Category: News

The stock of electric car maker Tesla Motors hit an all time high of over $60 per share this week. Partly that’s because later this afternoon the company, led by entrepreneur Elon Musk, plans to announce what it says will be its first profitable quarterly earnings in Tesla’s history . While Tesla is enjoying the brightest time in its decade-old lifetime, Musk, and the company’s board, actually have far grander ambitions than the current already impressive $6.4 billion marketcap.

According to documents prepared for Tesla’s upcoming annual meeting, Musk has an equity and stock grant package — called “2012 CEO Grant” — which was granted last summer, and which would deliver him another 5 percent of Tesla’s total shares if Tesla meets certain milestones and certain marketcaps. Musk is already a fabulously wealthy person, but it’s the operational company milestones, and accompanying soaring marketcap, which underscore Tesla’s ambitions.

The first tranche of the grant becomes available if Tesla’s marketcap hits $7.2 billion, and one of its operational goals is met. The remaining parts of the grant become available for every $4 billion added to the marketcap, along with an additional operational milestone, until the market cap reaches $43.2 billion and all ten of the operational milestones are met (see the milestones below).

As of April, when the documents were filed for the annual meeting, none of the milestones had yet been met, and Ford and GM had marketcaps of $53 billion and $40 billion respectively. For comparison’s sake, Apple — which Tesla has often times been compared to in its approach, brand and leader — has a marketcap of $430.52 billion.

• Successful completion of the Model X Engineering Prototype (Alpha)
• Successful completion of the Model X Vehicle Prototype (Beta)
• Completion of the first Model X Production Vehicle
• Successful completion of the Gen III Engineering Prototype (Alpha)
• Successful completion of the Gen III Vehicle Prototype (Beta)
• Completion of the first Gen III Production Vehicle
• Gross margin of 30 percent or more for four consecutive quarters
• Aggregate vehicle production of 100,000 vehicles
• Aggregate vehicle production of 200,000 vehicles
• Aggregate vehicle production of 300,000 vehicles

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Kim Kardashian recently joined her family in Greece on an early-summer holiday, and she wasn’t afraid to flaunt that baby belly.

Wearing a daring string bikini, the mom-to-be had some fun in the sun with her mom and sisters, although we’re guessing she passed on the jet-ski rides.

“She’s loving the seventh month,” a source told Us Magazine of the pregnant reality star. “And she thinks pregnancy is so cute.”

Kim recently spoke about the effects her pregnancy has had on the media, saying they often print nasty things about her weight.

“There are maybe two or three covers just this week that say I am 200 pounds,” she said. “I’m like, ‘You are 60 pounds off here.’… It wouldn’t even bother me if I gained all the weight. And I have the biggest sweet tooth and I love junk food. Being pregnant, I don’t like any of it.”

Kim is reportedly due to give birth in July.

Image: Splash News
Lead Image: Us Weekly

A lot of small and medium sized businesses don’t need all the extra security and device management that enterprise level deployments demand out of BlackBerry Mobile Fusion. Enter ActiveSync: an easy way to manage mobility for your small or medium sized business.

Smartphones were born out of push email and a lot of the BYOD devices that people use for business are for smaller businesses. These deployments are no different than a consumer set up so below are some resources on setting up your BlackBerry 10 device to your mail servers using ActiveSync.

Click here for a guide on how to set up your BlackBerry 10 device to your mail servers using ActiveSync.

Click here for a Knowledge Base article on how to connect your BlackBerry 10 device to Microsoft Office 365.

I’ll be honest, one of the last places on this Earth that I’d want to go is the Arctic Circle. You see I hate the cold, like REALLY hate the cold. I know I’d be missing out on the picturesque beauty and tranquility, but at days end I’d find a way to deal with it. Murph (the guy in this video) is different. So different in fact that he went to the Arctic Circle on his trusty BMW R 1150 GS motorcycle. Even though he may (or may not) have a screw lose, I’ve got to give the guy credit, as this is one thing I’d never attempt.

Like I said, I hate the cold.

