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Investments into the next generation of location and augmented reality applications these days are as big as the buzz surrounding them. But while we’re seeing amazing apps and demonstrations, we’re still not seeing compelling revenue models.

On Wednesday, April 28, a select group of about 75 entrepreneurs, investors and technologists will gather at the GigaOM offices for our 11th GigaOM Bunker Session to debate how we will monetize location and AR services. In this session, we will explore what revenue models will work in the near term, and what timelines we might see for the realization of further revenue. The conversation will be moderated by GigaOM Pro Analyst Phil Hendrix.

A few speakers will lead the debate at the forum, but the overall emphasis will be on participation and comment by all those invited. Our conversation leaders will include:

• Matt Galligan, SimpleGeo
• Tom Coates, Yahoo
• Marc Davis, Invention Arts
• Rahul Sonnad, GeoDelic
• Michael Liebhold, Institute for the Future
• Ted Morgan, Skyhook

The event is open to invitees only and will be live streamed at our subscription research site, GigaOM Pro. To submit questions or discussion topics, watch video or the event, and access post-event analysis from GigaOM Pro contributors, subscribe now. For a limited time, we are also offering a 20 percent discount on a one-year subscription. Enter the code “BUNKER0428″ at checkout.

Related Research Briefings:

• “Location: The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation,” by Phil Hendrix
• “Mobile Augmented Reality Today and Tomorrow,” by John du pre Gauntt

Image courtesy of Flickr user nerdcoregirl

More details have become available for the Lenovo LePhone, and not all of them are pretty. Previously thought to be running Android 2.1, it now appears to be running a highly-customized version of Android 1.6 that is being called LEOS (LEnovo OS?).

Despite some quirks such as a proprietary data cable and a back with "striped texture feels like a touch rusty iron in the same chip," the reviewer seems to like the phone quite a bit. The source is all in Chinese, but it’s worth a look even with a poor translation. [CNbeta.com]

Have you always wanted a plane but didn’t want the hassle of the whole hangar thing? Well, the folks at Icon are showing off their Icon A5, which has wings that fold up for convenient storage right next to the Bowflex you never use.

The travel-writin’ peeps at Jaunted.com snapped some pics of the A5, which is currently on display at the JetBlue terminal at JFK International Airport in New York.

This puppy will set you back $135,000, but you won’t have to worry about carry-on fees… mostly because you can’t bring more than 60 lbs of baggage on board.

Go over to Jaunted to check out their gallery of the A5.

O que é prazer pra você? Esta foi a pergunta condutora do primeiro publi-editorial do grupo BMW no Brasil, publicado neste mês na revista TRIP.
O projeto BMW Joyride convidou três pessoas que tivessem em comum uma grande paixão: surfar. O destino escolhido para ilustrar este publi-editorial de 5 páginas foi Paraty e as paradisíacas praias ao redor da cidade histórica. A bordo do Novo BMW X1, Teco Padaratz, 38 anos, bicampeão mundial de Surf; Alex Miranda, 39 anos, sócio da Produtora Trator Filmes, e John Wolthers, 54 anos, Trader de café. Juntos criaram um diário de viagem único, ilustrando o verdadeiro significado de Prazer.

O início desta inovadora estratégia de comunicação começou em dezembro de 2009, ao criarem ao lado do designer, Kiko Farkas, 3 pranchas com os motivos: praia, campo e cidade. As pranchas ficaram presentes no Café de La Musique, em Jurerê, durante o verão de 2010. Na seqüência, a revista TRIP produziu este publi-editorial de 4 páginas para a BMW, provando que conteúdo e publicidade caminham juntos.

A confecção desde publi-editorial veio de encontro com o perfil e conceito do Novo BMW X1: um SAV compacto premium, jovem, versátil, ativo, capaz de permitir uma condução baseada na emoção, onde o carro torna-se um companheiro em qualquer situação: campo, praia ou cidade.

