Category: News

Yelp announced today that it surpassed 100 million unique vistors on its site in January, marking the first time in Yelp history it has had that many uniques in a month.

“That’s an all-time high for traffic to the desktop and mobile site and a clear indication that people are looking for local businesses and finding them on Yelp,” said CEO Jeremy Stoppelman in a blog post. “While that number is huge, it doesn’t even include the 9.4 million unique mobile devices that used the Yelp mobile app in January alone.”

“Even more staggering than 100 million unique visitors using Yelp.com in January are the millions of contributions Yelpers made to the community in the same time frame,” he added. “The 4.6 million calls and 5.7 million directions generated through the Yelp mobile app and nearly 2 million bookmarks created by Yelpers are the connection between searching for a specific local business and making a spending decision.”

According to Stoppelman, who cites a recent survey, business owners on Yelp report that the average customer across all categories spends $101.59 in their first visit.

The company has put out this infographic to accompany its impressive traffic news:

The Chromebooks of today aren’t exactly cutting edge. The budget notebook PCs are intended to bring the power of the Web to as many people as possible through affordable hardware. That all may be changing in the future if a leaked video is to believed.

Android Authority nabbed a fascinating teaser video that references a new Google project called the Chromebook Pixel. It features a 2560×1700 display. The only thing better would be the 15-inch MacBook Pro which sports a 2880×1800 retina display. Check out the leaked teaser video below:

New ChromeBook – Next Generation Concept… by androidauthority

The leaked video doesn’t tell us much about the Chromebook Pixel’s hardware, but we do know that it will sport a touchscreen. Adding to the legitimacy of the leak is that it originally came from François Beaufort, a developer who has leaked previous Google products on Google+.

Google hasn’t made any formal announcement in regards to the Chromebook Pixel yet, or even hinted that such a thing exists. The company only just recently partnered with HP for the Pavilion 14 Chromebook.

Still, the idea of a high-end Chromebook is exciting. The only thing holding the Chromebook back with power users, besides Chrome OS’s incompatibility with traditional applications, is that they’re usually underpowered devices. The Chromebook Pixel could go a long way in increasing adoption among power users, especially with that glorious screen.

Google announced that it has integrated new input tools into Google Translate. When you choose an input language, you should see the input tools icon at the bottom of the text area. Click on this to turn on the input tool, or switch to another one in the drop-down menu.

The tools are also available in Gmail, Google Drive, Chrome, Android, and as software for Windows.

“We have always allowed you to choose among alternative input methods, but your choice was limited,”Google says in a blog post. “For example, only one of four popular input methods for Chinese was previously available. Our new input tools greatly expand the set of available input methods for many languages.”

“We believe that your choice of input tools is important, because the best way to input text with a keyboard varies from language to language, and even from person to person,” the company continues. “Every language has its own set of popular input methods, each familiar to its own subset of users. For example, the Portuguese keyboard has two common layouts, one popular in Brazil and another in Portugal. In addition, given the popularity of Latin-alphabet keyboards, a transliteration input tool is often the preferred input method for many languages, allowing users to convert Latin-alphabet input into the proper written script. (Chinese has over 80,000 characters. Try fitting them all on a keyboard.) With the right transliteration input tools turned on, you can simply type “privet” to input привет, “tieng chao” for tiếng chào, and “nihao” for 你好.

Google Translate supports 65 different languages.

U.S. President Barack Obama today announced his pick for a new Secretary of the Interior. Sally Jewell, the CEO of Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI), will be nominated by the president to head up the U.S. Department of the interior. If confirmed, Jewell will replace former U.S. senator Ken Salazar, who currently holds the position.

“…even as Sally has spent the majority of her career outside of Washington – where, I might add, the majority of our interior is located – she is an expert on the energy and climate issues that are going to shape our future,” said Obama. “She is committed to building our nation-to-nation relationship with Indian Country. She knows the link between conservation and good jobs. She knows that there’s no contradiction between being good stewards of the land and our economic progress; that in fact, those two things need to go hand in hand. She has shown that a company with more than $1 billion in sales can do the right thing for our planet.

