In the span of one day, how does the world do business? In Connected: 24 Hours in the Global Economy , journalist and economist Daniel Altman answers this question by visiting more than a dozen cities around the world and tracing the threads of our ever-changing, ever-integrating economic fabric. Readers travel to Syria, where the president wants to launch his country's first stock market; to Brazil, where a corruption scandal is brushed under the rug in the name of economic stability; to East Timor, where a new nation grapples with its impending oil wealth. Altman diagrams all the gears and cogs, showing how they fit together in the vast machinery of the global economy--all in the events of a single day. Connected: 24 Hours in the Global Economy is a new and accessible way to look at our complex world. “Instead of the usual heavy and indigestible fare, Daniel Altman cleverly serves bite-sized, tasty portions of economic insight that will leave readers hungry for more.” ― Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind “Altman's easy narration, merged with a few well-researched anecdotes, can offer that winning combination sought by all writers of popular economics, a succinct overview of the well-known with an original, intellectually stimulating point.” ― Mario Pisani, Financial Times “Altman gives us a revealing view from the trenches.” ― Time “Clever . . . [Altman] eschews straightforward narrative, favoring zoom-in, zoom-out impressions and lengthy quotations from a kaleidoscope of people.” ― Stephen Kotkin, The New York Times Daniel Altman is the author of Outrageous Fortunes: The Twelve Surprising Trends That Will Reshape the Global Economy , Connected: 24 Hours in the Global Economy , Power in Numbers (with Philippe Douste-Blazy), and Neoconomy . He is Director of Thought Leadership at Dalberg Global Development Advisors and the founder and president of North Yard Economics, a not-for-profit consulting firm serving developing countries. He previously wrote economics columns for The Economist , the International Herald Tribune , and The New York Times and currently teaches at New York University's Stern School of Business. He lives in New York City. Connected: 24 Hours in the Global Economy By Altman, Daniel Picador Copyright © 2008 Altman, Daniel All right reserved. ISBN: 9780312428099 Chapter One  “ERICSSON AND NAPSTER TO UNVEIL ONLINE MUSIC SERVICE” WHEN DOES WORKING TOGETHER REALLY WORK? A scratched-up old train pulls in to the small station at Helenelund, just a few stops from the center of Stockholm. Outside the station, a road leads through a leafy working-class suburb. It passes under a low-slung highway, and there, across a two-way street, is a six-story cement building with the word “Ericsson” on the side. Next to it is another one, this one faced in brick. Behind them are two more. And there, off in the distance, the name of one of the world’s biggest builders of telephone networks is visible again. Six thousand miles away, at the wrong end of Los Angeles’s trendy Melrose Avenue, a plain office block lies unmarked except for a white sign that bears an abstract image of a cat wearing headphones. A couple of blocks down the street, a heavy metal band is scorching its way through a set in a studio that used to be someone’s house. These two buildings are the headquarters of Napster, a former file-sharing service that is now an online music store listed on the stock market. On the face of it, the two businesses make one of the oddest couples in the corporate world. One company is a pillar of its nation’s corporate identity, a leader in design and manufacturing for over a century. The other is an upstart that began life as an  illegal network of tech junkies and only recently became a  respectable brand. Ericsson has more than fifty thousand employees in 140 countries. Napster has a couple hundred, most of them located in those two largely anonymous buildings on the edge of Beverly Hills. Yet in the global economy, the age-old telecommunications giant and the cutting-edge music retailer had no trouble finding each other. For some time, Ericsson has been helping the operators of mobile phone networks to sell music to their customers, says Svante Holm, Ericsson’s sales manager for applications and content. Some of them want to slap their own name on the services, but others think that there’s a better way. “A lot of them say, we are not a music store, that’s not our core competence,” Holm says, speaking—how else?—from his mobile phone on a train somewhere in Europe. Instead, these operators want to piggyback on an established brand in the music world. Though it’s less than ten years old, Napster may hold the answer. “We looked at the different brands in the industry, and we saw that their brand was recognized more than anybody else for legal and illegal downloads,” Holm recounts. “We actually called them up,” he says. “We flew over to L.A. and met their president a