With the reasons behind the huge Toyota recall still engulfed in some sort of a milky mist, all the Japanese carmaker really needed was an US government official throwing more stones. And along came Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood, who after calling Toyota a bit "safety deaf," managed to scare Toyota owners even more, by giving them a little piece of advice: "stop driving it (the Toyota) and take it to a dealer."
Of course, Toyota felt offended by the comment and, by u… (read more)
Kia has just rolled out the second teaser showing the Ray concept that will be officially displayed at the Chicago Motor Show next week. Just as we told you some time ago, the car will come in the form of a plug-in hybrid that will boast several innovations, including a panoramic glass roof plus LED taillights, probably to minimize electricity use.
Today’s new teaser reveals a futuristic design for the front fascia, with extended headlights and what seem to be fog beams integrated into the fr… (read more)
Hardly a week passes that Google doesn’t sport a new doodle to replace its, very well known, logo on the homepage. It employs a team of artists to create doodles for all sorts of celebrations and commemorations. The doodles have become a fixture on the site and for a few years Google has also been running the Doodle 4 Google competition for children with an inclination for drawing to have their doodles featured on the Google homepage. Now Google is announcing the latest competition is about t… (read more)
Fiat Yamaha MotoGP team revealed its new 2010 YZR-M1 challenger for the 2010 season of the premier motorcycle series during an online broadcast, only hours before the first test meeting of the year kicked off in Malaysia.
As expected, the livery of the two bikes – to be ridden by Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo for the 3rd straight year in the series – did not suffer too many changes, while the YZR-M1s did experience some technological tweaks. The powerplant of the bike was the one the Yam… (read more)
German manufacturer Opel will keep the Eisenach production facility alive, despite initial plans to suspend activity at the plant. After a meeting with Thuringia’s prime minister Christine Lieberknecht, Opel/Vauxhall CEO Nick Reilly said the Eisenach production plant will begin manufacturing a new model from 2013, but details are yet to be disclosed.
It was initially believed that General Motors will shut down the Eisenach plant, together with Bochum in Germany and Antwerp in Belgium. However… (read more)
The current general manager of production engineering for Toyota in North America, Gilbert Passin, will no longer be on Toyota’s payroll, as he has moved to electric carrmaker Tesla, where he will take charge of Tesla’s vehicle manufacturing operations.
Now, we know you can’t help yourself to wonder whether the move is some type of a consequence to the huge recall the Japanese carmaker is making these months. Of course, neither Tesla nor Toyota announced the reasons behind Passin’s switch of… (read more)
After trying out the 5001 Amazing Facts app from XiMad I was looking forward to review some of their other app and we got the chance too look at 3001 Wisdom Quotes today. Read the full review to see if the UI is as impressive as their previous app…
Read more at BestWindowsMobileApps.com
Article Tags: ClimateGate
SCIENTISTS at the heart of the Climategate email scandal have been accused of “fabricating” scientific claims after new allegations cast further doubts over their global warming research.
Analysis of emails hacked from the University of East Anglia (UEA) showed researchers tried to suppress key details of their 1990 research paper on how cities affect global warming.
Now critics say measurements from Chinese weather stations used by Professor Phil Jones of UEA and exposed in the emails make his findings seriously flawed.
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Source: express.co.uk
Fernando Alonso was undoubtedly the hit of the Valencia test this week, as the Spaniard set the fastest time of the entire 3-day meeting at his very first experience with the Ferrari F10. With almost 40,000 fans in the grandstands cheering for him all day long, the 2-time world champion revealed his first impressions over his new single-seater at the end of Wednesday afternoon.
While admitting his optimism over the lap times recorded by Ferrari in 3 consecutive days at the Ricardo Tormo track… (read more)
Facebook is assuming its rightful place in the Internet ecosystem as a significant distribution channel for media properties.
Hitwise reported today that the social network now drives the fourth largest amount of traffic to media properties behind Google, Yahoo and MSN. Facebook’s public relations team also has started encouraging users to set up ‘News’ channels. (Facebook’s Malorie Lucich explains how to do it here).
