Put Together

Mercury Prize

2011-11-05T12:21:00.002-04:00

The Mercury Prize (or it is known as the Barclays Card Mercury Prize now) is a prize with reward money given to the best album from UK and Ireland each year. It was incepted in 1992 in time to see Achtung Baby by U2 shortlisted and did not win the prize.

It would set the trend for favourites not to win the prize. Landmark British and Irish albums have all lost including :-

the aforesaid album by U2 (many consider the best U2 album),
Oasis' (What's the story) Morning Glory,
Radiohead's Ok Computer,
Amy Winehouse's Back to Black
Adele's 21

It is more indie than indie. Top notch indie albums such as Bat For Lashes' Two Suns, KT Tunstall's Eye to the telescope and La Roux self titled album had all missed out.

Still it is very prestigious and with PJ Harvey winning it 2 times (the only artiste to do so) including this year for the excellent Let England Shake, it is very creditable.

Kelly Clarkson's New Album and Already Gone vs Halo revisited

2011-10-24T15:21:00.000-04:00

Kelly Clarkson is the first American Idol winner back in 2002. I always love her. Starting from her name, Kelly, which is one of my favourite names. To her vocals. She is a big singer who can compete with the best of them, and is a great advertisement for the Idol brand. And her hit songs, ballads such as Breakaway and Already Gone, and pop hits such as Since U Been Gone and My Life Would Suck Without You.

She has been a pop star for 10 years now since her Idol win and has released 5 studio albums with her latest, just released fifth album, Stronger. She is a hit record maker and chart topper.

She is also a big girl. Having slimmed down during Since U Been Gone, to now bigger and probably permanent size in Mr Know It All. I love her for that too. You got to be true to yourself. Hey, big is in, in the year of Adele.

Lets take a step back and revisit the controversy of her hit song from her previous album, Already Gone and Beyonce's hit song, Halo. The controversy was in 2009 but I did not release it until today.

Fans and radio DJs and the public in general to a certain extend found both songs similar and it was a controversy for Kelly because Halo was released earlier as an album version compared to Already Gone.

Both songs were written by song writer for hire the OneRepublic lead singer. The story went that the songwriter wrote Already Gone which Kelly co-wrote the melody and lyrics to for inclusion into the album. When Beyonce heard the song, she hired the song writer to write a similar ballad for her album. Halo then came out from the song writer (which Beyonce's co writing role on it was smaller than Kelly did on Already Gone).

When Kelly heard about the complaints from fans (on her as her song was released later than Halo), she decided it was valid and they sounded quite alike. She called the songwriter to complaint that the latter had pulled a fast one on her by using the same tune for both songs. The songwriter said it was not the same. Still he had written other songs for different artistes that sounded alike.

Do I think both songs are alike ?

Like I said, I did not know about the controversy. In my mind, Already Gone is Kelly's best song todate and like wise, Halo is Beyonce's best todate. I did read when the album first came out in 2009, critics called Already Gone a Beyonce's soundalike. But it did not stick on me that one was a rip off of another.

In conclusion after hearing the mash up of both songs, they are different. If you want to find similarities, you can always find. After with billions of songs out there, there has to be some overlaps and similarities.

I will say the similarities between the two songs are not apparent enough to sound like a rip off. I have heard many other songs that are more rip off.

Songwriters have certain style to their writings of music. That is why singer song writers albums always have their unique styles. This songwriter probably recycled the song foundation to create Halo from Already Gone.

I can understand why Kelly took such a public stand on the song writer over this controversy. Already Gone was as much her song writing effort as the songwriter. And it was one of her best songs. For the rest of her live singing or hearing the song, the stigma is attached to it that the songwriter used the same song foundation to give to two singers to write on to.

To conclude on this matter once and for all. Both songs do not sound similar to be noticed as a rip off of one another. Both songs do not sound similar.

Now lets talk about the new album, Stronger, which was dropped today.

On first listen, I find it appealing as a Kelly Clarkson product. I want to listen to her vocals and I get it from her album. It is good music but not outstanding. There is no Already Gone moment. The album does not appear to be as solid as a pop album compared to All I Ever Wanted which is her best album todate. Still, this album can fight to be her second best todate.

It is still an awesome album and pleases Kelly fans like me and pop music lovers in general.

The first single, Mr Know It All is decent but probably not as awe inspiring like My Life Would Suck. The follow up single, What Doesn't Kill You is as solid but lacks the uniqueness of I Do Not Hook Up.

To be fair, it is always going to be difficult to follow up on a great album.

Still I like it. It has been a long wait for me to get her new album.

Her performance of Mr Know It All on UK's X Factor yesterday was superb by the way.

Steve Jobs Dies

2011-10-05T20:22:00.002-04:00

For the past week I took back out my old book which I last read in 2006, iCon, and re-read it again because Apple has become the largest corporation in the world.

The book is a third party autobiography of Steve Jobs from his early years until 2005 (before iPhone and iPad) and written by Jeffrey Young and William Simon. The book mentioned all his achievements as well as his flaws.

The book ended saying this:

We expect our heroes to be flawed. Heroes without flaws would not be successful. Yet in the end, it is not the flaws we need to remember but the achievements.

Steve Jobs died today. Apple under his leadership has become the largest corporation in the world.

Carlos Tevez

2011-09-05T15:41:00.000-04:00

Manchester City's Carlos Tevez is expected to remain settled in the club for now. This means "20 goals a season" as Roberto Mancini said on his prolific striker.

Tevez revealed he had depression this summer. He was blamed for playing ineffectively for Argentina during Copa America and missed a penalty which resulted in its elimination and the national coach being sacked. He also was labeled difficult and selfish for insisting on leaving Manchester City because his wife and daughters were in Argentina and could not settled to life in England. The depression led him to over eat and put on weight and he had to checked into a clinic.

He is more settled and happier now as his family has moved to England. This was evident when he made a really funny remark on his club and national team mate, Sergio Aguero starting to learn English :-

"I will give him a week or 10 more days before he quits. This first week he will say I have English today. The second week he will say the same thing but with a different expression. By the third week, he will go for a siesta instead."

Copa America 2011

2011-07-07T21:20:00.002-04:00

The Copa America 2011 is currently underway in Argentina. This is the oldest international football tournament in the world and is now played every 4 years in the year following the World Cup.

All 10 countries in South America play in this tournament and usually 2 other countries are invited each time to complete the number of teams to 12.

The host of this year's tournament is Argentina who has won the Copa 14 times before but the last time it won was way back in 1993. All South American teams send their senior first team to play here.

Argentina is in one of 3 groups of 4 countries. The other countries in its group are Costa Rica (an invitee who is represented by its junior team), Columbia and Bolivia.

Argentina has so far drawn both its opening two matches, 1-1 with Bolivia and lucky to escape with a 0-0 draw with Columbia.

After two matches in the group, Columbia is on top with 4 points, Costa Rica is 2nd with 3 points, then Argentina with 2 and Bolivia 1 point.

A quick word on the poor performance by Argentina. Messi looked bad because he has no support. All his team mates played badly. Messi alone could not do make a difference in today's modern game.

(Maradona could then, when he single handedly helped Napoli in the club level and the national team, although it could be argued that the national team then was very good too and supported Maradona well. A case in point was in the world cup final which all 3 goals scored by Argentina over Germany came from other team mates and Maradona did not have that much influence on that match and yet Argentina won the world cup final.)

But to say Messi is less skill ful than Maradona is no true too. Just look at the goal he scored for Barcelona against Arsenal in this year's champions league 2nd leg quarter final in Barcelona.

And the players surrounding Messi are all world class players. Mascerano plays in Barcelona first team, they are players for Inter Milan, Real, from the EPL and other top clubs all over Europe.

The coach, Sergio Batista has experience. He won the difficult football gold medal in the Beijing Olympics and he has many of the winning team players at his disposure now.

The reason hence comes down to tactics. The team has no tactics that work. To put it simply, if we put another coach with a plan and tactics, the same Argentina team will play well and attractive football. The coach can still be Batista. He just got to get it together and he has to do it fast as things are not looking good for Argentina in this tournament. Else he will surely be sacked ahead of the world cup marathon qualifiers which will take place the next 2 years.

I am of the opinion to make the following team changes:-

Romero

Zanetti, Burdisso, Milito, Rojo

Mascerano, Messi, Pastore

Laverzi, Higuan, Di Maria.

Have 2 wingers in Laverzi and Di Maria to open the game up on the flanks. Tevez has nothing to show and should be dropped instantly. Messi can't do his magic to far forward as the midfield has no playmaker. He has to drop back to midfield and dance through central defence and slip passes to the strkers. Higuan can act as centre forward. Pastore has not been used yet and could provide some playmaking which all other midfielders so far fail to.

Argentina has plenty of work to do if it is to survive.

The calculations for survivor in this tournament going into the last group match next week are these:

1. If Argentina beats Costa Rica, it is guaranteed of a 2nd place. It may even be group winner if Columbia loses to Boliva or even draws.

2. If Argentina draws with Costa Rica, it will end up at best 3rd place which may still qualify for the quarterfinals but it is dependent of the results of the other 2 groups as 2 of the best 3rd place finishers from the 3 groups will also go through.

However, Argentina may end up 4th and therefore eliminated if it draws with Costa Rica and Columbia loses to Bolivia.

3. Same situation if Argentina loses to Costa Rica, it may still end up 3rd place provided Columbia does not lose to Bolivia. If it does, Argentina will be 4th and eliminated.

Argentina	1	Bolivia	1
Columbia	1	Costa Rica	0
Argentina	0	Columbia	0
Costa Rica	2	Bolivia	0
Argentina		Costa Rica
Columbia		Bolivia

	P	W	D	L	F	A	PTS
Argentina	2	0	2	0	1	1	2
Columbia	2	1	1	0	1	0	4
Costa Rica	2	1	0	1	2	1	3
Bolivia	2	0	1	1	1	3	1

Argentina		Columbia	win	draw	loss
	win		2	1 or 2	1
	draw		3	3	4
	loss		3	3	4

2010 Music in review

2010-12-30T20:33:00.003-05:00

It is the end of the year and lets look back at the albums and singles in offering in 2010.

Overall, I would say this is not bad a year in terms of quality in music although there were not as many great albums compared to 2009. 2009 was a peak in terms of productivity for quality albums and songs. Still, 2010 pretty much held its own and is comparable to 2009 for quality.

Lets take a look at some of the albums I like and the outstanding tracks from those albums. This list is in no particular order as I do not go down the path of ranking songs and albums anymore. If it is good music, it is good music.

The year will be remembered for the outstanding contribution to dance music as can be seen in the list.

A prolific place for me to discover good movies or music is on long haul flights. Besides reading books, I usually would take in a movie or two or if I am tired, sampled some albums on the inflight entertainment library. It was 2 months back, I chanced upon an album on a flight that is so good it is one of the best in 2010. It is the debut self titled album by UK duo, La Roux.

A really good album has many good songs in it and in some landmark albums, all songs are good. you will find yourself liking a couple of songs first and then later find out other songs are better. In La Roux, almost all the 12 songs (including 1 bonus track) are good. Of course the 2 most recognisable are the most successful singles, In For The Kill (which actually launched her career) and a even more successful follow up single, Bulletproof (debut at no. 1 in Uk and peaked in no. 8 in US). However, I find the real gems in the album are 3 other songs which are way better than these 2 singles.

The first one is in fact La Roux first single from the album. It is called Quicksand. It did not do as well in the UK charts as the top 10 In For A Kill which got people to notice the band. Quicksand is the best track from the album and one of the best songs of 2010.

Two other standout tracks are Armour Love and Cover My Eyes.

Joanna Newsom released a triple CD album called Have One on Me early 2010. Though it is 3 cds, the playing time is about 2 hours. 3 songs from the album were published on her web page as promotion for the album and that 3 songs are the standout tracks from the album.

Good Intention Paving Company is considered by some critique as one of the best songs of the year. 81 is a short song, which for Newsom is a rare as her songs tend to be very long. The third promotion single, Kingfisher runs for 12 minutes. It has become a subject of ridicule by the mass media, making fun of her various and complex melody in Kingfisher. For me, it is her best song from all her previous work (better or at least as good as Emily from her previous album Ys). Kingfisher is one of the best songs of 2010.

K T Tunstall's third album is her best work todate. She called her material as dance music. And it is not far off, considering her genre tends to be indie country. Lost is one of the best songs of the year and definitely her best todate. Other outstanding tracks include the opener, Uummannaq Song, Push The Knot Away, Fade Like A shadow, Madame Trudeaux and Still a weirdo.

5 Times World Champion

2010-11-16T22:34:00.002-05:00

Gago proved yet again a big event scorer for Argentina as he scored the world cup winning goal for Argentina for the third consecutive final. Argentina defeated France 1-0 through an 18th minute header goal by Gago off a Messi corner. This was Argentina's 5th World Cup at the Winning Eleven 4 star international challenge.

Argentina topped the South American qualifying group with 49 points from 16 wins, 1 draw and 1 defeat and scoring 49 goals against 14 goals. Brazil finished second one point behind with 16 wins and losing 2 times home and away to Argentina. Paraguay, Uruguay and Columbia finished 3rd to 5th and qualified to the finals as well. This is one of the rare times when Argentina could finish first in the qualifying ahead of Brazil. Only in 2 other occasions this happened before.

With the superb form from the qualifiers, Argentina used the following first team line up for the world cup finals: Abondiazerri, Ayala, Milito, Samuel, Burdisso, Cambiasso, Lucho Gonzalez, Maxi Rodigrez, Gago, Messi and Tevez. Messi captained the team.

However Argentina suffered disastrous results in the first 2 games of the round one group 5. They lost 4-1 to Japan, trailing 4-0 before Messi scored a late consolation goal, which would prove vital for Argentina later. Needing nothing less than a win in the second match, they failed to score in a goalless draw against Latvia. With just 1 point after 2 matches, Argentina's fate lied in others hands in the final group matches. Argentina faced group leaders, Switzerland which had scored 7 goals to nothing in the first two wins. Argentina raced to a 3-0 lead early on and withstood Switzerland's fight back afterwards. A late own goal gave Argentina a 4-0 win which proved enough for Argentina to survive to the second round with 4 points but a 5-4 goals advantage against third placed Japan which had 4 points but 6-7 goals record. Japan lost 4-0 to Switzerland in their second match and had to win the final match against Latvia to qualify but could only muster a 2-2 draw. Switzerland finished top of the group. It was a miraculous escape for Argentina.

In the round of 16, Argentina faced frequent world cup opponent, Czech Republic and came out 3-0 winners. At the quarter finals, Argentina was rampant against a lethargic Mexico winning 7-1. A difficult Germany was in the way in the semi final but Tevez capitalised on Germany's goalkeeper's errors three times for Argentina to come out 3-2 winners in a tense semifinal match. In the other semi final, France upset Brazil 3-2 after extra time.

In the final, Argentina scored early with Gago's goal which it held out till the end for its 5th world cup again. Tevez top scored for Argentina in the finals with 8 goals. Messi scored 5 while Gago had 3 goals and Lucho 2 goals to their names.

This was Messi's second time captaining Argentina to the world cup.

The Start Up stories of Twitter and Facebook

2010-11-02T22:38:00.004-04:00

Here is the start up story of Twitter as reproduced from the New York Times.

AT the annual South by Southwestgathering of techies in Austin, Tex., in March, conference organizers had chosen a hangar-size room to accommodate their star speaker: Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, the messaging and social networking site that had become a digital phenomenon.

In a private moment before the doors opened, Mr. Williams, who is famously deliberate and cautious, snapped a photograph of the endless rows of chairs facing the stage and posted it on Twitter.

“Gulp,” he wrote.

Later, as Mr. Williams talked with the interviewer about building a 21st-century business, keeping to Twitter’s foundational principle (the Google-like “be a force for good”) and fostering corporate experimentation, members of his audience started groaning — and leaving, one by one.

“They wanted Ev Williams; they got Ev Williams,” a Twitter staff member said later.

It is no small irony, of course, that a man so ill at ease on the big stage is a pivotal force in a communications revolution, one that has made it easier for people to chat, disseminate information and mobilize locally and globally with almost anyone who has a cellphone or an Internet connection.

And Twitter has become one of the rare but fabled Web companies with a growth rate that resembles the shape of a hockey stick. It has 175 million registered users, up from 503,000 three years ago and 58 million just last year. It is adding about 370,000 new users a day.

It has helped transform the way that news is gathered and distributed, reshaped how public figures from celebrities to political leaders communicate, and played a role in popular protests in Iran, China and Moldova. It has become so muscular and ubiquitous that it now competes with the likes of Google and Facebook for users — and is beginning to compete with them for advertising dollars.

Yet for all its astonishing growth, Twitter has succeeded in spite of itself — the enviable product of a great idea and lightning-in-a-bottle viral success rather than a disciplined approach to how it’s managed.

Because of that, Twitter is on the cusp of becoming the next big, independent Internet company — or the next start-up to be swallowed whole by a giant like Google or, possibly, the next start-up to run out of steam.

Now the company is trying to instill some of the rigor and sense of purpose it needs to ensure that it is, indeed, the next big thing.

“The thing I’ve learned that’s much different than any other time in my life is I have a team that is really, really great,” says Mr. Williams, 38. “I’ve been studying this stuff for a really long time, and I’ve screwed up in many, many, many ways in terms of managing people and product decisions and business, so I feel fairly confident at this point that it could scale pretty well.”

Last month, he unexpectedly announced that he had decided to step down as chief executive and give the job to Dick Costolo, who had been Twitter’s chief operating officer.

Mr. Williams, who remains on the company’s board, now focuses on product strategy. He made the decision after conceiving and spending months working on the recent redesign of the Twitter Web site. People who have worked with him say he excels at understanding what Internet users want and contemplating Twitter’s future, but isn’t a detail-oriented task manager.

“He takes these things that everyone thinks are as big as they can get, these geeky things, and he makes them mainstream,” says Philip Kaplan, a co-founder of the review site Blippy and one of Mr. Williams’s close friends.

Mr. Costolo, meanwhile, is all about the details of making money and getting things done. This has been his third time running a company; he sold his last one, the Web subscription service FeedBurner, to Google in 2007.

For his part, Mr. Williams may embody a classic Silicon Valley type — the inspired, talented start-up guy with good ideas, but not the one to execute a sophisticated business strategy once things get rolling, says Steve Blank, an entrepreneurship teacher at Stanford.

And Mr. Williams may have also earned the self-awareness and confidence to recognize exactly who he is.

“Evan Williams is the type of entrepreneur who knows when to pivot,” says Mr. Blank, “and what we may be seeing is wonderful signs of entrepreneurial wisdom.”

TWITTER was born in 2006 as a side project.

At the time, it was an appendage of a podcasting service named Odeo, another company that Mr. Williams co-founded that had millions of dollars from investors.

Even the founders, though, were having a hard time getting excited about Odeo, and Mr. Williams told everyone who worked there to hatch new ideas. While sitting on a children’s slide at a park eating Mexican food one day, an engineer, Jack Dorsey, suggested to colleagues a simple way to send status updates by using text messages.

Mr. Dorsey and Twitter’s third co-founder, Biz Stone, built a prototype in two weeks. During that time, Mr. Stone was ripping up the carpet at his Berkeley home when his cellphone vibrated in his pocket. It was Mr. Williams sending a message on Twitter: “Sipping pinot noir after a massage in Napa Valley.”

Twitter was a unique entrant on the social media scene. People could follow others without being followed back, and all posts were public by default — and limited to 140 characters so they could fit inside cellphone text messages.

The founders likened Twitter to ice cream: not that useful, but “a fun thing for family and friends when they are not in the same place,” Mr. Williams says.

That is a far cry from his vision today, an about-face that is typical of Twitter’s evolution. For a long time, Twitter’s founders talked about it with awe, as if it had a life of its own and they were mere bystanders. They freely acknowledged that they had no idea how people would use it or how it would make money.

But they thought it had potential, and in 2007 they spun it off as a separate company from Odeo, with Mr. Dorsey serving as Twitter’s first chief executive, Mr. Stone as creative director and Mr. Williams as chairman.

Mr. Williams had dipped into his own funds to cash out Odeo’s investors and subsequently gained a controlling stake in Twitter — but he was spending his days running yet another company, Obvious, an incubator for start-ups, and wasn’t focused on managing Twitter.

While Mr. Stone, an outgoing showman, was friends with both Mr. Williams and Mr. Dorsey and socialized with them, Mr. Williams and Mr. Dorsey are much quieter men whose only bond was their work. When Mr. Williams decided to join Twitter full time in the spring of 2008, his relationship with Mr. Dorsey quickly became strained as the two men competed for power.

By the end of 2008, Twitter’s growth was exploding — and things inside the company were beginning to break down. Mr. Williams suggested to Twitter’s board that it push Mr. Dorsey out. With the exception of Mr. Dorsey, the board unanimously agreed, according to several people involved in the discussions. Mr. Williams had run three companies, directors reasoned, so they figured that he would do a better job.

Upon Mr. Williams’s ascent, Mr. Dorsey became Twitter’s chairman. Although that move was potentially fraught with problems, the board wanted to ensure that Mr. Dorsey remained close to the company because he still owned a large stake in Twitter and he had originally come up with the idea for it, according to two board members.