Source: MotorTrend.com

The Open Compute Project, which Facebook launched a little more than two years ago, has decided that utterly disrupting the server and storage market isn’t enough. On Wednesday, it said it would solicit input on an open source top-of-rack switch.

The project, in a presentation by Frank Frankovsy at Interop, said it was taking a slightly different tack with its design, deciding to get input from others before actually making and releasing the hardware to the community. However, just because the hardware isn’t designed yet, Facebook isn’t going to twiddle its thumbs for a traditional multi-year design cycle. Frankovsky told me in an interview that he expects the hardware to b out in 9 to 12 months.

“We have built these islands of openness in the data center but the last element, and the one that was connecting the compute and storage, was the network,” said Frankovsky. “And there is a lot of pent-up passion out there for breaking open this appliance model.”

Networking is the last bastion of proprietary profits

Prepare to be disaggregated, switch!

For those who don’t dwell in data centers, the top-of-rack switch is the networking gear that sits on the top of a rack of servers directing traffic between those boxes and between the other racks in the data center. While the networking world is all aflutter over the promise of OpenFlow and software-defined networking, very little real progress has been made in building switches for the webscale data center.

Google, a few years back, had famously issued a request for a new type of switch that would fit its very specific scaled-out needs and no one responded. Now the search giant makes its own hardware. But soon after that, Andy Bechtolsheim saw the need for Google-like speeds and scale and started Arista, a switch company that has dominated in the webscale, financial and high-performance switching space. Meanwhile, at the lower end, Cisco’s cheaper Nexus line of switches have done really well.

Facebook’s Najam Ahmad.

Yet, these options aren’t palatable for Frankovsky or Najam Ahmad of Facebook (Ahmad will be at our Structure conference in June discussing more about Facebook’s networking strategy). On the existing product side, Frankovsky is frustrated by hardware that doesn’t play nicely at scale. He specifically mentioned that the side venting of heat on switches means he can’t place them right next to another switch. Ahmad, who is in charge of the social-networking giant’s network, is concerned about getting out of the proprietary OS model.

“We want it to be OS-agnostic so we can use one from our existing provider or build our own,” he said. He added that he’d prefer an open Linux-based implementation. These proprietary OSes — Cisco has IOS, Juniper has Junos and Arista has EOS — are one of the reasons that companies are locked into one networking gear provider. They are also stuck using proprietary code to make changes.

Who will be the Red Hat of the networking OS?

Networking cables along the ceiling at Facebook HQ.

If you are chock full of technically savvy people, losing the agility that comes from writing your own code as well as paying higher prices for the proprietary hardware and software combination is probably maddening. Hence Facebook’s interest in the open source OS. Of course, building out the underlying hardware is only the first step, the next will be supporting an OS that runs on top of that system.

While Facebook might build its own OS, not every company will want to do that, and Facebook may not open source its own networking OS if it ever makes one. That leaves a market opportunity. Perhaps a firm like Arista might move in here with an open source version of EOS, although given that Arista uses merchant silicon in its boxes, putting up an open-source version of its software would eat into its margins.

This is neither Open Flow nor SDN

But let’s go back to the box. Facebook is working with Broadcom, Intel, The Open Daylight Foundation, the Open Networking Foundation and Big Switch as some of its collaborators on this project. The box itself might run x86 hardware or a proprietary ASIC, according to Frankovsky. As for the protocols, Open Compute is going to see what the other collaborators want.

Software-defined networking

But for those wondering about Open Flow support, it’s likely. Frankovsky said that the Open Networking Foundation asked Facebook to get involved via the Open Compute Project with making open networking hardware. While Frankovsky and Ahmad didn’t cop to it, I know there has been frustration in many areas of the webscale and networking world that the promise of commodity hardware that Open Flow could offer has not really hit the market in a way that offers the most flexibility for data center operators.

Frankovsky said that the ONF approached Open Compute (Facebook is a founding member of both organizations) in part because it believed it could move quickly on this. And it will. But it’s worth noting that this announcement is about an open source top-of-rack switch, not a controller and not some type of software-defined networking play.

