Wade Roush wrote:
The Echo Nest, a Somerville, MA-based music search and recommendation startup, has raised $1.3 million in new equity financing, according to a regulatory filing today. The investors weren’t disclosed in the filing, but the company’s directors include Eliott Katzmann of Commonwealth Capital Ventures (which led a previous funding round in September 2008). Xconomy profiled The Echo Nest in October 2008.
Newly-independent Skype is kicking off the Consumer Electronics Show with details about its newest attempt to become an everyday communication utility—not just a tool the techies use. It has brokered deals with Panasonic and LG (SEO: 066570) that will bring Skype video-chats to the big-screen TV.
Skype’s software will be embedded into Panasonic and LG’s web-enabled HDTV’s; the models will be available in mid-2010. For the electronics brands, the goal is to make buying a web-enabled TV even more of a draw, as there’s been some consumer resistance to paying extra for them, per the NYT. Still, video chats on the Skype TVs won’t just magically happen, shoppers will also have to buy special web cams (priced in the $100 – $200 range) from the Skype store.
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Shockingly enough, analyst Maynard J. Um “expects” a new iPhone launching in mid-2010. See, this guy is so smart that we must trust him when he says that he “believes” that a CDMA-based iPhone is coming from Verizon, right? RIGHT?
We believe a CDMA-iPhone is also in the works, though believe Verizon Wireless and Apple may currently be apart on pricing.
When he says “We” he refers to him and the Queen of England. I guess that Verizon’s customers are really waiting for this to happen, but other analysts are calling all this wishful thinking. While we wait to see if he is right or not, I would be polishing my
by Agence France-Presse
OSLO—Think, an electric car maker based in Norway, will assemble its vehicles in the United States next year and hopes to roll out more than 20,000 units a year, the Wall Street Journal said on Tuesday, quoting the group’s chief executive.
The Think City. Photo courtesy Think“Nothing has been finalized yet but a decision is expected today,” a Think spokesman, James Andrew, told AFP.
Think, which will receive local and state incentives, is expected to invest $43.5 million to modernize an assembly plant in Elkhart, Indiana, the Wall Street Journal said.
Several U.S. states had been in competition for the investment.
The newspaper reported that the project was to be officially announced in Indiana on Tuesday.
The plant would have an assembly capacity of more than 20,000 cars a year, but production would be “in the low thousands” in 2011, chief executive Richard Canny said.
The Think City, a small plastic vehicle that seats two adults and two children, is expected to sell for around $30,000, after a tax rebate of some $7,500, the Wall Street Journal said.
After teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, Think was saved in August by a group of investors, including Ener1 of the U.S., the owner of Enerdel which supplies batteries for the Think cars.
Enerdel is the largest shareholder in the carmaker, holding 31 percent.
In northern Europe, production of Think cars was transferred last year from Oslo to a plant in the Finnish town of Uusikaupunki, where the Finnish group Valmet Automotive already assembles models for German sportscar maker Porsche.
The Think City has a maximum speed of 68 miles an hour and a range of 110 miles.
Related Links:
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U.S. car fleet shrank by four million in 2009
Sorry guys, Google’s not changing the game today: the Nexus One will be priced like any other smartphone: $180 on contract with T-Mobile, $530 unlocked, both available through Google’s online store. It’s what we’d heard, if not what we’d dreamt.
Buying the phone on contract with T-Mobile is exactly like buying any other smartphone on T-Mobile, aside from the fact that the storefront you’re purchasing from may be Google’s. If you’re buying it unlocked, though, there are some serious caveats: namely that this is a GSM phone, which means that it’ll only work with T-Mobile or AT&T, and that of the two, the Nexus One is only capable of 3G data connectivity on T-Mobile. So “unlocked” here is more or less meaningless, but hey, no contracts! So there’s that.
Google handed the Nexus One out to employees weeks ago, and we even had a change to play with one—in other words, little was left to mystery with the Nexus One, as phone. As a product, though, it had potential: Google’s a cash-rich company with a habit of giving things away for free, so… free phone? A partially subisidized, no-contract phone? A Google telco company? Ha, nope. But still, it’s a hell of a phone at a reasonable price, so that’s worth something. [Google, Nexus One Liveblog]
UPDATE: Existing T-Mobile customers are pretty much getting screwed on the Nexus One discount. Only new customers are eligible for the $180 price.
Veo los modelos que se han presentado en la Auto Expo de Nueva Delhi, en la India, y pienso que el tiempo de los coches pequeños ya está aqui. Ya hablamos sobre la importancia que los salones asiáticos del automóvil han tomado, incluso me atrevo a decir que llegarán a eclipsar a los salones conocidos.
