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Last month, Sony sold its Madison Avenue headquarters building in New York for $1.1 Billion. The sale netted the electronics manufacturer around $770 million in cash, which the company needs as it various divisions (electronics, motion pictures, music, video games) have begun to feel the financial crunch of the past few years as well as increased competition from companies such as Samsung. Since Sony’s offices in the building will not be moving, it’s clear that Sony needed some quick cash to prop up its earnings.

Today, Sony announced that it has sold yet another of its buildings. Its Sony City Osaki building in Tokyo has been sold to Nippon Building Fund Inc. and an unnamed “Japanese institutional investor” for ¥111.1 billion, or around $1.2 billion. The deal was very similar to the Madison Avenue sale, and Sony will be leasing its current space in the building for five years.

Sony has stated the sales are part of a reorganization of its assets “in an effor to strengthen its corporate structure.” In other words, they needed the money.

Why does Sony need all of this quick cash? To keep investors happy is another easy answer, but to speculate, as the company nears production of the recently announced (and powerful) PlayStation 4, it could be preparing to take a loss on each console in order to challenge Microsoft in the U.S. home video game console market.

The Winans family, who comprise one of the biggest names in the gospel music world, is taking a hit this week after Michael Winans Jr. was sentenced to 14 years in prison for a huge financial scam.

The scam, which was reportedly promoted at church, included numerous victims and involved selling Saudi Arabian oil bonds. Some of the victims testified in court, saying the scam had robbed them of their life savings. Winans, while apologetic, did admit that he had taken money from the victims even after he learned the deal was a scam. Described as a Ponzi scheme, the scam involved paying off early investors to attract more; Winans ended up with hundreds of willing participants, many of whom are now broke. It’s estimated that more than 600 people are owed about $4.7 million.

“I want to apologize to everyone. … These were decisions that were negligent and irresponsible,” Winans said in court.

Judge Sean Cox relayed the words of some of the victims who weren’t in the courtroom, including a young woman who said she’d joined the Army just to be able to go to college because her family can’t afford her tuition now.

“Fraud on good, decent church-going people – that was very, very troubling to me,” Cox said.

MYO, the gesture control armband from Y Combinator-backed Waterloo startup Thalmic Labs, has managed to rack up over 10,000 pre-orders over the course of its first two days of pre-order availability. At $149 a pop, that means the young company has already managed to secure around $1.5 million in gross revenue, so long as they actually ship hardware.

The MYO, as Ryan pointed out on Monday, is a wearable control device for smartphones, PCs and other electronics that uses lower-power Bluetooth 4.0 to connect, which also has a boatload of sensors on board to help it detect electrical activity in arm and hand muscles to detect movements at the earliest possible stage. It’s the latest in a series of devices trying to make sci-fi type interfaces a reality, and could be among the most accurate yet.

Thalmic Labs co-founder and CEO Stephen Lake explained in an interview that while the team expected some kind of response to its launch, there was no way they could have anticipated quite this level of interest.

“I think we knew that there was going to be a lot of people interested in the technology, since it’s such a cool technology, and there are so many good potential applications for it,” he said. “We’re not completely surprised, but the amount of attention it’s got is more than anyone could’ve expected.”

Lake had some ideas about why people are so interested in traditional modes of interaction for computers. He said he believes people are looking around for something different, and that MYO is a case of the “right technology at the right time.”

“There’s a lot happening right now with the form factor and how we’re connected to technology,” he said. “A lot of the technology that’s coming out, and Google Glass is a perfect example in the realm of wearable technology, is really going to change not just how we input information into the computer, but just how we interact with technology, and make our devices an extension of ourselves instead of an outside thing you’re interacting with.”

The interest from consumers eager to try out the MYO has likewise attracted a lot of interest from distributors and retail partners, Lake said. His inbox has been flooded with “thousands” of emails from companies wanting to be a distribution partner for MYO all over the world. He wasn’t at liberty to share any details on early stage discussions at this point, but it seems reasonable to expect the MYO will get a splashy launch when it’s ready to come to market.

Developer interest has also grown by leaps and bounds thanks to the initial response from buyers and media, Lake said. Building out that community is key, just as it is for other innovative input and interaction hardware like the Leap Motion Controller, and Lake says Thalmic will have a dedicated developer website with support forums and more information up and running as soon as possible to help deal with the influx of attention.

