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It is a shame that HTC doesn’t have a larger place in the smartphone market. For years it has crafted high-quality devices, and for a while it seemed that the focus on quality would win over the market. The Google Nexus One, for example, was far and away the best smartphone of its time. But recently HTC has hit a roadblock, and its name is Samsung.

With powerful marketing campaigns to go along with their powerful smartphones, Samsung has come to dominate the Android smartphone space. It’s not just with their flagship Galaxy S phones, though those have gone a long way in aiding their dominance. It’s a selection of phones that covers the smartphone market from top to bottom, edge to edge. HTC just can’t match that.

Where HTC can match Samsung is at the top of the market. While the Galaxy S III has captured much of the high-end market, we know that consumers will change their minds if something better comes along. The Galaxy S IV will likely fortify Samsung’s market dominance, but there will still be room at the top — especially for those who don’t enjoy Samsung’s TouchWiz UI or the feel of its phones.

In terms of phone feel, HTC has always had the upper hand. It continues along that high-quality path with the HTC One, which features an aluminum body. That makes it instantly more durable than the S3, and durability is one of the major concerns with that device. The 4.7-inch display nearly measure to the S3′s 4.8 inches, so there is little or nothing lost there.

I could sit here and extol the virtues of the HTC One’s specs — including its quad-core 1.7GHz processor (vroom) — but we all know that the specs do not make the phone. The user experience is what makes the phone. The New Sense UI could make a difference. It uses tiles instead of app icons, which has been pretty popular lately. You can also easily flip to the default icons screen with one swipe. The New Sense UI, at a glance, is a huge step up from previous Sense, which turned off many users. It’s just another example of a manufacturer taking advantage of Android’s openness. It’s not a new OS, but it sure feels like one.

Will the HTC One be enough to save a company that has been decimated by Samsung’s increasing popularity? It’s hard to see the answer being yes at this point. The market is simply enamored with Samsung. But there has to be room for other players, right? If that rings true, HTC is definitely the one. Their phones are far better than anything LG and Motorola put out. It might not make them a dominant player, but there will be many Android users thrilled with what the HTC One brings to the table.

Check out more at HTC’s website.

The post HTC Makes Its Stand Against Samsung appeared first on MobileMoo.

Microsoft announced last month that it had sold 60 million Windows 8 licenses. It’s pretty obvious that most of those sale went to OEMs who will be putting the software onto computers going out to market. That’s good news for Microsoft as OS market penetration is largely driven by hardware sales, not software upgrades. Unfortunately, new PC buyers may be sticking to Windows 7 according to a new report.

PC Pro reports that Windows 7 is still the most popular operating system on PCs sold in the UK. The publication was contacted by several PC system building companies who said consumers are requesting Windows 7 on their machines instead of Windows 8. In fact, one company said that 93 percent of its machines are shipped with Windows 7.

What may be even worse for Microsoft is that customers who buy systems with Windows 8 are returning the PCs and requesting they be changed back to Windows 7. One particular PC vendor – Computer Planet – said that it’s now offering Windows 7 as the default OS again after Windows 8 failed to catch on.

So, what’s the major beef people are having with Microsoft’s new OS? It seems that driver issues and the newness of the Metro UI are turning people off. A common complaint seems to be that people can’t figure out how to get around in the new OS. That being said, those same customers like the general look of Windows 8′s desktop mode, but wish it was in a Windows 7 environment.

Despite all this, the OEMs say that PC sales haven’t been hurt by the general negativity directed towards Windows 8. They feel that most of the complaints are due to the initial shock at the newness of Windows 8, and that most consumers get used to it relatively quickly. The only thing they would suggest is that Microsoft include a guide or tutorial that took consumers through the more intricate features of Windows 8.

That last suggestion has been echoed by major players in the PC manufacturing business. Samsung, in its decision to not release its Windows RT tablet in the U.S., said that Microsoft needs to do a better job of explaining Windows 8 to consumers. The company has been too busy lately focusing on crazy office parties and pinata slaughter instead of showing consumers how the new OS works.

Microsoft needs to slow down, and actually show people how Windows 8 works. Show consumers still on Windows XP or Vista how Windows 8 can improve their computing experience. The rumored relaunch of WIndows 8 and the future launch of Windows Blue may give Microsoft the opportunity to do just that.

Here’s Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield giving us a tour of his space kitchen and showing off his zero-gravity culinary prowess.

