Making Money on Line

Roundup, Venture Capital, Innovation Economy

VCs Making Smaller Investments, V-Vehicle Restarting Under New CEO, Qualcomm Buys iSkoot, & More San Diego BizTech News

Bruce V. Bigelow 10/18/10

A common theme in last week’s technology news is how companies and entire industries continually remake their businesses, whether it’s the venture capital community, startup carmakers, or a San Diego company that specializes in data storage technology. Read on to see what I mean.

—As the venture capital survey data comes in from the three months that ended September 30, we’re seeing a nationwide rebound in first-time financings for startups. Data from CB Insights, the New York financial information firm, shows seed-stage deals increasing from 1 percent of the deals in the third quarter of 2009 to 11 percent of all deals during the third quarter.

—Venture capital surveys from CB Insights and the MoneyTree Report both show an increasing deal count, but a decline in the total amount of invested. In a year-over-year comparison, the MoneyTree Report showed a 7 percent decline in capital invested with a 9 percent increase in deal count during the third quarter, when venture firms invested $4.8 billion in 780 deals nationwide.

—V-Vehicle, the San Diego startup automaker, changed its name to Next Autoworks. The company, which has raised $87 million from investors that include Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, and T. Boone Pickens, also hired industry veteran Kathleen Ligocki as CEO.

—Overland Storage (NASDAQ: OVRL), the San Diego data storage technology specialist, acquired Sunnyvale, CA-based MaxiScale, which provides data protection and data management technologies. Financial terms were not disclosed.

—San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) acquired San Francisco-based mobile social networks software developer iSkoot Technologies. Financial terms were not disclosed.

—Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder and the San Francisco-based company’s creative director, told The San Diego Union-Tribune last week that a new-and-improved version of the micro-blogging service should improve service worldwide. “It was re-architected to actually be snappier, faster – to deal with information faster,” said Stone, who was in San Diego to speak at the 2010 Tijuana Innovadora conference on innovation across the border.

—Predixion Software, based just across the Orange County line in Aliso Viejo, CA, said it had closed on $5 million in Series A financing, led by DFJ Frontier. Predixion, which specializes in low-cost, self-service in the cloud predictive analytics software, said it will use the funds to expand product development,increase sales and marketing initiatives, and expand its sales channel programs and strategic partnership activities.

Bruce V. Bigelow is the editor of Xconomy San Diego. You can e-mail him at bbigelow@xconomy.com or call 858-202-0492

I wrote about two startups today that raised angel-sized financing rounds of around $1 million each: Hipmunk and Alphonso Labs. What caught my eye about both deals is this – neither had involvement from the so called “super angels” (except Hipmunk, which took an investment from SV Angel).

Hipmunk raised from traditional individual investors. Alphonso Labs raised money from venture capitalists.

Super Angels are investors who previously invested only their own money but at some point raised small funds and started investing third party money. That makes them indistinguishable from traditional venture funds in most respects.

Unlike angel investors, super angels have limited partners to answer to. And if returns aren’t competitive, those limited partners go elsewhere. Which is why we’re seeing so much stress emerge in the sector. Competition is fierce, and valuations are rising.

In fact, valuations are rising so quickly that a crucial psychological milestone has been reached – the $4 million pre money valuaiton. That was the primary reason that led to the formation of the AngelGate group, say multiple sources who attended those meetings.

For the first time this year the valuation on early stage deals started to average more than $4 million, say our sources. And that is the threshold where super angels’ valuation models start to break.

In a typical super angel round a company will raise $1 million on, say, a $4 million pre-money valuation. That gives investors 20% of the company, which is worth $5 million after the transaction is closed (the $4 million valuation plus the $1 million they just received)

Unlike old school venture capitalists, super angels are only counting on small exits of $15 million – $30 million. They need 7/10 or more of their companies to have these small exits to make any money. Any less and they won’t be able to raise new funds. Traditional VCs only count on 3-4 deals even returning capital. The rest are losses. But at least one of those ten deals is a huge home run, returning 10x the initial investment. Or more.

But with valuations rising, say investors we’ve spoken with, even 7 or 8 “wins” out of 10 won’t be enough to sustain the funds, given how small the acquisitions are. So exit valuations must increase, which is unlikely given the small number of buyers competing for deals, or valuations need to decline.

Some investors are just paying the higher valuations – Dave McClure is a notable example. Others are sitting on the sidelines and not investing much.

But all are griping.

The rising popularity of convertible notes, which are actually debt rounds that convert to equity later on, is increasing stress on the system. In some cases there aren’t any price protections for investors in those deals at all.

What happens next? Some of the super angel funds need to disappear, say Silicon Valley insiders. And maybe that’s for the best. The ones that are left standing will have an easier time making money down the road.

Small Business <b>News</b>: Social Media Secrets

Pssst. We've got something important to tell you about a new tool that can totally transform your business. In terms of upfront investment, there is no cost,

Fox <b>News</b> Crew Gets Scolded At Democratic Meeting (VIDEO)

A Fox News camera crew showed up unannounced at a Democratic meeting in Wisconsin Monday, prompting a confrontation that eventually forced the show's producer into a rather startling admission: he understands why Democrats are wary of ...

Shepard Smith Inks New Fox <b>News</b> Deal – Deadline.com

EXCLUSIVE: Fox News Channel's signature news anchor Shepard Smith has signed a new multi-year deal to continue as the channel's lead news anchor as well as anchor of FOX Report and Studio B. Smith's most recent pact with Fox News inked ...

bench craft company complaints
bench craft company complaints

Small Business <b>News</b>: Social Media Secrets

Pssst. We've got something important to tell you about a new tool that can totally transform your business. In terms of upfront investment, there is no cost,

Fox <b>News</b> Crew Gets Scolded At Democratic Meeting (VIDEO)

A Fox News camera crew showed up unannounced at a Democratic meeting in Wisconsin Monday, prompting a confrontation that eventually forced the show's producer into a rather startling admission: he understands why Democrats are wary of ...

Shepard Smith Inks New Fox <b>News</b> Deal – Deadline.com

EXCLUSIVE: Fox News Channel's signature news anchor Shepard Smith has signed a new multi-year deal to continue as the channel's lead news anchor as well as anchor of FOX Report and Studio B. Smith's most recent pact with Fox News inked ...

bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints

Roundup, Venture Capital, Innovation Economy

VCs Making Smaller Investments, V-Vehicle Restarting Under New CEO, Qualcomm Buys iSkoot, & More San Diego BizTech News

Bruce V. Bigelow 10/18/10

A common theme in last week’s technology news is how companies and entire industries continually remake their businesses, whether it’s the venture capital community, startup carmakers, or a San Diego company that specializes in data storage technology. Read on to see what I mean.

—As the venture capital survey data comes in from the three months that ended September 30, we’re seeing a nationwide rebound in first-time financings for startups. Data from CB Insights, the New York financial information firm, shows seed-stage deals increasing from 1 percent of the deals in the third quarter of 2009 to 11 percent of all deals during the third quarter.

—Venture capital surveys from CB Insights and the MoneyTree Report both show an increasing deal count, but a decline in the total amount of invested. In a year-over-year comparison, the MoneyTree Report showed a 7 percent decline in capital invested with a 9 percent increase in deal count during the third quarter, when venture firms invested $4.8 billion in 780 deals nationwide.

—V-Vehicle, the San Diego startup automaker, changed its name to Next Autoworks. The company, which has raised $87 million from investors that include Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, and T. Boone Pickens, also hired industry veteran Kathleen Ligocki as CEO.

—Overland Storage (NASDAQ: OVRL), the San Diego data storage technology specialist, acquired Sunnyvale, CA-based MaxiScale, which provides data protection and data management technologies. Financial terms were not disclosed.

—San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) acquired San Francisco-based mobile social networks software developer iSkoot Technologies. Financial terms were not disclosed.

—Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder and the San Francisco-based company’s creative director, told The San Diego Union-Tribune last week that a new-and-improved version of the micro-blogging service should improve service worldwide. “It was re-architected to actually be snappier, faster – to deal with information faster,” said Stone, who was in San Diego to speak at the 2010 Tijuana Innovadora conference on innovation across the border.

—Predixion Software, based just across the Orange County line in Aliso Viejo, CA, said it had closed on $5 million in Series A financing, led by DFJ Frontier. Predixion, which specializes in low-cost, self-service in the cloud predictive analytics software, said it will use the funds to expand product development,increase sales and marketing initiatives, and expand its sales channel programs and strategic partnership activities.

Bruce V. Bigelow is the editor of Xconomy San Diego. You can e-mail him at bbigelow@xconomy.com or call 858-202-0492

I wrote about two startups today that raised angel-sized financing rounds of around $1 million each: Hipmunk and Alphonso Labs. What caught my eye about both deals is this – neither had involvement from the so called “super angels” (except Hipmunk, which took an investment from SV Angel).

Hipmunk raised from traditional individual investors. Alphonso Labs raised money from venture capitalists.

Super Angels are investors who previously invested only their own money but at some point raised small funds and started investing third party money. That makes them indistinguishable from traditional venture funds in most respects.

Unlike angel investors, super angels have limited partners to answer to. And if returns aren’t competitive, those limited partners go elsewhere. Which is why we’re seeing so much stress emerge in the sector. Competition is fierce, and valuations are rising.

In fact, valuations are rising so quickly that a crucial psychological milestone has been reached – the $4 million pre money valuaiton. That was the primary reason that led to the formation of the AngelGate group, say multiple sources who attended those meetings.

For the first time this year the valuation on early stage deals started to average more than $4 million, say our sources. And that is the threshold where super angels’ valuation models start to break.

In a typical super angel round a company will raise $1 million on, say, a $4 million pre-money valuation. That gives investors 20% of the company, which is worth $5 million after the transaction is closed (the $4 million valuation plus the $1 million they just received)

Unlike old school venture capitalists, super angels are only counting on small exits of $15 million – $30 million. They need 7/10 or more of their companies to have these small exits to make any money. Any less and they won’t be able to raise new funds. Traditional VCs only count on 3-4 deals even returning capital. The rest are losses. But at least one of those ten deals is a huge home run, returning 10x the initial investment. Or more.

But with valuations rising, say investors we’ve spoken with, even 7 or 8 “wins” out of 10 won’t be enough to sustain the funds, given how small the acquisitions are. So exit valuations must increase, which is unlikely given the small number of buyers competing for deals, or valuations need to decline.

Some investors are just paying the higher valuations – Dave McClure is a notable example. Others are sitting on the sidelines and not investing much.

But all are griping.

