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In the
next few weeks, the ReadWriteWeb events guide will take you from New York City, to San Francisco,
to Portland, Oregon. Along the way you'll find a conference on search engine strategies, a
showcase for startups, an in-depth look at the freemium business model, and a day filled with of
social media case studies.
How do you like your events calendar? As a
world map? As an
iCal (and Google Calendar-importable) file? You can also import individual events using the
link beside each entry. Know of something cool taking place that should appear here? Let us know
in the comments below or contact us.
Go beyond search at Search Engine
Strategies New York. Learn the newest trends, strategic action plans, and technology that
industry leaders are employing today. Our experts will trace the natural evolution of search
exploring topics such as: digital asset optimization, mobile application development, transition
from search to discovery and more.Book your pass today. Enter RWW15 to save 15% off the
registration. Sessions include:
After a long winter's hiatus, S.F. Beta is back, for its forth year straight! Join
hundreds of founders, investors, developers, and technologists for a lively evening of demos,
drinks, conversation, and new connections. Early bird
tickets are available, and they're going fast. Register now for discounted admission. As
always, we feature startup demos all night. This time around, the theme is Search &
Discovery. If you're building the next Google (or the next Google acquisition), we want you here!
Email cperry@sfbeta.com for more info.
The first Freemium Summit is a one day
event focused on exploring what it takes to succeed under the freemium business model. Across all
segments of the media landscape, entrepreneurs and executives are pioneering models that combine
a free offering with a premium, paid offering. This hybrid business model is one of the most
exciting areas of business model innovation impacting the world of media and the Freemium Summit
will explore the most important topics on the minds of leading practitioners.
Confirmed Speakers: Toni Schneider, Automattic (WordPress); Matt Brezina, Xobni; Aaron Levie,
Box.net; Phil Libin, Evernote; Tom Conrad, Pandora; Drew Houston, Dropbox; Ranjith Kumaran,
YouSendIt; Ben Chestnut, Mailchimp; Lance Walley, Chargify; Isaac Hall, Recurly; and Lincoln
Murphy, Sixteen Ventures.
The social media conference for marketers, Social Fresh is not about concept, but focused purely on
case studies from the front lines. Learn what social media can really do for business bottom
lines. Over the course of the day, you'll hear from 35 speakers from companies like Intel, Ford,
Comcast, Nike and many more, as well as keynote Peter Shankman. Register now and use coupon code RWW15 for 15% off.
4 April 2010: Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania
TEDx CMU is an independently
organized TEDx event that will be held on April 4th, 2010 at Carnegie Mellon University and will
feature a full day of talks by prominent speakers as well as recorded videos from past TEDTalks.
Confirmed speakers include Jonathan Fields (author, blogger and entrepreneur), Stacey Monk
(founder of Epic Change, a startup nonprofit), Chase Jarvis (photographer, director and social
artist) and Nathan Martin (CEO of Deeplocal, an innovation studio in Pittsburgh).
The theme of the event is "Fearless", and we are inviting speakers from cross-disciplinary
backgrounds to talk about their experiences, and tell us a little about what inspires them to be
fearless in the pursuit of goals. We hope to spark discussions and foster connections between
participants, encouraging aspiring individuals to follow their dreams and make a difference. The
event is free to attend, and the application deadline is March 21, 2010.
For more information about the event, visit tedxcmu.com or email
info@tedxcmu.com. You can also find TEDx CMU on Facebook
or follow us on Twitter.
ConnectNow brings together international
specialists and thought leaders in social media, emerging technologies and their intersection
with business. Learn how the realtime web, location based services, augmented reality, ubiquitous
computing and personalised services are changing marketing and communications. Understand the
importance of trust in relationship marketing and what is "social currency". For more info email
info@connectnow.net.au.
PubCon, the premier search
and social media conference, features the industry's biggest names and key players shaping the
future of the Web. PubCon South will include
cutting-edge panel sessions exploring tracks dedicated to search, social media and affiliate
marketing, an intensive professional search and social media training program, and some of the
world's top keynote speakers. PubCon South at Dallas will also hold a one-day, two-track slate of
intensive educational training programs led by some of the industry's most respected search
professionals. The event takes place at the Richardson Conference and Civic Center. Register
here.
Under the Radar: Cloud is must-attend
event for dealmakers and heads of IT from large enterprises, SMBs, service providers, carriers
and media companies who are responsible for helping their companies leverage new technology and
innovation in the fast-evolving IT ecosystem. Join us for the 15th Under the Radar conference,
featuring a hand-picked selection of the world's most innovative cloud startups among 350 top
tech, media, telcom and finance executives. For ticket and more information, visit http://undertheradarblog.com.
FutureMidwest is the region's largest technology and knowledge
conference. Founded by Adrian Pittman, Jordan Wolfe and Zach Lipson, FutureMidwest is the fusion
of two successful conferences held in Michigan in 2009 - the Module Midwest Digital Conference
and TechNow.
Both conferences highlighted how technology and digital tools have dramatically changed the way
we do business and the effect this transition has had on companies. FutureMidwest kicks things up
a notch with presentations, group breakout sessions, relationship-building opportunities and
influencers who are taking action to redefine business in the digital age. Register here.
