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This past week I have been working to update our ECM and Document Management market analysis

There is a question being bandied about by people in the game industry. It effects something you do, or, if you don’t, your friend, roommate, wife or fencing opponent does. Social gaming.

Is social gaming – games played on social networks, like Facebook and MySpace – actually gaming? Millions of users have already given their tacit approval that there is indeed entertainment value in those games. But what puts hardcore gamers’ skivvies in a knot is the idea that there has been total sacrifice of gameplay in exchange for filthy lucre – that these “games” have been so neutered that they only outwardly resemble gaming. And so the more important question is this: Are hardcore gamers simply demanding that all cars on the road be sports cars, or are they a bellwether of a shift in social gaming from click-click-click, to quality?

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“Social games are making tons of money,” said Karen Clark, a Project Manager at Electronic Arts. “They are like slot machines made legal and web-accessible. There’s a lot of investment. Most game people think these ‘games’ suck because they are more like exercises in clicking and monetization of customers than they are fun.”

It is a burgeoning area. In December, Digital Sky Technologies bought into Zynga for $180 million. EA snapped up PlayFish for $400 million and Playdom, whose “Social City” game racked up 10 million players in about a month of existence, scored a $43 million series B.

Most social games as well as some casual games make use a business model of selling in-game “currency” for the purchase of anything from fertilizer to a straight-razor and combining that with player-privileges sales and advertising.

“The business model for social games worked really well,” said Mark Hendrickson of Big Fish, a Seattle-based gaming company, “because there were only a few companies who could harvest all the affiliate money and swamp anyone else’s efforts by putting that money right back into the Facebook ad network. I really think they should have called it ‘Facebook gaming.’ Social gaming is only on the radar because it is a really, really cheap way to possibly make a whole lot of money, if implemented properly.

“As Facebook goes, so goes social gaming.”

Tami Baribeau, the producer of Metaplace’s Island Life game on Facebook, sees it very differently.

“Games go where people go,” she said. “Social networks are clearly a hot platform right now because it’s where people are spending time on the web.”

She attributes the fiction that gameplay is compromised to hardcore gamer prejudice more than to any pandering to a lowest common denominator.

“The fact that social games are whittled down to their basic core mechanics and feedback loop mean that they’re instantly understandable, casual, and the fun is easy to find. This is why they open up the market to so many people, and such a different demographic than traditional console/PC gaming. Traditional gamers don’t like to admit (or simply don’t realize) that games do not have to be massive, 3D, scripted, deep, and immersive experiences in order to be fun and engaging and monetizable. “

Alex Swanson, Project Lead at Playdom, also disagrees with the notion that good gameplay is stepped back in social gaming.

“Initially computers themselves were extremely complex and difficult to learn, so the platform self-selected for people that were tolerant of (or even attracted by) complexity,” he said. “Since then computers have be come much more accessible, creating a gap in the market between the average computer user and the average ‘gamer.’

“Part of the reason that games like these were never very successful prior to the existence of social networks is once again an issue of accessibility. These games are built around the idea that the user has a connected identity. Trying to ask users to build out their social graph as part of entering a game would create an insurmountable barrier to entry. Fortunately, Facebook has already convinced the players to do this by providing its own unique benefits.”

If you play social games, you probably do not care about this argument. You play because it’s fun. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe it’s not for one group of gamers to tell another that they oughtn’t love what they love.

“All I know,” said one social gamer, ” is I’ve met the nicest people playing Mafia Wars.”

For another view of social gaming, see ReadWriteWeb’s post on Armchair Revolutionary.

Discuss

While we still hear some traditional journalists whining and complaining about the dying journalism field, it’s really exciting to see those who aren’t paying attention to that working hard on reinventing journalism in a way that works. We already wrote about how the Planet Money team at NPR spent their own money to buy a toxic asset to learn more about how it worked, and now Clay Shirky points us to another, similar, experiment from new journalism operation ProPublica. In reporting on the mortgage modification story (which is a big, but vastly underreported story), ProPublica is acting as a matchmaker, connecting struggling homeowners with local reporters in order to have their stories told.

