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It’s not a groundbreaking device by any means, but the Pantech P9020 that was spotted over at the FCC shows that the QWERTY trend is far from being over.  Offering a 2.0-megapixel camera, full QWERTY keyboard, touchscreen, and 850/1900 MHz 3G connectivity, it appears to be a decent mid-range device.  What’s more, FCC documentation and the user’s manual show that the device is indeed headed to AT&T, making it a good option for text-centric teenagers on the nation’s second largest wireless carrier.

What say you – is this something that you would carry?  Let me know in the comments.

Via: Engadget Mobile

Here’s a look back at the 20 most popular posts we published in 2009. There was a $30 kitchen makeover, snacks for lunchbox, a gallery of lovely white kitchens, a roundup of many DIY recipes, and much more!

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As everyone has made pretty clear by now, picking favorite posts from an entire year’s archive is tough. And I’m just looking back at The Kitchn — I didn’t even think about rounding up favorite posts from my favorite weblogs! There would be so much to choose from! As I did think back about this year here at The Kitchn, I decided to be very practical. I loved so many of our kitchen tours, recipes, how-tos, tips, good ideas — and as Sara Kate demonstrated, each writer here brings something deeply enjoyable to the mix.

So I decided to go with the visceral. Which posts grabbed me — which said, “Make me now!” What did I actually cook? Here’s a musing little trip back through some of the posts that made their way into my own kitchen.

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Charlie Sheen isn’t the only one with skeletons in his closet. The actor’s wife, Brooke Mueller, was reportedly arrested twice, once for a DUI in 1996 and again cocaine possession in 2001, according to RadarOnline.

This revelation comes on the heels of of a Christmas morning fight between the troubled pair. Sheen — who has long battled addiction and two trips to rehab — allegedly held a knife to Mueller’s throat during a dispute in the Aspen, Colorado home last Friday.

According to a police incident/investigation report in the 2001 case, officers approached a Chevy Corsica driven by Mueller after it appeared that the car had hit a sign and pulled to the side of the road.

“When Mueller stepped out of the vehicle, she nearly fell down. She used the vehicle door as a brace to remain standing. She had some slurred speech and appeared to be confused. She stated that she had not hit anything and she had just pulled over on the side of the road. She had no recognition of hitting any sign,” the report reads.

Officers wrote that after she was taken to Palm Beach County Jail, “Mueller displayed several mood swings. Her mood swings were not long in duration. The mood swings ranged from happy and pleasant to sad. Several moments she started to cry, then was very pleasant, talkative and cooperative.”

Charlie and Brooke are the parents of nine-month-old twin sons, Max and Bob.

Article Tags: ClimateGate, Pat Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger, Reply To Article

Back of December 18, 2009, the Washington Post ran an editorial E-mail furor doesn’t alter evidence for climate change by Penn State’s Dr. Michael Mann, who attempted to explain why the recent release of the Climategate emails “doesn’t alter evidence for climate change.” But Dr. Mann—a central figure in the released emails—is speaking only from one side of the issue—his side. While the contents of the Climategate emails may not alter the evidence of climate change published in the scientific “peer-reviewed” literature, it is an entirely different matter when it comes to evidence of climate change that may have been kept out of the peer-reviewed literature. And the Climategate emails illuminate continual efforts from Dr. Mann and colleagues to limit the contents of the peer-reviewed scientific literature to only those types of results and conclusions that they liked. As such, the extant scientific literature of the past 5 to 10 years cannot be considered to be a fair representation of what it would have been had it not been manipulated. Thus, it is impossible to judge whether or not the evidence for climate change has been altered by the Climategate emails, contrary to Dr. Mann’s claims.

Below is a letter-to-the editor of the Washington Post that I submitted is response to Dr. Mann’s December 18th op-ed. Since it has been more than 10 days since I submitted it, I’ll assume that the Post has decided not to run it (they did not run any letter-to-the-editor on this topic, despite having received 651 comments on-line, the majority of them quite negative). My letter is reproduced here:

Source: sppiblog.org

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Google is moving into new markets almost as fast as it’s rolling out new products. Despite its emerging ubiquity though, several areas are getting the most of the attention in the coming year and one of the most interesting ones is voice. Operating systems are also uncharted territory for Google, but seeing how Chrome OS is just a bit more than a browser that can access USB drives, it’s voice communications that are the true frontier for the search giant.

Android and the upcoming Nexus One phone are great but they’re hardly revolutionary. What Google plans with Google Voice and the recent acquisition of Gizmo5 is though, and it may very well be the biggest change to voice communication in quite a while.