The social media conference for marketers, Social Fresh is not about concept, but focused purely on
case studies from the front lines. Learn what social media can really do for business bottom
lines. Over the course of the day you'll hear from 35 speakers from companies like Ford, Best Buy,
Scottrade, Hardees, CMT and many more. Register now
and use coupon code RWW15 for 15% off.
DrupalCon is
the premier conference focused on Drupal, the award-winning open source content management
framework that is galvanizing social publishing and web development today. For a registration fee
of $195, attendees get three full days of sessions led by the best and brightest Drupal
experts.
Drupal has been downloaded over 2 million times since its inception, and project growth has
doubled annually for several years. Drupal is used to deliver a wide variety of application types
including blogs, wikis, community networks, digital media portals, and web content publishing and
management.
The Future of Money & Technology
Summit will bring together the best and brightest thinkers around money, including
visionaries, entrepreneurial business people, developers, press, investors, authors,
solution/service providers, and organizations who work where cash and commerce collide. We meet
to discuss the evolving ecosystem around money in a proactive, conducive to dealmaking
environment. Featured speakers include Jolie O'Dell from ReadWriteWeb, as well as representatives
from Wells Fargo Bank, Kiva, SharesPost, Jambool, Founders Fund, Outright.com, SoftTech VC, and
many more.
Use discount code "rww" to get 10% off registration.
The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010
will be an exploration of the latest Mobile development trends - both the technology and the
emerging business applications. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of Mobile with
the brightest in the industry, your peers! As in our last Summit, The Real-Time Web, the
ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit is an unconference.
An unconference is a participant driven conference where the agenda is created
on the day, in real-time and discussions are lead by conference participants. Read about the history of unconferences.
We will have two main tracks at this Summit - Development and Business - so the Summit will be of
interest to managers, marketers, developers, innovators, entrepreneurs and thought leaders alike.
Here's a sample of some of the topics we'll explore in both of these tracks.
FinovateSpring 2010 will again showcase the most cutting-edge
financial and banking technology innovations to Silicon Valley and the world. With Finovate's
signature mix of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) from handpicked
companies and intimate networking time with their executives, this conference packs a ton of
unique value into a single day.
Come see the cutting edge of banking and financial technology and network with hundreds of the
leading financial executives, venture capitalists, press, industry analysts, bloggers and fintech
entrepreneurs. Early bird registration
rates are available.
The SF MusicTech Summit
will bring together 700-plus visionaries in the music/technology space - the best and brightest
entrepreneurs, developers, investors, service providers, journalists, musicians and organizations
who work with them at the convergence of culture and commerce. We meet to discuss the evolving
music, business and technology ecosystem in a proactive, conducive-to-dealmaking environment.
Enter the discount code "rww" to get 10% off.
Glue is the only conference devoted
solely to exploring the problem-sets facing architects, developers and IT professionals in a
"post-cloud" world. Glue focuses on the APIs and protocols (Twitter, Facebook, Websockets,
PubSubHubBub, XMPP), formats and standards (RDF/Linked Data, JSON, Microformats, HTML5),
platforms and providers (Amazon, Rackspace, Google App Engine, Salesforce.com, Eucalyptus),
Identity Protocols (OAuth/WRAP, SAML, OpenID, SPML) emerging NoSQL data models (Cassandra,
CouchDB, MongoDB, Riak, HBase), and other mechanisms that are building the post-cloud world.
ReadWriteCloud will be blogging live from Gluecon and CloudCamp, and ReadWriteWeb's Alex Williams
will be moderating the "Managing Complexity in the Cloud" session. Please join us May 25-27 in
Denver, Colorado. ReadWriteWeb readers can receive 10% off of
registration by using the code "RWW12".
The Corporate Social Media Summit is a
two day conference focused exclusively on how big businesses can take advantage of social media
to enhance their marketing/comms strategy. Featuring:
Practical and relevant insights from peers who have already used social media successfully
20-plus corporate speakers (including
PepsiCo, Whole Foods, Dell, McDonald's, General Motors, Citi, Johnson & Johnson),
Best practice, benchmarks and practical next steps you can use to take advantage of social
media in your business
A tightly-focused agenda with 14 in-depth,
practical workshops giving you knowledge on only the most critical business issues surrounding
corporate use of social media
Save $400 if you quote RWW400 when booking. Book here.
The 2nd annual Cloud Computing World Forum is
the perfect event to learn and discuss the development, integration, adoption and future of cloud
computing and SaaS. Building on the success of the 2009 show, this two day conference and
free-to-attend exhibition will provide a focused platform for the global cloud and SaaS industry.
Show highlights include:
Co-located with CloudCamp London
Co-located with Green IT conference
Free-to-attend exhibition with seminar and scenario theatre
FinovateFall will return to Manhattan on Tuesday, October 5 to
showcase dozens of the biggest and most innovative new ideas in financial and banking technology
from established leaders(...)
