Author: Serkadis

French game developer Gameloft, listed on Euronext Paris, this afternoon shared its 2009 financial results with the world. The video game publisher achieved consolidated sales of €122.0 million – roughly $170 million – for 2009, up 11% compared to 2008.

The company also specified ‘iPhone revenue’, which presumably means its income from distribution of its games on both the iPhone and iPod Touch: in 2009, that number jumped 231% YOY to reach €17.6 million (approximately $25 million).

Gameloft withdrew from boxed games in January 2009, and says mobile games accounted for 94% of the company’s sales for the whole year. The remaining 6% are related to consoles game sales.

Full-year revenues from the mobile game segment grew by 12%, self-reportedly due to the success of the games the company distributes through Apple’s App Store. To demonstrate this growing importance for the company, you need only look at its revenue figures for the fourth quarter of 2009: iPhone revenues for the company reached €7 million ($9.75 million), while initial expectations were €4.4 million.

Total Q4 2009 sales reached €31.8 million ($44.5 million), which means revenues from the App Store are currently about 22% of the company’s total revenue.

Last week, Gameloft CEO Michel Guillemot was quoted as saying that he regards the iPad as massive new opportunity for game developers, and to ’stay tuned’ for upcoming announcements on iPad-specific video games.

Gameloft was founded by the Guillemot brothers, founders and owners of video games leader Ubisoft, and has partnership agreements with carriers, handset manufacturers, specialized distributors in over 100 countries. The company employs some 3,500 developers around the world. For a comprehensive list of games developed by Gameloft, head on over to their Wikipedia profile.

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Southwest is one of the last major carriers to finally commit to in-flight Wi-Fi, but at least they’re doing it right. According to a recent post on the Southwest blog, the airline is going to begin outfitting its planes with Row 44 Wi-Fi starting this spring, and will have the entire fleet connected by 2012.

The ramp-up will be slow at first, with just 15 planes per month getting internet-equipped. Pricing, too, hasn’t yet been determined, and since almost every other airline uses a different service provider (Gogo), there’s not a lot of pricing precedent. Southwest says it will be a “great value,” though, so expect something at least competitive with the current standard of $5-$13. [Southwest Blog via Hot Hardware]

We were just recently reporting on yet another in a very long line of studies that showed that instant messaging and texting was actually helping kids have better writing skills. So, it was interesting to see an article published up in Canada (thanks to Marcus Carab for sending this in) that claimed a study “proving” that Twitter and texting was causing grammar and spelling problems for students. But, if you read the details of the article, they don’t say that at all. It’s entirely made up by the reporter. It’s done with a neat little rhetorical trick. The title of the article says:

Students failing because of Twitter, texting

Okay, fair enough. Let’s see the details of how Twitter and texting are leading students to fail.

The opening paragraph is:

Little or no grammar teaching, cellphone texting, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, all are being blamed for an increasingly unacceptable number of post-secondary students who can’t write properly.

First note that the reporter combines “little or no grammar teaching” with “cellphone texting, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter,” even though those are very, very different issues. Onto the next few paragraphs, where the rhetorical “switch” is pulled:

For years there’s been a flood of anecdotal complaints from professors about what they say is the wretched state of English grammar coming from some of their students.

Now there seems to be some solid evidence.

Ontario’s Waterloo University is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills.

Almost a third of those students are failing.

Now, if you’re not reading carefully, you might think this claimed that there was “proof” that texting or social networking sites were leading students to fail. But that’s not what’s being said at all. The only “proof” is a study showing that students aren’t doing well on a particular grammar test. It presents no evidence as to why. It also presents no evidence that suggests that it’s any worse than at any time in the past, since it doesn’t present any historical comparison at all. It just says a bunch of students are failing and blames texting and Twitter, despite all those actual studies that say the opposite.

Nowhere else in the article does it present any evidence at all that texting or Twittering has anything to do with the grammar skills of students. Instead, there are a few people who suggest the real problem was that first one listed: the lack of any grammar instruction in high schools. But, I guess that doesn’t make a very good headline or opening of an article.

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Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino has filed paperwork to trademark his nickname.

The chiseled reality personality, who swapped his life as personal trainer for one as one of the stars of MTV’s breakout hit Jersey Shore, has submitted an application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in a bid to trademark his world-famous moniker, The Situation.

