Blog

Belgian prosecutors have charged three Britons and a Dutchman with failing to pay 3 million Euros on carbon trading transactions, according to a report in The Guardian.

This fraud is terrible news for supporters of a U.S. cap-and-trade system.

The “carousel fraud” involves buying credits in one country that allows credits to be sold without charging Value Added Tax (VAT) then selling to buyers in another country that requires VAT to be collected.

The sellers then disappear without forwarding the tax to the government. Similar fraud has cost the European Union an estimated 5 billion euros in the last 18 months.

The problem is unique to the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) because the taxation regimes are not harmonized across different countries. Thus, fraudsters can exploit differences in the taxation rules.

This would not necessarily be a problem if the U.S. introduced a cap and trade plan – which would be governed by one set of taxation rules – but could create enormous problems in an international scheme.

More to the point, gaming of the system also validates the anxiety many people feel about creating a huge, new financial market to curb emissions.

Public trust in Wall Street is at a low-ebb and voters are wary of giving financial firms an entire new market to manipulate in both legal and illegal ways.

The EU believes it has found a way to stop the VAT fraud. But the damage to the EU’s coffers, and cap and trade’s image, has been done.

Joe Romm has an important post about the folks down in Texas who are constantly trying to bring the textbooks into line with ideology. This is something we usually think of as affecting the evolution issue, but no–climate change is also a topic that is being watched closely by the watchers of educational content.

Romm himself is linking a Washington Monthly piece called “Revisionaries,” which reports the following:

A similar scenario played out during the battle over science standards, which reached a crescendo in early 2009. Despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change exists, the group rammed through a last-minute amendment requiring students to “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming.” This, in essence, mandates the teaching of climate-change denial. What’s more, they scrubbed the standards of any reference to the fact that the universe is roughly fourteen billion years old, because this timeline conflicts with biblical accounts of creation.

The strategy is identical, isn’t it? “Critically analyze” evolution, “critically analyze” climate change…and smuggle bad science into the classroom to sow doubt and confuse the kids. Frankly, I am wondering these days if climate denial may not be growing into an even more massive phenomenon than evolution denial in the US. I doubt it has the potential to be as long-lived. But the intensity of it, which I feel every day now, simply dwarfs what’s going on in the evolution fight….

I used to read a blog by a patent attorney named Gene Quinn. Sometimes it had some interesting posts on it with a strong pro-patent viewpoint. But too often he would just become a parody of the pro-patent position, making declarations that something was fact, when the evidence suggested otherwise. Late last year, he insisted that it was impossible for a patent attorney to think patents harm innovation. He also insisted that it was an economic impossibility for patents to not help innovation. When we presented an awful lot of evidence to the contrary in the form of numerous studies that looked at the historical evidence and made clear — from a variety of different angles — that patents do not lead to greater innovation, Quinn responded by saying he didn’t care about what the studies said, because he just knew that patents increase innovation based on what he saw. Consider it faith-based economics. Evidence be damned. Gene Quinn is right because he just knows it (oh yeah, and he profits from it too…).

Anyway, after that, I realized there was no reason to read his blog, but reader Brad points us to an absolutely stunning argument that Quinn has now made, saying that true innovators want patents, and only those who don’t innovate don’t like patents:

If you are against software patents you are not an innovator. Innovators want patents, those who do not innovate and copy others do not want patents

This was in response to Ian Clarke, a well known software developer, entrepreneur and someone who has argued strongly and articulately against software patents, pointing out in great detail, the harm they have done to the software industry. Clarke does a good job explaining his position, but Quinn doesn’t bother responding to Clarke directly, but makes up strawmen. For example, Clarke points out that he’s raised plenty of money from investors, despite being against software patents, and Quinn mocks the idea that any VCs would fund businesses without patents:

I would love to know who the investors are that are willing to provide funding for a software business that relies on trade secrets and copyrights. Naive investors like that would certainly be interested in companies with real protections. Simply stated, software cannot be adequately protected with copyrights, which I am sure you know or you should know. Likewise, trade secrets do not offer much, if any, protection for software. If the software is released the trade secret would be lost because anyone can get to the code.

