On German exposure to credit crises of all flavors: North American and European  Michael Lewis is the author of several non-fiction bestsellers chronicling the current plight of the US and global financial markets.  Last month he wrote a thought-provoking piece in Vanity Fair that not only covers not Germany’s central role in the US (sub-prime mortgage-driven) and European (sub-prime EU partner-driven) debt crises, but also speculates on some cultural issues that may have might have contributed to the extent of the country’s involvement.  As a US expat living in Germany, I felt that while a few of his points in that regard were a bit of a stretch, he gets a lot right.  Agree or disagree, an interesting and well-written piece.

If you read one article on Steve Jobs’ legacy…  read David Carr’s piece in the New York Times.  Enough said.

A picture’s worth a thousand words… especially when it’s a gigapixel picture.  No reading required to get the point here on what the combination of hi-resolution photography and social media (or even worse, facial recognition technology) could mean to privacy.  Not just ‘online’ privacy, but physical privacy – in public. 

Just click here (it takes a bit for the image to load), and zoom into the crowd.  Keep zooming – until the little blue icons (and the implications of this technology on personal privacy) become clearly visible.

Writing from New York  a few hours before Irene is set to hit town, this seems genuinely the first broadband-generation social media-heavy hurricane coverage to strike our Northeastern states.

The New York City Mayor wrote me an email, and my Brooklyn neighborhood association sent one, too. So did my beach house community. Even my insurance company seems to worry about me these days.

What strikes me most amidst this blast of e-messages is how different public service announcement now disseminate and how they seem to have changed an entire city’s public perception about what constitutes appropriate disaster recommendations.

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On Monday, August 8, SXSW.com will announce the launch of the SXSW Interactive Scholarship 2012 program. While last year’s scholarship program was limited to nonprofits, this year’s iteration expands its focus to recognize individuals from all sectors and from anywhere in the world who are using new media to push the boundaries of tackling community problems. Nonprofit leaders, grassroots organizers, individual citizens, and civic-minded entrepreneurs are all eligible.

Individuals can begin to submit their essay anytime between Monday, August 8, and Friday, August 26. SXSW and CauseShift will lead the review and selection process with the five scholarship recipients to be announced on Monday, September 19. Each of the five recipients will receive a complimentary SXSW Interactive badge for the 2012 SXSW Interactive Festival.

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First, let’s just say it: roaming outside the US with a US-carrier smartphone and SIM card, no matter what you do, is highway robbery. There, now that that’s out of the way…

I have a global phone from Verizon (shoutout: Droid Incredible 2, w00t w00t), and I’d planned on purchasing a German SIM card to use on my trip, since it’s too expensive to use Verizon’s global services. To do so, I called ahead and got the unlock code for my phone (this is not “jailbreaking” or “rooting” as some have asked in forums online— this is just unlocking your phone to be able to use with another carrier).

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In the context of the city becoming a European center for internet startups, here’s a short video piece from Reuters on two companies based here in my adopted hometown of Berlin: soundcloud and wooga.