On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Apple has confirmed that is has bought Lala . The music company that offers music streaming. Based on cloud computing. The company came to the fore front when Google used it's service to offer one song streaming for free on its search results. Lala did not charge for this service. Lala being the No.1 retailer in the music streaming business. ""The idea of paying 99 cents a track to fill my iPod – I don't need that anymore," says Ted Cohen, a managing partner at TAG Strategic, a music industry consulting firm. "That era is over." Lala differs from Pandora and iTunes in that it let's you pay to listen to songs at 10 cents a song. You do not need to buy the song. Another notable feature of Lala is that it has a "Vault" which let's u store songs and listen to it later. With the integration of Lala, Apple may Lala's social features to iTunes . This is a service that may play the role of the Radio in how music is found and popularized...