Note that Quinn is both ignorant of the factual situation (many of the top venture capitalists around are against software patents — and Clarke lists out his investors, which include top tier VC firms) and then twists the story to something that Clarke did not say. Quinn seems to be of a belief that the only way a software company can be in business is with some sort of gov’t backed monopoly to “protect” them. It has apparently not occurred to him that businesses survive not based on protections, but on selling products and services, and you can do that without protectionism. In fact, here in the US, we tend to recognize that competition is a good thing. I’m not sure why Quinn is so against it. Oh yeah, as for VCs against software patents, we’ve discussed quite a few.

Clarke does a nice job responding to Quinn. Quinn — as he has done to me multiple times — refused to let Clarke’s post go live until Clarke complained and noted that it wasn’t worth responding any more, leading to this next extraordinary claim from Quinn, who seems more like a parody of the pro-patent side than anyone arguing seriously:

Everyone knows that those who don’t want patents just want to copy the work of others. Copyists are not innovators, they are a drag on everyone. Free riders are not innovators. I know you understand that, and suspect that is why you are leaving, having been defeated by logic and rational arguments. Sorry if I hit too close to home. Sorry also that you couldn’t stand up to the debate and chose to run and make false allegations in the process. Not surprising though.

Funny thing? Those are the same arguments used for ages before Quinn came along. He’s copying them. According to his own logic, he’s a drag on the system. Also, he went to law school at some point, and was given a bunch of information that he has copied into his brain. Free rider!

The debate goes on and Quinn continues to make fantastical assertions like the following:

Innovators by definition create things that are innovative, which means they are new, non-obvious and otherwise unique. Those who engage in endeavors that are unique do not begrudge others from obtaining protections themselves, because if what they are doing is really unique there is no skin off their nose for others to obtain protections. An innovator who concerns themselves with what others are doing and demands they stop obtaining patents are really only logically saying one thing. You shouldn’t get a patent and patents shouldn’t be issued because I want to copy you and I don’t want you to be able to prevent me from doing that.

This statement has so little connection to actual innovation (especially as done in the tech world) that it’s difficult to think what Quinn is possibly referring to. As anyone who has been near real innovation knows, actual innovation isn’t created in a vacuum. It involves building on the ideas of others and doing more with it — the proverbial standing on the shoulders of giants. But, in Quinn’s mind, apparently, standing on the backs of giants is free riding. He goes on in that same comment to accuse Ian of lying in claiming he has raised $15 million from some of the top VCs in the world. This is stunning. Ian is not lying. The facts are not hard to find. Ian is well-known and well-respected, as are many of his investors. Quinn did, of course, try to leave himself an “out” by saying that if Ian is not lying, then his investors are “the most naive investors in the world,” yet fails to note that they are actually some of the most well respected and successful VCs in the world. But, apparently that’s meaningless to Quinn.

Later on Quinn again makes the usual fallacy of claiming that any startup that is truly innovative and doesn’t get patents would go out of business quickly, because a big “Mega Corp.” would just copy the tech and the startup would go under. Of course, once again, the historical evidence suggests otherwise. Does this happen? Sometimes… but rarely. The reasoning is obvious if you’ve actually been around innovative companies. First, if your idea is truly innovative, Mega Corp. doesn’t recognize it until its too late. In typical innovator’s dilemma fashion, they dismiss truly innovative products as being “not good enough.” By the time they realize what’s happening, it’s usually way too late to jump on the bandwagon. Second, innovation is not a once-and-done thing, but an ongoing practice. If big Mega Corp. just copies, by the time they’re done copying, the innovative startup is already innovated past that and big Mega Corp. is just playing catchup. Third, by that time, the innovative startup has the reputation as the innovator, and people trust them more than the Big Mega Corp. doing the copying. We’ve seen this over and over and over again. Gene apparently missed it.

From there, the conversation spirals further and further out of control. If you ever want to see what the extreme pro-patent position is, then this is it. It presents no evidence at all (nowhere in any of the posts does Gene back up a point with evidence, but he does, repeatedly insist that “everybody knows” or something is “100% true” when neither is the case). When actual evidence proving him wrong is presented, he either ignores it, pretends it says something different than it does, or blatantly says that the evidence itself is a lie. Even if you believe in patents (software or otherwise), Gene Quinn is making a mockery of the pro-patent argument by arguing such things and ignoring any and all evidence that proves him wrong. There may be legitimate arguments in favor of patents out there, but Gene isn’t doing that side any favors by making himself look so ridiculous in the face of strong arguments to the contrary.

