MF Global has put out one of the more interesting 2010 predictions reports we’ve seen. Among its calls: A jobless recovery, an easing of investor demand for commodities, sovereign debt worries, and the peak of US liberalism coinciding with the official passage of healthcare reform. Thanks to ZeroHedge for posting the document.
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Does anyone know anything about the TrueRead meter? I’ve done a Google search that turned up nothing useful.
After discovering that Apple had registered iSlate.com in late 2006 (we dug a little deeper and found trademarks had been filed for ‘ISLATE’ in both the United States and Europe by a company that was most likely a dummy corporation set up by Apple), MacRumors has now discovered another possible name for the upcoming Apple tablet.
MacRumors bases its report on the filing for a US trademark for ‘IGUIDE’ by another Delaware-registered company called iGuide Media LLC, which can be linked to Cupertino by means of signatures on the documents coming from Apple’s Senior Trademark Specialist, Regina Porter.
Let’s dig a little deeper, once again.
Domain names
There’s no indication that Apple owns any domain name that contains the term ‘iguide’. The identity if iguide.com is shielded from public WHOIS records, but not by Mark Monitor, the brand protection firm Apple usually works with. The domain name iguide.net belongs to a company called iGuide Media, a marketing and design firm started by Jon Warren back in 1997 and led by a Brian Noon from 2002 to 2006, when the company was sold.
I checked a couple of other TLDs (.ca, .fr, and more) and found no indication that Apple owns any of those.
Trademarks
Two trademarks were filed for ‘IGUIDE’ by iGuide Media LLC (through a James Johnston) in the United States: a principal and a service mark, both on 18 December 2007. The description of goods and services given to iGuide Media is very similar to the one given to Slate Computing, the supposed shell company set up by Apple used to register the trademark for ‘ISLATE’, although it leans a bit more to a focus on software and services than hardware.
On the exact same day, iGuide Media LLC filed for a trademark in Europe as well: search OHIM for ‘iguide’ and you find a trademark filing that has all the Apple marks on it: the legal representative is ‘EDWARDS ANGELL PALMER & DODGE UK LLP’ (the same as for ‘ISLATE’ and ‘MACBOOK’, among others), and the priority country is Trinidad & Tobago, the same as when Apple filed for the ‘iphone’ trademark in Europe.
Noteworthy: the status history suggests that the community trademark application was registered (not filed) in February 2009, and that the full examination of the CTM application has been completed very recently, on the 18th of December 2009 to be exact.
Final thoughts
If I were betting man, I’d still be putting my money on the name iSlate for the tablet, Magic Slate for a possible peripheral, and iGuide for a service linked to the hardware device(s).
Here’s why:
– Apple doesn’t seem to own, directly nor indirectly, any ‘iguide’ domain names
– The ‘ISLATE’ and ‘MAGIC SLATE’ US trademarks were not filed for separately as a service trademark, unlike ‘IGUIDE’
– The ‘ISLATE’ US trademark was filed earlier than ‘IGUIDE’, by a different shell corporation (and the same as ‘MAGIC SLATE’)
– NYTimes editor Bill Keller’s mention of an ‘Apple slate’ device in a past speech
– According to Trademarkia, the ‘ISLATE’ trademark application was extended a second time last September, to show use in commerce
– The slightly different description for ‘goods and services’ for both Slate Computing and iGuide Media
Or, of course, we’re all wrong, and none of these names will ever be actually used by Apple. I would deem that unlikely, but we can’t know for sure.
Besides, has Apple announced that it’ll be selling a tablet computer yet?
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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Egad. We had such high hopes for the Camangi WebStation, but as with a few other non-phone devices that have attempted to use Android, it seems as if this 7-inch slate falls a bit short in practice. The gang over at Laptop was able to corral a unit for a brief sit-down, and while they admired the exceptionally light and portable hardware, they kvetched about the lowly 800 x 480 screen resolution, sluggish performance when opening applications and the limited / confined feel of the Camangi Marketplace. They also barked about the resistive screen’s inability to accurately recognize finger presses, and while they’re still holding out some hope that this thing could be useful in at least a few scenarios, it’s fairly clear this piece isn’t for everyone. Peek the source link for the full skinny.
Camangi WebStation gets a few first impressions: ’sluggish’ and ‘confined’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 08:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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There’s little sense in resisting the obvious: Google is slowly but surely taking over your life, but rather than get indignant and discombobulated, we’d suggest letting go and appreciating how much easier things are with the folks in Mountain View squarely in control. Take Google Goggles, for instance, which aims to convert cameraphone images into useful search results on its own Android platform. Up until now, we’ve been shown stock demos and videos of it running on conventional handsets, but seeing the Goggles hard at work on Sony Ericsson’s not-yet-released Xperia X10 is another thing entirely. Hop on past the break for the frames you’re craving, but don’t bank on this making the wait for said phone any simpler to stomach.
