Cellphone maker Nokia is in talks to sell its UK luxury subsidiary Vertu, which hand makes some of the world's most expensive mobile phones, a source familiar with the company's strategy said on Monday.
Earlier the Financial Times reported that talks with private equity group Permira were at an advanced stage on a possible sale which would raise about 200 million euros ($265 million).
Vertu's cellphones can feature crystal displays and sapphire keys, costing more than 200,000 pounds ($320,000) due to the precious metal components.
Nokia, which had its credit rating cut to "junk" status by Standard & Poor's last week, first signaled its intention to sell Vertu in December, and recently said it plans to dispose of "non-core assets".
Nokia, once the world's dominant mobile phone provider, declined to comment, while Vertu and Permira were not available for comment.
The FT report, published on its website on Sunday, cited people familiar with the talks as saying Goldman Sachs was advising on the possible sale, but said the outcome was not yet certain.
EQT, the Northern European private equity group, has also been in talks about buying the company, although those close to the process, cited by the FT, say that these are not progressing at this stage.
Earlier the Financial Times reported that talks with private equity group Permira were at an advanced stage on a possible sale which would raise about 200 million euros ($265 million).
Vertu's cellphones can feature crystal displays and sapphire keys, costing more than 200,000 pounds ($320,000) due to the precious metal components.
Nokia, which had its credit rating cut to "junk" status by Standard & Poor's last week, first signaled its intention to sell Vertu in December, and recently said it plans to dispose of "non-core assets".
Nokia, once the world's dominant mobile phone provider, declined to comment, while Vertu and Permira were not available for comment.
The FT report, published on its website on Sunday, cited people familiar with the talks as saying Goldman Sachs was advising on the possible sale, but said the outcome was not yet certain.
EQT, the Northern European private equity group, has also been in talks about buying the company, although those close to the process, cited by the FT, say that these are not progressing at this stage.
Live in one place long enough and you start to develop strong opinions on all the things in the area that could be improved--maybe there’s a vacant lot that would be perfect for a park, or a street that desperately needs bike lanes. Chances are, if you think that lot needs a park and that street needs a bike lane, other people do too. But how can you make your collective voice heard? Neighborland, a New Orleans-based startup that aims to be a social network for neighborhoods across the U.S., is a start.
The recently launched site, which is backed by The Obvious Corporation (an ideas incubator started by the cofounders of Twitter), grew out of cofounder Candy Chang’s projects in New Orleans and Fairbanks, Alaska. In New Orleans, the artist stuck nametag-like stickers saying "I WISH THIS WAS ___” on abandoned structures throughout the city. In Fairbanks, Chang launched a similar project, where an abandoned apartment building was draped in a sign saying "Looking for Love." Passersby were encouraged to use chalkboards at the building’s base to write their hopes and dreams for its future uses.
Neighborland takes the neighborhood revitalization theme a step further, acting kind of like a Digg or Reddit for neighborhood ideas. Go to the New Orleans page, and you’ll see a list of suggestions from users--things like "I want a Computer Science department at Tulane in New Orleans" and "I want a lot more recycle bins available/visible all over the city in New Orleans." Anyone who is signed in can comment or click the "Me Too" button to indicate that they would like the suggestion to be taken seriously. Users can sort through suggestions by what’s current, popular, or new.
When an idea gains enough traction, Neighborland tries to make sure that the appropriate local agencies see it. In one example, a Neighborland idea to bring the new downriver streetcar in New Orleans to Poland Ave. was so popular that Transport for NOLA and Neighborland teamed up ensure that the request was added to the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority’s request for federal funding. After an online petition garnered over 2,200 signatures, Neighborland held an event with local residents and community leaders to bolster support even more.
In another instance, 61 people on the site expressed interest in having the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority open up its GPS data so developers could build smart apps. This caught the eye of local organization Transport for NOLA, which partnered with Neighborland to create a petition that racked up 300 signatures. An open data policy was already on the RTA’s to-do list, but it became a much bigger priority because of the petition. Now the agency has opened up its transit data.