In her keynote at the Strata conference in Santa Clara, Calif., on Tuesday, Rebecca Shockey, global research leader for business analytics and optimization at IBM’s Institute for Business Value, asked why about a quarter of respondents to a recent IBM survey still had not yet started engaging in “big data activities.” Making the business case and showing potential returns on investment turned out to be a major obstacle to adoption, she said. Later at the conference, some of those still on the fence might have found some good ideas.

Putting small energy data in perspective

Barry Fischer, head writer at the data blog from Opower, the company that crunches data for utility companies servicing almost half of all households in the United States, passed around sample bills that chart consumers’ year-to-year energy use and show how consumers compare with their neighbors. Besides the information for bills, Opower also provides alerts if consumers are on track to get a high energy bill and a Facebook app for consumers to compare their energy use with that of their friends. The data Opower collects — consumption figures from utilities, preferences from users and third-party weather, housing and demographic statistics — also enable Fischer and other company bloggers to present simple and consumer-friendly correlations, such as the fact that Yahoo Mail users typically pay $110 more per year in energy bills than those who use Google Mail. Taken together, Opower’s uses of data show how millions of people can benefit from contributing their own individual data.

In January, GigaOM’s Katie Fehrenbacher named Opower one of her 13 energy data startups to watch in 2013.

Etsy bakes a Funnel Cake

In another session, three data engineers from Etsy revealed how they use Hadoop to detect issues with various functions on the website, and they talked about building a program other employees use to optimize the parts of the site that generate the most revenue. At Etsy, already a big Hadoop user — at one point, engineers ran 5,000 Hadoop jobs for a variety of purposes in a single month — a popular term is the attribution funnel, or the process customers take as they buy products on the site. The data engineers wanted other employees to be able to identify the steps where customers get caught up before purchasing, such as email address verification to establish new accounts. So they built a program called Funnel Cake, which scales better and deliver real-time information faster than Hadoop, said engineer Wil Stuckey. Running Funnel Cake, employees can streamline the process and increase the percentage of site visitors who end up buying products. Beyond that, they can see which kinds of pages lead to the most sales and focus more or less attention on browsing and searching functions or storefronts from product makers.

Vending machines, advertisements and babies

Other use cases on display at the conference spanned from vending machines to babies. One company has installed sensors on its vending machines and now monitors the resulting data in real time to spot theft and cut down on purchasing new machines to replace stolen ones. An internet advertising company now uses highly scalable software based on Hadoop MapReduce, Apache Nutch and Apache Solr to detect traffic sources for advertisements, bringing new revenue. And a hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit has implemented a visualization tool for real-time health statistics that shows signs of “baby crashing” and thereby can reduce mortality rates.

Executives from Aetna, Williams-Sonoma, Facebook and other companies will discuss big data use cases at the GigaOM Structure:Data conference in New York on March 20-21.

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Despite earlier reports that Pope Benedict’s resignation means curtains for the official @Pontifex Twitter account, it looks like the account will stay alive while the Papal Conclave selects his replacement.

At least according to the Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Paul Tighe.

“During the period between today and the election of new pope the account will be inactive…not shut down,” Tighe told Forbes.

According to Tighe, the Twitter account will be kept on ice so that the next pope can determine whether or not he wants to continue the social media communications unveiled under Benedict.

“Obviously we leave all decisions to the new man. But we would hope that he might continue to use @pontifex, which would maintain continuity,” he said.

Thank you for your love and support. May you always experience the joy that comes from putting Christ at the centre of your lives.

— Benedict XVI (@Pontifex) February 28, 2013

The Pope first started tweeting out his daily messages on December 12th of last year, and has currently sent 39 tweets and amassed nearly 1.6 million followers (english language).

We recently learned that the 117 Cardinals, whose job it is to select the next pope, will be barred from all Twitter use. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, considering the secrecy of the Papal Conclave – all outside communications will be restricted. It really should matter that much, as only 9 out of the 117 Cardinals even operate personal Twitter accounts.

We’re positively sure no one ever in the history of the world looked at a soccer ball and thought of it as anything more than just a soccer ball. That’s why we’re a little astounded at SOCCKET, just a normal soccer ball… that also doubles as a portable generator.

