World Markets Simplified

Apple's Sir Jony Ive Quashes Rumors Of Leaving Apple
Apple's chief of design Jony Ive was knighted yesterday in his native Britain, technically making him Sir Jonathan Ive, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. The event led him to speak to the media and Ive used an interview with the BBC to definitively quash some rumors swirling about his future at Apple: Asked where he wanted to go in the future he said "the same team I've been fortunate enough to work with for the past 15 years" to tackle the "same sort of problems." Ive also explained that Apple's goal is to remain producing the best products rather than simply trying to make money, which gives us an unusual insight into the company in the post-Steve Jobs era.

$78,000 Fine For Fake Angry Birds Android App Maker
A1 Agregator posted mobile aps to the Android marketplace that pretended to be big-name games like Angry Birds and other titles, but the software used Android's open systems to secretly send out a text message to a pre-arranged number, thereby triggering a premium SMS messaging service that cost users £5 (about $7.85). The UK's regulator in charge of premium rate services handed out a £50,000 fine ($78,300) to the firm, far more than the estimated £27,850 it made via the scam. The news comes as more attention is directed toward smartphone scams and security concerns because the devices are dominating the cell phone space and are taking over more functions in user's lives.

$200 Million Funds Ultrafast Broadband To Six Communities In U.S.
Startup Gigabit Squared revealed today, the New York Times reports, that it's raised $200 million to fund an experimental gigabit broadband network in six communities dotted across the U.S. Working with Gig.U, an university-centric enterprise aiming at building "islands" of ultrafast networks to improve economic and social conditions, the company will build the fast broadband infrastructure around six top research unversities and is in discussions with its first one. The entire endeavor is an attempt to push forward the technology where existing telecoms firms have perhaps proved reticent, which may mey explain why the U.S. is slipping down the list of most connected nations around the world.

The concept of Eurobonds as one tool to tackle the euro zone debt crisis has re-emerged onto the agenda this week. But how would they work and how could they help to solve the crisis?

First of all, any Eurobond, or e-bond, wouldn’t be the same as the existing eurobonds-with-a-small-e (note the potential for confusion). The latter are bonds which are issued in a different currency from the country in which they are issued (not necessarily in euros, either), and are often used by developing economies such as Nigeria and Ukraine to attract foreign investors.

A joint bond issued by euro zone countries, the Eurobond, could help some of its weaker members, as investors might be more willing to buy bonds from the entire region rather than, say, Italy or Spain. The bond market has been one of the key battlegrounds of the crisis, where countries such as Ireland and Greece have fought and lost the attempt to survive without bailout loans. A joint Eurobond could be, essentially, another way of allowing weaker euro zone economies to benefit from association with stronger economies. It could also bring the region’s fiscal integration closer.

There are still key differences between EU leaders over what form Eurobonds would take—and whether they should exist at all. Germany, anxious to avoid handing its taxpayers an even greater burden for the bailouts, especially ahead of elections later this year, is digging in its heels.

France’s new president, Francois Hollande, appears to be following his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy in supporting the idea.

Catalysts for euro zone leaders to decide in favor of Eurobonds could include either a messy Greek exit from the euro or a run on the single currency itself, according to Justin Knight, head of European rates strategy at UBS.

There seem to be two main ideas for how the Eurobonds would start: One is to integrate the current stock of debt and issue common debt. The second, which could be more palatable for the Germans, would involve a debt redemption fund and some sharing of fiscal policy.

“Last year, the German government moved away from muddling through to the realization that the euro zone has got to move towards some form of fiscal union or face a full break up. But the possibility of moral hazard would have to be eliminated first,” Knight said.

The idea can be traced back to the Blue Bond proposal put forward by economists Jakob von Weizsäcker and Jacques Delpla in 2010. It suggests that EU countries should pool their debt up to 60 percent of GDP, which would become its senior debt. Any debt beyond this should stay as national debt for individual countries, with procedures for an orderly default in place.

One of the solutions which was put forward when talk of Eurobonds first emerged last summer came from Knight. His idea, which took the Blue Bond proposal as its starting point, suggests that governments should issue debt only in the form of eurobonds, until their Eurobond debt reaches 60 percent of GDP. Beyond that, they issue debt individually, so that the joint bond is safeguarded.

Knight said that he has not altered his view of how this model for Eurobonds could work since August. He added that the risk of subordination of a country’s non-Eurobond debt could be avoided by having countries which default on their individual debts defaulting equally on their Eurobond debt.

An independent agent to issue the new bonds would be key to their success, Knight believes.