The change shocked employees and further frayed relations between Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Williams. Mr. Dorsey declined to comment for this article, but people close to him say he felt betrayed by Mr. Williams.

“There was a feeling that Ev wanted to take control after he realized the potential importance of Twitter,” says a Twitter employee who was there during the transition and requested anonymity to protect business relationships.

“It’s hard and confusing,” Mr. Williams says of Mr. Dorsey’s departure. “I think there’s few cases in history where the C.E.O. steps down and is also the founder and reports to someone and that works.”

Directors say Twitter’s board meetings are amicable, and in the last couple weeks, Mr. Dorsey has been spotted around the offices more and has taken on a greater role in long-term strategy.

Even with Mr. Williams as C.E.O., Twitter was growing faster than he or anyone else at the company could handle. In 2009, Twitter ballooned to 71.3 million registered users from 5 million. The Web site crashed often, and the “fail whale” — an image of a whale that appears on the site whenever Twitter falters — became the butt of jokes.

Twitter was fielding dozens of calls a week from big companies, celebrities and politicians. Among the callers were CNN, “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and the State Department, which asked Twitter to delay maintenance so that Iranians protesting an election in 2009 could continue using the service.

“We were just hanging on by our fingernails to a rocket ship,” Mr. Williams recalls.

What the company needed was simple: people to do all the work. Yet it moved painfully slowly in hiring, with just 110 employees by the end of 2009, even though it had raised $150 million in venture capital by then.

“The mistake I made was definitely underhiring, both in quantity and in experience, in several areas, for a long time,” Mr. Williams says now. He attributes that mistake to the daily distractions of running Twitter and not anticipating how big it would become.

Twitter’s first office in San Francisco was classic start-up: dorm-room décor, complete with a keg in the kitchen, a couple of big, green concrete deer and a communal table where employees ate take-out burritos together.

Big-name chief executives would visit the company and sit on frumpy couches because there wasn’t an adequate conference room. A video crew once walked in through Twitter’s unlocked front door without permission and began recording employees.

The company’s offices today have locked doors and a receptionist in a sunlit lobby, where the green deer now stand. Trendy furniture includes plentiful conference tables, and while there is still a keg, a chef prepares lunch for the 300 employees.

Sixty percent of those people are engineers, who have spent the last year methodically rebuilding the software that runs Twitter and developing a system to monitor downtime.

The fail whale still appears, but not nearly as often, an important change now that Twitter sells ads to companies like Starbucks, Ford and Microsoft. The ads can appear on the Twitter feed as sponsored posts, or in Twitter’s list of trending topics or among the suggested accounts that Twitter recommends that its users follow. Mr. Costolo spearheaded all of these initiatives.

Twitter finally hired a recruiter, as well as people to handle mundane but important big-company tasks like human resources, payroll and ensuring that all of Twitter’s partners use the same blue bird logo. A whiteboard near the executives’ desks lists headings like “commit,” “invest” and “leverage.”

Mr. Williams and his colleagues no longer liken Twitter to ice cream. They now describe it as an information network, not a social tool, and see it as an essential way for people to communicate and get information in real time.

Yet even though Twitter’s executives say their heads are finally above water, Mr. Williams still describes the company as “a 6-foot-tall sixth grader — there’s a lack of maturity, despite size and the perception of outsiders.”

He says Twitter now has a team that can realize the company’s ambitions — a revelation coming from someone who arrived in Silicon Valley with something to prove and volumes to learn about working with others.

EVAN WILLIAMS grew up on a farm in Nebraska, “90 miles and an eternity” from Lincoln, he says. And he didn’t fit in.

“My brother was the consummate Nebraska boy — the football star who went to the university, was president of his fraternity, hunted with my dad all the time,” he says. “I just didn’t feel at home there.

“I had a fierce desire to create things, to be independent and prove myself, which caused me to reject authority, but never in a sort of rebellious way,” he adds. “It was more like, ‘I’m going to show you by doing it all myself.’ ”

Mr. Williams dropped out of the University of Nebraska and started a business in Lincoln, financed by his father, designing Web sites for local businesses and making CD-ROMs about Nebraska football and the Internet.

But it turned out that, among other problems, football fans weren’t using CD-ROMs. The business ended up being Mr. Williams’s first failure, and he couldn’t repay his father.

Mr. Williams had devoured the early issues of Wired magazine, and California loomed in his imagination as a place where he could truly carve out his own niche as an entrepreneur. He made his first move west in 1997, with a marketing job at O’Reilly Media, the technology publisher in Sebastopol, Calif.

“Ev was just very frustrated, and he had ideas for how we could do things differently and better,” recalls Tim O’Reilly, the publisher’s founder. “He had a little bit of attitude, a chip on his shoulder, but always with good spirit.”

Mr. Williams left O’Reilly after seven months — “I was bad at working for people,” he says. And in January 1999, at the height of the dot-com bubble, he started his second company, Pyra Labs, with his former girlfriend, Meg Hourihan. Paul Bausch, a friend from high school, soon joined.

Pyra made a Web-based project management tool but soon saw a different opportunity: a tool that allowed users to easily post articles and photographs to personal blogs. That became Blogger, one of the first Web services that automated blog publishing.

Soon after, the tech bubble burst, and Blogger was running out of money. Mr. Williams told his five employees, including Ms. Hourihan and Mr. Bausch, that he could no longer pay them and that he would run the company alone.

But six months later, in June 2001, Blogger started making money by charging for added features, and Mr. Williams had a budget that allowed him to hire new workers. In 2003, Google acquired Blogger.

Several people who once worked at the company said they didn’t make money on the sale because Mr. Williams had never submitted the paperwork needed to allocate stock options. Mr. Williams says that this group hadn’t worked at the company long enough for their stock options to vest.

Others have a different view of Mr. Williams’s tenure at Blogger.

“I don’t think he took care of the people who got him to where he was,” says Ms. Hourihan, who earned millions of dollars from the sale. “It was bitter, horrible and tough. He’s not C.E.O. material. It doesn’t play to his strengths. He’s a better inventor; he’s better at coming up with ideas.”

Mr. Williams says that all successful businesspeople make enemies along the way. Yet he also says he learned from the Blogger experience. “I was trying to do everything myself when we were going through hard times,” he says. “When it was just me, I was happier, which I think is a sign of failure of working with people.”

In 2004, Mr. Williams left Google, where he was still running Blogger, and planned to take time off. Instead, he started working on Odeo with his neighbor Noah Glass. A year later, he again found himself running a company.

MR. WILLIAMS doesn’t fit the Silicon Valley stereotype. He is neither a back-slapping former frat boy nor a socially awkward programmer most content behind a computer screen.

He is at ease with himself, and convivial and dryly funny in small settings, but he tends to be quiet in large groups and is ambivalent about his newfound celebrity. Recently, with invitations to Davos and the Grammys, he traded in his uniform of jeans, a bird T-shirt and a hoodie for a suit — only to lose his luggage on the flight to Switzerland.

Last year, when his wife, Sara Morishige Williams, went into labor and wrote about it on Twitter, CNN published the news and her photo while she was still in the hospital. But Mr. Williams rarely posts personal messages to the 1.3 million people who follow him.

His fingers move constantly while he talks, whether fiddling with his keychain or shredding toothpicks at a bar, and staff members give him a drink and an espresso to loosen him up before big public appearances.

“Often there will be a room with five people having a conversation and he says the least, but when he does talk, everyone listens intently, and it’s a gem,” says Mr. Kaplan, his friend.

In business, that trait can be beneficial. In 2008, Facebook tried to buy Twitter, and financiers asked Mr. Williams if he wanted to sell. He said he wanted to sleep on it, and the next day sent them a long e-mail about why he wanted Twitter to stay independent.

“He’s got this ability to be patient in this very productive way,” says Bijan Sabet, who is on Twitter’s board and is a partner at Spark Capital, which invested in the company. “It was not just this flip e-mail but very thoughtful — what we could accomplish by when, why there’s still so much we have left to do. It was pretty inspiring.”

But others say Mr. Williams’s methodical approach can get in the way. “Ev is very difficult to work with because he has a tough time making a final decision on products,” says the C.E.O. of a Silicon Valley social networking company who requested anonymity because the company works with Twitter. “This all changed when Dick took over. He’s very logical and knows how to make things happen.”

From Mr. Williams’s point of view, his division of labor with Mr. Costolo, a wiry and restless counterpoint to Mr. Williams’s reserve, is a sign of success. After failing early on to work with others, Mr. Williams says he has figured out how to be part of a team.

“Dick is hard-charging and very focused on urgency and executing now, and I tend to be very contemplative,” he says. “My weakness is probably taking too long to make a decision, and his is being too hasty.”

THE cumbersome details of running Twitter now fall to Mr. Costolo. He says his biggest challenge is ensuring that in other countries, like Japan, South Korea and Brazil, where Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds, the company avoids the managerial mistakes it made in the United States.

That means marketing Twitter as an information network, not a social one, from the get-go; buying enough computing power; and hiring people to sell ads in those countries. Twitter also has to prove that it can build an advertising business in the United States.

The company, meanwhile, is trying to avoid the bureaucracy that plagues larger businesses. The topic is important to Mr. Williams, who says he started companies because he didn’t believe in aligning himself with institutions.

Twitter’s executives talk about the “Dunbar number” — the maximum number of people, generally believed to be 150, with whom one person can have strong relationships. This effort, mind you, comes from a company with a business model that fosters a multitude of ever-growing — and largely glancing — interactions among Twitter’s users.

“I’ve never seen a company so focused on avoiding the Dunbar number,” says Adam Bain, who recently joined Twitter from the News Corporation as head of global revenue. “You can tell Ev planned it out.”

Each time employees log on to their computers, for instance, they see a photo of a colleague, with clues and a list of the person’s hobbies, and must identify the person. And notes from every meeting are posted for all employees to read.

Speaking to a group of new hires at an orientation session last spring, Mr. Williams said Twitter had three goals: to change the world, to build a business and to have fun.

“You can succeed by only building a business, and many companies do,” he said. “We won’t consider it success unless it’s all three.”

Here is the start up story of Facebook as reproduced from Vanity Fair's article With a Little Help From His Friends.

At 19, Sean Parker helped create Napster. At 24, he was founding president of Facebook. At 30, he’s the hard-partying, press-shy genius of social networking, a budding billionaire, and about to be famous—played by Justin Timberlake in David Fincher’s new film, The Social Network.

Sean Parker was sitting in World Civilization class at his Virginia high school when someone brought him a note. His father, it read, was waiting to take him to an orthodontist appointment. A chill ran down Parker’s spine. He didn’t have an orthodontist. When he got outside, his father angrily whisked him into the family minivan. When they arrived at their modest suburban house, a team of F.B.I. agents was toting papers and a desktop computer out of Sean’s room.

Within a few short years, Parker went from apprehended 16-year-old hacker—he had managed to break into the computer networks of numerous multi-national corporations and even military databases—to world-class Internet entrepreneur. In 1999 he became rather notorious, at 19, for helping an even younger teenager named Shawn Fanning create Napster. That free song-sharing service upended the music industry. More recently, Parker played an indispensable role as the founding president of Facebook, the mammoth social-networking site where 500 million people now spend 700 billion minutes a month. Had he not joined founder Mark Zuckerberg in Palo Alto in the summer of 2004, when the fledgling Facebook was just five months old, the service almost certainly would not be the colossus it is today.

Parker is widely considered a Web oracle; more than a few acquaintances and colleagues use the word “genius” to describe him. He understands not only computers and Web networks but also how people want to incorporate them into their lives. As a result, he’s been stunningly successful. That said, he has a libertine side. Parker has a knack for missing deadlines and appointments, for disappearing for weeks on end, for avoiding the press. (His decision to cooperate with a Vanity Fair profile is unprecedented and rather out of character.) He was pushed out of Facebook after an arrest for cocaine possession in 2005. (No charges were filed.) Even among his many supporters, he has a reputation for being an erratic party animal.

Now he is about to achieve a new level of fame, as one of the main subjects of the highly anticipated film The Social Network. In theaters this month, the movie purports to tell the story of Facebook’s first year, partly by focusing on a darker side of Parker’s persona. Justin Timberlake plays a suave, conniving Parker, who both in the movie and in reality was Zuckerberg’s main mentor during Facebook’s crucial early days. But as crafted by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, Parker comes across as a pushy, greedy—and, yes, visionary—schemer. “A million dollars isn’t cool,” Parker says at one point in the movie. “You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg (see page 189), comes across as cocky, angry, and somewhat sex-obsessed.

The real Parker is both more complex and more interesting, despite the considerable skills of Sorkin and director David Fincher. In fact, Parker, a svelte, wavy-maned clotheshorse, is a uniquely quirky figure in the annals of 21st-century business. At age 30, he is already worth close to a billion dollars, thanks mostly to the cache of Facebook stock he still owns. An autodidact who barely finished high school, he is nonetheless almost painfully cerebral. A sickly child whose asthma sometimes landed him in the hospital, he devoured books from a very young age; his father, a U.S.-government oceanographer, began teaching him programming at age seven. There is hardly a topic—literary, political, medical, or technological—about which he cannot offer an informed and nuanced opinion in his rapid-fire patter. (Don’t get him started on Ben Franklin’s role as a media pioneer.)

Most of all, he turns his knowledge and instincts toward Internet business strategy as a way, he says, of “re-architecting society. It’s technology, not business or government, that’s the real driving force behind large-scale societal shifts.” Indeed, Parker has such a superb track record for predicting where technology is headed (and which type of product and service will appeal to consumers) that companies often invite him to invest simply to tap his brain. “Few people are as smart as he is,” says Facebook’s Zuckerberg, aged 26, who still consults quite frequently with his former partner.

But, for all his Web-world savvy, Parker at times seems just as drawn to recreational indulgence. His is the life of programmer-as-rock-star—often spent among real-life rock stars—with the lifestyle that that implies. He routinely stays up very, very late, talking intensely about subjects he cares about and/or partying—and sleeps in much of the following day. Says San Francisco tech investor Ron Conway, a longtime friend, “The fact that Sean is so scattered yet so brilliant is something you just don’t see often. He’ll probably start another five really significant life-changing companies before he’s through.”

Parker’s high-school hacking bust seems itself cinematic: a down-home version of a Matthew Broderick scene from WarGames. The teenager had been sitting in the family den, all night, drilling deeply into the bowels of a Fortune 500 company, which he refuses to name. Back then he had a hobby, he says, of hacking into different sorts of organizations, keeping a file of .com, .edu, .mil, and .gov Internet domains he had penetrated in various countries around the world. His goal was to break into one of each type in a laundry list of countries. He claims that once inside he usually alerted the system administrator—from his or her own e-mail—to vulnerabilities he had discovered.

Unfortunately, after this particular night, his father came downstairs at five A.M. Parker had been performing erratically in high school—sometimes pulling A’s but just as often simply refusing to work, and nearly failing. It was all deliberate, he claims. “I had a desire to prove to myself that I was actually in control—that I wasn’t a puppet,” he says. “I didn’t want to kowtow to the system.” Seeing his son hunched over his terminal, Parker’s father, outraged, apparently had a vision of yet another lost day at school. “So,” recalls Parker, “he grabbed the keyboard from my hands, ripped it out of the computer, and took it upstairs. I started crying and saying, ‘Dad! You don’t know what you’re doing! I have to log out!’ But he didn’t let me.” Unable to cover his tracks, Sean Parker’s dalliances were exposed, his location identified by tracking him through his Internet-service provider. In the end, as a minor, he was sentenced only to community service.

But one aspect of this story may help elucidate Parker’s subsequent attitudes toward rebellion. He performed his court-ordered duties at a library with other teenage offenders. There he met a girl whom he describes as a “punk-rock princess.” One day she wrote her phone number on Parker’s hand—in ballpoint pen, he remembers fondly—and a few months later, he says, “I lost my virginity to her.” He explains: “I thought it was an incredible cosmic irony. This was the most romantic experience of my life and I met her because I’d been raided by the F.B.I.”

Around the same time, Parker made the online acquaintance of 15-year-old Shawn Fanning, another talented hacker. Fanning recalls their first conversation. “Right away we were talking about things like theoretical physics. We realized we had a lot in common.” Along with a couple of buddies, the pair soon launched an Internet-security firm called Crosswalk, offering to advise companies that might otherwise have been their targets. It didn’t succeed. Parker, meanwhile, began working as a programmer at a major Internet company near his Virginia home, receiving academic credit during his senior year.

Against his parents’ wishes, Parker decided not to apply to college, and when Fanning told him about his plan to create Napster, he immediately asked to get involved, becoming a co-founder and contributing key ideas. He picked up and moved to San Francisco, having never before spent any time away from home, says his mother, Diane, a TV-advertising broker.

In its first year, the music file-sharing network gained tens of millions of enthusiasts. Parker soon became a habitué of nightclubs and raves. But in the process Napster drew the wrath of record companies, which launched an all-out legal assault. Within 14 months, a federal judge would order Napster to stop allowing users to download copyrighted material. E-mails that Parker had written, blithely discussing the likelihood that users were breaking the law, were enlarged and displayed in open court by industry attorneys. Though an appeals judge let the service keep operating, it was the beginning of Napster’s long, slow death. Parker himself was pushed out by Fanning’s more elderly partners. Thus began a cycle of vertiginous triumph followed by humiliating failure.

In early 2001 he tried to launch his own Internet company, and to redeem himself. “It had to have the potential to be as big as Napster,” he says. “Otherwise it wasn’t interesting to me.” He realized his electronic address book was getting out of date. Maybe everyone could use help keeping theirs current. Could that be a company? But the idea took a while to gestate, and even longer to finance. “I lived on couches for something like six months,” Parker says. “I had no home. I was totally broke. I would stay at a friend’s house for two weeks, then move because I didn’t want to become this permanent mooch.” His girlfriend at the time urged him to give up and get a job at Starbucks.

Eventually, Parker and some partners managed to land some seed money from Sequoia, the prestigious Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. The company, named Plaxo, opened its doors that November. In short order it became the most famously annoying service on the Internet, peppering innocent Web users with requests to correct their entry in their friends’ address books. For the irreverent Parker, this was a virtue—a triumph of viral marketing. But disgrace soon followed. Parker’s unreliability began to grate on his colleagues and the company’s investors. Sometimes he didn’t show up for work. By early 2004 he was fired. The company’s board later hired a private investigator in a retroactive attempt to look into various rumors, including whether Parker had been providing drugs to other employees. Parker—who calls the accusations “ludicrous, a smear campaign”—was again on the street, and broke.

He began to hang around with some of his newfound San Francisco friends, including night owl Jonathan Abrams, a programmer who had launched Friendster in 2002, in part to help people hook up. Parker was fascinated with Friendster, which that year became the world’s first online social network to grow its membership into the millions. But the service began sputtering when its systems could not handle the traffic. Parker, however, smelled an opportunity.

One day—in a scene fictionalized in The Social Network—Parker saw Thefacebook, as it was then known, on the computer of his roommate’s girlfriend, a student at Stanford. (In the movie, he gets his first peek after spending the night with a woman whose name he barely knows.) Parker had already concluded that the most promising way to launch a social network would be within a relatively closed community. College seemed perfect. He trawled the Web site and sent an e-mail to the kid who ran it—Mark Zuckerberg, then a sophomore at Harvard—suggesting that the two of them meet.

Matt Cohler, who joined Thefacebook shortly after Parker, is awed when he thinks about that pivotal e-mail. “Napster and Facebook are two of the most significant companies in the history of the Internet,” he says, “and in both cases Parker spotted them earlier than anyone—other than the people who invented them.”

Parker impulsively flew to New York, where he met Zuckerberg for dinner, and the two quickly bonded. A few months later, in June 2004, they ran into each other on the streets of Palo Alto, where Parker, unemployed (but still driving around in a BMW 5-series), was living with yet another girlfriend. Zuckerberg invited him to move into Facebook’s newly rented summer house. At first, Parker slept on a pad on the floor of co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s room, until, as Moskovitz puts it, “things got more serious with my girlfriend, and I had to kick him out.” Perhaps more than at any other time in his life, Parker focused closely on one project.

Back then Parker apparently believed even more passionately in the company’s potential than did Zuckerberg himself. Peter Thiel—the billionaire hedge-fund manager and co-founder of PayPal, who became Thefacebook’s first investor—says that around that time “Sean consistently argued that Facebook was going to be really big. If Mark ever had any second thoughts, Sean was the one who cut that off.” In late August 2004, Zuckerberg and Parker went into a branch of Silicon Valley Bank to open a business account. With only two weeks before the fall semester, Zuckerberg was still talking about returning to Harvard, and the two argued over it right then and there, according to Ken Loveless, a senior vice president at the bank. Parker was adamant that Zuckerberg shouldn’t go back. (Zuckerberg dropped out.) Says Moskovitz, known for his dry humor, “Sean probably deserves less credit for turning Facebook into what it is than he thinks he does, but also more credit than anybody else thinks he does.”

