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<title>Haaze.com / feofanovv / Published News</title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com</link>
<description>Test Web 2.0 Content Management System</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Mar 2011 07:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Facebook to test Groupon-like deals service]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=facebook-to-test-groupon-like-deals-service</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=facebook-to-test-groupon-like-deals-service</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Mar 2011 07:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>feofanovv</dc:creator>
<category>Marketing and advertising</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=facebook-to-test-groupon-like-deals-service</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Facebook will soon begin testing a service that will provide its members local discounts, a move that will put it in direct competition with daily-deals giant Groupon.The service will be tested in Dallas, Austin, Atlanta, San Francisco, and San Diego, and will expand on the social-networking giant's Deals program, which offers users deals to members when they use Facebook Places to check in at local business, the company said. Members will be able to buy deals and share them with their friends on the network.&quot;Local businesses will be able to sign up to use this feature soon and people will be able to find deals in the coming weeks,&quot; the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said in statement today.Facebook plans to sell the deals through its own sales team, as well as working with partners such as Gilt City, Home Run, Pop Sugar City, Tippr, KGB Deals, Plum District, Reach Local, Zozi, and Open Table.With 500 million members, Facebook will bring a sizable user base in its challenge for dominance in the deals market, which brought in $873 million in revenue last year and could bring in $3.93 billion by 2015, according to a projection from consulting firm BIA/Kelsey.Chief among those competitors is Groupon, which has been riding meteoric growth with half-price massages, discounted restaurant meals, and travel bargains. Chicago-based Groupon, with 60 million users and more than 39 million deals sold in its two years in business, is expected to beef up its muscle with an initial public offering later this year.In addition to Groupon, Facebook will have to contend with a host of &quot;Groupon clones,&quot; including deals site LivingSocial, which announced a $175 million investment from e-commerce giant Amazon.com late last year.Facebook will also face competition from Google, which over the past couple of years has been losing employee talent to the social-networking giant. Just a month after being rebuffed in a buyout offer of Groupon, Google confirmed in January that it's preparing to launch its own social-buying competitor called Google Offers.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA['Compostmodern' fertilizes the creative mind]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=compostmodern-fertilizes-the-creative-mind</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=compostmodern-fertilizes-the-creative-mind</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 24 Jan 2011 08:11:06 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>feofanovv</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=compostmodern-fertilizes-the-creative-mind</guid>
<description><![CDATA[editor's notebook SAN FRANCISCO--I had the great good fortune this past weekend of attending Compostmodern, a two-day conference here devoted to exploring different ways in which designers can help create a sustainable future. And I'd like to mention a few of the tech- and Internet-related highlights--some of which are new, some of which you, like me, may have missed the first time around. There's a variety of supercool stuff here, so read on.Organized by the San Francisco chapter of AIGA (one of the country's premier professional groups for designers)--and sponsored by Adobe and other companies, the conference attracted designers and design thinkers of every stripe. Web designers, industrial designers, branding and communications specialists, architects, builders, educators--you name it--all were on hand to absorb and contribute.The first day was devoted to a series of brief presentations by the likes of Scott Thomas, the guy who oversaw design for the Obama campaign' Julie Cordua, who helped Motorola launch the Razr phone and went on to work with the &quot;(RED)&quot; campaign, which piggybacks on global superbrands like Nike and The Gap to raise money for AIDS relief in Africa' and Yves Behar, designer of the One Laptop Per Child campaign's $100 laptop. The second day was billed as an UnConference, where presenters and attendees broke into groups and engaged in several rounds of brainstorming, on topics generated by the attendees themselves.Samuel Cabot Cochran and Teresita Brigitte Cochran&amp;39's &amp;34'solar ivy,&amp;34' a project from the Pratt Design Incubator. (Credit:Samuel Cabot Cochran and Teresita Brigitte Cochran / Pratt Design Incubator)Following are some of the highlights from day one, along with links that allow for further exploration.Onetablet per childBehar kicked off his talk by adapting something he'd heard bad-boy filmmaker John Waters say: the job of the young is to annoy the old. Behar's twist The job of a designer is to annoy the rigid. The Switzerland-born, S.F.