“What’s needed is a fiscal authority to work alongside the monetary authority of the European Central Bank , which has to remain independent,” he said. “This fiscal authority would probably have to be independent of the member states, with an elected official at the top of it. Fiscal policy making needs democratic legitimacy.”

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Yahoo Accidentally Leaks Private Encryption Key For Axis, Its New Search System
Last night Yahoo introduced Axis, a browser extension/ mobile app designed to turbo-boost Internet searching. It's a bold new front in the Search Wars. But it was accompanied by another, less savory release, discovered by Nik Cubrilovic, an Australian entrepreneur: Yahoo accidentally leaked its private encryption key for the Chrome version. This is part of the certificate that secure websites and browser extenstion bear to prove that they're legitimately software created by who you believe to be true. The exposure of the certificate could allow a malicious coder to release code masqueradeing as a legitimate Yahoo app but carry out whatever data-scraping or other intrustions the coder desired. Yahoo quickly apologized, and released a new version for Chrome that does not contain the offending certificate data, but the implications of the slip have yet to be concluded.

When it comes to finding a mate, gentlemen prefer a woman who looks dumb and sleepy enough for a one-night-stand, rather than look for charm and intelligence, according to a new study.

In the study, University of Texas at Austin graduate student Cari Goetz and her team focused on the so-called sexual exploitability hypothesis, which is based on the different ways in which men and women approach reproduction.

The goal of the study was to test out the hypothesis that a woman who appears silly or inert, or in other words more 'sexually exploitable,' is a turn-on for the average straight man, the Daily Mail reported.

In the evolutionary psychology sense, the word 'exploitable' simply indicates that a woman is willing or can be more easily pressured into having sex, even if she is a prostitute or a nymphomaniac.

The researchers began testing their model by asking a large group of undergraduate students to nominate some specific actions, body postures, attitudes and personality traits that might signal vulnerability, such as exhaustion, intoxication, or low intelligence.

In the end, the participants of the study had produced a list of 88 signs that a woman might by especially receptive to a man's advances.

Among the chosen red flags were: lip lick/bite; over-the-shoulder look; sleepy; intoxicated; tight clothing; fat; short; unintelligent; punk; attention-seeking and touching breast.

Next, Goetz and her colleagues scoured the Internet for publicly available images of women displaying each of these 88 cues.

Once they had pictures of women licking their lips, partying, wearing sexy clothing, etc., the researchers cross-checked them with a separate group of students who presumed that the photos indeed matched the cues.

The researchers then invited a fresh group of 76 male students and presented them with the images of presumably 'ripe-for-the-picking' women, asking them what they thought of each woman's overall attractiveness, how easy it would be to 'exploit' her using anything from a pickup line to physical force, and her appeal to them as either a short-term or a long-term partner.

The study revealed that the images of fat or short women had no effect. The participants of the study did not view them as either easy to bed or appealing as partners.

But when it came to reading the more psychological and contextual cues-pictures of silly or childish-looking women, or of women who looked sleepy or drunk, men rated them as being easy to 'score' with.

More importantly, the dumb-looking and inert women were also perceived as being more attractive than their more lucid or intelligent-looking peers, but only when it came to short-term relationships.

When the men were asked to judge the same liquored-up, silly-looking women in the photos as potential girlfriends and wives, they had entirely lost their appeal on them.

A follow-up study has also found that the more promiscuous men who happened also to have deficiencies in personal empathy and warmth were the ones most attuned to female 'exploitability' cues.

An article describing the findings will soon be published in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg changed his status to 'married' recently, but his social-networking website is causing a third of all divorces, a new UK survey has claimed.

According to a the survey, feuding couples are increasingly complaining about their spouse's behaviour on Facebook in divorce filings, with inappropriate messages to the opposite sex being the biggest cause for complaint.

More than 33 per cent of divorces last year listed Facebook as a contributing factor, a study of 5000 divorce petitions by UK law firm Divorce-Online found.

The figure has shot up from just 20 per cent in 2009. "If someone wants to have an affair or flirt with the opposite sex then Facebook is the easiest place to do it," Divorce-Online spokesman Mark Keenan was quoted by the 'DailyMail' as saying.

Incriminating status updates, suspicious check-ins at restaurants and inappropriate photographs being posted online were all increasingly being used as evidence in divorces.

"People need to be careful what they write on their walls as the courts are seeing these posts being used in financial disputes and children cases as evidence," Keenan said.

According to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, 80 per cent of US divorce attorneys said the number of cases using the social network had increased.

K Jason Krafsky, co-author of 'Facebook and Your Marriage', said office romances and out-of-town affairs that took months or even years to develop in the real world happened "with a lightning speed" on Facebook.

