That’s a pretty crass threat and bizarre that a US company can do this!

Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you’ll be fired | The Digital Home – CNET News.

Apps and websites that use the Google Maps API will soon have to pay $4 per 1,000 visitors Google announced today.

There is an allowance for small sites – the first 25,000 map-loads a day are free.

Google Maps API now costs $4 per 1,000 requests • The Register.

Basically it’s because econonmists allways calibrate the data – ie. change certain parameters to try to represent reality. Carter proved that even small changes to parameters make huge differences in the predictive power of a model. Economists calibrate and recalibrate their models all the time, leading to worse and worse predictions.

Why Economic Models Are Always Wrong: Scientific American.

Analysis: HP – Dial M for mayhem | Reuters.

Oops

As for what kinds of tricks the labels use, well, Frascogna notes “breakage fees” of 20%, which are based on breakage rates for vinyl from half a century ago. That CDs don’t break so much and that digital files don’t break at all, doesn’t matter. The labels still try to get a super high breakage rate that they get to deduct. For them, it’s pure profit. Then there are “uncollected account” withholdings, on the basis that some retailers go bankrupt and don’t pay for the stock they had. The way it’s described here, that’s often just a set number, rather than based on any actual, documented cases of uncollected fees. Next up? “Free goods.” Now, we talk about the importance of free goods all the time. But here it’s used in a different manner. Basically the labels deduct the “cost” of providing reviewers/radio stations/etc. with “free” copies of your album. That money comes straight out of the gross that the royalty is calculated on. The fact that you could just email the mp3 to those folks yourself? Well, pay no attention to that newfangled technology.

Next up, there are “container charges.” That’s for things like the jewel cases and inserts for CDs. Again, the fact that digital music doesn’t have such expenses is pretty much ignored. Also, the fact that all of these expenses get deducted from the artists’ share? That also seems wrong. Even more insane? Apparently the standard “container charge” is an additional 30% off the revenue. Again, in many cases that’s just pure profit for the labels.

Finally, there’s the ever lovely and totally amorphous “reserves.” As Frascogna notes: “no one really knows what reserves entail.” It’s basically a blank check for the record labels to claim they have to keep some of the money themselves for “other stuff,” which is mostly undefined. In this case, some labels simply set a straight percentage, up to 20% more of the gross that artists never get to see as part of their own royalties.

via RIAA Accounting: How To Sell 1 Million Albums And Still Owe $500,000 | Techdirt.

It has decided to roll back a days’ trading as a result of the stolen bitcoins, which were dumped on the market, crashing the value of a single bitcoin. Apparently there wasn’t that much cash involved (only $1000,-) which means that the bitcoin currency isn’t very strong at all.

Concurrently, a trojan has been found that scours your hd for bitcoins, and on top of that a hacker has released accounts and passwords for a slew of bitcoin users.

Huge Bitcoin sell off due to a compromised account – rollback

Bitcoin collapses on malicious trade • The Register.

Well, this is getting interesting. Last week, we noted that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, alone among the other G8 leaders, questioned today’s copyright laws, suggesting that they did not fit with the times, and pointed out that these century-old laws don’t seem to fit with today’s internet.

What the ‘free’ west can learn from ‘oppressive’ Russia!

via Russian President Proposes Creative Commons-Style Rules Baked Directly Into Copyright | Techdirt.

This page shows each ministry’s ICT projects, descriptions and budgets and how far they’re over or under budget.

ICT-dashboard | ICT-dashboard.

KPN: Where unlimited means limited!

I guess this is their strategy for people using whatsapp and skype services more often. It’s not a very good one, it’s like going back to the days where we paid a few cents per email… that business model didn’t last that long either.

KPN wil klanten extra laten betalen voor bepaalde mobiele internetdiensten. Daarmee lijkt de provider netneutraliteit aan de kant te willen zetten. Onder meer voor onbeperkt gebruik van voip en chat via 3g zal extra moeten worden betaald.KPNDe telecomprovider gaat bundels voor mobiele telefonie introduceren waarbij mensen tegen een meerprijs ‘extra faciliteiten’ kunnen gebruiken. Dat blijkt uit de woorden van KPN-topman Eelco Blok.Tegen Tweakers.net zei Blok dat gebruikers het onbeperkt gebruik van bepaalde diensten, bijvoorbeeld instant messaging en voip-diensten als Skype, moeten ‘afkopen’. Volgens Blok betekent dat niet meteen dat diensten worden geblokkeerd voor gebruikers die niet extra willen betalen. Dat strookt echter niet met zijn uitspraak dat onbeperkt gebruik moet worden betaald. Dat zou immers tot gevolg hebben dat mensen die niet extra betalen, de desbetreffende dienst niet onbeperkt kunnen gebruiken.

via KPN wil klanten extra laten betalen voor chat- en voip-diensten | Mobile | Tweakers.net Nieuws.

Background: In 2009, the EU discussed the issue of a term extension for the ”neighbouring rights” that record companies have to recorded music. These neighbouring rights are now 50 years from the recording of a song. The proposal was to extend them to 95 years. After a lively debate in the European Parliament, it was decided to extend them to 70 years. Then the issue got stuck in the Council of Ministers, where several countries (including Sweden and Denmark) felt that no extension was necessary. Now it appears that the Danish government has folded, which means that there is no longer a blocking minority in the Council.

