A magnitude 6.9 earthquake hit 66 miles (107 km) south south-east of Manokwari, Irian Jaya, Indonesia, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
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While much of the United States waits for reliable 4G service, the Navy is quietly rolling out their own 4G project. The Navy's 4G system will be used for multiple purposes. Starting in 2013, 4G Long-Term Evolution systems based on existing commercial products will be unveiled on the U.S.S. Kearsarge, the U.S.S. San Antonio, and the U.S.S. Whidbey Island. The Navy hopes that fast, accessible smartphone Internet for sailor use will free up important on-ship bandwidth for military needs and allow new military products to be developed. All three ships are part of the U.S.S. Kearsarge Expeditionary Force; a justification and approval form (PDF) for the project indicates that 4G is a “mission critical requirement” for the Counter-Piracy Task Force, which primarily operates off the Horn of Africa. 4G can fight pirates!
Technology for the product is expected to be supplied by D.C.-area telecom firm Oceus Networks and will give service members access to high-speed Internet (8-15 megabits per second) which will be faster than the average home broadband connection, even at sea. The 4G systems on all three ships will have a line-of-sight range of 15-20 miles, which can be extended to 30 miles with the use of a base station on a Marine H-1 helicopter. Naval Air Systems Command's Larry Hollingsworth told NextGov's Bob Brewin that the 4G systems will be used to free up satellite bandwidth for military use. At the moment, satellite Internet use by troops keeping touch with home makes up a considerable portion of bandwidth.
According to industry journal Military Intelligence Technology, one sample use for 4G could be helicopters transmitting sensor data to Marines in small boats preparing to board vessels infiltrated by pirates or terrorists. Marines and sailors in the Expeditionary Force will be provided with custom Android handsets equipped with a basic whiteboarding app in addition to standard voice/data/camera capabilities. The Android handsets can be used to transmit non-classified information only; Naval Air Systems Command is working with the NSA to create a solution that will allow the phones to transmit classified data.
As currently proposed, the Kearsarge project is a pilot for the Navy. If successful, 4G will be rolled out across the Navy in coming years.
Spotify just announced some big-name partnerships, and on the roster are Coca Cola, AT&T and McDonalds, Intel and Reebok. The Coca-Cola deal is built to help Spotify go global, and more information is expected later this afternoon. Spotify also confirmed plans to embed "brand apps" in its desktop application, which sound like they would give their brand partners Intel, Reebok and others better visibility. All this fresh from AdAge digital conference where Spotify CEO Daniel Ek's been speaking this morning.
What is the history of Spotify?
Before we found that spotify just hit 3 million paying subscribers, the Financial Times reports. That may sound like an impressive milestone for the popular on-demand music service, but how impressive is it really?
Only about 64 days have elapsed since Spotify announced it reached 2.5 million subscribers in November. That means 500,000 users have signed up to pay for the service in that time--or, from another perspective, a back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that 7,000 to 8,000 users are subscribing to Spotify each day, on average. And remember: These are global statistics from a service that has been touted by the record labels and media, and boasts the powerful backing of Facebook's Open Graph.
That may not sound like a lot, but compared with other digital subscription services, Spotify is certainly growing at a fast clip. Netflix, for example, added 610,000 users this past quarter, while Sirius XM added 540,000 in Q4, meaning Spotify is gaining subscribers at a faster rate. (Interestingly enough, Netflix grew from 2.5 million members to 3 million members in about the same time frame back in the early aughts.)
Still, to reach Netflix's and Sirius XM's 20-plus million subscriber counts, it would take Spotify roughly 7 to 9 years at this rate, though user ship figures are likely to increase faster the more popular the service becomes.
Spotify's growth gives weight to evangelists of Facebook's Open Graph, which enables third parties to create apps on top of the social network. Earlier this week, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg highlighted Spotify's success, saying that Facebook has helped add more than 7 million users of the service.
