Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Deal Note: Scribd

from BGSL by umair So Scribd is hot - really hot. If we accept the rumour, at the A-round, Scribd achieved a valuation of >20m. Not bad, given the fact that it hasn't exactly seen exponential growth in terms of attention share. The hypothesis behind investing in Scribd is easy - a global repository of documents will garner an incredible attention share at any reasonable scale. Even at a measly Digg-scale, the revenue potential of a Scribd begins to be significant. And then there's the fact that Scribd ads can be hypertargeted... Now, that's all well and good. In fact, what's really interesting about Scribd isn't the yawner of an investment thesis - but the fact that it's one of the few startups around that really pushes the definition of what media is. Can other people's documents really be a medium? What are the economic of that medium? Very interesting and thought-provoking questions. But back to the IRR. I'm just not so sure of the key assumption behind the investment: that Scribd solves a problem that actually exists. Is there a supply of prosumers with "documents" leaping at the chance to share them? Initial attention share tells us very clearly - not yet. And even if there are, why wouldn't they just start a blog? YouTube had a clear monopoly on online video (at least usable online video). Scribd doesn't have the same clarity of market power. Would I have taken a bet on Scribd anyways? Probably. Good ideas are (very) few and far between these days. And the potential upside of a Scribd is well worth the risk. Let's discuss the sideline of a Scribd as host (essentially) for ripped-off books, magazines, etc. YouTube was in a legal grey area (ie, microchunks). Scribd isn't (which it acknowledges). Can Scribd exert pressure on publishers? Not unless it's in the grey area. But the larger point ist that there are lots of other positionings to be explored - Scribd as Office meets community (which is what a lot of the buzz is about), Scribd as Digg-feeder, etc - which is what offsets the risk of the key and somewhat shaky assumption, and makes Scribd a fairly cool play which will be a lot of fun, if not an obvious game-changer.

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All Steamed Up

The blue lagoon near Reykjavik, Iceland.
Paco Cruz / Digital Press Photos / Newscom

Xianyang, China, was once a great place to live--during the Qin dynasty, anyway, more than 2,000 years ago. Since then, it has gone pretty much downhill. Today Xianyang is one of the most polluted cities in a very polluted country, partly as a result of the air-fouling coal that's burned to generate much of its power. The air in Reykjavík, by contrast, is crystal clear, because nothing is burned there. Iceland's capital gets 100% of its heat and 40% of its electricity from geothermal power. (The rest comes from hydropower.) The same forces that have scattered no fewer than 130 volcanoes across the tiny country bring molten rock relatively close to the surface everywhere. When this encounters underground water, it generates steam, which is tapped to produce clean, renewable electricity.

All of which explains why a group of engineers from the Icelandic power company Enex have left the pure air of Reykjavík behind to work in smoggy Xianyang. The ancient Chinese city might just have the geothermal resources to become the Reykjavík of the East. In December engineers from both countries completed the first stage of a joint venture that could eventually provide geothermal-powered heating to millions of people in Xianyang. If the project is successful, the city will eventually have the biggest such system in the world.

That would be good for everyone. Last year alone, China added 102 gigawatts to its electrical grid--roughly twice the total capacity of California's--and about 90% of that came from carbon-belching coal plants. Geothermal energy can at least make a start on cleaning up this mess. The China Energy Research Society expects 110 gigawatt hours (GWh) to be produced through geothermal power nationally by 2010, out of 2.7 million GWh in total. That's a tiny slice, but energy experts believe China has the potential to do much more. "There are geothermal resources in almost every province in China," says Ingvar Fridleifsson, director of the United Nations University Geothermal Training Program in Reykjavík. Geothermal pumps will even be used to heat and cool some of the venues at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

It's the Chinese government that has committed the country to tapping its geothermal potential. But as is often the case, it's newly entrepreneurial citizens who are making things happen. One Chinese student who studied geothermal technology in Reykjavík went home to transform what had been a peasant village into a model geothermal development, with housing, pools and a recreation park all heated geothermally. "People can say a lot of things about the Chinese government," says Hans Bragi Bernhardsson, head of China operations for Enex. "But if they decide to do something, they achieve it." In this case, let's hope so.

with reporting by Krista Mahr/Reykjavik

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Participation on Web 2.0 sites remains weak

A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google's top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch

Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos.

The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation's couch potatoes -- voyeurs who like to watch rather than create.