So this inevitably begs the question: will Facebook be the savior that the traditional news media has been waiting all along for?
Nope. But it will probably help a little.
Facebook has a few advantages over other aggregators like Google:
1) Facebook’s Pages encourage loyalty to specific media brands and publications. Users choose to ‘Fan’ a number of content sources and follow them persistently, which encourages them to return again and again to a single place.
This is a contrast to Google’s search model, in which users look for content around a specific topic and are presented with millions of possible choices. (Yes, there’s Google Reader but it’s not as mainstream as Facebook and most of the traffic Google drives is through search.) Search is a model that makes the commoditization of news more apparent. It’s also the basis of The Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson’s infamous criticism that Google encourages “promiscuity” and Mark Cuban’s complaint that the search giant is a vampire.
2) Facebook will offer publishers new kinds of analytics that Google can’t. The company recently started giving Page owners feedback statistics, showing the total number of impressions, “likes” and comments for an update.
These are much richer analytics for engagement than pageviews or even unique visitors. Pageviews can measure anything from a split-second visit to a 10-minute stay. It’s much better to go to advertisers and say definitively, “Here’s how many real people are genuinely interacting with our content.”
Over time, these analytics will probably become more sophisticated. Wouldn’t it be nice to know as a publisher, that women ages 24 to 35 are more likely to follow you or share your content? You can almost imagine Facebook building an ad network outside of its main site and on all of the Connect properties, enabling them to offer hyper-targeted advertising across millions of sites. Imagine visiting a Facebook Connect-integrated Wall Street Journal and seeing advertising that’s perfectly fit for you, rather than generic ones for Dutch investment banks. (Note: The company hasn’t said they’re doing this. It’s just a possibility that I think would be interesting.)
3) Engagement analytics may attract better-produced content. The CPM (cost-per-1000-impressions) or CPC (cost-per-click) model of advertising incentivizes cheaply produced, thinly-reported content and loads of linkbait. If you’re a free media property relying solely on advertising, you want to get as many hits as possible as fast as possible. So you want to write short pieces with provocative headlines or go the Demand Media route, by studying search trends and producing 5,000 items a day in response to changes in search volume.
But if you’re optimizing for likes and comments, a three-paragraph story produced in 15 minutes is not going to get a lot of interaction, unless it’s shocking news or thought-provoking.
4) News is compelling in a social context. There are stories out there that I probably wouldn’t give a second glance to if it weren’t for a couple of friends discussing and sharing them. Facebook will probably be the best place online for mainstream audiences to replicate the experience of reading and sharing The Sunday New York Times (outside of the newspaper’s own web site.)
The Huffington Post-Facebook Connect integration is the best example of the network’s potential for making news socially relevant. The integration created a virtuous cycle of traffic for both companies. People follow what their friends have read on the Huffington Post, click through on interesting links and then find more stories to share with other friends. Within the first month of the integration, Facebook referrals to The Huffington Post nearly tripled to 3.5 million visits.
5) Facebook may help balance Google’s power over publishers. If it becomes as significant as Google in terms of driving traffic, it will provide a counterweight against the search giant, and possibly give publishers — a teeny, tiny bit — of leverage.
Google commands the search market with 65.7 percent market share and said it paid $5 billion to publishers last year through AdSense. The arrival of Bing raised some hope that media companies like News Corp. could wrangle concessions out of both search engines by playing them off each other. As Facebook grows more powerful in directing traffic around the web, similar arguments will probably come up.
But with Facebook’s ARPU (average revenue per user) relatively low between an estimated $1 and 5, it’s highly unlikely that the company would share advertising revenue appearing on Fan pages or on its domain, just as it would be unlikely for Google to offer a share of its search ad revenues to the properties it indexes. Plus there are collective action problems in organizing millions of publishers to stand up against monolithic corporations. However the mere existence of another competitive player should push Google to be even more conscientious about its relationship with publishers.
