ENERGY - USA

In the United States of America energy remains the driver of prices
In October, price indices markedly increased. The CPI (consumer price index) gained 0.6% over the month, the monthly gain of the PPI (producer price index) was 1.7% while import prices jumped by 1.5%. On a year-on-year basis, the CPI accelerated to 3.2% (after +2.5% in September), the PPI to +4.4% (after +3.3% in September) and import prices to +9.7% (after +8.1% in September).

However, energy was the main source of this marked acceleration. Excluding this component, the monthly gain was limited to +0.3% for the CPI, +0.7%, while non-petroleum import prices declined by 0.2% in October. On a year - on - year basis, the non-energy CPI was up by 2.2% (same as in September), the non-energy PPI by +1.9 % (after +2.1 % in September) and non-petroleum import prices by +2.7 % (after +2.8 % in September).

In short, there is currently just one source of inflation: oil prices. In October, they gained 16.2% m/m (as measured by the monthly average in the West Texas Intermediate), driving their year-on-year rate of growth to almost 76%.

Recently, oil prices dramatically calmed down. After fluctuating above USD 50 per barrel in October, they were "just" USD 46 per barrel yesterday. If they were to remain at that level until the end of the month, it would be translated into 11% drop in November.

All in all, I still think inflationary pressures remain limited in the US, with the volatility in oil prices being the main story behind monthly developments
Write: by LuisB. November 2004



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ECONOMY - EUROPE

Euro zone: Inflation surged in October, industrial output softened in Q3
In spite of a slight downward revision, inflation markedly accelerated in October. It reached 2.4% after 2.1% in September. This surge is linked to the energy component (+9.8% y/y). Core inflation remained moderate, stable at 1.8%. As long as households’ inflation expectations remain contained, the increase in headline inflation will not be a sufficient motive for the European central bank to change its monetary policy stance.

In spite of a 0.5% m/m increase in September, industrial output lost ground during the third quarter (0.2% q/q against 1.0% in the previous quarter). Output in investment goods was quite dynamic. This tends to confirm my hypothesis that the slowdown in GDP growth during the third quarter was, in part, attributable to an increase in imports, itself generated by a nascent recovery in investment.

Even if the different leading indicators for the industrial sector (orders, PMI and European Commission surveys, OECD leading indicator) are currently depicting a mixed picture, we believe that the sector should pursue its expansion next year, but on a more moderate pace.

Inflation at 2.4% in October following the surge in energy prices
Eurostat’s initial “flash” estimate was slightly revised downwards (by 0.1 percentage point). Nevertheless, the increase in inflation remains quite significant. In fact, inflation jumped from 2.1% in September to 2.4% in October. The surge in oil prices which, in September and in October was only marginally alleviated by the appreciation of the euro, pushed consumer prices upwards.
The energy component accelerated by 9.8% y/y, the highest since the end of 2000. Transport fuels contributed by 0.45 percentage point to the inflation rate.
On the other hand, core inflation, excluding energy, alcohol, tobacco and food products, remained stable at 1.8%, reflecting the absence of fundamental inflationary tensions. As long as households’ inflation expectations – and thus their wage demands – remain contained, the increase in headline inflation – due to an exogenous energy shock – will not be a sufficient motive for the European central bank to change its monetary policy stance.

As expected, industrial output softened in Q3 2004
Industrial output rose 0.5% m/m in September, which corrected its previous 0.6% m/m decline. Still, during the third quarter, industrial output markedly lost ground, with a gain limited to 0.2% q/q compared with 1.0% during the previous quarter.
The analysis of the components reveals that output in investment good was quite dynamic: +5.3% y/y in September, the third consecutive acceleration. This tends to confirm my hypothesis that the slowdown in GDP growth during the third quarter was, in part, attributable to an increase in imports, itself generated by a nascent recovery in investment. Moreover, output of non-durable consumer goods continued to improve, with a third consecutive increase in September.

Yet, perspectives for industrial output do not seem to favour strong growth in the sector during the coming quarters. Industrial orders have been declining since June. Their year-on-year growth rate, expressed in terms of a 3-months moving average, was limited to 8.6% in August, whereas it had reached a 12.2% high in July. According to the Reuters purchasing managers index, this softening should, to a large extent, be attributed to weaker foreign orders. The “Euro zone” export orders index, obtained by a weighted average of the indexes for the four major Euro zone economies, dropped to 52.0 in October against 53.7 in September and a 56.5 high-point in May 2004. The strengthening of the euro against the dollar should, in the medium term, even further contribute to a softening in extra-EU exports.

Moreover, latest market survey’s results have been painting a somewhat mixed picture. The manufacturing PMI, for instance, has not ceased to decline since July (but it still remains in expansion zone). On the other hand, the picture depicted by the European
Commission’s industrial confidence survey, is much more favourable, with an index increasing since the summer. At –2 in October, it reached its highest level since February 2001. In addition, if the current conditions index indeed softened, output expectations rebounded. The OECD leading indicator, which had badly fallen in August, marginally increased in September. Overall, I believe that the sector should pursue its expansion next year, but at a more moderate pace.
Write: by LuisB. November 2004



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E-LITERACY - UNITED KINGDOM

British Library goes Wi-Fi
The British Library has launched wireless Internet connectivity in the public areas of its building at St Pancras.
The new service offers Wi-Fi access throughout the 11 reading rooms, the 225-seat conference auditorium, the café and restaurant and the outdoor Piazza area.
It will enable readers, researchers and business-people to connect to the internet and access email using either their existing service provider or by using the Library’s own pay-as-you-go service.
The Library, which receives around 3,000 visitors a day, commissioned consultants Building Zones to undertake a user study to gauge demand for the new service.
The study revealed that Laptop ownership amongst visitors was 86%, and users were leaving the library to go to a nearby Internet café to access their email
Building Zones partnered with The Cloud and Hewlett Packard (HP) to roll out the building infrastructure, network and user support services. The trial service went live on the 31 May this year and by the end of that period the service was registering 1,200 sessions per week.
Source: Netimperative. November 2004



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ENERGY - FINANCE

EnCana Confirms Plans to Sell Ecuador Assets Archived Story
EnCana Corp. (ECA) said it plans to sell its Ecuador and U.S. Gulf of Mexico assets in order to focus on its North American onshore natural gas and oil sands businesses, confirming what has long been rumored.
At an investor presentation here Tuesday, EnCana president and chief executive Gwyn Morgan said he expects to have deals in place within a year to sell the Ecuador and Gulf of Mexico assets. He later declined to disclose specifics of the proposed transactions.
Morgan indicated that the proposed asset sales could together be valued at around $1.8 billion. He projected that the combined value of EnCana's asset sales since 2002 will reach $8 billion by the end of next year, up from an expected $6.2 billion following the closure of the company's recently announced deal to sell its North Sea assets to Nexen Inc. (NXY) for $2.1 billion. He said the company has no immediate plans for further substantial sales of Canadian assets.
Morgan also predicted that, by the end of next year, EnCana's oil and natural gas production will return to levels reached prior to the expected sale of its North Sea assets.
He said the company doesn't plan any further acquisitions of oil and gas properties to replace the North Sea production, but will instead add production by developing its remaining properties.
During the presentation, Morgan predicted that EnCana's natural gas production next year will increase by about 14% compared with 2004, offsetting a decline in conventional oil production due to the North Sea asset sale.
Afterwards, he told reporters EnCana also expects to add 30,000 barrels a day of oil production from its Alberta oil sands projects in 2005, almost doubling output from about 38,000 b/d in 2004.
Morgan told reporters that EnCana's oil sands production in the short-term may increase more rapidly than its natural gas production "because it is growing from a smaller base." Long-term, he predicted that oil sands could account for up to 15% of EnCana's total output.
Morgan told investors EnCana plans to buy back up to 10% of its oustanding shares over the next year.
Beyond 2005, EnCana is aiming for steady but more moderate growth in oil and natural gas output, and to strike a balance between investing its cash flow in drilling, futher share buybacks and debt repayment, Morgan said.
EnCana is an oil and natural gas producer.
Write: by Tamsin Carlisle. November 2004


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DEFENSE INDUSTRY - ISRAEL

Israel to export $255 million worth of military equipment to Poland
An agreement for military industrial collaboration between Israel and Poland is to be signed Wednesday during a meeting in Warsaw between Israel's Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and the Polish Economy Minister, Jerzy Hausner.
According to the plan, Poland's ground forces will be equipped with 2,765 Israeli missile and 264 personal launchers over the next 10 years, at a total cost of about $255 million.
The missiles will be sold in two models: personal launcher and a vehicle-mounted one, Haaretz reported. In addition, the Polish army intends to mount the launchers on armored cars manufactured in Finland.
Mofaz signed an agreement for strategic dialogue between Israel and Poland in his meeting in Warsaw Monday with Poland's Defense Ministry, Jerzy Szmadjdzinksi.
Mofaz and Szmadjdzinksi signed the agreement at the end of the meeting, and Mofaz invited his colleague to visit Israel. Mofaz later visited the landed forces headquarters, and delivered the first Israeli produced LR Spike anti-tank missiles, which were purchased by the Polish army, through an industrial collaboration with the Mesko Company of the Bumar group.
Source: MenaR. November 2004



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TOURISM - IRAN

Tourism revenues amount to US$ 500 million per year
Head of Iran Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organization (ICHTO) Hossein Marashi said on Monday that Iran's revenues from tourism amounts to some US$ 500 million per year. Speaking to reporters, he added that it is estimated that the figure will stand at US$ 2 billion by the end of the fourth five-year development plan (March 20005-2010). According to IRIB, he added that currently, Iran's share in the world tourism revenues is a merger 0.0001 percent. Marashi said the average growth of the tourism in the third five year development plan (March 2000-2005) stood at 6.5 percent.
Source: IRIB. November 2004



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ENERGY - ITALY

Eni Denies Report of Talks To Buy YUKOS Assets
Italian oil and gas giant Eni S.p.A (E) Wednesday denied a report that it is close to clinching a deal to acquire a key asset from troubled Russian oil titan OAO YUKOS (YUKO.RS).
"No talks are under way, and Eni hasn't submitted any bid" for YUKOS' assets, a spokeswoman for Eni said.
News agency Adnkronos reported that Italian Industry Minister Antonio Marzano has met Russian counterparts in Moscow to get approval for a transaction between the two companies.
Under the terms of such an agreement between Rome and Moscow, Eni would acquire YUKOS' unit Yukosneftegaz, the agency said, citing sources close to the deal.
Eni Chief Executive Vittorio Mincato could fly to Moscow before Christmas to ink the deal, the agency reported.
The Russian government has said in the past it plans to sell off all or part of Yuganskneftegaz, which pumps 1 million barrels of oil a day, or 60% of Yukos' oil, to pay a multi-billion dollar tax bill.
Eni had denied an interest for Yuganskneftegaz in October, but speculation about a move by the Italian state-controlled energy company persisted.
Write: by Vittorio Alessio. November 2004


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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY - CHINA

China vs Taiwan on IT
China is developing the means to electronically blockade rival Taiwan with attacks to the country's vital utilities, the Internet and other communications networks, a high-ranking US defense official has said.

