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Electronic Arts said today that it expects its quarterly and fiscal year revenues and earnings to be below its previous financial guidance.

That much was known, since EA is laying off 1,500 people. But the surprise is that EA was also somewhat pessimistic about the year that ends March 31, 2011.

Eric Brown, chief financial officer of EA, said in a conference call that the company’s fiscal third quarter ended Dec. 31 will be short of internal expectations and consensus estimates because of a soft December for EA in Europe and a shift to lower-margin distribution titles in North America. Overall, Brown said the overall packaged good sector is likely to be flat or down in the fiscal year that ends March 31, 2011. The latter prediction surprised some analysts on the call.

EA said sell-through and reorders were below expectations. Digital games, such as online-based titles, were above expectations but not enough to make up for a shortfall in Europe in packaged good sales. EA now expects non-GAAP results of $1.33 billion to $1.35 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of 29 cents to 33 cents. The shift from packaged goods sold at retail to digital games played online has been very fast and dynamic, said John Riccitiello, chief executive of EA, on the conference call.

“What we have is a two-year turnaround that is taking longer” because of the dynamism in the sector, Riccitiello added.

He acknowledged that EA’s forecasts were so far off in 2009 that the company is planning for a more conservative view of the overall sector. Riccitiello said EA has a massively multiplayer online game planned for the spring of 2011 that should make a big difference in its earnings, but EA is excluding that revenue from its FY11 plan for now.

For the fiscal year, EA expects non-GAAP results of $4.125 billion to $4.2 billion in revenue and EPS of 40 cents to 50 cents a share. In the current fourth fiscal quarter, EA is launching Mass Effect 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Dante’s Inferno, Army of Two: The 40th Day, and Command and Conquer 4.

Riccitiello said the rest of the year will include a “great new version of Medal of Honor,” a “revitalized” Need For Speed in fiscal 2011, “The Sims on console, Dead Space 2, FIFA in a World Cup year” and Crysis.

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Looking for a hearty, satisfying vegetarian sandwich?  My favorite veggie sandwiches feature either grilled portobello or grilled eggplant, both of which have a meaty robustness.  Trader Joe’s carries a product in the freezer section called “Misto Alla Griglia,” marinated grilled eggplant and zucchini, which takes the work out of enjoying these grilled veggies.  I used them in a sandwich here, but they’re perfect for serving alongside an arugula salad or incorporating into a lasagna (grab some TJ’s pasta sauce and no-boil noodles, and that lasagna really can’t get any easier.)

In this sandwich, the rich eggplant and zucchini slices contrast nicely with some fresh, peppery arugula and tangy feta.  Don’t skip the lemon garlic sauce – it adds so much flavor and brings it all together.  If you’re not crazy about garlic, start with a little less and see how you like it.  We all mmm-ed and aah-ed as we ate these sandwiches, so I hope you love it too!

For some other tasty vegetarian sandwiches, check out recent posts on a Roasted Red Pepper and Goat Cheese Sandwich and our Eggplant Cutlet Sandwich.

Grilled Veggie Sandwich with Lemon Garlic Sauce

1 bag frozen Misto Alla Griglia (Marinated Grilled Eggplant & Zucchini)
Petits Pains Rustiques (4 Country Style French Rolls)
Fresh arugula (a few handfuls)
Crumbled Feta with Mediterranean Herbs

Lemon Garlic Sauce (enough for 4 sandwiches)
4 Tbsp mayo
4 tsp lemon juice
4 cubes frozen Crushed Garlic (or 3-4 small cloves garlic, crushed)

1) Thaw bag of eggplant overnight in fridge, or microwave until warm per package instructions.
2.) Cut rolls in half.
3.) In a small bowl, stir together the ingredients for the Lemon Garlic Sauce until smooth. 
4.) Build the sandwiches by drizzling a bit of the sauce into the bottom half of each roll.   Add a big handful of arugula, then 1/4 of the warmed eggplant and zucchini slices, and finish with a topping of feta. 

Serves 4. 
To make just one sandwich: use one roll, a handful of arugula, 1/4 of the veggies, and for the sauce use 1 Tbsp mayo, 1 tsp lemon, and 1 clove/cube garlic.