Tue Apr 17, 2007 10:55PM EDT By Eric Auchard (Reuters) SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Web 2.0, a catchphrase for the latest generation of Web sites where users contribute their own text, pictures and video content, is far less participatory than commonly assumed, a study showed on Tuesday. A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google's top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise. Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found. The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation's couch potatoes -- voyeurs who like to watch rather than create, Tancer's statistics show. Wikipedia, the anyone-can-edit online encyclopedia, is the one exception cited in the Hitwise study: 4.6 percent of all visits to Wikipedia pages are to edit entries on the site. But despite relatively low-user involvement, visits to Web 2.0-style sites have spiked 668 percent in two years, Tancer said. "Web 2.0 and participatory sites (are) really gaining traction," he told an audience of roughly 3,000 Internet entrepreneurs, developers and financiers attending the Web 2.0 Expo industry conference in San Francisco this week. Web 2.0, a phrase popularized by conference organizer Tim O'Reilly, refers to the current generation of Web sites that seek to turn viewers into contributors by giving them tools to write, post, comment and upload their own creative work. Besides Wikipedia, other well-known Web 2.0 destinations are social network sites like News Corp.'s MySpace and Facebook and photo-sharing site Photobucket. Visits by Web users to the category of participatory Web 2.0 sites account for 12 percent of U.S. Web activity, up from only 2 percent two years ago, the study showed. Web 2.0 photo-sharing sites now account for 56 percent of visits to all online photo sites. Of that, Photobucket alone accounts for 41 percent of the traffic, Hitwise data shows. An older, first generation of sites, now in the minority, are photo-finishing sites that give users the ability to store, share and print photos.

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Ad Industry Still Virtually Dumb

dumb ad wankersOk, ok - we all took the mickey out of all those brands that rushed into SecondLife to an audience of no-one but at least we can get the rationale behind what they did there. Those brands built experiences for consumers to interact with. Pretty sensible thinking, no?

So, What does the ad industry do next? Takes a step backwards and introduces spam to SL in the form of video billboards. Adverlab shows us some demo shots of brands like Dove appearing in the virtual world (Yeah, because SL is full of fat birds).

And just another point the developers AMPP might want to consider. Up until now, for residents to watch video they have to click the Play button that appears at the bottom of the screen whenever video content is in the immediate vicinity.

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Art Hijacks Internet Ads

Picture_2 Artist Steve Lambert and the non-profit “R&D For The Public Domain” Eyebeam OpenLab, coded a Firefox add-on that replaces ads on a website with contemporary art. While a prototype is up and running, they’re working to build a fully curetted art database.

The project will be supported by a small website providing information on the current artists and curator, along with a schedule of past and upcoming AddArt shows. Each 2 weeks will include 5-8 artists selected by emerging and established curators. Images will have to be cropped to standard banner sizes or can be custom made for the project. Artists can target sites (such as every ad on FoxNews.com) and/or default to any page on the internet with ads. One artist will be shown per page. The curatorial duty will be passed among curators through recommendations, word of mouth, and solicitations to the AddArt site.

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Monday, May 07, 2007

Apartments in Dubai - What you get for $10 Million ?

signature damac

Now that’s called luxury and is a perfect post for our Dream Homes section. Dubai’s Damac Properties is targeting the world’s super-rich with a collection of apartments priced at up to $10 million. The exclusive residences will each occupy an entire floor in two of Damac’s landmark skyscrapers: Ocean Heights in Dubai Marina and Lotus Heights in Business Bay. The apartments, known as Signature Residences, will have uninterrupted 360 degree views thanks to their lofty locations from the 67th to 75th floors of the towers. They will each be reached by their own private, voice-activated elevator. All apartments come with a maid’s room, four parking spaces each and every apartment will have its very own swimming pool, personal gymnasium and steam room.

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Top 5 javascript frameworks

By Justin Silverton

5) Yahoo! User Interface Library

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

Features

Two different types of components are available: Utilities and controls. The YUI utilities simplify in-browser devolvement that relies on cross-browser DOM scripting, as do all web applications with DHTML and AJAX characteristics. The YUI Library Controls provide highly interactive visual design elements for your web pages. These elements are created and managed entirely on the client side and never require a page refresh.

utilities available:

  • Animation: Create “cinematic effects” on your pages by animating the position, size, opacity or other characteristics of page elements. These effects can be used to reinforce the user’s understanding of changes happening on the page.
  • Browser History Manager: Developers of rich internet applications want bookmarks to target not just pages but page states and they want the browser’s back button to operate meaningfully within their application’s screens. Browser History Manager provides bookmarking and back button control in rich internet applications.
  • Connection Manager: This utility library helps manage XMLHttpRequest (commonly referred to as AJAX) transactions in a cross-browser fashion, including integrated support for form posts, error handling and callbacks. Connection Manager also supports file uploading.
  • DataSource Utility: DataSource provides an interface for retrieving data from arrays, XHR services, and custom functions with integrated caching and Connection Manager support.
  • Dom Collection:The DOM Utility is an umbrella object comprising a variety of convenience methods for common DOM-scripting tasks, including element positioning and CSS style management.
  • Drag & Drop: Create draggable objects that can be picked up and dropped elsewhere on the page. You write code for the “interesting moments” that are triggered at each stage of the interaction (such as when a dragged object crosses over a target); the utility handles all the housekeeping and keeps things working smoothly in all supported browsers.