The stern warning was issued by Richard Lawless - deputy undersecretary of defense - during a closed-door meeting with business leaders last month in the US. A copy of Lawless' speech was obtained by The Associated Press yesterday under the US Freedom of Information Act.

Lawless cautioned that if a war broke out between Taiwan and China, the first casualties might not be "brave men and women in uniform." He said China might first target things that keep Taiwan's high-tech society running.

"China is actively developing options to create chaos on the island, to compromise components of Taiwan's critical infrastructure:
Telecommunications, utilities, broadcast media, cellular, Internet and computer networks," Lawless said on Oct. 4 to the US-Taiwan Business Council.

``Taiwan could be electronically blockaded, isolated from the world, creating a kind of perfect storm in which the US could not communicate with Taiwan or Taiwan with the world,'' Lawless said during the council's meeting in the south-western city of Scottsdale, Arizona.

Lawless said such a strategy could be called an "acupuncture" attack aimed at "the destruction of a national will" with "the insertion of a hundred needles."

Beijing insists that self-ruled, democratic Taiwan is part of China and has repeatedly threatened to attack if the Taiwanese seek a permanent split or delay too long on unification.

Much of the debate over whether China will invade has focused on China's growing arsenal of destroyers, jets, submarines and hundreds of missiles aimed at Taiwan, just 160km off China's southern coast.

But in recent years, analysts have touted the possibility that China could be developing new high-tech weapons that could give the Chinese an edge over US forces -which are widely expected to help defend Taiwan.

Lawless said that several recent incidents have exposed vulnerabilities in Taiwan's critical infrastructure and communication systems and that China is aware of these weak spots.

In 1999, the loss of a single transformer station on Taiwan "left thousands without power for weeks," while a massive earthquake the same year "left Taiwan dependent on satellite communications to the outside world for more than a month."

"Many feared China would attempt to take advantage of Taiwan's ill fortune," Lawless said.

Taiwan must do more to safeguard telecommunications, fiber optics, energy supplies and major transportation arteries, and should consider allowing private agencies to assist in national defense, he said.

"Taiwan is one of the most technologically advanced societies in the world, but the expertise and wealth of experience that exists in the private sector remains largely untapped," he said.
Source:AP. November 2004


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SOFTWARE - LINUX

Four Linux Vendors Band Together
Conectiva, Mandrakesoft, Turbolinux, Progeny Form Group
Four Linux vendors have joined together to develop technology that would potentially make it easier for software makers to build products for multiple distributions of the open-source operating system.
The Linux Core Consortium, announced Wednesday, plans to develop a runtime environment and software development kit that would standardize programming of software to the interfaces of the Linux kernel. The LCC's founding members are Linux distributors Conectiva S.A., Mandrakesoft S.A. and Turbolinux Inc., and Linux services provider Progeny.

The LCC software layer would ensure that applications built for certified Linux distributions would be compatibly programmed for the Linux Standard Base 2.0 interfaces defined by the Free Standards Group.
A business application built today targets Linux distributions supported by the independent software vendor. While the software may work on other distributions, the ISV may not provide support for those products, Ian Murdock, chairman and chief strategist for Progeny, said.

A Linux distribution is the operating system's kernel, plus the open-source software a vendor will add on top. As a result, distributions differ considerably.
Rather than a software maker supporting just a couple of distributions, the LCC project looks to expand that support to any certified distributor, which would potentially give customers more flexibility in choosing and swapping vendors.
"We increase the choices that customers have in which distributor they use without sacrificing compatibility," Murdock said.

The LCC plans to release its technology and reference implementation in the first quarter of next year. The software will be incorporated in the founders' following product lines: Conectiva Enterprise Server, Mandrakesoft Corporate Server, Progeny Componentized Linux and Turbolinux Enterprise Server.

The group plans to eventually expand its work to encompass Linux standards developed by the Open Source Development Labs.

Organizations that have announced support for LCC include Computer Associates International Inc., Free Standards Group, Hewlett-Packard Co., Novell Inc., the OSDL, Red Hat Inc., the leading Linux distributor; and Sun Microsystems Inc. Despite the support, it's unclear how active the organizations will be in the effort.
Despite its inclusion as a supporter, Red Hat has not decided whether it would dedicate development resources to the LCC effort, or whether the group's technology would be integrated into Red Hat products.

"Our participation in the press release was mainly around our support of LSB," Day said.

Two of the founding members of the LCC were members of UnitedLinux, a consortium of second-tier Linux vendors that sought to pool resources around a single distribution to better compete against market leader Red Hat. The group, which included SuSE, the SCO Group, Turbolinux and Conectiva, is no longer active.
Missing from the LCC announcement is tech giant IBM, which has invested more than a $1 billion in research and products related to Linux. IBM did not respond to a request for comment.
Source: Techweb News. November 2004
Write: by Antone Gonsalves



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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY - MANAGEMENT

Cisco to buy mgmt. start-up, with eye toward network unity
Cisco this week announced plans to acquire Jahi Networks, a start-up that makes network management appliances for enterprise firms.
The $16 million deal would give Cisco products and technology designed to tie together various network devices and manage them as a single system.
Closely held Jahi Networks, based in San Jose and Hyderabad, India, makes products aimed at tying together disparate network gear and providing a common management interface for switches, routers, security products and other hardware, Cisco says. Whereas enterprise network administrators commonly write custom scripts, or even whole applications, to manage different devices, the Jahi technology lets users view network gear as “virtual devices” and configure these devices through one application.

The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2005. Jahi Networks’ 20 employees will become part of Cisco’s Network Management Technology Group, which develops CiscoWorks network management software and other management technologies.
Making various boxes on a network behave more like a unified system has been a focus for Cisco in the last few years. Cisco says such networks would be less expensive to manage for enterprise customers, and provide greater reliability and security.
This has been the focus of Cisco Chief Development Officer Mario Mazzola, who has previously stated that Cisco is taking more of a system approach to building products, as opposed to concentrating on just feeds and speeds in network devices. "This will be necessary in the shift from [product-level] resiliency to system resiliency," he said at the company's analyst meeting late last year.
Of course, no other vendor is in a better position to do this, as Cisco owns more than two-thirds of the LAN switch and WAN router markets, according to the Dell’Oro Group. Observers say Cisco’s systems approach to network gear is aimed squeezing more revenue out of the low-growth router and switch markets by selling premium services - such as its NAC security architecture, or AVVID convergence technology - that ride on top of an end-to-end Cisco infrastructure.

And customers are buying it, analysts say. A survey in August of 100 CIOs by Goldman Sachs showed that more than 53% plan to increase their spending on Cisco gear in the next 12 months; 35% said they would spend the same, and only 12% said they would buy less Cisco gear.
Write: by Phil Hochmuth. November 2004



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LOGISTICS - FRANCE

French problems grow for TNT Logistics
According to reports in the French press, TNT Logistics has not ruled out leaving France due to the continuing poor performance of its business unit in the country. The previous country manager, Reynald Huck, has been replaced by Georges Ruiz from TNT Express in another attempt to turn around the struggling division. The decision to sack the manager had been made due to continuing problems at the unit.

Management has stated that many of the problems for TNT in France have stemmed from difficulties in integrating the three acquisitions it had made in the country, one of the biggest being Transport Nicolas. It has been indicated that TNT Logistics revenues in France are between €200-250m, of which Transport Nicolas, focused on the weak retail and consumer goods sector, accounts for around half. Whereas TNT Logistics operations throughout the rest of the world are based on higher value supply chain management, France’s operations are largely oriented around commoditised transport provision, and therefore have been particularly vulnerable to the weak economy and falling volumes.

