The Truth: What’s Really Going On With Apple, Google, AT&T And The FCC

by Michael Arrington 

Apple has responded to the FCC’s request for information around its rejection of various Google and third party iPhone applications for the iPhone.

In short, Apple denies that they rejected the Google Voice application, but they go into great detail about how the Google Voice application hurts “the iPhone’s distinctive user experience.” All of those statements are either untrue, or misleading, or both.

The first part of Apple’s argument, that they never rejected the application, is “a total lie,” according to many sources with knowledge of the Google Voice application process.

The second part of Apple’s argument, that the Google Voice application hurts the iPhone’s distinctive user experience, is seriously misleading. I know this because I’ve become intimately familiar with the Google Voice service and applications over the last few months. See here, here, here and here, for example. I haven’t used the Google Voice app for the iPhone specifically, because it never launched. But I have been briefed by the Google team on two separate occasions on how the app would work over the last couple of months. Also, I’ve demo’d the Blackberry version of the app, and now use the Android version of the app.

Here’s the key language from Apple’s letter, with my comments:

The Truth: What’s Really Going On With Apple, Google, AT&T And The FCC

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The report Mbeki and Zuma hid from you

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Mpumelelo Mkhabela

Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe has been named by a government-appointed commission as being “privy to material information” relating to controversial businessman Sandile Majali’s shady oil deals with the former Iraqi regime.

Majali — a well-known ANC funder who was also at the centre of the Oilgate scandal in 2004 — carried out deals with Iraq in a manner that contravened United Nations-imposed sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

In all, Saddam’s regime scored about 1.8-billion from surcharges and kickbacks under the UN’ s oil-for-food programme.

Motlanthe is named in a report compiled by the Donen Commission, which was set up by former president Thabo Mbeki. It was asked to probe the involvement of South African companies and individuals in the violation of the UN sanctions on Iraq.

Despite promising to make the commission’s report public, Mbeki kept it under wraps after it was handed to him in late 2006.

The Times - Exclusive : The report Mbeki and Zuma hid from you

China's Credit Bubble and the Balance of Trade

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Tyler Durden
Recent German economic data has been interpreted as indicative of a renaissance in the Eurozone's primary economy. Aside from the fact that Germany is ill prepared to handle its so-called "second credit crisis wave" (the ECB having much less free reign over printing wheelbarrows worth of Euros may have something to do with this), looking purely at GDP components one would note that a primary function of this anticipated growth comes primarily from a mathematical contribution resulting from an increase in net exports. From the Bundesbank's most recent monthly economic report:

According to provisional figures from the Federal Statistical Office, in May the foreign trade surplus was up by 30.2 billion on the month to 39.6 billion. After adjustment for seasonal and calendar effects, it rose from 39.0 billion to 310.3 billion. The value of exports rose slightly by 0.3%, while the value of imports declined by 2.1%. If April and May are taken together, seasonally adjusted nominal exports were 5.1% below the average for the first quarter of 2009. Of this, 0.6 percentage point can be attributed to export prices. Imports were down as much as 8.4%, with 1.7 percentage points due to market prices.

China's Credit Bubble and the Balance of Trade -- Seeking Alpha

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• France and Germany exit recession (news.bbc.co.uk)

Spike in Mass Layoff Events

Tyler Durden
In a dramatic reversal to the moderating trend from the past several months, Mass Layoff Events surged from 256,357 in June to a whopping 336,654 in July, a 31% increase, and surprisingly the second highest reading for the year since January's 388 thousand. Actual MLE increased by 21% from 2,519 to 3,054. The primary weakness was focused in the manufacturing sector, where claims jumped from 85 thousand to 154 thousand, an 81% increase.
As a reminder, the BLS defines a Mass Layoff Event as one that occurs when an establishment has at least 50 initial unemployment compensation claims filed against it within a five-week period and the layoff lasts longer than 30 days.
Spike in Mass Layoff Events -- Seeking Alpha

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Weak consumer spending will last for years

by Edward Harrison

It has been my thesis for some time that we are seeing a secular change in consumption patterns in the United States.  This will have grave implications for a world economy used to seeing the American consumer as an economic growth engine and consumer of first choice. Retail sales in the United States have fallen 10% since peaking in November 2007. Much of this decline represents a permanent fall in consumption by overly indebted American consumers.