Continue reading Google Goggles gets video demo on Sony Ericsson Xperia X10
Google Goggles gets video demo on Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 07:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Cell phone, wallet, keys. That’s the standard pocket check when leaving the house. BlackBerry in the front right pocket, wallet and keys in the front left. While this layout makes for easy access, it does become quite bulky. Even with relatively loose jeans, you can still see the outlines of a BlackBerry and my wallet in each pocket. It’s not a big deal, really, but I like to avoid it when possible. For instance, I switched from a wallet to a money clip (with card holders) a year ago. Case-Mate now has a way for me to further combine. Their ID line of cases now comes with a card holder, so you can eliminate the need for a wallet. You can use an even thinner money clip and still have everything you need when leaving the house.
Fannie Mae reported today that the rate of serious delinquencies – at least 90 days behind – for conventional loans in its single-family guarantee business increased to 4.98% in October, up from 4.72% in September – and up from 1.89% in October 2008.
“Includes seriously delinquent conventional single-family loans as a percent of the total number of conventional single-family loans.”
Read the whole story at Calculated Risk — >
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Filed under: Etc.
With 2009 nearly in our rearview mirror, MotorTrend has put together its annual list of 50 top automotive execs and their fortunes for the coming new year, and it’s a good primer on the industry’s movers and shakers.
It’s unlikely that 2010 will be as tumultuous as 2009, what with two of the world’s largest automakers under the fed’s control and storied marques being killed off faster than a topless chick in a slasher flick, but 2010 has the potential to be a another truly newsworthy year and MotorTrend‘s Power List gives you a glimpse into the people behind the action. Make the jump for the top ten entrants and hit up MT for the full list with individual analysis of each exec.
[Source: MotorTrend]
Continue reading Motor Trend uncorks its yearly industry Power List
Motor Trend uncorks its yearly industry Power List originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 08:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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So you are bored of the same black high gloss finish speakers. The Rock-It portable vibration speaker system takes music from your device and sends those vibrations through the Rock-It “pod” onto any object you choose. So basically you can stick your “pod”onto a juice carton, a box of cereal, or a Barbie and you’ll have music “pumping” out of it. Just press play on your device be it a iPod, MP3 player, or mobile phone. Basically any device that has a headphone jack and Rock-It will work with it. Besides being a unique way to hear your music, your pals will think you are technological genius for turning your sour milk carton into a speaker system.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/978/eg8.htm
(Nevine El-Aref)
“After 14 centuries, a giant monolith from a submerged temple was raised from the seabed in
There was more activity than usual in
Meanwhile, five underwater archaeologists in diving gear were inspecting the planned route on the seabed along which pylon tower would be moved.
The event was watched by 1,000 or so Egyptian and international journalists, TV anchors, photographers and producers as well as curious local people. It was planned that the media observe the event from the deck of a yacht, however, this wasn’t possible due to the bad weather that hit
The weather also interfered with plans for raising the pylon. After mud and scum which clung to the surface of the pylon, a huge, single block of granite was removed, the monolith was dragged across the seabed”
First, it's clear that the longest-term 30-year bonds have rarely been fooled for long by short-term cuts to interest rates. Furthermore, while 30-year yields momentarily collapsed during the credit crisis, no doubt due to safe-haven panic buying of the times, they snapped back pretty fast and today yields are back near 2006 and 2007 levels, and arguably near the levels we've seen since 2001.
For 30-year bonds, everything is essentially back to 'normal', expecting moderate inflation rates and the Fed to raise interest rates back to the previously expected long-term run rate. Summed up in a sentence: We're riding the same long-term road as before, even if it's a bit bumpy at times. There are neither long-term deflation nor hyper-inflationary expectations baked into 30-year bonds.
(LInk via Abnormal Returns)
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Vinit Nijhawan wrote:
Mumbai, December 23, 2009—There are now 500 million cell phone subscribers in India. In the major metropolitan cities, penetration rates are close to U.S. levels. A golf caddy, who makes about Rs 300 ($6) per day, has a cell phone so golfers can reserve him for a round. The 500 million subscribers appears to be a large potential market for mobile value added services (VAS) such as cricket scores and Bollywood ringtones. However, unlike the U.S., where an iPhone app can reach tens of millions of consumers, India has a fragmented consumer demographic. There are five dominant cell phone operators in India, each with about 100 million subscribers.
But these operators have to be looked at as 60-80 “companies,” since each of India’s 28 states and 7 union territories is different in language, culture, and, therefore, consumer needs. Most of the cell phone growth is now in rural areas that still retain centuries old ways of living.
