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Freddie Mae, S&P, Lehman, Goldman, Nikkei, The Intern.... - Kyle Outlaw

We follow digital convergence here at the Communities Dominate blog and digital money is another of those opportunities. Jim O'Reilly and I discussed how advanced South Korea was in this area, in one chapter out of our book Digital Korea in 2007. At that time we reported that all three mobile phone networks had enabled full mobile payments and for example five separate credit card services were enabled on the three networks and that the default setting for new credit cards in South Korea was to enable it to your mobile phone, with the traditional plastic card as the optional extra, sent to your home mailing address only if you wanted the plastic card as well. - Kyle Outlaw

While the world’s mature mobile markets continue to wait for ubiquitous mobile banking, the industry is thriving in emerging economies. - Kyle Outlaw

Imagine, for a second, how finance began, with small loans within families and between trusted friends. As the circle of lenders and borrowers grew, financial transactions were able to muster larger sums and to spread risk, even as promises became harder to enforce. Paul Seabright, an economist at the University of Toulouse in France, observes that trust in a modern economy has evolved to the miraculous point where people give complete strangers sums of money they would not dream of entrusting to their next-door neighbours. From that a further miracle follows, for trust is what raises the billions of dollars that fund modern industry. - Kyle Outlaw

Since its celebrated launch in October 2007, farmers from the State of Maharashtra and Punjab have reaped the benefits of accurate, timely and customised information. Hundreds of farmers have reported making additional profits ranging from Rs. 5000 to Rs. 200,000 following RML. - Kyle Outlaw

Back in 2006 Max Keiser predicted a global banking crisis triggered by subprime debt. Now, he's bringing his predictive powers to BBC World News in a series called the Oracle... - Kyle Outlaw

Call for Works This year’s competition will distinguish authors whose work manifests a keen sense of sound and listening as means of expression. The jury will deliberate on two areas : ++ Radio Arts will privilige all forms of inventive radiophonic creation (documentary, feature, fiction, essays, Hörspiel, experimental forms etc.) ++ Inter Media awards will go to sound installations or works which have been specially created for “inter media environment” to bring new experiences in sound to listeners. In each category the jury will deliberate on two types of work : 1)completed productions 2)projects - Kyle Outlaw

The most visible manifestation of this trend is the rise of the netbook, or small, low-cost laptop. Netbooks are great for browsing the web on the sofa, or tapping out a report on the plane. They will not run the latest games, and by modern standards have limited storage capacity and processing power. They are, in short, comparable to laptops from two or three years ago. But they are cheap, costing as little as £150 in Britain and $250 in America, and they are flying off the shelves: sales of netbooks increased from 182,000 in 2007 to 11m in 2008, and will reach 21m this year, according to IDC, a market-research firm. For common tasks, such as checking e-mail and shopping online, they are good enough. - Kyle Outlaw

The Juniper Research report determined that the mobile banking market is currently most advanced in the Far East, but that growing numbers of mobile banking services are being offered in North America and Western Europe. The developed nations of the Far East, North America and Western Europe are forecast to account for over 70% of the user base by 2011. ... More information about Juniper’s report titled “Mobile Banking: Strategies, Applications and Markets 2008-2013″ is available from the research company’s website. - Kyle Outlaw

Once Lance Armstrong has finished his cycling comeback, his sporting career will turn full circle. Armstrong has confirmed widely-held speculation that he will eventually compete in an Ironman triathlon. - Kyle Outlaw

Zimbabwe's central bank says it will soon introduce a 100 trillion dollar note as the once prosperous country battles to keep pace with hyperinflation that has caused many to abandon the country's currency. - Kyle Outlaw

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan. - Kyle Outlaw

Shake to make them angry. Stroke to make them sad. The future of their relationship is in your hands. Ruben Lullaby are lovers having their first fight, and whether they break up or make up depends on you! A new kind of entertainment called an opertoon, Ruben Lullaby is part comic, part game, part musical instrument, and controlled with motions and gestures which enable you to shape the feelings of the characters. You can shake your iPhone or iPod touch to make Ruben angry, stroke the screen to make Lullaby sad, and more. The characters respond to your actions--and to each other--according to how theyre feeling in the moment. - Kyle Outlaw

Rwandatel is the latest telecomms firm to enter the burgeoning mobile finance market in emerging economies in Africa. In Kenya, Safaricom's mobile money transfer service M-Pesa has led the way and last month hit the five million subscriber milestone. But the service has come under fire recently from financial institutions because it currently operates outside existing banking regulations. This has led to Kenyan finance minister John Michuki ordering an audit in an effort to allay concerns about the safety of users' money. - Kyle Outlaw

When banks are private, as they are in most of the world, the creation of money is therefore a private business. If the banking system abuses this prerogative, this privilege could or should be withdrawn. The logic is not new: money is a public good, and the right of issuing legal tender belongs at least theoretically to governments. So, while bailing out the banking system through nationalizing banks or nationalizing the problem assets is the classical policy choice, it can also be expected that proposals for nationalizing the money creation process itself will reemerge, as they have in previous predicaments, including the 1930s. Under a government run monetary system, the governments would simply spend money into existence without incurring interest at its creation; banks would become only brokers of money they have on deposit, not creators of money, as is the case now. - Kyle Outlaw