Depois de quase 1 ano e meio de embarques de veículos chineses da Hafei Motor (modelo Towner) e da Jinbei Automobile (Topic) por meio de contêineres, a CN Auto recebeu no dia 29 de dezembro último o seu primeiro embarque de 840 unidades pelo sistema roll-on roll-off (ro-ro), em navio sulcoreano que passou pelo porto de Dalian, na China, contratado pela importadora brasileira.

Nos últimos 4 anos, quando chegaram os primeiros veículos chineses ao Brasil, todos os embarques aconteceram por meio de contêineres, por falta de volume. A partir de agora, no entanto, a exemplo do que ocorreu com os veículos sulcoreanos no início dos anos 90, os volumes de produtos procedentes da China passam a ser interessantes aos armadores internacionais.

“Além do fator frete, o sistema roll-on roll-off é mais seguro em relação a possíveis avarias, típicas em transporte marítimo por contêineres”, afirma Humberto Gandolpho Filho, diretor comercial da CN Auto. “Com o objetivo de viabilizar ainda mais a entrada de carros chineses no mercado brasileiro, já iniciamos negociações com outras importadoras no sentido de firmar o transporte marítimo por ro-ro”, enfatiza Gandolpho.

Fonte: Textofinal

We’ve discussed in the past how the record labels have this habit of “negotiating through lawsuits,” in that they will often sue an innovative music startup, even as they’re negotiating licensing deals with them, just to get the upperhand in the negotiation. It’s happened with countless music startups — and it’s one of the main reasons so few survive. They’re overly burdened with ridiculous costs from the beginning. We already saw that EMI used this strategy with Grooveshark, in forcing it into a licensing deal, and apparently Universal Music decided it could do the same thing. It’s now suing Grooveshark as well — even though Grooveshark insists it pays all the appropriate licenses. Of course, the end result of all this is that it gives Grooveshark more publicity, but may make it more difficult for the company to survive.

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Taylor Kitsch is leaving Friday Night Lights (FNL).

The 28-year-old heartthrob will not reprise his role when the cult football drama airs its fifth — and likely final — season later this year, TV Guide’s William Keck divulged on Monday.

Kitsch is exiting the show to focus on his burgeoning film career, producers say. Kitsch has been cast in the sci-fi fantasy film John Carter of Mars, which is set to start shooting this month. He is also attached to co-star in the apartheid drama The Bang Bang Club. Lights producers wanted to ensure that Kitsch could focus on both films, so it’s unclear how much time he’ll have left for FNL.

“Because this was a big opportunity for him, we wanted to let him do that,” said Friday Night Lights producer Jason Katims. “We’ll stay in close contact with production and try to get him for as many episodes as possible,” he added.

Friday Night Lights current airs on DirecTV.

Early last month, a young man was shot in the streets of Harlem. Now we’ve learned that his murder may have begun with an argument on Twitter which gradually escalated to the point of leaving cyberspace.

Kwame Dancy and Jameg Blake grew up together and were said to have been close before some kind of argument tore them apart. It may have been because of a girl whom they fought over in the past, it may have been over something else. What we know is that they began sending messages such as this one over Twitter:

N——-s is lookin for u don’t think I won’t give up ya address for a price betta chill asap!”

How much of a role tweets like that one played in finally pushing things over the edge is unknown, but the point remains that, in the end, Darcy wound up dying after a shotgun blast to the neck and a few tweets.

Between this and the two guys dying over an iPod, I’ve barely got any faith left in people. [Daily News via News.com.au via William Gibson]

Pictured: Jameg Blake, 22, who is accused of killing Kwame Dancy.

Filed under: Concept Cars, Detroit Auto Show, Performance, Hatchback, Chevrolet

We lost track of the number of times the Chevrolet Aveo RS concept was dubbed a “euro hot hatch” during The Bowtie brand’s press conference, and judging by the number of times the word “tuner” was used, Chevy’s desperate to rebrand its econobox.