Indian startups have learned to operate in a high growth, low cost, and fragmented market. In practically every consumer category, India is the toughest market in the world: in telecom, India has the lowest ARPU (average monthly revenue per user). Which has gone from about $7 to $2-3. India is manufacturing the cheapest car in the world, the Tata Nano, which retails for Rs 100,000 ($2,000). A tandoori roti, which costs $2 in a Boston restaurant, can be purchased for Rs 2, or about 4 cents, in the alleys of old Delhi; a heart bypass surgery which costs $30,000-$50,000 in the U.S. is available for roughly $2,000-$6,000 in India with equal mortality outcomes.
China is following the Japanese and Korean economic model of supporting oligopolies of scale-size companies in every industry with access to low-cost capital. Indian companies, though, are engaged in vicious, even unhealthy, competition that requires constant innovation to bring costs down. Investment capital is costly. Therefore, most Indian companies operate with bare minimum up-front capital investments and a pay-as-you-grow investment model.
I visited an Akshay Patra kitchen, a charity providing free mid-day meals to school children, and marveled at how it is delivering over a million meals daily for $24 per child annually. Operating in 17 cities across India, each location customizes meals to suit local tastes. Such as rice in the south and wheat rotis in the north. Founded by a religious Hindu organization, it is being financially and organizationally supported by a number of IT millionaires, including Narayan Murthy of Infosys and Boston’s Desh Deshpande. Akshay Patra is innovating in manufacturing (specialized roti machines that spit out 30,000 rotis an hour), supply chain efficiencies, and IT infrastructure to manage and track health and success outcomes for the children.
Emerging from the chaos that is India are entrepreneurs who use juggar to get around daunting obstacles: an inefficient and corrupt government, consumers with very little buying power, and infrastructure that cannot keep up with demand. These entrepreneurs, once they establish scale operations in India, will be ready to compete in global markets.
By Yun-Hee Kim, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Computer-memory chip makers expect to see their fortunes improve next year after two tough years, allowing them to boost capital spending to improve their technology.
Industry heavyweights and observers see the notoriously up-and-down industry turning positive this year. Weak capital investments over the past two years have led to a gradual decrease in global supply of dynamic random access memory chips, which are the main chips used to store data in personal computers. The decrease in supply, coupled with improving demand, has led to a recovery in prices of DRAM chips in recent months.
The launch of the new Windows 7 operating system from Microsoft Corp. may also prompt consumers and corporations to replace their aging computers with new ones that require more memory storage next year, providing a much needed demand boost for DRAM makers.
The recovery in the DRAM market, while a sign that demand in the electronics supply chain is improving, could put pressure on PC manufacturers to trim their component costs to maintain margins.
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A tax payers revolt is brewing in the Highlands after the Taxpayers Alliance discovered, after a Freedom of Information Request, that local councils were spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on RIM Blackberrys.
Aberdeenshire Council was the worst offender, with more than £117,000 spent on contracts this year.
The total annual bills for Blackberrys and mobile phones rose from £150,000 in 2007 to £261,000 last year and up to £346,000 this year.
Describing the figures as “staggeringly high”, the TA complained the gadgets were an unnecessary luxury.
An Aberdeenshire Council spokesman however responded that: “Blackberrys allow us to offer more flexibility to staff who need to respond to e-mails and keep in touch with what’s going on, without having to travel large distances back to an office. They are an invaluable tool in a modern business environment.”
Susie Squire, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, was unimpressed.
“They’re out of touch with economic reality,” she said. “These Blackberry costs are staggeringly high and will shock and disgust a lot of taxpayers.
An alternative which could lead to significant savings however exists, in the form of Windows Mobile handsets, which in studies have been shown to have a lower total cost of ownership of between 20 to 40%.
In the current economic climate, and with costs being passed on automatically in increased council fees, tax payers need to be holding their elected representatives accountable for feeding their crackberry habit when better, cheaper alternatives already exist ready to be deployed.
Read more at PressandJournal.co.uk here
That longtime “perma-bear” Jim Grant had turned bull late this summer was one of the year’s big surprises.
He wasn’t early to the rally by any means, but his public conversion didn’t “ring the bell at the top” as some had assumed.
In the latest NYMag, Hugo Lindgren has a nice profile of the newsletter author and economic philosopher. In it Grant reiterates his belief that the economy is basically a bouncing ball, which flies of the cement at roughly the same velocity it hit.
What makes Grant refreshing is his unwillingness to say how the recovery will work. Take, for example, the unemployment situation:
In a worrying climate of dying professions, it’s hard to get a grip on what takes their place. “Though we humans do our best,” he wrote, “we usually underestimate the capacity of market economies to reinvent the nature of work.” How exactly it will work this time, says Grant, we don’t know. We never know until after the fact.
Lindgren also captures another sub-story playing out, which is Grant’s failure to account for the big rally in the 80s, right after the economy was mired in a deep recession.
Over a quarter-century in which the economy mostly boomed, Grant stayed mostly gloomy. His view has been that the economy is a Frankenstein creation of cheap credit that drove up prices and instilled a false sense of prosperous stability.
