Urban Compass, the startup in stealth mode that raised an $8 million seed round from high-profile investors late in 2012, is slowly revealing more details about what it will be doing, and how it will be doing it, when it launches for business later this year -- most likely in April.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/u1rf7E7LTA8/
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PARIS (Reuters) - France's foreign minister said on Monday Syria risks falling into the hands of Islamist militant groups if supporters of the Syrian opposition do not do more to help it in a 22-month-old revolt against President Bashar al-Assad.
Addressing the opening of a conference in Paris with senior members of the Syrian National Coalition, Laurent Fabius said the meeting must focus on making the opposition politically and militarily cohesive to encourage international assistance.
"Facing the collapse of a state and society, it is Islamist groups that risk gaining ground if we do not act as we should," he said. "We cannot let a revolution that started as a peaceful and democratic protest degenerate into a conflict of militias."
Western concern over the growing strength of jihadist militants fighting autonomously in the disorganized ranks of anti-Assad rebel forces is rising. This has hindered international aid to the moderate Syrian National Coalition opposition and may push it more into the arms of conservative Muslim backers, diplomatic sources say.
The meeting, which brought together Western and Arab nations and the three vice-presidents of the coalition, aims to tackle the lack of cohesion that has led to broken promises of aid.
Coalition vice-president Riad Seif said "time is not on our side" and that the opposition no longer wanted pledges of support that would not be followed through on.
"We need an interim or transitional government to provide assistance to millions of Syrians in liberated zones and to help bring the collapse of the (Assad) regime," he said.
"From the beginning we said we should be based in Syria, but so far we haven't received any money to run a government."
HALF A BILLION DOLLARS
Since its formation in November, the coalition has failed to gain traction on the ground in Syria and its credibility has been undermined by its inability to secure arms and cash.
Seif said the coalition lacked the financial or military means to set up within Syria and support civilians on the ground. "We are looking with our friends at how we can protect the liberated zones with defensive weapons and we are discussing how to get billions of dollars to create a budget," he said.
"But if we don't have this budget there is no point having a government. It makes no sense."
George Sabra, another coalition vice-president, said the coalition needed at least $500 million to launch a government.
But its disunity - it failed last week to form a transitional government [ID:nL6N0AQ0RX] - has deterred the West from boosting assistance, especially sophisticated arms and ammunition insurgents are crying out for.
"We also need weapons. We needed them from the first minute," Sabra said. "At the last meeting of Friends of Syria, they recognized our rights to defend ourselves. (But) what does that mean if we cannot provide help to victims?"
The insurgents have seized territory in the north and east of Syria, including several border crossings, and made some inroads into Assad's dominance in major cities. But Assad's air power and far superior weaponry have limited rebel advances.
France said last week there was no sign Assad was about to be overthrown, reversing previous statements that he could not hold out long, while Jordan's King Abdullah said the authoritarian Syrian leader would consolidate his grip for now.
Fabius said the Paris meeting had three objectives: to address the needs of the vulnerable Syrian population, pursue internal structuring, bring opposition fighting units of the Free Syrian Army under its political authority and prepare the post-Assad transition.
However, he sidestepped the question of arming the rebels, underlining the wariness of Western countries about spreading weapons to Islamists in Syria and across the volatile region.
The European Union is set to review its arms embargo on Syria at the end of February.
(Reporting By John Irish; Editing by Vicky Buffery and Mark Heinrich)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/france-fears-islamist-rise-syria-unless-opposition-helped-113119963.html
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Jan. 28, 2013 ? Male sparrows are capable of fighting to the death. But a new study shows that they often wave their wings wildly first in an attempt to avoid a dangerous brawl.
"For birds, wing waves are like flipping the bird or saying 'put up your dukes. I'm ready to fight,'" said Duke biologist Rindy Anderson.
Male swamp sparrows use wing waves as an aggressive signal to defend their territories and mates from intruding males, Anderson said. The findings also are a first step toward understanding how the birds use a combination of visual displays and songs to communicate with other males.