Google Voice is currently in private beta. The service enables users to have just one phone number through which they can be contacted regardless of where they are and what device they’re using or what mobile carrier or landline. It supports SMS and can even take over the actual phone calls to provide the users with cheaper calls. It also comes with a set of additional tools like automatic voicemail transcriptions. In itself, it’s quite a compelling product but it still relies on existing phone lines and contracts.

The biggest move may come via the Gizmo5 acquisition. Gizmo5 provides user… (read more)

Happy New Year, old relatives! You can die, now.

That’s pretty much the grisly theme of this WSJ piece on the estate tax, which takes a one-year vacation in 2010 — thanks, W! (And Congress!) In a macabre act of inter-generational-kindness, a bunch of old people are trying to time their deaths just right to pass along their untaxed estate to their offspring. How … sweet?

Here’s the nutshell of the story:

The macabre situation stems from 2001, when Congress raised estate-tax
exemptions, culminating with the tax’s disappearance next year.
However, due to budget constraints, lawmakers didn’t make the change
permanent. So the estate tax is due to come back to life in 2011 — at
a higher rate and lower exemption.

Two points: 1) This is a perfect example of a molehill transformed by political voodoo
into a mountain. According to the article, the tax applies to about
5,500 taxpayers a year. That number is not large! And yet the attention
that attends the “death” tax is.

2) I’ll be interested to watch how both parties deal with the tax for 2011. Naturally, Republicans are united against any action that involves not destroying the death tax forever. That includes Sen. Judd Gregg, the moderate Republican and co-producer of the fantastical commission to reduce the deficit, who has consistently supported every effort to whittle away the estate tax.

Obviously, one way to reduce the deficit is to reduce spending. But another way is to raise taxes — or at least to not kill the taxes that we already have in place. The Lincoln-Kyl bill in the Senate to cut estate taxes after the one-year hiccup would cost almost $250 billion over 10 years. That is, as they say, real money, and it’s hard for me to imagine how this tax cut would spur economic growth, since inheritance is passive. If we’re going to consider spending over the baseline part of PAYGO, we should do the same for government receipts below the baseline. So would Republicans plan to make up that money?

Filed under: Tips and tricks, Internet

I’m an avid user of Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) as are probably many of you. I browse the Internet regularly on three different computers, and so it helps immensely to have all of my Firefox bookmarks and passwords synced. But the one fly in my ointment has been my iPhone’s mobile Safari installation — because I don’t usually use Safari as my browser, I haven’t yet figured out a way to get all of my usual bookmarks on to the iPhone.

Until now: this writeup by Shawn0 (via the good folks at Lifehacker) presents a quick workaround to get your Xmarks-synced bookmarks up and running on your iPhone. Unfortunately, he uses Internet Explorer to do it, but given that we’re all on Macs, I discovered that it worked just fine with Safari. Set up Xmarks on your Safari installation, sync it up with your usual bookmarks, and then set iTunes to sync your mobile browser’s bookmarks with Safari. The one big drawback is that you’ll have to start up Safari every once in a while to make sure your changes get all the way out to the mobile device, but that’s better than not having them synced up at all.

And yes, you MobileMe users are laughing at us Xmarks users right now, because Apple’s service syncs all of these things automatically. But I’ve never known Xmarks to go down, and this solution costs the low, low price of free per year. If, like me, you haven’t landed on a solid way to sync bookmarks out to the mobile browser yet, here you go.

TUAWTUAW Tip: Sync your bookmarks to an iPhone or iPod touch with Xmarks originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Gaming, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch, App Review

Das Cube [iTunes link, $1.99] is a simple little iPhone game that comes with a pretty impressive pedigree: it’s made by one of the creators of Aquaria, Mark Johns of Space Barnacle, and features music by the composer of Canabalt’s crazy addictive soundtrack. As you can see in the video above, it’s got more in common with the iPhone post-apocalyptic running simulator than the underwater adventure: your job is to move a little ball that can smash together a series of abstract shapes that then explode into points. That’s pretty much it — as the game gets tougher (there are two difficulty settings, though I found the “Brutal” setting to be only a little tougher than the “Easy” setting in the first few minutes), more blocks drop, and while you can shake the iPhone occasionally to help you clear the screen, if you go too long without matching pieces, your game is over and the high scores are calculated.

It’s not quite as simple or addictive as Canabalt — the controls feel a little floaty, and sometimes the ball you push around will squeeze in between the blocks. A few times while playing, it seemed to me that the easiest way to win would be to just swirl the mix around, and sure enough, when I just rolled the ball around the screen, I eventually got blocks to crash together randomly. But by the time I hit around 60,000 points or so (you can tweet your high scores, just like Canabalt), I found a little more precision was required, but even then, the controls are anything but sharp.

Still, Das Cube is an amusing little mix of music and graphics. Unfortunately, there’s no free trial, but what you see above is what you get: smash shapes together to groovy techno tunes. If that appeals, you can pick it up for $1.99.

