U.S.-Chinese relations have become tenser in recent months, with the United States threatening to impose tariffs unless China agrees to revalue its currency and, ideally, allow it to become convertible like the yen or euro. China now follows Japan and Germany as one of the three major economies after the United States. Unlike the other two, it controls its currency’s value, allowing it to decrease the price of its exports and giving it an advantage not only over other exporters to the United States but also over domestic American manufacturers. The same is true in other regions that receive Chinese exports, such as Europe.

What Washington considered tolerable in a small developing economy is intolerable in one of the top five economies. The demand that Beijing raise the value of the yuan, however, poses dramatic challenges for the Chinese, as the ability to control their currency helps drive their exports. The issue is why China insists on controlling its currency, something embedded in the nature of the Chinese economy. A collision with the United States now seems inevitable. It is therefore important to understand the forces driving China, and it is time for STRATFOR to review its analysis of China. (more…)

This:
Pirates of Silicon Valley – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Then this:
What Happens When Apple Passes Microsoft In Value? Yes, When.

Am I the only one waiting for the sequel here?

Even as the buzz builds toward the April 3rd ship date of the iPad, Apple is preparing to announce its “next big thing” — a new personalized, mobile advertising system that could well be called the “iAd” — Online Media Daily has learned. The new ad platform, which will be officially unveiled to Madison Avenue on April 7th, has been described as “revolutionary” and “our next big thing” by Apple chief Steve Jobs, according to executives familiar with the plan.

Precise details of the system and its features could not be discerned at presstime (and calls to Apple had not been returned), but it is believed to have been built on top of Quattro, the mobile advertising developer Apple acquired in January for nearly $300 million, and it is expected to be the first real battle of a Silicon Valley Holy War between Apple and arch frenemy Google that is shifting its front line to Madison Avenue.

The war has been mounting ever since Google introduced its Android mobile operating system to compete with Apple’s iPhone, and agreed to acquire mobile ad firm AdMob for $750 million, but it is expected to reach ballistic proportions following Apple’s April 7th announcement, which insiders say will be every bit as important as other recent marketplace introductions, including the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad launches. (more…)

“In the animal kingdom, as well as in humans, sometimes a single sound can trigger automatic behavior. For example, when a mother turkey hears a certain chirp from her chicks, she becomes a very conscientious mother turkey. But if she doesn’t hear exactly that chirping sound, she will ignore or even kill her young. But here’s where it gets interesting, especially for anyone who wants to evoke automatic and favorable responses in humans.

Listen to these two amazing experiments, described in the wonderful book, The Psychology of Influence, by Dr. Robert B. Cialdini. The first involved mother turkeys, the second, humans. Let’s look at the first . . . . “For a mother turkey, a polecat is a natural enemy whose approach is to be greeted with squawking, pecking, clawing rage. Indeed, the experimenters found that even a stuffed model of a polecat, when drawn by a string toward a mother turkey, received an immediate and furious attack. ” (more…)

YouTube went down because of “technical issues” for an unspecified period this morning (March 25). So Billboard.biz calculated the likely impact on the major labels from an outage on the video site.

According to TubeMogul analysis, Vevo videos were getting 14 million views per day through YouTube. Warner Music Group videos received 9.3 million views per day. Throw in a very conservative estimate of 6 million views per day for EMI and that’s 29.3 million views per day for the four majors on a global basis.

Assuming all videos are monetized (not a guarantee), and using a rough estimate of 0.65 cents per stream, those 29.3 million views generate about $190,000 per day. Traffic may vary by hour of the day and day of the week, but on average the four majors pull in a combined $8,000 per hour from their YouTube plays.

This calculation is based on total outage. In today’s case, it appears embedded YouTube videos were still working, as were videos that were accessed through direct links. (more…)

We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

(SEC filings are public financial documents and contain a wealth of information for those willing to wade through them. For example, much of the information in our Google infographic was extracted from SEC filings. All publicly traded companies are required to file these documents.)

Google’s own words about its competition

So who and what does Google consider to be its competition these days? Here are Google’s very own words, quoted directly from their latest SEC filing. Emphasis added by us:

We face formidable competition in every aspect of our business, particularly from companies that seek to connect people with information on the web and provide them with relevant advertising. We face competition from:

• Traditional search engines, such as Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corporation’s Bing.
• Vertical search engines and e-commerce sites, such as WebMD (for health queries), Kayak (travel queries), Monster.com (job queries), and Amazon.com and eBay (commerce). We compete with these sites because they, like us, are trying to attract users to their web sites to search for product or service information, and some users will navigate directly to those sites rather than go through Google.
• Social networks, such as Facebook, Yelp, or Twitter. Some users are relying more on social networks for product or service referrals, rather than seeking information through traditional search engines. (more…)

A decade ago, on March 10, 2000, it seemed almost difficult to find someone skeptical about the dazzling future of dot-com stocks.

An undeniably prescient strategist at Warburg Dillon Read, now part of UBS, told the New York Times that “I don’t see the end in sight.” The Los Angeles Times quoted a Banc of America Securities analyst as saying that, before “too long,” the Nasdaq index would double.

It was exactly 10 years ago that the Nasdaq index reached its all-time peak of 5,048.62, and the tech-heavy index has never come close to recovering. It closed Tuesday at 2,340.68, 54 percent below its dot-com bubble high on March 10, 2000.

If you consider the devaluation of the U.S. dollar during that period caused by the Federal Reserve, the Nasdaq has dropped from an inflation-adjusted high of 6,352–an even more vertiginous plunge of 63.15 percent.

Read more on C|net…