Washington Wizards star Gilbert Arenas has been slapped with a felony weapons charge in connection to the recent gun scandal that left him suspended indefinitely from the team. He has been charged with carrying a pistol without a license outside a home or business after allegedly pulling the firearm on teammate Javaris Crittenten over an unsettled gambling debt.
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Sergio Marchionne’s dinner speech was the target of protestors at the Automotive News World Congress on Tuesday evening.
In a dramatic display, the protestors carried white balloons and a banner, and upon release of the balloons one protestor, Teamsters Union member Matteo Colombi, commenced to distribute flyers to the crowd that read “The Fiat/Chrysler Bailout Bandit. Tell Chrysler: Stop Killing Good Jobs.” It also referred people to the website ‘www.carbuyersbeware.com’. Colombi’s protest came in the wake of Chrysler’s decision to use non-unionized car haulers; a move that will save the company about $10 per car, or $10 million total.
Another protestor made her way on stage and began ranting about how a defective Chrysler product caused her mother’s demise. “My mother died because of a defective Chrysler product,” the woman said. The banner hung from the ceiling read “Fiat-Chrysler: Damaged When Delivered?”
Marchionne was more than apologetic to the crowd for the interruptions.
– By: Stephen Calogera
Source: Free Press
When it last reported earnings, Intel (INTC) surpassed Wall Street’s expectations and issued a strong outlook for the rest of 2009. So investors had high hopes for its latest quarterly report. And Intel appears to have met them. Reporting fourth quarter earnings after market close Thursday, the company posted a profit of $2.3 billion, or 40 cents a share, compared with a profit of $234 million, or 4 cents a share, for the year-ealier period. Revenue was $10.6 billion, up from $8.2 billion for the same quarter in the year-ealier period.
A strong showing and one that blows the doors off consensus estimates that called for 30 cents a share in profit on earnings of $10.17 billion. Don’t forget these results include a European Commission fine of $1.45 billion and a $1.25 billion settlement agreement with AMD.
“Curb your enthusiasm [for Intel]” Bank of America analyst Sumit Dhanda told clients in a research note issued Wednesday which warned of a revenue miss from the chip behemoth. Curb your enthusiasm? Not likely after today’s results.
“Intel’s strong 2009 results reflect our investment in industry-leading manufacturing and product innovation,” Intel CEO Paul Otellini said in an earnings release. “This strategy has enabled us to generate unprecedented operating efficiencies while growing our traditional businesses and creating exciting new market opportunities, even in difficult economic times. Our ability to weather this business cycle demonstrates that microprocessors are indispensable in our modern world. Looking forward, we plan to deliver the benefits of computing to an expanding set of products, markets and customers.”
Looking ahead to the first quarter of 2010, Intel expects revenue of $9.7 billion, plus or minus $400 million. Evidently, the PC market is back.
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A ratcheting up in the Google-versus-China fight: The White House has officially endorsed the search giant’s position.
Here’s White House spokesman Robert Gibbs today, per MarketWatch:
“We support [Google’s] action…in a decision to no longer censor searches that happen using the [Google] platform,” Gibbs told reporters. He added that “our concern is with actions that threaten the universal rights of a free Internet.”
I’ll leave it to geopolitical tea leaf readers to decipher whether the White House’s position on this means that much for Sino-American relations. But it’s not a huge surprise: The affectionate relationship between Google (GOOG) and this administration has been documented many times already.
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Conan O’Brien will have no problem finding job offers should he decide to leave NBC over the late night announced by the network this week. The late night comedian, who joked on Monday’s Toniight Show that he’d like to “work in a classier business with better people, like hardcore porn,” might just get his wish.
Adult film giant Pink Visual has has offered Conan a position as a contract star for their features due to the current high demand for “tall, lean, pale, male ‘gingers’ that have a David Caruso kind of thing going on.”
The company says it “would be elated to have a personable, motivated self-starter such as yourself join our team of merry pornstars.” In fact, the porn purveyors already have a name in mind for Conan’s first feature. What do think of Conan the Boobarian?
