Society
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John Hagel’s Edge Perspectives blog provides some interesting insights into globalization and the impact of the Internet on the global economy.
Among the problems he identifies in several posts is the tendency of companies to focus on short-term savings from suppliers, thereby creating an ongoing adversarial relationship that doesn’t ultimately serve either party well. Hagel suggests that a better solution is to cultivate long-term supplier relationships that can lead to better responsiveness and greater flexibility. He identifies this as one of the major problems that has placed U.S.-based automakers behind the competition.
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The borderless Internet may have been the goal, but government interference into the free flow of information has put serious restrictions on the liberating effect that might have had on culture and society. The Open Net Initiative, sponsored by the University of Toronto, Harvard and Cambridge Universities, is focusing its research on what individual governments are doing to control information flow, and the impact this has had on politics, human rights, state sovereignty and law.
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The information below is from a cogent PowerPoint presentation that Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley recently presented at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. It underscores the tremendous changes and rate of change that is happening with new media, technology and related fields of study. The complete presentation is here.
Some of the interesting facts in her presentation:
- In 1995 North America made up 66 percent of Internet users. By 2005, that number had dropped to 23 percent.
- Asia/Pacific now makes up the largest share of the Internet market at 36 percent. China has more Internet users under the age of 30 than anywhere else.
- There were 7.6 billion global searches on Google last year…up 74 percent over the previous year.
- There are 40 million users who have a personalized My Yahoo! page.
- The market cap of Google+Yahoo!+eBay+Yahoo! Japan was $2 billion prior to their 2000 IPOs. As of 11/11/05 their combined market cap was $262 billion.
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The facility would make the villain from a James Bond film envious — a concrete bunker with blast-proof doors carved out of a mountain on an island off the coast of Norway. Inside, the permafrost will provide a cool environment for storage of every known variety of crop seed.
The goal of the seed repository — construction is slated to begin next year — will be to ensure that a global disaster would not wipe out essential crop species. Currently, there are about 1,400 seed banks around the world, but many are located in politically or environmentally unstable areas.
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The United States will soon pass a major milestone. Sometime later this year, the population of our country will reach 300 million people.
It took us 125 years as a country to get to 100 million people, reaching that number around 1914. It was in 1967, about 53 years later, that we passed 200 million. And now just 39 later, we will be hitting the 300 million mark. Experts predict it will only take about 30 more years to swell our population to 400 million. These facts seem impressive when you consider our country’s ever-shortening cycle to add the next 100 million people.
However, I couldn’t help compare our country’s population growth to some recent astonishing statistics I read about worldwide Internet growth. Based on figures from Internet World Stats, the Internet first surpassed 100 million users in 1998. By the year 2000, there were 300 million users, and by 2003, there were 600 million users. Recently, the Internet surpassed one billion users and it is adding a million new users worldwide about every four days. Most of those new users are not from the U.S., and most of those new users don’t speak English.
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