When Jammie Thomas (now Thomas-Rasset) became the first alleged P2P file-swapper to take her case all the way to trial and verdict, no one suspected that she would actually have three trials and verdicts, but that's the case today, as the RIAA rejected a federal judge's decision to slash Thomas-Rasset's damage award. Instead, we're headed to a truncated third trial on the issue of damages.

The recording industry also made it clear this week that both Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum (the second P2P defendant to go to trial and verdict) are, in its view, quite terrible people: lying, deceiving, irresponsible, and unreasonable. And the industry can't understand why they're both fighting on.

Alicia Keys

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Alicia Keys
Keys performing at Pavilho Atlntico in Lisbon, Portugal on March 19, 2008
Background information
Birth name	Alicia Augello Cook
Also known as	Lellow
Born	January 25, 1981 (1981-01-25) (age 29)
Origin	New York City, New York, United States
Genres	R&B, soul
Occupations	Singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, record producer, actress, music video director, author, poet
Instruments	Vocals, piano, keyboards, cello, synthesizer, vocoder, guitar, bass
Years active	1985present
Labels	Columbia, Arista, J
Website	www.aliciakeys.com

Alicia Augello Cook (born January 25, 1981), better known by her stage name Alicia Keys, is an American recording artist, musician and actress. She was raised by a single mother in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan in New York City. At age seven, Keys began to play classical music on the piano. She attended Professional Performing Arts School and graduated at 16 as valedictorian. She later attended Columbia University before dropping out to pursue her music career. Keys released her debut album with J Records, having had previous record deals first with Columbia and then Arista Records.

Keys' debut album, Songs in A Minor, was a commercial success, selling over 12 million copies worldwide. She became the best-selling new artist and best-selling R&B artist of 2001. The album earned Keys five Grammy Awards in 2002, including Best New Artist and Song of the Year for "Fallin'". Her second studio album, The Diary of Alicia Keys, was released in 2003 and was also another success worldwide, selling eight million copies. The album garnered her an additional four Grammy Awards in 2005. Later that year, she released her first live album, Unplugged, which debuted at number one in the United States. She became the first female to have an MTV Unplugged album to debut at number one and the highest since Nirvana in 1994.

Keys made guest appearances on several television series in the following years, beginning with Charmed. She made her film debut in Smokin' Aces and went on to appear in The Nanny Diaries in 2007. Her third studio album, As I Am, was released in the same year and sold six million copies worldwide, earning Keys an additional three Grammy Awards. The following year, she appeared in The Secret Life of Bees, which earned her a nomination at the NAACP Image Awards. She released her fourth album, The Element of Freedom, on December 15, 2009. Throughout her career, Keys has won numerous awards and has sold over 30 million albums worldwide, establishing herself as one of the best-selling artists of her time. On December 11, 2009 Alicia Key's was ranked as top R&B artist, the fifth top overall artist and the second top female artist (behind only Beyonce) of the 2000-2009 decade by the Billboard Magazine decade end chart. ^[

My Thoughts On Techcrunch And Daniel Brusilovsky

Less than 100 tickets remain for Mashable's Social Media Week event, NextUp NYC The Future Journalist on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 92YTribeca.

Join us for networking and a conversation and Q&A with Sree Sreenivasan (Professor and Columbia Journalism School Dean of Student Affairs and contributing editor of DNAinfo.com) and Vadim Lavrusik (new media journalist and digital media graduate student at Columbia University Journalism School).

Details

Location: 92Y Tribeca, 200 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10013

Socialize: Facebook Event Page

Pricing: $20 in advance, $25 at door. Tickets on Sale Now.

Food and drink: Full cash bar and food menu available

Schedule

• 6:00 7:15 = Open Networking
• 7:15 8:45 = Conversation and Q&A with Sree Sreenivasan and Vadim Lavrusik
• 8:45 Bar Close = Open Networking

A Conversation and Q&A with:

Sree Sreenivasan Prof. Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia Journalism School Dean of Student Affairs and contributing editor, DNAinfo.com.

Sree Sreenivasan is a tech evangelist and skeptic specializing in explaining technology to non-techies. He is a professor and dean of students affairs at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches in the digital media program. Sreenivasan is contributing editor at DNAinfo.com, a Manhattan-news startup he helped launch in 2009 with Joe Ricketts, the founder of Ameritrade and whose family just bought the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field. He also has been a fixture on NYC-area television. For more than eight years, he served as technology reporter for WABC-TV and WNBC-TV and now occasionally appears on various TV shows (on CNN, NBC's Today Show, CNBC and elsewhere) to talk tech. He has written articles for The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, National Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes and Popular Science. You can find him on Twitter at twitter.com/sreenet and on the Web at sree.net.

Vadim Lavrusik Online journalist and M.S. candidate in Digital Media at Columbia Journalism School

Vadim Lavrusik is a new media journalist and social media consultant studying digital media at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where he is launching NYC 3.0, a tech start-up news site as part of his Master's project. He's reported for publications like the Star Tribune, The Minnesota Daily, the Mpls./St. Paul Business Journal and most recently was a guest feature writer for Mashable.com, where he covered trends in news media, and contributed to Poynter Online's E-Media Tidbits. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/lavrusik and the Web lavrusik.com.

Thanks to our Sponsors

Pepsi believes in the power of people and their ideas to make positive change. That's why Pepsi is giving away more than $20 million this year to fund good ideas, big and small, that move communities forward. The Pepsi Refresh Project invites individuals to share their ideas about how they can refresh the world. The public votes for their favorite ideas and Pepsi will give out up to $1.3 million each month to fund the winning ideas. Pepsi is leveraging the power of social media platforms to inspire ideas and encourage individuals to participate.

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Thanks to our Partner

Tags: Events, nextup-nyc, social media week

Jammie Thomas-Rasset

Much of Jammie Thomas-Rasset's legal arguments following this summer's $1.92 million Recording Industry Association of America file sharing jury verdict against her don't have much weight or precedent.

Clearly, that a jury in June ordered her to pay $80,000 for each of the 24 music tracks she infringed on Kazaa is outrageous and shocks the conscience and there's no rational relationship between the amount of harm suffered by the recording industry and the award granted.

Thomas-Rasset wass the nation's first sharing defendant to go before a jury. The RIAA has filed more than 30,000 lawsuits targeting individuals, and most have settled out of court.

That said, in their latest court papers, (.pdf) Thomas-Rasset's legal team again is sticking to the argument that the whopping jury award is a due process violation all in a bid perhaps to secure a third trial. (The first ended in a $222,000 judgment against the Minnesota woman, but a mistrial was declared after the judge conceded he gave faulty jury instructions)

Still, it is true that the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower courts have repeatedly reduced lofty jury awards based on so-called due process breached. But those were punitive damages awards, not statutory damages awards.

