Author: Serkadis

See update below. GeneralEmergency writes “I was performing a Google search on the phrase “this website has been closed” recently, and the sixteenth result was a link to http://vxbinaca.beevomit.org/party_van/ where you get treated to the following (which you may want to read before clicking):

Guess I’m in big trouble now! I’ll let you know if any suits show up on my doorstep!”

I actually don’t believe this is a honey pot at all. Just a bogus threat tactic. It’s the same message that goes up on every file sharing site that eventually gets taken down. Four years ago, we wrote about the same message on the front of Grokster’s site. It’s a blatant (and bogus) scare tactic, and pretty ridiculous as well. It is a bit silly that (1) the FBI and NSA allow their names to be posted with the RIAA and MPAA (2) that they imply just visiting the site is somehow illegal and worthy of being logged followed by a “visit” and (3) that they somehow think this is effective. Update: As pointed out in the comments, the particular site singled out above is a hoax… but really isn’t all that different from the site that actually did go up on the Grokster page…

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Dads say the darndest things….Massachusetts Senator-Elect Scott Brown called his daughters “available” in an awkward moment during his victory speech on Tuesday night. Brown thanked his wife Gail and daughters Ayla and Arianna for their help on the campaign, before letting men across America know that his girls are “available” and ready to please.

A visible embarrassed Ayla told her father that Arianna is taken, to which the Republican replied: “Arianna is definitely not available, but Ayla is.”

If you are building a SaaS (Software as a Service) venture, you should be thinking hard about your pricing strategy. It may be the single most critical decision you make. Pricing impacts your marketing, financial and organizational strategy. Are you selling an expensive, complex enterprise solution? Or a simple impulse purchase that an individual can make with a credit card? Will you offer a free, a.k.a.freemium, option?

You cannot fudge these decisions, you have to tell customers how much it will cost before they can commit. To provide input into this decision, it is good to learn what your peers are doing. So I researched 103 SaaS vendors to see how they handled pricing.

Sponsor

This guest post was written by Bernard Lunn, a serial entrepreneur. In 2010 he is focusing on how the Internet is disrupting the capital markets after the financial meltdown, and also on what is happening as SaaS crosses the chasm to the mainstream. In 2009 Lunn was the COO of ReadWriteWeb. In earlier times he has built ventures at the intersection of software, media and outsourcing. Comfortable with globalization, he has built ventures in Europe, America and Asia. You can follow him on Twitter.

The Sample Set: 103 SaaS Ventures

How many SaaS ventures are there today? Nobody knows. I can see all of the public ones, and most of the ones that get serious VC money, and those that break through to some level of success. I found 103 of them. But I know that for every one I find, there are probably 100 more. But I think that I found 103 pretty important SaaS ventures and that 103 is a reasonable sample size. You can find the full list here. Here is how I categorize them by funding stage:

1. VC (institutional round)= 62%
2. Bootstrapped (maybe angel, but no investors on the record)= 16%
3. Publicly traded= 22%

Only 30% Really Want You To Call Them

I looked at all 103 to see how many have an 800 number right there on the front page with a big invitation to “call us right now”. That is a sign that they have invested in an inside sales team that can take an inquiry and convert it to an action.

The answer is only 30%. That was lower than I expected.

Note: Some companies have an 800 number on their Contact Us page. I did not count those. Most will go to a switchboard or voice mail. If the number goes to a sales team that is hungry for leads, you will want that number as prominent as possible.

I expected more to use inside sales to convert to action. There may be three reasons for this.

1. They are selling at such a low price point that it is not economical to have a human salesperson in the loop. I saw a few companies in this category. This is what might be called the Google strategy: The sales person only gets into the loop after a large company has already gone far down the adoption road.
2. They prefer to have prospects fill in a form so that a sales person can call them. As most do not show their pricing online (see next section) this seems a likely explanation. It is the traditional enterprise way. But I question if this way works in the SaaS model, and in an online world where site visitors want instant gratification and are nervous about getting spammed if they give out their information.
3. They don’t have the money to build an inside sales team. This seems unlikely given that our sample set was larger SaaS ventures.

Only 24% Show Pricing Transparently

I looked on the front page for a link about pricing and I dug down a level to find it there. Only 24% display pricing in the transparent manner that I think as the norm for SaaS (usually with multiple tiers). That is being generous; in our interpretation of “transparent” I included some who have one price with a line saying “pricing starts at x-dollars” that is really a come-on to get somebody to call.