Besides serving as Zuckerberg’s comrade-in-arms, Parker also worked to bolster his partner’s position, so what happened to Parker at Plaxo could never be repeated at Thefacebook. In the financing that Parker negotiated with Thiel, as well as a much larger deal signed seven months later with the Accel Partners venture-capital firm, Parker was able to negotiate for Zuckerberg something almost unheard of in a venture-funded start-up: absolute control for the entrepreneur. Because of that, Zuckerberg, to this day, allocates three of Facebook’s five board seats (including his own). Without that control, Facebook would almost certainly have been sold to either Yahoo or Microsoft, whose C.E.O., Steve Ballmer, offered $15 billion for it in the fall of 2007—only to be met with a blank stare from the then 23-year-old Zuckerberg.

Yet again, Parker’s undisciplined ways would prove his undoing. On a kiteboarding trip to North Carolina in 2005 he was arrested during a party at his rental house on suspicion of cocaine possession. Though he was never formally charged, some of Facebook’s investors and employees felt Parker could no longer effectively serve as company president. With much anguish, he agreed to depart.

But while his exit may have been ignominious, Parker, by this time, was getting better at rolling with the punches. This was due, in part, to the fact that Zuckerberg himself never forsook him. “I don’t think Sean ever really left Facebook,” says board member Thiel. “He’s continued to be involved in many ways.”

Working with Parker, according to several colleagues, remains gratifying but frustrating. Joe Green, a Harvard classmate of Zuckerberg’s, who is now Parker’s partner in a Facebook application called Causes—which helps people donate money to nonprofits—first met Parker six years ago at Facebook’s Palo Alto crash pad. “I was sleeping on the couch,” Green recalls. “Sean came in and needed to borrow money for a haircut.” Once, Green says, when the two of them were late for a flight, Parker simply refused to stop doing his e-mail. “He said, ‘I’m getting a lot done. It’s worth it to me.’ ” At times, Green insists, the only way to reach Parker is via “war dial”—calling his cell phone 10 to 20 times until Parker, who seldom listens to voice mail, finally realizes somebody must really want to talk to him.

Reid Hoffman, a longtime friend and the founder of LinkedIn, who sits with Parker on the board of Gowalla—a location-based social-media service—remembers Parker suggesting an intriguing new concept for the company while the two of them were chatting in Davos, Switzerland. “I said, ‘Dude! You gotta start coming to board meetings again!’ This is Parker’s pattern—great idea, work like the devil, then disappear for a while.”

“Why do we all put up with it?” asks Green rhetorically. “For two reasons. He adds a lot of value in the time he’s there. And he’s very loyal. When you really need him, he will be there. That builds up a reservoir of goodwill.”

Reggae plays in the background at Shawn Fanning’s huge 40th-floor apartment, directly over San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. It is late at night. Parker stretches back on an easy chair and bemoans what he sees as the scarcity, in contemporary culture, of revolutionary thinkers on the level of, say, Jim Morrison and Jack Kerouac. “They were capable of folly,” he says, “and willing to take risks in terms of their message. We live in an extremely repressive era, and we fail to realize how repressive it is, because we’re told that all these outlets for rebellion, like listening to rock music, are no longer satanic. Smoking weed—that’s sort of O.K. and acceptable in some circles.” To Parker, the implication is that people in his position have almost an obligation to do what they can with the tools at their disposal—software and the Internet—to free up society through disruptive technology. As he muses, it is clear that he sees entrepreneurship and invention as handmaidens of social transformation.

Parker had been trying to explain himself while he wandered the streets on that hazy night, attempting at length to find Fanning’s apartment (even though the building is the tallest in the neighborhood). “I think the best way to describe me is as an archetypal Loki character,” Parker begins, “like Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. I’m like the prankster or Puck in mythology. He’s not trying to cause harm, but rather to pull back the veil that masks your conventional, collectively reinforced understanding of society. This renegade thing was very clear at Napster. The point was that the emperor—the content industry—had no clothes.” He hesitates. “This all probably sounds incredibly pretentious and narcissistic.”

It does. But even as Parker alternates between putting himself down and pumping himself up, he can rely on most of his friends to speak glowingly. Says Peter Thiel, “I’ve told Sean he may be the long-lost grandson of Howard Hughes—a brilliant entrepreneur who is somehow transforming the United States and yet is not understood by society. Sean is one of the great serial entrepreneurs of his generation, someone who is really changing the world and turning the wheel of history.”

It’s easy for Parker to make new friends, and he does quite often. People of all sorts are captivated by his ideas and his enthusiasm. “Sean is a genius, no question,” says Ashton Kutcher, whom Parker advised while the actor was developing his own Net-oriented production company. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales met Parker in 2008 and the two started hanging out. “He gets things very quickly,” says Wales. “He’s incredibly intense and engaged about ideas.” One of Parker’s closest friends, musician Sean Lennon, offers, “His brain is like the technological equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. He’s really one of the smartest people I’ve ever met—and that’s an understatement. He’s always talking about the potential of computers to generate algorithms for likable melodies, and we have this ongoing argument: he believes it’s only a matter of time before computers will be able to create listenable tunes. Sean is an artist—a business artist.”

Actress and activist Trudie Styler, who is married to Sting, invited Parker and his then girlfriend to a retreat for philanthropists and activists that the couple hosted at their Tuscany estate last year. There, Parker met Laura Ziskin, who produced the Spider-Manmovies and co-founded a charity called Stand Up to Cancer. “It turned out Sean has an interest in immunology and a belief that it is the next frontier in cancer research,” says Ziskin. “He had talked to as many people about it as I had!” They’re now friends. Styler found herself impressed: “He was just so lovely with everyone, and kind. A higher being. I’m very fond of him.” (Parker also fraternizes in the most elite precincts of global governance and policy—but in his own way. At the World Economic Forum in January, he was disappointed in the quality of the nightlife in Davos and speculated with relish that he could throw the all-time-best forum party if he took over a big local venue and brought in some of his rock-star friends.)

A lover of the good life, Parker maintains a collection of elegant white shoes, a closetful of Tom Ford suits, and a $100,000 Tesla electric sports car he never quite seems to have time to drive. He divides his nights between a San Francisco apartment and a palatial (rented) New York town house. Among its many amenities: a full, mowed lawn on a patio on the third of its five floors.

And although he thinks little of hiring a private jet for a late-night trip from New York to Washington, he is also almost compulsively benevolent. When his friends fund-raise for charity, several told me, Parker is often the one who contributes the most. A connoisseur of tea (he has a collection of about 100 varieties), he makes gifts of his favorite blends, which he personally labels and presents in special mulberry-bark canisters ordered from Japan. He has financed the businesses of numerous cohorts, merely out of affection. “He’s one of the most generous people I know,” says another associate. “Also one of the flakiest.”

Today, Parker spends most of his time finding and managing investments for Founders Fund, Thiel’s venture-capital shop. His current passion: a London-based music company called Spotify, which he thinks can finish the job that he and Fanning started with Napster—this time, legally. (Spotify lets you listen to music from almost any artist on any label, gratis, through ad-supported streaming.) Not everything Parker touches, however, necessarily turns to gold. A little while back, he was shelling out money in an unsuccessful bid to expand a hand-painted-clothing company. He was also briefly brainstorming with a group that included his old crony Shawn Fanning and the 18-year-old founder of Chatroulette, Andrey Ternovskiy, about how to turn that voyeuristic live-video networking site into a full-fledged service. Oh, and when he’s home in New York he takes piano lessons from Sean Lennon.

While Parker has few generational equals in terms of raw achievement, that doesn’t mean he isn’t still surprisingly insecure. As several bemused friends and associates recounted, he devoted considerable effort—knowing a reporter would be interviewing them for this piece—to attempting to script their comments. (Mostly, they say, he appears to have wanted them to characterize his wilder behavior as youthful indiscretions.)

“If there’s some triumphant end of the story, I guess in a roundabout way I’ve gotten what I wanted,” Parker posits late one night, “which is the ability to do interesting things and the wealth to be free.... I can sort of do what I want. Maybe I have to work harder to prove myself in some new relationship because they’ve heard some wacky stories about me. But at least I can get the meeting.”

The road, he points out, has been rocky. “It hasn’t been some kind of fairy tale for me. All of my success has been born of failure. Your childhood dreams are always tales of glory; reality is a lot messier and more dramatic.”

Parker met his on-screen alter ego, Justin Timberlake, just once—at a club, after the actor had read Aaron Sorkin’s script. “He said he wanted to get to know me,” recalls Parker, “but I said, ‘That isn’t going to help you play the part Sorkin has written. That character really isn’t me.’ ”

True. Sorkin’s Parker is vindictive, calculating, and mean, unlike the real one. The Parker of the script is also greedy, which is not Sean Parker’s big issue. More than money, he wants credit and recognition. “I’ve helped change the world, at least three times,” says Parker at one point, by way of self-assessment. But he also says, wistfully, “I’m a perennial outsider.” With the movie likely to be a hit, one thing is certainly going to change. He’s about to get the kind of recognition that the superficial society which he scorns seems to value the most: the stamp of real celebrity. How he handles it is another question.

2027

2010-10-14T20:41:00.002-04:00

The global chief economist of Goldman Sachs, Mr Jim O' Neill, has forecasted that the economies of the BRIC countries will overtake that of the G7 countries by 2027.

Mr O'Neill came up with the terms BRIC back in 2001 to recognise the growth potential of the biggest emerging countries in the world. BRIC is Brazil, Russia, India and China. The first countries have GDP of approximately US$1.6 trillion each now while China's current GDP is about US$4 trillion. China is poised to be the 2nd largest economy in the world, overtaking Japan. While Brazil is poised to be the 5th largest. Currently, the BRIC countries' combined economies made up about 15% of the world but they will continue their fast growth rate to be an economic power in the future.

Other emerging economies that are growing strong and attracting global interest are Mexico and Turkey.

The G&7 comprises US, Japan, Germany, France, Canada, UK and Italy. Many of them are still struggling with the economic crisis and are expected to see slow growths for a while.

The Start Up of Facebook

2010-10-11T23:12:00.002-04:00

Facebook is stirring a lot of interest now. It is the biggest website in the world with over 500 million members. It is valued at over $20 billion. Its three 20 something founders are all billionaires. A book, The Accidental Billionaires, and a movie adaptation, The Social Network, tell the story of Facebook and the intrigue behind it. Both book and movie are doing well in sales.

A key story behind Facebook is how Eduardo Saverin was left out of the company by main man, Mark Zuckerberg. Saverin was a founding shareholder with Zuckerberg when the company that would be Facebook was incorporated. Saverin had contributed $3,000, the same amount as Zuckerberg had contributed. Saverin had in return 30% share in Facebook. While Zuckerberg created the technology behind Facebook, Saverin was charged with the business side of it eg to find a business model and to bring in investors.

Accounts of people who have dealt with Facebook in the early days, have indicated that both Zuckerberg and Saverin represented Facebook as founders.

What happened was that Zuckerberg and another early partner in Facebook, Dustin Moskovitz, dropped out of Harvard to move to California to further develop Facebook. Saverin did not join them and continued to study in Harvard. It was said that Zuckerberg transferred all the ownerships and rights of the original Facebook company of which Saverin was a shareholder to another company without Saverin and continued Facebook in the new company. Another version, had it that Zuckerberg got in new investors and diluted Saverin's 30% stake to 0.03%.

Zuckerberg then deleted what ever reference to Saverin's role in Facebook and the latter's contribution in Facebook diminished. It was said that Zuckerberg's teaming up with Napster's founder, Sean Parker, was a contributory reason for Zuckerberg's move to kick Saverin out of Facebook. Parker was portrayed to have influenced Zuckerberg to regard Saverin as unable to contribute to Facebook and Parker would have the connection and knowledge to replace Saverin. Parker would go on to serve as President of Facebook for a while after Saverin left.

Saverin subsequently sued claiming his stake was unreasonably diluted and that he had contributed as much as $20,000 to Facebook at its startup. In 2009, Zuckerberg decided to settle the law suit with Saverin by giving Saverin a 5% stake in Facebook and to recognise him as a founder.

This brings to the issue of dilution of original shareholders in a company when the company grows and new investors come in. Usually when a company needs new capital, the existing shareholders will have to contribute the new capital in proportions to their existing shareholding so that post new capital, their shareholding remains the same in the company. That is if all shareholders are able to contribute their share of the new capital.

More often the case is the existing shareholders cannot contribute the new capital and new shareholders will come in with the capital. This will result in the dilution of the shareholding of the original shareholders. How much is the dilution depends on the agreed valuation of the company of which the new capital and investors will base on.

In Facebook's case, the reason why it is worth over $20 billion now and why the founders are billionaires is because of the valuation agreed on when a new investor came in with capital. Microsoft last came in and paid $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook in 2007. This valued Facebook as a whole as $15 billion in 2007.

The new investors all in all had diluted the founders shares to 24%, 6% and 5% respectively for Zuckerberg, Moskovitz and Saverin.

Besides valuation to protect dilution of shareholders, shareholders agreement is another important legal document to preserve rights and dilutions of shareholders.

It was unlikely Saverin had the benefit of a shareholders agreement with Zuckerberg but there could be other supporting documents such as incorporation documents. Anyway in the end, Saverin had his restitute.

Zuckerberg is now facing yet another law suit claiming for ownership of Facebook from an early contribution of funds. A copy of a cheque for the amount of $1,000 paid to Zuckerberg is the basis for the new suit. There could be little other supporting documents. It remains to be seen how this suit develops.

Facebook is worth US$23 billion

2010-09-22T23:46:00.000-04:00

Facebook now has 500 million users and according to a recent study, internet users spend more time using Facebook than all Google sites combined (including search, Gmail and youtube). If it is true, that is amazing because people like me keep my gmail logged in all the time and use its affiliated accounts such as documents, calendar and of course searches a lot. Still, I know Facebook is very sticky with young people. It has games which my children play a lot and youngsters spend most of their time to update their status and communicate there.

Before, youtube used to be the most popular site. People spent most of their time online watching youtube videos. Still, it remains a very strategic and smart buy by Google. Imagine, Google bought youtube for just over US$1 billion a few years ago.

Facebook is now conservatively estimated to be worth US$23 billion today. Its 3 founders (2 of them only 26 years old) are now billionaires (on paper). Mark Zuckerberg is the main shareholder with a net worth of US$7 billion. The other two are smaller shareholders with over US$1 billion worth.

Google's 2 founders are worth US$15 billion each.

In terms of social networking site, only Twitter, with its unique broadcast style, is the only real competitor to Facebook. Blogs, mySpace, Zune, youtube and others have all lost out to Facebook. Facebook is really a result of critical mass advantage rather than an unique service. It is because so many people are using it, people join in and continue to use it rather than it is a site that people want to use.

Twitter, though has its uniqueness which may threaten Facebook in time to come.

Google still has done amazing things to the internet and technology world. For example, its Android mobile phone operating system has become so popular that it is a credible rival to Apple's operating system.

Four Times World Champion

2010-09-21T20:54:00.004-04:00

Argentina won its 4th world cup today, beating Spain 2-1 after extra time in Winning Eleven 4 stars Football. This avenged its final defeat to Spain 0-1 in the last world cup. This is also the first time Argentina has beaten Brazil in the world cup finals.

Argentina qualified second from its South American group with 44 points from 14 wins, 2 draws and 2 defeats. It scored 40 goals and let in 9 goals. Brazil finished first, while Uruguay, Columbia and Paraguay qualified as third to fifth place finish respectively. In the qualifying, Argentina beat Brazil at home and lost away.

Usually reliable centre forward, Tevez had a forgettable qualifier. Missing some matches through injury, he was not in form in others, resulting in poor goal count. However, he rediscovered his form in time for the finals to help his team at the crucial time.

In the world cup finals, Argentina was in group 3 with Mexico, Bulgaria and Iran. It started its campaign with a 2-1 win over Mexico. This was followed with 3-0 wins over Bulgaria and Iran. Midfield general, Gago was injured at the end of the qualifiers and missed the first 2 group matches. The last time Gago did not play because of injury, Argentina did not make it out of the group stage in the finals. However, this was not such problem this time and Gago made a timely return during the business end of things. Argentina finished top of group 3 with a maximum 9 points from 3 wins and 8-1 goal advantage.

Argentina was drawn in the same half with fellow world champions, Brazil and the Netherlands. The other half had 2 world champions, defending champion Spain and Germany. Finalist Italy was also in the half.

In the round of 16, Argentina scored 4 times in the first half to beat Japan 4-0. In the quarter final, Argentina defeated nemesis, the Netherlands 2-1, coming behind to win after the Dutch had scored first. Tevez and Messi were prolific thus far while Lucho and Maxi added their names on the scorers chart with one goal each.

Then Argentina had to face Brazil. Although it beat its arch rival regularly in the qualifiers, the same cannot be said when it comes to the final. Argentina has lost all its matches against Brazil in the finals, including 3 times in the world cup final and another time during semifinal. Brazil surprised by starting with Juniohno instead of Ronaldino. But instead the former did maximum damage which the latter would have done too. Juniohno's trickery left 2 Argentina central backs flat footed and he passed to Robinho at the edge of the box to score the opening goal. Lucho, received a pass from Maxi and from outside of the box drilled a right footed which goalkeeper Dida could not stop for Argentina's immediate reply.

Just before half time, Juniohno scored to put Brazil ahead again. All the hard work done by Lucho's equaliser was undone. To make things worse, Maxi's lunge against a Brazilian player earned him a straight red card and Argentina was done by one man and one goal early in the second half. Brazil could not take advantage of the situation because Maxi's right midfield position could easily be taken over by right sided attracker, Messi. Tevez managed to steal the ball outside the box and launched a spinning shot at goal which evaded Dida's reach. Argentina was back level, 2-2. With 5 minutes' of second half remaining, a Messi corner was won brilliantly be man of the match, Lucho's header for Argentina to move in front for the first time in the match. Argentina suffered nervous moments with the final 5 minutes when it allowed Brazil to attack at will and run unmarked in the box. Somehow several close range shots including a couple from Ronaldino, which had joined in the game at the second half, hit the Argentine defence and stayed out. 10 man Argentina survived to move into the final with a 3-2 come from behind win over Brazil.

Spain defeated Italy 2-0 in the semis after beating Germany in the quarterfinals. So both the finalists had difficult paths prior to the final. Spain beat Argentina in the world cup final the last world cup 1-0 with the winning goal from David Villa inside the last 10 minutes. This time, Torres started instead of Villa, and like Juniohno of Brazil, Torres was a torn for Argentina throughout the match. His headers were troubling Argentina and he scored a late equaliser to take the match to extra time.

Argentina had a perfect start when Messi's corner has won and headed home by Riquelme in the 8th minute for a 1-0 lead. Riquelme had replaced regular right midfielder Maxi was was suspended following a red card in the semifinal. Argentina was dominating in the early and had opportunities to score from Tevez and Gago which they sky-ed from close range. Tevez hit the post too early in the second half. Just when it was thought Argentina had done enough to hold off Spain, Torres equalised off a mistake by a central defender on the 84th minute. Then immediately after that, they stole the ball outside the box and with just the keeper to beat, shot wide.

Argentina steadied itself and started the extra time well. On the 8th minute of the first half of extra time, Gago brilliantly took a pass from Burdisso and dribbled pass a few defenders into the box and launched a shot pass the onrushing Spain goalkeeper, Reina. This time, Argentina held off Spain until the final whistle. For the second consecutive world cup win, Gago had scored the winning goal. When Argentina won its third world cup, Gago scored the only goal in the 1-0 win over Italy. Now for its 4th world cup, Gago did it again for a 2-1 extra time win over Spain.

This was the first time Messi had won the world cup as captain. He had previously lost a few world cup final while captaining the team. Gago was captain when they won the third time. The first 2 world cup wins was captained by Tevez.

Tevez finished as top scorer of the World cup with 8 goals. Messi scored 5 times while Lucho had 3 goals, including 2 against Brazil. Maxi, Riquelme and Gago all scored one goal each.

Abbondiazerri kept goal just like in the 3rd world cup win. His substitute, Carrizo was goalkeeper in the first 2 world cup wins.

Argentina used 4 centre backs. Ayala and G. Milito played central defenders while Samuel guarded the right and Burdisso the left.

Cambiasso was holding midfielder while Gago provided attacking links in the middle of the park. Maxi and Lucho served as right and left midfielders respectively.

Captain Messi attacked from the right off central forward Tevez.

GDP vs GDP

2010-09-20T20:41:00.002-04:00

What is the total economy size (as measured by GDP) of the major economies of the world i.e. US, Europe and Japan compared to the 4 largest emerging markets (BRIC) ?

Latest GDP data available in 2010 in US$ trillion

1. USA 15

2. Europe 16

3. Japan 5

Total 36

4. China 4.3

5. India 1.7

6. Brazil 1.6

7. Russia 1.6

Total 9.2

There you go.

We Can Always Read Too Much Into It

2010-09-08T10:48:00.002-04:00

We can always read too much into Argentina's 4-1 friendly win over World Champions, Spain in Buenos Aires. After all, Argentina suffered for long under mediocre managers at world cups (even Bielsa - the Olympic gold medal coach and coach to a revived Chilean team this world cup - couldn't conjure some success when he took charge of Argentina) making ridiculous selection decisions. So, to be able to give something for its fans to cheer about is never bad.