Right now: On the agenda for the meeting of the European Parliament’s legal affairs committee JURI this Monday and Tuesday, there has appeared a point about making certain formal corrections to the text that the European Parliament adopted (such as the date when the new rules should enter into force). It appears that they have been trying to give the issue a low profile. The documents were not sent out to members of the JURI committee until last Friday, after we had explicitly asked for them.

Copyright term extension will be voted this week « Christian Engström, Pirate MEP.

A new study by Forrester Research found that maintaining a Facebook presence is less effective at drumming up business than plain old email newsletters or search ads. Companies interviewed for the study “received little benefits from Facebook,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Another recent study found that even print ads were better at fostering consumer engagement with brands than a Facebook page. Hundreds of thousands of people may “like” a brand’s Facebook page, but they don’t actually like it

via Nobody Actually Likes Your Brand’s Stupid Facebook Page.

A study conducted by the Dutch calculators came up with the conclusion that open source didn’t save any money. Not so, says the MOD – they didn’t take into account things like the same costs incurred for 2500 users are now spent to service 6000 users, a savings of 66%!

Rekenkamer blundert bij berekening open source | Webwereld.

internet kassa, ecommerce, e-commerce, internet payment, credit card, creditkaart, shop

PSPcheck.nl.

The European Commission (EC) suspended trading in carbon credits on Wednseday after unknown hackers compromised the accounts of Czech traders and siphoned off around $38 million, according to published reports.

EU countries including Estonia, Austria, The Czech Republic, Poland and France began closing their carbon trading registries yesterday after learning that carbon allowances had been siphoned from the account of the Czech based register. A notice posted on the Web site of the Czech based registry said that it was “not accessible for technical reasons” on Thursday.

The EC followed suit: issuing a statement on Wednesday evening saying that the EC was suspending transactions for all EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) members until January 26 in light of “recurring security breaches in national registries over the last two months.”

via Carbon Trading Halted After Hack Of Exchange | threatpost.

Allthough you lose quite a few subscribers, you keep the subscribers who are interested in your messages and you increase conversions. You won’t be put on a spamlist (if you mail a subscribed list with an option to unsubscribe). It also outperforms using social media.

Extreme Email Experiment: How Much Is Too Much?.

For the past 20 weeks I have been engaged in a very strange dialogue with the two noble Lords, in the course of which I have been trying to bring to their attention the willing availability of a strange organisation which wishes to make a great deal of money available to assist the recovery of the economy in this country. For want of a better name, I shall call it foundation X. That is not its real name, but it will do for the moment. Foundation X was introduced to me 20 weeks ago last week by an eminent City firm, which is FSA controlled. Its chairman came to me and said, “We have this extraordinary request to assist in a major financial reconstruction. It is megabucks, but we need your help to assist us in understanding whether this business is legitimate”. I had the biggest put down of my life from my noble friend Lord Strathclyde when I told him this story. He said, “Why you? You’re not important enough to have the answer to a question like that”. He is quite right, I am not important enough, but the answer to the next question was, “You haven’t got the experience for it”. Yes I do. I have had one of the biggest experiences in the laundering of terrorist money and funny money that anyone has had in the City. I have handled billions of pounds of terrorist money.

Baroness Hollis of Heigham: Where did it go to?

Lord James of Blackheath: Not into my pocket. My biggest terrorist client was the IRA and I am pleased to say that I managed to write off more than £1 billion of its money. I have also had extensive connections with north African terrorists, but that was of a far nastier nature, and I do not want to talk about that because it is still a security issue. I hasten to add that it is no good getting the police in, because I shall immediately call the Bank of England as my defence witness, given that it put me in to deal with these problems.

The point is that when I was in the course of doing this strange activity, I had an interesting set of phone numbers and references that I could go to for help when I needed it. So people in the City have known that if they want to check out anything that looks at all odd, they can come to me and I can press a few phone numbers to obtain a reference. The City firm came to me and asked whether I could get a reference and a clearance on foundation X. For 20 weeks, I have been endeavouring to do that. I have come to the absolute conclusion that foundation X is completely genuine and sincere and that it directly wishes to make the United Kingdom one of the principal points that it will use to disseminate its extraordinarily great wealth into the world at this present moment, as part of an attempt to seek the recovery of the global economy.

And it just keeps getting better!

Lords Hansard text for 1 Nov 201001 Nov 2010 (pt 0003).

Yup, the little kids have to fork over the money if they want to sing modern songs covered by copyright.

Kindergartens ordered to pay copyright for songs | Germany | Deutsche Welle | 28.12.2010.