Ten years ago this week, online music pioneer Justin Frankel released a little application dubbed
Gnutella that enabled file sharing through a distributed P2P network. Frankel, whose previous
claim to fame was programming the then hugely-popular Winamp MP3 player software, supposedly named the client after his favorite hazelnut
cream spread, and the first version published online was really more of a proof of concept than
anything else.
Still, Gnutella hit a nerve. Napster had been sued three months before, and many file sharers were rightfully
fearing that the music industry would eventually prevail in court and force Napster to switch off
its servers. With Gnutella, no such switch existed, as the client was allowing direct P2P
connections without the help of any centralized server. Add to it the fact that Gnutella, unlike
Napster, allowed users to swap videos and software as well as MP3s, and you begin to see why many
immediately viewed Gnutella as the next step in P2P file sharing.
A step, one should add, that made Frankel’s employer AOL more than a little nervous. It
only took the Internet giant a day to force Frankel and his colleagues to take down
Gnutella – but even that was too long, as countless sites quickly started to first
mirror, then build upon Frankel’s official Gnutella client. There’s always been a
little bit of mystery surrounding the exact happenings of those days, but some people have been
musing that a person with a surprising amount of insider knowledge showed up in one of the first
IRC chat rooms dedicated to Gnutella soon after AOL pulled the plug, only to provide some very
detailed information about the inner workings of the client’s P2P protocol.
Speaking of IRC: Early versions of the software didn’t really have any way for users to
connect, save for entering another user’s IP address, which is why IRC quickly became an
integral part of the early days of Gnutella. It was also in those IRC chat rooms that the myth of
Gnutella as a seemingly invincible P2P protocol was born, and the fact that AOL tried but
couldn’t contain the software seemed to fit right into that picture. Gnutella was one of
the very first P2P apps I ever wrote about, so I lurked in those chat rooms as well, where people
were cheering the fact that someone finally found a file sharing solution that couldn’t be
shut down. I still remember one IRC user saying: “We’ve started a damn cult
again!”
Only Gnutella wasn’t really ready to be a cult. The network routed search requests from
peer to peer, leading to an exponential growth of traffic as its network became bigger. Napster
programmer Jordan Ritter described the problem early on in a paper titled “Why Gnutella Can’t
Scale. No, Really,” and Frankel himself, who has hardly ever gone on the record about
Gnutella, once stated that he was
fully aware of “how poorly it would scale” when he released the client.
Still, Gnutella captured the imagination of many, one of them being Mark Gorton, founder of the
New York-based Lime Group. Gorton was at
the time pursuing a vision of automating businesses through structured data, and Gnutella, as
something that could, for example, distribute real estate listings wrapped in XML, seemed to fit
that image quite nicely. Early versions of the Gnutella client of Gorton’s LimeWire venture were still written with this
vision in mind, hoping to build a P2P network that could eventually be used to do all kinds of
things with which we’re now familiar on the web, thanks to web services.
LimeWire’s engineers joined a growing group of developers loosely connected through web
sites like the long-defunct Gnutella.wego.com (whose admin Gene Kan tragically committed
suicide in 2002) and mailing lists like the one for the Gnutella Developer Forum, and one of
the first issues to be tackled was scalability. The introduction of a two-tiered system of
ordinary clients and so-called Ultrapeers helped grow both the network as a whole and each
user’s search horizon. The idea was also later adopted by the developers of KaZaA, whose
own take on this two-tiered approach still lives on in Skype’s P2P network.
Technical improvements like these helped Gnutella to grow, but the competition was quick to catch
up. Bram Cohen unveiled a first version of
BitTorrent only two years after Frankel had published Gnutella, and BitTorrent quickly became the
file sharing client of choice for sharing videos online. Part of BitTorrent’s quick rise to
fame was its modular simplicity: Cohen had outsourced much of the search and indexing of files to
torrent web sites, only handling the actual distribution of data within the client. Gnutella on
the other hand was meant to work without any web server. That made it much more invincible, but
also much less accessible to users who migrated from apps and clients to a world of web services.
Another issue that has plagued Gnutella from the beginning is not technical, but legal. The
protocol was supposed to outsmart trigger-happy lawyers, but the mere fact that there
wasn’t a central switch to turn off the Gnutella network didn’t stop rights holders
from going after people and companies associated with it. Lawsuits and legal threats forced Morpheus, Xolox, Bearshare and
a number of other companies and developers to throw the towel.
LimeWire got sued by the music industry as well in 2006, but that hasn’t
stopped the company from continuing with the development and monetization of its client.
LimeWire’s client also utilizes BitTorrent these days, but LimeWire’s VP of Product
Management Jason Herskowitz told me during a phone conversation that Gnutella has “worked
really well” for the company, and that its engineers are looking into ways to make Gnutella
once again more attractive to developers by exposing some of its functionality through web
services. “There is still a long future ahead for Gnutella,” he predicted.
Not everyone agrees with that outlook. Adam Fisk, who was hired by LimeWire as one of its first developers in the summer of
2000, but left the company in 2004 to eventually start his own P2P venture dubbed Littleshot, believes that some core assumptions
of the Gnutella protocol are outdated. “I don’t think that distributed P2P search
makes any sense,” he told me, explaining that the very server-less search functionality
that made Gnutella superior to Napster also ended up being its biggest burden, and that it would
be much easier to have servers handle search and just use P2P to deliver data – a recipe
that has already helped BitTorrent succeed.