As with the reporters buying the toxic asset, it’s about getting past the old “he said/she said” style of reporting, and digging deep by actually getting involved in the story. And, it nicely balances out away from pure “citizen journalism” where the participants do the reporting themselves. Instead, it recognizes that there are times when it’s useful to have a professional help tell the participants’ story — but in a situation like this, where there are so many participants, there previously wouldn’t have been a really effective way to tell that story. You could possibly do a survey, but those are often misleading, and don’t go very deep. But by reaching out and teaming up lots of homeowners going through this process with lots of reporters, you create a potentially really interesting and deep set of news stories about an important topic.

Journalism isn’t dying. It’s just evolving.

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Amazon sure knows how to start our week right. If you head over to their page right now, you’ll see that they have Battlefield: Bad Company 2 up on sale. And you better head over there right

President Joseph Kabila on cover that reads "La Revue". The Democratic Republic of Congo has established joint military monitoring agreements with neighboring Rwanda and Uganda in order to curb rebel activity in the eastern region of the country.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos

pa.press.net
06/04/2010 04:06

Congo calls for UN force to leave

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon refused to confirm a date for the pull-out of peacekeepers from Congo

Congo’s president has called for the UN’s 20,000-strong peacekeeping force to leave before September 2011 so the country can “fly with its own wings,” but the UN secretary-general is not signing off on a date, according to a report.

Ban Ki-moon said he wants to ensure that military operations against rebels in eastern Congo are successfully completed, that well trained and equipped Congolese army units can take over the UN force’s security role, and that the government extends its authority in areas freed from armed groups before the largest UN peacekeeping operation in the world departs.

The secretary-general did recommend in the report to the Security Council that the withdrawal start immediately with up to 2,000 troops leaving peaceful areas of the central African nation by June 30, the 50th anniversary of Congo’s independence.

President Joseph Kabila initially wanted the UN force, known by its French acronym MONUC, out of Congo before the independence celebrations. But following a visit to Kinshasa last month by UN peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy, where Kabila stressed “that it was now time to allow the country to fly with its own wings,” the government “decided to be more flexible and shift that date to August 30, 2011,” the report said.

Congo was engulfed in civil wars from 1996 to 2002, drawing in half a dozen nations and leading to deployment of the UN force in 1999 to support implementation of a ceasefire that was repeatedly broken. Following a 2002 agreement that ended much of the fighting, MONUC has supported the reunification of the country and the country’s first democratic elections in more than four decades in 2006, which Kabila won.

Kabila’s government, however, has since struggled to assert its control in the east and has had difficulty building effective institutions and integrating former fighters into a national army.

Ban took note of Kabila’s desire for all UN troops to be gone by September 2011, but did not endorse it.

An assessment team he sent to Congo recommended withdrawing the UN force over a period of three years if the security situation continued to improve and the government accomplished a series of “critical tasks,” according to the report.

The team concluded that “a continued significant presence of the MONUC force was essential in the Kivus and Orientale provinces” in the volatile east, but not in the other eight provinces where the government could independently maintain law and order and protect civilians, the report said.

The secretary-general said the 50th anniversary of Congo’s independence provides an opportunity for the government and people “to turn the page on a period of the country’s history that has too often been disfigured by conflict and violence”.

Who knew the drama unfolding on the set of Desperate Housewives was even saucier than some of the strange happenings that frequently take up residence on Wisteria Lane? Actress Nicollette Sheridan is suing the creator of the Emmy Award-winning primetime soap for more than $20 million over allegations of assault, battery, violence and wrongful termination, TMZ reported Monday.

Nicollette is steaming over an event first reported by The National Enquirer nearly two years ago.

