Archive for April 18th, 2008
“(Reuters) – A diamond thong worth S$168,000 ($122,000) was the highlight of a lingerie fashion show in Singapore on Thursday.
A model is carried on the shoulders of two other models as she displays a diamond-studded thong during Viva La Eve by Triumph at the Singapore Fashion Festival April 3, 2008. The thong, valued at S$168,000 ($121,106), is decorated with 518 diamonds totalling 30 carats.
The Triumph Luxurious Diamond Thong had 518 brilliant-cut diamonds, totaling 30 carats, studded into the front of a black lace thong in a floral pattern. The skimpy underwear that left little to the imagination also had 27 white gold tassels hanging off it.
Danielle Luminita, a brunette model from Romania, was carried down the runway on the shoulders of two male models wearing only the diamond thong.
‘It is very comfortable, it’s not heavy or scratchy or anything,’ Luminita told Reuters backstage.”
Tuberculosis
Posted on: April 18, 2008
- In: billion | health | killing | lungs | medicine | People | respiratory | TB | Tuberculosis | World Health Organisation
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Modern medicine is facing a resurgence of TB
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There has been a resurgence of tuberculosis around the world.
TB, which is a disease of the respiratory system, is now the biggest killer of women, according to new research from the World Health Organisation.
Figures show that 8.8 million people world-wide are infected with the disease.
It is estimated that two million deaths resulted from TB in 2002 alone.
How long has TB been killing people?
TB or Mycobacterium tuberculosis has been killing people for thousands of years. Tissue samples from Egyptian mummies over 4,000 years old show signs of being infected with the disease.
Some estimate that TB was responsible for around 20% of all deaths in England and Wales in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 19th and 20th centuries there has been a steady decline in deaths from the disease in industrialised countries. This was given a boost by the development of penicillin and other antibiotics in he last 50 years.
But the decline began to level out in he 1980s and since then the incidence of the disease has started to increase again. Some scientists have said the number of people around the world infected with TB has reached a 10-year high.
What is TB?
TB is a disease which usually attacks the lungs, but it can affect almost any part of the body. A person with TB does not necessarily feel ill but the symptoms can include a cough that will not go away, feeling tired, weight loss, loss of appetite, fever, night sweats and coughing up blood.
Like the common cold, TB is spread through the air after infected people cough or sneeze.
There is a difference between being infected with TB and having the disease. Many people infected with the TB bacteria do not develop the disease, as their body’s defences protect them. Neither can they pass the disease on. But TB can lie dormant in the body for many years and strike when the immune system is weak.
Who is at risk?
The disease is often perceived as most frequently affecting the elderly, and in industrialised countries a quarter of all cases occur in those over 65. But in the developing countries of Africa and South America, TB is most common among young adults.
Women of childbearing age between the ages of 15 and 44 are more likely than men of the same age to fall sick with the disease. Women in this age group are also at greater risk from HIV infection which makes them more susceptible to TB too.
In the developing countries, the leading causes of death of women aged between 15 and 44 are: TB – 9%; war – 3%; HIV – 3%; heart disease 3%.
Why is TB making a resurgence now?
One factor in the rising TB trend in both the developed and the developing world is HIV infection, which weakens the immune system. One third of deaths of those who are HIV-positive are TB related. Those with HIV are 100 times more likely to develop TB than other members of the population. Other people who are at risk from the disease include those with diabetes, the malnourished, alcoholics, and IV drug users.
Another aspect in the resurgence of the disease is the development of drug resistant strains which now affect up to 50 million people. These strains can be created by bad medical practice such as over-prescribing antibiotics or patients not taking the drugs long enough to get rid of the disease. Instead this encourages the bacteria to become tougher.
Treating patients with drug resistant TB is beyond the pocket of many developing countries. The cost of treatment can rise from $2000 per patient with non-resistant TB to $250,000 for multi-drug resistant TB.
The multi drug resistant strains are often fatal and have mortality rates that are comparable with those which existed before the development of antibiotics.
Some experts also blame lax public health procedures at immigration control for the rise in TB in developed countries.
Visitors arriving from less developed countries where TB is more prevalent may get little medical attention even if they admit to having the disease. Among black Africans in Britain TB rose by over 100% between the end of the 1980s and early 1990s.
How much of a threat is the disease?
According to the WHO, TB infection is currently spreading at the rate of one person per second. It kills more young people and adults than any other infectious disease and is the world’s biggest killer of women. In 1993 the WHO declared TB “a global health emergency”.