Controls available:

  • AutoComplete: The AutoComplete Control allows you to streamline user interactions involving text-entry; the control provides suggestion lists and type-ahead functionality based on a variety of data-source formats and supports server-side data-sources via XMLHttpRequest.
  • Button Control: The Button Control provides checkbox, radio button, submit and menu-button UI elements that are more impactful visually and more powerful programmatically than the browser’s built-in form widgets.
  • Calendar: The Calendar Control is a graphical, dynamic control used for date selection.
  • Container: The Container family of controls supports a variety of DHTML windowing patterns including Tooltip, Panel, Dialog and SimpleDialog. The Module and Overlay controls provide a platform for implementing additional, customized DHTML windowing patterns.
  • DataTable Control: DataTable leverages the semantic markup of the HTML table and enhances it with sorting, column-resizing, inline editing of data fields, and more.
  • Logger: The YUI Logger provides a quick and easy way to write log messages to an on-screen console, the FireBug extension for Firefox, or the Safari JavaScript console. Debug builds of YUI Library components are integrated with Logger to output messages for debugging implementations.
  • Menu: Application-style fly-out menus require just a few lines of code with the Menu Control. Menus can be generated entirely in JavaScript or can be layered on top of semantic unordered lists.

Download and more information: here

4) Prototype

Prototype is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications.

Featuring a unique, easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around, Prototype is quickly becoming the codebase of choice for web application developers everywhere.

Features

  • Easily deploy ajax applications: Besides simple requests, this module also deals in a smart way with JavaScript code returned from a server and provides helper classes for polling.
  • DOM extending: adds many convenience methods to elements returned by the $() function: for instance, you can write $(’comments’).addClassName(’active’).show() to get the element with the ID ‘comments’, add a class name to it and show it (if it was previously hidden).
  • Utilizes JSON (JavaScript Object Notation): JSON is a light-weight and fast alternative to XML in Ajax requests

Download and more information here

3) Rico

Designed for building rich Internet applications.

Features

  • Animation Effects: provides responsive animation for smooth effects and transitions that that can communicate change in richer ways than traditional web applications have explored before. Unlike most effects, Rico 2.0 animation can be interrupted, paused, resumed, or have other effects applied to it to enable responsive interaction that the user does not have to wait on
  • Styling: Rico provides several cinematic effects as well as some simple visual style effects in a very simple interface.
  • Drag And Drop: Desktop applications have long used drag and drop in their interfaces to simplify user interaction. Rico provides one of the simplest interfaces for enabling your web application to support drag and drop. Just register any HTML element or JavaScript object as a draggable and any other HTML element or JavaScript object as a drop zone and Rico handles the rest.
  • AJAX Support: Rico provides a very simple interface for registering Ajax request handlers as well as HTML elements or JavaScript objects as Ajax response objects. Multiple elements and/or objects may be updated as the result of one Ajax request.

Download and more information here

2) Qooxdoo

qooxdoo is one of the most comprehensive and innovative Open Source multipurpose AJAX frameworks, dual-licensed under LGPL/EPL. It includes support for professional JavaScript development, a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit and high-level client-server communication.

Features

  • Client detection: qooxdoo knows what browser is being used and makes this information available to you.
  • Browser abstraction: qooxdoo includes a browser abstraction layer which tries to abstract all browser specifics to one common “standard”. This simplifies the real coding of countless objects by allowing you to focus on what you want and not “how to want it”. The browser abstraction layer comes with some basic functions often needed when creating real GUIs. For example, runtime styles or positions (in multiple relations: page, client and screen) of each element in your document.
  • Advanced property implementation: qooxdoo supports “real” properties for objects. This means any class can define properties which the created instances should have. The addProperty handler also adds getter and setter functions. The only thing one needs to add - should you need it - is a modifier function.
  • Event Management: qooxdoo comes with its own event interface. This includes event registration and deregistration functions.

    Furthermore there is the possibility to call the target function in any object context. (The default is the object which defines the event listener.) The event system normalizes differences between the browsers, includes support for mousewheel, doubleclick and other fancy stuff. qooxdoo also comes with an advanced capture feature which allows you to capture all events when a user drags something around for example.

Download and more information here

1) Dojo

Dojo allows you to easily build dynamic capabilities into web pages and any other environment that supports JavaScript sanely. You can use the components that Dojo provides to make your web sites more usable, responsive, and functional. With Dojo you can build degradable user interfaces more easily, prototype interactive widgets quickly, and animate transitions. You can use the lower-level APIs and compatibility layers from Dojo to write portable JavaScript and simplify complex scripts. Dojo’s event system, I/O APIs, and generic language enhancement form the basis of a powerful programming environment. You can use the Dojo build tools to write command-line unit-tests for your JavaScript code. The Dojo build process helps you optimize your JavaScript for deployment by grouping sets of files together and reuse those groups through “profiles”.

