Category: News

Though President Barack Obama easily won two presidential elections, it doesn’t mean he coasted into the White House. Perhaps his biggest political challenge came before he ran for president in 2008, when he fought Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president. Now that Obama’s time as president is coming to an end, speculation has begun that Clinton will again attempt to gain the Democratic nomination for president, which many Democrats believe she should have gotten five years ago.

With that history in mind, it isn’t surprising that former President Bill Clinton is beginning to field questions about Hillary’s plans for 2016. It’s also not surprising that the former president is already sick of those questions.

According to a Washington Post report, Bill rebuffed questions about Hillary’s future at a fiscal summit this week. He stated that Hillary is writing books, working with the Clinton foundation, and “having a little fun being a private citizen for the first time in 20 years.” Bill also stated that speculation about a Hillary 2016 campaign is “the worst expenditure of our time.”

In many ways, Hillary Clinton is the shoe-in for the 2016 Democratic nomination for president. Her candidacy in 2008 was supported by nearly half of Democrats, and it’s easy to imagine the entire party falling in line behind the Clinton name once again. In addition to her experience as a Senator, Hillary now has years of diplomatic experience as U.S. Secretary of State to run on. Also, while Republicans have begun frantically searching for a party spokesperson who can connect with mainstream U.S. voters, no Democratic stars seem to have appeared to challenge current party orthodoxy, and certainly none that could beat Hillary in a Democratic primary. A PPP poll just weeks ago showed that Hillary might enjoy over two-thirds of primary votes in New Hampshire, with Vice President Joe Biden coming a distant second.

Google Ventures has added Ken Norton as a partner at its Startup Lab. Norton announced the news on Twitter. The new hire also was noted on The Next Web. Norton was a group product manager at parent company Google.

Here is a link to The Next Web post.

The post Ken Norton Joins Google’s Startup Lab appeared first on peHUB.

The story of the three missing girls (now women) who have been rescued after being kidnapped a decade ago, has taken the nation by storm. It’s a tragic story, without question, but it’s nice to at least see one in which the victims survived.

Amanda Berry has been deemed the “real hero” of this whole thing by Cleveland police, after she called 911 and got the whole thing “rolling”.

There has been a website dedicated to finding Berry, including these pictures from before the kidnapping:

Hat tip to EveryJoe, who also shares these photos of Gina DeJesus, one of the other kidnapped women:

Photos of the third woman, Michelle Knight, are not circulating so much. According to Mail Online, while Berry’s and DeJesus’ cases have remained “high profile” over the past ten years, not as much is known about Knight, and according to the publication, no picture has been published of her so far.

Google is not only routing iOS users from its Gmail app to its own apps, such as YouTube, Chrome and Google Maps apps, it’s now helping other third-party iOS developers send their users to Google apps too. On Tuesday the company announced a way to integrate Chrome with their iOS apps; another way of saying Google is helping other developers not use Apple’s default Safari mobile browser.

From the official Chrome team blog:

With Chrome’s OpenInChromeController class with x-callback, users can open a web page in Chrome and then return to your app with just one tap.

So not only can developers opt to have their links in those apps open in Chrome, they get a nice back button that is labeled with their app’s name.

It’s good for developers to have options. And Google — Apple’s biggest competitor — has been able to build apps that can easily replace some of the iPhone’s core services; it’s something the company has been slowly rolling out ever since Apple decided it no longer wanted to rely on Google for some of its most important default apps, such as YouTube and Google Maps, for example — last year.

Apple doesn’t allow users to set alternate browsers as the default in iOS. But now Google is creating ways for developers to pick its browser for users. It will be interesting to see how Apple responds or how long it allows this to go on.

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Microsoft’s Corporate VP for Windows Julie Larson-Green was at WIRED’s Business Conference today, and she was put on the spot when asked by interviewer and WIRED Senior Editor Michael V. Copeland about the apparently sluggish start for Windows RT. RT’s failure is a consumer education problem, according to Larson-Green, since it’s very different from what’s come before.

Windows RT, for those unfamiliar or confused by the new familial breakdown of Windows following the introduction of version 8, is a lightweight version designed for ARM-powered devices (vs. x86, the architecture which full Windows OS runs on), which doesn’t offer access to the full suite of Windows software. According to our own Matt Burns, that has resulted in a big app gap, and made the Surface RT essentially a glorified web browsing tablet, which sounds like something different from a simple matter of properly framing the product.

