How Bets Among Employees Can Guide a Company's Future

The need to predict the future, as exciting as it sounds, crops up in corporate life in terribly mundane ways. Case in point: large videogame companies need to know where to put their marketing dollars many months before they complete their games. Inevitably, some games will be stinkers, hardly worth the investment of an ad campaign. But how do you know which ones?

Here's how one very large videogame company used to guess the answer: its marketing people would predict the score their games in progress would garner on the website Metacritic, which aggregates game reviews. But why would the marketing people know more than the game's developers?

Three years ago, a startup called Crowdcast suggested a different tactic. Why not take 700 of your lowliest employees, the ones in the trenches who are actually making and testing these games, and ask them what they think the Metacritic scores will be? Better yet, why not give them each $10,000 in play money and ask them to bet on the outcome? Let them accumulate a pot of pretend wealth if they're right. Turn game marketing prediction into, well, a game.

To the executives' delight, the employees' Metacritic predictions turned out to be 32 percent more accurate. More disturbingly, their accuracy was inversely proportional to their place in the hierarchy. The closer you got to the C-suites, the less of a clue you had--and the lower your pretend wealth in Crowdcast's game.

That embarrassing factoid might explain why this particular videogame company, like many Crowdcast customers, wants such stories to remain anonymous. "It's kind of experimental," explains Mat Fogerty, Crowdcast's sardonic British CEO, "and it may undermine the credibility of their awesome management."

Indeed, anonymity and uncomfortable revelations in the boardroom are Crowdcast's stock-in-trade. The San Francisco startup already boasts clients as diverse as Hallmark, Hershey's, and Harvard Business School. It is built on the back of years of research into how internal prediction markets work. In such a market, managers ask employees questions about the future of their product and let them bet on the answers, without knowing who bet what. The results can be scarily accurate.

In September, Crowdcast ran a prediction market for a large American car company, one that normally runs its designs for new autos through a car clinic?a lengthy and expensive kind of focus group of buyers. Crowdcast's project involved asking engineers and factory supervisors what they thought the outcome of the car clinic would be.

Forty questions were in front of these ground-floor experts at any given time during the market. For example: What percentage of buyers will list this car's dashboard as its most important feature? The trial market was so accurate that the car company will be trying another in January. The auto giant now has a new way to cut costs: use these predictions markets instead of expensive car clinics as much as 75 percent of the time.

Crowdcast calls these outcomes "social business intelligence" rather than crowdsourcing. "Within your organization, there are people who know true future outcomes and metrics," says Leslie Fine, Crowdcast's chief scientist. "When is your product going to ship? How well will it do? Normally, crowdsourcing asks for creative content. We're asking for quantitative opinions."

Put that way, it sounds a lot more respectable than "get your employees to play a kind of fantasy football with sales and shipping dates." But make no mistake?that's actually what Crowdcast does. That used to be a hard sell, Fogerty admits: "It seemed weird to be talking about playing games at work and using Monopoly money."

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Cloud Services Let Gadgets Punch above their Weight

Smart phones and tablets have never been more popular, but they pack puny computing power compared to the average desktop computer. Two companies hope to change this by connecting modestly powered portable devices to powerful Internet servers that perform intensive tasks on their behalf. This week, both these companies?OnLive, based in Palo Alto, California, and GameString, in Seattle?demonstrated handheld gadgets running high-end games and other complex software.

Since launching last year, OnLive has used powerful servers to stream computer games to its subscribers' PCs. It recently released a lightweight "microconsole" that brings the service to television sets, and it also has its sights set on portable devices. Yesterday it released an iPad app that uses the same technology to bring those PC games to Apple's tablet. The action is relayed from the server to the app using compression algorithms that ensure quick transmission of data over a wireless connection and the Internet.

"Initially we are only offering the ability to watch other players who are logged into OnLive from a PC, because these games were not designed to run on a touchscreen," says Steve Perlman, OnLive's founder and CEO. "But I know that publishers are excited about it becoming possible to offer high-performance titles on a tablet, and we will work on that." As soon as game developers release a game that can be operated with a finger rather than a keyboard and mouse, OnLive will make it playable on an iPad, he says.