At critical moments, such as the great collapse of the eighties boom, this analysis proved brave and useful, swelling Grant’s subscriber rolls and turning him into a star of sorts. But it also led to him advising caution and restraint as some of the most vigorous bull markets in history commenced. Indeed, the nineties was not kind to pessimists. “In this business,” he says, “everything is cyclical, including one’s evident IQ. One goes from genius to moron all too quickly. And so I went from being regarded as one of the brighter people on Wall Street to being, let’s see, a perma-bear, and there was truth in that. I wasn’t supple enough, wasn’t flexible enough. I was in love with our story, which had been so successful, and didn’t see the world change.”
Having made this mistake more than once, Grant is determined never to make it again.
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When you manufacture the best impact sockets in the industry, you also want full control over all critical production steps. Swedish Momento needed greater capacity and wanted to prepare production for future products. The first step toward a successful future included bigger facilities and a new press cell with an AP&T press.
The impact sockets used in the assembly industry, power industry or by your car mechanic are in all likelihood manufactured in Momento’s factory in Flen. The company was established in the early 1950s and manufactures impact sockets with a width across flats ranging from 3 to 300 millimeters. Memento knows what pros expect from a socket.
“When an assembly line in the automotive industry has to stop because a socket in a robot spindle is broken, it doesn’t take long to understand that product quality is a deciding factor for our customers,” says Momento production manager Torbjörn Lund.
Great demand
With increased demand for Momento sockets, production capacity soon reached its limits – even though production continued around the clock. Capacity had to increase for the company to be able to offer fast and reliable deliveries.
“In addition to standard sockets, we also manufacture special sockets with just a few weeks of lead time. That’s why we need security in the form of a little overcapacity,” explains Torbjörn Lund.
Momento also wanted the ability to form even larger impact sockets with the help of the heat pressing method the company uses for smaller sockets.
Heat pressing vital
An important benefit of the heat pressing, a type of forging method, is that the structure of the metal is maintained, which in turn generates a more durable socket. The solution was a completely new automated press cell with a hydraulic press from AP&T that is served by a six-axis robot with gripper. The blanks are heated in an induction oven and are fed into the press tool by a robot that also picks the hot socket out after forming.
“Heat pressing is the heart of socket production since this step is vital to the properties of the end product,” says Torbjörn Lund.
Power with precision
Heat pressing requires high press forces in combination with fine tolerances. The AP&T press has 630 tons of press force. Its combination of load-sensing hydraulics with servo hydraulics together with the other three hydraulic cylinders gives Momento the ability to achieve fine tolerances without complicated press tool solutions.
It is hard to believe that this time next week I’ll be on the way to Sin City to attend the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) 2010. It’s hard to guess what attendance will be like this year given the economy, but one thing for certain there will be gadgets everywhere. I believe there will be several hot mobile tech areas this year, and I note them here in no particular order.
Smartbooks. We saw a few smartbooks at the show last year, but it was clear they were not ready to take center stage. That will not be the case this year as I believe the smartbook will be the big mobile gadget at the show. We will see major OEMs launching smartbooks, and it is the space to keep an eye on while wandering the show aisles. We will likely see smartbooks of all shapes and sizes, and many will be ready for immediate sale. I expect to see at least 20 different models at the show, with each vying for attention. Smartbooks will be the netbook of 2010.
Phones. Android will be the focus in the phone world, which is not surprising. We should see Android phones with 2.x everywhere, and Android apps will be well represented at the show, too. We will see Android begin to spill over into other gadget forms, like tablets and notebooks. The processors that will drive the smartbook into the mainstream will be used to turn smartphones into little powerhouses, and we will see quite a few phones with sizzling capability at the show.
Netbooks. There will certainly be netbooks at the CES, but they will largely be more of the same as we’ve seen before. We will see some with better graphic-handling ability, but that will come at a price. I do believe we will see a few convertible netbooks with multitouch screens. Even the major OEMs are going to get into the swivel screen game, in an attempt to kindle excitement in this now old-school genre. I’m not sure if consumers will be willing to pay the extra price for touch on the otherwise cheap netbook.
e-Book Readers. This will be the second big area at the show. We will see readers all over the place, with single screens, double screens, e-Ink, Pixel QI, and other features I can only guess. They will be accompanied by announcements for content deals, as readers without books are just dead weight. We may see some readers announced by players that are surprising, as e-books are now hot items and this attracts new blood to the table.
Handheld Computers. I think we will see quite a few little computers of all shapes and sizes. There will be clamshell forms as small as 5-inches, and slates as large as 9 or 10. There will be gadgets that are Windows-based, and Android will be onboard others. Linux will be well represented on some of the gadgets, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see someone who has shoe-horned the developer version of the Google Chrome OS on one or two of them.