Features

  • Multiple Points Of Entry: A fundamental concept in the design of Dojo is “multiple points of entry”. This term means that Dojo should work very hard to make sure that users should be able to start using Dojo at the level they are most comfortable with.
  • Interpreter Independence: Dojo tries very hard to ensure that it’s possible to support at least the very core of the system on as many JavaScript enabled platforms as possible. This will allow Dojo to serve as a “standard library” for JavaScript programmers as they move between client-side, server-side, and desktop programming environments.
  • Unifies several codebases: builds on several contributed code bases (nWidgets, Burstlib, and f(m)).

Download and more information here

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Whistle-Blower on Student Aid Is Vindicated

Published: May 7, 2007

WASHINGTON — When Jon Oberg, a Department of Education researcher, warned in 2003 that student lending companies were improperly collecting hundreds of millions in federal subsidies and suggested how to correct the problem, his supervisor told him to work on something else.

Jon Oberg, a former Department of Education researcher, warned that student loan companies were abusing a subsidy program and collecting millions in federal payments to which they were not entitled.

The department “does not have an intramural program of research on postsecondary education finance,” the supervisor, Grover Whitehurst, a political appointee, wrote in a November 2003 e-mail message to Mr. Oberg, a civil servant who was soon to retire. “In the 18 months you have remaining, I will expect your time and talents to be directed primarily to our business of conceptualizing, competing and monitoring research grants.”

For three more years, the vast overpayments continued. Education Secretary Rod Paige and his successor, Margaret Spellings, argued repeatedly that under existing law they were powerless to stop the payments and that it was Congress that needed to act. Then this past January, the department largely shut off the subsidies by sending a simple letter to lenders — the very measure Mr. Oberg had urged in 2003.

The story of Mr. Oberg’s effort to stop this hemorrhage of taxpayers’ money opens a window, lawmakers say, onto how the Bush administration repeatedly resisted calls to improve oversight of the $85 billion student loan industry. The department failed to halt the payments to lenders who had exploited loopholes to inflate their eligibility for subsidies on the student loans they issued.

Recent investigations by state attorneys general and Congress have highlighted how the department failed to clamp down on gifts and incentives that lenders offered to universities and their financial aid officers to get more student loans. Under this pressure, the department is now seeking to set new rules.

The subsidy payments that Mr. Oberg uncovered are another corner of the lending system on which the department long failed to act, critics say, letting millions of dollars flow from the public treasury to about a dozen lenders.

The department now says it did not fully understand the extent of the maneuvers the loan companies were making to get the subsidies until last September, when its inspector general investigated and issued a report detailing manipulations carried out by a Nebraska lender, Nelnet. The audit recommended that the department recover $278 million from the lender, but education officials instead reached a settlement allowing Nelnet to keep the money but cutting it off from further subsidies that it claimed it was eligible to receive.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate education committee, has asked Ms. Spellings to turn over documents related to the settlement decision. She is likely to come under questioning about the Nelnet settlement on May 10, at a hearing of the House education committee.

Mr. Oberg, now retired, has a master’s degree from the University of Nebraska and a doctorate in political science from the Free University of Berlin. He is a former Navy officer, university professor, and aide to Senator J. James Exon, a Nebraska Democrat, from 1979 to 1984. He was an Education Department liaison to Congress under the Clinton administration.

The subsidy payment issue that came to preoccupy Mr. Oberg grew out of decisions Congress made in the 1980s to ensure that low-cost student loans were available at a time when the economy was souring. Lawmakers guaranteed nonprofit lenders a rate of return of 9.5 percent on student loans that were financed by tax-exempt bonds to protect the companies from spiraling costs.

Congress eliminated much of the subsidy program in 1993 because interest rates had dropped, but at that time retained the 9.5 percent return for existing loans. By 2002, lenders had devised ways to inflate the volume of loans for which they received the 9.5 percent subsidies. Congress closed one loophole in 2004, but lenders found others. Congress further restricted the subsidies in 2006.

In 1997, the Clinton administration proposed legislation to eliminate all references to the subsidies from the Higher Education Act in an effort to rein them in. Mr. Oberg took the legislation to Sally Stroup, who was then serving as senior aide to the Republican chairman of the House education committee.

“Sally told me there was no way that language was coming out,” Mr. Oberg recalled. “She didn’t give a reason — just forget it.” Ms. Stroup, who went on to become an assistant secretary of education in the Bush administration, and who is now back as an aide on Capitol Hill, did not return several phone calls and messages left for comment.

In 2000, Mr. Oberg transferred to the department’s research operation, and two years into the Bush administration, began to review the government filings of Nelnet and other lenders. He found that not only were payments to lenders rising rapidly, but also that the base amounts of the loans lenders were claiming as eligible for the 9.5 percent subsidies were exploding.

