Author: Serkadis

“It’s the hyperlink in the physical world” says a Microsoft PR man, giving us the most succinct definition of what Redmond’s Tag initiative is all about. Having annouced its alternative take on the barcode at CES 2009, Microsoft has been working behind the scenes on proliferating the use of these multicolored Tags, which are designed to be snapped by nearby cameraphones. Once the pattern is recognized, you can obtain digital content directly on your phone — whether it be a website link, YouTube video, or whatever — and the uses are pretty much limitless: business cards, product packaging, magazines, anything that can benefit from supplemental online content and has a flat surface is a candidate to be Tagged. Such is the theory anyhow, and Microsoft’s doing all it can to make it happen, with software for most mobile platforms, including the iPhone. Video demonstration after the break.

Continue reading Microsoft Tag makes a video appearance, still seeking popularity

Microsoft Tag makes a video appearance, still seeking popularity originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You’ll say the whole Robot Apocalypse meme is played out. We say it’s your lack of focus that’ll eventually be the downfall of society. Gurus at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne have been working on “evolving robots” for quite some time, but the latest breakthrough is easily the most astounding (and in turn, terrifying) of all. According to new research that was just made public, a gaggle of robots programmed to use Darwinian selection in order to learn, evolve and mutate have now successfully moved sans collisions through a maze and helped each other push tokens around in order to achieve a common goal. Moreover, some of the creatures even displayed early signs of a predatory-prey relationship, which effectively assures mankind that these cute little learners will one day assimilate to rule the world however they please. Keep laughing if you must — it’ll probably make the painful sting of reality a bit easier to take when Doomsday rolls around.

Continue reading Evolving robots navigate a maze, help each other, plot descruction of mankind

Evolving robots navigate a maze, help each other, plot descruction of mankind originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of the things that was abundantly clear in the high energy physics sessions at Physics@FOM is that everyone is very excited. The LHC is ready to roll later this winter, the Tevatron is putting out data like… well, a machine, and there is just so much stuff waiting around the corner. It almost feels as if you’re among kids that are about to be given the keys to a candy store.

I only attended three talks in this session: an update on the ATLAS detector at the LHC, preliminary results from the Tevatron’s search for the Higgs boson, and a talk introducing a new way to go from a theoretician’s idea to experimental data. Individually, these talks are fairly unimportant, but together they are pretty exciting.

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The guidos and guidettes of MTV’s Jersey Shore are all expected back for the show’s next season — but there’s still some confusion about where the series will be set. The New York Post claims the troupe could be headed for New York’s Hamptons for season 2, while The Chicago Sun-Times has South Beach Miami as the most likely next stop for Snooki & The Crew.

What city would you like to see host the second season of Jersey Shore?

Filed under: Motorsports

Danica is doing the dozen – NASCAR races, that is. The only question now is which dozen she’ll be doing. While she’s slated to run a pre-season ARCA race on February 6, it isn’t clear whether she’ll do the season opener at Daytona the following week. The concern is that she might not be ready for one of the most challenging races in the series for her first outing, and the decision will be made after the ARCA race.

Automobile says Danica will be focused on IndyCar from February to June and is expected to sit out most of the 15 races that follow Daytona, through June 26. With 35 races in total this year, Danica will have room to fit those 12 in among the 19 remaining, beginning with Daytona again on July 2.

However, according to an Associated Press report Danica’s 12 races have already been selected, and they’ll include marquee tracks like Dover, Charlotte, New Hampshire, and Homestead-Miami. Danica said she wants “quality seat time at a variety of facilities,” which could be a way of saying she wants to properly prep herself for campaigning in 2011.

[Source: Automobile]

Confirmed: Danica Patrick scheduled for 12 NASCAR races, Daytona still a maybe originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Considered by some one of the world’s greatest freestyle motocross production, the Nuclear Cowboyz show will start airing on Fuel TV, Feld Motor Sports announced. The 30-minute Nuclear Cowboyz: Behind the Scenes show has it all, from the Nuclear Cowgirlz dance tryouts in Los Angeles, to the two weeks rehearsals at the LA Sports Arena, where the tour was assembled.

