Outlook Business has a mult-part article on the prospects for solar energy in India in light on of the new policy measures. Two policy measures in the last month, the first by the Centre, hesitant, yet calibrated, and the second by Gujarat, bold and ground-breaking, indicate that the tide is changing in the struggling power sector. The Centre’s Integrated Energy Policy (IEP) is significant, for

In a word this post title says it all, I can only add that we need more Shane Crawford’s in this world.

Shawn Crawford confirmed that he gave his Olympic silver medal to Churandy Martina, the sprinter who finished second in the 200 meters but was later disqualified for running out of his lane.

[From Crawford confirms he gave Olympic medal to Martina]

By now we have all heard of Bernard Madoff. It is reported that his Ponzi scheme of $50+ billion dollars is the largest of all time. I've found one that may top Madoff's Ponzi scheme that may occur under the everyone's radar.

As you may know, several states in this country continue to have budget shortfalls. In a typical year, many of these local governments run a bit in the red and borrow money until tax revenues come in. Given the current state of world financial affairs, the projected tax revenue shortfall will likely bankrupt these governments. New York is facing a big shortfall, so is California.

CNBC reported today that in response to California's budget shortfall the state may be taking desperate measures to make sure it keeps running. Among those under consideration is the state simply writing I Owe You's to vendors. However, the state finance guy indicates that he is not likely to do that because it would affect the state's ability to borrow in the future. Thus, his solution is to simply delay the payments of people's tax refunds.

Does this sound a little bit like robbing Peter to pay Paul? Does this sound a little bit like the big hedge funds that have lowered the gates on redemptions? Perhaps this is so Bernard Madoff that people do not realize it. I am amazed that the world wants to send Madoff to jail, wants to demonize hedge funds for not allowing withdrawals, and wants to crucify anybody who runs a Ponzi scheme - yet when California wants to do something as preposterous as "delaying" tax refunds because of a budget shortfall, this goes unnoticed.

I am not an attorney, but this situation is akin to a clearing company utilizing clients' account assets for operating expenses. It is illegal and gets you a fine from the SEC and possibly shut down.

Thus in our great country, not only do you have to prepay your taxes and essentially pay for something ahead of time before your bill is due, you actually may have to pay for something that you don't actually owe. You pay your taxes ahead of time and then when there is no tax due, you don't get it back until it is convenient for the government. It is the taxpayers that should charge interest to the government who does this, not the other way around. It is once again the taxpayer who is bailing out the government.

Is it any wonder why people in this country try and hide their assets offshore?

Brilliant. All joking aside, this is a great concept for an affiliate shopping destination with great integration options to services that would be glad to have the traffic. Everything from gift services to Opentable.

PMSBuddy.com is a free service created with a single goal in mind: to keep you aware of when your wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, daughter, or any other women in your life are closing in on “that time of the month” - when things can get intense for what may seem to be no reason at all.

[From PMSBuddy.com - The free online PMS reminder]

• New Anti Tunneling Technology against Hamas' Tunnels
  Anti tunneling technology has become a priority for Israel. 2 Israeli scientists have developed a new way to detect tunnels using fiberoptic cables to create an underground electronic fence. The system will recognize the changes in the strain on a fiberoptic cable that occur when someone digs a nearby tunnel.

So the City of San Jose is distraught that Tesla pulled the plug on their planned factory in San Jose. Check out their math.

Construction would mean 600 jobs and $40 million in wages, according to an analysis by city staff, and the facility ultimately would employ 525 people with an annual payroll exceeding $100 million.

[From Plans for Tesla auto plant in San Jose appear doomed - San Jose Mercury News]

Let’s look past the construction jobs and focus on permanent payroll… the average employee at the Tesla factory, according to San Jose officials, would earn $190,000. We could speculate on bonus structures and additional taxable compensation components, but at any rate that is a lot for per employee at a car factory, it pretty much puts GM’s $78 per hour cost to shame. Okay, it’s also company HQ and has R&D but that is still a lot of coin.

I also question city officials for the wisdom of basing these projections and plans on a company that has failed to meet any of the original targets they set for themselves in the timeframes made public and to date has delivered a mere 160 cars.

PS- I pulled up behind a Tesla yesterday at stop sign, the car has some wicked acceleration.

