Time

If time gave opportunity......

Never forget you, Paul Newman

Paul Newman died at the aged 83.

 Last year he told "you start to lose your memory, you start to lose your confidence, you start to lose your invention. So I think that's pretty much a closed book for me."

He played in about 60 movies during his life such as 

The Silver Chalice, 1955

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1958

The Hustler, 1961

Hud, 1963

Cool Hand Luke, 1967 (pictured)

Rachel Rachel (director), 1968

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969

The Sting, 1973

The Towering Inferno, 1974

Absence of Malice, 1981

The Verdict, 1982

The Color of Money, 1986

Nobody's Fool, 1994

Road to Perdition, 2002

Cars (voice), 2006

Round 1 in debates between Obama & McCain

Watch this debate in :

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/27/debate.poll/index.html

The un-iPhone

Sep 25th 2008 | SAN FRANCISCO From The Economist print edition

The un-iPhone

What Apple did for smartphones, Google may do for all the rest

NOT since the launch of Apple’s iPhone last year has the unveiling of a handset caused such a stir. On September 23rd T-Mobile, a mobile operator owned by Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, presented its new phone, the G1, which is made by HTC, a Taiwanese manufacturer. The reason for the buzz is that the device is the first to be based on software called Android, made by Google, the largest internet company.

The phone naturally invites comparisons to the iPhone, still the most elegant “smartphone” on the market today. But that is to focus on the wrong thing. It is not the features or design that matter, since the two phones aim at different users. Rather, it is what each phone is likely to do for the industry as a whole. The iPhone, for its part, has demonstrated that consumers do and will use mobile phones to search, browse and otherwise use the internet. Vendors of other smartphones, such as RIM, the maker of the BlackBerry, are now racing to match the iPhone in usability. As they do so, mobile-internet usage is rising steeply.

Yet fancy smartphones account for less than 15% of the handset market, says Kevin Burden at ABI Research, a consultancy. Most consumers, using simpler phones that the industry confusingly calls “feature phones”, are not going online while on the move. These are the people that Google is targeting.

Android-based phones will be cheaper than existing smartphones. But the more fundamental difference hearkens back to the mid-1980s, when the PC era was dawning and two rival operating systems—from Apple and Microsoft—competed to become the dominant platform for which software companies would write programs. Something similar is now happening with phones, all of which will become “smart”.

Most mobile operators and handset-makers are searching for a platform for their mass-market phones of the future. Many have warmed to Linux, a free, open-source operating system which can be customised. Some are tweaking Linux to make their own flavours. Google’s Android is also a variant of Linux.

Google hopes that other operators and handset-makers—South Korea’s Samsung and LG appear to be next—will adopt Android to save themselves the expense of developing their own software. It also hopes that programmers will write fun software for Android, making it as ubiquitous as Microsoft Windows became in the PC era (but has failed to become on phones). Its aim is not to challenge Apple or Microsoft. Instead Google, which makes money from online advertising, will be happy as long as nobody locks up the market and people do ever more Google searches, on all their devices.

F**king crazy president

  IRANIAN president interview...

Groundswell

Harvard Business School published new book that name is groundswell. this book is about social technology. In cover page of it you can read " Corporate executives are struggling with a new trend: people using online social technologies (blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, podcasts) to discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals. This groundswell is global, it's unstoppable, it affects every industry--and it's utterly foreign to the powerful companies running things now. When consumers you've never met are rating your company's products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Inc. explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity. Using tools and data straight from Forrester, you'll learn how to: Evaluate new social technologies as they emerge; Determine how different groups of consumers are participating in social technology arenas; Apply a four-step process for formulating your future strategy; and Build social technologies into your business--including monitoring your brand value, talking with the groundswell through marketing and PR campaigns, and energizing your best customers to recruit their peers.  Timely and insightful, this book is required reading for executives seeking to protect and strengthen their company's public image.

Google phone comes

The first phone that harnesses Google Inc.'s ambition to make the Internet easy to use on the go was revealed Tuesday, and it looks a lot like an iPhone.

20 Best Countries for Startup

(CNNMoney.com) -- Singapore, New Zealand and the United States have the world's friendliest business climates for small companies, according to a World Bank report released this week.

For the fourth year in a row, those three countries occupied the top spots in the annual "Doing Business" report card created by the World Bank and its private-sector lending arm, the International Finance Corp. The 2009 edition ranks 181 countries on their small-business regulatory environments.

Compiled with the help of 6,700 business experts and government officials around the world, "Doing Business 2009" analyzes how difficult it is to comply with 10 different sets of business regulations that affect company lifecycles, from startup to closure. The World Bank's research team examined the number of procedures required to start a business and the ease and cost of transactions such as obtaining construction permits, hiring workers, getting credit, paying taxes, enforcing contracts and declaring bankruptcy. Each category is given equal weight to create an overall "ease of doing business" index and ranking.

