Quarter Life Crisis

Paying people a compliment appears to activate the same reward center in the brain as paying them cash, Japanese researchers said on Wednesday.They said the study offers scientific support for the long-held assumption that people get a psychological boost from having a good reputation.

“We found that these seemingly different kinds of rewards — a good reputation versus money — are biologically coded by the same neural structure, the striatum,” said Dr. Norihiro Sadato of the Japanese National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, Japan.

“This provides the biological basis of our everyday experience that personal reputation is felt as rewards,” Sadato said.

Source: Reuters, April 23 2008 

“Google China Exec: Mobile-Search Volume May Exceed PCs In Three Years
 
Google (NSDQ: GOOG) still trails Baidu (NSDQ: BIDU) in online search in China but has high hopes for mobile growth, Google’s China president Lee Kai-Fu said in an interview with Bloomberg News this week. “In some quarters, our mobile traffic will double, whereas it will take perhaps a year to double on the PC side … Looking over a three-year horizon, I know that affordable 3G will happen. … We find that Chinese mobile users are very cost sensitive.”

He suggested that mobile-search volume may exceed that from computers in three years. Google already leads Baidu in the category thanks to an exclusive search deal with China Mobile Ltd. But, as a Baidu spokeswoman pointed out to Bloomberg, the Chinese company will provide search services for fixed-line carrier China Netcom Group Corp. Mobile search overall should take off after the Chinese government issues 3G licenses.

For a sense of scope, also via Bloomberg, according to China’s Ministry of Information Industry, at the end of February, China had 565.2 million mobile-phone users?more than the population of the U.S. and Japan combined.”

Seems to be good news for Goog’s sustained growth in web traffic. But how does Click thru rates for ads translate from PC to mobile?