Tech Billionaires Face Tricky Political Waters After Democratic Sweep

Many donated money to President Trump’s favored causes and became his allies. Now that political alignment may be a liability. 

The New York Times, Eli Tan, Theodore Schleifer and Erin Griffith, Nov. 5, 2026

President Trump met with leaders of the artificial intelligence industry 

at the White House in September.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

In September, President Trump hosted a White House luncheon to discuss artificial intelligence, flanked by some of the world’s wealthiest tech executives: Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and others. They had the president’s ear to pitch an A.I. future uninhibited by regulation or guardrails. 

For two years, it had been that easy to get what they wanted. Tech billionaires and their companies donated money to Mr. Trump’s favored causes, including the White House ballroom. The moguls posed for photos and lavished him with praise and gifts. Amazon heavily promoted a movie about Melania Trump. 

Then on Tuesday, the American public delivered a rebuke of the tech industry’s agenda. Overnight, the billionaires’ political alignment with the president may have become a liability. 

Democrats, riding a wave of anti-tech sentiment, including distrust of tech leaders, opposition to data centers and fears of job loss fueled by A.I., will soon control Congress and prominent state governments. In victory speeches around the country, they made tech titans avatars of inequality and corruption that plagued the Republican Party in the election cycle. 

That puts some tech executives in a trickier position. It may be harder for them to make progress on their goals of A.I. dominance. Many saw their net worths drop on Thursday as investors sold out of A.I. and chip stocks, driving the tech-heavy Nasdaq down more than 5 percent. And some may even find themselves under investigation. 

“You guys aren’t the actual leaders of the Valley. You’re the mis-leaders of the Valley,” said Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn who is one of the country’s top Democratic donors and a leader of the tech industry’s progressive wing. “It will no longer be that these MAGA voices in the Valley are in charge.” 

Silicon Valley’s shift to the right began in 2024, when Mr. Musk and others went all-in on Mr. Trump, visiting Mar-a-Lago and taking up powerful positions in his administration. New political groups supporting niche interests like cryptocurrency spent enormous sums to promote their agendas. 

Guests at Mr. Trump’s inauguration last year included, from right in the front row,

Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sánchez Bezos and Mark

Zuckerberg. Credit...Ricky Carioti

This time, the money was even bigger. Among the 20 biggest donors in the mid terms were tech billionaires, including the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. 

An Andreessen-backed cryptocurrency group, Fairshake, spent tens of millions on a mission to defeat Sherrod Brown, the Democrat running for Senate in Ohio. Mr. Musk poured over $474 million into Republican super PACs, including hundreds of millions to support Ken Paxton, the Texas Republican nominee for the Senate. And a Musk-endorsed billionaire ran for governor in Ohio.

Mr. Musk’s results, said Rohan Patel, a former Tesla vice president reporting to Mr. Musk who now works in Democratic politics, are a “total repudiation of his ugly brand of politics.” 

Neil Malhotra, a professor of political economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, said tech leaders had mostly been acting out of self-preservation. 

“They understand when you have a president who is willing to use the state to intervene in the economy, it’s smart business practice to be on good terms with the administration,” he said. 

Dr. Malhotra noted that most business leaders would rather that the government not move too far from the center in either direction. After the 2024 election, “Republicans overinterpreted their mandate,” he said. 

Now, tech leaders may find their business dealings under investigation. “They are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing,” Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, posted on social media on Tuesday. 

The tech titans appeared triumphant in one race: A proposed billionaire tax in California is on the cusp of being defeated. Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, and other tech investors and founders poured about $330 million into efforts to vanquish the measure, which called for a one-time 5 percent tax. A companion measure that would effectively ban all future wealth taxes also appeared likely to pass. 

Still, anti-billionaire and anti-tech sentiment was prominent in victory speeches around the country. Mr. Paxton’s opponent in Texas, James Talarico, whom Mr. Hoffman backed with nearly $17 million, compared his race to David versus Goliath. 

“We just sent a message to every billionaire megadonor, every trillionaire megadonor,” he said. He called out “the billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians.” This election was a referendum on their power, too, he said. 

Roy Cooper, a Democrat who won a Senate seat in North Carolina, said in his victory speech on Tuesday that “we told Washington loud and clear that North Carolinians will always matter more than the billionaires and the insiders.” 

The left-wing victor in Michigan’s Senate race, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, said he would be “taking on the corporations and the billionaires, special interests who’ve rigged the system against us for far too long.” 

And Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat who won re-election in Georgia, called out “the titans of Silicon Valley,” who “dig bunkers for themselves and warn that the artificial intelligence they’re creating risks human extinction.”

Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, called out “the titans of Silicon

Valley” while speaking on election night at an Atlanta hotel. Credit...Nicole Craine

for The New York Times

Late Tuesday, as the results of the election rolled in, the hosts of the tech podcast “All-In,” who are tech investors, expressed surprise and disappointment in a livestream at the possibility that Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, could lose his bid for a fourth term. 

The tech industry had assumed that after Mr. Abbott won, he would lift a moratorium on data centers in Texas and that construction would begin again, the “All-In” hosts said. Pro-business Texas is the second-largest state for data center projects, representing roughly 30 percent of the planned capacity for 2028, according to SemiAnalysis, a research group. 

Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat who beat Mr. Abbott, has said she would keep the moratorium going until the state could pass legislation around data centers, delaying projects from coming online for many months. 

Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico campaigning in San Antonio on Sunday.
Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

Chamath Palihapitiya, an “All-In” host, connected the slowdown or halt of data center projects to the performance of A.I.-related stocks and, ultimately, the fate of the U.S. economy. He warned of a recession, noting that losing the computing power of new data centers was the “single most effective way to tank the market.” 

Mr. Musk, who donated $5 million to Mr. Abbott’s campaign, posted on social media after the results: “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.” 

Could cryptocurrency dethrone the dollar?

MSN – Yahoo, 1 September 2019 

Chris J Ratcliffe Bank of England governor Mark Carney has suggested that a
virtual currency could one day replace the dollar as king of the foreign exchange market

Bank of England governor Mark Carney has suggested that a virtual currency, modelled on Facebook's Libra, could one day replace the dollar as king of the foreign exchange market.

The BoE chief aired vague proposals for a so-called "Synthetic Hegemonic Currency" at the recent Jackson Hole Symposium of central bankers.

Here is a brief assessment of why the greenback is losing its lustre and the outlook for Carney's proposed new digital currency, which would be supported by major central banks around the world.

Why dollar dominance?

The dollar has been the world's reference currency since the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944, when various key units were fixed to the value of the greenback. It has retained its global supremacy ever since, thanks to the economic and political clout of the United States.

"The dominant currency is always that of the world's biggest political power," noted Philippe Waechter, head of research at Ostrum Asset Management.

The dollar accounted for almost 62 percent of global foreign exchange reserves in the first quarter of 2019, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The European single currency was second with 20.2 percent, while China's yuan comprised only two percent despite the country's rise to the rank of the world's second biggest economy behind the US.

Why is greenback losing appeal?

Although the dollar has lost its sparkle owing to globalisation and the changing world economic order, gyrations in the US unit still impact economies elsewhere.

"US developments have significant spillovers onto both the trade performance and the financial conditions of countries even with relatively limited direct exposure to the US economy," Carney said at the recent bankers' meet in Wyoming.

Alastair Pike Don't expect the US to let its currency dwindle without a fight

When the greenback appreciates, so do repayments for many emerging nations because their debts tend to be denominated in dollars.

The BoE chief, who steps down in January, added: "In the longer term, we need to change the game."

Central bank role?

The public sector, in the form of central banks, could instead provide the best support for a new virtual currency, according to Carney.

"It is an open question whether such a new (cryptocurrency) would be best provided by the public sector, perhaps through a network of central bank digital currencies," he said.

Yet central bankers and world leaders alike remain anxious over the current crop of virtual currencies because they are unregulated.

US President Donald Trump himself has lashed out at Bitcoin and Libra for being "based on thin air" and having no standing or dependability -- unlike the dollar.

Commentators believe Washington is unlikely to allow the greenback to lose its cherished status as the world's premier reserve currency.

"The United States will simply not allow it to happen without a fight. Nobody in its position would," said Rabobank analysts.

What about Libra?

The BoE governor meanwhile made explicit references to Libra -- a future cryptocurrency unveiled by social media giant Facebook in June.

Carney avoided all mention of Bitcoin, which is the world's most popular digital unit but has been plagued by volatility.

Libra, which aims to launch in the first half of 2020, will be backed by a basket of currency assets to avoid the wild swings of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Yet Libra has also attracted the ire of central bankers owing to its origin in the private sector.

"Central banks are a little annoyed by this (Facebook) bid to privatise currency," said Agnes Benassy-Quere, a researcher at the Paris School of Economics.

Whereas Bitcoin is decentralised, Libra will be co-managed by 100 partner firms including Facebook itself.

Official world foreign exchange reserves, divided by currency, converted to US dollars, in the first quarter of 2019 @AFPgraphics pic.twitter.com/B73vkAA4Ec

— AFP news agency (@AFP) 1 september 2019

German software giant boosts Palestinian IT sector

It’s easy to assume that nothing much goes on in the Palestinian territories other than war and violence. But the German enterprise software giant SAP has spotted an opportunity there.

