Nokia sold less than 100,000 top-of-the-range N900 smartphones

Nokia sold less than 100,000 top-of-the-range N900 smartphones in its first five months on the market, researcher Gartner said, indicating it has yet to mount a serious challenge to the iPhone and Blackberry.The chunky computer-like handset  with slide-out keyboard and a touch screen   has found support among hard-core technology specialists but failed to attract a wider audience.

A spokesman for Nokia, the world’s top cellphone maker, declined to comment on the sales number, saying the company was pleased with sales, but an executive was more bullish.”Sales have substantially exceeded expectations,” Alberto Torres, head of Nokia’s solutions business, told the Open Mobile Summit trade conference in London this week.

Nokia has been unable to mount a serious challenge to Apple three years after the iPhone’s launch. Its last hit smartphone model, the N95, was unveiled in 2006.The sales of less than 100,000 N900s compares with sales of 8.75 million iPhones in January-March alone.

The N900, which went on sale last November, is Nokia’s first phone running the Linux Maemo operating system, which analysts see as a key for Nokia to regain ground in the coming years.

In February this year Nokia unveiled a plan to merge Maemo with Intel’s Moblin operating system.Nokia sold 50,000 N900s in the last quarter of 2009, and quarterly sales fell in January-March, Gartner statistics showed. Gartner does not track phone sales per model, but as the N900 is the only phone using Maemo, the statistics for operating systems show sales for the model.(Reuters)

Illegal immigrants plan to leave over Arizona because of the law

PHOENIX Many of the cars that once stopped in the Home Depot parking lot to pick up day laborers to hang drywall or do landscaping now just drive on by.Arizona’s sweeping immigration bill allows police to arrest illegal immigrant day laborers seeking work on the street or anyone trying to hire them. It won’t take effect until summer but it is already having an effect on the state’s underground economy.”Nobody wants to pick us up,” Julio Loyola Diaz says in Spanish as he and dozens of other men wait under the shade of palo verde trees and lean against a low brick wall outside the east Phoenix home improvement store.

Many day laborers like Diaz say they will leave Arizona because of the law, which also makes it a crime to be in the U.S. illegally and directs police to question people about their immigration status if there is reason to suspect they are illegal immigrants.Supporters of the law hope it creates jobs for thousands of Americans.”We want to drive day labor away,” says Republican Rep. John Kavanagh, one of the law’s sponsors.An estimated 100,000 illegal immigrants have left Arizona in the past two years as it cracked down on illegal immigration and its economy was especially hard hit by the Great Recession. A Department of Homeland Security report on illegal immigrants estimates Arizona’s illegal immigrant population peaked in 2008 at 560,000, and a year later dipped to 460,000.The law’s supporters hope the departure of illegal immigrants will help dismantle part of the underground economy here and create jobs for thousands of legal residents in a state with a 9.6 percent unemployment rate.

Kavanagh says day labor is generally off the books, and that deprives the state of much-needed tax dollars. “We’ll never eliminate it, just like laws against street prostitution,” he says. “But we can greatly reduce the prevalence.”Day laborers do jobs including construction, landscaping and household work for cash paid under the table. Those jobs have been harder to find since the housing industry collapsed here several years ago.

Standing near potted trees and bushes for sale at a Home Depot in east Phoenix, Diaz, 35, says he may follow three families in his neighborhood who moved to New Mexico because of the law. He says a friend is finding plenty of work in Dallas.Diaz says he has too much to lose by staying – he’s supporting a wife and infant son back home in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, across the border from El Paso, Texas.”They depend on me to survive,” he says. “I’m not going to wait for police to come and arrest me.”Jose Armenta, a 33-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico’s western coast, is already planning to move to Utah within the next 20 days because of a combination of the economy and the new law.”A lot of people drive by,” he says as he watched nearby cars speeding past, “and they yell, ‘Hey, go back to Mexico!'”