The rising popularity of convertible notes, which are actually debt rounds that convert to equity later on, is increasing stress on the system. In some cases there aren’t any price protections for investors in those deals at all.

What happens next? Some of the super angel funds need to disappear, say Silicon Valley insiders. And maybe that’s for the best. The ones that are left standing will have an easier time making money down the road.

bench craft company complaints

Small Business <b>News</b>: Social Media Secrets

Pssst. We've got something important to tell you about a new tool that can totally transform your business. In terms of upfront investment, there is no cost,

Fox <b>News</b> Crew Gets Scolded At Democratic Meeting (VIDEO)

A Fox News camera crew showed up unannounced at a Democratic meeting in Wisconsin Monday, prompting a confrontation that eventually forced the show's producer into a rather startling admission: he understands why Democrats are wary of ...

Shepard Smith Inks New Fox <b>News</b> Deal – Deadline.com

EXCLUSIVE: Fox News Channel's signature news anchor Shepard Smith has signed a new multi-year deal to continue as the channel's lead news anchor as well as anchor of FOX Report and Studio B. Smith's most recent pact with Fox News inked ...

bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints

Small Business <b>News</b>: Social Media Secrets

Pssst. We've got something important to tell you about a new tool that can totally transform your business. In terms of upfront investment, there is no cost,

Fox <b>News</b> Crew Gets Scolded At Democratic Meeting (VIDEO)

A Fox News camera crew showed up unannounced at a Democratic meeting in Wisconsin Monday, prompting a confrontation that eventually forced the show's producer into a rather startling admission: he understands why Democrats are wary of ...

Shepard Smith Inks New Fox <b>News</b> Deal – Deadline.com

EXCLUSIVE: Fox News Channel's signature news anchor Shepard Smith has signed a new multi-year deal to continue as the channel's lead news anchor as well as anchor of FOX Report and Studio B. Smith's most recent pact with Fox News inked ...

bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints

Small Business <b>News</b>: Social Media Secrets

Pssst. We've got something important to tell you about a new tool that can totally transform your business. In terms of upfront investment, there is no cost,

Fox <b>News</b> Crew Gets Scolded At Democratic Meeting (VIDEO)

A Fox News camera crew showed up unannounced at a Democratic meeting in Wisconsin Monday, prompting a confrontation that eventually forced the show's producer into a rather startling admission: he understands why Democrats are wary of ...

Shepard Smith Inks New Fox <b>News</b> Deal – Deadline.com

EXCLUSIVE: Fox News Channel's signature news anchor Shepard Smith has signed a new multi-year deal to continue as the channel's lead news anchor as well as anchor of FOX Report and Studio B. Smith's most recent pact with Fox News inked ...

bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints

Forum Making Money

Paid-for dungeon content in Guild Wars 2 isn't a done deal; the feature may not happen. It depends what you lot want, developer ArenaNet has said.

"We haven't decided on what exactly we are or aren't going to offer for money post release," lead designer Eric Flannum commented, in a post written by community manager Regina Beunaobra on the GW2 Guru forum.

"My answer to the dungeons question was meant to say, 'We're open to whatever our players seem most interested in.' If after release you guys would like more story content, more dungeons, more events, more maps or whatever, it's something that we have to consider because ultimately making you happy is what makes us successful. Whether we release that in DLC (like the bonus mission packs in GW1) or whether we do it through expansions (Like Eye of the North) is yet to be determined.

"As to whether or not there are going to be items like XP boosts available in the in-game store I can only reiterate what we've said before (and will continue to say), that we'll release details on it when they are available and that our core philosophy - of not requiring you to spend additional money to play the game and not making the game difficult or painful to play in order to encourage you to buy things from the store - still stands."

Content available to buy for Guild Wars 1 ranges from add-ons to costumes, and from character and account services to unlock packs. You can buy a character makeover for �6.99; a new costume for �4.99; extra missions for �5.99; or a PVP Access Kit for �13.99 that gives you a top level character with loads of skills and lets you play the PVP side of Guild Wars 1 without even having to buy the game.

That pricey micro-transaction model may at first seem strange, but remember that Guild Wars 1 has no monthly subscription fee. You buy the MMO and that's it. Therefore, ArenaNet needs to charge for additional content. Only recently, however, has this been any less than a full expansion pack.

Incidentally, Guild Wars 2 will also not have a monthly subscription fee.

There's no release date for Guild Wars 2 yet. The MMO is expected next year but the official FAQ line is: "When it's finished. Guild Wars 2 is the largest project ArenaNethas ever undertaken, and we want to make sure we take the time to do it right."

ArenaNet has plenty of bright ideas for Guild Wars 2. There are no healers or tanks, for instance, and there will be personal storylines that grow from the results of a personality test taken at the game's start. That's in addition to a world story that can dynamically alter zones and spread throughout the land.

The Guild Wars 2 website stays well abreast of the new game information and offers in-depth posts on different features as they are announced. Alternatively, keep an eye on the Guild Wars 2 blog for developer musings and game coverage from around the web.

Few people are more highly regarded in the blogging-for-business world than Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net. He has essentially set the blueprint for how to turn a blog into a business, and is one of the go-to sources for tips on how to do as much. He had a chat with WebProNews at BlogWorld last week, after speaking in one of the more popular keynotes at the event. 



Rowse discussed with us how people can get started blogging, and eventually turn their blogs into moneymakers. "You need a blog to start with, then really my first priority would be getting some useful content on there - some content that's actually going to solve some problems for people," he said. "So if you're blog's a how-to type blog, you want to start thinking 'what's a beginner in this topic need to know?' and start writing that type of content that you can be referring back to later, so that when you start promoting it, you've got content there that they'll find, that is engaging for them. So that is probably the first step, and then, it's about putting yourself out there, and trying to find some readers."



Have you been able to turn your blog into a business? Let us know. 



If the how-to path is the one you're interested in traveling, I'd reccommend reading this article, discussing ways to create effective how-to articles, with tips provided by John Hewitt, who has written technical manuals for companies like IBM, Intuit, and Motorola. 



Either way, "First you want to know who you want to attract, because it's kind of easy to get noticed on the Internet, but if you do it in the wrong way, you could actually 1. take yourself further away from your goals, but 2. find the wrong readers," noted Rowse. "You could get..readers from a place like Digg or StumbleUpon...some of these social bookmarking sites, but they may not actually be the type of person that you want to journey with for the whole long term. So define who you want to reach, and ask the question, 'where can I find them online?'" 



"Answering that question, for me, on my photography site led me to Flickr. Flickr's a place where people have cameras, and not everyone takes great photos, so it was a place for me to develop a presence. For other blogs, it may lead you to Twitter or Facebook or another blog or a forum that is related to your particular niche."



Forums can actually be great for your brand (in some cases, maybe even more so than Facebook or Twitter). Forums are a good source of relevant discussion to your niche, provided you engage in the right places. They can help you establish yourself as an expert (not unlike Q&A sites), and they can be particularly good for building a search presence. Forum threads do really well in Google for certain queries, particularly when someone is looking for help with something. 



"I think a lot of bloggers treat their blog as a hobby, and I mean, that certainly is the way I started out," Rowse told us. "I didn't realize you could make money from blogging when I started. But my wife kind of gave me an ultimatum after a while. I'd began to dream about my blog becoming a business, and certainly was moving in that direction...one day, she kind of said, 'you need to do it'. Then she gave me six months to get it done."



"Once I had that ultimatum, and that deadline in mind, it just switched in my mind and started making me thinking of it as a business now, and really that was the turning point for me, because I began to think more strategically about who was reading my blog, what they needed, and products that I could launch to them," he continued. "But also, I got on the phone for the fist time and started ringing advertisers to create a direct relationship with them."



Rowse recently discussed using temporary blogs as stepping stones for your broader goals:

Small Business <b>News</b>: Marketing Mambo

It's a dance step every small business must master and arguably the most important especially in the beginning of your small business. Marketing encompasses.

Nevada Voters Complain Of Problems At Polls - Las Vegas <b>News</b> Story <b>...</b>

LAS VEGAS -- Some voters in Boulder City complained on Monday that their ballot had been cast before they went to the polls, raising questions about Clark County's electronic voting machines. Tuesday, October 26, 2010.

BREAKING <b>NEWS</b>: Drunk &amp; Naked Charlie Sheen Trashes Hotel Room <b>...</b>

Trouble seems to follow Charlie Sheen - whether it be in Los Angeles, Apsen, or now, to New York. Police were summoned to the posh Plaza hotel early Tuesday, where a drunken and naked Sheen had trashed his hotel room, RadarOnline.com ...

bench craft company complaints
bench craft company complaints

Small Business <b>News</b>: Marketing Mambo

It's a dance step every small business must master and arguably the most important especially in the beginning of your small business. Marketing encompasses.

Nevada Voters Complain Of Problems At Polls - Las Vegas <b>News</b> Story <b>...</b>

LAS VEGAS -- Some voters in Boulder City complained on Monday that their ballot had been cast before they went to the polls, raising questions about Clark County's electronic voting machines. Tuesday, October 26, 2010.

BREAKING <b>NEWS</b>: Drunk &amp; Naked Charlie Sheen Trashes Hotel Room <b>...</b>

Trouble seems to follow Charlie Sheen - whether it be in Los Angeles, Apsen, or now, to New York. Police were summoned to the posh Plaza hotel early Tuesday, where a drunken and naked Sheen had trashed his hotel room, RadarOnline.com ...

bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints

Paid-for dungeon content in Guild Wars 2 isn't a done deal; the feature may not happen. It depends what you lot want, developer ArenaNet has said.

"We haven't decided on what exactly we are or aren't going to offer for money post release," lead designer Eric Flannum commented, in a post written by community manager Regina Beunaobra on the GW2 Guru forum.

"My answer to the dungeons question was meant to say, 'We're open to whatever our players seem most interested in.' If after release you guys would like more story content, more dungeons, more events, more maps or whatever, it's something that we have to consider because ultimately making you happy is what makes us successful. Whether we release that in DLC (like the bonus mission packs in GW1) or whether we do it through expansions (Like Eye of the North) is yet to be determined.

"As to whether or not there are going to be items like XP boosts available in the in-game store I can only reiterate what we've said before (and will continue to say), that we'll release details on it when they are available and that our core philosophy - of not requiring you to spend additional money to play the game and not making the game difficult or painful to play in order to encourage you to buy things from the store - still stands."

Content available to buy for Guild Wars 1 ranges from add-ons to costumes, and from character and account services to unlock packs. You can buy a character makeover for �6.99; a new costume for �4.99; extra missions for �5.99; or a PVP Access Kit for �13.99 that gives you a top level character with loads of skills and lets you play the PVP side of Guild Wars 1 without even having to buy the game.

