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RICHES BEYOND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS IN SPAIN FOR THE TAKING

Millions of crisis-hit Spaniards are snatching up tickets for the world’s richest lottery draw on Thursday, which will shower winners with a record 2.5 billion euro ($3.25 billion) in prizes.

Undeterred by a 21.5 per cent jobless rate and the prospect of recession, four out of every five Spaniards are expected to spend money on a ticket to a lottery known as “El Gordo”, or the “Fat One”.

Long queues snaked through the streets as people took a chance to dream of an escape from the economic crisis, each person buying an average of more than 60 euro worth of tickets.

In Madrid’s main artery, the Gran Via, many waited for tickets at a small kiosk.

“I am spending more than last year, 100 euros, and I am sharing the tickets with my friends and family,” said a 48-year-old office worker, Victoria.

“Some of them are having a very tough time financially and I want us to win,” she said.

A tradition that dates back nearly two centuries, “El Gordo” is an engrained Christmas ritual.

Family, friends and colleagues can play the same number and share the gains if they are lucky on December 22, when pupils from former Madrid orphanage San Ildefenso sing out the numbers on national television.

At Madrid’s Dona Manolita lottery ticket shop, which is famed for having sold the winning number several times, superstitious players are prepared to wait for hours for a ticket.

“And they say Spain is in a crisis,” a passer-by could be heard muttering as he struggled to get past the huge queue.

Spaniards’ attachment to “El Gordo” allows the national lottery to rake in a fortune each year, of which 70 per cent is shared out in prizes.

It makes the draw one of the world’s most generous, said Juan Antonio Gallardo, sales director of the national lottery.

The jackpot has grown to 400,000 euro from 300,000 euro last year.

With lottery ticket sales expected to amount to 3.6 billion euro, up from 2.7 billion euro last year, the total prize money to be shared out is expected to be 2.52 billion euro, the lottery says.

“The Christmas lottery is written into Spaniards’ DNA. No other lottery in the world sells so much,” Gallardo said.

Spaniards are paring back Christmas spending as they face a bleak economic outlook in 2012, with incoming conservative prime minister Mariano Rajoy promising 16.5 billion euro in budget cuts.

“I am spending much less than last year. I am looking for practical gifts,” said 52-year-old Maria Jose Perez, with a shopping bag stuffed with pyjamas and sports shoes for her 16-year-old daughter.

According to Spain’s federation of independent consumers and users, Spanish households will spend an average 560 euro on Christmas – 114 euro less than last year.

“Consumption is fragile, frugal and tired,” said a report by the Spanish business school ESADE, which predicted a 40 per cent decline in Christmas spending.

“But we will always keep some room for the little pleasures,” said the report’s author, Gerard Costa.

“And we won’t forget traditions like the lottery.”

Spain’s outgoing Socialist government had planned to sell a 30 per cent stake in the lucrative lottery to rake in up to 7.5 billion euro for the state’s depleted coffers.

But the government abandoned the sale in September, blaming plunging markets that would have slashed the sale price.

The national lottery posted a net profit of 2.99 billion euro in 2009, up 3.5 per cent from the year before despite an economic crisis.

Spain traces its fascination with the lottery back to the creation of the royal lottery in 1763, which used profits for social causes such as hospitals. The national lottery was approved in 1811 and held its first draw the following year.

BILL GATES THE EXTRAORDINARY PERSON DESERVES A KNIGHTHOOD

Bill Gates today ruled out ever returning to the helm of Microsoft and dismissed harsh barbs by his former arch-rival Steve Jobs.

In an interview with Fairfax Media, Gates said Jobs was driven by the fact that “Microsoft machines outsold his machines by a lot”.

This month Fortune reported rumours that Gates was considering a comeback to Microsoft, the company he founded in 1975 but stepped back from in 2006 to focus full-time on philanthropy.

