RiskMetrics Group today released its 2010 updates to its benchmark proxy voting guidelines. These global updates are developed as part of an extensive process that includes broad-based outreach to financial market participants. RiskMetrics’ governance analysts will begin applying the updated policies to all companies with shareholder meeting dates on or after February 1, 2010.

The 2010 policy updates address the governance issues stemming from a rapidly evolving regulatory environment and ongoing investor frustration with the global financial crisis. As a result, in the U.S., RiskMetrics’ key policy updates address important topics surrounding board accountability and executive compensation, including poison pills, director independence, long-term pay-for-performance alignment and management say-on-pay.

The entire 2010 global policy updates are accessible through RiskMetrics’ online Policy Gateway. The Gateway also contains helpful FAQs, summaries of outreach efforts, and other informational resources to provide all market participants with a better understanding of how RiskMetrics formulates and applies its updates.

Also, on December 10 at 1 p.m. EST, RiskMetrics will host a webcast to review its 2010 policy updates. To register for the webcast, please visit here.

We’ve just received a full spec list for the very blurry Motorola Motus and it’s pretty interesting. Why, you ask? Besides AT&T 3G support, the specs are pretty similar if not identical to the Motorola CLIQ. Our connect didn’t flat out tell us that the handset would be hitting AT&T, but hey, we can dream right? Here are the full specifications for the Motorola Motus:

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE
• Tri-band 7.2Mbps HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100MHz)
• 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash
• 256MB RAM
• aGPS
• Wi-Fi
• 3.1″ capacitive 480×320 display
• Bluetooth 2.0
• Weight: 133g
• 1400mAh battery
• microSD slot
• Qualcomm MSM 7201A CPU
• MOTOBLUR

Last but not least, we’ve been told the Motus is not a slider but a unique “flip” phone. That’s all we’ve got for now, but we’ll keep you updated as always.

Thanks, Daddy G.!

Filed under: Etc., Celebrities

We’ll admit up front that this news item is minimally car-related, but bear with us. In response to News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch’s repeated threats to bury all of his content behind a pay-for-it-wall, the UK’s Guardian conducted a poll asking readers which online columnists they’d pay for. The not so shocking result: Jeremy Clarkson, number one. Number two is Charlie Brooker, who we’ve heard of. The next eight? Not so much. But here’s the point.

Jeremy Clarkson writes about cars. The other day, we were arguing with a burned out (and nameless) colleague about our mutual chosen profession. Eventually he blurted out, “You’re still working under the delusion that writing a good car review is somehow noble.” Not that Clarkson is particularly noble, but the notion that the writer most people (well, British people…) want to read spends his days scribing about powersliding the tires off half-a-million dollar cars is quite heartening. Almost ennobling, really.

[Source: The Guardian | Image: AFP/Getty]

STUDY: If you’re gonna make us pay for a bloke’s writing, it bloody well better be Clarkson originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A new industry has taken root in Detroit with the opening of the city’s new ‘MedGrow Cannabis College’.

Here students learn how to grow marijuana professionally, debating the ‘finer points of inhaling’ and which plants ‘give the biggest hit’.

And no this isn’t some tiny research lab, it’s clear what this is about — making money and building an industry.

Apparently Michigan issues 1,000 medical marijuana certificates each month, after becoming the 14th state to legalize medical marijuana.

Guardian: Among the first students paying $475 (£285) for six evening classes are people reliant on marijuana for pain relief and those who help them, including a clergyman who runs an Aids clinic.

Then there are young men such as Ryan Hasbany, a 20-year-old business student. He’s still a year too young to get a grower’s licence but he wants to learn the trade. “My father is a family practice doctor and he is issuing medical marijuana cards so I know there are a lot of people getting them. It could turn into a very lucrative business. The street prices are ridiculously high,” he says of medical grade marijuana, which sells at $250 (£150) an ounce in Michigan. “There’s Harvard economists who say this is what we need to bring the economy back.”

Bring on the deflation. Here are some excerpts from the college’s website:

• ‘Join one of the fastest growing, recession proof industries in the state and earn a living while helping patients with serious medical conditions.’
• ‘Med Grow Cannabis College is comitted to the economic revival of Michigan, if you are looking for work, there has never been a better time to learn how to succeed in the medical marijuana industry.’
• ‘Entry level, certified caregivers can earn between $40,000 to $100,000 a year!’

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Detroit’s Famous Pontiac Silverdome Sells For Just $583,000
• Where The Most Jobs Died: Phoenix, Detroit and Las Vegas
• Unemployment In Detroit Is The Nation’s Worst By A Mile

Earlier this week there was a discussion on Slashdot about how to evaluate a data center. The thread features more than 200 comments about items to look for and avoid when selecting a data center, including questions to ask while touring a facility. As always, there’s a variety of views, some more informed than others. But the discussion may provide useful feedback, whether you’re shopping for colo or looking for insight into potential customers.

