save face by targeting JA

5. JA’s lawyers certainly fear their client may end up in a US jail.

6. JA’s lawyers advise that Sweden far more dangerous for extradition than UK

7.  Wikileak’s founding phrase – Courage is Contagious – encourage information sharing through successful examples

8. US was not leading target – closed & corrupt regimes first target, and US not closed – but US is connected to many world

9. Much material for closed countries such as North Korea from third parties

10. WL have no objections to paying sources but are currently overwhelmed by material

11. Through to beginning of 2010, WL financed via JA and friends

12. JA not at all an anarchist but secret institutions can start to become corruptive – JA supports just institutions

13. A Washingtonian network, of friends, cross-shareholdings, which spreads-out from Washington to the world, are behind campaign against JA & WL

14. Dirty tricks being played against JA re: case details being released => s’bdy connected to Swedish gov’t

15. Intelligence sharing of all types happening btw. US & Sweden

16. Perhaps accusers are innocent victims who have been bamboozled by police

17. Prosecution applied for solitary confinement, and no bail => not sure if fair trial is available in Sweden

18. JA: what are the charges ? Prosecution has refused to give evidence to British courts – initial complaint, anything … => JA hasn’t even been charged

19. British legal system more open

20. Most senior Swedish prosecutor states not any suspicion of rape yet …

OBIEE 10g Clustered Installation

First download biee_windows_x86_101341.zip from http://download.oracle.com/auth/otn/nt/ias/101341/biee_windows_x86_101341.zip?e=1289854363&h=a0b35067822577171924e998e3d64fe7

This is a test

 

This is a test of MS Live Writer for writing blogs. It appears to be pretty good… we shall see!

Here is a screenshot of my blog:

Tisdall’s Sloppy Reporting

Guardian foreign affairs pundit Simon Tisdall again demonstrates his lack of journalistic credentials. Mr. Tisdall, it seems, takes great joy in simply repeating Israeli government talking points.

David Cameron jumped into the ever-sensitive politics of the Middle East with both boots flying today, determined to call a spade a bloody shovel and Gaza a “prison camp” that shamed all those, principally Israel, responsible for its enduring misery. Cameron’s lunge was the diplomatic equivalent of Nigel de Jong’s chest-high tackle of Xabi Alonso in the World Cup final. From Israel’s perspective, he too was lucky not to be sent off.

On the same topic, why is it that Western regimes must desperately claim their allegiance to a secure and safe Israel but care little for the hell they bestow on Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere.

The world is upside down. The masses are treated with contempt.

LeWeb, Paris – Day 1

Nokia, Tapulous, Shazam, SGN, Orange round table

* Nokia (Bjorn Wigtorss): OVI Store 1M dloads/users

* Tapulous (Andrew Lazy, Kiwi?, CEO) : social games, 20m user dloads, FB apps, biz models: virtual goods, advertising, freemium …

* Shazam (Andrew Fischer, CEO): 500k new users/week!, mobile will be 4x as big as web online, adopt freemium model & ubiquitous single product (vs portfolio of products single platform Tabulous)

* SGN (Shervin Pishevar): mobile gaming, Mary Meeker forecasts for Iphone are great, “Fast” game = 700k downloads at $3 avg/download = $2.1m, 90 days to $1m gross revenues

Facebook, Ethan Beard, Director, Facebook Developer Network
* Social Graph: users’ connections with things they like
* Facebook built a platform to grow
* Facebook Connect extended to IPhone & Xbox this year, strong growth
* Press writes about death of platform apps but Ethan claims
* 250M users of FB apps, 500k apps, 300 apps have > 1M users/month
* Gaming is massive
* FB Connect growth massive: 60M users, 80K sites
=> Huffington Post

* One-click registration

* User email soon available through Facebook Connect* “Consume news”

Growth => * 500% FB referals up * 50% comments * 50% user growth

=> Jibjab

* Access FB photos easily

* Primary method for logging in is via FB Connect

* 80% of users, 20 clicks per JJ story, 2x registered JJ users (doubled)

=> TF1

* 120k ppl watched Fra-Ireland on tf1.fr, FB social graph present “Live Feed Widget”

* “Live Feed Widget” : 4000 status updates/minute during Obama election

Future:

* FB Connect everywhere => on other devices: TV, Game Console …

* Cross platform, ubiquitous

=> Social Web: experience web through friends – “Social Graph” foundation of social web

Twitter, Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform

* Twitter uses RoR

* 50k registered apps

* Exs. of businesses: OneRiot (search), cotweet (branding),tweetmeme (analytics), businesses prepared to pay for this

*

=> Cross platform analytics platform? Youtube, Twitter, FB, Google ….

Cloud Spend On the Rise!

Percentage of what though.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_g0tLOqtAg-o/SrZOtXtVSlI/AAAAAAAABXM/UQUtdKxwPV8/s1600-h/Cloud%20v%20non%20cloud.jpg

Paul Capital’s View on Secondaries Market

Article can be seen here.

There are probably 20 dedicated secondaries buyers on a global basis, but most of the capital is with around six of them. That has not changed very much and I think it will remain so. It seems like a business that should not have many barriers for entry, but there are huge barriers. If you want to put together a portfolio with some thought behind it, it takes a lot of work. We track the holdings of 24,000 institutional investors and you cannot build that kind of a database unless you have been in the business for a long time.

…

Around 70 per cent of our transactions are the acquisitions of LP fund interests and 30 per cent are other kinds of transactions.

…

Do you have an opinion on electronic exchanges for secondaries?

“They do not work. There is a huge amount of confidentiality involved in these transactions.

…

Online Advertising Mark II

The new advertising model will be based upon user’s shared info. That sites like FB are collecting. See here for post. I’m not convinced that users will be willing to share their all their consumer habits online, or that representative samples of users use these sites and share their information. A quantitative comparison of advertising effectiveness through Doublelick vs FB should be done …

Need to brush up on basic statistics!

Lost Spark: Minority Shareholders Oppose MBO

Real Deals report today that Spark Ventures are in need of a new light. The company reported a £3.9m annual loss, and two weeks ago froze all new investments. A rescue plan involves a management buy out by Thomas Teichman, Andrew Carruthers, Jay Patel and Andrew Betton. However minority shareholders are not please.

However, Vine Street Capital, which holds 8.2 per cent of Spark, is expected to argue against such a move at the firm’s general meeting on Friday.

On Monday, the company wrote to other shareholders suggesting the plan undervalues Spark and would only “give a reward for failure to an executive management team who have presided over consistently loss-making investment activity since the company’s listing in 1999”.

Instead, it wants the process opened to outside bidders.

Isango! is an interesting company. Not sure about Cluster7.

The firm’s recently disclosed full-year earnings have revealed a mixed performance. While IMImobile and Kobalt, which together make up more than half of its portfolio, grew their revenue, the firm was forced to write down £900,000 against interior design site MyDeco because “retail markets have continued to suffer”.