“Several big lending agencies were gaming the system,” Mr. Oberg said in a recent interview at his home in Rockville, Md.

He notified the Education Department’s inspector general’s office. He also told his superiors but felt they were brushing him off. So in November 2003, he wrote a memorandum for general distribution throughout the department warning that lender manipulations could cost the government billions unless stopped, and he recommended that the secretary could end the abuse with a letter to lenders clarifying government rules.

That is when his supervisor, Mr. Whitehurst, director of the department’s Institute for Education Sciences, stepped in. Mr. Whitehurst said that he had forwarded Mr. Oberg’s memorandum to appropriate senior officials, whom he declined to identify, but acknowledged that he “wasn’t real happy” because he considered Mr. Oberg’s research to be outside his job description.

“Plus, I didn’t understand the issues,” Mr. Whitehurst said recently. “In retrospect, it looks like he identified an important issue and came up with a reasonable solution. But it was Greek to me at the time — preferential interest rates on bonds? I didn’t know what he was doing, except that he wasn’t supposed to be doing it.”

He told Mr. Oberg to stop because he wanted him to be monitoring grants, not lending practices. Officials also rewrote Mr. Oberg’s job description, documents show, barring him from further research into the subsidies. Although Mr. Oberg was a civil servant, the Bush administration may have seen him as a holdover from the Clinton administration.

Mr. Oberg said he decided to continue his research in his free time because, “If you tell some people they can’t do something, they want to do it all the more.”

But when he requested from his own department data on payments to lenders, known in the bureaucracy as the 9.5 percent Special Allowance Payments, Donald Conner, an analyst in the department’s postsecondary division, e-mailed Mr. Oberg saying, "I’m not permitted to give any 9.5 percent SAP information."

Mr. Whitehurst, in an interview, suggested that Mr. Oberg was viewed by some senior officials as an annoyance. “I was told he was like a dog on a bone, agitating on this issue,” Mr. Whitehurst said. Ms. Spellings did not reply to a memorandum Mr. Oberg sent her about waste in the loan program just before his 2005 retirement, Mr. Oberg said.

But Mr. Oberg’s warnings prompted a clamor in Congress and a string of reports by government investigators calling for a stop to the giveaways. Senior department officials disputed or declined to follow the recommendations of all of them.

A 2004 report by the Government Accountability Office urged the department to rewrite its regulations to save billions of dollars in future loan subsidy payments. But Ms. Stroup, who had once worked for one of the lending companies that is now under investigation for the subsidies, argued in response that it would be simpler for Congress to clamp down with new legislation. Mr. Paige repeated that argument in a letter to Mr. Kennedy, who was pressing the department to curb the subsidies.

Then, in 2005, the Education Department’s inspector general recommended that $36 million be recovered from a New Mexico lender. Ms. Spellings overruled the finding that the payments were improper and declined to recover the payments. And in January 2007, after the inspector general recommended that $278 million in overpayments be recovered from Nelnet, the department instead reached a settlement under which Nelnet could keep the money — if it dropped plans to bill the department for another $800 million in subsidies.

Nelnet was the nation’s most generous corporate donor to the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2006, and its top three executives were the largest individual donors to the committee as well, according to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics.

Nelnet was also well connected at the department. Don Bouc, Nelnet’s president through 2004 and president emeritus thereafter, sat on the department’s Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance from 2001 through Feb. 1 of this year, even while the department was auditing the company’s subsidies and negotiating the settlement. Mr. Bouc resigned from the committee 11 days after the department announced that it would not seek to recover the $278 million.

Ben Kiser, a Nelnet spokesman, said Mr. Bouc’s service for the committee was unrelated to the audit.

Robert Shireman, a researcher in Berkeley, Calif., who co-authored a private nonprofit group’s 2004 report on the subsidies called “Money for Nothing,” said, “There has been an outrageous lack of interest at the Education Department in doing anything to stop the bleeding.”

Then this January, turning to a measure Mr. Oberg had recommended in 2003, the department issued a “subregulatory guidance” letter cutting off subsidy payments to all lenders except those who prove their eligibility with an audit.

Kristin D. Conklin, a senior adviser at the department, said the department had been unaware, until its inspector general issued its Nelnet audit last September, that lenders were collecting subsidy payments on loans that were clearly ineligible.

That audit documented how Nelnet had transferred loans repeatedly into and out of tax-exempt bonds issued before 1993 to expand the volume of loans eligible for the subsidies. The audit identified so-called first-generation loans, financed from the pre-1993 bonds, and second-generation loans, financed from the proceeds of the first-generation loans, as eligible for the government subsidies. It said later-generation loans were ineligible.

“It’s not like we were sitting on this big problem and didn’t address it,” Ms. Conklin said. “We didn’t know the extent to which these third- and fourth-generation loans were being used. The full scope of this problem first became known to us in September, and we moved seriously to address it in the following months.”