Community organizations can also ask the Neighborhood community what amenities they would like to see. Broad Community Connections, a neighborhood organization in New Orleans, asked users last year what they would like to see on Broad St. The organization received dozens of responses, including "fresh artisan bread," a dance class and martial arts studio," "a dignified swimming hall," and "bike racks outside of businesses."
Neighborland was incubated in New Orleans--that’s why there are so many ideas for the city on the site--but it’s now open to a handful of other locations, including Boulder, Houston, and Minneapolis. It will open up even further in the future. It’s too early to tell whether Neighborland will be successful on a country-wide scale, but a blog post from the Obvious Corporation sums up the need for the service:
"We don’t live in a 1950s TV show. It’s unlikely in most neighborhoods that residents will walk over, knock on your door, introduce themselves, and ask how they can help. However, 'signing in’ to your neighborhood and connecting with those who live around you about shared issues--speed bumps, recycling, whatever--that is a more likely and familiar scenario nowadays. Neighborland has the potential to unite residents and profoundly upgrade our neighborhoods."
Plants do it right. They’ve evolved to use the sun as their main energy source, converting solar energy into chemical energy in a process known as photosynthesis. The result, finely honed over billions of years, is a fast, efficient system that splits water (H2O) up into its component parts. Such a method would be the ideal clean-energy technology, using the sun’s rays to convert water into oxygen and hydrogen, the cleanest natural gas. Scientists have been trying to mimic the system for decades, but they always fell short. It was nearly impossible to split water fast enough for the process to be efficient.
Now, a group of researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, has developed a method that, for the first time, approaches speeds that approximate nature’s own process. The sticking point has always been finding the right catalyst, a molecule that could speed up the chemical reaction in just the right way.Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen isn’t easy--it needs high energy.
“Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen isn’t easy--it needs high energy,” says Licheng Sun, the organic chemist who led the research. The chemical reactions that are required need chemical prompting, and the catalysts that had been created just weren’t efficient enough. “The reported catalysts are too slow. Two hundred orders of magnitude slower than nature, and they couldn’t speed up the process enough for efficient splitting.”
Sun and his colleagues developed a catalyst that, at least when put into solution, split water at close to the same pace as that found in grass and leaves. They’re now working to integrate it into a device that can be commercialized. “I have been working in the field for more than 20 years, and on this catalyst for five years,” Sun says. “This can replace fossil fuels. We don’t need coal, petroleum, or natural gas. We’re only keeping them for energy. But we can use sunlight to drive the whole world.”
Now, a group of researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, has developed a method that, for the first time, approaches speeds that approximate nature’s own process. The sticking point has always been finding the right catalyst, a molecule that could speed up the chemical reaction in just the right way.Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen isn’t easy--it needs high energy.
“Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen isn’t easy--it needs high energy,” says Licheng Sun, the organic chemist who led the research. The chemical reactions that are required need chemical prompting, and the catalysts that had been created just weren’t efficient enough. “The reported catalysts are too slow. Two hundred orders of magnitude slower than nature, and they couldn’t speed up the process enough for efficient splitting.”
Sun and his colleagues developed a catalyst that, at least when put into solution, split water at close to the same pace as that found in grass and leaves. They’re now working to integrate it into a device that can be commercialized. “I have been working in the field for more than 20 years, and on this catalyst for five years,” Sun says. “This can replace fossil fuels. We don’t need coal, petroleum, or natural gas. We’re only keeping them for energy. But we can use sunlight to drive the whole world.”
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YouTube cofounders Steve Chan and Chad Hurley just closed a Series A funding round on their new startup AVOS Systems. The group made the announcement at the TNW Conference now underway in Amsterdam. The year-old company took over bookmarking site Delicious from Yahoo, launched its China clone mei.fm, and is working on what looks like a magazine building site over at zeen.com. This funding round is led by Google Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.