But speaking in Sydney today, where he is on holiday with his family, Gates said he had made the transition to work full-time at his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation “and that will be what I do the rest of my life”.

“I’m part-time involved with Microsoft, including even being in touch this week to give some of my advice but that’s not going to change – the foundation requires all of my energy and we feel we’re having a great impact.”

A possible comeback was loosely compared to Jobs, who took the reins at Apple in the late 90s after a decade in the wilderness and saved the company.

Steve Ballmer, who has been Microsoft’s CEO since taking over from Gates in 2000, is widely considered to have missed the significance of what Jobs dubbed the “post-PC era” and Microsoft is now an also-ran in smartphones, tablets and music players.

Gates, who plans to donate nearly all of his money to charity when he passes away, may be just as culpable as Ballmer for missing the new era in computing as he has been quoted questioning the viability of Apple devices like the iPod and iPad.

Gates on Jobs

Gates and Jobs were the founders of the personal computing revolution and although they have displayed great mutual respect, over the years the competitors frequently took potshots at one another.

Jobs recently said Gates was “unimaginative” and hadn’t invented anything.

Today, Gates said Jobs was “brilliant” and he enjoyed working with him on Mac software and also competing with him, but “because the Microsoft machines outsold his machines by a lot he was always kind of tough on Microsoft, but that’s fine, he was a brilliant person”.

‘Tough things’

“Our work at Microsoft was super successful for all good reasons but Steve made huge contributions and he actually in his last few years was a lot kinder than that but over the years he did say some tough things,” Gates said today.

Gates’ approach – to license his software to all computer makers – contrasted sharply with Jobs’s philosophy of controlling the entire user experience from top to tail.

Gates’ method saw Windows dominate the PC industry but the Jobs philosophy is proving powerful in the smartphone and tablet era.

Gates has previously said of Apple’s closed model: “The integrated approach works well when Steve is at the helm. But it doesn’t mean it will win many rounds in the future.”

‘Crappy’

Jobs said of Gates’s open model: “Of course his fragmented model worked, but it didn’t make really great products. It produced crappy products.”

Gates has previously described Jobs as “fundamentally odd” and while recognising his mesmerising effect on people, described him as “weirdly flawed as a human being”.

Jobs, who went on a journey of spiritual enlightenment in his younger years, said Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger”.

But Jobs’s harshest barbs came during an interview with his biographer, Walter Isaacson.

“Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology,” Jobs told Isaacson. “He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

Jobs has previously complained that Gates stole the idea of bringing a mouse-operated graphical user interface to Windows after seeing it on the original Macintosh.

‘No shame’

“They just ripped us off completely, because Gates has no shame,” Jobs said in the biography, to which Gates replied “if he believes that, he really has entered into one of his own reality distortion fields”.

Of Jobs’s technology prowess, Gates has said: “Don’t you understand that Steve doesn’t know anything about technology? He’s just a super salesman.”

But in an internal email that previously surfaced, Gates was more charitable: “Steve Jobs’ ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things.”

When Jobs and Gates appeared on stage together in 2007 in a rare joint interview, Gates said: “I’d give a lot to have Steve’s taste.”

Gates on … bringing his family to Sydney

“They thought it would be fun to come down and see some of the neat places around Australia. Sydney is a great place and it’s summer here. Wish it was a tiny bit warmer, but it hasn’t been too bad”

… on Australia’s overseas aid 

“Australia is making good increases” but “The other rich countries on average are doing even more.

“I think it’s important to get out to Australians that this kind of generosity really makes a difference. Actually the most impactful dollars that Australia can spend are actually what goes to help the poorest.”

Kevin Bermeister [personal web] is sueing the giants of the IT world

Google, YouTube, Amazon, EMC, VMWare, Dropbox, NetApps, NEC and Caringo.

The Sydney entrepreneur who created Kazaa is a shareholder and chairman of a US company that is suing the biggest names on the internet, including Google and Amazon, for patent infringement in a case that experts say could run into the hundreds of millions.