TUAWDas Cube for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bill Gates promised years ago that you would be able to enjoy shared experiences between Xbox Live online games, Windows PC games, and Windows Mobile phones. Xbox Live and Windows games were integrated into games such as Shadowrun in 2007

But the Windows Mobile part never happened. Now it looks like Microsoft is moving forward with the integration of Xbox Live into Windows Mobile cell phone software. A job posting confirms that the company is seeking a principal program manager who would be responsible for bringing “Xbox Live enabled games to Windows Mobile.”

The posting suggests that Microsoft wants to integrate avatars, the cartoon-like characters that users can create to represent themselves on Xbox Live. Integrating social interaction and multiscreen experiences are also on the list. Another tipster tells us that you will be able to sign into an Xbox Live account from a Windows Mobile phone, send or receive messages from friends on the Xbox Live service, send Tweets or Facebook status updates, view and buy things on the Xbox Live Marketplace, and view all of your gaming achievements.

Clearly, Microsoft has to do something. Through its own inaction, it has allowed both Apple and Google to race ahead of it in mobile phones. Windows Mobile 6.5 launched in October, but it didn’t seem to gain Microsoft any new friends in the mobile space. Next year, Windows Mobile 7 is expected to be a better contender with Apple’s iPhone/AppStore juggernaut.

Xbox Live, which has tens of millions of subscribers thanks to the success of multiplayer gaming on the Xbox 360, is Microsoft’s strongest service in games. It’s only logical that the company leverages that strength to help improve the struggling Windows Mobile platform. Microsoft has said tha tit will show off the Windows Mobile 7.0 platform to developers at its Mix conference in mid-March. We’ll see if Microsoft discloses anything new on the subject at CEO Steve Ballmer’s keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Shows on Wednesday.

[photo illustration credit: Engadget]

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I have this habit hat really annoys my wife. I store old stuff in plastic waterproof bins in my garage. I was cleaning out my collection of old papers and happened upon these precious old magazines. The covers and the accompanying stories show how astoundingly bad that we, the media, can be at making bold predictions about the future. I’ve shared some samples below of some of the worst predictions and otherwise amusing covers going back a couple of decades. Of course, I don’t mean to pick on any magazines in particular here, as they were really just reflecting the conventional wisdom of the time. I have made my share of lousy prognostications as well. But these are the ones that managed to survive multiple paper-weeding drives over the years. I savor them like some people collect old copies of the Saturday Evening Post. I hope you enjoy these classics and keep them in mind as you read the many stories predicting how next year and the coming decade will unfold. These covers themselves give us a long-term perspective; my prediction is that we’ll be recycling these headlines or motifs again in the years ahead, with different circumstances or different companies.

The headline on “Is Nothing Private?” is amusing to me because we are running the same kinds of stories today. This story ran in Business Week on Sept. 4, 1989. It chronicled how for very little cost, anybody could learn anything about anybody. But two decades later, we are writing the same thing about companies such as Google, Facebook, and the credit bureaus. So this headline isn’t wrong. It’s just comical and sad that we can slap it on just about any story today. As Sun Microsystems honcho Scott McNealy once said, “You have no privacy. Get over it.”

This article was prescient in that it foretold a day when we could all take a trip into the future on the “electronic superhighway.” If anything, the article was a little too rosy. At the time, cable and telephone companies were wiring the country with fiber optic cable, but we didn’t know how long it would take them to get broadband into the mainstream. The article was also a little light on imagination as it foretold of 500 channels on TV. While that has come to pass for cable, it missed the availability of an infinite number of channels on the Internet. I have to say I found the article, which appeared in Time’s April 12, 1993, to be inspiring. The author of the article, Philip Elmer-Dewitt, is busily blogging today about Apple’s latest news.

This article in the November, 1994 issue of Wired chronicled the rise of “the first digital supergroup,” pre-flameout. Rocket Science Games was supposed to be a marriage of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, a combination of video game and movie-making skills, all inside one video game company. It raised $12 million — a princely sum at the time — from Sega and Bertelsman. But the hit makers couldn’t make enough hits. They went out of business in 1997. There are some super-talented video game development studios today, from Rockstar Games to Infinity Ward. But these rockstars were a little ahead of their time.

Sun Microsystems saw a meteoric rise in the 1990s as it launched Internet servers and adopted “We’re the dot in dotcom” as its tagline. Sun’s chief Scott McNealy ranted about Microsoft and graced a lot of magazine covers besides this one in the January 22, 1996 issue of Business Week. But the company wasn’t ready for the dotcom bust. As Intel-based servers took off, Sun’s own business began a long decline. By 2004, magazines were using the awful pun “The Sun Also Sets” in their headlines. Sun is now in the process of being acquired by Oracle, if the European Union will let it happen.