The French operation was one of the primary reasons why the company initiated its Transformation through Standardisation turnaround strategy. However whilst the other problem units it identified (Germany, Italy non-automotive) have apparently responded well to the initiatives, the French operation has remained a challenge. At its latest third quarter presentation, management of TPG went so far as to say that France would be responsible for the division missing its profit margin targets for the year.
Write: by LuisB. November 2004



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E-BUSINESS - TRAVEL

AOL, Yahoo and MSN expanding travel offerings
AOL, Yahoo and MSN have all announced their plans to offer travel shopping comparison and booking tools on their web sites.
This is a major reversal from their prior policy not to compete with Travelocity.com and Expedia who pay each tens of millions yearly for exclusive travel bookings on AOL, Yahoo and MSN sites.
AOL is making a minority investment in interactive services company Kayak Software to get the travel search site off the ground.
"Travel is a sizable and growing area and a primary category of focus for AOL Media Networks, especially as we build out our suite of travel products both on the AOL service and the Web," said David Lebow, executive vice president of AOL Media Networks, in a statement.
The deal also further validates the travel search engine model and puts AOL on an equal footing with Yahoo, which recently launched its own travel search site, reports Dow Jones Newswire. Travel search engines allow users to type in travel destinations and dates, and then scour multiple travel Web sites for the cheapest prices. The engines then direct users to those sites to make the actual bookings. Travel vendors, like airlines or hotels, pay the search engines a marketing fee to be included in the searches.
Travel search tools differ from online travel agents, such as Travelocity and Expedia because a few popular, low-cost airlines - such as JetBlue and Southwest Airlines are available through search engines, but not travel agents.
Travelocity spokesman states that they are not overly concerned with these events and they doubt travel search engines are good for vendors or customers. And, believe that the search engines are commoditizing travel at a time when they are working hard to go in the opposite direction.
AOL says they are in close touch with Travelocity, exploring new opportunities.
Source: Media
Write: by LuisB. November 2004



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AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY - CHINA

Hyundai on target to double sales
Hyundai Motor should double its sales to $US2.2 billion from a car-making venture in China this year, despite a downturn in the world's fourth-largest vehicle market.
Xu Heyi, chairman of Beijing Hyundai Automotive Corp., a 50-50 venture set up in 2002, told Reuters the company should earn revenue of 18 billion yuan ($2.2 billion) in 2004 and remains on track to move 150,000 vehicles.
It will also next year start making Mercedes sedans in China with DaimlerChrysler AG, the report noted.
Reuters said Hyundai, currently fourth in the market, has said previously it wanted to sell 200,000 vehicles in China in 2005 but Xu declined to elaborate on that target.
Hyundai and its partner sold 110,862 vehicles in China in the first 10 months of this year and the car maker has said it hoped to sell 60,000 Sonata sedans and 90,000 Avantes in China in 2004, the report said.
"We haven't any unsold inventory. In fact, sales are so strong that our dealers are clamouring for product and paying for it up-front," Xu told Reuters. "We'll certainly hit our sales target for the year."
Source: Reuters. November 2004



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DIGITAL DIVIDE - ICT

UN task force reviews adequacy of global funding for information technologies
A United Nations task force today began examining the adequacy of funding worldwide for information and communication technologies (ICT), particularly in developing countries.
Chaired by the Administrator of the UN Development Programme, Mark Malloch Brown, the Task Force on Financial Mechanisms was born out of the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) last December in Geneva.
At the event, financing of ICT for development was one of two key issues left unresolved, the other relating to Internet governance. President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal had proposed the creation of a Digital Solidarity Fund to bolster ICT in developing countries, while numerous western countries favoured using existing funding mechanisms instead.
The task force was set up to probe the matter further with a view to making a recommendation to the Summit's second phase, to be held from 16 to 19 November 2005 in Tunis, Tunisia.
Consultations during the one-day meeting in New York will involve representatives from the private sector, civil society, regional banks and commissions as well as individual experts. Inputs will also be mobilized through virtual discussions on WSIS-online.
Write: LuisB. October 2004


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E-GOVERNANCE/E-GOVERNMENT - COMMUNITY

Towards a Neo-Apartheid System of Governance in Latin America – Implications for the Community Informatics Guild
Governance today is being reconfigured by the evolving global demand for unskilled labor in the North and elite intransigence linked to limited capital inflows in the South. The emerging profile is one of dual economies wherein the wealthy dominate decision-making systems and strategic sectors while struggling to sustain a return on their investments, and the poor either emigrate or administer meager resources in the informal sector of their respective national economies. Remittance transfers now sustain this growing corpus of diaspora communities throughout the region.

This grim scenario is now widespread in the context of States under reconfiguration, moving toward a “ritual and virtual fiction” of e-governance orchestrated by shrewd and skilled elites who have responded adaptively to the challenges that information technologies represent to their historical leadership and hegemony while astutely orchestrating an “apertura democratica” that is more form than substance. Latin America with its pronounced income distribution inequities is the region where this process is quite visible. And its current intensification should belie illusions about enhancing democracy via top down, “government as online citizen administrative chores and tax payment systems” and kindred supply side information technology initiatives. E-government programs in this context may only exacerbate the current class and ethnic polarities.

Students and practitioners of “community informatics” need take this scenario into account when either designing research protocols or consulting with activist ICT non-governmental organizations who are committed to a rustic, ingenuous “better connectivity=enhanced democratic culture” strategy. The latter today too often ignores the power of national elites who have configured their regulatory regimes to favor quasi-monopolistic market dominance in cahoots with foreign IT hardware and software interests. At the same time, this innocence fails to lead to a critical perspective on the design and impact of official connectivity programs too often tailored without critical, public input in the Ministries’ chambers and much attuned to the interests of corporate hardware and proprietary software suppliers.

Today, many government subsidized connectivity projects languish in schools, libraries and public health centers where community “buy-in” is scarce, training limited, maintenance infrequent and content often irrelevant to the needs and aspirations of the local, young IT consumers. This growing population has already been weaned at the town or village cyber cafe, a regional network of mom and pop connectivity shops whose self-sustaining human and technical resources are largely ignored by the State programs. This profile of the Latin American connectivity and ineffective use pattern, suggests community informatics in this region of the South requires distinctions and caveats in any general arguments meant to apply globally, an urgent priority for forthcoming conferences on the topic.

As we slouch toward the second World Summit on the Information Society (Tunis, November 2005), Latin American States emerge from a lengthy and costly reconfiguration of public assets. Now largely privatized, these resources allow national and regional elites and capital groups (plus their foreign allies) to sustain their historical controls via modern IT-anchored mechanisms, whereby partnerships with “privatized” public entities and foreign capital partners effectively concentrate power in the key media, telecommunications and energy sectors of the respective national economies; such societies already being dramatically polarized between rich and poor. As a result, the emerging privatized Latin American State may be a ritualized fiction that sustains a democratic drama while power is increasingly concentrated and constrains any radical democratizing process (recent events in Venezuela are indicative).

In these States there is no civil service, little or no due process, limited transparency re public contracts and government budget disbursements, an elite-controlled media and telecommunications sectors, and the remittance economy has become the social safety net for the poor. The scale of the latter today permits these same elites to applaud the growing remittance flows while attenuating pressures on national social service budgets whereby “the poor appear to be able to pay their own way”. Add to this the discourse about decentralized municipal authority and it is not difficult to perceive the ruse that camouflages the concentration of effective power in these countries. Plans for the delivery of key government services via online portals may portend a “virtual State” where the programming protocols of the servers remain in the discretionary hands of a few. This is not the model of e-governance some of us may have in mind.
Write: By Scott S. Robinson. Universidad Metropolitana, México, D.F. October 2004
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E-GOVERNANCE/E-GOVERNMENT - ACTIONS

Hackers re-invent political protests
The fashionable city of Milan has become the staging area for a new breed of online social protests. Via della Pergola is only a 15 minute walk from the centre of Milan. But in a sense the street could not be farther away from the glitz that you find downtown. Here, you can find Pergola Move. It is a rambling old set of buildings that is part cafe, part restaurant, and part youth hostel. But it serves mainly as a meeting point for a loose collection of Milan's social activist groups.
Activists have been squatting in these buildings since 1990. Now, they pay rent and use the facilities for their work. Among those working here is Blicero, a computer hacker with a group called Reload. He says the members of Reload decided early on what they meant by hacking.

"For us it meant basically dismantling stuff, reducing them to components, and trying to put them back together in a way that looked like something we liked more.
"We thought that this was perfectly parallel, perfectly integrated with the idea of people who were involved with social struggle," said Blicero.

"We felt that social struggle was about taking apart social reality and building it up again in a way that is socially more interesting, or socially more right for what we think."

Social points
Reload calls it Reality Hacking. The group uses the internet, for example, to stream its own radio content.
It used the online station to get people to participate in this year's May Day marches.
Reload then teamed up with another hacker group named Molleindustria, which means soft industry.
Together, they created an online May Day march. Virtual activists could march by choosing their own character complete with different hair colours and outfits.
But predictably, many had their characters march naked.
Molleindustria also supplies simple computer games for Reload's activist projects.

The games are politically and socially charged
In Tamatipico, you try to keep your assembly line worker happy by making sure he gets enough rest, enough food, and enough time in front of the television. If your workers not satisfied, he will go on strike.
Blicero says that games like Tamatipico are first and foremost, fun.

"If you have fun, it tends to drive your attention to the thing that you're doing, and maybe stop and think about a couple of things that are happening," he said.

"I think the whole point is to make people aware of what they're actually living.

"And to have this, you have to create images, fantasies, idea, fun, things people can recognise easily and interact with easily and get near to you, talk to you, and then decide whether you're talking bullshit, or things that make sense.

Growing up
For some, like computer game expert Matteo Bittanti sips, what Reload and Molleindustria are doing is a new way of thinking about games.
Mr Bittanti is the driving force behind a series of books on video games currently being published in Italy.
To him, Molleindustria games work like a great film - you're entertained, but you come away with something more.

"I got a feeling the video game industry doesn't want to grow up," he said.


"They keep making very lame games. I mean the medium is so powerful, you can do so many things with it.

"And yet, you always end up with the same games, shooting people. I think you can do smart games that actually sell well, you have a whole generation of new game designers that have great ideas.

"And the technology's cheap, you can do very easy games that have a global view and can actually influence people."

Cyber-hippies
Others, like Noah Wardrip-Fruin, co-editor of the computer game book First Person, say these games are just that, games.
He argues that people who march in a virtual May Day parade are not involved in serious political activism.

"They aren't actually putting their physical bodies online. In a way, it's just a more dramatic way of them signing an online petition.