Twitter bots, aggregators, social software, mobile apps - we use these things more and more in our daily routines to make our lives better. But can we also use them to remake our cities altogether? How can these technologies be applied to transform urban spaces, changing them from the centralized, hard-coded things they are today into finely-tuned, fluid, user-operated systems that are efficient, sustainable and fit for life in the 21st century? - Kyle Outlaw

Not only will the fuel be cheap, but the exhaust will also produce the wonderful aroma of coffee. - Kyle Outlaw

Zimbabwe's annual rate of inflation has surged to 2,200,000%, official figures have shown. The figure is the first official assessment of prices in the troubled African nation since February, when the rate of inflation stood at 165,000%. - Kyle Outlaw

The Diamond goes the furthest in changing the way a Windows phone behaves. Its futuristic-looking screen has nice features like a picture-led phonebook: Two clicks and the phone's camera takes a picture of your mate and puts it in an easily browseable "stack" to ensure his or her phonebook entry stands out. This touchscreen phone, however, exposes another problem plaguing most smartphones: a slick interface requires serious hardware. - Kyle Outlaw

There is no denying that the netbook boomlet — started in Fall 2007 by the Asus Eee PC — was one of the biggest computer stories of 2008. The 1 million units sold in 2007 have reached 13 million this year as both Taiwanese ODMs (like Acer) and major branded PC makers (Dell (DELL), HP (HPQ), Lenovo (LNVGY.PK)) have jumped into the fray. - Kyle Outlaw

As rich countries struggle to reduce the amount of gigawatts they consume, residents of places like Karagwe in Tanzania can't plug a single light into a single plug to draw a single kilowatt. With no grid infrastructure coming to the region anytime soon, an American company and an African NGO are teaming up to bring light to the region by charging battery-powered lights with a modded recumbent bicycle generator from Nepal. - Kyle Outlaw

Vodafone is stepping up its mobile payments business. The global operator has partnered with The Western Union Company to pilot its cross border Mobile Money Transfer (MMT) service that lets customers send remittances between the UK and Kenya. Customers will be able to send money from Western Union locations in Reading, Berkshire directly to subscribers of Safaricom, the Kenyan operator in which Vodafone owns a 40 percent stake. Those receiving the money can either cash the money through a Safaricom agent, or forward it on to another mobile phone in Kenya. - Kyle Outlaw

This mobile wallet of the future will let consumers deposit and withdraw cash through on-device clients, send money to friends or family via a short message service text, or purchase an item through near field communications (NFC), an RFID technology that enables data exchange with a swipe of the phone. IMS Research forecasts that the number of active users of mobile banking and payment services will increase 662% over the next four years, while overall mobile users will grow at just 32% in the same period. The aforementioned functionality could be a leading driver of the explosion in mobile commerce, but today consumers and vendors are still realizing the possibilities. - Kyle Outlaw

While most wireless technologies start in developed markets and eventually make their way to emerging markets, mobile banking is one area where developing countries may be leading the way. In regions like the United States, mobile banking is quickly gaining traction as a complement to online services, but in many emerging markets, the technology is already a staple for unbanked consumers. - Kyle Outlaw

Humor has been a prominent but under-analyzed aspect of art in the past century; the comedy impulse is strongest in the history of media appropriation and conceptual art, beginning with Duchamp's poker-faced readymades and continuing through the work of Bruce Conner, Andy Warhol, Dara Birnbaum, Ant Farm, Jeff Koons and many others. Even the very way we talk about art overlaps with laff-lingo: we call certain pieces "one-liners," value work for being "wry" or "witty," and discuss whether or not a viewer "gets it." And of course, one of the first things someone will ask who doesn't "get it" is: "Is this supposed to be a joke?" - Kyle Outlaw

"The games are certainly no works of art, but they were not designed to be awe inspiring. They were instead designed to capture the moment, and immortalize it from a particular point of view that people in this particular time can appreciate, or at least recognize. ... just like the satirical editorial comics of our own past, these snippets of code will offer a window into the past, and the individually conceived past moments that it consists of." - Kyle Outlaw

IS IT any surprise that an industry that enables its customers to escape from reality into elaborate fantasy worlds is thriving in today’s gloomy economic climate? As other industries collapse, sales of video games are racing away. Global sales of console hardware and games software are expected to hit a record $49.9 billion this year, says Screen Digest, a consulting firm (see chart). Games sales in America in October totalled $697m, 35% more than a year earlier, according to NPD, a market-research firm. It is often said that video games are recession-proof. Are they really? - Kyle Outlaw

* The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020. * The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness. * Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020. * Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment. * The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations. * Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch. - Kyle Outlaw

The Ecofont is developed by SPRANQ, based on a hunch of Colin Willems. We tried lots of possible ink-saving-options. From extra thin letters to letters with outlines only. We have ommited various shapes: dashes, squares, triangles and even asterisks. In the end the circle was choosen as the best candidate for the job. With the Ecofont SPRANQ hopes to increase environmental awareness too. Increasing customer awareness about printing behavior: is printing really necessary or (partly) a waste of ink and paper? We also hope to inspire software giants and printer manufacturers to innovate in an environmentally conscious manner. - Kyle Outlaw

(AP) -- For the past three years, a startup called M2Z Networks has been figuring out a way to blanket the nation with a free wireless broadband network to ensure all Americans have access to basic high-speed Internet connections. - Kyle Outlaw