Kevin Bermeister, born in South Africa but now living in a mansion near the water in Rose Bay, reached a $150 million settlement after being sued by the music industry over the Kazaa file sharing service in 2005. He has since turned his hand to developing technology to combat internet piracy.

Bermeister is a significant shareholder and non-executive chairman of PersonalWeb, which late last week filed separate cases in the United States District Court for the eastern district of Texas against Google, YouTube, Amazon, EMC, VMWare, Dropbox, NetApps, NEC and Caringo.

The cases allege the companies infringe eight PersonalWeb patents in their cloud computing products, “including content addressable storage and/or distributed search engine technologies”.

“PersonalWeb protects its proprietary business applications and operations through a portfolio of patents that it owns, and we are actively pursuing licensing and participation in the operation of businesses that use these patents,” said Michael Weiss, CEO of PersonalWeb, in a statement.

Peter Black, senior lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology, said that while he had not closely assessed the merits of the case, if successful the damages would be “substantial”.

Mark Summerfield, a senior associate at Watermark in Melbourne who is a patent law specialist, said going by similar cases the damages claims will be “at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars per defendant”.

However, Black worried that patents in the technology sector were “very general”, making infringement “almost inevitable” as new products are developed (e.g. the Samsung vs. Apple litigation).

“An increasingly common trend is to use patent litigation as a business model – companies use patent lawsuits (or the threat of patent lawsuits) as leverage to enter into license arrangements with competitors,” said Black.

Weiss could not be reached for comment today while Bermeister declined to comment as he is a witness in the case. Google and EMC both refused to comment as the case is before the courts.

PersonalWeb says it has used the patents to develop related technologies such as an online collaboration platform for students dubbed StudyBods.

The patents also form the basis of Global File Registry, a technology that Bermeister and his team have been pitching to ISPs and police agencies as a way of combatting online piracy and child pornography. The technology is able to recognise millions of known pirated content and child pornography files and when users search for such files on peer-to-peer services, is able to offer a paid, legal version of the content or , in the case of child pornography, a law enforcement message.

Before Kazaa and Global File Registry, Bermeister created the video games distributor Ozisoft in 1982 and in 1994 he established the now-defunct $70 million interactive Sega World theme park in Sydney. He was also a founding investor in Skype.

In the complaint against Google and YouTube, seen by this website, PersonalWeb alleges that the core services provided by the companies infringe its patents around identifying, processing, distributing and controlling access to data online.

Almost identical claims are made against the other web giants. PersonalWeb has produced a document, seen by this website, which claims each of the companies it targeted have in fact cited PersonalWeb’s patents in their own patents several times, but have not paid licensing fees.

“Google had prior knowledge of at least one of the patents-in-suit and the patented technology because they were cited in several of Google’s own patent applications,” the complaint against Google reads.

PersonalWeb is asking for a jury trial and ultimately, damages.

Summerfield said while he was not an expert on US patent law, the Texas court chosen by PersonalWeb was “most-renowned as the preferred venue for so-called patent trolls” – the term used to describe companies that buy patents in order to sue and obtain fees from alleged infringers rather than develop a product.

He questioned whether it was an attempt to extract fees out of “a stack of really big companies with deep pockets”. “After all, if you genuinely have an innovative new technology that is supposedly going to be clearly differentiated in the market, why would you need to sue only the biggest names in the business for doing what they are already doing,” said Summerfield.

PersonalWeb has gone to great pains to point out the products it has attempted to develop using the patents.

Summerfield said he was unable to comment on the merits of the case as that would involved hours of analysis. However, he said on the currently available evidence “it is very unclear whether PersonalWeb’s primary business model is as a developer of innovative online services and solutions, or as a patent-holding company seeking to derive income from patent licensing and/or enforcement”.

Separately, another Australian inventor, Ric Richardson, has been battling Microsoft in a different patent infringement case.