Sheridan, who played Edie Britt on the comedy-drama, claims show creator Marc Cherry hit her across the face and head, and then fired her after she complained about the assault, legal documents reveals.

According to Enquirer spies, Marc got into a furious screaming match with Nicollette over a dialogue change he had made in the actress’ script in the fall of 2008.

“Everyone was very uncomfortable,” an on set source told the tab in October of that year. “People were trying to act as though they weren’t paying attention, but when Cherry blasted her for having an opinion…it got hard to ignore the fight.”

“He totally lost it and swung for her head,” the spy insisted at the time.

Although reps for the show have long denied spywitness accounts claiming Sheridan had been “smacked or slapped” by Cherry, Nicollette finally spilled the tea on the fateful encounter in court papers filed in Los Angeles Monday.

The 46-year-old British-born star claims Cherry created a hostile work environment by “behaving in an extremely abusive and aggressive manner toward the individuals who work on the show.”

And if that weren’t enough, she confirms that Cherry physically assaulted her after she questioned him about a script during filming of the show’s fifth season on Sept. 24, 2008. “Cherry took her aside and forcefully hit her with his hand across her face and head,” according to the lawsuit.

After the alleged incident Cherry went to her trailer to ask for forgiveness. Nicollette says she immediately reported the incident to ABC but the network failed to take action. Cherry’s aggressiveness escalated and she was unceremoniously booted from the show in early 2009.

The lawsuit also alleged that when Cherry found out Desperate Housewives star Teri Hatcher went above his head to complain about him, he retorted: “I hope Teri Hatcher gets hit by a car and dies.”

For some reason, CBS decided to actually allow late-night talk show host Craig Ferguson to have this robot skeleton companion. Mythbusters’ Grant Imahara built the odd—and slightly freaky—fellow and then taught him the Robot Skeleton Sidekick Laws: More »

Riding on the popularity of their groundbreaking social data visualization service Many Eyes, data-hungry IBM just released the online visualization website Many Bills [ibm.com]. The so-called “Visual Bill Explorer” is a sophisticated social visualization of the U.S. congressional legislation in 2009. The website presents all bills from both the U.S. House and Senate, which are organized into collections and split into meaningful sections. All sections are color-coded and labelled to indicate what topic each section is about.

A bill is a piece of legislation that is presented in Congress for discussion. It is not yet law. A bill is rendered as a series of colorful blocks, each representing a section in the bill itself. The height of the block corresponds to the actual length of that particular section in relation to the entire bill. Each block is assigned a color in accordance with our classification of that section’s text. The actual subject to each section is shown as a little badge to the left of the section. At the top of each bill, a few pieces of information are displayed, including the top subject of the bill (as assigned by the Congressional Research Service), the bill’s number in congress and its short or official title (depending on availability).

Users can collect bills into personalized “trays”, which can be saved as collections, shared or even embedded into blogs and websites (see example below).

User collections can be explored, all bills can be queried for specific keywords (e.g. “military” (375 bills) or “education” (2826 bills)), and individual bills can be investigated, such the recent healthcare bill or the initiative to award a gold medal on behalf of the Congress to Tiger Woods.

See also All Words Spoken in Congress, Capital Word Frequency, Parsing the State of the Union, History of the 2-Party Senate and Political Chart Wars.

Lithium-air battery technology looks to have a big future. With the potential of providing energy densities up to three times that of the conventional lithium-ion batteries found in just about every portable consumer electronics device going around (not to mention the incoming wave of electric vehicles), many companies, including IBM and General Motors are pursuing work on lithium-air batteries. Now researchers at MIT have made a breakthrough that could help make the commercial development of lightweight rechargeable batteries a reality…

Tags: Battery,
Lithium-ion,
MIT,
rechargeable batteries

Related Articles:

• Lithium-sulfur batteries could store triple the power of lithium-ion
• Air-fueled battery boosts capacity tenfold
• Silver-Zinc batteries shape up to the Lithium-Ion incumbents
• New Sony rechargeable battery charges faster and lasts longer
• 4x, 8x, huh? How much power do Lithium batteries actually have?
• ZPower’s silver-zinc rechargeable batteries promise efficiency gains

Introduction/Summary

Exploring the seasons is a very simple way to teach earth science to elementary school students.  Our Seasons, written by Grace Lin and Ranida T. McKneally, shows four young children experiencing the joys of each season while answering basic scientific questions about how the seasons affect weather, plants, and people.   The book answers the question “why do we have seasons?” in a very accessible and kid-friendly way, and offers a helpful illustration showing the rotation of the earth around the sun.  From this starting point, each of the following pages features lovely illustrations of the children enjoying the seasons and their natural phenomena, accompanied by seasonal haikus.  For example, in the cold autumn air, “Ki-Ki sees her breath./She pretends she’s a dragon/Blowing out hot steam.”  The text then answers the question, “Why do I see my breath?”  Other pages offer more fun illustrations, haiku, and seasonal questions and answers; for example: Why is there frost on the windows?  What makes a thunderstorm?  Why is the air sticky?  Parents will be very familiar with these often-asked questions, and they are charmingly answered here.  The book concludes with the question, “Does everyone have four seasons?,” and the authors explain that some regions of the world have only two, and even at the North or South Pole, you have a light season and a dark season, though both seasons are cold.  A glossary in the back provides helpful vocabulary for young readers.

Curriculum Connections

This picture book could be used to add more information to any earth science lesson focused upon the seasons and weather observations.  Kindergarten students learning about weather (K.8) or the different states of water (K.5) would certainly enjoy the pictures and an educator could simply conduct a picture walk through the book to talk about changes throughout the year.  Elementary students learning more about seasonal changes and their effects on weather phenomena (2.6, 3.8, 4.6) would enjoy this engaging book, and can see how seasonal change affects plants, people, and their surroundings (1.7, 2.7).  Fourth graders who are studying the motion of the Earth around the sun and the causes of the Earth’s seasons (4.7)  could utilize this as well.  Independent readers would enjoy this easy read, and it would be a good addition to the classroom library.  Educators could use the pictures and seasonal haiku as an inspired springboard for a science/language-arts activity.   

Additional Resources

• National Geographic’s Xpeditions: A Reason for the Season activities: Younger students can work as season sleuths over the course of the year as they draw pictures of a place in their yard or neighborhood on each of the solstices and equinoxes, recording observations about natural phenomena and noting activities that people enjoy during that time period.  Older students can investigate seasonal celebrations around the world and create their own celebrations using foods and flowers particular to each season.

• Brain Pop:  Seasons:  This site provides fun information and animated videos about the seaons, the solstices and equinoxes, why birds seasonally migrate, and even offers a spotlight on winter and snow that offers hibernation information. 

• Not Just Cute’s blog post:  Vivaldi’s Four Seasons:  Don’t Just Listen, Get Up and Move!  (12/30/2009) – This blog site offers up many great ideas for preschoolers, but this lesson could certainly be adapted for any elementary grade level as it incorporates music and movement to talk about the seasons.  Many children have heard Vivaldi’s music before and this offers a great incentive to make a cross-curricular connection and can be extended into a visual art activity. 

• NASA Kids offers up two science activities to help explain the reason for the seasons and the role of water in each of the seasons. Their four seasons of water paper plate collage could easily be turned into a foldable activity.

• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s National Weather Service has links to help explain seasonal weather patterns such as hurricanes and tornadoes. 

• Traditional Japanese haiku poems must contain a kigo, a season word, to indicate in which season the haiku is set.  For a lesson plan on how to introduce haiku into a seasons lesson plan, the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English’s readthinkwrite website offers great tips on how to get your students writing. 