The Department of the Interior manages and conserves federal resources, including 500 million acres of public land and national parks. It also oversees the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which operates programs for Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians.

“I have a great job at REI today, but there’s no role that compares than the call to serve my country as Secretary of the Department of Interior,” said Jewell. “I’m humbled and I’m energized by this opportunity, and I look forward to getting to know members of the Senate as they consider my nomination in the coming weeks.”

Jewell has been CEO of REI since 2005. Since that time, the consumer cooperative has nearly doubled its sales from $1 billion to almost $2 billion and added 71 stores across the U.S.

(Image courtesy REI)

Shipments of microservers will rise threefold this year, a new report from IHS iSuppli predicts. But before getting too excited, note that that growth only means 291,000 microservers will be shipped.

A microserver uses a bunch of densely-packed, low-power chips. The configuration makes more sense for less demanding compute jobs, such as serving up contact information on one website user, than a server with a more capable brawny core, which tends to use much more power. Webscale companies such as Facebook and Yahoo want to add them to lower their operating costs.

Microserver shipments are going up faster than general servers and blade servers, according to IHS.

And the product sales won’t stop this year. The forecast shows shipments increasing substantially each year until 2016 (see data at left). By then, it will represent one-tenth of overall server shipments.

Still, those normal server shipments are huge; IDC estimates that 8.4 million servers were sold last year. The microserver market, for its part, is clearly still nascent. Nevertheless, the report does give an interesting insight: the microserver trend will only grow, not level out, through 2016.

The report attributes the shipment increase to the need for lower-performance, lower-power chips in the data center and in smartphones.

The billion-dollar question is, Which companies will capture the largest chunks of microserver revenue?

On the processor side, Intel is vying for a sizable cut. In December the company unveiled an Atom-based processor that uses just 6 watts, as my colleague Stacey Higginbotham reported. But last year AMD snapped up SeaMicro, and Rackspace has already certified the new SM15000 — available with Intel Atom, Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processors — for use in OpenStack.

ARM could stand to gain from the microserver growth, too. In October AMD said it would license ARM’s chip technology to make chips for its own microservers. Plenty of other companies use, or plan to use, ARM’s intellectual property to build chips that could go in microservers, too, including Applied Micro and Calxeda, to name a couple.

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Distinguished Senior Fellow at IER Mary Hutzler testifies before the House Energy & Commerce committee and reveals new data from the study “Beyond the CBO: The Additional Economic Effects of Immediately Opening Federal Lands to Oil and Gas Leasing.  

Watch the full video below:

Facebook wants to ensure that billions of people in emerging markets have access to its mobile apps when they buy their first phones. The social networking giant found an easy solution to that problem: Facebook is working with Chinese chipmaker Spreadtrum to embed its software directly into the guts of inexpensive smartphones.

Before you get too excited, Spreadtrum isn’t building the elusive Facebook Phone. Instead, it’s guaranteeing that millions of new phones sold into emerging markets will be “Facebook ready.”

Spreadtrum is pre-installing Facebook’s application software in its all-in-one Android smartphone platform – basically a smartphone-in-a-box containing the baseband and applications process, protocol stack, operating system and reference design. Spreadtrum’s customers — handset makers — can then use that platform to quickly produce inexpensive smartphones quickly and with minimal engineering and design investment.

Technically any Android phone user could simply download the Facebook app from Google Play (Facebook is often pre-installed on smartphones, in fact) but the Spreadtrum agreement ensures the software will be optimized for even the lowest end smartphones expected to make their way into countries like India and China. Facebook won’t have to deal with OS fragmentation on those devices, or worry about whether their hardware is capable of supporting its app’s features. Spreadtrum will work with Facebook to test app updates and new features to ensure they’ll work across the phones already in the market.

Also, having your app icon sitting front and center on a new phone’s home screen can’t hurt when introducing yourself to a new country.

“Working with Spreadtrum will extend Facebook’s reach in emerging markets, leveraging the rapid shift from feature phones to smartphones that is now taking place globally,” Facebook VP of mobile partnerships and corporate partnerships Vaughan Smith said in a statement.