GameString released its own demo video yesterday, of an Android smart phone being used to play the multiplayer game World of Warcraft (see video). The Android app was made using Adobe's Air platform for web apps and a software toolkit created by Gamestring to help game developers make powerful games that run partly on a mobile device and partly on a cloud server.

Wireless networks, server hardware and software, and portable devices have all become sophisticated enough to enable a big shift in how games are delivered, says Chris Boothroyd, GameString's founder and CEO. "They're following music and movies?onto the Web," he says.

Streaming a game is much more complex than streaming video or music, though. Video software typically "buffers" several seconds of footage ahead of what the viewer sees at any time, in case of connection problems. This can't be done with games, because what happens in the next few seconds depends on the player's present actions. Instead, compression has to be good enough to ensure that the data stream never falls behind long enough to affect gameplay.

OnLive's engineers have developed algorithms that are tuned to a particular game, and even a particular user's Internet connection. "The compression algorithm that we use can even vary from scene to scene," says Perlman. "Darkness, detail, and the pattern of the 3-D motion in the frames all make a difference." If data is lost in transmission, then OnLive's software attempts to conceal the error by extrapolating from what is known, he says. All of that work is done by software running on remote servers-in the cloud. The software installed on a user's device is very simple, sending little more than the coordinates of the user's mouse and the timing of keyboard or button clicks.

The technology has applications outside gaming, says Perlman, who yesterday demonstrated a still-unfinished app that brings a full Windows 7 desktop to the iPad. "Everything works as if it was local," says Perlman, "even high-end applications like professional video editing or computer-aided-design applications typically used on a workstation."

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Nuji launches as ?Instagram meets Instapaper? for social shopping [TNW Apps]

With the holiday shopping season now in full swing, you might be looking for some inspiration for your gift list. Nuji, a social shopping recommendation service which has just left closed beta, might be just the ticket.

Nuji is a way for users to create and share a list of items they?re interested in buying and get social shopping recommendations by following users with similar tastes. Amazon-goes-social, if you like, but for all retailers. The team is betting on social recommendations being far more appealing to users than the automated suggestions provided by services like Amazon.

The result is a bit like ?Instagram meets Instapaper?, but for shopping. Here?s how it works: you?re in a shop and you see something you?d like to buy in the future, or simply just like. You scan the barcode using Nuji?s iPhone app and the item is added to your profile. If you?re browsing online, a bookmarklet allows you to do the same thing.

As you tag items you like, your profile fills up with pictures of things you like, defining you by your taste. You followers get to see what you?re interested in and can ?reshare? your selections with others, helping to mark you out as a influential Nuji user.

Nuji plans to monetize by offering relevant shopping deals to users based on their interests, although this feature hasn?t been rolled out yet. Photo tagging will soon be added to the iPhone app, allowing you to keep a record of real-world items you like even if they don?t have a barcode.

Based in London, Nuji was founded in February this year and the startup was a Seedcamp 2010 winner. You can sign up to Nuji here and download the iPhone app at this iTunes link.

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Everything You Need to Know About Wikileaks

What is Wikileaks?

Wikileaks is a self-described "not-for-profit media organization," launched in 2006 for the purposes of disseminating original documents from anonymous sources and leakers. Its website says: "Wikileaks will accept restricted or censored material of political, ethical, diplomatic or historical significance. We do not accept rumor, opinion, other kinds of first hand accounts or material that is publicly available elsewhere."

More-detailed information about the history of the organization can be found on Wikipedia (with all the caveats that apply to a rapidly changing Wiki topic). Wikipedia incidentally has nothing to do with Wikileaks?both share the word "Wiki" in the title, but they're not affiliated.

Who is Julian Assange, and what is his role in the Wikileaks organization?

