Andrey Ternovskiy, founder of one of the world's hottest startups, has a problem. If you can help him, we'll give him your resume.

Andrey is the 17-year-old founder of Chatroulette, the Russian site that randomly pairs users from around the world in video chats.

Read the rest of this story »

Following the Congressional Budget Office's score of the health care reform reconciliation package, Fox News has attempted to portray the nonpartisan CBO as untrustworthy and unreliable. By contrast, after the CBO gave a "favorable" score to the GOP health care plan, Fox praised the office as "nonpartisan" and advanced false GOP claims about the CBO's findings.

 Beck mocks CBO score of health care reform: "Well, that's a party in my pants." On the March 18 edition of Fox News' Glenn Beck, Beck asked, "How would the CBO numbers even make any difference? You know, 'Only 900 and' -- what is it -- '$954 billion.' Ooh. Well, that's a party in my pants. Thank you for sending that one by. How does that make a difference?"

 Doocy: "[C]an you really rely on the numbers that the Congressional Budget Office comes out with?" On the March 19 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy claimed, "Democrats say it will reduce the deficit by more than $100 billion over the first decade." After guest host Dana Perino responded by saying, "Well, but there are other members who say that it actually will cost $2.4 trillion over the 10 years once you add it all up," Doocy asked, "Because, can you really rely on the numbers that the Congressional Budget Office comes out with?"

 Perino: "[C]an we trust these numbers?" Introducing an interview with Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) on the same edition of Fox & Friends, Perino said, "Nine hundred and forty billion dollars over the next decade. That's the preliminary price tag for the Democrats' health care bill, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It also says the plan will cut the federal deficit by $130 billion in that time, but can we trust these numbers?" Weiner said the score "came out really better than we thought it would. It was a great savings number, and so the deficit hawks now have things that they can point at and say, 'You know what? This really does save money." Perino then asked him, "But do you think ... that those numbers can be trusted later on?"

 Johnson Jr.: "I don't expect or anticipate that their numbers are real." On the same edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade said that the "average person" would say, "[I]f a plan costs $940 billion, tell me how I'm saving 130 billion. So it doesn't make any sense." Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. then noted that Perino had asked, "Do we really trust these numbers?" and claimed that "if you read carefully the latest CBO things, they say, 'Well, we don't usually project out another 10 years.' And there's so many variables and so many wiggle words that I don't expect or anticipate that their numbers are real." He later said, "I think we're being spun."

 Hannity calls CBO score "budgetary gimmicks and tricks." On the March 18 edition of Fox News' Hannity, host Sean Hannity called the CBO score of the health care bill reflected "budgetary gimmicks and tricks" and said that it is "[f]lat-out dishonest" that the score didn't contain separate legislation that cancels scheduled cuts in Medicare payments to doctors. After guest Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) claimed "the only way that [Democrats] pay for those additions is to reduce seniors' health care benefits on their Medicaid or raise taxes," Hannity responded, "[W]hy would the CBO not highlight this to give a truly educational, informational, you know, scoring of this to the American people?"

 Hemmer asks Juan Williams "do you believe" the CBO long-range forecast. On the March 18 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom, Fox News contributor Juan Williams called the CBO score a "deal-maker" because it will "reassure those independents and, by extension, those Democrats that have been on the fence because they are deficit hawks" because of the deficit reduction. Co-host Bill Hemmer then said to Williams, "That's 20 years out. You've lived in Washington a long time. Do you believe that?"

 Fox Nation headline: "CBO Score Called a 'Lie.' " On March 18, Fox Nation posted a National Review article under the headline "CBO Score Called a 'Lie.' " From Fox Nation:

 Fox's Shively touted "favorable" CBO report on GOP health care bill and advanced false GOP claim that GOP plan would lower premiums more than Democrats' plan. On the November 5, 2009, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, contributor Caroline Shively adopted the GOP spin by reporting, "Now, on the other side of the aisle, Republicans have gotten favorable reports from the Congressional Budget Office on the cost of their health care bill. GOP lawmakers say that means premiums for millions of families will be almost $5,000 lower under their plan, compared to the cheapest plan in the Democrats' exchange." In fact, the $5,000 difference Shively cited ignored premium caps in the House Democrats' plan. As Media Matters for America has noted, because the Democrats' health care bill provides premium caps on a sliding scale based on income, the lowest amount that a family would have to pay in premiums is significantly less than the GOP alternative.