Ms. Conklin also said the department had previously lacked the power to cut off overpayments using a simple letter. Only intervening legislation passed by Congress made that possible, she said. Today, with Mr. Oberg’s predictions proven accurate, he has become a bit of a celebrity. Mr. Kennedy arranged his testimony before the Senate in February.

“Taxpayers owe a tip of the hat to former Nebraskan Jon Oberg, who blew the whistle on the scheme that allowed companies to grab hundreds of millions in subsidies,” the Lincoln Journal Star wrote in October.

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HOWTO own a 128-bit number!

Would you like to be the exclusive owner of a number, with the right to sue other people for knowing your number or telling other people what it is? Now you can.

Last week, the AACS consortium made history by issuing legal threats against the 1.8 million web-pages (and counting) that mentioned its secret code for preventing HD-DVD discs from being copied.

In effect, AACS-LA (the AACS Licensing Authority) claimed that it owned a randomly chosen 128-bit number, and that anyone who possessed or transmitted that number was breaking the law. Moreover, it claimed to own millions more random numbers -- claimed that the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalises telling people how to break anti-copying software, gave it exclusive dominion over its many keys.

Why should the AACS get all the fun? Princeton prof Ed Felten has come up with a great way of giving out legally protected 128-bit numbers to anyone who wants them. If he gives out 2^128 of these, then all 128-bit numbers will be owned and no one will ever be able to use a 128-bit key without breaking the law. Good times.

Here’s how we do it. First, we generate a fresh pseudorandom integer, just for you. Then we use your integer to encrypt a copyrighted haiku, thereby transforming your integer into a circumvention device capable of decrypting the haiku without your permission. We then give you all of our rights to decrypt the haiku using your integer. The DMCA does the rest.

The haiku is copyright 2007 by Edward W. Felten:

We own integers, Says AACS LA. You can own one too.

My number is AF BC 9C 5D DA 6B 7A A8 7C 33 A1 2B E7 D3 EA 11. You aren't allowed to know this number. I also reloaded the page and generated a few more numbers. I'm not telling you what they are, but I'll be setting up a Google alert for them and if I catch you using them, I'm gonna take your house away. Link

See also: AACS vows to fight people who publish the key AACS DRM body censors Cory's class blog Digg users revolt over AACS key Secret AACS numbers, the photoshopped edition Side effect of AACS turmoil: MSM turns on Web 2.0? UPDATED Blu-Ray AND HD-DVD broken - processing keys extracted EFF explains the law on AACS keys More AACS spoofs: WOW protest, and PSA vid: Think Before You Post HD-DVD/Blu-Ray cracker muslix64 interviewed Web-page aggregates links to "forbidden numbers" used to break HD-DVD

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Photobucket Was A Steal v. Google/YouTube

By almost any measure, MySpace got Photobucket for an absolute steal when compared to the Google YouTube deal. The companies are somewhat comparable - both have very large libraries of user-created videos, and both built their business on the back of MySpace. Photobucket also has a huge library of shared photos, a business YouTube never entered.

Google paid $1.65 billion in stock for YouTube. By the time the deal closed, the Google stock was worth nearly $1.8 billion. Photobucket is being acquired for just less than 1/5 of that - $250 million plus an earnout of up to $50 million

At the time of the announcement of their acquisition in October 2006 YouTube had very little revenue. Photobucket, however, is on track to blow through their projection of $25 million this year.

Also, the relative sizes of the two companies aren’t that far off. At the time of the acquisition, Comscore suggested that YouTube had approximately 25 million U.S. monthly visitors. Today, Photobucket has around 20 million U.S. monthly visitors, or 80% of what YouTube had when it was acquired.

Photobucket has 40 million registered users and is gaining another 85,000 or so per day. Their users are highly active, and upload a lot of content to the network. YouTube’s registered users were far below Photobucket’s 40 million at the time of their acquisition. YouTube had (and still has) a lot of traffic coming to the site to view videos, but far fewer users actually creating and posting content.

Leaving revenue aside, the traffic numbers indicate a comparable price of $1.3 billion for Photobucket, 4x the price they actually received from MySpace. To look at this another way, YouTube was paid about $67 per unique visitor. Photobucket got just $13.

Did Google overpay for YouTube? Did MySpace get Photobucket for a steal? Perhaps both. But in the end, being no. 1 in a category means you get a premium on acquisition. In the case of YouTube, that premium seems to be about 4x.

Another factor: Photobucket just didn’t generate the bidding hype that YouTube saw. It looks like the final bidders were IAC and MySpace, with a number of other bidders falling off in the last few weeks (perhaps spooked by the MySpace blockage of Photobucket videos).

In a year or so this deal is likely to look as brilliant for NewsCorp (which owns MySpace) as the MySpace acquisition was. Some would argue that they play dirty poker, but shutting Photobucket down at a crucial point in the acquisition negotiations was a brilliant move, and may have shaved hundreds of millions of dollars off of the purchase price.

