Author: Serkadis

ScanLife is a free app for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry, plus Symbian and Java phones too. It turns a camera-equipped phone into a barcode scanner for two-dimensional barcode tages (as opposed to the one-dimensional UPC barcodes on nearly everything you buy) made to the specs of ScanLife’s’ maker, Scanbuy. The New York City-based company, founded in 2000, has convinced print publications Esquire, InStyle, Entertainment Weekly and Star to include its barcodes on their pages.

Esquire’s March issue, for example, will carry ScanLife barcodes in a feature titled “The Esquire Collection: The 30 items a man needs to get through life.”  Entertainment Weekly and Star will place the barcodes on ad pages instead of editorial content. A competing product, Snipp, appears in ESPN magazine and People StyleWatch.

Scanbuy, which previously raised $21 million through a series of secretive funding rounds that didn’t disclose the lenders, now has gone the other way: They’ve announced funding from mobile gadget megacompany Motorola, but won’t say how much. The funding will be used to further develop

The managing director of Motorola Ventures, Reese Schroeder, said in a prepared statement, “The camera quality, display capability and processing power of today’s smartphones, coupled with advanced network speeds, now enable consumers and the advertising community to fully take advantage of mobile barcode technology. Motorola … believes that Scanbuy has the best combination of technology and strong ecosystem partners in its space.”

The short video below shows ScanLife barcodes in action.

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VentureBeat alumnus MG Siegler has posted mockup screenshots and video of a prototype Google tablet running the company’s Chrome OS operating system. Chrome OS basically boots Linux and then launches Google’s Chrome browser. The user does everything within the browser.

Google’s tablet may look like an iPad, but the browser-only operation is a big difference from Apple’s onboard applications and downloadable apps. Will Google’s’ tablet support Android apps? Quite probably not, because Chrome OS is not based on the same operating system source code as Android.

In the video below, a pair of cartoon hands operates a touchscreen the size of a desktop display, not a 9.7″ portable tablet.

With Google tablets surely on the way, JooJoo pledging to ship this month, and Apple now rumored — what, did you think we were done with the Apple rumors? — to be developing a bigger tablet that runs Mac OS X rather than the iPhone operating system, it seems touchscreen devices are finally becoming a mainstream product. I generally avoid predictions, but I’ll offer my take on tablets: Like flat-panel monitors, they’ll be seen as exotic items for a couple of years. But at some point in the future, we’ll look around and realize they’re everywhere.

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Filed under: LA Auto Show, Convertible, Coupe, Sedan, Wagon, Cadillac, Rumormill, Luxury

Cadillac is in the midst of a renaissance. Again. Still. The 2008 CTS paved the way, the Converj is set to follow, and the XTS is set to put the stodgy old Seville and Deville to rest. But Caddy’s also preparing to launch an attack on the entry-level end of the luxury market. And according to word on the street, it’ll be a full-on assault.

When the “small” Cadillac model dubbed ATS debuts for 2012 – the smart money’s on the Los Angeles Auto Show in December – it’ll be spearheaded by a four-door sedan, targeting the likes of the BMW 3 Series and Infiniti G37. But like the offerings from BMW and Infiniti, the sedan won’t be the end of the story. According to an inside source speaking to Inside Line, the ATS will also breed a wagon, a coupe and a convertible.

Whether the convertible will use a folding metal roof or a conventional rag top remains to be decided, but whatever form it takes, one thing’s for sure: General Motors remains very serious about Cadillac, and so should the competition.

[Source: Inside Line]

Rumormill: Forthcoming Cadillac ATS to breed sedan, wagon, coupe, convertible originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Beyoncé Knowles has lit a media bonfire around the launch of her first fragrance. Fueled by Sunday evening appearances on “60 Minutes” and the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards — where Knowles picked up a record six awards, making her the most celebrated female artist at a single Grammys — the media swelter thrown around by Beyoncé Heat, the entertainer’s debut fragrance, will be felt well beyond this week. The entertainer will make an appearance at Macy’s Herald Square at 5 p.m. Wednesday. She is due to appear on the “Today” show Friday and on “The Tyra Banks Show” Feb. 15.