You take SOCCKET and play around with it just as you would with an ordinary soccer ball. Dribble, score some goals, take a few good-natured kicks at people’s heads.

SOCCKET then takes all of that kinetic energy from rolling around and hitting people’s heads and converts it into electrical energy. SOCCKET also includes a tiny LED lamp that can be plugged into the ball. 30 minutes of play with SOCCKET can power the lamp for 3 hours.

SOCCKET’s aim, of course, is to be a little more than a novelty item gathering dust on the shelves of The Sharper Image. What may seem like a cool “gimmicky” gadget to us is surely a lot more than that to developing regions of the world with limited access to electricity.

That’s probably why SOCCKET is currently being tested into “resource-poor” areas of North America, South America, and Africa. When you add that factor to soccer’s (aka football’s) overall popularity worldwide, this all sounds like it could be a real winner.

SOCCKET is currently fundraising over at Kickstarter, with a starting pledge of $89.

In a contentious investor call Thursday morning, analysts questioned Barnes & Noble’s entire strategy following its poor third-quarter earnings report. With Nook revenues down, Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch sought to assure investors that both Nook and physical B&N bookstores will survive — even as a committee evaluates B&N founder and chairman Len Riggio’s proposal to buy the chain’s 689 retail stores and take them private.

As today’s earnings report revealed, physical stores are doing better than the digital business, with comparable store sales down just 2.2 percent as Nook revenues plunged by 26 percent.

The conversation repeatedly became heated, with one analyst asking why Riggio continues to serve as the company’s chairman even as he tries to buy its stores. The analyst accused Barnes & Noble of ”selling its working business to the chairman while keeping its shareholders beholden to the business that isn’t working.”

When Lynch noted that Riggio also owns shares in Nook Media and said he “isn’t trying to do anything that isn’t in the business of all shareholders,” the analyst pushed back — asking again why Barnes & Noble is “considering selling the business that is doing better to Riggio” while leaving shareholders with Nook Media, which has “no business model.”

At that point, B&N’s retail CEO Mitchell Klipper snapped back, “The loaded question you’re posing really isn’t appropriate for us to discuss on this call.”

Klipper isn’t normally a participant in the company’s earnings calls, but he was trotted out Thursday to assuage concerns about Barnes & Noble closing more physical stores over the next decade. Klipper had recently told the Wall Street Journal that the chain will have “450 to 500 stores” 10 years from now, compared to 689 today.

Klipper described the article as a “mischaracterization.” Ninety-five percent of our stores are profitable and we have no plans to close any of those…let’s make no mistake about it, folks.” He also spoke of “new store formats” and said B&N plans to open three to five new stores in fiscal year 2014.

“We’re not going to continue doing what we’re doing”

Barnes & Noble released two new Nook tablets last September. Lynch described those tablets as reading-focused and said that as the market shifted to multi-function tablets,” customers simply weren’t looking for B&N’s new products. “We did a lot of work with the consumer post-holiday to find out what happened,” he said. “What we’re seeing is, the larger technology brands have more resonance in that multi-function tablet market than we do. We obviously have to adjust and change … we’re not going to continue doing what we’re doing.” He said there are “announcements forthcoming.”

One analyst asked Lynch if there was anything the company would have done differently when it launched its new tablets. “You look at the numbers and there are absolutely things we could have done differently,” Lynch said. “I’m not going to go into what those are.” He said Barnes & Noble leads in “delivering reading experiences,” citing its apps’ high ratings in the iOS, Android and Windows 8 stores. But “as the market goes to more multi-function tablets, we have to look at how we offer functionality differently and that’s what we’re focused on now.”

“You poured a huge amount of money into a display that really seems not to matter a whole heck of a lot,” one analyst said.

More than once, Lynch mentioned Barnes & Noble’s strength in digital content as such sales were up by 6.8 percent for the quarter. When an analyst asked how B&N defines that content, Lynch explained it comes from “hundreds of thousands of publisher relationships. Our ability to resell their copyrighted content.” In other words, it is the ebooks, digital magazines and so on that Barnes & Noble sells, but that other retailers — like Amazon and Apple — sell as well.

“Umm … is that proprietary?” the analyst responded. “Can somebody [else] turn around and put it on iTunes tomorrow?”