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More perfect

Most people in the US can't cook. So you would think that reaching out to the masses with entry-level cooking instruction would be a smart business move.

In fact, as the Food Network and cookbook publishers have demonstrated over and over again, you're way better off helping the perfect improve. You'll also sell a lot more management consulting to well run companies, high end stereos to people with good stereos and yes, church services to the already well behaved.

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Kraft Launches Second Life Supermarket

Kraft Foods is opening shop on Second Life today.

The company is using the popular virtual-world Web site to showcase 70 new products as part of its sales pitch to retailers at the annual industry convention, the Food Marketing Institute show, which runs May 6 though 8.

Kraft hosts the grand opening today of a new Second Life store, “Phil’s Supermarket,” named for TV’s “Supermarket Guru” Phil Lempert, food editor for the “Today” show. The store will be a permanent feature on Second Life, which has 6 million registered users and counting.

Kraft, which has paid an undisclosed amount of money to sponsor the virtual supermarket, is the only food manufacturer whose brands will appear in the store. In fact, it is the only packaged goods company tied to the store: Lempert’s other partners are IBM and the National Grocers Association.

Part of Kraft’s deal includes links from Second Life to its own Web site for nutrition education and to other sites, such as Second Harvest, as well as online forums for Second Life “residents” to chat with Kraft Kitchen experts.

“This non-traditional effort illustrates how we’re changing the way we market our products to build brand equity and remain relevant to our key consumers,” said Kraft spokesperson Lisa Gibbons.

The supermarket opens with simultaneous online and real-world ribbon cuttings with Kraft North America president Rick Searer at the FMI Show in Chicago. During the ceremony, Kraft will donate $450,000 (in real money) to Second Harvest. It’s the first time a corporate donation is being staged in Second Life, according to Kraft.

Product launches are a top priority for Kraft under the growth plan that CEO Irene Rosenfeld outlined in Febuary. Kraft’s strategy now is to compete in broader categories—for example, pitting DiGiorno pizza against local pizzerias, not just other frozen pizzas. Its launches this week cover four main sectors: health and wellness, premium taste, quick meals and snacking.

"We are looking at our products through a new lens—the eyes of the consumer," Searer said in a statement. "By reframing our categories and focusing on four growing segments … our 2007 product innovations fit the dynamic lifestyles of our consumers."

Thirty of its new items are headed to U.S. supermarkets later this year, under brands including DiGiorno, Jell-O, Oscar Mayer, Philadelphia, Planters and South Beach Diet. Kraft also is launching cheeses with probiotics and prebiotics, the digestive-aid ingredients that have become the newest buzzwords in nutrition. A new sub-brand, called LiveActive, piggybacks flagship Kraft brand cheese for Kraft LiveActive cheese sticks and cheese cubes (with probiotics) as well as the Breakstone's and Knudsen brands for LiveActive cottage cheese (with prebiotic fiber). Other new products include:

  • Planters NUT-rition Energy Mix (dark chocolate-covered soy nuts with peanuts, almonds, cashews, pecans and walnuts)
  • Kraft Bistro Deluxe Pastas (mac and cheese with sundried tomatoes, Portobello mushrooms or Asiago cheese)
  • Oscar Mayer Deli Creations Hot Sandwich Melts (microwavable sandwiches)
  • South Beach Diet Chicken Salad Kits
  • Taco Bell Home Originals Bowlz (single-serve heat-and-eat Mexican food)
  • Oreo Cakesters Soft Snack Cakes
  • Jell-O Pudding Mix-Ins (pudding with chocolate, mint or caramel chips mixed in)

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Spanish solar tower could eventually power an entire city

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Just last month we witnessed a gigantic skyscraper / solar tower hybrid that generates a whopping 390-kilowatts of energy, but even that looks like child's play compared to the 40-story solar power plant that resides in Spain. The expansive system consists of a towering concrete building, a field of 600 (and growing) sun-tracking mirrors that are each 120-square meters in size, and a receiver that converts concentrated solar energy from the heliostats into steam that eventually drives the turbines. Currently, only one field of mirrors is up and running, but even that produces enough power to energize 6,000 homes, and the creators are hoping to see the entire population of Seville (600,000 folks) taken care of solely from sunlight. So if you're eager to see what's likely the greenest solar power plant currently operating, be sure to slip on some shades, tag the read link, and peep the video.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6616651.stm#graphic
Power station harnesses Sun's rays
By David Shukman Science correspondent, BBC News, Seville

Solar thermal power station   Image: BBC
A field of 600 mirrors reflects rays from the Sun
There is a scene in one of the Austin Powers films where Dr Evil unleashes a giant "tractor beam" of energy at Earth in order to extract a massive payment.

Well, the memory of it kept me chuckling as I toured the extraordinary scene of the new solar thermal power plant outside Seville in southern Spain.

