WASHINGTON–The Obama family, finally, return to Sweet Home Chicago for the Memorial Day weekend.

The last time the family — Obama, first lady Michelle, Malia, 11 and Sasha, 8 — were back at their home on South Greenwood was over Valentine’s Day weekend 2009. Obama made two quick day trips last summer, not staying overnight.

If anyone thought that the Kenwood community would host a Chicago White House — and some people did — well, they were very disappointed.

I’m told the Obama family is planning a casual weekend with friends. President Obama will throw in some work; on Monday, Obama will deliver a Memorial Day address at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, near Joliet, about 50 miles south of Chicago.

When Obama was elected, he envisioned frequent visits back home that never materialized. In December 2008, then President-elect Obama said he expected to return “as often as possible, my expectation would be that, depending on what my schedule looks like, you know, we’re going to try to get back here at least once every six weeks or couple of months.”

It turned out that the first couple was so eager to embrace Washington — and get Sasha and Malia settled in a new school with new friends — that Chicago visits just never happened. Besides, the Chicago pals — of the Obamas and their kids’ friends — were just as happy to hang at the White House or Camp David, the presidential retreat. Last summer, Chicago buddy Marty Nesbitt and his family even rented a place in Washington for a short time just to be nearby.

The Obama home will be a historic site whether or not the Obamas ever live there full time again. Last January, I asked Mrs. Obama why they never came home. She said, “Just tell Chicago, ‘nothing personal.’ It’s kids.”

The Obama Valentine’s Day return did cause some tumult, Mrs. Obama noted. South Lake Shore Drive closed for their motorcade, and security officials restricted access to streets near the house. Mrs. Obama, who said she missed shopping at the Target on Roosevelt Road, added, “It’s really life and the fact that the kids have built a life here and that’s good and right now I want to encourage that life and not keep pulling them out. So it’s less our schedules than them. Who’s got kids? They dictate the weekend.”

When the Obamas get home, they will find the home next door empty; their former neighbors, Bill and Jacky Grimshaw, moved out after selling their place for $1.4 million, and the new owners planned extensive renovations before moving in. The bidding war the Grimshaws hoped for over their home never occurred. While federal representatives looked at the Grimshaw house, the government did not go ahead with a purchase.

Consumer sentiment is definitely healing. In May, Confidence climbed further, according to the Conference Board. The Consumer Confidence Index now sits at 63.3, up from 57.7 in April. It has increased for the past three months, as it dipped all the way down to 46 in February. This is the best consumer sentiment we’ve seen since March 2008. It also soundly beat economists’ expectations of 59.0. The report contains even more good news.

But before getting into that, here’s the miniature chart that the Conference Board provides:

This begins to show just how much confidence has risen recently. If this trend continues, we’ll soon hit pre-recession levels of confidence.

Speaking of pre-recession levels, that’s where the Conference Board’s expectations index stood in May. It rose to 85.3 from 77.4 in April. Of course, expectations prior to a recession aren’t necessarily impressive. Indeed, the confidence reading, though rising, is still weak by historical levels. So good times aren’t exactly here again for U.S. consumers, but they clearly feel a lot better than they had during most of the recession. And the expectations index shows their optimism.

Yet, the market today, and over the past few weeks, poses a nagging question: can this consumer recovery really take hold? The Dow is down 12% since its April high of 11,205. The housing market is also showing signs of weakness now that the government credit has ended. And that doesn’t even begin to take into account all of the instability overseas with conflict in the Koreas and sovereign debt crises plaguing Europe. So far, consumers haven’t let any of that get to them. But if those worries mount, they could begin to pull back again.

Conference Board – Consumer Confidence Index – United States – Economic – Economy

ModNation Racers (PS3, PSP), developed by United Front Games and Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios (San Diego), brings an entertaining twist to classic kart racing, while empowering players of all levels to fully customize and design their entire racing experience. The second title in PlayStation’s PLAY, CREATE, SHARE series, ModNation Racers allows players to not only enjoy developer-made content, but unleash their imagination with easy-to-use editing tools to generate customized tracks, karts and characters that can be uploaded and shared with the ModNation community via PlayStation Network.