Deutsche Welle, 23 June 2015

Murad Tahboub is the first to admit that the year 2000 was not a good time to start his IT services business in Palestine.

"It was just before the second intifada, so it took us a long time to get going, and it wasn't until 2005 that we started landing some serious export business," said Tahboub.

"Even now, it's a challenge overcoming the stereotypes about Palestine. But our company ASAL Technologies has been growing healthily for the last ten years. We started with 10 employees, and today it's more than 150."

Tahboub's business is not an isolated example. Despite periodic outbreaks of fighting between Israel and the Palestinians (the most recent being Israel's offensive against Gaza last year) there is a flourishing IT software industry in Palestine, and its universities turn out more than 2,000 graduates in IT-related subjects every year.

Strong startup scene

The industry's strengths lie in software development in all areas, and there's a lively startup sector of small businesses with bright ideas looking for investors to take them to the next stage of growth.

So although a recent initiative by SAP may have raised eyebrows elsewhere, in Palestine it's seen as due recognition for their growing IT muscle. In 2005, information and communications technology (ICT) was worth $112 million (98.6 million euros) in added value to the economy; by 2013, it was $453 million at constant prices, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. ICT accounts for about six per cent of GDP.

The SAP deal is this: in the last few weeks, eight Palestinian universities have joined SAP's University Alliances program to develop graduates with critical IT skills. Palestinian graduates will also be recruited into SAP's Young Professional Program, where they'll receive training in SAP solutions and tools.

Although there is no guarantee of jobs with SAP, the graduates will effectively be part of the software giant's push into the whole of the Middle East. It has around 1,350 customers there already and the region is one of SAP's fastest-growing markets.

Unknown to many, Palestine's economy is more than just vegetable growing

So it was a hard-headed business decision, but Senior Vice President for Strategic Investments Marita Mitschein prefers to emphasise the social benefits. "SAP believes in the importance of IT to shape people's lives in the Middle East and we are proud to play a part in doing that in Palestine," she said.

On the ground in Palestine, they don't disguise their pleasure at SAP's move. "It's significant for the training of our graduates, but the connections that SAP partners will make with each other are more important," said Yahya Al-Salqan, chairman of the 150-strong Palestinian IT Association.

"It will be a network that will help us build a strong industry in the region, and we need that to hold on to our brightest graduates. They often have to go abroad to get a job. We have lots of bright people, a reputation for quality and great value because our costs are about half the costs in Europe and the US."

Outside help

SAP and Palestinian IT didn't just fall into each other's arms. The marriage broker was the Office of the Quartet Representative (OQR), which has a brief to promote economic development. Tony Blair is currently the Representative and the Quartet was set up by the EU, the UN, the USA and Russia. The OQR brought in David Dick, an IT industry executive, to attract the world's big IT players to the region – the likes of Hewlett Packard, IBM, Microsoft and SAP.

"I've had a whole career in IT, so I've been engaging with senior IT execs to persuade them about the opportunities in Palestine. SAP were quick to offer their support and they put me in touch with their Middle East business and their worldwide university training team," said David Dick.

"The key to drawing in the big global businesses is to get Palestine onto their radar. They already place much of their support work in low-cost locations anyway, so it's not difficult for them to add Palestine to the mix. SAP is just the first, and we hope to make another announcement soon."

Back in Ramallah, Murad Tahboub is brimming with optimism. "The SAP initiative is a wakeup call to all multinationals to take a look at the valuable resource we have here. Things are looking rosy for the IT sector here, and despite all the obstacles, I believe that the generation of jobs is the key element for peace and prosperity in the region."

Hewlett-Packard reportedly set to split into two companies

Silicon Valley personal computer and printer maker Hewlett-Packard Co. is set to split into two companies, according to a newspaper report. The business will look to focus more on corporate services.

Deutsche Welle, 6 Oct 2014

The Wall Street Journal reported on its website Sunday that HP was poised for the split, citing people familiar with the matter.

The move, which could be announced as early as Monday, would see HP create one company that sells computers and printers, and second that focuses on technology services, including data storage, servers and software.

HP was founded by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in Palo Alto, California in 1939. It went on to have a pivotal role in the rise of the Silicon Valley tech industry and the personal computer revolution.

The company has struggled of late, laying off tens of thousands of employees over the past few years as it struggles with dwindling sales and a rise in mobile computing.

HP still retains 300,000 employees, however, and is on track to earn $112 billion (90 billion euros) in revenue this fiscal year.