When you’re done with this, make sure you catch his recent reddit AMA. It’s out of this world! (I’ll show myself out).

The White House Photo Office just released a set of behind the scenes photos from January 2013. Images include scenes from the Inaugural swearing-in and festivities, meetings around the White House and more. 

Check out the gallery below, and see all the images on Flickr.

Wannabe developers on Codecademy are getting even more opportunities to build virtual tools. Last month, the New York-based learn-to-code startup launched a new track of lessons on using APIs (application programming interfaces) with partners like YouTube, NPR, SoundCloud and others.  On Tuesday, Codecademy said that it had added another set of lessons through partnerships with 14 companies, including Twitter, Gilt Groupe and Box.

With the new lessons, a student could access historical tweets or tweet from her website with Twitter’s API; explore her heritage and health risk with 23andme; or build apps for scouring the latest designs on Gilt. The full list of new partners includes WePay, Twitter, Box, Evernote, Microsoft Skydrive, 23andMe, Mashape, Gilt Groupe, Ordr.in, Firebase, Easypost, Github, Mandrill (mailchimp), and Dwolla.

“We really wanted to have a diverse set of partners that were real consumer brands – brands that people use in their everyday lives – so that we could show them that programming isn’t just abstract,” said Zach Sims, Codecademy’s co-founder and CEO.

For students on Codecademy — whether they’re first-time programmers or more experienced developers — the lessons provide ways to create tools they can actually use and are connected to media sites, productivity apps and other consumer sites they frequent. As we’ve said before, that project-based approach is wise given all the options for learning how to code online (although others also focus lessons around specific projects). For the partners, it’s a way to get more exposure among a big and growing group of developers. The lessons are provided by the partners and Codecademy has said there is no financial relationship between the companies at this point.

Codecademy declined to share specifics but said “many thousands” of users have taken its API classes to date.

Image by spaxiax via Shutterstock. 

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When 26-year old Robert Saylor went to the movies last month to see “Zero Dark Thirty”, he liked it so much he wanted to stay in the theater for another showing. Saylor, who was living with Down syndrome, garnered the attention of theater managers, who called police when he wouldn’t leave without buying another ticket. The responding officers forcibly removed him from the theater and, in the process, Saylor was forced to the ground and handcuffed. Officers say he suffered a “medical emergency” which required them to remove the cuffs and seek help. He was pronounced dead shortly after.

It is believed that Saylor succumbed to “positional asphyxia”, which can be caused during an arrest if a suspect is forced to the ground and, in a panicked state, struggle and can’t catch their breath. However, sheriff’s office spokesperson Cpl. Jennifer Bailey said in a statement that it’s important for them to gather all the details about the cause of death before moving on with the case. For now, the officers involved are still actively working, but they may be put on administrative leave.

“He just loved unconditionally everybody,” Patti Saylor, Robert’s mother, said. “He has never had anyone put their hands on him in his life. He would not have been doing anything threatening to anybody.”

Saylor said her son had no pre-existing medical conditions that would have contributed to his death.

It’s the eve of Sony‘s big PlayStation 4 announcement, and rumors are beginning to give way to leaks.

The news broke today that multiple internet domains for the phrase “PlayStation Cloud” have been registered. The domains PlayStation-Cloud.com and PlayStation-Cloud.org, as well as PlayStation-Cloud and PS-Cloud on many different domains. The domains were all registered last Friday, February 15.

What makes this news relevant is that the contact info for the domains refers to Gaikai, the streaming gaming company that Sony acquired in 2012. The Gaikai connection and the PlayStation Cloud name confirms that the websites will point to a Sony product or service at some point. Whatever it is, PlayStation Cloud is coming soon.

With the PlayStation 4 announcement just one day away, the registration of these new domains suggests that an announcement involving PlayStation Cloud could be coming during that presentation.

The word “Cloud” is vague in terms of what service could be offered, since many PC digital right management (DRM) schemes and the PlayStation Network itself already feature “cloud saves” that sync player stats and data across platforms. The connection to Gaikai, however, lends credence to reports yesterday that stated Sony’s new console will be backwards-compatible with PlayStation 3 games via Gaikai streaming technology.

Needless to say, a PlayStation 4 that comes with on-demand access for PlayStation 3 (and other console) games would be easier for Sony to market than the normal route of touting a small lineup of (often lackluster) launch titles.

(via the NeoGAF forums)

Demand Media announced today that its board of directors has authorized a plan for the company to explore separating into two separate public companies – one for its media business and one for its domain business.