The tour kicked off on January 2nd at Pittsburgh’s Mellon Arena, with some of world’s greatest FMX riders performing to a scripted… (read more)

The brand image is very important in car sales, so the people from the marketing department keep on working until things are in place; just like it happened at Ford Performance Vehicles Australia, who’s new appointed official Ambassador is racing legend Allan Moffat.

Moffat, who will represent FPV at future events throughout 2010, is a four-time Bathurst winner. His relationship with the Ford brand started in the late ’60s, when Moffat became a factory team driver. The high point of Allan’s h… (read more)

Filed under: Features, Odds and ends

You know, at first I wasn’t so impressed with the iPad, but the more I thought about the ways in which you can use it, the more excited I got. As a piece of leisure technology – something you just have laying around your living room like a newspaper – it’s a lot more user friendly than a laptop or an iPhone.

However, I don’t think the iPad is revolutionary. By now we’re well familiar with multi-touch devices and apps stores. And let’s face it, ebooks are nothing new. The iBooks app isn’t going to be breaking any ground, but you know what would? An iMag store.

Sure, there’s sites like emagazines.com that offer browser-based magazines, but there’s no one universal storefront for emagazines that’s easy to use. Even Zinio doesn’t make the emagazine buying experience as easy or pleasurable as buy a song from the iTunes store. Can you imaging what an iMag app might be like? Bjørn Rybakken, creative director at Tangram Design, an Oslo based design agency, sent me these mock-ups (and you guys know how I love mock-ups) which got me thinking what the iMag store might be like.

Now, before someone stops me and says “But the Kindle does magazines…” It does, but not how magazines should be done. In my first journalism class we learned of how in the early part of the 20th century (I think the year was 1913, but can’t be sure – sorry professor), the editors at National Geographic were putting the finishing touches on an issue that was a day away from going to press when they discovered that they came up short in the articles department that month. In a last-ditch attempt to fill the space the editor-in-chief decided to publish eleven full-page photographs a journalist had sent him. Before that issue, National Geographic (like all magazines of the day) had been what we would consider a journal – a lot of text articles with few photographs. When the issue hit newsstands, the editor-in-chief was sure the publishers would fire him. They didn’t. That issue turned out to be their best-selling issue since the publication started in 1888. People loved the photos and since then, National Geographic has become synonymous with iconic photography and every other magazine in the world has used photography as a way to enhance and highlight their pages. Magazines aren’t like books. Magazines rely heavily on photography, charts, sidebars, page-bleeds, and even cartoons. E-ink readers like the Kindle just can’t give you the magazine experience that a full-color display can.

An iMag store could allow you to find and purchase magazines from all over the world, in any language. You could search by title, subject, or even author (a cool search feature because most authors write articles for many magazines). Indie magazine publishers would also now have a wider distribution network – and a chance at a wider audience. The magazines could feature videos in the articles, live polls, and even integrated chat rooms discussing the current article.

iMag store pricing? Yearly magazine subscriptions for $9.99. Single issues for 99 cents. There’s been countless times I would have liked to buy a magazine I don’t normally read off the newsstand, but the $4.99 cover price kept me from doing so. However, if I could get that same magazine for 99 cents instantly in electronic form, I’d buy it in a heartbeat – especially if they were all as slick as this.

Existing emagazine sites charge between $9.99 and $34.99 per title for an annual magazine subscription. I think most publishers would agree to a $9.99 price through an iPad iMag store if they could supplement the lower pricing with revenue generated from in-page dynamic advertising (it’s 2015 and you decide to peruse a 2014 issue of MacWorld: the ads in the iMag MacWorld magazine have updated to advertise the current 2015 iCar) – especially if the forecasts are correct that there will be 12 million iPads in homes across the world by the end of 2011. Not to mention 12 million potential iPad customers is a hell of a way to get their subscription rates up.