But the main onslaught is scheduled for tonight, when Knowles’ fragrance licensee, Coty Inc., will illuminate much of Union Square Park with flickering projections of flames, steam and fog onto trees and the outside of 15 Union Square, where the launch party will be held. The building is the site of the original Tiffany’s and is being renovated. On the building’s spa level, Coty chief executive officer Bernd Beetz will make the main fragrance presentation, followed by Stephen Mormoris, senior vice president of global beauty in the Coty Beauty division, who will unveil the advertising. His presentation is expected to culminate with the star herself appearing out of the advertising.

An after party is scheduled to follow upstairs with various aspects of the fragrance projects being discussed and dramatized in different rooms. Photographer Michael Thompson and Trey Laird will talk about the ad campaign in one room, while perfumers Claude Dir and Olivier Gillotin of Givaudan will talk about the fragrance in another. Packaging designer Lutz Hermann will discuss the bottle design in another room decorated with flacons, which will be bathed in red light. But the heart of the heat wave is expected to swell out of the fourth room, where Knowles’ sister, Solange, will be DJing.

Knowles will not lack for company. The guest list includes husband Jay-Z and friends Usher, Kanye West, Michelle Williams of Destiny’s Child, Iman, David Bowie, Mary J. Blige and Alicia Keys. Journalists, expected to number 120, have been invited from 40 countries.

On Wednesday afternoon, Macy’s is preparing to do some business even before Knowles makes her appearance. According to the plan, the first customers to purchase the Beyoncé Heat three-piece fragrance set for $122 will be given the chance to meet and pose for a photo with Knowles. Neither Coty nor the Knowles organization would talk numbers, but according to industry sources, 100,000 units of open stock have been shipped into the chain with 100,000 kits to make gift sets. Although the official launch was Monday, Macy’s started selling the fragrance two weeks ago, and it reportedly hit number one inside the chain.

Knowles can’t wait for her fans to get their hands on her scent. “I’m so happy with it,” she said in December during an exclusive interview with WWD. “I’ve been working on it for a while now. I was on tour for a year, and I have meet-and-greets with fans. I’ve never in my life gotten so many compliments. Coty has their own testing, but that was my testing! The fans loved it. They were like, ‘I love that, I’m getting that, why isn’t it out right now? I need it!’

“This was my first time starting from scratch, although I’ve worked with a few other fragrance projects,” said Knowles, who has also been the face of Tommy Hilfiger’s True Star and Giorgio Armani’s Diamonds. “Everything from the bottle design to the name and the ideas for the commercials — that’s me. When I commit to something, I do it 100 percent, and I’ve never had [creative control over a fragrance] until this project. I learned a lot of great things from the past — but I always asked myself, ‘If I could have my own scent, what would it be?’ I wasn’t worried about deadlines. It could have taken me three, four, however many years — this was my first fragrance, and I wanted to make sure that it was something I would love forever.”

A pesar de los altibajos, hace tiempo que me rendí a Perdidos y, como no podía ser de otro modo, tenía el cliente de bittorrent afinado y preparado para la ocasión: el estreno del primer episodio de la sexta temporada, con la confianza añadida de que mañana a mediodía estarían los subtítulos disponibles. Hacía años que no sentía esa urgencia por ver descargar una serie el día de su estreno.

Pero no sé si lo voy a hacer, no sé si habrá descarga de este comienzo del fin de Lost. La culpa no es de la ley Sinde, ni porque las campañas de imagen de las productoras hayan conseguido que interiorice algún complejo de culpabilidad “pirata”, lo he descartado por la promesa de que en Play Cuatro lo tendré disponible con una calidad aceptable, bajo demanda y en un tiempo razonable: una semana como explican en Vaya Tele. Si lo diesen desde el primer día no tendría dudas, escogería la opción de Cuatro y me olvidaría de archivos “fakes”, de problemas de sincronización de subtítulos y del lío de versiones y formatos. Aunque tenga algo de publicidad, al final se trata de competir con mejor experiencia de usuario. Donde si parece que darán la opción de verlo desde el primer día, de pago, es en Digital +. Si fuese cliente de la plataforma y estuviese disponible en alta definición, probablemente caería en la tentación.

