The man who tweeted the attack on Osama bin Laden -- without knowing it - storify.com. Europe Investigates Banks Over Derivatives. 11:05 a.m. | Updated European Union antitrust regulators announced on Friday two sweeping antitrust investigations into the world’s largest banks and their roles in a market for derivatives where a small number of companies control trillions of dollars of financial instruments. The European officials are looking at whether banks, including Barclays and Goldman Sachs, have harmed rival organizations that could compete in markets for providing information and clearing a form of transaction that had become critical to the smooth functioning of the entire economy. “Lack of transparency in markets can lead to abusive behavior and facilitate violations of competition rules,” the European Union antitrust commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, said in a statement.
“I hope our investigation will contribute to a better functioning of financial markets and, therefore, to more sustainable recovery.” The banks are involved in two crucial components of the market for credit default swaps. Recovered Techcrunch Editor Discloses Investments, Admits To Conflict Of Interest. Posted by Tom Foremski - April 27, 2011 Mike Arrington, editor and founder of Techcrunch, an AOL company, today disclosed his investments in some high profile startups. He said he had refrained from making investments in startups since 2009 because of distracting accusations of conflicts of interest but that he had recently changed that policy (following the sale of Techcrunch to AOL). Over the last several months I have begun investing actively again. We've noted these investments in Shawn Fanning's new startup and in Kevin Rose's new startup.I have also become a limited partner in two venture funds, Benchmark Capital and SoftTech VC.
He says he is OK with having financial conflicts of interests in his reporting: There's a very good chance that I'll be a direct or indirect investor in a lot of the new startups in Silicon Valley, and that will mean that there will be financial conflicts of interests in a lot of my stories. Foremski's Take: -Techrunch reporters will become investors too. How to translate your tweets into other languages using hashtags - TNW Twitter. While you probably wouldn’t want to do it too often, there are might be times tweeting the same message in multiple languages might be useful.
A new app has been designed to let you easily do just that. Developer Chi Poon says he created the app as a reaction to Japan’s recent troubles. “Being in Japan, I kept up to date on the earthquake, tsunami, and radiation situation by following my Japanese friends’ Twitter feeds,” he explains. “Unfortunately my Japanese is not the best and I couldn’t understand what they tweeted, so I relied heavily on regular English news which was delayed. To solve this problem, Chi built an automatic translator tool based on the Google Translate API. Once you’ve linked your Twitter account to the app, you just need to add the relevant hashtag for the language you want to translate into at the end of your tweet. 58 languages are supported and you can even add multiple hashtags to produce tweets in a number of languages at once.
Decline, plateau, decline: New data on The Daily suggests a social media decline and a tough road ahead. While the news industry looks at smartphone and tablet apps as a chance to build more engaged readers — and maybe even get people to pay! — for those of us who watch the business, apps are frustratingly opaque. With sites on the open web, there are any number of ways for outsiders to estimate the size of audience a news outlet is reaching. They’re imperfect, but they’re out there. But for, say, apps sold in Apple’s App Store, the only data available is pretty poor. For top sellers, you can see where they rank among other free or paid apps, but those numbers flit around from day to day. The number of ratings or reviews tell you something, but not a lot. And some of the most interesting work in the future of news is happening in these apps — for instance, in The Daily, which is trying to both create an iPad-native experience and get people to pay 99 cents a week for it.
So I set out to see if there was some way to use publicly available data to try to understand at The Daily’s readership. Obama, Romney and the Uncommin American Family. The Real Housewives of Wall Street | Rolling Stone Politics. The Best Information Comes From Short Questions. There’s no better way to improve the quality of information you receive from a potential customer than by asking short questions. We all can recall far too many times when we’ve sat across the table from a customer we’re trying to help – and we know we can help, if they would just provide us information about their needs and goals. The problem is that no matter what question we ask, we get the same response: a big fat “I don’t know” (or something along that line). Then, almost without thinking, we put on our super salesperson cape and start telling the person everything they need.
Unfortunately, when it comes to agreeing to the sale, the person turns cold. Our problem in dealing with this type of customer is we need to find a better way to engage them and to get them to think about what they want and need – and then share that information with us. The answer to this dilemma? For example, we ask a question that has a couple of facts wrapped up in it. Short questions get you long answers. What will your next Tweet say? This site thinks it knows. - TNW Shareables. 6 painful social media screwups - Chrysler drops the F-bomb (1) - CNNMoney.com. Big Auto is the industrial core of Motor City, and post-bankruptcy Chrysler showed its hometown pride with a splashy Super Bowl ad called "Imported from Detroit.
"