Spreadtrum has already begun shipping its smartphone platform in China, building off the company’s expertise in the TD-SCDMA radio technologies unique to Chinese operators. But on Wednesday, Spreadtrum revealed Facebook has given it permission to sell the platform outside of the Chinese market, opening up the possibility of millions of new Facebook-optimized devices in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa and India. Spreadtrum said it expects to ship 80 million to 100 million of those chipsets in 2013 alone.

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I’ve been using the BlackBerry Z10 for a couple weeks now when people ask about what I don’t like about the device, I immediately talk about the “App Gap”. The fact that the platform doesn’t have Instagram, Skype, Netflix, Snapchat and other apps that people have come to love on the other platforms, is the most obvious downside to the device. The App Gap has got me thinking though, is this really a problem? After giving it some consideration, I’ve thought of 5 clear reasons why the App Gap is not as big of a deal as people will have you believe.

1. Apps come and go like any trend – Snapchat was really cool but interest in it is already dying. By the time BlackBerry 10 is in the hands of millions of people worldwide, there’s going to be 10 apps that have duplicated, altered and relaunched the Snapchat app in a variety of ways with varying uptake. It seems ridiculous, in a world where apps can gain 100 million users in a few years, to think that any app will be around for long. Apps are like any trend, they’re popular one day, but it’s only a matter of time until the next big thing hits.

Snapchat Interest on Google Trends

2. Porting is easy – I recently talked to a game publishing company that had made a Flash game for facebook and managed to port the entire game over to BlackBerry 10 in under 3 weeks. That’s an incredible turnaround time for a large publishing company. We also talked to Michael Schade of Fishlabs who said they ported their game Galaxy on Fire 2 from iPad to PlayBook in “one fucking day”. Many developers are ready to port their apps, but they’re waiting to see if the user uptake will justify the porting cost. The important thing to note though, is that the porting cost is low. So while a company might be waiting for 50 million Windows Mobile users to justify porting, it might take only 10 million BlackBerry 10 users to be able to justify a port.

3. There are commitments and talks – For those apps that we have come to love such as Skype and Netflix, it’s good to know that Martyn Mallick’s team at BlackBerry is “in talks” to bring those apps to the platform. Again, just give it time for the user base to build and the platform to mature a little more.

4. Where one developer won’t port, another will cash in – Remember Angry Farm? The guys at Smarter Apps knew that Rovio didn’t have any plans to bring Angry Birds to the legacy BlackBerry platform, so they cashed in and created a clone for those devices. It was probably the most successful game on BlackBerry, revenue wise, and all they did was fill the demand gap. There’s no reason why developers won’t be doing something similar for BlackBerry 10. Most big services out there have APIs just for that very purpose.

5. Games are bigger than apps – The App Gap is exactly that. It’s not a “Game Gap”. BlackBerry has done a great job of bringing top tier games to the platform and they’ve attracted developers from the big publishers and code bases. In the end, apps are but a fraction of mobile usage compared to apps. Instagram isn’t even in the list of the Top 20 Free titles and most of that list is comprised of games. So before you start talking about how crucial it is to have apps, realize that you’re not the norm.

So while it’s important to have all the apps, it’s more about focusing on a platform that makes it easy for developers to come on board and to build a solid base of loyal users. I think early reviews of the device are not taking a step back to look at how the app industry is playing out. Tech reviewers that are quick to say “it doesn’t have Instagram, therefore it sucks”, are placing far too much emphasis on Instagram being a killer app even 1 year from now. I’d like to think that the next billion dollar app will be developed on BlackBerry first. There’s absolutely no reason why not.

The Surface Pro will be launching on February 9 for $900. That’s only for the 64GB version as the 128GB model will go for $1,000. It costs even more when you throw in the touch or typepad, and other accessories. Isn’t this all a little too much? Tami Reller, Windows Finance and Marketing Chief, doesn’t think so. In fact, she think it’s an incredible value if you start looking at the “right way.”