General Information

• Book:  Our Seasons

• Author:  Grace Lin and Ranida T. McKneally

• Illustrator:  Grace Lin

• Publisher:  Charlesbridge Publishing, Inc.

• Publication Date:  2006

• Pages: 32

• Grade Range:  kindergarten through fourth

• ISBN: 1570913617

“It’s not about the value of the task, it’s about the value of me not having to do it, or even think about it anymore.” That’s how Ted Roden describes Fancy Hands, his new side project that provides virtual personal assistants in the cloud for a low monthly fee.

Need an appointment made for you? Research done on Fantasy Baseball players you might want to draft onto your team? Roden has hired more than 100 people based in the US and England who can perform almost any quick, legal task for you, within minutes, at any hour day or night. You can send them 15 emails with task requests per month for a $30 fee. An algorithm sorts the tasks and routes each one to the most appropriate person.

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Roden says the people he’s hired include retired lawyers, actors waiting with time to spare before going on camera and former employees of competitor ChaCha. He wrote a program to sift through piles of applications and plans on using the company’s own service providers to select new hires in the future as well.

Roden himself has a day job in the R&D department of the New York Times. He’s a creative dynamo whose energy spills out in side projects like the visually compelling social bookmarking service EnjoysThin.gs and an O’Reilly book about building real-time websites, due out this Summer. Previously, he was the 2nd full-time programmer at art-video portal Vimeo.

Roden says he built Fancy Hands because he wanted to build something big. He calls it that just because it was the filename for his first bit of code, a tradition across all his projects. He’s bootstrapping it himself “and my wife says it’s ok,” he says.

Casting The Tasks

Fancy Hands is easy for customers to use. I asked the service to find where in town I could buy a “sweater bag” to run sweaters through the washing machine and got a great response, complete with multiple options online and a personal recommendation, within an hour. I asked for links to reviews of iPad RSS reading applications and the first response I got was terrible. I emailed back complaining and the person on the other end sent me back something even worse. Then Roden noticed and reassigned the request to someone who filled it beautifully.

Roden says that for now he’s doing the quality control himself and generally well after the tasks have been completed. He’s got a complex series of tubes and pulleys rigged up to sort tasks, though. He calls it “the eHarmony of Getting Things Done.”

In that way it’s a little reminiscent of Aardvark, the social search startup that began as a human bucket brigade behind a facade of technology and ended up a complex web of computer science that Google acquired this Winter for millions of dollars.

At its core Fancy Hands is people, though. And the people are paid by the task. Roden has created a system that ranks tasks by complexity and rewards assistants with higher pay when they complete harder tasks. Once they reach a particular pay grade, all their tasks become better paying, thus incentivizing them to dive in to harder and harder work.

The people behind the scenes are often surprisingly enthusiastic. Roden says that compared to other, similar systems, Fancy Hands is more affordable, competitive on speed and often surprisingly superior in quality of results. At least at launch, the people he’s hired seem relatively interested in the project and the work.

This afternoon I asked Fancy Hands to make me an appointment with “Bob’s Heating System Repair” and gave it my own phone number to call, just to see how it went down. I answered my next inbound call with “hello, Bob’s heating repair, this is Bob.” And went through a few minutes of appointment conversation before telling the virtual assistant what I was really doing. I think he felt a little bit toyed with, but he was very professional before and after I disclosed my true identity.

He said he had interacted just a little bit with Ted and that he was very interested to see what kind of research he would be tasked with doing. He was very cautious about telling me anything specific about what the system was like on his end because “we’re a brand new company, just starting.” I thought it was charming that one of the 100 people hired to do tasks for a fee felt so closely associated with the business.

These Hands Are Fancy

People familiar with this kind of “human powered micro-outsourcing” will no doubt be familiar with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. All kinds of businesses bid for Turk users to perform rapid little tasks that require just a touch of human intelligence. Spammers pay Turkers to leave spammy spam around the web, podcasters pay Turkers to transcribe tiny fragments of audio files, businesses like Citysearch and Yelp pay Turkers to confirm changes to local business listings submitted by users. It’s a big business, a platform that other businesses are being built on top of.

