Author: Serkadis

The "Super Bowl ads" war has started. As you might already know, the Super Bowl is the most viewed sport event of the year, so there is a lot of interest around the advertising time. Most of the big companies who haven’t had their pocket emptied by the recession will probably buy some air time during this event.

Though companies make the most of their Super Bowl air time, Danica Patrick’s NASCAR sponsor GoDaddy.com managed to get its money’s worth of publicity even before the big ev… (read more)

Chicago Alderman Toni Preckwinkle declared victory in the Democratic race for Cook County president Tuesday as voters sent a strong and unmistakable anti-tax message to incumbent Todd Stroger.

“This victory belongs to the people of Cook County, people who have demanded reform and accountability from their government,” Preckwinkle told about 150 chanting supporters at the Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza in Chicago.

“Today the people of Cook County have all spoken with one voice – black, white, Latino, Asian, gay and straight, North side, South side, West side, Chicago and the suburbs,” Preckwinkle said, promising to repeal the 1 percentage point sales-tax increase Stroger backed and saw imposed in 2008.

With 97 percent of precincts reporting, Preckwinkle led with 49 percent of the votes.

Metropolitan Water Reclamation District President Terrence O’Brien had 22 percent, Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown had 14 percent, and Stroger trailed with 13 percent.

Preckwinkle’s lead was even larger in the suburbs, where she pulled in 53.6 percent of the vote.

On the Republican side, the slated candidate Roger Keats, a former Wilmette state legislator, led with 68 percent to 31 percent for Chicago police officer John Garrido.

Stroger cheered his county employees for “three very good years,” but also “an exhausting three years,” conceding, “Sometimes your message doesn’t get out.”

It was the voters, however, who delivered their message loud and clear in what amounted to a tax referendum on the sales-tax increase, which was half rolled back late last year over Stroger’s veto in a move to take effect in July.

O’Brien was actually the first Democrat to say he’d roll it back completely, and he told supporters Tuesday night that they had the momentum, but the clock ran out with the early primary. “We got our message out,” he said, “but the time frame was short.”

Keats called Preckwinkle “a friend of mine,” but said he was already looking to hit her on tax hikes she approved as a Chicago alderman, a line O’Brien tried against her but found ineffective.

Stroger insisted to the end the tax hike was necessary, though it brought Chicago’s overall sales tax to 10.25 percent, the highest for a major U.S. city.

“We have done a good job to maintain the county services,” he said in conceding defeat. “This is a bump in the road. Life goes on.”

Daily Herald Staff Writer Robert McCoppin contributed to this report.

Read the original article on DailyHerald.com.

AOL announced its first quarterly earnings today as a newly public company. Fourth quarter revenues dropped 8% to $471.6 million, and turned a profit of $1.4 million (see the slides below). Notes from CEO Tim Armstrong’s first conference call are below. He laid out AOL’s strategy, warned that sales would probably be dampened this quarter as a result of reducing a third of its workforce and noted that “AOL is not a quarterly project.” He also said that AOl will pursue new paid subscription services in the future.

Here are my live notes:

Tim Armstrong:

We have an aggressive strategy, starts and ends with execution,

We have gone through major cost reduction, reducing one third of workforce
built and designed Seed, our new content management system
cleaned up Mail (fewer ads)
adding to management team,
recent acquisition of StudioNow
a new middle market sales team
redesigned sales process,
reignited AOl’s brand with agencies,
completed spinout from Time Warner.

Most important thing, we put the heartbeat and will to win back into AOL

Strategy we are going after
1. in content, building content platforms for journalists on the web, matching technology with content can capture large audiences.
2. 2. In advertising want to help brand advertisers transition to the Web
3. 3. Communications, working on new platform
4. 4. Paid services, we will be testing services and subscriptions in 2010

Some major items on the checklist
1 scale content production and content partnerships
2 launch anew brand platform
3. scale the number of local communities
4. stop decline of communications products and launch new ones
5. launch paid services

7. recur

It is difficult to remove a third of workforce without some impact, may see some dampening on ad sales, AOl is not a quarterly project.