Olympic gold medal coach, Sergio Batista used common sense to choose the right players (which Maradona does not have) to be sent out to meet Spain. Inter Milan with some key Argentina players defeated Spain proxy, Barcelona, and Germany proxy, Real Madrid in this year's Champions League. It showed through Inter that Argentina has the players to do well, if the coach has common sense.

Batista showed this today.

He did not take too much risk but instead started with steady and experienced players. Sergio Romero, world cup and Olympic gold medalist keeper, kept goal and played a fine game making important saves against Spain.

Gabriel Milito had a outstanding game in central defence which covered fellow central defender Demichelis from unnecessary risk. Inter captain, Javier Zanetti, provided the missing link in South Africa, a proper and functioning right back. Heinze kept left back, for now as Insua would surely take over some day soon, and provided a good cross for Argentina's fourth goal.

Mascherano was the holding midfielder and retained captaincy under Batista. Partnering him were equally defence minded Banega (Olympic gold medalist) and, with the injury to Gago, Inter star, Cambiasso was the third midfielder. And Cambiasso controlled the middle of the park like he did with Inter in the Champions League final. He made his point the had he been there against Germany in South Africa, things could be a lot of difference.

Tevez and Messi both had attacking duties as well as to fall back when Spain launched into its long possession football. Higuan served as out and out central forward.

Messi raced through at the Spanish defence and eventually received a return pass which he took on Reina and chipped over for the first goal on the 9th minute. Immediately, Higuan received a Tevez pass and evaded an advancing Reina only to slot home from a tight angle just 3 minutes later.

Reina would slip when he attempted a ball clearance and Tevez pounced on the loose ball which although hit Reina's leg but the ball still creeped in off the post by the half hour mark.

The three central forwards were substituted in the second half at different times with Messi playing until the final minute to make way for playmaker D' Alessandro. Spain also took out three star players after the first half which saw a dominant Argentina: Iniesta, David Villa and Silva. Another star, Xavi came in to replace Iniesta. Argentina used Aguero and Di Maria.

Spain scored a consolation goal late through Llorente just before Heinze crossed for Aguero to head a bouncing header pass second half Spain goal keeper Valdez.

In football, a system is very important as it uses the players well. For Argentina, the midfield must be able to win battle to control the ball to feed to Messi and/or Tevez to run at defence. Higuan would mop things up in front of the goal. The defence should be strong and will Insua, and Samuel, they have enough good defenders. In midfield, Riquelme and Gago are the additional playmakers available.

It is good to beat Spain even though it is just a friendly.

Third Time World Cup winner

2010-08-17T21:10:00.003-04:00

Argentina won its third Winning Eleven 4 star world cup today.

At the world cup final, Argentina defeated Italy 1-0 through F Gago's first half injury time strike. This final was the 10th time Argentina has made it, ending up as runnersup on 6 occasions.

They qualified from their South American group second to Brazil with 37 points comprising of 11 wins, 4 draws and losing 3 times. They scored 35 goals and received 14 goals for a goal advantage of 21. Paraguay, Uruguay and first time qualifier Ecuador also made it to the finals but none of these 3 countries made it out of their first round groups.

In the World cup finals, Argentina was in group 8 with Bulgaria, Trinidad & Tobago and Czech Rep. Argentina's first 11 was Abbondanzierri at goal. Ayala and G Milito marshalled centre defence while Samuel was right back and Burdisso left back. Both Samuel and Burdisso were outstanding during the finals.

Central midfielder, Gago captained Argentina for the first time and it was first time lucky for him as he captained his side to their third world cup title and scoring the winning goal in the final as well. He has been a revelation during the tournament, winning balls in the middle of the park and distributing passes to set up Argentina's awesome and relentless attacking engine.

Enforcer, Cambiasso, as usual steadied things as defensive midfielder. Opponents found it hard to get pass him as he provided cover to his defenders. Argentina's game plan was simple. Defend hard so that they did not concede goals and their relentless attacking engine would provide opportunities for them to score goals.

Maxi Rodrigues played wide as right midfielder while his counterpart on the left was Lucho Gonzales. Both of them provided speed and width to the team which was important as the midfield area could get very congested.

Tevez, who captained Argentina in their first two world cup wins, played at main striker. Messi, who captained Argentina the last 3 times they made it to the world cup final (all losing to Brazil) and vice captain this time, played as right sided striker.

Argentina opened the group matches with a confident 2-0 win over Bulgaria. The two strikers, Tevez and Messi both scored.

While Bulgaria was a team Argentina seldom met, Trinidad & Tobago, like Czech Rep, were frequent opponents and had proven to be difficult to play with. They slowed the game down to frustrate Argentina's fast attacking game and played with precise passing. The strategy worked as T&T took the lead mid way in the first half after absorbing repeated Argentina's attacks. Nevertheless, Argentina managed to equalise before half time by Cambiasso's shot at the top of the box. Rodriguez, who had a unconvincing game, rescued the team by giving them a 2-1 lead which they kept to record their second win and assured of qualification to the round of 16.

Entering the final game, Czech Republic needed at least a point to be sure of qualifying second from the group while a win over Argentina, which had 6 points then, would see them overtaking Argentina to the top of the group. Both sides played well in a highly tactical matchup. Neither could get the better of the others which saw Czech playing one of their best games against Argentina by denying them opportunities to attack. The goalless draw saw Argentina ending as group winner with 7 points while Czech qualified second with 5 points.

When the round of 16 matchups were made known, Argentina was the only former world champion placed in the first half. The second half consisted of all the other former world champions, Brazil, England, Germany, the Netherlands and France. Argentina had a clear path, at least on paper, all the way to the final. Instead, the second half saw such round of 16 matches:- Italy vs England (which Italy won) and Germany vs the Netherlands (which the Netherlands won). In the quarterfinals, France met Brazil and the former did Argentina a huge favour by eliminating its biggest arch rival.

Argentina's round of 16 opponent, Tunisia was of little known to them as they seldom met before. But like any African countries, they could play well and surprise. But as it turned out, Tunisia offered only token resistance and despite Argentina holding back in the second half, they still won 6-0. Lucho scored 4 goals while Tevez and Messi added one each.

Quarterfinal opponent, the USA was the exact opposite. They played well, fast and passed well. Argentina had their chances but could not score more than a midway Messi superb breakaway goal. As the goal came midway, Argentina had the game under control although was not able to add further goals as security.

As the format of the tournament puts group opponents in the same half, Argentina's group opponent Czech Rep survived the round of 16 and quarterfinals to meet Argentina again in the semi finals. Argentina had met Czech frequently in the world cup, including in the final which Argentina won emphatically for its second world cup. The stakes were almost as high this time, and Argentina braced for a tough time after been held out in the group match.

Still Argentina packed too much attacking power for Czech. Lucho and Tevez scored one each with Lucho making the break through by breaking away down the left frank and cutting into the penalty box and beating the goalkeeper from an accute angle. Soon, Tevez stuck a second goal just before half time. After resumption of play, Messi scored his first goal of the match by rounding the goalkeeper to hit the ball into an empty net immediately after. Then they set back and absorbed some Czech pressure but late in the game, Messi again found space to round off the keeper and hit into the empty net again for an empathic 4-0 semi fnal win.

Argentina had entered the final again and knew they had better chance facing a team other than Brazil. It was Italy's first final. Italy do not do well in the world cup, sometimes do not qualify for the finals, and if they do, are eliminated earlier than they should be.

The match was tight and the first real opportunity came from Italy. It passed well and cleverly to break through Argentina's defence and got a chance to shoot for goal which was charged down by Abbondanzieri. The resulting corner was just headed over after an Italian head beat out the defence to have a clean header.

Argentina responded when Tevez had the first chance to race at the defence. His shot narrowly missed the post. Italy marked both Tevez and Messi well. Then the floodgate opened as waves and waves of Argentina attack came from the enterprising Gago which was in top form winning his fair share of the ball in midfield compared to earlier in the game, when Italy was running things in midfield. Argentina also used Lucho a lot to deliver balls from the left frank which he did productively but the headers could not trouble the Italian keeper. He kept a few dangerous strikes from Tevez and a less effective Messi on the right.

Just when Italy looked like they did enough to hold out Argentina in the first half, a moment of genius by Gago gave Argentina the lead. Gago took the ball in command fashion outside the box and took it far right to find shooting space. He could not find any as the Italian defence was tight. Instead of passing from the right, Gago dribbled his way back to the middle of the box pass defenders and found space to shoot in front of Buffon, the keeper. He unleashed a stiff but controlled shot to beat the keeper for Argentina to lead 1-0. That was the last action of the first half.

In the second half, Argentina had a couple of opportunities to increase the lead but could not break through the keeper or the defence. Most of the time was spent in defence. While Argentina was brilliant in defence, they too were nervous like giving away unnecessary corners to Italy which Argentina cleared convincingly thereafter. Even in the dying seconds of the final, Italy has a chance in front of the goal which Abbondanzieri collected at the foot of an Italian striker to ensure Italy did not get a dramatic equaliser.

In the end, Argentina did enough to hold on to the 1-0 win for their world cup victory.

Both Lucho and Messi top scored for Argentina with 5 goals each although the top scorers of the finals scored 6 goals. Gago had 3 goals, Tevez 2 and Cambiasso and Rodriguez 1 each.

Well Said

2010-07-30T09:13:00.002-04:00

We are still on the subject of good riddance to Argentina coach, Maradona. I reproduce this excellent piece by Slam Sports.

Ruggeri helps save Argentina

By TIM KEEBLE, Sports Network

PHILADELPHIA -- If Argentina lifts the World Cup four years from now in Brazil, Oscar Ruggeri will be able to take some of the credit.

No, Ruggeri is not a fleet-footed winger capable of scoring bags of goals, or even a stalwart defender who will help to shore up a leaky defence.

Ruggeri was a coach on manager Diego Maradona's staff during the 2010 World Cup for Argentina, and he is partly to blame (or praise) for Maradona not being retained.

All indications over the past few weeks pointed to a four-year extension for the legendary Maradona, which would run through the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

Argentinean Football Association president Julio Grondona was firmly in Maradona's corner, but he wasn't as pleased with some of Maradona's coaching staff.

Ruggeri in particular came under scrutiny since he was the defensive coach who watched his side concede four goals in a quarterfinal loss to Germany earlier this month.

However, Maradona was adamant that he would need to be able to retain all of his staff if he were to continue, telling El Show del Futbol with typical boldness:

"If they touch a hair of one of my guys, even if the masseur or the kitman, I'm going. "I want to continue the adventure but not with (just) anyone. I chose these people. I want to continue working with them."

The problem is that some of the other board members did not agree that Maradona's staff warranted another chance, and he was instead let go in order to make way for a new coach.

"I would be a hypocrite if I didn't admit there was a general disliking of several aspects of the cycle that ended with the World Cup," general secretary Jose Luis Meiszner told cable channel C5N. "We did not see any intention to show humility, to say things should have been done better. There was no evaluation, no review, no conclusions. These are the things you have to think about in order to think about the future."

Humility has never been one of Maradona's greatest attributes, and if he had been retained as manager for another four years, Argentina would have many entertaining press conferences to look forward to, but no real chance at winning its third World Cup.

Maradona's appointment as manager in October 2008 was met with plenty of skepticism. After all, here was a man whose coaching resume consisted of a pair of one-year stints as a coach with smaller clubs in Argentina, making him grossly underqualified to take on such a big task.

Essentially, Maradona was a teenager with a learner's permit who was given the keys to a race car and asked to compete in the Daytona 500.

He got off to rocky start in qualification with an embarrassing 6-1 defeat at the hands of Bolivia, while also losing matches against Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay.

In fact, qualification for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa was not secured until the final two games, as Argentina needed late goals to beat both Peru and Uruguay.

Maradona and his team were heavily criticized for such a poor showing, but they still had enough talent to be a factor in South Africa.

The one thing they were missing was an experienced coach on the bench, and that fact became horribly apparent in their quarterfinal thrashing against Germany.

After winning four successive games to start the competition based on having superior talent alone, Argentina came up against an equally talented German side, but Maradona was in no position to match wits with his German counterpart, Joachim Loew.

Germany was able to score an early goal, and from there, Loew had his team sit back and soak up the pressure from Argentina before finding openings on the counter attack.

It was a plan that worked to perfection, as Argentina time and again tried to break down a well-organized German defence, only to be turned away and punished on the break.

It was a bit like watching someone run headfirst into a brick wall over and over again, and hoping that the outcome will be different the next time they try.

In a situation like this, Maradona the player would simply drop into midfield, collect a pass and dribble through six defenders before scoring a wonderful goal.

However, Maradona the manager was only able to stand on the sidelines and clap his hands while shouting encouragement to his befuddled players, looking as confused and lost as they did.

Instead of making a tactical adjustment Maradona watched as Argentina continued to hit its head against the wall by attacking in the same manner over and over again.

The end result was not pretty; a 4-0 defeat and a plane ticket back to Buenos Aires.

The one area in which Maradona did excel was taking the focus off of his players and soaking it up himself.

Prior to the Germany match he engaged in a war of words with some of the German players, and while the ability to deal with pressure is a good quality for a coach, it is just a small part of the job.

Maradona clearly was in over his head tactically, and with such a gifted side at his disposal, it was a shame that they lacked any real direction.

You would have thought that the result against Germany would have been enough to convince Argentina's board that Maradona needed to be replaced, yet still they were ready to offer him four more years.

However, the poor performances of coaches like Ruggeri have now saved Argentina from making a terrible mistake and have given the board a chance to redeem itself by finding a qualified coach capable of taking the reigns.

Maradona's playing career is no less brilliant despite his failings as a coach, and his loyalty to his staff is admirable. However, he is clearly not the right man for the job, and thanks to Ruggeri, Argentina can now search for the man who is.

Yes, Maradona is Out !

2010-07-28T00:05:00.002-04:00

I am a great fan of Maradona, the player.

But he is not a good coach. Argentina was humiliated in the world cup because he could not do a good job as coach. It was to my dismay when the Argentine FA was offering him another 4 year term until the next world cup.

Compared this to Brazilian coach, Dunga resigning immediately after losing narrowly to the Netherlands and their FA replacing him with a new coach.

I could see glory for Brazil in 4 years' time when they are host and more agony for Argentina.

But, disagreeing over coaching staff, the Argentine FA has decided to not renew Maradona's contract. As such, he will no longer be coach for the national team.

No new coach has been decided yet but a good interim coach has been appointed, the current youth team coach, Sergio Batista, who won the world cup as player with Maradona and crucially proven to be a capable coach by winning the Beijing Olympics gold medal with the likes of Lionel Messi, Riquelme, Mascherano and Angel Di Maria. He will not be a bad choice to be senior coach, or at least should be given a chance in future.

At the moment, any other choice as coach is better than retaining Maradona. Maradona had his chance and failed miserably.

Forever Young

2010-07-22T16:46:00.002-04:00

Mr Hudson as featured by Jay Z's version of Forever Young, sadly cannot carry the tune. Mr Hudson starts well but as the song goes on, the limitation in his voice is obvious. Jay Z chose the wrong vocalist.

And Jay Z's rapping is no great shake either.

The end result of their Young Forever is a weak cover version of a great song.

But this is all good because it brings fans back to this original masterpiece by German band, Alphaville. This song was first released back in 1984 during the golden new wave era.

As scary and pathetic the current pop scene is with artistes like Jay Z, Usher, Eminem, Gaga, etc churning out either weak cover versions and even weaker originals, there are surprisingly a few great pop songs out now at the same time. This makes the strongest collection of pop songs on the charts for a long while.

The few great pop songs I refer to are:-

1. Anything from the album, Animal by Kesha, in particularly non single, Blind.

2. Dancing on my own - Robyn

3. I Like - Keri Hilson

4. If I ever see you again - Timbaland featuring Katy Perry

5. Break Your heart - Taio Cruz featuring Ludacris

You may want to add a sixth which is the original version of Forever Young.

Diego Forlan is a worthy Golden Ball winner

2010-07-13T21:35:00.003-04:00

Everybody praises Diego Forlan as worthy winner of the Golden Ball.

Although there have been past world cup when the Golden Ball winners were undisputed (ie. Rossi in 82, Maradona in 86 and Romario in 94), other times the choices were controversial :-

1990 Schilani - who the fuck is he ?

1998 Ronaldo - after his mysterious illness in the final ?

2002 Kahn - when Ronaldo was really the standout and putting two past Kahn in the final no less.

2006 Zidane - was it Golden Ball or Golden Head ?

This year, Forlan was overwhelming the winner by a large margin with his selfless, skill ful all round game and scoring the highest number of goals too, and breathtaking goals too.

Spain deserves to win the World Cup

2010-07-12T11:41:00.002-04:00

Spain deserved to win the world cup although the match could have swung either way.

Spain deserved to win because as a nation it had develop the sports longer and more successfully than the Netherlands. They were European champions back in 1960 and again in 2008. The La Liga is probably the best football league now and their top clubs, Real Madrid and Barcelona have dominated the UEFA competitions over the decade. To achieve success at so many levels shows the resources and commitment the country has put into developing the sports. Their planning and execution of the development programmes must have worked to show results. Youth development programmes must have been sustained to ensure continual supply of football talents. The talents do not limit to players as can be seen even the coaches talent pool is plenty. They won the Euro 2008 with one coach and the world cup now with another coach.

The world cup final could have swung either way. The first half was dreadful as both sides were tentative and could not play to their normal rhythm and plan although the players ran around with pace. Things improve somewhat after that because both sides were frantic.

Robben had the best chance to finish off the match during normal time when at around the hour mark, he was put through clear of the Spanish backline by Sneidjer and went one on one with Casillas. Robben shot as Casillas went the wrong way but somehow his trailling left deflected the ball out.

Substitute, Fabregas had a similar one on one with the Dutch keeper but that was after the extra time and again it hit the leg of the keeper and the ball did not go in.

Match winner, Iniesta shows his magical skills and comparison to Messi as worthy of becoming a world champion.

The referee dishing out 14 yellow cards was a dreadful display. Luckily other than the ridiculous number of cards, needless to say some are unnecessary, he did not make any major wrong decisions other than wrongly sending Heitingal off with about 5 minutes extra time left. To put into perspective, the often said worst final ever was 1990's Germany vs Argentina. The match was dull and ill disciplined and the number of cards shown was just 6, compared to this final.

Casillas cried uncontrollably before the final whistle. The Dutch team stood in two rolls to congratulate the Spanish during the victory pass through after collecting their medals and the World Cup. The Netherlands were not as skill ful compared to Spain, so the time was not right yet for them to win this time.

World Champion and Best Player

2010-07-11T19:47:00.002-04:00

Spain deserved to be the 8th nation to win the FIFA World Cup. They beat the Netherlands 1-0 through a late extra time strike by Andre Iniesta, whose skills are comparable to Lionel Messi.

The win is also a much needed morale booster for the nation which is under financial distress.

Diego Forlan has been voted by the media as the best player of the World Cup and won the FIFA World Cup Golden Ball award. His 5 goals in the tournament tied with Muelller, Villa and Sneidjer but these other three players were adjudeged to have won the Golden, Silver and Brooze Boot respectively in that order for the top 3 scorers.

Forlan's Golden Ball would made up for Uruguay's missing out on a medal for finshing fourth in the World Cup.

Mueller also won best young player while Casillas won Golden Glove.

World Cup joint golden boot winners ?

2010-07-10T22:45:00.002-04:00

Forlan hit the post in the last free kick of the match ! Uruguay had chances to pull this one off but still there is no shame for a country with fewer population than Singapore to win the World Cup 2 times and reach the semis another 3 times. Forlan proved he is one of the best players of this World Cup. And to cap it off, he still has the chance to end up as the tournament's joint top scorers or golden boat winners.

Germany’s confidence could be seen affected after the semis loss. Their quick attacking football was not there. This could be due to chances in players but they were younger players coming in so it was more of morale and confidence issue. Still they had so much talent to win the match despite not playing at full capacity. Coming from behind to win is never easy. Getting the bronze medal is a success even for the prolific Germany.

It is a fitting accolade for both Forlan and Mueller to have scored 5 goals each and just before the final, top scorers along side the finalists' Sneidjer and Villa.

Remember The Pain

2010-07-05T19:41:00.003-04:00

Probably the most heart wrenching moment if you are an Argentina fan is not when you saw goals after goals came in that night or when the players cried with their heads bowed as they trooped off the pitch after the match. It was when you saw 15,000 cheering fans greeting the team when they landed in Buenos Aires. The fans were condored off 2 km away from the airport by the police. Fearing angry reaction from fans, the team had their customs cleared on board their plane and immediately whisked aways in a bus to the FA without stepping into the airport terminal building. If that was not enough, the police in addition did not allow any non passengers to come within 2 kms from the airport. The waiting fans had to make do with cheering and waving flags at the side of the airport highway hoping the team would catch a glimpse of them when their bus passed by.

