Steve Benen summarizes the latest news about Sen. John Ensign starting to lose support within the GOP caucus and then sighs:

I've largely given up trying to figure out why major news outlets aren't taking this seriously. We're talking about a controversy featuring a sitting senator's adulterous affair, plus alleged ethics violations, hush money, and official corruption. An ongoing FBI investigation appears to be heating up, and by some accounts, expanding, and yet, no media frenzy.

It is sort of mysterious, isn't it? I sort of get the fact that Ensign is skating on his affair. That happens all the time. But then there's the fact that Ensign pretty clearly paid out hush money to his lover's husband, funneled through his parents in $12,000 chunks to avoid having to report it to the IRS. And the fact that he just as clearly tried to shake down some local businesses to provide a job for the guy. Plus the fact that apparently he's a total douchebag and everyone hates him. Seems like a great story!

But it goes to show the power of the news cycle. Basically, unless you're as agenda-driven as Fox News, it's hard to keep a feeding frenzy going unless you have something new to report. And there's just not enough new stuff to report on Ensign. He had an affair, he evaded IRS reporting rules, he tried to use his influence to get his lover's husband a job, and he's a douche. It's old news. What have you got for me that's fresh?

     

From today's Economist, Greg Ip writes:

America's economic transformation will require businesses to rely less on selling to Americans and more on selling abroad.... The emphasis will be on high-value products and services rather than on labour-intensive items such as furniture and clothing.

This article is part of a longer special section on America's Economy.

One interesting point:

... between 1993 and 2003 [t]he increase in any given year came almost entirely from existing exporters, but over time new ones played an increasing part. For example, in 1993 alone firms exporting existing products to existing markets accounted for 91% of total export growth. But over the entire ten-year period they made up a relatively modest 35% of the total, with new firms contributing 24% and firms with new products or entering new markets as much as 42%.

For some thoughts on the goal of increasing exports, see [1] and [2].

In the realm of more-enthusiasm-but-no-more-analysis for vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, Fereidoon Shioshansi at the EU Energy Policy Blog asks, “Will V2G Evolve Into A Great Electrical Sponge?“  He asks the question, and it is an excellent question to ask, but he doesn’t answer it.

Instead we get a little taste of claims made by researchers based on a pilot project – “the extra costs of making an EV battery V2G compatible could be as little as $1,500 while the potential reward may be as high as $3,000 per annum through a ‘load-balancing contract’ with a grid operator” – and follow those claims with the usual rather unconstrained imagination of exciting possibilities.

Actually, Shioshansi is better than many commentators on V2G because he at least realizes that there is more than just an electrical cord necessary to connect an the electric car and the vast power grid in need of load balancing services:

Additionally, the owner must reach an agreement with the grid operator – most likely through an aggregator and/or intermediary – to provide a reasonable revenue stream for the car owner while offering tangible storage and balancing service to the grid operator. These are formidable but not insurmountable challenges.

“Not insurmountable” is technically correct, but a casual stroll through history offers some perspective.  It took a literal act of Congress to get much third party access to the transmission grid (namely, the Energy Policy Act of 1992), and then it was several years before final rules governing third party access were issued by FERC.  It typically takes a supportive state law or regulation for local distribution companies to become very interested in helping consumers attached distributed energy sources to the local grid, and while energy policy folks have been talking about these issues for decades most places don’t have much in the way of effective state policies supporting distributed energy resources.  The physical proof-of-concept type issues are being solved, thanks in large part to the efforts of talented researchers at the University of Delaware and elsewhere, but the associated contractual/policy/institutional issues are far from being resolved.

In order to manage the safety and reliable operations of the grid, grid operators like to have some control over devices connected to the grid. V2G asks us to imagine a world in which consumers are attaching to the grid at times and points of convenience to the consumer, and then have the grid operator pay the consumer for some limited access to the battery capabilities of the electric vehicle for the uncertain amount of time the vehicle remains connected.  And advocates of these ideas ask us to believe, simultaneously, that electric vehicles with V2G technology will be available in large enough numbers to make it worth the trouble of someone to overcome all of these challenges, and yet not available in large enough numbers to overwhelm the electric system’s demand for load balancing service.

