Blog

Gran Turismo 5 has apparently hit a speed bump on the way to the finish line. Sony recently announced that the game’s Japanese release date has been delayed.
 
Thanks to Fred and bpa94 for the tips!

There’s nothing better than serving up a fresh, homemade soup than doing so in a homemade vessel. It makes the meal and the serving pieces themselves created with love and passion. We’ve rounded up 15 of our favorite pieces, including a few that are a little — well odd.

Read Full Post

Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne says the company will report its first annual profit soon.

The company, which is loved by short sellers as a perpetual source of downward stock momentum, has never announced an annual profit. It is down almost 80% over the last 5 years and down almost 5.5% in 2010.

But now its CEO has told a reporter for the New York Observer that they had a profitable 2009.

This probably raises some disclosure issues. The company hasn’t issued a press release or made any filing with the SEC about the news. And the CEO seems to know that talking profits ahead of the official news release might be troublesome. “I’m probably going to get a lot of shit for having said this,” he told the Observer.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne’s Facebook Pretexting Scheme Lasted Six Months
• Trader: We’re Shorting Overstock.com Because Of This Facebook Insanity
• Overstock: Actually, Grant Thornton Is Lying

By now I think it is pretty safe to assume Windows Mobile 7 will eventually be coming to the HTC HD2.

The latest confirmation comes from a response to a customer question sent last month asking about the very issue of an upgrade.

Dear Toby

Thank you for your enquiry about HD2

What we do it ROM Upgrades from our website, however 6.5 windows mobile has only been out 2 months and windows mobile 7 hasn’t even been developed. This wont be out until next November at the earliest. But when it is available it will be a free download.

If these steps have not helped, please let me know by responding using the link provided and I will be happy to check again for you.

Best regards,

Terry Snelling
HTC customer support team
HTC Corp. Global Service Division
http://www.htc.com/europe/CA_Hotline.aspx

At present we are also pretty sure the OS will be announced at Mobile World Congress in a months time, which we expect to be following very closely. 

If you want to keep abreast of Windows Mobile 7 news remember to sign up our RSS feed or follow us on twitter using the bar below.

Via Redmondpie.com

Ford Motor Company has decided that the 4 cylinder 1.6 liter unit destined for the U.S. 2011 Ford Fiesta will be developed in Brazil, with Ford’s Taubate, Sao Paolo, factory being used to manufacture the engines. Currently the facility produces about 280,000 engines per year.

The unit has an aluminum block and head, and delivers estimated figures of 119 HP and 109 ft-lb of torque and promises to offer a 40 mpg highway fuel consumption figure in the Fiesta. Its most important technology howev… (read more)

Carol Tenopir

KNOXVILLE — A $1 million grant to study the value of academic libraries to students, faculty, policymakers, funders and others has been awarded by Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Libraries and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL).

Carol Tenopir, a professor in the School of Information Sciences, is the lead investigator on the project. Former UT Dean of Libraries Paula Kaufman, now university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Illinois, is a co-principal investigator; and Martha Kyrillidou, senior director for statistics and service quality programs, is leading the project from ARL.

The three-year grant, entitled “Value, Outcomes, and Return on Investment of Academic Libraries (Lib-Value),” will work to enrich, expand, test and implement methodologies measuring the return on investment (ROI) in academic libraries.

“There is an increasing need for academic librarians to demonstrate the return on investment and value of the library to the various stakeholders of the institution and to guide library management in the redirection of library funds to important products and services for the future,” Tenopir said.

Academic libraries actively participate in the many changes in scholarship, such as the move to e-science, collaborative and participatory scholarship, and focus on new materials such as data, multimedia and born-digital assets, Tenopir said. To remain relevant and central to the academic mission in the future, academic librarians need to be able to demonstrate the value that the academic library provides to the campus community using proven methods of measurement that will allow librarians to determine where their efforts should be concentrated and how funding should be allocated.

