18th March

Put Heads Together

The article tries to cover various issues that the upcoming G20 summit faces with respect to global economic recovery. Financial reforms and regulations, protecting developing countries from the downturn and preventing economic nationalism would be the major challenges. 

The G-20 summit of finance chiefs last week promised almost everything that can be done to revive global economy. While there is a need of more coordinated fiscal stimuli, the need for financial reforms is more acute. However, the efforts should be according to fiscal and monetary capabilities of individual country. Reservations about such financial reforms and its affect should be kept aside. Protecting the developing countries with no fault of theirs in this financial turmoil is another major objective. Countries like India, China and Brazil, who are seen as forces for global economic recovery should have a greater say in the IMF decisions and any future financial architecture. Finally, economic nationalism, rightly opposed by India, should be duly prevented. Attempts of countries like US, France, Germany, UK and Switzerland to protect domestic jobs at the cost of economic efficiency would only add to trouble. 

What is needed is to have a greater economic interdependence and countries of G-20 should put their domestic policies backdoor.

World in my pocket

The article talks about the increasing popularity of smartphones and the way they are revolutionizing the way we communicate with our world.

PCs have been around us for hardly 25 years and WWW even less then that. Just as PCs changed the way we store and access information, cellphones changed the way we find and use the information. The newest cellphones with bundle of applications from word processor to e-mail client to web browsing are called smartphones. In US, it is 23% of the cellphone market in 2008 and heading northwards. The new smartphones are also containing GPS applications that help the users find their location, get information about the nearest restaurant or petrol station. With more innovative technologies, cell phones are deemed to perform some of the most complex tasks. India is home to 280 million cellphones out of 4 billion in the world. However, as expected the market of smartphones is abysmally low. But it’s just a matter of time that the technology would become cheaper just as color phones, which was high technology few years back, is now an industry standard. 

Future generations would see smartphones as Swiss knife of portable electronic devices and almost every one of them would have one.