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Saturday, July 19, 2008

This year’s Leisure Taiwan trade show (a.k.a Taiwan Sport Recreation and Leisure Show) started yesterday, with 131 companies participating including sports media companies such as ESPN and VideoLand Television, businesses selling sports equipment and fitness clubs.

There were also a variety of sports being played in the arena built for the trade show. The events included a 3-on-3 basketball tournament, free style shooting, and bicycle test-riding. In addition, conferences discussed issues related to sports and physical education.

A major topic in the trade show was energy-efficiency and, as a result, bicycles and similar sports equipment were being heavily promoted.

Next Tuesday, companies from the electronics industry plan to promote their industry at “2008 Digital E-Park.” In previous years, organizations from the electronics industry have showcased their products at Leisure Taiwan instead of at the Digital E-Park, so this move has reduced the number of markets covered by Leisure Taiwan.

Friday, October 12, 2007

The Internet is very much present at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2007, not just, like in previous years, as a means for the journalists who have 80 workplaces for their own notebooks to report on the fair, but like before as a chance – and as a threat for rights-owners of digital media.

After a marginal existence in the previous year, bloggers have got their own “living room 2.0” at the fair, furnished with everything a blogger needs, including media attention. Every day from Wednesday October 10 to Sunday October 14 they will write and podcast about the big names to meet, the events not to be missed and their very personal experiences and thoughts. Three of the bloggers write in English, two English language podcasts are done, to widen the reach of the Book Fair 2.0. The blog entries and podcasts will be available until after the book fair at http://www.book-fair.com/en/wordpress/ and the bloggers themselves can be visited on the weekend at hall 4.2, Q411, though until now it is more the media and less the visitors of the fair, the bloggers come in contact with.

Digitalization and digital media, especially books and magazines offered digitally, are a hot topic at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, as more and more publishers want to see the digital counterparts of their traditional media not just as a field to be present in, but as a possible profit center. With scientific books, this move already was quite successful: Publishing house Springer for example, offering over 40,000 ebooks and over 1700 electronic magazines, of which over 1200 are still actively continued with Springer, nowadays does an ebook-variant of every traditional scientific book they print – and already has the largest part of their cash-flow from digital media.

This is harder for fiction publishing houses as the Pabel Möwig group (VPM), which has become active early. They do offer the digitized new adventures of – say, the outer-space-hero Perry Rhodan -, but the turnover is still only a small addition to the print and other media versions. Readers become readier to read on a screen, but their readiness is still growing slowly. Since a new generation of readers is growing up using the internet as a reference work – especially Google and Wikipedia – it will become more and more natural in the future.

A growing number of service companies in the publishing sector therefore offers re-digitalization apart from increasingly effective content management systems, with which new forms of media can easily be compiled from the contents of a data base.

Older works, of which the publishing house owns the rights, but for which a reprint might not be profitable, are scanned, divided into content sections and tagged. When the original type face isn’t good enough, books are typewritten in third world countries two or three times which are corrected and merged into a final version. Once in the system, digitalized books can be at disposal as MobiPocket ebooks or Print On Demand (POD) and with aid of the Amazon BookSurge program remain available, possibly even within 24 hours.

Digital content can also be used as a marketing-tool with the “Search Inside” from Amazon.com, where the full text of a book is visible but only small parts of the book are shown at a time.

Right after Amazon, Google also presented their own projects for the digitalization of books, where publishers have the option of just sending a box or container full of their books in printed form and leave the job of digitalization to Google, where afterwards their content will be findable with Google Book Search. The difference between those two internet services was obvious, though: Amazon wants to earn money with books, while Google’s business is advertising, their revenue model is AdSense and AdWords, targeted as perfect as possible with full text search. Both services had to answer questions as to how they will protect the content from unpaid exploitation, as probably fewer and fewer users will be willing to pay for a digital eBook when they can read the content for free, up to twenty pages at a time. The freeloader mentality of many Internet users was seen as a threat by many of the publishers.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Seven Canadians were killed, and six others were in critical condition, after an Israeli raid in Lebanon on Sunday, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay announced. The deaths were believed to be the first recent casualties in Lebanon from any G8 country.

Associated Press reports anonymous Lebanese officials saying the family of Canadians were killed at their home in the town of Aitaroun. Many Lebanese citizens have emigrated to Canada and often return to spend their summers in the south of Lebanon.

Sixteen thousand Canadians have registered with the embassy in Beirut, but MacKay said the number of those present could be as high as 40,000. “We’re calling for restraint in all sectors right now and hope to be able to have those ships in place and citizens moving out of Lebanon as quickly as possible.” MacKay said.

Parliament Hill demonstrators in Ottawa on Sunday protested the Harper government’s position regarding the ongoing strikes. One placard declared, “Killing children is not a ‘measured response’,” referring to the G8 statement released earlier.

During a protest in Montréal on Sunday, one woman said she had just been informed that two of her family members were killed in the Israeli air strike. The unnamed woman screamed “My father, my uncle — they’re dead. What’s happening?” She said her family members were in the Middle East for a summer vacation.

The deaths occurred on the fifth day of Israel’s military attacks in Lebanon, instigated by the capture of 2 Israeli soldiers and killing of 8 others by the Shiite Hezbollah in a cross-border attack. The fighting has caused at least 148 fatalities in Lebanon and 23 in Israel.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Hours before the Opening Ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics, 21-year-old Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili died after hitting an unpadded pole during a routine training exercise at the Whistler Sliding Centre in Vancouver, Canada on Friday morning.

