defazio-rotary.com

Its white-collar focus–billionaire Bill Gates is proud of his profile–means that LinkedIn can attract premium advertisers and charge quite a bit for ads–reportedly $75 per thousand impressions.

The job cuts also come on the heels of the unveiling last week of LinkedIn’s new developer platform, as well as third-party apps that aid in trip tracking, file sharing, and presentations.

Business-focused social-networking site LinkedIn announced Wednesday that it is cutting 10 percent of its workforce, or about 36 jobs, as part of a restructuring to focus on its revenue-producing businesses.

The site, which claims about 30 million members, is small in comparison with social-networking sites Facebook and MySpace. But the average LinkedIn member is 41 years old and earns about $110,000 a year.

The layoffs follow LinkedIn’s announcement last month that it had raised an additional $22.7 million in funding from Goldman Sachs, SAP, McGraw-Hill, and longtime investor Bessemer Venture Partners. That round followed a $53 million series D funding round in June that gave LinkedIn a valuation of $1 billion. The latest round of funding brings the total funds raised to just more than $100 million.

Company representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“The whole area of cyber is probably one of the faster-growing areas” of the U.S. budget, Lockheed executive Linda Gooden told Bloomberg.

will only be good news for computer security firms that have been struggling to stay afloat the last few years when the government and private sector showed little interest in spending money to secure computer networks.

Along the way, DHS was regularly receiving poor grades–including an F–on computer security report cards released by a congressional oversight committee.

Whether that is money well spent, however, is a separate question, as CNET News’ Declan McCullagh pointed out recently in a look at the efforts of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Formed in 2002, the DHS has always had a stated mission of combating cyberterrorism.

Wired’s Threat Level blog says that the outlays — and defense contractors’ need to acquire expertise —

Over the summer, when he was still a candidate, Obama said he would make national cybersecurity policy and leadership a top priority.

In December, a commission established by the Center for Strategic and International Studies urged that President-elect Barack Obama create a National Office for Cyberspace. “America’s failure to protect cyberspace is one of the most urgent national security problems facing the new administration that will take office in January 2009,” the cybersecurity policy report says. “It is a battle we are losing.”

More than six years later, and after spending more than $400 million on cybersecurity, DHS still has not accomplished that stated goal….

And that, of course, is just a drop in the bucket of Washington’s monetary outpouring. Altogether this year, the U.S. government is expected to spend $7.4 billion to secure military, intelligence, and other agency computer networks, Bloomberg reported, citing market researcher Input.

Bloomberg has a year-end rundown on the efforts of the big defense contractors to tap into a market that could swell to $11 billion by 2013. Boeing and Lockheed, for instance, both set up new cyberdefense business units in the last six months, the news agency says, while Raytheon in the last 18 months has acquired a trio of network security providers and is looking to boost the number of its certified security engineers by 50 percent in 2009.

The industry side of the military industrial complex is on the scent of the federal government’s cybersecurity dollars.

In fiscal 2008 alone, the federal government spent $115 million on the department’s National Cybersecurity Division.

Sometimes, especially when you’re new to investing, investing in the same companies as someone with a proven track record of making money in the stock market is worth considering. A small service called Covestor provides users with the ability to do just that. But unlike sites like GuruFocus, which allow users to monitor professionals like Warren Buffett, Covestor lets its users track individual investors.

Covestor’s main goal is to “de-institutionalize fund management.” To do that, it requires users to sign up and create a profile that tracks all the investments they make by linking their brokerage account to the service. Covestor tracks user performance and provides a leader board for other users to find and follow top performers.

But the real attraction to SaneBull is the way in which users can access all that data. SaneBull is actually more that a research site; it’s a widget platform. And after opening the Market Monitor, users move a series of stock price, news, and key ratio widgets around the screen in any order they wish. They can even resize the images to squeeze more information on the canvas. The site also lets users embed those widgets into their Wordpress blog or Facebook profile.