Obviously, I’m pretty strongly in the opposing “camp” on the question of patents, but even I can admit that, as with any monopoly, patents create two countervailing forces. The first increases activity in an area due to the promise of monopoly rents and monopoly profits. The latter decreases activity in an area due to the limitations created by a monopoly, and the power for such monopolies to prevent competition and continued innovation. The question is which force is stronger. And I’ve read many dozens of studies and historical evidence and nearly every one points to the latter being the stronger force. I’m willing to be convinced however by compelling evidence in the other direction. However, someone like Quinn doesn’t even seem willing to admit that these two forces exist and are in conflict. I don’t see how one can argue in favor of patents without at least admitting that the second force exists and has been proven over and over again — even if you still believe that the first force is stronger.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Wet computers—devices made of lipid-covered cells that handle chemical reactions similarly to neurons—are the key to machines with the processing power of the human brain. But for now, they may deliver drugs in a better way:

The type of wet information technology we are working towards will not find its near-term application in running business software, but it will open up application domains where current IT does not offer any solutions – controlling molecular robots, fine-grained control of chemical assembly, and intelligent drugs that process the chemical signals of the human body and act according to the local biochemical state of the cell.

That’s what University of Southampton’s Klaus-Peter Zauner says, pointing out that the molecular computer they are working on is a “a very crude abstraction of what neurons do.” When the lipid-covered cells contact each other, a passage opens between them so chemical reactions can pass from one to the next. Inside the cells, a reaction—called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky or B-Z—happens, triggered by other cells. This reaction can pass from one cell to the next, or can be contained within the cell, allowing for cell networking, which is key to form these wet processors.

Did you get any of that? Good. I just like the idea of my processors getting wet. [BBC]

The International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) didn’t break any attendance records this year, but it did post a slight increase in visitors — which is something in a down economy. Preliminary registration figures from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) reveal a headcount of over 120,000 attendees. That’s up roughly 6 percent from the 113,085 people that attended last year and far more than 110,000 the CEA had predicted would attend prior to the show.

A small, but not inconsequential bump, and one that suggests the industry is indeed beginning to turn the corner.

“The innovations unveiled this week at the 2010 International CES brought new optimism and opportunity to our industry and the global economy,” said CEA president and CEO Gary Shapiro. “This show exceeded expectations with its innovation, optimism and excitement. What a great way to kick off the new decade.”

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

Read Original Article

If you thought George Clooney’s character in “Up in the Air” racked up a lot of frequent flyer miles, you should meet his avian rival, which flies the equivalent of three round trips to the moon and back during its lifespan. For a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers tracked the arduous migration of the tiny Arctic tern and found that it flies an average of 44,000 miles every year on its trip from Greenland to Antarctica and back. That’s a new world record.

Scientists suspected that this tern could best the previous world record of 39,000-mile migrations by the sooty shearwater, though they previously lacked tracking devices small enough for the bird to carry. But the team used a tiny tracker developed by the British Antarctic Survey, which weighs just a twentieth of an ounce (1.4 grams)—light enough for an Arctic tern to carry on a band around its leg [National Geographic]. This device reported the birds’ position twice daily.

The locating devices reported back a few surprises. It turns out that the birds did not immediately travel south, but spent almost a month at sea in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. The researchers believe the birds use this lengthy stop-over as a chance to “fuel-up” with food before continuing on to less fruitful waters farther south [LiveScience]. In addition, the birds don’t fly a direct path from Greenland to Antarctica and back, but zigzag across the Atlantic Ocean—the map’s yellow lines show the terns jogging between Africa and South America on their northward journey in the spring.

These diversions took advantage of prevailing global wind systems to help the birds preserve energy, according to Carsten Egevang, from the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources [The Independent]. They also roughly double the distance that terns must fly, earning them this new record.

Not all tern migrations are created equal: The shortest in the study measured about 36,000 miles, the longest about 50,000. All in all, it adds up to a well-traveled lifetime. Terns can live on the long side of 30 years, and flying 44,000 miles every year for that length of time can add up to about 1.5 million miles, or about three lunar round trips.