CEO Richard Rosenblatt said, “Both businesses have grown to become leaders in their respective markets, and we now want to provide additional operational and strategic flexibility to drive sustainable growth. We believe a separation will position each business to better pursue its specific strategic priorities and vision, as well as improve transparency for investors and enable the capital markets to better assess each company’s value, performance and potential.”

“We intend to appropriately capitalize both companies to pursue their distinct growth opportunities, such as the upcoming launch of new generic Top Level Domains that is a transformative event for our domain services business, as well as further diversifying our content offerings in our media business,” he added.

Demand Media expects a potential transaction to come within the next nine to twelve months. In the meantime, the company will work with outside advisers to develop plans for the the board’s further consideration and approval.

The company also just released its Q4 and Fiscal 2012 financial results.

On the earnings call, Rosenblatt said the company intends to increase its investment in its people, its content production, and its gTLD initiative. On the content side of things, it will evolve its content production arm (Demand Studio), and expects to double its investment in content this year, further develop its algorithm, add additional quality improvements (like those that helped it achieve recovery from the Panda update), and expand production capabilities.

The company will also increase distribution by expanding its partner network, which doubled revenues in 2012. Rosenblatt says he expects its revenues to double again this year.

They’re also planning on launching eHow in two more countries this year (after launching in Germany in Q4).

Rosenblatt says they’ll diversify into new content models, and will expand beyond their core ad-driven model with new paid opportunities including subscription video and elearning content.

On the gTLD front, he noted that Amazon and Google were the biggest players, and that their participation will lead to a bigger market for everyone.

Demand Media ranked as a top 20 US web property throughout last year, and was ranked at number 13 in January, according to comScore. The company reached over 125 million unique visitors worldwide in January, and eHow (which was once famously hit by Google’s Panda update) was ranked number 12 in the U.S. with 62 million unique visitors in January.

“We finished the year on a high note, posting record fourth quarter results and completing our fifth consecutive year of record revenue and Adjusted EBITDA,” said Rosenblatt. “We improved content quality and diversified our distribution channels by successfully revamping our content platform in 2012, and are now prepared to significantly increase our content investments in 2013. In addition, we became a leader in the generic Top Level Domain opportunity, due to substantial investments we made in 2012. We plan to increase this investment ahead of the expected launch later this year.”

“As a result of these two different growth opportunities, we also announced today that our Board of Directors has authorized a plan to explore the separation of our business into two independent publicly-traded companies via a tax-free spin-off,” he added. “If approved, the separation will facilitate better operational and strategic flexibility, enabling each business to focus on its distinct priorities and growth opportunities.”

Here’s the earnings release in its entirety:

SANTA MONICA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Feb. 19, 2013– Demand Media, Inc. (NYSE: DMD), a leading digital media and domain services company, today reported financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2012.

Source: Demand Media, Inc.

Vine is looking for a few good men or women to join its new office in Union Square. And one of those men or women will be heading Vine’s plunge into the Android operating system.

Vine co-founder Colin Kroll tweeted out the news on Tuesday.

One of those positions is “Lead Android Engineer.” Inside the job description for the Lead Android Engineer position, the top responsibility is to “lead development of the first version of Vine for Android.” So there you go.

Vine is also currently looking for a Dev-ops Engineer, Lead iOS Engineer, Product Designer, Software Engineer, and Software Engineer (Front-End).

Vine is expanding our 3 person engineering team in NYC. Join us:vine.co/jobs

— colin kroll (@ckb) February 19, 2013

Twitter’s Vine first launched back in January, on iOS only. Vine lets you take six-second videos and share them across other social networks. It received quite a bit of attention when it first launched, thanks to the fact that people will be people. You give them video capabilities, they’ll give you porn.

But Vine’s “porn problem” wasn’t really that much of a problem – except that the app made it too easy to find (remember, nudity isn’t banned on Vine).

To remedy that, Vine started blocking porn-related searches and slapped a 17+ mature rating on it in the App Store, likely to please the porn-nazis at Apple.

With the porn problem behind them, expanding into the Android platform will do nothing but improve Vine’s visibility across social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. We already knew that Vine would eventually make an Android version of their app, but this job posting confirms that they’re looking to do it. Now.

[h/t TechCrunch]

I love to cook, but half the battle of preparing meals is knowing what to make. That’s when I turn to an app called Gojee. It’s not your standard cookbook app or a recipe search: it’s an app that tells you what to make based on what’s in your refrigerator and pantry. And the best part is it’s got a great mix of basic food preparations, along with some unusual recipes.