InvestingMinds is an investment community where members can share opinions and advice on a variety of topics like stocks, bonds, and financial planning. And it’s that community that makes InvestingMinds such a unique and useful service.

Finding those companies isn’t always easy. You can go to sites like Yahoo Finance or Bloomberg to find data, but there are also some smaller, yet useful services that provide different perspectives.

Although SaneBull doesn’t provide anything unique to set itself apart from a site like Yahoo Finance, it’s a great service that makes tracking and researching stocks much easier.

Emerginvest

Even better, Emerginvest provides a link to brokerages that allows users to purchase the security in international markets. Unfortunately, though, I’ve found that few brokerages will allow their clients to acquire obscure international securities.

The self-proclaimed “Yahoo Finance for the rest of the world,” Emerginvest provides financial data about companies that are operating outside the U.S. Once you register for the site, it displays a “heat map” detailing the performance of markets around the world. That’s just a starting point for what is a deluge of financial information about companies operating in more than 120 countries. That data includes news, market overviews, sector data, individual company performance, analysis, and much more.

SaneBull’s main attraction is its Market Monitor. The tool provides users with live stock quotes, real-time news, and key comparison factors like financial ratios and Balance Sheet assessment, making it easier to determine the financial health of a prospective investment. Even better, it’s free.

SaneBull

InvestingMinds

Once the user signs up, they can create a personal profile and start communicating with other members on the site through its instant messaging and group platforms. The site also features an area to research companies of interest and create an investment portfolio that can be shared with the rest of the community. But the real value comes in the forums and blogs where investors share their insight into investing. That doesn’t mean it’s all valuable and it’s advised that research play an important role before making investment decisions. But by and large, the community does a fine job of correcting many of the outlandish ideas posited by some users.

Sure, the economy is in bad shape. Investing now can be dangerous. But that doesn’t mean you should be scared; it’s also a time of opportunity. There are
companies in the Market right now that are worth investing in and thanks to the recession, shares in many of them can be acquired at a discount.

One of the main issues facing sites like Bloomberg or MarketWatch is that most of their focus is placed squarely on U.S.-based companies. It makes sense–most of the visitors to those sites are looking for information on companies that operate in the United States. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need international data, and that’s exactly what Emerginvest provides.

It may sound risky to perform all the same trades as a person you don’t know, but in a strange way, it makes sense. If you use a fund manager, that’s all you’re doing anyway and at least by following others through Covestor, you can see what works and what doesn’t. Simply put, it’s a neat service that’s not only free, but very educational.

Once a user starts following another, they can determine if the person they’re following really knows what they’re doing and if so, instruct Covestor to make trades on their behalf by following exactly what the other person does. Once that happens, the followee will then receive some compensation from Covestor based on the follower’s performance.

InvestingMinds aims to combine the knowledge of the population to help the individual. And although there are some opinions by some users that are totally outrageous (”never considering buying Google stock,” for one), most of the information on the site helps investors gain a better understanding about investing and what precautions to take before jumping into it.

SaneBull won’t make you a better investor, but you will become a more informed investor. And that’s not such a bad thing.

Covestor

Before the conference began, the organizers used a carbon emissions-management software application in an effort to lower the environmental impact of the event.

More than half of consumers are willing to pay a little more for products designed with the environment in mind, while 22 percent said that they are willing to pay 15 percent more.

That’s not surprising given the explosion in green claims in the past few years. And when you consider the diversity of what’s considered
green tech at CES alone–from power strips that eliminate vampire loads to cell phones made from recycled material–it hints at the many aspects of “going green.”

The show organizer, the Consumer Electronics Association, earlier this week issued results of a survey that found that consumers are increasingly looking for green attributes, as are manufacturers looking to differentiate products.

Also telling were consumers’ responses to what is considered “green.” Over half of those surveyed said they didn’t know what the environmental attributes of high-tech products were and 38 percent said they were confused by the “green” label.

“Green is becoming a purchasing factor,” Steve Koening, director of industry analysts at the CEA, told the BBC.

