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	COP15: Brazil says ethanol is “the only real alternative” to fossil fuels Should the rest of the world follow Brazil’s lead?		REPORT: Tesla goes from competitor to demonstrator in Automotive X Prize Elon’s team decides to focus on product, not racing.
	REPORT: Some Chevy Volts to arrive early thanks to a $100 million bonus? The extra budget could mean more testing, which is not a bad thing.	Other news: Autocar details Land Rover’s hybrid plans REPORT: Ford looking to invest up to $500 million in Michigan hybrid, EV plants Audi e-tron gets driven, we get jealous

AutoblogGreen for 12.10.09 originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve always wondered why some recipes called for both baking soda and baking powder. They’re both chemical leaveners that do pretty much the same thing in pretty much the same way. So is it just extra insurance? We finally found our answer in this month’s issue of Fine Cooking!

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Friendster, the social network which set things off more than half a decade ago has finally been sold after several attempts in the past years. As expected, the social network was snatched up by an Asian company, MOL Global, a Malaysian e-commerce and payments company for an unreported sum which some put at about $100 million. MOL Global will take over 100 percent ownership of Friendster and hopes to bolster the social network’s position in the Asia-Pacific region where it’s a very strong player dominating the market.

“Friendster and MOL are both industry pioneers and are close partners. This combination is a natural progression of our relationship and will be an industry-changing event,” Richard Kimber, Friendster CEO, said. “The new combined entity gives Friendster the kind of financial backing, retail distribution, and e-commerce infrastructure that will enable us to accelerate our strategy and create a locally relevant, fun experience for our users in Asia, both on and offline.”

The acquisition was officially announced yesterday and MOL Global CEO Ganesh Kumar Bangah was confident of the social networks potential and in the opportunities created by the merger of the two businesses which are expected to build off of each other. The CEO said he expected the acquisition to add about $110 million to the bot… (read more)

While the banks latest December monthly report implies that struggling Baltic economies are on the mend, the ECB is actually far more worried about the Baltics according to confidential documents acquired by Bloomberg.

Essentially, the bank is worried that Baltic countries could be on the verge a new debt crisis, partly due to their pegged currencies.

Bloomberg: “the authorities in the Baltic states may not be able to prevent a renewed emergence of macro-economic imbalances and a repetition of the boom-bust cycle,” the ECB said in a document dated Nov. 17 and prepared for a meeting of the EU’s economic and finance committee.

…

“The experience of the Baltic states suggests that, for countries that have opted for pegging tightly their exchange rates, there is a significant risk that relatively low interest rates lead to excessive domestic borrowing and the emergence of asset price bubbles,” the ECB said.

…

The boom-to-bust fate of the Baltic states has been exacerbated by euro-denominated borrowing since the countries joined the EU more than five years ago. That’s obliged central banks to stick more rigorously to their euro pegs or risk leaving households and businesses unable to service their debt.

Read more from Bloomberg here.

Note the far more optimistic tone shown in the ECB’s public monthly report below. This could be yet another example of how central banks need to be more transparent. While telling the hard truth can destroy market confidence in the near-term, it’s far better than prolonging problems.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Ukrainian Black Lung Deaths Doubling Every Two Weeks Throughout Europe
• What Do J.P. Morgan And Will Smith Have In Common?
• Thanks To The Financial Crisis, Bill Gross Will Be The Biggest Manager Ever

Most concept cars that we usually see are weird. More so, if they claim to save the earth from going under. Here are 10 concept cars that will take your breath away not just by their green appeal, but by their sheer weirdness too.

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AOL is on the verge of a long-awaited spin-off from Time Warner and will officially begin trading as an independent company on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) later today. Shares have already begun trading, but AOL will officially be on its own in a few hours as the market opens. It’s been a crazy decade for the company which was its worth drop massively, but it’s now looking at the future and growth as content company with its eyes set on every niche market possible.

It marks the end of one the most tumultuous mergers in corporate history. It began almost ten years ago, at the height of the dot come bubble when AOL was riding high on its dial-up business and online proprieties. It was the biggest thing on the Internet at that moment and old media, Time Warner, wanted a piece of the seemingly never-ending pie. AOL was valued at $165 billion at that time, more than Google today, making the merger one of the biggest in history as well and the combined value of the newly formed AOL Time Warner giant was at $240 billion.