A number of major companies have spun off operations into separate companies in recent years, in the face of pressure from shareholders. Investors often reward technology companies for doing so, in the belief that more focused companies perform better.

Last week online auction company eBay announced it would spin off its mobile payment service PayPal. The move prompted a more than 7 percent rise in share prices on the day when news of the move broke.

dr/av (AP, Reuters, AFP)

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Obama appoints new chief technology officer

English.news.cn   2012-03-10      

            

WASHINGTON, March 9 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday appointed Todd Park as the administration's chief technology officer (CTO), filling a vacancy created by last month' s departure of Aneesh Chopra.

 Todd Park 

Since August 2009, Park has served as CTO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

"Todd Park has demonstrated a remarkable talent for enlisting innovative technologies to modernize government, reduce waste, and make government information more accessible to the public," Obama said in a statement. "In his new position he will bring those skills to the entire federal enterprise, ensuring that government will serve all Americans fairly, effectively, and efficiently."

The U.S. CTO, a position that Obama created on his first day as president, is responsible for ensuring the adoption of innovative technologies to support administration priorities, including job creation, broader access to affordable health care, enhanced energy efficiency, a more open government, and national and homeland security, according to the White House.

In his work at HHS, Park led the creation of HealthCare.gov, which promotes the president's healthcare legislation and allows consumers to compare health insurance plans by zip code.

Editor: yan

India taps IT power to woo African youth

The Economic Times, 28 MAY, 2011

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DAR ES SALAAM: India is reaching out to African youth here by offering to make Tanzania a "communication and IT hub of East Africa" and has unfurled new possibilities of cooperation in key high-tech areas like space cooperation.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
with Tanzania President  Jakaya Mrisho
 Kikwete visiting project (Co EICT) at
 Dar-es-Salaam Institute of Technology
at Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania on
Friday. (PTI)

Drummers and dancers swayed jauntily, waving flags of India and Tanzania at the entrance to the Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology where hundreds of budding engineers and young IT trainees eagerly waited for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to speak to them Friday evening.

It was a hot and humid evening in this coastal metropolis, but the torrid weather could not deter students who sat patiently and clapped spontaneously as Manmohan Singh described them as "the future of Tanzania" and offered to "create a pool of world class professionals" in East Africa's largest country.

"You represent the future of Tanzania, and from what I have seen I can say with confidence that the future of Tanzania is bright," he said to loud applause before formally launching the Indo-Tanzanian Centre for Excellence in IT which has been set up by Indian software engineers at a cost of a little over $2 million in August last year.

"India is ready to provide all the help we can within our resources to enable Tanzania to create a pool of world class IT professionals," he said.

"If we can produce a steady stream of highly trained scientists, technologists and engineers, our cooperation would be worthwhile and we would be putting our money to good use," he said.

This is the first time an Indian Prime Minister was addressing the youth in an African university, signalling New Delhi's new vision to forge a contemporary and modern partnership with the African continent where over 50 per cent of nearly 1 billion people are in the age group of 18-35.

"The scientific and technological empowerment of the youth has a direct correlation to a nation's social and economic progress," he said.

The institute also houses the Param High Speed Super Computer gifted by India to Tanzania in 2009 that is being used for weather-forecasting and high-speed computation.

This has made Tanzania only one of four African countries that also include Ghana, Egypt and South Africa which has facilities for high-tech computing facilities. India has also set up a similar IT centre for excellence in Ghana.

Raising the bar for India's diplomatic thrust in Africa, Manmohan Singh announced India's readiness to cooperate with Tanzania in the area of space technology and applications and placed it in the larger context of South-South bonding.

Bell Labs’ lightRadio Promises Greener, Simpler, Lighter Networks

Scientific Computing

Alcatel-Lucent has announced lightRadio, a new mobile and broadband infrastructure that streamlines and radically simplifies mobile networks. The solution was unveiled at a major press launch event in London supported by partners Freescale and HP.

The lightRadio cube is a small antenna
and radio that has shrunk the regular
workings of a conventional cell phone
base station and antenna and could,
as soon as mid-2012, replace unsightly
cell phone towers. Courtesy of Bell Labs /
Alcatel-Lucent

Pioneered by Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent’s unique research and development arm, the new lightRadio system is designed to dramatically reduce technical complexity and contain power consumption and other operating costs in the face of sharp traffic growth. This is accomplished by taking today’s base stations and massive cell site towers, typically the most expensive, power hungry, and difficult to maintain elements in the network, and radically shrinking and simplifying them.

lightRadio represents a new architecture where the base station, typically located at the base of each cell site tower, is broken into its components elements and then distributed into both the antenna and throughout a cloud-like network. Additionally, today’s clutter of antennas serving 2G, 3G and LTE systems are combined and shrunk into a single powerful, Bell Labs-pioneered multi-frequency, multi-standard Wideband Active Array Antenna that can be mounted on poles, sides of buildings or anywhere else there is power and a broadband connection.