Fonte: Visar

It’s SD conference paper review time again. Last year I took notes while reviewing, in an attempt to capture the attributes of a good paper. A few additional thoughts:

• No model is perfect, but it pays to ask yourself, will your model stand up to critique?
• Model-data comparison is extremely valuable and too seldom done, but trivial tests are not interesting. Fit to data is a weak test of model validity; it’s often necessary, but never sufficient as a measure of quality. I’d much rather see the response of a model to a step input or an extreme conditions test than a model-data comparison. It’s too easy to match the model to the data with exogenous inputs, so unless I see a discussion of a multi-faceted approach to validation, I get suspicious. You might consider how your model meets the following criteria:
  • Do decision rules use information actually available to real agents in the system?
  • Would real decision makers agree with the decision rules attributed to them?
  • Does the model conserve energy, mass, people, money, and other physical quantities?
  • What happens to the behavior in extreme conditions?
  • Do physical quantities always have nonnegative values?
  • Do units balance?
• If you have time series output, show it with graphs – it takes a lot of work to “see” the behavior in tables. On the other hand, tables can be great for other comparisons of outcomes.
• If all of your graphs show constant values, linear increases (ramps), or exponentials, my eyes glaze over, unless you can make a compelling case that your model world is really that simple, or that people fail to appreciate the implications of those behaviors.
• Relate behavior to structure. I don’t care what happens in scenarios unless I know why it happens. One effective way to do this is to run tests with and without certain feedback loops or sectors of the model active.
• Discuss what lies beyond the boundary of your model. What did you leave out and why? How does this limit the applicability of the results?
• If you explore a variety of scenarios with your model (as you should), introduce the discussion with some motivation, i.e. why are the particular scenarios tested important, realistic, etc.?
• Take some time to clean up your model diagrams. Eliminate arrows that cross unnecessarily. Hide unimportant parameters. Use clear variable names.
• It’s easiest to understand behavior in deterministic experiments, so I like to see those. But the real world is noisy and uncertain, so it’s also nice to see experiments with stochastic variation or Monte Carlo exploration of the parameter space. For example, there are typically many papers on water policy in the ENV thread. Water availability is contingent on precipitation, which is variable on many time scales. A system’s response to variation or extremes of precipitation is at least as important as its mean behavior.
• Modeling aids understanding, which is intrinsically valuable, but usually the real endpoint of a modeling exercise is a decision or policy change. Sometimes, it’s enough to use the model to characterize a problem, after which the solution is obvious. More often, though, the model should be used to develop and test decision rules that solve the problem you set out to conquer. Show me some alternative strategies, discuss their limitations and advantages, and describe how they might be implemented in the real world.
• If you say that an SD model can’t predict or forecast, be very careful. SD practitioners recognized early on that forecasting was often a fool’s errand, and that insight into behavior modes for design of robust policies was a worthier goal. However, SD is generally about building good dynamic models with appropriate representations of behavior and so forth, and good models are a prerequisite to good predictions. An SD model that’s well calibrated can forecast as well as any other method, and will likely perform better out of sample than pure statistical approaches. More importantly, experimentation with the model will reveal the limits of prediction.
• It never hurts to look at your paper the way a reviewer will look at it.

[JURIST] Officials from the UK Ministry of Justice announced Friday that the government will award compensation to Lotfi Raissi, an Algerian-born UK man wrongfully detained in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Raissi was jailed in September 2001 on a US extradition warrant after being indicted by a federal grand jury on accusations that he provided pilot training to 9/11 hijackers. In February 2008, the UK Appeals Court ordered the Ministry to consider Raissi’s appeal for compensation, reversing a 2007 High Court ruling that he was ineligible for compensation because his detention stemmed from an extradition order. The Appeals Court held that the issue of extradition is not relevant to the question of compensation so long as it still results in a miscarriage of justice by UK courts. Last month, the Appeals Court gave Justice Secretary Jack Straw 28 days to decide whether to compensate Raissi. An independent assessor will now determine the amount of the award, which some expect to be several thousand pounds.
Raissi was arrested naked in his home with his wife and brother on September 21, 2001. He was granted conditional bail five months later because the US government was unable to adduce any evidence to support its allegations. He sought compensation under a government scheme allowing payment to any “person whose convictions are quashed on appeal or who, following charge, have not been proceeded against or have been acquitted of crime at trial.”

By John Tate

Ron Paul, Campaign for Liberty, and speakers including Tom Woods, Bob Murphy, and Bruce Fein are coming to Des Moines, Iowa on May 14-16 for C4L’s Iowa Regional Conference and Forum on the Future of Conservatism.