Julian Assange is an Australian citizen who is said to have served as the editor-in-chief and spokesperson for Wikileaks since its founding in 2006. Before that, he was described as an advisor. Sometimes he is cited as its founder. The media and popular imagination currently equate him with Wikileaks itself, with uncertain accuracy.

In 2006, Assange wrote a series of essays that have recently been tapped as an explanation of his political philosophy. A close reading of these essays shows that Assange's personal philosophy is in opposition to what he calls secrecy-based, authoritarian conspiracy governments, in which category he includes the US government and many others not conventionally thought of as authoritarian. Thus, as opposed to espousing a philosophy of radical transparency, Assange is not "about letting sunlight into the room so much as about throwing grit in the machine." For further analysis, check out Aaron Bady's original blog post.

Why is Wikileaks so much in the public eye right now?

At the end of November 2010, Wikileaks began to slowly release a trove of what it says are 251,287 diplomatic cables acquired from an anonymous source. These documents came on the heels of the release of the "Collateral Murder" video in April 2010, and Afghan and Iraq War logs in July 2010 and October 2010, which totaled 466,743 documents. The combined 718,030 are said to originate from a single source, thought to be U.S. Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning, who was arrested in May 2010, but that's not confirmed.

Has Wikileaks released classified material in the past?

Yes, under an evolving set of models.

Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman has some interesting thoughts on the development of Wikileaks and its practices over the years, which will be explained in greater detail when the Berkman Center podcast about Wikileaks is released later this week. In the meantime, here's a capsule version.

Wikileaks has moved through three phases since its founding in 2006. In its first phase, during which it released several substantial troves of documents related to Kenya in 2008, Wikileaks operated very much with a standard wiki model: the public readership could actively post and edit materials, and it had a say in the types of materials that were accepted and how such materials were vetted. The documents released in that first phase were more or less a straight dump to the Web: very little organized redacting occurred on the part of Wikileaks.

Wikileaks's second phase was exemplified with the release of the "Collateral Murder" video in April 2010. The video was a highly curated, produced and packaged political statement. It was meant to illustrate a political point of view, not merely to inform.

The third phase is the one we currently see with the release of the diplomatic cables: Wikileaks working in close conjunction with a select group of news organizations to analyze, redact and release the cables in a curated manner, rather than dumping them on the Internet or using them to illustrate a singular political point of view.

What news organizations have access to the diplomatic cables and how did they get them?

According to the Associated Press, Wikileaks gave four news organizations (Le Monde, El Pais, The Guardian and Der Spiegel) all 251,287 classified documents before anything was released to the public. The Guardian subsequently shared its trove with The New York Times.

So have all 251,287 documents been released to the public?

No. Each of the five news organizations is hosting the text of at least some of the documents in various forms with or without the relevant metadata (country of origin, classification level, reference ID). The Guardian and Der Spiegel have performed analyses of the metadata of the entire trove, excluding the body text. The Guardian's analysis is available for download from its website.

Wikileaks itself has released (as of December 7, 2010) 960 documents out of the total 251,287. The Associated Press has reported that Wikileaks is only releasing cables in coordination with the actions of the five selected news organizations. Julian Assange made similar statements in an interview with Guardian readers on December 3, 2010. Cables are being released daily as the five news organizations publish articles related to the content.

Is each of the five news organizations hosting all the documents that Wikileaks has released?

No. Each of the five news organizations hosts a different selection of the released documents, in different forms, which may or may not overlap. It's not clear how much they're coordinating on releasing new documents, since each appears to have a full set and normally newspapers would be eager to scoop one another.

How are the five news organizations releasing the cables?

Le Monde has created an application, developed in conjunction with Linkfluence, that hosts the searchable text of several hundred cables. The text can be searched by the sender (country of origin, office or official), date range, persons of interest cited in the docs, classification status, or any combination of the above. Only the untranslated, English text of the cables can be accessed and cut-and-paste is not available.

