Mobile payments have been around in Africa for years, mainly because there's no legacy systems to compete with, and the lack of a solid banking/payment processing industry has made growth occur unopposed.
Whereas the incumbent players in North America (most credit card and payment processing juggernauts) will most likely put up more of a fight against systems like Square.
And hopefully burdened with less administrative tasks and armed with more data that tracks progress and speed of learning, teachers can act more as a curator of knowledge (and guides, as you described) that cater more specifically to the needs of each student. It could very well be that in a few years, our children are bombarded with more educational content that they know what to do with, and the roles of the teachers will also rightfully shift.
If programming is now attracting more mainstream interest as you said, I wonder if the pedagogy of disseminating programming knowledge will change. Will the educators (I can't think of a less formal word for this, but basically refers to anyone that wants to share knowledge, whether pros or amateurs) now approach teaching in a way that does not assume someone has been tinkering with Unix since they were 5, but instead cater to an audience of post-secondary and/or adult learners, including those of us that are career switchers? A section of O'Reilly's materials certainly serves this segment, but will the greater tech community cater to this new group of learners?
So movie-making is becoming more geographically and capital diverse, good for us! Note how little Monsters costed (under half a mil), or District 9 in 2009, for that matter. Some cool movies made outside of Hollywood and released last year: http://www.dailytitan.com/2011/01/01/the-best-little-movies-...
It's good to know that quality still sells, and prices aren't everything.
Maybe because of Europe's location, I see textiles sourced from places like Turkey and even Latin America, rather than purely from China/Asia in general. What kind of things do you see coming out of the UE?
I can see how that's very likely, my experience is limited to Western Europe at the moment:) We still see quite a lot of goods in cheaper stores that come from China, but nothing like the market domination I see back in North America. Over here in NL for example, I see way more stuff coming from France, Germany, Italy, etc, than just China. I think consumers in some parts of Europe prefer goods that are better quality, even if they are a bit more expensive. From a longer term cost-benefit stand point, it usually works out cheaper anyway.
I think Japan's general economic malaise over the past few decades have been off-putting for investors and entrepreneurs that do not look for only a sizable market, but the promise of a GROWING sizable market. With an aging population, general economic slowdown, rigid labour market and social contracts that are very specific within the Japanese context, this is not all too encouraging for outsiders.
Although I would think that for businesses operating in the seniors' product and services sector, robotics, or artificial intelligence, to name a few, Japan would be the frontier and would be much more attractive to explore. So it would depend very much on the product, the team behind the product, status quo in the domestic market, etc.
But the discussion over whether it's worthwhile to tame the Japanese market reminds me of this article (http://potlatch.typepad.com/weblog/2011/02/whatever-happened...) that asks why the world's collective attention has shifted away from Japan in recent years.
It is also out of self interest that Germany pumps money back to the European rescue funds from their trade surplus with these less-than-stellar European economies. It's not altogether unlike how China finances the US debts by selling more stuff to it. So in the end, it just leads to more co-dependence.
Another relatively male-dominated field is banking (although probably less so than programming), yet one can argue that there's plenty of drama operating within those concrete towers.
What differentiates the level of "drama" between the banking industry from the software programming industry? Is it because engineering is inherently more meritocratic and less egotistical? Or is there just too much money and power at stake when it comes to banking that one can't help but get involved in more politicking? Does the (presence or absence of any one)gender come into play at all?
Europe in general (perhaps with the exception of the UK) is much less saturated with Made in China goods than the rest of the world, perhaps due to more stringent adherence to standards and quality, or perhaps as a result of its trade laws that still somewhat protect European-made goods.
Germany has benefited greatly from the expansion of the European internal market, and has always had, and still does have, a very good name. Everything from cars to electronics, down to appliances and kitchenware, Made in Germany still speaks volume on the continent.
Despite the somewhat higher prices of German goods (and they are actually kept quite low due to various work-sharing labour arrangements), weighing things on a quality-price scale, they still come out better value than a lot of alternatives. So it's really no surprise that the country is running such a huge trade surplus against the rest of the continent.
Most of those excuses mentioned really come down to one of two things: arrogance (I know best so you don't need to know) or laziness (why bother because see former), both of which are hardly unique to programmers.
Whereas the incumbent players in North America (most credit card and payment processing juggernauts) will most likely put up more of a fight against systems like Square.
There's a recent podcast about the mobile payment industry (http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2011/02/spark-139-february-27-march-...), check out the part about Mobile money in Kenya, and the Smartphone wallet.