Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

How those Yahoos! destroyed Flickr!

In one of the best articles of its kind for many a long day, Mat Honan of Gizmodo exposes corporate stupidity on a staggering scale in a piece titled "How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet". Money quote:

"There's a difference between a missed opportunity and a complete fuck-up. When Yahoo failed to capitalize on Flickr's social potential, that was a missed opportunity. But if you want to see where it completely fucked up, where it just butchered Flickr with dull knives and duller wit, turn on your phone and launch the Flickr app. Oh, what's that, you don't have one? Exactly.

Flickr had a robust mobile Web site way back in 2006 — before the iPhone even shipped. You could use it with your piece of crap Symbian phone, or the dinky screen on your Sony Ericsson T68i. But it was basically just a browser. If you wanted to get a photo from your phone to your account, you had to email it."

It may be too late in the day to fix Flickr, Honan says, and Yahoo! is probably too distracted now to take on the task because CEO Scott Thompson has just resigned after being tripped up by his academic record. Thompson had joined the company in January after previous CEO Carol Bartz was fired in September. Sadly, Yahoo! has become that kind of company.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 16 May 2012 at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Heading for the border, running for the bank exits

"Greek depositors withdrew €700 million ($898 million) from local banks Monday, the country's president said, as he warned that the situation facing Greece's lenders was very difficult." The Wall Street Journal

This is a classic Catch-22 situation as Greek depositors will increasingly want to avoid their valuable euros being turned into worthless drachmas, but a bank run will only accelerate the insolvency of the Greeks banks. Still, how would you react to the crisis if you were living in Patras or Heraklion? Would you risk leaving your savings in a system that's on the verge of collapse, or would you move the money to a place where it might be safer?

Clearly, German, Dutch, British and Swiss banks can expect lots of new business. The only snag is that EU authorities are probably tracking the currency outflows and they might force the recipient banks to hand over the money pour encourager les autres, as it were, because in our networked times there's nothing to stop panicked Portuguese, Spanish or Italian depositors from doing the very same. Anecdotal evidence acquired by Rainy Day suggests that Irish people are busy moving their euros north of the Border to the safety of the sterling zone.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Surreal Europe: bottoms-up from the tops-down

There are times, and these are indeed such times, when Europe appears to be the set of a surreal soap opera directed by the ghost of Luis Buñuel. In the latest episode, some of the original supporters of the utterly reckless common currency experiment are now proposing a rescue plan. Topping the bill among the cast of former stars, we have Jacques Delors, former President of the European Commission and mad genius of the euro idea, Helmut Schmidt, the chain-smoking former German Chancellor, and Javier Solana, Spanish socialist and former Secretary General of the Council of the EU. These are but three signatories of a bizzare letter entitled "Let's create a bottom-up Europe". Coming from those who helped create a top-down technocratic model of European amalgamation, this is simply too rich for satire. Their manifesto contains such gems as: "We, the undersigned, wish to provide a mouthpiece for European civil society... as a counter to the top-down Europe, the Europe of elites and technocrats that has prevailed up to now and that considers itself responsible for forging the destiny of the citizenry of Europe — if need be, against its will."

The surreality of this becomes apparent when one realizes that Delors, Schmidt, Solana & Co. were the architects of a system that allowed Greece and Italy to cook the euro entry books. "Europe is also about irony; it is about being able to laugh at ourselves," say the signatories, realizing, perhaps, the absurdity of their new-found religion.

Europe is also about imagination and it was Luis Buñuel who said: "Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether."

It will take a great feat of imagination now to protect freedom from the top-down hypocrites who were for elites and technocrats before they were against them.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 15 May 2012 at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pure Mo

"We Asians like being Asians, Siamese being Siamese, Malays being Malays, Viets being Viets. But a warning. Scratch us, there's a snarling xenophobe behind the smile." So speaks Snooky, the hero/heroine of Pure, the latest novel by Timothy Mo. By the way, Snooky is a well-endowed Bangkok lady boy who joins a group of bloodthirsty Islamist terrorists flitting between the porous borders of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. Yes, you'll need a vivid imagination to cope with all that, but for Timothy Mo, who has made a trade out of what is called "bi-cultural diversity", the world of bi-sexual extremism is a logical step in his ongoing meditations about imperialism and colonialism in South-East Asia.

