Canon EOS Rebel available at AbeÂ’s of Maine for $599.00. Not all cameras are created equal and this one stands apart with EF-S 18-55mm IS Lens. The Zoom Lens is 75-300mm f/ 4-5.6 III EF. These features allow for great picture taking from greater distan...

Most forecasters have expected broadcast ad revenues to experience a nice recovery as the recession eases, but BernsteinResearch analyst Michael Nathanson expects a TV advertising to see a rebound that could bring stations back to their healthier 2007 levels. While the major station owners took a big hit on revenue declines last year, margins remained fairly strong. For example, while Gannett’s broadcast revs fell by almost 20 percent in ‘09, it was still able to post EBITDA margins of 42.6 percent. Belo’s TV station ad revs dropped 23 percent between ‘07 and ‘09, but it still managed to produce respectable a 26.7 percent EBITDA margin. And although CBS’ and Scripps’ margins have gone from the 30 percent neighborhood down to the mid-teens, Nathanson expects a large wave of political ad spending this year to boost those levels back up—though on a smaller revenue base.

Most forecasters have expected broadcast ad revenues to experience a nice recovery as the recession eases, but BernsteinResearch analyst Michael Nathanson expects a TV advertising to see a rebound that could bring stations back to their healthier 2007 levels. While the major station owners took a big hit on revenue declines last year, margins remained fairly strong. For example, while Gannett’s broadcast revs fell by almost 20 percent in ‘09, it was still able to post EBITDA margins of 42.6 percent. Belo’s TV station ad revs dropped 23 percent between ‘07 and ‘09, but it still managed to produce respectable a 26.7 percent EBITDA margin. And although CBS’ and Scripps’ margins have gone from the 30 percent neighborhood down to the mid-teens, Nathanson expects a large wave of political ad spending this year to boost those levels back up—though on a smaller revenue base.

In continuing to look at the way that Facebook has become a driving force behind online news consumption, Heather Hopkins of Hitwise has dove into the numbers again, this time examing how Facebook users compare with others in return visits.

According to her article, Facebook not only drives a high amount of traffic, higher than Google News, but its users are far more loyal, as well.

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Hopkins took a look at the data earlier this month, noting that Facebook drives three times as much traffic to broadcast than Google News, and now we find that these users are also repeat offenders. That is, they don't just visit once, they come back for more. From the Hitwise blog:

Why do we care about this metric? Because "visitors aren't as valuable if they don't come back. Advertisers and retailers need some assurance that visitors will return again and again." Hopkins notes that even visitors from Google.com, often the leading source of traffic to these sites, are outpaced by those from Facebook when it comes to return visits. But why is this?

Hopkins doesn't get into the "why" behind the numbers, but we'd be willing to wager that it has something to do with a few reasons. First, content posted by peers is more likely to be compatible with an individual's world view. Second, their trust in friends as sources might lead them to return for more.

Google, on the other hand, can give great results just the same as it can lead you to the most worthless pages you've imagined. It doesn't offer that one thing we can all trust - the valued opinion of a friend. It's also possible that the friend making the recommendation in the first place is a return visitor who repeatedly recommends the articles they read.

Whatever the reason, the numbers tell us one thing for sure - news outlets need to focus on making sure it is as easy as possible for readers and viewers to share content on Facebook. Or, as Hopkins so succinctly puts it, "with recent Pew Research showing that Newspapers have seen ad revenue fall 26% during the year and 43% over the past three years, understanding where to find loyal readers is becoming increasingly important."

I caught up with Kieran Hannon the other day. He was in the Bay Area for a meeting with the Irish prime minister (he's on the board of Enterprise Ireland) and I realized it had been a good few years since I had last seen him.

He used to be co-managing director of Grey Advertising, then had gone off to Texas to work as VP of Marketing for Radio Shack, and then moved to Santa Monica, in Southern California. He's now working as COO at a promising startup called Sidebar, which has an interesting mobile technology that recommends content based on what people like, very useful for online retailers and others.

Kieran and his family had spent 18 years living in San Francisco, and I was curious what life in Southern California (SoCal) was like.

He said life was good, and that the startup scene was healthy and that there are a lot of media/technology centers there. I often write about how Silicon Valley has become Media Valley, because of all the media companies here (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, etc) so it makes sense that SoCal, with its rich media history, would be a fertile breeding ground for media technology startups.

Earlier this week, Mark Suster, a VC based in SoCal, wrote an excellent post about startups in LA. Want to Start a Technology Company in LA?