“I think we have some work to do on explaining it to people because it’s different,” Larson-Green said. “They’re just so used to Windows meaning backward compatibility in all the programs that you use today. I use Surface RT as my main computing device, I connect to a corporate network using my virtual smart card and VPN when I need to, Office is already on there […] it’s just a simpler experience and then the Surface Pro has the flexibility if you want to work on the details.”

“I love my Surface RT,” was a common refrain from Larson-Green even into the Q&A, who later characterized it as a device for casual consumption mostly, especially filling a niche for “weekend” use. Even the dual nature of her defense of the Microsoft tablet shows that it still needs work at Microsoft itself in terms of fleshing out its role in the consumer ecosystem, which probably isn’t helping the company properly explain its purpose to the buying public.

The Surface RT is estimated to have sold only around 1 million units total since its launch late in 2012, far under its reported initial estimates of 3 million or so. Other OEMs have balked at the RT line in the meantime, with Acer waiting on launching its RT slate until at least Q2 of this year.

By now, you’re well aware that three women were found safe after being held captive in a man’s basement for 10 years in Cleveland, OH. The story (and the unlikely hero) have captured the attention of the nation, but now people are beginning to ask questions. Why couldn’t police find these women after they went missing?

Well, the house in question may help answer that question. The house belonging to the suspect, Ariel Castro, is pretty normal from the outside. Here’s what it looks like in a Google Street view image from 2009:

The house would look pretty normal to any bystander last week, but it takes on a creepier atmosphere now that the truth has come out. It’s actually a little unsettling to think that three young women were being held hostage in the house’s basement as Google’s Street View car drove by in 2009.

Here’s an interactive Street View version for those who want to tour the neighborhood in which the women were thankfully found alive and well:

View Larger Map

Three women wearing nuns’ habits looked a little too nervous about being on the lovely island of San Andres recently, and when police looked closely, they could tell that the fabric the women were wearing was all wrong (did they pull a Scarlett O’Hara and yank the curtains down to make their outfits?). Also, all three of them had unsightly bulges on their thighs, owing to the four pounds of coke they all had strapped to each leg.

During questioning, the women reportedly burst into tears and said they had agreed to smuggle the drugs on a flight from Bogota, Columbia because they were desperate for money.

Colombia cops Bust Fake nuns hid cocaine under habits.Wasn’t this in a Whoopie Goldberg movie?myfoxdc.com/story/22179978…

— Bob Gaskin (@BobG231) May 7, 2013

Headline alone deserves a RT. RT @huffingtonpost: Fake nuns hid 4 pounds of cocaine in hats huff.to/16RSVGH

— Sonya Hamasaki CNN (@SonyaCNN) May 7, 2013

Were these the nuns Biden asked for gun control support?// Colombia cops: Fake nuns hid cocaine under habits: tinyurl.com/cneqtrs

— AJ (@SeeTac7) May 7, 2013

Robert Steven Kaplan, author of What You’re Really Meant to Do, explains how to reach your unique potential.

Allergies can be crippling, but usually some choice drugs and patience can get even the worst allergy sufferers through allergy season. Suffering a runny nose for over a year and a half, however, is another matter entirely. An Arizona man recently found that what he thought was allergies was actually brain fluid leaking from his nose.

According to a Fox 10 report, after suffering a leaking nose for 18 months, Joe Nagy was told by a doctor that the fluid coming from his nose was actually brain fluid. It turned out that Nagy had a hole in the membrane protecting his brain.

Doctors told Fox 10 that such a condition can be easy to miss, since many people simply assume they have a constantly running nose. Many patients find out about the problem when the fluid becomes infected. Nagy himself developed a serious case of meningitis just before undergoing brain surgery to repair his leaking membrane.

The surgery used cartilage from Nagy’s nose to repair the membrane. It was successful and Nagy stated he was surprised by how quickly the issue was repaired.

“I was waiting for the dribble, you know?” said Nagy. “I was so used to it every day, I got a hanky, a cloth ready, a tissue. Nothing. And all of a sudden, it’s never come back.”

The Obama Administration has reportedly selected Nicole Wong for the the new job of chief privacy officer. Wong, who has worked as a senior lawyer for both Google and Twitter, has a reputation in the tech and legal community for defending online freedom.

The appointment, which was reported by CNET and has yet to be confirmed, comes at a time of growing public concern over data collection tools that scour everything from smartphones to shopping records, and make it easy for companies and governments to collect information about individuals.

The Obama Administration’s decision to appoint Wong may therefore represent an attempt by the government to find new ways to balance the power of data with preserving liberty and privacy.