Analysts say it’s too soon to tell what lasting effects the law will have on the state’s underground work force, which also includes baby sitters, maids and cooks.A study of immigrants in Arizona published in 2008 found that non-citizens, mostly in the country illegally, held an estimated 280,000 full-time jobs. The study by researcher Judith Gans at the University of Arizona examined 2004 data, finding that they contributed about 8 percent of the state’s economic output, or $29 billion.Losing hundreds of thousands of unskilled laborers wouldn’t hurt the state’s economy in the short term, but it could limit the economy’s ability to grow once it recovers, says Marshall Vest, director of the Economic and Business Research Center at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management.Legal workers who are willing to take any available job now will become more choosy if the unemployment rate falls back to low levels seen before the recession hit.

“That’s really the question, as to whether the existing population is willing to work those (low-level) jobs,” Vest says. “I think economics provides the answer. If job openings have no applicants, then businesses need to address that by raising the offered wage.”Some illegal immigrants, however, intended to stick around.Natalia Garcia, 35, from Mexico City, says she and her husband – a day laborer – will stay so their daughters – both born in the U.S. – can get a good education and learn English. The couple have been living in Arizona illegally for the last 10 years.”Mexico doesn’t have a lot of opportunities,” she says. “Here, we work honestly, and we have a better life.”Olga Sanchez, 32, from southern Mexico, lives in Phoenix illegally with her two brothers, who are 21 and 17. While the youngest boy is in high school, all three work and send money back home to their parents.

“This law is very bad for us,” says Sanchez, who gets about $250 a week cleaning three houses. “I’m afraid of what’s going to happen.”She says the family is going to wait and see if the law takes effect and what the fallout will be before deciding whether to leave. The law is certain to be challenged in court; Phoenix, Tucson and Flagstaff already are considering lawsuits.”All I ask from God is a miracle for us to stay here and work,” she says.(AP)

cigarettes that allegedly contains pig's blood

A researcher at the Australian launch of research on cigarettes that allegedly contains pig’s blood. The content of pork is forbidden by Muslims is found in cigarette filters.Professor of Public Health, University of Sydney, Simon Chapman, pointed to recent research that identifies the use of section 185 of the pigs, including in the manufacture of cigarette filters.

These findings, told News.com.au Chapman said, could have an impact on the Islamic and Jewish groups.”The Jewish community will obviously assess this issue very seriously and the Islamic community will judge it very disturbing,” said Chapman, Wednesday, March 31, 2010.This discovery, says Chapman, who opened the dilapidated tobacco industry is not required to include in the composition of cigarettes. “They said,” this is our business and a trade secret. “

This pig’s blood, said Chapman, found at least one of their cigarettes sold in Greece. Ascertained pig blood used in making cigarettes.A study in the Netherlands found a pig’s blood was used to make filters more effective capture harmful chemicals before the smoke went into my throat. That is, these findings clearly do not apply to cigarettes that do not use filters.

pay for facebook ???!!! will you ???!!!

Facebook is the new king of social networking. But the site is stuck with an old business model that prevents it from cashing in on the increasing affluence of its users and the monopoly it has over their attention. Simply put, Facebook should charge.A recent study by Nielsen Claritas indicates that the top third of lifestyle segments measured by the researcher relative to income were 25% more likely to use Facebook than the bottom third. Meanwhile, less-wealthy segments were 37% more likely to use MySpace.MySpace popularized the concept of online social networking, and had relative success handing out free accounts and plastering them with ads. But this model does not appear to be sustainable; the unit of News Corp. which contains MySpace lost $363 million in the year ending June 30, and a rotating executive team is evidence that the business is attempting a turnaround. The youth and lack of spending power amongst its users is at least partly to blame for MySpace’s decline — so too is the downturn in online ad spending.

As fast-growing Facebook closes in on MySpace in the U.S. in terms of unique visitors later this year, it’s burning through millions of dollars a month (some claim it’s as high as $20 million), with no magic levers to reverse the trend in the short term.In November 2007, when Facebook took a $240 million stake from Microsoft, the investment was at a $15 billion valuation. Now it’s down to $4 billion and probably less. As Caroline McCarthy reported a few days ago, rumor has it that “one potential investor submitted a term sheet for a valuation in the neighborhood of $2 billion.”As Facebook works its way toward a probable IPO, the big question is: how can it show it can make money? Well, one way–and I’m not the first to suggest it–would be to charge a nominal monthly fee. With that in mind, I ask a simple question: how much would you be willing to pay to use Facebook per month?A lot of people I ask say they’d pay $1 a month–or, preferably, a yearly fee of $10 if paid in one shot. But some say they have Facebook fatigue and would rather quit than pay a dime.

