Author: Serkadis

Chinese search leader Baidu and Rakuten, Japan’s largest e-commerce player, have announced an agreement to jointly invest US$50 million over three years in a joint venture to build a huge online ‘B2B2C’ shopping mall for Chinese Internet users.

Under the terms of the agreement, Rakuten will become majority shareholder of the new, yet to be named joint venture (51%) with Baidu owning the remaining 49%.

B2B2C refers to an online marketplace that links and provides value-added services to both business to business and business to consumer.

The online mall, which is expected to go live in the second half of 2010, aims to provide customers with merchandise from well-known Chinese and foreign brands as well as small and medium sized enterprises at ‘competitive prices’. The mall is anticipated to quickly become the largest online B2B2C shopping mall in China.

Rakuten sure has the experience of running such ventures: founded in 1997 as MDM Inc., the company operates Rakuten Ichiba, Japan’s leading Internet shopping mall with over 30,000 participating merchants and over 47 million items registered on its e-commerce platform.

Baidu, meanwhile, has seen two top executives depart the company just this month (both CTO Yinan Li and COO Peng Ye bailed citing ‘personal reasons’), but that hasn’t stopped it from teaming up with other companies to strengthen its foothold in China.

Earlier this month, word got out that Baidu was setting up a new independent online video company in partnership with Hulu investor Providence Equity Partners.

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As the Oracle, Sun acquisition drama winds down after the EU approved the deal, it marks the end of a 28-year era for Sun as an independent company. While the finishing touches are being put on the deal and Oracle is shaping up its future plans for the newly acquired company, Sun founder and CEO for 24 of the 28 years, Scott McNe… (read more)

Article Tags: Terence Corcoran

Insider Andrew Weaver is getting out while the going is good

A catastrophic heat wave appears to be closing in on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. How hot is it getting in the scientific kitchen where they’ve been cooking the books and spicing up the stew pots? So hot, apparently, that Andrew Weaver, probably Canada’s leading climate scientist, is calling for replacement of IPCC leadership and institutional reform.
If Andrew Weaver is heading for the exits, it’s a pretty sure sign that the United Nations agency is under monumental stress. Mr. Weaver, after all, has been a major IPCC science insider for years. He is Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria, mastermind of one of the most sophisticated climate modelling systems on the planet, and lead author on two recent landmark IPCC reports. For him to say, as he told Canwest News yesterday, that there has been some “dangereous crossing” of the line between climate advocacy and science at the IPCC is stunning in itself.

Not only is Mr. Weaver an IPCC insider. He has also, over the years, generated his own volume of climate advocacy that often seemed to have crossed that dangereous line between hype and science. It is Mr. Weaver, for example, who said the IPCC’s 2007 science report — the one now subject to some scrutiny —“isn’t a smoking gun; climate is a battalion of intergalactic smoking missiles.”

He has also made numerous television appearances linking current weather and temperature events with global warming, painting sensational pictures and dramatic links. “When you see these [temperature] numbers, it’s screaming out at you: ‘This is global warming!”

Source: network.nationalpost.com

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Is your LCD TV not fulfilling your primordial need for contrast, more contrast? If so, you could do worse than to check out these so-called polarizer plates from Zeon, which promise up to ten times better contrast ratios than current LCD tech. The Japanese company’s latest wares are compatible with IPS panels (yay!) and it even has a version for OLEDs on tap, though we hardly think weak contrast is the problem with OLED displays right now. Still, the expansion of viewing angles is always welcome, so let’s hope the projected mass production by the middle of this year materializes, so that we can all be talking about awesome new displays come CES 2011. Onwards and upwards. [Warning: source link requires paid subscription.]

Zeon display filter ameliorates backlight bleed, improves LCD contrast and viewing angles originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jan 2010 05:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Seems like Helsinki’s always got something interesting to show in its Nokia Research Center (NRC). Today’s conceptual adventure involves radar, or RADAR (RAdio Detection And Ranging) if you prefer. Without going into too much technical detail, Nokia demonstrates a handset that uses electromagnetic waves to measure the speed of an impressively stoic Finn as he walks towards and away from a prototype handset that can identify the direction of movement. It also works through fabric to help turn typically mundane tasks such as volume adjustment into an aerobic art form. No really, see for yourselves in the video after the break.

Continue reading Nokia’s mobile radar handset responds to movement, not emotion

Nokia’s mobile radar handset responds to movement, not emotion originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nouriel Roubini at Davos has announced in none too uncertain terms how he feels about Greece right now — it’s a lost cause that Europeans will be forced to back-stop.

CNBC:

“Greece is bankrupt,” Roubini told CNBC.com at WEF. “Look, they have to ask China to help them out.”

If the situation becomes dire enough the European Union will be forced to help bail Greece out because it’s such a threat to the monetary union, he said.

Now the question is whether or not Greek bonds are a good buy, given that Europe might come in and support the nation’s finances. It all depends on how exactly any bailout were structured, ie. how much pain bondholders are made to feel.