Request-AOL Q4 2009 Earnings Presentation

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2009 was a banner year for Salesforce.com. The enterprise cloud computing company made significant enhancements to its product lineup, reported overall strong earnings, and even launched their own take on realtime enterprise social networking and collaboration, Chatter. Today, Salesforce is launching one of its first product enhancements for 2010: the Force.com Visual Process Manager.

Force.com, company’s platform to build and deploy enterprise applications, will now allows companies to design and deploy business processes inside their apps without having to build the applications on other software. Customers can visually design any complex business process with a design tool and instantly run it in the cloud without writing a single line of code. The technology powering the Visual Process Manager is based on technology acquired from Informavores, call scripting startup Salesforce bought last year.

The Manager has several different components. The Process Designer essentially helps businesses sketch out applications with established set forms, questions, and choices, and logic components, like task assignments, decision trees, and approval processes. These components can be dragged and dropped into a visual process design diagram/ The Process Wizard Builder enables companies to design a “wizard” to help walk end-users, step-by-step, through their business process. The Process Simulator lets customers test out and review processes before they are deployed. And lastly, the real-time process engine will run all of a company’s sophisticated processes and provides realtime scalability.

For example, if an insurance company wanted to create a step by step business application for sales representatives to follow in order to create a price quote for insurance packages, the administrator could visually map out every question and step the sales reps need to take and then simple create an application that would automate these processes.

Prior to the inclusion of the Visual Process Manager, companies would have to build applications off of separate platforms, including on-premise software, hardware and infrastructure, to automate processes. The bonus to the Visual process Manager is that it integrates seamlessly into all of Salesforce’s applications. The Process Manager will be available to Enterprise and Unlimited Edition Force.com subscribers for $50 per user per month.

The company recently rolled out Force.com Sites, which lets companies build and run their applications for internal use as well as for public use on Salesforce.com cloud computing platform. And Salesforce also opened up an additional distribution channel off of Force.com: the Value-Added Reseller (VAR) program

While the opening up of the Visual Process Manager pales in comparison to the scale of launching Salesforce Chatter, both products represent Salesforce’s rapid pace of innovation. It should be interesting to see what 2010 brings for Salesforce; the company just raised $500 million, which we all expect will be uses towards a few acquisitions.

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CHICAGO (AP) — The polls have closed in Illinois’ primary election.

The Illinois Board of Elections says turnout is lower than previous years.

Board of Elections spokesman Mark Greben says the turnout is below 30 percent of registered voters and the average has been 37 percent and higher in past years.

Chicago Election Board Chairman Langdon Neal says it started out as a very quiet day and was steady all day long. He says turnout likely won’t hit 30 percent for voters in the city.

He says all Chicago polls opened on time and closed on time.

Neal says there were only minor problems at polling places in the city, including three judges at three different precincts who were removed for drinking alcohol.

Illinois’ primary is the first election of 2010.

Read the original article from Herald & Review.

Filed under: Europe, Plants/Manufacturing, GM, Fiat, Diesel

One of the last vestiges of the aborted partnership between Fiat and General Motors is coming to a close. An engine plant in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, has been jointly owned by GM and Fiat Powertrain Technologies (FPT). FPT has reached an agreement with GM to buy out the American company’s stake.

The plant builds the 1.3-liter Multijet diesel four cylinder that is used in an array of vehicles from both companies including the Opel Corsa and Astra and Fiat 500 and Punto.

The plant will continue building the same engine under Fiat management and GM will continue using the engine. No purchase price has been revealed for GM’s stake. The press release is after the jump.

[Source: General Motors]

Continue reading Fiat Powertrain Technologies to buy General Motors stake in Polish engine plant

Fiat Powertrain Technologies to buy General Motors stake in Polish engine plant originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A lot of people have taught J.D. Salinger’s books, and almost everyone with a high school education has read “Catcher in the Rye.”

But Greg Herriges, an English professor at Harper College, has a personal connection with the reclusive author who died Thursday at the age of 91.

In 1978 Herriges and his girlfriend, both Chicago Public School English teachers, took a road trip specifically to meet Salinger, whom Herriges credits with changing him from a rebellious teen to an avid reader and aspiring author.

