Community

My City spies tell me that Tony has landed on his feet yet again and will be moving to Ernst & Young as head of regulation and compliance.

Useful links courtesy of MySibos, the Swift messaging system which also display real-time news from SibosOnline.

Dining

http://boston.citysearch.com/find/section/boston/restaurants.html

http://boston.diningguide.com

http://boston.com/ae/food/restaurants

Arts

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: http://www.mfa.org

Institute of Contemporary Art: http://www.icaboston.org

Isabella Gardner Museum: http://www.gardnermuseum.org

More: http://www.museumsofboston.org

General

Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism: http://www.massvacation.com

The Greater Boston CVB: http://www.bostonusa.com

Boston Online: http://www.boston-online.com

Search Boston

http://www.searchboston.com

http://boston.citysearch.com

Weather

http://www.weatherforyou.com/weather/Massachusetts/Boston.html

I'll be staying on for the weekend after Sibos. Thinking of hiring a car and taking off to Cape Cod for a bit of R&R.

From Wikipedia: "East of America, there stands in the open Atlantic the last fragment of an ancient and vanished land. Worn by the breakers and the rains, and disintegrated by the wind, it still stands bold." - Henry Beston, from his book The Outermost House

More prosaically: "(Cape Cod is)... a vast morgue, where famished dogs may range in packs - the most uninviting landscape on earth." - Henry David Thoreau

Should be just the ticket!

UK P2P network Zopa is looking to cash in on the opaque nature of bank borrowing and lending practices. The firm has just issued a press release entitled: 'Northern Rock debacle highlights the big benefits of Social Lending'

"Social Lending not only offers people better rates, it also offers complete transparency," states the PR. "Lenders can see exactly who they are lending to, for what purpose and at what rate. Borrowers know exactly what rate they have to pay and who they are borrowing from. The suspicions and nervousness caused by the infinitely more complex and opaque ‘behind the scenes’ workings of Northern Rock remains a pivotal reason why their customers are leaving in droves, despite all the reassurances."

The firm also play up the tenuous link between the interest rates banks charge to their borrowers on one hand and the interest rates they pay out to savers on the other.  "The lack of transparency in this link creates big opportunities for the banks to ‘play games’ and engineer larger profits, especially when rates change."  

Goldman Sachs abandoned its traditional partnership structure and let the public buy pieces of its equity at the turn of the century. The official reason: the old structure was inhibiting prospects for growth and expansion. Unofficially, Goldman's 190 partners stood to reap a bonanza of about $110 million each by owning stock instead of their partnership interests.

It scans nicely with 'Girlfriend in a coma'.

Speaking of inspired marketing, check out the AskNinja video take on global warming - it's all to do with boy bands apparently - set up by the good people of Ask Jeeves.

Yuvaraj

I'd go along with you there. I think John Shepherd-Baron's 5-year time horizon is a touche ambitious.

That said, I do agree with his analysis that it will be payment by mobile phone that eventually puts paid to the hard cash economy. 

Oh dear, I may have spoken too soon. It seems the Swedish government is getting a bit restive about Nasdaq's proposed takeover of OMX. Could be a case of one step forward, two steps back...

Or to put it another way: One-quarter of Temenos' clients are not satisfied with the performance of the vendor. Mmmm....

According to Nomura Research Institute Ltd. statistics, the e-money market in Japan expanded from 180 billion yen in 2006 to 690 billion yen in 2007, including Edy's 100 billion yen share and Suica's 50 billion yen share. The market is expected to be worth 2.8 trillion yen in 2011.

With the popularisation of e-money, concerns have been raised that the money supply - one of the elements that the Bank of Japan uses to map out its monetary policy - may not reflect the actual state of the economy, as the money supply data does not include e-money.

According to statistics, the money supply in March was 80.38 trillion yen. Of this, only 4.49 trillion yen is currency from small-scale settlements, which is likely to be substituted by e-money.

Your man from Diebold may just be looking at the wrong stats. See this article from Yomiuri Shimbun for more background on the advance of e-money in Japan.