By Geoffrey Rogow Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES NEW YORK (Dow Jones)–U.S. stock futures pointed to a lower opening for equities Tuesday, ahead of reports on home price and consumer confidence, as well as the beginning of a meeting for the Federal Reserve. Technology stocks were particularly weak, led by Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) after […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net

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Love by Cartier, an ad campaign that's not exactly for the emo-teen demographic.

When you consider “bling” on MySpace, you probably think about glitter text on profiles, or maybe Swarovski-studded Sidekicks, not Cartier jewelry. But that hasn’t stopped the legendary luxury brand from launching a promotional …

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By Andria Cheng Last update: 7:46 a.m. EDT June 24, 2008 NEW YORK (MarketWatch)– Chain-store sales for the week ended June 21 rose 2.2% from the year-ago period, according to a survey released Tuesday by the International Council of Shopping Centers and UBS Securities. On a week-over-week basis, sales dropped 0.6% as consumers’ willingness to spend remains […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net

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Multiply, a social network that has done a fine job of flying under the radar since its 2005 launch, has announced a new paid-account program that focuses on media storage. Called a “digital scrapbook,” this premium feature will cost $19.95 annually.

Members who opt in to the “digital scrapbook” …

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Earth Day 2008 is upon us. Shouldn’t we all take into account issues like dwindling natural resources, water pollution, and climate change each day? Is one day really enough? 

Earth Day kicked off in 1970. It was established by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson to “thrust the issue of environmental quality and resources conservation into the political dialogue of the Nation.”

Thirty-eight years later, it has done just that-and more. The day has gone international, and so too have the environmental issues that we all face. 

Getting the issues on the national agenda is one thing. Encouraging and integrating policy from the solutions already at hand is proving to be another. 

Looking forward, what can we achieve in say, five years… by the time Earth Day 2013 rolls around? 

I asked this question of Lena Hansen, senior consultant with RMI’s Energy & Resources Team. She leads the Institute’s work on renewable energy and biofuels, and has additional expertise in demand-side management and carbon strategy for corporations, industry, electric utilities, and governments. 

Her answer was quite profound, and practically talking, more than achievable: 

• By Earth Day 2013, the United Says will have passed meaningful carbon legislation. Whether in the form of a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program, this legislation will renew the U.S.’s reputation as a world leader in environmental responsibility, and will support private sector innovation around efficiency and whole-system design. 

• In conjunction with this carbon legislation, individual says will have begun to adopt energy efficiency and renewable energy policies and programs that are at least as aggressive as those currently on the books in California. 

• Leading utilities will have shifted their forward planning efforts away from coal-fired power and towards an increased reliance on energy efficiency and renewable energy. 

• This transition can be reached through the development of strategies that address the variability of wind and solar power, and the implementation of business models that grant utilities to profit from the sale of ‘negawatts.’ [Negawatts are units of energy saved by using power more efficiently or at a more suitable time, and therefore made available to other applications.] 

• To facilitate this increased reliance on energy efficiency, leading engineering and design schools will have incorporated whole-system design principles into their core curriculums. 

Education, innovation, and policy — all driving toward a world in which we use energy more efficiently, more thoughtfully. 

Is Earth Day still a protest, or a day that’s furthering the calls for action? 

Andrew Demaria is Rocky Mountain Institute’s Director of Content.

For more visit Source:[green.yahoo]

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This afternoon TripSay, a travel site that’s currently in private beta is opening up to a bigger group of testers and launching a few new features. The service will help you figure out places you should go on your vacation based on a calculator that’ll narrow down the results based on your budget, lingual ability, and comfort zone for going off the beaten path. You can also plug in your interests, and add ratings of places you’ve already been.

All of this information is taken and mapped out for you while being combined with what other TripSay members have put in as their favorites. The idea is that you can browse around other people’s experiences and start to plan out your own escape from the working world.

This isn’t a new idea by any means, but TripSay does have some good things going for it. For one there’s simple linking to media publishing services you’re already using like Flickr, YouTube and Blogger. I’ve seen some travel sites come through and attempt to steal away that conversation from popular blogging tools with their own solutions, so it’s worth a kudos for any site that recognizes the mass market will go with what their friends are using.

Also useful is the new groups feature. Groups let members join up and share places that have exceptionally good offerings in a particular interest. For example, the freeskiing group has compiled a list of some hot spots around the world which can be cross referenced with each recommender’s likes and dislikes. That way if you’re a beginner skier, by checking out someone’s recommendations you can make sure their skiing habits don’t tend to require a helicopter.

To expand on that, there’s also an “expert” section. Similar to Yelp’s idea of “Elite” members, TripSay premier users have more gravitas than new users based on their past interactions on the site, either in submissions or discussion.

The service is currently in private beta, but we’ve got 500 invites for Webware readers. To get yours just shoot an e-mail to info@tripsay.com with the subject line “Webware.”

Find places to go based on your travel tastes with TripSay.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Fore more visit Source: [webware]

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SAN FRANCISCO–Here at the Structure conference, everything is cloud, cloud, cloud. No one wants to own their own Web hardware anymore, it seems, and the company representatives talking here are happy to provide the software and virtual services to replace the hardware.

One of those is GoGrid, which is shooting for the same cloud-computing market that Amazon.com is making a run at with its EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud, service and related Web services.

The GoGrid pitch: We’re cheaper. And easier.

GoGrid CEO John Keagy told me that, at volume, his services undercut Amazon’s. He charges 8 cents a gigabyte-hour for calculate services, compared to EC2’s 10 cents. Also, data storage is associated with compute servers, and if a server goes offline, when it comes back, the storage will still be there.

At Structure on Wednesday, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels pitched “persistent storage” as a new offering from Amazon.

Keagy also stated GoGrid has a graphical user interface-based control panel for its customers, allowing them to quickly set up their compute environment in a simpler manner than Amazon’s service grants.

I can’t do a hands-on with these two cloud services, but there are a few other points that I found interesting. First, GoGrid offers virtual Windows services, as well as Linux, and about 50 percent of its installations are for Windows processes. Some popular Web 2.0 services, like CommunityServer, are still Windows-only.

Also, GoGrid has never had a system-wide outage, as Amazon has. Keagy is realistic, though: “We’re in beta. It will happen to us too.” But, he says, with well-designed systems, recovery can be swift.

One thing GoGrid certainly doesn’t have is Amazon’s scale. Even though the company is a division of the well-established ServePath, its single 20,000 square-foot facility can’t hold a generator to Amazon’s large distributed infrastructure. Keagy did state he is building out distribution for GoGrid, using more of ServePath’s locations.

Like the new Mosso cloud-based storage service, GoGrid is accessible through REST (representational say transfer) application programming interfaces.

Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.

Fore more visit Source: [webware]

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With more GPS-enabled handsets on the way–iPhone 3G, I’m looking at you–there are few Web 2.0 niches that are more hyped-up than location-based services.

The latest evidence: Nokia announced Monday that it plans to acquire Plazes, a start-up still in private beta.

Financial terms of the deal, …

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With more GPS-enabled handsets on the way–iPhone 3G, I’m looking at you–there are few Web 2.0 niches that are more hyped-up than location-based services.

The latest evidence: Nokia announced Monday that it plans to acquire Plazes, a start-up still in private beta.

Financial terms of the deal, …

Source [The social]

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