Modern News

It’s too early to predict the economic damage of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. However, preliminary indications are encouraging. Mike McKee of Bloomberg TV reports that the impact could be relatively modest if the spill continues to drift away from the coast.

The fishing industry could take a hit, and there may be a sharp rise in seafood if Louisiana is heavily impacted. (About 80% of the Gulf’s output comes from Bayou State fishermen). Real estate and tourism could also be impacted. But the impact on global oil prices looks to be slight.

So we can go back to worrying about Greece and the Euro.

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The YouTube battle for Number 10
Apr. 28 – Britain is renowned for its innovative advertising campaigns, but attempts by UK political parties to replicate digital strategies which were so successful during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign have largely failed to ignite enthusiasm. (02:43)

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Robot child gets upgraded
Apr 27 – A robot designed to learn like a child is getting some new legs and smaller hands. The iCub was originally designed to resemble an infant but had hands of an 8-year-old child because of difficulties making them any smaller. Stuart McDill reports. (01:41)

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Microsoft and HTC signed a patent deal for mobile phones.

EDMOND, Wash. — April 27, 2010 — Microsoft Corp. and HTC Corp. have signed a patent agreement that provides broad coverage under Microsoft’s patent portfolio for HTC’s mobile phones running the Android mobile platform. Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will receive royalties from HTC.

The agreement expands HTC’s long-standing business relationship with Microsoft.

“HTC and Microsoft have a long history of technical and commercial collaboration, and today’s agreement is an example of how industry leaders can reach commercial arrangements that address intellectual property,” said Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft. “We are pleased to continue our collaboration with HTC.”
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A lot of people use Firefox as their main browser for the internet. Now it is coming to the Android. It is in a pre-alpha version so there will be some bugs, but it will be nice to have it for the Android. I downloaded it and will check it out
It is actually called Fennec

We’ve only really tested this on the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One.
It will likely not eat your phone, but bugs might cause your phone to stop responding, requiring a reboot.
Memory usage of this build isn’t great — in many ways it’s a debug build, and we haven’t really done a lot of optimization yet. This could cause some problems with large pages, especially on low memory devices like the Droid.
You’ll see the app exit and relaunch on first start, as well as on add-on installs; this is a quirk of our install process, and we’re working to get rid of it.
You can’t open links from other apps using Fennec; we should have this for the next build.
This build requires Android 2.0 or above, and likely an OpenGL ES 2.0 capable device.
Edit: This build must be installed to internal memory, not to a SD card.
There also aren’t yet any automated nightly developer builds or automated updates to this build; it’s even more of a pre-nightly build (even earlier than pre-alpha). But, it’s usable enough that we wanted to get some feedback on it as we continue to develop. —Vladimir Vukićević

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Standard & Poor’s cut Spain’s credit rating to AA today, which is still investment grade, but puts it on a par with Slovenia’s. This follows cuts in the ratings of Greece and Portugal.

These downgrades highlight the two fundamental challenges facing the EU: 1) does currency union make sense among countries as disparate as Germany and the southern tier?, and 2) Will the more well-heeled countries be willing to pay the price to maintain it?

It also highlights the downward path of the spendocracy that has taken control of many countries, and what awaits the USA if we don’t mend our ways.

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Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is a major player in the investment world. Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzer interviews Alwaleed about the current state of Wall Street. I had never listened to an interview with Alwaleed before, and was struck by the common sense of his perspective. And by the irony that he appears to have a better understanding of our system than many in Washington DC.

Some major highlights:

-Alwaleed hopes that the government does not have a vendetta against Goldman Sachs, which would destabilize the financial markets, and cautions that the firm is innocent until proven otherwise.

-Financial reform is a necessity and will happen. Republican opposition to the current bill is part of the negotiating process.

-Citibank’s recently reported earnings of $4.4 billion is proof of the value of its global franchise, and CEO Vikram Pandit has his confidence (Alalweed is a major investor in Citi).

-Alalweed’s Kingdom Holding Company, which went public a few years ago, will soon declare dividends in order to satisfy Saudi retail investors, who carry more clout in their system than institutional investors. (Now that is change one could believe in here!)

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Investing legend Warren Buffett has criticized the role of derivatives in causing the 2008 financial meltdown. However, the talk on the street is that he is lobbying to exclude existing transactions from the scope of the pending finance reform bill.

It is not hard to see why. Berkshire Hathaway owns over $60 billion of such contracts, which are hedging the financial risk exposure of its vast corporate empire. Buffett would prefer not to subject these holdings to the requirement to post collateral that is embedded in the bill.

One wonders whether the outcome will be the ususal Washington DC “reform” product- a bill riddled with exceptions, exemptions and grandfather clauses that give the politically connected an advantage versus their less savvy peers.

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc posted quarterly results that blasted past Wall Street’s expectations, led by strong sales of the iPhone.
The company on Tuesday reported net income of $3.07 billion, or $3.33 a share, in the fiscal second quarter ended March 27, up from $1.62 billion, or $1.79 a share, in the year-ago period.
(more…)

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Yahoo Inc exceeded Wall Street’s earnings expectations in the first quarter thanks to the sale of some of its assets and its search deal with Microsoft, but the company’s revenue fell a hair short of Wall Street expectations.
Shares of Yahoo were down about 1 percent after closing the regular Nasdaq session nearly flat at $18.38.
(more…)

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