"It has a very specific focus on the regulatory environment," said Penelope Brook, the World Bank Group's director of indicators and analysis.

Other factors that affect regional businesses, such as domestic infrastructure and security, are not considered - which explains how frequently violent Georgia landed in the top 20.

While this year's top-10 list remained almost unchanged from last year's (Australia moved up to No. 9, knocking Norway down one spot), a wave of business-friendly reforms is pushing a new crop of countries up the ranking. The "Doing Business" team identified 239 pro-business reforms in 113 economies between June 2007 and June 2008, the highest number recorded since the project began six years ago.

Heading this year's list of most-active reformers was the Middle East's Azerbaijan, which moved up 64 spots in the overall ranking to 33rd place, thanks to reforms made in seven of the 10 measured sectors. Most notably, Azerbaijan slashed the time required to start a business from 122 to 16 days, reformed its civil code and created an online tax-filing system.

Singapore retained its ranking as the world's easiest location in which to do business, thanks to its low import and export costs, strong legal protections for investors, and employer-friendly labor regulations. Incorporating a new business takes only four days - fast by most standards, but sluggish by New Zealand's. There, entrepreneurs can register a new venture in just 24 hours.

The U.S. came in at No. 3 in the overall "Doing Business" ranking. Its advantages include labor laws that are among the least rigid in the world and streamlined bureaucracy for getting a new venture off the ground.

Also at the top of the list were Hong Kong, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada.

While the trend toward pro-business reforms is a global one, the catalysts for improvement vary by region. Some governments in Eastern Europe have been motivated by regulatory requirements for joining the European Union, while officials in Latin America are striving to make their economies more competitive within regional trading blocs, according to the World Banks' Brook.

"There's a desire to give local entrepreneurs the chance to be part of the local growth story," Brook said. "Being able to build a business should depend on having drive, skills and good ideas more than who you know and your connections."

1-Singapore 

2-New Zealand

3-United State

4- Hong Kong

5-Denmark

6-U.K

7-Irland

8-Canada

9-Australia

10-Norway

11-Iceland

12-Japan

13-Thailand

14-Finland

15-Geogia

16-Soudi Arabia

17-Sweden

18-Bahrain

19-Belgium

20-Malayia

30 BEST COMPANIES TO WORK FOR 2008

Rank	Company	Job growth	U.S. employees
1	Google	60%	8,134
2	Quicken Loans	68%	4,920
3	Wegmans Food Markets	4%	35,302
4	Edward Jones	5%	31,451
5	Genentech	9%	10,842
6	Cisco Systems	17%	32,160
7	Starbucks	15%	134,013
8	Qualcomm	15%	10,095
9	Goldman Sachs	10%	13,764
10	Methodist Hospital System	11%	10,481
11	Boston Consulting Group	8%	1,543
12	Nugget Markets	20%	1,322
13	Umpqua Bank	25%	1,788
14	Network Appliance	25%	4,481
15	W. L. Gore & Associates	6%	5,211
16	Whole Foods Market	11%	41,385
17	David Weekley Homes	-11%	1,450
18	OhioHealth	4%	11,254
19	Arnold & Porter	-3%	1,272
20	Container Store	5%	3,019
21	Principal Financial Group	3%	13,438
22	American Century Investments	-5%	1,694
23	JM Family Enterprises	4%	4,609
24	American Fidelity Assurance	1%	1,376
25	Shared Technologies	28%	1,401
26	Stew Leonard's	13%	2,282
27	S.C. Johnson & Son	0%	3,419
28	QuikTrip	-5%	9,630
29	SAS Institute	-1%	5,153
30	Aflac	5%	4,475

Source : CNN Money

What do you know about Telenor company?

http://www.telenor.com/

Lehman collapse hits Asian shares

BBC News.

Markets in Japan and South Korea fell by nearly 5% in early trading having been shut on Monday for a bank holiday.

The figures reflected earlier falls in Europe and the US, which on Monday had its worst day's trading since 9/11.

The fourth-largest US investment bank, Lehman filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday, becoming the latest victim of the global credit crunch.

Japan's benchmark Nikkei-225 index dropped by 4.7% in the first half hour of trading on Tuesday, while South Korean shares shed more than 5% in value in just 20 minutes.

Markets in Shanghai, Taipei and Singapore were also sharply down.

The collapse of Lehman, which had incurred billions of dollars of losses from the failing US mortgage market, threatened to deal a further blow to other financial institutions, as they unwind deals with the former investment giant.