These services can be taken too far, of course. Author Tim Ferriss famously paid a team of assistants to pretend to be him on dating websites. They vetted women for intelligence and appearance before scheduling a day full of short first dates all in a row. That’s just dishonest, an interpersonal crime of convenience.

There’s something both more and less human about what Fancy Hands is doing, though. Its algorithmic task sorting could become very complex but the people on both ends are more invested, too. Roden says his model of $30 for 15 tasks per month makes people stop and ponder whether a task is really one they want to expend part of their monthly subscription on. There’s something intriguing about that.

For himself, Ted Roden has a simple rule for using the system he built. “If I think about anything twice, I just put it into Fancy Hands,” he says. It will be interesting to see how often his customers think about Fancy Hands and whether enough of them will renew their subscriptions to make this a sustainable service. If nothing else, this mix of human and machine is thought provoking, and perhaps prescient, in the way it strategically blends the online and offline worlds.

Photo by Justin Ouellette.

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Did you know the first 3 digits of a barcode tells you country of origin?
If the first 3 digits  are:
690-692 … then  it is MADE IN CHINA
00  – 09 …   USA   &   CANADA
30  – 37 …   FRANCE
40  – 44 …   GERMANY
47  …   TAIWAN
49 … JAPAN
50 …   UK

There has been no one piece of technological kit that has become more synonymous with the world of business than the BlackBerry. Sometimes nicknamed the CrackBerry for the addictive effect it has on its users, the BlackBerry has come to symbolize the working world of business to such a degree that in a famous court case against the device’s manufacturers, the U.S. Department of Defence issued a statement saying that if BlackBerry was to be shut down, national security would be crippled due to the sheer number of government users.

The BlackBerry is very simple. It is a computer phone. To begin, it has the normal features of a phone and you can buy them through any normal phone provider. Vodafone for example, currently has a whole section on its website – and indeed a significant chunk of its marketing power – devoted solely to the BlackBerry, and other providers are offering similar packages. Visit the Vodafone website for their full BlackBerry range.

However, while including the standard PDA applications (address book, calendar, to-do lists, etc.) as well as phone capabilities, the BlackBerry is best known for its ability to send and receive e-mail wherever it can access a wireless network of certain cellular phone carriers. Most current BlackBerry models have a built-in QWERTY keyboard, optimized for “thumbing”, and there are also several models that include a standard cell phone keypad for typing, and one model that is a full touch-screen device with no physical keyboard.

Indeed, so ubiquitous is the BlackBerry that the company who makes it has made itself the fastest growing business in the world; pretty much off the back of one product According to business magazine Fortune, the Canadian-based RIM has come top of the magazine’s latest annual guide to the 100 fastest-growing businesses. Even in the current financial situation of doom and gloom the company has still managed growth, something that without the BlackBerry would have been totally impossible.

It is hard to see any form of competitor even beginning to approach the massive market domination that the BlackBerry has achieved, and until then there is absolutely no shame in jumping on the bandwagon.

© 2007 Freakitude dot Com.

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Many animal advocates were outraged last week when a Hawaiian House committee advanced a resolution that, if passed, would have recognized cockfighting for its cultural significance in the state. Although the resolution wouldn’t have legalized cockfighting, which is illegal in all 50 states, many animal-rights and animal-welfare groups viewed it with disgust.

One of the most vocal opponents of the proposal was Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States. Pacelle took to his blog last week to protest the action of Hawaii’s House Committee on Tourism, Culture and International Affairs.

"A wide array of animal abusers use the smokescreen of culture as a defense for their depravity, whether they are bullfighters, dogfighters, or seal clubbers," Pacelle wrote. "It is just amazing that a group of elected officials … would provide a defense for a group of known, professional lawbreakers who enjoy the sight of animals trying to hack each other to death and like to gamble on the outcome."