The new lightRadio product family, of which initial elements will be ready to begin customer trials in the second half 2011, is designed to provide the following benefits:

• Improve the environment: reduce energy consumption of mobile networks by up to 50 percent over current radio access network equipment. (As a point of reference, Bell Labs research estimates that basestations globally emit roughly 18,000,000 metric tons of CO2 per year). Also, lightRadio provides an alternative to today’s jungle of large overcrowded cell site towers by enabling small antennas anywhere.
  
  
• Address digital divide: By reducing the cell site to just the antenna and leveraging future advances in microwave backhaul and compression techniques, this technology could eventually enable the easy creation of broadband coverage virtually anywhere there is power (electricity, sun, wind) by using microwave to connect back to the network.
  
  
• Offers major savings for operators: Thanks to lightRadio’s impact on site, energy, operations and maintenance costs; when combined with small cells and LTE, this new solution is expected to lead to a reduction of total cost of ownership (TCO) of mobile networks up to 50 percent (as a point of reference, Bell Labs estimates that TCO spent by mobile operators in mobile access in 2010 was 150 billion Euros).

Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, said: “lightRadio is a smart solution to a tough set of problems: high energy costs, the explosion of video on mobile, and connecting the unconnected.”

Alain Maloberti, Senior Vice President, Network Architecture and Design, France Telecom/Orange said: “Alcatel-Lucent’s new vision and strategy of mobile broadband is quite exciting: the new wireless network architecture and innovative radio proposal will potentially help us to achieve significant operating cost savings and be better prepared for future challenges. We look forward to work closely with Alcatel-Lucent to explore and test this new approach.”

Tom Sawanobori, VP Technology Planning, Verizon Wireless, said: “Verizon looks forward to learning more about the benefits of lightRadio technology and how they could be applied as we continue to expand and evolve our LTE network.”

Alcatel-Lucent also is in advanced planning with China Mobile, as well as a number of other carriers around the globe around co-creation and field trials of the lightRadio solution.

Alcatel-Lucent studies have concluded that the total addressable opportunity for the multi-technology radio market (consists of radio access base stations that simultaneously support 2G, 3G and LTE, and multiple frequencies, in the same platform), which lightRadio addresses, will be over 12 billion Euros in 2014, representing more than 55 percent of the total wireless RAN market. The cumulative total addressable market will be over 100 billion Euros from 2011-2018.

Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio portfolio integrates a number of breakthrough innovations and technologies from Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs research arm and ecosystem of companies:

Market Impact

• Technology Innovation – A new generation of active antennas allows vertical beam-forming that improves capacity in urban and suburban sites by about 30 percent, supports all technologies (2G, 3G and LTE) and covers multiple frequency bands with a single unit.
  
  
• lightRadio cube – A unique Bell Labs antenna technology, the lightRadio Cube includes an innovative diplexer type, radio, amplifier and passive cooling in a small cube that fits in the palm of the hand. By moving former basestation components to a System on a Chip (SOC), lightRadio places processing where it fits best in the network — whether at the antenna or in the cloud.
  
  
• System-on-a-chip (SoC) jointly developed with Freescale Semiconductor, integrates intelligent software from Alcatel-Lucent onto fully remotely programmable state-of-the-art hardware. The economics of radio networks are substantially improved by reducing the number and cost of fiber pairs required to support the traffic between the antenna and the centralized processing in the cloud.
  
  
• Unique compression algorithms provide nearly a factor of three compression of IQ sample signals. Matching of load to demand through ‘elastic’ controller capacity, delivered on sets of distributed and shared hardware platforms, will improve cost, availability and performance of wireless networks.
  
  
• Virtualized processing platforms – Alcatel-Lucent will use innovative virtualization software and will collaborate with partners like HP to enable a cloud-like wireless architecture for controllers and gateways.

The lightRadio Product Family

The new Alcatel-Lucent lightRadio product family is composed of the following components: Wideband Active Array Antenna, Multiband Remote Radio Head, Baseband Unit, Controller, and the 5620 SAM common management solution. The Wideband Active Array Antenna will be trialed later this year and have broad product availability in 2012. Additional product family members will be available over 2012, 2013 and 2014.