Anderson and her colleagues published the results online Jan. 28 in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.
Scientists had assumed the sparrows' wing-waving behavior was a signal intended for other males, but testing the observations was difficult, Anderson said. So she and her co-author, former Duke engineering undergraduate student David Piech ('12), built a miniature computer and some robotics, which the team then stuffed into the body cavity of a deceased bird. The result was a 'robosparrow' that looked just like a male swamp sparrow, which could flip its wings just like a live male.
Anderson took the wing-waving robosparrow to a swamp sparrow breeding ground in Pennsylvania and placed it in the territories of live males. The robotic bird "sang" swamp sparrow songs using a nearby sound system to let the birds know he was intruding, while Anderson and her colleagues crouched in the swampy grasses and watched the live birds' responses. She also performed the tests with a stuffed sparrow that stayed stationary and one that twisted from side to side. These tests showed that wing waves combined with song are more potent than song on its own, and that wing waves in particular, not just any movement, evoked aggression from live birds.
The live birds responded most aggressively to the invading, wing-waving robotic sparrow, which Anderson said she expected. "What I didn???t expect to see was that the birds would give strikingly similar aggressive wing-wave signals to the three types of invaders," she said. That means that if a bird wing-waved five times to the stationary stuffed bird, he would also wing-wave five times to the wing-waving robot.
Anderson had hypothesized that the defending birds would match the signals of the intruding robots, but her team's results suggest that the males are more individualistic and consistent in the level of aggressiveness that they want to signal, she said.
"That response makes sense, in retrospect, since attacks can be devastating," Anderson said. Because of the risk, the real males may only want to signal a certain level of aggression to see if they could scare off an intruder without the conflict coming to a fight and possible death.
Still, the risk of severe injury or death didn't keep the studly males from swooping in and clawing at the robotic intruder, whether it wing-waved or not. "It's high stakes for these little birds. They only live a couple of years, and most only breed once a year, so owning a territory and having a female is high currency," Anderson said.
She and her team had planned to test how the sparrows use wing waves combined with a characteristic twitter called soft-song to show aggression and fend off competition. But the experiment may be on hold indefinitely because robosparrow's motor seems to be burned out, and its head was ripped off in an attack, a true fight to the death.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/ojdyQhq8B7c/130129100253.htm
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FILE - In this Sept. 9, 2008, file photo, the logo on a BlackBerry smartphone is shows in Bochum, Germany. The maker of the BlackBerry smartphone is promising a speedy browser, a superb typing experience and the ability to keep work and personal identities separate on the same phone, the fruit of a crucial, long-overdue makeover for the Canadian company. (AP Photo/dapd, Volker Hartmann)
FILE - In this Sept. 9, 2008, file photo, the logo on a BlackBerry smartphone is shows in Bochum, Germany. The maker of the BlackBerry smartphone is promising a speedy browser, a superb typing experience and the ability to keep work and personal identities separate on the same phone, the fruit of a crucial, long-overdue makeover for the Canadian company. (AP Photo/dapd, Volker Hartmann)
TORONTO (AP) ? The maker of the BlackBerry smartphone is promising a speedier device, a superb typing experience and the ability to keep work and personal identities separate on the same phone. It's the fruit of a crucial, long-overdue makeover for the Canadian company.
Thorsten Heins, chief executive of Research In Motion Ltd., will show off the first phone with the new BlackBerry 10 system in New York on Wednesday. A marketing campaign that includes a Super Bowl ad will accompany the long-anticipated debut. Repeated delays have left the once-pioneering BlackBerry an afterthought in the shadow of Apple's trend-setting iPhone and Google's Android-driven devices.
Now, there's some optimism. Previews of the software have gotten favorable reviews on blogs. Financial analysts are starting to see some slight room for a comeback. RIM's stock has nearly tripled to $16.18 from a nine-year low in September, though it's still nearly 90 percent below its 2008 peak of $147.
Most analysts consider a BlackBerry 10 success to be crucial for the company's long-term viability.