I notice that Salesforce, the bellwether of the SaaS industry, has both transparent pricing (and a big 800 number invitation to call them). Other leaders with pricing transparency include Zoho, 37 Signals, Constant Contact, Xero and Timebridge.

Only 6% Have a Freemium Plan

That was the big surprise. Freemium is being discussed almost as the de-facto pricing strategy for SaaS. Note: I did not include a free trial as freemium. Most vendors have a free trial. Freemium means free forever, albeit with limitations.

Some experts are questioning this freemium orthodoxy. In particular I like the work being done by Lincoln Murphy (right), an SaaS expert at Sixteen Ventures. You can find his paper entitled The Reality of freemium in SaaS here. It is a good primer on freemium but once he explains the basic rationale, he goes on to suggest caution. His best advice is that you need to really understand what value you are getting back from your free users. He makes it clear that a no-think freemium tactic (“put it out there for free and figure out conversion later”) is often a disaster.

However, if freemium is the orthodoxy I expected more companies to offer a free option. The 6% freemium rate can be explained by either A: the vendors figured out what Murphy is saying and so don’t offer freemium, or B: the vendors are locked into old enterprise styles of selling and marketing. They may be SaaS-modern on the delivery side, but they are legacy on the sales and marketing side.

It is probably a mix of the two. The lack of pricing transparency indicates that B is more likely in most cases.

CAC Ratio: Where This All Comes Together

CAC (customer acquisition cost) is one number you should obsess about if you run a SaaS venture. Bruce Cleveland, the SaaS-focused partner at InterWest Ventures (see the ReadWriteWeb interview here) has a good post that outlines his definition of CAC. There are different ways to look at CAC, but I think Cleveland’s makes the most sense in the real world. Here is how he calculates the CAC Ratio: ($ Total Sales + $ Total Marketing)/$ First Year Contract Value.

He goes onto say, “The objective is to make the CAC ratio less than 1, which implies a customer acquisition payback of a year or less.”

That is controversial. Some would allow ROI over the years of Lifetime Value (LTV). Read his post why that is a bad idea operationally. (Cleveland was one of the original members of the Siebel executive team, so he talks from operational experience not MBA textbooks).

However, whether you measure CAC over one year or multiple years, the CAC ratio is how your investors will measure you. It will determine your capital efficiency, which determines how many times you need to go back to investors for more money.

I believe that vendors that don’t offer a clear path to revenue online (through transparent pricing and, for higher priced products, an inside sales) will struggle to have a best-of-breed CAC ratio.

What Is Your Experience?

Is a CAC Ratio below one feasible? What freemium strategies are working? Is it viable to hide pricing behind a lead generation form?

Freemium photo credit: ReadWriteWeb
Discuss

Adam was flying out of Boston on US Airways, and he checked his Xbox 360 with his luggage. When he got home, he found a ziploc bag full of little metal components on top of a newly broken Xbox 360.

He is understandably pissed off, and US Airways has essentially told him to piss off because it was done for security reasons. Of course! We all know that if an Xbox 360 is checked, it could be used by the pilots, which would be distracting and dangerous. Only by rendering it inoperable was US Airways able to keep our skies safe. Thanks, you wonderful, sensible airline! [Consumerist]

The animal rights zealots at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have honored critically-acclaimed director James Cameron with their annial Proggy Award for Outstanding Feature Film for his work in the sci-fi blockbuster Avatar.

PETA granted Cameron the Proggy — short for progress — after falling in love with Avatar’s message about “the importance of treating all living beings, no matter how ’strange’ or ‘alien,’ with respect and dignity.”

“We hope viewers will come away from ‘Avatar’ with a new way of looking at the world around them and the way we treat our fellow earthlings,” PETA Senior Vice President Lisa Lange said in a statement. “For helping animals with the positive message of this film, James Cameron is PETA’s ‘King of the World.’”

“Viewers will recognize how the plight of Avatar’s catlike Na’vi people, who are faced with being driven off their land by a greedy corporation, closely echoes the real-life plight of animals on earth, many of whom continue to be torn away from their homes and families and locked up in cages in zoos, circuses, and laboratories,” organization president Ingrid Newkirk added. “PETA also applauds the movie’s stunning special effects, which beautifully illustrate how unnecessary it is to subject animals to the stress of a film production.”

Avatar has grossed more than $1.6 billion worldwide.

Cindy McCain is taking part in the NOH8 campaign for marriage equality.