Related Content:
80beats: Tiny Bird Backpacks Reveal the Secrets of Songbird Migration
80beats: The Birds’ Sixth Sense: How They See Magnetic Fields
80beats: The Intimate Mating Migration of the European Eel
80beats: Monarch Butterflies Navigate with Sun-Sensing Antennae
DISCOVER: Works in Progress: How do migrating birds know where to go?

Image: Carsten Egevang

• Key Competitors: Acura MDX, Lexus RX, Audi Q5, Volvo XC60, Mercedes-Benz GLK.
• Power: 3.7L Duratec V6 Ti-VCT- 305-hp / 280 lb-ft.
• Transmission: 6-speed SelectShift automatic.
• Availability: Later this year.
• Pricing: TBA.

The new 2011 Lincoln MKX is here and it seems like it’s here to make a statement and to show off the reinvention of the Lincoln brand, which Chairman Bill Ford points out is really important to him, his father and his grandfather.

Totally redesigned for 2011, the new Lincoln MKX gets the brand’s signature split-wing grille and gets rid of the unibrow tail lamp, which we never liked in the first place.

The 2011 MKX will also be the first FoMoCo vehicles to feature the company’s redesigned interior with MyFord Touch (known as MyLincoln Touch in the MKX).

Click here to see our original post on the MKX for more details.

2010 Detroit: 2011 Lincoln MKX:

All Photos Copyright © 2009 Omar Rana – egmCarTech.

2011 Lincoln MKS:

– By: Omar Rana

Filed under: Detroit Auto Show, Crossover, Lincoln, Luxury

The first major unveiling on day two of the 2010 Detroit Auto Show has come and gone, and we managed to sneak out of the room with a slew of live photos of the newly refreshed 2011 MKX. We already got the details that make the 2011 model a considerable improvement over its previous incarnation, and you can refresh your memory by clicking here or reading the press release after the break.

After touching, feeling and prodding the reborn MKX ourselves, we can confidently say that the quality of its materials and craftsmanship are top notch. We’re also pretty intrigued by the new MyLincoln Touch – nee MyFord Touch – system, which combines an eight-inch touchscreen display in the center stack, two 4.2-inch LCD screens to the right and left of an analog speedometer (the exact same screens you’ll find in the Fusion Hybrid) and two steering wheel-mounted five-way button controllers.

Tie it all together with Ford’s award-winning HMI (Human-Machine Interface) setup and you’re able to control all that newfangled technology using either your voice or your fingers on the touch-sensitive console or the aforementioned wheel-mounted controllers. Pretty cool stuff, and you can read all about it here. Be sure to check out our live photos in the gallery below and make the jump for the full press release.

Continue reading Detroit 2010: Lincoln MKX smiles for the camera

Detroit 2010: Lincoln MKX smiles for the camera originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

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

Read Original Article

Affiliate programs, where a website can link to a commerce website like Amazon and eBay and receive a commission on resulting sales, are potentially a big source of money for publishers. But they can also be pain to set up, meaning that many publishers who might benefit from affiliate links don’t use them, and that those links aren’t even encoded correctly more than half the time — at least according to VigLink, a startup hoping to change that.

The San Francisco company wants to automate the process of creating those links. It’s making its own deals with many of those affiliate programs, then it offers publishers a service where they just add a few lines of JavaScript to their site, then all possible affiliate links are automatically transformed into actual affiliate links. For example, right now, if VentureBeat linked to a book listed on Amazon, that could automatically become a link where we get a commission every time a reader clicks through and buys the book.

VigLink just announced $800,000 in seed funding raised from First Round Capital and Google Ventures, as well as prominent individual investors including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, former Google executive and current LinkedIn Vice President of Product Dipchand Nishar, Niel Robertson, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Carlos Cashman, and Micah Adler.

Co-founder and chief executive Oliver Roup acknowledged that VigLink isn’t the first company to offer something like this. It’s competing with a London startup called SkimLink, but Roup argued that there are some key differences, such as VigLink’s Silicon Valley location and connections, plus the fact that publishers don’t suffer of VigLink’s infrastructure suffers from the occasional startup hiccups — if the company’s servers go down, its links still work.

