What if the government could know the future? It’s trying. Armed with billions of tweets, Google (GOOG) searches, Facebook (FB) posts, and other publicly available social-media and online data, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is sponsoring research projects involving 14 universities in the United States, Europe, and Israel with the goal of using advanced analytics to […]
I ENCOUNTERED something on this trip to India that I had never met before: a whole new political community — India’s “virtual middle class.” Its emergence explains a lot about the rise of social protests here, as well as in places like China and Egypt. It is one of the most exciting things happening on […]
Millions of people in Arab Spring nations are painfully realising that the fruits of revolution are not all they were cracked up to be. January 25 was meant to be a joyous occasion in Egypt, but instead of fireworks, there were Molotov cocktails and smoke from burning tyres and torched buildings. No major Egyptian city […]
Unless you’ve been on a different planet for the past 3 months, or don’t have children, you would know what I am referring to when I say ‘Gangnam Style’. PSY, and his catchy tune, is an international phenomenon that, through the power of You Tube, has reached virtually every computer screen and living room in […]
When the Corruption Perception Index 2012 was published last week, the Saudi Twittersphere wasn’t very thrilled. Transparency International‘s annual study of perceptions about corruption among public-sector officials showed that Saudi Arabia had fallen nine places, and ranked number 66 out of 174. This provoked a storm of discussion on Twitter. Read Here – The National
“We want to survive,” read signs carried by the hundreds of protestors who thronged the streets of Ningbo, a southeastern Chinese coastal city, from Friday through Sunday. Their demand: that the local government scrap plans for an $8.9 billion expansion of a petrochemical plant to be operated by a subsidiary of state-run oil giant Sinopec. By Sunday […]
Many foreign policy mandarins might not like or understand it, but the foreign policy operating environment is changing quickly. When in 2011 the Swedish Foreign Minister, Carl Bildt, was unable to get in touch with his Bahraini counterpart during the heat of the protest movement there, he opted to publicly shame him via Twitter. When General Electric was […]
As the networked world of the internet makes that which is distant seem very local, reality can be both distorted and amplified. The unfortunate “Innocence of Muslims” video served as a catalyst for the dissatisfaction felt by many toward American support of Arab nations. Yet this would not have occurred without the ability to spread […]
The team in charge of tracking Facebook’s (FB) growth works on the second floor of Building 17. Most days, the offices are like anywhere else at Facebook: whiteboards, toys on desks, shorts and flip-flops, pretty low-key. Around noon on Sept. 14, the second floor was packed. In one of the common areas, a giant screen showed the […]
The unrelenting negative reports about Facebook Inc. (FB) are enough to rattle even the true believers among us. Yet it would be premature to despair over the company’s long-term viability and health. Facebook is still potentially the most valuable information-based business. It had 955 million monthly active users at the end of June, and benefits from a tremendous […]
looking beyond borders 