Those punitive damage reductions, including the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster, do not apply to Thomas-Rasset's case although Thomas-Rasset's defense team suggests there's always a first.

Punitive damages are the amount a jury awards to punish conduct of an offender. Up until recently, there generally has been no limit. But the Supreme Court has suggested that punitive damages should be limited to about no more than 10 times the amount of actual damages a jury awards.

Higher ratios, the courts have said, are due process breaches because defendants have no notice ahead of time about the lofty financial consequences of their actions.

But the law is crystal clear when it comes to the Copyright Act, the law under which the RIAA sued Thomas-Rasset. Juries can award up to $150,000 per violation. Punitive damages do not fall under the Copyright Act.

One of the only points in Thomas-Rasset's brief that makes a compelling argument is that the Copyright Act, when amended in 1999, didn't conceive of non-commercial cases the RIAA has been bringing the past six years.

The notion that Congress decided that the award of statutory damages in this case was somehow appropriate or tailored to ensure deterrence is a fiction that the plaintiffs would have this court adopt. The Congress that enacted the statutory-damages provision of the Copyright Act could not have had the kinds of illegal but non-commercial music downloading here at issue in mind, defense attorney K.A.D. Camara argues in recent briefs.

It's true: There's no doubt that a $1.92 judgment over $24 worth of music provides the clearest example yet of the abuses made possible by the 1976 Copyright Act, which Congress modified in 1999, at the behest of Hollywood and the recording industry, to carry a maximum penalty for a single infringement of up to $150,000.

That statutory penalty was intended to bankrupt large-scale commercial pirating operations, like organized DVD and CD bootleggers not to put individuals like Thomas-Rasset in debt for the rest of their lives.

Still, the RIAA is crying foul.

After Thomas-Rasset refused to settle out of court, the industry is now demanding that Thomas-Rasset pay up. The RIAA is also seeking U.S. District Judge Michael Davis to issue an injunction barring her from future file sharing.

Plaintiffs' evidence showed that defendant knew what she was doing was wrong, that she did it anyway, and then lied about it for years. Through two trials, defendant still shows no remorse whatsoever for her actions and has made it clear that she has no intention of ever satisfying any portion of the judgment against her, Timothy Reynolds, the RIAA's attorney, wrote (.pdf) Davis.

Judge Davis of Minnesota could rule on the retrial and injunction issue any time.

See Also:

• Jury in RIAA Trial Slaps $2 Million Fine on Jammie Thomas
• Feds Support $1.92 Million RIAA File Sharing Verdict
• Will File-Sharing Case Spawn a Copyright Reform Movement?
• Thomas Seeks New RIAA Trial; Says $1.92 Million Verdict Monstrous
• File Sharing Lawsuits at a Crossroads, After 5 Years of RIAA
• Jury Dings File Sharer $675000, RIAA Prevails Update

• Taylor Lautner - 2009 Teen Choice Awards (socialitelife.celebuzz.com)

Copyright Litigation Handbook (West 4th Ed. 2009) by Raymond J. Dowd

Finally some good news from American law courts which have usually protected the psychotic, lying, whoring skanks who anonymously insult innocent people on the Internet. On Monday, in a New York court, Judge Joan Madden ordered Google to unmask a self publisher on their Blogger service who had anonymously compromised the professional and personal integrity of Vogue model Liskula Cohen.

The blogger went after Cohen in five anonymous posts on August 21 last year. I would have to say that the first place award for Skankiest in NYC' would have to go to Liskula Gentile Cohen, one post began, before accusing the international cover girl model as being a psychotic, lying, whoring skank.

And now Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden has ordered to Google to expose the name of the blogger, thereby enabling Cohen to sue him/her for defamation.

READ MORE FROM DAILY TELEGRAPH BLOG

Names added to that list yesterday included one local writer: the ludicrously prolific Michael Nagrant of Hungry Mag, Serious Eats, New City and just about any paper or website that publishes a byline. Owning to all sorts of biases here as both a colleague and friend, if the Times really wanted to make a splash in naming Bruni's heir apparent few food critics have the resume of Nagrant; one that includes collaborating on a Beard Award-winning cookbook; a critic whose voice is constantly evolving; a entertaining and engaging writer equally comfortable in traditional and new media; one whose personal code of food journalism ethics is downright Orthodox Catholic in the age of the Yelp! Elite Squad.

I contacted Nagrant about his name popping up. He responded by saying that he's sent Times "Dining In/Dining Out" Editor Trish Hall samples of his work in the past two months for her consideration. Nagrant replied, "The New York Times food critic position is one of the most important jobs in American food writing. Whether it's (Ruth) Reichl or Bruni or (William) Grimes et al, as a writer I've looked to those who've held that chair and always tried to write to that standard. The NYT critic spot is very much a goal of mine." As to wanting to take the job in these uncertain times for print journalism, Nagrant said, "In these tough times for print journalism where some would rather be the next food TV star or own a restaurant, I want to write. I don't want to be rich or famous. I only want to sustain myself, practice the craft and get better everyday. I want nothing more as a writer and I'm willing to give everything I am if the honor came my way."

Nagrant acknowledged Eater's speculation yesterday with (natch) twitter updates, paraphrasing Groucho Marx and even providing a headshot so the Times doesn't have to.

Internet defamation attorneys and bloggers listen up! A new law will take effect in California on January 1, 2009, which allows online speakers to obtain attorney's fees if they successfully oppose a subpoena to obtain their personally identifying information in California involving out-of-state litigation.

A little over a month ago, Elgg 1.0 was introduced to the world. In this newest release, several years in the making, the software has been improved from the inside out. It has a more attractive UI and design, for starters. But under the hood you'll find more changes like better plugin support, RSS and OpenDD views, and a new database schema.

We may have said that the next social networks would be powered by blogging CMS platforms like WordPress and Movable Type, but what we're really seeing is a shift towards making all web platforms more open and social experiences.

To that end, Elgg can help form the basis of a new generation of social networks. But their platform goes beyond just delivering a solution for the next web 2.0 hangout or social site, although that it a popular use for their software. The Enterprise 2.0 movement is also aided by Elgg as companies wanting to build and customize their own intranet-based social networks have begun to adopt the platform as well.

The Interview

We recently had the opportunity to follow up on our original interview with one of Elgg's founders, David Tosh. We talked about where Elgg stands today and what plans they have for the future.

How would you describe Elgg to someone who didn't know what it is?