I haven’t done the analysis, but I can state with fairly high confidence that the demand for load balancing service is not perfectly elastic at the $5 – $10 day rates obtained by the three test cars in the University of Delaware/PJM pilot project.

So while Shioshansi asks a great question, his conclusion is an appropriately tempered “V2G technology may prove to be a welcomed blessing.” (Emphasis added.)  Hedging claims is probably wise in this space.

The New York Times has provided a handy blogging point for today in the form of a long piece on the relationships Tim Geithner formed while head of the New York Fed. The story is based in part on the results of a Times FOIA request, for the contents of Geithner's daily calendar while at the bank, and bloggers have primarily approached the story as a search for potentially nefarious activities. As examples, we see Paul Kedrosky concluding that there's no real "smoking gun," and Yves Smith writing that the story is far too kind, as it mysteriously excises all the times Geithner was scheduled to dine on babies and puppies in the company of Satan and AIG executives.

For the life of me, I don't know why we're not spending at least a little more time on the opening anecdote:

Last June, with a financial hurricane gathering force, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. convened the nation's economic stewards for a brainstorming session. What emergency powers might the government want at its disposal to confront the crisis? he asked.

Timothy F. Geithner, who as president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank oversaw many of the nation's most powerful financial institutions, stunned the group with the audacity of his answer. He proposed asking Congress to give the president broad power to guarantee all the debt in the banking system, according to two participants, including Michele Davis, then an assistant Treasury secretary.

The proposal quickly died amid protests that it was politically untenable because it could put taxpayers on the hook for trillions of dollars.

Smith notes the line and proceeds to throw of a line constituting one of the most epic examples of point missing in recent memory:

The story fails to note this was almost assuredly the most bank friendly program possible.

To begin with, that's not even true. The most bank friendly program possible is handing the banks a lot of money with no strings attached. But how does Smith miss that this would not only have been a very smart and prescient move, but it might also have laid the groundwork for a much tougher bank policy? Guaranteeing all the bank debt was, of course, one of the key ingredients of the Swedish bank rescue so beloved by fans of nationalization. Smith just assumes Geithner is looking to help his Wall Street buddies, but he might just as easily have been reading directly from the Swedes' playbook.

Moreover, this move would have entirely changed the calculus in September. It would have made the government much more reluctant to let Lehman fail, which I believe we can agree would have been a good thing. Had they nonetheless decided that Lehman should be allowed to go down, in the knowledge that the government would have to make the debtholders whole, then we would have avoided most of the negative effects of the actual Lehman collapse. No money market fund would break the buck. No freeze in commercial paper markets would have resulted. And no emergency rush to TARP would have followed. Correspondingly, no intense fear of bank failures or nationalizations would have cast its shadow over all subsequent decisions.

This should be getting more attention, and it should also be causing Geithner-haters to rethink what they think they know about the man -- about his timidity, subservience, and allegiances. But it's already clear that it won't.Related Links
Geithner's Brave New Regulatory World: An IMterview
Finally, Drama! A Geithner vs. Bair Clash?
Harder Times

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"The average user spends over 30 minutes every day using apps on their phone," Jobs said, according to Engadget's live blog at the event. "If we said we wanted to put an ad up every 3 minutes, that's 10 ads per device per day. That would be 1 billion ad opportunities per day."

Users may benefit from more free apps supported by ads. Maybe that will offset any resentment about immersive ads on a mobile device for which they pay monthly fees to use, and temper app price escalation that came with the iPad.

Apple's going to take 40 percent of the revenue from iAds that it's going to sell and host. In response to a question, Jobs said developers can use other ad systems besides iAd, according to the Wall Street Journal's coverage of the event.