Other companies may take this box and perhaps an open source OS if one is developed, and then layer on some type of controller software to make a software-defined network, but this is just a box.

That being said, this is a box that could seriously disrupt the existing players in networking, from giants like Cisco and Dell all the way to smaller startups like NoviFlow or even Pica8. Much like Facebook is changing the server market with Open Compute, we’ll see if it can tweak the model and do the same in networking.

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Nobody really thinks of Amazon Web Services as a startup any more. But it was not all that long ago in 2003 when retail giant Amazon.com readied its push into the cloud infrastructure market. Andy Jassy, senior VP of web services for Amazon, shared some wisdom on hiring for startups for attendees of a Startup Secrets event hosted by Michael Skok, partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, at the Harvard Business School’s iLab on Wednesday.

Andy Jassy and Michael Skok chat at the Harvard iLab.

When he was given the green light to hire 57 people to build AWS back in 2003, here’s what Jassy looked for (and continues to look for) in prospective employees.

1: Intelligence

It’s table stakes but it’s important. When AWS was staffing up, it was key to find people with deep infrastructure knowledge but who “were not pickled,” Jassy said. Knowledge is important but so is intellectual curiosity.

A startup or a startup within a bigger company needs to make sure that the folks it hires know a lot of stuff, but don’t think they know it all already, Jassy told a roomful of entrepreneurs or would-be entrepreneurs.

2: Stick-to-itiveness

It was clear from the get go that AWS would be a huge project so team members had to have the ability to handle a long haul. “We knew this would be hard so we wanted people who would stick it out.  We screened for tenacity,” Jassy said.

3: Big vision, big energy:

Another checklist item was that Amazon wanted “hungry, ambitious people with a high bias for action … any startup needs to move fast not slow,” Jassy told a roomful of entrepreneurs. Folks had to be optimistic that they could “change the world.” At that time the idea of rolling out big data centers and offer services for rent at low margin was a huge bet.

4: Willingness to debate

The debates over spec’ing out which services or features to build immediately, which to hold off on and which to skip, have to come early in the process. Hashing out the plan often before rolling it out was also a huge deal that’s not usually popular with developers, who just want to get on with it.

But it’s really important to validate your plan of action before writing code, Jassy said. ”There is nothing worse for dev teams to believe this is the product and get way down the road and have people flip it around,” he said.

The odd upside of pre-planning is that once it’s done, development usually goes much, much faster, he said.

5: People who listen

The other side of that same coin is that developers and managers really need to heed feedback from users or potential users. “I’ve seen teams soliciting feedback and then not listening to it. Sometimes you have such a strong vision, it’ shard to hear something needs to change. You have to hear and be willing to adjust,” Jassy said. But its also important to drill down into that feedback to make sure what you’re hearing is really waht they’re saying.

“We ask lots of questions,” Jassy said.

6: Startup DNA

Amazon preferred people who had been at startups or at startups within existing companies and it didn’t hurt if the startups had failed. “We just wanted them to be self aware of why it didn’t work. We want people at all levels who are really good learners.”

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The White House Correspondents Dinner is a big to-do every year, drawing in huge names from across the country in almost every field imaginable. When one has the opportunity to go, one goes. But Muslim-American physician Seema Jilani may not be going back next year after experiencing what she says was blatant racism.

Jilani attended the dinner as a guest of her husband, a journalist; as the spouse of the invited guest, Jilani wasn’t allowed to attend the actual dinner, but instead would be spending the evening in a designated cocktail area with others. Soon after they parted company, however, Jilani realized her husband had her keys. Upon realizing she couldn’t contact him on his phone, she approached a group of security officers and asked if she could go into the ballroom just to get her keys. That’s when the trouble started.

“They refused to let me through,” Jilani wrote. “For the next half hour, they watched as I frantically called my husband but was unable to reach him. Then something remarkable happened. I watched as they let countless other women through — all Caucasian — without even asking to see their tickets. I asked why they were allowing them to go freely when they had just told me that I needed a ticket. Their response? “Well, now we are checking tickets.” He rolled his eyes and let another woman through, this time actually checking her ticket. His smug tone, enveloped in condescension, taunted, “See? That’s what a ticket looks like.”