-based industrial designer then gave an overview of his work to date and talked about the importance of making sustainable design sexy and fun for mainstream consumers--and of creating innovative products that allow people to indulge their current lifestyle in sustainable ways. As an example, he offered up the all-electric Mission One motorcycle his Fuseproject firm designed. Unveiled in 2009, it sacrifices nothing in the way of sex appeal or performance--it can reach speeds of 150 mph. Behar also talked about the One Laptop Per Child campaign's effort to develop--surprise!--a tablet computer.GoodGuide on iPhone.&quot;GoodGuide&quot; goes AndroidGoodGuide founder Dara O'Rourke talked about how he came up with the idea for his Web site, which lets consumers search on products they buy to see how healthy, safe, and environmentally friendly those products are (or aren't). He was putting sunscreen on his toddler's face, he said, when he thought to investigate its ingredients. After far too difficult a search, he discovered that the product contained a carcinogen that was activated by, of all things, light. After working through his anger, he made it his mission to make such information easily available to consumers. The GoodGuide is already available as an iPhone app, which lets shoppers hold their phones up to barcodes for instant info (how completely awesome is that). O'Rourke said an Android version is due in about a month. (And for those without a smartphone, there's a version that operates via text messages.)Crowdsourcing the creative brainNathan Waterhouse of renowned design firm IDEO discussed OpenIDEO, a Web site that taps the crowdsourcing model to create a global brainstorming tool for designers eager to tackle issues of sustainability. Here's a sample &quot;challenge&quot; posted on the site: &quot;How might we increase the availability of affordable learning tools &amp; services for students in the developing world&quot; Winning concepts run the gamut, from the high-tech (a repurposed mobile phone loaded with a free educational software bundle) to the decidedly low-tech (a mobile puppet theater that teaches crafts and storytelling while highlighting social issues). Anyone interested in how technology might be used to fight global problems--and anyone who's simply interested in great, inspiring ideas--should take a peek at OpenIDEO.Here's a video that gives an overview of how the site works:Introduction to OpenIDEO / OpenIDEO.com from IDEO on Vimeo.Sharing the sustainable loveLisa Gansky, who founded Flickr competitor Ofoto and later sold it to Kodak, talked about her recently released book &quot;The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing&quot; and gave a glimpse of the online Mesh Directory. The directory is a guide to companies and organizations that &quot;create, share, and use social media, wireless networks, and data crunched from every available source to provide people with goods and services at the exact moment they need them, without the burden and expense of owning them outright.&quot; The idea is to help people buy less and use more. Companies/organizations included in the directory range from tool-lending libraries to car and bike sharing setups to home-swapping groups to online bartering services. There's also a section full of organizations devoted to developing socially conscious software applications. Does the site help promote Gansky's book Sure. But, hey, it also points you toward online book swaps.From homework to world-changing productDebera Johnson, founder of the Design Incubator at Pratt Institute in New York--one of the country's top art and design schools--talked about the Incubator's genesis. Johnson got tired of seeing impressive student projects end up in the student's senior portfolio and then just simply disappear. The Incubator's mission is to help bring the best of those efforts into production in the real world. Johnson showed off some stunners, including Samuel Cabot Cochran and Teresita Brigitte Cochran's &quot;solar ivy,&quot; small solar panels designed to be mounted vertically and that can, among other things, be shaped into letterforms to create lighted signage that generates enough electricity during the day to power itself at night.Those are only a few of the presenters. You can check out info (and links) on the others here.The biggest round of applause went up for Dan Phillips and his Phoenix Commotion project, which provides housing for low-income families, using recycled materials as well as materials salvaged from the construction industry. Phillips truly enchanted the crowd with his down-home charisma and fascinating images. You can check out a TedTalk with him here, in which he reveals how to make architectural details out of chicken eggs and Bondo. Go, Dan!If its goal was to inspire, Compostmodern did the job. I can't wait to see what sorts of sustainable gizmos and solutions all those pumped-up designer attendees produce in the coming years.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Hackers target carbon emissions trading market]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=hackers-target-carbon-emissions-trading-market</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=hackers-target-carbon-emissions-trading-market</comments>
<pubDate>Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:10:41 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>feofanovv</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=hackers-target-carbon-emissions-trading-market</guid>