America's Newsroom attributes Republican talking point to CBO. On the November 5 edition of America's Newsroom, host Martha McCallum claimed, "The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is saying that the Republican bill ... will carry lower costs for Americans. The CBO estimates that health insurance premiums would be nearly $5,000 cheaper under the Republican reforms than the Democratic ones." In fact, the CBO never made that claim. The comparison was based on calculations done by Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee. From America's Newsroom:

Fox & Friends report obscures that GOP plan wouldn't cover uninsured, wouldn't significantly lower premiums, would reduce deficit less than Democrats' plan. Shively's Fox & Friends report ignored that the GOP plan would not cover most uninsured Americans. Shively also did not report that the CBO estimates indicate that House Democrats' bill lowers the deficit more than the GOP's proposal.

Douglas MacMillan / Business Week:
Apple Swears iPad Partners to Secrecy  —  Developers must sequester the tablet computer in rooms with blacked-out windows, reflecting secrecy around a product that may mean billions of dollars in sales  —  Apple makes big demands of software developers who want an early crack at the iPad.

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

Palm shares plunged in late trading Thursday after the company posted yet another dismal quarter and warned that revenue for the current one will fall far short of Wall Street expectations. The company will have to take substantial charges to help its carrier partners eat through excess inventory, and whatever luster once existed for its flagship Pre is long gone. The question now is, who’s going to pick up Palm?

Palm’s last-ditch gamble on webOS has been a disaster. The operating system — which debuted last summer on the Pre — has received solid reviews, but an utter lack of effective marketing from Sprint — and more recently, Verizon Wireless — shackled handset sales. And an upcoming partnership with AT&T — which looked to be Palm’s last chance at redemption — is reportedly fizzling already after the carrier delayed the launch of webOS handsets, slashed its order and cut its marketing budget.

So what are Palm’s options? CEO Jon Rubinstein is projecting a “stay the course” attitude, saying better training of Verizon Wireless sales staffers will begin to pay off — a questionable theory given the flat-line demand for the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus so far. Producing a tablet would be an interesting strategy, as James over at jkOnTheRun suggested yesterday. But the market for tablets is still very uncertain, and there’s little reason to believe Palm can move a different kind of hardware when it can’t sell phones. So a suitor will likely sweep in and pick up Palm, snatching up webOS — the company’s most valuable asset — and a sizable patent portfolio. Here’s a quick rundown of the most likely (or most highly speculated) candidates for acquiring Palm — including their odds of doing so:

• Google : The most intriguing play on the board, Google might be compelled by Palm’s patent portfolio, as Gizmodo noted yesterday. What’s more, Google and Palm both operate Linux-based mobile operating systems, which would make it easy for Google to cherry-pick the best features from webOS and add them to Android. Google could easily afford Palm, and as a bonus would keep it from falling into the hands of a competitor. Odds: 7-1
• Dell : The Texas computer vendor joined the smartphone space a few months ago, launching handsets in Brazil and China, and will soon launch an Android-based device through AT&T. But its late entry means Dell will have a hard time differentiating its hardware, and coming to market with its own mobile operating system, app store and developer community could be a great way to stand out from the crowd. Odds: 7-1
• Hewlett-Packard: HP’s tiny smartphone business is dissolving in the superphone era. Picking up what amounts to a turnkey mobile OS would be a huge — if costly — move to attract attention and breathe life into its mobile business. Odds: 11-1.
• Nokia : Nokia has long been mentioned as a potential buyer for Palm, but successfully marrying the two has become an increasingly difficult proposition. Nokia already claims the world’s most popular smartphone OS in Symbian, and its Maemo — um, sorry, I mean MeeGo – operating system appears to be its long-term strategy. What’s more, Ovi has gained impressive traction in recent months. Adding another platform to the mix would only serve to distract Nokia just as it finally appears to be regaining its focus. Odds: 25-1
• Motorola : Another hardware maker that might be compelled by the idea of owning its own OS, Motorola’s $8 billion in cash ensures plenty of capital to pocket Palm. Yet despite what Om suggested earlier this year, taking on a mobile operating system would likely be more than Motorola could handle, given its difficulty in regaining its once-dominant market share in smartphones. Marriages of two weak players from different spaces rarely end up happy. Odds: 30-1
• Microsoft : Palm and Microsoft seemed like a great fit just a few months ago. But that was before the gang from Redmond went public with its plans to scrap Windows Mobile in favor of Windows Phone, an impressive, consumer-targeted platform set to debut late this year. Windows Phone may fail gloriously, but there’s no reason to bring another OS into the fold — and webOS is largely considered to be Palm’s most valuable asset. Odds: 35-1
• Cisco : An acquisition of Palm would enable Cisco to immediately expand beyond infrastructure into the mobile consumer market. Such a move wouldn’t exactly be unprecedented for Cisco, which last year bought the maker of Flip Video camcorders for $590 million, but maintaining a mobile operating system is a far more sophisticated endeavor than simply churning out camcorders. Odds: 40-1.

This is only a partial list, of course, and new potential suitors are sure to emerge as Palm begins to circle the drain. The clock is ticking, and there’s almost no hope Palm can reverse course at this point. So someone in the mobile space might be able to do very well by picking up a dying company at a cut-rate price.

Related content from GigOM Pro (sub req’d):

Could Games Redeem Windows Mobile and Palm’s webOS?

Image courtesy Flickr user nathangibbs.

Jeffrey H. Anderson / Weekly Standard:
CBO: Obamacare Would Cost Over $2 Trillion  —  The CBO's most recent analysis is out, and it's not likely to convince wavering House Democrats to jump to the Obamacare side of the fence.  Even the Democrats are granting that the latest version of their proposed health care overhaul would cost $69 billion more than the previous version.

For nearly 10,000 years--since the dawn of civilization and the Holocene era--our world seemed unimaginably large. Vast frontiers of land and ocean offered infinite resources. Humans could pollute freely, and they could avoid any local repercussions simply by moving elsewhere. People built entire empires and economic systems on their ability to exploit what seemed to be inexhaustible riches, never realizing that the privilege would come to an end.

But thanks to advances in public health, the industrial revolution and later the green revolution, population has surged from about one billion in 1800 to nearly seven billion today. In the past 50 years alone, our numbers have more than doubled. Fueled by affluence, our use of resources has also reached staggering levels; in 50 years the global consumption of food and freshwater has more than tripled, and fossil-fuel use has risen fourfold. We now co-opt between one third and one half of all the photosynthesis on the planet.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Documents in Viacom's three-year-old, $1 billion suit against YouTube, unsealed today by U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton, paint a fascinating picture of the intertwined relationship between the video site and the conglomerate that owns MTV, BET and Comedy Central.

For example: YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim were in a race early on to build traffic at the site in hopes of getting acquired, and knew full well that illegally uploaded TV clips might help.

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• YouTube Says "Viacom Continuously And Secretly Uploaded Its Content To YouTube"
• The YouTube-Viacom Documents Are Now Available For Your Reading Pleasure!
• The 20 Hot New York City Startups You Need To Watch

Casio's solar-powered Pathfinder watch plays the green card twice originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has become the best-selling March release on record in North America and Europe after shifting over 2.3 million copies.

According to EA's DICE, over 2.9 million hours have been played online in one 24 hour period, and the game has logged 230,000 peak concurrent-users.

