listen to more than 50,000 radio stations from across the world on your iPhone, BlackBerry or Windows Mobile

WunderRadio

This app allows you to listen to more than 50,000 radio stations from across the world on your iPhone, BlackBerry or Windows Mobile. It means holidays and business trips need never interfere with your Archers listening again. The app also has Twitter integration, enabling users to follow the Twitter feeds of one radio stations while listening to the broadcast of another.

Price: (from £3.99 (approx USD $6.00); wunderradio.com)

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/picture-galleries/5886365/Hottest-gadgets.html?image=2)

Made in China iPhone Nano---Apple launching iPhone Nano

Internet world has been abuzz about Apple launching iPhone Nano for quite sometime. Every few months, grapevines suggest Apple working on a Nano version of iPhone. In fact, only last month a new patent filed by Apple again fueled iPhone Nano rumors. But all these so far remain mere speculations, with no official confirmation.

However, in faraway Shenzhen (China) an iPhone Nano has actually hit the shelves. The made in China iPhone Nano is widely available in the country including on online stores (may be you can check our own grey markets too!). These iPhone Nano models available from several Chinese companies offer several high-end features and come at an attractive price tag.

Here’s looking into the Chinese avatar of iPhone Nano.

Display and dimensions

* Display: 2.4 inch touchscreen LCD, 260 thousand color; 240 x 320px

* Dimensions: 105x55x10mm (LxWxH)

* Language: English, Chinese (Simplified)

* MP3 & MP4 player

* FM radio


Camera & connectivity

* 5 MP Camera, with video recording;

* ROM: 512MB

* Data Transfer: USB cable/ card-reader/Bluetooth (file transmission, voice, stereo)

* Lithium batteries


Miscellaneous features



* Supports caller’s picture option, group ring tone; 64 chord ring tone

* Telephone directories: 300 groups of contacts

* Messages: Supports both SMS and MMS (150 messages, MMS)

* Schedule power on/off: Supports auto start/close

* Standby time: 220-260 hours

* Talk time: 120-180 minutes

* Colours available: Black and silver

* Price $90



(http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/4841344.cms)

Hottest gadget

Google Sky Map

Google does more than just internet searches and email – it also has an impressive number of mapping tools, such as this one, which allows you to take a virtual tour of the solar system. By joining forces with astronomers at some of the world’s largest observatories, Google has created a superb rendering of the galaxy that can be explored on an Android-powered phone. Simply point the camera at the night sky and the application automatically identifies which stars are which. You can also search for specific stars and planets. Educational, addictive and free

Price: Free (google.com/sky/skymap.html).

Ten of the Most Audacious Swindles Ever

Hook, Line and Sinker:

Ever since the invention of money there have been con artists out there ready to swindle the unwary out of their cash. Last year around 28 million Britons were targeted, according to the government, and £1 billion was lost in financial scams.

Fortunately, most victims suffer a greater dent to their pride than their bank balance. But some involve the loss of millions or even billions of pounds and cause real financial hardship. Here are ten of the most audacious financial swindles ever.

1. Dave Rhodes, whoever he or she may be, has a lot to answer for. His is the name at the top of the most famous chain letter in the world – which more often than not is sent by e-mail nowadays. The original letter titled “Make Money Fast” and signed by Rhodes began doing the rounds about 20 years ago. Who the original Dave Rhodes was, or if he even existed, has never been ascertained. (A website reputed to be by the original Dave Rhodes is thought to be a hoax.)

Recipients are usually told to send money to the first name or names on a mailing list and then copy the letter to hundreds of other addresses. In return, they are promised huge profits for their small investment. “It is an undeniable law of the universe,” goes one letter promising £40,000 in cash within the next 60 days, “that first we must give to receive. Do this with a big smile on your face because “as ye sew (sic), so shall ye reap.” If you say so.

2. Canadians are usually thought of as law-abiding and frankly boring souls. But they were implicated in one of the nastiest swindles of recent years – the Canadian lottery scam. This involved organised criminals telephoning unsuspecting Brits – often elderly people – claiming they had won a fortune on the Canadian lottery. To claim the prize you had to send money to cover processing fees. In some cases, victims lost more than £40,000.