Four years ago Herriges wrote a book, “J. D: A Memoir of a Time and a Journey” (Wordcraft of Oregon), about the trip and the reactions he got from other authors like Kurt Vonnegut and John McInerney when he told of meeting Salinger.

He talked about the experience in an interview Friday.

When the teachers first showed up at Salinger’s farm near the tiny town of Cornish, N.H., they were frightened off by the writer’s three dogs. They had also been warned that Salinger had a shotgun.

Herriges then wrote Salinger a letter and delivered it to the post office where the author got his mail, saying they would visit in three days.

When they arrived in the girlfriend’s Volkswagen Rabbit, the author came out through an automatic garage door that seemed to be his front door.

“He was sweet, firm and kind of haughty,” said Herriges. “He had a sense of humor and was very articulate with his New England accent. Every once in a while he was very stern. I had never witnessed such confidence in my life. He was a major talent, and he knew it. Just a cut above with a very East Coast preppy look.”

But there was no invitation to tea and cookies.

“He wouldn’t let us out of the car,” said Herriges. “He kept leaning against my door, and he looked in the back seat to be sure I didn’t have recording equipment.”

The author told the teachers he wrote for himself.

“Contact with the public hinders my work,” said Salinger, and Herriges said he understood.

“No, you don’t; if you did you wouldn’t be here,” Salinger retorted.

Herriges offered to leave a couple of times, especially because it was raining, but each time Salinger said they seemed like nice young people and might as well ask their questions.

And what is Herriges’ take on the success of “Catcher in the Rye?” for more than half a century?

“It is a virtuoso performance in terms of impersonating the thoughts, voice, emotions of a disaffected 17-year-old. He spoke to decades worth of alienated youth who were coping with that very difficult stage of development.”

Herriges was never very interested in Salinger’s private life, but just in his art.

“I never thought there wouldn’t be a J.D. Salinger. He couldn’t live forever, could he?” Herriges said. “We’ve got his books, and there might be more. In a way he kind of does.”

The inaugural Hermance Vehicle Efficiency Award, which recognizes the most efficient and appealing new car, will be given at the 2010 Chicago Auto Show. The award is given in honor of the late Toyota executive engineer David Hermance and will be presented on February 10 to the vehicle that represents Hermance’s vision of practical efficient design, as well as affordability for consumers and profitability for car companies.

"Our hope is that this award will become something like the Nobel… (read more)

Days after Macmillan books disappeared from Amazon’s inventory due to a feud over pricing, Amazon has confirmed that it has caved to Macmillan’s demands and will be raising the prices of Macmillan e-books from $9.99 to $12.99-$14.99 for hardcover and bestselling editions. The online retail giant expressed its strong disagreement with this pricing but decided to still offer the books to customers who can decide with their wallets whether they want to purchase Macmillan e-books at at what it calls “needlessly high prices”. A domino effect is beginning to be seen with News Corp-owned HarperCollins now jumping on the “We want higher pricing” bandwagon. In its earning conference call on Tuesday, News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch clearly and concisely summarized the situation by stating:

We don’t like the Amazon model of selling everything at $9.99. They don’t pay us that. They pay us the full wholesale price of $14 or whatever we charge. We think it really devalues books and it hurts all the retailers of the hard cover books. We are not against [inaudible] books. On the contrary we like them very much indeed. It is low cost to us and so on. But we want some room to maneuver in it. Amazon, sorry Apple in its agreement with us which has not been disclosed in detail does allow for a variety of slightly higher prices. There will be prices very much less than the printed copies of books but still will not be fixed in a way that Amazon has been doing it. It appears that Amazon is now ready to sit down with us again and renegotiate pricing.

With the single decision to capitulate to Macmillan, Amazon has opened the floodgates on higher e-book pricing and we can expect that other major book publishers will seek similar increases. Any Kindle owners out there care to chime in on these price increases and the potential effect on your book buying habits?

Read (Macmillan)

Read (HarperCollins)

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Infiniti says that it decided to release prices and information about their M model ahead of launch as a response to the interested audience which, they say, it’s quite large. And judging by the looks of this car, they might be right. It’s not that hard to believe people find this Japanese luxury sedan very attractive.