ModNation Racers’ user-friendly creation tools feature a simple interface and a robust menu of options to trick out tracks, karts and drivers with a variety of accessories. If players are not feeling creative, ModNation Racers also features a Story Mode with a humorous narrative and a wealth of pre-made characters, karts and over 25 tracks to try. Here’s a video review courtesy of IGN:

“We continue to deliver on the success of PLAY, CREATE, SHARE movement with ModNation Racers as the next title in the series started by LittleBigPlanet,” said Scott A. Steinberg, Vice President, Product Marketing, SCEA. “Combining deep customization with solid kart handling, and online multiplayer options, ModNation Racers brings a creative and interactive kart racing experience to life. It’s a breath of fresh air in the kart racing genre only available on PlayStation.”

ModNation Racers’ single-player career mode tells the tale of Tag, an inexperienced racer given the opportunity to compete in the world famous ModNation Racing Championship. Players with the PS3 system will dive into the ModSpot, the game’s central hub, showcasing each game mode including career, online, creation, and more. In the ModSpot, players can check out the community’s top Mods and Karts, enter Hot Lap tournaments, play the Top Tracks voted on by the community, and socialize with other racers. ModNation Racers also delivers Career Central mode leading players to beat the computer and unlock more content for creation.

Players of all ages will keep coming back for more ModNation Racers with an infinite number of customizable possibilities for cars and drivers. Players can CREATE unusual and unique racers by resizing character features such as eyes and ears, applying different skin designs and colors and trying on different apparel options. With kart creation, players can choose between dozens of body types, from school buses to sports cars and customize with an array of parts, ornaments, decals, and paint jobs.

In just minutes players can build a track or spend hours perfecting it with the same tools the developers used to design the game. By simply driving, players build a track that is laid out behind them. Players can create tunnels, bridges and hairpin turns as well as alter the terrain and morph the land to form mountain ranges, lakes, and more. With auto-complete, players can finish their track at any point during the building process and instantly populate it with obstacles and scenery. Whether a player builds a track covered in weapons or a narrow road for pure racing, the depth of track creation in ModNation Racers truly offers players a unique racing experience.

ModNation Racers features multiplayer options for both the PS3 and PSP systems. The PS3 system version includes split-screen racing with up to four players offline and two player split-screen online. Players also have the option to go online and battle against 11 other players on the PS3 system version. The PSP system version allows up to six players both online and offline. Through PlayStation Network, players can SHARE their creations with the rest of the world and interact with the community on the platform by uploading racers, karts and tracks online for others to experience.

As we said in this post, Volkswagen announced today the takeover of Italdesign Giugiaro S.p.A. (IDG), more exactly, the German manufacturer will take a 90.1 percent stake including the brand name rights and patents.

The stake will be acquired by Audi’s Italian subsidiary Lamborghini Holding S.p.A, while the remaining shares will remain in possession of the present owner family Giugiaro. For those who don’t know, Volkswagen had a successful cooperation with IDG for many decades and the partnership created important vehicles such as the first Volkswagen Passat, Scirocco or the Audi 80. Italdesign Giugiaro was founded in Turin by Giorgetto Giugiaro and Aldo Mantovani in 1968. Currently, the company generates sales of over €100 million and has a workforce of some 800 employees. “With this shareholding in Italdesign, we are participating in one of the most renowned design and development companies with one of the richest traditions in the automobile industry. Italdesign is the flagship for creative Italian automobile design and has been instrumental in shaping the face of the automobile industry worldwide. As the creator of the Golf I, Giorgetto Giugiaro laid a new foundation for Volkswagen design in the 1970s,” said Prof. Dr. Martin Winterkorn, Chairman of the Board of Management of Volkswagen.

Source: Car news, Car reviews, Spy shots

Sex and the City ladies sizzle in hot shades on the red carpet during Monday night’s red carpet premiere of Sex And The City 2. With fashion playing the sixth major character (of course, NYC is the fifth) in the SATC franchise, all eyes were on the dresses as the stars of the show stepped out for the premiere of the hotly-anticipated sequel at Radio City Music Hall in New York City overnight.