The results of the study will provide evidence and a set of tested methodologies and tools to help academic librarians demonstrate how the academic library provides value to its constituents and ROI to its funders, and to measure which products and services are of most value to enhancing the university’s mission. This project will greatly expand upon earlier studies to consider multiple measures of value that the academic library brings to teaching/learning, research, and social/professional/public engagement functions of the academic institution.

To ensure that the process will be rigorous, realistic and highly visible in the academic library and university community, an experienced team of academic librarians and outstanding researchers will bring their leadership to the project. Two well-known researchers in the library field will serve as consultants: Bruce Kingma, an economist at Syracuse University, and Donald W. King, a statistician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel-Hill. Additional project participants include: Gayle Baker, Ken Wise, Rachel Fleming-May, Regina Mays, Crystal Sherline, and Andrea Baer of UT Knoxville; Tina Chrzastowski of the University of Illinois; and Henry Gross, Gary Roebuck and David Green of ARL.

The project is also engaging an advisory committee of noted information science researchers: José-Marie Griffiths of UNC-Chapel Hill, and Michael Koenig of Long Island University; academic library directors Carol Mandel of New York University, and Colleen Cook of Texas A&M; consultants Judy Luther and Joseph Matthews; and economists George Deltas of the University of Illinois, and Nicolas Flores of University of Colorado.

ARL is a nonprofit organization of 124 research libraries in North America. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has long ranked among the nation’s most distinguished teaching and research institutions. Its diverse, world-class programs reflect the mission of a comprehensive, land-grant university. The largest public university in Illinois, the campus was chartered by the state in 1867 as the Illinois Industrial University and opened its doors to students in 1868. For more information about the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, please visit http://www.illinois.edu.

—

C O N T A C T :

Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, [email protected])

We recently wrote about InMobi, a mobile ad network that has seen success in Asia and Africa and was beginning to see traction in Europe. In order to jumpstart growth, InMobi has hired Rob Jonas, Google’s Director of Strategic Partnerships for Europe, Middle East and Africa to lead operations cor the mobile ad network’s European sector.

InMobi is currently being used in 37 countries around the world with over 7.5 billion ad requests monthly. In Europe alone, InMobi is now receiving 850 million mobile advertising requests monthly across all major European markets.

Jonas was previously responsible for Google’s largest commercial relationships in the European region. Before Google, Jonas was at Yahoo Europe. InMobi has raised a total of $7.6 million to date, starting out with a $500k seed round from a group of angel investors and followed up by a multi-million financing round led by Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures (the VC firm started by Ram Shriram, early backer and founding board member of Google).

Of course the big elephant in the room is Google’s recent acquisition of AdMob and how that will effect InMobi’s continued expansion into the U.S. and European markets. And there’s the possibility that Google could make a move to overtake InMobi’s stronghold in other countries.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

Facebook isn’t exactly known for its open approach, recent privacy changes notwithstanding, but, at least on the software side, it has been working towards giving more back to the development community. Its most recent move in that direction is becoming a Gold sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation, the organization that fosters some of the… (read more)

Ryan McBride wrote:

Life Image, a Newton, MA-based provider of software that enables doctors to share radiology images with colleagues around the globe via cloud-based in-boxes, has closed a $2.2 million round of financing, according to an SEC filing. Company CEO Hamid Tabatabaie told Xconomy last month that he had gained commitments for this financing. The investors in the round included new backer Long River Ventures and previous backers Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation and Partners Innovation Fund, Tabatabaie said last month. Hopkinton, MA-based storage giant EMC (NYSE:EMC), which is Life Image’s cloud storage partner, has a seat on the startup’s board of directors occupied by EMC executive Joel Schwartz, according to the regulatory filing.

Comments | Reprints | Share:  

 
 
 

—
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had one of those articles that seek to make people worry, a lot. The grim picture it paints is not one of a job market that will just be slow to recover — it claims that some Americans’ occupations may be lost forever (shudder!). It worries that some jobs that were lost during the recession may never come back. While certainly true on a sort of practical basis (if a firm goes under, its jobs are lost forever), the article argues a graver point: that the job market is changed forever.