"And the same with people who are doing things like cyber-hippie work or things like that where they do these sort of minor attacks on military computers and things like that.

"But I think there's definitely more potential than that."

And the Reload collective is thinking ahead. It is offering workshops, and courses on hacking and on creating online radio stations that need just one microphone and one computer.
It is also exploring ways to use the internet to link up with other social activist groups, not just in Italy, but across the globe.
Source: BBC News. October 2004
Write: Clark Boyd is technology correspondent for The World, a BBC World Service and WGBH-Boston co-production

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INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY - EVOLUTION

South Gains Ground in Intellectual Property Debate
Countries of the developing South successfully lobbied the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to incorporate development goals and consumer rights, to counterbalance the interests of powerful nations and corporations, in a resolution adopted Tuesday.
The decision by the WIPO general assembly”is a breakthrough move by the U.N. body, which has been often accused of caring more for the rights of intellectual property owners than of users, especially those in developing countries,” said a statement by Consumers International, the worldwide federation of consumer organisations.

The proposal that was approved with a few modifications was introduced by Brazil and Argentina with the backing of Bolivia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Iran, Kenya, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania and Venezuela.

The resolution by the general assembly not only represents a victory for the developing South, but also ”a change in culture and direction for WIPO...(which) will never be the same,” said U.S. activist James Love with the Consumer Project on Technology.

WIPO, which did not become part of the U.N. system until 1974, administers the international treaties on intellectual property and copyrights. It is unique in that it is made up of representatives of the private sector as well as the member states.
”For generations WIPO has responded primarily to the narrow concerns of powerful publishers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, plant breeders and other commercial interests,” more than 500 prominent scientists and intellectuals from around the world stated two weeks ago in a document titled ”The Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organisation”.

Consumers International observed that the resolution that was approved by the WIPO general assembly contains many of the ideas expressed by the Geneva Declaration.

The member states cannot ignore certain complaints that have been made public, said Argentine representative Alfredo Chiaradía, who called for WIPO to become a more receptive, transparent and inclusive forum for all of its members and all sectors of civil society.

The final resolution adopted by WIPO includes the developing nations' proposal to establish a ”development agenda”.

The organisation also decided to set up a working group to examine how the new guidelines can be applied, which will hold meetings open to observers from inter-governmental and non-governmental organisations, and is to present a report on Jul. 30, 2005, to be submitted to the next general assembly, scheduled for September 2005.

WIPO also committed itself to organising a joint international seminar on intellectual property and development with other multilateral organisations like the U.N. Trade and Development Conference (UNCTAD), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the U.N. Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO).

In the final version approved by the general assembly, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was also included in the list of international bodies that will help organise the seminar, although it did not figure in the original proposal set forth by Argentina and Brazil.

Industrialised countries were initially hesitant in their reaction to the proposal, arguing that WIPO already deals with development issues through cooperation programmes with specific countries or regions, to which it has earmarked around 500 million dollars for the 2004-2005 period, 85 percent of which is covered by revenues from patent registration and copyright systems.

But Uruguayan representative Guillermo Valles underlined that the development focus advocated by the countries that backed the initiative is not limited to technical assistance or cooperation.

”A WIPO development agenda would obviously need to take into account any possible negative impact on the users of intellectual property, on consumers at large, or on public policy in general, not just the promotion of the interest of intellectual property owners,” said a delegate from India.

The group of developing nations argued that it is essential to reform the existing intellectual property treaties to ensure that they favour real transfer of technology to developing countries, and especially to those defined by the U.N. as ”least developed countries”.

Anna Fielder, Director of the Consumers International Office for Developed and Transitional Economies, said”The WIPO decision to move on this resolution is good for creators and consumers alike. We particularly welcome the willingness to look at increasing access to knowledge and technology in developing countries.”

The resolution also proposes an evaluation of the possibility of suspending negotiations on new treaties that would strengthen protection of intellectual property and place a burden on the fragile bureaucracies of developing countries.

James Love said that”For years, WIPO has pushed to expand the scope and level of intellectual property rights, and told developing countries that this would help their development.”

But ”Today WIPO supported an entirely different approach, which emphasised free and open source software, public domain goods like the human genome, patent exceptions for access to medicine, the control of anti-competitive practices, and other measures that have been ignored by WIPO for years,” he added.
Write: By Gustavo Capdevila. October 2004
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TELECOMM/INFRASTRUCTURE - AFRICA

African countries ‘denied ICT investment'
Half-hearted attempts at ICT liberalisation have denied African countries investment dollars from within and outside the continent, says Ernest Ndukwe, chief executive of the Nigerian Communication Commission.
Speaking today at the Telecoms World Africa Conference in Cape Town, Ndukwe, along with other delegates, said Africa needs to deregulate the ICT sector and called for a uniform plan to ensure a common regulatory regime and to set standards.

“Governments should never be protective of the incumbent operators to the detriment of new entrants that will establish a more competitive environment,” he noted.

Akossi Akossi, secretary general of the African Telecommunications Union, said several attempts at drafting a master plan have been made in the past, but they “came to nothing”.

“In the mobile arena, we already have one standard across Africa, namely GSM. However, this has not been emulated in other ICT areas. We need to improve infrastructure, particularly supplying broadband for Internet access and interconnection of telephone systems.”

Akossi said there needs to be a policy forum whereby regulators, governments and the private sector can come together on a continental basis to create the mechanisms that will allow a standardised telecommunications framework to be put in place.

“One obstacle has been the arbitrary changing of communications ministers and their departments in many countries. Often when these staff changes take place there is little in the way of continuity to ensure that policies worked on will be completed,” he said.

“Technology knows no geographic or political boundaries,” said Yvonne Muthien, MTN's executive director for corporate affairs. “Base stations in SA can be used for making phone calls in Botswana and those in Rwanda can be used in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and parts of the Sudan.”
Muthien said a common policy framework for Africa would help to alleviate some of the confusion around using services that are based in another country.

Yasmin Carrim, MTN's group executive legal affairs, said an efficient regulatory framework helps attract foreign and domestic investors as it allows them to predict the future value of their investments.
“An inefficient framework leads to court cases and other forms of legal action that are costly and this is a big deterrent to investors. The regulator must also be perceived to be fair and that perception is vitally important,” she said.
Write: By Paul Vecchiatto. October 2004
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POVERTY ALLEVIATION - INTERNATIONAL

Battle between cultural diversity and 'Free Trade' takes shape at UNESCO
The intergovernmental conference finished early, at noon on Friday 24 September, with the rapporteur's summary of the debate. Governments are invited to submit their formal comments by 15 November. It is not fully clear whether NGO comments will also be accepted and included in the Secretariat report. The next intergovernmental will be two weeks long, commencing 31 January 2005. Clearly this will be the critical meeting for negotiation on the text and the one around which CRIS should mobilise.

Governments have appointed a bureau and a drafting committee; the latter will be an important focus for lobbying. It includes USA, France, Switzerland, Finland, Japan, South Africa, India and others. The oral report of the rapporteur was a rather bland summary and seemed to ignore all of the NGO interventions. Main points were that the draft formed a good basis for discussion that the preamble and the principles need to be fine tuned, the definitions section is rather wordy and there were differences of opinion on how this should be approached included the definitions of culture. Some delegations wanted greater attention to language and/or religion. In the main issues of the draft there were different views on Options A and B and an aspiration to find a "third way" that would achieve greater consensus. The relevance of Annexes A and B were questioned; these could well be dropped entirely. There was a tension between countries that see the convention as primarily asserting a right to defend their national culture in the face of globalisation and those that see the convention as significantly about cultural diversity within countries. Many delegations spoke positively about the importance of involving civil society. There were several reservations about creating new institutions such as the proposed observatory however others noted that the absence of any dedicated monitoring mechanism would substantially reduce the effectiveness of the treaty.

A final list of participants was distributed and should be available electronically shortly. It has full contact details, including emails, for most delegates including government representatives. This will be important for lobbying. 132 governments were represented at the meeting. International organisations listed as present were UNESCO, WIPO, UNCTAD, WTO and UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, plus 4 regional bodies. 20 NGOs were listed although a smaller number took part in the daily NGO meetings convened by the UNESCO-NGO Liaison Committee.

The UNESCO-NGO Liaison Committee took the lead role in convening NGO meetings. In addition to focusing on issues of procedure the Liaison Committee see itself as having a role in developing substantive common position statements. It issued two sets of amendments during the week and will revise and refine these before submitting formally to the UNESCO Secretariat. The UNESCO-NGO Liaison Committee is elected from the 300 or so NGOs with consultative status at UNESCO although it seems to have consulted with a smaller selected list in developing its pre-conference position. Its position was rather closely based on INCD drafting.

At the final meeting of the NGOs we agreed a number of issues around process and tactics. NGOs are strongly encouraged to submit their own proposals to the UNESCO Secretariat by 15 November (although they should be published earlier if they are to influence government positions). The Secretariat will be asked to include NGO responses as an Annex to the compilation document for the next conference. There is a need for an open list for NGOs to share papers and proposals. I offered to assist with getting this set up. Decision to be taken by the Liaison Committee next week, it was also agreed to call on the sponsoring governments (Canada is sponsoring the January/February 2005 meeting) to provide financial support for south participation.

As a general conclusion I would say civil society participation was rather weak and rather narrow - few participants, lack of experience among many, predominance of artist/producer groups, and almost complete absence of south participation. Even INCD were not sure they would get into the meeting since they don't have formal consultative status with UNESCO. The UNESCO-NGO Liaison Committee has a very broad constituency including business perspectives such as that of the Independent Publishers Association. INCD is also trying to bridge civil society interests with the small producer end of the private sector. There is certainly an opening for CRIS to play at least an equal role with groups like INCD and the Coalitions and I am sure a communication rights perspective will broaden the basis of debate.

