STD: Socially Transmitted Decline

It's been a quiet week for South East Asia, considering all the political noise last week about South China Sea. The bright spot is the markets, which continue to climb. Malaysia hit its all time top this week. But you know what happens, when you hit the top?

The global economy is still going sideways, but the drama will heat up as the Americans go into election. The latest political football is the Federal Reserve. In reality, they are under heavy influence of the very same banks they are supposed to regulate, since its birth in 1913. Regional federal reserve board of directors are elected by banks themselves. Recently, congress passed a bill to allow them to audit the Fed, thanks to Ron Paul. But its unlikely the Senate will pass it. Pity.

It has not been good news for social networks. Twitter's been offline, facebook was punished in the market. Its umbilically attached gaming co, Zynga, slowed from limping to crawling. Drawsomething, is now yesterday's news, and has become an expensive anvil around their neck. Paypal finally admitted its still stuck in the past (ie net 1.0), but its plan is vague. Oh well, they are not alone. The unasked question is: what's going to happen to Groupon?


But hey, its only part of hype curve, as explained by Gartner. There continues to be heavy VC investments in everything social including: social tickets, social hotel finding, social marketing / targeting, social learning, social "word of mouth", white-label social CRM, social video. That's over $160M in just seven days.

Google is not the only company that's got glasses. Canon and Oculus have developed their own respective, cool versions. Canon have developed a solution called mixed reality. Its similar to augmented reality except it includes fully 3D rendered objects, intended for training engineers. Actually, I think it will be more fun, and lucrative, to give it to the people who develop Call of Duty or Battlefield. Oculus, born from Stanford and Berkeley (where else) are building a holodeck ala Star Trek! I guess, they still have some more work to do. But its promising.

The last words in social: the world's first fully digital sexually transmitted disease, developed thanks (I think) to Stanford and Venter labs who succesfully modelled the disease called "Mycoplasma genitalium". They have also included the link with full source code. Download it  http://bit.ly/MPJp8i , if you dare! Maybe the Indonesians may help stem the tide of digi-sex. They have just blocked over 1 million smut sites, just for the month of Ramadan. I guess when the following month Syawwal arrives, the porn is back on?