One of the observations of last year’s State of the Future report (which I blogged about here) was that organised crime was one of the the three biggest threats to global security and prosperity. Misha Glenny’s new book McMafia (’a journey through the global criminal underworld’ 
comes to a similar conclusion - arguing that [...]
Kenya’s mobile phone-enabled payment system M-Pesa has grown explosively over the last nine months, according to Russell Southwood’s Balancing Act newsletter, which has been tracking the African mobile and internet markets for something like four years now. According to the newsletter the operator, Safaricom, gained 150,000 users in the three months to June last year, [...]
One of the things you learn working as a journalist is that most news is predictable - a point satirised by Michael Frayn in his outstanding novel The Tin Men in the 1960s. But sometimes headlines do still surprise you. One such was the news that British car exports had reached record levels last year.
I blogged earlier this year on the toy industry and Chinese production, and on the idea of ‘toxic consumption‘ - that the things we buy are bad for our health. Christmas seems a good time to come back to it, and Core 77 (thanks) points me in the direction of a long article by Jonathan [...]
The Earth Policy Institute has an item on a trend that could mark the start of a tipping point away from bottled water. What’s interesting is that two separate constituencies have aligned: citizens/consumers who are concerned about the environmental impact of the industry, and public authorities which are concerned both about the direct cost [...]
Mobile payments have at last reached the stage in the UK where trials and pilots are starting. Barclays Bank, O2, and Transport for London has announced a trial of a combined transport/payments card in London (news report here), while RBS and MasterCard have announced a trial of a mobile debit card in London and Edinburgh [...]
The average British child sees at least 10,000 commercials a year, many unsupervised - according to David Piachaud of the London School of Economics. The result is increased family conflict and greater pressure on poorer families. Piachaud says the case for greater regulation or legislation to protect children from exploitation is strong. The research is [...]
I am probably the last person in the blogosphere to write about Amazon’s launch of its e-book device, the Kindle. It’s described as “a wireless reading device” and in the initial wave of publicity Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has taken care to position it as complementary to the book. But even with Amazon’s strengths [...]
Our dominant management methods and theories are now a century old - and are no longer suitable for what they have to do. That’s the overall argument of Gary Hamel’s new book, The Future of Management, which he spells out in a recent ‘conversation’ with McKinsey Quarterly. But while he thinks that the new [...]
It must be the season for newspapers and magazines to look at how well businesses are doing in greening themselves. The New York Times and the Guardian have run supplements, while Fast Company and Business Voice have prominent articles. The NYT looks most interesting in terms of trends; it suggests that we have reached the [...]