But the best thing about an iPad iMag store? No more of those annoying magazine subscription cards falling all over your lap.

TUAWWhere’s the iMag store? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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To Our Clients, Colleagues and Friends,

• Last week we listed all those people you wouldn’t want to see naked, and we accidentally listed Allan Greenspan as Allan Greenberg. Regardless, the response was overwhelming.  Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank were big winners (or losers), Nixon got lots of thumbs down, and surprisingly, no one objected to the idea of seeing Joe Biden getting out of the shower. Seven people wrote in Barbara Bush, three wrote in Dick Cheney, and Hillary Clinton got two write-ins. Many wrote us that it made them nauseous just thinking about this topic.
• Out of sheer boredom, we took eight of the larger banks and divided their current stock price by their 52-week low.  The idea was to see what multiple they had recovered by.  As an example, the Bank of America is currently trading at $15.41, so we divided that by its 52-week low of $2.53 and see that it’s up 6.09 times since bottoming out.

12.15  Fifth Third	3.35  Citigroup
6.09  Bank of America	3.09  U.S. Bank
4.13  Suntrust	3.00  Comerica
3.65  Wells Fargo	2.64  JP Morgan Chase

How’d you liked to have put $10,000 into Fifth Third stock when it bottomed out at $1.01? Today, with the stock at $12.28, that $10,000 would be worth $121,000. 

• If you’re a bit worried about Flagstar, find something else to worry about. They just raised $300 million of new capital and plan to double that. And their supervisory agreement with the OTS was one of the mildest ones we’ve seen.

• Some of you may remember Harmon Killebrew as a charter member the All Ugly Team, but we remember him for his power.  He hit 573 career home runs, was fifth on the all-time list when retired, hit 40 or more home runs eight different times, and batted in over 100 runs nine times. He led the league in homers six times, was an 11-time All Star, and get this, he didn’t get into the Baseball Hall of Fame until his fourth year of eligibility.  Can anyone explain that??
• If you want to know almost everything there is to know about a given bank, their FDIC Call Report is the place to look.  Banks have 45 days from the end of each quarter to file them.  Check out http://www2.fdic.gov/idasp/main_bankfind.asp  The website is a bit clunky at first, and the financials are not necessarily in a format you’re used to, but it’s worth it.

• There have always been people worried that FNMA and Freddie Mac would one day replace the middleman lender and deal directly with the borrower. While we never thought this was a real possibility, the paranoid among you will get freaked out to learn that these two entities are now going direct to borrowers to modify loans, by-passing servicers.  They’ll initially work through non-profits but also plan to open their own offices to deal with borrowers.
• People always talk about this or that movie being the all time biggest hit.  Here are the movies with the biggest domestic gross sales adjusted for inflation:

1,    $1.485 bill.     Gone with the Wind

2.    $1.309 bill.     Star Wars

3.    $1.046 bill.     The Sound of Music

4.    $1.042 bill.     ET

5.    $  962 mill.     The Ten Commandments

6.    $  943 mill.     Titanic

7.    $  960 mill.      Jaws

8.    $  900 mill.      Dr. Zhivago

9.    $  810 mill.      Snow White

10.  $  750 mill.      101 Dalmatians

Avatar is #26 on this list, but it’s brought in $560 million and is still drawing big crowds. Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and 101Dalmatians (1961) still generate millions every year for Disney, and it’s interesting that not one blockbuster came out of the 40’s. The Ten Commandments (1956) is still watchable, and except for The Sound of Music (1965), they all are.

• We predict at least 10-20 of you will write us that we’re totally wrong about Sound of Music. They will claim that it is actually the best movie ever made.
• And speaking of adjusting for inflation, let’s talk about Roger Maris.  In 1960 he was the American League MVP, hitting 39 home runs with 112 RBI’s and having a .283 average. In 1961 he signed a one-year contract for $36,000.  Even adjusting for inflation, that’s still peanuts, especially for the MVP.
• If you’re a parent waiting for those college acceptance letters to arrive, go rent Orange County . This just might be one of the ten funniest movies ever made. The basic story has to do with a high school senior trying to get into Stanford.                            