If Conan isn’t interested in peddling his wares on camera, Pink Visual would love to have him on board as a “writer,” who they believe could “bring some much needed wit to the world of porn dialogue.”
(Since when does anyone care about “porn dialogue.?” It’s a skin flick, not a love story. A pornstar’s job is to suck peen and shut up — we don’t need you to be Flip Wilson!)
While the Lexus LFA may carry a hefty price tag of $375,000, it hasn’t stopped Toyota from selling out its new luxury supercar in Japan. According to reports from Japanese media, the entire allocation of 165 units have been sold out two months ahead of schedule.
Reports say that the application schedule to purchase an LFA was open from October 21, 2009 to March 21, 2010, but was wrapped up earlier yesterday after all the units were spoken for.
Out of the total 500 units to be produced, only 150 will make it to the United States. Toyota previously confirmed that it will not be making a profit on any of the LFAs sold.
Click here for more news on the Lexus LFA.
Refresher: Power for the Lexus LFA comes from a 4.8L V10 engine that makes 552-hp with a maximum torque of 354 lb-ft. Mated to a 6-speed Automated Sequential Gearbox, the LFA goes from 0-60 mph time of just 3.5 with a top speed of 202 mph.
2011 Lexus LFA:
– By: Omar Rana
Jacob writes “It appears that American Reading has several trademarks on the term “100 Book Challenge,” and as such, has sent a cease & desist letter to the owner of the website LibraryThing.com (a social cataloguing site that also provides content and services to libraries) for having a user-created discussion group called “100 Books Challenge 2010” (and also for previous years).
I looked up the trademarks they listed in their C&D letter and they all seem to apply to educational programs designed to promote children (pre-k to 12th grade) to read through incentives and stuff. Members of the 100 Books Challenge groups on LibraryThing, however, only commit to reading at least 100 books in one year, with no set curriculum, reading levels, or prizes, and all members of LibraryThing are, by law, over the age of 13, due to the COPA, and as such, are not “children.”
I do not know if they’ve sent a similar letter to other sites that have a “100 Book(s) Challenge,” such as another social cataloguing website called GoodReads..”
There are certainly questions about whether or not there’s any likelihood of confusion here. I have a lot of trouble seeing how any such confusion would result. It also seems like the term is being used in a descriptive way (it is in fact, a 100 books challenge), which you would think would help qualify as fair use. But, of course, just going through the process of fighting such a claim is expensive and probably not worth it for a site like LibraryThing.
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At CES this past week, Google executive Andy Rubin said that the next version of the Nexus One phone will be for the enterprise. It could have a physical keyboard.
Our bet is that Google Apps will be tightly integrated into the Nexus One enterprise phone. Google syncs every Android phone to a Google account. The next step seems logical. Sync Google Apps with the Android.
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With Google Apps integrated, a customer could assign employees a Nexus One smartphone that is tied centrally to the account. As described on Ars Technica, each device could have its own Google Voice number. The smartphones could be then distributed to employees. Billing would be centralized and the employees would have a managed suite of applications for email, messaging, calendering, contacts and more.
In the end, Google may be the winner simply also by offering features that are as available on the Nexus One as on a Blackberry device. A core Google strategy is to develop features that cut across the consumer and enterprise. That’s apparent in a feature announced today that allows Blackberry users to search email and contacts with a new Google application. You can perform the same function on a Nexus One.
But he Nexus One has a long way to go before it can really compete with the Blackberry or the iPhone.
With that in mind, here are some security features that would make the Nexus One more compelling for the enterprise.
Without hardware encryption, the Nexus One will never meet enterprise security standards. The iPhone and the Blackberry both have this necessary feature.
A lost smartphone is a vulnerable smartphone. The Android does not support the capability to erase data remotely. Like encryption, this is a must have feature for the enterprise.
The Blackberry has the ability for corporate IT to lock down a device. This relates to remote data wiping. The Android needs this corporate security capability for it to be enterprise ready.