Sure, LimeWire and some other Gnutella clients could still stick around for a long time, Fisk
admitted, but he was skeptical that we would ever see any significant new project based on
Gnutella. “That would be shocking,” he said.
In the last few years, there's been a push by some companies to bring back the immensely troubling
"hot news doctrine," that appears to violate everything we know about the First Amendment and
copyright law. Basically, the "hot news doctrine" says that if someone reports on a story, others
are not allowed to report on their reporting for some period of time -- on the theory that it
somehow undermines the incentive to do that original reporting. Last year, we wrote about the
very troubling
implications of allowing the hot news concept to stand. Beyond the free speech implications, it
also has the troubling quality of effectively creating a copyright on facts -- which are quite
clearly not covered by copyright. On top of that, it's not necessary in the slightest. As anyone
who is actually in the online news business knows, getting a scoop gets you traffic -- even if
others report the same thing minutes later. Being first gets you the attention. You don't need to
artificially block others from reporting the news.
Unfortunately, with various publications struggling, some have picked up on the hot news doctrine
as a way to somehow block competition. Tragically, it looks like a court has now adopted the hot
news doctrine in one case. Paul Alan
Levy alerts us to the news that a judge issuing an
injunction against TheFlyOnTheWall.com, a website that would publish summaries of Wall Street
research. The Wall Street firms said this undermined their business model -- and the court agreed.
It passed an injunction saying that TheFlyOnTheWall had to hold off publishing any news about any
Wall Street research report until either 10am (if the report is released early in the morning) or
for two hours after it's released if it comes out during the day.
These totally arbitrary restrictions are highly troubling from a free speech standpoint and seem
effectively random. This seems like yet another case of a company being upset by interference with its business model,
which should be a reason to change the business model -- not run to the courts.
But what's most troubling of all is that now all the publishers who have been salivating over the
hot news doctrine have a legal ruling to point to. Can you imagine how the world would work if you
couldn't blog about or mention a particular piece of news for a few hours because the Associated
Press got to it first? It's hard to see how this could possibly stand up to a First Amendment
analysis, and it's quite troubling that the judge found the way she did.
About five years ago, I wrote a detailed report on how one could have the choice between GNU /
Linux and other operating systems in Argentina. that was most surprising for French people, that
have always had the greatest difficulties in getting such a choice, despite the remarkable
efforts made by the Working Group Detaxe
and Racketiciels. It was even possible at that time in
Argentina to compare on the website of major retail chains (Fravega, Garbarino, the equivalent of
Darty or Boulanger in France) the price for the same machine with another operating system or
with a Debian-based, customised Argentinian GNU / Linux, developed by an SME named Pixart (not to
be confused with the studio Pixar!).
One may well ask why: this is not without reminding us of the situation here in France, where
after SFR placed on the market more thatn 250000 Netbooks all equipped with GNU / Linux about two
years ago, we can not find now a single netbook without Windows (yes, I write the name in full
letters now, because I am particularly upset: I wanted to buy one for personal use this
Christmas, but despite my efforts, I have not found a single model with a GNU / Linux
preinstalled in France).
The few remaining fans of software monopolies like to say that this sudden vanishement proves
that the other operating system is superior to GNU / Linux.
Well, I happen to have in my hands right now a copy of the appeal filed against Microsoft by the
little Argentine SMEs Pixart, and it is very helpful in understanding what really happened there
... and very likely what is happening here too.
The Windows For The Poor
Microsoft does not usually sit back when it loses market share, and I already noticed back then
that Redmond had put in place a strategy to counter the spread of GNU / Linux in emerging
markets. In Argentina, already in 2005 they had managed to convince the government to spend
taxpayer money on an operation codenamed 'Mi PC', which through a microcredit whose interests
were paid by the state, encouraged the public to buy machines that are sold with Windows SE
(Starter Edition, they say), better known today as Windows FTP (For The Poor). This edition
sports ludicrous limitations like the following: only recognises 256 Mb of RAM (with XP, It's a
little short), 80 GB hard disk (ditto), screen resolution was limited to 800x600, no local
network, and you cannot open windows for more than 3 applications at once (oh well, if there is
something that poor people have in abundance is time, therefore they will only run 3 tasks in
parallel, and no more).
This version was sold cheaper than the standard Windows editions , with the aim to compete with
GNU / Linux machines, but at that time this move made me laugh quite a bit because the early
machines with Windows FTP still costed at least 500 pesos more than the equivalent GNU / Linux
systems, which had no such ridiculous limitations: one really had to be poor in spirit to
purchase them!
The rear margins (or Market Development Agreements)
What I did not know in 2006 is that the Windows For The Poor was just a first step in the
strategy: The second step was to artificially lower the final price of computers running Windows,
and financially strangling Pixart, which could not charge anymore its service for
pre-installation of custom GNU / Linux on machines manufactured in Argentina.
