Former Israeli Leader Ariel Sharon Dies

''Former Israeli leader Ariel Sharon,died Saturday.
Mr. Sharon's career spanned the history of Israel from its establishment in 1948. As a soldier, he commanded troops in every major conflict through the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, when he encircled Egypt's Third Army in the Sinai and was hailed at home as the "King of Israel."

  In subsequent years, he was a senior member of the Likud Party and served in numerous cabinet posts. Among them, he was minister of defense during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, an episode that left him tarred by a government commission that blamed him for failing to prevent the killing of a large number of Palestinian and other civilians in what became known as the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

In 2001, Mr. Sharon staged a political comeback when he became prime minister at a time of escalating terrorist violence. As prime minister, he initiated construction of a controversial barrier along the West Bank to protect Israel from incursions.

Then, in 2004, the longtime hawk rocked Israeli politics when he changed course to favor unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. In 2005, the Knesset approved his disengagement plan to withdraw troops and citizens from the Gaza Strip and four West Bank settlements.

The uproar within Likud following the withdrawal led Mr. Sharon to resign and form a new party, Kadima, that dominated the Knesset for most of the rest of the decade.

Ariel Sharon was born at Kfar Malal, a cooperative Jewish farming settlement in the British Mandate of Palestine, outside Tel Aviv. His parents, originally named Scheinerman, were Zionists who emigrated from Russia at the end of World War I.

  He joined the Haganah, the underground military movement, in high school, then enrolled in officer training school. Mr. Sharon was 20 when he commanded an infantry company during the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. During the Battle of Latrun, a strategic hilltop between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, his unit was pinned down under hostile fire from Jordanian forces and sustained heavy losses. Mr. Sharon was seriously wounded.

Mr. Sharon had a reputation as a swashbuckler, sometimes leading men into battle in an armored car stocked with gourmet cheese and sausages. On several occasions, he was accused of exceeding orders and of atrocities, but he was regularly promoted.

After the 1948 war, he battled cross-border raiders in the early 1950s. He led the capture of the strategic Mitla Pass in the 1956 Sinai war with Egypt.

In 1967, months before that year's Arab-Israeli war, he was elevated to the rank of major general, and subsequently won a victory over Egyptian troops in the Battle of Abu-Ageila, helping seal Israel's capture of the Sinai Peninsula.

When Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel in 1973, Mr. Sharon had already left the military, but he returned to the front line as a reserve general and led his troops across the Suez Canal, turning the tide against Egyptian forces and cementing his reputation for military prowess.

Mr. Sharon retired after a cease-fire was negotiated, and turned to politics, winning a seat in the Knesset in 1977. He served as agriculture minister and helped draft plans for scaled-up settlements on the West Bank.

In 1982, after the massacres in Lebanon, Mr. Sharon was forced to resign as defense minister when the Kahan Commission found that Israel's army, stationed around two Palestinian refugee camps, knew Christian militants were slaughtering residents of the refugee camps but did nothing to stop it.

After Israel's government stopped establishing new settlements in the 1990s, he encouraged Jewish settlers to set up improvised hilltop settlement outposts, whose watchtowers and crude lodgings gave them the appearance of military bases.

Mr. Sharon was elected prime minister in 2001.A year after his election, as suicide bombings on buses and at restaurants escalated, Mr. Sharon ordered the army into Palestinian cities in the West Bank. He directed plans for a permanent barrier in the West Bank; that wall is credited by some with helping stop the wave of suicide bombings by Palestinians in Israeli cities. Mr. Arafat was besieged in his compound in Ramallah, in the West Bank, where he remained isolated until illness overtook him, and he died in 2004.

While battling militants, Mr. Sharon also decided it would be necessary for Israel to uproot settlements and pull back from Gaza and the West Bank to make way for a Palestinian state and avoid creating a binational state.

Only months after the historic Gaza pullback was completed and amid a 2006 election, Mr. Sharon suffered a stroke that left him in a permanent coma, ending his career and stoking renewed political turmoil''.

Source: WSJ

Toyota fuel cell car set for 2015 global release

 

Amongst the incremental improvements seen at CES, Toyota has announced its notable and progressive intention to begin selling hydrogen powered cars starting next year. Roll-out will begin in California initially and will continue around the world, it has confirmed.