He makes some great points:

...LA [is] the second largest city in the country with a population if 16 million. We have universities like Caltech, UCLA, USC and many more. We have many seasoned entrepreneurs who have built successful companies here and made a lot of money for investors and themselves. But LA is not Silicon Valley and we don't need to aspire to be so. We will never be Silicon Valley in the way that Toronto will never be Hollywood. But we have a great city for building technology companies.

He goes into details about how LA is not like Silicon Valley.

- Funding is different, there are smaller "A" rounds of around $3m rather than $10m here.

- Recruiting is different. There aren't huge pools of engineers, but it is possible to build 100+ sized teams.

- Commuting isn't as bad as people think it is, most people live close to where they work. And hey, commuting isn't that easy here.

- Lots of content creation skills. This is an interesting point to make because software engineers can be found almost anywhere in the world today, but content creation skills are very culture specific, you can't outsource this work.

- There are now larger numbers of successful entrepreneurs, many are on the their second and third successful company.

Here are a few success stories:

There is a lot of innovation happening in LA from places like Eqal, Deca.TV, DemandMedia's studios, Clicker, Filmaka and other initiatives.
. . .
The whole category of "sponsored search" came from a successful LA company, Overture. (my firm, GRP Partners, was an investor). LA produced Applied Semantics that created AdSense and was bought by Google. We were also an investor in the early local listing company, CitySearch - an LA company. LA was a leader in lead generation (LowerMyBills), comparison shopping (PriceGrabber, Shopzilla), social networking (MySpace ... I know, I know - Facebook won - but it was still a big business). If we extend a bit North up the coast line we have many affiliate marketing innovators including ValueClick, Commission Junction and FastClick. They also produced GoToMeeting and CallWave.
. . .
A great team from MySpace has created Gravity. Gil Elbaz from Applied Semantics has now created Factual. Zorik Gordon is tearing it up at ReachLocal. TechCoast Angels backed GreenDot should be a major IPO this year. Frank Addante has created Rubicon Project. Douglas Merrill, the former CIO of Google, is building his next company in LA. Scott Painter, founder of CarsDirect has created two new generation LA startups (Zag and TrueCar, both backed by GRP Partners). Brett Brewer (ex MySpace) has AdKnowledge, there is Adconian, Legal Zoom and many more. Hautelook, Gogii, Magento - all very high potential companies building in LA.

Mr Suster is one of the organizers of Launchpad LA V2, which was announced today. This is a project aimed at helping first-time entrepreneurs and helping to educate them and guide them in building successful companies.

We will be selecting 10 startup companies to participate. There is no cost but you must physically be based in or move to Los Angeles for the 6 months of the program. Applications are due April 6th, 2010, the form is on the website and the Twitter address is@launchpadlad

A West Coast corridor of innovation...

It won't be long before we have a West Coast corridor of innovation stretching from Silicon Valley to Southern California, and beyond.

In fact, if you fly from San Diego heading north along the coast you pass over tons of innovation centers:

- The communications and biotech industries of San Diego;

- The electronics industries of Orange County;

- The media centers of Hollywood and Santa Monica;

- Then you reach San Francisco/Silicon Valley with its electronics, software, media tech, biotech, cleantech industries;

- Then Portland with its thriving startup scene plus Intel's big presence there;

- Seattle with a thriving tech scene mostly spun out of Microsoft, and Amazon;

- Vancouver and its software industry.

Wow. 1400 miles of innovation. There's no other region like it, hundreds of miles of world-class, industry leading, innovation and creativity.

Interestingly, it's all built on top of one of the most unstable fault lines in the world. A disruptive reality. Is there a connection?

I've always said that innovation has to be disruptive otherwise it's not innovation.

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Palm’s woes continue to balloon after the handset maker announced its earnings for Q3 2010. As a recap, Palm reported $349 million in revenue with a $22 million net loss for Q3 2010 which looks rosy when compared to the $90.6 million revenue and $98 million net loss reported in Q3 2009. Though revenue has increased and net loss has narrowed year over year, Palm continues its downward slide with net loss increasing from $13.7 million in Q2 2010 to the $22 million quoted above. Palm shipped 960,000 handsets in Q3 2010 which represents a 23% increase from Q2 2010 and a 300% increase year over year. This abundance of handsets is Palm’s downfall as the handset maker revealed that it has only sold a mere 408,000 units in Q3 2010, leading to a standing inventory that some estimate to be a staggering 1.15 million. Palm has put handset production on hold (told you so) while carriers sell through the current inventory which is equal to six months worth of retail sales at last year’s rate. As a result, Palm’s Q4 2010 outlook is dire with the company projecting revenue of only $150 million, a figure that falls far short of the $305 million that was expected. Read on after the jump.