Given that many European nations fear losses on Greek bonds for their own banks, perhaps bondholders will be given a free-pass and investors might be able to thus free-ride the Greece bailout via high-yielding Greek bonds. Just as China might end up doing.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• EU Privately Freaking Out About Greece And The PIIGS Breaking Apart The Union
• RBS: Here’s Why Greece Will Ultimately Be Bailed Out By The Europeans
• Bernanke Gets The Roubini Endorsement

Prior-Design is what we like to call an appearance tuner – the small company offers aerodynamic packages, bespoke rims and sport exhaust systems. The company has abducted the famous pure driving machine, the Porsche 911 GT3 and will only release it with it’s PD3 aerodynamic package. The project follows the complete perfection motto.

The Prior-Design Porsche 911 PD3 has an optimized front end. Thanks to this, the downforce level has now apparently been increased. The use of carbon spoiler blad… (read more)

It seems that electric vehicles and the Internet go hand in hand, as ECOtality presented an internet-based software for the advanced charging of your car. The application will be shown at the Washington Auto Show.

This is an innovative move forward for ECOtality as we continue to cement our role as the leading EV solutions provider, says ECOtality President and CEO Jonathan Read. Our software platform will allow EV drivers to log in via a website to remotely check the charge status of an EV a… (read more)

Bruce V. Bigelow wrote:

Economic downturns often light the fuse of revolutionary change. And one key change is becoming apparent now in San Diego’s life sciences community—which has been hammered by the 2008 capital markets collapse and plunge in VC funding.

Unable to raise capital, many biotechs and medical instrument makers were forced over the past 16 months to slash their budgets, lay off employees, and look for easier and less expensive ways to carry on the process of bringing drugs and devices to market. In some cases, that has meant outsourcing research, clinical trials, and other work to overseas labs. But many San Diego life sciences companies also are turning to local consulting firms, biomedical research laboratories, and a variety of specialized service providers. Collectively, they are known as CROs, or clinical research organizations—and in San Diego, at least, they are proliferating. (CROs are alternately known as contract research organizations)

At Xconomy’s request, San Diego-based Assay Depot, an online marketplace for CRO services, conducted a survey of CROs in the greater San Diego area. To our mutual surprise, Assay Depot found 144 companies providing a variety of contract services for local life science companies. Assay Depot’s Christopher Petersen plotted these companies on a Google map, below; you can scroll and zoom the map and click on each pin for the name and URL of each company. We also have provided a complete list of all the companies, with links to the websites of all-but-one CRO, at the bottom of this story.

Is 144 enough to count as a new technology cluster in San Diego?

If so, it is a hub that has been 15 years in the making, according to Joe Panetta, CEO of Biocom, the nonprofit industry group that represents San Diego’s biotech and biomedical instrument companies. Panetta says that Biocom was formed in 1995 to help local biotech startups connect with local business, law, and scientific service providers.

In recent years, though, there has been an explosion in the number of local companies that provide specialized biomedical research, from matching molecules with targets for drug development to recruiting patients for clinical trials.

The CROs “create efficiencies and cost-savings and a level of expertise that biotechs would not otherwise have,” Panetta says. The proliferation of CROs has accelerated in recent years because of the weakened economy, he adds. With waves of layoffs sweeping through the upper echelons of many biotechs, Panetta says, “A lot of experts are moving into consultant roles. So over the last year, we have seen a real buildup in the numbers and depth of CROs.” With the venture-backed model for life sciences startups stalled by the weak economy and uncertainty over the outcome of health reform in Congress, Panetta says CROs represent “a different model in which [life science] companies can succeed by relying on outside expertise that they previously would have relied on internally.”

View San Diego CROs in a larger map

Kevin Lustig, Assay Depot’s CEO, cites a variety of other factors for the growth of CROs, including great academic centers, San Diego’s high quality of life, lack of large pharmaceutical employers, and cheap lab space close to academic centers. “As always, the actual reason is likely some combination of these factors,” Lustig says.

As he puts it, many outstanding researchers come to work at one of San Diego’s renowned biomedical institutes (which include UC San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute, The Salk Institute, and recently renamed Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute)—and they stay for the balmy coastal lifestyle. “Since we have relatively few large pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies in San Diego, these researchers tend to work at smaller companies,” Lustig says. And perhaps because they work …Next Page »

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Honda will showcase the next-generation Odyssey minivan at next month’s Chicago Auto Show, through a concept model, the carmaker announced today. The concept version is expected to offer a preview of the production model, that will likely go on sale sometime in early-2011.

However, typical for Honda, the carmaker did not release any teaser photos of the Odyssey concept, so we’ll just have to wait for the show on February 10, 2010, to see it.

The next-generation Odyssey will further enhance… (read more)

Si te has preguntado alguna vez cual es la velocidad punta del Lamborghini más rápido de la historia, entonces tendrías que echar un ojo al Lamborghini R-GT, una versión de competición especial para Le Mans .

El R-GT es capaz de alcanzar 370km/h de velocidad punta gracias a su motor V6 con 6.000CC. Sin embargo, este super bólido no está homologado para su uso en carretera por lo que para los afortunados acuadalados que busquen el Lamborghini homolgado más rápido tendrán que conformarse con el Murcielago LP640 que es capaz de alcanzar unos 340Km/h.