In reading the appeal filed by Pixart, we learn that Microsoft would have started in 2008 to give
back large amounts of money to the whole distribution chain to convince them to buy exclusively
Windows, and these sums have been disguised in various forms.
For example, I heard that Microsoft would have payed hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to
some distributors, officially for the Microsoft logo to appear on the leaflet advertising the
chain. Well, this kind of operation is called 'rear margin' here, and generally corresponds to an
abuse of dominant position from retailers who charge abusive fees to small suppliers for
purported advertising campaigns that hide forced rebates. But in our case, I have a hard time
thinking that a small retail chain in Latin America has a dominant position when facing a
multinational that generates profits of billions of dollars a year.
But why, you will say , is Microsoft complicatin its life like this? Was'nt it easier to simply
lower the cost of licensing Windows to, say, $ 5, rather than continue to charge $ 100 initially,
to repay $ 95 to distributors right after?
Well, no! Because, if we lower the cost of the officially licensed Windows FTP to $ 5, then it
must be sold $ 5 everywhere, and we can no longer pretend to charge $ 200 to large customers
(such as ministries in Argentina) for the full version .
It is much more interesting to pretend that the cost is 50 or 100 dollars, and find a way to give
back 45 or 95 dollars under the table: on one side the illusion is maintained that the price is
high and constant, on the other, one can happily strangle competition, by lowering prices only on
the competitive segment (the rebate is conditioned, of course, to stopping any sale of the rival
product).
The competition law
This wonderful monopolistic invention has one flaw, though: it brutally violates the rules of
competition, which are codified, for better or worse, in almost all countries, including
Argentina. To function properly, it must be carried out in the greatest secrecy, and stay safe
from prying eyes.
But it may well be that this discretion is not going to las much longer: using the laws on
competition in Argentina, Pixart filed appeal, describing what it thinks is the strategy followed
by Microsoft, and asking the judge to compel Microsoft, and distributors to provide all evidence
of purchases, grants, rebates, in short, an account of all financial transaction, even by means
of intermediaries, between Microsoft and distributors.
Pixart also suggests that the judge checks whether Microsoft properly pays tariffs for imports of
these licenses: it is well known that Microsoft
Zotac's H55 ITX was the first Mini-ITX motherboard to hit the market using Intel's H55 Express
chipset. Now, it looks like the board will be getting some competition from Gigabyte. SemiAccurate
has come across pictures of an H55N-USB3 mobo posted on the XFastest forums. Although no...
It used to be
that every full-line American automaker offered a version of its mainstream full-size sedan to make
it appropriate for police duty. By the time 1996 rolled around, the Chevrolet Caprice, which was the last would-be competitor
to the standard-setting Ford Crown Victoria, was
discontinued, leaving the lucrative police market to the Blue Oval Boys.
The automotive industry took notice, and plans began in corporate board rooms to remedy that
situation, and even a few new entrants - most notably Carbon
Motors - sprung up with promising designs that eschewed the mainstream production-based sedan
design.
In 2005, Dodge rolled out a factory police package for
its full-size Charger sedan, and for the first time
in a decade the Crown Victoria faced some stiff V8-powered, rear-wheel-drive competition. Then in
2009, Chevrolet announced that its new Zeta
platform Caprice would be
returning for the 2011 model year packing a strong 6.0-liter V8 of its own.
How would Ford answer this newly mounted competition? Would the aging Panther-based Crown Vic
finally get an update? Nope. Instead, Ford just recently announced that it would soon offer a highly ruggedized
version of its most recent Taurus sedan, optionally equipped with the stout 3.5-liter
turbocharged V6 engine powering all four wheels as seen in the revived Taurus SHO.
We decided to see for ourselves how the three new competitors stacked up against the old guard
Crown Vic on paper, and as you can see, there's little to separate each offering on the spec
sheets. It should prove interesting to see how police agencies react to these choices, especially
since reliability and durability will be mostly unknown factors for the first time in ages. See for
yourself.