Upon pressing the security officers as to why they would let others in without a ticket, Jilani was threatened by the guards, who said they would escort her out. Outraged, Jilani wrote a seething editorial on Huffington Post, where she spoke about the injustice done to anyone with dark skin and a foreign name, now more than ever.

“I explained that I am a physician, that my husband is a noted journalist for a major American newspaper, and that our guest was an esteemed, Oscar-nominated director. They did not believe me. Never mind that the American flag flew proudly outside of our home for years, with my father taking it inside whenever it rained to protect it from damage. Never mind that I won “Most Patriotic” almost every July 4th growing up. Never mind that I have provided health care to some of America’s most underprivileged, even when they have refused to shake my hand because of my ethnicity,” she wrote.

As of now, the White House has had no response about the incident, though that is likely to change soon; Ms. Jilani’s story has gone viral.

I’m not sure who does whom the bigger favor — Apple or T-Mobile USA. The nation’s fourth-largest carrier started selling iPhone 5 in stores April 12 (preorders a week earlier) and today reports 500,000 sold to date. T-Mobile also added 100,000 previous iPhone owners (presumably the majority from AT&T based on network types). The carrier also sells iPhone 4 and 4S but kept the big news to the 5.

Half-million new iPhones sales is just what Apple needs, too, with the U.S. smartphone market rapidly saturating. Apple is the country’s leader, with 39 percent subscriber share in March, according to comScore. Samsung follows with 21.7 percent share. T-Mobile’s contribution is sure to lift iPhone against rivals, when April numbers release.

iPhone is part of a four-prong strategy to revive T-Mobile. Second is MetroPCS merger, which was official May 1. Network expansion — massive 4G LTE rollout — is the third. Then there is Simple Choice, a no-nonsense contract-free plan, where subscribers pay less upfront for the phone than other carriers followed by 24 payments. There is also the option to buy phones outright.

T-Mobile does not sell phones unlocked, something you might not expect from the marketing. A store representative told me yesterday that unlock codes typically are issued after 45 days, except for handsets purchased outright. Code comes within hours.

The carrier hopes that iPhone and the new “un-carrier” plan will revive subscriber losses. The company’s bigger success is prepaid customers, for whom Simple Choice may resonate. During Q1, T-Mobile added 202,000 branded prepaid customers, the seventh consecutive quarter of gains. However, postpaid subscribers fell by a net 199,000, which is actually a 61 percent improvement — meaning the artery isn’t gushing quite as much blood. Pink — or should that be Magenta — gained just 3,000 branded subscribers. While small number, behind are big implications: First growth in 3 years.

Many carriers let prepaid customers bring their own devices, a strategy that worked well for T-Mobile when its network didn’t fully support iPhone and promises to be better now that the handset is official. Simple Choice lets people bring their own unlocked devices to a postpaid service that starts at $50 per month for unlimited text, talk and web — the latter is high-speed for just the first 500MB of data. There is no contractual commitment.

For people buying phones, T-Mobile courts the budget-minded — those worrying what they’ll pay upfront and on a monthly basis. For example, iPhone 5 is $99.99 upfront and 24 $20 monthly payments — or $579.99 outright. Full price through Apple or big-three carriers: $649. The 32GB is $199.99 and the 64 gigger $299.99 upfront and 24 monthly payments, or $679.99 and $779.99 outright, respectively, from T-Mobile. Upfront price from Apple and the big three: $199 (16GB), $299 (32GB), $399 (64GB). Full price: $749 and $849.

When the phone is paid off, the T-Mobile bill goes down by $20 a month. With, say, AT&T, the bill stays the same after the contract commitment is complete. Meaning: Subscribers pay a subsidized phone price premium, whether or not they have a contract. Last week, I got my first full T-Mobile bill: $161, compared to $294 for my last bill with AT&T.