Those targeted were often chosen because they appeared on “sucker lists” circulated among criminal gangs because they had fallen victim to similar cons in the past.

3. The notorious Women Empowering Women pyramid selling scheme made headline news in 2001 after it swept across the country and left people with heavy losses. The swindle claimed to have women’s interests at heart. “Our main goal is the empowerment of women by providing for them the financial and emotional abilities to support themselves, their loved ones and the community", claimed the schemes’ gushing mission statement.

The scheme encouraged women to sign up family and friends by promising that they would generate £24,000 for each person who invests a £3,000 stake. While a few profited, thousands lost their £3,000 'joining' fee. The scheme resurfaced in 2003, in a more exclusive mode, under the name Hearts, targeting well-heeled society figures including Lady Elizabeth Anson, the Queen’s cousin, and celebrities such as Cilla Black.The government has since attempted to outlaw such scams, but driven by greed, it can only be a matter of time before it rears its ugly head again.

4. Have you ever received an unsolicited e-mail claiming to be from the family of a dead Nigerian dictator or someone high up in that country’s civil service? They will almost certainly have desperately needed help getting the family’s millions out of the country (their bank accounts have been frozen, you see). Did they ask you to provide them with money and supply your bank account details to help them transfer money out of the country? Then you’ve been targeted by the infamous Nigerian “419” scam. In return for your help they promise a handsome reward: in reality they empty your bank account.

These 419 scams have been so widespread that some enterprising individuals have started to fight back by scamming the scammers with some very funny results. Check out 419eater.com or thescambaiter.com

5. They say love is blind, which is perhaps why fraudsters are increasingly targeting victims through online dating services. It’s the ideal time to catch you with your defences- and maybe even your pants - down. Malihu Ramu, a married Singaporean woman was sentenced to six months in jail earlier this year after conning a man in America out of $45,000 (£22,000) after she promised to marry him.

Ramu used a false name and photographs of Bollywood actress Gayatri Joshi on an online chat room to seduce her prey. Using all the arts of seduction, she asked for the money to cover her mother's funeral expenses and for a friend's wedding. It was only when she asked him for more cash that his suspicions were aroused and he called in the police. To find out more take a look at romancescam.com.

6. One of the most popular scams is the pyramid scheme, and in 1920 trickster Charles Ponzi gave his name to the granddaddy of them all – the Ponzi scam. Ponzi raked in millions of dollars from Americans who were taken in by his promise to double their money in 90 days by trading hoax postal coupons. About 40,000 people invested about $15m (£7m) all together – which is worth about $150m in today’s money.

Returns were paid to the first investors out of the funds received from those who invested later – with Ponzi siphoning off a large chunk of the cash for himself. The simple arithmetic of the scheme meant that soon thousands and then millions of people were needed to keep passing money up through the pyramid chain. The scheme collapsed, Ponzi ended up in jail and the swindled investors got back only about a third of their funds, but it hasn’t stopped it being replicated thousands of times since.

7. Millions of Albanians lost their life savings in what must the most damaging pyramid selling trick ever: it caused rioting in the streets, brought down the government and sparked a near civil war in this desperately poor Balkan state in south-west Europe. About two-thirds of the population of the former Communist dictatorship were duped by a series of these schemes in the 1990s, which initially received the support of the government.

Thousands sold their houses and farmers flogged their livestock to invest in them, entranced by the promise of huge riches- more than 100 per cent a year at the peak of the mania. The dream didn’t last and the schemes crumbled leaving many Albanians penniless while thousands died in the ensuing violence.

8. Most con men are shady characters who try to keep a low profile, but they don’t always hide from the public gaze. The Barlow Clowes affair is one of Britain’s most notorious frauds. In the eighties, the firm attracted the savings of 18,000 private investors who believed they were putting their money into risk-free government bonds. In fact, hundreds of millions of pounds of this money was being diverted into the bank account of co-founder Peter Clowes, who spent the cash on private aircraft, cars, homes and a luxury yacht. Barlow Clowes collapsed in 1988 after the con was uncovered.