Elgg is an open source social networking engine started by Ben Werdmuller and myself back in 2004. Elgg can be used by developers as a starting point from which to build out their own social applications (it handles common back-end functionality and has an extensive programming API), and out of the box as a useful social utility. This year, it was voted by a panel on InfoWorld as the best open source social networking platform 2008.

What's new with Elgg since we first spoke?

We have completely rewritten the Elgg core. This was necessary in order to future-proof the project, improve scalability and allow for greater customization. Over the past four years, we have found that one size really does not fit all, so we had to make sure Elgg was flexible enough to handle new demands being thrown at it, both now and in the future. The era of the monolithic social network is coming to a close; we want to make it easy for people to add social functionality into all kinds of applications.

Why did you move away from being focused just on being a platform for education?

Although we've always had an educational base, a lot of users from other fields began picking up on Elgg. As a result, we were securing contracts to build custom networks on Elgg for groups that were not part of the educational circle, and feeding those developments back into the product. Gradually, interest in Elgg became greater outside of education, so we adapted to that change.

How does Elgg compare to its commercial competition?

With its new architecture and open standards at its core, we feel it is best placed to handle changing expectations in the social arena. It's a very competitive space, but a lot of products have just bolted social features on top of their existing systems - Elgg has social functionality built into the core and was designed from the ground up to support it. That allows us to create deeper features, and also plan ahead for new kinds of social applications. As the types of social applications and uses for them grow, we feel our approach will pay dividends.

Some employers are even letting employees use Facebook at work now. Do you worry that will affect the number of potential customers for your product?

Not really. If anything, I think this increases the potential and opportunity. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc play an important role in bringing the concept of social technology to new audiences. For groups like us, who provide niche services, this is great. For example, companies try out Facebook and then start releasing that they want to improve their internal communications to be more Facebook-like; we can help them with that.

Why should someone consider Elgg for their network?

I think there are three main reasons: simplicity, extensibility and openness. The basic version of Elgg is deliberately very simple and clean. Our architecture allows you to easily extend Elgg's functionality to meet your specific requirements. Lastly, we fully embrace open standards such as OpenDD, FOAF, RSS, Open Social and OpenID, allowing you to interact with other applications.

Who is using Elgg today?

Elgg users range from sports networks to corporate companies, university intranets to school districts. There is a wide cross section picking up the software and applying it to their own niche. Increasingly, companies are also using Elgg to build social sites for their clients; we're keen to promote and support this.

What's in store for Elgg's future?

We have a couple of things in the pipeline:

• Firstly, we're going to launch an Elgg supporter scheme. This will give companies who are providing Elgg-related services the chance to form closer links with the core project.
• We are working on a new mobile intranet platform, powered by Elgg, that allows users to share status updates, photos, documents and media via MMS, SMS, email or the web. It also handles simple notes and shared tasks.
• We decided we needed a system within Curverider to improve our communication while on the move, and built it for our own use; it's been so successful that we thought other companies and organizations might find it useful as well. So far, the reaction from people we've shown it to has been extremely positive.
• All Elgg-powered services have the Open Data Definition built into their core, which allows for full import and export of users, content and connections as well as the ability to syndicate friends' activity in a distributed way.
• Lastly, we have just announced an advisory board that is packed with experts with excellent track records, in order to ensure Elgg and Elgg-powered services continue to develop and grow.

So, last week, I had the pleasure of being stabbed, scanned, physically simulated, and synthetically defocused. Clearly, I must have been at SIGGRAPH 2008, the world's biggest computer graphics conference. While it usually conflicts with Black Hat, this year I actually got to stop by, though a bit of a cold kept me from enjoying as much of it as I'd have liked. Still, I did get to walk the exhibition floor, and the papers (and videos) are all online, so I do get to write this (blissfully DNS and security unrelated) report.

SIGGRAPH brings in tech demos from around the world every year, and this year was no exception. Various forms of haptic simulation (remember force feedback?) were on display. Thus far, the best haptic simulation I'd experienced was a robot arm that could "feel" like it was actually 3 pounds or 30 pounds. This year had a couple of really awesome entrants. By far the best was Butterfly Haptics' Maglev system, which somehow managed to create a small vertical "puck" inside a bowl that would react, instantaneously, to arbitrary magnetic forces and barriers. They actually had two of these puck-bowls side by side, hooked up to an OpenGL physics simulation. The two pucks, in your hand, became rigid platforms in something of a polygon playground. Anything you bumped into, you could feel, anything you lifted, would have weight. Believe it or not, it actually worked, far better than it had any right to. Most impressively, if you pushed your in-world platforms against eachother, you directly felt the force from each hand on the other, as if there was a real-world rod connecting the two. Lighten up a bit on the right hand, and the left wouldn't get pushed quite so hard. Everything else was impressive but this was the first haptic simulation I've ever seen that tricked my senses into perceiving a physical relationship in the real world. Cool!

Also fun: This hack with ultrasonic transmitters by Takayuki Iwamoto et al, which was actually able to create free-standing regions of turbulence in air via ultrasonic interference. It really just feels like a bit of vibrating wind (just?), but it's one step closer to that holy grail of display technology, Princess Leia.

Best cheap trick award goes to the Superimposing Dynamic Range guys. There's just an absurd amount of work going into High Dynamic Range image capture and display, which can handle the full range of light intensities the human eye is able to process. People have also been having lots of fun projecting images, using a camera to see what was projected, and then altering the projection based on that. These guys went ahead and, instead of mixing a projector with a camera, they mixed it with a printer. Paper is very reflective, but printer toner is very much not, so they created a shared display out of a laser printout and its actively displayed image. I saw the effects on an X-Ray - pretty convincing, I have to say. Don't expect animation anytime soon though (Side note: I did ask them about e-paper. They tried it - said it was OK, but not that much contrast.)

Always cool: Seeing your favorite talks productized. One of my favorite talks in previous years was out of Stanford - Synthetic Aperture Confocal Imaging. Unifying the output of dozens of cheap little Quickcams, these guys actually pulled together everything from Matrix-style bullet time to the ability to refocus images - to the point of being able to see "around" occluding objects. So of course Point Grey Research, makers of all sorts of awesome camera equipment, had to put together a 55 array of cameras and hook 'em up over PCI express. Oh, and implement the Synthetic Aperture refocusing code, in realtime, demo'd at their booth, controlled with a Wii controller. Completely awesome.