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Editorial: Print dying, journalism thrives

The Jakarta Post | Tue, 02/09/2010 9:18 AM | Opinion

Print may not be dead but those who still glorify printed materials, including newspapers and books, are preventing the industry and society from taking the necessary steps to prepare society to enter into the digital era. One hard truth those in self-denial refuse to swallow is that the printed world is a sunset industry. One would be much better off preparing not only for its inevitable demise, but more importantly, for an emerging society dominated by the digital world.

The National Convention on the Mass Media in Palembang this week hears two contrasting views of how the Internet impacts the media industry and society.

One camp still insists there is ample room for growth for the printed world, and the Internet will not replace the printed materials. Newspapers will survive just as they overcame earlier challenges from telex, the radio, television, facsimile and cable TV.

Another camp, which predicts 100 million Internet users in Indonesia in the next three years, asks the important question: Is Indonesia ready for the digital world? Andy Sjarief of Media Track believes that Indonesia can still take control of the direction of the Internet development, but it needs to get its act together.

The implied message is clear: Drop any pretension that the Internet is not a threat and start entering the new digital world to make sure that we don’t lose out in the fierce global competition, unleashed by the ongoing revolution of the communication and information technology.

Being a sunset industry means it is only a matter of time before the printed world loses its relevance. The experience of the United States and Europe tells us that it is not so much a question of people ceasing to read or buy newspapers, as a question of the industry losing its commercial viability. The writing had been on the wall for some years, and the economic recession helped to speed up the demise of dozens of newspapers in the US by a few years.

Expect more titles to close down and migrate to the digital world in the coming years, including in Indonesia.

The sooner we accept that print is dying a slow death, the sooner we will be in making adjustments. In journalism, this means reinventing the profession to fit to the new situation, a world in which anyone, thanks to easy and cheap access to the Internet, can do the work that has traditionally been the domain of journalists: to disseminate information to the masses.

Professional journalists today have to compete with “netizens” or citizen journalists, including bloggers and just about everyone with accounts in social media like Twitter and Facebook, in breaking news and in spreading information. On many cases, they are breaking the news before even journalists reach the area, which raises the question, how should professional journalists respond?

In this kind of competitive environment, it is wrong to ignore the ground rules and ethics in journalism. If there is one thing that does not change in journalism — whether print, broadcast or the Internet — it is that credibility and trust continue to be the chief currencies underpinning this profession. Good journalism means sticking to the old and tested principles and values that make this profession the fourth pillar in democracy, including honesty, accuracy and fair reporting.

Print may be dying, but the traditional journalism will continue to live for far longer. When society suffers from a massive information overflow, good and honest journalism becomes even more, not less, relevant than ever.

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Social media 'could transform public services'

BBC News, by Mark Ward , Technology correspondent, BBC News

Capturing experiences can change the way some services are run

Social media could transform the NHS and other public services in the same way that file-sharing changed the music industry, a conference has heard.

Growing use of tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, offered an opportunity to reinvent services, delegates heard.

The MyPublicServices event debated ways to harness these conversations, many of which are critical, to make services better and more inclusive.

If this was not done, many services would be undermined, speakers said.

"It's happened to the music and travel industries and it's going to happen to public services," said Dr Paul Hodgkin, founder of the Patient Opinion site that organised the MyPublicServices conference.

Said Dr Hodgkin: "The question is how do we cope with it in a useful and productive way and not spend decades beating each other up?"

Capturing stories

Dr Hodgkin created Patient Opinion to capture stories about what happened to people when they got medical treatment. The site takes their criticism or praise and routes it to people in a local health authority who need to know and can, if need be, use that information to improve services.

He said that conversations about people's experiences with public services were going on all over the web and needed to be taken into account.

Dr James Munro, the director of Patient Opinion, said the web and the rising influence of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and other discussion sites was likely to force big changes in the running of programmes.

"Public services seem only to be there to give you what you need," he said. "A patient is all about being passive."

"This is about turning things upside down so the thing that looks like a deficit, your experience, becomes the gift you have to give to other people."

The conference heard from many people who had been moved by their frustration with current practices to set up a website or a service that can do something about it.

Denise Stephens created Enabled by Design in 2003 after being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.

Ms Stephens said she grew increasingly frustrated with unattractive assistive technology that made her home resemble a hospital. She started Enabled By Design to share information about better designed, cheaper and more attractive alternatives.

"A lot of assistive technology is ugly and does not do the job very well," said Ms Stephens.

Talking about their experiences at MyPublicServices were projects to ensure that those in nursing homes are looked after with dignity, to help make welfare to work programmes less adversarial and a place to report experiences with police investigations.

Tom Loosemore, head of 4iP, Channel 4's Innovation fund, said he suspected that active citizens and frustrated users could become a big catalyst for change in public services.

"The design of public services around the needs of the public not the needs of the state enabled by the internet, that's the big change," he said.

