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...
According to people familiar with the matter, Sony is working on a smartphone that leverages the companies entertainment assets such as the PlayStation Portable. In addition to having all the features that come with a Smartphone it will also have the ability to play PSP games. There is also going to be a device that is more than a Netbook but less than a Laptop. Sounds familiar, well yes, sounds like that device Steve Jobs launched a short while back. So is Sony going to bring out an Apple iPad like device?. To do that they would need to break into the iTunes market with a Smartphone and an online Power house to combat Apple and their success. They already have Sony Online Entertainment created to replicate an iTunes style online utility. Meanwhile, sales of the PSP and PSP Go, portable versions of the PlayStation , are well below expectations, and sales of the Sony Ericsson smart phones fell hard in 2009. The Wall Street Journal said that Sony is working with Sony Ericsson to dev...