Of course, some of the coolest stuff at SIGGRAPH is reserved for full conference attendees, in the papers section. One nice thing they do at SIGGRAPH however is ask everyone to create five minute videos of their research. This makes a lot of sense when what everyone's researching is, almost by definition, visually compelling. So, every year, I make my way to Ke-Sen Huang's collection of SIGGRAPH papers and take a look at the latest coming out of SIGGRAPH. Now, I have my own biases: I've never been much of a 3D modeler, but I started out doing a decent amount of work in Photoshop. So I've got a real thing for image based rendering, or graphics technologies that process pixels rather than triangles. Luckily, SIGGRAPH had a lot for me this year.

First off, the approach from Photosynth continues to yield Awesome. Dubbed "Photo Tourism" by Noah Snavely et al, this is the concept that we can take individual images from many, many different cameras, unify them into a single three dimensional space, and allow seamless exploration. After having far too much fun with a simple search for "Notre Dame" in Flickr last year, this year they add full support for panning and rotating around an object of interest. Beautiful work - I can't wait to see this UI applied to the various street-level photo datasets captured via spherical cameras.

Speaking of cameras, now that the high end of photography is almost universally digital, people are starting to do some really strange things to camera equipment. Chia-Kai Liang et al's Programmable Aperture Photography allows for complex apertures to be synthesized above and beyond just an open and shut circle, and Ramesh Raskar et al's Glare Aware Photography evaded the megapixel race by filtering light by incident angle - a useful thing to do if you're looking to filter glare that's coming from inside your lens.

Another approach is also doing well: Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir's work on Seam Carving. Most people probably don't remember, but when movies first started getting converted for home use, there was a fairly huge debate over what to do about the fact that movies are much wider (85% wider) than they are tall. None of the three solutions - Letterboxing (black bars on the top and bottom, to make everything fit), Pan and Scan (picking the "most interesting" square of video from the rectangular frame), or "Anamorphic" (just stretch everything) - made everyone happy, but Letterboxing eventually won. I wonder what would have happened if this approach was around. Basically, Avidan and Shamir find the "least energetic" line of pixels to either add or remove. Last year, they did this to photos. This year, they come out with Improved Seam Carving for Video Retargeting. The results are spookily awesome.

Speaking of spooky: Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness. Sure, everything you see is photoshopped, but it's pretty astonishing to see this automated. I wonder if this is going to follow the same path as Seam Carving, i.e. photo today, video tomorrow.

Indeed, there's something of a theme going on here, with video becoming inexorably easier and easier to manipulate in a photorealistic manner. One of my favorite new tricks out of SIGGRAPH this year goes by the name of Unwrap Mosaics. The work of Microsoft's Pushmeet Kohli, this is nothing less than the beginning of Photoshop's applicability to video - and not just simple scenes, but real, dynamic, even three dimensional motion. Stunning work here.

It's not all about pixels though. A really fun paper called Automated Generation of Interactive 3D Exploded View Diagrams showed up this year, and it's all about allowing complex models of real world objects to be comprehended in their full context. It's almost more UI than graphics - but whatever it is, it's quite cool. I especially liked the moment they're like - heh, lets see if this works on a medical model! Yup, works there too.

As mentioned earlier, the SIGGRAPH floor was full of various devices that could assemble a 3D model (or at least a point cloud) of any small object they might get pointed at. (For the record, my left hand looks great in silver triangles.) Invariably, these devices work like a sort of hyperactive barcode scanner, monitoring how long it takes for the red beam to return to a photodiode. But here's an interesting question: How do you scan something that's semi-transparent? Suddenly you can't really trust all those reflections, can you? Clearly, the answer is to submerge your object in fluorescent liquid and scan it with a laser tuned to a frequency that'll make its surroundings glow. Clearly. Flurorescent Immersion Range Scanning, by Matthias Hullin and crew from UBC, is quite a stunt.

So you might have heard that video cards can do more than just push pretty pictures. Now that Moore's Law is dead (how long have we been stuck with 2Ghz processors?), improvements in computational performance have had to come from fundamentally redesigning how we process data. GPU's have been one of a couple of players (along with massive multicore x86 and FPGA's) in this redesign. Achieving greater than 50x speed improvements over traditional CPU's on non-graphics tasks like, say, cracking MD5 passwords, they're doing OK in this particular race. Right now, the great limiter remains the difficulty programming the GPU's - and, every month, something new comes to make this easier. This year, we get Qiming Hiu et al's BSGP: Bulk-Synchronous GPU Programming. Note the pride they have with their X3D parser - it's not just about trivial algorithms anymore. (Of course, now I wonder when hacking GPU parsers will be a Black Hat talk. Short answer: Probably not very long.)

Finally, for sheer brainmelt, Towards Passive 6D Reflectance Field Displays by Martin Fuchs et al is just weird. They've made a display that's view dependent - OK, well, lenticular displays will show you different things from different angles. Yeah, but this display is also illumination dependent - meaning, it shows you different things based on lighting. There's no electronics in this material, but it'll always show you the right image with the right lighting to match the environment. Weird.

All in all, a wonderfully inspiring SIGGRAPH. After being so immersed in breaking things, it's always fun to play with awesome things being built.

New Version Of NewsGators Widget Platform Makes It Even Easier for Brand & Media Companies to Build, Deploy, & Track Widgets

Denver, Colo. June 19, 2008 NewsGator Technologies Inc. today announced the general availability of Editors Desk 2.1, a new version of the companys widget platform that makes it even easier for brand and media companies to build, deploy, and track widgets.

Updates to NewsGators widget platform include a dramatically redesigned user interface, sophisticated new templates, and an easier, more streamlined workflow for widget creation. Editors Desk 2.1 boasts exciting new features including a widget search tool for simple creation of subject-specific content widgets, a duplicating clone capability that allows users to easily create similar widgets, and feed monitoring that provides instant feedback on widget performance and feed errors.

Media and brand companies are embracing widget strategies at a breakneck pace because syndicating content with widgets works, said Jeff Nolan, vice president, NewsGator Software-as-a-Service. By simplifying the creation, deployment, and management of widgets, Editors Desk 2.1 enables companies to quickly and easily realize positive business results from extended brand reach to increased website monetization.

NewsGators widget platform is part of NewsGator Software-as-a-Service, which encompasses the companys syndication and data services offerings and helps media companies, content publishers and advertisers engage audiences through the use of social media and Web 2.0 technologies. NewsGator's Web 2.0 syndication products, including personalized RSS readers, Widget Framework, Community Publisher and Widget Ads, give companies the tools they need to enable their audiences to create, subscribe and interact with the most relevant content while staying within the company's brand. NewsGators widget and data services are in use by some of the world's largest media companies and brands, including CNN, Media General, National Geographic, Newsweek, CBS News, Reuters, USA Today and Discovery Communications. For more information, visit www.NewsGatorWidgets.com.