The beer heiress and wife of former presidential candidate Sen. John McCain joins the dozens of celebrities lending their star power to the campaign protesting California’s Proposition 8 ban against same-sex marriage. Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, The Kardashians, Kim Zolciak, Lala Vazquez, and the McCains’ soft-Republican daughter Meghan are among the stars who have posed for NOH8.

“Although we had worked with [Cindy and John’s daughter] Meghan McCain before and were aware of her own position, we’d never really thought the cause might be something her mother would get behind,” a statement on the NOH8 website reads. “We have a huge amount of respect for both of these women for being brave enough to make it known they support equal marriage rights for all Americans.”

Pima County, Arizona | Subterranean Sites

The McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, atop Kitt Peak in Arizona, is the world’s largest instrument dedicated to studying the Sun. Designed by Bruce Graham of the prolific Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill architectural firm, the telescope commands an awe-inspiring view with its distinctive 110-foot-tall tower and 200-foot-long diagonal shaft.

Completed in 1962, the building’s main instrument is a heliostat, which tracks the Sun through the sky and focuses its light down through the diagonal shaft. This shaft continues about 50 vertical meters underground to a 1.6-meter primary mirror, forming the largest unobstructed-aperture of any optical telescope system. From here, the light travels back up a portion of the shaft to a flat mirror, which then reflects an 85-centimeter wide image of the Sun downward to a subterranean laboratory.

In addition to being the largest solar telescope in the world, the McMath-Pierce is also unique because it is sensitive enough to observe bright stars at night. The telescope also boasts a low-cost (which translates from astronomical terms to less than $25,000) adaptive optics system. This setup utilizes a rapidly deformable mirror to correct for distortions introduced by the turbulent atmosphere. Using sensors to measure the degree of image distortion, the adaptive optics system adjusts the mirror’s shape accordingly and thus turns a blurry image into a clear one.

One major area of study at the observatory is the structure of sunspots, which are relatively cold, dark spots on the Sun’s surface created by intense magnetic activity. Some of the more important discoveries made at McMath-Pierce, however, include the detection of water vapor in the Sun, the measurement of kilogauss magnetic fields (thousands of times stronger than the Earth’s) outside of sunspots, and the detection of a natural maser (like a laser, but with microwaves instead of visible light) in the Martian atmosphere.

A U.S. Representative from Michigan introduced legislation at the capitol on today that would force Illinois to close two Chicago-area locks and dams in an effort to prevent invasive Asian carp from entering Lake Michigan.

Rep. Dave Camp (R-Michigan) introduced the bill, dubbed the Carp Act, to essentially achieve the same results as a motion filed before the U.S. Supreme Court last month.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected Michigan’s plea, leaving the issue in the hands of federal and state officials in Illinois.

“It is clear Asian Carp pose an immediate threat to the Great Lakes, its ecosystem and the 800,000 jobs it supports,” Camp said in a released statement.

“The failure of the Supreme Court to act yesterday jeopardizes the future of the Lakes and it is clear we must take additional steps now. So, today, I am introducing legislation that will provide for the immediate closure of all Asian Carp pathways to the Great Lakes. This bill takes necessary action to protect the Great Lakes while minimizing the commercial and environmental impact on Chicago and the State of Illinois.”

Camp’s legislation forces closure of the O’Brien Lock and Dam and the Chicago Controlling Works, the two area locks Michigan’s Attorney General sought to close when he sued Illinois in December.

The Carp Act also tasks the Army Corps of Engineers install permanent barriers in the North Shore Channel and the Grand and Little Calumet Rivers to prevent the migration of bighead and silver carp into Lake Michigan.

Barriers would also have to be built separating the Des Plaines River from the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and the I&M Canal from the shipping canal to stop the advancement of carp during periods of heavy rain.

It also grants the Army Corps new authority to control the migration of Asian Carp through the use of fish toxicants, commercial fishing and netting, harvesting, and other means. In addition the corps are required to initiate two new studies for developing alternative flood control measures and commercial routes.

In other Asian carp news Wednesday, the White House formally accepted the offer from the governors of Michigan and Wisconsin to hold a “Carp Summit” at a yet to be determined site in the Midwest or in Washington D.C.

In a letter to Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle, Nancy Sutley, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, suggested a meeting between the governors of Great Lakes states to be held the first week of February. The goal of the meeting is to hash out a plan to try to control the advancement of Asian carp into the Great Lakes and, if possible, eradicate them from Illinois’ waterways.