Sex And The City 2 sashays into theaters this Friday, May 27.

Looks like Netflix has decided to go with Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM for all upcoming Netflix-ready devices. If all goes according to plan you shouldn’t even notice the DRM being there, but we all know how well DRM has worked in the past.

Netflix already uses PlayReady for its Mac and Windows PC instant streaming services, so both companies already have a convivial working relationship. More importantly to end-users, I don’t recall any big DRM dust-ups vis-à-vis Netflix streams.

This announcement also confirms a host of new Netflix-ready devices. The press release mentions “Internet TVs, Blu-ray disc players, home theater systems, video game consoles and other devices.” What could “other devices” mean? Something like Google TV, or maybe the Boxee Box? A Netflix-equipped Google TV could do well for itself.

Netlfix says the move to PlayReady DRM will make it easier to get content providers (movie studios and the like) to supply a steady stream of, well, content. If there’s one complaint against the Netflix streaming service is that there’s not as wide a selection of content as there is with disc-based Netflix. That should begin to change with this move.

The first devices making use of this new DRM should hit stores early this summer.

Needless to say, your ability to stream Netflix on your Xbox 360 (or PS3 or Wii) won’t be negatively affected by this transition.

Sure, you can drop $549.99 for the myTouch 3G Slide at Best Buy (that’s full retail, in case you were wondering), but for those not looking to spend their life savings, Walmart has opened pre-orders for the Android-powered device.  Though it’s $20 higher than T-Mobile’s price, Walmart’s $199.99 price skips the mail-in rebate.  The remaining question is whether the device will ship in time for the June 2nd launch date.  Anyone planning a purchase?

Via TmoNews

Peter Elson was an influential Sci-Fi Illustrator with his works appearing in numerous paperback Sci-Fi novels. His art and concepts depicted vast space environments, giant spaceships, aliens, astronauts, and other out of this world creations. A lot of the science fiction art, games, film, and more can be attributed to some of his drawings which are now owned by his sister after he died of a heart attack in 1998.

Continue reading for more images.

Or not, if they enjoy being famous on the internet.

[via Reddit]

Spanish wind turbine builder Gamesa and San Diego wind farm developer Cannon Power Group have teamed up to start building a wind farm South of the Border to supply clean power to a quarter of a million households in both California and Mexico from 500 MW of power by 2015. Cannon says the site’s potential capacity is ultimately 1,000 MW.

The location’s wind production peaks when demand for electricity is highest; from mid-afternoon to early evening. Typically wind production peaks at low demand hours.

Cannon and Gamesa have signed a 10-year exclusivity agreement and will collaborate on further wind farms that Cannon has plans to develop in Baja California (Mexico) with Gamesa supplying some development assistance and the wind turbines. (more…)

Might We Suggest…

• AT&T Getting the Hero? Ummm… What?
  We know that AT&T is planning to release a plethora of Android devices this year. What we don’t know is which ones they are. Rumors have it that a Touch Pro 2 like device will be on the menu. But …

The wheels seem to be coming off Shia Laboeuf’s top pick — oil exploration company InterOil (IOC). 

The stock is now down 40%+ from its recent peak, and the company’s latest press release today hasn’t helped matters.

The press release is titled:

 

InterOil’s Operations Continue to Make Progress

When the market sees a non-announcement like that, the interpretation is usually “the company is trying to say something, anything to bolster confidence and stop the stock’s collapse.”  And that certainly seems to be the interpretation today.

The two specific data points the company announced in the release, moreover, aren’t particularly encouraging.

Here’s the first:

InterOil has received the first payment from Mitsui to fund the Front End-Engineering and Design (FEED) of its proposed joint venture condensate stripping plant.

That’s positive, in a way, but it’s also expected. Also, the word “payment” creates a misleading impression of the Mitsui transaction. As we noted when InterOil first announced its deal with Mitsui, what Mitsui is essentially doing is lending InterOil money to continue to move forward with its plans for a possible plant.  If InterOil eventually actually builds the plant, then Mitsui’s loan will be converted into an unspecified amount of equity in the project.  If the plant is not built, however, InterOil will have to pay the money back.  So, for now, this “payment” is best viewed as a loan.