Ford Crown VicFord TaurusDodge
ChargerChevrolet CapriceAvailability Forever Late 2011
2005 - Present 2011 Type Four-door, body on frame Four-door, enhanced unibody
Four-door, unibody Four-door, unibody Engine 4.6L V8 3.5L V6
Twin-turbo 3.5L V6 5.7L Hemi V8 6.0L V8 Power 250 horsepower 263 horsepower
365 horsepower 368 horsepower 355 horsepower Torque 297 lb-ft 249 lb-ft
350 lb-ft
395 lb-ft 385 lb-ft Fuel Economy 14 City / 21 Highway 18 City / 28 Highway (2010
Ford Taurus FWD)
17 City / 25 Highway (2010 Ford Taurus SHO AWD)
16 City / 25 Highway 15 City / 24 Highway (2009 Pontiac G8 GT) Driveline Rear-Wheel Front or All-Wheel Rear-Wheel Rear-Wheel
Shifter Column Column Column Console Wheels 17-inch steel 18-inch
steel 18-inch steel 18-inch steel Brakes Four-Wheel Discs Four-Wheel Discs
Four-Wheel Discs Four-Wheel Discs Cop Brakes Y Y Y Y Cop
Suspension Y Y Y Y Cop Cooling Y Y Y Y Seats Front -
Cloth
Rear - Vinyl Bench Front - Cloth
Rear - Vinyl Bench Front - Cloth
Rear - Cloth Bench Front - Cloth
Rear - Vinyl Bench Interior Volume 106.4 Cubic Feet 102.3 Cubic Feet 104 Cubic
Feet 112 Cubic Feet Trunk Space 20.6 Cubic Feet 20.1 Cubic Feet 16.2 Cubic Feet 18
Cubic Feet Special Features Overwhelming Ubiquity
Tough as nails
Capable of withstanding 75-mph rear impact Seats with downsized lateral bosters, cut-outs for
utility belts
Ford SYNC
Safety Canopy(R) side-curtain air bag
Rollover protection system
Customizable steering-wheel switches
Rear doors swing 71-degrees
Capable of withstanding 75-mph rear impact
BLIS(R) (Blind Spot Information System)
Cross Traffic Alert
Rear View Camera System
Reverse Sensing System 160-mph (certified) calibrated speedometer
AM/FM radio with CD player, changer controls, four speakers and clock with auxiliary audio input
jack
Load-leveling, height-control shock absorbers
Independently switched red/white LED dome lamp Seats with downsized lateral boosters, cutouts for
utility belts
In-dash touch-screen computer technology
Driver information center in the instrument cluster with selectable speed tracking feature
Biotech, insurance, internet, and green growth companies make semi-finals BOSTON, March 19
/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The 2010 North of Boston Business Plan Competition today announced the
six semi-finalists who will compete for $10,000 in prize money. The companies range from
green to biotech
According to the Nielsen Company, the global average time spent per person on social
networking sites is now nearly five and half hours per month (February 2010 data), with Facebook accounting for the majority of that
time. That’s up more than two hours from last year.
In arriving at that conclusion, Nielsen measured social network usage per person across 10
countries and compared that to data from the same time last year.
When looking at specific countries, Italy tops the charts with social network time per person
just under six and a half hours per month (6:27:53), and Australia is a close second (6:02:34).
The United States — which has the largest unique social networking audience — ranked
third in usage with the average person spending just over six hours (6:02:34) on social networks.
What’s even more interesting is that Facebook — with its 400 million members —
is far and away dominating the rest of the competition.
Facebook is the number-one social network destination worldwide and accounts for nearly
six hours (5:52:00) per person with the average user logging in more than 19 times per
month. What that boils down to is that the time spent on Facebook is almost five hours
longer than the time spent on MySpace
(0:59:33), the second closest social network in terms of time spent on site per person.
Nielsen also found that:
- Globally, the average Twitterer conducts three unique sessions for a total of 36 minutes per
month.
- In the U.S. the active unique social network audience grew roughly 29% from 115 million in
February 2009 to 149 million in February 2010.
- Active unique users of social networks are also up nearly 30% globally, rising from 244.2
million to 314.5 million collectively.
Patent system supporters regularly point (slightly misleadingly) to the claim that the patent
system gives patent holders the right to exclude others from using their inventions. And, thus,
most lawsuits we see around patents revolve around cases involving a company manufacturing a
product that includes a patented invention. But what about a lawsuit for a company that
deliberately chose not to license or use a patented technology, because it was too
expensive?
Welcome to today's world.
A few years back, there was a lot of attention paid to videos from a company called SawStop that
made a pretty cool product that protected your fingers from a table saw. You may have seen the
videos: The company tried to license the invention to various table saw makers, but after
evaluating the technology, many were not convinced how well it worked and felt that the cost was
way too high (both for themselves, and for consumers). In fact, some appeared to fear that if they
did adopt this technology and then someone still got hurt, they were asking for a big lawsuit for
promoting this technology as a safety feature.
But what about the other way around? Could someone be so bold as to actually sue for using a table
saw that did not have this technology?
ChurchHatesTucker alerts us
to the story of a lawsuit in Boston that involved a guy whose hand was damaged in a table saw
accident while using a table saw from Ryobi. The guy's complaint was that Ryobi should have included this technology and that it should be required
to protect hands. And, amazingly, the jury sided with the guy.
Yes, you read that right. The jury effectively claimed that any table saw maker is liable for
injuries if it does not license this technology and build it into its table saws.
That, of course, conflicts with that basic "exclusivity" part of patent law -- and would
effectively mean that SawStop has now been given total defacto control over who can be allowed to
sell table saws in the US. That clearly is not what the law was intended to do. The government
should never require companies to have to purchase a patent license for a technology they don't
believe the market wants. And, in this case, the ruling has resulted in numerous other lawsuits
against other table saw makers -- and a near guarantee that the price of table saws will go way up.
Old saws can't be retrofitted, and table saw makers need to totally change their manufacturing
process and greatly increase costs to offer this technology.
This seems blatantly wrong. If the government is going to require companies to use a patented
technology, it seems that the only reasonable solution is to remove the patent on it and allow
competition in the market place.