Pero vayamos al grano. El Honda Small Concept, al igual que el Toyota Etios, es un coche que inicialmente sólo competirá a nivel local con el famoso, a estas alturas, Tata Nano. Y para ello ha sido presentado, aunque los datos entregados por Honda con respecto al modelo sean bastante escasos.
El Honda New Small Concept fue presentado sin motor y sin interiores. Por cierto, Honda tiene la posibilidad de hechar mano a unos cuantos motores pequeños de su línea, aunque sea un misterio la decisión final; hay que tener en cuenta que el New Small Concept es un coche pensado para el segmento bajo, de manera que sus costos de producción deben ser bajos para cumplir con ciertos objetivos y que el coche cueste un precio reducido.
De todas maneras, el Tata Nano quedará seriamente afectado contra este coche desde el punto de vista del diseño, lo que se comprueba nada más de ver las fotos. ¿Cuanto costará? ¿Llegará algún día a Europa? Nadie lo sabe, por ahora. Sólo podemos asegurar que el New Small Concept será lanzado al mercado asiático como modelo 2011. El tiempo de los coches pequeños ha llegado, y si son como este concepto, bienvenidos sean.
Vía | Autoblog
As the global economy limps out of the last decade and enters a new one in 2010, what will be the next big driver of global growth? Here’s betting that the “teens” is a decade in which artificial intelligence hits escape velocity, and starts to have an economic impact on par with the emergence of India and China.
Admittedly, my perspective is heavily colored by events in the world of chess, a game I once played at a professional level and still follow from a distance. Though special, computer chess nevertheless offers both a window into silicon evolution and a barometer of how people might adapt to it.
Read the full article at Project Syndicate –>
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by Tom Laskawy
The New York Times has another piece encouraging a flare-up in the cage match between organic farmers and those in favor of genetic engineering as the solution to future food needs. This one is centered on the “unlikely” but happy marriage of a plant geneticist and an organic farmer:
Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak have every reason not to get along.
Ronald, a plant scientist, has spent her past two decades manipulating rice from her lab bench, bending the grain’s DNA to her whim. Adamchak, meanwhile, is an organic farmer, teaching college students the best practices of an environmentally gentle agriculture at his California market garden.
As Adamchak confesses, few have been more vociferously opposed to the genetic engineering practiced by Ronald than his organic movement, which has steadily grown in recent years to constitute an influential, if tiny, part of the U.S. farm system. So it can come as some surprise when Ronald and Adamchak let slip that they have been happily married for more than a decade.
Such a union should not be shocking, the couple argues. And a more modest version—sans marriage—must be considered by any farmer or consumer hoping for a sustainable future for agriculture.
… To spread their message to two communities that rarely speak in measured terms, Ronald and Adamchak have written a book, Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food, which came out in paperback last month.
What Adamchak and Ronald pursue in the book is in essence a unified theory of farming. While critical of Western seed companies that have co-opted genetically modified (GM) crops for questionable business practices, the couple argues that both current and future generations of altered crops will, if responsibly managed, allow much of the world’s hungry to be fed from land already degraded by the plow’s slice and the tractor’s compressing wheel.
Photo courtesy illuminating9_11 via FlickrIn addition to offering the shocking revelation that opposites attract, this news gets the usual contrarian suspects cheering. But to read the article, you’d think there are all these fantastic genetically engineering seeds just waiting to be planted if only the “powerful” organic lobby would let it happen. Only there aren’t. Not a one. And while Ronald, the plant scientist, urges open-mindedness among sustainable agriculture folks, her own major plant breeding project on flood-tolerant rice uses advanced breeding techniques and not genetic engineering.
It’s worth revisiting a Newsweek article from the summer that talked about the “return” of conventional breeding as the favored technique for developing new crops:
Part of the story is that conventional breeding can still do certain things extremely well—even better than genetic manipulation. What GM techniques are best at is isolating particularly useful bits of DNA in a prized plant, and transferring that single gene to another plant that is less well endowed. (In the best-known example, Monsanto spliced a gene from naturally herbicide-tolerant grass into soybeans, so farmers could apply the chemicals without killing their crops.) Conventional breeding still does better at building up qualities that require a complex suite of genes, such as the ability to fight off certain insects or to resist drought, which involves a host of genes that determine the way plants take up and manage water.