Apparently in a direct response to the flap over the proposal, Hawaii lawmakers have quietly decided to shelve the idea to recognize cockfighting on cultural merits by sending it back to committee, according to the Associated Press.

"Lots of people had strong concerns and objections to the bill and so, at the end of the day, we thought it might be a distraction to the bigger work we have to do," the state’s House majority leader, Blake Oshiro, a Democrat, told the Star-Bulletin newspaper about the decision. "Absent some extraordinary maneuvers that I’m not aware of, it’s dead."

Rep. Joey Manahan, also a Democrat and chairman of the Committee on Tourism, Culture and International Affairs, said he was disappointed that the proposal failed to advance because cockfighting enthusiasts had invested so much energy into it. He told the Associated Press that he’ll consider bringing the issue back to the House next year.

— Lindsay Barnett

Animal news on the go: Follow Unleashed on Facebook and Twitter.

Photo: A cockfight in Pakistan on Jan. 29. Credit: K.M. Chaudary / Associated Press

The U.K. just entered its election season and the pound could be rocked by further poll anxiety as the May date comes closer.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown named May 6 as the election date, setting up his Labour Party’s square off against the poll leading Conservatives and the up-start Liberal Democrats.

Labour stand just 4 points behind the Conservative Party in the polls. The British public has not settled on Conservative leader David Cameron’s fiscal austerity campaign, instead preferring to hope their current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown’s, more middle-ground approach becomes the norm. Of course by middle ground, we mean more loose with the public purse, which may not be in the British pound’s best interest.

But the country doesn’t exactly love Gordon Brown either, and with 13 years of Labour rule behind them, the U.K. is irking for a change. Just not necessarily the change towards austerity Cameron is currently offering.

Both candidates will push towards the center, offering campaign sweeteners to the all important “Middle England” vote, the equivalent of America’s “heartland voter.”

Thus the pound could get choppy as the polls tighten, as markets battle with concerns that U.K. politicians will have to err on the side of more (rather than less) government spending in order to keep as many people as possible happy with their camp. The prospect of the U.K. heading towards a hung parliament, and policy stalemate, also makes the passage of tangible austerity measures even less likely.

In overnight trading the pound is down slightly against the dollar.

On a longer view, perhaps we’re in for another down-leg.

Join the conversation about this story »

You like getting stuff for free? Well, you missed out on a free Nexus One if you didn’t enter Big in Japan’s first video contest. They announced the winner today, a college student from the University of Texas named Demi Adejuyigbe. But there’s a second contest now and you could be the winner of a Motorola Droid.

“Demi’s video provides a great illustration of how millions of consumers around the world are using ShopSavvy every day – in many cases, changing the way they shop forever,” said Alexander Muse, co-founder of Big in Japan.

Said Adejuyigbe: “As a college student, I’m forced to be frugal everywhere and anywhere I can be. I’ve saved well over $1,000 with this application — including about $200 on the video camera I used to shoot this video. I take it with me whenever I shop.”

You can view Adejuyigbe’s winning video at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK6HykLLcxE

To enter the second ShopSavvy fan video contest, interested users should:

* record a short video (two minutes or less) describing how they used ShopSavvy to save money while shopping;
* provide details such as store name, location, product name, and amount saved;
* star in the video themselves (no actors);
* be sure to show their phone running ShopSavvy;
* upload the video to YouTube, including the title “ShopSavvy Fan Video from (name)” and the tags “shopsavvy, shop savvy, barcode, barcode scanner, upc, ean”;
* focus on your savings from ShopSavvy – do not mention the contest itself;
* e-mail your name, mailing address and a link to your video to [email protected].

The Droid winner will be selected from the first 100 entries received, so users are encouraged to submit their videos promptly, and no later than May 15. Only one entry per user will be accepted.