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1. Lamborghini Reventon Roadster en el Salón de Frankfurt
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3. Lamborghini abre su primer concesionario en Sudamérica

Kimi Raikkonen is looking to improve his results in the Arctic Lapland Rally this weekend, as he’ll compete in the snowy event in Finland for the second time in career. The former Ferrari-an will however use a more powerful machine this year, as he’ll debut his Citroen C4 WRC alongside new teammate and notes reader Kaj Lindstrom.

If last year, the 2-day event in his native Finland was regarded as a fun adventure for the then-Ferrari driver – that was actually his first rally event in career -… (read more)

PSA Peugeot Citroen is looking into ways to expand Chinese operations and thus gain an 8 percent market share in the country by 2016, company officials said. Furthermore, the alliance wants to grow as much as 30 percent in 2010 in China, while the country’s auto sector is projected to post an increase of 15 percent.

Peugeot Citroen is currently holding a Chinese market share of 3.4 percent, according to Jean-Marc Gales, head of the Peugeot and Citroen brands.

In short terms, the easiest wa… (read more)

Before everyone started freaking out about Greece, the big concern in Europe was the health of Spanish banks, and whether they would implode and wreck the euro.

That story isn’t over yet.

BBVA just announced a 94% drop in profits, according to Bloomberg.

Credit losses were the culprit:

The bank took 1.05 billion in charges as it adjusted the value of its U.S. business. Other writedowns included 200 million euros of provisioning charges for assets acquired in Spain as it reported additional losses on its Iberian consumer loan book, BBVA said.

Today’s writedown represents about 15 percent of the goodwill attached to the U.S. business, according to estimates by Banco BPI SA. U.S. provisions were 715 million euros higher than in the third quarter as the bank adjusted the value of commercial real estate collateral. The bank also took a charge of 73 million euros on its Mexican cards business and a 90 million-euro charge to account for Venezuelan inflation.

Bad loans as a proportion of total lending climbed to 4.3 percent from 2.3 percent a year ago. “Doubtful risks” on BBVA’s books leapt to 15.6 billion euros from 12.5 billion euros in September and 8.6 billion euros a year ago.

The stock is off about 4.4%

(via Alphaville)

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Everyone’s Freaked Out That Spain Has The EU Presidency
• Spanish Economist Niño Becerra: ‘Two Months Until Euro Market Crash’
• Will Spanish Banks Implode And Wreck The Euro?

Even after receiving treatment with antidepressants, depressed workers costs employers more in short-term disability and absenteeism, says a report in the February Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Suellen Curkendall of Thomson Reuters Healthcare and her team of researchers used insurance claims and employee health and productivity databases to examine the relationship between antidepressant treatment and productivity costs.

What they found in their study was that depressed employees are about twice as likely to use short-term disability leave, compared to workers who were not depressed. Those workers with severe depression were three times as likely.

Deficits in productivity were significant, according to the report, with short-term disability costs of about $1,000 for each depressed worker and $1,700 for each severely depressed worker. These costs were, in fact, much higher than for other common illnesses such as high blood pressure, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.

Curkendall’s team also found that workers with depression missed more work days, even after treatment with antidepressants.

The authors conclude their report by stating that these productivity losses probably occur due depression symptoms that persist despite treatment and suggest that “therapies that can better manage depression may provide opportunities for savings to employers.”

From Depression Blog

By Hutch Carpenter, Blogger, bhc3.wordpress.com

In a recent interview with EMC’s Stu Miniman about the future of the web, I predicted that in 20 years, we’ll all have online reputation scores. Little badges, numbers that communicate our level of authority, this sort of thing. And these reputations will have tangible impact.

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By Brian Raftery, Writer, Wired Magazine

Just how funny is a beer-drinking horse? Ben Huh is sitting in his downtown Seattle office asking himself this question. It’s an unseasonably warm afternoon in November, and Huh, the 32-year-old founder of the humor-blog startup Cheezburger Network, is deciding whether a picture of a boozy equine chugging a cold one should run on Daily Squee, a Web site devoted entirely to user-generated snapshots of twee creatures.

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"The Ultimate Wave Tahiti 3D" film for IMAX theaters will premiere in February 8 with a private screening and a Tahitian-style after party, with live performances by Mason Jennings and DJ Chris Holmes at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. One of the guest appearances on the red carpet is the Suzuki Grand Vitara which will be joined by the 2010 Kizashi sedan, SX4 SportBack, SX4 Crossover and RMZ-4 Equator pickup.

"The Ultimate Wave Tahiti 3D" movie features nine-… (read more)

The United States automotive market is showing some signs of recovery and carmakers selling vehicles in the country are planning to take full advantage of this. Mitsubishi for example is looking to return to its optimistic goal to sell around 100,000 units per year in the United States but admits that such an achievement would be possible in a three-year timeframe.

To give you an idea on the way Mitsubishi performs in the Unites States, you should know that the Japanese manufacturer sold a to… (read more)