Last week, Intuit co-founder Scott Cook appeared on my show and extolled the virtues of the Chinese economic development model. Cook used the example of Deng Xiaoping’s establishment of “Special Economic Zones” such as in Shenzhen that, he said, has resulted in 300 million Chinese people being liberated from “grinding poverty”. Today, the acclaimed monologist Mike Daisey responds to Scott Cook’s argument, describing the defense of Special Economic Zones as “absolutely sickening” and claiming that Cook needed to “wake up” to the appallingly cruel realities of working conditions in Shenzhen. → Read More
Hojoki this morning announced that it has raised $620,000 in seed funding as the German startup gears up for the launch of its public beta on the 7th of December (coinciding with the Le Web conference in Paris). The round was led by Kizoo Technology Ventures.
Hojoki’s mission is to solve the problem of ‘information fragmentation’ by building a unified activity stream inbox for cloud apps such as Google Docs, Dropbox, Highrise, GitHub, and plenty of others. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — talked SOPA, Amazon Fire, FaceBook Borging our data and not letting it out, the end of books, the beginning of Pad magazines, and why Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Starz, Arrested Development, House of Cards, and Comcast cares.
Another Gillmor Gang recorded Monday morning at 9, the show asks the musical question: should we start the week off with a bang or end it with a whimper? In the new world of streaming, nothing is more fitting than messing with the broadcast window from the start. If Congress can only pass bad laws to prop up the content cartel, maybe it’s up to the tech community to turn reality TV into our fantasy of what should happen next. → Read More
Driving from the Foxconn Factory, down the road from the main gate, we spotted a truck full of pigs in an open-sided container. They were huge, porcine pink, and surprisingly clean. They were still alive – but wouldn’t be for long – and they were, we could only presume, destined for the bellies of some of the company’s 400,000 workers.
As the truck trundled along the well-paved road, I flicked through the pictures I took of the Foxconn kitchen. It was something out of a delicious version of Hieronymus Bosch: huge cauldrons manned by men and women in white smocks, smoke and steam coming out of huge soup pots, the food flipped and tossed using shovels.
There, in the course of the day, nearly 400,000 meals pour out into the campus. There a cooker the size of two truck trailers cleans, cooks, and cools hundreds of pounds of rice, and some of those pigs (slaughtered off campus because that’s one thing the kitchen at Foxconn isn’t allowed to do) are stir-fried or stewed and sent out to one of the many campus cafeterias.
→ Read More
It’s the age old tale. Company makes phone. Company codenames phone (sometimes multiple times). Company dabbles back and forth between a couple names before ultimately choosing the wrong one (*cough* HTC ChaCha *cough*). Retailer changes the name of the phone anyway, usually back to the better name (but sometimes to a ridiculously long and uselessly vague name). Happily ever after.
Today the cycle repeats with none other than the holy grail of Android handsets, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus? Or is it Prime? → Read More
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