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From BoingBoing, here’s a Google document that explains the global economic meltdown – with stick figures. Mortgage holders of the world unite! You have nothing to fear but exotic derivatives.

From the New York Times, here’s a report about the booming gray market for iPhones in China. iPhones are manufactured in Taiwan, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apple doesn’t sell the iPhone in Taiwan or in Communist China because no Chinese telecom operator will meet Apple’s demands. So there’s not legal way to buy an iPhone in Taiwan or China.

No carrier? No support? No problem.

It’s relatively easy to unlock an iPhone and use it with on a GSM network. Third-party software is available to localize the screens and provide missing features. When Apple updates the iPhone’s firmware, these unlocks tend to break. This article from Business Week mentions that Prague is a major center for iPhone hacking.
But someone who is using an iPhone in China may not care that much about these new features. As more iPhones enter the gray market, more programmers join the effort to jailbreak the device.

This makes me wonder what might have happened if Apple sold unlocked GSM iPhones online and in its retail stores, and told AT&T, T-Mobile and every other GSM carrier in the world to just deal with it. The customer service problems might be significant, which explains why Apple has decided not to break the rules… yet.

I also wonder how many iPhones have been purchased in Honolulu and then shipped outside the United States.

Silicon Hutong predicted over a year ago that Apple would wait to introduce the iPhone in China. Looks like he was right!

See my earlier posts about the iPhone:

• 31 January 2008: Applications are coming for the iPhone
• 26 January 2008: iPhone helps AT&T add more wireless customers
• 13 January 2008: The story of the iPhone
• 20 November 2007: An iPhone for China?
• 14 November 2007: No iPhone for you, China

I followed a link on BoingBoing to this Times of India article: Delhi is getting a 45-kilometer monorail system.

The technology panel will announce their selection for Honolulu’s proposed fixed guideway mass transit system tomorrow, according to this article in the Honolulu Advertiser. The five panel members are evaluating four technologies, including:

1. trains (steel wheel on steel rail)
2. buses (rubber tire on concrete)
3. monorail
4. magnetic levitation

The decision will also be announced on the Honolulu High Capacity Transit Corridor’s web site. The video simulation of the proposed Aloha Tower station is pretty good. Most of the site’s content is trapped in PDF files, however.

As I posted on 6 February 2008, I support the bus option. This option could create a two-lane elevated road that can also be used by emergency vehicles. The buses for this system might also be deployed on surface roads as demand warrants. The other three technologies are less flexible and more expensive. City councilmembers Donovan Dela Cruz and Ann Kobayashi appeared on the byline for this article in the Honolulu Star-Builletin on 26 August 2007. The article includes a picture of one bus model. Below is a promotional video for the Eindhoven bus system.

Early Sunday, I saw this on a BoingBoing article: Google legal counsel David Drummond has released a statement that criticizes the proposed merger as anticompetitive. Here’s a New York Times article about the announcement. Google claims that Microsoft would use Yahoo to push proprietary solutions. Microsoft has a long history of developing and implementing its own extensions to Internet standards.

Elizabeth Montalbano of NetworkWorld had similar concerns in her article. She and the Register point out that Microsoft is really buying Yahoo’s computing platform and user base, partly because Microsoft’s Internet presence ls ineffective.

Of course, both companies have different cultures. One uniting factor may be their mutual envy of Google, as discussed in this BusinessWeek article.

This is not a “done deal” by any means

Yahoo’s board will most likely resist the buyout offer, which may give the Federal government and the EU more time to raise their objections. BusinessWeek has a good summary of the potential challenges to the proposed purchase in this article.

Even if Microsoft does actually purchase Yahoo, victory is not assured. As Joe Nocera of the New York Times pointed out in his article today, Microsoft’s online division is the only one of the company’s five strategic business units (SBUs) that loses money. Adding Yahoo may not stem the flood of red ink.

See my Friday, 1 February 2008 post and comments about the proposed Microsoft purchase of Yahoo for more information and links.

LEGO celebrated the 50th anniversary of its first Danish patent on Monday. I grew up playing with a few tubs of LEGO – the basic blocks and some trays, no kits!

BusinessWeek posted a nice slideshow of LEGO’s manufacturing process. The company produces 19 billion LEGO bricks each year with very high quality standards: only 18 of every 1 million bricks is defective.

That’s 36,000 bricks each minute, and  more than 2 million an hour, according to Neatorama.

PopAndCo.com has a cute flash animation of the process. The audio track is loud, however.
LEGO is moving most of its brick manufacturing from Denmark to Mexico and the Czech Republic, according to the New York Times. US manufacturing and distribution is being moved to Mexican outsourcing firm Flextronics, according to this report.

In September 2007, SupplyChainDigest published a good report about how LEGO management came to this decision. Earlier attempts to fix the company’s value chain had helped, but outsourcing was a step the company was reluctant to take. LEGO toys are an important symbol in European lives.

On BoingBoing, an editor created a timelapse video while he built a 5000-piece, US$500 kit of the Millennium Falcon.

As a final note, the Wikipedia entry for LEGO closes with a brief discussion of the trademark.