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HD Radio technology seems to be to automotive manufacturers just like the little black dress is everywoman’s closet: a must-have. After Ford, Rolls Royce, Jaguar and Volkswagen, Audi is the next to include HD Radio as a standard feature on its 2011 models, namely the A6, A8 and Q7.

The technology will also be available as an optional feature on the 2011 A4, A5 and Q5 models. All models will be available at US Audi dealerships by fall 2010.

We are dedicated to provid… (read more)

euronewsFuture Capital Eyes Biofuels PlantNew York Times (blog)A global animal feeds business has also made a commitment to purchase the feed produced as a by product of biofuel production process worth around £500 …North East biofuel venture target…

Former McLaren Mercedes test driver Pedro de la Rosa will likely return to Formula One racing as a full-time driver with Peter Sauber’s team. Although the news is yet to be made official, several media in Spain and Switzerland have suggested that the confirmation is due to be made public in a matter of hours, or a few days at the most.

De la Rosa was on Sauber’s list of desired drivers for the past couple of weeks, alongside another experienced F1 racer Giancarlo Fisichella. A few… (read more)

Luke Timmerman wrote:

Tandem Diabetes Care, a San Diego-based company developing insulin pumps for diabetics, has raised a whopping $52.3 million round of equity financing that began last May, according to a regulatory filing.

The company is led by CEO Kim Blickenstaff, the co-founder and former CEO of Biosite, a diagnostic company that was acquired by Inverness Medical Innovations for $1.8 billion in June 2007. The filing doesn’t say who invested, although it has some prominent people on its nine-member board, including Amylin Pharmaceuticals founder Howard “Ted” Greene; and venture capitalists from Delhi Ventures, HLM Venture Partners, TPG Biotech, and Domain Associates.

Tandem didn’t respond to a request for comment Saturday, so if I hear anything from them I’ll be sure to update this story. But it’s really not too hard to see what the company is trying to accomplish from looking at its website. The company says it is “deep in product development” of new kinds of insulin pumps that will enable diabetics to remain active. This is a big business opportunity as the incidence of diabetes, a lifelong condition in which people struggle to maintain normal blood sugar levels, keeps on climbing. An estimated 23.6 million people in the U.S.-about one out of every 13 people—have the disease, according to the American Diabetes Association.

Tandem says it is seeking a better way to manage the disease with wearble insulin pumps, which essentially make it so patients can get fast-acting insulin continuously throughout the day using a catheter, instead of giving themselves periodic injections.

“Tandem Diabetes Care is a company with experience; not in age, but through the wisdom that has been shared with us by more than 1,000 clinicians and current pump users,” the company says on its website. “Experience also comes from our on-staff insulin pump users and the former executives of leading life science companies who are committed to creating and offering products that provide people with freedom, style, and peace of mind. We also believe that “one size does not fit all” when it comes to pump therapy—therefore, we hope to offer consumers an array of product choices that fit their individual needs.”

Tandem is entering a market with a number of established competitors. Current insulin pump models are made by Minneapolis-based Medtronic, Bedford, MA-based Insulet, Switzerland-based Roche, New Brunswick, NJ-based Johnson & Johnson, South Korea-based Sooil, and Japan-based Nipro, according to reviews on diabetesnet.com.

Besides Blickenstaff, Tandem’s board includes Dick Allen, a prominent startup investor; Greene, the co-founder of Amylin; John Livingston, a former executive with MiniMed; Tandem founder Paul DiPerna; Jesse Treu of Domain Associates; Ned Brown of TPG Biotech; Doug Roeder of Delphi Ventures; and Ed Cahill of HLM Venture Parnters.

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It seems the car industry doesn’t have any problems left that need to be solved. Or what else can explain Nissan’s shot at designing a car that can “show emotions”? The so-called Smiling Vehicle was jointly developed by the Hara Design Institute Nippon Design Center and the automaker. And yes, the mini vehicle, based on the Nissan Cube, does look friendly.

The concept car is covered with a substance called ROICA, a a polyurethane elastomer fiber from major chemical company Asahi Kasei. ROICA has the ability to deform by up to 900% and is normally used for producing shoes, clothes or car seats. Combine the material with Animatronics, and you get a car grill that can actually “smile”.

The idea behind the Smiling Vehicle sounds rather esoteric. Apparently, Nissan sees this technology as an extension of the driver’s character, meaning it can be used to express your current feeling when you sit in the car. This involves being able to share your feeling with other drivers thereby communicating with other people while on the go.

This video (courtesy of Diginfonews in Tokyo) shows the Smiling Vehicle in action:

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Last month, when the October employment numbers came out looking good, a number of commenters rushed to slam the number, and argue why it was totally distorted.