"On Facebook they happen in just a few clicks," he said. Krafsky said the social networking website differed from traditional dating websites in that it both re-connected old flames and allowed people to 'friend' someone they may have only met once or twice.

"It puts temptation in the path of people who would never in a million years risk having an affair," he said.

Even when affairs develop offline, Facebook provides a forum for couples to inadvertently arouse the suspicions of their partners.

The UK study also found couples who had already split up were using Facebook to vent about each other, posting nasty comments for all their friends to see.

Twitter only appeared in 20 of the petitions as part of behaviour allegations. Couples complained their spouses were using twitter to make insensitive comments about them.

The L Condom company is designed to deal with condom shortages in the countries where birth control and AIDS prevention is most needed, and to make safe sex easier and more fun for everyone involved.

Talia Frenkel didn’t mean to become a social entrepreneur. She was living the kind of life magazines write about: photographing disaster zones for the Red Cross and other nonprofits. On trip after trip, she began to notice a disturbing lack of condoms in the countries she visited. According to the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, nine out of 10 African countries with high HIV prevalence go through what’s called a condom stock-out--when stores simply run out of condoms--with stock-outs commonly lasting over two months. Those stockouts can be caused by a number of things, including poor planning, funding, or logistical problems.

“That was when I got angry,” says Frenkel. “HIV is a preventable disease, and I believe that access to condoms is a basic human right.” She decided to start a woman-focused social enterprise and harness the one-for-one model (buy one and one gets donated overseas) employed by other companies.

When Frenkel started doing research into condoms and innovation, she felt stymied by the available offerings. “I knew that going into a condom aisle as a woman, there was no innovation in the condom industry. Just the branding, the look and feel, has a kind of a false male bravado. It doesn’t resonate with a modern feel of sexuality.”That company, L Condoms, will begin shipping its product this summer. Over the past four years, Frenkel has worked to make changes in condom materials, manufacturing, and distribution to make condoms better. According to the company, if contraception were broadly available in poor countries, more than 50 million unwanted pregnancies could be averted every year. The resulting decline in unintended pregnancies would bring down costs related to maternal and newborn care by $5.1 million.

Working from offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Frenkel has teamed up with relief organizations in Uganda to begin distributing condoms immediately to high-risk areas. “We’re starting with the high-impact areas where condoms are needed immediately, because there’s a high HIV rate and little or no access to condoms. In many places, women sell sex for less than the price of a condom. So there we’re just distributing them freely, with peer-to-peer education.”L Condoms try to improve the materials as well as the distribution. The condoms are manufactured in Malaysia, where natural latex is produced and purified to cut down on the smell. They use new lubricants that are free of glycerin and parabens, which Frenkel says have been shown to cause urinary tract infections. The foil is square instead of rectangular, which puts less strain on the condom itself. All the packaging is simple and recyclable.

The condoms are also being distributed to women-owned enterprises who sell them for affordable prices, creating sustainable livelihoods.

Frenkel is also working with sororities, fraternities, and co-ops in the U.S. to sell monthly condom subscriptions. For each condom bought, one will be donated to students in African universities. “I really wanted to focus on the idea of one-for-one, but we also wanted to provide a better product than what’s out there.”

Oracle Spends $300 Million Buying Vitrue, A Social Marketing Firm
TechCrunch reports that Oracle has just spent $300 million buying Vitrue, a smallish firm that's an expert in social media-based marketing--though the news has been confirmed by press release, the price remains officially undisclosed. Vitrue was said to be on course for revenues near $100 million this year, and is seen as a go-to name for big firms keen to attract Facebook fans and leverage platforms like Facebook or Twitter to spread news. Oracle, of course, is one of the older big names associated with IT and the Net.

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Petrol prices have been increased by Rs 7.50 a litre from midnight. The increase was on the cards with the rupee continuing its free fall against the US dollar. The rupee fell to a record life low of 56 per dollar on Wednesday.

Oil companies had already told the government that wanted to hike petrol price by at least Rs 4 per litre.

Earlier on Tuesday, Petroleum Minister S Jaipal Reddy had said that there was an immediate need to raise fuel prices, but refused to say when the hike would actually take place.


The government had decontrolled petrol price in June 2010 but rates were last increased on November 4 last year. This despite oil price rising by 14 per cent and 7 per cent fall in value of rupee against the US dollar.

Price of diesel, kerosene and cooking gas were raised in June 2011.

State-owned oil firms, who had in the fiscal ending March 31, 2012 lost Rs 4,860 crore on petrol sales, are currently losing Rs 6.28 per litre on petrol.