About NewsGator Technologies, Inc.
NewsGator Technologies helps enterprises and media companies leverage social computing solutions to deliver real business value. The companys enterprise social networking and widget services are in use by hundreds of the worlds most recognized brands, including Bank of America, Biogen Idec, CBS, CNN, Discovery, National Geographic, Procter & Gamble and USA Today. NewsGator Social Sites and Enterprise Server give enterprises better ways to collaborate, share content, expand employee knowledge and improve productivity. NewsGator Widget Services enable media and brand companies to better engage their audiences and extend the value of their brands through viral syndication of content. NewsGator also offers free, award-winning RSS aggregators for the Web, desktop, mobile devices and e-mail clients. For more information, visit www.newsgator.com

Contact Information
Laura Farrelly
NewsGator
303-552-2046
lauraf(at)newsgator(dot)com

Jennifer Gazin or Zoe Vandeveer
LaunchSquad
415.625.8555
newsgator(at)launchsquad(dot)com

For example, a couple of months ago, Scott Kveton wrote a blog post about how cool it would be to have a way to aggregate all of the cool Portland people on Twitter in one place (and yes, he worked a bacon reference in there). He even registered a domain name for the idea - pulseofpdx.com. I thought it would be cool, too, so I started tinkering around with Twitter and Tumblr, and within a couple of hours, we had it up and running. Since then, smarter and more talented people than I have taken it much further - Michael Richardson coded up a better solution, Jessica Beck gave it a swanky design, and the idea even snowballed into other projects (PulseofOpenSource.com, and eventually, the award winning mashup site TweetPeek.com, which launched at SXSW 2008).

Yesterday, another one of those cool perfect storms of ideas, easy to use web tools and services, and smart, innovative people happened.

It all started with some photos I posted of a recent trip to the beach, of me in my signature orange Crocs. A conversation on the topic started up on Twitter. I pointed out that I always wear orange Crocs - they're my trademark, my RSS Evangelism Shoes. Something remarkable about me - I'm the guy with orange Crocs. @verso chimed in that she'd love to see orange Crocs Around the World - sort of like the traveling gnome meme. i thought it was a cool idea, but knew I probably wouldn't have time for yet another fun little side web project. Kelly (@verso) even came up with some name ideas - crocsvacation, crocsightings, crocspotting.

At this point, I just couldn't leave the idea alone. I started to think about what would actually be required to do it, and realized the answer was not much, really. At the same time, @jcjdoss on Twitter informed me that he had snagged the domain crocspotting.com in case I wanted it. That was the final straw. I knew I had to do it.

So, I started playing around. I've been using a very cool tumblog service called soup.io for my lifestream (www.joshbancroft.com) and linkblog (linkblog.joshbancroft.com). I knew the site would have to update itself automatically if it were going to work - I don't have time to manually update something like that - and soup.io makes a great aggregator/foundation for that piece. You can map a custom domain name to a soup.io stream, so I had @jcjdoss do a little DNS CNAME magic. Then I started messing around with RSS feeds for tags on Flickr, to find the actual pictures of Crocs. I ran into some frustration with the fact that some people tag things that really aren't what they say. I tried a couple ways around the problem of pictures of crocodiles appearing in the results - Flickr search will let you exclude keywords, but you can't get an RSS feed of search results, so that was out. I played around with Yahoo Pipes to filter out the unwanted pictures, and that worked beautifully, but it broke some apparent magic that soup.io uses to display large versions of pictures from Flickr, instead of the very small thumbnails that appear in the feed. So, using Yahoo Pipes, filtering worked, but the pictures were too small. In the end, I stumbled upon an elegant feature of soup.io that solved the problem - you can delete items after they've been imported from an RSS feed. So I just removed the off-topic pictures. Viol!

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to Crocspotting.com!

Want to participate? Upload your Crocspotting photos to Flickr, and tag them crocspotting. That's it. They'll show up on the site. Want to get updates when new Crocs are spotted? Subscribe to the Crocspotting RSS feed.

Pointless and silly? You betcha. Is it well thought out, with a business plan and revenue model? Heck no! Unless someone from the Crocs company is reading this, and wants to work out a sponsorship deal. Hey, if they can sponsor that Mario Batali chef guy (who TOTALLY ripped off the orange Crocs thing from me!), why not sponsor me?

The point is that it was fun, and it was easy, and it was fast. It all happened using free web services (except for the domain name cost - thanks @jcjdoss!). It went from the first inklings of an idea to a reality inside a couple of hours.

So, if you don't care about Crocs, think about your own wild, crazy, idea, and how to make it happen. Use your network of friends and smart people (you DO cultivate a network of friends and smart people, don't you? ) to help fill in the blanks, and help out, and who knows? Take something you like, mash it up, play with it, tweak it, turn it around, and see what happens. You might be able to make something cool, fun, and remarkable that you never thought possible.

Drop a line today if you'd like to chat about me coming to speak with your group. There's still time to book for Summer and beyond, so let's talk.

1. Inbox Zero Google Tech Talk

58 minute presentation at Google's Mountain View campus; July 23, 2007
(original post)

It's amazing to me that this little fellow has now been watched 213,000 times (I hope that's counting partial views, otherwise that's over 23 person-years of viewing time. yikes.)

I really like how this turned out, and it's been very cool to hear how many people this has turned on to the idea of doing something more responsible with their email.

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2. Macworld Time and Attention Talk

70-minute slideshow with live audio; Macworld 2008; January 14, 2008
(original post)

This talk premiered to an enthusiastic SRO crowd at Macworld San Francisco 2008 in January of this year. The talk is evolving quickly and it's since been re-titled Who Keeps Moving My Brain?: Revaluing Time & Attention.

This is a more high-level discussion of attention issues than Inbox Zero, and it's turning out to be an excellent presentation for a more general audience.

N.B.: The first slide is white; the video is fine, I promise.

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3. IDEO Know How Talk

1-hour conversation at IDEO's Palo Alto campus; September 9, 2007
(original post)

Sure, I was high on the Theraflu, but this gave me the chance to talk about the idea that's most got my attention right now: How do we deal with the lack of scarcity in our electronic world?

Many thanks to my pals at bOING bOING for putting this on lots of people's radar screens. Much appreciated.

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4. Merlin Show Interview: Jonathan Coulton

10-minute interview with internet troubadour, Jonathan Coulton
original post

I conducted this interview with the wonderful Jonathan Coulton right around the time I found out I was going to become a father. Have to say that, given my mood at the time, I found what he had to say inspirational.