Roland would surely agree. And the fact is that the agricultural challenges before us require more than dropping in a gene here or there. To date, genetic engineering techniques have simply not shown themselves to be up to the task. The result is that the debate over GMOs as a sustainable solution remains entirely theoretical. The existing GMO seed lines require heavy doses of synthetic fertilizer and water (in the case of the Bt crops mentioned in the article) or heavy doses of synthetic pesticides, fertilizer, and water (in the case of Roundup Ready crops, the only other GMO seed line), neither of which are consistent with organic—or sustainable—practices.
In essence, this is an argument about federal research dollars not an argument about which seeds to plant. Wake me up when Monsanto invents a seed that can actually do all the things they’ve been promising us for the last couple of decades. In fact, don’t. It’s likely to be decades and decades before someone sees fit to rouse me. I could use the sleep.
Related Links:
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World veterinary agency to probe link meat-climate link
Atlantic bluefin tuna inches towards protection
The Nexus One is here, and it brings gifts: Google Earth, a fantastic app that was inexplicably released for the iPhone before its parent company’s mobile OS, is coming to the App Market.
So how is it better than Google Earth on the iPhone? Voice search. Just say where you want to go. And we’re betting the whole experience is a bit smoother thanks to the Nexus One’s oomphier internals.
… who also delivers an almighty slapdown to Kraft.
In early afternoon trading on Tuesday, shares in the UK confectioner were hit hard – falling over 4% to 770p
The reason? Warren Buffett, who has thrown a rather big spanner in the works.
From a statement just released by Berskhire Hathway.
Omaha, NE (BRK.A; BRK.B)—Berkshire Hathaway has voted “no” on Kraft’s proposal to authorize the issuance of up to 370 million shares to facilitate the acquisition of Cadbury. Berkshire, taking into account both its own holdings and those of its pension funds, believes that the 138,272,500 Kraft shares it owns – 9.4% of the total outstanding – make it the company’s largest shareholder.
The share-issuance proposal, if enacted, will give Kraft a blank check allowing it to change its offer to Cadbury – in any way it wishes – from the transaction presented to shareholders in the proxy statement. And we worry very much that, indeed, there will be an additional change from the revision announced this morning. To state the matter simply, a shareholder voting “yes” today is authorizing a huge transaction without knowing its cost or the means of payment.
Our understanding is that Kraft must announce its final offer for Cadbury by January 19th. If we conclude at that point that the offer does not destroy value for Kraft shareholders, we will change our vote to “yes.” At this time, however, we believe no shareholder should vote “yes” when he can’t possibly know what he is voting for.
Oh dear. This is very embarrassing for Kraft – its biggest shareholder is clearly not onside as far as the Cadbury bid goes.
Buffett’s beef is that Kraft shares are a very expensive acquisition currency.
What we know with certainty, however, is that Kraft stock, at its current price of $27, is a very expensive “currency” to be used in an acquisition. In 2007, in fact, Kraft spent $3.6 billion to repurchase shares at about $33 per share, presumably because the directors and management thought the shares to be worth more.
Does the board now believe those purchases were a mistake and that Kraft’s true value is only the current price of $27 per share – and that it is therefore fine to structure a major acquisition based upon that price? Would the directors use stock as merger currency if the price were, say, $20 per share? Surely the true business value of what is given is as important as the true business value of what is received when an acquisition is being evaluated. We hope all shareholders will use this yardstick in deciding how to vote.
And all this on a day when Kraft removed Nestle from the Cadbury auction with a neat side deal.
Of course, the sale of Kraft’s North American North American frozen pizza business to the Swiss for $3.7bn goes some way to addressing Buffett’s concern; Kraft is offering Cadbury shareholders the option of receiving an extra 60p per share in cash instead of some of the Kraft shares.
But it seems this is not enough, which raises the question of whether Kraft will be forced to make further disposals – its coffee assets for example – if it wants to secure Buffett’s backing. Importantly, though, there is still time for Kraft to do this or at least make a commitment to do so.
At the moment we don’t know whether a Buffett ‘no’ vote can de-rail Kraft’s bid for Cadbury, but this post will be updated when we do. That said, it is probably worth assuming that many Kraft shareholders will follow Buffett’s lead.
Of course this could all be irrelevant because if Kraft does not increase its offer Cadbury shareholders will probably vote ‘no’ as well.
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From Amazon – Apple iPod touch 32 GB (3rd Generation) NEWEST MODEL
Ke$ha performed “Tik Tok” live on The Ellen DeGeneres Show Tuesday…..Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Since when is slithering around stage and talking through a song considered performing? I’ve heard more talented vocalists in a middle school choir.
Are you looking ahead to Valentine’s Day? If you are planning a romantic dinner at home, break out this special cocktail infused with Dos Lunas tequila. This recipe is a nice twist to a traditional glass of champagne and it uses pomegranate juice for a splash of Valentine’s Day color.