Friday Five : ’frÄ«-(,)dÄ,-dÄ“
‘fÄ«v : On the sixth day of every week, I hit the shuffle button on my iTunes,
then share the first five tracks and thought for each track. Sometimes there is a playlist
involved, occasionally we’ll have a guest, but most of the time it’s just me. The
rest is up to you, our friends and readers! Fire up your media player of choice and share the
first five random track of your shuffle in the comments.
Editor’s Note: It doesn’t happen often, but I’m actually
going to be away from all forms of internet today so I’ve asked my Popdose cohort, Rob Smith, to watch the shop for me today. I’m
sure you will all make him feel right at home, and I’ll be back next week! –
Michael
The Five:
Huh? Wha? You want me to do what? Lead off this
week? Sure, dude. Absolutely. Anytime.
Here goes:
Gowan, “Moonlight Desires.” Cool live version, solo
piano. I like this a lot better than the original studio version, with Jon Anderson
on guest vocals. Gowan, of course, has been the new Dennis DeYoung in Styx for the
last 11 or so years. I know a few Styx fans who can’t stand Gowan, but
it’s not like he won a Rock Star: Styx competition to get the gig or anything. He had a
solid, though unspectacular career prior to joining the band. I recommend this live
record (called Solo Live: No Kilt Tonight) for Gowan’s voice and chops, certainly, but also
his humor (he performs a 30-second snippet of Monty Python’s “Lumberjack Song”)
and this most excellent ballad.
Escape Club, “Wild Wild West.” Jesus freakin’ Christ, I have
Escape Club on my iTunes? Damn that Like, Omigod box set. On the rare
occasions I hear this song, I think about doing radio in college, freshman and sophomore
years. We had a Top 40 show I’d DJ on occasion, and this one was in the stacks
and played pretty much constantly [I also think of Information Society's "What's on Your Mind
(Pure Energy)" when I hear this, cuz both tracks were more or less ubiquitous]. We
could play Escape Club once an hour with no complaints from management, but when I tried to
squeeze in Thomas Dolby’s “Airhead,” I got in trouble. I did win
once, though — I was the first to play Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me
Crazy,” got yelled at, but was eventually vindicated when it became, oh I don’t know,
the Number One song in the country. I had fucking EARS back then, man! But I hate
Escape Club. Shit. Next?
Van Halen, “Unchained.” That’s more like it. My
fave Van Halen song, whether performed by Roth, Hagar (on the ‘04 tour — fucking
awesome), or Cherone. I just think the riff is tops — one of the simplest and
best Eddie VH ever conjured. Big fail, though — having Wolfie do the “C’mon
Dave, give me a break” line on the most recent tour. Roth could eat that kid alive, and on
occasion did. You’d think Ed would want to protect his only child from wiseacres like Roth.
Perhaps ye olde parental instinct got burned out during one or another evening with the Schlitz
Malt Liquor tallboys.
Jonatha Brooke, “Because I Told You.” The gods smile upon me. I love
Brooke’s music, particularly the stuff from the Story through maybe ‘95 or
‘96. This is from her first live record, and it’s a gem. A track from
Ten-Cent Wings, arguably her best solo record, the melody gives me chills every time I hear it
(only other song to do so consistently: Springsteen’s “Bobbie Jean.” Man, when
that sax solo kicks in at the end …). The sorta/kinda middle-eight is
particularly beautiful: “You take the wheel for now / I’m too tired to drive this one
home anyhow, for now.” Find this if you’ve never heard it — studio version or
live. You’re welcome.
John Denver, “Rocky Mountain High.” Fuck you if you think this is
wimpy. Just … I don’t want to hear it. It takes a man — a real man, one not
afraid to mow his lawn in the nude — to come up with a chorus like this one.
“I’ve seen it raining fire in the sky?” Are you kidding me?Â
Fucking great image. I also like the AM radio vibe on this; it doesn’t matter
what I hear this song on — computer, earbuds, boombox, or multi-component stereo system
— it still sounds like I’m listening to it in my dad’s old
Chrysler. The one with the manual transmission, shift on the column.Â
But I don’t want to hear that it’s crap, or wussified pap, or unfit for man or
Muppet. Great song. “Friends around the campfire and everybody’s
high?” I could go for being around that campfire right about now.
So anyway, now that I’ve defended John Denver by telling you all to fuck yourselves, I
suppose that I should ask forgiveness. But really, all I want to know is this:
What’s on YOUR shuffle?
Fearing growing competition from its smaller rivals, iPhone holdout China Mobile is reaching out to
Apple this month in hopes that the mobile device maker will concede to building support for
Beijing's proprietary 3G standard into its next-generation handset.
· Arsenal face champions and United face Bayern Munich
· English sides to meet in final if they overcome tough opponents
Arsenal have drawn Barcelona in the quarter-finals of the Champions League, with Manchester
United facing Bayern Munich.
In a tough draw, the English sides will meet the only two sides left in the competition to have
won it in its modern form.
Barcelona, who hammered Stuttgart 5-1 on aggregate in the last round, are a much-changed team to
the one which beat Arsenal four years ago. But they remain favourites to retain the title, at 7-4
with Ladbrokes.