In an interview with GeekWire, Reller says that the $1,000 price tag of the Surface represents a value to the typical Apple buyer who spends that much on a MacBook Air alongside an extra $500 for an iPad:

Compare it to a typical Apple buyer, who is going to get a MacBook Air, plus an iPad. That’s a more interesting comparison. … If you’ve got a buyer who needs both a computer and a tablet, Surface Pro is $1,000, vs. $1,000 plus $500 (for the MacBook Air and iPad). I think that’s the interesting comparison.

She goes on to say that the Surface Pro represents a better value over the competition because it’s a touch-based system. It means the device is a tablet and an Ultrabook – it’s everything the modern technology user wants in a single system.

Microsoft will probably not have any luck in attracting the hardcore Apple users who are perfectly content with throwing money at multiple devices every year. The value that Surface Pro presents to those users is negligible. The company needs to focus on the PC user that will most likely skip the Surface Pro and opt for a similarly specced notebook. To those consumers, Reller says they have to look at the big picture:

You have to look at design, pen, touch performance. You look at it and you say, OK, I’m getting Ultrabook-class PC with the added benefit of a tablet package. It’s all I need. $899 plus a keyboard of my choice, I’m into the $1,000 category, and I have all I need, in a premium package.

Are consumers going to be swayed by that argument? It’s legitimately hard to say. Many people say that they plan on purchasing the Surface Pro after skipping on the Surface RT last year. These consumers want the full Windows 8 experience, and the Surface Pro mostly delivers if its largely positive reviews are to be believed.

Regardless, that starting price of $900 is a pretty scary proposition for consumers. For $100 less, consumers can get the 128GB Retina Display iPad. Is the newness of Windows 8 able to win out over the familiarity of iOS? Microsoft certainly thinks they can, but consumers may not be as adventurous.

Got your grains of salt at the ready? Good. Rumors of a more extravagant Chromebook have been making the rounds for months now, but the new, supposedly leaked video the new touch-friendly Chromebook Pixel may provide the first real glance at what Google has been working on behind closed doors.

The video was spotted by Chrome buff François Beaufort, and it certainly looks flashy enough — it exhibits and level of polish and clarity of message that’s notably absent in most fan-made mockups (though some of them are getting very good). The video doesn’t offer much in the way of hardware specifics aside from noting that the display plays home to 4 million pixels, which Beaufort believes means a screen resolution of 2560 x 1700.

For what it’s worth, the information laid out in the leaked video jibes with some earlier reports of a touch-enabled Chromebook. Last November, the China Times claimed that Google was planning to launch a Chromebook with a 12.85-inch touch display, and noted that the search giant (and not a hardware partner like Samsung or Acer) had placed orders with ODMs Compal and Wintek.

The implication at the time was that Google would be bypassing its usual slew of hardware collaborators completely in favor of crafting and selling its own gadgets. Interestingly enough, the Chromebook Pixel video states that it’s a new kind of computer “designed entirely by Google,” suggesting that Google may have done just that. Naturally, Google declined to comment when asked if the Chromebook Pixel was indeed a real product.

The story behind how this video came to light is perhaps just as outrageous as the product being shown off. It was found on a YouTube channel owned by Slinky.Me, a Mountain View company whose states mission is to build the “world’s largest visual guide” — whatever that means. Slinky.Me was apparently was hacked a few hours ago, and the secretive Chromebook video was posted to the company’s YouTube account shortly afterward.

But why would a company working on what appears to be a fairly static visual guide have access to a promo video for unreleased Google hardware? Well, it would seem that part of the team’s work also involves crafting promo videos like these pro-Google ads that were uploaded to their collective Vimeo account this past week. None of them seem all that high-brow — not nearly as much as curious Chromebook Pixel promo anyway — but they hint at some sort of working relationship between Google and Slinky.me.

Adding fuel to the fire is Slinky.me’s CEO, one Victor Koch who claims on his LinkedIn account that he is (or was, if he’s not the type to update regularly) a software engineer at — you guessed it — Google. A quick look at his Facebook profile seems to shed a bit more light on the situation, as he refers to himself there as an “ex-Googler.” We have been unable to confirm with Google that Victor Koch was a former employee, and Mr. Koch wouldn’t respond to the Facebook messages I’ve sent him so for now this facet of the story is still a bit murky.