This enthusiastic response came as a surprise to the team who underachieved again at the world cup. They expected rough reception back home but instead was showered with love and affection.

The greatest feeling is when you experience a failure and have someone to come to you to give you love and trust and belief in you. This is the greatest encouragement and motivation to propel you forward.

The pain of the defeat is also a feeling to remember by. A player had said to remember this pain so that it could be used on the field the next time.

Remember the pain when Argentina faces their opponents in the next world cup. Remember the love and trust their people has given then when nobody believed them after the humiliation in this world cup.

Argentina's Managerial Failure

2010-07-04T23:12:00.002-04:00

It is still unclear if Maradona will leave his post as manager after the humiliation in the world cup. It will be a disaster if he would be allowed to continue to lead the team for the next big assignment which is the Copa America in 2011 in which Argentina is the host. 2012 will be the year of the Olympics and again it is a crucial tournament for Argentina to qualify and to win the hattrick of gold medals. After that, 2013 and 2014 will the long qualifiers and the world cup in Brazil.

If Maradona is so thick skinned not to resign now and their Football Association still does not know that he is not a good manager after the 4-0 thrashing, then Argentina fans will have to endure more heartaches, now coming to 24 years since 1986.

Argentina is not without good coaches. They won the last two Olympics and their coaches then knew how to finish the business with the wealth of talent they had - harvesting a talent pool of youth world cup champions for many times. Another two Argentines coached Chile to qualifying to the world cup and finished in the round of 16 and Paraguay into the quarterfinal.

Inter Milan knew how to comprehensively defeat Bayern Munich in the May champions league final. Inter had many Argentina players which Maradona could use to counter the Bayern's side which supplied many of the talents to Germany during the quarterfinal world cup match.

If Maradona is a good enough manager, he would know how to utilise Cambiasso, Zannetti, Samuel and Diego Milito as so effectively done so by Jose Mourinho for Inter. If Maradona does not have the most important engine in Inter in the form of Holland's Sneidjer, but he has in his place, Messi, the best player in the world.

It is as simple as that. If you have Messi and the wealth of talent Inter has and many more, and you still get destroyed comprehensively by Germany, the manager is just not good enough for Argentina.

For the good of Argentina's football, Maradona has to be replaced as manager. Whether their FA would replace him with a capable coach, this is a necessary first step.

Messi & Higuain deserved a better coach

2010-07-03T12:08:00.003-04:00

Maradona deserved the 4-0 humiliation by Germany so that he would never coach the national team again.

His antics and that of Demichellis are now met with poetic justice. Maradona acted as if he had won the world cup after getting through to the quarterfinals on the back on 4 wins but asking the reporters to apologise to him (again) although he was generous enough to say the reporters did not have to remove their pants. He even said it was God's will for Argentina to win this world cup. During the post match press conference in the March friendly against Germany, Maradona thought Mueller, who attended the same press conference to represent Germany, was a ball boy and left because it was a humiliation to him to be seated with an unknown for the press conference. He only returned after Mueller had left.

Demichellis, whose defensive capabilities were seen inadequate in matches such as against South Korea during this world cup and the recent Champions League final, had the gall to deride John Terry's performance against Germany, saying he would be shameful to return home after such a performance as put up by Terry.

The turning point of the match came when Mueller, having fallen on to the ground, used his feet to scoop a pass to Podolski that left the entire Argentine defence stranded. Podolski went on to square a pass to Klose to score Germany's second goal.

Germany had the courtesy to continue to attack even when leading 3-0. After an Argentine's attack had broken down in the German half, Germany raced forward in numbers to launch yet another attack which led to the fourth goal. They could have hold on to the ball and passed it around to frustrate their opponents like what Spain did and to a certain extent, what Holland did against Brazil.

Di Maria who was supposed to shine saw the spot light taken over by fellow winger, Mueller. Questions would be asked why many players were not used by Maradona such as Samuel, Milito, Cambiasso, Zannetti, Veron and Riquelme. Many who was trusted by Maradona disappoint such as Di Maria, Demichellis, Ottamendi, Rodiguez and Tevez.

Messi, though did not score, showed his capabilities in flashes but lacked the support he needed. Higuain demostrated he was a potent goalscorer. Both deserved a better world cup had Argentina not used Maradona as coach. Still, both at 23 and 21 respectively, if they continued improving their form, should still have another shot at the next world cup.

Still, it remained, Argentina could not win the world cup now.

They need a capable coach. 2 coaches took Argentina to win successive Olympics gold medal.

Quarter Final 1 : Holland wins

2010-07-02T17:12:00.001-04:00

The Dutch has upset Brazil in the first quarterfinal of the World Cup.

Brazil scored early and controlled the half but did not try hard enough to score more. The Netherlands were completely outclass and hardly threatened in the first half.

The own goal was the turning point. It came early in the second half and after that Brazil panicked. The Dutch second goal off a corner was very pleasing on the eyes but displayed poor marking by Brazil. Robben swung in a low and shallow corner from the right, it landed to Kuyt in front of the goal and crowd. Kuyt brilliantly flicked the ball with his head backwards towards the central of the penalty box for an unchallenged Sneidjer to rise and head towards the corner of the goal.

Brazil played with more urgency after the goal and was threatening but unable to find an equaliser. Holland, with a man advantage after the red carding of Fellipe Melo, had several opportunity to finish off the game but comically wasted all of them.

Still, the Netherlands must fancy their chances now in the semifinal.

2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa

2010-06-13T16:38:00.002-04:00

Germany produced the biggest win so far in the World Cup with a triumphant 4-0 win over Australia, who is no push over.

The tournament has so far seen average goal of one per match with teams finding it hard to make break throughs despite playing entertaining football. This could be the modern day football where teams and players are well learnt enough to know their opponents' moves to counter them.

Still, Germany showed it could produce brilliant passes to break through tough defences and scored more goals. During the last world cup as well as Euro 2008 which Germany finished third and second respectively and this by no means failure, Germany showed an aging side with few young players of calibre coming up.

World Cup 2010, with the injuries and off form of some old guards, meticulous coach, Joachim Leow used this as the best time to give the youngsters the opportunity to break into the senior national team. Hence, we saw and know players like Ozil and Muller, the two most outstanding players in the Australian match, as well as other standouts Khedira and Cacau, all of which in their early 20s. In fact, the average age of the German team is below 25 and captain Lahm is the youngest captain ever in their national team. That says a lot because Ballack had been captain for a long time when he was very young.

Germany has a rich tradition in sports in particular football. Their youth training system is world leading. For example, in a district football tournament for junior high school kids of 13 years old in California, you will find a visiting German team, spending weeks there to compete in the tournament's league. That shows how far Germany is willing to invest in grooming their youth. Even to the extend to learning and exposing to playing techniques in countries who most people think inferior to Germany in football. Obviously, to the Germany, they don't think so as they know the future of football lies in training system and the best is to learn from everywhere, be it traditional football powers or up and coming footballing nation. USA played as well as World Cup favourites, England did in their match.

Also in coaching and management skills. Ballack had said during Jose Mourinho's time in Chelsea that Loew was the better coach in comparison of the two because Loew was competent and meticulous in every department in football. Whether it represents what Loew is has not been demonstrated before the World cup because Germany, by its own high standards, has not stand out. They outdid themselves to finish losing finalist to Spain in 2008, and had a comfortable world cup qualifying. But it was not spectacular. In March, they lost a high profile friendly 0-1 to Maradona's Argentina, which prompted critics to install Argentina's chance at the World Cup. That defeat, in which Argentina contained Germany very well, plus the lost of the likes of Ballack and the lost of club forms in stalwards like Podolski and Klose, had put Germany well under the radar for the world cup. (France and Italy are also in the same boat, but there is a huge difference though. France and Italy are using the old players, and France has shown it lived up to its expectation by playing unimpressively in its first match. )

The aspect of coaching skill could well be the reason why Argentina could not win this World Cup despite the embarrassment of riches it possesses. Maradona has no management skill and it is true. During training sessions opened to public, he demonstrated zero coaching. And in matches, he acted like another fan, albeit a fan who can stand in the technical area. He was so inept as a coach, he couldn't do anything to ensure Argentina's qualifying process was more assured. Instead he chose to swear at reporters after having qualified and to promise team place to players who scored important goals at qualifiers.

So, despite the brilliance of Messi, Di Maria, Higuan and Milito, Maradona will do his best to ensure his players will underperform. Di Maria should be in the lime light as he is as brilliant as Mueller, but instead he was hardly used in the match against Nigeria. Messi, being Messi can lead his team to win a big tournament despite the pressure as shown in the Beijing Olympics, showed to the world that all the hype about him is justified in that match. But winning may involve more, such as tactics, planning, execution, cooperation and management. In all these departments, Maradona certainly is one of the weakest of all coaches at the world cup.

In the entertaining World Cup opener between host South Africa and Mexico which played to a 1-1 draw and Mexico scored a brilliant goal to demonstrate its technical competency, we relearned the off side rule. Mexico scored a goal late in the first half but that goal was ruled offside. Off a corner, Mexico player outjumped the goalkeeper and flicked a header to a more advance team mate who slammed home the ball pass a South African defender who stood on the goal line behind the scorer.

For those who understand offside as in a more advance position than the last defender, this offside decision may be a puzzle as the scorer was not in a more advance position than the last defender. But actually the off side rule states that the player must not be in a more advance position than 2 opposing players when the ball is played to him by his team mate, or words to that effect. So, it is 2 opposing players. In most case the 2 will make up of the last defender and the goalkeeper. But in this case, as the goalkeeper has come out to intercept the corner kick and the scorer was in a more advance position than the goalkeeper, leaving only the defender on the line which is one person and that is not enough players to make the scorer onside. The offside rule is better understood now for those who did not know before, like me.

Now, Germany certainly delighted its fans with a brilliant display in its match against Australia. The modern game is played with cautious and patient build up, to be followed with a swift movement of players and interchanging of passes to expose your opponents. We saw plenty of that be executed to perfection by Germany. Argentina did the same thing but was unable to score more than one.

BP Oil Leak Impact

2010-05-30T20:25:00.002-04:00

I am trying to make sense on the impact of the current BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico which is the worst oil spill in the US history. An oil well has been spilling oil from the bottom of the sea for more than a month now and the current prospect looks at August before the oil spill can be stopped via alternative oil wells being built now to divert the oil from the leaking oil well. The oil spill was caused by an explosion of a driller at the errant oil well.

The oil spill is said to occur at a rate of between 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day. Let's see how bad is this. To put things in perspective, the current total production of oil per day for the whole world is about 80 million barrels. At 19,000 barrels of oil leak per day, that constitutes 0.024% of the total production of oil per day of the world.

If the oil leak continues until end August before it stops, the total oil loss will be 2.28 million barrels. That constitutes about 2.85% of the world's production of oil per day.

The oil spill is the worst oil disaster in the US. It is really bad and heart wrenching to see such precious commodity being lost. Nevertheless, the amount of oil loss being put in perspective, is not likely affect the world oil market and prices.

The real major impact comes from the damage caused by the oil spill and cleaning up cost. BP will bear the clean up cost that is running up to hundreds of million of dollars. It will also likely to bear the cost of economic losses due damages caused by the oil spill but still US will suffer severe economic loss.

World Cup Winner Again

2010-05-22T10:23:00.002-04:00

Argentina captured the 4 star Winning Eleven World Cup again in an exciting tournament. This is its second world cup. It has previously reached the final 3 other times finishing as runnersup.

Qualifying began with a bang with Argentina beating Brazil 3-1 at home. But it would soon lose to Columbia at home and in the return leg, lost 3-1 to Brazil. With it could only draw against Paraguay, Argentina was 5 points behind Columbia in the race for second place behind run away leader, Brazil. Columbia then lost its initiative by drawing to lowly Bolivia which put Argentina 3 points behind Columbia with one last match, playing Columbia away. Argentina went on to beat Columbia 2-0 to end the South American qualifying in second place with 36 points from 10 wins, 6 draws and the 2 losses mentioned above. It pipped Uruguay to 3rd spot and Columbia to 4th, all three teams with the same number of points. Paraguay was far away in 5th spot and all 5 teams qualified to the world cup.

Finishing second this time was a boost after having finishing 3rd in recent times. Argentina was drawn against Russia, Costa Rica and Togo in Group 8 of the World Cup first round. Argentina would finish top of the group with maximum 9 points from 2-0 win over Russia, 3-0 over Costa Rica and 5-2 over second placed Togo.

In the second round, Argentina faced Finland which it won easily 3-0. The next opponent was the Netherlands. In the quarterfinal, the Netherlands twice went ahead but each time Argentina managed to equalise. In fact, at the end of regular time, Argentina missed a golden opportunity to finish Holland off, when Messi squared at the edge of the box to an unmarked Tevez whose flick in the face of the onrushing Dutch goalkeeper missed the post by centimetres. That would have been some winning goal as it was the last kick for regular time. Argentina continued to take the game to the Netherlands during extra time. Their effort paid off when Tevez scored the winning goal in the second period of extra time to carry Argentina to a 3-2 win over the Netherlands.

Another strong opponent await Argentina in the semifinal, France. France had convincingly beaten former World Cup winner, Germany in the quarter final, with favaourites, Brazil was upset 2-3 by Portugal in another quarterfinal. Tevez made a steal from a French fullback and scored with the goalkeeper to beat to give Argentina the lead in the second half. France piled up the pressure against Argentina and pinned them back in their half. France hit the post off a Frank Ribery freekick and with minutes left, France missed a golden opportunity to equalise with it hit the post with only the goalkeeper to beat. That miss was France's last chance to get back into the game and Argentina was lucky to emerge 1-0 winner. In the other semifinal, both non past winner, Czech Republic upset Portugal. In fact, Argentina was the only past winner left in the semis.

Argentina had the chance to win a second world cup facing non past winner, Czech Republic in the final. Pressure was on Argentina to win as they are the favourite in this final. Tevez' headed Argentina in front in the 15th minute off a Messi goal to settle the nerves early on. Argentina was in top form winning many middle of the park exchanges and was controlling the game well. They held on to the single goal lead at half time. Tevez headed in a second goal early in the second half to provide additional safety to Argentina. Messi brilliantly concluded the final with a third goal. Final score, Argentina 3 Czech Rep 0.

Captain Tevez held aloft the world cup for the second time. France finished third by beating Portugal.

Tevez finished the tournament as top scorer with 8 goals which Messi ended second with 7 goals. 3 of the midfielders, Cambiasso, Guttierez and Lucho Gonzales all scored goals which the 4th midfielder played a key role as assist.

Michael Ballack

2010-05-17T07:18:00.003-04:00

Michael Ballack is one of my favourite football players. He is captain of Germany and plays for Chelsea FC in England for the last 5 years.

He is one of the best midfielder in the world and has 98 international caps. In 2002 World Cup, he led Germany to the final including scoring the only goal in the semi final win over host South Korea. He however missed the final through suspension in which Germany lost to Brazil. In 2006, as host he led Germany to finish third. In the quarter finals, Germany stunned the outstanding team of the tournament, Argentina (which saw the World Cup debut of Lionel Messi) by holding them to a 1-1 draw and winning on penalty kicks. It however was defeated by eventual champion, Italy 2-0 in semifinals but Germany ended the World Cup on a high by thrashing Portugal in the 3rd place place off.

In Euro 2008, Ballack put up a virtuoso performance to guide Germany to an over achieving 2nd place finish, losing to a single goal by the all conquering Spain. The Germans were lacking in depth in players where the aging stars had to carry on international duties with a drought of young capable players coming into the national team.

Having played most of his career in Bayern Munich, he was given a free transfer to any club of his choice, and among the many big clubs that sought him, he chose Chelsea FC and because of the free transfer in which the club did not have to pay Bayern a transfer fee, Ballack could negotiate a very high weekly salary. Since joining Chelsea in 2006, he has been a regular first team member playing both attacking as well as defensive midfielder. Despite initial difficulty of playing for coach Jose Mourinho, settling into a new country and playing style of the Premiership, his performance remained outstanding to command permanent first team appearances. For this 2009/2010 season, he won the double - the Premiership and the FA cup - with Chelsea FC.

During the FA cup final, a rogue tackle by a Portsmouth player left Ballack unable to continue the match in the first half. He was diagnosed with a torn ligament which would rule him out of the World Cup in South Africa this June. At 33 years' old, this would certainly be his last World Cup as captain of Germany.

Still, he has illustrious career for the national team and football club although he has not won the biggest prizes i.e. the World Cup, Euro and champions league, having finished runners-up in all three. He is certainly one of the best football Germany has ever have.

His footballing career will now continue with Chelsea where he is expected to have his contract extended for at least another year. He can then channel all his energy to helping Chelsea to have a stellar season.

Cache

2010-05-05T22:15:00.002-04:00

I am having a mini film festival of my own and watched some of the best movies of the decade. A good number of the titles are in fact in foreign language and they are really good.

One of the most intriguing movies that got many people talking about it is the French thriller, Cache, released in 2005, that won a host of awards including best director in Cannes.

The movie which title is given an official English translation as Hidden, has unresolved issues which got everybody getting onto the discussion boards to discuss and find answers. The main query is who sent the video tapes to the movies main protagonists that spark off the memory of long time event and meeting of two parties from that event.

The director of the movie, Michael Heneke is a riveted film maker whose style of story telling requires the audience to interpret the story themselves rather than having clear conclusions. In Cache, the sender/s of the tapes are not revealed and that riles up the audience who is used to have solutions in movies.

In fact, Heneke has said that those who ask who sent the tapes has missed the point of the movie. The movie is about the story of the long time event and the consequences and interpretation it. The fact that anonymous video tapes is used to aid the unfolding of the story is just a medium used by the film maker but instead has become the main concentration of the audience.

Main theories have been put up on who sent the tapes: (1) The older son (2) the two sons (3) the protagonist (unconsciously or it is a fragment of his imagination) (4) The older son's father (5) Heneke himself or a film maker mentioned in passing in the movie. Heneke himself has gone on to say that whoever the audience wants to think is the sender, it can be right, and if you want to find flaws in any of the answer, you can too.

While it is clear what Heneke's message in the movie is, and that he has deliberately leave out the solution of who the tape sender is so that the movie concentrates on the message and that the identity of the sender is not important, the audience's interest remains in finding out who is the sender to satisfy themselves. I will discuss the identity theory first and then go on to discuss the message Heneke is trying to deliver in Cache.

When Heneke wrote the movie, he has intention to resolve the identity of the sender or at least give more evidence to the audience. This is done by the most talked about segment of the movie which is the concluding scene where the two sons meet. Heneke actually wrote dialogue for the two youngsters and they acted the dialogue out in the scene. However, during editing, Heneke decided to leave the dialogue out because he wanted the audience to appreciate that the identity of the sender is not important but the message of the movie.

So, the dialogue of the two sons is key to the identity of the sender. As Heneke took that off, and even made the two actors promised not to tell anyone what the dialogue is, we can only offer theories on who the sender is.

And the most plausible conclusion is either (2) the two sons and (5) Heneke himself. Again to rid the obsession of the masses with wanting an answer, Heneke has replied to an interviewer that offered Heneke as the answer, that it was not him but a character in the movie (which if you believe his answer, then it has to be the two sons). However, I am inclined to believe his answer was just to put off admitting the answer, because I believe his intention is simply that there should be no answer.

There are two scenes in which only the two sons can and Heneke (which in itself is a form of story telling to have the movie director to participate in the movie to generate events for the audience to see) can have access to. One, there is a video made from the inside of the older son's house. Only he can have access to his own house. (Of course his father and the protagonist can be there to record the video but they do not offer satisfactory answers if they are the one recording and sending the video). The other scene is that a video was left at the door inside the protagonist's house. Only the younger son who is the protagonist's son has access to it.

But still there is a bigger clue which lends to Heneke being the answer and believing Heneke is the answer is satisfying to me and agrees with his intention to deliver the movie's true message. That clue comes in the form of a shadow which is shown twice in a night scene of a video watching the protagonist's house. The shadow looks like that of a movie camera on a camera stand. That can be the clue deliberately left behind by Heneke to show that the video is shot by the movie director himself, Heneke.

Now to the message of the movie. It is that we choose to forget about our unpleasant past. We have our ways to make ourselves feel better about our regrettable past, such as taking sleeping pill to sleep this off. We have concentrating on our own problems although the problems are small and pale in comparison with the massive problems many people face in the world daily. If given an opportunity to acknowledge our past mistakes, to apologise and to redeem, will we do it ?

Cache becomes more intriguing and generate most interest eventhough it is a very fine movie is because the answer is not given. It is like you know I am good in a certain skill, eg martial arts. But I refuse to fight and show you how good or bad I am in martial arts. By not showing you, you imagine I am as good as you think or heard I am. And in a way, it can be said that I refuse to show you because I am afraid I may not be as good as you think I can. So, by not showing you, I led you to believe I am better than whom I really am.

Cache is not the best movie I have seen during this mini festival. In fact, Heneke has other movies which are widely raved about, including one which won the Palm D'Or at Cannes.

So, the conclusion is don't ask who is the tape sender because it is not important. The message of the movie is more important, although may be more bland than findig out who is the sender. If you indeed need an answer very badly to be at peace with yourself, then it is Heneke.