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Samsung may have just sold more smartphones than Apple, according to industry scuttlebutt doing the rounds now--it's all based on rumor because Samsung doesn't reveal sales of its phones separately anymore, and the entire question is muddied because Apple sells just two versions of the iPhone and Samsung's stock covers hundreds of only slightly different varieties. Or, on the other hand, Samsung may not have beaten Apple. It may have achieved a greater marketshare of smartphones globally, or perhaps not. We really don't know, but the widespread chatter about it at least illustrates that people are watching this market keenly. We're more certain that Samsung has now ousted Nokia from its 14-year lead as biggest phone vendor--a plausible fact given Nokia's continuing slip from grace. And we're pretty convinced that Samsung's dirty tricks "smear" PR campaign against Apple customers--accusing them of being sheep--now rings completely hollow.
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Lincoln, Nebraska, is an unlikely test bed for the future of journalism. It’s more than a thousand miles in both directions from the major coastal media markets. None of the country’s big magazine, newspaper, or broadcasting empires is headquartered here. Lincoln isn’t even particularly close to the companies that are producing the hardware of new media platforms. All the way out here on the Great Plains, however, Lincoln is a great place to practice flying drones.
“You can’t swing your arms in Manhattan without hitting people,” says Matt Waite, a journalism professor at the University of Nebraska in town. “Not a problem here. We’ve got space to stretch out and do things. And when you’re talking about flying a drone--especially when you’re first figuring it out--not having people around to crash into is a huge thing.”
Strange as this sounds, Waite is certain that drones will be a big part of the future of journalism. And the future of journalism will be tested here because there’s room to do it--quite literally--but also because the University of Nebraska is willing to do the R&D whereas media outlets and more staid journalism schools are not.
“There are not the very heady, haughty silos here,” says Gary Kebbel, the dean of Nebraska’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications. And he wants to enlist everyone from computer scientists to communications theorists to policy wonks working on the politics of drones. On this campus, that’s not such a strange suggestion. “There are people here who totally support and embody the mission of a land-grant university, which is to spread education throughout the state for the benefit of people in the state.”
Kebbel came here two years ago from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, where he ran the deep-pocketed Knight News Challenge. Kebbel lured Waite onto the faculty to join him last fall with the promise of doing, as Waite says, “out-there kind of stuff.” Waite, a Nebraska native, had previously helped develop the St. Petersburg Times’ political fact-checking site PolitiFact, the first website to ever win a Pulitzer Prize. Since arriving here from Miami, Kebbel has attracted attention for predicting that the future of media lies in mobile devices. He is currently planning to launch a Mobile Media Center that would begin to push the school (and the profession) in that direction.
“Mobile is the only device I’m aware of that is bridging all the digital divides I can possibly think of,” he says. And there are many: the divide between older and younger generations, between urban and rural, poor and wealthy, the well educated and the less so. Today, just about all of these groups have phones, if they have nothing else in common. And that means a journalist reporting on mobile devices can talk to anyone.
Kebbel is not, however, interested just in disseminating the news on cell phones (and this is good news for aspiring journalists who fear we’ll one day all be competing for the most Pulitzer-worthy text messages). He’s also talking about gathering the news with mobile devices. And this is where the drones come in. Kebbel wants the Mobile Media Center to attract grants and redistribute them to fund the research into drones and sensors and other portable tools that might revolutionize not just how the news is consumed, but how its acquired.
Journalists already mine stories from vast datasets. But that data typically comes from government sources. Waite and Kebbel want to deploy the types of mobile devices that could allow journalists to collect their own data. And they believe it’s the job of universities to figure out how to do this.
“They need to be doing R&D that, in particular, in these economic times, news organizations cannot do,” Kebbel says. “They don’t have the money. Some of the research that needs to be done, the boards of these companies would say 'you want to spend money on what?'"
