Ohio Begs Lawyers: Help With Foreclosure Crisis

Does the Chief Justice’s call to action resonate with you? Is the mortgage crisis, as Ohio’s state treasurer says, the defining issue of our time?

clipped from blogs.wsj.com How bad is the housing crisis in Ohio? So bad that the state’s chief justice is begging lawyers for help, and the state treasurer urges, “To anyone who wants to make a difference in the world, this is a defining issue of our time.” Foreclosures have spiked in the Buckeye State, clogging the court system. And yesterday, Chief Justice Thomas Moyer urged lawyers to offer pro bono services to distressed homeowners, according to this NLJ story. “This is more than a legal issue; this is a social issue,” Moyer said, according to a news release. “People’s lives are being seriously affected and the legal community must respond with action.” Ohio has among the highest foreclosure rates in the country. In 2007, foreclosure filings are up nearly 68% from last year, according to RealtyTrac. But does the Chief Justice’s call to action resonate with you? Is the mortgage crisis, as Ohio’s state treasurer says, the defining issue of our time?

Epix Soars 50% On Alzheimer's Data

clipped from blogs.forbes.com EPIX Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: EPIX - News), today announced compelling top-line results from a Phase 2a two-week clinical trial of its novel 5-HT4 agonist, PRX-03140, in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The results show that patients receiving 150 mg of PRX-03140 orally once daily as monotherapy achieved a mean 5.7 point improvement on the Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale cognitive subscale (ADAS-cog) versus a 0.2 point worsening in patients on placebo (p= 0.005). Patients on a 50 mg dose of PRX-03140 showed a 1.1 point improvement on the ADAS-cog. After reviewing these data, Serge Gauthier, M.D., Director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Unit at McGill University, stated, “There is such an urgent and undeniable need for additional safe and effective treatments for Alzheimer’s patients. Findings like these data are not only encouraging and compelling – they appear to represent a step forward in our ability to understand and combat the effects of Alzheimer’s.

Start-Up Sells Solar Panels at Lower-Than-Usual Cost

Write this name down and keep in mind when the IPO rolls around.

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Nanosolar, a heavily financed Silicon Valley start-up whose backers include Google’s co-founders, plans to announce Tuesday that it has begun selling its innovative solar panels, which are made using a technique that is being held out as the future of solar power manufacturing.

The company, which has raised $150 million and built a 200,000-square-foot factory here, is developing a new manufacturing process that “prints” photovoltaic material on aluminum backing, a process the company says will reduce the manufacturing cost of the basic photovoltaic module by more than 80 percent.

Nanosolar, which recently hired a top manufacturing executive from I.B.M., said that it had orders for its first 18 months of manufacturing capacity. The photovoltaic panels will be made in Silicon Valley and in a second plant in Germany.

Nanosolar has focused on lowering the manufacturing cost

Nanosolar

claims to be the first solar panel manufacturer to be able to

sell solar panels for less than $1 a watt

Nearly 20,000 Downgrades — and Counting

clipped from blogs.wsj.com The tsunami of subprime-related bond downgrades this quarter sent shockwaves throughout the financial markets. Now that the tide has weakened, analysts are surveying the wreckage. According to research from Deutsche Bank, credit rating companies Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings have issued an unprecedented 19,795 debt downgrades so far this year among securitized assets. That compares with the 2,539 separate downgrades they issued for all of 2006, and the previous annual record for downgrades, which was 4,168 in 2003. The percentage of subprime-mortgage-backed debt affected by downgrades is much higher – for example, 58% of collateralized debt obligations backed by subprime collateral that were issued from 2005 to 2007 have been downgraded “Even more alarming is the degree to which very highly rated securities seem to have deteriorated overnight some securities issued by collateralized debt obligations had their ratings slashes from triple-A to “distressed”

IPhones Take Over the Internet

Amazing. Really amazing.

clipped from blogs.wsj.com iPhone owners were responsible for nearly one out of every 1,000 Web page views last month. This erases any doubt that the future of mobile devices most certainly includes the Web. The iPhone has the same browser as Apple’s computers, meaning iPhone owners can see the same version of Web pages people see on their PCs. IPhone owners embraced the browser to the extent that they represented 0.09% of all Web pages viewed in November. That doesn’t sound like much, but consider that through September, Apple had only sold 1.4 million iPhones. As a point of comparison, devices running every version of Windows mobile operating system combined made up 0.06% of Web page views. Companies have been making mobile devices that run Windows since 1996, according to Computer World, and three million of the devices were shipped in the first quarter of 2007 alone, according to research company Gartner. By our calculations, iPhone owners are about 90 times more likely to view a Web page than the typical Internet user, of whom there are approximately 1.25 billion worldwide.

IPhones Take Over the Internet

Posted by Ben Worthen

We’ve always felt that the iPhone’s game-changing feature was its Web browser. Now we have proof: iPhone owners were responsible for nearly one out of every 1,000 Web page views last month. This erases any doubt that the future of mobile devices most certainly includes the Web.

Many phones have Web browsers, but most of the time these were made specifically for mobile devices and only give phone owners access to watered-down versions of Web sites. The iPhone has the same browser as Apple’s computers, meaning iPhone owners can see the same version of Web pages people see on their PCs.

IPhone owners embraced the browser to the extent that they represented 0.09% of all Web pages viewed in November. That doesn’t sound like much, but consider that through September, Apple had only sold 1.4 million iPhones. As a point of comparison, devices running every version of Windows mobile operating system combined made up 0.06% of Web page views. Companies have been making mobile devices that run Windows since 1996, according to Computer World, and three million of the devices were shipped in the first quarter of 2007 alone, according to research company Gartner. Here’s some more perspective: By our calculations, iPhone owners are about 90 times more likely to view a Web page than the typical Internet user, of whom there are approximately 1.25 billion worldwide.

It’s obvious that people have a need for Web access even when they aren’t at their desks or at home or wherever else they have a PC. We think that businesses could make their employees more productive by making sure that the mobile devices they give them have a full-fledged browser. We’re not saying companies should go out and buy everyone an iPhone – although if you do we’d love to hear about it. But presumably, it’s just a matter of time until an iPhone-like browser is a standard feature on mobile devices.

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