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From autos to outsourcing, these companies can operate at low cost in tough markets. They're likely to survive the downturn and thrive In what seems like the blink of an eye, companies little known in the U.S. and Europe just a few years ago have become global leaders. Their common attribute is this: They all come from the rapidly developing economies (RDEs) of Asia, Latin America, the Persian Gulf, and Central and Eastern Europe. They are what the Boston Consulting Group calls the "Global Challengers." Some financed their global expansion by borrowing heavily in the years just before the downturn became apparent and now face a day of reckoning. For others, cash-rich or with access to capital through government programs, the recession creates new opportunity. As a general rule, RDE companies with healthy balance sheets and access to capital will fare better than those with heavy debt burdens. Indian outsourcing services should gain, as these companies take advantage of We

No, you won’t need to go to Google to find Bing – all you need to do is to visit Bing.com where you’ll find that Bing is now in beta. Although Microsoft wasn’t set to launch Bing into life until June the 3rd, it seems as though someone at Microsoft just couldn’t wait for Bing to start singing its siren song of search. So, while Google may have thought it still had a couple of days up its sleeve to work on whatever plans it had to sting Bing, it looks like Microsoft has danced like a butterfly so it could do some stinging of its own. Finally, the world can now see whether Microsoft has the smarts to make Live, MSN and even Google Search but distant memories, but will the reality be a surge of interest in Bing before the familiar ring and results of Google become too overwhelming? You’ll have to let us know what you think of Bing, dear reader. The big question is… how quickly Google will take some of the elements Bing has brought forward and duplicate them in its own search results? But

Chipmakers are spreading their bets around on the three current standards for home-networking—all of which could give way in the end to G.hn. Wireless networking gets all the love in today's mobile world, but inside the home, wires will still play a key role in delivering entertainment and other content. Your set-top box may sport an Ethernet port, but it still connects to the wall via coaxial cable. Wires are a secure, fast, cheap, and existing network inside most homes. The main links around the home are power lines, coaxial cable, copper phone wires or some mix of the three, depending on where in the world a person lives. But the three standards vying for dominance today could gradually give ground to an emerging standard for delivering IP-based services called G.hn. This fall, the electronics industry will finalize a standard called G.hn (already being pushed by the HomeGrid Forum) that will allow chip companies to provide the silicon that can deliver 700-Mbps speeds over pow

I can't believe I missed this. Even worse, it looks like just about everyone did (OK, not everyone). I just checked a GPS-enabled webpage page, below, on a 3.0B5 iPhone's Mobile Safari and Boom! The webpage checks the GPS coordinates of the iPhone and returns a result. The test webpage was built by Doug Turner for Mozilla's upcoming implementation of the Geolocation API (if you have Firefox 3.5B you can try it out). Google also mentioned in their Latitude for iPhone presentation last week that they were no longer going to build a native app for the iPhone. They said Latitude was now going to be a WebApp that would run in Safari. That should have tipped me off that Safari would have to be able to not only retrieve others' locations, but also broadcast the location of the user's iPhone. GPS in the browser is a relatively new trick. The Geolocation API Specification is part of the W3 Consortium's standards but hasn't been finalized just yet. That means that the

For all the weapons deployed in the war on cancer, from chemicals to radiation to nanotechnology, the underlying strategy has remained the same: Detect and destroy, with no compromise given to the killer. But Robert Gatenby wants to strike a peace. A mathematical oncologist at the Moffitt Cancer Center, Gatenby is part of a new generation of researchers who conceive of cancer as a dynamic, evolutionary system. According to his models, trying to wipe cancer out altogether actually makes it stronger by helping drug-resistant cells flourish. Rather than fighting cancer by trying to eradicate its every last cell, he suggests doctors might fare better by intentionally keeping tumors in a long-term stalemate. It’s an unorthodox notion. But nearly 40 years after Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, orthodox approaches have produced little in the way of treatment. Cancer death rates have fallen by 20 percent in the last 15 years, but experts say that much of the improvement comes from lifesty

Farting may be an act of someone immediately unloading eruptive smelly gases before leaving a room; leaving that special something to be remembered by. Person 1: That party was the worst. Person 2: Don't worry, I made sure to thank them with a farting gift. LOL!

Twitter has reportedly been valued by investors at $1 billion with Oprah Winfrey on board the twitter ship. A high-profile D conference was set yesterday with the company's (Twitter) founders. So it's odd they seem to see their own product as a repository for jokes about cleavage, bird shit and killing Jason Calacanis. There were many comments about twitter as many would write that twitter is just another social networking site. Some would like to post their impressions or products so that users or any web paparazzi can get a hold of the real score. Nonetheless, we quote some of what the users think of twitter. Twitter allows its users to mark some tweets they find particularly amusing, insightful, witty, informative, or whatever as "favorites." But this may also mean that rifling through the founders' favorites is a pretty good way to get a sense of what they think Twitter is good for: crude jokes and narcissistic status updates. Below is a sample of the tweets f