An international love affair with Facebook is also a culprit. Not only has the site — started in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 — won over many younger users of MySpace, it’s introduced social networking to people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and older. As the Nielsen Claritas study hints, these users have jobs and bank accounts, and might be willing to shell out a few bucks a month for what is becoming an increasingly valuable communication tool in their lives.Another recent report from Nielsen says that 17% of the time people spend surfing the Internet is devoted to social sites, up 6% from a year earlier. No doubt, the quick and addictive status updates posted daily by users of Facebook and Twitter have something to do with the increase.Who knows? Social networking could prove to be an even more valuable business than news, an industry that’s giving serious consideration to charging premium subscriptions for online access. One difference working in Facebook’s advantage: many consumers have been getting online news for free for the past decade, and have grown accustomed to it. Social networking is relatively new.Facebook has shot down the idea of charging all of its members (the company’s COO Sheryl Sandberg in April said, “We are not planning on charging a basic fee for our basic services”). But the site may have plans to put a price tag on services, such as offering to print the millions of photos people upload to the site. It could also charge a nominal fee, like $1 per month, to let members avoid ads.



Light Shed on Mysteries of Deadly Jellyfish

Box jellyfish are odd creatures. Some species have 24 eyes. They mate in mass spawning, during which males and females never touch while they release sperm and eggs into the ocean and let nature take its course.Most interest to humans is the fact that box jellyfish can be deadly. But because jellyfish don’t make for good fossils, and few jellies exist in museum collections, little is known about their evolutionary history or the relationships between different species.Now scientists have gained new information about the distribution, relationships and evolution of these deadly sea creatures, findings that could eventually help researchers generate antivenom to save lives.

Who’s related to whom

Box jellies, also called sea wasps, stingers or fire jellies, live primarily in warm coastal waters around the world. They are particularly well known in Australia, the Philippines and the rest of southeast Asia, but they also occur in Hawaii and in waters off the United States Gulf and East Coasts. Some are harmless, others cause death to humans in just minutes.Named for their box or cube-shaped body, these animals are members of Cubozoa, the smallest class of Cnidaria, animals ranging from sea anemones and corals to Portuguese man of war and true jellyfish, all of which possess stinging capsules known as nematocysts.

Using DNA extracted from tissue samples, the researchers used a number of genetic tests and analytical techniques to trace the evolution of the various species and their toxicity and to sort out misidentified species. Among the findings: Box jellies may contain a unique family of proteins that, with further study, could help create antiserums.The Australian box jellyfish (Chironex fleckeri), the largest box jellyfish species, is considered the most venomous marine animal and its sting can be fatal. Its close relative, Chironex yamaguchii, has caused deaths in Japan and the Philippines. A much smaller species, Carukia barnesi, is the first species known to cause Irukandji Syndrome. Symptoms include severe low back pain, nausea, headache and vomiting, and sometimes “an impending feeling of doom”, but the syndrome is usually not life-threatening. Other box jellyfish species are now known to cause the same symptoms.“Knowing who is related to whom among the box jellyfish will be very helpful in making predictions about species that are not well known,” said NOAA researcher Allen Collins. Its possible an antivenom that works for one species might work for another, he said.

Where they are

Other species of jellyfish are known to swarm and takeover parts of the oceans. Box jellies don’t seem to move around as much as some species, however. The study revealed several patterns in the global distribution of box jellyfish species. Some live exclusively in the Atlantic, others in the Pacific, and still others are found in the Indian Ocean.”Geography seems to isolate species and most don’t seem to cross open ocean habitats,” the researchers said in a statement. “A few are found in all three oceans and may live in tropical regions around the globe.”The study, funded by the National Science Foundation and the PADI Foundation, is detailed in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.