Roup compares the service to Google AdSense, in that it can be a good fit for both large and small websites. For now, VigLink is in private testing, but interested publishers can also go to the site and get an estimate for how much money they might make from affiliate programs. For kicks, I entered VentureBeat.com , and, it turns we aren’t talking about a huge boost to our income — this month’s estimated VigLink revenue would have just about paid for my recent trip to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. But hey, if the service is as hassle-free as Roup says, why wouldn’t we install it and make that extra cash?

“We monetize the ordinary hyperlink,” Roup said. “By buying and selling small items that didn’t seem to be worth a lot initially, we could create a really link economy here.”

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

Read Original Article

Big Fish Games has launched a multi-year strategic alliance with casual game developer and publisher PlayFirst. It’s a sign that, even on the web, distribution still matters.

Under the deal, Big Fish Games will take over the PlayFirst web site. Big Fish, which has more than 2,500 games, will operate the PlayFirst site, putting both Big Fish and PlayFirst games on it. PlayFirst, meanwhile, will concentrate on making its own games and give Big Fish a 30-day exclusiveon PlayFirst’s games.

Mari Baker, chief executive of PlayFirst in San Francisco, explained it this way. In the past, PlayFirst focused on developing, publishing and distributing its own games. The latter part it handled by publishing the games on its own web site as well as publishing the games on other casual game sites. Now it will stop focusing on distribution, which Baker said is something that Big Fish does well. Big Fish can handle infrastructure tasks such as payment system, electronic commerce, and customer support.

This will allow PlayFirst to redirect resources to higher priorities, such as making games for both the iPhone and social networks such as Facebook and Xbox Live. PlayFirst has had a lot of hits related to its Diner Dash game, where Flo the waitress has to juggle plates and customers to keep everybody happy in a busy diner. Many of PlayFirst’s game focus on female gamers.

Jeremy Lewis, chief executive of Seattle-based Big Fish, said that his company has had a long and profitable partnership with PlayFirst. This move will help serve Big Fish’s goal of getting more premium content for its own site and for its distribution business. Big Fish has 400 employees and is now expanding an office in Cork, Ireland, as part of a move to grow its business worldwide. The company doesn’t release financial results, but Lewis described 2009 growth as “extremely robust.” The company is profitable.

During the recession, casual game companies such as Big Fish have taken a hit, partly because downloadable web games that once generated $20 now generate only $7. To try to set itself apart, Big Fish has relied on high-quality, unique games such as its recent Harlequin romance game. PlayFirst fits with that approach. Big Fish, founded in 2002, raised more than $83 million in funding in 2008.

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

Read Original Article

(Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. This column originally appeared on his blog.)

Sometimes what sounds like bad news when talking to customers might be your finest hour.

As we started E.piphany, we got out of the building to test our hypotheses by talking to potential customers in and around Silicon Valley. On one of our most memorable visits, we met with Joe DiNucci, the VP of Marketing at Silicon Graphics who was generous enough to brainstorm the types of problems corporate marketers had. At the time Silicon Graphics – with 2+ billion dollars in sales of 3d workstations – was one of the hottest hardware companies in Silicon Valley.

The conversation seemed to click as he checked off every one of the issues we thought might define our product:  no closed-loop between expensive marketing activities and results, lack of department and corporate wide visibility to real-time sales and marketing data, browser versus client-server application, etc. We came up with a rough estimate of how much Silicon Graphics could save if they had a way to solve these problems, and together did a back of the napkin ROI (Return on Investment) analysis.

Next we started enumerating what form a solution might take and what kind of features a product should have. Amazingly we came up with a feature list that was pretty close to the one we were building.  I was feeling like a genius so I went to the next step and I asked Joe: “It sounds like Silicon Graphics might be interested in working with us to be an early customer?”

The answer was not what I expected.: “No not at all.”

Say, what?  Why?  “We also decided that this was an important problem to solve, and since we couldn’t find any vendor selling it, my director of marketing wrote the software to do it. We’ve built and deployed the product throughout Silicon Graphics. It’s called Mine Your Own Business.”

Talk about feeling your bubble deflate fast. I went from feeling the high of believing that I might have an early customer in an innovative company to the low in realizing that they’d never buy anything from us. And worse, what we had envisioned as a product so unique that no one had thought of it, someone had already built. We wouldn’t be the first. We were doomed.