It also helps silence critics. Only today, Rhapsody president Jon Irwin questioned whether Facebook was helping to add freeloaders or paying subscribers. "I think the success that Spotify's had on Facebook--well, Spotify has a very tight relationship with Facebook in terms of the development of their implementation," he said. "And it's seen significant growth in its number of users--and I emphasize number of users on the service, who are not necessarily subscribers...But the question remains whether it's effective in converting people to being paying subscribers versus, say, music transients who want to just listen to music for free and move onto the next allotment of free music they can get."
Spotify gave some defense of its freemium-to-premium conversion rate today, showing how
20% of its active users are now paying subscribers, compared with just 15% last year.
Last year, a clutch of researchers at Britain’s University of Exeter developed the first 3-D–ever chocolate printer--and the world rejoiced. The device, which the team called ChocALM for Chocolate Additive Layer Manufacturing, uses the principles of rapid prototyping to layer molten chocolate, rather than plastic, into any shape imaginable without a mold. The wait is over: Dr. Liang Hao, the head of the operation, has spun off a business to offer his Choc Creator printers for pre-order.
Before you get too excited: The price of the machine is roughly $3,300 (30% of that secures your order; the rest is billed once your printer ships, within 9–12 weeks after your deposit is received). Once it arrives, however, the setup is straightforward: Just fill the printer’s syringe with chocolate, select one of two printing heads, and start modeling your cat out of chocolate. Users have access to open-source 3-D software for sketching their designs. But there’s a catch: The printer isn’t yet food-grade certified, meaning that technically it can be used for creative and artistic purposes, not for consumption, though Hao gave us this assurance: “I can eat the printed chocolate myself. [You] need to follow right process to do so.” A food-grade model will be released within the next three to six months.
The very first commercial printer was auctioned on eBay yesterday for GBP 1,9000 (about $3,000); Hao sweetened the deal by including 2% of the company’s gross income for the first year of sales. That might be a prohibitive cost for most interested consumers, but it’s an expense a candy manufacturer can swallow: According to the BBC, Thorntons, Britain’s largest chocolatier, has expressed interest.
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Yahoo! India has announced the launch of the first-ever full-fledged cricket app for Windows Phone users in India. The app is available for free on the Windows Marketplace and offers a slew of features and user-friendly interaction for the user to follow live matches, and also keep a tab on the recent and upcoming ones. The app is the first to offer a complete match experience in a variety of ways like live scores, detailed ball-by-ball commentary which can be filtered by wickets, 4s and 6s; an interactive score card which allows the user to browse through the batting line up, fall of wickets and a complete chronology of how a match progressed. If you are a Windows Phone user and live and breathe cricket, then grab the app from here.
With this new app from Yahoo! Cricket, Windows Phone users can now catch all international matches and the IPL series – live, on-the-go. On a non-match day, the app will connect the user to specially created photo-galleries, latest news articles on the game, player and team profiles, as well as results of completed matches, and schedules of upcoming ones. Developed at the R&D center in Bangalore, this is the third cricket app released by Yahoo!. Following on the success of the earlier apps built for iPhone and Android (the recent Android app has seen 11000 down loads within 10 days of launch) , the new Windows Phone app has already garnered praise from users who've installed it.
Some of the highlights of the app include: A quick look at all the live scores of matches currently happening. An interactive scorecard. Browse through the batting line-up to know about partnerships, who got out when, and who is coming up next. Provides users with various ways of enjoying a cricket match – from the basic scores, all the way up to a detailed ball-by-ball commentary View specially created photo galleries showing the latest from the world of cricket. Read all the latest news articles on the game. A simple way to browse through results of completed matches and to know schedules of upcoming matches. Browse through all international teams and players
Barclays bank has been on top of the mobile payments game, most recently with the launch of their secure mobile money transfer app, Pingit. Now they're taking contactless payment one step further into the wild world with a stick-on contactless credit card that could turn any phone into a tap-and-pay service, provided of course, that there's an appropriate point-of-sale device around. "PayTag" is available free for Barclays Visa credit card holders, as an extension of their existing accounts. Also in the works at Barclays is a partnership with cellular service provider Orange. Orange is due to announce a slew of Android phones with a Barclays payments app enabled, which can be swiped over contactless registers at various department stores, and coming soon to the London bus system and the Tube. Meanwhile, speaking at the Ad Age conference this week, MasterCard execs said that the company is investing generously in apps and mobile, following pilots like the six-month-long MasterCard PayPass test with New York's MTA.