– Joel Hood

Photo: An Asian Bighead carp swims in the Great Lakes Invasive Species tank at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

Read the original article from Tribune News Services.

A Hammond man was found stabbed and shot to death in a Burnham recording studio Tuesday evening, authorities said.

Edmond Gerald, of the 6500 block of Nebraska Avenue in Hammond, died of multiple stab wounds and multiple gunshot wounds in a homicide, the Cook County medical examiner’s office found after an autopsy today.

Police said Gerald was 33.

Police responded to a call of a person down in a business in a strip mall in the 2400 block of  State Street in the south suburb about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, according to a release from Burnham Police.

When police arrived, they found Gerald dead in the recording studio, said Burnham Police Chief Peter J. Belos, who said Gerald was “affiliated” with the studio.

Belos said he could not provide further details, including whether anyone else was at the studio when police arrived, “because I don’t want to jeopardize” the investigation.

Phone calls to the music studio today went unanswered. Burnham police and the South Suburban Major Crimes Task Force were investigating.

– Staff report

Read the original article from Tribune News Services.

American Airlines warned alliance partner Japan Airlines that it will face a lengthy and messy fight if it switches allegiance to Delta Air Lines and forms a close partnership to coordinate flying between the U.S. and Japan, as has been widely reported.

Leading the opposition to a JAL-Delta tie-up: American Airlines. “We would object vigorously,” American CEO Gerard Arpey told analysts and reporters during an earnings conference call Wednesday. “It would be a very unwise course for them.”

Texas-based American would lose a long-time partner in JAL, which links American’s passengers to a host of cities within Japan and northern Asia, and would find itself a bit player in the northern Pacific market.

American is still trying to gain antitrust immunity to share flying and revenues with British Airways across the Atlantic, an effort that has stretched over 13 years. Regulators have repeatedly questioned the competitive fall-out from allowing the two largest trans-Atlantic players to team up.

Although American expects to finally prevail in its cause, Arpey ridiculed the notion that Delta and JAL could quickly gain antitrust approval for a venture that would control about 60 percent of the market. “It would make a farce of the whole process,” he said.

Arpey insisted that JAL, which filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday, had not yet finalized a deal with Delta and its SkyTeam global marketing alliance, despite widespread reports to the contrary.

American continues to hold talks with the embattled Japanese carrier, which is laden with billions of dollars in debt, as well as its banks and Japanese government officials overseeing the airline’s bail-out efforts.

Losing JAL would cost American more than $100 million in annual revenues, officials said, at a time when it is trying to turn the corner after reporting heavy losses in 2009. AMR Corp. lost $344 million in the fourth quarter and nearly $1.5 billion for all of 2009 as traffic fell and many business travelers stayed home or bought cheaper tickets in the weak economy.

Excluding special items, including a tax gain, AMR said Wednesday it would have lost $415 million, or $1.25 per share, in the fourth quarter. Analysts, who usually exclude items from their calculations, expected a loss of $1.23 per share.

American officials insisted that they haven’t given up hope on retaining their current relationship with JAL, but noted their cause had been complicated as the airline and government officials have signaled that they are no longer interested in garnering foreign investment in the carrier.

American and its partners had offered to provide $2 billion in investment and other incentives to keep JAL in their OneWorld global alliance.

If the Japanese carrier defects to OneWorld, American will look to forge closer ties with other carriers in the region, officials said. When its longer-range Boeing 787s arrive in the next few years, American will have the option of ignoring Japan and focusing on emerging markets such as China.

If it loses, American is almost certain to reduce flights to Japan, potentially leaving Chicago consumers with less service to Asia’s largest market. American currently operates one daily non-stop from O’Hare to Tokyo’s Narita, as does JAL. The Japanese carrier would be likely to shift that service to one of Delta’s hubs, analysts said.

“The fact is our ability to serve Japan will be extremely limited,” Will Ris, American’s senior vice-president for government affairs, told the Tribune last month. “We have a significant number of passengers on our flights today who are connecting through Tokyo on Japan Airlines. We’ll lose a lot of passengers and therefore could not sustain the level of service that we provide today.”

AMR lost a total of $1.47 billion in 2009, or $4.99 per share, compared with a loss of $2.12 billion, or $8.16 per share, in 2008. Revenue tumbled 16.2 percent to $19.92 billion, as $3.85 billion in revenue vanished with slow demand for travel.