On Friday, the November numbers came out looking pretty weak, and they were still bad. And yet critics are doing the same — arguing that however bad they looked, in reality they were much worse.

TrimTabs is the market research firm that always complains about BLS methodology, and they usualy home in on the birth-death issue (the estimate for the creation of new businesses that the government uses). Here’s their latest broadside.

—–

Job Situation Worse than BLS Reports

TrimTabs’ Estimates more than 152,000 Jobs Lost in December, while BLS Reports Decline of 85,000

Gigantic Seasonal Adjustments and Mysterious “Birth/Death” Adjustment Distort BLS Data

 TrimTabs employment analysis, which uses real-time daily income tax deposits from all U.S. taxpayers to compute employment growth, estimated that the U.S. economy shed more than 150,000 jobs in December.  While end-of-month calendar quirks and unknown December bonus payments prevented a precise job loss estimate, there was enough data to suggest that job losses were at best 150,000 and at worst as high as 200,000. 

 Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the U.S. economy lost 85,000 jobs in December.  They revised their October and November results down 123,000 jobs, resulting in a 39% labor market improvement relative to their preliminary results.

 We believe the BLS is underestimating current job losses due to flawed seasonal adjustments and a mysterious “birth/death” adjustment.  In our opinion, the BLS is doing the public a huge disservice because while its results point to recovering economy, TrimTabs’ results point to a dangerously weak economy.

 Flawed Seasonal Adjustments

 Seasonal adjustments are designed to smooth out the regular ups and downs in employment over the course of a year.  These adjustments assume a repetitive employment cycle and work reasonably well when the economy is growing at a steady pace year-after-year.  However, when the economy turns, the seasonal adjustment methodology breaks down.  In particular, the current economic downturn has persisted for almost two years and the seasonal adjustment methodology was never designed to address this type of environment.  

 The problem worsens during the holiday season because the BLS applies huge seasonal adjustments to account for the large number of temporary retail jobs added and then subtracted to payrolls. In the past three months, the BLS seasonal adjustments subtracted a staggering 3.5 million jobs from an adjusted job loss of 208,000.  In January, when the seasonal adjustments are the largest of the year, the BLS will add anywhere from 2.0 to 2.3 million jobs to their survey results.  In our opinion, applying a seasonal adjustment numbering in the millions, in order to report monthly job losses numbering in the tens of thousands, is a fool’s errand.

 Mysterious Birth/Death Adjustment

 The BLS applies a “birth/death” adjustment to its results that is nothing more than an educated guess about the number of jobs added or lost from business openings and business closings.  In 2008 and 2009, the BLS’ “birth/death” adjustment added 904,000 and 882,000 jobs, respectively, for a total of 1.79 million.  By way of comparison, in 2006 and 2007, the BLS’ “birth/death” adjustment added 964,000 and 1.13 million jobs, respectively.   We find it highly unlikely that in 2008 and 2009, during the worst recession since the 1930’s, more businesses opened than closed netting 1.79 million jobs.

 A comparison of TrimTabs’ employment results versus the BLS’ results from January 2008 through December 2009 is summarized below.

Source: TrimTabs Investment Research – www.trimtabs.com and Bureau of Labor Statistics – www.bls.com

 Several other employment related statistics support Trimtabs’ conclusion that the labor market is weaker than what the BLS is reporting:

·        Real-Time tax withholding data shows that wages and salaries declined an adjusted 4.1% y-o-y.  While that is better than the average 5.0% y-o-y decline over the past several months, it is still singnaling significant labor market contraction.

·        The TrimTabs Online Jobs Index reported lower online job availability in December

·        The Monster Employment Index declined in December

·        The employment component of the ISM Non-manufacturing Index was 44.0 in December, well below 50.0 which signals employment growth. 

·        Household employment fell by 589,000 in December as the labor force declined by 661,000

·        The unemployment rate was unchanged at 10.0% and the broadest measure of unemployment (U-6) pointed to a jobless rate of 17.3%

·        The median duration of unemployment increased to 20.5 weeks in December, up from 20.2 weeks in November.  At the end of December, a whopping 10.4 million people were collecting some form of unemployment insurance, up from 9.0 million at the beginning of November.