Environmental watchdog Greenpeace held a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Friday to announce results of its second annual survey called “Green Electronics: the Search Continues.”

The good news is that manufacturers are using fewer hazardous chemicals, such as PVC plastic, and are running more electronic take-back programs. Another positive trend is the use of LED screens for notebooks, which are relatively energy efficient and use less mercury than other technologies.

Consumers are increasingly demanding better environmental attributes in their digital gadgets, but the consumer electronics industry can go a lot further to make gadgets “green.”

(Credit:
Greenpeace)

The assessment, which follows Greenpeace’s ratings of individual vendors issued in November, comes at perhaps the most environmentally themed CES so far.

But many manufacturers are slow in adopting EnergyStar energy-efficiency standards or using recycled materials. Consumer electronics companies should also take more responsibility for recycling, according to Greenpeace. (Click here for a PDF of the study.)

The CES show also hosted a Greener Gadgets Tech Zone and had a “Technology and Environment” session track with panels on electronics recycling and energy use.

The first event at the Consumer Electronics Show, called CES Unveiled, actually takes place a couple of days before the show officially opens. The press reception, which is sponsored by CES’ host organization, the Consumer Electronics Association, is an opportunity for a small group of exhibitors to preview what they plan to show at CES.

Lenovo, which several years ago acquired IBM’s personal-computer division, also introduced its first all-in-one integrated desktop PC, which features a remote control that gamers can use like the innovative controller of the
Nintendo Wii. Its “motion drive” feature allows the user to use the remote as if it were a virtual tennis racket or other moving object.

Unlike the Air, which starts at $1,799, the MSI notebook is expected to sell for between $700 and $1,000 when it becomes available later this year.

Lenovo's ThinkPad W700ds has a second pull-out screen.

The remote also doubles as a voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) handset that you can use to make Internet phone calls. The computer itself uses various flavors of Intel Core 2 Duo processors, an optional ATI Radeon graphics card, up to 4GB of memory, and as much as a terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) of hard-drive space.

And for anyone coveting the ultrathin MacBook Air whose wallet might be too thin to actually afford one, help is on the way from MSI, a Taipei-based company that showed off its X-Slim Series X320 “Super Slim” Notebook PC which, at its biggest point, is only .77 inches thick, which is pretty close to the thickness of the Apple MacBook Air.

Also on the wacky side, Lenovo showed off a notebook that definitely looks strange but might actually be practical. The ThinkPad W700ds has two screens (the “ds” stands for dual screen). The primary screen is 17 inches, but if you need extra screen real estate, you can slide out the 10.6 secondary screen from the right side of the unit, adding about 40 percent more screen space.

The secondary screen can be adjusted to your preferred viewing angle, “similarly to how a
car’s rear-view mirror tilts,” according to Lenovo. The idea is to give you additional space while working with photographs, Web browsers, or other applications that might otherwise overwhelm the notebook’s main screen.

As usual, products range from somewhat wacky to actually practical. One of the more unusual products was a 3D Webcam from Manchester, U.K.-based Promotion & Display Technology.

The Minoru 3D Webcam has two lenses, which makes it look a little like a cute creature from outer space. You mount it on your monitor, and it transmits moving images in 3D and, yes, your viewers need special glasses to see you in 3D. The software that comes with the Minoru has “stereoscopic anaglyphic processing,” that creates the 3D effect.

After devouring plenty of finger food at the reception, I’m not sure how thin I’ll be, considering that hard-working journalists like me will have to attend several more receptions before CES is over. But it’s my duty to press on, so damn the calories, and pass the egg rolls.

The $89 price includes the camera, software, and five pairs of red and cyan 3D glasses. I have no idea if it will catch on with the public, but it did win the Fan Favorite award at the Consumer Electronics Association I-stage event in October. The folks behind this product had better hope that those fans, and plenty more like them, have the vision to turn into customers for this unique device.

