"Jobs Bill Passes in Senate With 11 Votes From Republicans" (NYT)

"The Senate approved and sent to President Obama on Wednesday what Congressional Democrats hope will be the first in a series of bills spurring employment by providing tax breaks and other hiring incentives to businesses.

The Senate approved and sent to President Obama on Wednesday what Congressional Democrats hope will be the first in a series of bills spurring employment by providing tax breaks and other hiring incentives to businesses..."

"China’s Exports Rise 46%" (NYT)

"China announced Wednesday that its exports climbed 46 percent in February from a year earlier. Economists said the data signaled a rebound in consumer demand from the United States and other Western markets after the financial crisis last year.

It was the third consecutive month of increases in Chinese exports and the fastest growth in three years. Orders from the United States, the European Union and Japan accounted for almost half the growth, following a pickup in demand from emerging markets in the previous two months.

Chinese imports also rose 45 percent over the previous year, led by crude oil as factories stepped up production..."

"BREAKING: GM Battery Czar Denise Gray Leaves Volt Team For California Startup" (greencarreports.com)

"A key member of the small team brought together four years ago to create the 2011 Chevrolet Volt electric car is unexpectedly leaving General Motors.

Denise Gray, director of global battery systems engineering at General Motors, will leave the company on Friday, March 5, to take an unspecified position with an unidentified battery startup in California....

What led Gray to leave the only company she'd ever worked for? "The opportunity to create and build and plant seeds and mold and shape an organization," she said--just as she was able to do with the small Volt team.

And in a theme common to many professionals who've left solid jobs to join startups, she said simply, "I didn't want to look back and say, 'I could have, I should have ...' "

Her new position, a senior leadership role, will keep her squarely in advanced battery technology. She'll work with products that can be applied to electrified transport and to stationary applications, and her job will include profit-and-loss responsibility...."

"G.M. to Close Hummer After Sale Fails" (NYT)

"General Motors said on Wednesday that it would shut down Hummer, the brand of big sport utility vehicles that became synonymous with the term gas guzzler, after a deal to sell it to a Chinese manufacturer fell apart.

The buyer, Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machines, said in a statement that it had withdrawn its bid because it was unable to receive approval from the Chinese government, which was trying to put a new emphasis on limiting China’s dependence on imported oil and protecting the environment.

Tight financial markets also hurt the deal. When the commerce ministry did not bless the transaction, the well-capitalized Chinese banks became reluctant to lend money to Tengzhong, even though it tried to set up an overseas subsidiary to buy Hummer. That left Tengzhong trying to borrow money from Western banks that have been curtailing their lending even to established borrowers, much less a little-known company from western China..."

Kiva!! (microloans)

Made my third Kiva loan today to a woman in the Philippines who has requested a loan so that she can expand the stock in her general store. The first loan I made was for $25. The 2 previous loans were repaid in full, so each new loan I make is paid from the previous loan....an easy cycle to participant in with a relatively minor financial commitment!!

"See Where Stuff Comes From with SourceMap" (Treehugger)

"You have certainly heard that buying local is "greener". You have probably also heard counter-arguments: a product made more efficiently but shipped some distance may beat out a local product. But all that talk is merely theoretical if you don't know where your stuff comes from anyhow. And in the new global economy, the "made in" tag on a product does not tell half the story. What is the discerning consumer to do?

Imagine a future in which pointing a PDA at a product bar code returns an instant readout of product source and environmental footprint to inform the buyer's decision. This future could be reality with SourceMap. Designed as a "collective tool for transparency and sustainability," SourceMap aims to be the Wiki of visualizing supply chains.

SourceMap is a project of Media Labs, a division of MIT. Developers have adapted the Google Earth geotagging capabilities to the purpose of charting the components that go into products. After two years in develpment, the site is live in beta, and a SourceMap pilot project is underway in Scotland, where businesses can input data on sourcing and supply to share with customers. SourceMap hopes to show that a marketing and social networking advantage justifies the effort of businesses to create transparent reports..."

