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...
Ping is Apple's effort of going social with a music-based social network. Ping the iTunes related social network was built to allow users to follow artists and friends and see what they were listening to. The service still does not have a tie-up with Facebook as yet. There however has been a lot of news lately that Apple and Facebook where in talks to get that done. Ping was launched without the Facebook integration and was not received well by critics and users alike. There has been a meeting however between Steve Jobs and Zuckerberg at Steve Jobs home and things might soon start turning in the right direction. iTunes ping will be hopeless without proper Facebook integration. Artists have also had to struggle with creating a profile on ping. Some work needs to be done before Apple can make a foray into the world of Social Networking. ping however shows a lot of promise with allowing people to connect with friends and artists and see what they are listening to. This way users can f...