All Gojee needs to know is what staples or ingredients you have on hand, what meal or category of food you’d like to cook, and anything you absolutely won’t or can’t eat. Once this information is plugged in, Gojee produces not just recipes, but beautiful photos of food for users to swipe through and get inspired for an upcoming meal.

After being recommended to me by one of my colleagues, Gojee has been my go-to cooking app for several months. These days, I end up preparing at least two meals per week with this app and have rarely made the same thing twice, thanks to the sheer variety of food blogs it pulls recipes from. I think it could be a good fit for anyone, no matter their skill in the kitchen.

Here’s a quick tour of Gojee’s food recommendation app.

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Butler Business Accelerator has released findings from a new study of mobile search engines and question and answer platforms. The study says ChaCha answered questions better than ten other mobile search engines and Q&A platforms including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Siri, Ask.com, Answers.com, and Quora.

“ChaCha delivered the highest quality responses consistently across the largest group of categories and question types,” said Trent Ritzenthaler, operating director of the Butler Business Accelerator.

Here’s a look at the rankings of the Butler University Q&A Intelligence Index, which measured the likelihood that “a user could expect to receive a correct answer in a timely manner to any random query using natural language.”

Here’s what the study had to say about Google:

Google’s response rate was 100%, but the first non-sponsored result on the search results page (which often times was not fully visible as an organic search result on the presented page on a mobile device) only presented an accurate answer about 50% of the time, according to the Butler University Q&A Intelligence Index. On a mobile phone, when accounting for the clutter of ads and the likelihood of extra clicks to achieve the answer, allowing for the answer to be within the first non-sponsored search result might be considered generous. Again, this study differs from the results found in the Piper Jaffray study, but differences are likely due to variations in methodology. For example Piper Jaffray found that Google scores highest in terms of navigation and information (Elmer-DeWitt, 2012).

…

In terms of handling structured data more effectively, Google is promoting direct answers using its new Knowledge Graph and Google Now technology, “which tap into the collective intelligence of the web and understand the world a bit more like people do,” (Google, 2012). The limits of Google’s algorithmic technologies are evident in the empirical results of this study and users’ actual experiences. Other Q&A platforms in this study are also incorporating similar algorithmic solutions.

Okay, the study was sponsored by ChaCha, but Search Engine Land says CEO Scott Jones told them the company had no involvement in the methodology, “nor did it seek to influence the outcome in any way.” So, take that how you will.

We did talk to Jones recently, and he was without a doubt, incredibly confident in ChaCha’s abilities. The company is on the verge of launching a new and vastly improved mobile experience (at least, according to Jones). More on its upcoming app here. Jones did admit that the current ChaCha desktop web experience is “crappy.”

Either way, ChaCha is really geared towards answering different kinds of questions than most of the other services on this list. Even Google thinks ChaCha has the best answers to some questions, despite hitting it with the Panda update:

I should note that this was totally an organic find. ChaCha did not point it out to us (and frankly, the answer ChaCha provides doesn’t really even answer the question).

You can find the study here.

Medical Solutions has acquired OA Nurse Travel from On Assignment. Financial terms weren’t announced. OA Nurse Travel, of Cincinnati, provides traveling nurses. Omaha-based Medical Solutions is owned by Tenex Capital Management and McCarthy Capital.

PRESS RELEASE
Medical Solutions, a leading national healthcare staffing company headquartered in Omaha, Neb., today announced the acquisition of OA Nurse Travel from On Assignment, Inc. (NYSE:ASGN). With the finalization of this deal, the company will employ over 1,000 traveling nurses and become the third-largest travel nurse staffing company, according to Staffing Industry Analysts 2012 findings.

This acquisition will enable the company to offer significantly more assignment locations across the country for traveling nurses. Additionally, it provides a much larger base of highly skilled and qualified nurses to fill the needs of its hospital clients more quickly and efficiently. Medical Solutions will maintain its corporate headquarters in Omaha, Neb. and add offices strategically located in San Diego, Calif.; Tupelo, Miss.; and Cincinnati, Ohio.

“We are very excited about the acquisition of OA Nurse Travel. This will expand the industry-leading customer experience that Medical Solutions provides to all travelers and hospitals,” stated Scott Anderson, CEO of Medical Solutions. “The addition of OA Nurse Travel will create the third-largest travel nurse company—one that is solely focused on meeting and exceeding the needs of healthcare professionals and our partner healthcare facilities.”