In the six-page Dec. 11 application, Mike, 28, outlines plans to market Situation-themed bathing suits, bathrobes, pullovers, tank tops, tracksuits and tuxedos, among other products.

But Mike’s bid to prove that he is one of a kind has already hit a snag. We hear two applications have been filed with the Patent Office; including one by The Sitch’s own brother, porn producer Mark Sorrentino.

Do you use WordPress and want to blog from your Android phone? Doing that just got a lot easier. WordPress for Android – an open-source app backed by WordPress.org – is now available in the Android Market. With this app, anybody who blogs on WordPress.com or a self-hosted WordPress blog can post and edit blog posts, as well as moderate and post comments. In addition, the app will display notifications whenever a reader comments on a blog post.

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Features

With WordPress for Android, you can also configure and manage multiple blogs, which is a great feature for those of us who post on more than one site.

Using the app is pretty straightforward. Simply enter your blog’s URL and your credentials and you are ready to go. The actual editor is a pretty basic HTML editor, though unlike WordPress’ early iPhone efforts, it’s easy to add links and italicize or bold text. The app also makes it very easy to select and upload photos from the phone’s photo gallery to a WordPress blog. While we were testing the app, however, selecting an image on the Nexus One regularly led to a crash.

Open Source App

Just like WordPress for iPhone and WordPress for BlackBerry, the Android app is an open source effort. Indeed, a large part of the code base for WordPress for Android is based on the popular wpToGo application, which will now be discontinued in favor of the official WordPress app. Developers who are interested in helping out can find more information here.

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Last night, we reported that Facebook was planning to release a JIT compiler for PHP, a huge step toward making the PHP runtime – and PHP-based sites and apps – faster by taking the interpreted lagnuage (a.k.a., more human-readable code) a few steps closer to the bare-metal ones and zeros machines actually read.

We’ve been updated this morning that the PHP runtime has in fact been rewritten, with an extra step: The PHP is translated to C++ (a more machine-readable language) which is then compiled with g++. This project, called HipHop, has been in development under great secrecy at Facebook for the past couple years and has just this morning been open sourced.

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Facebook engineer Haiping Zhao writes, “With HipHop we’ve reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead.”

We’re sure this is good news for Facebook’s brand new data center, still under construction.

“HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner,” Zhao continues, “and sacrifices some rarely used features – such as eval() – in exchange for improved performance.”

He also notes that while interpreted languages such as PHP, Ruby and Python – the languages that, by and large, rule the web of apps and social site we all use today – allow for huge strides in developer productivity, they are also less efficient and often simply slower in runtime. For a huge and ever-growing site such as Facebook, this might have eventually led to scalability issues.

In other words, it cost Facebook less to create a faster PHP runtime than to buy all the servers that would be needed to support hundreds of millions of users without a faster runtime.

“Scaling Facebook is particularly challenging because almost every page view is a logged-in user with a customized experience,” writes Zhao. “When you view your home page we need to look up all of your friends, query their most relevant updates (from a custom service we’ve built called Multifeed), filter the results based on your privacy settings, then fill out the stories with comments, photos, likes, and all the rich data that people love about Facebook. All of this in just under a second.

“HipHop allows us to correct the logic that does the final page assembly in PHP and iterate it quickly while relying on custom back-end services in C++, Erlang, Java or Python to service the News Feed, search, Chat and other core parts of the site.”

Zhao notes that PHP and C++ share relatively similar syntax, although C++ is by far less taxing on system resources. While it would have been impossible to write the codebase by hand, Zhao had been tinkering with programmatically converting PHP to C++ for a few years. He got the idea at a Facebook Hackathon, he said.

UPDATE: Late last night, we pinged PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf on Twitter, asking for his opinions on the rumored PHP compiler. This morning, he wrote, “I think HipHop is cool and will certainly help the poor people stuck in framework soup.” However, he also noted, “HipHop on simpler template-style PHP pages probably isn’t going to help you too much. It’s not going to make your SQL queries any faster.”

We will update this post as news continues to break.