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5. Merlin Show Interview: Jeffrey Veen

16-minute interview with Google's Jeff Veen
original post

Jeff's been a swell pal and great guy to work with (I managed projects for him back in the day). In this particular instance, Jeff's insight into how to move aside the BS and get to the kernel of things is not to be missed.

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6. SxSW, Worst Website Ever: FlockdUp

6-minute pitch for a fictional social networking site

Oh, what the heck. Let's throw this one in for fun. It's a 6-minute mini-presentation I delivered as part of a South by Southwest panel called Worst Website Ever, in which seven teams were invited to pitch their fictional idea for the worst web startup of all time to a real-life VC.

Roo Reynolds was kind enough to capture my award-winning pitch with a hand-held camera. This was a lot of fun to do, and the audience reaction was swell.

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Merlin's speaking info
Contact Merlin

The site is in the final week of private beta. To register, you still need an invitation code. The company asked me not to publish it, but it's OK if I distribute by request via email. Send a note to info@netbanker with "SmartyPig" in the subject line. Or simply wait until after this weekend when the site goes into public beta.

How it works:

1. Users create savings accounts at the site. Deposits are held at West Bank, a Des Moines, IA- based financial institution with $1.3 billion in assets. Funding is through ACH (electronic) transfers from outside bank accounts. SmartyPig currently pays a high, 4.3% APY on deposits.

2. After the account is established, users are encouraged to create savings goals funded through automatic monthly ACH transfers until the goal is met.

3. Now here is where SmartyPig diverges from a typical bank account. The savings goals can be made public or kept private. Public goals can be funded in part, or entirely, by outside contributors. Think of grandma and grandpa contributing birthday money to help junior buy a new bike. Contributions are funded through credit card charges with a maximum charge of $500 and a per transaction processing fee of $4.95. To make sure grandma's $50 doesn't go to a Mario game, the money cannot be withdrawn until the savings goal is met (or canceled by the primary account holder).

4. After goals have been met, the user can elect to take the funds out in the form of a MasterCard debit card or a gift card from a retail partner such as Amazon.com. Participating retailers add a up to 5% bonus to the savings goal so that $1000 saved for the plasma TV is worth $1,050 if redeemed via Amazon gift card. That's a great added incentive to use the service.

Gift Cards
SmartyPig also sells gift cards that can be redeemed towards new or existing savings goals. These cards, issued in denominations of $25 to $500, are meant to be given as gifts or employee incentives. They cannot be redeemed outside the SmartyPig system. Physical card are produced and delivered for a processing fee of $4.95 plus delivery fees of $5.95 or more. Or consumers can deliver a virtual card through email to eliminate the delivery charge (but the $4.95 processing fee remains the same).

Summary of Fees

• Public contributions: $4.95 flat processing fee for each contribution made by an outside contributor. Contributions can be from $25 to $500 and are funded via credit card.
• Gift cards: Gift cards incur a $4.95 processing fee and an optional $5.95 shipping fee. The shipping fee can be avoided if a virtual gift card is chosen which is fulfilled via email.

Analysis
Although, not everyone is going to want to go through the extra steps to save this way, we are impressed with SmartyPig and are awarding it our first OBR Best of the Web award for 2008 (see note 1). We like how it's part gift registry, part savings account, and potentially a big help in getting users in the habit of saving for larger goals. The look-and-feel is very Web 2.0 and should resonate with teens and twenty-somethings.

There are a few rough edges that need better explanation and/or minor redesign. For instance, there is no way to simply add funds to a savings account without first setting up an automatic funding plan. But the site isn't even officially launched yet, so these issues should be ironed out during the beta period.

The processing fee of $4.95 per transaction is a bit on the high side. One could argue that it's worth price of a triple mocha for the convenience and benefits of the savings account. But for smaller deposits of $50 to $100, it's a pretty high percentage of the overall deposit.

It would be nice if the company could lower the fee, perhaps by creating an ACH funding option. Another way to reduce costs is to lower the 4.3% APR. I'm not sure the savers attracted to this account really need that high of a rate. A lower interest rate combined with lower fees might make the service more palatable overall.

The company may have to tweak its business model going forward. But the real lesson here is that savings accounts can be made stickier with automation and incentives. Leave it to the Iowans to show us the way (note 3).

Screenshots

1. The main account screen: I set up a savings account for my son. Then set a savings goal of $300 for a new bike. SmartyPig requires that the savings goal be funded in equal monthly withdrawals from the linked checking. It would be helpful if you could opt out of the automated savings plan so that the savings goal could be funded manually.

2. Public goals: If you opted to make your savings goal public, anyone can find it by searching via email address under the "Friends' Goals" tab on the top (you can see this one by searching for jim@netbanker.com).

Users can publicize their goals with a widget (see inset, and link at bottom of screen above) or by sending email to friends.

After making a contribution, the following screen is displayed.

Note:

1. Online Banking Report (OBR) Best of the Web awards are given for products that "raise the bar" in online financial services, usually for pioneering a new feature. Recent winners are covered here. Five awards were been handed out in 2007: two for Wesabe, and one each for Jwaala, Buxfer and Obopay. In the past 10 years, 67 companies have won the award.

2. Full disclosure: I was born and raised in Iowa and my brother lives within a few miles of the SmartyPig world headquarters.

The former publisher is accused of firing the two law firms she'd retained to wage her legal fight against News Corp. to keep them from sharing in what is believed to be a multi-million-dollar settlement.

The firms, Drier LLP and Redniss & Associates, were supposed to get 25 percent of any award or settlement. Instead, they got zero percent. They're also accusing Regan of stiffing them on $42,560 in fees.

It gets better: Bert Fields, the Hollywood attorney Regan brought in to see her suit against News Corp. to its conclusion, is also named as a defendant. He tells the New York Post that he's going to sue Dreier and Redniss if they keep this up.

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Elfenbein points them to the Global Settlement:

The settlement required funding of "independent research."
The result has been a disaster and few people will admit it. Basically, nobody wants this research...
Here's my proposal: Instead of wasting money on political ads or over-paid consultants that nobody reads, let's fund something that's already working. Each year, the trustees of the of independent research funds should award prizes of, say, $10,000 each, to the best finance bloggers...
The Global Settlement was for $1.4 billion so I think they could scrape together a little cash to fund some worthy blogs. It would be a small slice of what's already being spent and it would certainly have a much greater impact on research that is truly independent.

He's right. If you love the bloggers when they write for free, just imagine what they'll do if you incentivize them with a million dollars or so! That sum is tiny: big buy-side shops spend many multiples of that on directed commissions for sell-side research they usually disdain. This is exactly the same idea: investors should pay, ex post, for good ideas that they are shown for "free".