“Medical Solutions will continue to offer the same level of customer support we have become known for, and will maintain one of the largest recruiter and support staffs in the industry,” said Christy Johnston, chief people officer at Medical Solutions. “The internal company cultures of both groups are very similar and focused on providing an outstanding customer experience. The acquisition provides additional opportunities to further develop the combined, dedicated staff, which has been the primary driver to Medical Solutions being one of the fastest-growing and best places to work in the industry.”

Steven Francis, co-founder and former longtime Chairman and CEO of AMN Healthcare Services, Inc. (NYSE:AHS), and current chairman of the board for Medical Solutions stated, “Medical Solutions is a premier Travel Nurse company which is solely focused on providing the highest quality nurses to its Healthcare partners. Medical Solutions has an exceptional caliber of team members, medical professionals, superior technology and a passion to serve the Travel Nurse industry.”

Mr. Francis went on to say, “The positive, team-oriented culture at Medical Solutions is one that is built on mutual trust and respect. These two elements are fueling our rapid growth as we continue to pursue companies and professionals who share our passion for excellence. In my nearly thirty years of experience in this industry, I have never witnessed such a strong culture that is dedicated to providing such a positive work environment for the corporate staff as well as serving its healthcare professionals and facilities. The two combined companies will bring unique and exciting opportunities to the Travel Nursing marketplace, and I am excited to be a part of it. We welcome OA Nurse Travel internal staff and its nurses to our growing family.”

About Medical Solutions
Medical Solutions L.L.C. was one of the first Travel Nurse and Allied Healthcare staffing companies to be certified by the Joint Commission and has been continuously certified since 2004. Its focus is on meeting the urgent and short-term staffing needs of its clients with highly skilled Allied Health professionals, Nurses and Technologists. Medical Solutions was named one of the top three staffing firms to work for in Staffing Industry Analyst’s 2012 Best Staffing Firms to Work For, and was also named to the 2012 Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies. A nationwide network of travelers allows Medical Solutions to help its client hospitals continue to provide excellent patient care amidst a Nursing and Allied Health shortage. Medical Solutions has contracts with nearly 1,200 client hospitals nationwide and is one of the fastest-growing companies in the Travel Nursing and Allied Health industry. Visit www.MedicalSolutions.com to learn more.

Medical Solution’s private equity Partners:
Tenex Capital Management – www.tenexcm.com
McCarthy Capital Fund V – www.mccarthycapital.com

The post Medical Solutions buys OA Nurse Travel appeared first on peHUB.

When I’m driving in the rain on a dreary day, I like to listen some sultry and slightly dissonant jazz – maybe some Charles Mingus or even some Ornette Coleman – but when the sun’s out and there’s a large expanse of highway in front of me, I want to listen to something far more upbeat and bright. Wouldn’t it be great if my car stereo knew that and could select songs accordingly? Well, maybe one day it will.

The folks over at Gracenote have hacked the Ford Focus to get it to play different kinds of music depending on the car’s current driving state. By tapping into the car’s Control Area Network (CAN) — the in-vehicle system that handles communications between the car’s different controls and interfaces — Gracenote was able to get trigger different songs by turning on the windshield wipers or accelerating over 50 mph.

Here’s a video Gracenote shot demonstrating the feat at Music Hack Day in San Francisco last weekend:

Admittedly, programming a media player to cue up specific tracks whenever you perform a specific action is hardly a mood-sensing stereo. What Gracenote has done here is more of a proof-of-concept for Ford’s new OpenXC developer’s program. Using Ford’s OpenXC specs it built a CAN translator that opens up the vehicle performance and control data that would normally be locked within the car’s computer, making it accessible to the infotainment system. That’s never really been done before except in a case where a developer has worked in direct collaboration with an automaker.

Where Gracenote takes this technology next will be very interesting. Imagine if you could plug this info into Pandora’s music recommendations algorithm. Pandora already knows that when you’re in the mood to listen to the Rolling Stones, you’re also in the mood to listen to Alabama Shakes and other bluesy rock ‘n’ roll. Once Pandora learns you like to listen to the Rolling Stones when on the open highway with the top down, it effectively starts learning your driving moods.