American Express Identifies ‘A New Era of Pause and Purchase’ With Five Key Trends Driving Consumer Spending in 2011 and Beyond

Report Finds Locally-Sourced Goods, Digital Shopping and “Give-a-nomics” Are Among Top Trends Re-Shaping the American Consumer

More Than Half (54%) of Americans Said They Try to Support Their Local Economy

Over a Third (38%) of Americans Equate Being Good and Ethical to Quality of Life, Far Higher Than Being Rich (5%)

41% of Americans Cite Internet Accessibility as the Biggest Factor Affecting Spending Habits in Years to Come

via American Express Identifies ‘A New Era of Pause and Purchase’ With Five Key Trends Driving Consumer Spending in 2011 and Beyond.

Underground comic creator found out that someone had scanned his entire comic and posted it online in 4chan. Instead of getting pissed, he chatted with the people and his sales went higher than after being reviewed at Boing Boing!

UNDERGROUND » Pictures help us learn..

The directive will fully harmonise the period within which payment is due at 30 days. Companies dealing with other companies will be able to set that period at 60 days in their contracts, but must pay bills within 30 days if no contractual period is set.

Contracts will not be able to extend that period beyond 60 days “unless otherwise expressly agreed in the contract and provided it is not grossly unfair to the creditor”, according to the new directive.

Organisations that break those rules will have to pay interest at 8 per cent above the European Central Bank’s reference rate. They will also have to pay fixed fees to companies to cover costs. This will be set at a minimum of €40 but can cover all reasonable costs.

via European Parliament: If you don’t pay, you will pay • The Register.

Behavioral economics tells us that emotions can profoundly affect individual behavior and decision-making. Does this also apply to societies at large, i.e., can societies experience mood states that affect their collective decision making? By extension is the public mood correlated or even predictive of economic indicators? Here we investigate whether measurements of collective mood states derived from large-scale Twitter feeds are correlated to the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) over time. We analyze the text content of daily Twitter feeds by two mood tracking tools, namely OpinionFinder that measures positive vs. negative mood and Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS) that measures mood in terms of 6 dimensions (Calm, Alert, Sure, Vital, Kind, and Happy). We cross-validate the resulting mood time series by comparing their ability to detect the public’s response to the presidential election and Thanksgiving day in 2008. A Granger causality analysis and a Self-Organizing Fuzzy Neural Network are then used to investigate the hypothesis that public mood states, as measured by the OpinionFinder and GPOMS mood time series, are predictive of changes in DJIA closing values. Our results indicate that the accuracy of DJIA predictions can be significantly improved by the inclusion of specific public mood dimensions but not others. We find an accuracy of 87.6% in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the DJIA and a reduction of the Mean Average Percentage Error by more than 6%.

via [1010.3003] Twitter mood predicts the stock market.

Interesting: the OpinionFinder (which is itself examined here and GPOMS could be used to find other mood causalities…

Yes – Opinion Mining and sentiment analysis has a look at this

There’s a whole world of Sentiment Analysis out there!

The Norwegian traders, Svend Egil Larsen and Peder Veiby, were handed suspended prison sentences and fines for market manipulation after outsmarting the trading system of Timber Hill, which is a unit of US-based Interactive Brokers.

The two men managed to work out how the computerised system would react to certain trading patterns. This allowed them to influence the price of low-volume stocks for their own gain.

via Norwegian traders convicted for outsmarting US stock broker algorithm – ComputerworldUK.com.

I agree – it’s like jailing someone for using Word to write a letter – if you know that’s the functionality, that’s what you’re going to exploit it for. Then Timber Hill shouldn’t have used something so predictable as a computer algorithm and certainly not without oversight. Just because there’s money in it, it’s a crime?!

Dear website owner, congratulations on your excellent site, which includes features covered by our registered patent, #5,251,294. As the description indicates, many of the components on your pages, particularly your menus, rollover images, and shortcuts, are detailed in our claim. We would be delighted to lease these to you at a reasonable royalty rate of $80,000. Please call our offices at your convenience to arrange a payment schedule

Webvention acquired the property from the great patent gobbler itself, Intellectual Ventures, and has been having a grand old time with it ever since. The firm is suing Abercrombie and Fitch, Bed Bath & Beyond, Dell, Gamestop, E*Trade, Neiman Marcus, Visa and ten other companies for patent infringement on ’294. And the outfit wants jury trials in Texas. East Texas.

via Rollover image on your website? That will be $80,000 (please).

New Zealand has had a look at how the US software patents work and the mess they’ve made of things, so they’ve written up a bill stating that software is unpatentable.

NZCS News – - NZ Computer Society.

This shows how from every $1000,- of revenue, the average music artist makes around $23,- out of which the record company then recoups ‘expenses’.

” In a traditional loan, you invest the money and pay back out of your proceeds. But a record label deal is nothing like that at all. They make you a “loan” and then take the first 63% of any dollar you make, get to automatically increase the size of the “loan” by simply adding in all sorts of crazy expenses (did the exec bring in pizza at the recording session? that gets added on), and then tries to get the loan repaid out of what meager pittance they’ve left for you.

Oh, and after all of that, the record label still owns the copyrights. That’s one of the most lopsided business deals ever.”

RIAA Accounting: Why Even Major Label Musicians Rarely Make Money From Album Sales | Techdirt.

Of course, Hollywood does this too but on a much larger scale.

Which is why we need copyright laws – to protect the big companies. Screw the artists!