I left Silicon Graphics feelings discouraged. But on the drive back to E.piphany a few things hit me.

• A credible customer told me that we had hit on a high-value problem
• They couldn’t find commercial software to solve this problem.
• It was an important enough problem that they invested effort to write their own software.
• It had been deployed inside their company and there were real world users
• I could now point potential investors and visionary customers to the widespread use of the product inside SGI as a proxy for our product

The more I thought about it, the better I felt. This was a validation of our ideas not a negation.

The next day I called the VP of Marketing back and asked him if I could get a demo of their software. Soon I was in the office of John McCaskey, the director of Silicon Graphics Science Industry Marketing who wrote Mine Your Own Business. As he went through the demo, I realized I was looking at working code for a big part of what we had spec’d as our first release.

I told John he ought to join our startup. “How many of you are there?” he asked. “Three, I said. “Including me. Four if we count you.” John rolled his eyes and tried to change the subject. I said, “We’re three now, but if we do this right we could be selling $100 million dollars a year of your software. Wouldn’t you rather be doing that than working at a big company?” That got his attention. “Well who’s funding you?” My turn to pause, “Well no one yet, but every VC thinks it’s a great idea.”

Watching someone rolling their eyes twice is not a good sign you’re going to close the deal, so I grabbed the phone and called Bill Davidow, a legendary VC whose office I had just left. “Bill, do me a favor,” I asked, “Can you tell this guy how big the enterprise software market can get?”  I don’t know who was more surprised, Bill Davidow in getting a call from me (since he had just told me he wasn’t going to invest in our new company – his firm having funding Rocket Science, the previous company I had just cratered) or John having watched me get the VC on the phone on the first ring (pure and unadulterated luck.)

Bill was kind enough to spend a couple of minutes educating John about the opportunities for a startup like ours, and enough of a gentleman not to mention he had passed on our deal.

Thirty days later John became the fourth co-founder of E.piphany.

Sixty days later we convinced Silicon Graphics to license us all of John’s code for a dollar. (During the craziness of the Internet bubble E.piphany’s market cap would be greater than Silicon Graphics.)

John’s boss, Joe DiNucci, the VP of Marketing of Silicon Graphics became E.piphany’s VP of Sales.

Finding that a potential customer wrote their own software (or hardware) to solve a problem is good news, not bad. There’s no stronger sign that you’ve identified a high-value problem.

Photo by Rüdis Fotos via Flickr

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

Read Original Article

Permalink

| Leave a comment  »

Those of you making use of T-Mobile’s VOIP offerings to save some minutes, hang onto your WiFi. The newly Google-favored carrier has decided to axe its HotSpot@Home service, meaning no more calls over WiFi from home. T-Mo will allow existing subscribers to carry out their existing contracts (if only to avoid giving them an early out), and everyone can still make calls over WiFi at the company’s public hotspots, but no new folks will be able to add the service to their accounts, meaning this old offering won’t die, it’ll just fade away.

T-Mobile killing HotSpot@Home service, softly originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink BrightHand  |  AP  | Email this | Comments

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

Article

We know you were put off by the whole Twitter censorship debacle last month, but Microsoft and the Zune HD have moved past that (honest) and they want you to come along as well. They’re enticing everyone to forget about that bone-headed move by, well, throwing everyone a bone and adding in Xvid support, part of full compatablity with MPEG-4 part 2 Advanced Simple Profile. DivX will not be coming out to play, but Smart DJ will be, a feature that isn’t so much new but is newly portable, providing a counterpoint to the iPod’s Genius and, since you can use it to stream content from the Zune Marketplace (when connected via WiFi) it begins to approach the functionality of apps like Pandora or Slacker Radio. Tasty, indeed, though at this point we’re not sure when Microsoft will be throwing us this juicy firmware update.

Zune HD getting Xvid, Smart DJ, ever more appealing originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink SlashGear  |  CNET  | Email this | Comments

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

Article

Upon reading various hedge fund investor letters and conversing with colleagues in the industry, one thing has become quite clear: hedge funds got their asses kicked on the short side of the portfolio in 2009. This is by no means a shocking revelation given that the stock market itself has risen over 70% from the lows back in March 2009. After all, a rising tide seems to lift all boats. While the negative performance of short positions over the past year is a common trend, we want to focus on a theme found in many of their portfolios.