According to those on the scene, blood was “pouring” from the athlete’s head as he was being placed into a stretcher. Doctors did try to revive him, but to no avail.

“Our first thoughts are with the family, friends, and colleagues of the athlete,” Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), told international media. “The whole Olympic family is struck by this tragedy, which clearly casts a shadow over these Games.”

CEO of the Vancouver organizing committee, John Furlong went on to say: “We are deeply struck by this tragedy, and join the IOC in extending our condolences to the family, friends and teammates of this athlete, who came to Vancouver to follow his Olympic dream.”

The International Luge Federation (FIL) is now in the process of conducting an internal investigation into the circumstances of what occurred. Training was suspended until officials were able to certify the course as safe.

The president of the ILF, Josef Fendt, said in a statement: “This is a terrible accident. This is the gravest thing that can happen in sport, and our thoughts and those of the luge family are naturally with those touched by this event.”

Mr. Kumaritashvili is the fourth athlete to die in Winter Olympic history.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Nervous savers have re-formed queues this morning outside many branches of Northern Rock, after the £2.68 billion bank took an emergency loan from the Bank of England, the UK central bank.

Shares in the bank had dropped 25% by lunchtime yesterday in London – and stood nearly 60% lower from their high of February – after the Bank of England acted in its capacity as “lender of last resort” to provide Northern Rock with short-term financing to enable it to continue operations.

The Bank of England hasn’t acted as lender of last resort since 1973, when the collapse of Cedar Holdings – a pioneer of second mortgages to UK home-owners – threatened a crisis in the country’s banking industry.

Northern Rock has been hit hard since June this year by the turmoil in world credit markets. Although only 0.24% of its assets are exposed to subprime US housing debt, the bank’s business model saw it grow its loan book by 43% in the first six months of this year. Rather than lending money deposited with it by savers, Northern has borrowed aggressively in the short-term capital markets.

“Northern Rock is not a reckless lender,” said Angela Knight, head of the British Bankers Association on national radio this morning. Urging the bank’s savers not to withdraw their money in panic, “the mortgage lending it does well and it does in a high quality, high calibre way,” she added.

But savers queuing to withdraw their money from Northern Rock today said they were “horrified” by the Bank of England needing to step in.

“I am going to take out the lot, every penny,” said one Northern Rock saver to Bloomberg as he queued outside the bank’s West End branch in London.

Friday, February 27, 2009

On February 24th the Swedish Royal Court announced that the Crown Princess Victoria is to be married in 2010 to her boyfriend and former fitness trainer Daniel Westling. KP Victoria, 31, and Daniel, 35, have been in a relationship for seven years. As the wedding is to be held in the summer of 2010, it gives the court 18 months to prepare, contemplate the wedding dress of the Crown Princess, and complete the guest-list – which will include prominent guests from Europe and the world.

According to the Swedish constitution, KP Victoria must ask for the King’s approval for the marriage, who then has to call a cabinet council so that the government can give its approval. This was done on Tuesday morning, just before the court announced the engagement.

After the wedding, Daniel will be given the title of Prince Daniel, Duke of Västergötland. Their children will be next in line to the throne after Crown Princess Victoria.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

At least 400 people have been killed and a further 10,000 injured by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake and its aftershocks which struck remote and mountainous Yushu county, in the south of Qinghai province in the west of China.

An official for the town of Jiegu (Gyêgu), the county seat, which was one of the worst-hit locations, said that “the death toll will definitely go up.”

The USGS reports the tremors started at 07.49 local time (23.49 UTC). The epicentre was 240 kilometres north-northwest of Qamdo, Xizang, and 375 kilometres south-southeast of Golmud, Qinhai, at a depth of ten kilometres. The China Earthquake Networks Center, however, conflicted the USGS statistics, putting the earthquake’s magnitude at 7.1.A local official, Huang Limin was quoted by the Chinese Xinhua news service as saying: “Soldiers have been dispatched to save the people buried in the collapsed houses.” Authorities have ordered supplies to be moved to the area, but Yushu is hundreds of miles away from any airport, according to the BBC.

The USGS also reported there was a 5.8 magnitude aftershock hit the same area about an hour and a half later, at 09.25 local time (01.25 UTC).

The head of news for the Yushu county television station, who was a witness to the quake, spoke to the state broadcaster CCTV about the incident, saying “In a flash, the houses went down. It was a terrible earthquake. In a small park, there is a Buddhist tower and the top of the tower fell off.” He said that residents fled after the tremors began.

“Everybody is out on the streets, standing in front of their houses, trying to find their family members,” he added.

Another official commented that around 85% of the buildings in the town of Jiegu, located close to the quake’s epicentre, were destroyed, saying that “the streets in Jiegu are thronged with panic – injured people, with many bleeding in the head.

“Many students are buried under the debris due to building collapse at a vocational school. I can see injured people everywhere. The biggest problem now is that we lack tents, we lack medical equipment, medicine and medical workers.”

The plateau where the earthquake hit is frequently visited by tremors; however, there are rarely many casualties due to its remoteness and small population. However, in May 2008 a heavy 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck near Sichuan foothills, killing 80,000 people.