The next phase (and the threat to Apple and Google)

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From Business Insider.

There are two major trends that will dictate the future of the tech industry.By the end of this decade more people will be using the Internet through a mobile device than through their desktop.The Internet is becoming Chinese. Already, there are more Internet users in China than there are in any other country in the world. That lead will only grow. Research firm IDC says China’s market already accounts for 25 percent of the world’s smartphone sales, more than the US’s 17.5 percent.These trends combine to create an obvious reality: Any company that wants to control the future must have a firm grasp on the smartphone market in China. 

What’s a lawyer for?

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Terrific address by Larry Lessig to the graduation class at John Marshall Law School. It’s about what’s happened to the practice of law in America. Vintage Lessig: witty, thoughtful, moving. Inspiring, even. Best lecture I’ve seen in ages.

Make yourself a cup of coffee and watch it.

Nipplegate

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It seems that the New Yorker got temporarily banned from Facebook for violating their community standards on “Nudity and Sex,” by posting a Mick Stevens cartoon showing a post-coital Adam and Eve. Here’s a snapshot of the relevant section of the aforementioned guidelines:

Reassuring to know that male nipples are ok, isn’t it?

Broken Windows and the iPhone 5

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It’s not every day when one finds Paul Krugman writing about technology, but here he is today on the strange theory that the iPhone 5 (out tomorrow, for those who have been vacationing on Mars) might give a boost to the US economy:

I can’t judge how plausible the sales estimates are; but it’s worth pointing out how the economic logic of this suggestion relates to the larger picture.

The key point is that the optimism about the iPhone’s effects has nothing (or at any rate not much) to do with the presumed quality of the phone, and the ways in which it might make us happier or more productive. Instead, the immediate gains would come from the way the new phone would get people to junk their old phones and replace them.

In other words, if you believe that the iPhone really might give the economy a big boost, you have — whether you realize it or not — bought into a version of the “broken windows” theory, in which destroying some capital can actually be a good thing under depression conditions.

Of course, it’s nice that the reason we’re junking old capital is to make room for something better, not just for the hell of it. But you know what would also be nice? Building useful stuff like infrastructure employing labor and cash that would otherwise sit idle.

Playing by the (new) rules

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Interesting NYT column by Tom Friedman.

The Guardian newspaper of London [published] an online poll asking its readers: “Children aged 7 to 16 are being given the opportunity to learn how to code in schools in Estonia, should U.K. school children be taught programming as part of their school day?” It’s fascinating to read about all this while visiting Shanghai, whose public school system in 2010 beat the rest of the world in math, science and reading in the global PISA exam of 15-year-olds. Will the Chinese respond by teaching programming to preschoolers?

All of this made me think Obama should stop using the phrase — first minted by Bill Clinton in 1992 — that if you just “work hard and play by the rules” you should expect that the American system will deliver you a decent life and a chance for your children to have a better one. That mantra really resonates with me and, I am sure, with many voters. There is just one problem: It’s out of date.

The truth is, if you want a decent job that will lead to a decent life today you have to work harder, regularly reinvent yourself, obtain at least some form of postsecondary education, make sure that you’re engaged in lifelong learning and play by the rules. That’s not a bumper sticker, but we terribly mislead people by saying otherwise.

Why? Because when Clinton first employed his phrase in 1992, the Internet was just emerging, virtually no one had e-mail and the cold war was just ending. In other words, we were still living in a closed system, a world of walls, which were just starting to come down. It was a world before Nafta and the full merger of globalization and the information technology revolution, a world in which unions and blue-collar manufacturing were still relatively strong, and where America could still write a lot of the rules that people played by.

That world is gone. It is now a more open system.