9. Some con-artists really know how to tug on the heartstrings. Eugene and Kathryn Stabe were charged with swindling $13,000 out of people in their home town of Huntington Indiana by claiming their daughter was dying of leukaemia. They said they wanted to fulfil as many of her dreams as possible before she passed away and used the generous donations to take the whole family to Disney World in Florida. The child was in fact in perfect health.

10. It only had to be a matter of time before financial scams made it into the virtual word. Earlier this year, Ginko Financial, a bank in the life simulation game Second Life tempted customers with the promise of unrealistically high returns of 40 per cent to 60 per cent. It quickly collapsed leaving some people nursing large real life losses. Then another bank, imaginatively called “The Bank” became embroiled in another scandal after it stopped processing customer withdrawals and its owner “Jasper Tizzy” and his staff – Paydayloan Lindman and Teanna Nomura - disappeared In Second Life players use "Linden dollars", which are converted into and out of real cash using a special exchange. Some residents lost 2.5m Linden dollars when the bank went bust – that’s the equivalent of about £5,000.

Whether these were actual scams or business mistakes have yet to be ascertained. But with no official law and order in Second Life, one thing is guaranteed: investors can wave good bye to the money they have lost.

List compiled by David Budworth. (http://timesbusiness.typepad.com/money_weblog/2007/11/hook-line-and-s.html)

Times Money's top 10 investment gurus

Times Money's top 10 investment gurus

Genuine stock market experts are a rare breed, and their investment thinking is never more valuable than when the financial world is in turmoil, as it is today.

So here at Times Money we have come up with a list of our top ten stock market gurus of all time.

1. Benjamin Graham

He is generally regarded as one of the most influential thinkers on investment management. His book, the Intelligent Investor, is still selling more than 50 years after he wrote it.

Mr Graham’s basic idea was that you should be looking to buy companies worth ten dollars a share for five dollars a share. The way you determined which companies were selling at way below their book value was to make a detailed study of their balance sheets. He believed in cautious investment following thorough analysis and abhorred ill-informed speculation.

2. Warren Buffett.

The ‘sage of Omaha’ has put his investment skills to good use and is now the world’s richest man. In the process he has made millionaires out of many of the shareholders in Berkshire Hathaway, his main investment vehicle.

Mr Buffett’s basic idea is that there are a handful of truly outstanding businesses around - and a lot of mediocre ones. The investor’s skill comes in identifying the rare great businesses and then in waiting for the moment when a great business is selling at a really attractive price. He is down to earth - he won’t invest in a business he doesn’t understand - and very patient. He is prepared to wait a long time for the right sort of company to turn up. As he would put it, he is like a baseball player who is ready to stand at the plate for ball after ball until he finds one he can hit into the stands.

3. Philip Fisher

Mr Fisher, the father of Ken Fisher, was a renowned growth investor who was a passionate exemplar of the "buy and hold" approach.

His main idea was that the best way to invest is to buy a limited number of outstanding stocks and simply hold them for years and years. If you have chosen the right stocks in the first place - and that’s obviously a big if - then their real quality will shine through over the long term.
He was very definitely not an in and out trader. As he put it: “If the job has been done correctly when a common stock is purchased, the time to sell it is - almost never.”

4. T Rowe Price

Mr Price shared the long-term perspective of investors such as Philip Fisher. He, too, believed in the virtues of "buy and hold" and practised them with a vengeance. In 1972, looking back at a portfolio he had started in the 1930s, he found that he had held a number of stocks, such as Merck, the pharmaceutical company, and Black & Decker, the household tool company, for more than 30 years. Over that time they had made him a lot of money.

5. John Templeton

Sir John, who died earlier this year, was a classic contrarian investor. He embodied the dictum : "Buy when others are frantically selling and sell when others are greedily buying". While others were looking for gems in a jewel shop, he would be looking for diamonds in a dustbin. He was quite happy to buy what others were throwing away and believed that the stocks offering the best value would be those that other investors had completely neglected.

His most celebrated coup came in 1939, just after war had broken out in Europe. He reasoned, correctly, that although the immediate outlook was bleak, the war would provide a massive boost to US industry. He instructed his broker to buy 100 dollars’ worth of every single Wall Street stock that was priced at a dollar or less. Within four years he had sold his unusual portfolio of stocks for four times its original value.