"Forget "Shrink It and Pink It": the Femme Den Unleashed" (Fast Company)

"Boobs. The Femme Den talks about them easily and often -- and about the challenges they present to designers. Backpack makers don't seem to have a clue what to do about boobs. Ditto designers of unisex hospital scrubs, famous for their gaping V-necks. "One surgeon told me there wasn't a woman at the hospital whose boobs he hadn't seen," says Femme Den member Whitney Hopkins.

A design engineer at Smart Design, Hopkins is also one of four members of the Den, an internal collective at the firm that's devoted to thinking about the bodies and brains of women and how to design -- smartly -- for them. I ask the group, which consists of Hopkins, Agnete Enga, Erica Eden, and Yvonne Lin, if that means razors and sports bras or if it means rethinking everything. "Both," they answer in unison, from a nook of Smart's loftlike Chelsea offices. Women are not a niche market, they insist ("No one likes to be targeted," sniffs Eden), but companies should also be careful not to confuse equality with sameness.

"When most people think of designing for women, they automatically think of tampons and birth control," Lin says. (It doesn't help that in industrial design, females make up just 20% of the field.) "Even when a lot of companies think that a product is for both genders, in reality they're just designing for men. Design is male-biased. Designers are working with male procedurals, probably going back to the beginning of time." Now, the Femme Den is looking to inject some femininity into those procedurals, everywhere from U.S. Army bases to Target, BP, and Nike..."

"Inventors of bra that turns into gas mask win IgNobel prize" (Telegraph UK)

"...The IgNobel prizes - a play on the name of the Nobel prizes awarded every October from Stockholm and Oslo - are given out by the Harvard-based humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research and co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students and the Harvard Computer Society.

The Public Health prize went to Elena Bodnar of Hinsdale, Illinois and colleagues who designed and patented a bra that can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander..."

"16 Inventions That Boost Habitats, Humanity, Health and Happiness" (Fast Company)

The Hippo Water Roller
SinkPositive (My Favorite)
Antivirus
HomeHero Fire Extinguisher
Club WATT (My Second Favorite)
EnerJar
Learning Landscape
Tack-Tiles Braille System
SkySails
Walk Score (Super cool tool....and free!)
Daily Dump
mesu
DIY Soccer Balls
Nike + iPod Sport Kit
Donation Meter Program
PubliColor (Also My Favorite)

"IBM opens a Linux innovation center in Kazakhstan" (VentureBeat)

"IBM keeps pushing into emerging markets in an effort to encourage startups and technology adoption around the world. Today, it is announcing it has opened a Linux innovation center in Kazakhstan, the nation made famous by Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy movie, Borat.

IBM is betting that places like Kazakhstan will eventually see growth as vendors spread their wares around the globe and local businesses move onto the Internet. Linux is a perfect fit as far as encouraging low-cost technology in these areas. The center will be in Astana, Kazakhstan, the capital of the country.

The center’s mission is to drive the development and adoption of open standards and open source technologies in business and government organizations in Kazakhstan, the central Asian nation that spans territory larger than Western Europe. IBM recently launched a similar effort in Africa. Big Blue also has innovation centers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Bangalore, India; Moscow and other locations, such as the Cape Town, South Africa center, which opened last week.

Part of the continuing goal is to bridge the “digital divide” and fuel future economic growth. Inna Kuznetsova, vice president of systems software, marketing and sales enablement at IBM, says the center will support regional software vendors and IBM business partners as they localize their applications. It will develop prototypes of e-government services and work on e-learning solutions as well."

"Crowdsourcing company Fluther gets some big-name backers" (VentureBeat)

"Fluther, a startup that crowdsources answers for user questions, just raised $600,000 from some of Silicon Valley’s better-known investors.

They include Netscape founder Marc Andreessen of newly-formed venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway (who has invested in dozens of start-ups in Fluther’s space), Dave McClure and Naval Ravikant. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is also an advisor.

Although there are already many crowdsourced question-and-answer sites, including Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers and newer variants like Hunch and Aardvark, which digs through your social network for people to answer, Fluther says it’s different because it works in real-time and finds people across its entire network to answer your question.