The other reoccurring word: “Concept.” This isn’t the next Aveo – at least not yet. We expect a more pedestrian, near production version of the RS to be unveiled in the very near future (Geneva?), guaranteed to ditch its lighted brake cooling ducts, 19-inch wheels, slotted rotors and center-mounted dual exhausts. Even the C-pillar’s awkwardly integrated door handles aren’t likely to make it to production, but we hope the black-on-black interior, contrasting blue stitching and “motorcycle-inspired” dash all get the green light.

The drivetrain is destined to carry over unchanged, with the Cruze‘s turbocharged 1.4-liter four cylinder sending 138 horsepower and 148 pound-feet of torque to a six-speed manual transmission. All of this will surely improve the breed, but it leaves us wondering something…

Jim Campbell, Chevy’s general manager, announced that production of the Chevrolet Spark for the U.S. will begin late next year. With the Spark supposedly on the way, how does GM plan to market two economical runabouts in a market that’s remained luke warm to the original Aveo? We’ll find out next year.

Live photos by Drew Phillips / Copyright (C)2010 Weblogs, Inc.

Continue reading Detroit 2010: Chevrolet Aveo RS concept answers one question, poses another [w/video]

Detroit 2010: Chevrolet Aveo RS concept answers one question, poses another [w/video] originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When we wrote our year end posts for 2009, we should’ve added patent trolling to our list of trends. In the past year we’ve covered a number of patent disputes including the Word-blocking patent against Microsoft and VoloMedia’s patent on podcasting. Union Square Ventures’ Brad Burnham wrote an excellent piece today on independent invention and how patent reform can minimize trolls.

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Said Burnham, “Almost a third of our portfolio is under attack by patent trolls. Is it possible that one third of the engineering teams in our portfolio unethically misappropriated technology from someone else and then made that the basis of their web services? No! That’s not what is happening…Our companies are being attacked by companies that were not even in the same market, very often by companies they did not even know existed.”

What’s this? How can you be accused of stealing another’s intellectual property when you didn’t even know the company or patent existed? Independent invention is the idea that a group of software engineers can build a technology similar to one that has already been patented with no prior knowledge of the patent. For example, take the lingering case of the iPhone fart app disputes. Burnham argues that with an independent invention defense, patent holders would have to prove that startups had some prior knowledge of their technology before pursuing action. He argues that this would decrease patent abuse and place the burden of proof on those that are more likely to abuse IP law. In your opinion do you think Burnham’s vision of patent reform is a sound one? Why or why not?

Discuss

Earlier today, The Rumpus published a very revealing interview with someone claiming to be a Facebook employee. The interview covers a variety of subjects, including privacy restrictions at the world’s largest social network and some of the technological hurdles the site has to deal with. The biggest revelations? That Facebook collects more data about your habits than you may realize, and that there was once a ‘master password’ that would grant employees access to anyone’s Facebook profile — a password that some employees abused.

The interview wasn’t authorized by Facebook, and there are many who are doubting its authenticity. We’ve heard some rumors that the interview is legit, and The Rumpus’ editor stands behind it. For what it’s worth, much of it rings true to me — none of the ‘facts’ revealed are surprising or difficult to believe. Here are some of the highlights:

• Facebook is recording data on everything you do on the site. Everything. And not just the messages you’ve written and received either: it knows how many times you’ve clicked on your friend’s profile, which photos you’ve viewed, and more. Using this data it can establish who your best friends are, which helps it generate interesting stories in your News Feed. According to the interview, this data has recently been used to streamline search (your best friends show up first as your type in your query, rather than an alphabetical list).
• There was a master password that granted Facebook employees access to any account, if they knew it. The interviewee describes a password that would allow a Facebook employee to view anyone’s profile simply by typing in their unique user ID and the password (the password itself was a variation on ‘Chuck Norris’). This password was used primarily for engineering purposes, but other employees could find it “if they knew where to look”. To use the password, you would have to be accessing Facebook from the company’s ISP (in other words, there was no risk of it leaking to the web at large). The employee says that this power has been abused on at least two occasions, explaining that she is aware of two relating firings.
• The employee says that even the use of a master password is unneeded if you’re looking to access private data, because employees can simply query the database:
  

  See, the thing is — and I don’t know how much you know about it — it’s all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That’s what most people don’t understand.