Try to imagine the New York Times funding a drone R&D program. (OK, hologram-happy CNN is less of a stretch, but if they ever did light upon a good journalism drone, they probably wouldn’t share it with anyone.) To explain what Waite (pictured above on the right) wants to do with these things, it’s helpful to first think about weather (a perpetual top story in Nebraska). As a reporter, Waite chased tornados in Arkansas and covered hurricanes in Florida.
“I was thinking all along that it’s great we can rent a helicopter at a couple thousand dollars an hour,” he says, “but wouldn’t it be great to do this as a reporter with something on my back at the scene?” Like maybe a flying camera that could canvass a town in minutes?
Last summer, he stumbled on exactly such a drone at a digital-mapping conference. A company called Gatewing was demoing this video. In it, the Gatewing x100 flies overhead, snaps a zillion photos and then stitches them all back together into one georectified image. “I’m standing there watching this product demo,” Waite recalls, “and I’m thinking of every hurricane, tornado, every flood, every grass fire, every biblical disaster I’d ever covered as a reporter. And I’m like, 'here it is.'"
Waite tried to buy one on the spot. It turns out, though, that the Gatewing x100 costs about $65,000. And it’s currently illegal to fly it in the United States. Drones used for commercial purposes here are outlawed today. But the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill passed by Congress earlier this year is supposed to change that. The FAA now has until September of 2015 to figure out how to legalize drones.
And that means that UNL has the next three years to scale up drone journalism--to develop both the physical drones themselves and the legal, ethical, and safety guidelines that will be needed to actually use them. Right now, Waite says, if you’ve got a drone with enough power to lift a serious camera off the ground, you are effectively launching a flying lawnmower into the air. And soon journalists want to deploy these things over protesting crowds and urban car wrecks?
So there is a lot of work to do out in Nebraska. And this is all just one piece of it.
“We’re defining mobile as broadly as we can, to not just think about it as an iPhone, an iPad, an Android,” Waite says. Today, he has a small drone prototype in his office, the kind of toy you can buy at any Brookstone store. “But with the drone I have, I can actually control the drone with a mobile device, I can record video from it, I can edit that video on my iPhone or iPad, and I can upload that all to the web and never touch a computer. That’s 'mobile' in a lot of senses."
And that’s before we even get to the conversation about which mobile devices people will be using to follow these stories.
Here is a new set of official statistics that can escalate the politically contentious debate on what constitutes the poverty line.
If average monthly consumption expenditure is taken as the benchmark of what an individual needs to survive, the poverty line would be Rs 66.10 for urban areas and Rs 35.10 for rural regions, while about 65% of the population will be below this cut-off.
The figures, based on the 66th round of the National Sample Survey for 2009-10, provide a more realistic marker for estimating both the poverty line and the population below it than the Planning Commission's calculation of Rs 28.65 per capita per day for cities and 22.42 for rural areas.
The rural and urban all-India averages for monthly expenditure are Rs 1,054 and Rs 1,984 per person, respectively, and if these are projected on the expenditure-population curve, the population below this works out to 64.47% (rural) and 66.70% (urban). Official sources said the exercise was carried out as part of a study and is based on NSSO data largely available in the public domain. While the government is revising its parameters, the monthly averages might be a useful means of estimating where to draw the poverty line.
With almost all states showing more than 60% of populations below the monthly expenditure averages, the oft-repeated claim that 70% of India lives on less than $2 a day has a ring of truth in it.
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If average monthly consumption expenditure is taken as the benchmark of what an individual needs to survive, the poverty line would be Rs 66.10 for urban areas and Rs 35.10 for rural regions, while about 65% of the population will be below this cut-off.
The figures, based on the 66th round of the National Sample Survey for 2009-10, provide a more realistic marker for estimating both the poverty line and the population below it than the Planning Commission's calculation of Rs 28.65 per capita per day for cities and 22.42 for rural areas.
The rural and urban all-India averages for monthly expenditure are Rs 1,054 and Rs 1,984 per person, respectively, and if these are projected on the expenditure-population curve, the population below this works out to 64.47% (rural) and 66.70% (urban). Official sources said the exercise was carried out as part of a study and is based on NSSO data largely available in the public domain. While the government is revising its parameters, the monthly averages might be a useful means of estimating where to draw the poverty line.