The Toyota Fuel Cell Vehicle (FCV) runs on hydrogen that, combined with oxygen, creates a chemical reaction from which electricity can be harnessed. The only by-product of this process is water, minimizing the environmental impact of using the car. The announcement means that FCVs will be available to consumers less than 20 years after Toyota developed its first Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle (FCEV) in 1996, as part of its research into vehicles powered by alternative energy. The company sold its first Prius in Japan the following year and to-date estimates a reduction in CO2 emissions of 34 million tons (30.8 million tonnes) as a result of subsequent sales. The FCV will use the Hybrid Synergy Drive technology that is used in the Prius, with a hydrogen fuel cell in place of the gas engine. Toyota anticipates that its FCVs will have a range of 300 miles (483 km) and that refueling will take as little as three minutes. 

BCRP Perú cerró 2013 con 65.663 millones de dólares en reservas internacionales (RIN)

- Perú cerró 2013 con 65.663 millones de dólares en reservas internacionales (RIN), una cifra mayor en 1.672 millones de dólares respecto a lo alcanzado a fines de 2012, informó hoy el Banco Central de Reserva (BCR).

Según los datos ofrecidos por el ente emisor, y publicados por la agencia oficial Andina, las RIN descendieron al 7 de enero de 2014 a 65.334 millones de dólares.

Al 31 de diciembre de 2013, el BCR acumuló compras de moneda extranjera por 5.210 millones de dólares y ventas por 5.205 millones.

El banco también realizó ventas de moneda extranjera al sector público por 4.298 millones de dólares.

Las cifras del BCR precisaron que al 31 de diciembre el circulante alcanzó un saldo de 35.070 millones de soles (12.525 millones de dólares), con lo que registró una tasa de crecimiento de 8,8 % en los últimos 12 meses.

El saldo del circulante al 7 de enero fue de 34.756 millones de soles (12.412 millones de dólares), que representaron una tasa de crecimiento anual de 10,6 %. 

Fuente:  EFE

Why Asia Is More Innovative Than Silicon Valley

I grew up looking up to Bruce Lee, as does every Asian boy with a heart. He’s the quintessential modern-day Asian hero. And I’m going to take a page out of the master’s book:

 

I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.

That’s perfect advice for Asian startups. We’re not in a startup to live up to Silicon Valley’s expectations.

As you may know, I think Asia should embrace its own identity and stop trying to be Silicon Valley . Today, I’m telling you, Asia is just as innovative as the Valley – if not more so. And this can’t be ignored.

For more thoughts on this matter, I chatted with Yat Siu, whose latest venture is game developer Animoca, his seventh venture so far from Hong Kong. We chatted together about Yat Siu’s key thesis about Asia: that its time has come.

First, let’s remember, Asia is super innovative.

The whole idea that Asia is copying Silicon Valley and that Asia needs to catch up to the Valley is outdated. Asia is not quickly becoming a great innovator, it already is. My favorite example from Yat Siu is Samsung.

 

Apple didn’t invent the GUI, nor the idea of a touch phone or a mouse. They licensed it, they innovated on the business model, the distribution, the app store, and so on. And in that same vein, Asia innovated on its supply chain, its production. Look at Samsung. Their innovation isn’t really just in a fantastic Galaxy phone. It’s everything around it. Being able to produce so many stock-keeping units like nobody else. Coming up with the best LEDs or LCDs. Or Chinese companies that can produce the quality at the pace and speed that the market of today needs. Nobody in the West can even hope to emulate that.

When we think that Asia is not innovating, we’re all missing something. Much of the wholesale innovations that we see in global markets are built on a foundation of Asian innovation.

 

Like freemium, it’s a distinctive Asian model, originally designed because pay-to-play didn’t work because of piracy. But now, that’s the principal source of revenues for any app that makes it globally.

The thing is, these regional innovations are hidden.

The silent and hidden innovators

The only reason why Kickstarter could really take off is because Asia could manufacture in a way that wasn’t possible even a decade ago. If you look at gaming content, look at Korea and Japan. If you look at innovation in streaming or P2P, China is leading in that area. Asian companies crush their Western counterparts in revenues and profits. Gung Ho, GREE, DeNa, Gamevil, Com2US versus Zynga, GLU, and so on. Just look at the market data.

In some ways, you could look at Asian culture’s propensity for hiding accomplishments and Silicon Valley’s PR machine as one reason why we don’t have enough press on this. The nature of Silicon Valley means that it just gets way more press. But the real secret is that the copying that you see isn’t actually copying.