Despite all this, Facebook doesn’t solve the news industry’s core problem.
Here’s how it used to be. There used to be a limited number of channels to reach consumers. You had to advertise in mass media like newspapers or TV stations to be in front of your potential customers. There was weak accountability for whether that advertising actually translated into real purchases, and instead mostly metrics on overall audience size and some demographic breakdown.
Now there are billions upon billions of sources of content competing for attention. And with that, the advertising model that once subsidized public interest and in-depth reporting has fallen apart. Plus, Google’s search ad model is more effective at capturing user intent and people when they’re close to the point of purchase.
As Clay Shirky so elegantly put it – from a business perspective, the best newspaper journalism of the 20th century was merely a fortuitous, economic “accident”:
“The expense of printing [newspapers] created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.”
Facebook and Google are now the vehicles for display advertising and they now own these audiences in all their fragmented glory. It’s a tad ironic, considering that when Facebook initially conceived of the news feed, vice president of product Chris Cox said that the company started with the newspaper as their design paradigm on-stage at a real-time meetup last November.
While Facebook is a must-have distribution channel for news properties, it doesn’t change the fundamental economics facing news publishers. Audiences have splintered and taken traditional media’s pricing power over advertising with them. First movers like The Huffington Post that understand the power of social distribution will gain a tremendous advantage over other outlets that are late to the game. But as Facebook becomes more saturated and crowded with news content, we’ll be back to where we started with lots of sites screaming for our attention.
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After yesterday German manufacturer Daimler announced it will donate 20 Fuso Canter trucks to help the Haitian relief effort, it’s time for American carmaker GM to answer former Presidents Bill Clinton’s call for 100 trucks.
GM says it will back up the effort coordinated by William J. Clinton Foundation with two of the trucks already present in Miami, at the NFL Little Haiti Outreach Event held at the Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center.
Everyone in America has been affected in some way b… (read more)
Article Tags: ClimateGate, Newspaper Article
LONDON: The embattled chief of the UN climate change panel has admitted that a mistake in a landmark 2007 report has damaged the body’s credibility.
But Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, refused to apologise for the erroneous claim that global warming could melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035.
The admission came as former British chief scientist David King backed away from his sensational claim that a foreign intelligence agency or wealthy US lobbyists were behind the hacking and release of controversial emails between climate scientists.
Sir David admitted he possessed no inside information about the leaks of embarrassing emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, and had merely been speculating on material already in the public domain. His remarks to a journalist had been a “side-issue”, he said.
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Source: theaustralian.com.au
German carmaker Porsche will be the sponsor of the High Museum of Art exhibition in Atlanta, called "The Allure of the Automobile," bringing pieces of its own history to be showcased there. The carmaker is also celebrating the brand’s 60th anniversary of selling cars in the U.S.
The exhibition will run from March 21 to June 20 and will display 18 collector items, belonging to brands such as Bugatti, Duesenberg, Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari, Pierce Arrow, Packard, Cadillac and Tuc… (read more)
When you’re on your way out of a job, there’s a lot of fun ways to exit. Some choose to take all the staplers in the office, some show up to the last day in shorts, some pull a Jerry Maguire. And some tweet out a haiku.
That’s exactly what Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz did tonight. Here’s his tweet:
Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more
Really, what more needs to be said?
Schwartz had been surving as Sun’s CEO since 2006, prior to that he was the company’s COO. It has been known that he would resign for several days now following Sun’s sale to Oracle, which the EU just approved.
Schwartz has always enjoyed this type of public discourse, as he continued to blog in a time when very few CEOs would dare do such a thing. His latest post was on January 27, describing what he’d be doing next.
As for where life takes me next, you should follow me via Twitter at openjonathan to find out. I’ll also be rehosting this blog (and again, stay tuned to Twitter by following me here). I expect to do my part to keep things interesting.
Indeed. Tonight he started that off with a bang (and we love the two self-promotion links).