Palm’s stock has plummeted a staggering 18% to under $5 since its poor Q3 2010 earnings and its dire Q4 projections were announced. Like a pack wolves, analysts are jumping all over the Sunnyvale, California company, issuing stock price targets as low as $0. Peter Misek of Canaccord Adams, who issued the $0 value, defends his pessimistic view of Palm by writing,

“We believe Palm’s troubles will only accelerate as carriers and suppliers increasingly question the company’s solvency and withdraw their support.With what appears to be roughly 12 months of cash on hand, an accelerating burn rate, a complete lack of earnings visibility, and substantial debt and preferred equity, we no longer see any value in the company’s common equity.”

Palm is at the edge of a precipice and needs either a miracle or a very wealthy suitor to save it from what appears to be inevitable self destruction. Anyone with a Pre or Pixi in good condition may want to box that puppy up and put it in a drawer as it may be a collector’s item someday. We’re half kidding. Kind of.

Read (Q3 2010 earnings)

Read (Inventory)

Read (Worthless stock)

In all fairness I should also say that its not only IJ I wish had this feature. I dread fixing eclipse configuration files because I have broken them by reimporting a maven project into an existing eclipse project. Luckly, I only use eclipse every 6 months to do what IJ can't for unit testing and a very few other things.

-Rob

WebYep focuses on web designers that concentrate on design and don't want to adopt PHP or deep HTML skills to simply make some pages (of a maybe already existing website) editable.

WebYep uses reduced functionality on the user (editor) side, keeping the web designer in control and removing the load of complex content administration from the user - editing web content with WebYep can truly be done by everyone!

As it's very important to us that you can easily test the full feature set of WebYep, you can download here and run the full version of WebYep including the WebYep Dreamweaver Extension without a license code!

Until a valid license code is entered, you will only see a popup window (with a demo notice) when accessing the website that uses WebYep. Beside that, the "demo" mode has no restrictions and offers the full feature set.

• Fixed: Problems with the recognition of an installed CKEditor when using the RapidWeaver Plugin (the relevant pages must be re-exported after installing the new plugin).
• Fixed: Problem with CKEditor and Internet Explorer (JavaScript errors).
• Improved: URL format used by the Menu Element. Open menu trees are now remembered in the cookies instead of the URL. The URL query key for the current document instance was changed to "DOC_INST" (was "WEBYEP_DI").
• New: Added ckeditor_styles.js to set up CKEditor's Styles popup menu (see Rich Text Element's documentation for details).
• Improved: Image detail window (when not using Lightbox) now better supports very large images.
• Improved: Restoring of editor window sizes.

Have we moved one step closer to color eBook readers? PVI, the company who makes the e-ink displays for Amazon’s Kindle, is now showing off its 6-inch and 9.7-inch color e-ink displays for eBook readers at a trade show in Shenzhen, China. The displays on demo are able to handle animated color clips, albeit the refresh rate of the display was far from good enough to handle video. PVI has already shown the screens to Amazon and Barnes & Noble, though there wasn’t any confirmation as to whether it will be used for future eBook readers. These color screens obviously consume more energy than the monochrome e-ink displays, but it’s still less than the energy consumption of LCD panels. PVI is predicting mass production of these displays to begin in Q4 of 2010. Will the next generation of eBook readers sport color e-ink displays?

Permalink: Color E-ink Display Pictured from Ubergizmo | RSS Sponsor: Win a Fellowes Microshred Paper Shredder!

All signs point to Mac OS X 10.6.3 being released soon. Start revving your Software Updaters!

Read More: AppleInsider

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This is far from confirmed, so take it with a pinch of salt. A picture of what is claimed to be the upcoming BlackBerry OS 6 has been leaked. To be honest, it looks quite a bit like the concierge app that was on show a while back, so this could be another Photoshop job. If it is true, what do you think about it? It seems a tad cramped, but we’re sure some people like the information overdose.

Permalink: BlackBerry OS 6.0 Picture Leaked? from Ubergizmo | RSS Sponsor: Win a Fellowes Microshred Paper Shredder!

The fourth annual Pwn2Own contest—which takes place at the CanSecWest security conference every year—kicks off next week. Like last year, 2010's contest will offer security experts and hackers the chance to "pwn" a number of mobile platforms in addition to various browser/OS combinations. Though no mobile devices were successfully hacked last year, expectations are high that the iPhone will go down in this year's contest.

"With all the recent research on mobile phone security being presented worldwide, these devices are quickly becoming a ripe target," wrote Aaron Portnoy, security researcher at TippingPoint and Pwn2Own contest organizer. "First to fall: the iPhone."