That’s rubbish. The recession didn’t cause a sort of structural job shift that might have resulted from, say, a major technological innovation. It just created severe cyclical job losses in several specific industries. And while it might take a very long time for those job numbers to return to their pre-recession level, they will get back to a healthy level eventually.

Let’s consider what the WSJ says:

The downturn that started in December 2007 delivered a body blow to U.S. workers. In two years, the economy shed 7.2 million jobs, pushing the jobless rate from 5% to 10%, according to the Labor Department. The severity of the recession is reshaping the labor market. Some lost jobs will come back. But some are gone forever, going the way of typewriter repairmen and streetcar operators.

Oh c’mon. What industries were completely obliterated? I can’t think of a single one, though some were severely debilitated, and will take a while to reconstruct. Here are the sectors the WSJ mentions:

Many of the jobs created by the booms in the housing and credit markets, for example, have likely been permanently erased by the subsequent bust.

It later singles out construction. So did construction jobs go “the way of the typewriter repairmen and streetcar operators?” Unless I missed news about a new army of robots that now construct homes and office buildings, then of course not. The construction industry definitely suffered extraordinary job losses. Given the enormous excess inventory of housing and commercial real estate the bubble caused, I doubt those jobs will come back anytime soon. But they will come back eventually.

At some point, probably years down the road, the home and building inventories will begin to dwindle. Old construction will need more repairing, and population growth will demand additional housing, factories and office buildings. At that time, you’ll see construction jobs grow again. They’re hardly gone forever.

The same could be said for credit markets. True, you might not have as many little mortgage companies and shady mortgage brokers popping up around Southern California as there were pre-recession. But people will continue to need mortgages one way or another. Those jobs will just be for mortgage underwriters at good, old fashioned banks instead of subprime mortgages shops. Again, credit markets aren’t suddenly gone forever. Even securitization may rise again — unless regulation kills it.

I don’t mean to minimize the seriousness of the employment situation. It’s a major problem, particularly given how long it will likely take to get back to anywhere close to full employment. But I don’t buy into alarmist articles like this one from the WSJ, which simply exaggerate reality just to scare their readers.

Jay-Z and Beyonce earned $122 million together between June 2008 and June 2009, more than any other couple — married or unmarried — in entertainment. The list makers at Forbes are at it again, this time determining Hollywood’s top-earning couple.  Beyonce and Jay-Z beat out the competition not only by churning out hit songs but also by attaching their names to Budweiser, American Express and a host of other brands. In this relationship, the wife out-earned the husband, $87 million-$35 million.

A polymorphism of the ability to smell urinary metabolites of asparagus.

Face it: your pee smells after you eat asparagus. (And if you think yours doesn’t, it’s because you can’t smell it.) This phenomenon (which is caused by various malodorous sulfur-containing compounds) has tickled the fancies of many researchers, as well as such luminaries as Proust, who wrote of asparagus: “exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, and whose precious essence when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting like a fairy-play by Shakespeare) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume (translated from Du côté de chez Swann, Gallimard, 1988, I, 119; I, 131).

But our favorite allusion to the asparagus-pee phenomenon has to be from Benjamin Franklin, who, in 1871 1781, wrote a letter asking researchers to come up with a solution to fart smells (the letter is definitely worth reading in full: To the Royal Academy of Farting):

“Certain it is also that we have the Power of changing by slight Means the Smell of another Discharge, that of our Water. A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreable Odour; and a Pill of Turpentine no bigger than a Pea, shall bestow on it the pleasing Smell of Violets. And why should it be thought more impossible in Nature, to find Means of making a Perfume of our Wind than of our Water?”

So, now that we understand why our pee stinks when we eat asparagus, can we address Benjamin’s larger concern? Check back tomorrow for some cutting-edge research on fart-smell-reduction!

We’ve already followed the iPhone money, but this follow-up infographic from GigaOm proves what we suspected all along: the real money’s in apps. [GigaOm]