George Gilder rode the idea of the “telecosm” to punditry fame. The prognosticator and author predicted a broadband nirvana back when Wired ran this article in March, 1996. The telecosm (published first as a Forbes ASAP article and later as a book in 2000) meant that ubiquitious broadband would dispense with the need for operating systems, microprocessors, and all sorts of heavy-duty hardware in consumer’s homes. That is still coming to pass, and we’re not quite at broadband nirvana yet. But Gilder did later acknowledge that he stirred a lot of hype that led to the dotcom bus. The ideas of the telecosm still have currency, but they’re playing out in ways no one, including Gilder, predicted.

Little did we know that Bernie Ebbers, the “Telecom Cowboy” who parlayed WorldCom into one of the biggest telecommunications players in the world with its $34 billion acquisition of MCI, would come flaming down in an accounting scandal. This Oct. 13, 1997 cover on Business Week lionized the bold pardner who ultimately wound up in jail for fraud. It all unraveled and he was convicted of fraud related to WorldCom’s finances in 2005. Ebbers is serving a 25-year sentence.

Business Week had the foresight to warn that fragmenting audiences, multiplying platforms, and the creation of entertainment giants was going to lead to a glut of entertainment. In February, 1996, this story predicted that the entertainment field had become too crowded, much like the Internet itself, with too many choices for consumers. But here we are in 2009, and we now have millions of Internet web sites, 117,000 iPhone apps, hundreds of thousands of Facebook applications, and more on the way. Somehow, despite the glut, we just keep getting more and more ways to entertain ourselves. A logical step, given the premise of this article, would have been to sidestep the entertainment industry in favor of other investments. But somehow, in 2009, the crowd is even bigger, as is the pie. And entertainment still seems to be a magnet for attention and money. It’s yet another reminder that it pays to have a good imagination in times of vast change.

Speech recognition technology has been just around the corner forever. But I’m typing this story on a keyboard, our thumbs are sore from our BlackBerrys, and voice has only begun to trickle into various applications. This story from the Feb. 23, 1998 issue of Business Week identified the problems, but it was a little optimistic about the timetable. It works pretty well in applications such as Ford Sync, which lets you make cell phone calls with your voice or pick the songs you want to play in the car. But our tolerance for inaccuracy has gone down as well. I sincerely hope that perfect speech recognition is coming.

James Cameron has been obsessive about every film he makes. This profile in the February, 1998 issue of Wired caught him on the verge of the launch of Titanic, the biggest-selling movie of all time. It talked about how he was so crazy that he rented Russian submersibles and built special cameras to shoot a stunningly expensive film. The story wasn’t wrong, but it is interesting at how the story has come full circle and that Cameron is once again the focus of so much attention, thanks to the huge debut of Avatar, which generated $500 million in revenue in its first 10 days.

This March 6, 2000 cover of Newsweek captured a lot of attention around the globe. Sony sounded so arrogant in the story, yet it managed to sell more than 150 million PlayStation 2 game consoles over the course of a decade. It didn’t, as Sony’s Ken Kutaragi and others predicted, mean an end to the personal computer, which sold in the billions during the same time frame. But game consoles have indeed become portals for the web-connected home, and the story prompted Microsoft to move into panic mode. (The designers of the Microsoft Xbox 360 actually envisioned what kind of article they wanted Time magazine to write on its cover, as an inspiration for their design — and Time did put Bill Gates and the Xbox 360 on its cover). But time changes. Now Sony ranks third place in the console wars, thanks to the cleverness of the Nintendo Wii and the over-pricing of Sony’s PlayStation 3. The story is fun to read, but it’s more a reminder of how big corporations shouldn’t come to believe their own good press.

Silicon Valley graduated from the dotcom mess. Google had its IPO. Then came the turn for the new Young Turks. Business Week’s cover story of Aug. 16, 2006, annointed Digg as one of many Web 2.0 sites that could be the “new New York Times.” But the magazine missed its chance at being truly prescient, putting Digg’s Kevin Rose on the cover instead of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who got a smaller profile on the inside. But the article was right about one thing. Web 2.0 was big, Silicon Valley was back.

Not long before it went out of business itself, Business 2.0 got a whole generation of would-be media moguls excited about blogging with its September, 2006, cover story, “Blogging for Dollars.” It noted how Drew Curtis’s Fark.com humor blog generated more than $60,000 a month, and how Michael Arrington of TechCrunch could rake in $50,000 from a party. And the magazine did open eyes about how blogs could generate money through events or ad revenues. Of course, the odds of being so successful from blogging are tough. While there are millions upon millions of blogs, relatively few make real money at it. Technorati reports that most bloggers are hobbyists, and part-timers make maybe $14,000 a year.