The mistake is in viewing Asia through the lens of Silicon Valley. Asian companies must innovate in very different ways. Asians, and much of the rest of the world, suffer severely from “Silicon Valley envy”. But for Asia, it has been innovating quite a bit, it’s just been invisible.

The winds are changing eastward

The days when India was seen as the outsourcing nation and China as the manufacturing hub are coming to a close. The brain drain is reversing as high-skill jobs grow in the region. And the newest technologies are shifting right into the hands of Asia.

It’s looking like, after mobile, the internet of things will be the biggest trend to hit the world. That includes everything from wearable technologies to tracking objects to Arduino. And Asia is uniquely poised for this. Asia’s got a powerful mix of manufacturing and technology that will allow Asia to dominate the space in the future. Something the West can only dream of. As Yat quips pithily, “can the West even produce at any margin today?” Asia should be leveraging its software startups and its manufacturing wings to winning combos that will conquer the tech world. And we’re already seeing rumblings of Asian companies taking software innovation more seriously.

Source:  by Anh-Minh Do, TECHINASIA

Internet Pioneer Andreessen : Bubble Believers 'Don't Know What They're Talking About'

WSJ January 3rd, 2014.

According to an article published on the Wall Street Journal "in a 2011 essay in The Wall Street Journal, venture capitalist and Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen predicted that software companies were "eating the world" by replacing old industries with new services that are smarter, faster and cheaper''.

If anything, Mr. Andreessen's prophecy is unfolding ahead of schedule. The smartphone is now a portal into a taxi ride, a doctor's appointment or a date.

Startups like Airbnb Inc., TaskRabbit Inc. and RelayRides Inc. have used software apps to pioneer a new economy where consumers share their materials and services.Google Inc.,  the 12th most-valuable company by market capitalization when Mr. Andreessen's essay was published, is now third on that list.

In an interview, Mr. Andreessen looks back on his predictions and made some new ones for the year ahead.

Edited excerpts:

WSJ: What's driving the current speed of technological progress?

Mr. Andreessen: It's only really in the last two years that the smartphone has now become a mass-market phenomenon.

Heading into 2014, I think the number is like two billion smartphones in the world, and that number is growing really fast.

Within three years, I don't think it's going to be possible to buy a phone that's not a smartphone. The vendors are literally going to stop making these low-end feature phones, they're just going to make smartphones instead. That's what takes us to five billion.

We're just now starting to live in the world where everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket and everybody's connected. And so we're just starting to see the implications of that.

WSJ:Does that further the power of those who control the platforms— Apple and Google?

Mr. Andreessen: On current trends, yes. Apple and Google are both in extraordinarily powerful positions because they are the two dominant platforms owners in this new world. And there's no question they are both gaining strength right now. The big question for Apple is: Can they hold market share in the high end of the market? And the question for Google is: Can they keep Android together, or does Android fragment, especially overseas?

We're just now starting to live in the world where everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket and everybody's connected. And so we're just starting to see the implications of that.

WSJ:Does that further the power of those who control the platforms— Apple and Google?

Mr. Andreessen: On current trends, yes. Apple and Google are both in extraordinarily powerful positions because they are the two dominant platforms owners in this new world. And there's no question they are both gaining strength right now. The big question for Apple is: Can they hold market share in the high end of the market? And the question for Google is: Can they keep Android together, or does Android fragment, especially overseas?

WSJ:There's a flood of capital going into a range of software companies. Is this sustainable?

Mr. Andreessen: In my opinion, there's nothing broad-based that's happening. There's no bubble, per se. Bubbles are a very specific phenomenon where you've got mass psychology and you've got every mom and pop investor and every cabdriver and every shoe-shine boy buying stock in whatever it is—going all the way back to the South Sea Bubble all the way through to the dot-com bubble.

There's nothing like that. We're talking about a fairly small number of companies. And then, we're talking almost entirely on the private side. It hasn't really affected the public market that much.

WSJ: How is this different than the dot-com bubble?

 Mr. Andreessen: The costs of building an Internet company today are far lower than they were in the late '90s.

In the '90s if you wanted to build an Internet company, you needed to buy Sun servers, Cisco networking gear, Oracle  databases, and EMC storage systems. And those companies would charge you a ton of money even just to get up and running.

The new startups today, they don't buy any of that stuff. They don't buy literally anything from any of those companies. Instead, they go on Amazon Web Services and they pay by the drink and they're paying somewhere between 100x and 1000x cheaper per unit—per unit of compute, per unit of storage, per unit of networking, per unit of software.