United are second favourites at 3-1 after being handed a repeat of their famous 'football, bloody
hell' final of 1999, when they scored twice in the dying moments to pickpocket Bayern. The German
champions currently sit top of the Bundesliga, having only lost twice all season, though they
were twice beaten by Bordeaux in the group stages.
If United progress they will meet the winners of an all-French quarter-final between Lyon and
Bordeaux. Arsenal are on course to meet Internazionale or CSKA Moscow in the semi-finals.
Luis Figo was his old side Internazionale had avoided United and Barca. "You cannot choose,
they're all good teams with quality, but theoretically you don't want to play against Manchester
or Barcelona."
The two English sides will meet in the final if they progress.
The semi-final draw was made in Switzerland at the same time as that for the quarter-finals, as
has been the case in recent seasons.
Eight teams from six different countries reached the quarter-finals, the most varied group since
1998-99.
Quarter-final draw
Lyon v Bordeaux
Bayern Munich v Manchester United
Arsenal v Barcelona
Internazionale v CSKA Moscow
First leg 30 and 31 March; second leg 6 and 7 April.
Semi-final draw
Bayern Munich or Manchester United v Lyon or Bordeaux
Internazionale or CSKA Moscow v Arsenal or Barcelona
First leg 20 and 21 April; second leg 27 and 28 April.
Call for Papers Let the Games Begin: The Medieval World at Play Humanities Research Institute,
University of Sheffield 19th - 20th June 2010 We invite postgraduate students and early career
researchers working in any field of Medieval Studies to submit abstracts for an interdisciplinary
conference at the University of Sheffield, organised by medievalists in the Department of French,
hosted by the Humanities Research Institute, and subsidised by the Society for French Studies. We
welcome papers that approach issues concerning games and sports in medieval culture. Suitable
topics may include, but are not limited to: Children's games / play / toys Courtly games Chess /
card / board games Drinking games Love games Competitions Jousts / Tournaments / War games Fairs
Hunting / Hawking Sports: archery, hammer-throwing, quarter-staff contests, stoolball, hurling,
gameball, wrestling etc Please send proposals of no more than 250 words for a twenty minute paper
in English with your name, institution and contact details either by e-mail to
gameplayconference@shef.ac.uk or by post to the address by 12 April 2010. As in previous years, a
selection of papers is likely to be published in an edited collection. Medieval Studies Conference
c/o Dr Katariina Nara SOMLAL University of Sheffield Jessop West 1 Upper Hanover Street Sheffield
S3 7RA U.K. For further information, please contact the organisers: Lorna Bleach, Keira Borrill,
Katariina Närä, at the e-mail address [...]
Whatever happened to actually competing in the market place? Copycense points us to a
recent legal battle between Dixie and Huhtamaki over the design of their disposable coffee cups. Seriously. Dixie claimed that
Huhtamaki violated its trade dress because its cups, like Dixie's, included a white band at the
bottom of the cup. After two years in court, the judge, thankfully, didn't see what the big deal
was over both cups having a white strip at the bottom and ruled against Dixie. In part, the judge
noted, Dixie never proved that the white strip was non-functional, which is important, since trade
dress is supposed to be for non-functional design elements: Dixie even provided alternative
designs for Huhtamaki to adopt to differentiate its cup from Dixie's, according to the judge's
order.
"Because Huhtamaki would either incur additional costs or sacrifice design quality if it were
forced to adopt one of Dixie's alternative designs, the court finds that the product feature in
question is functional under the traditional test." Still, just the fact that lawsuits like
this even exist in the first place shows how far gone these things have gone. It's as if every
company feels entitled to having no competition whatsoever, and will sue anyone who offers anything
remotely similar. What a sad state of affairs.
SEOUL (Reuters) - Technology powerhouses Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics reinforced market
optimism that strong demand recovery is in place, while cautioning that competition from global
rivals is heating up.
The popular iPhone and iPod touch "Physics Puzzler With a Bang" takes in-game competition to new
heights with this exciting contest for players of all skill levels. (PRWeb Mar 19, 2010)
For a plan that puts "competition" as its number one goal, the National Broadband Plan is
remarkably light on policies that will produce much of it in the wireline space. Talk of
competition is everywhere, but all suggestions are remarkably general or terribly banal: "more
data collection" and "future policy reviews" are everywhere. Suggestions about how such reviews
should turn out is lacking.
But the reviews will still be held, and at some point the consensus-building NBP will
devolve into ugly battles of wholesale access, special access (middle-mile connections), and ISP
disclosure. The FCC commissioners know it, and they're already gearing up for the fights ahead.
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In the
next few weeks, the ReadWriteWeb events guide will take you from New York City, to San Francisco,
to Portland, Oregon. Along the way you'll find a conference on search engine strategies, a
showcase for startups, an in-depth look at the freemium business model, and a day filled with of
social media case studies.
Go beyond search at 
After a long winter's hiatus, 
The first 
The social media conference for marketers, 
The social media conference for marketers, 
The 
The 
The 
The 2nd annual 
It used to be
that every full-line American automaker offered a version of its mainstream full-size sedan to make
it appropriate for police duty. By the time 1996 rolled around, the 
According to the 
Recommandations
)
and reject those that you are not interested in
(
)
