6 AM Pacific

Economist’s Global Elections for US President

The Economist has a global vote running on the US Presidency. Its design matches the US electoral college system. Each country has a number of electoral votes that are roughly proportional to the population of the country. The candidate who wins the country takes all the electoral votes of that country. The electoral votes are not split in proportion of the individual votes.

The vote of course makes no difference to the actual election, if only to bring focus to what the rest of the world thinks about the candidates who are contesting to be the “ruler of the free world”.

The very early results indicate a strong support for Barrack Obama. The screenshot attached was taken at about 9:15PM Pacific. [You can click on the image to see its details.] At 8 PM when I cast my own vote, John McCain had no electoral votes. Since then El Salvador seems to be leaning towards McCain. Most countries I checked - India, Britain, Germany, USA - had Obama polling over 80% of the votes. Even Israel was over 70%.

These are very early results. The poll was announced in the print edition of this week’s economist. With just the weekend gone, I suspect that the results still represent the voting of the core economist reader. This will change as each party’s supporters will be sent to the economist site to register their vote.

You need to create a user id for economist.com which is free, but don’t have to be a subscriber of the print edition.

Bailouts and the Fog of Finance

“Bailout” was a bad word in the US to begin with. The current financial crisis and the US government’s $700 B plan to revive the market for troubled mortgage based assets have made it toxic.

What does “bailout” mean to Joe Citizen? It means that a company made mistakes and as it suffers financially, is perhaps close to bankruptcy, the federal government rides to its rescue using taxpayer’s money (“my tax dollars”) to rescue the company. To any logical person that seems unfair.

But Joe Citizen is not all logical about this. There is a lot of emotion and mental imagery involved with the current set of bailouts.
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Zoho and the Bottom of the Software Pyramid

Last week Sridhar Vembu the CEO of Adventnet, makers of the Zoho suite of software, was featured on the Economist’s Face Value. This may seem like a big deal for the CEO of $60 M company (The Indian CEO featured before Sridhar was TCS’s Ramadorai). But you have to hand it to the Economist. For a magazine that covers politics, economics and business, it has the pulse of the software industry. What Zoho is attempting to do can be game-changing for business software. More »