El Pais offers access to more than 200 cables, available in the original English or in Spanish translation, searchable by country of origin and key terms and subjects (such as "Google and China"). These searches also return El Pais articles written on a given subject, often placed ahead of the cables in the search listings. The paper also offers a "How to read a diplomatic cable" feature, explaining what all the abbreviations and technical verbiage mean in plain speak, posted on November 28, 2010.

The Guardian offers the cable data in several forms: It has performed an analysis of metadata of the entire 251,287-document trove, and made it available in several forms (spreadsheets hosted on Google Docs and in downloadable form) as well as infographics.

The Guardian also hosts at least 422 cables on its website, searchable by subject, originating country, and countries referenced.

The New York Times hosts what it calls a "selection of the documents from a cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks intends to make public starting on November 28. The webpage goes on to say "A small number of names and passages in some of the cables have been removed by The New York Times to protect diplomats' confidential sources, to keep from compromising American intelligence efforts or to protect the privacy of ordinary citizens."

The documents are not searchable and are organized by general subject.

Who is responsible for redacting the documents? What actions did Wikileaks take to ensure that individuals were not put in danger by publication of the documents?

According to the Associated Press and statements released by Wikileaks and Julian Assange, Wikileaks is currently relying on the expertise of the five news organizations to redact the cables as they are released, and it is following their redactions as it releases the documents on its website. (This cannot be verified without examining the original documents, which we have not done?nor are we linking to them here.) According to the BBC, Julian Assange approached the U.S. State Department for guidance on redacting the documents prior to their release. One can imagine the State Department's dilemma there: assist and risk legitimating the enterprise; don't assist and risk poor redaction. In a public letter, Harold Koh, legal adviser to the Department of State, declined to assist the organization and demanded the return of the documents.

Are the documents hosted anywhere else on the Internet? What is the "insurance" file?

In late July 2010, Wikileaks is said to have posted to its Afghan War Logs site, and to a torrent site an encrypted file with "insurance" in the name. The file, which apparently can still be found on various peer-to-peer networks, is 1.4 gigabytes and is encrypted with AES256, a very strong encryption standard which would make it virtually impossible to open without the password. What is in the insurance file is not known. It has been speculated that it contains the unredacted cables provided by the original source(s), as well as other, previously unreleased information held by Wikileaks. There is further speculation, which has been indirectly boosted by Julian Assange, that the key to the file will be distributed in the event of either the death of Assange or the destruction of Wikileaks as a functioning organization. However, none of these things is known. All that is known for sure is that it's a really big file with heavy encryption that's already in a number of people's hands and floating around for others to get.

What happens if Wikileaks gets shut down? Can it be shut down?

It depends on what's meant by "Wikileaks" and what's meant by "shut down."

Julian Assange has made statements suggesting that if Wikileaks becomes nonfunctional as an organization, the key to the encrypted "insurance" file will be released (the key itself is not a big document and could presumably fit into Twitter messages). The actual machination of how such a "dead man's switch" would release the key is not known. If the key were released, and if the encrypted insurance file contains unredacted and unreleased secret documents, then those decrypted files would be available to many people nearly instantaneously. Wikileaks claimed in August that the insurance file had been downloaded more than 100,000 times.

Wikileaks apparently maintains a small paid staff?who and where is not exactly on a "people" page, though there used to be a physical P.O. box in Australia where documents could be sent?and is additionally supported by volunteers, speculated to be at most a few thousand. So, would it be possible for a motivated organization to disrupt its real-world infrastructure? Yes, probably. However, at this point, it is not practical to recover the information the organization has already distributed (which includes the entire trove of diplomatic cables to the press as well as whatever is in the encrypted insurance file), as well as any other undistributed information the organization might seek to release. So in terms of the recovery of leaked information, the downfall of Wikileaks as an organization would matter little.

Furthermore, there appear to be currently more than 1,000 sites mirroring Wikileaks and its content. Wikileaks has made available downloadable files containing its entire archive of released materials to date.