Researchers have calculated that 8-10 million people catch the disease every year, with two million dying from it. It causes more deaths world-wide than Aids and malaria combined.
The WHO predicts that by 2020 nearly one billion people will be newly infected with TB, of them 70m will die. TB blackspots include eastern Europe with 250,000 cases a year, south east Asia, three million cases a year and sub-Saharan Africa with two million cases a year.
Did Yahoo just raise its prices for search ads? Yesterday, Yahoo made a significant change to its advertising bidding system by removing the minimum bid for sponsored search keywords. The minimum bid used to be $0.10 per keyword. Now, the minimum bid will be set more dynamically based on two factors: the quality of the advertiser and the value of the keyword.
In theory, advertisers whose ads are clicked on more often will be rewarded with lower minimum bid requirements. But the past popularity of a keyword also goes into the equation, so a keyword that has been bid up in the past could also result in a higher minimum bid. So minimum bids have now become dynamic, and no single advertiser really knows what they are until they put in their bid for a specific keyword.
Already some search advertisers are complaining that their minimum bids have gone up 2X to 4X overnight. At this point, that is just anecdotal evidence. We will have to wait until the end of this quarter to see if the change has had any material impact on Yahoo’s revenues.
What is curious about this move is that it suggests that many keywords on Yahoo get bought at the minimum price, without any real competitive bidding going on. After all, if at least two advertisers are bidding for a keyword that means the minimum bid is no longer an issue. So it makes you wonder how effective Yahoo ad a”
“(Reuters) – Countries that act unilaterally on the world stage undermine the authority of the United Nations and weaken the broad consensus needed to confront global problems, Pope Benedict said on Friday.
In a major speech to the U.N. General Assembly, the pope also said that the international community sometimes had to intervene when a country could not protect its own people from ‘grave and sustained violations of human rights.’
The pope, who arrived from Washington on the second leg of a U.S. trip, became only the third pontiff in history to address the General Assembly.
Speaking in French and English from the Assembly’s green marble podium, he gave a wide-ranging address on issues such as globalization, human rights and the environment.
The international community must be ‘capable of responding to the demands of the human family through binding international rules,’ said the 81-year-old pope, who spoke after meeting privately with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.”
Live Current Media Signs a $50 Million Deal For Exclusive Online Rights To Indian Cricket
Posted on: April 18, 2008
Here’s a deal straight out of Rupert Murdoch’s playbook circa 1994. Just like Murdoch established Fox back then by paying an exorbitant-seeming sum ($1.6 billion at the time) for the rights to broadcast the NFL, Live Current Media is paying $50 million over ten years for the exclusive online rights to official content from the Indian Premier League (a new cricket league in India with a shorter, more fan-friendly version of the game—first match is tomorrow). Cricket is huge in India and elsewhere. It is a sport perfect for online distribution, with fans spread all over the world. Globally there are about one billion fans, estimates Live Current Media. And the Indian Premier League has already on track to generate $2 billion overall this year.
As part of the deal, Current Live will create and operate official sites for the Indian Premier League (IPLT20.com) and the Board of Control for Cricket (BCCI.tv). Current Live will pay the Indian Premier League $3 million a year, and the BCCI $2 million a year for the exclusive online rights to official photos, video footage, live scoreboards, match results stats, a fantasy cricket league, ticketing, fan polling, contests, and more. It is a pretty big commitment for Live Current Media, a domain-name company with revenues of $9 million last year and a net loss of $2 million. The Canadian companyis basically betting its entire $51 million over-the-counter market cap on this deal.
But Live Current also owns cricket.com, which will be seeded with content from this deal. Kulveer Taggar, the former CEO of Auctomatic (which was recently purchased by Current Live Media) and one of the internal champions of the deal tells me:
The Cricket.com vision is to create a site for cricket fans regardless of the country or specific league. Passionate cricket fans may be interested in watching a different league or may just want to stay up on all the cricket news they can get access to and that is what Cricket.com will deliver. Following this significant relationship with the IPL and BCCI, Live Current will be speaking with other cricket organizations and determining relationships for content, media access and distribution as appropriate.
There is no question that global multinationals are looking for ways to target the high-growth Indian market and that cricket is one of the few channels through which the majority of Indians are engaged with. It’s not surprising to see sponsors of the league such as Pepsi, Honda, and Citibank. It is not a local Indian phenomenon. There are major business players globally tapping into this market.