And what about the ideas that come from data-miners and blog aggregators who don't so much look for individual ideas but rather look for bigger-picture signals from the mass of blogs as a whole? Collective Intellect generates authority scores for a broad mass of financial bloggers, maybe those scores could weight a lottery system, where a few lucky bloggers end up with a surprise check for $10,000 every so often.

All this wouldn't cost much, in comparison to the sums currently spent on research by the buy side. And it could have a transformative effect on the quality of ideas the buy side receives.

Tell us about yourself and where you're from.

My brother and I run the network together, we both grew up in Orlando, Florida. Now I live in Montana and he lives in Indianapolis. John writes young adult novels (the award winning Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines.) I run EcoGeek.org, an environmental technology blog. A year ago we started a video blog together, and during that vlog, John created the concept of the Nerdfighter, a person who is proud of their nerdiness...and will use their brains to fight for a better world.

Why did you create the network?

For the Nerdfighters, of course. Our year-long, Brotherhood 2.0 project ended, and it became quite obvious that this thing was bigger than just us. So we wanted to make nerdfighting a more collaborative, community-based thing. Ning was absolutely perfect.

What's your favorite feature?

I really love the way I can promote member content to the main page. We have it set up so that the blog is the featured element of the page, and over half the blog posts are promoted member posts. People get really excited when their posts get promoted, and already people are using it to organize awesome projects and gatherings.

What's been the most surprising thing you've encountered?

Most people are 100% comfortable with the interface right away. They want to participate in the community, comment on each other's profiles, create content and customize. I knew Ning would let them do all of these things, but I can't believe the percentage of people who are actually doing it!

What are you future plans for the network?

We would like to use the power of nerds to make the world a better place. It's a short term and long-term goal, and I think the Ning network is going to play a big part in it.

I've been a huge Apple fan for a long time, so I was a bit disturbed when I found out that they weren't doing their very best to protect the environment. If I could do anything to improve that situation, I thought I should. Being an Apple fan does not mean I will ignore problems.

Just like Veerle I had my doubts about the whole thing at first, mostly because the project involved copying (or ripping off, if you prefer that term) Apple's design. It was for a good cause though, so morally I didn't feel that it was a problem. It was Apple sending their lawyers after us that had me worried. But after Veerle told me that Greenpeace would take full responsibility if anything like that should happen I jumped on board. Besides, I only did the coding, not the graphic design.

Coding-wise this project isn't very complicated, though there were a couple of accessibility challenges. I managed to find what I think are reasonable solutions to most of these challenges, but if I redid the project today I would probably do some things a little differently.

If you look at the code and find strange things like unescaped ampersands or images with no alt attributes, rest assured that those were not in the markup I handed over ;-). For more details on part of the coding as well as the story behind the graphic design, read Veerle's post Greenpeace Green my Apple project, which I co-authored with her.

The campaign is over now but the site, which won a Webby award in the activism category, is still online.

Finally, like Veerle I'm asking you to please not turn the comments area into a political discussion about Apple vs. Greenpeace vs. the environment.

Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites.

Posted in Apple.

This award winning, uncomfortable 'game' as it's called, was waiting at one of Betsy's resale shops.

I'm not sure that buying a second hand game for probing is a good idea but could be fun on a blind date in Arkansas.

Convenient Store Gas Deli Beer Lotto EBT BP Gas Game Current bid: $1,500,000.00 on eBay PSP Downloads Games, Music, Movies, Software And Cheats Current bid: $0.01 on eBay See all 220,559 game items on eBay.

The big question for those of you who bravely bought in: Will my bastard child videos still work even with the permanent closed sign in the store's window?

The videos you purchased and downloaded are yours to keep. Yes, you can play your videos as many times as you wish on the computer you used to download the videos. Due to licensing restrictions, you cannot copy or transfer your video files and play them on a different computer.

The store's sudden death actually isn't too surprising even though it was less than a year old and the first one to sport content from the "big six" studios. Who thinks "Wal-Mart" when they think "video downloads," and wants to deal with a clusterfuck of DRM, WMV files and Windows and IE-only compatibility? (Not Hollywood types!) Besides, its goose might've been cooked anyway when iTunes finally snagged a video rental deal.

On the other hand, its online music store is still going strong, or at least going enough to try to pressure labels to sell MP3s through it, though it looks like Amazon has the upper hand (in more ways than one.) Let's hope they weren't taking any cues from their cubicle mates in the vid store department! [Wal-Mart, Thanks MarktMan!]

Can NBC Do for Quarterlife' What YouTube Could Not? Scripts by Marshall Herskovitz, the Emmy award-winning writer and producer, have drawn millions of viewers to movie theaters and television sets over the past two decades. But on the Internet, where his 36-part series Quarterlife

Source: New York Times
Author: Brian Stelter
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/business/media

Techmeme permalink

The FBI is expected to step-up the initiative in January 2008, when it will award a 10-year contract to a company that will assist with the construction of the database, named the Next Generation Identification system. Further, employers will be able to request information regarding their employees is retained, which will mean the system will have a dual function for forensic and identification purposes. We are thinking it's not such a hot idea; having everyone's info all in one place, with a dual purpose, just seems like a bad idea to us. How do you guys feel bout it? [Reuters]

My position on inquiries of this type, which I actually get a couple times per year, is that I don't reveal sources unless the sources want to be revealed. In this case I went back to the sources of last week's column, asked if they would mind speaking with the DHS, and to my surprise they were perfectly happy to do so. Usually I end up saying "no," but this time was different.

I have written many times about how government is reactive when it comes to technology. We don't make laws in anticipation of emerging technologies but to cope with problems supposedly raised by technologies that have recently appeared. Government is always behind this curve. On some level I find that reassuring. It tells me that despite the NSA listening in to everything I type or say, they'll probably misuse it, or lose it, or chalk up my babblings to some other guy named Cringely or Bob. And this view can only be confirmed by my now knowing that the DHS -- the folks who are supposed to know all about who is in or out of this country -- have less data to work with than does the local credit bureau. The fact that the department has been in existence for six years and didn't think until now to try this line of research, well that astounds me.

With this fact in mind, then, I'll take another stab at improving the data security of all Americans. CHANGE YOUR DAMNED PASSWORDS!! Most people don't do this -- ever. They have one or two passwords they use for everything, often associated with one or two user names. If a system forces a password change they'll move to password B in hopes that when the next move is forced they can move back to password A. If you have an eight-character password that mixes numbers, letters, and non-alphanumeric characters in various combinations of upper and lower case -- in other words a REALLY GOOD password -- I can pretty much guarantee you've been using that exact same password since 1998. People are lazy. People don't want to learn arcane eight-character passwords on a regular basis.