The iPhone requires application signing. The certificate can be pulled at any time by Apple. This helps protect against rogue applications. Android devices do not require a trusted authority sign the certificates.
We know little about what is planned for the Nexus One. But we can’t expect it will have huge appeal in the enterprise. It’s so new to the market. The OS is still quite nascent in its development. Even with a Google Apps integration, enterprise managers will have to see how the OS and its security features measure up before giving it the green light.
Filed under: Car Buying, Marketing/Advertising, Chevrolet, Ford, Hummer, Mazda, Mercury, Saab, Subaru, Toyota
After one of the worst years ever for the auto industry, which automakers do you think came out of 2009 with an unsullied reputation? Consumer Reports just published its 2010 Car Brand Perception Survey and the results are a bit perplexing. Naming the manufacturers that slipped last year would probably be a piece of cake, but try to guess which ones came out ahead of their 2008 rankings.
Before you try to guess, here are the ground rules. According to CR, “The scores reflect how consumers perceive each brand in seven categories: Safety, quality, value, performance, design/style, technology/innovation, and environmentally friendly/green.” Further, “The scores reflect consumers’ total perception level of a brand across those categories, and not the actual qualities of the brand’s individual vehicles.”
The overall top brands in the rankings were the usual suspects for the most part. Toyota was tops (guess CR readers haven’t heard about that sticky gas pedal thing), followed by America’s sole avoider of bankruptcy, Ford, then Honda. Somewhat surprisingly, Chevrolet placed fourth – bankruptcy be damned. Carmakers improving by the largest percentage over last year were an equally mixed bag. Chevy and Ford improved quite a bit, but the company posting the biggest gain was Subaru, which mirrored the success it had on the showroom floor in 2009.
Perhaps even more interesting were the bottom brands. Not surprisingly in these green-leaning times, Hummer scored the lowest as a brand, followed closely by GM problem-child, Saab. The Swedish firm was actually tied, though, with Ford’s forgotten brand, Mercury, and shockingly, recent Ford divestiture, Mazda. Dropping the most this year were luxury brands like Porsche, Lexus and Lincoln. How Porsche and Lexus dropped so much is a bit of a mystery, but Cadillac droppng 15 points was a real head-scratcher considering the success of the CTS.
The complete survey is an interesting read, as are the full rankings. The top scorers in each category is particularly revealing. Before you click the source link below, though, try to guess where your favorite brands placed. You might be as surprised as we were.
[Source: Consumer Reports]
Toyota tops in CR brand perception study, Subaru, Ford, Chevy make gains originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Was supposed to be opened by April but due to delays planned date of opening is somewhere in July 2010.
More information can be found here:
http://philadelphiaunion.com/Content1.aspx?cid=4.0
Finally, the City of Light lives up to its name, thanks to artist Michel de Broin’s 7.5-meter disco ball suspended 50-meters above the Jardin du Luxembourg. It’s even more impressive in action and up close.
It took artist Michel de Broin 1,000 mirrors to construct the disco ball for his Nuit Blanche project, and spotlights positioned throughout the city to make it sparkle.
The main purpose of the giant mirror ball—other than having a raging citywide disco throwdown—was to simulate a starry sky normally obscured in urban areas by ambient artificial light. If stars these days look halfway as festive as this, I’m getting the heck out of NYC, pronto.
[Michel de Broin via Lifelounge via NOTCOT]
Booyah, the mobile gaming company full of alums from Blizzard Entertainment, just rocketed ahead in the world of location-based gaming.
Their MyTown app, which is kind of like Monopoly for the real world, now has 450,000 users who log-in for 30 minutes a day on average. That’s the average for all users, not just active ones, according to Booyah CEO and co-founder Keith Lee. Lee adds that MyTown has had more than 31 million check-ins from 2.1 million unique real-world locations. These stats could put it ahead of other startups like Gowalla and Foursquare.
But Booyah takes a slightly different approach from them. Booyah starts with the gaming first, and then incorporates real world elements. It’s more of a classic game than a social network. Location-based networks like Foursquare start from the opposite angle: they ultimately are about socializing and location-sharing and happen to use gaming elements to incentivize people to play.