This is one of the more hotly contended things about the HD2, some claim it’ll last days whilst others get barely get hours…

I’ve only had the HD2 for a little over a day, but as far as I’ve seen so far, battery life is pretty good. I’ve been playing with it a lot with HSDPA (not switched it to GSM at all), some bluetooth file transfers, browsing the interwebs, taking lots of pictures, texting, calling, videos and listening to music for a few hours and generally showing off quite how awesomely fast it is, and it’s survived from 7:30 this morning till now. That’s a little under 7 hours which is pretty good for what I’d call very intensive use.

With things like Chainfires WMLongLife, and not deliberately trying to kill the battery, it could well do significantly longer, possibly up to two days. For my usage it’s fine as is, though you might want a second battery if you really need it to last more than a day!

My first impressions are very very very good! If you can live with the sheer size, it’s definitely the best Windows Phone out there, maybe even the best phone out there.

I apologise for the picture: it was taken with my Diamond as I couldn’t find my camera…

Thanks to Clove and WMPowerUser for supplying the device!

For a non-profit organization, the Mozilla Foundation is doing pretty well financially, better than many for-profit web companies are doing these days. The organization has released some financial details for 2008, saying that revenue has reached $79 million percent in the last year, up five percent from the previous one. It’s not exactly clear why it would release the numbers in November 2009, but what is clear is that revenue growth is slowing down after revenue increased by 12 percent from 2006 to 2007.

“Our revenue and expenses are consistent with 2007, showing steady growth. Mozilla’s consolidated reported revenues (Mozilla Foundation and all subsidiaries) for 2008 were $78.6 million, up approximately 5% from 2007 reported revenues of $75.1 million. The majority of this revenue is generated from the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox from organizations such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and others,” Mozilla Foundation chairwoman Mitchell Baker said in her annual “state of Mozilla” letter.

Firefox has had a good year in 2008, so this isn’t the reason for the slow down, rather the organization has seen some pretty heavy losses at its investment portfolio. The Mozilla Foundation lost about $7.8 million on long-term investments, about 25 percent of the portfolio’s worth. Exclud… (read more)

On the occasion of a joint event organised by the JRC in cooperation with the Malta Council for Science and Technology (MCST), the two organisations signed a Memorandum of Understanding on intensified research cooperation. Areas of such collaboration have been identified on the basis of mutual interest and include environment, biotechnology, information and communication technologies (ICT), energy, food safety and maritime affairs.

Both organisations have also agreed to host Maltese doctoral and post doctoral students in the various JRC Research Institutes. Candidates for grants funded by Malta’s national programmes will be nominated by MCST or the University of Malta, and pre-selected candidates will be approved by the JRC. Maltese candidates to the EU grants will need to follow the common JRC grants procedures or apply for a Marie Curie fellowship.

This week, a reporter from San Francisco public radio station KALW is spending her days in Oakland courtrooms, taking in all of the action (and inaction). She’s reporting for a story funded by individuals through the website Spot.us, on the daily activity in a criminal court — and she’s blogging about what she sees, letting us in on both the process of reporting a story like this and the day-to-day workings of a court that the media usually misses in its 800-word story about a murder conviction.

So far, reporter Rina Palta has seen some high-level cases, more than one might expect from the daily grind of a criminal court. She wrote on Tuesday about watching arguments from both sides of a death penalty sentencing hearing. The proceedings piqued her curiosity about jury selection and she spent the next day watching lawyers interview potential jurors in a case where the state was seeking to label a man a sexually violent predator, making him eligible for lifetime civil commitment.

Together, Spot.us and KALW are exploring a new method of covering our criminal justice system, and there’s great potential here. Criminal justice reform can’t happen until the system’s failures and successes become human stories to which we can connect. Crowd-funded reporting offers a chance to shine a spotlight on the invisible people within the system.

(more…)

Bay Area Internet Solutions has built a new 80,000 square foot data center in Santa Clara, Calif. that features an innovative economizer design. One end of the data center is lined with more than 200 fans to bring fresh air into an exterior “air corridor” that surrounds the data center. The air is then filtered and used in the facility’s cooling system. Bay Area Internet expects to be able to use the air economizers to provide free cooling for 85 percent of the year. This video was produced by Emerson Network Power and features its products, but also provides an inside look at an interesting new facility in the active Silicon Valley market. This video tour runs about 6 minutes 30 seconds.

For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

Filed under: Truck, Recalls, Safety, Chrysler, Jeep, Off-Road

Owners of model year 2007-2008 Jeep Wranglers with automatic transmissions may have to visit their local dealers as Chrysler is recalling 161,450 of the SUVs over potential transmission overheating problems. According to the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA), Wrangler models manufactured between June 2006 and July 2008 with automatic transmissions were not fitted with a transmission fluid temperature warning system. If the AT fluid in the affected vehicles overheats, it may boil over and come in contact with hot engine or exhaust components – possibly leading to a fire.