6. Mark Mobius

Dr Mobius is from the Templeton stable of investment managers and has become a specialist in emerging markets. He shares something of Mr Templeton’s contrarian style. As he puts it: “We seek out shares that other investors have rejected. We go where others fear to tread.”

But above all he is a value-based stockpicker. He focuses on putting together a portfolio of good quality stocks, irrespective of which country they are from. One of his great strengths is that he immerses himself in his subject, travelling tens of thousands of miles each year to visit companies and meet their managements. He says:, “At Templeton we like to get out from behind our desks. We are also active investors, ready to get alongside management and take a seat on the board.”

7. Anthony Bolton

Mr Bolton is perhaps the best known UK fund manager of recent years, though he has now stepped back from the hands on running of funds. Like Mark Mobius he is a contrarian investor, as he demonstrated recently by indicating that he was putting some of his own money into bank shares just when everyone else was seeking to make a rapid exit from the sector.

One of his great skills is correctly anticipating market trends. He foresaw the end of the most recent bull run some months before the market peaked in the summer of 2007 and had already battened down the hatches before the market storms set in.

8. Neil Woodford.

Mr Woodford has taken over Mr Bolton’s mantle of best known UK fund manager and one of his great skills is being able to achieve very good performance with enormous sums of money that would weigh down a lesser investor. His two principal funds contain more than £13 billion of investors’ money.

Mr Woodford, like Mr Bolton, is something of a contrarian investor, and he shows considerable skill in keeping ahead of the investment pack. He had been warning about the excessive levels of debt in the UK and US long before the credit crunch struck and had sold all his bank and property shares before those two sectors collapsed.

He takes a top-down view of the economy and is not afraid to make big sector bets. In the past few years he has invested heavily in tobacco and utilities at a time when they were distinctly unfashionable areas to put your money.

9. Nils Taube.

Mr Taube, who died earlier this year, was Britain’s longest-serving fund manager. Like John Templeton he was fond of buying stocks that had been overlooked by other investors. He made a name for himself by keeping a cool head during the stock market slump of 1973-74 and was investing when most other people had despaired of shares ever recovering.

He called the market right again in 1987, when he anticipated the October crash of that year and was selling stocks short in the months running up to the dramatic drop in share prices.

10. Robin Geffen.

Mr Geffen might be viewed as something of a "new boy" because his company, Neptune Investment Management, was launched only in 2002. But Mr Geffen has nearly 30 years of investment management experience under his belt and it is now showing in the outstanding performance of his Neptune stable of funds.

Mr Geffen takes a thematic approach to investment and, like Mr Woodford, is prepared to take big sector bets. He is not constrained by index weightings and will seek out value wherever he finds it. He is quite prepared to go against the trend where he thinks this makes sense. For example while energy companies make up 60 per cent of the Russian stock market Mr Geffen’s Russian fund has just 22 per cent of its portfolio in energy.

(http://timesbusiness.typepad.com/money_weblog/2008/10/ten-investment.html)

The 10 biggest winners from the financial crisis

High street retailers, estate agents, Iceland…the casualties of the economic crisis are all too familiar. But while there are losers, others have profited from the doom.

We’ve rounded up ten credit crunch Houdinis who’ve escaped the financial crisis and are laughing all the way to the ailing bank.

1. Andrew Lahde
Andew Lahde, a California based hedge-fund manager, made 888 per cent profits last year when his company Lahde Capital bet against US sub-prime mortgage assets. In September this year Mr Lahde decided he was rich enough to retire, closed his fund and released a letter, which has become an internet sensation.

The opening paragraph begins: “Today I write not to gloat, given the pain that nearly everyone is experiencing, that would be entirely inappropriate.” In a petulant rant he then, bizarrely, goes on to ask the American government to recognise the benefits of growing marijuana and urges bankers to bin their blackberries and go on holiday.

2. John Paulson
Last year, John Paulson, a New York-based hedge fund manager, outsmarted Wall Street and made nearly $2 billion by betting against mortgage backed securities. Much derided for cashing in on others' misery, he has shown few regrets, telling the Wall Street Journal: “I've never been involved in a trade that had such unlimited upside with a very limited downside."