In MyTown, you get a bit of virtual currency when you join so you can “buy” real places in the game like your local coffee shop. If you manage them properly and upgrade them from time to time, you can earn rent and amass a virtual real estate empire. When you check-in to a location, or let the app know that you’ve visited the real place, you might find a treasure chest with extra cash inside the game that can help you purchase more properties or level up. Booyah’s designers have created a virtual economy inside MyTown, where property prices fluctuate based on demand and how many check-ins they get from other users.
Lee has a couple recommendations for app developers looking to promote discovery of their work:
He said he’s not advertising inside MyTown yet, although that will come in the next version. Booyah has 18 employees and raised $4.5 million from Kleiner Perkins’ $100 million iFund last year. The company has the pedigree to make real-world mobile gaming work. Its three founders were instrumental in making games at Blizzard Entertainment, now part of Activision Blizzard, like Diablo II and at Insomniac Games with titles such as Resistance: Fall of Man and the original Ratchet & Clank.
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In the wake of Google’s threat to forgo the China market, the question we ought to ask is: Should Google go home?
In the flurry of Internet commentary, hopeful stock analysts have focused on language in the company’s announcement regarding pending discussions with the government about operating an unfiltered search engine inside China. At worst this reflects naivete regarding the Party’s determination to control the internet. At best this is sop to Wall Street – a feeble attempt to demonstrate that management tried to maximize shareholder value. Don’t be misled – Beijing will no more negotiate with an American Internet company about free speech than Tel Aviv would negotiate with hostage takers about ransom. Google is most likely going home.
Other commentators have tripped over the issue of cyber attacks – the suggestion by Google that their decision to abandon the booming China market was motivated by hackers trying to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Recall, however, that Google does not maintain on Chinese soil any services that involve personal or confidential information. In other words, the Gmail servers are not located inside China and pulling out of the country will have zero impact on future cyber attacks. More bluntly – the hacker story, while certainly true, is a public relations cover.
Still other pundits fall into the tempting cynical trap. Google, they say, would bring in a mere one percent of its 2010 profits from China, and thus the apparent principled stance is really a commercial retreat from a market dominated by domestic rival Baidu. But Google’s search market share has climbed from 13 percent in 2006 to 36 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009. Given the number of Internet users in China, the remaining vast expansion potential and a distinguished list of foreign failures that includes Yahoo! and eBay, Google’s adventure in the Middle Kingdom is not a commercial defeat.
That leads us back to our initial question: Should Google go home?
To find an answer we must first establish an objective. Google’s goal, as stated during Congressional hearings in February 2006 regarding the collaboration of American technology companies with China’s efforts to control the Internet, is to make the world’s information accessible to everyone, everywhere, all the time. During those same hearings, representatives of Google argued that it could provide more access to more information for more Chinese citizens more reliably by offering a censored search service inside China than by staying away.
What has changed since those Congressional hearings? Not a thing, except Google’s mind.
The core question, however, remains: Was Google right four years ago when it decided to provide censored search inside China, or is it right now in deciding to go home?
The next step toward an answer is to ask what will happen when Google is gone. The competition in China is Baidu, which commands a 58 percent share of the search market. If we assume that Baidu will grab at least that much of Google’s current market share, it would enjoy a 79 percent slice of China’s search market pie. What might this domestic Chinese company do with that kind of market muscle?
Although Baidu’s corporate mantra isn’t “be evil,” their policy with respect to paid search contrasts rather sharply with our friends from Mountain View. Google decided long ago that their search results would be as good as they could make them, unbiased and objective, clearly labeling paid search results as advertising. Baidu, on the other hand, offers paid search results, as alluded to in its most recent annual report. The vast majority of Baidu’s revenues come from their pay for placement service that literally auctions off to the highest bidder priority placement of links in key word search results.