Internet pone muy difícil el hacer tragar a los productos globales con los mercados locales. Con Perdidos se han acercado bastante a lo que debería ser la distribución de un contenido de este tipo. La pregunta es si, cuando el acceso online sea mayor que el directamente televisivo, los productos van a necesitar a agregadores como las cadenas de televisión.

Relacionado: Series globales, mercados locales. Caso FlashForward

Article Tags: Editorial

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) needs a top-down overhaul. So many revelations have been made recently about how the IPCC or its lead scientists have manipulated the data on global warming and worked behind the scenes to censor researchers who challenged the climate change orthodoxy, that the UN body no longer has any credibility.

The blows to the IPCC’s integrity have been so great that even Andrew Weaver — a Canadian climate scientist, prominent member of the IPCC, and himself an enthusiastic champion of the prevailing theory that human industrial activity is making the world hotter — has called for the resignation of the agency’s chairman, Indian economist Rajendra Pachauri. As Prof. Weaver told Canwest News Service last week, “the IPCC needs a fundamental shift” back to its origins as a clearinghouse for only the most iron-clad, peer-reviewed climate science.

On the other hand, even that move might be a futile gesture at this point. As December’s Copenhagen Earth summit showed us, the world’s leaders are in no mood to halt their countries’ carbon emissions, which means there is also little support for the IPCC’s other mission — finding ways to halt climate change.

Source: network.nationalpost.com

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AOL (AOL) reports Q4 earnings tomorrow; Citi analyst Mark Mahaney isn’t very excited.

Mark’s reiterated a “hold” on AOL, with a $29 price target.

He writes that AOL’s gross revenues will be down for the 16th consecutive quarter, “down 19% Y/Y vs. down 23% Y/Y in Q3 and down  23% in H1:09.”

Mark broke out AOL’s pros and cons.

Positives:

• Significant Internet Advertising secular growth opportunity;
• Focus on the $10B+ Local ‘Net Ad opportunity is differentiated;
• AOL still remains a top 5 U.S. Internet property in terms of users;
• Solid balance sheet with $100MM in net cash & generates $100MM in FCF per qtr;
• At approx 3.5X ’10 EV/EBITDA, valuation is the lowest of any Mid/Large Cap Internet Stock.

Negatives:

• Clearly deteriorating fundamentals, with EBITDA  down approximately 30% in ’09
• Broad and sig. market share losses – in terms
  of basic Internet usage, Display Advertising revenue, and Search queries
• A significant profit hole from the structural decline of its Subscriber business
• Substantial competitive risk;
• An unproven (@ AOL) management team. We would pick YHOO as our Value Buy.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• AOL To Hire 150 Engineers In Silicon Valley
• AT LAST!
• AOL Asks For 2,000 $50 Assignments On SXSW

Monopoly is celebrating its 75th Anniversary with a facelift. Hasbro, the makers of Monopoly, debuted the updated version at the 2010 Toy Fair in New York City last week. The classic board game isn’t really a board game anymore — it is being relaunched with a circular board, and in a sign of the times, with no cash. Monopoly now features a chip and pin credit card that has to be swiped on the central console. Gone, too, are the game’s classic metal playing pieces. They’ve been replaced with engraved plastic slabs.

The new Monopoly arrives in stores later this year.

Spotted@

We’ve seen a black-and-white Iron Man MacBook decal before, but this full-color one is much more striking. Although you’ve gotta be OK with equating Apple’s logo with the powers of a superhero. Fanboys. Buy one here: [Etsy via Geeky Gadgets]

Apple has just released an iPhone firmware update in iPhone OS 3.1.3. It’s basically a big fix release, focusing on:

• Improving accuracy of reported battery level on iPhone 3GS
• Resolves issues where third-party apps would not launch
• Fixes bug that may cause an app to crash when using Japanese Kana keyboard

Doesn’t seem like a huge deal, but for those of you who like your iPhone to be fresh, there you have it.

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iphone,
iphone 3.1.3,
iphone 3.1.3 firmware,
iphone 3g,
iphone 3gs,
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iphone os 3.1.3,
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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.

Sponsor

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 launguages 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.

We will update this post as news continues to break.