On the substance of the convention it seems to me the outcome will be significant but it could as easily be negative as positive. A weak convention, subsidiary to other treaties, with no powers of sanction and no monitoring and enforcement bodies could still provide the diplomatic fig leaf to bring culture into GATS. This, as the International League on Human Rights state, would be worse than no convention.
Write: by LuisB. October 2004
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TECHNOLOGY - MARKET

PalmOne licenses Microsoft Exchange for mobile e-mail
PalmOne Inc. has licensed technology from Microsoft Corp. to make its devices work directly with Microsoft's Exchange e-mail server, the companies said Tuesday.
With the support for Microsoft's Exchange Server ActiveSync protocol, users of PalmOne devices will no longer need to install third-party client and server software to be able to access e-mail, calendar and contact information on a server running Microsoft's Exchange Server 2003 software, said Steve Janiak, a senior product manager at PalmOne.

The first PalmOne device to include the Microsoft technology will be a new Treo smart phone, scheduled to be available before the end of the year, Janiak said. PalmOne's license is not specific to one device or type of device, and the company may include the technology in other future products aimed at business users, he said.

Janiak does not expect PalmOne's support of Exchange Server ActiveSync to drive the vendors who currently link PalmOne devices with Exchange servers out of business.
"We think that Exchange ActiveSync is going to expand the market more than that it is going to shake other people out," he said. Users of Good Technology Inc. and Seven Networks Inc. products will probably continue to use those products because of the additional management, security and other features, he said.

The agreement with PalmOne marks the first such licensing deal for Microsoft. Support for mobile devices, previously a separate product, was included in Exchange Server for the first time with the release of Exchange Server 2003 in October last year. PalmOne and Microsoft are rivals in the handheld operating system (OS) space: PalmOne sells devices running Palm OS while Microsoft backs its own Windows Mobile software. For Microsoft, PalmOne is just another company with which it both competes and partners, albeit through different parts of the giant software company, said Chuck Sabin, a senior technical product manager at Microsoft.

"Even though PalmOne may compete with some of the manufacturers that are delivering Windows Mobile devices, from an Exchange Server perspective we have the need to support a broader range of devices," he said. Terms of the licensing agreement were not disclosed.
Source: IDG News Service. October 2004
Write: by Joris Evers

DIGITAL DIVIDE - ONLINE

Development Gateway: biased, unaccountable and overpriced?
A study prepared for the Bretton Woods Project has found that the Development Gateway, an internet portal on development issues initiated by the World Bank, presents a biased picture of development debates, lacks independence and is inefficient when compared with other similar initiatives.

The Gateway seeks to promote sustainable development and poverty reduction through knowledge and resource sharing. Initially conceived and designed by the World Bank, it commenced operations as an independent not-for-profit organisation in July 2001. However, its launch and operations have been dogged by controversy as civil society organisations have objected to the Gateway's links with the World Bank and its potential for disseminating the World Bank's vision of development at the expense of more diverse and pluralistic views. They have suggested the initiative is ill-conceived and biased, leading to the further marginalisation of southern knowledge, and the crowding out of other knowledge aggregators.

Two evaluations of the Gateway have been published. The first was a broad evaluation of the World Bank's overall knowledge sharing policies and practices conducted by the Bank's internal Operations Evaluation Department (OED) in 2003. The evaluation claims that the Gateway has delivered "credible and high quality content" without providing any basis for this conclusion. It ignores the numerous criticisms by civil society organisations, saying that "the controversy that accompanied early plans for the Development Gateway has declined". The second evaluation was commissioned to a private consultant, Louise Walker Consulting, by the OED the same year. While this is specific to the Gateway it is based on a three week limited desk review during which 14 Bank staff and external individuals were interviewed and "a range of documents from the Development Gateway and the Development Gateway Foundation" were examined.

Given the limited scope and questionable independence of these evaluations, the current investigation was undertaken in light of both the initial criticisms and generally accepted knowledge sharing principles. The study is based on a review of existing documentation (from both the Gateway and external sources) coupled with analysis of the Gateway website and consultations with development professionals.

The focus is on the governance of the Gateway, the relevance and role of the Gateway, and the quality of content in terms of its comprehensiveness, uniqueness, diversity, organisation, usability, and cost-effectiveness. It is limited to the topic pages and, to a lesser degree, the country-specific sections known as 'Country Gateways'; it does not address the sections on consulting opportunities (dgMarket) or donor activities (AiDA). Three other development portals are studied as comparators: civil society portals OneWorld and Choike and research portal Eldis.

Lack of independence
Out of the 35 current topic areas, 24 are managed by World Bank or Gateway staff. Six of the twenty board members are current Bank employees, while another two are former employees. A $6 million a year service agreement for providing operating staff and services to the Gateway was won by the World Bank - apparently without competitive bidding. Clearly, the Gateway has a long way to go before it could be considered independent of the World Bank.

There has been a lack of accountability and responsiveness to civil society, and as a result a lack of trust among the Gateway's intended users and 'beneficiaries'. Key documents regarding the establishment of the Gateway are no longer available on the website, nor are the two existing evaluations. For two months, there was no response to requests for such documentation. Furthermore, despite the limited evaluation of the Gateway so far, there are no plans to commission an independent examination.

Many of the criticisms leveled at the Gateway echo those made of the World Bank as a whole. In particular, the tendency to ignore local circumstances and alternative viewpoints in favour of 'best practice' solutions is a common criticism of the Bank that manifests itself in the Gateway. It is unlikely that these criticisms will be addressed if the Gateway continues to be linked to the Bank.

Biased knowledge
The editorial policy, under which designated 'topic guides' select relevant content that demonstrates methodological rigour, severely disadvantages information from southern sources. A detailed analysis of the privatisation and trade topics showed that more than 80 per cent of the resources were from northern sources, and 96 per cent were in English. Telecommunications liberalisation was the single most popular theme, which brings into question whose interests are reflected in the choice of content. Under privatisation, 41 per cent of all resources were sourced by the World Bank or its affiliates. Both internal evaluations pointed to inadequate attention to local circumstances as a key concern. This was supposedly addressed by the Gateway through expanding the pool of topic guides and partners. However, only three out of 35 'topic guides' are from the south.

Encouragingly, there is no evidence that the Gateway has cannibalised other independent development portals. However, Roberto Bissio, director of Instituto Tercer Mundo, believes that this is "not because the Gateway has not tried to position itself as the major portal, but because they have not succeeded!". Bissio expresses concern that the Gateway may however have "diverted an enormous amount of funds intended to support development-related internet activities from the content providers in the South to a highly centralised operation in Washington DC."

An unclear definition of stakeholders and beneficiaries has been acknowledged by both internal evaluations of the Gateway. This is identified as a major problem in the context of customising the content for actual users. This is in conflict with the knowledge sharing principles espoused by the World Bank, that state clearly that the point of knowledge sharing programmes lies in the application of knowledge, not the mechanics of sharing. The Gateway has built a de-contextualised repository of development knowledge, without any clear idea of how this knowledge will be used. This is also reflected in the fact that the goals of the Gateway are framed in mechanistic terms such as achieving five million page views a month, rather than in terms of outcomes. Both existing evaluations found that the Gateway does not provide any strategic uniqueness.

Questioning content
Despite the expenditure of vast sums, the Gateway is not the most comprehensive web portal for development knowledge. The global civil society portal OneWorld and research portal Eldis provide as much or more content than the Gateway for social, political, and environmental topics, while the Gateway tends to be strongest in economic topics, and more specifically information technology related topics. This technological bias is also reflected in the categorisation of topics, with five out of the 35 Gateway topics allocated to information technology, and none dedicated to health, education, rural development, debt, labour, or conflict.

Other development websites can provide broader coverage by serving as true portals - pointing to the relevant information regardless of where it is located. This was clearly demonstrated by searching for specific information across all the portals. Out of forty search terms, the Gateway returned the highest number of hits for just four - broadband, ICT, internet and microfinance. Choike, by far the smallest portal, provided access to more resources than the Gateway for as many as 21 out of the 40 selected search terms. OneWorld and Eldis also provided more resources than the Gateway for 21 and 29 search terms respectively.

Access to country-specific information is chaotic, with different portions of the Gateway website giving access to wildly different numbers of Country Gateways. The OED may claim that the Gateway's content is credible and of high quality, but this analysis suggests that it is poorly organised and lacks comprehensiveness.

Who pays the bill?
The Gateway is significantly less cost-effective than the other portals. Total Gateway expenditures up to mid-2003 were $23.4 million. In contrast, total costs incurred up to mid-2003 were $4.6 million for OneWorld, $0.9 million for Eldis, and $0.4 million for Choike.
Dividing these costs by the number of resources created by each portal provides a measure of total costs incurred per resource provided. This was found to vary between a low of $57.50 for Eldis to a high of $407.88 for the Development Gateway. An alternative view of cost-effectiveness was obtained by looking at usage of each website. Dividing monthly costs by the monthly number of visits gives the cost incurred per website visit. This ranges from $0.26 for Choike to $4.85 for the Gateway.

Ways forward
The Gateway has consumed more than $30 million of mostly public funding since its inception and is currently raising another $40 million. This without having achieved many of the goals it set itself and with major question marks over its ability to deliver. We urge a full, properly independent evaluation, expanding on the work in this study, before any more money is spent.

Some of the steps needed to resolve the problems identified in this study include:

- Re-open the dialogue with civil society and official development partners to redefine the mission and priorities for the Gateway, clearly identifying the distinct categories and needs of users;
- Establish an ongoing monitoring and evaluation system;
- Undertake immediate action to diversify the board and staff to reduce the influence of the Bank and better reflect the needs of users;
- Terminate the World Bank service contract and develop alternative service partnerships;
- Launch an initiative to increase content from the South, through increased partnerships with southern civil society organisations, universities, media, or web portals;
- Improve transparency to all stakeholders in development, through provision of key documents, performance statistics, and consultation results on the website. Provide a forum on the website for an open discussion of the Gateway itself; and
- Restructure existing content by rationalising the taxonomy and rectifying the bias towards technology at the expense of important social and political issues.