During her time at Google, Wong fought the governments of Turkey and Pakistan over YouTube censorship, and she has also worked with The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a respected cyber-advocacy group.

Wong’s appointment also comes at a time when Google chairman Eric Schmidt has been calling attention to the growing threat of governments using Western technology to spy on and oppress their citizens.

Wong, who joined Twitter last November, is the second long-time Google lawyer to be hired by the White House in recent months. The Administration recently hired former Googler Michelle Lee to head the troubled Patent Office.

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Nest proved that energy monitoring can be tantalizing. And it’s about to get even better. The company just announced that it has acquired MyEnergy to further enhance its suite of monitoring tools. Terms of deal were not released.

Originally called Earth Aid, the startup launched its online dashboard in 2009 as one of the first energy monitoring solutions. Similar to EnergySavvy, Google’s Powermeter andMicrosoft’s Hohm, Earth Aid, and now MyEnergy, provides consumers with information on how much electricity, water, and natural gas they use and how much they spend on these utilities. Simply connect your online utility accounts with the platform, and the system imports all the necessary bits and displays them on the beautiful web dashboard.

Spend a few quick minutes on MyEnergy.com and it’s easy to see why Nest wanted MyEnergy in its corner. The system is wonderful. Just like the Nest Learning Thermostat.

In 2011 the startup raised $4 million in Series A funding from Point Judith Capital, the Clean Energy Venture Group, and Capital-E. According to today’s announcement, MyEnergy has users in all 50 U.S. states and spans more than 1,500 utility territories.

“Giving our customers more in-depth access and analysis of their energy usage has always been part of the Nest vision,” said Tony Fadell, Nest founder and CEO said in a released statement today. “We’ve made great strides in the past year and a half; by bringing MyEnergy into the Nest family, we can reach our goals even faster. The MyEnergy team is incredibly like-minded and we’ve already begun working with them to find ways to integrate their technology into Nest products.”

The Nest Learning Thermostat is beautiful. But the web dashboard is lacking in depth. There is plenty of room for improvement. MyEnergy will likely not only make it look better, but dramatically enhance the tool set by giving the homeowner information from their neighborhood.

Nest is charging forward, simultaneously building out consumer aspects and partnering with utility companies. This acquisition clearly fits within Nest’s vision. It’s unclear exactly what Nest plans to do with MyEnergy, but as a Nest user myself, I’m rather excited to see what Tony Fadell and team does with the beautiful MyEnergy platform.

Smart thermostat maker Nest has acquired energy data startup MyEnergy, formerly called Earth Aid. Nest didn’t disclose terms of the deal, but said in a release on Tuesday that the acquisition would help Nest further its goals of helping its users “understand and address” home energy consumption.

MyEnergy is a startup that was founded back in 2007. The company was called Earth Aid for several years, and has developed algorithms that collect, analyze and provide recommendations around utility energy data. MyEnergy CEO Ben Bixby told me in an interview that MyEnergy is already hard at work stitching MyEnergy into the fabric of the Nest service, and he thinks that the union between the two services could be a “game changer” for energy data.

Unlike some startups like Opower that collect and aggregate energy data for utilities to deliver services to their customers, the MyEnergy platform aggregates utility energy data largely to deliver energy efficiency services straight to the consumer. For example, if your utility has an online account, and you gave MyEnergy permission to link that account to its system, then the site would pull your energy consumption data into its network. MyEnergy then would use that data to offer the user recommendations for how to reduce energy consumption and also create a sort of social network around energy consumption. The important part to remember is that your utility doesn’t even have to be involved in the process.

In recent years some utilities have embraced the Department of Energy-backed Green Button program, which is supposed to make this process of collecting and managing utility energy data even easier and standardized.

MyEnergy also has a utility-facing data product, but Bixby clarified that the utility data product isn’t white labelled (the way Opower’s is), and is branded with MyEnergy. Nest said it will also use MyEnergy to provide services for energy providers, so it clearly will be using MyEnergy for both straight to consumer data services and utility data services.

The acquisition move shows how Nest is increasingly working with utilities and energy service providers on energy efficiency and energy services. While Nest, founded by former Apple designers, is well known for making a chic learning thermostat, one of its under appreciated values is its ability to collect and use energy data in new ways. The move also puts Nest in closer competition with leading energy utility data companies like Opower.

Last month Nest announced a variety of energy services that its collective thermostats can provide to energy companies and utilities. Examples of energy services include “demand response,” which is when power companies turn down power usage of a collective group during peak times (like a hot summer afternoon).

MyEnergy doesn’t provide detailed numbers on how many users it has, and Bixby would only say that its customers are found within 1,500 utility service territories. Boston-based MyEnergy had 12 employees before the acquisition, and some of those folks will be coming out west to work with the Nest team. MyEnergy is backed by Point Judith Capital, Clean Energy Venture Group, and Conservation Services Group. Nest is backed by Venrock, Kleiner Perkins, and Google Ventures.

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Three women – Amanda Berry, Gina Dejesus and Michelle Knight – disappeared over a decade ago in Cleveland, and were found today after being kidnapped and held captive.

Cleveland police chief Ed Tomba reportedly said today, “The real hero is Amanda. She got this rolling.”

Here’s her 911 call:

Charles Ramsey, a guy who lives next door to the house where the girls have been held, heard the screams, and helped Berry, who also had a six-year old daughter with her. The father of the child has not been disclosed.

The two other girls were found inside the home. Three brothers: Ariel (the owner of the house), Pedro and Onil Castro, have been arrested.

Berry was reported missing on April 21, 2003.

Anne Hathaway was rocking a platinum hairdo at the Costume Institute Gala at the Met this weekend, and says it was in honor of Blondie’s Debbie Harry.

“I don’t know that you could tell it by looking at me, but Debbie Harry was [my inspiration],” she said. The gala’s theme was Punk: Chaos To Couture.

Hathaway’s hair made waves last year after she debuted a super-close crop, which was done during filming for “Les Miserables”. The lighter shade makes her doe eyes pop, but it’s hard to say whether she’ll keep it for long; she may have to tint it dark again for a movie role.

The 30-year old said she immediately loved the dress she wore to the gala, a vintage Valentino gown from 1992.

“I couldn’t believe it when he (Valentino) sent me the picture because he asked me if I wanted to wear archive . . He said, ‘Well, have you ever done anything punk, darling?’” Hathaway said. “Princess, maybe! He sent me this one and I said, ‘Oh my god, I love it. It’s fabulous! First and only [choice] as soon as I saw it! I took the chaos thing as far as the couture would allow.”

Image: Us Weekly

Continue reading…

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk thinks that autonomous vehicles that drive themselves may not be as far off in the future as the auto industry makes them out to be. The big sensor arrays that Google, Toyota and Ford are testing in their autonomous car prototypes are a long ways from becoming commercially viable or affordable, Musk said in an interview with Bloomberg. But he said a scaled down version of such sensor systems relying on camera imaging could power a form of car autopilot that automates many of the ordinary tasks of driving.

“I like the word autopilot more than I like the word self-driving,” Musk said in the interview. “Self-driving sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. Autopilot is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.”

Musk told Bloomberg that he’s discussed the autopilot concept with Google’s engineers and even mentioned the possibility of Tesla and Google jointly developing such a system. But Musk later tweeted from his Twitter account that his comments to Bloomberg were meant to be off the cuff, and that Tesla and Google weren’t announcing any big new initiative.

“Creating an autopilot for cars at Tesla is an important, but not yet top priority,” Musk tweeted. “Still a few years from production.”

Musk’s notion of an inexpensive autonomous driving system is an interesting one as it does away with the complex light detection and ranging — or Lidar — sensors that use 360-degree scanning lasers to render a 3D construct of the world around the vehicle. You’ve seen such funky laser arrays on top of mapping vehicles before, so the technology is readily available, but even a scaled down version of such systems would add enormous cost to car. According to Ford engineers, those costs are among the principal reasons why fully autonomous cars are still many years away from becoming reality.

But Musk posited that a car could simply use cameras to collect the data the car needs from its surroundings. The approach has its limitations compared to lasers. Cameras take pictures, while Lidar is registering physical objects, tracking their distance and relative speed to your car. Cameras would extrapolate that data from images. Stereoscopic lenses could allow for better depth perception on the road, but ultimately a camera-based system would depend on a lot of image-processing muscle to cull critical life-saving information from a massive pool of pixels.

Luckily for Musk, he’s not the only one thinking this way. Many of the new advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) systems that warn drivers of impending accidents or alert them to lane drifting are camera based. It’s also no coincidence that graphics card giant Nvidia is making a big play in the connected car space. The silicon vendor believes that its years of crunching real-time image and spatial data in PCs and game consoles make it the ideal company to power future car sensor systems.

Eventually cars won’t just sense the other vehicles and objects in their vicinity. Those vehicles will actively communicate with one another and those objects. Using a secure form of long-range Wi-Fi, a car will tell all the vehicles behind its about brake or change lanes. Transmitters on the highway will tell you a big curve is coming up. (For more info on the connected car see our infographic.)

Such vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications could never replace sensors entirely since it would take decades for every vehicle on the road and every stretch of asphalt to become connected. But those technologies would allow cars to evolve cars beyond autonomy into a kind of ad hoc network, in which they would collectively make decisions instead of merely reacting to each other’s actions.

Returning to Musk’s remarks, though, I find it particularly interesting how he’s positioning the concept of the driverless car. He’s calling it a form of autopilot not too far off from the adaptive cruise control we use in our vehicles. Musk is downplaying the idea of car usurping control from the driver. He’s keyed in on the biggest obstacle facing the autonomous vehicle today: consumer perception. Few people are ready to cede act of driving to computer.

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Darby Private Equity, the private equity arm of Franklin Templeton Investments, announced that its Darby Converging Europe Mezzanine Fund will exit its holdings in Sirma, a Turkish bottled water and beverage manufacturer. The firm is selling a majority interest in Sirma to Danone. Darby made a mezzanine investment in Sirma in 2010, and a follow-on equity and mezzanine investment in 2011. Terms of the deal were not released.

PRESS RELEASE
Darby Private Equity (“Darby”), the private equity arm of Franklin Templeton Investments, announced that its Darby Converging Europe Mezzanine Fund (“DCEMF”) signed an agreement to exit its equity and mezzanine holdings in Sirma, one of the leading Turkish bottled water and beverage manufacturers, in connection with a strategic sale of a majority interest in Sirma to Danone. DCEMF’s exit is subject to the closing of the transaction with Danone. The transaction terms were not disclosed.

DCEMF made a mezzanine investment in Sirma in 2010 to provide long-term funding for the growth of the company. DCEMF made a follow-on equity and mezzanine investment in 2011 to finance Sirma’s new factory .

Robert Graffam, Darby’s Senior Managing Director for Europe, commented: “We are the first and leading mezzanine and equity fund with a dedicated presence in Turkey. This transaction reinforces our track record in supporting middle-market companies with long-term growth capital in the region.”

Nicholas Kabcenell, Darby Managing Director commented: “During our involvement Sirma has strengthened its position as a leading company in its sector through new products, new factory investments and successful branding. We look forward to seeing the company continue to prosper in the future.”

Burak Dalgin, Darby Managing Director added: “We have done six investments to date in Turkey and Sirma will be our third exit in Turkey. Two of these new investments and two of the exists, including the potential Sirma exit, happened over the past twelve months.”

The Darby Converging Europe Mezzanine Fund is focused on providing growth capital to middle-market companies in Central and Eastern Europe. Sirma will be the eighth exit for the Fund.

Darby has been a pioneer in providing mezzanine products – a hybrid of both debt and equity – to various emerging market regions, including Latin America, Asia, and more recently Central and Eastern Europe. The firm has been managing mezzanine and equity funds in Latin America since the close of its first Latin American private equity fund in 1994.

Darby was founded in 1994 by The Honorable Nicholas F. Brady, who served as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury between 1988 and 1993. Richard Frank joined the firm as CEO in 1997 after his career at the International Finance Corporation (IFC)/World Bank. In 2003, Darby became a fully owned subsidiary of Franklin Resources, Inc. [NYSE:BEN], a global investment management organization operating as Franklin Templeton Investments. For more information please visit darbyoverseas.com.

Franklin Templeton Investments provides global and domestic investment management solutions managed by its Franklin, Templeton, Mutual Series, Bissett, Fiduciary Trust, Darby, Balanced Equity Management and K2 investment teams. The San Mateo, CA-based company has more than 65 years of investment experience and over US$823 billion in assets under management as of March 31, 2013.

The post Darby Private Equity Exits Sirma appeared first on peHUB.

Sen. Rob Portman has smoked marijuana. That was the big reveal during the senator’s interview with BuzzFeed Brews on Monday evening. Since then, the video blew up as people are somehow drawn to stories of drug use and politicians.

Of course, Portman doesn’t smoke anymore. That was only during his younger days in the 70s and 80s when BuzzFeed’s John Stanton said the senator looked “a bit like a dirty hippie with long hair.” He didn’t elaborate on if he used the drug more than once. He did, however, talk about his efforts as a senator to stop drug use in Ohio and around the nation.

Marijuana use among politicians is a popular question to ask during interviews as it always draws a humorous or awkward response. One of the more famous was when former President Bill Clinton was asked if he smoked pot during a 1992 interview. He admitted that he did, but claimed that he didn’t inhale.

[h/t: ABC News]