“Each one of those contracts has its own nuance,” Lynch responded. “This isn’t flip the switch, get them done. We were the biggest customers for those publishers on the physical side. There is no flip-switching. It is a strategic asset that is valuable and hard to replicate. And expensive.”

This story was corrected 1 pm to say Mitchell Klipper, not Marshall. 

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The “Six Strikes” Copyright Alert System is being implemented across major ISPs this week. Those who regularly download music or movies illegally via BitTorrent might just start seeing these alerts pop up in your email inbox.

Of course, the concerned Internet user may want to know what these alerts actually look like. Ars Technica was able to get their hands on a few of the alerts from Comcast, and they’re pretty much what everybody was expecting.

Comcast provided Ars with only a limited number of alerts – one, two, four and five to be exact. The ISP wouldn’t say why it couldn’t provide all of the alerts, but it’s safe to assume that all the alerts will look similar to what was provided.

Interestingly enough, it looks like the Copyright Alert System isn’t even doing its supposed job. As pointed out by Ars, the alerts don’t even tell consumers what they downloaded to receive the alert. The email also doesn’t point consumers to legal alternatives. You would think Comcast, which owns NBC, would want to point consumers to Hulu or other legal alternatives where its properties are hosted.

Granted, this is just the start and Comcast may refine the system in the coming months. We also don’t know what the alerts from other ISPs will look like. Those may point to legal alternatives and actually provide more information to the suspected infringer.

For those worried about the CAS, it seems that a VPN may be the way to go. Ars confirmed with a spokesperson from Time Warner that the ISP will probably not be able to catch those downloading media through a proxy.

I’m sure we’ll start seeing what the other alerts look like as people with other ISPs start to receive them. We’ll then be able to tell whether or not this is truly an “educational” program, or just another pro-copyright campaign that will only piss off consumers.

For the sixth consecutive year, Apple (AAPL) has been named the world’s most admired company by Fortune. The decision comes as something of a surprise considering the $250 billion that has been shaved from Apple’s market cap over the past five months. IApple is still the world’s most profitable technology company by a huge margin though, and apparently it is also still the most admired. Fortune’s blurb on Apple follows below.

Continue reading…

If you go to the Google Glass page for “How To Get One,” Google now informs you that the contest is over, and applications are now closed.

“But the conversation is just getting started,” Google says. That’s true, as further evidenced by words from Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley at Mobile World Congress and a recent sighting of Mark Zuckerberg talking to Sergey Brin about the device (not to mention this TMZ “interview”).

Google says this on the page now:

Thank you so much to everyone who applied to be a Glass Explorer.

We have been overwhelmed, entertained and inspired by your responses. #ifihadglass is now closed and we will be notifying successful applicants soon. If you don’t hear from us, don’t despair! There will be more chances to get Glass at a later date.

If you would like to stay informed about Glass, you can sign up here.

There is a form on the page where you can sign up to stay informed.

Google has said that Google Glass will be available to all by the end of the year, and that they will cost less than the $1,500 early contest winners have to pay.

Earlier this week, Samsung revealed that the unveiling of its next flagship Android smartphone will take place in New York City on March 14. The Korean company invited people to “come and meet the next galaxy,” implying that the event will be the unveiling of the Galaxy S IV, which has been rumored for some time.

Today, Samsung has followed up on its announcement with another invitation. This time, the company is inviting people to come to Times Square on March 14. A new invitation, seen below, was posted to the Samsung Facebook page. The message “be ready 4 the next galaxy” isn’t too subtle in indicating that the Galaxy S IV is coming.

People are invited to come to Times Square at 7 pm on March 14 to “experience Samsung’s new flagship smartphone at Times Square.” It’s unclear whether the actual devices will be shown off at the location (and, if so, whether people will be able to actually hold one or turn it on), or whether the Samsung announcement will simply be streamed live at the location.

Everyone who isn’t a New Yorker, or who doesn’t want to stand out in the cold for a look at a smartphone that won’t be available for weeks, the Samsung presentation will be streamed live on the SamsungMobile YouTube channel.

If you’re strolling through your Facebook news feed, bored by all of your friends’ lame breakfast statuses and baby pics, and you happen to see something about a Rihanna sex tape – keep on strolling.