It didn’t take long for frictions to begin between the execs at the two companies and coupled with the burst of the ‘bubble’ a very short while after that, it soon became apparent that it would be one of the biggest disasters in the history of mergers as well. Today the two c… (read more)

Once upon a time, we all sent paper invites through the mail when we wanted to invite friends and family to a party. Remember that?! These days, there are so many more options for getting the word out. We’re curious – how do you invite people to parties?

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Material manufacturer recommends VARIMAT V for huge industrial roof in Vietnam

Vietnam is an up-and-coming country. Above all, the
comparatively low wages are among the important
attractions for foreign companies. 60 % of the population
is under 30, which means the potential labour
force is correspondingly large. Moreover, this “Asian
Tiger” also offers investors a very good tax environment.
The domestic market itself is also becoming
increasingly lucrative. All these are valid reasons that
make Vietnam appealing as a production location.

Gigantic flat roof
It will therefore come as no surprise that Intel singled out
Ho Chi Minh City as a location for an enormous production
plant. The world’s largest manufacturer of semiconductors
has been expanding its production facilities massively
here for around 300 million US$. Welding machines
made by Leister were used in the construction of one of
the buildings. The gigantic flat roof measures 40’000 m2.

Brady Environmental saves time, money and the environment with Leister heaters.

From a spill dating back to the 1970s, Togiak Fisheries was faced with 70,000 tons of diesel- and gasoline-contaminated soil on the shores of Togiak Bay, Alaska.

The remote fish-processing facility wanted to sell, but the plant was stuck with the price tag of $12 million to clean up the contaminated site. The cost was overwhelming, yet so were the challenges that go into cleaning a 5-acre site this remote. Without any roadways, all supplies and equipment would have to be shipped in by barge or plane.
Brady Environmental was able to complete the project for $4 million, dramatically lower than the $12 million market rate, due to its patented system using Leister hot-air tools.

The webpage Visualizing Prime Numbers [primalchaos.yolasite.com] does exactly that. It contains a number of consecutive visualization experiments titled “Maps of Factors”. Each “map” reveals the factors for each number, so that when only 2 circles intersect the horizontal axis at their right quadrants, a prime number is revealed (highlighted by green vertical lines in the graphs). Since factors in general are geometrically chaotic in nature, prime numbers are also geometrically chaotic in nature, as the resulting image seem dependent from initial conditions (much like “atoms in Quantum Mechanics”).

If I understand this correctly, in an interesting twist, the author attempts to find large prime numbers in a more efficient way through analyzing and predicting the resulting visualizations, instead of working the other way around, that is to visually represent prime numbers which were derived purely algorithmically.

See also:
– The Visualization of Randomness
– Data Signals (also of prime numbers)
– Symmetrical Mathematics
– Ulam Prime Numbers Spiral
– Prime Number Spiral

Eco Factor: Zero-emission car powered entirely by onboard batteries.

Siemens has presented the eRuf Stormsters for the Climate Change Conference currently underway in Copenhagen. The zero-emission all-electric vehicle is built by eRuf on a Porsche Cayenne chassis. The vehicle is taking the opportunity to prove to the world leaders that the current state of the industry lays on practical EVs.

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Microsoft is pouring huge amounts of money into online search and it finally looked like it was paying off after it launched Bing last summer as the search engine was slowly picking up momentum though it was still far behind Google and even Yahoo. The latest numbers from Hitwise though show, once again, that there’s no stopping Google, the search engine grew in market share in the US by 1 percent from October to November, not a whole lot but more than Bing has managed in several months. What’s more, Microsoft’s search engine actually took a small dive in market share in the previous month.

By the numbers, Google got 71.57 percent of the market, a 1 percent rise from the 70.6 percent it saw in October. Yahoo dropped 5 percent from 16.14 percent to just 15.39 percent while Bing saw a smaller drop of 2 percent from 9.57 percent to 9.34 percent. The only other ‘major’ search engine to see a rise in November, besides Google, is Ask.com which grew from 2.62 percent to 2.65 percent, a 1 percent rise.

Search market share varies quite a lot depending on the source of the data, but the overall trend is visible. While Bing has been seeing some growth since launch Google isn’t budging, if anything, it’s also growing mostly at the expense of Yahoo. For a while, it also looked like Google was being outmaneuvered by Bing w… (read more)

Eco Factor: House designed to be powered entirely by solar energy.

Students from the University of Nottingham have designed the UK’s first zero carbon mass market home that can be powered entirely by solar energy. Dubbed the HOUSE (Home Optimizing the Use of Solar Energy), it is a full-scale zero carbon starter home that requires no form of active heating.