Postscript
The study was sent to the Development Gateway for feedback at both the draft and final stages. Their response to the draft simply disagreed with the report overall without addressing any of its specific findings. Karen Lynch, the Gateway's Communications Director now suggests that they are "in the advanced stages of addressing the recommendations of the report". Accordingly, they plan to end the World Bank service contract by June 2005. Diversification of partners is an "ongoing goal" (though Gateway staff take issue with the basis for the study's statistics on usage and content). They concede problems with the organisation of the content and are working to improve it.
Date: September 2004

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OPEN SOURCE - SOFTWARE

Free software, Internet gives a voice to African activists
Proper management and planning can give lobby groups and campaigner’s cheap, rapid communications and information.
African lobby groups, as well as community and independent media, are using free software and the internet to fight a lack of money and skills.
The internet had also helped overcome the problems associated with widely dispersed audiences and, in some countries, government crackdowns on freedom of expression, speakers told the Highway Africa 2004 conference in Grahamstown last week.

Lynne Muthoni Wanyeki, a director of Femnet, a pan-African organisation based in Kenya, said the group had used the internet to campaign for and protect women's rights. It began by sending information via e-mail and SMS to women's groups across the continent and posting information on its website about the regional debates on the formation of the African Union. It had also lobbied its network to make nominations for the posts available for women in the PanAfrican Parliament.
Wanyeki said Femnet's experience showed there was a need to plan internet-based campaigns carefully, determining who needed to be reached, what needed to be achieved and how, and to understand better the technologies available.

John Lannon of the Praxis Centre at Leeds University said the internet had helped human rights movements because it was cost-efficient, suited non-hierarchical structures and could be used to skirt government controls. It was used to disseminate information to a wide audience rapidly and could encourage effective action. It was also a useful research tool and provided educational material. One organisation to use the internet well was religious group Falun Gong, harassed by China's government.

Some well-known South African examples of using the internet for lobbying are websites such as "hellkom", "telkomsucks" and "neverflysaa", which were begun by dissatisfied Telkom and South African Airways customers.

Telkom's senior manager of corporate communications, Hans van de Groenendaal, said there was a difference between lobbying and activism on the web. A ctivism went further than lobbying for example, by encouraging supporters to send e-mails, which Telkom considered an infringement on people's right to privacy.

Customers should have a right to express an opinion, and although companies might not like it, they should listen and respond by changing or correcting wrong perceptions, if that was the case, Van de Groenendaal said. Companies should be allowed to protect their brands and trademarks, and the media should take into account that opinions expressed on lobby sites might emanate from a minority.

Open-source software can also help cash-strapped media organisations. The Centre for Advanced Media Prague (Camp), a Czech-based subsidiary of the Media Development Loan Fund, gives technology assistance to independent news media in emerging countries.
In SA, Noseweek ran on Campware, MD Sava Tatic said, and the organisation had also assisted community radio stations in Indonesia and Nepal.
Campware, which was free, was available in multiple languages and included content management, customer relationship management and print distribution tracking software.
Another solution was using refurbished computers. Alan Finlay of Open Research said it was estimated that about 50% of Africa's computers were refurbished. These cost less than new ones and last at least five years.

But there were limitations to using the internet, Lannon said. Skills were often lacking, and human rights websites and e-mails were competing for attention with a lot of other noise in cyberspace. The internet was only a tool and could not "change the disengaged to the engaged".
Source; BusinessDay
Data; September 2004

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E-BUSINESS - E-PUBLISHING

Do-it-yourself book publishing takes off on the Web
When Ross Yockey and his daughter, Beth, wanted to write a book parodying the national No Child Left Behind educational standards, they had no time or interest in the traditional book publishing route.
Instead, the Seattle residents - who wanted their book in readers' hands before the November presidential vote - uploaded their completed manuscript to a North Carolina-based Internet company called Lulu.com.
Within minutes, the book was available for sale online. Each time a purchase is made, a printer in Rochester, N.Y., makes an individual copy that is shipped to the buyer, typically in 24 hours or less. The royalties are split automatically among the Yockeys, Lulu and the printer, ColorCentric.
"I'm a longtime author, with 15 books published," said Ross, who has also written biographies on former Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl and composer-conductor Andre Previn. "This is the first one that hasn't gone those usual channels," which he said can be lucrative but lengthy.

The book, Strictly for the Birds, hasn't gone blockbuster yet, Ross said, although that's wasn't the goal. He and his daughter wanted to make a point — and fast. "It was super, mega, totally crazy fast," said Beth, 26.
Such on-demand printing is still a small fraction of the overall book industry. But it is quickly opening avenues for authors to bring their books to market directly, quickly and sometimes cost-free.

"There were a lot of early abortive efforts to try this," said Jim Hamilton, an analyst with InfoTrends/CAP Ventures in Weymouth, Mass. "There was a concept that there would be instant book kiosks in bookstores, and that did not work. ... But we are in a very creative phase now and it's very exciting."

What's more, this kind of publishing might just foster a market for book-writing in the same way Kodak first opened up photography to amateur picture takers nearly a century ago, said Frank Cost, a printing professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
"Everyone is starting to realize this works, and it's fantastic," Cost said.
A string of on-demand book publishers has cropped up in the last few years, including iUniverse.com, AuthorHouse.com, Xlibris.com, CafePress.com, uPublish.com and Lulu.com. While prices vary widely depending on the level of services offered, most work in similar ways.

Authors write their texts, sometimes including photos and illustrations, then upload the book via the Internet to the publisher. Some list the books directly with Internet retailers such as Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and Borders.com.
IUniverse.com, for example, is partly owned by Barnes & Noble and has positioned itself much like a traditional publishing house, requiring the author to go through copy editing and review. It also offers layout and cover design for a flat fee.
"We're focusing on being a farm team for people who want to get into the publishing industry," said Lynette Petersen, spokeswoman for iUniverse, based in Lincoln, Neb.

"We will always produce the books meant for friends and families. But we're designing books also so they have more appeal to the traditional channels in the publishing industry."

Other publishers, such as Lulu.com, opt for a more direct approach: Authors upload their text, which printers produce as is.
"If we are wildly successful, it's not that we're going to steal 5% of sales from Random House or other publishers," said Bob Young, Lulu.com's founder as well as the founder of open-source software company Red Hat. "It's because we're creating a whole new industry and bringing a whole new category of content to the market."
Printing experts say the entire concept of on-demand or instant books has reached a new level — publishers and printers can now produce one copy of a book profitably.
"A number of titles can be successful if run in quantities of 10 or 20 books, or even one copy," said Thomas F. Wetjen, vice president of Xerox Graphic Communications Industry, Production Systems Group. "We've been able to lay out a case to publishers to show them where there is value and where they can make money on that."

For example, a traditional publisher that expects a book could sell 1 million copies might decide on a print run of 800,000, then assign any remaining sales to an on-demand printer. It may also mean a book never actually goes out of print, since publishers could print small batches of books as needed.

"Maybe there's not a huge market for individual books," said Stephen Fraser, Lulu's director of communications. "But they are very meaningful to those who write them, for people who want to put their family history on the shelf, to create something special."
Source; USA Today. September 2004
Write; by Richard Mullins, Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle

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TECHNOLOGY - R&D

Last gasp of the fax machine
Office technology: That most exasperating piece of equipment, the fax machine, is on its way out. But it will take a very long time to die.
Who hasn't felt the urge to smash up the office fax with a hammer at least once? The machines are slow, testy and prone to breaking - usually at the worst possible moment. They became indispensable items of office life in the 1980s and 1990s, when huge rolls of paper curled from out-trays as lengthy documents arrived. (More advanced machines cut the paper, but then the individual pages ended up on the floor in random order.) Such clunkiness was nonetheless a major advance from 150 years earlier, when Alexander Bain, a Scottish inventor, patented the first fax - a device that connected two styluses using a pendulum and a telegraph wire.

Thank goodness, then, that faxes are now going the way of the typewriter and carbon paper. E-mail is mostly responsible: it is easier, cheaper (especially for communicating abroad) and paperless. Whereas fax machines must be checked constantly to see whether something has come in, e-mail simply pops up on screen. Stand-alone fax machines have been especially hard-hit, though multi-function machines - which combine the fax machine with a copier, printer and scanner - have also struggled. Peter Davidson, a fax consultant, says that sales of fax machines worldwide fell from 15m in 2000 to 13m in 2001 and are still falling. He estimates that faxes now account for just 4% of companies' phone bills, down from 13% ten years ago. Americans especially are shedding them fast: by 2006, Mr Davidson predicts, their spending on fax machines will be less than half what it was in 2002.

Junk faxing has helped to keep the machines whirring. But it too is fading as governments crack down. In January, for example, America's telecoms regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, fined Fax.com, a marketing company based in California, $5.4m (the biggest such penalty ever) for mass-faxing unsolicited advertisements in violation of a law passed in 1991. Fax.com had defended itself on the grounds of free speech, an argument echoed by telemarketers, who are also under fire as people rebel against intrusive salesmanship.

As well as fining six companies in the last five years, the FCC has issued more than 200 warnings. Stronger limits on fax marketing, requiring anyone sending an advertising fax to have written permission from the recipient, are due to come into force in January 2005, though Congress may yet soften this to allow businesses and charities demonstrating an “established business relationship” with customers to send them faxes without prior permission.