That pricey micro-transaction model may at first seem strange, but remember that Guild Wars 1 has no monthly subscription fee. You buy the MMO and that's it. Therefore, ArenaNet needs to charge for additional content. Only recently, however, has this been any less than a full expansion pack.

Incidentally, Guild Wars 2 will also not have a monthly subscription fee.

There's no release date for Guild Wars 2 yet. The MMO is expected next year but the official FAQ line is: "When it's finished. Guild Wars 2 is the largest project ArenaNethas ever undertaken, and we want to make sure we take the time to do it right."

ArenaNet has plenty of bright ideas for Guild Wars 2. There are no healers or tanks, for instance, and there will be personal storylines that grow from the results of a personality test taken at the game's start. That's in addition to a world story that can dynamically alter zones and spread throughout the land.

The Guild Wars 2 website stays well abreast of the new game information and offers in-depth posts on different features as they are announced. Alternatively, keep an eye on the Guild Wars 2 blog for developer musings and game coverage from around the web.

Few people are more highly regarded in the blogging-for-business world than Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net. He has essentially set the blueprint for how to turn a blog into a business, and is one of the go-to sources for tips on how to do as much. He had a chat with WebProNews at BlogWorld last week, after speaking in one of the more popular keynotes at the event. 



Rowse discussed with us how people can get started blogging, and eventually turn their blogs into moneymakers. "You need a blog to start with, then really my first priority would be getting some useful content on there - some content that's actually going to solve some problems for people," he said. "So if you're blog's a how-to type blog, you want to start thinking 'what's a beginner in this topic need to know?' and start writing that type of content that you can be referring back to later, so that when you start promoting it, you've got content there that they'll find, that is engaging for them. So that is probably the first step, and then, it's about putting yourself out there, and trying to find some readers."



Have you been able to turn your blog into a business? Let us know. 



If the how-to path is the one you're interested in traveling, I'd reccommend reading this article, discussing ways to create effective how-to articles, with tips provided by John Hewitt, who has written technical manuals for companies like IBM, Intuit, and Motorola. 



Either way, "First you want to know who you want to attract, because it's kind of easy to get noticed on the Internet, but if you do it in the wrong way, you could actually 1. take yourself further away from your goals, but 2. find the wrong readers," noted Rowse. "You could get..readers from a place like Digg or StumbleUpon...some of these social bookmarking sites, but they may not actually be the type of person that you want to journey with for the whole long term. So define who you want to reach, and ask the question, 'where can I find them online?'" 



"Answering that question, for me, on my photography site led me to Flickr. Flickr's a place where people have cameras, and not everyone takes great photos, so it was a place for me to develop a presence. For other blogs, it may lead you to Twitter or Facebook or another blog or a forum that is related to your particular niche."



Forums can actually be great for your brand (in some cases, maybe even more so than Facebook or Twitter). Forums are a good source of relevant discussion to your niche, provided you engage in the right places. They can help you establish yourself as an expert (not unlike Q&A sites), and they can be particularly good for building a search presence. Forum threads do really well in Google for certain queries, particularly when someone is looking for help with something. 



"I think a lot of bloggers treat their blog as a hobby, and I mean, that certainly is the way I started out," Rowse told us. "I didn't realize you could make money from blogging when I started. But my wife kind of gave me an ultimatum after a while. I'd began to dream about my blog becoming a business, and certainly was moving in that direction...one day, she kind of said, 'you need to do it'. Then she gave me six months to get it done."



"Once I had that ultimatum, and that deadline in mind, it just switched in my mind and started making me thinking of it as a business now, and really that was the turning point for me, because I began to think more strategically about who was reading my blog, what they needed, and products that I could launch to them," he continued. "But also, I got on the phone for the fist time and started ringing advertisers to create a direct relationship with them."



Rowse recently discussed using temporary blogs as stepping stones for your broader goals:

bench craft company complaints

Small Business <b>News</b>: Marketing Mambo

It's a dance step every small business must master and arguably the most important especially in the beginning of your small business. Marketing encompasses.

Nevada Voters Complain Of Problems At Polls - Las Vegas <b>News</b> Story <b>...</b>

LAS VEGAS -- Some voters in Boulder City complained on Monday that their ballot had been cast before they went to the polls, raising questions about Clark County's electronic voting machines. Tuesday, October 26, 2010.

BREAKING <b>NEWS</b>: Drunk &amp; Naked Charlie Sheen Trashes Hotel Room <b>...</b>

Trouble seems to follow Charlie Sheen - whether it be in Los Angeles, Apsen, or now, to New York. Police were summoned to the posh Plaza hotel early Tuesday, where a drunken and naked Sheen had trashed his hotel room, RadarOnline.com ...

bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints

Small Business <b>News</b>: Marketing Mambo

It's a dance step every small business must master and arguably the most important especially in the beginning of your small business. Marketing encompasses.

Nevada Voters Complain Of Problems At Polls - Las Vegas <b>News</b> Story <b>...</b>

LAS VEGAS -- Some voters in Boulder City complained on Monday that their ballot had been cast before they went to the polls, raising questions about Clark County's electronic voting machines. Tuesday, October 26, 2010.

BREAKING <b>NEWS</b>: Drunk &amp; Naked Charlie Sheen Trashes Hotel Room <b>...</b>

Trouble seems to follow Charlie Sheen - whether it be in Los Angeles, Apsen, or now, to New York. Police were summoned to the posh Plaza hotel early Tuesday, where a drunken and naked Sheen had trashed his hotel room, RadarOnline.com ...

bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints

Small Business <b>News</b>: Marketing Mambo

It's a dance step every small business must master and arguably the most important especially in the beginning of your small business. Marketing encompasses.

Nevada Voters Complain Of Problems At Polls - Las Vegas <b>News</b> Story <b>...</b>

LAS VEGAS -- Some voters in Boulder City complained on Monday that their ballot had been cast before they went to the polls, raising questions about Clark County's electronic voting machines. Tuesday, October 26, 2010.

BREAKING <b>NEWS</b>: Drunk &amp; Naked Charlie Sheen Trashes Hotel Room <b>...</b>

Trouble seems to follow Charlie Sheen - whether it be in Los Angeles, Apsen, or now, to New York. Police were summoned to the posh Plaza hotel early Tuesday, where a drunken and naked Sheen had trashed his hotel room, RadarOnline.com ...

bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints

foreclosure victims

After a quick review of its procedures, Bank of America this week announced that it will resume its foreclosures in 23 lucky states next Monday. While the evidence is overwhelming that the entire foreclosure process is riddled with fraud, President Obama refuses to support a national moratorium. Indeed, his spokesmen on the issue told reporters three key things. As the Los Angeles Times reported:

A government review of botched foreclosure paperwork so far has found that the problems do not pose a "systemic" threat to the financial system, a top Obama administration official said Wednesday.

Yes, that's right. HUD reviewed the "paperwork" problem to see whether it threatened the banks -- not the homeowners who were the victims of foreclosure fraud. But it got worse, for the second point was how the government would respond to the epidemic of foreclosure fraud.

The Justice Department is leading an investigation of possible crimes involving mortgage fraud.

That language was carefully chosen to sound reassuring. But the fact is that despite our pleas the FBI has continued its "partnership" with the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA). The MBA is the trade association of the "perps." It created a ridiculous on its face definition of "mortgage fraud." Under that definition the lenders -- who led the mortgage frauds -- are the victims. The FBI still parrots this long discredited "definition." That is one of the primary reasons why -- in complete contrast to prior financial crises -- the Justice Department has not convicted a single senior officer of the large nonprime lenders who directed, committed, and profited enormously from the frauds.

Note that the Justice Department is not investigating foreclosure fraud. HUD Secretary Donovan's statement shows why:

"We will not tolerate business as usual in the mortgage market," he said. "Where there have been mistakes made or errors, we will hold those entities, those institutions, accountable to stop those processes, review them and fix them as quickly as possible."

Note the language: "mistakes", "errors", "processes" (following the initial use of "paperwork"). No mention of "fraud", "felony", "criminal investigations", or "prosecutions" for the tens of thousands of felonies that representatives of the entities foreclosing on homes have admitted that they committed. Note that Donovan does not even demand that the felons remedy the harm caused by their past fraudulent foreclosures. Donovan wants them to "fix" "processes" -- not repair the harm their frauds caused to their victims.

The fraudulent CEOs looted with impunity, were left in power, and were granted their fondest wish when Congress, at the behest of the Chamber of Commerce, Chairman Bernanke, and the bankers' trade associations, successfully extorted the professional Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to turn the accounting rules into a farce. The FASB's new rules allowed the banks (and the Fed, which has taken over a trillion dollars in toxic mortgages as wholly inadequate collateral) to refuse to recognize hundreds of billions of dollars of losses. This accounting scam produces enormous fictional "income" and "capital" at the banks. The fictional income produces real bonuses to the CEOs that make them even wealthier. The fictional bank capital allows the regulators to evade their statutory duties under the Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) law to close the insolvent and failing banks.

The inflated asset values allow the Fed and the administration to ignore the Fed's massive loss exposure and allow Treasury to spread propaganda claiming that TARP resolved all the problems -- at virtually no cost. Donovan claims that we have held the elite frauds accountable -- but we have done the opposite. We have made the CEOs of the largest financial firms -- typically already among the 500 wealthiest Americans -- even wealthier. We have rewarded fraud, incompetence, and venality by our most powerful elites.

If the government does not hold the fraudulent CEOs responsible, who is supposed to stop the epidemic of elite financial fraud? The Obama administration's answer is the fraudulent CEOs themselves, at a time of their choosing. You can't make this stuff up.

But ultimately resolving the problems is not the government's responsibility, said Michael Barr, assistant Treasury secretary for financial institutions.

"Fundamentally, this is up to the banks and the servicers to fix," he said. "They can fix it as fast as they feel like."

So who is Michael Barr and why is saying things on behalf of the Obama administration that make it appear to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the fraudulent lenders and servicers? He's a Robert Rubin protégé and he's the senior Treasury official for banking policy.

We have a different policy view. We believe that only the government can stop fraud from growing to catastrophic levels and that among the government's highest responsibilities is to provide the regulatory "cops on the beat" with the competence, resources, courage, and integrity to take on our most elite frauds. We believe that anything less is a travesty that causes tens of millions of Americans to be defrauded and poses a grave threat to our economy and democracy.