Having finally had a chance to dissect the retail sales data from last week, I wanted to show you a few graphs which indicate how much consumption has fallen in the present downturn and what the implication is for the future global economy. But, first, I want to start with a broader discussion as to why the fall in US consumption is a longer-term change and not a cyclical one.

naked capitalism: Weak consumer spending will last for years

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Facebook | The Future of News Will Be Social

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by Arianna Huffington

Despite all the current hand-wringing about the dire state of newspapers, we are actually in the midst of a Golden Age for news consumers. We can surf the net, use search engines, access the best stories from around the world, and interact by commenting and forming communities.
The days of publishing pooh-bahs dictating to us what's important and what's not are over. We now can get the news we want, when we want it, how we want it and where we want it.
The Web has given us control over the news we consume. Now the explosive growth of online social networking is fundamentally changing our relationship with news as well. It's no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, react to news and share news.
News has become an important element of community—something around which we gather, connect and converse. We all are part of the evolution of a story now—expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of view.

Facebook | The Future of News Will Be Social

Facebook pages can tweet

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by Mark Andrews

Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction. Facebook has produced an app that will automatically send Facebook Page updates to Twitter, allowing businesses, organizations, bands — anyone with a Facebook Page — to have posts automatically generate a tweet to their Twitter followers. The details were posted on the Facebook blog by Michael Gummelt — the summer intern who developed this app.

If you administer a Facebook Page, you can set up Twitter updates by visiting http://www.facebook.com/twitter/. You’ll be asked to configure what kinds of new posts will trigger Twitter updates

 

Twitter Blog: Location, Location, Location

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Twitter platform developers have been doing innovative work with location for some time despite having access to only a rudimentary level of API support. Most of the location-based projects we see are built using the simple, account-level location field folks can fill out as part of their profile. Since anything can be written in this field, it's interesting but not very dependable.

We're gearing up to launch a new feature which makes Twitter truly location-aware. A new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won't be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.

Twitter Blog: Location, Location, Location

MBA Forecasts Foreclosures to Peak at End of 2010

by CalculatedRisk

On the MBA conference call concerning the "Q2 2009 National Delinquency Survey", MBA Chief Economist Jay Brinkmann said this morning:

 

• The problem is moving to prime loans, and fixed rate prime loans. Although the delinquency rate is lower for prime fixed rate than for other loans, these loans make up 65.5% of all loans - so the increase matters.
• Brinkmann expects delinquencies to peak in mid-2010.
• Brinkmann expects foreclosures to peak at the end of 2010.
  Note: The MBA data shows about 5.8 million loans delinquent or in the foreclosure process nationwide. I believe the MBA surveys covers close to 90% of the mortgage market. Many of these loans will cure, but the foreclosure pipeline is still building.

Calculated Risk: MBA Forecasts Foreclosures to Peak at End of 2010

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Unemployment Spike Compounds Foreclosure Crisis

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By Renae Merle

The country's growing unemployment is overtaking subprime mortgages as the main driver of foreclosures, according to bankers and economists, threatening to send even higher the number of borrowers who will lose their homes and making the foreclosure crisis far more complicated to unwind.

Economists estimate that 1.8 million borrowers will lose their homes this year, up from 1.4 million last year, according to Moody's Economy.com. And the government, which has already committed billions of dollars to foreclosure-prevention efforts, has found it far more difficult to help people who have lost their paychecks than those whose mortgage payments became unaffordable because of an interest-rate increase.

"It's a much harder nut to crack, unemployment," said Mark A. Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute. "It's much easier to bash lenders than to create jobs."

Unemployment Spike Compounds Foreclosure Crisis - washingtonpost.com

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