"I'm not sure that the government can re-engineer itself from the inside out," he said. "It's going to take the demands of people to force it into shape."

He counselled attendees to "shout loud and force change" on local and central government.

He told conference goers: "You are the future of public services not .gov.uk."

The downturn and lags in usage take a heavy toll on countries in the Economist Intelligence Unit's 2009 e-readiness rankings

Seoul (Korea Newswire) June 17, 2009 03:05 PM -- A sharp deterioration in business environments owing to the economic crisis has taken a toll on countries' e-readiness their ability to harness ICT for social and economic development. The Economist Intelligence Unit maintains that a stable and transparent business environment is essential to fostering development and utilisation of digital technologies and services. Over the past year, however, the crisis has constricted availability of credit, led governments to entertain protectionist measures including in the technology sector and dampened foreign investment and support for private enterprise. All 70 countries in the e-readiness rankings have seen their business environment scores drop in 2009 an important reason why all but nine countries registered lower overall e-readiness scores this year compared with 2008.

Scores also fell, however, because this year’s rankings now cover ICT usage in addition to availability. The availability of technology is not enough to deliver the full socioeconomic benefit to countries that ICT can provide. For this, digital technologies must be used, and used effectively. Tracking actual ICT use is a tricky endeavour, but we have introduced several new indicators this year which compare countries on the extent to which their businesses and individuals use online channels. Since technology usage tends to lag availability, countries’ e-readiness scores have declined further.

These and other factors have also led to changes in the rankings table. Denmark has reclaimed global e-readiness leadership, a position it relinquished to the US last year. Other north European countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway having, among other attributes, high levels of ICT usage have reaffirmed their places among the top ten e-readiness countries or, in the case of Norway, advanced into this tier. Meanwhile, the US and UK, whose business environments have been hit particularly hard in the past year, have fallen a few rungs.

“The results of this year's research underscore the fact that digital development does not take place in a vacuum,” says Robin Bew, Editorial Director of the Economist Intelligence Unit. “Tough economic conditions can constrain the drivers of technology adoption and use. Policymakers can help maintain the momentum of digital advancement, but above all they should refrain from introducing protectionist measures, which will only make matters worse.”

Since 2000, the Economist Intelligence Unit has published an annual e-readiness ranking of the world’s largest economies, using a model developed in co-operation with the IBM Institute for Business Value. A country’s “e-readiness” is a measure of its e-business environment, a collection of factors that indicate how amenable a market is to Internet-based opportunities. Increasingly, it is also about how individuals and businesses consume digital goods and services.

Other major findings from this year's study are highlighted below:

• Emerging markets continue to rack up big advances in connectivity, or the extent to which people are connected to communications networks. Progress in the “connectivity and technology infrastructure” category of indicators is particularly notable in the Middle East and Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America. But there remains a large gap between these and mature markets, which may have a negative knock-on effect on the usage scores of less well-connected countries.
  
  
• Government ICT strategy in emerging markets is bearing fruit. Most nations are making progress in implementing e-government programmes; a few developing countries keep pace and even outperform the e-readiness leaders in some areas. The governments of Mexico, Jordan and Vietnam, for example, have made substantial progress in recent years in making digital channels available to citizens for information provision and consultation (“e-participation”).
  
  
• ICT development may benefit from the recession. Many countries' economic stimulus packages designed to hasten recovery notably in rich-world countries hardest hit by recession, such as the US have big ICT infrastructure projects wrapped up in them. But generally, all new stimulus-driven infrastructure spending, including on railways, power plants and other projects incorporates a lot of ICT.
  
  
• Policy concerns exist on the near and longer horizons. Protectionism risks are growing in the global economy, and measures are afoot in some countries China, for example to increase protection of local ICT industries. Some stimulus programmes may also have a protectionist sting in their tail. Policymakers remain concerned that ICT providers are not doing enough to ensure the privacy and integrity of customer data. Finally, there is mounting concern about the environmental impact of digital devices and networks.

News Source: Economist Intelligence Unit

Economist Intelligence Unit e-readiness rankings 2009
Top 10 with 2008 position in brackets

1. Denmark (5)
2. Sweden (3)
3. Netherlands (7)
4. Norway (11)
5. United States (1)
6. Australia (4)
7. Singapore (6)
8. Hong Kong (2)
9. Canada (12)
10. Finland (13)

Tourism Industry Missing the Big Attraction

The Jakarta Globe, Nanda Ivens, March 26, 2009

I can only hope I did not sound like I was from another planet when I spoke about the urgent need to listen to “word of mouth” and “engage social media” with top executives and entrepreneurs from the tourism industry at a seminar in Jakarta earlier this month.