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SGN founder and executive chairman Shervin Pishevar is an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. Back in 2008, he shared a semi-lucid and beautiful post about entrepreneurism that he emailed to friends during a trip to Eastern Europe.
Then, late in 2009, he found himself wandering through Europe as part of one of Dave McClure’s Geeks On A Plane adventures. After an evening at the BetaHaus in Berlin, Germany, Pishevar put on his iPod and stumbled across Jay-Z’s song “A Star Is Born”. Inspired, he set upon a creative mission: to create a cover version that captured the spirit of Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship.
After penning the lyrics, Pishevar took advantage of the services offered by GreetBeatz, a startup that lets you contract professional rappers to sing anything you want (he paired up with Thunda). And thus Silicon Valley’s rap anthem was born.
Of course, not every entrepreneur is successful with their first startup. And it appears that they don’t always nail their first rap song, either. As you watch the clip below, you may well get the urge to start giggling, perhaps with a cocked eyebrow as you try to get a handle on what you’re watching. It’s a lot to take in, with everything from The Fonz to cameos from James Hong, Phil Kaplan, Joe Greenstein, and Saar Gur. And then there’s the babies. Lot of babies.
I’m not entirely sure what emotion Pishevar was trying to elicit, but he sure made me smile (and cringe). But even if it’s pretty clear that he should stick to his day job, by making this video Pishevar has shown what Silicon Valley is all about. He’s cultivated an idea from lyrics jotted on a piece of paper into a full fledged music video. He channeled his passion to make something. Plus, he gets bonus points for including the Fonz.
Now say it with me: Platform. Platform. Platform. H-ayyyyy.
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I’m planning for a coastal karntaka tour in March from Pune. I’ve 5 days and 4 nights to cover whatever possible but not in a dizzy. We like leisure holidays and have 2 young kids also travelling so can’t make it a packed schedule.
Please suggest itineraries, must-see places, best beaches, tour experiences, maps, distances….any information that you may have on this please!
Cheers
There have been more than a dozen and a half AVP games over the last three decades and a new one is prepped to launch on February 16, 2010 on the 360, PS3, and Windows. That’s awesome. But the truth is that while I’m going to advice you to fire up Steam and download the demo, I didn’t even know there was a new AVP game in development until I saw the news.
But I feel confident enough in the series to tell you that it’s likely worth your time to at least download the free demo. I know I spent nearly as much time playing AVP as I did the original Half-Life. If this new title doesn’t work out, I’ll probably just end up playing the updated version of that release: Aliens versus Predator Classic 2000. Either way, I’m killing me some Aliens.
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Even as Rupert Murdoch is calling aggregators and other sites “pirates” and claiming that fair use can be blocked, it seems his daughter has a more enlightened view. Copycense points us to a recent talk by Elisabeth Murdoch, who owns a TV production house, where she basically admits that blocking what people want to do is a bad idea:
“Fans remain the best salesmen of our content, even if that behavior is on the borderline of piracy. Danger of the new world is that we must concede that we’ll lose some control.”
Nice to hear. Now, if only her Dad would listen to her before he pisses off a bunch of his best content salesmen.
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Areview Forex:Despite the singular depression that affects the stock market these days, you will be surprised to know that a lot of people are earning lots of money each day.
Ahhh, Leica special editions. How you love to come out, and cost lots of money. The Hermès edition is no exception, though, as expected, the design is still 99.9% the same as the other Leicas. But this one has a delicious special-process orange leather grip, plus a special 35mm f/1.4 Summilux lens made using a new process that makes it as light as the black alloy lenses, but chromed like the heavier brass ones.
The owner says he’s going to take a lot of crap from other Leica people because he intends to never use the camera. Well, yeah, and here’s some right now! These things are meant to be used! I collect beautiful, expensive old books, and then when someone says “why are you reading that, you’re going to ruin it,” I tell them “it’s a freaking book!” It wants to be read.
Similarly, this is a camera. A rangefinder to be precise, but it needs to be touched and clicked and whacked against things on accident. That’s what cameras do. Ah well.
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