Prompt Corrective Action

First, it is time to stop the foreclosures until the banks and servicers adopt corrective steps, certified as adequate by FDIC, that will prevent all future foreclosure fraud. They must also adopt plans to remedy the injuries their foreclosure frauds have already caused, and assist the FBI, Department of Justice, and legal ethics officials investigations of their officers' and attorneys' frauds and ethical violations.

Second, it is time to place the financial institutions that committed widespread fraud in receivership. We should remove the senior leadership of the banks and replace them with experienced bankers with a reputation for integrity and competence, i.e., the honest officers that quit or were fired because they refused to engage in fraud. We should prioritize the receiverships to deal with the worst known "control frauds" among the "systemically dangerous institutions" (SDIs). The SDIs' frauds and fraudulent leaders endanger the global economy.

We propose Bank of America for the first receivership. In the last few weeks, the SEC has obtained a large (albeit grossly inadequate) settlement of its civil fraud charges against the former senior leaders of Countrywide. (Bank of America acquired Countrywide and is responsible for its frauds.) Fannie and Freddie's investigations -- with their findings reviewed by their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) -- have identified many billions of dollars of fraudulent loans originated by Countrywide that were sold fraudulently to Fannie and Freddie through false representations and warranties. The Fed, BlackRock, and Pimco's investigations have identified many billions of dollars of fraudulent loans provided by Countrywide under false reps and warranties. Ambac's investigation found that 97% of the Countrywide loans reviewed by Ambac were had false reps and warranties. Countrywide also engaged in widespread foreclosure fraud. This is not surprising, for every aspect of Countrywide's nonprime mortgage operations that has been examined by a truly independent body has found widespread fraud -- in loan origination, loan sales, appraisals, and foreclosures. Fraud begets fraud. Lenders that are control frauds create criminogenic environments that produce "echo" epidemics of control fraud in other professions and industries.

We have been amazed that, as one financially sophisticated entity after another found widespread fraud by Countrywide in the entire gamut of its operations, the administration, the industry, and the financial media act as if this is acceptable. Countrywide made hundreds of thousands of fraudulent loans. It fraudulently sold hundreds of thousands of loans through false reps and warranties. It fraudulently foreclosed on large numbers of loans. It victimized hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds of financial institutions, causing hundreds of billions of dollars of losses. It has defrauded more people, at a greater cost, than any entity in history.

Bank of America chose to purchase Countrywide at a point when it -- and its senior leaders -- were infamous. Bank of America made some of these Countrywide leaders its senior leaders. Yet, Bank of America is not treated as a criminal entity. President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Donovan, and Barr cannot even bring themselves to use the "f" word -- fraud. They substitute euphemisms designed to trivialize elite criminality. The administration officials do not call for Bank of America to be the subject of a criminal investigation. They do not demand that Fannie, Freddie, Ambac, the FHFA, and Pimco file criminal referrals about Countrywide's frauds. They do not demand that Fannie, Freddie, and the Fed refuse to purchase or take as collateral any mortgage instrument from Bank of America. No one at the Harvard Club in New York moves to kick Bank of America's officers out of their club! The financial media treats Bank of America as if it were a legitimate bank rather than a "vector" spreading the mortgage fraud epidemic throughout much of the Western world.

For the sake of our (and the global) economy, our democracy, and our souls this willingness to allow elite control frauds to loot with impunity must end immediately. The control frauds must be taken down and their officers removed promptly. Receivership is the way to begin to reclaim our souls, our economy, and our democracy and Bank of America has the track record that makes it a good place to start. It is sufficiently large and powerful that its receivership will send the credible signal that America is restoring the rule of law and that even the most elite frauds will be held accountable.

Next we need to remove the rest of the "too big to fail" institutions -- we call them systemically dangerous institutions, or SDIs -- to reduce the global systemic risks that they pose. We are rolling the dice with disaster every day. The SDIs are inefficient, so shrinking them will reduce risk and increase efficiency. We need to follow three types of policies with respect to SDIs.

1. They cannot grow larger and compound the systemic risk they pose.


2. They must create an enforceable plan to shrink to a level and functions such that they no longer pose a systemic risk within five years.


3. Until they shrink to the point that they no longer pose systemic risks they must be regulated with far greater intensity than other banks. In particular, control fraud poses so severe a risk of triggering another global financial crisis that there must be no regulatory tolerance for control frauds at the SDIs. One of the best ways to reduce their risks is to mandate that high levels of executive compensation be paid only after sustained and superior performance (at least five years), and with "claw back" provisions if compensation was obtained by fraudulent reported income or seriously inadequate loss reserves.

Appointing a receiver for an SDI will be a major undertaking for the FDIC, but it is also well within its capabilities. Contrary to the scare mongering about "nationalizing" banks, receivers are used to returning failed banks to private ownership. Receiverships are managed by experienced bankers with records of competence and integrity rather than the dread "bureaucrats." We appointed roughly a thousand receivers during the S&L and banking crises of the 1980s and early 1990s under Presidents Reagan and Bush.

Here is how it works. A receiver is appointed on Friday. The bank opens for business as normal (from the bank's customers' perspective) on Monday. The checks clear, the ATMs work, and the branches all open. The receiver's managers direct the business operations, find the true facts about the bank's operations, senior managers, and financial condition, recognize the real losses, and make the appropriate referrals to the FBI and the SEC so that the frauds can be investigated and prosecuted.

The receiver is also a well-proven device for splitting up banks that are too large and incoherent by selling units of the business to different bidders who most value the operations.

Hullabaloo

Saturday, October 02, 2010

 

Blighted Titles

by digby

If you've been following this amazing, unfolding foreclosure fraud story then you probably already know that JP Morgan/Chase, BofA and GMAC have all suspended foreclosure processes around the country now that it's been revealed they've been committing massive fraud. And Attorneys General in a number of states have also stepped in to stop the process, for the same reason.

But if you are just coming into the story, as is most of the national press, Alan Grayson has prepared a valuable primer on the crisis that's wee worth watching:

He lays out the history from the beginning when mortgage mills failed to properly file documents, instead using shortcut electronic transfer program instead of the documentation required by law. It's snowballed from there, to the point where nobody really knows who owns what and the crisis atmosphere has given cover to fraudsters, con men and greedy bankers.

Grayson is knee deep in this issue, leading the charge to get to the bottom of it, since ground zero for the foreclosure crisis is in Florida (and which this columnist warns could destroy Florida's economy.) He's dealing with some of these situations among his own constituency and among others, has been at the forefront of bringing this to the attention of the nation:

Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson of Orlando recently wrote the Florida Supreme Court, saying, "taking someone's home should not be done lightly." He asked the court to halt foreclosure proceedings for flawed paperwork brought by the most active "foreclosure mill" law firms in the state. Four firms are already under investigation by the Florida Attorney General's office. They are the Law Offices of David J. Stern, the Law Offices of Marshall C. Watson, Shapiro & Freeman and Florida Default Group.

In response to Grayson, the state Supreme Court punted, saying it lacked the authority to get involved. The court referred the official to the Florida Bar to investigate any allegations.

Sadly, the legal system isn't rapidly stepping up to the plate in most cases to right this, offering up excuses and in some cases, indicating a far great concern for efficiency than justice. Keep in mind that this latest wave of foreclosures isn't a bunch of high flying speculators or people who bit off more than they could chew in the go-go real estate market of the Bush years. Those people were foreclosed upon already. These are prime mortgages that have gone south because of the unemployment crisis. Many of these are people who are victims of a bad economy, not their own bad judgment and in some cases they are being fraudulently foreclosed upon without just cause.

The New York Times speculates that this freeze on foreclosures is a needed pause, allowing borrowers a little breathing room and giving the market a chance to stabilize a bit. Unfortunately, it would also appear that it's going to freeze the market since title insurance companies are justifiably gun shy in the wake of all these fraud revelations. It's a huge mess.

Again, I urge you to watch Grayson's video, especially if you haven't been following this story. It's one of the best illustrations we've yet seen of how the the unregulated businesses of the manic Bush years continue to destroy the lives of average Americans. And if you feel like getting his back on this, you can donate to his campaign here.


.

digby 10/02/2010 09:00:00 AM


|

Colts <b>News</b>: COLTS <b>NEWS</b>

Austin Collie (thumb) and Antonio Johnson (knee) have undergone surgeries, the Colts announced Thursday.

Scripting <b>News</b>: Rule 1 of local blogs

Recent stories. Twitter links. My 40 most-recent Twitter links, ranked by number of clicks. My bike. People are always asking about my bike. A picture named bikesmall.jpg. Here's a picture. AFP news pic. Calendar ...

Fashion, sports and magic: Moscow expats talk <b>news</b> over booze - RT

New Moscow Mayor, Russian Fashion Week and the Spartak – Chelsea match were among the most heavily discussed news items this week among Moscow expats.

eric seiger eric seiger

After a quick review of its procedures, Bank of America this week announced that it will resume its foreclosures in 23 lucky states next Monday. While the evidence is overwhelming that the entire foreclosure process is riddled with fraud, President Obama refuses to support a national moratorium. Indeed, his spokesmen on the issue told reporters three key things. As the Los Angeles Times reported:

A government review of botched foreclosure paperwork so far has found that the problems do not pose a "systemic" threat to the financial system, a top Obama administration official said Wednesday.

Yes, that's right. HUD reviewed the "paperwork" problem to see whether it threatened the banks -- not the homeowners who were the victims of foreclosure fraud. But it got worse, for the second point was how the government would respond to the epidemic of foreclosure fraud.

The Justice Department is leading an investigation of possible crimes involving mortgage fraud.

That language was carefully chosen to sound reassuring. But the fact is that despite our pleas the FBI has continued its "partnership" with the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA). The MBA is the trade association of the "perps." It created a ridiculous on its face definition of "mortgage fraud." Under that definition the lenders -- who led the mortgage frauds -- are the victims. The FBI still parrots this long discredited "definition." That is one of the primary reasons why -- in complete contrast to prior financial crises -- the Justice Department has not convicted a single senior officer of the large nonprime lenders who directed, committed, and profited enormously from the frauds.

Note that the Justice Department is not investigating foreclosure fraud. HUD Secretary Donovan's statement shows why:

"We will not tolerate business as usual in the mortgage market," he said. "Where there have been mistakes made or errors, we will hold those entities, those institutions, accountable to stop those processes, review them and fix them as quickly as possible."

Note the language: "mistakes", "errors", "processes" (following the initial use of "paperwork"). No mention of "fraud", "felony", "criminal investigations", or "prosecutions" for the tens of thousands of felonies that representatives of the entities foreclosing on homes have admitted that they committed. Note that Donovan does not even demand that the felons remedy the harm caused by their past fraudulent foreclosures. Donovan wants them to "fix" "processes" -- not repair the harm their frauds caused to their victims.