(Credit:
Lenovo)

Nerdz is a really simple way to manage a group of your favorite Twitter users. You simply drop in the names of the people you want to keep track of and it pushes their tweets onto a gray background with each tweet fading away as it gets older.

Nerdz was created by Aaron Boodman, who is currently a programmer at Google, and more notably the co-creator of the popular Greasemonkey extension for Firefox which is on the cusp of hitting 12 million downloads.

Nerdz lets you put together several Twitter usernames and see them in one simple stream.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

To add more names to your Nerdz list you just add them to the end of the URL, and they’ll be re-ordered alphabetically. You can send this link to anyone else as a quick way to give them suggestions of people to subscribe to, or simply use it as a no-software standalone for something like TweetDeck, which is all about making custom lists. Missing, however, is any way to click on their user name or individual tweets to go right to the Twitter.com pages.

I’ve put together a quick Nerdz of CNET News people if you want to give it a spin. See also GroupStatus, another Twitter friend organizer which we blogged about back in April.

Check out the Steamworks announcement made by valve today to see if you can pick out the similarities.

In an effort to prevent game piracy, Microsoft will be implementing zero-day piracy protection and server-side authentication, that hopefully will help prevent game piracy before a game’s street date, and include added protection for publishers and users by requiring authentication for online play.

For those of us that call many places our gaming home, lastly on the list is Roaming. Users can now save their personal settings back to their GFWL account in the cloud, providing access to their settings on any compatible and connected Windows PC.

To help users access additional game content in the most seamless way possible, GFWL is implementing a new marketplace API that, once implemented, will allow users to purchase additional game content while in-game, apparently without necessitating a restart.

Game for Windows - LIVE (GFWL) is an online gaming service for “Games for Windows”-branded PC games. It functions much like an
Xbox Live, but for the PC. On Tuesday Microsoft announced a couple of updates to the service.

(Credit:
Joystiq)

We’re not exactly sure at the moment how the details will work with this announcement, but it sounds like a big win for iTunes customers. One downer is that you’ll have to pay 30 cents to replace existing DRM-laden tracks with the new DRM-free versions, essentially upgrading those songs to iTunes Plus tracks. Check out this story from Greg for more details. The iTunes Store was slammed in the aftermath of the keynote, and service was spotty.

But iWork.com will be interesting to watch evolve. It’s in beta form for now, but if Apple works out the kinks, it could increase the usage of iWork especially if Apple finds a way to hook it into MobileMe.

At Macworld 2009, Apple's Phil Schiller revealed that the iTunes Store will now sell DRM-free tracks.

•  iWork ‘09: Does anybody actually use iWork? Easily the most underwhelming section of the keynote, the latest version of Apple’s office software didn’t appear to have anything compelling enough to cause a mass upgrade, other than perhaps Keynote Remote, which lets you use your iPhone or iPod Touch to control Keynote presentations.

•  iLife ‘09: There were some nice improvements with to the components of the iLife suite, such as geotagging support in iPhoto ‘09, improved editing capabilities in iMovie ‘09, and rock star instructors in GarageBand ‘09.

The most interesting part of this announcement, however, is the notebook’s battery. Apple is using a new type of battery that it says will allow the notebook to get between seven and eight hours of battery life, depending on which graphics chip is running.

The last San Francisco Macworld with Apple's participation saw Tony Bennett close out the show.

•  New 17-inch MacBook Pro: Apple completed its notebook refresh with this new model, which brings the unibody design, trackpad button, and new displays to the company’s largest laptop. It will cost $2,799, the same price as the current 17-inch MacBook Pro.

For all of you who weren’t able to follow our live coverage of Apple’s keynote address at Macworld 2009 earlier Tuesday from San Francisco’s Moscone Center, here’s a quick recap of the highlights.

•  DRM-free iTunes:
As first reported last night by CNET News’ Greg Sandoval, Apple announced plans to lift DRM technology from its entire catalog of 10 million iTunes songs by the end of April. Eight million songs are DRM-free as of today, and labels will be allowed to charge different prices for their songs, in a departure from the previous iTunes Store policies.