"The old models are becoming obsolete quickly," BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis said. "There is still a big user base but it's going to rotate off. The question is: Where do they rotate to?"
The BlackBerry, pioneered in 1999, has been the dominant smartphone for on-the-go business people. Corporate information-technology managers like the phones because they're relatively secure and easy to manage. Many employees loved them because of physical keyboards that were easier to type on than the touch-screen iPhone. President Barack Obama couldn't bear to part with it when he took office. Oprah Winfrey declared it one of her "favorite things." People got so addicted that the device was nicknamed "the CrackBerry."
The BlackBerry began to cross over to consumers. But when the iPhone came out in 2007, it showed that phones can do much more than email and phone calls. They can play games, music and movies. Android came along to offer even more choices. Though IT managers still love BlackBerrys, employees were bringing their own devices to the workplace ? a trend Heins acknowledged RIM was slow to adapt to.
Suddenly, the BlackBerry looked ancient.
Even as BlackBerry sales continued to grow in many parts of the world, many BlackBerry users in North America switched to iPhones and Android devices. BlackBerry's worldwide subscriber based peaked at 80 million in the quarter that ended Sept. 1, before dropping to 79 million in the most-recent quarter. In the U.S., according to research firm IDC, shipments of BlackBerry phones plummeted from 46 percent of the market in 2008 to 2 percent in 2012. Most phones in use today are either iPhones or Android devices.
RIM promised a new system to catch up, using technology it got through its 2010 purchase of QNX Software Systems. RIM initially said BlackBerry 10 would come by early 2012, but then the company changed that to late 2012. A few months later, that date was pushed further, to early 2013, missing the lucrative holiday season. The holdup helped wipe out more than $70 billion in shareholder wealth and 5,000 jobs.
Although executives have been providing a glimpse at some of BlackBerry 10's new features for months, Heins will finally showcase a complete system at Wednesday's event. Devices will go on sale soon after that. Prices have not yet been announced.
RIM redesigned the system to embrace the multimedia, apps and touch-screen experience prevalent today.
"Historically there have been areas that have not been our strongest points," Rick Costanzo, RIM's executive vice president of global sales, said in an interview. "Not only have we caught up, but we may even be better than some of the competition now."
Costanzo said "no one else can touch" what RIM's new system offers.
The new operating system promises better multitasking than either the iPhone or Android. Simply swipe a finger across the phone's display screen to switch to another program.
All emails and notifications from such applications as Twitter and Facebook go to the BlackBerry Hub, a nerve center accessible with a finger swipe even if you have another application open. One can peek into it and open an email, or return to the previous application without opening the email.
"You are not going in and out of applications; you're flowing through applications with one simple gesture of your finger," Costanzo said. "You can leave applications running. You can effortlessly flow between them. So that's completely unique to us."
That said, multitasking will still be limited. If you're watching a video, it will still run while you check for email. But it will pause if you decide to open an email and resume when you are done.
The BlackBerry's touch-screen keyboard promises to learn a user's writing style and suggest words and phrases to complete, going beyond typo corrections offered by rivals. See the one you want, and flick it up to the message area. Costanzo said that "BlackBerry offers the best keyboard, period."
Gus Papageorgiou, a Scotiabank financial analyst who has tried it out, agreed with that assessment and said the keyboard even learns and adjusts to your thumb placements.
The first BlackBerry 10 phone will have only a touch screen. RIM has said it will release a version with a physical keyboard soon after that. That's an area RIM has excelled at, and it's one reason many BlackBerry users have remained loyal despite temptations to switch.
Another distinguishing feature will be the BlackBerry Balance, which allows two personas on the same device. Businesses can keep their data secure without forcing employees to get a second device for personal use. For instance, IT managers can prevent personal apps from running inside corporate firewalls, but those managers won't have access to personal data on the device.
With Balance, "you can just switch from work to personal mode," Papageorgiou said. "I think that is something that will attract a lot of people."
RIM is also claiming that the BlackBerry 10's browser will be speedy, even faster than browsers for laptop and desktop computers. According to Papageorgiou, early, independent tests between the BlackBerry 10 and the iPhone support that claim.