Sophos Naked Security blog tips us to a new type of a very classic style of Facebook scam – the celebrity sex tape. This time it involves Rihanna.

What’s a little different about this one is that it hides inside an event: [VIDEO] RIHANNA SEX TAPE. Once you access the actual event page, you’ll be met with the text “I lost all respect for her after watching this” and a y.ahoo.it link. Don’t click it.

Rihanna isn’t the only celebrity with a recent sex tape scam on Facebook. Earlier this month, a viral scam made the rounds suggesting that Taylor Swift’s iPhone had been hacked and a sex tape had been leaked. Clicking on the provided link directed curious Facebookers to an online survey scam that phished for users’ personal info.

As always, be vigilant. And don’t let your curiosity cloud your better judgment.

Last fall, Facebook released its custom audiences tool for marketers. Now, they’ve expanded it to allow businesses to use Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai.

Businesses that already work with these third parties can use the same info they have used elsewhere to create campaigns on Facebook. Facebook will work with these third parties to create pre-defined targeting categories on Facebook, so businesses will be able to target categories like “soda drinkers” or “auto-intenders”.

“We know that many businesses also work with third party partners to enhance their online and offline marketing in order to show more relevant ads, and so today we’re announcing that we’re expanding custom audiences to allow businesses to work with these third parties,” Facebook says. “For example, an auto dealer may want to customize an offer to people who are likely to be in the market for a new car. To do this many businesses work with third party companies to better understand who might be in the market for a new car.”

“As with the existing custom audiences tool, these select partners use a privacy and data-protective matching process,” the company says. “The process is specifically designed so that no personal information is exchanged between Facebook, marketers or third party partners. People will still have the same controls over what ads they see on Facebook.”

The enhancements will be rolling out in the coming weeks to marketers in the U.S.

Earlier this week, AOL announced that its Advertising.com customers can now access Facebook’s inventory.

According to a report from Ad Age, Facebook is set to announce the acquisition of Microsoft’s Atlas ad platform as soon as today, following rumors that it would do so in recent months.

If iCloud has been acting up for you today, know that it’s not just you. At least three iCloud-based services are currently experiencing problems, according to Apple’s own system status page on Thursday morning. The current issues extend to Documents in the Cloud, Photo Stream — the service that syncs photos across Apple devices — and iCloud backup.

The outage has been going on for seven hours. As of this posting, the iCloud hiccup is affecting three percent of users, according to Apple’s status report. But earlier reports Thursday indicate iCloud had an even bigger issue.

Anyone having problems with iCloud mail ?—
Krzysztof Zabłocki (@merowing_) February 28, 2013

9to5Mac took a screenshot of Apple’s system status page about two hours earlier, which showed that there were issues with all iCloud services, from Mail to Calendar, Find My iPhone, iTunes Match, account sign-in and more. That was said to affect more than one in 10 iCloud customers.

Apple’s cloud service has taken off pretty quickly: it opened in October 2011, and as of the beginning of 2013 had 250 million users. But Apple’s struggled at times to keep iCloud running smoothly as more users signed up and as the company has integrated iCloud with more of its software.

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There’s been lots of buzz about adapting the ARM chips that power iPhones and iPads into servers, but few examples of these processors being used in production. Here’s one: Marvell (MRVL) said this week that its chipset is included in the first commercial deployment of ARM-based servers at Chinese search engine giant Baidu.

Baidu, which is one of China’s largest Internet companies, will use Marvell’s implementation of ARM in its ARMADA XP CPU server SoC (System on Chip) in its Baidu Cloud storage application. The new servers will help slash power usage across Baidu’s growing server footprint, which has prompted the company to focus on energy efficiency and sustainability.

“The world’s first large-scale deployment of ARM servers in the data center represents Baidu’s leadership in cloud computing system infrastructure,” said Wang Jing, vice president of engineering at Baidu. “In order to bring greater storage density to the data center, lower TCO (total cost of ownership) and deliver efficiency to a new level, Baidu integrated leading design capabilities with Marvell’s advanced chipset solutions. This project represents Baidu’s success in building cloud computing data centers.”

