Just like Egypt is having an economic boom that leaves out the poor, Reuters has an article describing consumerism in Saudi Arabia caused by the rise of oil prices from $10 per barrel to $100 in less than a decade.

As the rich get richer, the gap between them and the poor widens, and inflation takes its toll on them the most.

In October, the World Bank dubbed Egypt as "World's Top Performer". It rose fast to the 126th place.

Figures for September released by the Egyptian government said growth is at 7.1%. Egypt's revenue rose as oil prices have risen, and as oil rich neighbors poured their revenue into Egypt. Foreign investment in 2006 was $5 billion, more than India.

What are the results? Rolex, BMW, and Mercedes ... Luxury items are being bought by the upper class.

Last month, there were reports that Comcast is sending forged RST (reset) packets for BitTorrent file sharing, hence hindering users who use this protocol.

Now, the local newspaper, The Record, has an article about how a local company, Sandvine, supplied Comcast with the technology to do what it is doing.

Sandvine's sales and stock price have been doing well of late.

If there were help desk in Medieval Europe, what issues would they have to handle?

According to a Buffalo, NY TV station "Canadian shoppers have raised the region's sales tax revenue by five per cent".

With the Canadian loonie reaching parity with the US dollar in September, and topping 1.07$ last week, this is only logical.

Via CBC.

Finally, Google announced its mobile strategy.

It is centered around the Open Handset Alliance (OHC), which has members such as HTC, LG, Motorola, Samsung, T-Mobile and Sprint. Google's offering is Android, which is a mobile phone software stack licensed under an Open Source licesen (Apache V2).

Rumors are mounting that Google will unveil its gPhone strategy tomorrow.

The buzz says that Google will announce an open source based platform supported via an alliance of most phone manufacturers.

Here are some articles on the topic.

The Canadian Press had an article on how some members of Facebook are finding it annoying to the degree that they leave Facebook altogether.

This article discusses how good video footage is being shot by amateurs. The following high quality macro videography is what caught my eye.

Ants and Bees from youdiejoe on Vimeo.

Hover flies, Bees, and more, camel spider and mantis from Lucasberg on Vimeo.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is set to announce a set of software and services for mobile phones in the next two months. The service will provide search, Gmail, Maps, and YouTube.

Note that Google already acquired Zingku and Jaiku, two mobility oriented web sites recently.