He expects to launch Cricket.com by the end of the summer or early fall. So really, this deal is all about gaining exclusive content for Cricket.com. But did Current Live Media pay too much for the rights? Taggar argues not:
Recently the Cricinfo.com site was sold to ESPN for over $50 million and while the site had good traffic, it did not have exclusive content rights negotiated for that price.
Google reported earnings for the first quarter. The fears of a meltdown were overblown. Revenue was $5.2 billion, up 42 percent year-over-year and up 7 percent from the fourth quarter in 2007. After traffic acquisition costs (what Google pays its publisher partners) revenues directly to Google were $3.7 billion. Net income for the quarter was $1.31 billion, up 8 percent from the fourth quarter.
A recording of the call is here.
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Paid click growth was 20 percent year-over-year, vastly different than the flattish growth comScore was estimating. Also significant is that this is the first time international revenues exceeded U.S. revenues (51 percent of the total).
The earnings call is about to start. Here are my notes:
Eric Schmidt: Strategy of search, ads, and apps is beginning to pay off. Actually “transformative” in that it is letting people do things they were not able to before.
We are putting more control in the hands of advertisers. Doubleclick is hugely strategic. Allows us to offer a more comprehensive solution.
The recently announced Salesforce.com partnerships allows us to integrate Salesforce and Google apps. by doing these partnerships and investing in the app model, we think people will be able to do more things online in a way that was not possible before like share documents and calendars.”
Paid click growth was 20 percent year-over-year, vastly different than the flattish growth comScore was estimating. Also significant is that this is the first time international revenues exceeded U.S. revenues (51 percent of the total).
The earnings call is about to start. Here are my notes:
Eric Schmidt: Strategy of search, ads, and apps is beginning to pay off. Actually “transformative” in that it is letting people do things they were not able to before.
We are putting more control in the hands of advertisers. Doubleclick is hugely strategic. Allows us to offer a more comprehensive solution.
The recently announced Salesforce.com partnerships allows us to integrate Salesforce and Google apps. by doing these partnerships and investing in the app model, we think people will be able to do more things online in a way that was not possible before like share documents and calendars.
George Reyes: Results include DoubleClick since the acquisition was complete, but not materials in the quarter. Paid click growth on Google.com remains healthy.
Traffic acquisition costs of $1.5 billion in the Q was 29% of revenues, down from 30% in Q4.
19,156 employees at the end of the quarter, including DoubleClick. 20% (?) of U.S. DoublelClick employees have been laid off, and another 15% are expected to leave. Only in the U.S., Internationally, keeping all the headcount.
$1.78B cash flow, capex $842M,
free cash flow $938M, up 50 percent year-over-year
Sergey Brin:
Let me highlight search improvements in last 90 days. have launched more than 100 improvements in search quality. New tailored home pages in international markets, such as Japan. Also better job in foreign countries selecting domestic results.
UI improvements: can search within site on the search results page.
In the past year we have deployed Universal Search. Over the past year since we launched it able to double the number of queries where we show theses, especially images, maps and books.
On maps, have deployed Streetview in more cities (12?). Also including user-contributed data. allow users to correct information on Maps.
We have also been working on difficult queries. We were able to make a very large improvement in what we consider the hardest 20 percent of our queries. that was a big achievement that really stands out n my mind.
Mobile: faster search experience. Mobile available in 40 languages. Mobile search growing very rapidly. Mobile users now get entire library of YouTube videos.
We were pleased with our participation in the 700MHz spectrum auction. We are pleased with the results that will benefit Google and developers alike.
Larry Page: Launched Google Ad Manager for publishers. In testing publishers greatly increased their revenues. Also launched demographic targeting on social networks.
On AdWords, Conversion Optimizer which we launched in Q07 now seeing a lot of adoption. Can pay by conversion instead of by click. In Analytics, we launched industry benchmarking. A very popular feature. We find that people who use Analytics end up increasing their ad spend with us.
On YouTube, AdSense for video and in-video ads, seeing much better clickthroughs than banner ads.
Launched Google Sites, also rolled out offline Docs using Google Gears. We are also very excited about our Salesforce.com partnership [Oh, just buy them already].
Q&A:
UBS: Can you talk about key initiatives at DoubleClick? How are video ads doing? Also update on CFO search.
Eric: On CFO search, we have a whole bunch of interesting candidates. We have not made any offers yet.
?: From a customer relationship point of view on the display side we are taking advantage of our properties,especially YouTube. We are taking advantage of the DoubelClick salesforce to reach new advertisers.