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If your home mortgage was serviced by the defunct Ameriquest or its affiliates, you could stand to receive payouts starting at $1,000. Just enter your loan number on the settlement website and it will tell you if you’re eligible. The $325 million settlement came after a multi-state investigation which found shady lending practices that failing to disclose that loans had adjustable rates, failing to disclose the terms of the loan, refinancing homeowners into inappropriate loans, inflating home appraisals, and charging excessive fees. [ameriquestmdlsettlement.com]

Filed under: Motorsports, Etc., Design/Style

Tell us if this sounds familiar: you’re sitting in your lounge chair, maybe watching a race or playing a driving simulator on your gaming console, but in your head you’re in a car. What may sound ridiculous or downright childish to some piques the interest of the race fan and car nut.

The Autoblog Fantasy Living Room already includes coffee tables made from Shelby Cobras and engine blocks, sofas from Porsches and Aston Martins, and even a handful of chairs made to emulate car buckets. But this one takes the prize.

Designed by Bulgarian interior designer Alexander Christoff, this chair is made from ergonomically molded fiberglass with chrome legs and an upholstered adjustable head rest to look like the closest approximation of an F1 car in lounge-chair form we’ve seen yet. No word on availability or cost, but if you remember that whole supply and demand thing, anything’s possible. Also, is it just us, or can you picture this chair talking like the crab in the Honda Element ads from a few years ago? Okay, maybe it’s just us… carry on.

[Source: Behance]

From Bulgaria to the Autoblog Living Room: the Ultimate F1 Chair originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s commonly believed that most companies are able to pass on higher costs from inflation onto consumers, via higher prices. Thus the average stock is seen as relatively inflation-protected.

While this may be the case for the long-term, Mckinsey shows how companies’ cash flows are generally hurt by sudden bouts of inflation; as some believe the U.S. could soon be in for.

Additionally, if a company has any hope of protecting its cash flow, in real terms, against inflation, it has to grow sales faster than (not just equal to) the inflation rate. That’s pretty tough. History shows that few companies are able to do this within high inflation environments, which is why stocks are usually slammed during such periods, according to Mckinsey.

Mckinsey: One likely reason companies destroy value is that they can’t pass cost increases on to customers— or can do so only with a time lag. This problem is especially costly when inflation is high and unpredictable: a half-year delay in passing on 15 percent inflation implies that revenues are always 7.5 percent too low, causing margins to plummet.

Another reason could be that managers facing inflation don’t sufficiently adjust their targets for the growth of earnings and sales margins. Keeping margins and returns on capital constant in times of inflation means that cash flows and value are eroding in real terms. EBIT growth in line with inflation is also insufficient for sustaining a company’s value. This is even truer for leveraged indicators, such as earnings per share.

For an academic deep-dive, check out the full report below.

How Inflation Can Destroy Shareholder Value – Feb 2010

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See Also:

• The $700 Billion High Yield Debt Tidal Wave That’s Coming To Crush Corporate Finances
• Australia Stuns The World By Announcing Un-Official End To The Rate-Hike Cycle
• New Twist In Toyota’s Sticky Pedal Problem

Stocks are on a roll as the Dow is up around 100 points. Meanwhile, the NASDAQ is up 15 points to 2185 and the S&P 500 is up 1% to 1101.

Commodities continue to have a field day. Oil is up nearly 4% at $77.30 a barrel.

Gold is up $13.30 to $1118.30 an ounce while silver is up $0.07 at $16.73 an ounce. Copper futures are down a fraction of a cent.

Cotton futures continue their slide, currently down 1.5% at $68.29 a bale.

Sugar futures have since reversed and is on the rise. Earlier they were down slightly. Cocoa is down slightly as well.

As far as the S&P goes, nearly every sector is performing well, with tech being dragged down slightly by a few companies like Qualcomm (QCOM) and Google (GOOG). Financials are the same, with Wells Fargo (WFC) and PNC Financial (PNC) doing the dragging.

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See Also:

• Mid-day: Markets Still Up, Oil Still On Fire
• Equities And Commodities On The Rise, Soft Goods Down
• Dow Closes Up Over 110 Points, Huge Day For Gold

Longtime Silicon Valley exec Dan Rosensweig (pictured here) is stepping down as CEO and president of the Guitar Hero division of Activision Blizzard (ATVI) to take a new job as CEO of Chegg, the top online textbook rental startup.

Both companies confirmed the move, which is somewhat unexpected, given the former Yahoo (YHOO) COO landed the job running the top gaming franchise in March of last year.

It has been an eventful, but also a particularly tough year at Guitar Hero, in the face of yet another withering downturn in the gaming market.