If you are planning to join us at the Embassy Suites on the River in downtown Des Moines for these three packed days of activities and have not yet reserved your room at the Embassy Suites, our specially discounted rate for Conference attendees expires today!

Find out more about the Embassy Suites and our Iowa Conference by clicking here.

Visit the Embassy Suite’s website to register for your C4L room rate directly with the hotel.

Watch the video below to hear Congressman Paul talk about the Iowa Conference:

At this time, I’m proud to announce that Doug Bandow, frequent C4L contributor and former special assistant to President Reagan, as well as Daniel McCarthy, senior editor at The American Conservative, will also be speaking at our Forum on the Future of Conservatism!

Join us in Iowa on May 14-16 for top notch grassroots training (click here to register), issue education, organizational meetings, and a time of motivation and fun with like-minded people.

Wade Roush wrote:

A small explosion at E Ink forced an evacuation of the company’s Cambridge, MA, offices and manufacturing facilities near Fresh Pond this afternoon. No injuries were reported, but employees have been sent home for the weekend as the company deals with water damage from the building’s sprinkler system.

The company said in a statement released to Xconomy: “There was a small incident at E Ink today. The incident was contained to a very small space within [the] R & D facility. No one was injured. There is no damage and no interruption of production. The incident was quickly taken care of and E Ink is cooperating with the fire department. Employees were sent home for the day because the sprinklers were engaged as result of the flash and resulting smoke. All employees will return to business on Monday.”

E Ink, which is a division of Taiwanese display maker Prime View International, makes the electrophoretic displays used in e-reader devices such as the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, the Barnes & Noble Nook, and Plastic Logic’s forthcoming Que proReader.

Sriram Peruvemba, E Ink’s vice president of marketing, told Xconomy that the incident occurred in a “pod” or shop area in the company’s R&D operation where an employee was mixing various materials, and that it will not slow manufacturing of the “VizPlex” films used by E Ink’s customers.

E Ink researchers and engineers studying new display technologies routinely work with small amounts of dangerous materials, Peruvemba says. “Basically the research guys constantly get approval form the local authorities to bring in small quantities of different substances, including substances that may be flammable if mixed incorrectly,” he says. “In the next day or two we will know exactly what he mixed and what caused this. All of that will now be investigated by the fire department.”

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UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

With a big tub of quark in my fridge, I wanted to do something special with it. Quark is low in fat and high in protein, and it is a very versatile baking ingredient because it is stable in the oven (although it is good when eaten plain, too). I decided to turn mine into a pie, a variation on cheesecake.

This pie has two layers of quark cheesecake sandwiching a sweet filling made with cherries. I used jarred cherries, but frozen and defrosted cherries will work very well, too. Compared to a regular cheesecake, this pie is very easy to make. It takes minutes to mix it up and doesn’t have a long baking time. There is no need for a water bath or any of the other precautions that you might take with a cheesecake to get the pie to turn out well. Plus, quark is low in fat so you can feel pretty good having seconds when the pie is ready to eat.

Flavor-wise, the pie tastes like a cherry pie cheesecake, with a rich consistency and a very creamy texture. It’s not as heavy as a cheesecake because quark has that slight tang to it, much like plain yogurt or sour cream, that gives it a slightly fresher taste. It also makes it a great background for the fruit filling, allowing the great flavor of the cherries to stand out. The pie is good at room temperature, but I preferred it when it had been chilled before serving.

Quark is a bit of an unusual ingredient in the US, and while you might be able to find it at some specialty stores in your area (especially if they have a lot of gourmet/European baking ingredients), you also might not be able to find it. If you can’t, fromage frais would work pretty well as a substitute, although it may be slightly thicker than quark typically is. If you live in Europe, you probably won’t have a problem finding quark. Otherwise, keep an eye out because this low fat cheese is great for baking and will probably catch on even more in the US over the coming months.

(more…)

We’ve got a bit of hardware news and a bit of software news this week, and they’re both going to be controversial. What else is new? It seems that everything RIM does is under the microscope these days, because of the competition from Apple and Google. Still, I think it’s pretty good news.

So click on over here to hear the BBGeekcast (10 min, 17 sec)

And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you won’t miss future episodes!