• Finally, while the interviewee says the ‘master password’ has been deprecated, employees can still access your profile through a special tool, but they need to provide a reason for why they’re doing it. If they get audited down the line and fail to provide an explanation, they can be fired.

The rest of the interview is well worth reading. It covers Facebook’s international expansion, the efforts of one developer to create ‘Hyper-PHP”, and more.

Could the whole interview be a hoax? Sure. The interviewee apparently got some of their stats wrong, but frankly I doubt many Facebook employees can spout off the site’s membership and data storage figures off the top of their head. Here’s the statement Facebook gave us:

“This piece contains the kind of inaccuracies and misrepresentations you would expect from something sourced “anonymously”, and we’ll leave it at that.”

Reading between the lines, if Facebook was able flatly deny the claims made in the interview I suspect they would have. Instead it is trying to undermine the credibility of the article without pointing out any facts that were incorrect. And even if the interview itself is fake, I still think much of what was discussed rings true.

I’ve heard multiple times that Facebook employees can access your profile for security reasons, and they face the threat of being fired should they abuse that privilege. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the restrictions around these tools were much laxer a few years ago. These ‘Big Brother’ tools are very common at the social sites around the web, so Facebook would hardly be an anomaly in this case.

One final note: if the interview is legitimate, I suspect many of the facts were fabricated to conceal the identity of the interviewee. The article’s author, Phil Wong, has apparently only contributed a single post to The Rumpus (he may well not exist). The article says that Wong visited Facebook headquarters, which means that the company would certainly have a record of who he was there to visit, which would likely reveal the source’s identity. If the interview ever took place, Wong has either done a bad job covering his tracks or some of these details have been made up.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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Every day I troll SEC Form D Filings to discover new startups, fundings and investments. I put everything I find into CrunchBase. For everyone else I give you the daily digest, a quick hit of the latest and greatest SEC Form D filings in the TechCrunch sphere:

Nicira – Virtual Data Center Control Software
TopTenREVIEWS – Product Research and Reviews
Tangerine Solar – Community Solar Power Project
Powered – Social Media and Marketing

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Evan Dunham is one tough hombre. He was on queer street for two minutes in the first round but came back to physically punish Efrain Escudero in the second and third rounds. Ninety seconds into the final round, Dunham transitioned from side control and eventually caught the champ from Season 8 of "The Ultimate Fighter" in an armbar. Escudero tried to hold out but his arm was being hyperextended badly. Referee Dan Miragliotta stopped the fight at 1:59 of the final round. 

Escudero (13-1, 3-1 UFC) laid on the mat for a few seconds and it looked like the arm was damaged badly. He was holding it and cringing as he walked back to the lockerroom. It was the first loss of Escudero’s career as Dunham pulled the upset as a plus-220 underdog. 

The end was a surprise after what was a completely one-sided opening round where Escudero teed off on Dunham. Escudero landed a big knee and then an uppercut that rocked Dunham. Two more rights and Dunham was on his butt. Escudero got on top but it probably wasn’t the right place to finish against a jiu-jitsu brown belt. Dunham (10-0, 3-0 UFC) scrambled and survived. He turned things around in the second and really overpowered Escudero on the ground. 

Imagine this. You get to the airport, get your boarding pass, wait in line for security, and just when you’re about through, a polite man comes over to you and asks if you could come aside for a moment. But instead of ushering you to a white room and telling you to assume the position, he merely observes you closely and then asks you to take an aspirin. You see, the infra-red cameras have detected a slight fever. Yes, only in Japan.

Japan is very concerned for its citizens’ safety; but instead of concocting ineffective security measures, they are enforcing preventative care in that playplace of infection, the airport. I suppose it’s a bit of an invasion of privacy, but no more than x-raying your bags or getting millimeter wave pictures of your junk. They have infra-red cameras set up to pick out people who may be a little hotter than normal, and in extreme cases where an fever actually seems present, they may actually escort you to a hospital to be treated.

It’s an interesting idea to extrapolate to other devices: imagine if computers had low-res IR cameras that would detect a high temperature and advise you to medicate? Or a larger camera mounted in a nursery or children’s ward, which could easily monitor temperature without constant probing with thermometers?

Weird stuff, but pretty cool as well.

[via Laughing Squid]

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