However, the second-largest U.S. carrier is starting to see signs of a rebound. Business travel was up during the fourth quarter, while the media frenzy over the “underwear bomber” on Dec. 25 didn’t prompt any appreciable drop in passenger bookings, executives said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

[email protected]

Read the original article from Tribune News Services.

Article Tags: Open Letter/Fax, Robert Ferguson

We are often asked for references to the open letter Dr. Chris Landsea released outlining his reasons for withdrawing from the IPCC process. It is posted below.

This is an open letter to the community from Chris Landsea.

January 17, 2005

Dear colleagues,

After some prolonged deliberation, I have decided to withdraw from participating in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns.

With this open letter to the community, I wish to explain the basis for my decision and bring awareness to what I view as a problem in the IPCC process. The IPCC is a group of climate researchers from around the world that every few years summarize how climate is changing and how it may be altered in the future due to manmade global warming. I had served both as an author for the Observations chapter and a Reviewer for the 2nd Assessment Report in 1995 and the 3rd Assessment Report in 2001, primarily on the topic of tropical cyclones (hurricanes and typhoons). My work on hurricanes, and tropical cyclones more generally, has been widely cited by the IPCC. For the upcoming AR4, I was asked several weeks ago by the Observations chapter Lead Author – Dr. Kevin Trenberth – to provide the writeup for Atlantic hurricanes. As I had in the past, I agreed to assist the IPCC in what I thought was to be an important, and politically-neutral determination of what is happening with our climate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Source: sppiblog.org

Read in full with comments »   

So-called White House Dinner Crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in an appearance before Congress on Wednesday.

The Virginia couple were subpoenaed to appear before a Congressional committee investigating how the aspiring Bravo reality stars managed to attend The Obamas first White House State Dinner last November without an invitation.

cool interactive HPI calculator: More Fun With Real Estate Price to Income: Global Edition – By Paul Kedrosky – The Economist magazine has hugely facilitated making global comparisons of real estate prices to income via the following interactive chart. Check it out – Infectuous Greed Blog

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3 point plan – VIEWPOINT: HAFA Misses the Mark, But Has Potential – by GARY ACOSTA – HousingWire

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Another ‘Sneaky Pete’? – Bruce Krasting – …  Basically Fannie and Freddie are going to be the new bankers for HFA (Housing Finance Agency ). Treasury is buying the debt for this, so the taxpayers are at risk. It is not that big a deal, yet. It starts out with a modest $28b.  There was no discussion about this. There was no vote. … So how is a program of nearly $30b in federal subsidies not put on any budget? How is it there is no vote on this much money? This is substantially larger than California’s deficit. … – Bruce Krasting Blog

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interesting arguments – Finance Professor Says Most People Should Rent – Larry MacDonald – Seeking Alpha

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Yes, It’s Okay To Walk Away From Your Mortgage – Henry Blodget – … Importantly, the reason is not that “Wall Street deserves it” or “We’ve got to teach the banks a lesson” or any of the other bogus “retribution” logic being thrown around.  The reason is that you and your lender engaged in an arms-length transaction in which you balanced your competing interests and spelled out your agreement and obligations in a clear contract. And unless that contract states that you have a “moral obligation to pay,” you don’t. … – Business Insider

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(Julius Caesar had) The PERFECT Solution for the U.S. Housing Crisis – Written by Jeff Nielson – … Faced with his own foreclosure-nightmare, Julius Caesar came up with a decisive and practical means to cure the solvency crisis which was at the heart of that real estate meltdown. Caesar decreed, according to Armstrong, that all mortgage interest would be canceled. Thus, all mortgage payments … – Bullion Bulls Canada

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unintended consequences? – Is Slashing Mortgage Principal the Answer? – By James R. Hagerty – … How would principal reductions induce more people to walk away? Let’s say your neighbor, who hasn’t made any payments on his loan for months, gets a huge reduction in his loan balance. Meanwhile, you’ve been working three jobs and dining on cat food to pay your note each month. Your reward from the bank? Zilch.  So maybe you’d decide to stop paying, too, in the hope of the same deal your neighbor got. … – WSJ Blogs

Former Bulls star Scottie Pippen will have his No. 33 jersey retired Wednesday night in a ceremony at Central Arkansas, the NAIA school where he starred before being the fourth overall pick in the 1987 draft.

In advance of the ceremony, David McCollom of the Log Cabin Democrat in Conway, Ark., shared some stories about Pippen from those who knew him during his college days.

One story was about the night in 2005 when the Bulls retired Pippen’s number.