Discuss

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Cash-strapped Americans actually managed to drink more alcohol in 2009, but merely switched down to cheaper forms in order to adjust themselves to the New Normal of economic hardship.

Tequila had a great year, leading the cheap-booze charge with 21% year over year sales growth.

Moreover, the economic downturn may have actually been a boon for the spirits industry, since it appears to have reversed a trend whereby Americans were switching to beer from liquor.

Which makes sense, since liquor is the cheapest way to inebriate yourself:

AP:

Cressy said the fact that people were still drinking more spirits bodes well for the industry, still recovering from a long decline from the 1980s through the mid-’90s, when liquor sales fell by a third as drinkers turned to beer. Since then, an ever-increasing array of expensive liquors have fueled rapid growth.

The industry’s goal to keep people drinking spirits — no matter the price — and it can then get them to pay for higher-priced drinks when the economy recovers. Most major liquor manufacturers make brands in a variety of price ranges.

…

Matt McCluskey, a 28-year-old researcher in Santa Monica, Calif., started buying most of his alcohol at Costco, trying to save money by buying bigger bottles. Now he spends $36 for 1.75 liters of Maker’s Mark bourbon, rather than $25 for less than half that at his local liquor store.

“It’s a lot harder to pour. That’s the only drawback,” he said.

Read more here >

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See Also:

• CHART OF THE DAY: Ohio’s Unemployed Masses Are Getting Hammered Like Never Before
• Robert Reich: The Voters Are Firing Obama Because He’s Flopped On The Economy
• CHART OF THE DAY: Obama’s Only Hope Is To Be Ronald Reagan

A cringe-worthy segment on NPR this morning about the Teabaggers highlighted Liberty Belle (Keli Carender), a Seattle-based wingnut who gained notoriety for her childish theatrics at one of those infamous health care town halls over the summer.

Carender is at a microphone, holding up a $20 bill, challenging Democratic Congressman Norm Dicks of Washington to come get it.

“You come and take this $20 from me,” Carender said, “and take it as a down payment for the health care plan!”

Months later, that clip still makes Carender smile.

“I tried to boil down in essence what makes me so angry about it,” Carender says. “And it was this idea that he and other people decide what the needs are in society. They get to decide. But in order to fund those things, they have to take from some people in order to give to the other people.”

On Carender’s blog, among the books she recommends (along with Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism) is the US Constitution. But it’s pretty clear that Carender’s never actually read the Constitution herself, because Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 clearly states,

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.

Translated in Teabagger that means, “other people get to decide what the needs are in society and take your money to fund it.”

Why do Teabaggers hate the Constitution?

The last stop in our series of better file management through ideas based on smart folders brings us to iTunes, iPhoto and Aperture. All of these apps provide support for organizing your files similar to Address Book and Mail. The beauty of “smart” file management, of course, is once you have defined the frameworks for the album, folder or playlist, new content will automatically fall in place if it meets your rules.

iTunes

The first time you noticed a smart “anything with a purple icon” was probably in iTunes. Besides OS X, iTunes is the only piece of software to ship with several built-in smart items. You’ve seen them before, specifically the 90’s Music, Classical Music and Recently Played playlists, to name a few. If you’ve read our previous articles, you know how those work now (and can just right click them to edit their criteria).

But when it comes to iTunes, one thing that invariably also comes to mind is an iPod. If you have at least one iPod, chances are you probably have several iPods. As such, you can set each iPod to sync specific music, playlists or even smart playlists. But since oftentimes our music libraries are larger than the capacity of our iPods, Apple has built in a few unique twists in smart playlist support for iTunes to “shuffle things up.” Here’s a few ideas to get some unique use out of them. (Keep in mind, you can sync multiple playlists, allowing you to mix and match some of these unique smart playlists with your own favorite content.)

Random Tunes

If you have a small iPod, such as an iPod shuffle, you might try a smart playlist that just pulls a random sampling of your music.

Music I Never Listen To

As Apple (perhaps secretly?) wants iTunes to become the Google of your media collection, it has built in tracking of how often you listen to your content. You could create a playlist that showed you all items with a play count of less than 1 for a jam list of music you’ve never heard.