Jonathan: We feel we are in a position to become the world’s largest display ad provider. 90 percent of our ads are available for display ads. Activision used 7 Google products to launch Tony Hawk game [really going after integrated buys].
Merrill Lynch: Can you talk about display model, on network sites or your own? What is driving cost of revenue growth?
Sergey: YouTube is already running display ads. Other sites like Orkut could be candidates. Also making strides on the network. Optimistic on both fronts.
Reyes: Costs are driven by data center expenses, bandwidth costs and some DB amortization.
Q: Is Google not seeing macro impact
Eric: on the macro side, we have looked at this closely and not seeing that at this time. We are well positioned should economics change because our model is so targeted, and targeted advertising does well in most scenarios we feel.
Sergey: I was not referring to advertising improvements. But clickable backgrounds that we eliminated resulted in improvements. Certainly dozens of improvements in advertising quality we launched in the quarter.
Q: Which quality improvements have had the greatest impact on advertising?
Jonathan: There were relatively fewer in terms of impact on the quarter than we normally have because they came at the end. landing page quality improvements. have removed a lot of the made for ad. pages. Also URL matching policy, change in UK trademarks policy, removed restrictions on trademarks in the UK. The one other thing that I saw was just a very modest test, automatic matching beta test, trying to extend reach of advertiser.
Mark Mahaney: Are there enough data points so you know what the economics of mobile search will be vs. desktop search. At 20% year over year paid click growth, that was better than expected. Is that sustainable?
Sergey: On mobile anecdotally, in countries and markets where mobile has been developed, where there are devices and low latency like Japan. Mobile search and ads work very well. I don’t have the exact data. Nothing to dissuade me that it would be substantially different than traditional desktop search. In Europe and the U.S., which are behind but progressing, you will see more usage.
You have smaller screens so cannot display as much but have more information.
Eric: answer to your deceleration Q is No. We k now if we can improve aggregate quality the number of paid clicks will grow. We are very optimistic that this model of staying focussed on quality will give us the strongest ad network.
JPMorgan: You talked about monetization improvement fro social networking. What kind of improvement versus Q4? Also in terms of search quality
Larry: On social networking monetization, it is an area where we have tried a lot of new technologies. Demographic targeting has been successful. The challenge and the opportunity is that there is a lot of inventory. Part of it is just getting the advertising ecosystem built up and targeting in a way that makes sense. We have made some improvements but there are more improvements to be made. It takes time for advertisers to [get up to speed].
Q: Should Yahoo choose to outsource search to you, what benefit would it be to Google’s own network? And can you talk about different economic sectors, what you are seeing?
Eric: On the yahoo Q, we are very excited to be participating in this test. Second week of the test. It is nice to be working with Yahoo and we like them very much. Not appropriate to comment beyond that.
Jonathan: in an economy hat is slowing you would look at sectors like autos and travel. What we see is that clicks in some of those ares grow less than other areas, but on an absolute basis hose areas are doing well, absolute growth. Even in mortgages.
Q: Any updates on China and the team there?
Eric: On the China side, things are moving well. Why don’t we move to the next question. [Hmm, sounds like he really didn’t want to talk about that. Actually he just didn’t hear it. See response below.]
Q: Which area is growing faster, small self-sign up advertisers or large agencies?
?: We do see bigger advertisers be bigger drivers of growth [because they use more tools].
MorganStanley: As DoubleClick is integrated, will that drive more revenue growth?
Adding more display creates more competition among advertisers. There are plenty of reasons to believe there are positive dynamics.
Q: You mentioned 90% of ad formats are eligible for display, can you talk about effective CPMs of display versus search ads?
Omid: We let advertisers pay any way they like.
Jonathan: what we are trying t do is come up with a way to manage the auction so the text ads compete with the display ads, so three text ads versus one display ad units. That is basically how it works.
Eric Let me on china, we are seeing market share and revenue growth as we learn to operate in that environment. The market is nascent by the Internet is so large. [He wasn’t ducking the question before, just didn’t hear it the first time].
Q: U.S. revenues were up $29 million. Without DC it could have been flat. Is this sequential growth that you put up this Q is that more a reflection of where we are in the search cycle in the U.S.
Eric: We know what it is not, not macro economic. could have something to do with timing of deals, maturity of search advertising n the Us.
Jonathan: you have to be careful when you look at annualized YOY comparison. In the base Q you are comparing to, this Q last year we added a lot of big partners to AdSense. relative to that year we did not have a lot of big partners to add. It is primarily a factor for that. Also the AdSense for Domains cleanup.
