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...
With the release of Kin One and Kin Two Microsoft seeks to ride the mobile networking social wave. Unlike other phones that treats Twitter and Facebook as separate applications. Kin has at it's heart social networking. Seeking to keep the phone a hit between the age group of 15 to 30 which the company refers to as "Generation Upload" Microsoft unveils more of the project pink details. The Operating System that the company uses for Kin is called OS for Kin a derivative from Windows Phone 7. The Kin will have Verizon as it's exclusive mobile carrier in the US. The Kin's seriousness about social networking is very apparent in the devices which focus more on Texting, Tweets and Status updates. There is however no room for additional App's such as the iPhone and the BlackBerry. The Kin will be available sometime in May. Both models of the Kin will have Zune HD built into the device and users can sync the device to their PC to add music and movies onto Kin's int...