The fraudulent CEOs looted with impunity, were left in power, and were granted their fondest wish when Congress, at the behest of the Chamber of Commerce, Chairman Bernanke, and the bankers' trade associations, successfully extorted the professional Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to turn the accounting rules into a farce. The FASB's new rules allowed the banks (and the Fed, which has taken over a trillion dollars in toxic mortgages as wholly inadequate collateral) to refuse to recognize hundreds of billions of dollars of losses. This accounting scam produces enormous fictional "income" and "capital" at the banks. The fictional income produces real bonuses to the CEOs that make them even wealthier. The fictional bank capital allows the regulators to evade their statutory duties under the Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) law to close the insolvent and failing banks.

The inflated asset values allow the Fed and the administration to ignore the Fed's massive loss exposure and allow Treasury to spread propaganda claiming that TARP resolved all the problems -- at virtually no cost. Donovan claims that we have held the elite frauds accountable -- but we have done the opposite. We have made the CEOs of the largest financial firms -- typically already among the 500 wealthiest Americans -- even wealthier. We have rewarded fraud, incompetence, and venality by our most powerful elites.

If the government does not hold the fraudulent CEOs responsible, who is supposed to stop the epidemic of elite financial fraud? The Obama administration's answer is the fraudulent CEOs themselves, at a time of their choosing. You can't make this stuff up.

But ultimately resolving the problems is not the government's responsibility, said Michael Barr, assistant Treasury secretary for financial institutions.

"Fundamentally, this is up to the banks and the servicers to fix," he said. "They can fix it as fast as they feel like."

So who is Michael Barr and why is saying things on behalf of the Obama administration that make it appear to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the fraudulent lenders and servicers? He's a Robert Rubin protégé and he's the senior Treasury official for banking policy.

We have a different policy view. We believe that only the government can stop fraud from growing to catastrophic levels and that among the government's highest responsibilities is to provide the regulatory "cops on the beat" with the competence, resources, courage, and integrity to take on our most elite frauds. We believe that anything less is a travesty that causes tens of millions of Americans to be defrauded and poses a grave threat to our economy and democracy.

Prompt Corrective Action

First, it is time to stop the foreclosures until the banks and servicers adopt corrective steps, certified as adequate by FDIC, that will prevent all future foreclosure fraud. They must also adopt plans to remedy the injuries their foreclosure frauds have already caused, and assist the FBI, Department of Justice, and legal ethics officials investigations of their officers' and attorneys' frauds and ethical violations.

Second, it is time to place the financial institutions that committed widespread fraud in receivership. We should remove the senior leadership of the banks and replace them with experienced bankers with a reputation for integrity and competence, i.e., the honest officers that quit or were fired because they refused to engage in fraud. We should prioritize the receiverships to deal with the worst known "control frauds" among the "systemically dangerous institutions" (SDIs). The SDIs' frauds and fraudulent leaders endanger the global economy.

We propose Bank of America for the first receivership. In the last few weeks, the SEC has obtained a large (albeit grossly inadequate) settlement of its civil fraud charges against the former senior leaders of Countrywide. (Bank of America acquired Countrywide and is responsible for its frauds.) Fannie and Freddie's investigations -- with their findings reviewed by their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) -- have identified many billions of dollars of fraudulent loans originated by Countrywide that were sold fraudulently to Fannie and Freddie through false representations and warranties. The Fed, BlackRock, and Pimco's investigations have identified many billions of dollars of fraudulent loans provided by Countrywide under false reps and warranties. Ambac's investigation found that 97% of the Countrywide loans reviewed by Ambac were had false reps and warranties. Countrywide also engaged in widespread foreclosure fraud. This is not surprising, for every aspect of Countrywide's nonprime mortgage operations that has been examined by a truly independent body has found widespread fraud -- in loan origination, loan sales, appraisals, and foreclosures. Fraud begets fraud. Lenders that are control frauds create criminogenic environments that produce "echo" epidemics of control fraud in other professions and industries.

We have been amazed that, as one financially sophisticated entity after another found widespread fraud by Countrywide in the entire gamut of its operations, the administration, the industry, and the financial media act as if this is acceptable. Countrywide made hundreds of thousands of fraudulent loans. It fraudulently sold hundreds of thousands of loans through false reps and warranties. It fraudulently foreclosed on large numbers of loans. It victimized hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds of financial institutions, causing hundreds of billions of dollars of losses. It has defrauded more people, at a greater cost, than any entity in history.

Bank of America chose to purchase Countrywide at a point when it -- and its senior leaders -- were infamous. Bank of America made some of these Countrywide leaders its senior leaders. Yet, Bank of America is not treated as a criminal entity. President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Donovan, and Barr cannot even bring themselves to use the "f" word -- fraud. They substitute euphemisms designed to trivialize elite criminality. The administration officials do not call for Bank of America to be the subject of a criminal investigation. They do not demand that Fannie, Freddie, Ambac, the FHFA, and Pimco file criminal referrals about Countrywide's frauds. They do not demand that Fannie, Freddie, and the Fed refuse to purchase or take as collateral any mortgage instrument from Bank of America. No one at the Harvard Club in New York moves to kick Bank of America's officers out of their club! The financial media treats Bank of America as if it were a legitimate bank rather than a "vector" spreading the mortgage fraud epidemic throughout much of the Western world.

For the sake of our (and the global) economy, our democracy, and our souls this willingness to allow elite control frauds to loot with impunity must end immediately. The control frauds must be taken down and their officers removed promptly. Receivership is the way to begin to reclaim our souls, our economy, and our democracy and Bank of America has the track record that makes it a good place to start. It is sufficiently large and powerful that its receivership will send the credible signal that America is restoring the rule of law and that even the most elite frauds will be held accountable.

Next we need to remove the rest of the "too big to fail" institutions -- we call them systemically dangerous institutions, or SDIs -- to reduce the global systemic risks that they pose. We are rolling the dice with disaster every day. The SDIs are inefficient, so shrinking them will reduce risk and increase efficiency. We need to follow three types of policies with respect to SDIs.

1. They cannot grow larger and compound the systemic risk they pose.


2. They must create an enforceable plan to shrink to a level and functions such that they no longer pose a systemic risk within five years.


3. Until they shrink to the point that they no longer pose systemic risks they must be regulated with far greater intensity than other banks. In particular, control fraud poses so severe a risk of triggering another global financial crisis that there must be no regulatory tolerance for control frauds at the SDIs. One of the best ways to reduce their risks is to mandate that high levels of executive compensation be paid only after sustained and superior performance (at least five years), and with "claw back" provisions if compensation was obtained by fraudulent reported income or seriously inadequate loss reserves.

Appointing a receiver for an SDI will be a major undertaking for the FDIC, but it is also well within its capabilities. Contrary to the scare mongering about "nationalizing" banks, receivers are used to returning failed banks to private ownership. Receiverships are managed by experienced bankers with records of competence and integrity rather than the dread "bureaucrats." We appointed roughly a thousand receivers during the S&L and banking crises of the 1980s and early 1990s under Presidents Reagan and Bush.

Here is how it works. A receiver is appointed on Friday. The bank opens for business as normal (from the bank's customers' perspective) on Monday. The checks clear, the ATMs work, and the branches all open. The receiver's managers direct the business operations, find the true facts about the bank's operations, senior managers, and financial condition, recognize the real losses, and make the appropriate referrals to the FBI and the SEC so that the frauds can be investigated and prosecuted.

The receiver is also a well-proven device for splitting up banks that are too large and incoherent by selling units of the business to different bidders who most value the operations.

Hullabaloo

Saturday, October 02, 2010

 

Blighted Titles

by digby

If you've been following this amazing, unfolding foreclosure fraud story then you probably already know that JP Morgan/Chase, BofA and GMAC have all suspended foreclosure processes around the country now that it's been revealed they've been committing massive fraud. And Attorneys General in a number of states have also stepped in to stop the process, for the same reason.

But if you are just coming into the story, as is most of the national press, Alan Grayson has prepared a valuable primer on the crisis that's wee worth watching:

He lays out the history from the beginning when mortgage mills failed to properly file documents, instead using shortcut electronic transfer program instead of the documentation required by law. It's snowballed from there, to the point where nobody really knows who owns what and the crisis atmosphere has given cover to fraudsters, con men and greedy bankers.

Grayson is knee deep in this issue, leading the charge to get to the bottom of it, since ground zero for the foreclosure crisis is in Florida (and which this columnist warns could destroy Florida's economy.) He's dealing with some of these situations among his own constituency and among others, has been at the forefront of bringing this to the attention of the nation:

Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson of Orlando recently wrote the Florida Supreme Court, saying, "taking someone's home should not be done lightly." He asked the court to halt foreclosure proceedings for flawed paperwork brought by the most active "foreclosure mill" law firms in the state. Four firms are already under investigation by the Florida Attorney General's office. They are the Law Offices of David J. Stern, the Law Offices of Marshall C. Watson, Shapiro & Freeman and Florida Default Group.

In response to Grayson, the state Supreme Court punted, saying it lacked the authority to get involved. The court referred the official to the Florida Bar to investigate any allegations.

Sadly, the legal system isn't rapidly stepping up to the plate in most cases to right this, offering up excuses and in some cases, indicating a far great concern for efficiency than justice. Keep in mind that this latest wave of foreclosures isn't a bunch of high flying speculators or people who bit off more than they could chew in the go-go real estate market of the Bush years. Those people were foreclosed upon already. These are prime mortgages that have gone south because of the unemployment crisis. Many of these are people who are victims of a bad economy, not their own bad judgment and in some cases they are being fraudulently foreclosed upon without just cause.

The New York Times speculates that this freeze on foreclosures is a needed pause, allowing borrowers a little breathing room and giving the market a chance to stabilize a bit. Unfortunately, it would also appear that it's going to freeze the market since title insurance companies are justifiably gun shy in the wake of all these fraud revelations. It's a huge mess.

Again, I urge you to watch Grayson's video, especially if you haven't been following this story. It's one of the best illustrations we've yet seen of how the the unregulated businesses of the manic Bush years continue to destroy the lives of average Americans. And if you feel like getting his back on this, you can donate to his campaign here.


.

digby 10/02/2010 09:00:00 AM


|

Colts <b>News</b>: COLTS <b>NEWS</b>

Austin Collie (thumb) and Antonio Johnson (knee) have undergone surgeries, the Colts announced Thursday.