Uniloc, which owns Richardson’s patent around product activation, was awarded $US388 million by a US jury in 2008 after Microsoft was found to infringe the patent. On appeal, the infringement verdict was upheld, but the case has been sent back to the original court for a recalculation of the damages, still expected to be an extremely substantial amount.

INTERNET LANGUAGES ARE MANY & COMBINED ARE NOT ENGLISH

Five hundred and thirty seven million people use the Web in English; 445 million use it in Chinese. Yet the vast majority of users, 985 million people, navigate the Web in other languages.

“Although every Web site is global from the moment it goes live, few are designed with a worldly aspect,” says author John Yunker. Companies miss crucial opportunities if they don’t address a global audience. Research shows that people prefer to visit Web sites written in their own language.

A Eurobarometer survey, for example, found that 90 percent of European Web site users will always visit a Web site in their own language if they are offered a choice. Only 53 percent of users would choose to use an English Web site in place of one in their own language. Up to 60 percent of users who did navigate to an English language website expressed missing interesting information. In some countries, users only watch and read online content in their own language. This reluctance extends to buying products. A paltry 18 percent of users surveyed said they would “frequently or always buy products in a foreign language.”

Businesses ignore translation and localization at their own peril. The rise of the Millennial generation underlines the need for these tools. People under the age of 30 comprise more than half of the world’s population. The majority of Millennials live in China, Africa, South America, and other countries with per capita incomes of less than $1,000 per year. More than half of the users in China, which is expected to surpass the U.S. in terms of Internet users by 2013, are under the age of 25. Most U.S. Internet users are between 18 and 29 years old, according to a December 2010 Pew Internet survey.

Millennials are poised to make big changes to the global economy. The world is facing a peak population of 9.7 billion estimated for the middle of the century, an aging global workforce, and decreasing fertility rates. It is ready for the Millennial business model, which focuses on social causes in addition to the bottom line. An entrepreneurial group, Millennials harness widespread access to information and markets to collaborate internationally. Lower equipment costs, improved telecommunications infrastructure, and widespread mobile adoption around the world have ensured that almost everyone can connect easily and cheaply. Income no longer presents an insurmountable barrier to entry.

In many ways, big organizations are on the same page as millennials. A hypercompetitive economy has forced corporations to decrease their response times around both market and stakeholder needs. As a result, collaboration has to be efficient and take place on a global scale. Corporations have flattened their organizational hierarchies and become more flexible. Offshoring and outsourcing have led to a more diverse, multilingual global workforce, even within the same organization. Within this context it is essential to have training, marketing and technical materials available in relevant languages so that global teams can collaborate and work more efficiently.

Meeting Translation Needs

International collaboration is a must in the modern, Millennial-driven economy. Still, most translation options are one-size-fits-all solutions that don’t address a company’s unique needs. Hiring a good human translator is the traditional course of action. But at an industry-standard rate of 23 cents per word, the average millennial entrepreneur, who probably comes from a country with a low per-capita income, wouldn’t foot the cost. Considering the increasing predominance of social media within the organization, combined with how quickly content ages online, the time it takes to find the right translator, communicate the parameters of the project, find a project manager, wait for the translator to finish, then correct the content could cost a company its competitive edge & position.

One recent alternative, machine translation, is fast and free. But it doesn’t guarantee quality. The solution lies in combining the speed and low price of machine translation with the expertise of humans. Corporations today need a collaborative translation platform, which leverages both technology and crowds to create custom translation solutions. Through a combination of software and humans, analyzed and customized translations can match the level of importance of content. Instead of applying a uniform solution to unique needs, companies can match the workflow to the job at hand.

Millennials and multinationals alike benefit from fast, accurate, and cost-effective translation. In the new global economy, massive international collaboration is a core facet of doing business. The need for localized content and translation is no longer a luxury. It’s an absolute bare necessity.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha