Category: News

Netflix has just announced that they have gained the exclusive rights to the Wachowskis’ new sci-fi series Sense8. The 10-episode first season will debut on Netflix Instant in late 2014.

This is the first TV series to come from the Wachowskis, who are known as the minds behind The Matrix, V for Vendetta, and Cloud Atlas. Also attached to the project is Babylon 5‘s J. Michael Straczynski.

“Andy and Lana Wachowski and Joe Straczynski are among the most imaginative writers and gifted visual storytellers of our time,” said Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos . “Their incredible creations are favorites of Netflix members globally and we can’t wait to bring Sense8 to life.”

There’s not much in the way of plot details coming out of the announcement. Netflix describes it as a “gripping global tale of minds linked and souls hunted,” and says that it will be a sci-fi thriller told in the Wachowskis’ unique storytelling style.

“We’re excited to work with Netflix and Georgeville Television on this project, and we’ve wanted to work with Joe Straczynski for years, chiefly due to the fact his name is harder to pronounce than ours, but also because we share a love of genre and all things nerdy,” said Andy and Lana Wachowski . “Several years ago, we had a late night conversation about the ways technology simultaneously unites and divides us, and out of that paradox Sense8 was born.”

Netflix’s first foray into big-budget original content, the political thriller House of Cards, was by all accounts a huge hit for the company. It quickly became the most-watched title on the service, and topped IMDb’s list of most popular shows.

The original content strategy seems to have paid off in terms of Netflix’s stated goal – boosting subscribers. One survey showed that House of Cards made 86% of Netflix users more likely to stick around.

Likely, many are sticking around for more high-quality original content.

On April 19th, Netflix will debut the Eli Roth original horror series Hemlock Grove. The company has also announced a new kids series, Turbo: F.A.S.T., set to debut at the end of 2013. We’ve also heard talk of an original series based on the live of Pablo Escobar called Narcos that’s slated for a 2014 release.

Bill Gates‘ philanthropy continues to press hard on issues that may seem odd, but are actually essential to propping up the developing world.

Last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) selected a reinvention of the toilet that functions as a solar-powered wastewater treatment system. Now, Gates is challenging inventors to use improvements in materials science to develop a condom that feels good.

As part of the BMGF’s Grand Challenges in Global Health initiatives, the foundation is offering a $100,000 grant to someone who is willing to design a “next generation condom that significantly preserves or enhances pleasure, in order to improve uptake and regular use.”

The idea is that, as reliable and easy-to-use as condoms are, men supposedly experience more pleasure having bareback sex than they do using a condom. The challenge asks:

Is it possible to develop a product without this stigma, or better, one that is felt to enhance pleasure? If so, would such a product lead to substantial benefits for global health, both in terms of reducing the incidence of unplanned pregnancies and in prevention of infection with HIV or other STIs?

The challenge states that condoms have been in use for around 400 years, and have not improved in the past 50 years. However, the scientific advances made in the past 50 years, the initiative reads, have not been applied to this important area:

Material science and our understanding of neurobiology has undergone revolutionary transformation in the last decade yet that knowledge has not been applied to improve the product attributes of one of the most ubiquitous and potentially underutilized products on earth. New concept designs with new materials can be prototyped and tested quickly. Large-scale human clinical trials are not required. Manufacturing capacity, marketing, and distribution channels are already in place.

A better feeling condom could go a long way to convincing some men that they might as well roll one on before sex, if only for their own safety. However, the question of how a condom feels during sex isn’t the only factor that has prevented the condom from better curbing STIs and the AIDS epidemic seen in some regions of the world. Religious beliefs in particular continue to hinder the distribution and adoption of condoms in the developing world – and those can’t simply be engineered away.

With the expansion of cloud computing and various cloud services – many organizations are now further considering some type of cloud model. In many instances, companies looking to keep their data outside of a provider are looking to move to a private cloud platform. Where this type of environment can certainly bring a lot of benefits; the deployment and planning process have to be conducted very carefully. One of the first concepts to understand is that there isn’t just one magical cloud product. Rather, cloud computing revolved around the functionality of many different data center and infrastructure components.

To move to a cloud model, there has to be a solid understanding of those underlying components and how they all work together. Starting with a look at infrastructure and virtualization through process and governance, Cisco’s video discusses the Cisco Domain Ten —the ten essential domains you need to know to get started with the cloud journey.

[Image source: Cisco.com | Cisco Domain Ten – Simplifying Data Center Transformation]

Based upon the many cloud deployments — private and public, enterprise, public sector and service provider – Cisco worked to formulate this comprehensive framework to help you transform your data center and guide new initiatives.  In many cases, these new projects may include cloud, virtual desktop, application migration, and data center consolidation.

Click here to view Cisco’s video on The Cisco Domain Ten framework.  The important takeaway here will be the understanding of the ten key framework areas, or domains, that critical to consider, plan for and address as part of your data center and cloud transformational process.

When the Kindle Fire HD was announced last year, Amazon introduced X-Ray for movies along with it. The software, powered by IMDb, brought up the names of all the actors currently onscreen along with each actor’s filmography. Now that same software is making its way over to the world of television.

Amazon announced today that X-Ray for TV is now available to all Kindle Fire device owners, as well as those using the Amazon Instant Video app on the Wii U. Amazon says that X-Ray will be available for the most popular TV shows on Instant Video including Downtown Abbey, Game of Thrones, Lost, Doctor Who and The Walking Dead.

“X-Ray has been one of the most loved features on Kindle Fire HD since it launched last September,” said Peter Larsen, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “For people who are passionate about movies and TV, there is no better way to watch than on Kindle Fire HD, which combines an exceptional viewing experience with the unbelievable power of the over 100 million pieces of data in IMDb’s catalog.”

IMDb says that it’s now working to get X-Ray into every movie and TV show hosted on Amazon Instant Video:

“For over 20 years we have been cultivating a vast database of movie, TV and celebrity content,” said Col Needham, IMDb Founder and CEO. “Can’t remember where you’ve seen the actor playing Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey? No problem. Simply tap on the screen and you’ll see a full filmography, where you’ll realize that Hugh Bonneville was also in Notting Hill. Our vision is to make X-Ray available on every movie and TV show—we’re excited to make another big step forward today, and we are working hard to add X-Ray to more TV shows and movies in the future.”

X-Ray continues to be one of things that helps set Amazon Instant Video apart from the competition. It’s also investing in more original content to better compete with Netflix’s House of Cards and the new season of Arrested Development.

Merlin Entertainments Group, the private-equity backed owner of Madame Tussauds and Legoland, is preparing to go public in either London or New York and has been meeting with potential investors, its chief executive said on Wednesday. The world’s second largest visitor attraction operator behind Walt Disney, had revenue of over one billion pounds for the year to Dec. 29 2012, and was valued at 2.25 billion pounds ($3.41 billion) in 2010 when private equity firm CVC Capital Partners bought a stake.

(Reuters) – Merlin Entertainments Group, the private-equity backed owner of Madame Tussauds and Legoland, is preparing to go public in either London or New York and has been meeting with potential investors, its chief executive said on Wednesday.

The world’s second largest visitor attraction operator behind Walt Disney, had revenue of over one billion pounds for the year to Dec. 29 2012, and was valued at 2.25 billion pounds ($3.41 billion) in 2010 when private equity firm CVC Capital Partners bought a stake.

“We are definitely now considering our options,” Chief Executive Nick Varney told Reuters, adding a sale would allow it to pay down debt of 1.27 billion pounds as at the end of December, and help fund expansion in the U.S and Asia.

The company said as part of any IPO it would consider bringing its leverage level down below 3 times earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation from a current multiple of 3.6 times.

Merlin, owned by the Danish investment company Kirkbi A/S that controls Lego Group, and private equity firms Blackstone Group and CVC, put off plans for a listing in 2010 due to jittery markets.

After years of subdued activity, European initial public offerings (IPO) have picked up over the last few months as improving stock markets boost investor confidence.

Last week, British insurer esure, estate agent Countrywide and wind farm investment fund Greencoat UK Wind raised a combined total of more than 1 billion pounds ($1.52 billion) from selling their shares in London.

PREPARING THE GROUND

With the summer months being Merlin’s key trading period, Varney said the group would likely make a decision towards the end of summer, with a float possible in late 2013 or early 2014.

“We’ve been putting a lot of work into preparing the ground and making sure that if we do (IPO) … we can move relatively quickly and with people knowing and feeling comfortable about what they are dealing with.”

Varney said the company, which currently earns 20 percent of its revenue in the U.S., would prefer to list in London, but was also considering New York. He declined to comment on how much Merlin might be worth.

Walt Disney shares trade at 16.4 times prospective earnings for 2013.

Late last year Seaworld Parks and Entertainment, also backed by U.S. private equity company Blackstone, filed with U.S. regulators for an initial public offering.

On Wednesday Merlin reported a 16.5 percent rise in operating profit to 258 million pounds for the year to Dec. 29, as expansion in the U.S. and Asian markets helped mitigate the impact of the euro zone crisis, wet weather and London Olympics.

The group opened seven new attractions in 2012, taking it to almost 100 over four continents, and will open another six this year including a Sea Life centre in Manchester, England and Legoland discovery centre in New York.

A listing would likely include some new shares to help pay down debt, but the bulk would come from existing shareholders reducing their stakes, chief financial officer Andrew Carr said.

Kirkbi has a 36 percent stake, while Blackstone and CVC have 34 percent and 28 percent respectively.

Merlin had hired Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, UBS and Nomura as advisers in 2010 before abandoning its plan.

“It’s good that the market seems to be opening again, it’s been closed for a long time, there does seem to be a lot of appetite,” said Varney, adding that it had not yet appointed banks. (By Kylie MacLellan and Neil Maidment)

The post Reuters – Merlin Entertainments Plans Share Sale appeared first on peHUB.

The director of Nokia’s Here mapping platform, Sylvain Grande, is leaving the company to join SoundCloud, GigaOM can reveal.

Grande, who will take on an as-yet-undisclosed role at the Berlin-based audio platform firm next week, worked on Here Maps (formerly Nokia Maps) since the end of 2008. He ran the teams – also located in Berlin — that develop Here for Windows Phone, the web and other platforms. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was also “strongly involved in Nokia Maps’ key partnerships (from negotiation to delivery) with Yahoo!, Microsoft and others”.

Nokia tells me Grande won’t have a direct replacement as such. He reported to Thom Brenner, Nokia’s vice president of applications, location and commerce, and various members of Brenner’s team will take over his responsibilities.

The move comes at an interesting time for both SoundCloud and Nokia’s Here platform. SoundCloud has done a great job becoming the so-called YouTube of audio, but is only now starting to get serious about making money. Meanwhile, last month Nokia announced that it is opening up the Here platform to third-party developers, a shift that I reckon points to a strengthening of the platform’s significance for the company.

Grande’s jump to SoundCloud isn’t unprecedented. Indeed, SoundCloud co-founder Eric Wahlforss used to work at gate5, the Berlin mapping company that, along with Navteq and Plazes, was acquired by Nokia to form the underpinnings of what is now Here. Sources tell me at least one other developer has also left Nokia’s Berlin operations for SoundCloud, so there appears to be some active courting going on.

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Apple Insider has been working hard to unearth information about the Apple data center project in Reno, Nevada. After a drive-by shed little light, the site has obtained some aerial photos and one close-up of a new structure on the Apple site.

“As the project site was still being finalized, the company asked for permission to begin work on an initial, aproximately 20,000-square-foot structure to get head start on the construction project,” AppleInsider reports.

This is similar to the approach the company has taken in Prineville, Oregon, where a small structure was deployed quickly, with two larger buildings to follow.

What does this Apple facility look like? Hop over to Apple Insider for a quick look at the photos, and then come back. It’s a long, rectangular structure with a sloped roof with a peak in the center. Let’s see, where have we seen something like that before …

That’s an image of the Yahoo “Computing Coop” data center in Lockport, New York. The similarity shouldn’t be too surprising, since one of the Yahoo data center executives who worked on the Yahoo Lockport project, Scott Noteboom, now is a leader of the data center team at Apple.

There are some similarities between the two designs, but some differences as well. Both retain the “coop” structure, adopted from chicken coops that channel hot air into the upper area of the building. Both have large louvers and fans, effectively turning the building into a huge air handler to circulate air around the IT equipment.

But the Apple facility in Reno appears to be missing the “cupola” that runs along the crest of the roof on the Yahoo data centers, which allows rising server waste heat to be evacuated from the highest point of the roof. This suggests that Apple is using a different approach in handling the removal of hot air. The AppleInsider photos don’t present a full view of the positioning of the louvers on the side of building, but there are large fans and louvers at the end of the facility – which could mean an airflow pattern in which fresh air enters the side of the building, flows through the servers, and then through the hot aisle and into a plenum that brings the hot air out through the end of the building. Or not – only Apple knows for sure.

It’s interesting to note that the design in Reno is different from the smaller “tactical data center” that sits alongside the 500,000 square foot main building at Apple’s campus in Maiden, North Carolina. Here’s a photo from Apple:

As is the history with Apple, many of the technical details remain undisclosed. But what’s clear is that Apple is using a combination of small and large facilities, and mixing traditional big-box brick-and-mortar structures with pre-fabricated  modular components to speed its time to market. It’s a flexible approach that matches facility design to capacity planning – as well as the possibility that workloads are being matched to different types facilities (as Facebook has done with its cold storage data center).

Sometimes, kids have trouble saying certain words. And sometimes, it’s hilarious. In my opinion, this kid knew exactly what he was doing by the end of the video. Well played, kid, well played.

You know where this is going…

[aaronreynolds via reddit]

Google has released Chrome 26 FINAL for Windows, Mac and Linux. The latest release proffers three relatively minor new features, including improved spellchecking, plus 11 specific security fixes.

The most notable changes in Chrome 26 are improvements to the spell-checker tool. All supported dictionaries have been refreshed, while Korean, Tamil and Albanian support have all been added. Those using the Google Sync feature will be pleased to learn that any custom words added to the dictionary can now be synced to other devices along with other settings.

Also tweaked is the “Ask Google for suggestions” spell-checking feature. The feature — powered by the same technologies found in Google’s search engine — now supports checks for grammar, proper nouns, homonyms — words with the same spelling or sound, but a different meaning — and context-sensitive spell-checking, albeit only in English at present.

At the present time, only basic support is implemented in Windows and Linux, with the features expected to roll out over the next few weeks. Mac support should follow soon. The Ask Google for suggestions feature isn’t switched on by default – right-click inside a text box and enable it from the Spell-checker options sub-menu.

Also added in version 26 is a Windows-only feature that allows users to now save desktop shortcuts for individual user profiles on the desktop allowing users to quickly launch Chrome with their user settings applied. The option appears when creating a new user, and the shortcut places the user profile icon on top of the default Chrome icon for easy identification.

The final new feature is the addition of an asynchronous DNS resolver on Mac and Linux platforms – the feature is already present in the Windows build. The asynchronous DNS resolver is used to help speed up DNS resolution time – the time taken for a typed web address to be translated into its actual four-digit IP address before the site can be loaded.

11 specific security fixes and “rewards” have also been implemented in Chrome 26, including two rated high: one ensures isolated websites are run in their own process, while the other fixes an issue — “use-after-free” — in Web Audio. Google Chrome 26 FINAL is available now as a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Battery Ventures led a $20 million Series C round for Q2ebanking, a provider of electronic banking software for banks and credit unions. Return backers Adams Street Partners and C&B Capital also participated in the round. Q2ebanking is based in Austin, Texas.

PRESS RELEASE
March 27, 2013 – Croft & Bender, an Atlanta-based investment banking and private equity firm, is pleased to announce the successful completion of a $20 million Series C financing for its client, Q2ebanking. The funding was led by Battery Ventures, a Boston-based venture capital firm, with additional participation from existing investors including Adams Street Partners and C&B Capital.

Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Q2ebanking is a leading provider of highly secure electronic banking solutions for banks and credit unions throughout the U.S. The Company’s ebanking platform provides flexible deployment options for online banking, mobile and tablet banking, voice banking as well as a security application to effectively mitigate fraud risk for community focused financial institutions. By utilizing a single platform approach, Q2 delivers a more streamlined, better managed, fully featured solution designed to take full advantage of the anytime, anywhere aspects of the e-channel delivery model, enabling financial institutions to maximize their value contribution and better serve the needs of their customers.

The company provides its solutions for approximately 400 financial institutions, reaching over 3 million online users. The company has exhibited impressive revenue growth of 51 percent in 2012 and 49 percent in 2011.

Croft & Bender was retained as the exclusive financial advisor and placement agent to Q2ebanking in the capital raise. “We received inbound interest from a number of different parties about participating in our Series C round. Croft & Bender knew what we were looking for in a partner and had the experience to coordinate an efficient process that enabled us to quickly evaluate our alternatives and choose the best partner. We are thrilled with the result and excited to be partnering with Battery Ventures,” said Q2ebanking CEO Matt Flake.

“We are very fortunate to be involved with Q2ebanking. The combination of its best-in-class electronic banking solutions for banks and credit unions, driven management team, and accolades as one of the best places to work shows the company’s dedication to its core values and culture that will ensure its continued success,” commented Steve Tye, Managing Director of Croft & Bender.

The post Q2ebanking Adds $20M in New Financing appeared first on peHUB.

Yes I know, an Amazon phone has been rumored for what seems like an eternity, but the latest rumor is they will go into mass production during the later part of the 2nd quarter. As far as specs go, it’s rumored that it will come with a 4.7-inch display. Apparently they were initially going to go with a 4.3-inch display, but they went bigger since that’s what everybody (other than Apple fanboys) seems to want these days. The rest of the specs aren’t confirmed and supposedly Amazon is still “enhancing other specifications”, which could be the reason for the delays we reported about a couple of weeks ago. This one should be interesting so stay tuned.

source: DigiTimes

Come comment on this article: Amazon Kindle smartphone to go into production in Q2 with a 4.7-inch display

I am uncomfortable with the growing emphasis on big data and its stylist, visualization. Don’t get me wrong — I love infographic representations of large data sets. The value of representing information concisely and effectively dates back to Florence Nightingale, when she developed a new type of pie chart to clearly show that more soldiers were dying from preventable illnesses than from their wounds. On the other hand, I see beautiful exercises in special effects that show off statistical and technical skills, but do not clearly serve an informing purpose. That’s what makes me squirm.

Ultimately, data visualization is about communicating an idea that will drive action. Understanding the criteria for information to provide valuable insights and the reasoning behind constructing data visualizations will help you do that with efficiency and impact.

For information to provide valuable insights, it must be interpretable, relevant, and novel. With so much unstructured data today, it is critical that the data being analyzed generate interpretable information. Collecting lots of data without the associated metadata — such as what is it, where was it collected, when, how and by whom — reduces the opportunity to play with, interpret, and gain insights from the data. It must also be relevant to the persons who are looking to gain insights, and to the purpose for which the information is being examined. Finally, it must be original, or shed new light on an area. If the information fails any one of these criteria, then no visualization can make it valuable. That means that only a tiny slice of the data we can bring to life visually will actually be worth the effort.

Once we’ve narrowed the universe of data down to those that satisfy these three requirements, we must also understand the legitimate reasons to construct data visualizations, and recognize what factors affect the quality of data visualizations. There are three broad reasons for visualizing data:

• Confirmation: If we already have a set of assumptions about how the system we are interested in — for example, a market, customers, or competitors — operates, visualizations can help us check those assumptions. They can also enable us to observe whether the underlying system has deviated from the model we had and assess the risk of the actions we are about to undertake based upon those assumptions. You see this approach in some enterprise dashboards.
• Education: There are two forms of education that visualization offers. One is simply reporting: here is how we measure the underlying system of interest, and here are the values of those measures in some comparative form — for instance, over time, or against other systems or models. The other is to develop intuition and new insights on the behavior of a known system as it evolves and changes over time, so that humans can get an experiential feel of the system in an extremely compressed time frame. You often see this model in the “gameification” in training and development.
• Exploration: When we have large sets of data about a system we are interested in and the goal is to provide optimal human-machine interactions (HMI) to that data to tease out relationships, processes, models, etc., we can use visualization to help build a model to allow us to predict and better manage the system. The practice of using visual discovery in lieu of statistics is called exploratory data analysis (EDA) and too few businesses make use of it.

Assuming the visualization creator has gotten it all right — a well-defined purpose; the necessary and sufficient amount of data and meta data to make the visualization interpretable; enabling relevant and original insights for the business — what gives us confidence that these insights are now worthy of action? Our ability to understand and to a degree control three areas of risk can define the visualizations’ resulting value to the business:

• Data quality: The quality of the underlying data is crucial to the value of visualization. How complete and reliable is it? As with all analytical processes, putting garbage in means getting garbage out.
• Context: The point of visualization is to make large amounts of data approachable so we can apply our evolutionarily honed pattern detection computer — i.e., our brain — to draw insights from it. To do so, we need to access all of the potential relationships of the data elements. This context is the source of insight. To leave out any contextual information or metadata (or more appropriately, “metacontent”) is to risk hampering our understanding.
• Biases: The creator of the visualization may influence the semantics of the visualization and the syntax of the elements of the visualization via color choices, positioning, and visual tricks (such as unnecessary 3D, or 2D when 3D is more informative) — any of which can challenge the interpretation of the data. This also creates the risk of “pre-specifying” discoverable features and results via the embedded algorithms used by the creator (something EDA is intended to overcome). These in turn can significantly influence how viewers understand the visualization, and what insight they will gather from it.

Ignoring these requirements and risks can undermine the visualization’s purpose and confuse rather than enlighten.

Visualizing Data
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If you’ve been on Facebook in the last day or two, you’ve probably seen a whole lot of red equal signs as people change their profile pictures to show their support fo marriage equality. ‘Equality’ was the top term buzzing on Facebook on Tuesday, followed by DOMA, and Supreme Court. Also on the list: Prop 8, SCOTUS and Defense of Marriage.

It’s been interesting to see the creative ways people are using the red equal sign in their own ways. Appropriately, Martha Stewart Living went the cake route:

The post currently has nearly 14,000 likes and nearly 16,000 shares. The profile picture is still Martha Stewart’s face, however.

The red equal sign image started with the Human Rights Campaign, which posted it on their Facebook page. It’s a play on the campaign’s logo, which is traditionally yellow on blue.

It’s highly likely that many of the red equal signs will continue to penetrate your Facebook news feed throughout today, as the court will hear arguments on the Defense of Marriage Act. As previously reported, a number of tech companies, including Facebook itself (and Google), have filed an amicus brief arguing that the act is bad for business.

Mashable, which pointed to the Martha Stewart image has a slideshow of various brands that are showing their support.

Residents of Santa Clara, Calif. not only have a new smart meter program but free outdoor Wi-Fi to boot. The city’s non-profit electric municipal utility, Silicon Valley Power (SVP), is taking advantage of connected electric meters by integrating support for a second public unencrypted Wi-Fi channel, allowing the city to blanket the airwaves with free Wi-Fi.

SVP expects to support around 5,000 daily connections on the new public network, which has an SSID, or network name, of “SVPMeterConnectWiFi.” There’s no login, no password, nor credentials of any kind needed to use the outdoor wireless network. Utility data from the meters will be sent securely, however.

While the new network should add convenience around town, residents shouldn’t expect super high speeds: SVP says the connections will top out around 1 Mbps, which is slightly slower than 3G mobile broadband speeds. But for occasional use to check email, social networks and other light usage, those speeds should be more than sufficient; plus, you can’t beat the price!

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Golf is generally regarded as a leisure activity, something to pass the time in the sun while on vacation or on the weekend. So, when something as gristly as a shooting intrudes on such a leisurely activity, it makes the news.

The Associated Press is reporting that golfers at the Hilaman Golf Course in Tallahassee, Florida heard gunshots on Tuesday afternoon, around 5 pm. The golfers (bravely, I suppose) went to check out the source of the shots and found the bodies of two women.

According to a Leon County Sheriff spokesperson, the bodies were found in an area between the golf course and a nearby apartment complex. The names, ages, or descriptions of the victims have not been released, and law enforcement has begun canvassing the area for possible witnesses.

Brazilian oil company Petrobras is to auction off its stakes in Nigerian oil fields to raise cash for domestic projects, a deal that may fetch up to $5 billion, Reuters reported. The state-controlled company, formally known as Petroleo Brasileiro SA, has hired Standard Chartered to run the process, which will kick off in the next two months, banking and oil industry sources said.

(Reuters) – Brazilian oil company Petrobras (PETR4.SA) is to auction off its stakes in Nigerian oil fields to raise cash for domestic projects, a deal that may fetch up to $5 billion, sources close to the deal said.

The state-controlled company, formally known as Petroleo Brasileiro SA, has hired Standard Chartered (STAN.L) to run the process, which will kick off in the next two months, banking and oil industry sources said.

Asian state oil companies are expected to bid in the hopes of adding more production assets to their portfolios. Private equity funds are also interested, banking sources said.

Standard Chartered and Petrobras declined comment.

The decision to sell the Nigeria assets marks a retreat away from foreign markets once considered strategic in favor of realizing the government’s goal for Brazil to become self-sufficient in energy.

Petrobras will sell its 8 percent stake in the Nigerian offshore Agbami blocks, which are operated by U.S. energy major Chevron (CVX.N) and its 20 percent share of the offshore Akpo project, operated by France’s Total (TOTF.PA).

Crude oil production from the Agbami field fields began in 2008. Output from the project can reach 250,000 barrels per day (bpd), and it holds estimated reserves of 900 million barrels.

Akpo began production in 2009 and has plateau output of 175,000 bpd of light condensate oil and 9 million cubic meters of gas. It has proved and probable reserves of 620 million barrels of condensate and more than 28 billion cubic meters of gas, according to Total.

Petrobras began operations in Nigeria in 1998 in the deep waters off the coast of the Niger Delta.

ASSET SALES

Petrobras is divesting assets and redirecting investment towards higher-return activities such as exploration and production to finance a five-year, $237 billion capital spending plan, the world’s largest corporate investment program.

Petrobras hopes to more than double current oil and gas production by the start of the next decade to about 5.2 million barrels of oil equivalent a day and also help Brazil become self-sufficient in refined products as well.

By divesting assets such as the Nigerian blocks, Petrobras can focus more on exploring for oil in a vast deep sea region off the coast of Brazil known as the subsalt, thought to contain dozens of billions of barrels of high-quality oil.

Cash flow has been crimped by falling output and the government’s refusal, on anti-inflation grounds, to let Brazilian gasoline and diesel prices rise in line with world prices. This has forced Petrobras to subsidize consumers even as its debt rises above its internal limits.

Selling assets has not been easy, however, as potential buyers have sensed its need for cash and made low bids.

The company recently cut its asset sale goal to $9.9 billion from nearly $15 billion after it failed to get attractive offers for energy assets in the Gulf of Mexico.

ConocoPhillips (COP.N), meanwhile, is selling its Nigerian businesses to Oando Energy (OER.TO) for around $1.79 billion so it can focus on increasing its lower-cost U.S. shale oil and natural gas projects.

(Additional reporting by Jeb Blount in Rio de Janeiro and Guillermo Parra-Bernal; Editing by Tim Cocks and Jane Baird)

The post Reuters – Petrobras Auctioning Off Nigerian Oil Assets appeared first on peHUB.

As the current ECPA stands, law enforcement has the ability to obtain emails without a warrant. There are some laws currently making their way through Congress to change this, but law enforcement agencies obviously like things as they are. In fact, one agency in particular thinks it needs even more power to spy on your private communications.

Slate reports that FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann revealed during a talk at the American Bar Association last week that his agency is pushing for the ability to spy on communications in real time. In other words, the FBI wants to install the Internet equivalent of wiretaps on all major email and online chat services, including in-game chats on Facebook, etc, to monitor communications in real time.

Why does the FBI need this new power when it can already obtain emails without a warrant? It’s all about a 1994 surveillance law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. The law in its current state allows the FBI and other government agencies to install monitoring equipment on networks run by ISPs and phone companies, but it doesn’t cover the services that use those networks.

The Internet was a very different place in 1994, and many services that we now use, including Skype, Gmail and Facebook, were not around. The CALEA only covered broad communications made over a network instead of encrypted communications now being sent over these services. The FBI wants access to these because it just knows that they are being used for “criminal conversations.”

Despite the potential for abuse and overly broad powers, the FBI has made “reforming” the CALEA a priority for 2013. Weissmann says that they’re working with the intelligence community to craft a bill that would give it the ability to monitor all communications in real time.

The only silver lining of hope in all of this is that Weissmann acknowledges that there “should be a public debate” around granting the FBI new spy powers. It’s a nice gesture, but other privacy debates in Washington have shown that law enforcement and some lawmakers don’t really care about the public’s opinion.

The only thing that might be tougher than monitoring all the cloud service and price changes coming out of Amazon Web Services and other providers is keeping track of all the services that track all those cloud services and price changes.

RightScale maintains that its long history of monitoring AWS and other cloud activities for customers gives it an advantage here. It tracks price changes across the major clouds —  Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace and offers a free service to folks wanting to tap into that knowledge.

“We track 11,000 or so cloud prices across six clouds. People can use that data to help forecast their cloud costs into the future and tweak the deployments they already have,” said Kim Weins, VP of marketing for RightScale.

RightScale says there have been 29 price changes across AWS, GCE, Azure and Rackspace Cloud over the past 14 months, and, frankly, that number seems low to me. In November alone, there were something like six cloud storage price cuts between AWS, Google and Microsoft.

And that’s what RightScale will continue to do, pressing into a service technology it acquired last year with its acquisition of ShopforCloud, which it renamed Planforcloud.

In one respect, RightScale is in a good spot because it can claim expertise across the major clouds. Last year it said two-thirds of its customers ran multiple clouds and newer data is tracking the same way, Weins said.  As more business-capable cloud services come out of the OpenStack crowd — Rackspace, HP, IBM, Cloudscaling and others, being able to tap into multiple cloud data and aggregate it on one dashboard could be a draw.

On the other hand, AWS remains by far the largest cloud provider and as we have seen over the past year, Amazon is rolling out more Rightscale-like services of its own, notably OpsWorks.

In other words, hang on, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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