An example might help to drive home the point. Let’s take the Chinese word for beer – the first local term learned by many expatriates in the Middle Kingdom. On Google China the top five results include news articles, a Baidu encyclopedia entry, general pages that list many beer companies and Google maps with the location for bars and restaurants. Baidu? The right side results, which look like advertisements, provide company names, a tagline and a link. The left side, which look like pure search results, have four beer companies and the Baidu encyclopedia entry.
With or without Google, search inside the Great Firewall will be the world according to Chinese law. Without Google, search also becomes the world according to Baidu.
During China’s tainted milk scandal that followed the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it was alleged that Sanlu, the Chinese company that put more melamine industrial chemical into their infant formula than any other, attempted to pay Baidu three million renminbi (US$440,000) to censor out negative search results. Baidu denied the allegation.
Eight months later, however, an Internet post suggested that the wealthy family of a hit and run driver who killed a university student in Hangzhou also attempted to pay Baidu to filter out the bad news. The vast majority of people commenting on the post believed that Baidu took the money. Although the cynics were apparently wrong this time, the risk of having a market with only paid priority search listings and censored results, is more than a theoretical possibility.
And so we return to our original question: Should Google go home? On behalf of the company’s shareholders and its China-based users, I say bye bye Google – we are sad to see you go.
Nathan Green is the pen name for a long time China hand and author of The Great Firewall, a forthcoming novel on China’s internet adventure.
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The U.S. Department of Energy has given out billions of dollars to clean energy companies and projects since President Barack Obama took office — most of which has been geared toward producing jobs in the sector, including many industrial and manufacturing jobs to replace other shipped overseas. But today, the department is announcing $85 million in stimulus grants earmarked for 69 scientists still in the early stages of their careers.
The news suggests a shift in focus for the government, which has been showing more interest in developing high-level green-collar talent. Instead of just throwing money at creating the most jobs possible, it is now pinpointing individuals who could have the greatest impact on the future of America’s power mix. The idea is to give them the resources they need — over the course of five years — to eventually become leaders in their respective fields. Right now, they are expected to be either tenure-tracked assistant professors or government lab employees not yet 10 years out of doctoral programs.
The grant money will be divided between academic researchers, who will receive at least $150,000 each year for five years, and scientists based in national labs — including some working at the DOE itself — who will get at lest $500,000 a year to cover salary and research expenses. A new crop of recipients will be chosen each year by the DOE’s Office of Science.
To put the sum involved into context, the department just allocated less ($80 million) to jumpstart employment in the biofuels industry. The money will go to two consortia working to commercialize jet, diesel and gas-substitute fuels derived from algae and other feedstocks. The grants are being divided among many groups and people, not select individuals. Another sign that the DOE is looking to home-grow high-level talent: earlier this week it announced $187 million in grants that would help employ 500 skilled researchers and engineers in the advanced vehicle industry.
While the first round of winners has already been selected out of 1,750 candidates, the DOE is calling for more applications. In particular, it is looking for researchers working in computing, the energy sciences, environmental and biological labs, fusion energy, high-energy physics and nuclear physics.
Below is a full list of the 69 individuals chosen in the recent round. Not all of the projects they are working on sound immediately relevant to the U.S.’s most pressing energy questions. With titles like “Multifunctional Oxygen Evolution Electrocatalyst Design and Synthesis,” they seem to be more focused on the steps that come before applicable technology development. It’s nice to see the government funding such forward-looking interests.
The current winners hail from a diversity of institutions and laboratories. Unsurprisingly, there’s a dearth of women, but several are represented. It will be interesting to see how the DOE leverages the results of their projects to change the way regular Americans use and view energy, climate change and the environment.
Here’s the full list:
Early Career Research Program Selectees
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If spending money to build a satellite phone network reminds you of a few recent financial debacles, you’re not alone.
But regardless of its past foibles, Globalstar has created a real business and is announcing today that it is taking the first steps to deploying its $1.29 billion second-generation satellite phone network.