"We want to take advantage of the high levels of customer interest in this completely redesigned Infiniti M, kick-starting the launch with select lease offers and high-val… (read more)

Via Michael Geist, we’re pointed to a short interview with a representative from the US Trade Reps office, where the issue over ACTA concerns is raised, and the response is almost comically ridiculous. Stan McCoy, the assistant US Trade Representative for intellectual property and innovation, responds to complaints by saying that there has been a lot of misrepresentation about ACTA and that it really has a lot about counterfeiting and isn’t just about copyright. And….? Well, that’s it.

You see, this is the point where Stan McCoy or Ron Kirk or anyone in the USTR’s office should explain what those misperceptions are, by telling us what’s actually being negotiated. But, of course, they don’t. The USTR keeps insisting that it’s going to be more transparent, but hasn’t actually done anything. If anything, over the last couple months, the USTR has become even more secretive about ACTA. Saying that people aren’t accurately describing what’s in the document, and then not saying what’s actually in the document, doesn’t help matters. It just makes us wonder who the USTR is representing, because it certainly does not appear to be the American people.

Furthermore, McCoy is being willfully disingenuous, in saying that the “misperception” is that “this agreement will focus mostly or exclusively on copyright infringement in the digital environment.” No one has been suggesting that at all. Everyone knows that it covers real counterfeiting as well — but the part people are concerned about is the intellectual property part, because it’s being shoved into ACTA as if copyright infringement and counterfeiting are the same thing (or at least very similar) when they’re not. So his next statement is meaningless:

“The threat of physical goods bearing counterfeit trademarks is a real one and it is a priority for ACTA. Americans do not want to brush their teeth with counterfeit toothpaste or drive a car with knockoff brakes.”

That implies people are arguing otherwise, but no one is. Of course, we don’t want dangerous counterfeits, but that’s not the issue. The issue is using ACTA as a back door to changing IP laws in a way that does not reflect what’s best for the country.

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We have to admit, out of all of the Volkswagen Group subsidiaries, Czech manufacturer Skoda was the quietest one last year, with few launches and fewer even complaints about the economic crisis. We expect 2010 to be basically the same, except for few minor tweaks here and there.

So is the case with the new interpretation of the Fabia Combi, with all the Scout guise which comes with it. The facelift is in fact a minor nick’n’tuck, with changes here and there on the exterior of few (if not any… (read more)

Filed under: Internet, Apple

Despite the huge number of companies and individuals that have Twitter accounts, our favorite Cupertino-based company has been strangely silent on the “social media” scene. While some conspiracy theorists out there might take that as proof that Apple is going to create their own Twitter-like notification service or, even worse, buy Twitter outright, we’d like to believe that it’s just because they don’t need to blast out 140-character screeds every few minutes to get attention.

If Apple ever decides to join the crowd and tweet news blasts to several hundred million followers, they’ll be able to pick up @apple as their Twitter handle. According to 9to5Mac, a cybersquatter had taken over the twitter.com/apple username, but just recently the message you see above started appearing. Not only does this indicate that the squatter has been forcibly removed from his/her former inhabitance in Twitter-ville, but attempts to sign up as Apple on Twitter are rebuffed.

Whether this indicates that Apple will soon join the ranks of Twitterites or if it’s just Twitter being nice to the coolest computer maker on the ‘net, it is nice to see that we won’t be seeing tweets from “Fake Apple” in the near future.

[via Cult of Mac]

TUAWApple cybersquatter is ousted from Twitter, but still no sign of @apple originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re kind of starting to figure out ASUS’ naming scheme — E is for Easy, and N is for eNtertainment, jolly good. In other self-evident news, Engadget Chinese is the place to go if you want the lowdown on happenings in China and its nearby states. Joining HP’s Envy 15 soon in the USB 3.0-sporting ranks will be the familiar 16-inch ASUS N61 and the seemingly brand spanking new N82 14-incher. See the galleries below for the eye candy, but keep it here for specs. Core i5 and i7 CPUs will populate the role of orchestrator inside, while ATI and NVIDIA discrete graphics options will also be made available when these make their imminent Taiwan debut. In live demonstrations, the one USB 3.0 port (yes, you only get one) was shown to be three times as fast as USB 2.0, so not quite reaching its theoretical superiority, but hardly an unwelcome improvement. Let’s hope for quick global distribution following the Taiwanese launch, which is slated for the middle of this month.

