Daily Archives: March 27, 2009

Gnomes of Zurich stay home

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Wow! Fascinating Reuters report.

ZURICH (Reuters) – Swiss private banks are banning their top executives from traveling abroad, even to France and Germany, because of fears they will be detained as part of a global crackdown on bank secrecy, the Financial Times reported.

The newspaper quoted an unnamed head of a leading private bank in Geneva as saying steps by countries like the United States and Germany to fight tax evasion meant banks felt they had to limit travel to protect employees.

It cited four unnamed sources in the Geneva private banking industry as saying some banks were introducing total travel bans for staff, even for neighboring European countries.

“Private bankers aren’t even traveling to France. The partners are not leaving Geneva at all,” the FT quoted one senior industry figure as saying.

Still, it gives them a chance to spend more time with their money.

Ghost twittering

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It just goes to show that nothing’s straightforward — not even Twitter.

The rapper 50 Cent is among the legion of stars who have recently embraced Twitter to reach fans who crave near-continuous access to their lives and thoughts. On March 1, he shared this insight with the more than 200,000 people who follow him: “My ambition leads me through a tunnel that never ends.”

Those were 50 Cent’s words, but it was not exactly him tweeting. Rather, it was Chris Romero, known as Broadway, the director of the rapper’s Web empire, who typed in those words after reading them in an interview.

“He doesn’t actually use Twitter,” Mr. Romero said of 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson III, “but the energy of it is all him.”

In its short history, Twitter — a microblogging tool that uses 140 characters in bursts of text — has become an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, promising a level of intimacy never before approached online, as well as giving the public the ability to speak directly to people and institutions once comfortably on a pedestal.

But someone has to do all that writing, even if each entry is barely a sentence long…

Just for the record, I really wrote this post! Honest.

Graphing tools

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I hate the charts produced by programs like Excel, and so am intrigued by a new product from the Omni stable — the GraphSketch tool. The blurb claims that it:

helps you make elegant and precise graphs in seconds, simply by sketching what you want. Specifically designed for reports, presentations, and problem sets where you need to produce sharp-looking graphs on the fly, OmniGraphSketcher combines the data plotting power of charting applications with the ease of a basic drawing program.

I’ve just downloaded it and it works as advertised. Only runs on Macs, I’m afraid.

A new Internet Typology

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The Pew Internet and American Life project has come up with a new typology of technology users (and avoiders). Highlights:

  • Digital Collaborators: 8% of adults use information gadgets to collaborate with others and share their creativity with the world.
  • Ambivalent Networkers: 7% of adults heavily use mobile devices to connect with others and entertain themselves, but they don’t always like it when the cell phone rings.
  • Media Movers: 7% of adults use online access to seek out information nuggets, and these nuggets make their way through these users’ social networks via desktop and mobile access.
  • Roving Nodes: 9% of adults use their mobile devices to connect with others and share information with them.
  • Mobile Newbies: 8% of adults lack robust access to the internet, but they like their cell phones.
  • Desktop Veterans: 13% of adults are dedicated to wireline access to digital information, and like how it opens up the pipeline to information for them.
  • Drifting Surfers: 14% of adults are light users — despite having a lot of ICTs — and say they could do without modern gadgets and services.
  • Information Encumbered: 10% of adults feel overwhelmed by information and inadequate to troubleshoot modern ICTs.
  • The Tech Indifferent: 10% of adults are unenthusiastic about the internet and cell phone.
  • Off the Network: 14% of adults are neither cell phone users nor internet users.

    • Pew provide a quiz designed to help you assess where you fit in this classification system.

    (Footnote: I’m a ‘digital collaborator’, apparently.)