• We’re 100% in favor of a flat tax where there are no deductions, everyone pays the same rate, and tax returns are one page long. Still, we really object to people saying we’re over-taxed.  When Pres.  Kennedy came into office, the top marginal rate was 91%.  His tax cuts took the top rate down to 70%, and they stayed there till Reagan brought them down to the 30-35% range.  So when people complain that we’re over-taxed, they just don’t know their history. 
• The person at FNMA in charge of re-purchases is one Maria Brewster. If you sold fraudulent loans to FNMA, she’s  probably your worst nightmare.  
• There is a body of thought that the radiation associated with long-term cell-phone use can cause brain cancer, but a recent study showed that it appears to protect against and reverse Alzheimer’s-like symptoms in rats.  Go figure.
• A friend suggested we watch Jersey Shore , and we have one simple question:  Who exactly are these people, and what planet did they come from?
• Having taught Finance there many years ago, Saint Mary’s College of California is a favorite of ours, and their Galloping Gael’s basketball team is one we always root for.  They routinely win 23-24 games a year but rarely get invited to the NCAA playoffs because they usually come in 2^nd behind Gonzaga.  So far, Saint Mary’s is 19-3 to Gonzaga’s 17-4.  By the way, this tiny Bay Area school was once a national football power, routinely going to the Rose Bowl and other major bowls in the 20’s and 30’s.
  
• Saint Mary’s is run by the Christian Brothers Order, and while they may not have the quite the same scholarly reputation as the Jesuits, they were sure a lot of fun.  They owned a huge winery, and as a result, there was a ton of wine at the faculty lunches, and the Brothers didn’t mind drinking their share. At Christmas, college President Brother Mel gave each faculty member a case of really great wine plus a case of Christian Brothers Brandy as well.  How cool was that?
• We have an idea for an interesting public opinion poll.  Take all the people who ran for national office in 2008 and ask people who’d they vote for if the election were held today.  You’d include Obama and McCain, plus Hillary, Biden, Palin, Kucinich et al.  Would John Edwards get even 1%.  His campaign was about ending poverty, about the Two Americas and it turns out he was living Two Lives.  Sic Transit Gloria.
• Attached is a letter we sent to the head of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
• Key questions to ask yourself: (1) Did we prepare a 2010 budget, (2) Have we analyzed our secondary marketing leakage, (3) Did we earn at least 65 bps pre-tax on our production last year and (4) Do we already have a written plan to deal with increased rates and a 50% drop in loan volume?
                                                                         *     *

We hope this is as fun for you as it for us, getting together 2-3 times a week, talking banking and baseball, mortgages and movies, and other random thoughts.  Let’s keep meeting like this!
Garrett, Watts & Co.

“Helping lenders increase revenues, control costs, and better manage risk.”

• Joe Garrett      (510-469-8633)
• Corky Watts     (408-395-5504)
• Mike McAuley   (281-250-253

“Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.” Galatians 6:7-8

Most sane people, whether they are willing to tolerate the legality of first trimester abortion or embrace it wholeheartedly, oppose partial birth abortion (*graphic*).

*OBLIGATORY DISCLAIMER* (You all know I despise when I have to do this) Of course I believe it was wrong for Scott Roeder to walk into George Tiller’s church and gun him down. Okay, everyone got that. It was wrong. Legally. Vigilante justice honestly can’t be tolerated in civilized society as appealing as it might seem…

That being said, this post is about Tiller the abomination of a man (*graphic*) that he was and his (apparently) mentally ill wife that not only found it within her heart and her mind to be married to someone that did what he did every day…but to offer THIS STATEMENT:

“At this time we hope that George can be remembered for his legacy of service to women, the help he provided for those who needed it and the love and happiness he provided us as a husband, father and grandfather.” (source)

Like I said, despite the fact that Roeder was wrong to kill her husband, does she honestly think ANYONE will think of his legacy as “service to women?” Is she this delusional? This guy was as bad as it gets –worse than a serial killer IMO (*graphic*). He was a doctor and KNEW he was systematically killing viable children (*graphic*) and didn’t lose a night’s sleep over it. And to hear he had children of his own made me want to throw up. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t glad he was dead… But, what I really want is for Tiller’s wife to look at the pictures I linked, look me in the eyes and repeat her statement about his legacy.