ASUS N82 and N61 join the USB 3.0 laptop party originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s good to know that even huge inanimate objects appreciate the need for a work-life balance. After a nice winter hiatus, Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider is coming back online soon, set to resume smashing protonic beams at one another with the force of 3.5 trillion electron-volts (TeV) per beam, or 7 TeV in total. We have to swallow hard when we hear such force described as “low-energy,” but that’s what the LHC designers consider it, and moreover we’re learning they’ll skip past the middle and go for the full 14 TeV potential smashes after a retooling break during 2012. Although this may delay the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, other physics research shouldn’t be stalled in the meantime — scientists claim they’ll be able to extract data from the low-energy collisions that could lend us more information on aspects of string theory, extra dimensions, and supersymmetry. Doesn’t all this sound like nerds trying to avoid getting real jobs?

Large Hadron Collider schedules holiday for 2012, full 7 TeV power for 2013 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Spend any time in a audio or video editing suite of applications and you’ll find yourself overwhelmed by a selection of on-screen controls that have absolutely zero relevance to your on-desk controls — keyboard and mouse don’t really equate to slider and dial. FlexiKnobs bridge that gap, and allow collaborative work too. A project by researchers at the University of Applied Sciences, they’re little wooden mice of a decidedly non-ergonomic shape, but they allow you to move cursor (shown after the break) over on-screen control, then click in the wheel and spin it to adjust the value. The cursor changes depending on whether it’s locked on or floating free, and each bears the color of the FlexiKnob it is associated with. Up to 250 of the things can be paired with a computer at once, which sounds like heavenly pandemonium to us.

[Thanks, Sam]

Continue reading FlexiKnob paddle controllers are perfect for playing your old Atari Breakout ROMs

FlexiKnob paddle controllers are perfect for playing your old Atari Breakout ROMs originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ADP reported that Nonfarm private employment decreased 22,000 from December 2009 to January 2010 on a seasonally adjusted basis. They also revised their December job losses to -61,000 vs. -84,000 previously reported.

Construction jobs continue to get hammered, losing 37,000. January construction numbers mark the third year of consecutive monthly job losses.

On a brighter note, there was an uptick of job creation for medium-sized businesses. 

 ADP: Large businesses, defined as those with 500 or more workers, saw employment decline by 19,000 while small-size businesses with fewer than 50 workers, declined 12,000. Employment among medium-size businesses, defined as those with between 50 and 499 workers, increased by 9,000, the first increase in employment since January of 2008.

In fact, strip out the 37,000 construction job losses and the U.S. might have experienced job creation in January, ex-construction based on ADP numbers.

FINAL Report January 10

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See Also:

• Monthly Payroll: December 2009
• CHART OF THE DAY: The Week Washington Turned On Wall Street
• Teamster Plowmen Angry That They Won't Get Paid When There's No Snow

Today Daimler announced what could be one of the most important alliances in the world of the automotive financial services at the beginning of 2010: Daimler Financial Services AG and Allianz SE have decided to collaborate worldwide. Therefore Allianz becomes Daimler’s partner for the international automotive insurance business.

The collaboration between the two companies is not new, as they have standing agreements in many markets in Eastern Europe and Australia. With this new agreement, Al… (read more)

Here it is folks, the wonders of creative destruction.

In a discussion of employment, John Challenger, the CEO of research firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, said telecom was one of the main contributors to heavy layoffs in January. He specifically calls out Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone for layoffs at Verizon (VZ) right around the 3:30 mark of this video.

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See Also:

• iPad For Verizon Is Happening, Verizon Source Says
• Verizon Offering Palm Pre Buyers A Free Pixi
• Droid’s Parts Are More Expensive Than The iPhone, Nexus One