The jobless claims are accelerating. unemployment is accelerating. commodities prices improving is due to euro weakness and the notion that the economy is NOT improving, for, if it were improving, commodities would be rising on demand concerns. the markets are hilarious now. they go up because commodities are falling but commodities are falling because the economic […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net
Archive for August 14th, 2008There’s been another victory on the water for ConnectU founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss–even as their court case against Facebook continues to peter out unfavorably. 
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss racing in Beijing. (Credit: Row2k.com) The identical twins, representing the United States in the men’s pair (M2-) event …
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China Life Insurance Jan-Jul Premium Income CNY203 BlnPosted by: admin in Investment NewsChina Life Insurance Jan-Jul Premium Income CNY203 Bln Last Update: 8/13/2008 5:07:00 AM HONG KONG (Dow Jones)–China Life Insurance Co. (LFC), China’s biggest life insurer in terms of premiums, stated Wednesday its premium income in the seven months ended July 31 totaled CNY203 billion. The company didn’t provide a comparison figure, but the amount represents a 54% increase from the CNY131.9 […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net  At the launch of Yahoo’s Fire Eagle on Tuesday, local news aggregator Outside.in launched its latest product, the “hyper-local” service called Radar. Here’s the pitch: you tell it where you are (or have Fire Eagle do so on your behalf), and then it will tell you what’s going on within 1,000 feet of you. Or you could just look out the window. But seriously, this is a good pitch. While I don’t buy the literal 1,000-foot story, since the main drag of my neighborhood is 1,400 feet from my front door and that’s where the local action is, I continue to believe that we could all use a good aggregator for local and neighborhood news. And, obviously, there’s an advertising market for local commerce. 
Radar shows you what's happening around you. The service isn't picking up quite everything; more people need to sign up for Outside.in's Geo Toolkit. In Radar, you can also set up very specific favorite places–like your office’s location, your train station, and your lunch hangout–and get alerts on items from nearby those spots. It’s like Friendfeed for your favorite joints. What makes Radar especially interesting is how it gathers its information. The company parses several popular sources, like forums, Twitter posts, and event information from the standard sites. It does its best to discern which of those items are location-specific, and what locations they map to. It works so far. I gave Radar my address and it showed me relevant content in my San Francisco neighborhood, Noe Valley. It didn’t pick up some sources I would have liked to see, however, like local newspapers (the main Outside.in site is better at that). Outside.in also has a smart service for publishers, the Geo Toolkit. It will take a blog’s RSS feed, scan the text for geographical content, and then insert the geo tags into a new feed of the blog. It uses that feed on Radar, and the company plans to feed the geo data into an advertising system (possibly Google’s; CEO Mark Josephson wouldn’t commit when we talked) and help bloggers serve up local ads. Outside.in will provide widgets for bloggers, such as a map showing the location of their blog topics. It also has geo-analytics: It will tell you what places you blog about most, related places that you might want to cover, and who else also covers your favorite places. I hope a lot of people sign up for the Outside.in Geo Toolkit, and that Outside.in hurries up and builds a mobile version of Radar. I want the app on my iPhone that tells me at a glance exactly what’s happening right where I am, and where I am going, right now. See also:EveryBlock: A neighborhood site done right. AOL’s Platform-A subsidiary is now bringing affiliate marketing to widget ads. If that sounds like a lot of media talk, that’s because it is.  To power widget ads, AOL acquired start-up Goowy in February, and it has already worked the acquisition into Platform-A. As part of Tuesday’s …  Users visiting YouTube’s homepage today will likely see a message asking them to link their YouTube account with their Google account. Automatically detecting that you have a Google account, YouTube says, “It looks like you have a Google account. Would you like to link your YouTube and Google accounts?” When you walk through the process, YouTube promises that you will be able to, “Import your Google contacts into YouTube for messaging or sharing videos,” and that linking your account will make sure that you’re, “…ready as we bring more Google services to YouTube.” It is interesting that Google has waited this long to prompt users to link their YouTube accounts, when Yahoo did it nearly immediately after their acquisition of Flickr. Flickr users did not take to the idea very well, but maybe this delayed push will make the transition smoother for YouTube users.  As Google hints to in the transition message, linking YouTube and Google accounts is part of a bigger push to integrate functionality of other Google services with YouTube. Looking at Google’s master list of services, some likely candidates for integration include Blogger, Google News, and Google Talk. Fellow CNET blogger, Josh Lowensohn, seems to think that Google Finance might get cozy with YouTube. I’m not as convinced. To me, the most exciting integration would be Google Speak. We are already starting to see a chat room scenario with Streams, but I would look for more chat capabilities to spread throughout YouTube, powered by Google Speak, as a result of account linking. Google News integration also has the potential to be extremely interesting. With videos on current events flowing back to Google News, from YouTube, Google has a killer platform in front of them to be a leader in citizen journalism.  YouTube already allows you to load contacts from a Google account to add as friends, so it’s not immediately clear what Google plans to do with the account link, in terms of contacts. Hopefully contacts become a more central focus of YouTube, with a more robust messaging platform, since right now they are sort of hidden in the background. While linking YouTube and Google accounts might seem innocent enough, under the disguise of making it easier to login, it is clear that Google has more massive plans for the new stream of data that this opens up. What Google services would you like to see integrated into YouTube?
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Measuring social networks’ popularity by regionPosted by: admin in Social Media and TechPerformance-monitoring firm Pingdom thinks we should look at social networks differently. 
The popularity of a social site such as MySpace or Twitter is frequently measured in very special users, page views, or user registrations. But a current ministudy by Pingdom chose instead to look at how much of a proportional lock …
The hunt for a new USB thumb-drive is still on for me, so I’ve been keeping a look out for green possibilities. There’s a new very interesting option. Hoshino has released a “world’s first” with its new USB key made from corn. Corn is fermented down into polylactide (PLA) that can be biodegraded safely … but that does have to be done at a specialized facility with heat, which isn’t so earth-friendly. You can’t just toss it in the trash and think no harm done, like we assume is true when things are labeled “biodegradable.” Also, we’ve to point out that when practically everything is starting to have corn in it, do we really want to base something on it? Perhaps using recycled plastic would be a greener way to go. And finally, just in case you wonder about the source of the material, the USB drive is made to look like an ear of corn. Super dorkey. Oh, and it’s not available to the public yet … so my half-hearted hunt is still on for now. Via engadget, EverythingUSB Electronic wedding invitations aren’t exactly Adam Lowe’s cup of tea. As host of the popular Modern Manners Guy podcast, Lowe attempts to marry–pun totally intended–the culture of traditional etiquette with a digital world that increasingly threatens to subvert its longstanding norms. And he admits up front that he … |
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