To help alert drivers that their Jeep’s transmission is overheating, dealers will inspect and install a visual “Hot Oil” message in the instrument cluster accompanied by an audible chime to indicate the elevated fluid temperature. The service will be performed free of charge starting in December. For more information, owners of the affected models may call Chrysler at 1-800-835-1403, NHTSA at 1-888-327-4236, or visit www.safercar.gov. Full press release after the jump.

[Source: NHTSA]

Continue reading Jeep recalling over 161k 2007-2008 Wrangler AT models due to tranny temp. sensor absence

Jeep recalling over 161k 2007-2008 Wrangler AT models due to tranny temp. sensor absence originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve recently updated how we evaluate the nuts and bolts of the forty-one Web CMS vendors we cover in our Web Content Management research. Specifically, we’ve expanded and re-organized our ratings categories. See the sample, right. To be sure, this is a supplement to our assessment of vendors’ "fit" against different business scenarios. When developing a short-list, look to scenarios first, and then these ratings.

At a high level, we keep the same four main categories:

• Technology & Management Services
• Content Production Services (contributor-facing)
• Content Delivery and Interaction Services (visitor facing)
• Vendor Intangibles

 

Then we break down services into subcategories that attempt to match up to particular team members’ concerns. For example, your system administrator might be more interested in performance than templating and integration. It’d be easy to think that all our customers read an entire 10- to 20-page chapter about a particular vendor, but you’ve told us that you wanted better segmentation of topics, especially between businesspeople keen to assess criteria like usability or e-marketing, and IT team members, who may bring different interests.

 

We’ve also added or modified several service descriptions

• Content Reuse gets addressed more directly. All vendors say they can do it; few support it as well as you might like (though you need to be careful what you wish for, since granular content re-use in particular can present serious management challenges).
• UI Accessibility became an official consideration, partly at the request of our public-sector subscribers. This refers to the accessibility of the content management interface itself, as opposed to the generated website. We had always covered this topic, but not as deeply as now, especially since vendors tend not to pay attention to it. You’ll find a lot of check-minus scores there.
• Multi-site Management refers to a spectrum of services you may want to exploit to help you manage multiple properties from the same system instance.
• Friendly Output is also new as a first-class service, although we had covered some of the key issues previously. This segment covers criteria like friendly URLs, standards-based output, and the related issue of website accessibility. Much of the responsibility here will lie with your specific implementation, but it turns out that some Web CMS offerings natively support friendlier output than others.

"Vendor Intangibles" might look like a bit of an appendage, but we actually seem to spend more and more time on this with each update. I’ll never tire of repeating: the vendor (or open source project) "fit" is at least as important as tool fit. Key factors of late include the growing importance of community-based support to help satisfy your broader support needs, as well as the breadth of any consulting partner channel for those Web CMS offerings that are more platform-like.

I hope you find this list useful as you consider your own needs and opportunities. As always, our generic ratings must be weighed against more contextual requirements. For explanations of how we arrive at those ratings, consult the narrative for each vendor evaluation.

Please feel free to share any feedback below.

Brendan writes “Chapters/Indigo, the dominant book retailer in Canada, just recently launched their eBook store, thinly disguised as an independent 3rd party called ShortCovers. Both companies are children of the parent company Indigo Books & Music Inc.

The fact that they have launched an eBook program is not a problem. It’s great, in fact. I’d like to see more action in this space, and anything to help people read more is a step in the right direction. The problem I have is with how they’ve done it.

When announcing the service on Monday, the company trumpeted loudly the offer of “FREE eBook downloads!” in a mass email and on the main Chapters page. Can you guess what all the eBooks offered for free have in common? That’s right, they’re almost all public domain works. They do list the publisher as “Gutenberg” for all the PD books, but do they explain what that means? Do they inform the user that these are public domain works? Do they include a link to Gutenberg.org, where any user can download these books in plain texts to use however they want? No, of course not.

Instead, they wrap the books up in their tight little DRM package. Each page (according to their idea of a page) loads painfully in a flash frame and within the text of the book is non-selectable. And most are not available as downloads (as they are on Gutenberg).

The worst offense? That dangerous little line at the bottom of each page of each book: “(C) All Rights Reserved All copyright ownership rights relating to this content are specifically and expressly reserved by the owner thereof and are marked © by the owner of this content, 2009.” An interesting claim, to be sure. What am I to do with this book, ShortCovers?

“All Rights Reserved. You are free to make one (1) copy of this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you abide by the following:
* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
* Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
* Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author’s moral rights.”