Our last cover shows how quickly sentiment changes. As oil prices were rising, ethanol’s future looked rosy. The October, 2007 cover of Wired magazine celebrated the shift toward cleaner energy, saying, “Forget Oil. This plant is the future of energy.” But with gas prices down and the green hype moving on to other sectors such as the Smart Grid, the ethanol craze has cooled off. It no doubt has a bright future, but perhaps not as good as the mirage suggested.

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Nuance has confirmed the story VentureBeat broke earlier this morning, that it has acquired voice-to-text company SpinVox for $102 million. Of that, $66 million will be in cash, the rest in stock. The company said it was buying Spinvox to expand the voice-to-text part of its speech-recognition business.

In its statement, Nuance said it would integrate SpinVox’s technology, which is used by several international telecom carriers, into its speech recognition service offerings. Nuance has a market value of $4.45 billion. It cut its net loss to $12m from $30m in the year to September as sales rose 9% to $950m.

The company says there are now more than a billion voicemail boxes in the world, and that more than 150 billion voicemails are created a year, and that this has created strong interest in voice-to-text automation services. The two companies have helped “pioneer solutions that utilize speech recognition and transcription workflow solutions to convert voicemails into text that can be sent to users as SMS or email messages,” the company said.

In its statement, Nuance said it intends to accelerate growth in three key areas:

Service quality. The combination of SpinVox’s global infrastructure with Nuance’s proven speech recognition technology provides robust, carrier-grade voice-to-text services with outstanding quality, ISO security certification, and highly-scaled production systems that handle millions of messages per day;

Global reach. The combination will achieve the broadest language support in the industry, including English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, and Portuguese, and a customer list that includes major carriers throughout North America, Europe, South America, and Australia; and,

Innovation. By combining Nuance’s sophisticated speech recognition technologies with both companies’ experienced solutions development teams, Nuance expects to accelerate innovation for voice-to-text services. The acquisition creates a voice-to-text platform – comprising full and partial speech automation, Web services integration and advanced features – that is state-of-the-art today, and offers customers and partners the assurance of technological leadership through its robust product and services roadmap.

Nuance’s stock dropped 1.17 percent following the announcement.

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It’s a familiar image we might attribute to stereotype: a sluggish, maybe portly individual lying prostrate on the couch, his/her front littered with Dorito crumbs. Could there, however, be truth behind the picture? Is there indeed a connection between incessant snacking and chronic slothdom? Or considered another way, is there a connection between fasting and being active? As a long-time fan of intermittent fasting (and a believer in the research behind it), I’m convinced. A study out this month sheds even more light on the relationship between lethargy and continuous eating.

For decades now, conventional wisdom has told us that we should eat regularly throughout the day to keep our blood sugar steady. With three regular meals and at least two snacks, we’re counseled to keep our bodies in a perpetual postprandial state. However, newer research, including this month’s study from ETH Zurich, questions this assumption. Scientists focused on the opposing relationship between a transcription factor, Foxa2, and insulin. Foxa2 is found in both the liver and the hypothalamus, the central command for hunger regulation. It has a hand in the expression of two eating and physical activity related neuropeptides, melanin-concentrating hormone (MCH) and orexin. When insulin is present, as it is during and after eating, Foxa2 and the related MCH and orexin are reduced. However, fasting mice showed consistently high levels of Foxa2, MCH and orexin. The researchers then found that “hyperinsulinemic, obese” mice showed reduced Foxa2, MCH, and orexin, regardless of whether they had eaten or not. When the scientists bred mice with continually active Foxa2 (immune to the counter effect of insulin), these mice showed high levels of MCH and orexin – and a correspondingly high level of physical activity whether they had eaten or not. The specially bred mice had low body fat as well as higher muscle mass.

Consider this study another nail in the coffin of conventional wisdom. (It also goes a long way in explaining the snacking couch potato association.) Fasting, even short, between-meal breaks, promotes the activation of Foxa2 and the resulting formation of MCH and orexin – as well as their activity-inducing effects. A simple survival principle explains this: a hungry animal needs to get up and move to find food. On the other hand, if we are constantly swimming in the insulin of eating and post-eating states, we’re undermining our own motivation (and biochemical stimulus) to get up and burn off what we just ate.

CW encourages us to never skip breakfast, bring along a mid-morning snack, make time for a good lunch, grab a mid-afternoon nibble and then have a good dinner. Oh, and if you can’t sleep, you’re supposed to have warm milk and a banana before bed. Our bodies are either eating or processing what we ate. There’s never a recovery period. Nary a resetting opportunity. We’re so focused on the hobby horse of “stable” blood sugar that we’ve forgotten that there’s more to the biochemical story of balanced energy. We make ourselves feel perpetually full to the exclusion of feeling anything else. (How about light, energized?) We continually raise our blood sugar and insulin levels and, in doing so, turn off the body’s chance to activate or upregulate other key substances that promote energy balance – and as this study shows, the physiological motivation to be active. Simple advice: skip the snack. (Besides, dinner never tasted so good as it does on a healthily empty stomach.)