Here’s the common link: many hedge funds have shorted businesses with high operating leverage. Amidst the crisis of the past two years, operating and financial leverage became quite a detriment to various companies. Hedge funds quickly recognized this and shorted shares of companies who would struggle with this burden in an uncertain economic climate. At the time, it was a poignant move. However, markets are often driven by perception (versus reality).

Read the whole story at Market Folly — >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Who Needs Gold As An Inflation Hedge When You’ve Got Coke?
• Short-Seller Wants $9 Cab Fare Returned, After Getting Kicked Out Of First Solar’s Meeting
• Surprise: 33% Moody’s Rally Gives Short-Sellers Whiplash

Adapted from “Putting on the Pressure: How to Make Wise Threats in Negotiation,” by Adam D. Galinsky (Professor, Northwestern University) and Katie A. Liljenquist (Assistant Professor, Brigham Young University), first published in the Negotiation newsletter.

On August 3, 1981, 12,000 air-traffic controllers went on strike after negotiations with the federal government about wages, hours, and benefits broke down. Then-president Ronald Reagan took an uncompromising stand, threatening the workers that if they didn’t report to work within 48 hours, they would lose their jobs.

On August 5, true to his word, Reagan carried out his threat and fired the 11,359 air-traffic controllers who had not returned to work. Many observers view Reagan’s controversial threat and follow-through as a pivotal moment in his presidency and the foundation for future political victories.

This story highlights the important role of threats in negotiations. Broadly speaking, a threat is a proposition that issues demands and warns of the costs of noncompliance. Even if neither party resorts to them, potential threats shadow most negotiations.

A wise threat satisfies your own interests and targets the other side’s interests. Consider whether the threat will truly help you achieve your broader goals. Issuing a threat might provide gratification, but it can also lock you into a course of action and could be costly. To assess whether a threat will satisfy or violate your interests, answer these three questions:

1. Is your threat based on emotion? Effective negotiators must be immune to momentary pressures and volatile emotions. And a threat should never be made under the influence of anger: multiple studies have linked anger to reduced information processing, risky behaviors, and clouded judgment. A reliable rule of thumb is never to make a threat that you did not plan in advance.

2. Will your threat incite a counterthreat that dwarfs your own? Driven by reaction and revenge, threats often provoke counterthreats. Before making a threat, assess the potential impact of a retaliatory response, lest you initiate a battle that you aren’t prepared to fight.

3. Will the threat cost you more than it will cost the other side? Threats are not about punishing the opposition; they are about fulfilling your own interests. When you forget this important point, your desire to teach the other side a lesson may cause you to escalate a threat without regard to the toll it could take on you.

If you’ve determined that a threat would indeed serve your interests, make sure the threat will function as a motivator, not a punishment. Frame it in terms of how compliance will further your counterpart’s interests rather than how noncompliance will thwart them.

Imagine a dispute between a handheld computer company, Jansen, and a community hospital, Riverside. Jansen wanted to become a leading player in the lucrative health-care market. At the same time, Riverside needed handheld computers to increase efficiency and improve its precarious financial situation. Jansen and Riverside agreed on an information management system but, once it was installed, they argued about whether customized software was included in the deal. Without the specialized software, Riverside might be forced into bankruptcy and Jansen probably would not be paid.

Riverside could have threatened to secure the software in the language of punishment: “If we can’t reach agreement, you’ll see little of your money.” Instead, it framed the threat in terms of Jansen’s broader interests: “If we are forced into bankruptcy, you’re unlikely to make progress in this attractive market. However, if we can reach an agreement, you will be seen as our savior and could become a market leader.” By centering the threat on the benefits of compliance, Riverside increased the probability of reaching an integrative agreement.

from ainfos, 12 January 2010: “What happened in Rosarno has without doubt come as a slap in the face to all those who believe in and fight for a different world where sides based on race, language and religion face up to each other are just an ugly memory, and to all those who see the unity of all workers, wherever they are from, as the only force able to build a better society of free equals.

The violence of the State and of these new Calabrian Ku Klux Klans armed with rifles and iron bars, with more than a hint of agricultural ‘ndrangheta, towards the community of immigrants is an unfortunate reminder of the stories of Uncle Tom’s Cabin…” more