With almost all states showing more than 60% of populations below the monthly expenditure averages, the oft-repeated claim that 70% of India lives on less than $2 a day has a ring of truth in it.
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The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a new impotence drug, Vivus Inc.'s Stendra.
The pill is intended to be taken 30 minutes before sex, but Vivus said that in clinical trials, some patients were able to have sex as little as 15 minutes after taking the drug. Pfizer Inc.'s Viagra is supposed to be taken at least 30 minutes before sex. The FDA said an estimated 30 million men have importance, or erectile dysfunction.
In clinical trials, the most common side effects of Stendra, or avanafil, were headache, redness of the face and other areas, nasal congestion, back pain, and symptoms similar to the common cold. Vivus said the drug shouldn't be taken more than once per day.
Vivus licensed Stendra from Japanese drugmaker Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma. It has worldwide rights to the drug except for some countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Vivus has said it is talking to potential marketing partners for Stendra, and may sell the drug outright to another company. Analysts said Friday they expect Vivus to sell Stendra to another drug company to help fund future sales of its experimental obesity drug Qnexa.
"Given the large market opportunity and the potentially differentiating faster onset of action, we believe that in the hands of big pharma Stendra is probably worth around $300 million," said Cowen and Co. analyst Simos Simeonidis.
Simeonidis said Vivus will need a partner to help sell Qnexa, and will turn to a large pharmaceutical company with experience launching major drugs. He said it's also possible that another company could buy Vivus.
Rodman and Renshaw analyst Michael King said Vivus could get as much as $100 million for the rights to Stendra. He estimated that U.S. sales could peak at $483 million in 2016. After that, he said sales are likely to fall because generic versions of Viagra and other drugs will reach the market.
Vivus is based in Mountain View, Calif. The FDA was scheduled to make a decision on Qnexa this month, but announced it is extending its review by another three months. It is now expected to make a ruling by July 17.
Shares of Vivus ended the session up 72 cents, or 3 percent, at $25.15. After-hours the stock picked up 40 cents to $25.55
The pill is intended to be taken 30 minutes before sex, but Vivus said that in clinical trials, some patients were able to have sex as little as 15 minutes after taking the drug. Pfizer Inc.'s Viagra is supposed to be taken at least 30 minutes before sex. The FDA said an estimated 30 million men have importance, or erectile dysfunction.
In clinical trials, the most common side effects of Stendra, or avanafil, were headache, redness of the face and other areas, nasal congestion, back pain, and symptoms similar to the common cold. Vivus said the drug shouldn't be taken more than once per day.
Vivus licensed Stendra from Japanese drugmaker Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma. It has worldwide rights to the drug except for some countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Vivus has said it is talking to potential marketing partners for Stendra, and may sell the drug outright to another company. Analysts said Friday they expect Vivus to sell Stendra to another drug company to help fund future sales of its experimental obesity drug Qnexa.
"Given the large market opportunity and the potentially differentiating faster onset of action, we believe that in the hands of big pharma Stendra is probably worth around $300 million," said Cowen and Co. analyst Simos Simeonidis.
Simeonidis said Vivus will need a partner to help sell Qnexa, and will turn to a large pharmaceutical company with experience launching major drugs. He said it's also possible that another company could buy Vivus.
Rodman and Renshaw analyst Michael King said Vivus could get as much as $100 million for the rights to Stendra. He estimated that U.S. sales could peak at $483 million in 2016. After that, he said sales are likely to fall because generic versions of Viagra and other drugs will reach the market.
Vivus is based in Mountain View, Calif. The FDA was scheduled to make a decision on Qnexa this month, but announced it is extending its review by another three months. It is now expected to make a ruling by July 17.