“…Groundhog Day is right around the corner and the animal rights group PETA would like to replace the adorable Punxsutawney Phil with a robot! The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants organizers of Pennsylvania’s Groundhog Day festival to ditch Phil for electronics, plastic and a little metal.

PETA doesn’t like it. They say says it’s “unfair to keep the animal in captivity and subject him to the huge crowds and bright lights that accompany the thousands of revelers each year,” reports Tampa bay Online.

Organizers says they animal is treated better than most kids in Pennsylvania and claim PETA just wants publicity…” (source)

I think it bears repeating that I can’t stand that PETA constantly negates the good that they do with these ridiculous crusades. We need groups that make sure dogs aren’t having needles stuck into their eyes so vapid socialites won’t tear up when they smather mascara all over their lashes. I am glad that PETA brought to light the disgustingly barbaric practices that make fur coats possible (the fakes are good enough to ensure another mink need not experience anal electrocution…)

…But when they start pontificating about the cruelty of owning a pet when most American dogs and cats probably get treated better than most 3rd world children…and complaining that a groundhog that pops out to cameras once a year now needs a SAG membership to make sure he isn’t being mistreated… Ugh. They take 12 steps back for every two forward.

We’ve been seeing more and more stories like this, as various schools seem to overstep the boundaries of school property into the online world to try to regulate student speech. It’s highly questionable as to whether or not they have the legal right to do so (and, in fact, there are cases that suggest that there’s a significant limit to how much schools can even prevent students from speaking out while on campus as well). This latest case, sent in by reader Keyop, highlights a high school in Syracuse that gave detention to a group of students who had joined a Facebook group that made fun of a teacher. The school claims that the page about the group was derogatory and libelous. Even if we accept that’s true, this seems to step over the line in a variety of ways. First, students always make fun of teachers they don’t like. It’s part of being in high school. Pretending you can stop that isn’t going to change the human nature of teenagers. Second, even if the content is libelous, at most, shouldn’t the detention have only been given to those who actually posted the libelous information, rather than to everyone who became a “fan” or “member” of the group?

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Many of us know by now that Q4's 5.7% GDP blow-out was boosted 3.5% by an inventory adjustment, whereby the rate of businesses' inventory-cutting slowed.

Optimists are reading this as the beginning of a new inventory cycle, whereby slowing inventory reductions will eventually reverse into inventory growth, thus fueling future GDP growth.

Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute doesn't fall into in this camp.

According to Mr. Hassett, historically there have been nine quarters since 1970 when GDP growth of over 3% benefited from an inventory change of the magnitude we just witnessed for Q4.

Unfortunately, the economy usually hit a sudden speed bump right after such an event. Thus he believes that GDP growth could easily hit zero percent (no growth) in the current quarter:

Bloomberg: Inventory spikes make for blowout quarters. In the nine quarters with such spikes, the average growth rate was 6.6 percent and the average inventory contribution was 4.4 percent, even higher than what was observed for last quarter.

Spikes also produce hangovers. The average growth rate in the quarter after a spike was 0.9 percent, a whopping 5.7 percent lower. In the second quarter following a spike, the average growth rate is just 1.6 percent. 

To be sure, the inventory story is not the only red flag right now. The unemployment rate in the U.S. is hovering around 10 percent and has shown little sign of recovery.

...

We might consider ourselves lucky if we experience only the typical decline in growth that follows an inventory spike. In that case, first-quarter growth in 2010 will be right around zero. If that happens, talk of a double-dip recession will ignite.