Image: Dos Lunas
Makes 2 Cocktails
Ingredients:
Method:
Place Dos Lunas Silver Tequila, orange flavored liqueur and pomegranate juice into a large cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake to blend and chill. Strain evenly between two champagne flutes. Top with chilled champagne. Stir gently.
Post from: Blisstree
It’s still hard to say whether a warming climate will hurt the world’s economy. But if history is any guide, it’s likely to increase the gap between rich and poor.
In a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, Ben Olken of MIT and Ben Jones of Northwestern University make an important discovery: In poor countries, a temperature increase of only one degree Celsius reduces annual export growth by as much as 5.7 percentage points. The decline occurs in a wide variety of products, ranging from footwear to firearms. In rich countries, by contrast, Messrs. Olken and Jones find no effect.
That’s troubling, given the fact that scientists expect the global climate to warm by two to five degrees Celsius over the next 90 years. To the extent that the historical impact is a reasonable predictor of the future impact, we should be particularly concerned about the effect of warming on poor countries, says Mr. Olken.
The new results support previous research done by Messrs. Olken and Jones together with Melissa Dell of MIT. That research found that in poor countries, a one-degree-Celsius temperature rise was associated with a drop in annual economic growth of one to two percentage points. Again, they found no effect in rich countries.
Why poor countries? Mr. Olken says its hard to know. One possibility is that poor countries are more vulnerable because theyre more dependent on agriculture, though the export data suggest thats not the whole story. Another is that poorer countries have less access to air conditioning. Finding an explanation is an important area for further research, says Mr. Olken.
For journalists, the Joel Tenenbaum P2P case has been the gift that keeps on giving. Case in point: the team’s court filing asking for either a new trial or a vastly reduced damage award. It turns out that the labels were at least partially responsible for Tenenbaum’s years of P2P sharing.
“Plaintiffs, in August 2004, could reasonably be considered to have been at least partially responsible for the widespread dispersion of their recordings over peer-to-peer networks like Napster and Kazaa,” writes Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson, Tenenbaum’s lawyer.
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Not long after Google announced it had acquired mobile advertising firm AdMob, Apple has announced the acquisition of its own mobile advertising firm, Quattro Wireless. The announcement came today just after All Things D broke the rumor that the deal was imminent. Quattro cofounder and CEO Andrew Miller has been named vice president of mobile advertising for Apple as part of the deal.
Apple paid a reported $275 million for Quattro, a much better deal than Google ended up paying for rival mobile ad firm AdMob. Google ponied up $750 million in an attempt to outbid Apple, which had also reportedly made an offer for the company. That price is approximately 16.7 times AdMob’s sales, “the sort of price rarely seen in takeover deals since the heady days of the dot-com boom,” according to Reuters.
Google contends that its acquisition of AdMob is meant to compliment its own search- and Web-based advertising, though it’s worth noting that AdMob ads are featured prominently in many free, ad-supported iPhone applications. The FTC is currently investigating the deal between AdMob and Google, and there is an implication that Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s recently vacated position on Apple’s board of directors may have made him privy to Apple’s plans to move into mobile advertising.
Meanwhile, shortly after Google announced a partnership with streaming music service Lala, Apple announced that it had acquired the company. It is believed that Apple plans to incorporate Lala into iTunes and extend the iTunes Store with streaming-based options in addition to downloads. In the meantime, the deal with Google remains in place.
Given Apple’s foray into cloud-based services such as MobileMe and iWork.com, and the company’s integration of services with its mobile devices, it’s certain that the acquisition of Quattro will fit into Apple’s growing mobile strategy. The company may be leveraging mobile advertising opportunities for a long-rumored tablet product expected to be announced later this month. It could also be offering a way to advertise on the iPhone. Apple did not respond to a request for comment on its mobile advertising plans.
With Google’s plan to offer the Nexus One smartphone directly to consumers, its Android smartphone OS, and its array of online services and online advertising, it’s clear that the rivalry between Apple and Google is kicking into high gear.
Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]
The National Association of Realtors released some discouraging data today about the U.S. housing market. Its Pending Home Sales Index dropped a whopping 16% in November compared to October. It’s still 15.5% higher than it was a year ago, but the month-over-month decline is troubling since the trend had been consistently positive for some time. I think there’s reason to worry.
First, here’s that trend over the past twelve months:
The chart shows how each month’s index value changed versus the prior month. As you can see, it had been positive — meaning the index had been increasing — since February. This graphic also shows that the index fell off a cliff in November. And for anyone who wants to grumble about winter being a slow time for home sales: the index is already seasonally adjusted. On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, it would have decreased by 28%, not 16%.
