The Currency Cloud has developed a Foreign Exchange (FX) payments automation platform which supercharges the tired old world of cross-border business payments, aiming to reduce costs for business and make multi-currency payments more frictionless. Since FX is one of the last great ripoffs in finance, this might actually be a pretty big deal.

Why is this interesting? Well, we’re talking about a team from the City of London that built the UBS online FX platform bringing their skills and experience to the combined revolutionary powers of the Cloud and SaaS.

Obviously Foreign Exchange is a big market to attack. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the average daily turnover in global foreign exchange markets is estimated at over $4 trillion.

techcrunch

Swipestudy is a flash-card study tool for the smartphone age, very useful for studying foreign languages and preparing for exams and best of all its all free.

You can see what people are studying right now by following @swipestudy at twitter.

Try it here http://rng.it

Facebook today addressed three challenge areas that make it hard for developers to build apps on the mobile web: app discovery, browser fragmentation, and payments. As part of the second one, Facebook released Ringmark, a new mobile browser test suite, which it developed with open web technology company Bocoup. Facebook will soon open source it, publish it on GitHub, and donate it to the W3C.

The test suite for mobile browsers helps you, the developer, understand which mobile browsers support the functionality your app needs, such as orientation lock for games or camera functionality for social apps. Facebook says it is comprehensive, fair, and tests the feature sets which developers really need.

zdnet article

This is how I discovered Pinterest… I already new that only google employees post to G+

TheAtlantic: Abysmal Google+ Numbers: Users Spending 3 Minutes per Month on the Site

https://bestexchangerates.com now available in 5 countries, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Canada and UK!

The Snow Monkeys of Jigokudani near Shiga Kogen, Nagano.

After two kilometers of very snowy forest trail we came upon this amazing scene.

It’s good to be the king, but judging by the missing finger he’s had to fight for the right to sit in the sauna and been attended to by the gang.

A good example of the ‘Porosity’ of Asian city living…

Being a developer of several web-apps for both pc and mobile phones, I read with interest way back in March the brouhaha regarding whether Apple had intentionally hamstrung web-apps performance on the iPhone by preventing their use of its brand shiny new Nitro javascript engine.

The question that remains is whether this is an oversight on the part of Apple, or whether it is quietly intentional. With the company’s stand against Flash, an open standard of HTML5 should be its next logical thing to support. But if it doesn’t fix the problem in future versions of iOS, that leads a hefty credence to the rumor mill.

The debate primarily centred around whether with their update to Safari in iOS 4.3 Apple had purposely excluded web-apps for security reasons (JIT’s ability to mark memory pages in RAM as executable) or something more nefarious, such as perhaps feeling threatened by the rise of web-apps and a potential hit on the native app-store revenue….that debate rages on.

As I mentioned, I develop a number of websites with web-app versions customised to run on mobile phones. One of these apps is SwipeStudy (a flashcard study tool) which I submitted to the Apple web-app library, which is (or perhaps was) a very useful and thoughtful site provided by Apple for developers to showcase their (typically freeware) web-apps. However on my last update I mistakenly entered the web address without the http:// prefix (my mistake I admit) which causes the link to wander off to some internal Apple error page…doh!

I have been trying to contact apple to rectify this link, but started to suspect and now after the passing months am pretty sure that they are no longer maintaining this site. In fact the last update to was 3rd Dec 2010, over 4 months ago a year ago!

So I conclude with the question that if Apple are playing with a fair hand with respect to web-apps on iOS, why would they stop updating this site. I guess they may just be too busy dealing with their undoubted many successes, or could they see the writing on the wall with a business model based on app-store revenue when the whole app-ecosphere is converging on html5?

Later in the evening Presented SwipeStudy at Google Creative Sandbox 2011, Carriageworks Sydney.
, a great night despite the stormy weather, I was almost electrocuted on the monorail trying to get there…

Thanks to all you marketing types who gave me great feedback on swipestudy and it’s potential uses in training and education.

Swipestudy is a flash-card study tool for the smartphone age, very useful for studying foreign languages and preparing for exams and best of all its all free.

If you’re running Windows you can download it as an App here otherwise just goto http://swipestudy.com on your PC or smartphone.

You can see what people are studying right now by following @swipestudy at twitter.

But I think there’s actually a very good reason why we should, in fact, embrace the term “HTML5” as an overarching buzzword for this latest round of web standards and specifications. Our industry has proven on several occasions that we don’t get excited about new, interesting, and useful technologies and concepts until such a buzzword is in place.