To build awareness among the seminar participants about the power of Internet-based social media, I had to accept the fact that only a small number of participants raised their hands when asked whether they had corporate Web sites and almost none updated them regularly.

Have I been in Europe so long that I have lost touch with the developments of my own people? I doubt it. Just the other day there was an encouraging picture in a local paper of residents in a village near the West Nusa Tenggara provincial capital surfing the Internet through a program called “Digital Village.”

Consider these statistics: As of May 2008, there were 25 million Internet users in Indonesia, or 10 percent of the population. Friendster, a popular online social networking site, has eight million users in Indonesia, and WordPress and BlogSpot, free Internet blogsites, have 300,000 and 247,000 members from Indonesia. Bahasa Indonesia is the third most-used language on WordPress.com after English and Spanish, and Facebook, another Internet social media site, grew 645 percent in Indonesia in 2008. There are currently 831,000 Indonesians on Facebook. These are really amazing statistics for a country where about 15 percent of the population still survives on less than $1 a day.

The conclusion is clear: While most business executives in the tourism sector don’t seem convinced about the power of the Internet, the reality is that Indonesians have embraced it in full force. The 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer released this month in Jakarta makes it very clear that the future of communications in this country belongs to Internet-based social media.

According to the findings, 40 percent of young, informed respondents aged 25-34 said they consider information about a company on Internet search engines, particularly Google, extremely or very credible.

This is significantly higher than the 26 percent of respondents from the same age group who find information in newspaper articles extremely or very credible. For respondents aged 35-64, the information in Google has the same level of trustworthiness as articles in newspapers. Strong evidence that Indonesians are moving away from traditional media and looking for information on Internet-based sites.

Is the tourism industry aware of all the activity on social media? Or are we still limiting our interaction with customers to single-channel communications through advertising, when most of the informed public has migrated to the Internet for credible sources of information?

The current global financial and economic crisis may force the local tourism industry to shift its target from a foreign-arrival-oriented approach to one of cultivating and nurturing domestic tourist potential. Domestic tourism potential is huge, and local travelers share their experiences and seek information from social groups or their peers through social media. Pictures of tourist spots are shared on Facebook, and there is a significant amount of online chatter about tourist-related topics.

The Internet allows companies to be creative in the way they approach potential customers. Through interactive social media activities, companies are better able to focus potential customers on more detailed content about tourism hot spots, unique facets of the culture and rare cultural activities. This is all packaged in content-rich products that can easily be disseminated and linked to multiple digital platforms from social media to mobile. Travelers search the Internet for ideas and inspiration, and when they do they expect to get concise information on the destination of their choice, before interaction and engagement begins. Comments, feedback and customer ratings on the Internet are important to the traveler’s decision-making process. More importantly, a multichannel approach is necessary to enable, as well as empower, potential customers to make contact and ask questions without feeling intimidated.

Let’s start with the Web site. The Web site for a travel and tourism establishment is the sales agent on the Internet and the first point of entry for many potential tourists. The Web site needs to be easy to find on Google or Yahoo searches and present a professional and engaging image to build credibility with customers. This can be enhanced by linking to content sharing, social networks, travel advisory or micro-blogging sites; developing active blogs; and forging partnerships with travel aggregators and online travel agents overseas.

One of the most attractive aspects of Internet-based outreach for both companies and their audiences is the efficiency with which properly developed online communications can work. Not only is communicating online cost effective, a clear advantage given the current financial climate, but it is also accountable and measurable. It is accountable because it is measurable. The measurement metrics are not just about how many people see, click or engage, but include the sphere of influence of these visitors. It is cost effective because an effective digital campaign does not require more than 25 percent of a company’s overall marketing communications budget, but can reach a highly targeted audience with higher potential to purchase. This has become a strong driver in shifting tourism-related companies to online marketing on Internet portals and search engines.

Going beyond domestic tourism, we often wonder why more tourists visit Singapore and Hong Kong than our beautiful country. In 2008, a mere 6.23 million foreign tourists visited Indonesia, compared to the 10.1 million and 29.5 million tourists in Singapore and Hong Kong in the same year.

The fact is that these countries have managed to utilize the power of the Internet very effectively. Living outside Indonesia, it was much easier for me to find information online about traveling in these countries than for Indonesia. We have often used issues like political instability as the reason for our lackluster tourism, but we have a growing reputation for stability today and this excuse no longer holds water.

The future of tourism is in the Internet, and it is high time that we start by using this channel to market ourselves domestically first, then use that expertise to market ourselves abroad.

The writer is director of the digital division at IndoPacific Edelman.

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