Naturally, someone attempted to clean up this leak as best they could as soon as the supposed hack went down. The video no longer exists on YouTube, and the elusive Mr. Koch issued a public apology (and tagged Google co-founder Sergey Brin) on his Google+ account for the video’s sudden exposure. This case has many of the earmarks of your typical botched release, but I imagine we’ll soon get official word on the Chromebook Pixel’s veracity — Google I/O is just a few months away, after all.

Is $200 enough money to get you to cease all Facebook activity for a period of just under 5 months?

That’s the deal one dad made with his 14-year-old daughter. Paul Baier, a VP at a Boston-based energy firm has inked a contract with his daughter Rachel that will keep her off the leading social network from now until June 26th. All he has to do is pay her $50 on April 14th and the rest of the money upon completion of the contract.

To make sure that Rachel doesn’t relapse, the contract stipulates that Mr. Baier will have “access to [her] Facebook to change the password and to deactivate the account.

“It was her idea,” Mr. Baier told the Daily Dot. “She wants to earn money and also finds Facebook a distraction and a waste of time sometimes. She plans to go back on after the 6 months is over”

Apparently, she plans to use the money for “stuff.”

Distraction or not, it sounds like Rachel has somehow convinced her dad to pay her to do something she wanted to do anyway. Good on you, Rachel.

Yesterday we told you about a study from Pew that found that one in four people plan on cutting back on their Facebook usage over the next year. Are you one of them? If you still love Facebook and see no real reason to quit, how much cash would it take?

[PracticalSustainability via The Daily Dot]

Last month Ubisoft confirmed that the first episode of Assassin’s Creed III‘s “The Tyranny of King Washington” DLC (titled “The Infamy”) will be released on February 19. Today the publisher finally filled in the details for the final two episodes of the series.

The second episode, “The Betrayal,” will be released one month after the first episode, on March 19. The third and final episode, “The Redemption,” will be available for download on April 23. The dates are the same for all systems, including Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. The price for each episode will also be the same, $10 on PC or via the PlayStation Network, and 800 Microsoft Points via Xbox LIVE. There are no firm dates yet for when the content will hit the Wii U, but Ubisoft has promised that all Assassin’s Creed III DLC will make it eventually.

In conjunction with the announcement, Ubisoft has also released a new teaser trailer for the content. The video gives an overview of the new powers Connor will receive as part of the DLC, which include wolf camouflage and summoning wolves.

Google just announced the launch of enhanced campaigns for AdWords, which it says will help advertisers better manage their campaigns in a multi-device world.

One key feature is bid adjustments to help advertisers manage bids across devices, locations, time of day, etc. from a single campaign. Google shares an example.

“A breakfast cafe wants to reach people nearby searching for ‘coffee’ or ‘breakfast’ on a smartphone,” says SVP of engineering, Sridhar Ramaswamy. “Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 25% higher for people searching a half-mile away, 20% lower for searches after 11am, and 50% higher for searches on smartphones. These bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in one single campaign.”

Enhanced campaigns will show ads across devices with the right ad text, sitelink, app or extension, without advertisers having to edit each campaign for every combination of devices, location and time of day.

“A national retailer with both physical locations and a website can show ads with click-to-call and location extensions for people searching on their smartphones, while showing an ad for their e-commerce website to people searching on a PC — all within a single campaign,” explains Ramaswamy.

The enhanced campaigns also come with advanced reports to measure new conversion types. For example, you can count calls and app downloads as conversions in your AdWords reports.

“You can count phone calls of 60 seconds or longer that result from a click-to-call ad as a conversion in your AdWords reports, and compare them to other conversions like leads, sales and downloads,” suggests Ramaswamy.

Enhanced campaigns will roll out to advertisers as an option over the coming weeks. All campaigns will be upgraded in mid-2013.

Here at the BlackBerry Jam Europe conference, I’ve had the chance to talk to many developers and partners who are bringing their games and apps to BlackBerry 10. One of the partners that helps them do this in a simple way is Marmalade.