The second item in the press release is this:

The Antelope-2 horizontal well has achieved its 1,000-foot (305 meter) objective.

This refers to a horizontal test well the company has been working on to better establish the size and prospects of the oil-and-gas resource it has discovered.  The results of this test were first due in March, then in April.  And now, at the end of May, as the details in the press release explain, the test hole has apparently met some initial distance objective–but the drilling will continue and the actual test results are still a ways away:

InterOil has completed its objective of drilling horizontally ~1,000 feet (305 meters) in the Antelope-2 well and onsite activities are currently drilling ahead.  To date, InterOil has drilled 1,040 horizontal feet (317 meters) outside the 5 ½ inch casing.  InterOil believes that the well bore stability and drilling conditions warrant further extension of the horizontal section.  The Company intends to drill as far as possible with the current drill bit assembly.  Logging and well testing will begin promptly following completion of the horizontal section.  The horizontal well is designed to determine the condensate-to-gas ratio at the bottom of the reservoir.  This ratio will assist InterOil in the final FEED design of the proposed condensate stripping plant.

Now, a skeptic would suggest that one reason you might keep drilling after you “complete your objective” is because you haven’t yet found what you are hoping to find.  So some of the stock’s reaction to this latest press release may be additional concern that the Antelope test won’t reveal results that are as promising as the company expects.

In any event, the farther the stock drops, the more dilution existing shareholders will have to take if/when InterOil decides to raise more cash through additional equity issuance.  The market therefore continues to await the results of that test….

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• InterOil (IOC): The Dog Ate My Homework
• InterOil (IOC) Signs Deal With Mitsui, But The Devil’s In The Details
• InterOil (IOC) To Shortsellers: See, We Told You Our New Gas Site Is Huge

by Julian Ku

Sad news from the University of Georgia:

Gabriel Michael Wilner, a University law professor and executive director of International, Comparative and Graduate Legal Studies, died unexpectedly at his home Friday.

A native of Beirut, Lebanon, Wilner has been with UGA since 1973 and has served in several capacities since coming to the University. He has taught private international, comparative and maritime law, served as director of the law school’s Master of Laws program, and directed the Brussels Seminar on the Law and Institutions of the European Union since its inception in 1973….

A memorial service for Wilner will be held at the Bernstein Funeral Home in Athens on Friday at 11 a.m. In lieu of flowers, his family suggests a donation to the National Kidney Foundation, 30 East 33rd St., New York, NY 10016.

In a strong essay in the Forward
this week, Union for Reform Judaism President
Rabbi Eric Yoffie
says that “the time has come for the centrist and liberal elements of the
American Jewish community to get serious about mobilizing support against a
nuclear Iran.”




He argues that:

Their failure to do so until now
is somewhat of a puzzle. It may be that they have simply not recognized the
absolute urgency of the situation. It may also be that they are not championing
this issue because others see it as a parochial one, and American Jews do not
like to be perceived as self-serving. Yet it would be a terrible mistake to
fall into this trap.

Unos meses atrás, se rumoreaba sobre una posible expansión de la marca Seat al mercado asiático, en concreto, el mercado chino. Finalmente no será posible debido a órdenes estratégicas de la alta dirección del Grupo Volkswagen.

Seat intentó firmar un acuerdo con la FAW (First Automobile Works) que le permitiera fabricar sus modelos en Guangzhou. Según afirma el medio chino China Car Times, esta decisión ha sido tomada con la intención de asentar a Skoda como marca occidental preferente de China.

Related posts:

1. Seat Ibiza Good Stuff
2. Seat regalará un curso de conducción profesional a los clientes que compren sus modelos más deportivos
3. Seat deja de fabricar el Toledo

Walmart has dropped the price of the iPhone 3GS to $97, which is $2 less than Apple charges for the older 3G model. The move has fueled speculation that Apple plans to announce the next-generation iPhone at its developers conference next month. They may as well. It’s not like anybody’s going to be surprised to see it.

