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Very cool. But is it an Autobot or a Deceptacon?

Hi Matteo,

Yes, we do like an eyecatching headline here at Finextra.

I think you're right though, the occasional encounter with a troll or 419er is a common price to pay when getting involved in networking and discussion online. And as long as it's very occasional most people would see it as a minor annoyance or even humorous.

But just as we learnt from first using email as a business tool in the 90s it's when the tide of spam starts to rise that it becomes a real problem.

On the latter point, I suspect most job losses will be felt where Lloyds TSB and HBOS have the most overlap in presence. City-based staff, for example, will obviously feel the brunt of the cost savings. But elsewhere in high streets across the country, if I worked in an HBOS branch and there was a Lloyds TSB branch across the road, I would be polishing up my CV right now.

Hi Marite - In referring to common sense, I didn't mean whether the idea itself was based on common sense or not. As you say, most of the best ideas are. I was actually suggesting that the patent office should use their common sense in judging the substance of patent applications - is there anything concretely new in the idea, and are there obvious and widely known instances of prior art.

Hi József, welcome to the community.

You make an interesting point. The self-service channel focused approach has certainly worked well for some banks, who have succeeded without needing big branch infrastructures.

That said, banks such as Deutsche Bank obviously see the value in extending a branch network as part of a retail business growth stategy. But clever and cost-effective use of technology to support the branch will be a key success factor here too.

Perhaps Microsoft should take another approach?

In the interest of balance, I want to mention the video conferencing suite developed by HP and Dreamworks a couple of years ago. I saw some demos and wrote about it at the time, and it was eerily like having real people on the other side of the table, just separated by a pane of glass.

Business Week and the IT press all covered it at the time.

ABN Amro signed a deal last year to roll out rooms at 12 business units worldwide, but I'm not sure if that plan has survived the RBS acquisition.

The obituary update on the wire service is a regular occurence, and mistakes can happen. Sometimes it's the wire service sending it out accidentally without the usual warning header, but mistakes can also be made by media organisations who subscribe to the wires.

I worked for an English language newspaper in Japan that once killed the emperor well before his time, which caused quite a scandal.

I was there a few years after this happened, but from what I recall of speaking to colleagues who were there at the time, it was due to a mix of careless printing and an excitable subeditor at the end of their shift.

Part of the daily workflow involved selecting news stories off a single terminal, and printing them off an old dot matrix printer for review. Then the story was edited down to size and style and typeset. The printed copy could then be referred to by proofreaders if they had any queries about changes the sub had made.

One day one of the regular obituary updates for the emperor came over the wires. He was ill at the time, but these updates are quite common for major public figures and basically let media organisations have some up-to-date copy in case the public figure suddenly dies. These items usually come with a prominent warning in the header, that it's an update only, information for your files etc.

But someone ripped off this header when taking the previous story off the printer, just at the end of the news shift. When the sub saw the story, the news page was re-jigged to accomodate the breaking news of the emperor's death, and he didn't think to look more closely for any header info.

The resulting publication and discovery of the mistake caused a major uproar in conservative Japanese society. Right-wing nutters staged violent protests at the paper's head office (someone even said shots were fired into a ceiling somewhere). And the company's managers were forced into some serious bowing and scraping and begging for forgiveness over at the Imperial Household Agency.

Here's a NY Times article from 1988 on the mistake. In true Japanese style it was the managers that took the responsibility. They kept their heads, and their employment (barely). The editor in charge reportedly became what the Japanese call a "window gazer" - an obsolete executive who is employed, but given no work to do. They're lucky to get a window to look out of though. One guy I occasionally passed in an out-of-the-way corridor on the lower ground floor appeared to spend all of his working days in a small windowless room smoking cigarettes and playing solitaire on an old PC (no ubiquitous Internet connections back then.)

Excellent work. I've often wondered what the results of such analysis might be, and I'm sure many others have too. Nice to see some good news for Georgia too (currently leading the gold medal per capita table), given the current troubles there.

WebMoney, a PayPal-like internet-payment system, is currently implicated in the Citi ATM PIN security breach being investigated in the US. It seems to have been selected by the criminals because it gave them a way of converting cash to a digital currency that could be transferred abroad without being reported to the authorities. I would imagine that regulators are now looking closely at such services.

But your post puts forward an event more intriguing prospect of the criminals reverting to their own currency system linked to a gold standard. This may have its advantages for certain criminals. But when it comes to ease of laundering, cash euros will likely remain the number one option for criminals for some time, due to a number of reasons outlined in this Time magazine article.