Even so, new technologies and regulations will not kill off faxes just yet. The machines are still helpful for communicating with people in rural areas or poor countries where internet access is spotty. They also transmit signatures: although electronic signatures have been legally binding in America since 2000, hardly anyone actually uses them. Besides, some companies are only just adopting e-mail. Abbey, a British bank, used to rely heavily on faxes to transmit information between its headquarters and branches. Personal e-mail for branch employees was only installed this year as part of a technological overhaul.

Publishers, among the first to embrace fax machines because they sped up the editing process, may be the last to bid them goodbye. Stephen Brough of Profile Books, a London publisher affiliated with The Economist, says that faxes are still useful in transmitting orders to distributors, and in allowing authors to indicate changes on page proofs easily. (Electronic editing, in which multiple versions of the same file swiftly proliferate, can be a nightmare.) Publishing contracts, which involve lots of crossing-outs and additions, can also be edited by fax. At Lonely Planet, a travel-guide company, a publishing assistant says she is sometimes asked to fax pages of company stationery to other publishers as proof of identity.

The persistence of the fax has much to do with the perils of e-mail. Because it is such a pain to operate, the fax is generally used with discretion (a relief after e-mail overload). Faxes also allow lawyers, among others, to have exchanges that they can later shred, without leaving an electronic record. The biggest gripe about document transmission via e-mail, however, is attachments: unless you have the right software, they are meaningless.

“One of the most common academic experiences is the failed attachment: a person sends you an attachment with incomprehensible formatting of immense length that crashes your system,” says Gillian Evans, a history professor at Cambridge University. “Then there is an irascible exchange of often quite stylish e-mails - at the end of which one of the parties says, ‘For goodness' sake, send me a fax!'” This is especially true, she says, during summers, when professors are often at home using slow, dial-up internet connections. Unless e-mail improves drastically, in other words, the fax machine seems likely to retain a devoted, if shrinking, following.
Source; The Economist. September 2004

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PRIVACY - SECURITY

Google omits controversial news stories in China
The internet's most popular search engine Google has been accused of supporting Chinese internet controls by omitting contentious news stories from search results in China.
State-sponsored internet providers in China routinely block access to internet sites deemed inappropriate by the government. These include both Chinese and foreign news sites carrying reports that criticise the Chinese government.
Researchers at Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), a US company that provides technology for circumventing internet restrictions in China, have discovered that the recently-launched Chinese version of Google News omits blocked news sources from its results.
The origin of a computer sending a search request can be identified using its internet protocol (IP) address.

World view
Google admits to omitting some news sources within China but says this is meant to improve the quality of the service.
"In order to create the best possible news search experience for our users, we sometimes decide not to include some sites, for a variety of reasons," says a statement issued by the company. "These sources were not included because their sites are inaccessible."
Bill Xia, chief executive of DIT, however, accuses Google of reinforcing Chinese internet restrictions by leaving some sites off its list. "When people do a search they will get the wrong impression that the whole world is saying the same thing," he told New Scientist.
DIT enables Chinese internet users to get around government restrictions by connecting to computers located outside of the country.

Inside out
Some users recently reported that Google's Chinese news search returned different results depending when they searched using a computer based outside of China. The claims were substantiated by researchers who connected to computers inside the country.

In the past, other search companies have also been accused of supporting Chinese internet controls. In 2002, for instance, Yahoo's Chinese search engine was modified to provide only limited results for queries related to the banned religious group, Falun Gong.

And Xia notes that Google recently acquired a stake in a Chinese search company called Baidu.com.

Ben Edelman, of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, part of Harvard University in the US, says Google will face increasing pressure from the Chinese government to adhere to its restrictions as it extends its reach.
"As Google gains more interest in China and even comes to have financial interests in China, it's hard to imagine Google won't do so," he told New Scientist.
Source; New Scientist. September 2004
Write; by Will Knight

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TELECOMMUNICATIONS - MOBILE

Turkcell to become Iran’s second mobile operator
Turkcell, a Turkey-based mobile operator, has signed a license agreement with Iran to set up the first Iranian private mobile phone network, conditional on paying a EUR 300 million license fee
Date; September 2004
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HIGHLIGHTS


ECONOMY – EU-CHINA

EU Rejects China's Bid For Market Economy Status
The European Union has refused China's bid to be recognized as a market economy after an investigation by the E.U. Commission concluded the Chinese government still micro-manages the economy, an E.U. spokeswoman said Monday.
'To arrive at that position we need to establish there is no state interference,' said Arancha Gonzalez, spokeswoman for the Commission's trade department.
In the past year, China has been lobbying hard for the so-called market economy status, which would make it harder for other countries to accuse it of flooding the market with cheap exports and level penalties against it.
In a report submitted to the Chinese authorities, the E.U. has also requested that China install and abide by corporate governance practices and accounting rules in order that accounting information be reliable enough to be consulted when China is accused of violating trade agreements. Laws governing bankruptcy and property rights will have to be imposed and implemented. Finally, China's banking sector must be freed of government control.
Until it fulfils these criteria, China will remain a non-market economy. That official label means its local prices and costs won't be used to determine whether it is dumping cheap exports. Instead, the E.U. will use prices and costs in a third country that is a market economy to determine whether China is guilty of dumping and calculate anti-dumping penalties accordingly.
The E.U. currently has 32 anti-dumping measures in force and 22 anti-dumping investigations going on against China, which is considered a non-market economy. Last year, 0.5% of Chinese exports to the E.U. were subject to anti-dumping charges.
The most important products by import volume subject to measures are bicycles and bicycle parts, fluorescent lamps, dead-burned magnesium and fluorspar, a commission statement said.
The U.S. has imposed anti-dumping duties on textiles, televisions, and wooden bedroom furniture - buoyant sectors that accounted for nearly one-fifth of Chinese exports last year.
Write; by LuisB, June 04

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AIRLINE INDUSTRY – TAIWAN

China Air Interested In Airbus A380 Planes
Taiwan's China Airlines Ltd may buy Airbus's super-jumbo A380 planes for medium to long-haul passenger and cargo services, the Economic Daily News reports, citing China Air Chairman Y.L. Lee.
Lee made the remark during a visit to Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, the report says.
While China Airlines may consider introducing A380s to its fleet, the company has set no timetable for such a plan, the report adds.
Source; ROC media, June 04
Write; by LuisB

Picture; Airbus A380

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DIGITAL DIVIDE – SOUTH PACIFIC

InternetNZ to aid Pacific ICT growth
InternetNZ and Unesco have launched an initiative to boost the use of information and communication technology in the Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa and Tokelau.
The New Zealand National Commission for Unesco, the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Apia office and InternetNZ have drafted a memorandum of understanding to form the Pacific Internet Partners initiative.
The partner countries were chosen because of their strong links to New Zealand.
Laurence Zwimpfer, the National Commission deputy chairman, said the development of ICT skills in the Pacific was regionally important, and would be aided by the collaboration.
The initiative will see support this year for a Vanuatu conference, fostering of the establishment of national ICT professional organisations, and the establishment of internship and mentoring exchange programmes between New Zealand and the nations involved.
InternetNZ president Keith Davidson said members had wanted to get such an initiative off the ground for some time.
"By combining forces with UNDP, who are on the ground in these countries, and with Unesco's influence, we'll be getting significantly more bang for our buck."
Joyce Yu, of UNDP's Apia office, said the collaborative effort would allow better use of resources for meeting the UN's Millennium goals.
Don Hollander, chairman of Wellington's 20/20 Trust, who recently returned to New Zealand after two years working in Samoa on UNDP projects, said the agreement had been structured to let other interested parties join.
Hollander said Unesco New Zealand wanted to be involved in developing ICT skills in the Pacific.
Source; New Zealand Herald, June 04
Write; by Richard Pamatatau
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FOCUS


INTERNET – MARKET PERSPECTIVE

Examining the Twists and Turns of the Internet Bubble
Roger Lowenstein begins his book, Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing with the quote, “Set our course by the stars, not by the lights of every passing ship.” If only Wall Street could have appreciated a good metaphor as much as it appreciated earnings statements. Instead, the real life characters in Lowenstein’s cautionary tale spend the 1990s chasing passing ship after passing ship and disregarding the stars. The outcome would prove disastrous.

The author of two best-selling books, Buffett: The Making of An American Capitalist and When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management and current SmartMoney columnist, Lowenstein takes readers on the fateful journey through the stock market’s late century rise and subsequent slide into the new millennium. The author crafts an easy-to-read, well-researched tale that unfolds like a horror story. The villains - corporate America’s executives and their posse - get bolder at every turn and the main character - the stockholder - falls prey to the inevitable outcome.

Early in the book, Lowenstein lays out the ingredients that create this fateful cocktail. For more than half a century following the Great Depression, the stock market had fallen out of favor. But a recession took hold in the 1970s and stock prices fell. The “cheap” public companies were then taken over - many times by rivals in the same industry - by corporate raiders who purchased a majority share from company stockholders. By the mid-1980s, takeovers had morphed into leveraged buyouts (LBOs), or buyouts financed by debt. No publicly traded company was safe, and the groundwork for what Lowenstein calls “the great bubble” began to take shape.

“To escape a buyout, CEOs felt they had to raise their share price. This was a significant departure. Previously, stock prices had been seen as a long-term barometer,” writes Lowenstein. “A new phrase crept into the argot: ‘shareholder value.’”

Unfortunately, CEOs, whose job it was to maximize shareholder value, began to distance themselves from the phrase’s true meaning. According to Lowenstein, the culprit was the stock option. Although stock options existed prior to World War II, they entered the scene in a reenergized way in the early 1990s.

By giving company leaders a substantial amount of company stock, so went the reasoning, CEOs would become shareholders in their own firms, and would then behave like owner-managers. Hindsight proved this thought process incorrect. Since CEOs were not investing their own money, they assumed no risk. Writes Lowenstein: “A poker player will be aggressive when he is playing with ‘house money.’