“AJAX,” of course, is the canonical example of this. DOM scripting, XMLHttpRequest, and dynamic Javascript all existed long before the term “AJAX”. But it wasn’t until the clever term was coined that anyone really cared. As soon as we had a single, simple word we could all get behind, Javascript really took off. A proliferation of frameworks and libraries hit the scene, and suddenly we were all building dynamic web projects. And the term was misused. Badly. Left and right. Much of the great code being written didn’t use XML. Much of it wasn’t asynchronous. But most of it was pretty great, and it was usually called “AJAX” wether it really was or not. And pedants went crazy. They argued about the semantics of the term “AJAX” until they were blue in the face. But in the end, no one would argue that “AJAX” wasn’t a good thing for our industry. Without that term, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

And it’s not just AJAX. If you want other examples, look no further then “Web 2.0” and “Microformats.” “HTML5” is today’s “AJAX.” Just as with “AJAX,” people are misusing the term all over the web. But it wasn’t until influential people and companies (notably Apple) started misusing the term that web developers at large (myself included) starting taking this new collection of web standards, specifications, and best practices seriously, as something that might be useful before 2022.

Sometimes we just need a word to rally behind. And put in job descriptions. And claim we “support” (another word that is mostly meaningless). It’s a language thing and a human psychology thing.

So be pedantic about the semantics of “HTML5” if you want, but don’t be surprised if no one really listens. This is something most people can understand and get behind. This, on the other hand, is not.

http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2010/aug/02/term-html5/

2. (C) British Ambassador to the Kyrgyz Republic Paul Brummell invited the Ambassador to participate in briefing His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, ahead of his October 28 meetings with Kyrgyz Prime Minister Igor Chudinov and other high-level officials. The Prince was in Kyrgyzstan to promote British economic interests. Originally scheduled to last an hour over brunch, the briefing ended up lasting two hours, thanks to the super-engaged Prince’s pointed questions. The Ambassador was the only participant who was not a British subject or linked to the Commonwealth. The absence of her French and German colleagues was notable; they were apparently not invited despite being fellow members of the European Union. Others included major British investors in Kyrgyzstan and the Canadian operator of the Kumtor mine.

“ALL OF THIS SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE FRANCE”
—————————————-
¶5. (C) After having half-heartedly danced around the topic for a bit, only mentioning “personal interests” in pointed fashion, the business representatives then plunged into describing what they see as the appallingly high state of corruption in the Kyrgyz economy. While claiming that all of them never participated in it and never gave out bribes, one representative of a middle-sized company stated that “It is sometimes an awful temptation.” In an astonishing display of candor in a public hotel where the brunch was taking place, all of the businessmen then chorused that nothing gets done in Kyrgyzstan if President Bakiyev’s son Maxim does not get “his cut.” Prince Andrew took up the topic with gusto, saying that he keeps hearing Maxim’s name “over and over again” whenever he discusses doing business in this country. Emboldened, one businessman said that doing business here is “like doing business in the Yukon” in the nineteenth century, i.e. only those willing to participate in local corrupt practices are able to make any money. His colleagues all heartily agreed, with one pointing out that “nothing ever changes here. Before all you heard was Akayev’s son’s name. Now it’s Bakiyev’s son’s name.” At this point the Duke of York laughed uproariously, saying that: “All of this sounds exactly like France.”

RUDE LANGUAGE A LA BRITISH
————————–
¶13. (C) The brunch had already lasted almost twice its allotted time, but the Prince looked like he was just getting started. Having exhausted the topic of Kyrgyzstan, he turned to the general issue of promoting British economic interests abroad. He railed at British anti-corruption investigators, who had had the “idiocy” of almost scuttling the Al-Yamama deal with Saudi Arabia. (NOTE: The Duke was referencing an investigation, subsequently closed, into alleged kickbacks a senior Saudi royal had received in exchange for the multi-year, lucrative BAE Systems contract to provide equipment and training to Saudi security forces. END NOTE.) His mother’s subjects seated around the table roared their approval. He then went on to “these (expletive) journalists, especially from the National Guardian, who poke their noses everywhere” and (presumably) make it harder for British businessmen to do business. The crowd practically clapped. He then capped this off with a zinger: castigating “our stupid (sic) British and American governments which plan at best for ten years whereas people in this part of the world plan for centuries.” There were calls of “hear, hear” in the private brunch hall. Unfortunately for the assembled British subjects, their cherished Prince was now late to the Prime Minister’s. He regretfully tore himself away from them and they from him. On the way out, one of them confided to the Ambassador: “What a wonderful representative for the British people! We could not be prouder of our royal family!”

¶14. (C) COMMENT: Prince Andrew reached out to the Ambassador with cordiality and respect, evidently valuing her insights. However, he reacted with almost neuralgic patriotism whenever any comparison between the United States and United Kingdom came up. For example, one British businessman noted that despite the “overwhelming might of the American economy compared to ours” the amount of American and British investment in Kyrgyzstan was similar. Snapped the Duke: “No surprise there. The Americans don’t understand geography. Never have. In the U.K., we have the best geography teachers in the world!” END COMMENT.

cablegate.wikileaks.org