Regardless of BlackBerry 10's advances, though, the new system will face a key shortcoming: It won't have as many apps written by outside companies and individuals as the iPhone and Android. RIM has said it plans to launch BlackBerry 10 with more than 70,000 apps, including those developed for RIM's PlayBook tablet, first released in 2011. Even so, that's just a tenth of what the iPhone and Android offer. Papageorgiou said the initial group will include the most popular ones such as Twitter and Facebook. But RIM will have to persuade others to make a BlackBerry version, when they are already struggling to keep up with both the iPhone and Android.
Like many analysts, Papageorgiou recently upgraded RIM's stock, but cautioned that longtime BlackBerry users will have to get used to a whole new operating system.
He said RIM can be successful if about a third of current subscribers upgrade and if the company can get 4 million new users overseas, especially in countries where the BlackBerry has remained popular. IDC said smartphone shipments grew 44 percent in 2012. If those trends continue, it will be possible for the BlackBerry to grow even if iPhone and Android users don't switch.
"This doesn't have to be the best smartphone on the planet to be a success for RIM," he said. "I think the big question though is, if it fails, is it just too late? Are the other two ecosystems just so advanced that no one can catch up? That's a big risk."
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NEW YORK (AP) ? Amazon.com says its fourth-quarter net income fell 45 percent, as higher revenue failed to keep pace with increased spending on order fulfillment and digital content.
Revenue, along with revenue guidance for the current quarter, missed Wall Street's expectations ? but investors still sent the world's top online retailer's stock up more than 10 percent in after-hours trading.
"It boggles the mind," said BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis, who attributed the stock price jump to slightly stronger-than-expected operating income. "A lot of people scratch their head at the valuation given to Amazon and the support the stock has."
Amazon.com Inc. said Tuesday that it earned $97 million, or 21 cents per share, in the October-December period. That's down from $177 million, or 38 cents per share, in the same period a year earlier.
Revenue for the crucial holiday quarter grew 22 percent to $21.27 billion from $17.43 billion.
Analysts had expected earnings of 28 cents per share on revenue of $22.26 billion, according to a poll by FactSet.
Amazon said operating income increased 56 percent to $405 million from $260 million in the fourth quarter of 2011.
"We're now seeing the transition we've been expecting," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO, in a statement. "After five years, eBooks is a multi-billion dollar category for us and growing fast ? up approximately 70 percent last year."
For the current quarter, Amazon expects revenue of $15 billion to $16.6 billion. Analysts had expected revenue of $16.86 billion.
The company has been investing a lot of its income into enhancing its distribution network and its Kindle business as part of a long term growth plan.
Seattle-based Amazon's shares rose $27.10, or 10.4 percent, to $287.45 in after-hours trading. The stock had closed down $15.69, or 5.7 percent, at $260.35.
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State Racing and Wagering Board lawyer Rob Williams will be asked to don another hat and run the new gaming commission for awhile, a Cuomo administration source said on Tuesday.
Williams, who is already acting director of the Division of the Lottery and who has been serving in the executive chamber, will be acting director of the new body to oversee all legal gambling, racing and lottery operations statewide.
The source also confirmed a report on Tuesday in Bloodhorse that Gov. Andrew Cuomo has chosen two gaming commission board members: John Poklemba, a former administrator in Gov. Mario Cuomo?s administration, and Todd Snyder, a financial industry professional who has helped Gov. Andrew Cuomo in finding ways to cut cost of state employee benefits.
The New York Gaming Commission is supposed to have seven commissioners paid $300 per meeting. So the appointees, two from the Legislature and five from the governor, will go to people not looking for full-time work or full-time paychecks. Poklemba formerly served as the state?s director of criminal justice. He also went on to be a lobbyist for police.
Snyder was used by Andrew Cuomo?s administration to help find ways to trim health care costs, particularly for retirees, given his experience in developing deals with United Airlines and General Motors. He is with Rothschild Inc.
Source: http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/177205/names-for-gaming-commission-surface/
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