I met with Nick from the Marmalade team for a quick demo on how their product is helping to create fun apps that look and feel amazing. Check out how he’s able to start building an app and have it running on BlackBerry 10 in minutes. Let’s have a look:

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

Marmalade has been helping developers at BlackBerry Jam Europe to learn how easy it is to create apps for BlackBerry 10 so that when you head to BlackBerry World, you’ll have a ton of apps and games to choose from. Some of your favorite games for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet are already built using Marmalade, and many will soon be available (if they aren’t already) on BlackBerry 10 devices. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Did you know that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg could have been the CEO at another huge social networking company? Probably not. But apparently she reveals that story and more in her upcoming book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead.

Tom Gara at The Wall Street Journal got an advance copy of the book and posted his thoughts late Tuesday. Since then, he’s been pulling out some interesting anecdotes about her time at Google, relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, and more.

One little nugget comes in the form of a declined job offer from 2006.

Apparently, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman approached Sandberg and asked her to be the CEO of his company.

Here’s a direct quote from the book:

“In the summer of 2006, a tiny start-up called LinkedIn was looking for a new CEO, and Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, reached out to me. I thought it was a great opportunity, and after five years in the same position at Google I was ready for a new challenge. But the timing was tricky. I was thirty-seven years old and wanted to have a second child. I told Reid the truth: regrettably, I had to pass…”

Of course, LinkedIn would go on to hit 200 million members by the end of 2012.

I think it’s safe to say that Sandberg did well for herself at the company she eventually chose, which has also become pretty successful over the past six years.

Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead is due out on March 11th.

Crowdsourced video captioning platform Amara launched an improved YouTube integration this week that allows any YouTube user to crowdsource the subtitling of their videos, utilizing many of the same tools that are being used by companies like TED, Khan Academy, Udacity and Netflix. The move could not only help YouTube producers to provide support for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, but also expand their international audience.

Amara’s online subtitles editor.

Amara’s new offering links your YouTube account to a new or existing Amara account. Once that is done, all of your public videos are going to show up on your Amara profile, ready to be subtitled with the help of the platform’s subtitle editor. Users can add subtitles in dozens of languages.

You’ll also be able to invite others to help you, turning the process of captioning your videos into a collaborative project. Complete subtitles are automatically synced back to YouTube, making them accessible for anyone who watches the video. And Amara automatically edits a video’s description on YouTube, prompting your viewers to help you with the subtitling process.

YouTube’s automatic captions: not always that accurate.

Of course, YouTube already offers automatic, computer-generated captions. However, natural language processing only goes that far, and humans can greatly improve the accuracy of subtitles. But Amara’s offering is interesting for more than one reason: YouTube publishers can encourage their viewers to translate their videos into many different languages, which could help them greatly expand their audience, and subtitles can greaty improve video discoverability in search engines.

Amara, which was originally known as Universal Subtitles, has received $1 million in funding from the Mozilla Foundation and the Knight Foundation. It started out as an open access-inspired project of the Participatory Culture Foundation, but now also offers enterprise tools for corporate clients, which include Netflix, Twitter, TED and a number of online education startups. To date, Amara’s users have created 181,000 subtitle tracks across 238 languages.

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Half-human/half-animal creatures have always seemed strange to me. How exactly do these creatures come to be? Are they the result of some strange crossbreeding experiment gone wrong, or just good old fashioned magic? One Texas man decided he would try the former and see what happens.

Andres Mendozza, a 29-year-old from Texas, was recently arrested after trying to have sex with a horse. The reason? He was stood up by his girlfriend. Did he think this would be an appropriate way to get back at her? Maybe, but the story he told the cops was very different.

Upon being taken in by the police, Mendozza said that he “was trying to make the horse have a baby.” He explained further saying that he thought the horse “would have a horse-man baby.”

Wait, what?

I don’t think trying to create a mythical race of Centaurs is exactly the best way to get back at your girlfriend. Hell, I’m pretty sure any woman would want nothing to do with you after admitting to having relations with the neighbor’s horse.