The site is very intuitive. You type in a question and wait for people to respond. You can see live if someone is crafting a response, and they can see your reaction in return as you type it. Fluther says questions on the site average about 14 responses."...

"Neuromarketing Hope and Hype: 5 Brands Conducting Brain Research" (Fast Company)

"Even before the age of Mad Men marketers were trying to tap into the human subconscious to influence consumers to buy their products.

But over the last decade or so, as the fields of neuroscience and marketing science (as some like to call it) have evolved, the area of Neuromarketing has emerged. Today more companies are investing in the technology and studies. Neuromarketing blogs (Roger Dooley) and books (Buyology) are being accorded more attention and legitimacy. Nielsen's recent investment in researcher NeuroFocus has increased the influence and credibility of neuromarketing. However, the field is young and a bit like the wild west. And many in and out of marketing have raised concerns about the reliability and ethicality of neuromarketing.

What is Neuromarketing?

Neuromarketing is the practice of using technology to measure brain activity in consumer subjects in order to inform the development of products and communications--really to inform the brand's 4Ps. The premise is that consumer buying decisions are made in split seconds in the subconscious, emotional part of the brain and that by understanding what we like, don't like, want, fear, are bored by, etc. as indicated by our brain's reactions to brand stimuli, marketers can design products and communications to better meet "unmet" market needs, connect and drive "the buy".

...

Techniques include:
fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging)
SST (Steady State Topography)
EEG (Electroencephalography)
Eye Tracking
Galvanic Skin Response

So who is using neuromarketing (aside from consultants)?

Microsoft is now mining EEG data to understand users' interactions with computers including their feelings of "surprise, satisfaction and frustration."

Frito-Lay has been studying female brains to learn how to better appeal to women. Findings showed the company should avoid pitches related to "guilt" and guilt-free and play up "healthy" associations.

Google made some waves when it partnered with MediaVest on a "biometrics" study to measure the effectiveness of YouTube overlays versus pre-rolls. Result: Overlays were much more effective with subjects.

Daimler employed fMRI research to inform a campaign featuring car headlights to suggest human faces which tied to the reward center of the brain.

The Weather Channel used EEG, eye-tracking and skin response techniques to measure viewer reactions to three different promotional pitches for a popular series."

...

Collaboration and Innovation - "Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest" (NYT)

"Netflix, the movie rental company, has decided its million-dollar-prize competition was such a good investment that it is planning another one.

The company’s challenge, begun in October 2006, was both geeky and formidable: come up with a recommendation software that could do a better job accurately predicting the movies customers would like than Netflix’s in-house software, Cinematch. To qualify for the prize, entries had to be at least 10 percent better than Cinematch.

The winner, formally announced Monday morning, is a seven-person team of statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel. The multinational team calls itself BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos. The group — a merger of teams — was the longtime frontrunner in the contest, and in late June it finally surpassed the 10 percent barrier. Under the rules of the contest, that set off a 30-day period in which other teams could try to beat them.

...

The Netflix contest has been widely followed because its lessons could extend well beyond improving movie picks. The researchers from around the world were grappling with a huge data set — 100 million movie ratings — and the challenges of large-scale predictive modeling, which can be applied across the fields of science, commerce and politics.

The way teams came together, especially late in the contest, and the improved results that were achieved suggest that this kind of Internet-enabled approach, known as crowdsourcing, can be applied to complex scientific and business challenges.

That certainly seemed to be a principal lesson for the winners. The blending of different statistical and machine-learning techniques “only works well if you combine models that approach the problem differently,” said Chris Volinsky, a scientist at AT&T Research and a leader of the Bellkor team. “That’s why collaboration has been so effective, because different people approach problems differently.”

Yet the sort of sophisticated teamwork deployed in the Netflix contest, it seems, is a tricky business. Over three years, thousands of teams from 186 countries made submissions. Yet only two could breach the 10-percent hurdle. “Having these big collaborations may be great for innovation, but it’s very, very difficult,” said Greg McAlpin, a software consultant and a leader of the Ensemble. “Out of thousands, you have only two that succeeded. The big lesson for me was that most of those collaborations don’t work.”