There are a few things to consider when trying to determine what this drop in pending home sales means. Obviously, supply isn’t exactly drying up — there’s still an awfully big housing inventory. So any change must be more demand driven.
The government home buyers credit should have some effect. You might recall that in early November the first time home buyers’ credit was renewed through next April. At that time it was also expanded to include a smaller credit for most current homeowners. So even though homeowners were no longer rushing to buy a home before the credit would have expired in November, nothing really should have discouraged them from buying a home if they were already considering doing so. Indeed, for current homeowners, November marked the first month that Uncle Sam would give them a little gravy for taking the plunge.
Meanwhile, interest rates were also incredibly low during November — sub-5% for nearly the entire month, according to Freddie Mac. When consumers can get more for their money, it’s particularly surprising they’d be pulling back.
So while some of the decline might be blamed on demand relaxing and being delayed to early 2010 due to the credit’s extension, I think a drop this big is still meaningful. If the index doesn’t increase significantly through the first quarter from this level — or actually continues to decline — then I think you might be seeing the beginning of some home buying fatigue on the part of the American consumer. After all, there are only so many Americans out there who want to buy a home and have the savings and credit profile during this difficult time to do so.
If demand really has been exhausted, that’s extremely bad news for the housing market. 2010 will likely see significant increases in mortgage rates, which will deter some potential homeowners. If that pool of perspective buyers turns out to be quite limited to begin with, we might see housing inventory begin to increase again significantly as foreclosures continue, and prices could plateau — or even erase their 2009 gains.
For evolution to take place, you need DNA or RNA to change through mutation, providing the variations for natural selection to select. Right? Well, it may be more complicated than that. A new study suggests an exception: prions, the infectious protein bits that can cause degenerative brain diseases like mad cow disease. In a paper in Science, researchers document these lifeless structures evolving, despite the fact that they lack any DNA or RNA.
Study leader Charles Weissmann and his team transferred prions from brain cells to other kinds of cells and watched as certain members of the prion population adapted to the new environment and took over, out-competing their brethren. When he transferred the prions back to brain cells, the ones most adapted to brain living got the upper hand and increased in number as they out-competed the prions that had adapted to other cells. Weissmann argues that this shows Darwinian evolution can go even further than we thought: “In viruses, mutation is linked to changes in nucleic acid sequence that leads to resistance. Now, this adaptability has moved one level down- to prions and protein folding – and it’s clear that you do not need nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) for the process of evolution” [BBC News].
In diseases like mad cow and the human version of it, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, proteins in the brain go awry. Mammals produce the normal protein cousins of infectious prions as part of normal cell development, but during infection, misfolded or warped proteins can convert normal host prion protein into its own toxic, misfolded form. When this happens enough times, massive tissue and cell damage can occur [Popular Science].
This pattern of warping proteins could be the key to how this DNA-less evolution occurs, the researchers propose. When a prion converts a normal protein, it typically forces it into the same structure as itself, but at a low probability, other variant structures result. The population of these variants can then expand or contract based on selective pressures [Ars Technica]. This appears to happen more quickly when the prions are transferred to a new host, as happened in previous research when scientists moved prions from sheep to mice—the more virulent variants got a chance to take hold.
Given the problems today with bacteria and viruses evolving drug resistance, the idea of evolving prions seems like more bad news. But, taking a note from DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer’s “Evolving Viruses to Death,” perhaps doctors could use prions’ strength against them: Since infectious prions need their normal cousins to feed their own replication and evolution, therapies that limit the supply of normal prion proteins could essentially starve the degenerative cycle that makes those illnesses so effective at killing their hosts [Popular Science].
Related Content:
80beats: Ripped From the Journals, including a Nature study fingering prions from spreading chronic wasting disease in deer.
The Loom: Return of Mad Cow Memories
DISCOVER: When Bad Prions Go Good
DISCOVER: Prionlike Protein Help Form Memories
DISCOVER: Picturing Prions
Image: Eye of Science / Science Photo Library
Well now, this certainly puts my fiance’s restaurant proposal to shame. Boy Derick proposed to girl Emily using a spotlight, DSLR and three nights, creating a spectacular light writing proposal.
Along with several friends, two Canon 7D cameras were used by Derick to create the proposal—one on the ground, one from a hotel room looking out across the scene—with the ground camera using a Nikon 50mm f/1.4 lens. Dragon Stop Motion was used to superimpose the light writing image over the live view from the ground camera, with the video shown a few days later to the happy Emily. [Derick and Emily proposal via Neatorama]