Mac OS X security expert Charlie Miller, known for his past exploits of Safari and discovery of a possible arbitrary code execution exploit for the iPhone, is also confident that the iPhone will go down this year. "Someone I know quite well says they have an exploit for it and plan on using it," he said recently during a chat with Kapersky Labs' ThreatPost. "From an exploitation perspective, iPhone is no harder than [Mac] OS X now that Snow Leopard has data execution protection," Miller explained.

However, Miller plans to stick to Safari, which he successfully attacked the last two years, netting him thousands in cash and two MacBooks. "There isn't as much exposed code on the iPhone," he said. "The easy to exploit bugs I know about happen to live in the code that Safari has but Mobile Safari doesn't," mostly due to Mobile Safari's lack of support for Java, Flash, and other third-party plugins.

Also, Miller said, "in real life the iPhone is harder because you can't just execute a shell. You have to write your return-oriented payload to do all your dirty work, which can be a pain."

Miller said that attacking Safari this year will be harder than last year, since Snow Leopard has DEP and Safari sandboxes plug-ins in separate processes. However, he noted that Snow Leopard's incomplete support for address space layout randomization still leaves the Safari and Mac OS X combination open to vulnerabilities.

This year, contestants will have a chance to nab a laptop and a $10,000 cash prize for demonstrating exploits for IE8, Firefox 3, and Google Chrome 4 running under Windows 7, or Safari 4 running on Mac OS X 10.6. Contestants that successfully hack an iPhone 3GS, BlackBerry Bold 9700, a Nokia E62, or a Motorola Droid will get to keep the device as well as $15,000 in cash.

Read the comments on this post

The fourth annual Pwn2Own contest—which takes place at the CanSecWest security conference every year—kicks off next week. Like last year, 2010's contest will offer security experts and hackers the chance to "pwn" a number of mobile platforms in addition to various browser/OS combinations. Though no mobile devices were successfully hacked last year, expectations are high that the iPhone will go down in this year's contest.

"With all the recent research on mobile phone security being presented worldwide, these devices are quickly becoming a ripe target," wrote Aaron Portnoy, security researcher at TippingPoint and Pwn2Own contest organizer. "First to fall: the iPhone."

Mac OS X security expert Charlie Miller, known for his past exploits of Safari and discovery of a possible arbitrary code execution exploit for the iPhone, is also confident that the iPhone will go down this year. "Someone I know quite well says they have an exploit for it and plan on using it," he said recently during a chat with Kapersky Labs' ThreatPost. "From an exploitation perspective, iPhone is no harder than [Mac] OS X now that Snow Leopard has data execution protection," Miller explained.

However, Miller plans to stick to Safari, which he successfully attacked the last two years, netting him thousands in cash and two MacBooks. "There isn't as much exposed code on the iPhone," he said. "The easy to exploit bugs I know about happen to live in the code that Safari has but Mobile Safari doesn't," mostly due to Mobile Safari's lack of support for Java, Flash, and other third-party plugins.

Also, Miller said, "in real life the iPhone is harder because you can't just execute a shell. You have to write your return-oriented payload to do all your dirty work, which can be a pain."

Miller said that attacking Safari this year will be harder than last year, since Snow Leopard has DEP and Safari sandboxes plug-ins in separate processes. However, he noted that Snow Leopard's incomplete support for address space layout randomization still leaves the Safari and Mac OS X combination open to vulnerabilities.

This year, contestants will have a chance to nab a laptop and a $10,000 cash prize for demonstrating exploits for IE8, Firefox 3, and Google Chrome 4 running under Windows 7, or Safari 4 running on Mac OS X 10.6. Contestants that successfully hack an iPhone 3GS, BlackBerry Bold 9700, a Nokia E62, or a Motorola Droid will get to keep the device as well as $15,000 in cash.

Read the comments on this post

The fourth annual Pwn2Own contest—which takes place at the CanSecWest security conference every year—kicks off next week. Like last year, 2010's contest will offer security experts and hackers the chance to "pwn" a number of mobile platforms in addition to various browser/OS combinations. Though no mobile devices were successfully hacked last year, expectations are high that the iPhone will go down in this year's contest.

"With all the recent research on mobile phone security being presented worldwide, these devices are quickly becoming a ripe target," wrote Aaron Portnoy, security researcher at TippingPoint and Pwn2Own contest organizer. "First to fall: the iPhone."