I can make one (1) copy? Wow! I better use it carefully.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen bookstores DRM up and claim copyright over public domain works. The DRM stuff is dumb, but understandable, since they just want to have one system and often seem to choose an anti-consumer one. But telling people that they are only allowed to make one copy of a public domain work and putting a © sign on it is pretty ridiculous.

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Tier1 Research, the analyst firm that tracks the hosting and colocation market, will hold its Datacenter Transformation Summit – Silicon Valley (DTSSV) on December 8 at the Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, Calif.

Tier1 Research’s summit series brings together enterprise IT executives with some of the largest hosting and colocation providers in the market today. The Silicon Valley event will address reducing capital expenditures, meeting the needs of business stakeholders and sharpening the RFP process to ensure that the most value is extracted from IT investments. DTSSV has been structured to provide IT decision-makers with a full range of data center information, including the type of data centers that are best-suited for their business, the build vs. lease decision, the brewing storm around data center regulation and the future of data center architecture.

“In bringing our Datacenter Transformation Summit to the West Coast, we were determined to provide enterprise IT executives with the invaluable resources that they would need to make more informed decisions around their infrastructure management,” said Daniel Golding, Vice President and Research Director of Tier1 Research and Conference Chair. “Given the current economic climate, we cannot stress to enterprise IT executives enough the importance of ensuring that their infrastructure is not only reliable, but that it also has minimal impact on their company.”

Scheduled speakers include:

• Mark Waddington, president of Quality Technology Services
• John Sheputis, CEO of Fortune Data Centers
• Billie Haggarad, VP, Data Centers at CoreSite
• James Kennedy, senior manager of facilities, RagingWire
• Michael Tobin, CEO, Telecity Group 

See the Datacenter Transformation Summit web site for more details.

Skype has had its most tumultuous year yet, but all the problems are finally behind it and the company can focus on growth and revenue as opposed to lawsuits. eBay has announced that it has finalized the sale it first revealed several months ago and that Skype is now a separate private company, although eBay still retains a 30 percent stake in it.

“eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) announced today that it has successfully completed the previously announced sale of its Skype communications unit in a deal valuing the business at $2.75 billion. The buyer, who will control an approximately 70 percent stake, is an investor group led by Silver Lake and includes Joltid Limited and certain affiliated parties, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz,” the company said in a statement.

Almost all of the details of the deal had been known and it is actually very close to the one initially announced except for the change in the investor lineup. Skype was valued at $2.75 billion, well above what anyone estimated a few months back when eBay announced its plans to spin off the VoIP company in an IPO. eBay will get $1.9 billion in cash and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million. It also gets to keep about 30 percent of the company and about $50 million in debt.

The investors… (read more)

The ETF industry has sliced and diced the investment universe in every way possible.

One wonders if there might be more ETFs than stocks one day. (There are already a lot more mutual funds than stocks).

During this entrepreneurial process of industry birth and mutation, some real freaks have been let loose.

Some are just uselessly funny, but others are deceptive, and even losing people a lot of money.

So do your homework.

See The Ten Most Ridiculous ETFs >>>

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Schwab ETFs Are A Day Trader's Dream (SCH)
• We Just Added 25 More ETFs In Two Months
• SocGen: Prepare Yourself For The Worst Case Scenario!

BlackBerry themes have been a prominent topic this week. It started on Wednesday when, as we do every other week, we reviewed three premium BlackBerry themes. Two of these were created using BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0, so yesterday we went over how to create your own BlackBerry theme. I kiddingly urged someone to make me a custom theme, but I think I’ve found something to keep me occupied for a bit. Via BBCool, I found out that Bplay has launched a series of themes for cities around the world. Yeah, I’m totally getting the New York one, pictured below.

(more…)

Filed under: Motorsports, Government/Legal, Earnings/Financials, UK

It’s been one heck of a rollercoaster ride for Donington Park this year. The British racing circuit hosted a Formula One race back in 1993, and was set to take over the British Grand Prix from Silverstone until the race promoter fell on hard times.

Donington Ventures Leisure Ltd signed a 150-year lease with Wheatcroft & Sons Ltd, owners of the circuit just two years ago with the aim of bringing F1 racing back to the track. But having failed to raise the capital necessary to bring the track’s facilities up to F1 standards, Autocar reports that the 17-year deal with Bernie Ecclestone’s Formula One Management fell into jeopardy.

Its prospects and finances in ruins, Donington Ventures has declared bankruptcy and entered administration. Now the lease could be up for grabs; failing that, it will revert to Wheatcroft ownership, the British Grand Prix will likely return to Silverstone for good and Donington will go back to hosting concerts, touring cars and motorbike races once again.

[Source: Autocar | Image: Pascal Rondeau/Allsport/Getty]

British GP track Donington Park declares bankruptcy originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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