TheDeal.com has an article on how the two bidders for the bankrupt copper mining firm - India's Sterlite and Mexico's Grupo Mexico - are pushing for a lower price. Listen to Grupo Mexico's lawyer, Jorge Lazale, who told the Arizona Daily Star that "today we are not willing to pay everyone in full. [Asarco] decided not to engage with Grupo and now they are paying the consequences. Now they will

It pays to be venture funded:  MyThings acquires Israeli start up ViewScore for an undisclosed sum, estimated at a few hundred thousand dollars, TheMarker reports. ViewScore has been struggling to raise funding in the past few months. MyThings recently raised a second round of $5 million.

The two companies have a clear synergy: ViewScore is positioned in the PreSale market, helping users get UGC recommendations for consumer electronic products. ViewScore has developed a crawler that aggregates user reviews and generates a total quality score.  MyThings is the Post Sale segment, helping merchants stay connected with buyers by providing support, documentation, etc. ViewScore’s three employees will move to MyThings when the deal is completed.    Source: The Marker

UPDATE: 

ViewScore’s PR firm conatcted me with an update on the rational behind the deal.  Here’s part of the email:

I wanted to reach out to you today regarding your post about ViewScore’s acquisition. I Have worked with ViewScore since 2006, and I wanted to make you aware of the following. 

The company was indeed in negotiations to raise money in recent months with several interested parties, but when the MyThings opportunity came, they decided it was a better opportunity. Why?

1.         The fact that all ViewScore employees (except for the CEO) are now employed at MyThings

2.         The market conditions for ViewScore’s competitors

This was by no means a fire sale, especially considering the company’s low burn rate and initial revenues. Instead, it was an opportunity to migrate from ViewScore 1.0 to 2.0 so that the intellectual property and concept can thrive.

Thanks for the update and good PR work!

Related posts:

1. MyThings Gets $5 More Million ‘Things’ In Round B Another round B was announced for an Israeli startup...
2. India’s Ybrant Buys Israel’s Oridian India’s digital marketing company, Ybrant Technologies has announced the acquisition...
3. Bubble Burst - web 2.0 for sale In the past two years we’ve seen over 1154...

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The American Society of Civil Engineers comes out with an annual report card on America’s infrastructure and it’s almost always grim… otherwise how would it make news?

This year the ASCE gives our infrastructure a D grade, same as last year except that we are now at a D- instead of a straight D.

Quite honestly I think we are looking at this all wrong. If we consider that the time required to build infrastructure projects remains stubbornly long and spiraling costs actually form the major impediment to retrofitting and replacement, well maybe it’s the ASCE that deserves the D grade.

It’s true that we build structures that are safer and satisfy diverse constituent requirements but at what cost? It is impossible to move the ASCE grade up to a B with the constraints and costs that these projects require; it should be a core mission of the civil engineering industry to find and implement new technologies that not only offer performance advantages but also cost and time to construct advantages.

Let’s take a look at two examples. The Brooklyn Bridge began construction in 1870 and completed in 1883 for a cost of $15.5 million, which adjusted for inflation is about $2.5 billion in today’s dollars. 125 years later it still stands and serves the critical needs of New Yorkers who walk and bike across it, travel by train, and take their cars on a bridge originally designed for horse drawn carriages. A $725 million project, 1/3 of the original cost to build the entire bridge (adjusted for inflation) is underway to replace approaches and repaint it.

The SF Bay Bridge began construction in May 1933 and completed in November 1936, the total cost was $77 million, or $1.2 billion in today’s dollars. This is real progress because in a 60 year span the civil engineering industry figured out how to build a much more complicated bridge than the Brooklyn Bridge, and much larger as well, for half of the cost (again, using very simple inflation adjusting math, which is subject to inaccuracies but used to illustrate a general point) and in a much shorter project time span.

Engineers knew for 30 years that the Bay Bridge was at risk in an earthquake and it was the 1989 earthquake which damaged the bridge that finally brought the issue into public consciousness, almost 20 years ago. After 10 years of study and debate it was agreed that a replacement for just the eastern span would be the best option.

Construction began in 2002 with an estimated cost of $1.1 billion, roughly equal to the original build cost. A significant design modification caused the price tag to balloon to $2.6 billion in 2003 and then skyrocket to $6.7 billion in 2005. The original completion date was 2007, 2 years longer than the original complete build required but as it turns out, a massively optimistic projection as the new scheduled completion data is not until 2013… 11 years from when construction began and only 2 years better than the Brooklyn Bridge required in 1870.

How the hell can we expect, as a country, to invest in large scale infrastructure retrofitting and replacement with these kind of numbers? If we can’t do significantly better in 2009 than we did in 1883, and be massively more expensive at the same time, we can give D grades to infrastructure year over year and little will change. I can think of a few entities that deserve to be graded equally harshly.