Baidu has customized its ARM servers to work with its cloud storage requirements and is using the complete Marvell platform solution of quad core ARM-based ARMADA XP SoC products, including its CPU, storage controller, and a 10Gb Ethernet switch. In addition, Marvell has incorporated its low-power Ethernet physical layer (PHY) transceivers. The ARMADA XP chipset is at the core of Dell’s “Copper” ARM server as well.

“Marvell is proud that both our passion to drive breakthrough technology and innovation and our vision to make an early investment in ARM more than a decade ago has led to this important milestone of becoming the first semiconductor company in the world to commercially launch an end-to-end SoC platform that supports a new era of server demands in the modern data center,” said Ramesh Sivakolundu, vice president, Cloud Services and Infrastructure Business Unit, Marvell.

“Based on the ARM architecture and combined with our dedicated engineering, the Marvell server SoC is unique in its ability to deliver the low power consumption, high storage and computer density that can help companies cost-effectively support a new era of cloud- and Web-based services,” Sivakolundu continued. “The Baidu implementation brings Marvell’s vision for ARM architecture full circle.”

 

Twenty years ago, on two different business school campuses a continent away, the seeds of social entrepreneurship were planted.

At INSEAD, two students Philippe Dongier and Katie (co-author of this post) sent a school-wide email asking if anyone was interested in cultivating coursework and careers related to nonprofits. Overnight, 126 students, staff, and faculty responded — a number equal to 50% of the newly arrived class. With a student-faculty steering committee and 50,000 Euros of seed funding from the school’s administration, they founded INDEVOR, INSEAD’s social enterprise club.

Across the pond, John Whitehead, the former managing partner of Goldman Sachs and the board chair for several nonprofits, approached the dean of Harvard Business School with a similar idea. He asked how could HBS apply its distinctive competencies to help improve management within the social sector? Over the next few years, he provided small amounts of money to seed experiments and to challenge the institution to come up with innovative approaches to address his question. Like a venture capitalist, he said if these experiments delivered on their goals, more funding would follow. From this, the Social Enterprise Initiative was born.

In Europe, the seed planted at INSEAD grew steadily over the years and led to the development of the INSEAD Social Entrepreneurship Initiative, which now coordinates conferences and other forums, sponsors research, and supports students to learn more about the link between social impact and business.

In Boston, the HBS Social Enterprise Initiative was experiencing a similar growth trajectory.

INSEAD and HBS aren’t the only schools where the drive for social change has taken hold. Across all of the top MBA programs there has been soaring interest in social enterprise in recent years and schools have grown their offerings to meet the demand, as this data from The Bridgespan Group shows.

Dr. Nora Silver, the director of the Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership at UC Berkeley Haas School of Management, which today offers nine courses specifically related to social or public sector management (up from eight at the time of the Bridgespan study), told us, “This generation of students is the first that was required or expected to do community service in high school and college. These students grew up expecting to integrate social impact into their work — no matter what sector they join.”

Across the programs studied, Yale School of Management topped the chart with 95% of its course offerings in 2009 incorporating social benefit content.

Faculty interest has grown too, fueling research with social sector practitioners, which translates into new cases and discussion for the classroom. Valerie Malter, Director of Social Impact at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania noted in the Bridgespan study: “The level of interest from faculty members is extraordinary in this whole area.”

MBA programs today are minting not just captains of industry, but also crusaders for social good. Any program teaching business skills needs to train their graduates to serve both companies and society. This means equipping would-be entrepreneurs with an understanding of multiple bottom lines and equipping would-be corporate professionals with intrapreneurial vision to connect business interests to social value. Steeped in both social and business principles this new breed of MBAs will be able to navigate complexity and create opportunities to sustain the world we live and work in.

Follow the Scaling Social Impact insight center on Twitter @ScalingSocial and register to stay informed and give us feedback.

By Stephen Eisenhammer

Does a sovereign credit rating from a glass tower in London or New York impact life in the country being rated? Apparently in Africa it does.

According to research by the rating agency Fitch, sovereign credit ratings significantly boost foreign direct investment (FDI) to Africa.

Credit ratings added 2 percent to Gross Domestic Product in sub-Saharan Africa each year from 1995 to 2011 through increased  FDI when compared to countries in the region which do not have a rating, Fitch said in a note.

There are a number of possible factors behind this.