Scripting <b>News</b>: Rule 1 of local blogs

Recent stories. Twitter links. My 40 most-recent Twitter links, ranked by number of clicks. My bike. People are always asking about my bike. A picture named bikesmall.jpg. Here's a picture. AFP news pic. Calendar ...

Fashion, sports and magic: Moscow expats talk <b>news</b> over booze - RT

New Moscow Mayor, Russian Fashion Week and the Spartak – Chelsea match were among the most heavily discussed news items this week among Moscow expats.

eric seiger eric seiger

Making Money Ideas

Back in August, we got word that a startup called PlaceBook was being bullied by Facebook into changing their name. Obviously, a lot of companies are trying to ride on the coattails of Facebook now given the social network’s massive success, but in the case of PlaceBook, their name really just perfectly describes their service — more on that in a second. Still, Facebook lawyered up and PlaceBook founder Michael Rubin had to make a decision: fight or survive. He chose the latter.

PlaceBook is now known as TripTrace. Still in private beta, it’s a service that allows you to note places around the world you’ve been to. And places you’d like to go to in the future. All of this is done in two books (dare I call them “Place Books”?): your Atlas (places you’ve been), and your Travel (places you want to go). There’s a heavy emphasis on maps in these books, and all of your places are marked by pins (red for where you’ve been, blue for where you’re going).

The key to TripTrace is that it makes the complicated notion of travel planning relatively simple. They do this both by making the process a more visual experience, and with a series of tools. One of those is a TripClipper bookmarklet. With it, you can easily take notes as you’re browsing around the web, to bookmark things you find that you might like to do on a trip. Maybe you’re reading an article on a good restaurant in Paris, for example. With the bookmarklet, you can highlight what you want to save and it will be stored in your TripTrace books.

You can also email in things to add to your books. And eventually, of course, the plan is to add mobile applications to the arsenal as well so you can tag and note things on the go.

When you go back to the site, you’ll see the data you’ve saved as well as a ton of other data that TripTrace pulls from around the web via APIs. You know the drill here: Flickr pictures, Foursquare places, all types of events — eventually, anything that is location tagged, Rubin says. All of this data provides a rich place experience within TripTrace itself and will hopefully help you make decisions on places you want to go next.

In the Travel book, you can use any of the things you’ve clipped to help you get a costimate for a trip to that particular city. While this obviously isn’t exact, something like this is very helpful when determining if a trip is even feasible in the first place. TripTrace pulls information on things like flights and hotels based on your current location and dates you want to travel.

It should be fairly obvious by now that the eventual business model for TripTrace will be lead generation. If the service can team up with the Kayaks of the world, they can probably make for a pretty nice customer experience, while getting paid. Partnerships in the travel space is what Rubin and his team will go after. And they have some other ideas for possible sources of revenue as well — perhaps actual place books?

But that’s down the road. First, they need to nail the user experience. “The Holy Grail isn’t just getting stuff on a map, it’s mixing personal and private with public and common data,” Rubin says. “If you put that in one place, it’s enormously powerful,” he continues. But again, he notes that it need to be in a format and experience that’s useful.

Rubin and his team have quite a bit knowledge about merging public data with more personalized data, as many of them are ex-Netflix guys. Rubin himself was a director of product management there and was instrumental in the development of the website.

TripTrace currently has data for about 20,000 cities, and they’re pulling in more data each day. The service is officially an offshoot from PublicEarth, a free wiki database for locations, which has raised some money in the past. But Rubin notes this is a whole new team working on TripTrace, and they hope to be ready for a public launch sometime in the next few weeks. Provided they don’t change their name back to PlaceBook and get sued out of existence by Facebook first, of course.

DiscoveryBeat 2010 is just a day away. The conference at the Mission Bay conference center in San Francisco will have a single-minded focus on the problem of discovery, or finding the content that you want.

Like in the early days of the internet, finding what you want with the fewest steps possible is a problem that is only getting worse as more and more apps are piling into the Apple, Android and other app stores. The day of a million apps is not that far away. While Google and Yahoo solved the problem of sorting through millions of web sites, no one has figured out how to do the same in the age of apps, where cross-platform complexities and walled gardens stymie easy search solutions.

At DiscoveryBeat, we have assembled 36 experts (and a bunch of moderators) who can cover the breadth of the discovery ecosystem. If you check out our logo, you’ll see that the theme is akin to the discovery of a new world and how to navigate it. The problem of discovery exists inside apps. Brian Reynolds (left), chief game designer, can talk in his fireside chat about how you design an app from the inside out for easier discovery. The discussion will cover topics such as better user interfaces, accessible design, and moving designs to new platforms.

Sebastien DeHalleux (below right), co-founder of EA Playfish, will also have something to say about those topics in his fireside chat — but from the perspective of being inside a company with lots of well-known brands.

What does good design have to do with discovery? Our speaker Bing Gordon, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who will talk on our Investing in Discovery panel, says you can’t have discovery without engagement. If someone plays a game for two months instead of two days, they will be more engaged and share their game more widely. Gordon and his fellow panelists — Jennifer Scott Fonstad of DFJ, Savinay Berry of Granite Ventures, and Peter Relan of incubator YouWeb — will discuss what the opportunities are for investing in entrepreneurial startups and technologies in this new world. What investments make sense in this stage of of the ecosystem’s maturity?

That prompts the question: is anyone making money in discovery? Our Show Me the Money will focus on that question, with participants including Tapjoy’s Lee Linden, Flurry’s Peter Farago, Google-AdMob’s Aunkur Arya, and Mobclix’s Sunil Verma. The money must be there somewhere, right? Big brands are diving into the app markets. We’ll have a panel on that with Tim O’Brien of Disney-Tapulous, Travis Boatman of EA Mobile, James de Jesus of interactive agency AKQA, and Garrick Schmitt of agency Razorfish. And social discovery platforms are emerging. We’ll have a panel on that with Si Shen of PapayaMobile, Jason Citron of Aurora Feint, and Kabir Kasargod of Qualcomm’s Vive service.

We’ll have a lot of A lot of fresh thinking is going into discovery. Dave Smiddy, chief executive of Infrinity, is the winner of our Needle in the Haystack contest for the best new business ideas related to discovery. He’ll talk about creating a new kind of recommendation engine. William Mark, a vice president at research institute SRI, will also speak about how artificial intelligence can be applied to the problem of discovery. SRI spun out Siri, which built a cool AI-based discovery app and which was acquired by Apple.

Vijay Chattha will show that getting press for an app doesn’t have to be routine. Simon Khalaf (right) and Sean Galligan of Flurry will enlighten us on the topic of analytics and making money related to discovery. We’ll also have a lot of inspiring and instructive case studies from successful indie app makers, including Julian Farrior of BackFlip Studios (the maker of Paper Toss), Dave Castelnuovo of Bolt Creative (Pocket God), Doyon Kim of YD Online, Chris Williams of PlayFirst (Diner Dash), Justin Maples of Borken Thumb Apps (Zombie Duck Hunt) and Patrck Mork of GetJar, which runs an indie app store and which recently launched Angry Birds on Android.

One of the most successful new apps of the Twitter era has been Foursquare. We’ll hear how Foursquare — an app whose monetization is heavily related to how users discover new places — got discovered itself in a fireside chat with Holger Luedorf.

We’ll close the door with a discussion of the would-be app kingmakers and their tools. That panel will include Ben Keighran of Chomp, Alan Warms of Appolicious, Laura Fitton of oneforty (which discovers Twitter apps), and Chris DeVore of AppStoreHQ and iPhoneDevSDK.

We hope you’ll join us in the undiscovered country.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. Join us at DiscoveryBeat 2010 and hear secrets from top industry executives about how to break through and profit in the new cross-platform app ecosystem. From metrics to monetization, we’ll take an in depth look at the best discovery strategies and why they’re working. See the full agenda here. The conference takes place on October 18 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Sponsors include Flurry, Adobe, YD Online, Offermobi, appbackr, Altcatel-Lucent, Appolicious, AppLaunchPR, and Herakles Data Center.  To register, click here. Hurry though. Tickets are limited, and going fast.

Previous Story: Why did Facebook unplug LOLapps games with 150M users?

robert shumake twitter

Election 2010: NBC <b>News</b>, MSNBC Slate Midterm Coverage Plans - TVNewser

New York – October 18, 2010 – NBC News will offer comprehensive coverage of the upcoming 2010 mid-term elections on Nov. 2 across all its platforms, including msnbc, Msnbc.com, Telemundo, NBC News Radio and NBC News Mobile. ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Digital Photography Review

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Canon has released a bug-fixing firmware update for its EOS 5D Mark II full-frame DSLR. Firmware v2.0.8 addresses specific issues with video recording, live-view and flash settings.

robert shumake hall of shame

Back in August, we got word that a startup called PlaceBook was being bullied by Facebook into changing their name. Obviously, a lot of companies are trying to ride on the coattails of Facebook now given the social network’s massive success, but in the case of PlaceBook, their name really just perfectly describes their service — more on that in a second. Still, Facebook lawyered up and PlaceBook founder Michael Rubin had to make a decision: fight or survive. He chose the latter.

PlaceBook is now known as TripTrace. Still in private beta, it’s a service that allows you to note places around the world you’ve been to. And places you’d like to go to in the future. All of this is done in two books (dare I call them “Place Books”?): your Atlas (places you’ve been), and your Travel (places you want to go). There’s a heavy emphasis on maps in these books, and all of your places are marked by pins (red for where you’ve been, blue for where you’re going).

The key to TripTrace is that it makes the complicated notion of travel planning relatively simple. They do this both by making the process a more visual experience, and with a series of tools. One of those is a TripClipper bookmarklet. With it, you can easily take notes as you’re browsing around the web, to bookmark things you find that you might like to do on a trip. Maybe you’re reading an article on a good restaurant in Paris, for example. With the bookmarklet, you can highlight what you want to save and it will be stored in your TripTrace books.

You can also email in things to add to your books. And eventually, of course, the plan is to add mobile applications to the arsenal as well so you can tag and note things on the go.

When you go back to the site, you’ll see the data you’ve saved as well as a ton of other data that TripTrace pulls from around the web via APIs. You know the drill here: Flickr pictures, Foursquare places, all types of events — eventually, anything that is location tagged, Rubin says. All of this data provides a rich place experience within TripTrace itself and will hopefully help you make decisions on places you want to go next.

In the Travel book, you can use any of the things you’ve clipped to help you get a costimate for a trip to that particular city. While this obviously isn’t exact, something like this is very helpful when determining if a trip is even feasible in the first place. TripTrace pulls information on things like flights and hotels based on your current location and dates you want to travel.