Just keep in mind that the central argument here revolves around whether or not Q4's slowing of inventory cuts precedes a new cycle of inventory growth. Inventory adjustment boosts to GDP aren't necessarily something to be discredited every time. It all depends on how the inventory cycle plays out. Read more here >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Rosenberg: Here's Four Reasons Why That GDP Number Was A Joke
• Gold, Euro Tanking After American GDP Blow-Out
• GDP Growth Demolishes Expectations, Accelerates To Fastest Rate Since 2003

During last week’s Apple iPad mania, one company was notably silent: Fusion Garage, the 13-person Singapore company that makes the JooJoo tablet, which began life as TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington’s CrunchPad.

The runup to JooJoo’s launch in December got ugly. Arrington, who conceived the CrunchPad idea and brought Fusion Garage in to manufacture it, claimed that Fusion Garage CEO Chandrasekar “Chandra” Rathakrishnan had backstabbed him, cutting him out of his role as leader and arranging with investors for Fusion Garage to sell the tablet themselves.

On JooJoo’s launch day, ex-lawyer Arrington published the full text of a lawsuit he’d filed over the rift. Rathakrishnan, in return, did a video presentation a week later in which he called some of Arrington’s claims untrue.

I’m bored with the lawsuit. Here’s what I want to know: Is the JooJoo going to ship in the next 1-3 weeks as promised, or no? Fusion Garage started taking pre-orders at $499 in mid-December, and pledged to ship within 8-10 weeks.

And how does Fusion Garage view the iPad, the undeniable threat to JooJoo’s existence?

I got Chandra on the phone from Singapore on Sunday. Here’s an edit of our conversation.

VentureBeat: When will the first JooJoos reach customers’ hands?

Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan : The JooJoos will be in consumer hands by the end of February. That’s within the 8 to 10 week window we promised.

VB: How many pre-orders do you have?

CR: I can’t give you the number. I can definitely say that our pre-orders have exceeded our expectations. Since the iPad’s launch, we have had an increase in inquiries.

VB: What can you tell me about your funding?

CR: We have $3 million that we have raised so far. We will be announcing a new round of funding shortly. More important, we have innovated a new business model by a relationship with an OEM that removes all of the high up-front costs of manufacturing for us. We are just waiting for the final approval for the announcement. But our OEM is a mobile phone maker in southeast Asia, and their market share here is right behind Nokia, double digits. They will eliminate all of our up-front manufacturing costs in return for a royalty on every JooJoo unit that is sold.

VB: OK, geek time. What’s the JooJoo’s biggest advantage over the iPad?

CR: It has a much larger screen, 12.1 inches instead of 9.7 inches. The resolution is 1368 by 768 pixels instead of 1024 by 768. There are an extra 300 pixels of length, so it’s 16:9 widescreen resolution instead of 4:3. Watching video on it is a joy. And the Web browsing experience is even better than the iPad, because of the size of the screen.

VB: What browser does it use?

CR: We use a WebKit-based browser, to which we’ve added our own branding. [WebKit is an open-source version of the same core software Apple uses for its Safari browsers on the Mac, iPhone and iPad.]

VB: Does it support Flash?

CR: Yes.

VB: What about wireless networking?

CR: The first units will be Wi-Fi only. We are not ruling out the possibility of 3G in the near future.

VB: Will there be JooJoo apps?

CR: No. Most of the apps in Apple’s store are a reflection of things that are already on the Internet. And now you have to build them twice — once for the iPhone, and once for the much larger, higher resolution iPad screen. Our app store will be the entire Internet, completely open and completely uncompromised.

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La escudería gala Renault F1 acaba de anunciar a Vitaly Petrov como nuevo piloto del equipo. El piloto ruso será el nuevo compañero de Robert Kubica durante la próxima temporada 2010 de la Fórmula 1.

Petrov, de 25 años, y tras 3 temporadas y media en la GP2, es el actual subcampeón de dicho campeonato. Finalmente dará el gran paso y estará presente en la máxima categoría.