Until there is a full quarter, or even two, of iPhone sales and Simply Choice, T-Mobile’s bet is uncertain. If the carrier fails, it won’t be for want of trying.

T-Mobile US released highlights of their 2013 first quarter financial results showing positive growth in their customer base. For the first time since 2009, the carrier experienced positive customer net additions. This was a result of continued strength in prepaid net additions, the seventh consecutive quarter of growth, combined with a significant improvement in postpaid losses. Those losses were down to 199,000, a 61% improvement compared to the prior year when that number was in the 500,000+ range. Overall, T-Mobile added 579,000 customers and now claims 34 million customers. The growth in customers was attributed mainly to the introduction of their new “Simple Choice” Un-carrier plans and the addition of the iPhone to their portfolio.

Thanks to the improvement in the customer base, T-Mobile ended the quarter with earnings of $1.2 billion and a margin of 29%. That was 12% higher compared to the fourth quarter of 2012. This performance was achieved even though total revenue was down 7.1% year to year. T-Mobile President and CEO John Legere said, “Our first quarter operating metrics and financial results are showing positive impact from the changes we began making in the fourth quarter. Branded customer net additions turned positive for the first time since the first quarter of 2009 and our postpaid business has demonstrated significant improvement…We ended the quarter with strong operational momentum, which is continuing into the second quarter, driven by the successful launch of our Un-carrier ‘Simple Choice’ service plan and the introduction of the iPhone into our device line-up. Things only get more exciting from here, having brought T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS together to create the wireless industry’s value leader and premier challenger.”

T-Mobile reported capital expenditures of $1.1 billion for the first quarter as they continue the buildout of their 4G LTE network. Seven metropolitan locations were announced on March 26th and T-Mobile expects they will cover 200 million people by the end of 2013. Thus far 16,000 cell sites have been upgraded and modernized as part of T-Mobile’s Network Modernization program.

source: T-Mobile US

Come comment on this article: T-Mobile revenues dip, but customer base growing

A hiker who went missing on Sunday, May 5 in Yosemite National Park has been found dead.

According to the National Park Service, the body of Kenneth Stensby was found near the bottom of Vernal Fall, a 317-foot waterfall located on the Merced River in Yosemite. Stensby’s body was found on Monday afternoon by park rangers, who have stated that it appears the 73-year-old fell from a cliff near the top of the waterfall. The body was found following a full-scale search that included California Highway Patrol helicopters.

Stensby, who is from Edina, Minnesota, is reported to have taken daily hikes through the park while staying at a Yosemite hotel. On Sunday he left a note with hotel staff, as he always did, outlining his hiking plans. Stensby had planned to take a morning hike to the top of Vernal Fall and return by midday. Park Rangers were dispatched to look for Stensby when he had not returned that evening. His backpack was found near the guardrails at the top of Vernal Fall.

This is not the first occasion on which a hiker has died around Vernal Fall. In 2011, three hikers crossed guardrails erected to keep hikers out of the water above the fall. They were swept over the falls by the water’s flow, which was greater than usual due to a large melting snowpack from that winter.

(Image courtesy God of War at the English language Wikipedia)

Path plans to announce a partnership with Sprint on Wednesday that will allow Sprint customers to download the social networking app to their Android phones without having to search for it in the Google Play store.

Allowing Android users of certain phones, including the Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One and Torque devices, to more easily find Path could help the app win more users and improve distribution, which has been a continuing hurdle for CEO Dave Morin’s self-described closed personal network.

The company explained the partnership with Sprint in a statement:

“Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re starting something new with Sprint to make finding Path easy. Sprint has brought together a group of some of the highest quality apps around for its Discover-it Widget on the new Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One and Torque devices, and we’re delighted to be included. Now, millions of Sprint customers can download Path with just a quick tap, allowing them to easily connect and share with the ones they love.”

Path was dinged by users recently for reportedly spamming a user’s contacts telling people to sign up for Path. While Morin denied that Path had ever spammed its users, Facebook reportedly cut off access to the Facebook API that allowed users to invite their Facebook friends to join Path.