Let me know your thoughts. IFers – have you found this principle to be apparent in your own experiments? Thanks for reading.

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Related posts:

1. Dear Mark: Post-Workout Fasting
2. 10 Active Ways to Celebrate the Holidays
3. Dear Mark: Fiber, Fat and Fasting

Earlier reports had said Burlington, Massachusetts, digital speech company Nuance may buy troubled voicemail-to-text counterpart Spinvox before year’s end – and Nuance on Wednesday confirmed exactly that…

The price – $102.5 million – is less than half the more-than-$200 million in investment that Spinvox had raised before things started to go bad earlier this year, so there’s significant loss here for investors. It comes in $66 million in cash and $36.5 million in Nuance shares (2.3 million).

Nuance says it will be “integrating SpinVox’s carrier services with Nuance’s advanced speech recognition platform”, making it sound rather like the speech-to-text technology on which Marlow, England-based Spinvox has prided itself will play second fiddle to Nuance’s own. Nuance’s announcement repeats its clear statement that it’s its own, “sophisticated” speech technology which is “proven”: “This transaction marries innovative speech solutions and robust carrier-grade infrastructure to accelerate innovation.”

It means much-needed consolidation in a digital telephony market that may yet prove hot in 2010, with Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Voice and BT’s Ribbit ramping up to offer voice comms overlapped with web services.

Until recently a second-generation dot.com darling of English media, six-year-old Spinvox raised its second $100 million in March 2008 from Goldman Sachs, along with GLG (SEO: 066570) Partners, Blue Mountain Capital Management and Toscafund Asset Management. Invesco Perpetual in September said it lost 90 percent of its own investment

But its finances began looking shaky this year, when paidContent:UK reported how staff had accepted an offer of stock instead of salary. CEO Christina Domecq, in a July interview with us, said missed payments from its suppliers and the pressure of rolling out in Latin America had stressed company finances, and promised the company would turn cash-positive in 90 days.

But our story opened a can of worms. A BBC News story piled on, reminding readers that Spinvox’s voicemail-to-text process is not wholly automated. The company admitted the necessity to use human transcribers at call centers in new territories is very expensive…

Spinvox had never outright disguised its use of humans but, facing a perception problem in the summer season on top of financial difficulties, it was forced to raise over £15 million in emergency investment and take a £30 million bridging loan to stay afloat – all while defending against staff complaints about company spending…

It amounted to a perfect storm that was sure to mean investors calling for a full or partial sale. Three months ago, Invesco publicly confirmed sale chatter by saying in a filing the company was on the block. The company declined to tell us whether it met its 90-day cash target.

Nuance isn’t yet detailing which parts of Spinvox, which has been through a few layoff rounds in the last year, may be retained, but our guess is it won’t be the whole thing. In a final effort to be upfront about the product, however, Nuance’s announcement reminds us that the service offers both “full and partial speech automation”.

Related

• More SpinVox Reports: Nuance Sell-Off Nearing?

One of our favorite podcasts and radio programs is KCRW’s Good Food, hosted by Evan Kleiman. (See our past recaps of Good Food here.) Our very own Sara Kate was on Good Food this past Saturday, January 2, talking about the Kitchen Cure and ways to give your kitchen a fresh start for the new year.

Listen to Sara Kate on Good Food‘s archived podcast at the KCRW/Good Food website.

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One of the most amusing things in the mobile tech world is how the more things change, the more the same things come around again and again. Take the e-book craze, which is seeing more companies than you can shake a stick at promise us the newest, bestest reader ever. Looking at these new gadgets makes one thing clear: We’ve seen these before, and quite a long time ago.

Take the two promised “readers” from Paradigm Shift, which will be color readers and so much more. The two gadgets, slated to appear next week at CES, will have 5- and 7-inch screens for high contrast viewing. They will also bring “impressive battery life” as they run Windows CE. Using CE means they will not be mere e-book readers, but will be able to do much more.

If this sounds familiar to you it’s because Windows CE “e-book readers” have been out for almost 10 years. The first Pocket PCs ran Windows CE and had e-book reading software readily available. Paradigm Shift also points out that its revolutionary gadgets will be able to do such things as read Microsoft Office documents. Hello, that capability has been available in CE for years.

The good news is that the company claims it will be able to sell the two readers for $150 and $200, making them cheap alternatives to other single-purpose readers on the market. But they should be cheap; they’re using years-old technology and bring functionality I had almost a decade ago.