One of the great pleasures in life for economists is watching bubbles burst. First the speculative air is pumped in just beyond the point of reason. There is always a trader willing to say that a tulip bulb will soon be worth a million guilders; an investment bank ready to predict $200 oil prices by the end of the year. There is always a looming war or a potential harvest failure to add spurious justification. But the end is inevitably the same. The bubble bursts.
That is what is happening now in the energy market. Sometimes the bubble deflates rapidly, as with the US natural gas price – now at a 10-year low of less than $2 per mmbtu. In other cases the air escapes slowly. That is what has been happening to the oil price since the announcement of a modest fall in Chinese imports.
Once the fall begins it tends to continue. European gas prices are also declining and utilities tied into long-term contracts are struggling to renegotiate terms. If the Japanese succeed in restoring some nuclear power capacity the Asia gas market will follow the downward trend. Simultaneously the important report from the UK's energy department has reopened the door to shale gas development in Britain and perhaps across Europe.
The oil market is also set for a serious adjustment. Iran has backed off from its threats to close the Strait of Hormuz, and another complex negotiating process has begun in Istanbul to find a way in which Israel and Iran can step back from a confrontation neither could win. The sanctions on Iranian oil exports are an important bargaining chip in these negotiations. If there is any progress, Iranian production will come back on to the market.
In any circumstances short of a long war, the decline in prices could be substantial and only the action of Opec swing producers, led by Saudi Arabia, could set a floor. The Saudis' position is that prices should average $100 a barrel, but with output from Iran and Libya restored, that would require a cut of up to 3m barrels a day in Saudi exports – with troubling results for the kingdom's budget.
Nor is the fall likely to be temporary. Years of high prices have encouraged investment and technical advances have started to transform the energy market. The focus of attention has been on shale gas, with US production up 14-fold since 2000 and now meeting almost a quarter of US demand. In China, shale gas exploration is just beginning and if successful could dramatically reduce import requirements over the next decade. In Europe, the environmental debate is unresolved but following the UK government's supportive report, a forthcoming paper from the Royal Society could help set new standards, opening the way for production across the continent.
Significant shale gas reserves exist in Poland and France. With new and clear guidelines, development could be rapid and sharply reduce Europe's import needs. At the same time, the US is beginning to plan for exports of gas. This is the context behind last week's remarkable comment by Vladimir Putin, who warned Gazprom it would have to rise to the challenge of a transformed market.
But shale gas is not the full story. US production of tight oil, which is produced from shale and other rocks, has tripled in the past three years to almost 900,000 b/d. Predictions that the US could become self-sufficient in hydrocarbons in the next two decades no longer look absurd.
For consumers the news is good. The jerry cans in the garage will decline in value but the price at the pumps should decline steadily. In the US, the low gas price is seen as rebasing industrial costs and opening the door to a renaissance of manufacturing. The losers will be those who have invested in the highest-cost oil and gas developments and those who have planned their corporate or national finances on the basis of a one-way bet on rising prices and revenues. One of the most telling features of the current market is that despite the high prices of recent months the shares of oil majors have suffered serious falls. Shell and BP are both down against the market by more than 10 per cent since the start of the year. A persistent fall in prices will reopen the question of industrial restructuring, which has been postponed by the largesse of the past few years. Several Opec states will also be in serious trouble, with any added production from Iraq putting yet more pressure on the quota system, which sustains the cartel.
Within the energy market, attention has shifted to electricity production. The attraction of gas as a feedstock for generating power is well known. If that is reinforced by plentiful supply and falling prices, the drift from nuclear will continue and more questions will be asked about the scale of subsidies needed to back renewables. With climate change off the political agenda the risk of slippage on pledges to reduce emissions is high.
Bubbles tend to distract attention from such long-term trends. As the bubble bursts, we will see more clearly how much the landscape of the energy market is changing.
The writer is visiting professor and chair of King's Policy Institute, King's College London