But identity thieves aren't so lazy, especially when they have technology to help them. They can start a sweepstakes website that requires only free registration to win that cruise of a lifetime to Bora Bora. And in doing so the thieves can know that a majority of registrants will use a username and password combination that they also use at a lot of other sites, like bank and brokerage accounts. Not only don't they need to actually award the cruise, they don't even have to break into your bank account in order to benefit from the username/password combo. They just sell that information to another crook.

That crook knows your name, address, and likely username and password. Forty percent of the people in your town use the same bank. Fifty percent of his stolen usernames and passwords are valid. Forty percent of bank customers use online banking. Add this all together and that crook has more than enough information to raid the bank accounts of enough folks to make his day and ruin theirs.

It doesn't take just a fake website to accomplish this kind of phishing expedition. There are thousands -- probably tens of thousands -- of web operations that require user sign-ons but don't do anything to protect the user database from being stolen by employees. "We're not selling anything," they tell themselves, "so it doesn't matter."

It matters.

Half my credit card accounts now require me to go through an elaborate e-mail validation scheme if I try logging in from a new IP address or from a computer lacking the proper cookie. Half don't require this. The half that do were probably the targets of some huge and successful crime spree -- a spree we never heard of because it was never made public. Billions of dollars are ripped off this way each year from banks and other financial institutions but we never hear about it because that might encourage more crime.

So CHANGE YOUR DAMNED PASSWORDS and put an end to this kind of scam. Perhaps remembering new character strings will help to stave off Alzheimer's.

Another thing I am upset about is ITAR, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which is putting a real crimp in Team Cringely's attempt to put a rover on the Moon.

ITAR works on the basis that non-U.S. citizens should not have access to your rocket data (rockets are viewed as weapons) unless you request an export license for them. This includes legal aliens living in the U.S. This also includes any information transported in a laptop when visiting a foreign country. By extension, I could see that any design information transported over the Internet might also require an export license.

I'm not being pro-terrorist here, just expressing frustration because I need U.S. government permission to send a rocket to Brazil for launching, to launch a rocket IN Brazil no matter where it was made (this is on top of getting permission from the Brazilian authorities), and my rocket had darned-well better been built using only U.S.-born or naturalized citizens. The irony here is that I can copy rocket designs off the Internet and have them built in machine shops all over the world, but that is somehow different, or is at least viewed differently.

In terms of the Google Lunar X Prize, which Team Cringely is going to win sometime in early 2009, ITAR means I can't have non-U.S. citizens working on technical parts of the project without an export license. It also means potential foreign competitors for the prize can't use U.S. labor -- or data -- without an export license.

How do you enforce THAT?

This wouldn't be such a big deal if ITAR permission were given fairly easily. "I'm going for the Google Lunar X Prize, we need to launch from Brazil so we can use equatorial acceleration to put an extra 28.6 kilograms on the Moon, please." Alas, it is MUCH harder than that. ITAR licenses are given slowly and -- this is probably the worst for us -- there is simply no precedent for ITAR clearances being granted at all for what is, essentially, a recreational project.

Perhaps reassuring, though, is the fact that it is also much harder than I thought for Google to acquire a credit bureau and plunder its data. It turns out that data providers and the occasional government put restrictions on how that data can be used, so the best Google could probably do is statistically categorize us. But hey, that may be good enough.

When I moved to Boulder in 1995, Amy and I only knew one person and he moved away six months later. I had no expectations of doing any meaningful amount of business in Boulder I moved here to live in a beautiful place that was between the two coasts (Boston and the Bay Area) that I was traveling between on a weekly basis.

In addition to being an amazing place to live, Boulder has been home to a superb entrepreneurial community in the area that I invest namely software and Internet companies. I won the Esprit Entrepreneur of the Year award in 1999 with Brian Makare and Andrew for a company we co-founded called Email Publishing (which was acquired by and morphed into MessageMedia.) By that point I realized (and was deeply involved) in some of the special stuff that was happening on the Colorado Front Range and knew that I'd call this place home for the rest of my life.

It's very gratifying (and humbling) to be recognized again for my contribution to the entrepreneurial community in Boulder. I don't do it for awards or recognition, but it always feels good. It was especially satisfying to look at the list of companies and entrepreneurs that have been recognized over the past 12 years since I moved here and see a number of companies that I've been involved with. Rally is the latest, and I'm immensely proud of what Tim, Ryan, and their team are creating.

The line of the night goes to Bill Perry. During his closing speech, Bill talked about his experiences since coming to Boulder 25 years ago (ironically, we are both MIT grads there's something about this place that attracts people from MIT.) Bill reflected on several times when the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Boulder hit low points, and referred to companies around during those periods of times as Slinky Companies. In his words, these are companies that aren't very useful but they are fun to watch as they tumble down the stairs. Brilliant and I've had my share of slinkies.

Thanks to everyone that participated in the event last night it's a powerful thing to see so many local entrepreneurs in one place. And a special thanks to everyone that organized and worked on the event. Often I find events like this to be tedious but last night's was extremely well done, funny, and paced nicely.

You can also short Gore at 48 (48!) to win the Nobel Peace Prize. No one is ever that much of a lock-in to win this highly unpredictable award in any given year.

Ahem.

Friday I heard Fred Thompson talk for three minutes, he was so terrible I had to leave the room....
Most of all he has rotten diction (odd for a former actor), plus he had no idea what the market-oriented crowd wanted to hear. Sell short.

Thompson's still trading at a respectable 20.1 to get the Republican nomination, so you can make some decent money with a short.

Also worth a short from the Republican side: Ron Paul, who's traded up to 6.0, near his all-time high. Yes, he does have a fervent following. But ain't no way he's getting the nomination.

Similarly, on the Democratic side, Al Gore is trading at 12.1. I suspect he'd be trading lower than that if he actually declared, so there's little downside risk to shorting him.

You can also short Gore at 48 (48!) to win the Nobel Peace Prize. No one is ever that much of a lock-in to win this highly unpredictable award in any given year.

On the other hand, Obama is a screaming buy at 13.4. I'm not saying he's going to get the nomination, but he does have a greater than 13.4% chance of getting it. Buy here, and sell when he does well in one of the early caucuses, for an easy locked-in profit.

Unfortunately, the trading in the Nobel Economics prize seems to be completely illiquid, so no trading recommendations there, although if you can short anybody above 20, do so.

Finally, the 2008 US recession contract is trading at 49, and might be worth a short. Even notorious bear Alan Greenspan doesn't think it that likely.