También se ha aprovechado y al mismo tiempo que el piloto ruso era confirmado, se presentaba el nuevo monoplaza de la escudería, el Renault R30. Cabe destacar y a modo de curiosidad que tras varios años, vuelven a usar sus colores clásicos, el amarillo y negro.

Related posts:

1. Vitaly Petrov se asegura un puesto en Renault F1
2. Romain Grosjean, nuevo piloto de la escudería ING Renault F1
3. Renault F1 podría estar en manos rusas

Continental AG, one of the top 5 automotive parts producers in the world, is preparing to enter the turbochargers market (after a three year development stage), a segment which is becoming more and more important these days, as autonews.com writes.

The product will be manufactured by Schaeffler, a company that owns 49.9 percent of Continental’s shares. This is a new ground for Schaeffler too, as the company has only partially contributed to similar projects in the past.

According to autone… (read more)

What would you guess unemployment among Spanish youth stands at?

The answer is in this depressing note from Brown Brothers Harriman strategist Marc Chandler, publisher by Rolfe Winkler:

Today Spain reported that its unemployment rate in Q4 rose to 18.8% from 17.9% in Q3.  The consensus was for a rise toward 18.5%.  The unemployment rate has doubled in the past two years.  As seems to be typical in  Europe, the unemployment [rate] is especially pronounced for young people. In Spain it’s 40%…

Cyclical forces and the €8 billion public works program pushed Spain’s deficit to around 11.2% of GDP last year according to the EC.  This is almost as large as Greece’s.  One key difference between the two in this context is that Spain’s debt to GDP is considerably lower than Greece, giving it perhaps greater chance to stabilize the debt/GDP ratios before they become ruinous.

In the face of such sobering news on the labor market today, Spain officials have felt compelled to indicate that they are considering increasing their efforts to cut the budget deficit quicker.  The government is contemplating proposals that will cut another €50 billion or 5% of GDP by 2013.

5% of GDP. That’s going to sting.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Spain Goes On Offensive, Cuts Everything To Combat Debt Crisis
• Papandreou: Greece Is Being Targeted By An Outside Force With A Secret Agenda
• Spanish Banking Fears Re-Emerge, As BBVA Posts Huge Credit Writedowns

Singing superstar Lady Gaga and ’80s icon Cyndi Lauper will appear on the fourth hour of The TODAY Show on Wednesday, Feb. 10 to promote MAC’s AIDS Fund, which has raised over $150 million since 1994. Both ladies are sharing spokesmodel duties as the newest faces of the cosmetics brand’s VIVA Glam “From Our Lips” campaign.

Each songstress will unveil her own new shade of lipstick — Viva Glam Gaga and Viva Glam Cyndi — on March 18. Previous MAC AIDS spokesmodels include Fergie, Pamela Anderson, Christina Aquilera, Missy Elliot and Chole Sevigny.

For more happiness tips, check out my best selling book HOW TO BE HAPPY DAMMIT by clicking this line you’re reading NOW.

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Nokia and education company Pearson have formed a joint venture in China dubbed Beijing Mobiledu Technologies to grow MobilEdu, the wireless education service that the Finnish mobile giant launched in China back in 2007.

Mobiledu is a mobile service that essentially provides English-language learning materials and other educational content, from a variety of content providers, directly to mobile phones.

Customers can access the content through an application preloaded on new Nokia handsets, or by visiting the service’s mobile website and most other WAP portals in China.

According to Nokia, Mobiledu has attracted 20 million subscribers in China so far, with 1.5 million people actively using the service each month. According to the press release and by mouth of John Fallon, Chief Executive of Pearson’s International Education business, China is the world’s largest mobile phone market and the country with the largest number of people learning English.

UK-based Pearson owns the world’s largest education publishing business as well as the Financial Times and Penguin books. In april 2009, it acquired Wall Street English for $145 million in cash, giving it a leading position in China’s English-language teaching market.

The new joint venture company aims to deliver a wide range of services to meet the demand for digital education in China. It will begin operations immediately and will be managed by Angela Long, formerly head of Mobiledu at Nokia.