Ok folks, there you have it. Get creative come up with something interesting and you could be the next lucky winner. Good luck!!

Coats, wraps and other clothes that are made with animal fur would need to have special labels in California under legislation adopted Monday by the state Assembly.

Lawmakers voted 46-7 to close a loophole in federal law that allows many fur products to go unlabeled. Current law requires labels only for garments that have $150 or more worth of animal fur.

The bill now goes to the state Senate for consideration. If it’s signed into law, California would become the sixth state to impose the labeling requirement, joining Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Wisconsin.

"I think there is an expectation that if clothing isn’t labeled as real fur it must be fake, but this isn’t always the case," bill author Fiona Ma said in a statement after the vote. "People have a right to know if they are buying raccoon dog or a polyester blend."

A raccoon dog is a canine species from Asia.

The bill by the San Francisco Democrat would require that all garments containing fur are labeled with the type of animal and the country of origin. Currently, manufacturers avoid labeling requirements by using cheap fur from raccoon dogs and other animals raised in foreign factories, Ma said.

Critics argue that the labels would burden retailers. Assemblyman Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine) said the measure would lead to added regulations and fines for retailers. He said consumers should instead take recourse in the courts.

"I believe, and based on current civil code, you can in fact bring a lawsuit if something is said to be one thing and it is really something else and you suffer harm," DeVore said during the floor debate.

— Associated Press

Stay up-to-date on animal news: Follow Unleashed on Facebook and Twitter.

Photo: Assemblywoman Fiona Ma (D-San Francisco) looks over a vote tally after the fur-labeling measure she co-authored with Assemblyman Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) was approved by the state Assembly on April 5. Credit: Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press

Rackspace launched an iPad app to manage a cloud infrastructure, one of the first to offer such a service.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) does not have apps for the iPhone nor the iPad platforms. It has historically not offered mobile apps for AWS.

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You can still access AWS on the iPad through the Safari browser. But is the experience as rich as what you would have as on a native app?

Mike Mayo built Rackspace’s iPad app. He says it is the functionality that gives apps their value. It’s evident in both consumer and enterprise apps. Users get a rich user experience. You can see it in the Racskpace cloud app.

Mayo humorously says that the app offers administrators “a life.” Meaning that you can go out for dinner without the anxiety of not knowing how the infrastructure is faring. If you see a problem, you can reboot, directly from the device.

The app does have a new service not available on the iPhone version. You can delete your servers on it. Mayo kept the feature off the iPhone due to the concern that it’s such a small device, easily left at a bar or restaurant. He feels people are less likely to leave an iPad due to its size. We’re not so sure. People leave their laptops behind all the time.

We could go into details about the app and what it offers but Robert Scoble’s video does a good job of that.

Mayo is currently developing a Rackpace cloud app for the Android.

Disclosure: RackSpace is a sponsor of ReadWriteCloud’s parent site, ReadWriteWeb.

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California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman (R) wrote her campaign another check for $20 million Monday.

The billionaire former CEO of EBay has now put $59 million of her own money into the campaign, with election day still seven months away.

Whitman has already spent tens of millions of dollars in advertising and a new USC-Los Angeles Times poll suggests her investment is paying off.

Whitman led Democrat Jerry Brown 44 percent to 41 percent among the 1,515 registered voters, just outside the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.

Two-thirds of those surveyed said they had heard or seen an ad about the race.

The telephone poll, conducted March 23-30, shows Whitman leading state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner by 40 points in the GOP primary.

“Whether it’s facing down the powerful public employee unions who are propping up Jerry Brown or our well-financed primary opponent, Meg’s campaign will have the resources necessary to fight back.” said Whitman Campaign Manager Jillian Hasner.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg holds the record for most personal wealth put into a campaign at $108 million during his 2009 mayoral campaign.

Whitman Campaign aides confirm that she is willing to spend up to $150 million of her own money on her campaign.