While Activision introduced a new version of its flagship Guitar Hero game, as well as a new DJ Hero, Band Hero and a Guitar Hero: Van Halen version, sales were weaker overall, even though DJ Hero was the the No. 1 new game in both the U.S. and Europe.

Nonetheless, according to a recent report of the research firm NPD Group, sales in the videogame space were down eight percent in 2009 from 2008.

And while Guitar Hero gained market share as the most popular such game in its genre, Guitar Hero 5 sold slightly less than 996,000 units from September through December, according to NPD. Guitar Hero: World Tour, in comparison, sold 3.4 million units the year earlier.

In contrast, Rosensweig will be take over a much faster-growing business at Chegg, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif. and has become the dominant front-runner in the increasingly competitive online textbook rental space.

To help it maintain that lead, Chegg has garnered a huge $144 million investment kitty.

Top venture firms, such as Kleiner Perkins, Foundation Capital and, most recently, Insight Venture Partners, have presumably handed over that money to Co-founders Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra in the hopes of big returns.

The pair first started Chegg in 2005 at Iowa State University as a classified rental service, where books were the dominant item, but evolved its business to focus on actually doing the textbook rentals.

Its unusual name, Chegg, is a mashup of chicken and egg and its model is similar to that of innovative video rental outfit, Netflix (NFLX).

Chegg now serves close to 7,000 schools across the U.S. and has a cute practice of planting a tree for every textbook rented, bought or sold.

With 120 employees in Silicon Valley, as well as more at a warehouse operation in Louisville, Kentucky, Chegg claims it has grown over 600 percent year over year since its founding, although the startup would not provide more specifics on financials.

A spokeswoman said that company rented more books in January of this year than all of last year and has saved students more than $137 million.

Typically, a rental costs a fraction of what buying a book outright does.

All this activity has attracted a lot of interest from both big and small players, especially given the $10 billion college textbook business.

The Barnes & Noble (BKS) College division recently began testing a textbook rental program and is rolling it out to 25 U.S. colleges. And BookRenter is a smaller competitor.

But with Chegg, Rosensweig is getting to ride the lead horse in the space, taking over for its current CEO and Co-founder Rashid.

In an interview a year ago, in fact, Rashid said: “I do not want to be a long-term CEO. My passion is solving the problem and getting the company to a place where it can be taken to the next step.”

While he will remain chairman, the entrepreneur has also recently closed a $7.5 million funding for a new stealth startup called Kakai. Sources have said it is focused on the even more crowded e-reader space.

The replacement for Rosensweig–who has been working in private equity since his departure from Yahoo (YHOO) in late 2006, has also worked at CNET Networks and Ziff-Davis–will be the Guitar Hero division’s current COO.

And, until he has something to say about Chegg, here is a video interview I did with Rosensweig in September, when the new version of GH5, as well as Band Hero and DJ Hero, were launching:

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Palm’s got potential — M&A potential.

That’s the word from Deutsche Bank analyst Jonathan Goldberg who believes there’s a good chance the company might be acquired in the next two years.

In a note to clients this week, Goldberg argues that Palm (PALM), with its new Verizon (VZ) distribution deal in hand and nearly nearly 1,300 webOS applications in its App Catalog, is building the sort of market momentum that would be attractive to a larger company looking to break into the mobile device market — or shake it up.

“Big consumer electronics companies need some way to participate in the market and most of them have failed to come up with a successful strategy,” Goldberg writes. “Street consensus appears to be that Palm will be acquired in the next year or two, which given the current environment we think could be a reasonable possibility.”

But to make it a reality, Palm must first demonstrate its viability. “We think Palm needs to prove it can be a stand-alone entity, a viable business in its own right. We clearly think that it can.”

Clearly. Goldberg believes Palm will likely sell 600k WebOS devices through Verizon this quarter and he says that Palm’s App Catalog, whose applications already outnumber those in Nokia and Microsoft’s stores, will soon do the same to those in RIM’s App World and possibly the Android Market as well. That would certainly be enough to elicit an acquisitive glance from a company with mobile ambitions — just who that would be, Goldberg doesn’t speculate

Of course, Goldberg is far from the first analyst to posit Palm as a takeover target. I’ve written here before about speculation that the company might be acquired by Dell or Nokia.