The Sprint partnership could give Path a needed boost in adding new members, as the pressure increases on the mobile social network. Sprint most recently counted 55.2 million customers, and while not all of them are using Android, it certainly provides Path with a large new group of possible users.

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Hadoop-in-the-cloud startup Mortar Data is on a mission to bring recommendation engines to the masses, and it has recruited three well-known data scientists to aid its cause. On Wednesday, the company will start accepting applications on its website from companies that would like to have Mortar Data — as well as Bit.ly’s Hilary Mason, IA Ventures Scientist-in-Residence Drew Conway and freelancer (and former OKCupid data scientist) Max Shron — build them a custom recommendation system.

The way it works, said Mortar Co-founder and CEO K Young, is that his company will choose eight companies (in addition to the two it has been working with already) to implement custom systems based on their specific needs and businesses. Mason, Conway and Shron will split their time among the 10 total companies, but will be much more than advisers — they’ll actually dig into the data and be hands-on to ensure the right techniques and algorithms are applied in the right places.

The companies will keep any custom code, but the ultimate goal from Mortar’s perspective is to learn some best practices and create reusable building blocks that will let anyone create recommendation engines without pre-existing data science knowledge. Recommendation engines are commonplace on large web sites (Netflix, Spotify, iTunes, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, Eventbrite and the list goes on) but smaller companies can sometimes struggle to do them, or to do them well. Young hopes Mortar can establish an open source reference architecture of sorts that makes it easy to implement everything from building data pipelines to the actual algorithms that power recommendations.

“They’re really common and they’re really useful, but they’re really hard,” he said. “That’s why [a reference implementation] hasn’t been done before.”

They can get pretty complex, as evidence by this Netflix example.

Presently, Young explained, anyone wanting to build a recommendation system probably knows some of the algorithms to begin with and then gets to work researching how to implement them with specific processing frameworks (e.g., MapReduce) and on their specific data. Alternatively, they might have to hire a consultant that helps them build the recommendation engine. Either way, he noted, they’re probably not open sourcing it at the end because it’s presumed too valuable a competitive edge.

Mortar Data’s recommendation framework will be based on Pig, Python and Java, just like the company’s flagship platform for creating Hadoop jobs. Those languages will make the implementation more accessible and customizable by more people, Young said.

Really, he added, any web site or service that has multiple customers and deals with multiple entities — be they restaurants, songs, dating profiles, artisan necklaces, what have you — should have some sort of recommendation engine to help provide a more-intelligent customer experience. “It should become so ubiquitous that any service you go to knows enough about you to put forward the things you actually want to see,” Young said.

There is, however, one catch to Mortar’s plans as they stand right now: Because the service is hosted on Amazon Web Services, anyone interested in having Mason, Conway, Shron and Mortar work on their systems must have their data in AWS or be able to move it there. The initial reference implementation will likely be AWS-centric, too, but Young hopes contributors will use it and share methods for running it atop other platforms.

Feature image of Hilary Mason at Structure: Data 2011 courtesy of Pinar Ozger (www.pinarozger.com).

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Last week, as part of President Obama’s visit to Mexico and Costa Rica, I had the pleasure of participating in a roundtable discussion on women’s entrepreneurship.

In Mexico, President Obama and President Enrique Peña Nieto underscored the importance of their countries’ cooperation on regional and international issues, including gender equality.

On this, we were thrilled to hear that Mexico will join the Equal Futures Partnership, a multilateral effort to expand women’s economic empowerment and political participation which I helped launch last September.

Also in Mexico, I participated in a roundtable for Women Entrepreneurship in the Americas, or WEAmericas with Ambassador to Mexico Earl Anthony Wayne. The goal of our roundtable was to discuss and identify potential opportunities to work together to support more women entrepreneurs throughout Mexico, the region, and around the world.

read more

Members to Provide Guidance on Adaptation Science Initiatives

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell today announced the members of a newly created federal advisory committee who will provide guidance about the Interior Department’s climate change adaptation science initiatives.