Sio Bon Bon

2010-04-30T11:12:00.002-04:00

Siobhan Magnus was voted off American Idol season 9 at the Top 6 stage. Going out at top 6 is way too early for the talented and pretty 20 year old.

Although the placings on Idol do not matter as much because many lower placed past contestants have done well, it may also have the effect that people will think her talent as a singer is not as good as others who are still in competition.

At top 6, she will certainly not be able to get lucrative recording contracts from the show producers and will have to try to secure the smaller independent record companies. In the age of internet, promotion and marketing an album or songs is easier and cheaper. Many past idols are using the internet to put out their songs.

Siobhan will have to write her own songs too. Composers of songs such as Already Gone will want their hits to be sang by proven singers (read Idol winners). Writing her own songs will be good training for her as to stay in this career, she has to be able to write her own hits.

Knowing that a musical career may not be a certainty now, she is sensible to look at theatre and movies as possible career.

The quirky girl whom we felt in love with since she was first sighted on the show during Hollywood stage, is certainly the prettiest idol contestant. Her singing talent, though many experts are divided on, is versatile and does have her strengths.

Her departure from the competition was certainly a shock as indications have been that her fan base is strong enough for her to stay longer. But shock is common on American Idol since Constantine, Michael Johns and Adam Lambert. After all it is impossible to predict the outcome of 50 milllion votes .

I hope Siobhan will have a successful music career as I need to listen to her songs for a long time to come.

Maybe Someday I'll Be Famous

2010-03-28T10:29:00.004-04:00

She said those words in the video which was made at least a couple of years ago. Well, at least for now, she is indeed famous, I darn say worldwide too. American Idol is widely followed and there are quite a few fans of Siobhan Magnus out there.

The video was made in conjunction of her high school's presentation of the play Wizard of Oz. Siobhan had a role in the play and the promotion video featured her where she spoke about the difficulties she encountered in her life as her mother worked in a book store and her trucker father was disabled and it was a big family whereby she had to take care of two young sisters. She would overload herself with extra curriculum activities to forget about her challenges in life. In the video she was shown dotting over her two beautiful sisters who tagged along for her rehersal as she had to baby sit them.

Things would get worse for the family as her dad said to the press that he didn't want theirs to be a sob story but admitted it was tough like many families. He became disabled following an accident and his wife lost her job at the book store. But things are looking up for the Magnus family with the attention on Siobhan. Dad resumed his band gigs and older daughter Emily said she was recognised by strangers.

Just like amazing and touching stories of many contestants, she applied for a music school after high school but was rejected. She did not continue education after a short spell in college and began work as an apprentice in a local glass blowing shop. She had said that if she would continue school she would remain in the state as she needed to take care of her two younger siblings. After much persuasion from mainly mom, and advice from others, she overcame her shyness to audition for Idol. The singing Magnus family has someone now to seriously pursue a musical career. Like Adam Lambert, the breakout contestant last year, Siobhan's long involvement in her high school drama plays, provided the vocal training to make her versatile in her singing range.

Called eccentric, the class nerd and madcap, all in a good kind of way, Siobhan is well liked on the talent show. She has her advantages. Besides singing talent which she has demonstrated by reaching the final 10 now, she has a wonderful personality which commentators said they would rather listen to her talk instead of singing, and good looks. Whether it is the top 24 of American Idol, the entire audition bunch or in videos of her life outside of Idol, she stands out because of her good looks.

Her school teacher, work colleagues, friends and family all are rooting for her. Her teacher said that it is nice when nice things happen to nice people.

As her journey continues in Idol, she would probably do well in the show, but she would probably not be able to win it, but it is hope that she can have a long and successful musical career and remain famous so that her fans can continue to idolise her.

As a tribute to her for bringing back to vogue great songs of the past, one of her song choices is in my 5 best songs from the past 5 decades:-

1960s - Paint It Black - The Rolling Stones

1970s - Dreaming - Blondie

1980s - Eternal Flame - The Bangles

1990s - Angel - Sarah McClauhlan

2000s - Seven - Fever Ray

World Cup Winner

2010-03-10T10:02:00.003-05:00

I have won the World Cup for the Winning Eleven Soccer at 4 stars level today. Playing as Argentina in the International Fifa World Cup, this is my first World Cup win at 4 stars level.

Previously, Argentina has entered the World Cup final twice and lost both finals with the same identical score of 3-0 to The Netherlands and Brazil respectively.

This time, in the final, Argentina defeated The Netherlands 3-2.

The tournament started with a South American group qualifiers which had Argentina playing 18 matches against 9 other South American countries on a home and away basis. The top 4 teams in the 10 country league would qualify automatically to the World Cup. The 5th placed country will have to play off with a Central American team to decide the qualifier.

Argentina has mostly qualified 2nd place in the South American qualifiers while there was one occasion which it qualified first ahead of Brazil. There were a couple of occasions, it had to settled for third place.

This qualifier did not end too well for Argentina. It dropped points on 7 of the 18 matches by drawing 3 and losing 4 times to qualify third place with 36 points. It had won 11 matches and in total scored 29 goals and received 9 goals. Brazil, as usual, was the runaway winner with 54 points while Columbia pipped Argentina for the second place with 37 points.

Despite qualifying in third place, Argentina did not get a very difficult World Cup first round group. In the past, many times when Argentina qualified comfortably in second place, it was grouped together with strong opponents in groups of death in the first round of the World Cup. In the past, it was as rare for Argentina not to qualify through to the second round of the World Cup as for it to reach the World Cup final.

In the World Cup first round, Argentina was placed in group 2 with Ukraine, Poland and Trinidad & Tobacco.

For the finals, it mainly used the following squad:-

1. Carrizo - Goalkeeper

2. Ayala - central defender

3. G. Millito - central defender

4. Burdisso - left back

5. Samuel - right back

6. Cambiasso - defensive midfielder

7. Guttierez - left sided midfielder

8. Gago - right sided midfielder

9. Lucho Gonzalez - Central midfielder

10. Messi - right sided striker

11. Tevez - central striker

Tevez was the captain for this campaign as was the previous one. In past campaigns Ayala, Lucho and Riquelme had served as captains.

For all matches in the World Cup, Argentina stuck with this line up except for the second road match against Serbia and Montenegro which Tevez was out injured and Riquelme substituted.

During the South American qualifiers, other than Samuel's place was taken by Sorin, Heinze and Riquelme in turns.

This line up has gone through many experimentation and evolution based on experience from past failed campaigns. The back 4 comprised all central defence minded players to provide covers during aerial duels and to win balls when under defence. The strength of defence provided stability to Argentina which is more attrack minded.

Both Gago and Guttierez are fluent going up the flanks as well as to fall back to cover the side corridors. Cambiasso guided the space in front of the back four. He was instrumental in winning balls to defuse attacks in many of the matches. Lucho is roaming all over the pitch, usually along the central corridor and middle of the park. Messi' s position was free, giving him the licence to roam the pitch. But his favourite mode of attack was to come into the penalty box from the right flank. Tevez operated as an out and out striker. He was especially effective attacking the box from the left flank.

Argentina did not start the World Cup on a good note. It played a subdue and ineffective match against Ukraine in group 2. After conceding an early goal, it could not recover and at times never looked like scoring throughout the match. In the end, it lost 1-0 to Ukraine. Next, it had to win against Trinidad & Tobacco to revive its chance to qualify from the group. T&T has previously frustrated Argentina before by preventing the stronger Argentina side from winning. But this time, there was nothing T&T could do as Argentina romped home 7-0. This big score could come in handy during group stage where goal difference might be needed to qualify. In the last game, Argentina was never in trouble, scoring 2 goals early and played out the match winning 2-0. At the end, Argentina got 6 points from 2 wins and 1 loss and scored 9 times and conceded only once. This was however only good enough for Argentina to get second place behind Ukraine which had 7 points. Poland (3 points) and T&T (2 points) were eliminated from the World Cup as the top 2 teams from each of 8 first round groups qualified to the knock out stage.

Finishing second from the group stage did not harm Argentina as it avoided big name teams in the second round. It got Serbia & Montenegro in second road, though the opponents were never easy and was good offensive team. Tevez had to miss this match due to an injury which meant auxilliary striker, Messi had to step it out and deliver the goals for the team. Messi certainly stepped it up, scoring 2 quick goals and soon it was over as it beat Serbia & Montenegra 3-1.

In the quarterfinal, Argentina faced Portugal. This would become Argentina's toughest match in the World cup. Two times Argentina had to come back from a goal down. First, Messi equalised without a typical breakaway down the right, held off the chasing pack of defenders and cut into the box and slotted in a shot to the left of the goalkeeper between the near post. Then Tevez equalised the second time to level the score to 2-2. And yet Argentina had time to win the match outright. Tevez in a one to one situation hit a shot and it hit the onrushing goalkeeper and the ball defected to safety. Then in injury time, Tevez evaded the keeper and defenders to shoot goalwards to an empty goal. Instead it hit the overhead bar and rebounded away harmlessly. With these two setbacks, Argentina thought this might not be their day. This was especially so as both teams tried to finish off each other in the extra time of 30 minutes but no goal came and it had to be settled by the lottery of penalty kicks.

Argentina had a horrendous record in penalty kicks. They had lost a number of those in the previous world cups. This round of kicks started well for Argentina. Corrazo saved the first Portugese kick and Argentina led the kicks till their 4th penalty. Gago's shot to the left of the goal was saved well. They thought this would be another one of their infamous crock up when they had led in penalty kicks before only to lose in the end. Surprisingly, Portugese 5th and final shot flew over. Argentina had the chance to win this by converting their 5th kick. Lucho calmly slotted a grounder down the middle as the keeper dived to the right. Argentina won 4-3 on penalty kicks after an extra time score of 2-2.

In the semifinal, Argentina's opponent was multiple previous World Cup winner, Germany. In the other semis, multiple past winner, the Netherlands met Turkey. Argentina had mixed fortune with Germany before. They had won titanic battles against the Germans, so winning was a possibility but they had to play at the very top of their game. That meant, not giving away balls cheaply and winning individual battles in defence.

During the semifinal, Argentina had one of the easiest game against Germany. Tevez found space down the middle after 10 minutes after winning the ball. As he sped towards the box, he unleashed a stiff grounder from outside the box that beat the advancing German goalie. Argentina would double the lead after 20 minutes when Messi stuck a shot from the right which was saved brilliantly by the keeper. The resulting deflection missed the lurking Tevez who chased the ball to the left corner of the field. There, Tevez drove a cross towards the box with one target to hit, the dimunitive Messi. Messi beat a marking defender to the ball and headed the ball to the left corner of the goal for a rare header goal from him. With the cushion of a second goal, Argentina held off a couple of goal scoring opportunities for Germany in the first half, including a header to an empty goal which just sailed over the cross ball. It was more of the same confident and controlling play Argentina displayed in the second half to close out the match. Their reward was a third final appearance and their opponent would be the Netherlands again which won against Turkey. Later in the 3rd place playoff, Germany would beat Turkey.

Argentina had an improving record against the Netherlands of late. Since been trashed 3-0 in their first World Cup final, Argentina faced off with the Netherlands in the second round of the next edition of the World Cup. Then, Holland raced to a 2-0 lead that killed off the contest, but Argentina did get a consolation goal in the second half. In another World Cup, Argentina was drawn in the same first round group with the Netherlands. This time, Argentina held them off to a draw and both teams advanced to the second round. Just before this World Cup, in a friendly, Argentina defeated them 2-1 after extra time.

Argentina knew it had equal opportunity to win this but they must not concede early goals. That they did not have to worry as they found out in the final. As usual Holland started with all cylinders firing and was all over the Argentine penalty box. But their strong defence held up and prevented an early goal from their opponents. But Argentina could not put together a decent attack. Messi, their top scorer, was well marked out of the game and did not get the ball for the first 20 minutes. That would change after 24 minutes when Messi broke off on one of his run down the right. He held off chasing defenders and slotted a shot in the box that Van der Saal managed to pounce away. The deflection landed to the left of the box with 2 chasing defenders and Tevez. Tevez beat them to the ball and slotted home near the left post which Van der Saal could not keep out. On the 37th minute, off a Messi corner Lucho was unmarked an pounded a header pass the head of the goalkeeper.

Messi taking all the dead balls is one of the evolution of the Argentine game. Previously, Gago took all the free kicks, corners and penalties. Gago's delivery is harder and straighter which is more difficult to head on. Messi began taking the kicks because he is too short to pose a threat during corners and that at one time, Gago's place in the squad would be taken over by another player. Messi's natural curve in his balls is deadly in corner kicks. This has resulted in many goals coming from Tevez, Lucho, Guttierez and Gago waiting in the box. And one such header had given Argentina a cushion second goal in the World Cup final.

Argentina did not know that this time the 2 goal advantage would not be enough although it was sufficient against Germany. Nevertheless, Argentina did not go defensive as it knew the safest way to see off a game was to keep up the pressure. On the 60th minute, Argentina scored their best goal, one which was a new tactic in their attacking arsenal.

Most of the time, Messi would race down the right and would outpace the defenders and face off one to one with the keeper. But tough defence often could keep up with Messi's pace and block him off a shot. Messi then changed his tactic. When he reached the byline inside the box, he would pull back off the byline and look up to pass to a colleague in the middle of the box. This pull back would usually take off the defenders who had to run at top speed to keep up with Messi only to see him reversing to the other direction away from the byline. The strikers would receive Messi's pass and evade tackles and shoot for goal from the middle of the box in front of goal.

This time, Messi found Tevez who had advanced to the top of the goal to receive the pass. He then turned and curled a left footed shot to the left corner of the goal beyond an out reaching Van der Saal. After going 3-0, two minutes later, Messi's grounder cross from the right went through the penalty box and missed 3 Dutch defenders and found its way to Tevez who was behind the defenders. With an open goal, Tevez's stab at the ball saw it floated over the bar. It would appear to be more difficult to float the ball over then stabbing it into an empty net but he did that and Argentina could not race to a 4-0 lead which would surely kill off the contest.

As said, two goals would not be enough as the Netherlands launched a late counter attack. On the 69th minute, V.O. Hasselink reacted first to a shot that rebounded off the cross bar to stab home the first goal for the Oranje. Then late on the 87th minute, Kuyt broke away from the tight Argentina defence but his shot was charged down bravely by the on rushing Carrizo. But Kuyt got on the rebounce and slot home his country's second goal.

Was it a dramatic melt down by Argentina who had never won the World Cup before ? Would Holland come back from 3-0 down to equalise like what Argentina themselves did in the World Cup second round match against Uruguay where Argentina came back from 0-3 down to score three times to level the score during normal time and scored the winner in the extra time to knock out Uruguay.

However, Argentina held its composure and held out the game to win the World Cup final 3-2 and their first ever World Cup. This win came about after many many tries. It is a reward for keep trying and not to give up. It is a break for the team that keeps getting on it, learning and chancing tactics and technical aspects to forge stronger and stronger challenges.

Messi ended as top scorer of the World Cup finals with 8 goals while Tevez finished second with 7. Tevez was voted man of the match for the final.

Nearly One Thousand Kilo Bit Per Second

2010-03-05T04:11:00.002-05:00

Music compression software that we use today such as mp3, wma, aac, etc compresses the original audio material into smaller final files. The smaller files have commercial appeal because we can store lots of songs into our iPod. The most popular codec, mp3, typically compresses the original audio for a factor of 10. Meaning a song which original has a size of 30 MBs in the master tape or audiophile CDs is reduced into an mp3 file with a size of 3 MBs. This mp3 file plays at an output of 128 kbps or higher. The highest output allowed under the mp3 technology is 320 kbps. A 320 kbps song is of course much bigger in size as it has less compression. So, its size is about 12 MBs.

There is now a new technology to allow the capture of audio at loseless state. Meaning the original audio is not compressed at all. This will retain the high fidelity of the original sound. The free loseless audio codec (FLAC) is the software that carries audio at loseless state. The 30 MBs song will be transferred into FLAC file which has a size of 30 MBs. In terms of sound quality, this FLAC file plays at an output of almost 1,000 kbps !

Unfortunately, most audio equipment and even our ears cannot differentiate the sound quality of such high fidelity. And further more, most of today's audio players and software do not support FLAC and can't play loseless files.

But soon this may change for the simple reason, storage capacity is getting cheaper. Hence, the size of music files is not a concern anymore. With hard disk going into terabyte territory, files can get as big as it wants.

A Line Up That Makes Sense

2010-03-04T10:46:00.002-05:00

We can't read too much into Argentina's 1-0 win in Germany in today's international friendly. It was a high quality international and important for both sides to gauge their players as this represented one of the last opportunities to test them before the World Cup.

But what we can be delighted with is the line up used by unpredictable coach Maradona. He had Higuan, Samuel and Di Maria together with the formidable regulars Mascherano, Veron and Messi. This kind of line gives stability and peace of mind to its supporters. It is a line up that makes sense as they are the best players any coach in the world will want to use.

As a result, Argentina won with goal built up by a Di Maria - Higuan link up.

Di Maria is such a talent and mercurial attacking winger. He scored the gold medal winning goal for Argentina when they beat Nigeria 1-0 in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It came with a pass from Messi deep in Argentina's half in a counter attack. I had often said that had Messi passed to central forward Sergio Aguero instead of Di Maria, Aguero would not have score the goal and Argentina might not win the gold medal. Instead receiving the short pass from Messi was Di Maria. He ran from deep to the penalty box of Nigeria, drew the goal keeper out and nonchalantly flicked the goal pass the keeper.

We can hope that Argentina can give its best and entertain us all in South Africa.

Life's tough

2010-02-21T07:22:00.002-05:00

American Idol contestant, Hope Johnson came from a large poor family. They were so poor that they did not have enough to eat. She said she did not know she was poor when she was young and thought that everyone else was hungry too. During school, she would save her lunch so that she could bring it home to feed her younger brother who cried because of hunger.

She sought singing as an escape. And she was quite good too. She sough enough courage to enter AI and got passed the audition easily. She made it further in two preliminary cuts in Hollywood trials. But at the last but one stage she was unceremoniously dumped out of the competition together with a group of others. She could be seen crying uncontrollably on the floor. Her hope of doing one thing she like and as a mean to improve her life is dashed for now.

She is a very skinny girl who looked she did not have enough to eat even now. Her voice was not good enough and her final performance showed she lacked the quality for professional singing. The reality could well be she would never be a singer or be able to escape from a hard life.

Life's tough...

But then again, she may improve and come back again with improved skills and have another shot at the competition. She can do it. After all, it is in her name.

Hope (Johnson)

2010-02-05T11:09:00.002-05:00

American Idol season 9 concluded the audition episodes with probably one of the most improvised contestants that needed this talent show to breakout of poverty and improving quality of life. AI has after all given superstardom to waitresses, rural cowgirls, and the likes and has become the dreams come true channel of choice for aspiring singers. They can do like the majority of all recording artistes do which is to be discovered by a record company and signed on as a recording artiste. Or if they are not discovered that way, they can try out at American Idol.

The last contestant showcased was Hope Johnson. She came from a large family living in poverty. Their situation was so bad that the family could not have enough food to eat and lived in hunger. She mentioned that she did not know that she was living in poverty and thought being hungry was normal. She would keep food from her school lunch so that she could feed her crying and hungry younger brother at home. She used music as her escape from the reality of her life.

She is good looking and has enough singing talent to get through the audition.

Whether she could make it in American Idol depends on her talent. Nearly all contestants come from not well to do background and they need the break. Those who are successful, and there are only a handful coming from all previous 8 seasons, probably had a combination of opportunity, talent and coachability and learning factor.

At least for Ms Johnson, she is living in the right country. It is in America that dreams can come true. And she has picked the right industry. Singing is a huge industry in America and is most conducive to talents like her who do not have training prior to this. If it is in another industry for example investment or law or science or computers or many more, without proper training and opportunity to undergo training at young, no one could break through as this is a technical discipline which has no natural talent or could be trained in a short amount of time.

The greatest joy to watching shows like American Idol is to see people needing a break in life getting it. It is hope that Ms Johnson will live up to her name and give hope to herself and others to follow.

Good luck Ms Johnson.

Taylor "Tell It To My Heart" Swift

2010-02-05T08:30:00.002-05:00

Except that the Taylor "Tell It To My Heart" does not refer to Taylor Swift but to Taylor Dean after the latter's early 90s hit song.

Of course this post is about the more famous Taylor. The earlier Taylor is big voice pop star which did well but does not quite match up to the first ever country singer to win the Album of The Year grammy.

Taylor Swift's magnificent album, Fearless deserves the Grammy win as it contains many lovable country pop songs, most of which written by Ms Swift herself (on the floor of her bedroom as it is said). The album was the best selling album in the US last year.

With so much attention on her now, naturally comes controversies too. Like how Kanye West interrupted her MTV awards speech. Like how an ex boyfriend, Joe Jonas, called her to break up with her. Like how flat her voice was when she sang at awards shows such as the Country Music Awards and the Grammies.

Still she remains the brilliant country cross over mega star who writes good good songs. She is a cutie too especially the way she posted a video of herself making fun of the boy friend breakup with boy and girl dolls.