From a distance, as we rounded a bend and first caught sight of it, I couldn't believe the strange structure ahead of me was actually real.

A concrete tower - 40 storeys high - stood bathed in intense white light, a totally bizarre image in the depths of the Andalusian countryside.

The tower looked like it was being hosed with giant sprays of water or was somehow being squirted with jets of pale gas. I had trouble working it out.

In fact, as we found out when we got closer, the rays of sunlight reflected by a field of 600 huge mirrors are so intense they illuminate the water vapour and dust hanging in the air.

The effect is to give the whole place a glow - even an aura - and if you're concerned about climate change that may well be deserved.

Field of mirrors   Image: BBC
It is Europe's first commercially operating power station using the Sun's energy this way and at the moment its operator, Solucar, proudly claims that it generates 11 Megawatts (MW) of electricity without emitting a single puff of greenhouse gas. This current figure is enough to power up to 6,000 homes.

But ultimately, the entire plant should generate as much power as is used by the 600,000 people of Seville.

It works by focusing the reflected rays on one location, turning water into steam and then blasting it into turbines to generate power.

As I climbed out of the car, I could hardly open my eyes - the scene was far too bright. Gradually, though, shielded by sunglasses, I made out the rows of mirrors (each 120 sq m in size) and the focus of their reflected beams - a collection of water pipes at the top of the tower.

It was probably the heat that did it, but I found myself making the long journey up to the very top - to the heart of the solar inferno.

David Shukman on top of the tower   Image: BBC
David had to wear sunglasses to shield his eyes from the glare
A lift took me most of the way but cameraman Duncan Stone and I had to climb the last four storeys by ladder. We could soon feel the heat, despite thick insulation around the boiler.

It was like being in a sauna and for the last stages the metal rungs of the ladders were scalding.

But our reward was the cool breeze at the top of the tower - and the staggering sight of a blaze of light heading our way from down below.

So far, only one field of mirrors is working. But to one side I could see the bulldozers at work clearing a second, larger field - thousands more mirrors will be installed.

Letting off steam

I met one of the gurus of solar thermal power, Michael Geyer, an international director of the energy giant Abengoa, which owns the plant. He is ready with answers to all the tricky questions.

What happens when the Sun goes down? Enough heat can be stored in the form of steam to allow generation after dark - only for an hour now but maybe longer in future.

Anyway, the solar power is most needed in the heat of summer when air conditioners are working flat out.

Is it true that this power is three times more expensive than power from conventional sources? Yes, but prices will fall, as they have with wind power, as the technologies develop.

Also, a more realistic comparison is with the cost of generating power from coal or gas only at times of peak demand - then this solar system seems more attractive.

The vision is of the sun-blessed lands of the Mediterranean - even the Sahara desert - being carpeted with systems like this with the power cabled to the drizzlier lands of northern Europe. A dazzling idea in a dazzling location.

HOW THE SOLAR TOWER WORKS
Annotated pictures of solar tower, receiver, heliostat
1. The solar tower is 115m (377ft) tall and surrounded by 600 steel reflectors (heliostats). They track the sun and direct its rays to a heat exchanger (receiver) at the top of the tower
2. The receiver converts concentrated solar energy from the heliostats into steam
3. Steam is stored in tanks and used to drive turbines that will produce enough electricity for up to 6,000 homes

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Credit card offers in-game World of Warcraft rewards: it's real now

Link (via the-inbetween via Makezine via Joi Ito)

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Attack of the Advertising Widgets

Widgets are being turned into advertising delivery systems. Their nature - rich media applicatons that are easy to build, customize and add to a site - also make them an attractive way to add advertising to small sites. Google is now testing gadget ads, and we’ve written about services like boobox and AuctionAds (a sponsor) that easily ad affiliate advertising to a site via widgets. Last week eBay also launched “to go” widgets that let publishers embed ebay listings into websites, although for now there are no affiliate payments tied to those widgets.

Two more are coming this week. Tonight Silicon Valley-based Tumri is announcing a new product called Tumri Publisher, and Seattle’s Mpire will announce an advertising widget later this week.

Tumri Publisher, which is described here, allows users to create highly customizable widgets that promote specific products on their websites, in exchange for an affiliate or other fee. Tumri has twenty or so direct relationships with ecommerce sites like Overstock, Walmart, Shop.com and others to promote their products. Most advertising pay on a purchase, although at least one partner pays a on each click to their website.

Tumri splits revenue from the advertising 50/50 with advertising, and they say they’ll pay up to 70% of proceeds to larger publishers.

The widgets are javascript powered; the company says Flash versions are coming soon.

Tumri was founded in 2004 and has raised $6.5 million in a Series A round of financing from Shasta Ventures and Accel. They are currently closing a second round. They have 31 employees (16 in India, 15 in Silicon Valley).

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