My Top 10

If you are one to tag your songs with star ratings, you could create a playlist of your all time 10 best tunes, based on rating and frequency of play.

iPhoto

The iPhoto equivalent is, as you might have guessed, called Smart Albums. Similar to iTunes, iPhoto provides support for specialized criteria for searching, including criteria based on camera settings and support for Faces and Places. Here’s some ideas for unique iPhoto smart albums.

Group Shot

Keeping track of family photos is easy with faces. If you want to easily see all the photos from your own family, create a smart album that shows pictures based on the faces of any of your family members. (Make sure to set this one to “match any” instead of “match all.”)

European Vacation

In addition to tagging your photos by location (or GPS, if your camera is equipped), you could create a smart album that automatically grouped any photos taken in the countries you visited.

Those Pesky Movies

Newer cameras support the ability to record film, and for lack of a better place to store them, iPhoto imports them right along with your photos. But they’re all mixed up in albums and there’s no simple way to pick them apart. Just create a smart album that looks for the usual video extensions in any text. This should find them by their filename and let you view them all in one place.

Holiday Photos

If you have lots of family and friends who all love to take and share photos, you could create a smart album based on the date photos were taken. For instance, all photos that are in the range of December 20 through December 28 are likely my holiday photos. As more people send you their photos from the event, provided their camera tagged them with the correct date, they will automatically populate the album.

Aperture

Apple’s high-end photo management application also takes advantage of smart file management. Similar to iPhoto, you can use criteria based on EXIF metadata (aperture, ISO, shutter speed, etc.). Despite the fact that Aperture doesn’t support Faces and Places like iPhoto, there are a number of additional options that can make photo management even easier.

A word of caution with Aperture, however. When creating a smart album, Aperture will only search the root level of the location where you store the album. For instance, if I’m viewing my entire library and create one there, it’ll search all photos. If I am in a particular project, however, the smart album will only search photos within that project. As usual, remember that deleting a photo in your library will also delete it from the smart album. You’re just “reorganizing” the same content with smart albums and not actually making a duplicate. (This applies to all smart items: folders, albums, playlists, etc.)

Missing Captions & Credit

Aperture provides extensive support for IPTC data (the metadata you add to your photos after the camera is done with them). You can use this to create albums that show which of your photos are missing captions or copyright information, should you wish to make sure all of your photos are properly tagged.

Need the Ratings

If you’re a photographer who loves to use Apple’s star system to rate your photos, consider a smart album that is based on showing you photos without a rating. It’s a quick and easy way to find any of those photos that slip through the cracks.

Apple’s own apps are certainly not the only to take advantage of “smart” organization. 1Password and NewsFire are just two examples of a growing breed of third-party applications that really harness the power of OS X’s database infrastructure to deliver content organized on the fly by your rules. If you’ve found interesting uses of smart playlists in iTunes or Smart Albums in Aperture or iPhoto, share them with us below.

Earlier this month, Thomas Friedman wrote a column slamming Jim Chanos’s bear case on China.

It included the quintessentially awesome Friedman quote

First, a simple rule of investing that has always served me well: Never short a country with $2 trillion in foreign currency reserves.

We jabbed at the column here, but for a very serious, in-depth rebuttal, you ought to read this post from Peking University professor Michael Pettis.

Here’s a sample:

In response to Chanos’ claim Friedman made a number of very questionable statements about China.  These are matters of dispute and although I think they are completely wrong, they are at least defensible.  For example he says its true that there may have been risks of bubbles.  ”In the last few days, though, China’s central bank has started edging up interest rates and raising the proportion of deposits that banks must set aside as reserves — precisely to head off inflation and take some air out of any asset bubbles.” 

Really?  I think you have to be a tad credulous to believe that the RMB 7.5 trillion lending target for 2010 and the slightly higher interest rates represents taking air out of the asset bubble.  I would argue that they simply mean that the astonishing rate at which they were pumping air into the bubble has moderated slightly, to merely excessive.

He also says:

Now take all this infrastructure and mix it together with 27 million students in technical colleges and universities — the most in the world. With just the normal distribution of brains, that’s going to bring a lot of brainpower to the market, or, as Bill Gates once said to me: “In China, when you’re one-in-a-million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.”

