Swedish doctor and researcher Hans Rosling gives an awesome talk at TEDIndia on the trends in economies and when Asia (China & India, precisely) will overtake the West. Rosling sports a killer Swedish accent but has even better visuals and whit. He’s managed to put together software that clearly draws out the historical trend of the major economies over the past 150 years or so. He maps out income per person over life expectancy with the US, UK, China, India, & Japan on the graph and shows the trajectory each of these economies has taken up until today.  And he then predicts exactly when India & the Red Dragon will surpass Europe and the US. As he’s telling a great story throughout, the charts and visuals give the brain a way to really digest what he’s saying. I’m gonna watch some more of his stuff…

Update: you can try his visualization software free online: http://www.gapminder.org/ Well, it’s actually Google’s now…

Just installed a WordPress plugin called Lifestream. After some headaches around upgrading to PHP5.0 and tweaking some CSS, I was finally able to get it running properly. Lifestream publishes all the activity from my social web “life”. So it’s basically a dumb facebook feed that is just part facebook activity… you’ll also see music I listen to on Pandora, apps I’ve rated on the iTunes App Store, new blog posts, stuff I Digg, my tweets, etc.

Check out my lifestream here.

Contrary to what Gizmodo posted today, I actually think this Verizon ad is somewhat clever. It may seem like the marketing execs over at VZW are getting a bit desperate with this obvious attack at the iPhone, but I think — despite it’s corniness —  it’s pretty smart and targeted.

Of all the US carriers, it’s safe to say that VZW has the collection of the least exciting mobile devices. AT&T, Sprint, & T-Mobile all have flagship smarphones, and perhaps Verizon is now ready to put some money behind their own, The Motorolla Driod. The specs are impressive and so is the Android 2.0 OS. Personally, I think the iPhone is still the device to beat, but not everyone buys into what Apple’s selling. And with this new Moto supposedly being “the Android device to beat,” I think this is a clever attempt at wooing all the smartphone users with contracts expiring and also those people that haven’t yet found something exciting enough to buy that isn’t an iPhone.