Speculation about the new iPhone is running wild, given Apple’s problems keeping prototypes locked up (and the media’s need for new Apple news at least once a week). Muses The Wall Street Journal:

[T]he announcement comes as speculation is heating up about when Apple will launch a new iPhone.

In past years, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs has unveiled new iPhones at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, offering them up for sale soon after in late June or early July. The company said on Monday that Jobs would be delivering his keynote at this year’s WWDC on June 7 at 10 a.m.

Wal-Mart’s price cut is particularly notable because when Apple introduced the iPhone 3GS last year, it cut the price of the older iPhone to $99. Wal-Mart’s new price would allow it to continue to lead in pricing if Apple decides to repeat last year’s strategy and reduce the price of its iPhone 3GS to $99 when the next iPhone comes out.

Of course, the news could be nothing more than Walmart being Walmart, which is the way the big boxer is playing it right now. The company’s wireless chief, Mehrdad Akbar, would only say: “As it is our commitment to always lead on price, we are going to reduce the price on this most popular smartphone so our customers can realize these new saving as soon as possible.”

So, if you’re looking for a deal on an iPhone, Walmart may be the place to go — unless you want to just wait around for a new model to show up on a barstool near you.

Wal-Mart Cuts Price on iPhone 3GS [WSJ]

How might the Greek debt crisis be good for the United States?

Last week, we counted three possibilities: cheaper oil, greater international investment in the United States (as investors flee the eurozone for America’s embrace), and a longer period of easy money from the Federal Reserve. Today, the Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos finds a fourth, related benefit for the United States in the short term: historic low mortgage rates despite the Federal Reserve pulling back its mortgage-securities purchase program.

Conventional wisdom held that mortgage rates would rise as the Fed pulled back from propping up the market. Instead,
many in the industry now say rates could drift as low as 4.5% this
summer from 4.86% now, instead of rising to 6% as some economists
projected, making for significantly lower payments for Americans buying
homes or refinancing their mortgages.

Here’s what’s happening. The European crisis is making investors nervous about buying bonds from countries across the Atlantic. So they’re flocking to park their cash in US debt. High demand for US debt drives down the yield, or interest rate, on our bonds. Mortgage rates hold hands with the 10-year Treasury yield, which fell to 3.2% last week. That brought rates on 15-year mortgages down to 4.24% last week, “the lowest since Freddie began its survey in 1991,” according to Timiraos. Thirty-year mortgage rates are back to their December 2009 levels.

This is good news for a home market some feared would face a terrible summer. Since the $8,000 housing credit expired last month, some worried that the demand for new homes had squeezed itself into the first four months of 2010. But the return of low interest rates could make for a buyers market, since every percentage point decline in mortgage rates reduces home prices for the buyer by roughly a 10%. “If the current rates hold,” Timiraos writes, “that could help
stabilize prices and allow current homeowners to sell existing homes
without substantial price cuts.”

Update: The headline comes with a caveat: unless those home owners recently bought stock.

United States – Mortgage – Wall Street Journal – Debt – Refinancing

Don’t cry to AT&T or Apple if you crack your iPhone screen. They don’t care. Besides as this pictures and Cnet story clearly shows, with a bit of patience, nearly anyone can replace an iPhone screen. This 10-year boy used a $20 kit available from 3gcrackedglass.com to replace the glass on his dad’s iPhone and in turn saved him from the $200 repair bill that Apple would have charged for the same service.

But it’s not the act of saving this particular iPhone that’s compelling. Think about how proud this dad must feel watching his 10-year preform the operation. I get excited when my 3-year old son hits the baseball off the T ball stand. Fatherhood is great.

BroadVision, an enterprise software company with a long and not-so-glorious history, today launched a new offering called Clearvale — what it calls a “network of networks” designed to bring social networking to businesses on a large scale, just as earlier versions of the company’s software allowed them to create Web 1.0 “portals.” The company said more than 4,000 businesses are already using the hosted software-as-a-service platform, as part of a year-long beta test. The launch also includes a strategic partnership with Softbank, the giant Japanese telecom and media holdings company.