(more…)

We were just talking about how current child porn laws that make you a criminal based on incidental possession alone can be quite problematic. Reader Jesse highlights an example of this. If you happen to have been in Toronto on Monday, and received a copy of Metro Toronto, a popular commuter paper, buried a few pages in was a “featured picture” of some kids celebrating at an annual parade by jumping around in a hot tub. The only problem? The male in the photo appears to be, well… having a wardrobe malfunction. Not unexpectedly, a bunch of sites were having some fun with this… until some realized that these were high school students. At that point, even Gawker — who will post almost anything — removed the photo realizing that under current laws, it was likely child pornography. Jesse points out that this would appear to make a bunch of people at the Metro, all the recipients of the paper on Monday, many people who visited blogs like Torontoist and Gawker while they had those photos displayed… potentially at risk for possessing child porn (and in the case of Metro employees and these blogs, for distributing it as well) — making them all potential felons who could be required to sign up to be on sex offender lists for the rest of their lives. Isn’t something wrong with the law when that happens?

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In our poll yesterday, Kevin was the clear favorite, but the general consensus was that it was really anyone’s game. In case you haven’t seen the show, and have managed to avoid learning the winner, we’ll hold our tongue until after the jump. But we suggest you back slowly away from the internet and go watch the episode immediately.

Note: We reveal the winner and losers below.

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Technological Advance for Printing Giant thanks to Leister

Visitors to Beijing often report to be deeply impressed
by the rapid growth and the prosperity of Beijing. More
and more companies have become aware of the enormous
potential of this economic hotspot. Due to their
efforts to maximize advertising impact for their businesses
or one of their brands, billboard advertising has
become one of the most important marketing instruments
in China. The advantage of billboards is that
they, at relatively little expense, attract the attention of
a large target audience. Whether it be on large citysquares,
alongside business avenues or the highway to
suburbia, or wrapped around new buildings: Wherever
you turn the eye, you will see billboards, telling the
passersby: “Yes – we are here!” RIKON, a big name in
Beijing’s billboard industry these days, has become
aware of the increasing demand on the billboard market
a few years ago. Over the last few years, this company
has become market leader.

Precisely targeted hot air

The new filling plant of the established Swiss drinks
producer «Elmer Citro» achieves a capacity of up to
20000 bottles per hour. Prior to labeling the bottles,
which have been filled and sealed, they have to be
dried. A drying system developed especially for this
purpose blows the water away in uniform coalescent
drops. Leister Process Technologies, the supplier of
the drying system, is the worldwide leader in industrial
hot air technology.

Natural gas prices are so depressed these days, that they are very likely to rise at some point.

But according to Citi, it might be awhile. A large, sustained price move for natural gas may not come until 2011. The pain trade will continue for gas investors in vehicles like United States Natural Gas (UNG).

(Via Citi Investment Research, Oil & Services Equipment: 2010 Outlook, Robin Shoemaker, 9 December 2009)

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Four Reasons Natural Gas Could Explode (UNG, XOM)
• Exxon: The Natural Gas Mega-Trend Starts Today (XOM, UNG)
• Gazprom: Shale Is A Joke, And It Can't Possibly Compete With Gas

Real Time Is *Not* Fast Enough: Three Strategies For Companies To Get Ahead

View more presentations from Jeremiah Owyang.

I’m about to present at LeWeb, Europe’s largest internet conference with this year’s focus on “Real Time”.  With information moving even quicker, there’s a new strategy needed for companies to adopt.  Since the accompanying slides are best used with narration, here’s the gist of my presentation:

Real time data is exploding at a rapid pace with the influx of status features and mobile devices.  This brings new opportunities for people to get information when they need it and opportunities and the companies that want to provide contextual information.  Yet, despite the opportunities, most companies are unable to keep up with the “Slow time” web as it is.  In fact, those that can’t keep up risk missing opportunities, or worse –heading off detractors before they become mainstream.  To best leverage real time data, companies must adopt three strategies:  1) Start listening now, and quickly offer social personalization features, 2) Develop an unpaid army of advocates who can respond when you’re not there, and 3) Start to invest in systems –like social CRM– that can support their overall strategy.

Looking forward to sharing more on this topic as it develops during 2010, I’ve written more about this topic and the intention web.

Also, thanks to Carmen of Rexi Media, who is a great coach on presenting, her resources for presenters, such as the iPhone app are helpful for any speaker.  Update: Here’s a video of my presentation.