Islam is central to the region's experience of imperialism and colonialism, but so was British rule, which fills the elites with nostalgia for an idealized past and compels Snooky's generation to master the former master's language. Here s/he recalls the faltering first steps:

"I am not a native speaker but I have an affinity for the English language. Once I heard an African say, 'The English language is a harlot — she will go with anyone who cares to use her.' (Me, I figured that just made her one of my Gang). What she was more like to me was the Fairy Godmother, finding me a ragged Cinderella without make-up, crying in the kitchen. She waved her wand but, alack and alas, midnight came all too soon. Yah, just thinking in English always made me calm down. It predisposed me to compromise and rationality, made me find nuance and ambiguity. Of course, I started like every other ungifted Siamese idiot with stuff like 'Him have cold same-same you before but now already sneeze littun-bit only.' But as with anything — tennis, ballet, rhythmic gymnastics: oh, to prance twinkle-toed with swirling ribbon and whirling hoop! — I who had the talent soon left everyone at the starting-line behind, even though for a long time my accent dogged me like a soi cur, made my farang friends, even Avril , wince. Maybe was my grating Tranny voice but , more, my lazy Thai tongue. You spoke Siamese without one but the farang needed the tongue to speak English, just like you needed a jack to change a car wheel. In the end to switch cultures or change languages was easier than converting from Fahrenheit to Celsius. When I spoke English I was an aristo, when I spoke native languages I was same-same everyone. No, worse and weaker than them."

Mo is a word wizard in the Joycean sense and his Pure is as challenging as much of the Dubliner's musings. Is it good or very good? Hard to say at this point, but it is certainly not same-same.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 14 May 2012 at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So near, and yet so far

Last night, Borussia Dortmund thrashed Bayern Munich 5-2 in the German cup final in Berlin. Next Saturday night in Munich, the Champions League trophy will be up for grabs and, hoping for a less humiliating result, the thrashee of Berlin will host Chelsea FC in their home stadium, the Allianz Arena. Meanwhile, the "Grail" is doing a tour of the Bavarian capital where it is proving popular with collectors of digital relics.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 13 May 2012 at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Le Swing Cajun avec Hadley Castille

That colossus of Cajun fiddle playing, Hadley Castille of Opelousas, Louisiana, wrote Le Swing Cajun and he performs it in Lafayette in style with his grand-daughter Sarah Jayde Williams and the members of the band L'Angelus.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 12 May 2012 at 6:47 AM | Permalink

Those huge French Whales: Kerviel, Tourre and Bruno Iksil

According to Société Générale, one of its traders, Jérôme Kerviel, engaged in unauthorized transactions in 2007 totaling as much as €49.9 billion, a figure higher than the bank's total market capitalization. On 5 October 2010, a French court sentenced Kerviel to five years of prison, with two years suspended, full restitution of the $6.7 billion that was lost because of his speculation, and a permanent ban from working in financial services. Afterwards, the bank stated that the restitution was "symbolic", and that it had no expectation the sum would be paid.

Talking of 2010, fans of high finance will also recall the multi-billion dollar accusations of fraud against Goldman Sachs for selling its clients toxic mortgage-backed securities that it had specifically designed to fail for the sole purpose of betting against them. Who got blamed for this scam? Fabrice Pierre Tourre. The fabulous Frenchman was the only person named when financial regulators charged the US investment bank with fraud.

Now it's the turn of their compatriot Bruno Iksil to share the (dis)honour. Back on 6 April, The Wall Street Journal reported that Iksil, a trader at J.P. Morgan known in the market as the "London Whale", had made large bets on credit derivatives. The bank said Iksil's unit was meant to 'hedge structural risks'. A week later, Bloomberg ran a story titled "JPMorgan's London Whale Could Use New Nickname" that noted Iksil "had earned two unforgettable nicknames: (1) The London Whale, and (2) Voldemort, after the Harry Potter villain." On the very same day, J.P. Morgan reported its first-quarter earnings and CFO Doug Braunstein said that the bank was "very comfortable" with the unit's positions. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon called media coverage on the matter a "tempest in the teapot". That's a "tempête dans un verre d'eau", by the way.

Yesterday, J.P. Morgan said it had taken $2 billion in losses so far in the second quarter related to the London Whale's trading. Dimon called the strategy "flawed, complex, poorly reviewed, poorly executed and poorly monitored."

WSJ bottom line: "Asked what, in hindsight, he should have paid more attention to, Mr. Dimon deadpanned: 'newspapers.'"

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 11 May 2012 at 7:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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