81 billion points have been earned in online multiplayer sessions and 43 million weapons and gadgets have been unlocked.

Read more...

Plastic Jungle, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that runs a gift card exchange says it has raised $7.4 million in a round led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from previous investors, Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital and Bay Partners. The company raised $6 million in 2009.

Plastic Jungle is one of the many companies who are trying to solve the problems around the gift card economy, as I highlighted in my post about CardPool, a San Francisco-based very early stage start-up. According to some estimates, nearly $5 billion worth of cards go unclaimed every year. It allows consumers to get cash for unwanted gift cards for up to 92% of the unused balance and buy gift cards at up to a 30% discount.

In the 2009-2010 holiday season, Plastic Jungle saw 450% year over year revenue growth from 2009-to-2010. The company gets 118,000 monthly visitors to its website and is growing at about 60 percent per month.

On Fox, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore claimed that one reason the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the health care reform reconciliation package reduces the deficit is because it scored "10 years of revenue ... but only six years of spending," adding that "if you match up the cost with the revenues, I think most analysts believe that this is a revenue loser." In fact, CBO estimated that the bill will continue to lower the deficit after 2019, long after all the spending has kicked in.

Moore claims spending and revenue "mismatch" kept bill from looking like a "revenue loser." From the March 18 edition of Fox News' On the Record with Greta Van Susteren:

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN (host): How do they say we're going to pay for this?

MOORE: OK. So, first of all, this is roughly a trillion -- let's just round it to about a trillion dollars over the next 10 years. But, remember, this runs into the problem we talked about a couple weeks ago that it's -- the way that CBO has scored it: 10 years of revenues, Greta, but only six years of spending. So, it's a mismatch.

VAN SUSTEREN: OK. All right, so, for 10 years we're going to be paying for it, but we don't get 10 years of services?

MOORE: Right. We get six years.

VAN SUSTEREN: All right.

MOORE: That's one way they keep the deficit down because they don't start spending until the year's out.

VAN SUSTEREN: But they start collecting.

MOORE: Right. And so, actually --

VAN SUSTEREN: That's like going -- that's like making a car payment for four years but they don't deliver the car for four years.

MOORE: Well put. I like that analogy, and --

VAN SUSTEREN: And so you sit there and wait.

MOORE: And so, in fact, if you match up the cost with the revenues, I think most analysts believe that this is a revenue loser.

VAN SUSTEREN: I think that's silly the way they do that.

CBO: Senate bill yields "a net reduction in federal deficits of $138 billion" over 10 years. On March 18, CBO released its preliminary estimate of the effect of the combined effect of the Senate bill and reconciliation proposal on the federal budget. It found:

CBO and JCT estimate that enacting both pieces of legislation -- H.R. 3590 and the reconciliation proposal -- would produce a net reduction in federal deficits of $138 billion over the 2010-2019 period.

CBO: Over second 10 years, reconciliation bill would save "around one-half percent of GDP." CBO also estimated savings for the decade following the 2010-2019 period:

Therefore, CBO has developed a rough outlook for the decade following the 2010-2019 period by grouping the elements of the legislation into broad categories and (together with the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation) assessing the rate at which the budgetary impact of each of those broad categories is likely to increase over time.

[...]

Using that same analytic approach, the combined effect of enacting H.R. 3590 and the reconciliation bill would also be to reduce federal budget deficits over the ensuing decade relative to those projected under current law -- with a total effect during that decade that is in a broad range around one-half percent of GDP.

Court documents in the $1 billion lawsuit between Viacom and YouTube were unsealed today, finally shedding some light on key questions: did Viacom have "smoking gun" evidence that YouTube was deliberately profiting from 62,637 Viacom clips that were watched more than 507 million times on the site? Was Google aware of the copyright infringement problems when it purchased YouTube in 2006? Were YouTube's own founders involved in uploading unauthorized materials?

On all three counts, Viacom says yes—and it offers up a host of e-mails to prove it:

Read the comments on this post