In one of the most poignant themes in her Fearless album is a piano version of a song by the name of "Forever and Always" which is one of best songs in the album. The song was written by her about the breakup. It is a heartbreaking love ache song.

She then added that men would now know that those who are associated with her will somehow have songs written by her about them.

Well, Taylor, keep on writing, singing, and telling it to our hearts.

Loseless

2010-01-19T10:28:00.002-05:00

I experimented with loseless music files vis-a-vis lossy files. Loseless music files are music files that are extracted from its original source without losing any quality. It usually achieves its quality maintenance by not compressing the digital content and hence the size of the files are very large. A popular open source software for storing loseless music files is FLAC.

Lossy music files on the other hand compresses the digital content so that size of the files is smaller by sacrificing audio quality. The trade off is usually to sacrifice an amount of audio quality which is acceptable or can be hardly differentiated by our ears. MP3 is the de facto software music file compressor. Other similar software includes Apple's AAC.

To understand the compressing of music files, lets look at an example. A song from a hi-fi CD may be 30 MB in size. FLAC will extract and store it at 30 MB i.e. it does not compress the size to retain the original source's music quality. Mp3 usually compresses it to a factor of 10. The 30 MB file will be compressed to 3 MB. As sacrifice, the music file will be played at an acceptable quality which is calculated based on the input and output of digital data at a rate of 128 kilobits per second. However, the quality of Mp3 files can be enhanced by reducing the compression to 160 kbps or higher (other common bit rates are 192, 224, 260 and the highest possible for mp3 files, 360) and thus enlarging the size of files. For example, an mp3 at 320 kbps of that song may have a size of 12 MB.

What I did was to store a music file using FLAC. The size of the file was 300 MB. Using a converter software, I converted the FLAC file to 320kbps Mp3. As a result the mp3 file was compressed to 90 MB. To compare the quality of the audio, I also converted the FLAC file to 224 kbps mp3 which reduced the file size to 60MB.

The loseless FLAC file offered the best audio quality at the expense of a huge file size. Unfortunately, most commercial music players do not support the open source FLAC files. That is why i need to convert them to mp3 which is the common software used by music players.

Comparing the audio quality between 320 kbps and 224 kbps, I could not differentiate them by using headphones. As such, our ears indeed cannot differentiate music files quality if the difference is not huge.

Still, moving forward, it may be popular to store music files with FLAC because as storage cost reduces, the size of files do not matter anymore, and also more music players are supportive of FLAC files.

US Government Bailouts Worked

2010-01-15T08:36:00.001-05:00

Article courtesy of Time.

If you're the kind of person who would be outraged if a paramedic smudged your lipstick while giving you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, you should definitely be outraged by the latest AIG "scandal." House Republicans have unearthed e-mails suggesting that at the height of the financial panic of 2008, lawyers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — then led by current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner — may have discouraged AIG from disclosing details about payments it made to banks with its government rescue money. It's not at all clear that's what happened, and in any case it looks like Geithner had nothing to do with the situation. But if you booed Lassie for tracking mud on the carpet after saving that kid in the well, you might want to join the angry chorus calling for Geithner's head.

On the other hand, if you're the kind of person who believes at least some good deeds should go unpunished, you might want to cut Geithner and his colleagues at the Fed some slack for their performance during the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. They did, after all, help save the world from a second Great Depression. A House committee has dragooned Geithner into testifying about AIG on Jan. 27, but the constant second-guessing over the specific details of the AIG rescue — Why not impose haircuts on creditors? Why allow bonuses for executives? — is only distracting attention from the real AIG scandal and the efforts to make sure it never happens again.

The AIG bailout, in short, was the ugliest in a series of ugly bailouts of institutions that were deemed too big to fail, a $180 billion government reward for spectacularly reckless private-sector behavior. But it was also absolutely necessary and ultimately successful. The scandal was not the rescue, but the necessity of the rescue — as well as constraints on the rescuers that made their fix even uglier.

The first thing Fed bashers should remember about the AIG bailout is the chaotic circumstances. The Fed barely knew how to spell AIG before the panic of September 2008; it didn't regulate insurance companies, and its leaders had no idea that a division of this particular insurance company had turned itself into a giant and overleveraged hedge fund, much less that AIG was entangled with other giant and overleveraged institutions through exotic financial gambles ultimately backed by sketchy mortgages. According to accounts of the crisis like David Wessel's In Fed We Trust and Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail, Geithner first discovered that AIG posed a potentially catastrophic risk to the global economy just as he and the rest of the Fed were frantically trying to persuade Bank of America to take over Merrill Lynch while searching for a buyer for Lehman Brothers in order to prevent the largest bankruptcy in the history of the planet. It's not easy to improvise a bailout for a company you knew nothing about the day before while the world is going to hell.

Lehman collapsed on Sept. 15, triggering a freefall in the markets and a cascade of margin calls that required AIG to put up tens of billions of dollars it didn't have. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Geithner and then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson quickly realized that a default by AIG — which not only sold insurance to 30 million Americans and 100,000 companies but suddenly owed big bucks to many of the world's largest financial institutions — would trigger bank runs around the world. The failure of Lehman had shocked the system; the failure of a dozen more huge financial firms would have crippled it. So on Sept. 16, the AIG bailout began.

It wasn't pretty. The creditors for AIG's bad bets — including Goldman Sachs and several large foreign banks — were paid in full. Critics have blasted the government for failing to impose haircuts, essentially providing a backdoor bailout for those banks in the name of AIG, but nobody has explained how or with what authority anyone could have invalidated AIG's contracts with all those far-flung institutions on the fly, or why that wouldn't have worsened the panic. Perhaps the public officials should have devised some way to limit the future bonuses AIG would pay its executives, but it's understandable that they weren't thinking about a few million dollars in theoretical perks when trillions of actual dollars and the entire financial system were at stake.

The second and most important thing to remember about the AIG bailout and the rest of the extraordinary government interventions during the crisis is that they worked. For all the populist fury about taxpayer giveaways for Wall Street, they did quell the panic. And they did so at a price that seemed exorbitant at the time but now looks like relative peanuts. Research by the Cleveland Fed has documented that financial crises usually end up costing national governments at least 5% to 10% of their GDP in payouts; the tab to the Treasury for this panic will be well under 1% of GDP. In fact, the Fed is about to return a record $45 billion in profits to the Treasury because the vast majority of its emergency loans have been paid back with interest. Meanwhile, the wildly unpopular $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) is on track to cost only about $100 billion, including the giveaways for automakers, and the Obama Administration has proposed a bank tax that would bring that figure to zero.

As for AIG, the initial Fed loan that triggered the latest kerfuffle looks like it won't cost taxpayers a dime; in short, the exotic assets the Fed took as collateral because they became radioactive during the panic are turning out to be worth what the Fed thought they were worth. And the controversy itself is ridiculous. Congressman Darrell Issa has charged that the New York Fed tried to cover its tracks by crossing out proposed language in an AIG disclosure stating that its counterparties were paid 100 cents on the dollar. But the language was replaced with a less accessible but more precise explanation of how the counterparties were paid 100 cents on the dollar. Anyway, by that time, Geithner had already recused himself from AIG issues.

Taxpayers will take a big hit on some of the subsequent cash infusions to AIG — the company really had made hideous bets. But after Lehman collapsed, the AIG rescue sent a powerful message to markets and ordinary Americans with money in bank accounts and retirement accounts that the government was going to do whatever it took to make sure the financial system survived. Unfortunately, there was no way to do that without rewarding the jerks who imperiled the system in the first place.

The outrage that has been blasted at the decision makers who made the best of a horrible situation ought to be directed at the compulsive gamblers who created that situation — and channeled into fixing the regulatory system that allowed it to develop. AIG was a financial behemoth and should have been subject to federal financial oversight, including strict limits on leverage and strong capital requirements. The shadowy derivatives market that AIG was using as its casino also desperately needs adult supervision. Many of AIG's complex securities were based on subprime mortgages issued by unregulated brokers who had no incentive to seek creditworthy borrowers, but ratings agencies with equally strong conflicts of interest deemed the securities completely safe. And once the government had to come to the rescue, it had no emergency mechanism to wind down failed firms in an orderly fashion and impose haircuts on bondholders and other counterparties without imperiling the entire system.

In fact, the House of Representatives — with strong support from Geithner and the Obama Administration — has passed a financial-reform bill designed to address all those problems. It aims to provide stronger consumer protection, ensure that all financial firms and complex financial instruments are subject to strict oversight, and create a "resolution authority" so that no firm will be too big to fail during a crisis. And it received a grand total of zero votes from the House Republicans who are trying to fan the flames of the latest Geithner pseudo scandal. The Senate is trying to hash out a bipartisan bill, but for now the system in place is the system that failed. If that sounds outrageous to you, don't blame the firefighters who put out the last fire. Demand some real fireproofing.

Fifa World Player of The Year

2009-12-23T08:26:00.002-05:00

Lionel Messi won the 2009 Fifa World Player of the Year by a landslide over 4 other finalists, including Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaka.

This followed the Ballon D'or win by Messi earlier as European Footballer of The Year.

They had to give him the world best titles because of his exploits with Barcelona this year. Barcelona won everything they contested including major trophies the La Liga championship, the UEFA Champions League and the Fifa World Club Champions. Messi scored winning goals in the latter two title matches.

He will carry the title as the best player in the world into the World Cup and it will remain to be seen if he can inspired Argentina to World Cup success like how he did it in the Beijing Olympics.

Meanwhile, winning alongside Messi as the woman Fifa World player was the pretty Brazilian, Martha. A dead ball specialist and stylist attacker, Martha certainly stood out in the women's game in 2009. With hot looks to boot, the dark skinned star is a joy to watch.

Tavern

2009-12-21T10:48:00.003-05:00

Quentin Taratino's Inglourious Basterds is generating the bust as with his most critically acclaimed movie todate, Pulp Fiction. Basterds is also his most successful in terms of box office sales. And to boot it is getting nominations to rival Fiction during the current awards nomination season. It is building up expectations of Oscar shortlists. A couple of strategic win at the awards will make Basterds Taratino's best project todate, as Fiction did not get the wins it deserved at the awards leaving it only to show off the Palm D'or prize.

Basterds is by no means as good a movie as the ground breaking Fiction. But the former is a fun ride and a great watch with some genuinely good moments that make it successful with the nominations. It may still not win anything in the end, a proof it is not good enough.

One of the moments that set the movie as an award contender is the Tavern scene. That is the singular most brilliant piece of film making in the movie which otherwise the rest of it is quite ordinary.

In the tavern, the suspense is slowly and masterfully built up to the climax. The movie's stand out star, Christoph Waltz does not appear in the tavern scene. And to carry the scene to its masterful result is German actress, the gorgeous Diane Kruger. Impeccable acting in that cameo role as a well known actress double agent, Kruger got her recognition with a best supporting actress nomination at the Screen Actors' Guile awards. She however did not get nominated at the Golden Globe. A nod at the oscars and perhaps a win too will be apt reward for Basterds. This will give the movie the place in history as a good movie with an exceptional scene with some of the best acting involved.

The Year in Music

2009-12-18T14:56:00.002-05:00

As 2009 comes to an end, it is also the end of a decade. While we look back at the year in music, we could also compile a list of best of the decade. However, this exercise will be tedious and will go back too much in time to recognise albums which while from the point of view of the decade are important works, but as a listening enjoyment at present might have outran their course. In other word, tedious.

Anyway, there are many music experts out there who are more qualified to come out with the best of list. So, if many of them said Kid A was the best album of the Decade, I am most thrilled to accept that as songs eg Idioteque from that album still sounds relevant and cool till today.

Also, this year will be the first year since 1982 that I will not come out with a top 10 best songs list or a song of the year. I have already dwelled on the reasons for abandoning this annual ritual in an earlier post.

Instead for this post, I will honour albums which I like much this year that made it to the best of lists of music experts around the world.

There are 3 categories of success in terms of rankings in the experts' lists:- Very successful, moderate success, a little bit of success. This refers to how high they are ranked and how frequent albums that I like made it into the lists.

The Actor by St Vincent, Middle Cyclone by Neko Case and Yeah Yeah Yeahs It's a Blitz did very well.

Two Suns by Bat For Lashes and Fever Ray made it to a few of the lists.

Just about getting mention were Florence and the Machine's Lungs, Kelly Clarkson's All I Ever Wanted, Fuck Buttons' Tarot Sports, Girls' Album, Safe Trip Home by Dido and Norah Jones' The Fall.

Those albums that did really well this year are not among my favourite, yet :- Merriweather Post Pavillion by Animal Collective, U2's No line in the Horizon and Dirty Projectors by Bitte Orca.

For the record, Fever Ray's both studio and live albums are on the heaviest rotation for me this year.

The Noughties

2009-12-18T14:27:00.004-05:00

The Noughties of course refer to the zeros in the first decade of the millennium. The Noughties are coming to an end this year and it is time to look back at the decade. From next year onwards, the decade will be in the Teens. Or the Tweens, for those numbers between ten to thirteen.

Time magazine has the photo of the WTC during 911 as its cover to commemorate the Decade. It labeled it as a decade from hell. It started almost with the 911 event and much of the decade the world had to deal with its aftermath. And it ended with the global financial turmoil which saw the world experiencing the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The internet has become the single most important technology innovation of mankind. It has given people the power of information, decision and choice in their lives. Google has become a very important tool of the internet and the people as well as it has become a very important brand.

We have our fair share of gadgets and fads. iPod, the music player, iPhone, Blackberry, the Motorola Droid and many smartphones, GPS devices, netbooks, flat screen TVs, high definition video, the big 3 gaming machines (Playstation, Xbos and Wii), reality shows and 3D movies will come to mind easily.

In music, we will miss one of its best ever performer in Michael Jackson. Radiohead solidifies its image as one of the most important rock bands in history which it built last decade with Ok Computer, by coming out with Kid A (which is most regarded as the best album of the decade) and later with In Rainbows.

In sports, perhaps 3 names rose above others. Two of them record Grand Slam winners, Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, and the other one, the greatest 100m sprinter the world has ever seen, Usian Bolt.

Why should they be interested ?

2009-12-15T10:06:00.002-05:00

The book, Outliers - The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell was released about a year ago and went on to become an international best seller. I would regard this book to be his best todate. It tells of theories of success of outliers (which mean different from the masses) lie on not just themselves or what they do but rather on their environment and culture, among others.

The book is such a joy to read because Mr Gladwell tells stories to deliver his findings and hypothesis.

Which brings to the skill to capture the attention of your audience in a speaking or writing forum. Using stories to relate your messgae is effective as shown in Outliers.

In a book written about the speaking skills of Steve Jobs, whom people regard as the greatest salesman in the world, the following techniques used by Mr Jobs in his speeches are listed below :-

1. Do not use bullet points and standard powerpoint presentation formats

2. Come up with a one sentence headline (which should be not more than 140 characters as in Twitter).

3. Always remember the audience wants to know one thing, and one thing only, that is why should they be interested in what you have to say. If you don't answer this question fast when you start speaking, you will lose your audience.

4. Google's founders came up with a one sentence pitch to initial venture capital funders. They said, People can access to information of the world with a click. That did it for them as they got their funding. Subsequently, those funders insist future investees state why they should invest in their companies in one sentence.

In the past, elevator pitch was being practised where we were told to concise our sales pitch to a few minutes, the time for an elevator to reach the floors, to get to say what we want to say to our audience. Now, that is too long too. We only got one sentence, as in the venture capitalists above.

5. Use videos, audio and involve other people to share the presentation to complement your talk. If live demonstration is suitable, use it like what Mr Jobs does often.

Best Album Packing

2009-12-03T11:34:00.002-05:00

Fever Ray's website headlined that she is nominated for 3 awards. The Swedish P3 Gold nominations that is. Not the Grammies which nominations were also announced today.

Fever Ray and together with a host of top acts of 2009 were expectedly not nominated. In fact, unlike last year's in which Radiohead's In Rainbows was nominated for amongst others, Album Of The Year, there is nothing to look forward to.

Only a handful of the critics favourites received nominations. Yeah Yeah Yeah's It's A Blitz, Norah Jones and Kelly Clarkson's All I Ever Wanted got single mention in the nomination list. Oh not forgetting Bat For Lashes, Dido and Neko Case were shortlisted for glory too - in album designs, packing and the sort...

But then again, why would we want to go to the Grammies for the year's best anyway.

Lionel Messi Wins Ballon d'Or

2009-12-02T06:27:00.002-05:00

Lionel Messi of Argentina, widely called the best player in the world, has won his first footballer title that accolades this statue - the Ballon d'Or, which is the European Footballer of The Year.

His goal in his club, Barcelona's win in May's UEFA champions league final as well as his consistently top class performance for his club throughout the last and current seasons certainly helped cemented his award.

In addition, he helped Argentina to qualify for next year's world cup despite not enjoying as much success with his national team compared to his club.

There is another award which could go his way, which is the FIFA world footballer of the year which would be given out by year end. Nevertheless, as nearly all the best players in the world play in Europe and as such qualify for Ballon d'Or recognition, this award should also be considered a world title recognition in its own right.

With his statue as the best player in the world, he will feel the pressure of delivering at the world cup. This is not unusual for him as he has experienced similar expectation at the Beijing 2008 Olympics in which he played a pivotal role to help his country to win the gold medal. Still at 22, and having shown improvement year by year, time is on his side to realise World Cup glory.

Chasing Pirates

2009-11-21T16:05:00.002-05:00

Norah Jones has released her new album called the Fall. The songs are catchier, different instrumentation with more prominent guitar sound and still retains her trade mark brand of jazz, adult contemporary music. Overall, the album is quite good.

However, what is outstanding is how she looks and the first single of the album, Chasing Pirates. First her looks. She is always a very pretty face. Still retaining her fuller body, she has cut her hair short and looks absolutely gorgeous. Her stunning outfit in her single music video sees her cute as a button in a black top, lacey wide short white shirt with high black boots.

The song itself is a bomb. Very catchy melody which should appeal to the masses.

Outlandish Plead

2009-11-15T22:51:00.002-05:00

I would have wished Maradona would be slapped with a lengthy competitive match ban which would make him unavailable for the World Cup and probably prompt his football association to replace him with a more capable coach. This thought was prompted by him ridiculously promising team place to two of his fringe players who scored winning goals in the last two world cup qualifiers. This reward should have no place in professional set ups where performance and form over the next half year leading to the World Cup should be the deciding factor in choosing team players rather than the whims and fancy of the coach.

But he would escape such harsh punishment. Instead he would be banned for the next 2 months after he begged for forgiveness at a FIFA hearing. The ban would have no effect on him as there are no friendly internationals during this time.

It is however worthy to note the outlandish written apology cum plead he tendered at the hearing which is a good read. I reproduce a transcript courtesy of The Faster Times :-

Mis amigos, I cannot tell you how splendid it is to be here in Zurich. The mountain air, the sea breezes, the generous banks, the tick tock of your Rolexes, the fine chocolate; I come to you a humble and humbled man. Last month, when I apologized to all the women in the world I knew in my heart of hearts that it was not enough. The men of the world deserve to hear from me too. But first a word or two in my defense for I have done the state some service, and they know it. When, after the game against Uruguay, I told those scum of the Fourth Estate that they could all suck my cock and keep on sucking it I meant nothing untoward! Nada! In Villa Fiorito, where I grew up, it was simply my grandmother’s way of calling us in to dinner after she had throttled, gutted and cooked one of the local roosters. I am a generous man with a good heart and in Montevideo I had planned a great victory feast for my journalist friends, roosters donated by local cock-fighting impresarios, cooked on a spit like suckling pig, then skewered for easy sucking. And in any case in lunfardo a “cock” is actually a great man, a proud and strutting rooster cocksman. The President of Argentina herself would be proud to be called a “cock” even though she doesn’t have one. But I apologize also and especially to her for the shame and disgrace that the misinterpretation of my words and gestures-for those you who have seen the video of the team bus my eyes were wide, my mouth open and my hand moving like that because I was dreaming of swallowing chorizos with red peppers as that is always how I celebrate a victory! But in any case, gentlemen of Zurich, I ask you, was it not Jesus himself who said “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?” Is there one among you who can honestly say that there has never been a time when his chorizo has got the better of him? We have beautiful minds, mis amigos, but treacherous bodies. And the truth is I never left you, through all my wild days, my mad existence, I kept my promise… I’m sorry, the emotion of this occasion has carried me away. My neutral Swiss friends, some people say you are cowards. I say you are the bravest of men, honest and faithful right up to the end. If you were horses I would ride you, but in a heterosexual way, the wind in our gaucho faces, tears of remorse streaming down our cheeks. Dark swallows will return, but my ill judged words and gestures, they’ll not come back. Give me one more chance and I promise to remain on the sidelines, silent, absorbed, my chorizo tiny as a Brazilian garrincha inside my tracksuit. Disculpame!