You can also subscribe to the BBGeekcast in iTunes.

Highlights include:
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As predicted in this blog, the White House on Friday confirmed President Obama will visit Quincy, Ill. next week.

below, from the White House….

WASHINGTON- On Tuesday, April 27, President Obama will continue the White House to Main Street tour with stops in Iowa. In the early afternoon, he will tour Siemens Energy Inc Facility in Fort Madison and then share ideas with workers for continuing to grow the economy and to put Americans back to work. He will then make a stop in Mt. Pleasant. Later in the afternoon, President Obama will hold a town hall meeting in Ottumwa at Indian Hills Community College. The President will depart from Des Moines International Airport on the morning of April 28.

On Wednesday, April 28, the President will hold events in Macon, MO and Quincy, IL. More details will be announced for these events as they become available.only.

Calling all developers: The Snaptic Developer Conference is looking for a few good coders for a May 27 event in San Francisco. The agenda includes:

• Interactive sessions with amazing speakers
• Android: Intents, tools, stats, users, tips and happiness
• Hands-on help from the Snaptic Team and other experts
• Meet innovators in tech and cool developers like you!

Register now and get more info at Snaptic.com.

Drew Brees may appear on the cover of Madden NFL 11, but the Saints and their QB aren’t going to be in the game’s demo. Like the boxart, EA left it up for fan voting. Guess who

Filed under: Concept Cars, Crossover, Chevrolet, Beijing Motor Show, Electric

While Chrysler has failed to find a way to update or replace the retro-styled PT Cruiser, we can definitely see this as a forthcoming replacement to the Chevrolet HHR. The Volt MPV5 is slightly larger than HHR, but fills a similar market niche. While Chevrolet hasn’t announced a firm production commitment, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the MPV5 built in both conventional and ER-EV forms to help jack up GM’s light truck CAFE numbers. The roomy interior will likely find a bigger audience than the smaller Volt while still yielding a 32 mile electric range, and if we had to guess, we’d see the Orlando-inspired plug-in EV hit the market by 2013.

Beijing 2010: Chevrolet Volt MPV5 concept, HHR goes future tech originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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below, Durbin release…..

DURBIN OFFICE STATEMENT ON SUBPEONA ISSUED BY FORMER GOV. ROD BLAGOJEVICH

[CHICAGO] – Joe Shoemaker, spokesman for U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) made the following statement regarding a subpoena issued by Rod Blagojevich’s defense team:
.
“On April 16, 2010 Senator Durbin was served a subpoena by Rod Blagojevich’s defense attorneys.

Given the former Governor’s previous antics regarding this case, it’s no surprise he is casting a wide net – apparently from the President down to dogcatcher.

We have accepted service of the subpoena and will cooperate with the court in any reasonable way. The matter has been referred to counsel, and our office will not be commenting further.”

– 30 –

We just finished writing a story on deadline when in walks the mailman with a giant yellow package. We tore it open, and lo and behold, there was nothing in it but the current edition of The New York Times wrapped inside a black T-shirt. Oh, but wait! We opened it to page A19 (already tabbed) to see a full-page ad. "Today, our struggle begins against—INJUSTICE!" the copy reads. "Yes, we’re that serious!" a separate color ad tucked inside the newspaper says. Whoa! Turns out it was from Cats Against Clay, an organization that protests the use of clay in cat litter. A post on the group’s Web site reads: "We appreciate the support, New York. Many of you human types have shared enlightened messages about our plight—nice to see you ‘get it.’ It seems that newspaper, while not great in the litter box, is a fantastic way for us to make ourselves heard." We have to admit, it got our attention.

—Posted by Elaine Wong

Thanks to the upcoming April 30 expiration of the government’s new-home-buyer tax credits, in March the U.S. just experienced the sharpest spikes in new home sales back to 1963.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, new homes sales leaped at an annualized 27% rate in March. You’ll see this below, on the right. It’s clearly an abnormally high jump — welcome to the distorting force of government in markets. People were rushing to buy ahead of the April 30th deadline to qualify for the tax incentives.

Thing is, this isn’t healthy buying behavior. Given we just came off a housing mania, creating new mini-buying manias seems a bit dangerous. It’s kind of like taking shots to cure a hangover.

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