Ed note: This post was provided to us by the author. It is the latest in an interesting debate between several hedge funds on the value in mall owner General Growth Properties.

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Hovde Capital yesterday released its response (www.marketfolly.com/2009/12/hedge-fund-hovdes-general-growth.html) to Pershing Square’s rebuttal (http://www.scribd.com/doc/24411287/A-Detailed-Response-to-Hovde-s-Short-Thesis-on-GGP-12-22-2009) (and, to a minor extent, and our rebuttal (http://seekingalpha.com/article/178502-general-growth-properties-rebutting-the-bears)) of Hovde’s initial report on GGP (www.scribd.com/doc/24097404/General-Growth-Properties).

Our quick take is that it’s more of the same – like Hovde’s first report, there are a few good points (nothing we hadn’t already considered) mixed in with many arguments that are either factually incorrect or misleading, or with which we simply disagree.  In short, there’s nothing new that changes our view regarding the attractiveness of GGP (it remains by far our largest position).

Before proceeding, we want to make clear how much we enjoy the debate and think our markets would be much healthier if there were a similarly detailed exchange of viewpoints for EVERY stock!

To some extent, the debate is now about different views of the future: Hovde believes that consumer spending will be terrible for an extended period and that bankruptcies among mall-based retailers will continue or worsen, which will translate into severely declining NOI for GGP over time.  Pershing believes that the worst is behind us: that unemployment has peaked, consumer spending has stabilized and may even be picking up a bit, and that retailers are in remarkably good shape in light of what they’ve been through over the past 18 months, all of which will translate into approximately stable NOI.  Whether Hovde or Pershing is right about GGP over time will, to some extent, depend on future macro factors, which are obviously impossible to predict with certainty.

That said, good analysis matters and we think Hovde’s is sorely lacking, primarily in the following areas:

 1)    Hovde’s most serious mistake is misunderstanding (or misrepresenting) what will likely happen to GGP’s unsecured debt.  Hovde assumes that it either remains outstanding (throughout its presentation, Hovde calculates GGP’s leverage and interest payments assuming that the debt remains outstanding, which is the main reason its analysis differs from Pershing’s and ours – see page 63, for example) or that it converts to equity, which will result in “significant dilution” (page 72).  Hovde makes explicit this assumption when it claims that Pershing “does not use consistent assumptions” regarding what happens to the unsecured debt on page 35 of its report.

Hovde doesn’t appear to understand bankruptcy law and what will likely happen to the unsecured debt.  There is almost no chance that it will remain outstanding: it will either be refinanced or, more likely, be converted into equity (this is what Pershing assumes – there is no inconsistency).  But here’s the key: it will NOT BE DILUTIVE because it will convert AT FAIR VALUE, as determined by the bankruptcy judge.  Of course, if the judge determines that fair value is $1/share, then it would be massively dilutive, but that’s not going to happen.  The judge has a great deal of discretion in determining fair value, but will certainly take into consideration the current stock price, comps and the price of any equity offering(s) GGP might do.

For example, as soon as GGP exits bankruptcy and its stock is relisted (it currently trades on the pink sheets, which means most institutional investors can’t own it), it will be a must-own stock for every REIT fund (a big catalyst Hovde misses).  To meet this demand and pay down some debt, GGP might issue equity – and the negotiated price at which this stock is sold would likely weigh heavily on the judge’s determination of fair value (and would not be dilutive).  Of course, if someone like Simon were to buy GGP at, say, $20, the debt would convert at this price – and again, it wouldn’t be dilutive.

2)    Hovde takes seven pages (6-12) arguing for its definition of NOI, but there’s no right answer here.  NOI is like free cash flow: different people calculate it in different ways.  But however one calculates it, it’s important to be consistent – which Hovde is not.  It uses the most conservative assumptions to minimize GGP’s NOI, but then fails to do so for Simon, making its comp analysis deeply flawed.

3)    Speaking of comps, Hovde writes: “to suggest GGP should trade at the LOWER cap rate than SPG is LAUGHABLE in our view” (pages 22-23).  Hovde can laugh all it wants, but there are very good arguments for why Simon is, in fact, the best comp for GGP.  For starter, both have very similar mall portfolios with a national footprint (unlike Macerich, which Hovde cites as a better comp on page 63; MAC also has debt issues that are more significant than what GGP will likely have post-bankruptcy).  In addition, GGP will likely have a BETTER liability profile post-bankruptcy, with no maturities until January 2014.  Finally and most importantly, GGP is for sale and Simon isn’t, so there should be a premium for GGP reflecting a possible sale of this strategic asset.

