Status-Q

I’ve long been a fan of Garrison Keillor’s, and so was delighted to discover that the News from Lake Wobegon, a regular part of his Prairie Home Companion radio show, is now available as a podcast.

Wonderful stuff.

A little over a month ago I visited the Starbucks in the Forbidden City in Beijing. I was mildly embarrassed about doing so, but it was, a local friend had told me beforehand, ‘a godsend’. So I thought I could go proudly, celebrating the success of the free market over the surrounding communism… And so I paid standard global Starbucks prices for my cup of coffee. The following day, my friend and I had a delicious meal for two, with large Tsing Tao beers, at an (admittedly very primitive) back-street cafe, for substantially less than one of my cups of coffee. OK, I admit it – I had two. And they were, indeed, a godsend.

And now it’s gone. It was, actually, very discreet; I had a hard time finding it and I knew it was there. But even that was too much, apparently; everything in Beijing is being ‘tidied up’ in preparation for the Olympics and I guess this may have been a casualty.

But frankly, for any country, hosting the Olympics seems like a much bigger folly to me than hosting Starbucks…

John & Brian found a very nice little web app. You give it a word and it spells it out using letters from Flickr.

You can insert Javascript in your own page, if you like, then you’ll get something different on every reload:

Good David Pogue style:

Man, oh man. How’d you like to have been a PR person making a cellphone announcement last week, just as the iPhone storm struck? You’d have had all the impact of a gnat in a hurricane.

But hard to believe though it may be, T-Mobile did make an announcement last week. And even harder to believe, its new product may be as game-changing as Apple’s.

For a modest extra charge on your cellphone bill, you can make free wifi-connected calls from any wifi network – including T-mobile hotspots, and also from a router they provide for your home. There are only a couple of phones currently offered, but they can hand off seamlessly from wifi network to GSM and vice-versa.

BT and others have played in the past with mobile phones which could, alternatively, use DECT when they are in your house, and many smartphones are now capable of making voice calls over wifi, but there’s nothing as elegant as this, if it works as advertised.

US only at present. Definitely worth watching.

Here’s the full article.

UK online advertising grew 46% in 2006 – making us one of the biggest users of the medium. In 2007, more than half of the online advertising spend in western Europe will be in the UK. And if you look at online advertising as a proportion of our total spend, we are way ahead of anyone else including the US.

Source: ZDnet/BusinessWire