While satellite phones seem quaint at a time of growing cell phone coverage, Tony Navarra, president of global operations at the Milpitas, Calif., company, said that many of Globalstar’s 375,000 customers are in remote regions of the U.S. and Canada. The phones used to be the size of bricks, but they’re now about twice the size of typical cell phones, with a little antenna nub sticking out of them.
In an interview, Navarra said that this new network could prove far more cost effective than the last one. For $1.29 billion, Globalstar will be able to launch 24 satellites into orbit and build another 24 for the future. These satellites should last for 15 years, until 2025 and beyond, compared to just 7.5 years for the company’s first-generation satellites.
It’s last network cost $4.5 billion to complete and the debt load was so heavy that it drove Globalstar, founded in 1994, into bankruptcy in 2004. It restructured its debt and then went public in 2006. In the summer of last year, it did a debt financing of $738 million. Competition includes Inmarsat, Iidium Satellite, SkyTerra Communicaitons and Orbcomm. Globalstar needs to get the satellites deployed because service quality is starting to diminish.
Navarra said the satellites in the first network are becoming weaker. The low-earth orbiting satellites circle the globe about 850 miles in the sky. As they age, Globalstar takes them up about 1,000 miles above the earth and then replaces them with new satellites.
Since the technology has improved, the second-generation network will be able to handle duplex voice and data at a rate of 256 kilobits per second, compared to just 9.6 kilobits per second earlier. It has high quality, and the data transfer speed will now be better.
To further finance its new generation, Globalstar has raised $505 million in loans from a consortium of French banks and another $71 million from satellite maker Thales Alenia and rocket maker Arianespace.
The company generates about $76 to $80 per subscriber per month for voice service and $10 per subscriber per month for data service. The company also makes money from engineering services. And its Spot division recently announced a satellite communicator to go with Delorme’s navigation handheld.
Navarra said the company will launch one or two rockets this year, using Arainespace. Each rocket will carry six satellites. Today, the company said it has begun to install upgrades at its gateway ground stations around the world to get ready to deploy the second-generation satellite constellation.
In the third quarter ended Sept. 30, Globalstar lost $5.5 million on revenue of $17.5 million. That compared to a loss of $26 million on revenue of $22.5 million a year earlier.
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Via debuts M’Serv 2100 server with 64-bit Nano CPU originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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RED ONE getting Mysterium-X sensor upgrade next week originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Toyota has shown that they know how to retain customers. At Tuesday’s Automotive News World Congress, Toyota received four wards for customer loyalty, and Yoshimi Inaba, president of Toyota Motor North America Inc. has said that Toyota has no intention of stopping there.
“Our quality and safety were severely questioned,” he said, referring to Toyota’s recalls in 2009. “We learned lessons the hard way, but with the support of our dealers we will do everything to let our customers know how much we care for them and how committed we are that they drive the safest cars on the road.”
Inaba also mentioned Toyota’s commitment to leadership in environmentally friendly auto manufacturing, including the expansion of the Prius label, and the implementation of ToMoCo’s three-phase plan to gradually introduce a plug-in hybrid in two years, a battery electric vehicle by 2012, and a fuel-cell hybrid by 2015.
The recently ignored Scion label will also receive two new products geared to rejuvenate its youth-appeal. Inaba also said that he is hopeful that FT-CH concept showed in Detroit will become a full-production entry-level hybrid as part of the Prius family. He estimates a sales increase of about 10% this year with sales of about 11.5 million units, and even greater growth in 2011 and 2012.
2010 Detroit: Toyota FT-CH Concept:
All Photos Copyright © 2009 Stephen Calogera – egmCarTech.
– By: Stephen Calogera
Source: Automotive News (Subscription Required)
In case you aren’t sick of hearing it yet, Ke$ha stopped by The Wiggy Wendy Williams Show for a live performance of her breakout hit “Tik Tok” on Thursday. The grungy party girl showed up with her signature bedhead. and frailed around the stage for five minutes to the delight of Wendy’s studio audience.
Green Energy Reporter caught up with Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin to talk about Copenhagen and the future of the climate.
Read the whole thing at GreenEnergyReporter.com>>
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