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Garmin-Nuvifone M10 next to the the old Nuvifone M20

Chinese website GPC has managed to get their hands on the Garmin Asus M10 and revealed a device much more interesting than the very unsuitable M20.

The note the device is well specified, with a  Qualcomm’s 600MHz CPU, 512 MB RAM and ROM, built-in 4G Flash, MicroSD card, 3.5G HSDPA, GPS, WIFI, BT and many more functions.

They feel the design imitated the iPhone somewhat, and was quite plasticky, with the white version looking better than the black. Unfortunately the screen is plastic and not glass, and therefore not very scratch resistant. They were happy with the 1500 mAh battery and the 3.5 mm headphone jack, but complained the MicroSD card was under the battery, which was less than ideal.

They were also happy with the lanyard hole, which in Asia is very popular for tying trinkets to, and which has been eschewed by HTC in their latest HD2.

They liked the Garmin user interface but noted it was difficult to disable it, needing to change registry entries.

The Garmin UI seemed to have some extra innovation, with the status bar dropping down a notification list, like on TouchFlo3D, but with a search bar included, which seems like a good idea, and if text is highlighted at the time it will automatically do a search.

 

The Garmin software also included the mandatory weather widget, and the music and photo interface also looked very good. Regarding music playback however they did complain of noise on high volumes. The volume of the speakers was however very good. They note also that the volume settings on the headphones are different from those used on the speaker phone, which is useful for preventing ear injury from an inadvertent wrong adjustment.

The GPS sensitivity was good, both on a cold start, with a 1 min fix, and a warm start, which offered a 10 second fix. The bundled navigation software managed its 3D interface very well and smoothly, and had a good collection of POI.      

Performance was good with the 600 Mhz processor, and the device featured a nice task manager, activated by a long press on the windows key, which can be used to close applications if things get bogged down a bit.

In terms of video playback, they note that DIX playback was hardware accelerated, with the device being able to play 1.3 Mbs VGA quality video smoothly at 24 FPS. WVGA video playback was however not smooth, dropping to around 20 fps.

They complained that the 5 megapixel camera appears to lack auto-focus, which makes macro shots impossible.

They note stability was reasonable, and was expected to improve with the final firmware.

They concluded the device was excellent value for the budget conscious, but of course did not unseat the HTC HD2 on the high end.

Read their full review here.

Via Slashgear.com

A young girl, trying to make it to her dying father’s bedside. An old airline that can’t find your reservation. A $1200 ticket that is now a $2000 ticket. A prefabricated apology for only $50. These, are the Delta chronicles…

Mac writes:

“My girlfriend and I got a call a week before Thanksgiving that her father was in the hospital and wasnt expected to live through the night. We immediately scrambled, packed and tried to catch the first flight out we could. A friend of ours offered to book the flight for us and attempted to do so online, but since the flight was not for him the online registration would not accept his reservation and forced him to call their booking number. Well he managed to get us flights for 5 PM that day at a cost of about $1200. An hour later he forwarded the confirmation and booking info to us.

We arrive at the airport and attempt to get on the flight, but the lady at the ticket counter cant find our reservation at first. Then after some poking around she finds the info, but it turns out the Delta employee on the phone earlier only set it as a “hold” and it still needed to be paid for. I called my friend and he assured me he had given them his CC info and had forwarded me the confirmation, which I kept trying to show the ticket lady, but she wouldn’t accept it. She wanted an additional $1200 from us in order to get on the flight.

We my friend calls back to the Delta number and tries to straighten out the situation. As it turns out 1 hour and 5 different Delta reservation attendants later he manages to get us another flight on a later plane but for $2000 now. Seems they lost his original booking and somehow couldn’t get us on the original plane, even though the lady at the counter was trying to help us and told us she could get us on that plane if we paid her there at the counter.

So due to their incompetence, we had to wait an additional 5 hours and take a red eye flight that got us to her father 4 hours later, AND pay an additional $700 dollars for the flight. We attempted to straighten this out with their customer service department and was offered $50 flight voucher for our inconvenience. INCONVENIENCE! that $50 only paid for one of our checked baggage to and from the original flight, not to mention the stress the additional 5 hours cost us wondering if we would make it to his bedside in time ( Which we did thank God! )

Also come to find out that Delta does not offer any bereavement flights anymore.