Stephen Hawking has joined a boycott that sees the famed astrophysicist skipping out on a conference to be hosed in Israel in June.

Hawking was originally invited to speak at a conference hosted by Israel’s President Shimon Peres. His boycott of the event is part of a larger academic boycott encouraged by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine, a group strongly opposed to the occupation of Palestine.

The Committee provided the following statement on Hawking, which he later endorsed:

“Hawking joined the academic boycott of Israel and pulled out of the Israeli Presidential Conference: Facing Tomorrow 2013, under the auspices of President Peres. This is his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there.”

Hawking, and the boycott as a whole, was derided by the conference chairman:

“The academic boycott against Israel is in our view outrageous and improper, certainly for someone for whom the spirit of liberty lies at the basis of his human and academic mission,” said Israel Maimon.

Even without Hawking, the conference is expected to attract quite a few well-known people from around the world, including former British PM Tony Blair and former president Bill Clinton.

[h/t: AFP]

One of the Dixie Chicks has struck out on her own and released a solo album. Natalie Maines this week released Mother, a rock album that breaks from the Dixie Chicks’ country music past.

Maines told CBS in an interview this week that the album has a “harder-edge rock feel” than what the Dixie Chicks were playing. Maines told CBS that it would be hard for her to return to country music after fans lashed out in 2003 when she spoke out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“It’s definitely difficult for me to go back to country music,” said Maines. “So, yes, I’m sure that 10 years ago did have an effect on where I’m at right now and the fact that I’m doing this solo album.”

The Dixie Chicks have not released an album since 2006′s Taking the Long Way. Maines stated that she has not seen her former bandmates in around one year.

Maines also appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America on Monday to promote the Album. She and Ben Harper performed her first single from the album, titled “Without You.”

Maines is also promoting her album through her various social media channels. She is currently answering questions from fans via her Twitter account using the hashtag #chatwithnat.

Klout plans to announce a new feature on Wednesday that will prompt users who are supposedly influential about certain topics to answer related questions when they log into the site, building on the company’s idea that one’s knowledge about a particular topic can increase your credibility online.

The new product puts Klout in competition with several different products, from Quora to Yelp. CEO Joe Fernandez explained in an interview that the company wants to help users actually grow their visibilty on the internet and provide useful information to others, rather than just measure their internet visibility or connect those users with brands. However, the questions product, called “Klout Experts,” seems like an odd choice for the company, which has become something of a punchline in consumer tech and social media circles but might have more options courting businesses and marketing professionals.

The company used the questions of, “what’s the best veggie burrito in San Francisco” or “what’s the best digital SLR camera to buy” as examples of questions that users might answer, but it’s hard to imagine enough Klout users answering those questions more thoughtfully than the realm of other sites providing such information, or that people will go to Klout when they want burrito or camera advice. It’s true that no one has totally solved social recommendations, but there are companies with a good deal more payments data and location data giving it a shot, including public company heavyweights like Google and Yelp.

Fernandez touted the company’s integration with Bing as a key audience driver for the product (popular Klout answers will eventually show up in Bing search results), but with about 16.7 percent of market share in February, it’s not like Bing is a default search engine for many people.

However, when I asked Fernandez about the progress of Klout for business, he perked up (pun intended). Users have now redeemed more than 1 million Klout Perks since that product launched several years ago and said that they already have several hundred thousand businesses signed up for the program. Fernandez said the company is on track to do $10 million in revenue this year, and he sees his company becoming more like LinkedIn, where the majority of the revenue comes from products sold to businesses so it matters less how often consumers visit the site.

Fernandez said right now, businesses are eager to work with some of the people using Klout’s platform. For instance, McDonald’s might give a Klout Perk to fitness and health experts so those people can try out a new health-conscious menu item, in hopes that if the food is good, those people will tweet how much they love it. So the new question and answer product could become a way for both businesses to poll users about certain topics, or identify people who are particularly vocal online.

Here’s what users will see when the Klout Experts product comes to profiles:

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