4)    Hovde’s analysis treats GGP as a collection of assets, but it’s more than that.  The fact that GGP is in bankruptcy has put it into play, so there is a once-in- a-lifetime opportunity for Simon, Brookfield or someone else to acquire a national platform, as highlighted in this quote from the WSJ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704538404574541923917766450.html):

The opportunity “is a potentially transformational event that doesn’t come along very often,” says Steve Sakwa, an analyst with International Strategy and Investment Group Inc.

5)    Hovde dismisses the likelihood that GGP might be acquired (pages 51-55), focusing only on Simon and not even mentioning Brookfield, which may in fact be the more likely acquirer due to fewer anti-trust concerns and the need for a national platform (which Simon already has).  As noted above, Hovde misses the value of GGP as a strategic asset – no doubt, there’s lots of distressed inventory out there, but only one national platform for sale like GGP.

Finally, Hovde finds it “telling” that Simon and Brookfield bought GGP’s unsecured debt, but not the equity, even when the equity was at a much lower price.  But it’s not as telling as Hovde thinks for a number of reasons.  First, it’s possible that Simon and/or Brookfield do in fact own the equity – if either bought less than 5% of GGP, it wouldn’t have to file (in any case, for anti-trust reasons, they couldn’t acquire more than 7.5%).  Also, at the time they bought GGP’s debt it was very cheap and they might have reasonably concluded that it represented a better risk-reward than the equity.

6)    Hovde argues that GGP’s rental rates and leasing spreads are very poor and will likely get worse (pages 15-18).  They have indeed been under pressure, but Hovde is making the classic investing mistake of projecting the immediate past indefinitely into the future.  What Hovde is missing is that GGP over the past year, knowing that it was in a poor negotiating position due to the macro environment and its own bankruptcy, has been renewing leases mainly on a short-term basis.  These renewals have indeed been done at low rates, but this isn’t likely to be a permanent state of affairs.  The macro environment has at least stabilized and may be improving and GGP will soon either be acquired or exit bankruptcy, so its negotiating position will strengthen and therefore rental rates and leasing spreads will likely improve.

7)    On pages 28 and 33, Hovde repeats the charts from its first presentation (pages 33-34), showing that “Commercial Real Estate Prices Have Dropped 43% Since the Peak” and that cap rates are moving higher under the heading: “Despite Speculation to the Contrary, Cap Rates for All Property Types Are Moving Higher, Not Lower.  Does Pershing Square Believe These Transactions Did Not Happen?”  But the CRE chart doesn’t include mall real estate and the cap rate chart, while showing cap rates for virtually every other type of commercial real estate, is MISSING data for malls!  (The cap rate for mall REITs has fallen dramatically from earlier this year.)

8)    Hovde paints a very bearish picture of retail sales (page 61), but the latest data contradicts this – for example, an article in the NYT earlier this week www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/business/28shop.html) noted:

Over all, retail sales from November through Dec. 24 rose 3.6 percent from last year, according to SpendingPulse, an information service of MasterCard Advisors that estimates sales for all forms of payment, including cash, checks and credit cards.

That number — which does not include sales of automobiles and gasoline — was helped this year by an extra shopping day between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Adjusting the results for that extra day cuts the retailing industry’s sales increase to about 1 percent, in line with what many retailing professionals expected.

While the numbers do not suggest a turnaround for the industry, they signal an improvement over last year’s 2.3 percent sales decline…

… “Last year was just a storm and retail was all about dropping prices to get rid of inventory,” said Mr. Katz of AlixPartners. “This year it was much more of a planned strategy: low inventories and tight expenses. And controlled promotions.”

That means most stores did not erode their profit margins the way they did in 2008, though in the days before Christmas, Mr. Katz said, some chains discounted more deeply than they should have.

Perhaps the best news is that the double-digit declines that plagued nearly every retailing category last year are gone.

9)    Hovde spends many pages (38-43) questioning whether GGP’s Master Planned Community Segment has any value – but Pershing already assigns no value to it so it’s not clear who Hovde is disagreeing with.  Another note: on page 39, Hovde makes this ominous statement: “The heirs of the Hughes estate hold a contingent claim related to the valuation of these assets. If there is significant value in these assets, the resolution of this claim could result in a substantial unfunded liability, which Pershing Square has failed to include in its analysis.”  This is a red herring: the only claim by the Hughes estate is for half of any profits.  Thus, the only way there could be a claim, leading to a “substantial unfunded liability”, is if there are profits, which would be wonderful for GGP (even if GGP only received half of the profits, this is more than zero, which is what both Hovde and Pershing expect).

This is a great debate and it will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

Happy new year to all!

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See Also:

• Why The Bear Case On General Growth Properties Is Totally Wrong
• Bill Ackman Is Wrong On General Growth — Malls And The US Consumer Are So Screwed
• Bill Ackman: Here’s Why I’m Super-Bullish On Shopping Malls And The US Consumer

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