3. Barack Obama
The final straight of the presidential race has coincided nicely with the meltdown of the global financial system, providing a serendipitous marketing tool for Mr Obama. As voters watch the stock market plummet, the Democrats have offered to clean up the economic mess that the Republicans will leave behind.

4. Gordon Brown
A couple of months ago the Prime Minister was against the ropes. Now he’s being lauded as the rescuer of the banks. In an article in the New York Times entitled “Gordon does good” Paul Krugman, who two weeks ago picked up the Nobel Prize for economics said: “Luckily for the world economy, Gordon Brown and his officials are making sense… they may have shown us the way through this crisis.” Mr Brown’s polls ratings are starting to creep up and Labour, it seems, are back in the game.

5. Ronald McDonald
Don’t expect to bump into Ronald in the dole queue any time soon. As slightly pricier restaurant chains stare at gloomy sales figures, cheap and cheerful fast food joints are watching profits soar. McDonalds has seen two million extra customers a month compared with last year and is intending to create 4,000 new jobs in response.

6. Karl Marx
Dust off your headscarf, Marx is making a comeback. German bookstores have experienced a 300 per cent increase in sales of Das Kapital in recent months, and visitors are flocking to Marx’s birthplace in Trier – 40,000 so far this year. Jörn Schütrumpf, head of the Berlin publishing house Dietz, which brings out the works of Marx said: “We have a new generation of readers who are rattled by the financial crisis and have to recognise that neo-liberalism has turned out to be a false dream.”

7. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase
With more than $900 billion in deposits, JP Morgan Chase is now America’s biggest savings business after it bailed out the failed Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. Despite the market turmoil, its employees, not least its chief executive Jamie Dimon, can expect a nice Christmas box this year – staff have already been paid £700m in bonuses. Even better news for Dimon if rumour is to be believed, is that he will replace Hank Paulson as Treasury Secretary if Barack Obama makes it to the White House.

8. The Magic Circle
The paperwork is piling up on the desks of lawyers at Magic Circle firms such as Clifford Chance, Linklaters and Allen&Overy since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Icelandic banks. Some top City lawyers are now demanding up to £900 an hour to dish out their advice on insolvency and restructuring. Fraud litigators are also feeling plush, as fraudsters are easier to spot during economic downturns.

9. Emilio Botin, chairman of Santander
Spanish Santander has been fattening itself up on high street banks rather than subprime mortgages, and thanks to a tough stance on exotic investment is now the world’s fifth largest bank based on the profits it generates. Already the owner of Abbey, Santander’s rescue of Alliance & Leicester and Bradford &Bingley mean that Mr Botin oversees almost 25million UK customers.

10. Bart Becht, chief executive of Reckitt Benckiser
The world’s biggest household detergent group and the makers of Cillit bang, Reckitt Benckiser has posted record profits of £373m for the last quarter. Apparently, as none of us can afford to leave the house or go out to eat we are staying in to clean the loo and stack the dishwasher instead.

List compiled by Laura Whateley (http://timesbusiness.typepad.com/money_weblog/2008/10/the-10-biggest.html)

Ten people who predicted the financial meltdown

The financial events of recent weeks have filled many of us with shock and panic. Surely no one could have predicted that we would be in this mess? Well, actually, they did. Here are ten people who saw the financial meltdown coming...

1. Vince Cable - deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats

Here is a question Mr Cable’s posed to Gordon Brown, then Chancellor, during Treasury Questions back in November 2003: “The growth of the British economy is sustained by consumer spending pinned against record levels of personal debt, which is secured, if at all, against house prices that the Bank of England describes as well above equilibrium level. What action will the Chancellor take on the problem of consumer debt?”

Mr Brown did not answer how he would solve the problem, merely replying that: “We have been right about the prospects for growth in the British economy, and the hon. Gentleman (Mr. Cable) has been wrong.”

