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...
Image: AllthingsD This is not a confirmed report but news sites are buzzing with the news that the rumor is out again. The rumor that Facebook will be building an all new smartphone. This will be a Facebook Phone and will be called Buffy, from Buffy the vampire slayer. There are reports on the internet that a Mobile Phone manufacturer has also been chosen to produce the phone and that would be HTC, who incidently beat out rival Samsung to win the contract. There has been no official announcement from Facebook regarding the phone but the rumor mills are churning. Now a deeply social phone from Facebook does make some amount of sense but whether it is really going to take users away from their current phones and use the Facebook phone is left to be seen. Facebook does have over 350 million active mobile phone users. A Facebook spokesperson had this to say to AllThingsD . “ Our mobile strategy is simple: We think every mobile device is better if it is deeply social. We’re working across...