Mac OS X security expert Charlie Miller, known for his past exploits of Safari and discovery of a possible arbitrary code execution exploit for the iPhone, is also confident that the iPhone will go down this year. "Someone I know quite well says they have an exploit for it and plan on using it," he said recently during a chat with Kapersky Labs' ThreatPost. "From an exploitation perspective, iPhone is no harder than [Mac] OS X now that Snow Leopard has data execution protection," Miller explained.

However, Miller plans to stick to Safari, which he successfully attacked the last two years, netting him thousands in cash and two MacBooks. "There isn't as much exposed code on the iPhone," he said. "The easy to exploit bugs I know about happen to live in the code that Safari has but Mobile Safari doesn't," mostly due to Mobile Safari's lack of support for Java, Flash, and other third-party plugins.

Also, Miller said, "in real life the iPhone is harder because you can't just execute a shell. You have to write your return-oriented payload to do all your dirty work, which can be a pain."

Miller said that attacking Safari this year will be harder than last year, since Snow Leopard has DEP and Safari sandboxes plug-ins in separate processes. However, he noted that Snow Leopard's incomplete support for address space layout randomization still leaves the Safari and Mac OS X combination open to vulnerabilities.

This year, contestants will have a chance to nab a laptop and a $10,000 cash prize for demonstrating exploits for IE8, Firefox 3, and Google Chrome 4 running under Windows 7, or Safari 4 running on Mac OS X 10.6. Contestants that successfully hack an iPhone 3GS, BlackBerry Bold 9700, a Nokia E62, or a Motorola Droid will get to keep the device as well as $15,000 in cash.

Read the comments on this post

Following a disappointing earnings report, a Wall Street analyst has cut his price target on Palm to $0. In other words, he believes the company’s shares will be worthless within 12 months.

The report comes from Canaccord Adams technology analyst Peter Misek, who wrote this morning, “We believe Palm’s troubles will only accelerate as carriers and suppliers increasingly question the company’s solvency and withdraw their support.”

Although Palm’s revenue tripled in its most recent quarter versus the prior year, less than half of the smartphones it shipped to distributors actually sold. And for the coming quarter, Palm offered a revenue estimate of less than half of what analysts were expecting.

Initial optimism about the Palm Pre and Pixi — which are now also available on Verizon — had sent the company’s shares as high as $18/share last fall, but following today’s report, the company sees its shares back under $5. As of December ’09, the company had an estimated 6% share of the U.S. smartphone market.

Tags: palm

Google’s obsession with speed is well-documented. One of the primary design principles behind its search engine is to return results as fast as possible and strip away anything extra. But its need for speed goes well beyond search. All of Google’s apps are optimized for speed (well, except Gmail lately, but they promise to fix that). The Chrome browser is extremely fast, and the upcoming Chrome OS is also expected to make Web browsing and other computing tasks zippier.

It almost doesn’t matter if Google’s Chrome browser and OS gain significant market share or not, as long as they push other browsers and operating systems to keep up in the speed race. Google’s need for speed boils down to one very simple thing: money. It realized long ago that every millisecond improvement in pageload times on its search engine resulted in more searches, and thus more search ads served and clicked on. The opposite is also true. Google once did a study showing that delays of 100 to 400 millisecond in showing search results translated into up to 0.6 percent searches. Multiply that across the billions of searches done on Google and it starts to add up to real money, perhaps tens of millions of dollars per quarter.

Google can keep trying to make search faster because that is under its control. But what about the rest of the Web? The faster pages load, the more Web pages people will visit overall (this is why broadband adoption is the single biggest driver of Internet traffic and e-commerce). And it stands to reason that the more Web pages you visit, the more searches you will perform in any given day. Because searches are driven by the other things you do on the Web. You go look for information, surf around, and then go back to search when you want to find something new (at least Google hopes you do). By helping to speed up the Web, Google can speed up that information loop so that instead of waiting for Web pages to load you can get what you need and start another search instead.

No wonder Google tries to do everything it can to make the Web faster. For instance, it is supporting emerging standards such as HTML5 and SPDY, and sharing its best practices and speed-monitoring tools with developers. It is also baking the PuSH protocol into Google Reader and other apps. In doing so, Google is helping to deliver news feeds faster (PuSH, aka Pubsubhubbub, was created by two Google engineers, of course, and released as an open-source project). The list goes on and on.

It is all about trying to get people to achieve a “flow state” where they are just clicking from one link to the next and it all happens instantaneously. In order for humans not to notice electronic delays, new information needs to appear in a matter of milliseconds. Get the whole Web humming like that and we may never leave our monitors.

Photo credit: Flickr/ Ana Patricia Almelda