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Bloomberg’s William Pesek on Japan’s (lack of) English ability, and why it hurts competition

Bloomberg’s William Pesek has penned an excellent opinion piece on why Japan needs to focus on better English education for its workforce at this point in history. As he points out, without English ability across the spectrum, Japan will simply never be able to achieve its stated goal of being Asia’s leading financial hub. So long as dinosaurs as former Education Minister Ibuki Bunmei (himself fluent in English) continue to portray English proficiency as something to be feared, Japan simply will not be able to gain a competitive foothold.

Read it.

Metropolitan Musings: Panasonic Goes Gaga Over Google

Tokyo: Google and Apple are the tech brands du jour right now, something not lost on Panasonic as it seeks to consolidate its brand globally. On January 6, Panasonic and Google announced that they are pursuing a television capable of showing Google’s YouTube videos and Picasa photos. This made the news, but is it really newsworthy? At first glance, such a move seems like a stroke of genius, converging computer content with the living room television: the long-sought holy grail in modern media of marrying content and delivery. In reality, it’s an idea that will probably never get far, but served the extremely useful purpose of injecting Panasonic into the news cycle—joined at the hip with Google—at the beginning of the annual International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas from January 7-10, the largest trade show in the industry. Not coincidently, Panasonic President Toshihiro Sakamoto was one of the six keynote speakers this year.

Simultaneously, they were also trying to beat Apple to the punch in the event that Apple CEO Steve Jobs were to announce something revolutionary at the MacWorld Expo on January 15. It turns out that Panasonic did not need to announce anything extraordinary as Apple’s key announcement, the MacBook Air—much more evolutionary than revolutionary—has received only a lukewarm reception from macheads. Read more

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