The idea behind Clearvale is to provide a white-label social networking platform similar to Ning, but focused specifically on businesses. “We were among the first technology companies to help the enterprise understand how to do business on the web, and we feel poised to do it again — but this time for the Enterprise 2.0 era,” said Pehong Chen, founder and CEO. As part of the rollout of Clearvale, the company says it will be offering an app store for social networking tools, driven by an open API.

The name BroadVision may not be as well known as Netscape or Yahoo, but the company was one of the original Web 1.0 superstars. It went public not long after Netscape set the market for web companies on fire in 1995, but failed to make it through the web bust of the late 1990s. The stock was delisted from the Nasdaq for a time, and Chen said that BroadVision spent the past decade or so restructuring financially and becoming a much smaller business and is now ready to be reborn as a Web 2.0 software provider, offering custom social networks for businesses. In effect, Chen said he’s betting the company on this new strategy.

“We were a pioneer of e-business platforms, but we suffered because we overextended ourselves,” Chen told me in an interview prior to the Clearvale launch. “For the last decade we have been consumed with fixing that, mostly financially. We have survived, and have come back with a vengeance, with a solid balance sheet and lots of cash in the bank.” He said after watching the rise of social media and tools such as Facebook, he realized that businesses needed some way of creating “their own community online” and that BroadVision could offer that. Although software such as Yammer, Socialcast and Jive offer elements of this, Chen said no one had an “all-in-one” solution like BroadVision.

Although Clearvale can be implemented as company-hosted software for institutions such as banks and others that need to control their software more closely, Chen said it’s designed to be a social networking platform in the cloud, hosted primarily by Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure but also by major partners such as Softbank, which Chen said intends to offer social networking features to its mobile customers that are based on Clearvale. Companies such as Synaptics and Air Exchange are already using the software to create internal networks for staff and suppliers, he said. (For more on the cloud, attend the GigaOM Network’s annual cloud computing conference, Structure, June 23 & 24 in San Francisco.)

BroadVision’s existing business — building and managing web portals for companies — continues to make money, Chen says, but it has become a much smaller business than it was in the red-hot Web 1.0 days. Last year, the company had sales of $28 million, while at the peak it brought in close to 10 times that amount every year. “We may be smaller, but we are smarter,” Chen said. And what about competition from Microsoft’s SharePoint and other enterprise solutions? The BroadVision CEO said that Microsoft in particular has an existing legacy businesses that it has to protect. BroadVision, one the other hand, “doesn’t really have a lot to lose,” he said.

At first glance, Clearvale looks a little like BroadVision came up with the product while playing Web 2.0 “buzzword bingo” — it has social networking, is in the cloud, has an open API and an app store, and so on. But Chen is right that many businesses are looking for easy ways to implement social networking tools inside their companies, and BroadVision has an established reputation as an enterprise-software vendor. Whether it can make the transition to being a Web 2.0 company remains to be seen.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

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Yingli Green Energy Americas, Inc. has shelved plans to open a new North American manufacturing facility in either Austin or Phoenix, citing global financial turmoil that is hurting solar panel pricing.

Yingli’s U.S. Managing director Robert Petrina tells the Austin American-Statesman that the project is merely on hold and, “the U.S. is a big part of our plans.” However, the company is seeing its main advantage over Western solar PV firms – its low production costs – evaporate as the Euro and solar panel prices fall.

Petrina said that the instability in the solar market has made the company hesitant to commit to a large project right now.

He said the company is looking for the pricing levels to stabilize before making its final decision to locate its plant in either Phoenix or Austin.

Until yesterday’s announcement, parent company Yingli Green Energy looked ready to conquer the globe.

Company executives purchased a costly, but bold, 2010 World Cup sponsorship in February and watched as officials in Phoenix and Austin wooed the company with incentives to locate its new plant in their respective cities

Yingli announced some solid operational results yesterday, with record gross margins of 33.3 percent, but recorded a $24.7 million foreign exchange loss.

The foreign exchange problem points to a more general concern with Chinese green energy companies – they compete on price not on technology so they’re especially sensitive to currency shifts.

Barclays Capital Clean Technology Analyst Vishal Shah said today that Yingli was operationally strong but lowered his estimates to account for exchange loss and a weaker Euro.