Current Issues

2009-11-15T09:30:00.002-05:00

A few current issues. Auto tune is popularly used in the music industry nowadays. It is the using of software to alter a singer's voice to sound mechanical and when combined with music, this mechanical singing has become popular to fans. Auto tune is attributed to Cher's 1998's no. 1 hit, Believe, which was considered the first time auto tune was used as a main vocal, and also to 2005 when rapper turned singer, T Pain used auto tune to sing in an entire album. Now, many popular artistes, including one of the biggest selling albums this year, Black Eyed Peas' the E.N.D., are using this novelty. There is even an iPhone app called I am T Pain, which allows you to sound like autotune when you speak through your iPhone.

Fever Ray's pitch shifting is not unlike auto tune although the pitch is shifted lower for Fever Ray as compared to higher pitch in auto tune thus making them totally different genres.

Yahoo remained relevant in the internet space and one of the reasons of its continued success is its content creativity. When you land on the Yahoo site, the main news greeting you will most likely be a piece of information which you want to read. And you will click and enter its site and read the article. Usually the eye catching article is about entertainment. It is perhaps Yahoo does not need to present news at the space that makes it more interesting than other news sites, as real news are seldom as attracting as entertainment items.

Valuation Methods

2009-11-03T04:19:00.005-05:00

There are many different valuation methods used to value companies, business and investments. There common methods are price earnings ratio, price to book value, enterprise value to Ebidta (earnings before interest, depreciation, tax and amortisation), discounted cashflow, residue earnings, price to cash and dividend yield. No single valuation method will give you the true and most accurate valuation as each has its own superiority and inferiority. Depending on the companies and business, a valuation method may be more suitable than another. However, this truth remains. By using more valuation methods, and hence arriving at a range of valuation, we will have a better grasp of the true and most accurate valuation and can arrive at at conclusion based on negotiations within the range of valuation.

Essentially, cashflow based valuation methods are considered to be more accurate because they are derived using more data and cashflow of the company or business which is the most essential component. The discounted cash flow, residue earnings and EV/EBIDTA methods are cashflow based valuation methods. The others eg PE, dividend yield, P/B and P/cash are industry and business general valuation methods. They are easier to derive and have more industry comparisons and will assist in arriving at a valuation when more complex valuation methods are also used.

Lets take a look at two valuation methods, EV/EBIDTA and residue earnings. EV is the networth of a company (i.e. assets + liabilities) but less cash. Cash is taken out as EV looks at the value of a company after deducting liabilities from its own cash. This is akin to the takeover value when say you acquire a company. The cash in the company can be used by you to offset loans in the company.

EV in essence is the inverse of return on capital employed (ROCE). ROCE shows return (usually in the form of EBIDTA to arrive at its operating profit) on equity and debt capital. A return of say 20% will give a valuation using its inverse (which is a form of EV/EBIDTA which is more refined by taking out the cash component) of 5 times, while a higher return of say 50% will give a valuation of 2 times which is more attractive which is right because its return is higher.

Residue earnings is conceptually a cashflow valuation. Instead of taking cashflow, it uses accounting data to arrive at profit by deducting income with expenses and then charging the profit with the cost of equity to arrive at residue profit (another name for residue earnings). This residue profit is discounted to present value like in discounted cashflow to arrive at the valuation of the company. The concept behind RE is that a company is creating value only if it generates returns higher than the cost of capital which is the cost of risk of investing in the company.

The following is a illustration of how residue earnings method of valuation is arrived at :-

Residue Earnings Method of Valuation
(all figures in $ million)

Year	Invt base	Earnings	Dividends	ROCE	RE	PV RE	PV factors	Valuation
0	19.85							19.85
1	20.66	2.81	2	14.16%	1.024	$0.94	1.09
2	21.17	2.53	2.02	12.25%	0.671	$0.56	1.188
3	21.59	2.48	2.06	11.71%	0.575	$0.44	1.295
4	21.85	2.36	2.1	10.93%	0.417	$0.30	1.412
5	22.11	2.4	2.14	10.98%	0.434	$0.28	1.539
6	22.01	2.08	2.18	9.41%	0.09	$0.05	1.677
				Total PV RE		$2.58		$2.58
	Total value							$22.43

The opening capital is $19.85 mil while the cost of capital is 9% per annum. The earnings column shows the earnings of the company for each year for the next 6 years while dividends are paid out as shown in the dividends column. The investment base at the end of the year is the opening investment base add the earnings for the year less dividends paid. ROCE for the year is arrived at from the earnings return to the opening investment base.

With that, we can calculate the residue earnings for each year by deducting earnings for the year with the cost of capital based on the opening investment base. Hence in year 1, RE is earnings of $2.81 mil - (9% x $19.85 mil) to arrive at $1.024 mil. Discounting the RE for each year, we arrive at the total present value of each year's RE of $2.58 mil. At such, the company has grown its opening investment base of $19.85 mil by $2.58 mil in present value of RE and hence the company is worth or valued at $19.85 mil + $2.58 mil = $22.43 mil.

The assumption here and in the practical world, is that we can only have data for such a number of years in future. To arrive at a valuation, we need data up to infinity which we can replace with an assumed growth rate for the far future years or like in our example here, we stop at a certain number of years. This is not going to make much a difference as the present value of far future figures will be small and make insignificant difference to the valuation.

This Is It Movie

2009-10-31T12:37:00.002-04:00

Michael Jackson's This Is It movie which started showing worldwide for a limited 2 week run, has not generated mind blowing box office receipts in its US as well as rest of the world opening day. This is despite decent critic reviews of the movie, chart topping sales of MJ's albums and the sold out London concert series.

Still, the movie is well put together showing several of his greatest hits and its preparation and rehersals for the concerts. The band was great, the backup singer (as we all have heard how good they were at the memorial) were superb, and need we say more about the dancers. And with all time favourites like Wanna Be Starting Something, They Care About Us, Human Nature, Smooth Criminal, The Way You Make Me Feel, I Just Can't Stop Loving You, Beat It, Black or White, Thriller, Earth Song, Billie Jean and Man In The Mirror, the movie cannot possibly be bad. With the good sound systems in some theatres, and having only to pay a fraction of the price of a concert ticket, it was a well worth it MJ concert.

From the opening interviews of dancers participating in an audition where a dancer said about wanting to find some meaning to life and that joining these concerts, this is it, it was cue for the opening of the polish movie.

The set up and background for some the songs were amazing including elaborate settings for The Way You Make Me Feel, Thriller and Smooth Criminal.

Stealing the show throughout the rehersals were Orianthi Panagaris, the hot looking blonde female guitarist with prominent solos in Beat It, They Don't Care About Us and Black or White, and Judith Hill, the brilliant back up vocalist who sang lead in the memorial for We Are The World and Heal The World. Ms Hill dueted with MJ in Can't STop Loving You in the movie. Both are very attractive ladies and are enjoying successful solo careers now.

This Is It indeed has met the expectations of MJ fans all over the world.

Karin Dreijer Andersson

2009-10-23T11:24:00.002-04:00

Karin Dreijer Andersson in her Fever Ray incarnation has long white hair, face painted white with an inverted V line drawn from forehead running through both cheeks till the jaw line, draped in long flowing black gown with fingers exposing gloves. Fans attending her Europe cum North America tour get to see her Fever Ray look only momentarily when the concerts run towards almost the end when she performed When I Grow Up and she stepped into the light. For the rest of the concerts, she remains a dark figure hidden by mist, darkness and during the first 3 or so tracks, wearing a huge horned hood and at times singing in altered low voices.

The eerie atmosphere together with music from her album which is dark blends into a spectacle that though disturbing is a stunning experience to the fans. Andersson called the concert experience with painted faces and costumes, fun which even her young daughters enjoyed going through when they joined her at backstage. Neither were her girls scared of her shows, though they had complaints that they would not want to hear her music after hearing it for too long.

The whole live performance atmosphere is captured in the video, Triangle Walks, which is one of 4 music videos posted of her website.

Fever Ray is definitely one of the year's best albums. She described her masks, painted faces and not liking to do promotion for her music, as allowing her music to speak for itself rather than fronting the artiste. Still, she has performed about 50 shows and allowed many interviews to promote this album. However, she only allowed her painted face to be photographed eventhough she had attended interviews without masks and make ups.

The album was the result of almost three quarters of a year of full workdays song writing by Andersson in her studio. She composed her material alone using computers and music software instead of proper musical instruments because she was too lazy to set instruments up.

She has no plans to record another Fever Ray album and her website has cited her end of the year run of a few shows in Europe as her finale tour. While her fans can treasure this album for its brilliance, the thought of not seeing her performing solo and getting new Fever Ray material is really disturbing.

(Photo credit:- The Guardian, UK)

Maradona Has To Go

2009-10-15T10:18:00.002-04:00

I am a huge fan of Maradona and without a doubt considered him the greatest player of all time. His magical skills, not just during the 1986 World Cup, but during his Napoli days where he captained them from also rans to two consecutive Serie A championships. Him playing in European clubs tilt the greatest title to him compared to others during another generation who were not tested in European soccer.

And this came after Argentina put up a professional performance to beat Uruguay and qualified directly to the 2010 World Cup.

As a fan, and that Maradona has taken his national team to the world cup, I am now convinced that he should leave as national coach now and leave guiding the Los Albicelestes at the finals to another more capable coach. The main reason is his performance since taking over as coach but while his incapability was obvious to many, I was blinded by my idolation of him and that of Messi. But after winning qualification, his one single remark made me realise that if Argentina were to harbour any ambition of launching a serious bid for the World title, its fate should not be decided in the hands of this coach.

What was his remark ?

He named 4 players who he said would go to South Africa. This smacked of whim and fancy of a man who knows nothing about coaching. Nobody decides this early in advance their players. Furthermore, two of the 4 selected was because they scored the 2 winners in Argentina's last 2 qualifiers ! Football is a team sport. Everybody contributed to create scoring chances. And the last 2 winners were scored not by sporting skill but through confusion and melee. In other words, luck. Luck that the ball fell kindly to the scorers.

By not naming Messi now, he has demoralised the best player in the world who cannot function in his incoherent team without a capable coach's guidance. Remember Beijing 2008 ? Messi played a pivotal role for Argentina's gold medal foray. The reason was that coach was capable and knew how to utilise the strength of all the immensely talented players at his disposal. And was the Olympics chicken feet in terms of football ? Dunga was Brazil's coach there. And he was outplayed by Argentina, much like how he outplayed the Argentina now. Everybody knows Messi cannot play because of the fault of the coach.

With more than half a year to go, coaches would use the time to train and develop team tactics and observe the progress of all players. Only the best players playing at the best form should be selected at the time of the world cup. Not now. Just because they clinched the winners. Everybody who scored, everybody who assisted the scoring and prevented opponents from scoring, all helped clinched the qualification too.

One of the players named was Mascherano, the captain. Fine, many coaches assured their team captain of their places in the final squad. Like Joachim Loew assured Michael Ballack that if he is fit come the world cup, he would be assured of the captaincy. But that is Ballack. He has done so much for Germany. He nearly won Germany the world cup way back in 2002. His vital goals took Germany to the final of Euro 2008. And his current form in Chelsea is one of his best for years. At 33, he has earned the guarantee. And Loew put in a caveat that provided he is fit.

Not Diego. He just felt like the 4 should be there. No logic and no reason. Mascherano though a steady player, is never the best player on the field in all his matches. The 4th player, Guttierez is erratic and a mind boogling choice.

But then again Argentina is a third world country. So do not expect they will do the right thing to sack Maradona. Their football association president has been president for donkey years. He is probably an untouchable for helming the FA over 2 world cup triumphs. He could be too old to make bold decisions especially he has never sacked a coach before. And he would allow Maradona his way just because Argentina has reached the finals.

In the end, Maradona will guide Maradona to a mediocre run in South Africa. The talents of their players, or at least those who are allowed to participate, would probably ensure they would reach the knock out stage or perhaps repeat the under achievements of Germany 2006, despite of the current coach.

This is a pity really. Argentina could be a title contender in this World Cup otherwise. For Messi, his hope will really be in 2014 when he is 26 (the same age Maradona captained his side to the world cup) and surely under another coach who is truly capable.

Number Three

2009-10-01T10:36:00.003-04:00

This blog features the third female artistes who share a lot similarities with the two other artistes in previous entries.

The third artiste is St. Vincent whose real name is Annie Clark. Earlier, we had Bat For Lashes and then Fever Ray.

Like Bat For Lashes and Fever Ray, St Vincent :-

1. is a very talented female singer/song writer.

2. uses a stage name instead of her real name.

3. a hot looking chick.

4. in her latest album, The Actor, has one of the best albums of 2009.

5. music is the alternative genre but generating lots of buzz and critical acclaim.

St. Vincent in a recent interview mentioned that she considered Fever Ray's video of When I Grow Up is one of the best videos of all time and her favourite this year. However, in her next breath, she named she other ( difficult to like) albums as albums she considered to be among the best of 2009, without mentioning Fever Ray's. Still, she went for Fever Ray's concert as she is a fan of hers.

She has good looks and likes to dress up when performing. Unlike Bat For Lashes, she does not paint her face, or like Fever Ray, she does not hide her face nor does not get photographed.

As different as the appearance and music of the three, their latest albums are all stunningly brilliant.

Seven

2009-09-29T10:32:00.003-04:00

Seven is the third and latest single (to be released in the UK in October) from Fever Ray's self title album. Fever Ray is the stage name of Swedish singer, Karin Dreijer. This album is her first solo album. Previously she was part of the group, Knife, which consisted of her brother as well.

Fever Ray is an outstanding album and is widely regarded by music critics as one of the best this year. Seven is the standout track from the album which most material is of the pop-ish electrica genre.

Karin has always been eccentric, both in appearance and in performance. She goes into great lengths to avoid been seen and performs usually in dark stages or uses weird masks to hide her face. Photos of her are very rare indeed and the above shot of her without make up provides the world a glimpse of who she really is.

Her album cover shows a woman in sun glasses; there is actually no knowing if the woman is actually her as she is fond of using other persons to portray her especially in videos. In the popular video of her second single, When I Grow Up, a girl in dirty swimming costume and make up and pieces of cloth covering herself, dances on the diving springboard of a swimming pool. As the video progresses, a rare glimpse of the girl's face can be seen, showing a very young and extremely pretty person. This got fans worked up thinking Karin has finally allowed her face to appear to the public although it is known later that the girl is just a model for the video. In fact, in all her video for singles in the album, other persons have been used in place of herself.

This is the enigma of Fever Ray. All this can be for artistic reasons, so that we are drawn to her songs and singing but have to accept that we will not get to see or meet her.

This draws comparison to an equally private, pretty and tremendously talented fellow singer, Beth Gibbons of Portishead. However, unlike Karin who does not get photographed or interviewed (and it was said that when she did get interviewed in the rare occasions, she actually masked her voice), Beth allows herself to be photographed although she does not talk to the press or be interviewed.

We love them all for who they want to be because we love their talent so much. And we are so blessed to be able to enjoy their music.

Flash Mob Dance

2009-09-26T10:36:00.002-04:00

Flash mob dance is a group breaking out in dance in front of a surprise crowd. A flash mob dance involving reportedly over 20,000 was performed to the surprise of Oprah Winfrey while the Black Eyed Peas was performing their massive hit, I've Got A Feeling, in downtown Chicago on 9 Sep.

This was in conjunction of the launch of the 24th season of Oprah's talkshow and the BEP was the star performer in a public concert. As a stunt to surprise Oprah, BEP's will.i.am sent out messages through Twitter and Facebook to the public attending the show to take part in a massive flash mob dance. Response was great and the respondents were taught the dance moves by professional dancers days earlier and then together they taught the moves to the public who turned up at the show.

As a result, when the song started, none of the crowd was moving; they all stood still. A single woman in front started dancing widely. Then the group surrounded her began to dance together in unison. This spread quickly as the entire front section of the crowd was involved. Soon it covered the entire crowd right to the back estimated at over 20,000 people.

Oprah could be seen totally in awe with what she witnessed and repeatedly said that was the coolest thing she saw to the crowd after the song.

It is yet another hip stunt by the coolest band at the moment, the BEP, which has outdid itself with hits like I've Got a Feeling.

Music File Sharing

2009-09-23T08:55:00.002-04:00

In the UK, the government is proposing repeat file sharers will be disconnected from their internet providers for a certain period. A musician organisation has objected to this move citing among the reasons, that file sharers should be allow to sample music through the internet to determine whether to make purchases. As a result of this, other musicians have since come out to disagree with the music organisation and to show support for the government's proposal to ban internet access to file sharers.

Lets discuss the issue of music file sharing.

1. The music industry has suffered declining sales due to music piracy in particular file sharing over the internet. In the US, from over 788 million albums sold in 2000, sales figures have dropped 25% to 588 million albums by 2006. These sales figures included legal digital downloads (eg iTunes) which despite strong growth are unable to to make much difference to the overall music sales decline.

2. From declining music sales, it is a fact that the music industry has suffered due to rampant music piracy. Interest in music has not decline but it is rather people are now able to get their music free instead of purchasing it.

3. The advent of technology has enabled file sharing to be done more rampantly over the internet at faster pace and more pervasively. File sharing technology now downloads files faster if there are more people downloading at the same time, instead of slowing it down.

4. Declining music sales means less profit for record companies. They in turn are more carefully signing up artistes as their business becomes more risky. Artistes that do get signed up do not get paid well.

5. The music industry has all along favours the record companies (just like companies make the money rather than most employees.) For the risk in bringing up artistes, doing the promotions, marketing and investing in the records, they reserve most of the profits to themselves. Artistes get small share of the profits (which includes music royalties). Usually they are paid in advance before a record is out. If after a period of the sales of the record, there is surplus profits due to the artistes, the artistes will get additional and periodic payments. Usually, they do not get more than the first cheque. Recording artistes are just like any other employees in terms of what they earn despite the perceived glamour of the industry, and employees usually do not get rich.

6. The record industry worldwide is not getting much headway in terms of fighting music piracy despite the seriousness of this problem. Illegal music download is estimated to be as much as 20 to 80 times that of legal music purchases.

7. The reasons for the seemingly slow or no action taken on music piracy are many but two of them are the main contributors. Firstly, it is just too difficult to police music piracy. It takes too much work and governments and the industry do not have the resources to combat this effectively. Secondly, is the vested interest of other parties. It is to the interest of the economy as a whole for music file sharing to continue to grow rather than stopping it. Vested interest parties include internet service providers, hardware manufacturers as well as software services providers, just to name a few. The attractiveness of music and entertainment downloads helps to sell broadband internet connections. Internet infrastructure investors are major investors in a country and they have clouts to allow good return to their investments. Equipment manufacturers such as music control boxes that facilitates downloads, storage and playbacks just like a computer but with better looks and connectivity to TVs and hi fi systems need more customers who download stuff. Software such as antivirus and digital mixing thrives on more internet activities.

The economy benefits more as a whole compared to the losses to the music industry due to file sharing.

8. The internet has changed the way the whole world does business and the music industry is no exception. Everybody wants his stuff free, from reading newspaper, to learning skills to entertainment. Other industries have to learn to deal with this new way of doing business in the internet era. So, why is the music industry any different.

9. Take movies for instance. Movies are freely available in the forms of pirated DVDs or illegal downloads. But moviegoers have the choice to go through another experience far superior than watching pirated movies, that is watching on the big screens in theaters with THX sound and in digital 3D. Consumers will be willing to pay for the superior experience from watching movies in theaters. There is product differentiation.

10. Product differentiation is a key element in the new way to do business in the internet era. Businesses offer products for free usage on the internet with subscription option for premium versions of the products. You pay for having a paper newspaper for your reading convenience eventhough you can read the same news online.

11. This is where the music industry will evolve to. Record companies cannot have it all. Maybe the vested interest businesses will acquire music labels to continue churning out free music. Maybe record companies will merge and acquire into vested interest businesses that benefit from the file sharing phenomenon. Recording artistes will break away from the lop sided recording contracts as they are not getting much salary as it is anyway. Music has to be offered as a differentiated product with superior experience in lieu for consumers to pay for it. Free music is a way of promotion where far more audience can know about their music. Fans are willing to pay for live concert experience as well as premium products such as autographed CDs, and memorablias. Music will be sold as bundle with hardware such as phones. There so many business models the music industry can leverage on but it needs to get people to know the music first.

12. Rather than fight file sharing, which it may be too difficult to do, have them on your side and as fan base to leverage new business models on.

Moon And Moon

2009-09-17T13:20:00.003-04:00

Second time Britain's Mercury Prize nominee, Bat For Lashes did not win the recently announced 2009 prize for her album, Two Suns. Neither did fellow nominee, the equally brilliant, Florence and the Machine's Lungs.

Award shows are that way, you can never agree with their choices as can be seen with the Grammy awards. Still, nothing can take away Bat For Lashes' two stunning nominated albums. At the ceremony, Bat For Lashes performed the haunting ballad from Two Suns, Moon And Moon. Natasha Khan, the alter ego of Bat For Lashes, was supported by her 3 piece band comprising multi instrumentalist, Ben Christophers, and two very attractive ladies, Charlotte Hatherley (guitar) and Sarah Jones (drums). For that performance, Natasha played accousticly on the piano and assisted by Ben on keyboard. Both Charlotte and Sarah acted as backup singers, and it was a lovely sight.