I wonder how it's going to work to have multiple systems feeding ads into the apps. Will other ad systems have the same access the new ad serving and display capabilities Apple's building into the operating system without paying the 40 percent?

I was at a party the other night to celebrate the first anniversary of Nokia's "Ideas Project." The "Ideas Project" is an effort to bring together a diverse group of smart folks to share their thoughts on the evolution of media. The site has a bunch of interesting videos in which the likes of Esther Dyson, Robert Scoble, Loic Le Meur, Jerry Michalski, etc. share their big ideas. It is a really nicely curated site.

When Nokia started the Ideas Project just a year ago, it was not as blindingly obvious as it is today that the evolution of media is all about mobile (ok, maybe it was to Nokia). But, truth be told, venture capitalists have been predicting the domination of mobile and mobile applications for more than a decade now. And those of us who bet on the emergence of mobile in 2000 or 2003 or 2006 lost a lot of money.

So what has changed? A few short years ago, if you were pitching me on a mobile business, the most important slide was the one describing your startup's relationship with the carriers. If you weren't "on deck" -- meaning, your application wasn't pre-approved and pre-installed in the phone by the carrier -- you were nowhere. So carrier relationships were everything. And carrier relationships were hard. They took a long time to make happen. They cost a ton (carriers took the lion's share of the economics). And they were a huge dependency over which startups had very little control (and VCs hate that).

A second challenge for mobile startups of old was contending with the incredible variety of form factors and functionality. Startups trying to create location-based services couldn't count on a phone having GPS or Wifi or even a decent processor. Each phone had something different in it. Mobile gaming startups couldn't count on a phone having a big screen or high resolution. So mobile startups of old weren't developing a single version of an application. They were developing dozens of versions to suit dozens of screen sizes and processors and resolutions and chip sets and operating systems.

Enter the iPhone. As Apple did with music before it, Apple broke down the walls that existed in mobile. They opened up the "deck" and let application providers write straight to the device.[1] That changed everything. A huge dependency was lifted and innovation really started to flourish. Sure, the devices also got a whole lot more powerful. There's a lot more that you can do with a smart phone than you could do with your standard device circa 2005. But processing power was never the problem. The problem was access to consumers. And that door has been swung wide open.

The operating system problem has also gotten a lot better. Developers can write to a small number of mobile operating systems and reach the vast majority of the market. Mobile application developers were almost giddy with the simplicity of writing only for iPhone. But we all knew that couldn't last. Now it is iPhone and Android. Tomorrow Windows Phone 7 Series and Symbian as well. But that is a far cry from the OS challenges of old. (Unfortunately, despite the greater simplicity on the OS side, I fear a recurrence of the form factor problem -- Android may be a little too democratic and is bringing back a thousand variations on a theme).

Given the power of the devices, the simplicity of developing for them, and the proliferation of amazing applications, it is not surprising that the mobile revolution is finally upon us. Up next is "write once, publish everywhere." It's great that you can now write a mobile app and get it distributed quickly and easily to a plethora of mobile commuting devices. But why do developers still need to write a version for Flash and Silverlight and FBML (Facebook) and Android and . . . ? Solve that problem, and we're really off to the races.

I was one of the first people Nokia interviewed for their "Ideas Project" website a year ago. And I didn't talk about mobile. I talked about social. Which is still clearly a huge piece of the future of the consumer Web. But it is hard (dare I say impossible) to build a social application these days without also including mobility. If a digital experience doesn't extend to your pocket, it isn't long for this world. As an extension of the "Ideas Project," Nokia has just launched a section on the "Big Questions" and I got a second bite at the apple. This time I think I got it right. This time my question is all about mobile -- specifically, what is the future of location based services (LBS) in mobile computing? Go check it out here and let me know what you think. You may even win a Nokia phone and you can test out your theories.