“Execs intent on ‘managing’ their stocks became hypersensitive to a single number: quarterly earnings per share. From an economic perspective, quarterly numbers are virtually irrelevant because it typically takes years - not months - for businesses to bear fruit…. The game was to keep earnings rising, but never by too much, so as to save more for the next quarter,” Lowenstein writes.

Accounting statements became less and less transparent. And as financiers got more and more clever - and as they walked the line between creative accounting and illegalities - they found themselves rewarded, notes Lowenstein. In 1999, Andrew Fastow, Enron’s CFO, was awarded one of CFO Magazine’s prized Excellence awards for pioneering “unique financing techniques.” A year before, Scott Sullivan, WorldCom’s CFO, had garnered an “Excellence award.” A year later, in 2000, Tyco International’s Mark Swartz joined Fastow and Sullivan as Excellence award winners.

“That all three winners were eventually indicted testifies to Wall Street’s weakness for (too-) clever financiers. And it hints at a serious problem with creative accounting: it can lead to outright violations and fraud,” writes Lowenstein.

Making a quarterly number isn’t exactly the formula for long-term or enduring shareholder value, but Lowenstein argues that investors - especially professional investors - wanted to be mislead. “Fund families such as Janus, Van Wagoner, and Putman would stuff their portfolios with Cisco, Qualcomm, JDS Uniphase - the hottest stocks - which purchases would drive up the stocks and thus the fund prices higher,” Lowenstein says.

Lowenstein dots his historical narrative with juicy behind-the-scenes details from memos, meetings, and events. They lend a third dimension to Origins of the Crash. One such detail comes from a 1998 speech SEC chairman Arthur Levitt gave at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Levitt told students that “trickery is employed to obscure actual financial volatility.”

If Levitt knew this in 1998, why didn’t the SEC do something? Because the SEC was understaffed and it couldn’t catch up with “corporate miscreants” until many quarters later if at all, explains Lowenstein. “The lack of an effective deterrent, combined with the perverse structure of options, meant that, the rhetoric of pay-for-performance notwithstanding, many executives had an incentive to cheat,” he notes.

Although Lowenstein spends an entire chapter chronicling Enron (which he calls the “single corporation [that] could represent the corruptions of shareholder value”) and much of the following chapter deconstructing WorldCom, he is quick to point out that these companies were not alone in their misdeeds. He offers readers several synopses of other questionable dealings, including General Electric and its star CEO, Jack Welch; Tyco and its acquisition-crazy CEO, Dennis Kozlowski; Xerox; Webvan; CMGI, an Internet incubator; and AOL’s merger with Time Warner.

Along the way, Lowenstein takes issue with analysts, bankers, auditors, lawyers, politicians, venture capitalists, the financial press and investors. In many ways, they all conspired to look the other way. Groupthink prevailed. Lowenstein uses the case of Priceline to make this point: “By 1999, Priceline, which resold airline tickets but owned neither gates nor planes, was worth almost as much as the entire, tangible airline industry…. The bizarre yet inescapable conclusion was that according to the mathematics extant at the turn of the millennium, a dotcom stock was worth more than an actual, cash-generating business.”

Although the stories in Lowenstein’s books are not new, his ability to flesh them out with firsthand accounts and research leaves the reader with an undeniable feeling: what happened to the market at the dawn of the new millennium was years in the making and the manic “virus” of the times spread far and wide.

In the aftermath of the great bubble, what is left is a savvier public, beefed up government regulations and an SEC with as much bite as bark. For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 aims to reign in the accounting profession. CEO compensation packages are becoming more realistic. Those who sit on boards of directors are now held accountable. According to Lowenstein, ten underwriting firms were fined $1.4 billion for their part in the corruption and analysts are now barred from promoting their firms’ IPO’s. Many of the corporate executives who created glowing quarterly earnings face jail time.

Yet, has anything been learned from these events? Perhaps Lowenstein’s notes on the last page of his book, say it best: “It is a chief lesson of the scandals that the culture of a community, more than any laws, provides the moral determinant for its behavior.”
Source; University of Pennsylvania, June 04

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MEDIA – INTERNET

Forget Radio, Tune In to Net
Web music broadcasting is the best thing to happen to radio since FM.
The concept has many names: Web radio, webcasting, streaming jukeboxes, Internet broadcasts. But the idea is much the same. Music fans "tune in" to various services through their Net-connected PC, where they can hear music from a huge range of genres. And not just the same 20 songs over and over again, like commercial radio. With Internet radio, listeners can tap libraries of millions of songs that would never be broadcast on the airwaves.

MusicMatch music player software, a fine rival to applications like Winamp. A free version of the program offers free streaming - unlike competitors like Napster and Rhapsody. Just keep in mind you have to keep a full-blown application running in the background to use this service.

The stations are fairly basic, with a few nice options: Listeners can skip songs and are alerted to the next artist in the queue. And, like Launchcast, users can create their own station based on their favorite artists. The more you use the service, the better it is at identifying your tastes.
A music store is integrated into the player, making it easy to purchase songs or albums you just heard. You also get an added bonus if you decide to use MusicMatch to store and organize your MP3s - it has some of the best rating and personalization features around. It's just a shame you can't carry the power of that personalization to the online radio features, which would make the whole package the ultimate jukebox.

Radio Free Virgin Lite: Here's a player that lives up to its lite name. It has virtually no features. There's no need to download anything - the Web-based player launches at the click of a button on the homepage. A listener can select from 30-odd channels - some that are very slow to load - and that's it. While the player displays the song title, artist and album cover, there's no countdown, skip button, song history or customization options. While there is a volume adjustment on the player, it didn't work during our test.
Perhaps the only thing going for this service is that it's easy on the ads. There aren't any pop-ups, which is nice. And the audio ads are few and far between, making it easy to listen to a number of songs without interruption.

Winamp Radio: While better known as an MP3 player, Winamp shouldn't be overlooked as an online radio service (in version 5.03c, click the Internet Radio link in the Media Library). It features a diverse collection of free music with superb sound quality.
Listeners can also access several of these stations through the Shoutcast directory. Shoutcast is a Winamp-based streaming audio system. It's also where aspiring DJs can spin their tunes for other listeners.
Scroll through the list of 500 streams and you can find everything from Korean DJs broadcasting blues to Russian pop hits, and find entire symphonies or video-game soundtracks. It's a nice alternative to some of the Net broadcasters that make you join their premium services to access the more obscure music.
You can also see cool information like bit rates and the number of other listeners tuning in. Another cool feature: Right-click on the station and you can bookmark it. No pop-up ads, either.

The drawbacks? Stations are occasionally cut out or are inaccessible, because many of them are run by independent broadcasters. And listeners don't receive much information on each
song beyond artist and title.
Source; Wired, June 04
Write; by Katie Dean

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ECONOMY – US

US: Consumer confidence on the upside
- In June, consumer confidence as measured by the Conference Board index markedly improved, gaining 8.8 points (to 101.9), with current conditions up by 14.3 points (to 104.8) and expectations by 5.2 points (to 100.0).
- Last Friday, the University of Michigan released the final reading of its own index for June, up by 0.4 point versus the preliminary reading. Compared with end May, the headline index was up by 5.4 points, with current conditions gaining 3.9 points over the month and expectations 6.9 points from May to June.
- While the index from the University of Michigan remained in June below the high of January, the index from the Conference Board reached its highest level of 2004, and in fact its highest reading in two years. After a marked rebound in January, both indices lost ground until May. However the fall in the index from the Conference Board index was limited to 4.6 points (from 97.7 in January to 93.1 in May) while the University of Michigan index decreased by 13.6 points (from 103.8 to 90.2).
- Details show that both declines were due to the component for expectations, even if, and contrary to the Conference Board index, the University of Michigan current conditions index also suffered. Regarding the Conference Board, expectations lost 10.5 points from January to May, while the economic outlook index from the University of Michigan declined by 18.5 points.
- Going further into details, it appears that expected business conditions were the main concern. Indeed, the decline recorded by expectations from the University of Michigan was due to an expected deteriorating financial position for just 15%, 85% of the deterioration coming from worse business conditions (especially over next year). Even if more broad-based, the deterioration of expectations according to the Conference Board survey was also mainly caused by business conditions (47%), and to a lesser extent by prospects for labour (31%) and income (22%).
- The University of Michigan provides with deeper details. For instance, it published an index retracing news heard about business conditions. These details show that the main component that drove down the composite index from January to May was "bad news from higher prices". This return of accelerating inflation is also illustrated by the sharp increase in the expected rate of inflation over next year, which is also part of data provided by the University of Michigan. While this expected rate was 2.7% in January, it jumped to 3.3% in June.
- Consumers thus expect inflation to accelerate. The first question to be raised is: Is this bad news? The answer is: No, not at all. When the Fed highlighted the deflation risks (in much softer terms…), one of its goal was to revive inflation expectations. Indeed, deflationary expectations can proved self-fulfilled: if consumers expect prices to go continuously down, this is never time to consume, since products will get cheaper with time; demand is thus contracting, which leads to downward pressure on prices. The marked increase in expected inflation is thus good news since it is an additional illustration that the risk of the deflation is well off the table.
- But does this increased expected inflation could be the sign of inflation actually accelerating? First of all, the sharp rise in oil prices since the beginning of the year surely contributed to the rebound in expected inflation. Second, as shown on the graph on next page, consumers proved particularly bad forecasters for inflation…
- In short, just keep in mind that inflation expectations have risen. In Fed terms, you could say, "the probability, though minor, of a rise in inflation from its low level exceeds that of an unwelcome fall in inflation". In clear, there is currently more risk of inflation accelerating than decelerating. Thus the additional monetary easing bias has to be removed. Something the Fed will start doing as soon as tomorrow, with a "moderate" 25 bp hike.
Source; OECD, June 04


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