When you hit traffic, your intelligent radio knows by your braking and acceleration patterns to shift to more a mellow station. If you’re heading downtown on Saturday night maybe some dance music at high volume is in order. And when the first sign of raindrops appear, your radio – well, my radio at least – would immediately start playing soulful hard bop.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Maridav

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What’s popular in consumer technology? If you look at most wanted lists from last Christmas, it seems that tablets and smartphones were all the rage. As it turns out, however, it seems that the most wanted gadgets of our time move in a kind of cycle where one particular product dominates a few years to only concede to something else down the road.

The cyclical nature of popular tech has been documented in a new infographic from Insurace2go. The information may be popular tech from the UK, but I think you’ll find that it’s largely analogous to popular tech in the U.S. As you’ll see, game consoles and phones have dominated popular tech for the past 30 years with both going in and out of vogue until something new comes out.

The past few years have been dominated by mobile devices like the iPad and the Galaxy Note, so does that mean that game consoles are going to move back in on their turf? Probably not, unless the next PlayStation or Xbox really wow consumers. I’m with Insuracen2go on this one – the next popular technology will involve wearable computing.

Economist Keith Chen starts today’s talk with an observation: to say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.

Keith Chen: Could your language affect your ability to save money?

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

1. Navigation and Pormpuraawans
   In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.
   .
2. Blame and English Speakers
   In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.
   .
3. Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
   Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.
   .
4. Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
   In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

Joe Knight, coauthor of Financial Intelligence, explains the financial statement—and why managers should get involved in finance.

It’s always nice to check back in on some of our favorite Facebook-using criminals. This time, we have an update for now-38-year-old Jason Valdez from Ogden, Utah.

Back in June, 2011, Valdez holed up in a motel room for 16 hours in a standoff with police. Inside the room with him was a single hostage, Veronica Jensen. You can see a picture that he snapped of the two inside the motel room above.

During the course of the standoff, Valdez made a series of Facebook posts giving friends and family the live play-by-play of the whole event.

Classic.

Throughout the entire standoff, Valdez claimed that Jensen was not actually a hostage, but with him willingly. Some of his Facebook friends even tried to warn Valdez about police movements, to little avail. Police eventually stormed the room and Valdez shot himself in the chest, which put him in critical condition.

But he survived, and he has now been sentenced.

According to the L.A. Times, Valdez plead guilty to attempted aggravated murder and possession of a dangerous weapon by a restricted person for the June, 2011 standoff. He was sentenced to two concurrent sentences – five years to life for the attempted murder and 1 to 15 years for the weapons charge.

“Well everyone I’m lettin Veronica go here real soon but this is the end,” was Valdez’s final transmission before the standoff ended. At least he’s a man of his word. The hostage left unscathed.

Continue reading…

Super cheap solar panels being churned out of China continue to put pressure on the startups looking to build the next generation of thin-film solar cells. According to two reports (Dana Hull, and Greentech Media) thin-film solar startup Nanosolar has done a round of layoffs, which could be as substantial as 75 percent of its staff.

Oh how times have changed — one of the first stories I did for GigaOM’s cleantech channel was “10 questions for Nanosolar CEO Martin Roschiesen” in the summer of 2007. Back then Roschiesen told me the company was starting pilot production that year and had raised enough money to make it profitable. In 2008, the company was valued at $2 billion.

Fast forward to 2012, and Nanosolar raised $70 million from investors, reportedly at a pre-money valuation of $50 million. Aeris Capital, a fund that manages finances for SAP founder Klaus Tschira, partly funded that round as a way to pick up solar assets on the cheap. Other investors in that round included OnPoint Technologies, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Ohana Holdings, and Family Offices. Nanosolar has taken in at least $450 million since its start in 2002.

Nanosolar makes thin solar panels out of a material called copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS). At one time in Silicon Valley, CIGS was the great white hope — Solyndra, Heliovolt, Miasole, and others raised hundreds of millions of dollars to build the next-generation of solar tech. But the price of silicon-based solar dropped dramatically and made the economics of selling more expensive CIGS panels much more difficult. Some of these companies have gone bankrupt, done major layoffs, retrenched or been sold off in fire sales.

Solar Frontier, part of Japan’s Showa Shell, is one of the only companies to reach scale with its CIGS solar panels. The company completed a 900 MW factory in late 2010 and brought all of its production lines into commercial production mode by the summer of 2011.

Nanosolar could end up being acquired for cheap from international investors. South Korean and Chinese power conglomerates have particuarly shown interest in investing in and buying discounted U.S. clean power assets. Or there’s always the Solyndra route — a very public, abrupt bankruptcy.

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