[1] Yes, I know that some of you out there are thinking that Apple's approval process is onerous enough that they have simply replaced one deck for the other -- now you need to get past Apple, not the carrier. Whatever you may think of Apple's approval process, there is no comparison. Just ask anyone who tried to get an application on a phone in the early 2000's.

The NY Times had a great article yesterday on censorship in China.  While much of the focus here has been on the relationship between Google and China, the Times smartly distinguishes between China's censorship of unwanted foreign content-- which it does comprehensively and successfully-- and the censorship of domestic content-- which is a heckuva lot harder to do, but a far more pernicious evil. From the article:

Today, China censors everything from the traditional print press to domestic and foreign Internet sites; from cellphone text messages to social networking services; from online chat rooms to blogs, films and e-mail. It even censors online games.

That’s not all. Not content merely to block dissonant views, the government increasingly employs agents to peddle its views online, in the guise of impartial bloggers and chat-room denizens. And increasingly, it is backing state-friendly clones of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, all Western sites that have been blocked here for roughly a year.

The government’s strategy, according to Mr. Bandurski and others, is not just to block unflattering messages, but to overwhelm them with its own positive spin and rebuttals.

The government makes no apologies for what it calls “guiding public opinion.” Regulation is crucial, it says, to keep China from sliding into chaos and to preserve the party’s monopoly on power.

For anyone wanting to begin learning about China's censorship practices, this article is a great place to start.

And for anyone interested in how connection technologies-- like the internet, mobile phones, social media, etc.-- are both promoting freedom and enabling suppression around the world, I'd encourage you to come to our offices on Monday for a speech from Alec Ross, Secretary Clinton's Senior Adviser on Innovation.  Ross has been one of the forces behind State's 21st Century Statecraft Initiative, and has been a leader in State's new focus on internet freedom. On Monday, he'll be giving a talk on the role of connection technologies in open and closed societies.  Please RSVP here, click here to watch the webcast, or here for more information.

In 2007, NDN published a paper co-authored by Ross and Simon Rosenberg called A Laptop in Every Backpack, which contained one of the first public calls for universal access to the global communications network to be a major domestic and foreign policy priority of the United States.

For more of our work on internet & information freedom, take a look at this backgrounder, and come back to visit Global Mobile for regular commentary on the role of connection technology in promoting freedom around the world.

Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp, urged competing newspapers to raise paywalls around their content, saying that readers would pay "when they have nowhere else to go."

The Guardian.co.uk reported Mr Murdoch's remarks from a speech at a National Press Club event at George Washington University.

Mr Murdoch criticized rival New York Times:

...saying its paywall plans were halfhearted and needed to be more restrictive.

"They don't seem to be able to make up their mind. They will have opposition internally from some of their journalists, especially their columnists," he said. "To really make it work they have got to put a paywall up. I think most newspapers in [the US] have got to have a paywall."

[Please see:NYT: Charging Ahead (Slowly) - Paywall in 2011]

Mr Murdoch is a leading proponent of paywalls for newspapers. The Wall Street Journal has a successful paywall and his other newspapers, The Times and Sunday Times will have paywalls in June.

However, he is taking a risk because online readers might go to free rival newspapers. That's why he is keen on his largest rivals to also have paywalls.

[Please see: Why Pay-For-News Won't Work: The First Mover Disadvantage - SVW]

Jeff Jarvis, an associate professor of journalism at City University in New York, is a vocal critic of Mr Murdoch's paywall plans.

On Wednesday, Mr Jarvis was taunting Mr Murdoch on Twitter:

"Has Rupert finally just lost it?http://bit.ly/9ip602 Discuss."

"Hey, Rupert, when your readers tweet your story, is that "theft"?"

"The big news is that Rupert has actually touched a computer (well, an iPad)."

Mr Murdoch also told the audience that he would restrict access to news from search engines such as Google and Microsoft. He said that they were getting news for free and he would put a stop to their "very clever business model."