<description><![CDATA[In a digital heist reminiscent of a John le Carr&amp;233' novel, more than $9 million worth of greenhouse-gas emissions permits were stolen from the Czech Republic electricity and carbon trading registry this week and transferred to accounts in other countries, at the same time as the Prague-based registry office was evacuated due to a bomb threat. That electronic theft, the latest in a series of security breaches affecting the market for carbon emissions, led the European Commission to suspend transactions in national European Union registries on Wednesday for a week. &quot;Three attacks have taken place since the beginning of the year and other registries are known to be vulnerable to similar attacks,&quot; the European Commission said in a statement today. &quot;The Commission's best estimate is that roughly 2 million allowances, representing a total of less than 0.02 percent of allowances in circulation, have been illegally transferred out of certain accounts.&quot; The much-larger carbon futures market was not affected, the agency said. Valued at 14.48 euros each, those 2 million allowances would be worth about $39.4 million based on today's trading.  Carbon emissions allowances, or permits, are not your typical computer hacker target. Similar to other commodities that are traded on spot and futures markets, European Union Allowances permit energy companies and industrial factories to trade their pollution permits by buying and selling allowances allocated by their government. For instance, a Romanian energy company that expects to emit less carbon dioxide for a particular year can sell its extra government-issued emissions allowances to a utility in Germany that expects to emit more carbon dioxide than its government permits.  Ostensibly, the trading system should be highly secure and trades carefully accounted for to prevent fraud and theft. But lax security at some of the registries and the fact that transactions can be completed quickly on the spot market are likely what is appealing to thieves, sources told CNET.  &quot;It seems it is relatively easy to access the registries in this country and other countries,&quot; said Nikos Tornikidis, carbon portfolio manager at Blackstone Global Ventures, from whose account 475,000 allowances were stolen.  &quot;Once you get your hands on the allowances, it is quite easy to sell them and the settlement is almost instantaneous,&quot; he told CNET in an interview today. &quot;In a matter of hours you can get money out of the system. This doesn't happen when you trade other things.&quot; The bomb threat coinciding with the theft of the allowances is just &quot;too coincidental,&quot; said a trader close to the matter who asked to remain anonymous. &quot;The registries have lax security,&quot; he said. &quot;They don't have mechanisms to filter the accounts&quot; by serial number to prevent theft. Some people suspect that an insider was involved, the trader said, adding that he believes it was computer hacking instead.  The market was operating normally until around 12:30 p.m. Tuesday when Prague police received a tip of a bomb threat and the offices of the Czech registry, OTE, which stands for Electricity Market Operator, had to be evacuated, according to Reuters.  Early the next morning, employees at Blackstone Global Ventures went to check their carbon permissions account and noticed that it had been nearly emptied out. In addition, the contact information on the account had been changed, something that should only be accomplished by someone with administrator privileges at the registry, said Tornikidis.  Blackstone reported the matter immediately to the Czech Republic registry and was able to find out the unique serial numbers for the missing allowances, he said. &quot;I hope that we managed to stop the trading at a point where our allowances are with the first buyers after the hacker sold them,&quot; he added.  The Czech Republic registry said a total of 1.3 million permits were missing from six accounts and that the digital assets were transferred to accounts in Poland, Italy, Estonia, Lichtenstein, and Germany, and possibly other countries, according to Reuters.  As custodian of the carbon emissions permissions, the OTE has a fiduciary obligation to account holders and should replace any that are missing, Tornikidis said.  &quot;I don't know how it is possible in today's IT world that someone is able to hack into an account where someone's assets are and transfer them out,&quot; he said. &quot;Why can't they follow the money trail&quot;  Jiri Stastny, chief executive officer at the OTE in Prague, could not be reached for comment and other employees at the government-run registry directed all calls to him. The Czech Republic is not the only country to have security problems crop up in the relatively new carbon emissions trading market. The Austrian registry reported theft of allowances due to hackers last week and 1.6 million allowances belonging to cement maker Holcim in Romania were reported stolen from that country's registry in November. A year ago, 250,000 allowances were stolen in Germany after companies there were targeted by phishing attacks, according to reports.  The European Commission is likely to require additional security procedures at the national registries, such as passwords being sent to mobile phones or other two-factor authentication methods, according to a Bloomberg report. <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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