It should be fairly obvious by now that the eventual business model for TripTrace will be lead generation. If the service can team up with the Kayaks of the world, they can probably make for a pretty nice customer experience, while getting paid. Partnerships in the travel space is what Rubin and his team will go after. And they have some other ideas for possible sources of revenue as well — perhaps actual place books?

But that’s down the road. First, they need to nail the user experience. “The Holy Grail isn’t just getting stuff on a map, it’s mixing personal and private with public and common data,” Rubin says. “If you put that in one place, it’s enormously powerful,” he continues. But again, he notes that it need to be in a format and experience that’s useful.

Rubin and his team have quite a bit knowledge about merging public data with more personalized data, as many of them are ex-Netflix guys. Rubin himself was a director of product management there and was instrumental in the development of the website.

TripTrace currently has data for about 20,000 cities, and they’re pulling in more data each day. The service is officially an offshoot from PublicEarth, a free wiki database for locations, which has raised some money in the past. But Rubin notes this is a whole new team working on TripTrace, and they hope to be ready for a public launch sometime in the next few weeks. Provided they don’t change their name back to PlaceBook and get sued out of existence by Facebook first, of course.

DiscoveryBeat 2010 is just a day away. The conference at the Mission Bay conference center in San Francisco will have a single-minded focus on the problem of discovery, or finding the content that you want.

Like in the early days of the internet, finding what you want with the fewest steps possible is a problem that is only getting worse as more and more apps are piling into the Apple, Android and other app stores. The day of a million apps is not that far away. While Google and Yahoo solved the problem of sorting through millions of web sites, no one has figured out how to do the same in the age of apps, where cross-platform complexities and walled gardens stymie easy search solutions.

At DiscoveryBeat, we have assembled 36 experts (and a bunch of moderators) who can cover the breadth of the discovery ecosystem. If you check out our logo, you’ll see that the theme is akin to the discovery of a new world and how to navigate it. The problem of discovery exists inside apps. Brian Reynolds (left), chief game designer, can talk in his fireside chat about how you design an app from the inside out for easier discovery. The discussion will cover topics such as better user interfaces, accessible design, and moving designs to new platforms.

Sebastien DeHalleux (below right), co-founder of EA Playfish, will also have something to say about those topics in his fireside chat — but from the perspective of being inside a company with lots of well-known brands.

What does good design have to do with discovery? Our speaker Bing Gordon, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who will talk on our Investing in Discovery panel, says you can’t have discovery without engagement. If someone plays a game for two months instead of two days, they will be more engaged and share their game more widely. Gordon and his fellow panelists — Jennifer Scott Fonstad of DFJ, Savinay Berry of Granite Ventures, and Peter Relan of incubator YouWeb — will discuss what the opportunities are for investing in entrepreneurial startups and technologies in this new world. What investments make sense in this stage of of the ecosystem’s maturity?

That prompts the question: is anyone making money in discovery? Our Show Me the Money will focus on that question, with participants including Tapjoy’s Lee Linden, Flurry’s Peter Farago, Google-AdMob’s Aunkur Arya, and Mobclix’s Sunil Verma. The money must be there somewhere, right? Big brands are diving into the app markets. We’ll have a panel on that with Tim O’Brien of Disney-Tapulous, Travis Boatman of EA Mobile, James de Jesus of interactive agency AKQA, and Garrick Schmitt of agency Razorfish. And social discovery platforms are emerging. We’ll have a panel on that with Si Shen of PapayaMobile, Jason Citron of Aurora Feint, and Kabir Kasargod of Qualcomm’s Vive service.

We’ll have a lot of A lot of fresh thinking is going into discovery. Dave Smiddy, chief executive of Infrinity, is the winner of our Needle in the Haystack contest for the best new business ideas related to discovery. He’ll talk about creating a new kind of recommendation engine. William Mark, a vice president at research institute SRI, will also speak about how artificial intelligence can be applied to the problem of discovery. SRI spun out Siri, which built a cool AI-based discovery app and which was acquired by Apple.

Vijay Chattha will show that getting press for an app doesn’t have to be routine. Simon Khalaf (right) and Sean Galligan of Flurry will enlighten us on the topic of analytics and making money related to discovery. We’ll also have a lot of inspiring and instructive case studies from successful indie app makers, including Julian Farrior of BackFlip Studios (the maker of Paper Toss), Dave Castelnuovo of Bolt Creative (Pocket God), Doyon Kim of YD Online, Chris Williams of PlayFirst (Diner Dash), Justin Maples of Borken Thumb Apps (Zombie Duck Hunt) and Patrck Mork of GetJar, which runs an indie app store and which recently launched Angry Birds on Android.

One of the most successful new apps of the Twitter era has been Foursquare. We’ll hear how Foursquare — an app whose monetization is heavily related to how users discover new places — got discovered itself in a fireside chat with Holger Luedorf.

We’ll close the door with a discussion of the would-be app kingmakers and their tools. That panel will include Ben Keighran of Chomp, Alan Warms of Appolicious, Laura Fitton of oneforty (which discovers Twitter apps), and Chris DeVore of AppStoreHQ and iPhoneDevSDK.

We hope you’ll join us in the undiscovered country.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. Join us at DiscoveryBeat 2010 and hear secrets from top industry executives about how to break through and profit in the new cross-platform app ecosystem. From metrics to monetization, we’ll take an in depth look at the best discovery strategies and why they’re working. See the full agenda here. The conference takes place on October 18 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Sponsors include Flurry, Adobe, YD Online, Offermobi, appbackr, Altcatel-Lucent, Appolicious, AppLaunchPR, and Herakles Data Center.  To register, click here. Hurry though. Tickets are limited, and going fast.

Previous Story: Why did Facebook unplug LOLapps games with 150M users?

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Election 2010: NBC <b>News</b>, MSNBC Slate Midterm Coverage Plans - TVNewser

New York – October 18, 2010 – NBC News will offer comprehensive coverage of the upcoming 2010 mid-term elections on Nov. 2 across all its platforms, including msnbc, Msnbc.com, Telemundo, NBC News Radio and NBC News Mobile. ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Digital Photography Review

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Canon has released a bug-fixing firmware update for its EOS 5D Mark II full-frame DSLR. Firmware v2.0.8 addresses specific issues with video recording, live-view and flash settings.

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robert shumake hall of shame

robert shumake detroit

Election 2010: NBC <b>News</b>, MSNBC Slate Midterm Coverage Plans - TVNewser

New York – October 18, 2010 – NBC News will offer comprehensive coverage of the upcoming 2010 mid-term elections on Nov. 2 across all its platforms, including msnbc, Msnbc.com, Telemundo, NBC News Radio and NBC News Mobile. ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Digital Photography Review

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Canon has released a bug-fixing firmware update for its EOS 5D Mark II full-frame DSLR. Firmware v2.0.8 addresses specific issues with video recording, live-view and flash settings.

robert shumake twitter

Back in August, we got word that a startup called PlaceBook was being bullied by Facebook into changing their name. Obviously, a lot of companies are trying to ride on the coattails of Facebook now given the social network’s massive success, but in the case of PlaceBook, their name really just perfectly describes their service — more on that in a second. Still, Facebook lawyered up and PlaceBook founder Michael Rubin had to make a decision: fight or survive. He chose the latter.

PlaceBook is now known as TripTrace. Still in private beta, it’s a service that allows you to note places around the world you’ve been to. And places you’d like to go to in the future. All of this is done in two books (dare I call them “Place Books”?): your Atlas (places you’ve been), and your Travel (places you want to go). There’s a heavy emphasis on maps in these books, and all of your places are marked by pins (red for where you’ve been, blue for where you’re going).

The key to TripTrace is that it makes the complicated notion of travel planning relatively simple. They do this both by making the process a more visual experience, and with a series of tools. One of those is a TripClipper bookmarklet. With it, you can easily take notes as you’re browsing around the web, to bookmark things you find that you might like to do on a trip. Maybe you’re reading an article on a good restaurant in Paris, for example. With the bookmarklet, you can highlight what you want to save and it will be stored in your TripTrace books.

You can also email in things to add to your books. And eventually, of course, the plan is to add mobile applications to the arsenal as well so you can tag and note things on the go.

When you go back to the site, you’ll see the data you’ve saved as well as a ton of other data that TripTrace pulls from around the web via APIs. You know the drill here: Flickr pictures, Foursquare places, all types of events — eventually, anything that is location tagged, Rubin says. All of this data provides a rich place experience within TripTrace itself and will hopefully help you make decisions on places you want to go next.

In the Travel book, you can use any of the things you’ve clipped to help you get a costimate for a trip to that particular city. While this obviously isn’t exact, something like this is very helpful when determining if a trip is even feasible in the first place. TripTrace pulls information on things like flights and hotels based on your current location and dates you want to travel.

It should be fairly obvious by now that the eventual business model for TripTrace will be lead generation. If the service can team up with the Kayaks of the world, they can probably make for a pretty nice customer experience, while getting paid. Partnerships in the travel space is what Rubin and his team will go after. And they have some other ideas for possible sources of revenue as well — perhaps actual place books?

But that’s down the road. First, they need to nail the user experience. “The Holy Grail isn’t just getting stuff on a map, it’s mixing personal and private with public and common data,” Rubin says. “If you put that in one place, it’s enormously powerful,” he continues. But again, he notes that it need to be in a format and experience that’s useful.

Rubin and his team have quite a bit knowledge about merging public data with more personalized data, as many of them are ex-Netflix guys. Rubin himself was a director of product management there and was instrumental in the development of the website.

TripTrace currently has data for about 20,000 cities, and they’re pulling in more data each day. The service is officially an offshoot from PublicEarth, a free wiki database for locations, which has raised some money in the past. But Rubin notes this is a whole new team working on TripTrace, and they hope to be ready for a public launch sometime in the next few weeks. Provided they don’t change their name back to PlaceBook and get sued out of existence by Facebook first, of course.

DiscoveryBeat 2010 is just a day away. The conference at the Mission Bay conference center in San Francisco will have a single-minded focus on the problem of discovery, or finding the content that you want.

Like in the early days of the internet, finding what you want with the fewest steps possible is a problem that is only getting worse as more and more apps are piling into the Apple, Android and other app stores. The day of a million apps is not that far away. While Google and Yahoo solved the problem of sorting through millions of web sites, no one has figured out how to do the same in the age of apps, where cross-platform complexities and walled gardens stymie easy search solutions.