Aside from perhaps his overestimating the quality of the education system, this is very bad statistics, and perhaps shows how easily we can get intellectually overwhelmed by large numbers.  If China indeed has the same distribution of geniuses, or talent, as other countries, the fact that it has so many people won’t make it richer (and what about India?).  After all if you cut China into four countries, each country will have only one-fourth the number of geniuses.  Does that really mean that the four countries together are stupider?

This is also an incredibly important point on the forex reserves question:

The idea that massive levels of reserves are a guarantor of economic stability is, in other words, based on a profound misunderstanding both of history and of the nature of reserves.  Reserves of course are not useless as an enhancer of financial stability, but their use is for very specific forms of instability.  Having large amounts of reserves relative to external claims protects countries from external debt crises and from currency crises.

Great, but neither Chanos, nor even the most pessimistic Sino-analyst, has ever said that these are the kinds of risks China faces today, any more than they were the risks faced by the US in the late 1920s or Japan in the late 1980s.  The risks that China faces today (and the US in the late 1920s and Japan in the late 1980s) is of excessive domestic liquidity having fueled asset and capacity bubbles, the latter requiring the uninterrupted ability of foreign countries to absorb via large and growing trade deficits.  These risks include an explosion in domestic government debt directly and contingently through the banking system.

Definitely read the whole post >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Thomas Friedman Tries To Give Short-Selling Advice To Jim Chanos
• Chinese Columnist Accuses Jim Chanos Of Sabotaging The Nation’s Mobile Phone System
• Jim Chanos: Actually, We’re Not Betting Against China

UPS has pledged to fix the problem with their drivers lofting Ryan’s packages through the air and over the fence to smash on the concrete. After Ryan’s complaint went up, UPS contacted Consumerist, and we put them in touch with Ryan. They are also apparently going to work on the whole leaving packages to soak in the rain thing. Hurray.

PREVIOUSLY: UPS Insists On Chucking My Packages Over The Fence

And we were amazed by reports that Stephen Brill actually expected 10% to 15% of newspaper readers to pay up for the paywall he’s building for various newspapers (still none confirmed, as far as we know). A reporter over at Slate seems to have taken things to a new level. John points us to the back of the envelope analysis/calculation of the NY Times’ decision to put up a paywall that appears to have some highly questionable assumptions. The biggest one is that 66% of readers will pay. Yes, 66%. Oddly, this statement comes right after the reporter’s claim that, “a large percentage” of readers probably wouldn’t pay — but he seems to assume that “large percentage” is just 33%:

First of all, a large percentage of these readers land on these sites though search engines, and therefore are not likely to consume a lot of pages. Such visitors, about a third of the total audience, must be removed from the pool of readers likely to pay for content.

How much would people pay? According to a Boston Consulting Group survey, readers would agree to pay $3 per month on average. Interestingly enough, the BCG found the upper limit to be $6 for the “heavy print consumers” category.

Coming back to the Washington Post, using the remaining 66 percent of total users likely to pay for content (7.34 million unique views/month), the expected revenue could be considerable.

I’d argue that getting even 5% to pay, as one recent study suggested, may be wildly optimistic. 66% is downright delusional. While the pricing is clearly much higher, you would think that the recent example of Newsday getting a grand total of 35 subscribers to its paywall would be telling. So, it’s difficult to take the rest of the analysis seriously, when it kicks off with such a bizarre assumption.

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You just knew that Mosspuppet would get the first exclusive with Jobspuppet. Wide-ranging? Nah. But if you were curious how Jobs-o really feels about the iPad and Apple fanboys, this should clear things up nicely. [Mosspuppet]

Justin Mentell, an actor best known for his role on the now-defunct TV drama Boston Legal, has died, The Wisconsin State-Journal said Tuesday. Officials with The Iowa County, Wisconsin Sheriff’s Department say Mentell, 27, was killed early Monday, after his SUV went down an embankment off Highway 39 near Blanchardville and plowed into two trees.

The crash was reported by a passerby around 8:30 AM. Police says Mentell — a former member of the US Junior National Speedskating team — wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

Mentell appeared in the 1999 Disney movie G-Force before going on to appear alongside William Shatner and James Spader on Boston Legal from 2005-2006.