In retrospect, it's a miracle that anything worked in the late '90s given how limited the market was and given how expensive it was. It's a miracle that eBay worked, it's a miracle that Amazon worked.

The devil's in the details. It's really up to each company to demonstrate that it's going to be a franchise company and demonstrate over time that it can monetize appropriately. The ones that make it work are going to be enormously valuable. This is a time of very big franchise creation. The people who say it's all like the '90s and it's all going to come crashing down just don't know what they're talking about.

WSJ: But is there enough demand out there for two or three or more players in these categories that are getting a lot of venture money?

Mr. Andreessen: Generally in tech, the markets are winner take all. Google still competes with people in search and so forth, but over time, Google is gaining share against Microsoft and against Yahoo

I think it's a question of: What are the categories versus industries? Are Dropbox and Box the same thing or are they different things?

One way of looking at it is it's the same thing. Another way of looking at it—which is what we believe—is they are very different. Because one is consumer-focused, the other is enterprise-focused.

Another example is: Should all the sharing-economy companies just be one company? We think the answer is no. We think there is a big winner per vertical.

WSJ: With a lot of companies getting funding across the board, inevitably, many will fail. Is failure a good thing or a bad thing in Silicon Valley?

Mr. Andreessen: I'm really schizophrenic on this. I can argue both sides of it. The Midwestern Protestant in me is very strongly on the side of failure is terrible and horrible and awful and the goal of every entrepreneur should be to not fail. This whole thing where failure is somehow good in Silicon Valley, or failure is OK, or failure is wonderful, or failure is part of the process, is just a bunch of nonsense, and is actually a destructive sort of meme because it gives people an easy excuse to give up. If you look at a lot of the great successes in corporate history and in technology, they required real determination and real staying power.

The other side of it that I can argue equally enthusiastically, is that an enormous cultural positive for the Valley and more broadly the U.S. is that failure does not end your career. Failure is not a mark of shame that means you are done in your field—which is true in a lot of the rest of the world. In the Valley, it means you have valuable experience. One of the things I always tell our entrepreneurs is, don't just hire people out of successful companies, because the people out of successful companies didn't learn anything. Maybe they were just along for the ride. Whereas, the people who have been through tough times tend to be much more resilient and they tend to be much more determined and they're not daunted by things being hard.

The way I try to resolve it is, I think there's a grain of truth on both sides. I think both are kind of true and then it's just a question of nuance and judgment. You really can't just give up the minute things get hard. But at the same time, not everything works. And when something doesn't work, it shouldn't end your career, it should just inform the next thing you do. And that's kind of how the Valley works.

WSJ: How do you get behind startups with no business model? With Pinterest, how do you get from zero revenue to a $3.8 billion valuation?

Mr. Andreessen: There are two categories of companies like this. You can guess which one I think Pinterest is in.

There are the ones where everybody thinks they don't know how they're going to make money but they actually know.

There's this kind of Kabuki dance that sometimes these companies put on where we're just a bunch of kids and we're just farting around and I don't know how we're going to make money. It's an act. They do it because they can. They don't let anyone else realize they have it figured out because that would just draw more competition. Facebook always knew, LinkedIn always knew, and Twitter  always knew.

They knew the nature of the valuable product they were going to be able to offer and they knew people were going to pay for it. They hadn't defined it down to the degree of being ready to ship it, or they didn't have a sales force yet, so there were things that they hadn't yet done. But they knew. They had a high level of confidence and over the passage of time we discovered they were correct.

Now, there are other companies that honestly have no idea. Like, they really honestly have no idea. You need to be very cautious on these things because one of the companies that had no idea how it was going to make money when it first started was Google.

WSJ:Which type is Snapchat?

Mr. Andreessen: The bull case on Snapchat is that there's a company in China called Tencent that's worth $100 billion.

And Tencent is worth $100 billion because it takes its messaging services on a smartphone and then wraps them in a wide range of services—things like gaming and social networking and emojis, and video chat—and then charges for all these add-on services.

And it has been one of the most successful technology companies of all time and is worth literally $100 billion on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Maybe that's [CEO Evan Spiegel's ] plan. Maybe Evan's plan is to transplant the Tencent business model into the U.S., which nobody has actually been able to do yet.