At DiscoveryBeat, we have assembled 36 experts (and a bunch of moderators) who can cover the breadth of the discovery ecosystem. If you check out our logo, you’ll see that the theme is akin to the discovery of a new world and how to navigate it. The problem of discovery exists inside apps. Brian Reynolds (left), chief game designer, can talk in his fireside chat about how you design an app from the inside out for easier discovery. The discussion will cover topics such as better user interfaces, accessible design, and moving designs to new platforms.

Sebastien DeHalleux (below right), co-founder of EA Playfish, will also have something to say about those topics in his fireside chat — but from the perspective of being inside a company with lots of well-known brands.

What does good design have to do with discovery? Our speaker Bing Gordon, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who will talk on our Investing in Discovery panel, says you can’t have discovery without engagement. If someone plays a game for two months instead of two days, they will be more engaged and share their game more widely. Gordon and his fellow panelists — Jennifer Scott Fonstad of DFJ, Savinay Berry of Granite Ventures, and Peter Relan of incubator YouWeb — will discuss what the opportunities are for investing in entrepreneurial startups and technologies in this new world. What investments make sense in this stage of of the ecosystem’s maturity?

That prompts the question: is anyone making money in discovery? Our Show Me the Money will focus on that question, with participants including Tapjoy’s Lee Linden, Flurry’s Peter Farago, Google-AdMob’s Aunkur Arya, and Mobclix’s Sunil Verma. The money must be there somewhere, right? Big brands are diving into the app markets. We’ll have a panel on that with Tim O’Brien of Disney-Tapulous, Travis Boatman of EA Mobile, James de Jesus of interactive agency AKQA, and Garrick Schmitt of agency Razorfish. And social discovery platforms are emerging. We’ll have a panel on that with Si Shen of PapayaMobile, Jason Citron of Aurora Feint, and Kabir Kasargod of Qualcomm’s Vive service.

We’ll have a lot of A lot of fresh thinking is going into discovery. Dave Smiddy, chief executive of Infrinity, is the winner of our Needle in the Haystack contest for the best new business ideas related to discovery. He’ll talk about creating a new kind of recommendation engine. William Mark, a vice president at research institute SRI, will also speak about how artificial intelligence can be applied to the problem of discovery. SRI spun out Siri, which built a cool AI-based discovery app and which was acquired by Apple.

Vijay Chattha will show that getting press for an app doesn’t have to be routine. Simon Khalaf (right) and Sean Galligan of Flurry will enlighten us on the topic of analytics and making money related to discovery. We’ll also have a lot of inspiring and instructive case studies from successful indie app makers, including Julian Farrior of BackFlip Studios (the maker of Paper Toss), Dave Castelnuovo of Bolt Creative (Pocket God), Doyon Kim of YD Online, Chris Williams of PlayFirst (Diner Dash), Justin Maples of Borken Thumb Apps (Zombie Duck Hunt) and Patrck Mork of GetJar, which runs an indie app store and which recently launched Angry Birds on Android.

One of the most successful new apps of the Twitter era has been Foursquare. We’ll hear how Foursquare — an app whose monetization is heavily related to how users discover new places — got discovered itself in a fireside chat with Holger Luedorf.

We’ll close the door with a discussion of the would-be app kingmakers and their tools. That panel will include Ben Keighran of Chomp, Alan Warms of Appolicious, Laura Fitton of oneforty (which discovers Twitter apps), and Chris DeVore of AppStoreHQ and iPhoneDevSDK.

We hope you’ll join us in the undiscovered country.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. Join us at DiscoveryBeat 2010 and hear secrets from top industry executives about how to break through and profit in the new cross-platform app ecosystem. From metrics to monetization, we’ll take an in depth look at the best discovery strategies and why they’re working. See the full agenda here. The conference takes place on October 18 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Sponsors include Flurry, Adobe, YD Online, Offermobi, appbackr, Altcatel-Lucent, Appolicious, AppLaunchPR, and Herakles Data Center.  To register, click here. Hurry though. Tickets are limited, and going fast.

Previous Story: Why did Facebook unplug LOLapps games with 150M users?

robert shumake twitter

robert shumake twitter

Election 2010: NBC <b>News</b>, MSNBC Slate Midterm Coverage Plans - TVNewser

New York – October 18, 2010 – NBC News will offer comprehensive coverage of the upcoming 2010 mid-term elections on Nov. 2 across all its platforms, including msnbc, Msnbc.com, Telemundo, NBC News Radio and NBC News Mobile. ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Digital Photography Review

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Canon has released a bug-fixing firmware update for its EOS 5D Mark II full-frame DSLR. Firmware v2.0.8 addresses specific issues with video recording, live-view and flash settings.

robert shumake twitter

robert shumake hall of shame

Election 2010: NBC <b>News</b>, MSNBC Slate Midterm Coverage Plans - TVNewser

New York – October 18, 2010 – NBC News will offer comprehensive coverage of the upcoming 2010 mid-term elections on Nov. 2 across all its platforms, including msnbc, Msnbc.com, Telemundo, NBC News Radio and NBC News Mobile. ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Digital Photography Review

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Canon has released a bug-fixing firmware update for its EOS 5D Mark II full-frame DSLR. Firmware v2.0.8 addresses specific issues with video recording, live-view and flash settings.

robert shumake hall of shame

Election 2010: NBC <b>News</b>, MSNBC Slate Midterm Coverage Plans - TVNewser

New York – October 18, 2010 – NBC News will offer comprehensive coverage of the upcoming 2010 mid-term elections on Nov. 2 across all its platforms, including msnbc, Msnbc.com, Telemundo, NBC News Radio and NBC News Mobile. ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Digital Photography Review

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Canon has released a bug-fixing firmware update for its EOS 5D Mark II full-frame DSLR. Firmware v2.0.8 addresses specific issues with video recording, live-view and flash settings.

robert shumake detroit

Election 2010: NBC <b>News</b>, MSNBC Slate Midterm Coverage Plans - TVNewser

New York – October 18, 2010 – NBC News will offer comprehensive coverage of the upcoming 2010 mid-term elections on Nov. 2 across all its platforms, including msnbc, Msnbc.com, Telemundo, NBC News Radio and NBC News Mobile. ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Digital Photography Review

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Canon has released a bug-fixing firmware update for its EOS 5D Mark II full-frame DSLR. Firmware v2.0.8 addresses specific issues with video recording, live-view and flash settings.

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robert shumake hall of shame

Election 2010: NBC <b>News</b>, MSNBC Slate Midterm Coverage Plans - TVNewser

New York – October 18, 2010 – NBC News will offer comprehensive coverage of the upcoming 2010 mid-term elections on Nov. 2 across all its platforms, including msnbc, Msnbc.com, Telemundo, NBC News Radio and NBC News Mobile. ...

<b>News</b>: Jean Claude Van Damme Suffers Heart Attack On Set Of WEAPON

Images From Cronenberg's TALKING CURE � Brody Versus Argento � JCVD Has Heart Attack On Set � TROLL HUNTER Coming To America � MORPHINE Doc Gets A Trailer � Pegg / Frost Alien Comedy PAUL Trailer. Film News ...

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Digital Photography Review

Canon updates firmware for EOS 5D Mark II: Canon has released a bug-fixing firmware update for its EOS 5D Mark II full-frame DSLR. Firmware v2.0.8 addresses specific issues with video recording, live-view and flash settings.

robert shumake hall of shame

Finding free red hot keywords isn't always easy. Finding red hot keywords can be the difference between making money online with your writing or not. The anticipation of what will be a red hot keyword is also one of the more important things you'll ever figure out if you plan to write online as a second or full time career.

Where do you find free red hot keywords? There are several different avenues to pursue to find red hot keywords. These websites will just give away the red hot keywords for free. The only problem is that many people also log on to these websites to write their own stories for sites similar to Associated Content. That means the competition is fast and furious. Putting out high quality articles using variations of these red hot keywords can mean the difference between ranking high and making money or disappearing into the oblivion of other similar articles on the same topic.

Where do I start to find free red hot keywords? Google Hot Trends is my red hot keyword start page. I have found that writing according to the Top 20 can be financially lucrative for a site like Associated Content. You might not pay all the bills but you can definitely make some extra money. Typically the Google Hot Trends official website will list 20 or so search terms that are hot within the past few hours. Sometimes a 19th or 20th search term is on the way out. Sometimes the 19th or 20th search term is becoming red hot.

The key to writing stories is figuring out which keywords will become red hot and move up the charts and which ones are going out. Generally the top 5 are covered by so many writers that writing a succesful story is comparative to hitting the lottery. I particularly like to write about stories that have several different variations of keywords within the top 20. Let's say the top 5 list 3 of five red hot keywords on the same topic. Incorporate all three of those in your story and that article should do moderately well in terms of page views.

Let's take the Tiger Woods affairs scandal for instance. If a new mistress was introduced the search term slowly made it's way up the Google Hot Trends list. The key is to be on the internet writing with these red hot keywords before it makes it's way up the charts and becomes red hot. It's important that you anticipate what will be the next big thing people are searching for. Obviously when an earthquake takes place in Haiti it will be big news and provide many searches. The problem with chasing that keyword is that many many national outlets and bloggers will be doing the same thing. Think of different variations people will be searching for and use those as additional keywords to the ones suggested by Google Hot Trends.

I also like theYahoo Buzz and AOL Hot Searches to find free red hot keywords. Why is it important to find what's getting hot? People will search for a topic in a small time frame. Normally the news cycle is so brief that by the time you publish and spiders crawl that you might be a bit behind the game. That's why breaking a story is so important to celebrity sites like TMZ, Pop Crunch or US Weekly these days. The first to get the story on with the best available red hot keywords usually reaps huge rewards in terms of national stories. As a freelance writer, you can still make financial gains utilizing red hot keywords from these sites or anticipating what will be hot.

Here are more ideas. Get a calendar and plot ahead. If Christmas is coming soon then maybe you'll want to write articles about Christmas songs or stories. The same can be said for other Holidays. Read the TV Guide a few weeks ahead to what is coming up and what people will be watching and talking about. If the premiere of a new show is on the horizon then it might be worth your time to write a detailed analysis of the show which includes characters and plot. Timely writing usually comes down to anticipating what is going to happen and writing quickly when breaking news does take place. I believe finding free red hot keywords is 70 percent common sense and 30 percent research. Using sites like Google Hot Trends, Yahoo Buzz and AOL Hot Searches certainly makes the job a bit easier.

How do you utilize these free red hot keywords? Put the keyword phrase in the title of your story and in the first sentence. Utilize that and other variations of the keyword phrase throughout your story. Typically spiders will crawl and reward you with high rankings if the story is well written and contains the red hot keywords that people are searching for.


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