Selling sheep by instagram

Yiibu at Slideshare has posted some fascinating information about global mobile commerce, especially in places where there are no department stores and most buying and selling is done at the local bazaar, if there is one. His presentation is titled "The Emerging Global Web" and it contains a wealth of information.

M-commerce, meaning mobile commerce, is one of the buzzwords that apply to this phenomena.  Some of the retailing is conducted via Instagram, such as selling sheep in Kuwait. This article at Nitrogram tells how to sell products on Instagram.

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yiibu, slideshare

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If you check Alexa's topsites page, many of the top 20 are emerging economies:

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yiibu, slideshare

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And informal economy (read on-the-street retail) is moving into the mobile frontier.

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yiibu, slideshare

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In places where banking is difficult, virtual banking has become the answer.

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yiibu, slideshare

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Some of the sites mentioned in the slideshow are TaoBao, Alibaba (also see Alibaba Group), Jumia, and La Moda (Russia).  Besides Instagram, technologies important to m-commerce are WeChat (Chinese), Alipay (Chinese), and the QR code (first designed in Japan).

Note: the original reference for this post was found at New World Notes.

-- Marge

Humor: Stock market drama

On Monday, the "Dow Jones industrial average topped 16,000 for the first time ever" reported CNN Money. Considering how the stock market affected the world economy in 2008, I'm not impressed, neither is Jack Ohman:

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Jack Ohman, NYSE vs Unemployment, US News

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As Will Rogers said in December, 1929 (more quotes are here) --

I tell 'em that this Country is bigger than Wall Street, and if they don't believe it, I show 'em the map.

Seems to me, Republicans and Wall Street go hand in hand.  For a zany alternate view of Republicanism, take a look a College Humor's video, "The Mad (Republican) Tea Party:"

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In his radio broadcast in 1931, "Bacon and Beans and Limousines," Will Rogers noted,

So here we are in a country with more wheat and more corn and more money in the bank, more cotton, more everything in the world—there’s not a product that you can name that we haven't got more of it than any other country ever had on the face of the earth—and yet we’ve got people starving. We'll hold the distinction of being the only nation in the history of the world that ever went to the poor house in an automobile. The potter's fields are lined with granaries full of grain. Now if there ain't something cockeyed in an arrangement like that then this microphone here in front of me is—well, it's a cuspidor, that's all.

In closing, here's one from About.com's Political Humor:

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BTW, there's a handsome book about Will Rogers, titled The Quotable Will Rogers, by Joseph H. Carter at Google Books. You can buy a copy if you like.

-- Marge