WSJ: As software eats the world, what happens to the older, incumbent businesses being attacked by newer startups? Will they simply decay and die and go away, or will they adapt?

Mr. Andreessen: If somebody wants to go into a full defensive crouch, some people do choose to do that.

But I think more and more big companies are thinking OK, there are big opportunities here, there are new ways to reach out to customers, to ensure our customers are happy.

Sony puts 4K Ultra Short Throw projector up against the wall.

Source: Gizmag,Sony.


Sony is making another run at the Ultra HD home theater market, though this time over a much shorter distance. At CES, the company is demoing a prototype of its 4K Ultra Short Throw Projector that has the ability to cast images up to 147-inches in size from a distance of around 20 in (50 cm). 
Designed to look like a piece of furniture, the unit measures 43.3 x 10.4 x 21.1 in (110 x 26.5 x 53.5 cm) and sits on the floor alongside any wall with enough space to accommodate its considerable projection size. A 1.6x power zoom allows for the UHD image to be adjusted to anywhere between 66 and 147 inches in size. Sony says the device boasts 3D capability and will support current video content from internet, satellite and cable providers, along with services such as Netflix and Sony's own Video Unlimited 4K. Like the VPL-VW1000ES, the device uses an SXRD panel and boasts 4096 x 2160 pixels with 2,000 lumens of brightness, but does so with the inherent convenience that an Ultra Short Throw (UST) projector offers. In addition to minimizing shadows and removing the need for complex installation or mounting, Sony's UST home projector includes four HDMI ports and two speaker terminals, with separate speaker units able to sit nicely alongside the projector by modeling the same sleek design. Light is sourced from a laser diode, which the company says will see the display reach and maintain superior peak brightness and color accuracy compared to typical lamp-driven projectors. 
The Sony 4K Ultra Short Throw Projector will be available mid-2014 for approximately US$30,000 to $40,000. 

Britain to be home of "world's most demanding electric bus route"

We've recently seen electric city buses being tried out on routes in places like Germany, Sweden and Korea. On January 19th, however, a demonstration program will begin in the UK, which its organizers claim will be one of the most demanding ever. The 5-year project will involve eight electric buses running 17 hours a day, covering a 15-mile (24-km) route in the large British town of Milton Keynes. While the drivers are on their scheduled mid-shift breaks, the buses will be parked over charging coils embedded in the road. Power will be transmitted from those coils to receiving plates located on the underside of the buses – just like the inductive charging setups already in use in most of the other previously-mentioned projects.

All of the Milton Keynes buses will be serviced by two wireless charging points, with a 10-minute charge replenishing the batteries by approximately two thirds. With each bus logging over 56,000 miles (90,123 km) per year, it is estimated the eight vehicles will keep approximately five tonnes (5.5 tons) of particulates and noxious tailpipe emissions, and about 270 tonnes (298 tons) of CO2 from entering the atmosphere each year. The multi-partner project is being led by eFleet Integrated Service, a company set up by Mitsui & Co. Europe and design engineering consultancy Arup.

Sony reveals upgraded Action Cam

Sony is now offering a deluxe version of its Action Cam, which we spied on the floor of CES this week. Among the new features are high-speed shooting modes, a splash-proof body and of course, a nifty white finish. The latest version of the Action Cam (or the HDR-AS100V, technically-speaking) can now shoot slow motion footage at speeds of either 120 or 240 fps, both at a resolution of 720p. It can also now shoot at 1080p/24fps, for people who want a "filmier" look than that offered by 30fps. Sony claims that the AS100V is able to "capture quick action with extremely smooth image motion," thanks to a use of the XAVC S recording format and 50Mbps high bit rate data transfer. The camera's Exmor R CMOS sensor has also been bumped up from 16 to 18 megapixels, while shot stability has reportedly been more than doubled, courtesy of the company's SteadyShot Image Stabilization tech. 
  

Users can additionally control up to five Action Cams at once, using the optional wristwatch-style Live-View Remote (pictured above). Other new features include a choice of color settings, a 2-megapixel time-lapse mode, 13.5-megapixel stills, a built-in tripod mount, and the ability to record images upside-down when the camera is inverted. As mentioned, the AS100V is also splash-resistant, even when not encased in its watertight housing. Future firmware updates will include time code capability, burst photo mode, and live video streaming. The new Action Cam will be in stores as of March, at a price of about US$300 for the camera alone, or $400 for a package that includes the Live-View Remote.

Source: Gizmag

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