Rapid internet services are a boon. But not all regulators understand themIN ERAS past, economic success depended on creating networks that could shift people, merchandise and electric power as efficiently and as widely as possible. Today's equivalent is broadband: the high-speed internet service that has become as vital a tool for producers and distributors of goods as it is for people plugging into all the social and cultural opportunities offered by the web.Easy access to cheap, fast internet services has become a facilitator of economic growth and a measure of economic performance. No wonder, then, that statistics show a surge in broadband use, especially in places that are already prosperous. The OECD, a rich-country club, says the number of subscribers in its 30 members was 221m last June--a 24% leap over a year earlier. But it is not always the most powerful economies that are most wired. In Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland, over 30% of inhabitants have broadband. In America, by contrast, the proportion is 22%, only slightly above the OECD average of just under 20%. ...
At last, Larry Brilliant has set Google's philanthropy strategy. Now for the hard part"WHAT does a moral person do, given all the problems and suffering in the world? How do you focus?" Larry Brilliant illustrates how difficult this is by recalling a friend's struggle to decide how best to allocate a few rupees among the beggars waiting to die in the Hindu sacred city of Benares, in India. Such a place could hardly be more different from Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California--with its population of geeky 20-somethings, free food, volleyball courts and fake dinosaur--where Dr Brilliant and his 40-strong team have at last agreed a strategy for Google.org, the internet giant's philanthropic arm, which Dr Brilliant leads.The strategy, unveiled on January 17th, has been a long time coming. The announcement marks the end of the beginning of a mission that began before Google's initial public offering in 2004. As well as adopting the informal company motto, "Don't be evil", the internetsearch firm's co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, decided to commit Google to engage in serious philanthropy. Innovative as ever, they created a new sort of philanthropic entity, a division of the company that could pursue its mission through both for-profit investing and making charitable grants. This, they hoped, would one day "eclipse Google itself in overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world's problems." It would be funded with 1% of the firm's equity, annual profits and employees' time. ...
A new kind of dating agency relies on matching people by their body odourONE of life's little mysteries is why particular people fancy each other--or, rather, why they do not when on paper they ought to. One answer is that human consciousness, and thus human thought, is dominated by vision. Beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder, regardless of the other senses. However, as the multi-billion-dollar perfume industry attests, beauty is in the nose of the beholder, too. ScientificMatch.com, a Boston-based internet-dating site launched in December, was created to turn this insight into money. Its founder, an engineer (and self-confessed serial dater) called Eric Holzle is drawing on an observation made over a decade ago by Claus Wedekind, a researcher at the University of Bern, in Switzerland. ...
Last year was terrible for the recorded-music majors. The next few years are likely to be even worseIN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. "That was the moment we realised the game was completely up," says a person who was there. In public, of course, music executives continued to talk a good game: recovery was just around the corner, they argued, and digital downloads would rescue the music business. But the results from 2007 confirm what EMI's focus group showed: that the record industry's main product, the CD, which in 2006 accounted for over 80% of total global sales, is rapidly fading away. In America, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the volume of physical albums sold dropped by 19% in 2007 from the year before--faster than anyone had expected. For the first half of 2007, sales of music on CD and other physical formats fell by 6% in Britain, by 9% in Japan, France and Spain, by 12% in Italy, 14% in Australia and 21% in Canada. (Sales were flat in Germany.) Paid digital downloads grew rapidly, but did not begin to make up for the loss of revenue from CDs. More worryingly for the industry, the growth of digital downloads appears to be slowing. ...
Yossi Vardi, an Israeli entrepreneur, thinks the technology industry should do more to address social problems"IF YOU print this, I will kill you." Yossi Vardi, a veteran Israeli entrepreneur and venture investor, says it politely, but this is clearly not one of his many jokes. Nor is he trying to protect the top-secret business model of one of the dozens of start-ups he is advising or has financed. He simply hates to appear boastful about a social project to which he donates time and money. "This is more important than any of my start-ups," he explains. "Making it public would devalue what I'm doing here." To prevent loss of life--and to protect a deserving project--the secret will not be revealed. But the anecdote is telling. Mr Vardi has long been Israel's most famous technologist. He is known for having helped build the country's high-tech industry, and for selling ICQ, an instant-messaging service, to America Online in 1998 for more than $400m. Now his aim is to become the industry's conscience. His message: only a happy few are benefiting from Israel's amazing high-tech boom. "We have become two countries: a high-tech one with few children and very high incomes, and a poor one with lots of kids," he says.Born in 1942 in Palestine, Mr Vardi started his career in fields that would be called low-tech today. At the age of 27 he was appointed director-general of Israel's development ministry and then held a similar job at the energy ministry. Later he led or helped to found some 60 companies such as Israel Chemicals, the Israel Oil Company and ITL Optronics. Then, in 1996, he invested in his first internet start-up, Mirabilis, the company behind ICQ ("I seek you"). One reason was that his son Arik was one of the founders. But Mr Vardi also realised that instant messaging, then a novelty, would spread like a contagious virus. "Three major viral products emerged from this part of the world: the Bible 2,700 years ago, Jesus 2,000 years ago and ICQ ten years ago," he jokes. Search for ICQ using Google and there are 675m matches, he points out, compared with 160m for the Bible and 178m for Jesus. ...