Eric: This is the Q our international sales are 51 percent, I don’t think that number is going to go down. this is the quarter the sales team made Google a truly international company.
Call is over.
You’ve seen hot celebrities, you’ve seen careless (but entertaining) celebrities, now it’s time for the worst celebrity trainwrecks, ever.
How much damage can money and fame do to people? We get a fair idea of it every day with our regular celebrity gossip, but to get a clear picture of how f-ked up celebrities really are, we went ahead dug up the dirt (it wasn’t that hard, trust us) on some of the most popular screwups in pop culture.
Before we start – this is a list, not a ranking – so don’t be surprised if one of the strangest celebrities of all-time comes in at #51, or why Britney Spears isn’t #1 (surprisingly, she’s not the worst of the bunch, but that’s a different story). Click on the celebrity’s name to get their ‘rap sheet’.
The “Will They Ever Learn?” Trainwrecks
1. Pete Doherty
2. Amy Winehouse
3. Britney Spears
4. Lindsay Lohan
5. Paris Hilton
6. Kirsten Dunst
7. Mischa Barton
8. Michelle Rodriguez
9. Kiefer Sutherland
10. Kate Moss
11. Naomi Campbell
12. Sienna Miller
The “Golden Oldies”
13. Sean Young
14. Daniel Baldwin
15. Mel Gibson
16. Heidi Fleiss
17. Tom Cruise
18. Paula Abdul
19. David Hasselhoff
20. Keith Richards
21. Sharon Stone
22. Roseanne Barr
The “We Never Saw Them Coming” Trainwrecks
Celebrities who surprised us with their ability to mix with the best trainwrecks on this list. Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but these are the ones no one saw coming.
23. Eva Mendes
24. Owen Wilson
25. Lily Allen
26. Vanessa Hudgens
27. Jenna Jameson
28. Isaiah Washington
29. Jamie Lynn Spears
30. Katie Rees
31. Jessica Sierra
32. Brooke Hogan
33. Mary Kate Olsen
34. Avril Lavigne
The “Media Whores”
Celebrities who, for some reason or the other, seem to thrive on making fools of themselves in the press.
35. Tara Reid
36. Heather Mills
37. Calum Best
38. Jesse Metcalfe
39. Jordan
40. Bai Ling
41. Bobby Brown
42. Kim Kardashian
43. Pamela Anderson
Trainwrecks “Beyond Help”
You couldn’t fix these trainwrecks even if you tried (as I’m sure many medical professionals have)…
44. Michael Vick
45. Tom Sizemore
46. O.J. Simpson
47. Andy Dick
48. Anna Nicole Smith
49. Jonathan Rhys Meyers
50. Lil Kim
“Just Plain Odd” Trainwrecks
51. Michael Jackson
52. Lauryn Hill
53. Courtney Love
54. Jocelyn Wildenstein
“Blog search engine Technorati was days away from merging with blog network b5media when the whole deal blew up earlier this week, according to a source familiar with the negotiations.
Technorati has been searching for a new strategy ever since it appointed CEO Richard Jalichandra last October. It was recently trying to raise an additional round of financing, and pitching venture capitalists that it could turn itself into a blog advertising network and/or even pursue a blog roll-up strategy.
b5media-logo.pngThe talks with Toronto-based b5media (they’re big in Canada) indicate that it is taking the blog roll-up idea more seriously than we previously thought. If the merger with b5media had gone through, Technorati would have gained a network of 340 blogs. One of the slides in the pitch deck Technorati was showing potential investors (shown above) outlines how a roll-up strategy could be combined with an ad network. Technorati would use its search engine to promote owned-and-operated blogs. It would sell ads using its own sales force instead of third-party ad networks for an “immediate 30-50% revenue bump” and sell across its network.”
TechCrunch
Posted on: April 18, 2008
“Mark Zuckerburg’s creation has a new role. Fighting crime in Manchester, England. Greater Manchester Police (GMP) (reports TechCrunch UK) has launched a Facebook application which adds local crime alerts to your profile and news feed, getting the news about crime incidents out there to more youthful users of the Net than is normal for most police operations. Users can submit items via links to GMP on the application, and as well as news items, and even get GMP’s YouTube videos. The application appears to be the first of its type in the UK (I’m not sure about the world, but it could be a contender for that title). Quite who developed the app is as yet uknown, but I’ll update when I find out.”
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