- - -
Please see PearlTree:   

Leave Murdoch Alone... Pathetic Criticisms Abound

The "Heinz 57" Media Business Model

Filed under: Competitive Strategy, Google (GOOG), China

Google (GOOG) has already signaled its intention to leave the Chinese internet search market after scuffles with the Chinese government over information freedom and censorship. The move leaves an opening for Chinese market leader Baidu.com (BIDU) and even Microsoft (MSFT). What about the ever-growing mobile search market in China? What is Google going to do there?

Continue reading What Google Could Lose in the Chinese Mobile Market If It Leaves

What Google Could Lose in the Chinese Mobile Market If It Leaves originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sat, 03 Apr 2010 14:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Filed under: Penney (J.C.) (JCP), Stocks to Buy

Continue reading JCPenney: A Retail Sector Survivor

JCPenney: A Retail Sector Survivor originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The notes were sold at a yield of 3.90%. The Treasury got bids totaling $78 billion for the securities, the largest amount of orders relative to the size of a 10-year offering since at least 1994, according to Bloomberg News data.

The backup in yields over the last two weeks -- which saw the 10-year T-note’s market yield rise to a 17-month high of 3.99% on Monday from 3.66% on March 22 -- was enough to pull investors in from the sidelines, traders said.

“Retail and institutional investors drew a line in the sand at 4%” on the T-note, said Tom Di Galoma, head of fixed-income rates trading at Guggenheim Capital Markets in New York.

The yield on five-year T-notes slid to 2.61% on Wednesday from 2.70% on Tuesday. The 30-year T-bond yield dropped to 4.74% from 4.83%. The Treasury will auction $13 billion of 30-year bonds on Thursday.

Falling government bond yields will help take pressure off mortgage rates, which tend to follow the trends in Treasury yields.

The bond market turned dicey two weeks ago after demand was weaker than expected at the government’s sale of $74 billion in new five-year and seven-year notes. Those auctions raised fears that investors were beginning to choke on the massive supply of Treasury debt, as the Obama administration funds its ballooning budget deficit.

Expectations of higher interest rates also were stoked by the government’s March employment report, which showed the economy added the most jobs in three years.

But Wednesday’s sale of 10-year notes demonstrated that many investors still are happy to take Uncle Sam’s bonds, even at what are relatively low interest rates historically.

-- Tom Petruno

Photo: The Treasury building in Washington. Credit: Evan Vucci / Associated Press

Filed under: Penney (J.C.) (JCP), Stocks to Buy

Continue reading JCPenney: A Retail Sector Survivor

JCPenney: A Retail Sector Survivor originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I received a query from a grad student who, as part of an assignment, is analyzing my Ask Dave Taylor blog as a business. Interesting timing as I just went and talked at The University of Colorado, Boulder's School of Journalism about the business of blogging (see A Class of Future Journalists and Only One Blogs? and especially the scathing debate in the comments).

I thought that my response might be of interest to others, so I'm publishing it here too...

Hi Dave. I am currently taking Blogging 2.0 at [[major university]] and need to research Business Blogs. I am doing my "analysis of a Blog" on your blog and wanted to ask you two questions and have them answered by tomorrow midday if possible. (My assignment is due tomorrow evening.)

Great. I look forward to reading your assignment when you're done. Hopefully you'll have some insight and suggestions on ways I can improve things!

First, It seems like you do quite a bit of advertising for different companies. Is it free or are you compensated?

All advertising involves a financial relationship, whether it's free products for ads or money changing hands. Most all of my ads are through an advertising network run by Google called AdSense. You can learn more about it at http://www.google.com/adsense if you'd like.

Other ads are typically performance based: I don't get paid to run the ad, but if someone clicks on it and buys the merchant's product, I receive a small commission on the sale.

My blog Ask Dave Taylor is a business venture: I have put thousands of hours of my time into creating and maintaining the site and it's supported by advertising and adjunct revenue sources. It pays my mortgage and lets me feed my kids, so that's all good.