We have since fired off and additional letter to the CS department along with a few top execs. Hopefully someone in Delta will stand up for their customers and have a little compassion for the situation. If not, it looks like we along with our friends and family will be switching airlines on our future flight needs. I hear southwest doesnt charge for baggage, perhaps they would appreciate our business.”

Here is the correspondence between Delta and Mrs. P, Mac’s girlfriend:

“On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Customer Care wrote:
Dear Ms. P,

Thank you for your correspondence regarding the passing of someone who was special to you. On behalf of Delta, I am very sorry to learn about your loss and hope you will accept my deepest sympathy. As our customer, you are in the best position to point out areas that need attention. Our goal is to provide consistent and accurate information to our passengers at all times. I am truly sorry in this instance you did not receive the service you expected and should have received from one of our team members. Feedback like yours will help us improve our airport process and overall customer experience. Please know I will be sharing your comments with our Airport Customer Service leadership team for internal follow up.

As a gesture of goodwill, I have issued an Electronic Transportation Credit Voucher (etc) in the amount of $50.00. Please note the voucher number and associated Terms and Conditions will be arriving in a separate ma. Please keep the voucher number and the Terms and Conditions since the number is required for redemption. It is also important for me to mention that no charge is assessed for reservations confirmed online at delta.com.

Mrs. P, I hope I have been able to resolve any concerns you and your companion have about our service. Your business is important to us and given the opportunity of serving you in the future, I am confident Delta will not only meet but exceed your expectations.

Sincerely,

Kevin M. Aston
Coordinator
Customer Care”

Mrs. P wrote back:

“From:
Date: January 27, 2010 1:38:55 PM PST
To: Customer Care
Cc: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re: SAN/Reply from Delta Air Lines – Customer Care (KMM31216375I120L0KM)

Dear Mr. Aston,

While I appreciate your condolences, I am afraid a $50.00 voucher does not compensate for the inconvenience and emotional distress this problem had compounded with on an already distressing situation. Fifty dollars barely covers the expense to check in baggage with your airways.

Please be reminded, because of a clerical error on Delta’s part, our tickets not only increased by roughly $750-ish (the original tickets were around $1200… the new ones came to right under $2000) we had waited at least 1.5 hours to even find out where/when the problem occurred (Delta’s employee being responsible) and an additional wait for that flight when, obviously, time was of the essence. I cannot even begin to convey exactly how much more distraught checking in was for me because of this, as well as the anxiety that mounted because, not only of the delay, but the drastic increase of price of the tickets. Tickets that I have had to reimburse/pay for…

I am not a person financially well off and the ticket prices were exorbitant enough because they were last minute. I would have hoped that the staff at Delta would have taken this into greater consideration on the pricing of the second tickets; at the very LEAST, Delta should have matched the price of the original tickets.

What I am trying to convey is, although I appreciate your attempt at compensation, the situation, in my opinion, has not been resolved satisfactorily. I hope the next attempt, if there is one and I hope there is, will restore my confidence in your airline and its’ values. I truly would hate to leave Delta for my travel needs but I will do so to find an airline that not only has good flight schedules, airplanes, pilots, etc. but an airline with quality of customer service, basic sense and compassion for their clientele.

I have enclosed the documents I received from Delta, including the original confirmation of the first tickets as well as the additional alternate tickets I had purchased. Please review these and notate the difference in flight times as well as the booking fees incurred.

Honestly, I do not feel that I am being unreasonable in my appeal. I look forward to your reply and hope this will be resolved.

Regards,
Mrs. P”

For the first time in 11 months, homebuyers gained some negotiating power in December.

Zillow.com’s measure of discounts off list price creeped up from 2.6% to 2.7%, saving homebuyers an additional $80 on average.

The rise in negotiating power is a sign that demand does not easily support the market comeback.

National sentiment is still of the view that that home prices will fall.