2. Christopher Wood – chief strategist of CLSA, a broking firm in the Asia-Pacific Market.

In October 2005 Mr Wood wisely declared: "Investors should sell all exposure to the American mortgage securities market." In an interview in 2007, he said: "Some institutions have been behaving like leveraged speculators rather than banks… The UK economy is heading for a sharp shock. It just remains to be seen how bad."

3. Founders of www.stock-market-crash.net – website aimed at investors

The writers of this site claim that predicting crashes is, in fact, easy: “One of the greatest myths of all time is that market crashes are random, unpredictable events. The lead up to a market crash is often years in the making. Certain warning signs exist, which characterize the end of a bull market and the start of a bear market. By learning these common warning signs, you can liquidate your investments and prosper by shorting the market.”

4. Henry Weingarten - astrologer

Mr Weingarten is head of the Astrologers Fund, a New York firm that advises businesses on the basis of planetary movements. He forecast a major economic downturn in March 2007 – so hopefully his clients took note.

His website claims he has in fact made numerous successful predictions about worldwide financial affairs, including “both Mexican 1995 crises, the first 1995 dollar crisis, the 1998 oil collapse and 1999 recovery, and the decline of the Euro after its 1999 birth.”

5. Nouriel Roubini - economics professor

Aka Dr Doom, Dr Roubini is an economics professor at New York University. On September 7, 2006, at an International Monetary Fund meeting, he announced that a crisis was brewing. He said that the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence and, ultimately, a deep recession.

Homeowners would default on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities would unravel worldwide and the global financial system would shudder to a halt. These developments, he said, would cripple major financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

As Mr Roubini stepped down, his host said: “I think perhaps we will need a stiff drink after that.” They do now.

6. Nikolai Kondratiev - Russian Marxist economist

In the early 1920s, Mr Kondratiev proposed a theory that Western capitalist economies have long term (50 to 60 years) cycles of boom followed by depression. These business cycles are now called "Kondratiev waves", or grand supercycles. He predicted an imminent dip, and he was proved right with the Wall Street Crash in 1929.

The current crisis may mean he is about 10 years out – but, still, not a bad prediction for a man who died in 1938.

From the archive: William Rees-Mogg on Kondratiev (1980)

7. Founders of Housepricecrash.co.uk – property website

HousePriceCrash.co.uk was established in October 2003 after its founders predicted “one of the potentially biggest economic boom bust events in living memory” was coming. Its aim, apparently, is to provide a “counterbalance to the huge amounts of positive spin the housing market receives in the main media”.

Whist there is not currently a lot of positive news about the housing market to counter, the site does provide a plethora of information, statistics and forums for those interested in the great house price crash.

8. Lord Oakeshott - Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman

He may not have predicted the entire financial meltdown, but he did warn the Government of the possible collapse of Icelandic banks back in July. He said last week: “"Alarm bells were ringing all over about the Icelandic banks and the Treasury must have been blind and deaf not to hear them."

In a written question to the government in July, he asked: "What steps [have] the United Kingdom financial authorities taken to satisfy themselves, independently of the Icelandic financial authorities, of the solvency and stability of Icelandic banks taking deposits in the United Kingdom?”

Lord Davies, for the Government, replied that there was no concern about the liquidity or capital base of Icelandic banks operating in the UK.

9. Stephen Roach - senior executive at Morgan Stanley

In November 2004, Mr Roach predicted an “economic Armageddon”, in part due to the record US current account, trade and government deficits. His outlook was largely dismissed at the time.

Having being proved right, he recently went on to accuse central banks of being “asleep at the switch” in failing to stop the escalating crisis. “The lack of monetary discipline has become a hallmark of unfettered globalization,” he said.

10. Ron Paul - Republican Congressman

Back in September 2003, Mr Paul told a House Financial Services Committee that: “Ironically, by transferring the risk of a widespread mortgage default, the government increases the likelihood of a painful crash in the housing market.

“This is because the special privileges granted to Fannie and Freddie have distorted the housing market by allowing them to attract capital they could not attract under pure market conditions.” Of course, if we are going to give Mr Paul credit, than we should also highlight the efforts of Peter Schiff, his economic advisor and long-time economic hawk.

(http://timesbusiness.typepad.com/money_weblog/2008/10/10-people-who-p.html)