Secondly, If I were to consider advertising on my blog what would be the best and easiest way to start. (The blog was also created for school but I'd like to continue after the class ends.

The first thing to realize is that it's really darn hard to earn more than a few dollars/month on a blog. You have to work at it for years, produce good content, and write about something interesting to an audience that is also likely to buy related products or services. In other words, if your blog is "money saving tips" it's not going to make as much off ad revenue as "best high-end fashion purses". Make sense?

Having said that, I am a big fan of AdSense, as mentioned earlier. If you have good content and put the ads front and center, hopefully you can make a bit of money and get enthused to push further.

Good luck!

Filed under: Good news, Press Releases, Products and Services, McDonald's (MCD)

Continue reading McDonald's CEO Gets Supersized

McDonald's CEO Gets Supersized originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

And so it went. We talked about how CNN is a bastion of journalism, except it now also relies on iReport reporters who don't have any formal training, just a camera and access, and we did talk about how bloggers make money through advertising, sponsorships, and affiliate programs, using Dr. Colby's fave site Denver Stiffs (a sports site) as an example.

Ultimately, it was an interesting conversation, but it's been a while since I felt like I was in the position of defending what I see as the natural evolution of media and journalism. As I feared, my impression of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication remains that it's a dinosaur howling at the impending climate change, it's King Canute standing on the beach, commanding "Ocean, be thou still! I bid thee come not nearer to my feet!" even as the waves implacably roll in.

The world of information dissemination is evolving before our eyes, going from four channels of television to hundreds to thousands, from one or two major newspapers per community to dozens, and from mainstream outlets to everything being an outlet. Journalism is surely just as much about speed of dissemination as it is digging up the muck (a relatively modern invention in the journalistic world, btw), so Twitter users breaking the news of the Chilean earthquake way before any news outlets do is a harbinger of the future, not a change to be feared.

My thoughts to the students in the class are twofold. First, things change. Deal with it or be obsolete. The market determines what's important, not your professors. Second, writers write. You should be writing every single day, even if it's restaurant reviews or letters to your favorite pals. It's a muscle, exercise it and you'll thrive in a changing world of information.

And finally, to the department, this sea change in the world of news, journalism and information dissemination is way too big to deny and fear. Embrace it. Jump into the pool and see what happens. Otherwise you're failing at the core mission of the School of Journalism: to produce journalists ready for the modern world and what will come tomorrow.

From Rep. Steve King (R–Iowa), explaining why he wants the GOP to support full-on repeal of healthcare reform rather than the wimpier "repeal and replace":

I didn't want to confuse the message on repeal by adding the word "replace" because there's a question mark that hangs on "replace," which is, "What would you replace it with?" and then the discussion gets drug down [sic] into something that all Republicans are not going to agree on.

Well, points for honesty, I guess. It's not often that congressmen just flatly admit that the reason they don't want to offer up a plan isn't because they think the status quo is hunky dory, but because an actual plan might piss off some people. Kudos to King for being willing to admit this.

     

Filed under: Launches, Competitive Strategy, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT)

Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) seemingly is threatened by Google, Inc. (GOOG) on a monthly basis. Microsoft's history is costly software and related licensing; Google's history is free products supported by an advertising model that works exceedingly well. With the newest release of Microsoft Office due out shortly, has Microsoft kept to its old recipe or is it bringing the fight to Google's doorstep? A little of both.

Continue reading Microsoft Up to the Google Challenge with Latest Version of Office?

Microsoft Up to the Google Challenge with Latest Version of Office? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 29 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

People have making a lot of strong claims for the wonderfulness of the iPad over the past week, but nobody has yet claimed that it will help you live longer. That's kind of surprising, when you stop to think about it, but today Dave Munger finally fills this promotional void. Note, though, that there's more than just an iPad itself involved. There's also a couple of old two-by-fours and a bit of sawing and drilling. You can see Dave's life-extending iPad innovation here.