Central Arkansas athletic director Arch Jones and his family were among the guests at Pippen’s home that night and rode with him to the United Center for the event. Pippen was running late and hit a major traffic jam.

According to McCollom, Jones said Pippen told him, “Coach J, I’m gonna have to do this like I did when I was a player and hope they don’t stop me.” He then swerved onto the shoulder of the interstate and floored it.

“We basically rode the shoulder to the United Center,” Jones said in an interview afterward. “Scottie was weaving in and out of traffic. When people spotted him, they would slow down and let him in. They would honk their horns and wave. They’d let him go through. I think we got to the United Center 10 minutes early. If it were me, I’d been in jail.”

Photo: Scottie Pippen during a 2005 news conference for the Bulls retiring his No. 33 jersey. (Nuccio DiNuzzo/Tribune)

Read the original article from Tribune News Services.

The Financial System: More Dangerous than an Al Qaeda Attack? –  John Lounsbury – …   The quote is from a penetrating indictment of the state of the financial world, written by Frank Rich yesterday in The New York Times.   The danger that Rich refers to as greater than Al Qaeda is our financial system. This Op Ed is as good a description of the viper we call finance as I have read.  While the average man on the street is likely to recognize the name Al Qaeda, many will probably shrug their shoulders at the mention of CDO or MBS. A mention of other financial derivatives based on the aforementioned unrecognized instruments will just deepen the glaze covering the eyes of Mr. Average American … – Seeking Alpha

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Let’s Hope These 4 Things Don’t Happen – By Rick Newman – (on housing, stocks, debt, consumer) – US News Yahoo
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long and a must read – Blowing Up – How Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy –  hattip John Cervarich –  Gladwell.com 

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read this – intuition is wrong – Interest Rates vs. the Stock Market: DIA, SPY, QQQQ, TBT, PST – BY Thomas H. Kee Jr. – … For example, because higher interest rates often dampen economic activity, one might argue that the Market weakens during increasing rate cycles.  Evidenced by the graph below, that is not the case.  In fact, during tightening cycles, the Market actually performs well. … – Stock Traders Daily
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Crisis chart of the day: The correlation between severity and probability – by Felix Salmon – The World Economic Forum has released its annual Global Risks report, which kicks off with this chart: … But the really scary thing, for me, is the pretty clear positive correlation between severity and likelihood: the trillion-dollar risks all have a significant probability of happening, with the most severe risk of all — a global asset price collapse — being associated with a probability of well over 20%. … – Reuters Blogs

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Government Bonds — the New Junk? – By RANDALL W. FORSYTH – That’s gold’s message, more than inflation. – FROM GREECE TO CALIFORNIA TO JAPAN, markets are beginning to worry about what traditionally is deemed a risk-free asset: government debt securities. And that arguably lies behind the rise in the price of gold. – Barron’s
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Indirect Bidders Are Fleeing The Short Bond – Submitted by Tyler Durden – … Indirect bidders (aka Foreign Investors) continue to bid up US Government securities, their interest in the short end of the curve has not only declined, but accelerated redemptions have left Indirects with a heavily weighted long bond exposure. – has curve thoughts and great graphs –  … – Zero Hedge

A&E has ordered a new reality series starring singer/actor David Hasselhoff. The still-untitled 10-episode series focuses on the ex-Baywatch star’s business ventures, his fight to stay sober, and his teenage daughters — Taylor-Ann, 19, a communications major at the University of Arizona; and Hayley, 17, an aspiring actress and model, who are both hoping to breaking into the entertainment industry.

“It’s the dream of every parent to be able to help their children succeed,” David told The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday. “I told the girls that I would help them open the door when they are ready, but they would have to walk through it on their own. This is their time and I am excited to be a part of it.”

The series will debut later this year.

Last week, NBC confirmed that Deal Or No Deal’s Howie Mandel will replace David Hasselhoff on America’s Got Talent’s judging panel during the reality competition series’ fifth season this summer.

3D is here, whether we’re ready for it or not. But! 3D projectors cost as much as $175,000. There’s a modicum of hope, though—if you already own a 2D projector—in this neat little workaround called OculR.

The OculR system, from Oculus3D, is still too pricey for individual consumers at $20k-$25k per screen. But its compatibility with any standard 35mm projector could be a boon to smaller, local theater chains. It’s also—apparently—a simple lens installation, but I’m not expert enough in projector room shenanigans to confirm that. Not yet, anyway. [Oculus3D via SlashGear]