Firstly the rating works as a kind of advert to investors, showing that the country is open to foreign capital. It also helps investors to make a more informed decision as to where to put their money, as the ratings come with reputable data and risk analysis.

There’s also, Fitch said, a “positive effect” on economic policy in the rated countries as they attempt to implement reform in order to achieve an upgrade or at least avoid a downward revision.

The majority of FDI goes to resource rich countries such as South Africa and Nigeria, but recently other countries have entered the fray.

“In addition to South Africa and Nigeria (the main FDI recipients), new commodity countries have gained in importance (e.g. Angola, Ghana, Mozambique, Uganda, Zambia),” Fitch said.

But service sectors such as banks and drinks companies, booming off the back of a growing consumer base, are also starting to attract FDI.

“FDI in service sectors accounted for 34% of total greenfield projects in Africa in 2011,” Fitch said.

The benefits of a credit rating are not lost on African governments.  Since 1994 when Fitch assigned South Africa a rating, it and other ratings agencies have rapidly expanded their business on the continent. A total of 20 African countries now hold credit ratings, Fitch says.

Pandora users streaming free tunes all month long may find that today is the day the music died: Pandora is limiting its free monthly service to 40 hours. Don’t worry though, the free tunes start up again the following month or you can choose to pay a small fee for to enjoy music for the remainder of the month. Why the cap and fee? Rising per-track royalty rates, Pandora said in a blog post from Wednesday evening:

“Pandora’s per-track royalty rates have increased more than 25% over the last 3 years, including 9% in 2013 alone and are scheduled to increase an additional 16% over the next two years. After a close look at our overall listening, a 40-hour-per-month mobile listening limit allows us to manage these escalating costs with minimal listener disruption.”

According to the company, the impact is limited to just 4 percent of all users, which is surprisingly low. Perhaps more folks use the free streaming on desktops or laptops connected via Wi-Fi as opposed to smartphone and tablet users on costly mobile broadband networks.

Regardless of how people use the music service, pricing is understandably a challenge: Record label fees are negotiated at set royalty rates for a given time, but Pandora has no control over the demand for or growth of its service. The small $0.99 fee to continue music past the 40 hours in a given month seems reasonable to me, and I say that as a paying Pandora subscriber. I pay $36 a year for unlimited, ad-free music through Pandora mainly because I access it through multiple methods: my laptop, phone, tablet and even my television and car, both of which have integrated Pandora apps.

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Final Book Now Available

For thousands of years, the underground has provided humans refuge, useful resources, physical support for surface structures, and a place for spiritual or artistic expression. More recently, many urban services have been placed underground. Over this time, humans have rarely considered how underground space can contribute to or be engineered to maximize its contribution to the sustainability of society. As human activities begin to change the planet and population struggle to maintain satisfactory standards of living, placing new infrastructure and related facilities underground may be the most successful way to encourage or support the redirection of urban development into sustainable patterns. Well maintained, resilient, and adequately performing underground infrastructure, therefore, becomes an essential part of sustainability, but much remains to be learned about improving the sustainability of underground infrastructure itself.

At the request of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Research Council (NRC) conducted a study to consider sustainable underground development in the urban environment, to identify research needed to maximize opportunities for using underground space, and to enhance understanding among the public and technical communities of the role of underground engineering in urban sustainability.

Underground Engineering for Sustainable Urban Development explains the findings of researchers and practitioners with expertise in geotechnical engineering, underground design and construction, trenchless technologies, risk assessment, visualization techniques for geotechnical applications, sustainable infrastructure development, life cycle assessment, infrastructure policy and planning, and fire prevention, safety and ventilation in the underground. This report is intended to inform a future research track and will be of interest to a broad audience including those in the private and public sectors engaged in urban and facility planning and design, underground construction, and safety and security.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Engineering and Technology

Apple’s (AAPL) tremendous tumble after the stock hit an all-time high of $705.07 last September continues to be one of the biggest stories in tech. We know hedge funds led the charge, but investors continue to question the Cupertino-based company’s future after insisting it could do no wrong through much of 2012. Apple wasn’t the first company to learn how quickly sentiment can shift as its share price tumbled more than 30%, and it certainly won’t be the last. According to one industry watcher, Google (GOOG) might be next in line for a huge reality check.

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