Shares of Vivus ended the session up 72 cents, or 3 percent, at $25.15. After-hours the stock picked up 40 cents to $25.55
A few weeks ago, I returned from a week-long technology-free vacation with my family. No computer, no phone, no email.
When I got to the office and checked my computer, I had hundreds of email messages waiting for me. I took a deep breath and started in on them. Three hours later, my inbox — a week's worth of messages — was empty.
Contrast that with my experience the next day, and each day after that, when I've spent well more than three hours each day on email. Some of that time involved back-and-forth emailing, but still, the difference is dramatic.
I've come to the conclusion that I use email to distract myself. Whenever I feel the least bit uneasy, I check my email. Stuck while writing an article? Bored on a phone call? Standing in an elevator, frustrated in a meeting, anxious about an interaction? Might as well check email. It's an ever-present, easy-access way to avoid my feelings of discomfort.
What makes it so compelling is that it's so compelling. I wonder what's waiting for me in my inbox? It's scintillating.
It also feels legitimate, even responsible. I'm working. I need to make sure I don't miss an important message or fail to respond in a timely fashion.
But it's become a serious problem. When we don't control our email habit, we are controlled by it. Everyone I know complains about email overload.
Email pours in, with no break to its flow. And like addicts, we check it incessantly, drawing ourselves away from meetings, conversations, personal time, or whatever is right in front of us.
But it's not just the abundance of email that's our problem — it's the inefficiency in how we deal with it. Each time we check our email on the fly, we lose time pulling out our phones, loading the email, reading new emails without taking action on them, and re-reading those to which we haven't yet responded. Then, back at our computers, we re-read them again.
It's rattling us. According to USA Today the number of lawsuits filed by employees claiming unfair overtime is up 32% since 2008. The major reason for the increase? Email on devices like smartphones is intruding on our personal time.
The solution, I believe, is hidden in my post-vacation email experience.
Instead of checking email continuously and from multiple devices, schedule specific email time during the day while you are at your computer. All other time is email vacation time.
We are most efficient when we answer email in bulk at our computers. We move faster, can access files when we need them, and link more quickly and easily to other programs like our calendars. Also, when we sit down for the express purpose of doing emails, we have our email heads on. We are more focused, more driven, wasting no time in transition from one activity to another.
I bulk process my email three times a day in 30-minute increments, once in the morning, once mid-day, and once before shutting down my computer for the day. I use a timer and when it beeps, I close my email program.
Outside my designated email times I don't access my email — from any device — until my next scheduled email session. I no longer use my phone for email unless I'm away from my computer all day.
When the urge to check arises — and it arises often — I take a deep breath and feel whatever feelings come up. And then I focus on whatever I'm doing, even if what I'm doing is waiting. I let my mind relax.
Here's what I've found: I don't miss a thing.
In fact, it's the opposite. I gain presence throughout my day. I am focused on what's around me in the moment, without distraction. I listen more attentively, notice people's subtle reactions I would otherwise overlook, and come up with more ideas as my mind wanders. I'm more productive, more sensitive, more creative, and happier.
I'm also going through my email faster and with more attention than before. I don't make those I'm-moving-too-fast mistakes like copying the wrong person or sending an email before finishing it or saying something hurtful. So I'm also more efficient.
But what if someone needs an immediate response? Worrying about that is precisely the kind of misguided rationalization that reinforces our addiction. I haven't angered anyone with my new process. In fact, I don't think anyone has noticed my mini email vacations because responding to an email within a few hours is perfectly reasonable. And, in the off chance that they need a response within minutes, they'll find another way to reach me, either by texting or calling.
Email is no longer an overwhelming burden to me. I'm spending an hour and a half a day on it, which for me is the right amount. You may need more or less time per day. Experiment and then schedule the appropriate time slots.
The hardest part is resisting the temptation to check during your off-email hours. My advice? When you have the urge to check your email, check yourself instead. What's going on for you? What are you feeling? Take a deep breath and relax into an undistracted moment.
For a brief moment in the middle of a hectic workday, it just might feel like you're on vacation.