...

The new contest is going to present the contestants with demographic and behavioral data, and they will be asked to model individuals’ “taste profiles,” the company said. The data set of more than 100 million entries will include information about renters’ ages, gender, ZIP codes, genre ratings and previously chosen movies. Unlike the first challenge, the contest will have no specific accuracy target. Instead, $500,000 will be awarded to the team in the lead after six months, and $500,000 to the leader after 18 months.

The payoff for Netflix? “Accurately predicting the movies Netflix members will love is a key component of our service,” said Neil Hunt, chief product officer."

"Twitter Creator Gives Clues About His Next Venture" (GigaOm)

"Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey during a talk today at Webster University in St. Louis outlined his next venture, which he hinted may be focused on health care and financial services, according to the Wall Street Journal. Dorsey, who is now the chairman of Twitter’s board after stepping down as CEO last year, said the city of St. Louis would play a “very large part” in his next venture, according to a local paper.

Dorsey’s interest in health care mirrors other tech companies’ plans to enter the space, including Dell, Verizon and Google. Yet tech companies excited about opportunities in health care will likely have to deal with government regulation and frustrated doctors who may have previously invested in technology for their practice but received little return. That could prove a daunting task for a nascent company like Dorsey’s.

During his speech, Dorsey said that the new venture, which is currently in stealth mode, will be focused on Twitter’s core values: immediacy, transparency and approachability."

Ford Launches Vehicle-to-Grid Software Trial for Plug-in Hybrids (earth2tech)

"It may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of big automakers, but in the coming rollout of plug-in vehicles intended for the mass market, software and communication between vehicles and the power grid will be a key piece of the puzzle. Today Ford, which has partnered with utilities, the Electric Power Research Institute and the Department of Energy, pulled back the curtain on a 3-year demonstration project to test out vehicle-to-grid software for plug-in hybrid vehicles...."

Quirky - Social Product Development

Threadless t-shirts - "Nude No More"

Crowd-submitted designs, voted on by the community. Winning designs are printed in limited quantities (1500?). Winning designer earns "up to" $2,500. Cheap business model, unique designs.

"Survey Signals Dubai Housing Boom Has Ended" (WSJ)

Even Dubai is on the real estate roller coaster:

"This city's six-year property boom appears finally to be over, with asking prices for some homes here falling as much as 19% in October from the previous month, according to a closely followed survey.

Home prices were climbing sharply as recently as the first half of this year. But over the summer and fall, tightened local lending collided with the global financial crisis to choke off easy credit. That scared away buyers, especially local and international property speculators who have helped fan years of price increases..."

"Anti-Prop. 8 Campaign Gets A Boost From Apple" (Los Angeles Times)

Cool, big business taking a stand on social issues:

"Apple Inc. said Friday that it was donating $100,000 to fight the proposed ban on same-sex marriages in California, taking a rare political stand that may win over some customers and irk others.

The computer and gadget maker joined such companies as Google Inc., Qualcomm Inc. and Pacific Gas & Electric Co. in declaring opposition to Proposition 8, which would define marriage as only between a man and woman.

“We strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights – including the right to marry – should not be affected by their sexual orientation,” Apple said..."

How Toxic Is Your iPod? (SCIAM)

"There's a big question behind this podcast: how environmentally friendly is an iPod? The answer: this Apple is more brown than green. But it's getting greener.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has not only revealed new environmentally friendly MacBooks, he has unveiled new iPods that are the most toxin-free ever. They’ve eliminated the poison arsenic and the brain-damaging mercury—and sheathed it in a recycleable aluminum skin.

Why do we care? When you trash last year's model—or any old technology for that matter, remember the Walkman?—it often ends up in a landfill or, even worse, exported to countries like China or India. There laborers are paid a pittance to smash, crack, melt and cook the materials out of old electronics. The result is local children with lead in the blood and adults poisoned by toxic fumes..."