For a complete analysis of the current employment situation and economic conditions, refer to TrimTabs Weekly Macro Analysis published this coming Tuesday, January 12, 2010.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• As Wall Street Revels, The Foreclosure Guillotine Is Set To Fall On Millions More
• The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever
• David Rosenberg: Forget The Unemployment Rate, The Real Nightmare Is The EMPLOYMENT Rate

If you thought that all those ‘of the year’ and ‘of the decade’ lists that flooded the web at the end of the year were over, think again. The renowned American Dialect Society has released the results of its 20th annual word of the year vote and the winner was rather predictable. ‘Tweet,’ the act of posting a short message on Twitter and the message … (read more)

Once you throw out the internal combustion engine and all the bulky bits that go with it, the definition of a motorcycle can suddenly become a lot wider. Take the Comoto from Hirsch Design – it’s even smaller than the Zero S bike, and begins to blur the boundaries between motorcycle and mountainbike. Using an electric motor mounted in the rear wheel hub to eliminate the need for a chain drive, the Comoto can do more than 40mph (65kph) and do just over 30 miles (~50km) on a charge under normal riding conditions. Best of all, it weighs just 118 pounds (53kg), making it one of the lightest motorcycles we’ve seen…

Tags: Comoto,
Electric,
Electric Motorcycle,
Motorcycle

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11 January 2010, Curitiba (Brazil). Brazil, one of the world’s most diverse countries, convened an international event to launch the International Year of Biodiversity (IYB) on 8 January. The celebration took place at the margins of the Second Curitiba Meeting on Cities and Biodiversity which was attended by 95 participants, including representatives of 18 cities from around the world and the national focal points for the Convention on Biological Diversity from Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil.

Other participants included specialists in urban biodiversity and green infrastructure, NGOs and ICLEI. Aside from Mayor Beto Richa of Curitiba, attending authorities included Acting Minister of Environment Izabella Teixeira of Brazil, Minister Mah Bow Tan of Singapore and Ms. Kobie Brant, ICLEI Director for the African region.

Since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, Brazil has been a champion in promoting the biodiversity agenda. The CBD was opened for signature at the Earth Summit and Curitiba hosted the historic Biodiversity Summit in 2007 that ushered in a new phase of enhanced implementation of the three objectives of the Convention, as underlined by the Executive Secretary of the CBD, Ahmed Djoghlaf. He also added that “this important international year signals a once in a lifetime opportunity for us to raise global awareness of the crucial importance of biodiversity for our health, our wealth, our food, indeed for our life.”

This ceremony is one of many celebrations which will culminate next October at the Biodiversity Summit in Nagoya, Japan, with the adoption by the Parties to the Convention of a new Strategic Plan for the period 2011-2020 as well as a longer-term vision for managing biodiversity.

Events to launch the IYB will be held in every region of the world. India held its launch on 4 January and many others are planned in the weeks to come. The official global launch is being held in Berlin today, organized by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Read more on the IYB.

Bowers and Wilkins has taken its five decade’s experience with loudspeakers and created a true hi-fi computer speaker, which it unveiled this week at CES. The MM-1 is a serious speaker made small, with two separate drive units including an aluminum dome tweeter, and Digital Signal Processing that uses USB streaming to bypass the computer’s own soundcard…

Tags: B&W,
bowers wilkins,
CES 2010,
Computer,
Hi-fi,
MM-1,
Nautilus,
Speakers,
Zeppelin

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Cobra Electronics recently presented the world’s first full color touchscreen radar detector, a model included in the 2010 range of detection systems that are said to be easier to use as compared to their predecessors. We can’t really appreciate how difficult to use a radar detector actually is since it only features a few buttons, but the touchscreen support is surely a great addition to such a device.

Besides the touchscreen display, Cobra also rolled out the first radar, laser … (read more)

Our latest roundup of all things Nexus One includes news of an executive version of the device in the pipeline, a way the rest of the world can get a Nexus One without using eBay, iSuppli’s teardown of the device, missing 802.11n capabilities and another trick up Google’s advertising sleeve…

Tags: Google,
Nexus One

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The labour force contracted by 661,000. This did not show up in the headline jobless rate because so many Americans dropped out of the system. The broad U6 category of unemployment rose to 17.3pc. That is the one that matters.

Wall Street rallied. Bulls hope that weak jobs data will postpone monetary tightening: a silver lining in every catastrophe, or perhaps a further exhibit of market infantilism.

The home foreclosure guillotine usually drops a year or so after people lose their job, and exhaust their savings. The local sheriff will escort them out of the door, often with some sympathy –– just like the police in 1932, mostly Irish Catholics who tithed 1pc of their pay for soup kitchens.

Read the whole story at The Telegraph — >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• CHART OF THE DAY: A Jobless Recovery? Not For The Financial World
• David Rosenberg: Forget The Unemployment Rate, The Real Nightmare Is The EMPLOYMENT Rate
• NYC Foreclosures Surge, As Unemployment Goes Into The Teens In Several Neighborhoods

Now that the holiday season is behind us and nothing really exciting in terms of fun and partying can be expected in the near future, all that’s left to do is sit back, relax and enjoy the spring depression which will soon engulf us all. Or, one could go and buy him/herself one of these: the Mercedes Benz SL Night Edition or the SLK Grand Edition.

The SL Night Edition comes with special design magno night black paint finish specially created for it – we know, not exactly the most… (read more)