View the full gallery

•  The Philnote: Phil Schiller acquitted himself well in the starring role, usually accustomed to playing the role of Steve Jobs’ sidekick at these events. He wasn’t Jobs, although to be fair I’ve been covering technology events for eight years and haven’t run into an executive with anything even approaching Jobs’ presentation skills. But he engaged the crowd, made the proper offerings to the demo gods the night before, and ensured that the show would go on.

Photos: Jobs fill-in touts media, MacBook updates

Are they compelling enough to upgrade? That probably depends on the individual. Travelers will like the geotagging, budding musicians will like the lesson plans. One sour note: it doesn’t appear that anybody who bought the new MacBooks released from October onward will be able to upgrade to the new software without paying the full $79 fee.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News)

•  The rest:
No Steve Jobs sighting. No new
Mac Mini. No new iMacs or Power Macs Mac Pros. The line outside the keynote seemed smaller than in years past, although it also seemed that IDG did a better job moving the line along.

In order to get that technology into the notebook, however, Apple had to make the battery completely enclosed within the chassis: like the
iPod and
iPhone, you won’t be able to replace it yourself. Apple representatives did not have details on how the battery replacement program will work, although it won’t ship until later this month. Apple expects the battery to last five years.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News)

And Tony Bennett is the true ageless wonder.

Update at 2:08pm: Gizmodo reports the battery will cost $179 to replace, and it can be done at Apple stores or Apple resellers.

Click here for more Macworld Expo
coverage from CNET News.

…[Even so] for every Bono and his countless millions, there is a host of modestly paid session players, 90 per cent of whom earn less than [$22,500] a year….It will come as no consolation to them to know, if they do not know it already, that it was ever so.

For composers…copyright protection is very much a creation of modern times. Until deep into the 19th century, piracy of the most flagrant kind was the norm….In the course of the 19th century, ever-growing markets, bigger spaces for music and better communications allowed many more performers to make much more money….

Writing in The New Statesman, Blanning traces the history of the music industry, finding “Modern musicians’ lot compares very well to that of their predecessors.” Indeed, Blanning points out the very bane of modern musicians’ existence - the ability to record (and, hence, copy and distribute) music - is also the very reason that musicians have an opportunity to generate outsized returns on their musical investments.

There are no easy answers for the music industry, but in its quest to capture all possible digital revenue, let’s not forget that digitization has introduced dramatically more available revenue than ever before. A little “leakage” hurts, but not nearly as much as it would to go back in time and earn one’s keep by performance alone.

For those struggling musicians worried by rampant piracy and the subsequent difficulties in earning a living, Tim Blanning has news for you: it was ever thus.

commentary

The result? Today, good-but-not great bands like Coldplay can make tens of millions while the great composer Richard Wagner died a comparative pauper. With all the flaws of the modern system from pirates and ensuing economic uncertainties, we should be cheering the modern system and its digitization of musical content, even when some profit is lost to piracy.

Ever since musicians emerged from the servile but cosy world of aristocratic patronage into the harsh daylight of the public sphere, the musical profession has been a pyramid with a broad base and a sharp top. The new opportunities brought by every major technological shift have also left many casualties among musicians unable or unwilling to adapt.

Until music could be recorded, the only revenue available to the musician was from performances of that music. “Not even as great a virtuoso as Paganini or Liszt had a back catalogue.”

The Google Visualization API (application programming interface) previously could construct the graphics only from data stored on Google Spreadsheets. Now any Web-based data source, including databases and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, can be used, Google said.

Google made the announcement in conjunction with Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference Monday. Salesforce.com is adding its own new tools and technology atop the interface so its customers can more easily employ the visualization feature. For example, the tools can be used to create new customized dashboard-like monitoring and control panels.

A Google visualization tool that converts raw numeric data into charts, graphs, tables, maps, and plots has outgrown its initial ties to the company’s online spreadsheet application.