Homebuyer negotiating power is highest in Florida and the Northeast, where homebuyers should plan to lowball like hell (from Zillow.com):

On the other hand, there’s a growing seller’s market in places that saw high foreclosures re-sales, which are now perceived as undervalued. Namely, So-Cal:

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See Also:

• Goldman Studies 24 Housing Busts: Recoveries Always Weak, But Stocks Go Up Regardless
• Is Your City STILL In The Housing Market Gutter?
• Rosenberg: Housing Is In A Depression, And It’s Already Double-Dipping

Filed under: Sedan, Performance, Europe, BMW, Luxury

Problem: BMW will not make a M7. Despite making the M5 Wagon and the X6 M, the boys from Bavaria want no part of the Mercedes-Benz S63 AMG, S65 AMG, Audi S8, (soon) Jaguar XJR, Porsche Panamera Turbo or Bentley Flying Spur Speed market. Odd, yes, especially from the company that discovered a new segment between the 5 Series wagon and the X5. Anyhow, no M7 for you.

Solution: the Alpina B7, as its an M7 in everything but name. Some of you might want to argue the point that no way is the Alpina B7 good enough to wear a vaunted M badge. To which we say… you might have a point. So think of it as the 750CSI. Either way, this here new Alpina B7 is going to be a pretty worthy competitor to all them big, fancy super sedans up above. Here’s why.

From the outside the changes include front and rear fascias and spoilers that not only set the B7 apart from lesser 7 Series but are functional. The front spoiler provides 30% more downforce while the rear tacks on an additional 15%. Not only that, but the front spoiler provides specific cooling to new transmission and oil coolers. Also impossible to miss are the 20-spoke, 21-inch Alpina wheels. Inside nearly every surface gets covered with hand-stitched “Lavalina” leather (whatever that might be) and Alpina badges. The areas not swathed in Lavalina get treated with Alcantara. There’s also a heated steering wheel and illuminated blue Aplina door sills.

Of course, what’s underneath matters most. Specifically the 4.4-liter twin-turbo V8 gets pumped up to 500 horsepower and 516 pound-feet of torque (as opposed to the 750i’s 400 hp and 450 pounds of twist). The press release notes that all that torque is, “available across an unusually broad engine range, from 3,000 to 4,750 rpm,” which is either wool-over-the-eyes PR hype, or a typo. We’ll go with typo, as the regular strength 750i makes its 450 pound-feet from 1,800 to 4,500 rpm. Either way, the Alpina B7 can hit 60 mph in 4.5 seconds. And now, the kicker: the short wheelbase B7 costs $122,875 and the extended wheelbase B7 will set you back $126,775. Both prices are before the $875 destination fee. Press release after the jump.

[Source: BMW]

Continue reading 2011 BMW Alpina B7 comes in two spicy, pricy flavors

2011 BMW Alpina B7 comes in two spicy, pricy flavors originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you to make some improvements to Apple’s iPad. Some of these entries are definite improvements. Others? Uh, not so much.

First Place—Ron Cassel
Second Place—Jay Goebel
Third Place—Ken Grey

A game the size of Final Fantasy XIII has been bound to come on multiple discs for the Xbox 360 incarnation, and we’ve now learned just how many discs will be included. After online rental service GameFly listed it with three DVDs last night, Square Enix officially confirmed the news to VG247. The game will consist of two disc swaps, so it seems the content on the three DVDs will follow in regular sequence. The PlayStation 3 version is still set to come on one Blu-Ray disc.

While it may ignite fights among console loyalists, this isn’t terribly surprising. We’ve known three discs was the target since August, and to our own eyes it looks just as smooth as the PS3 version. Most 360 RPGs have required multiple discs, including the recently released Mass Effect 2, and it hasn’t harmed their reputation. It might bother some people to get up and swap discs every 10-20 hours, but as long as the game runs well, we doubt too many will complain.

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Back in May and June of 09 respectively, both Wal-Mart and Best Buy — two of the biggest videogame-selling retail chains in the nation — began experimenting with used games sales by using automated kiosks for consumers to trade-in titles and receive credit card or store credit. And now only a month into 2010, both experiments are over as kiosk-provider e-Play has closed its doors.

The reason for e-Play’s shut down isn’t clear, as their website offers the less-than-informative message, “e-Play, LLC has suspended operations. Thank you to all our customers.” But according to IndustryGamers, analysts never expected Wal-Mart’s or Best Buy’s experiments to make much of a dent in the used games market, and apparently that turned out to be the case. Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia called their business “underwhelming,” and said the kiosks would be turned off and “removed from the locations over the next few weeks.”

So does this mean Wal-Mart and Best Buy are done with the used games market for good? Hard to say, but as Bhatia noted, “it is clear the used games business is not an easy one to execute.”

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