So, Mendozza admitted to the deed, so how long is he in for? Surely bestiality carries a hefty sentence in Texas, right? Actually, according to Geekosystem, bestiality falls under public lewdness, which is only a Class A misdemeanor. After all was said and done, Mendozza only got four months in prison.

After he gets out, maybe he should try for a minotaur. I’m sure Texas’ bulls would appreciate it.

[h/t: The Sun]

Paul Tanner, who was the last surviving member of the Glenn Miller Orchestra, has died of complications from pneumonia. He was 95 years old.

Tanner played trombone for the popular jazz ensemble from 1938-1942 before moving on to play at movie studios; he later had a successful career as a music professor at UCLA, and in the late ’50s famously partnered with inventor Bob Whitsell to create a new musical instrument called the Electro-Theremin. This version of the theremin–an instrument which can be played without touch due to sensitive antennae on top–allowed the musician to have greater control over the sounds and pitches it produced, and was used to great effect on the Beach Boys song “Good Vibrations”.

Tanner’s second wife, Jeanette, said that he had a profound influence on his music students and often received letters from them years after graduation, thanking him for his time.

“He used to crowd the auditorium area where he had his classes, and it got so full that the fire department closed the doors and wouldn’t let any more in. I still get letters from people that were his students. They said that he changed their life,” she said.

All in all, not a bad career for a boy from Skunk Hollow, Kentucky. Tanner is survived by his wife and two stepsons.

Senator Cites IER Study, Urges President to “Redirect Anti-Fossil Fuel Agenda”

WASHINGTON D.C. — Citing a study released yesterday by the Institute for Energy Research, U.S. Senator David Vitter (R-La.) wrote President Obama today urging the administration to redirect its current “anti-fossil fuel agenda” and “make the right decision to promote the positive financial and economic impacts of domestic energy production on federal lands on our nation’s economy.”

The IER study, entitled “Beyond the Congressional Budget Office: The Additional Economic Effects of Immediately Opening Federal Lands to Oil and Gas Leasing” was conducted by Dr. Joseph Mason, professor at the Louisiana State University and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. According to Vitter, the study highlights “the true potential our economy has to experience if our federal government, specifically the Department of Interior, were genuine about our bountiful domestic fossil fuels.”

“We welcome Sen. Vitter’s letter to President Obama, and we will continue our aggressive efforts to inform policy makers about the tremendous benefits that pro-growth policies for federal lands and energy production could provide for the American people,” IER President Thomas Pyle said.

“Leading policy makers are increasingly aware that the management of our federal lands and the laws that govern them are failing the American people, resulting in lost economic opportunity, lower federal revenues, and fewer jobs. Senator Vitter is a bold advocate for responsible permitting and access decisions on federal lands and waters, and he knows all too well the effects that restrictive energy development can mean to states like Louisiana that depend on energy to support the economy.”

To read Sen. Vitter’s letter to President Obama, click here.

To read the “staggering numbers” that Senator Vitter cites from IER’s recent study, click here.

###

BlackBerry, the company formerly known as RIM, today announced that the BlackBerry Z10, the company’s first BlackBerry 10 device, is already breaking records. The device was only just released yesterday in Canada, and the hometown crowd seems to have backed the Ontario-based smartphone manufacturer considerably.

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins today announced that first-day sales of the Z10 in Canada were 50% better than for the launch of any other BlackBerry device. BlackBerry fans in the U.K., where the Z10 shipped on January 31, have stepped up as well, buying nearly three times as many Z10s during its first week on the market than they have any previous BlackBerry smartphone.

“In Canada, yesterday was the best day ever for the first day of a launch of a new BlackBerry smartphone,” said Heins. “In fact, it was more than 50% better than any other launch day in our history in Canada. In the UK, we have seen close to three times our best performance ever for the first week of sales for a BlackBerry smartphone.”

Of course, there is only one BlackBerry 10 smartphone model currently available, with the upcoming Q10 bringing a second physical keyboard option sometime this spring. RIM customers used to have the option of a wide range of BlackBerry choices. The reduction in options shows that handset manufacturers are truly beginning to embrace Apple’s “one phone fits all” philosophy.