On a more technical level, the Wikileaks website can come under attack, and its means of collecting money can be made much more difficult.

Why did wikileaks.org stop working as a way to find the site?

For a traditional website to work, it needs a domain name like "website.com" so that people can find it easily with a Web browser. The domain name system (DNS) is hierarchical?information is spread from a zone containing several top-level (root) servers down to zones containing lower-level servers?but the top-level servers don't determine everything held by servers lower down the chain.

Domain names can stop working for any number of reasons. One common assumption is that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which manages certain top-level protocol and parameter assignments for the Internet, intervened in the case of Wikileaks. It did not.

A little technical discussion to explain why: The root zone orchestrated by ICANN is a very small file?just a mapping between each top-level domain (TLD), such as .org or .ch, to the IP address(es) of servers designated to say more about that TLD. One server, not in ICANN's hands, keeps track of names under .org, another handles names under .ch, and so on. So the only thing, hypothetically, ICANN could do is to completely delete .org or .ch, which would make every domain name with that ending disappear temporarily.

Note that wikileaks.org went down not because of anything done to its DNS entry within the list kept by the registry that manages .org domains. (n.b. Jonathan Zittrain is on the board of trustees for the nonprofit Internet Society (ISOC), which is the parent to the Public Interest Registry, which keeps track of names in .org.) Instead, the name server to which its entry pointed (even lower down the DNS chain) was attacked with a flood of traffic by unknown parties, and EveryDNS, the operator of that name server, chose to stop answering queries about Wikileaks in the hopes that the attack would stop. (Apparently it did.)

A website also needs hosting, and Wikileaks has had to shift its hosting at least once after being dropped by a chosen provider: Amazon's commodity hosting service shut down the site for terms of service violations after being contacted by U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut).

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Smart Phones Help Fight Bank Fraud

A simple phone call or text message could have saved Mark Patterson nearly $350,000. The money was stolen from his company's bank account last year by cybercriminals based in Eastern Europe. Patterson discovered the fraud six days after it had begun, when the bank sent notice that a fraudulent $9,000 transfer to an account in California had failed to complete.

A startup security firm, DUO Security, hopes to offer a better way to secure banking transactions, by routing the information used to confirm a transaction through to a second device: a smart phone. The company has developed apps for a variety of smart phone platforms to create a separate channel between a bank and its customer to verify a transaction. Customers receive the details on their phone and approve transactions with a single touch.

"You push a button on your computer, you receive a notification, and you push a button on your phone, and that is it," says company cofounder Jon Oberheide. "We don't really want to overwhelm the user with options."

Patterson's company was a victim of the Zeus banking Trojan, a money-stealing software program used by cybercriminals to hijack victims' online banking sessions and pay out large amounts of money to intermediaries known as "money mules," who transfer the funds overseas. "It's been a very stressful year and a half," Patterson told attendees at the CyberCrime 2010 Symposium in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, last month.

Defenses against Zeus and other programs like it are few. Criminals routinely test the latest version of their code against antivirus software. Capturing a username and password during an online banking session is simple, which is why banking regulations no longer allow only a single factor (a password) to secure online transactions.

Because the criminals have control over the banking customer's computer, even a second factor--such as another temporary passcode--often fails. Zeus and other Trojans modify bank transactions in real time, sending funds on to money mules but displaying a page that makes it appear that the money is going to a legitimate payee. In fact, any security measure that uses the same communications channel between the PC and the bank can be corrupted by attackers who have compromised the device. DUO Security uses encryption to verify that the communication is going to and from a device that the user has registered.

Allowing the user to actually see the transaction before confirming it is key, says Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst at Gartner. "We have been advocating transaction verification for a long time," she says. "We call it 'sign what you see.'"

DUO Security is not the first to focus on the phone. Firms such as RSA, Entrust, and PhoneFactor use similar techniques for verifying transactions via a mobile phone. However, many products merely issue a passcode, an approach that is still vulnerable to Trojans. Zeus's developers are known to have circumvented the issuing of a text message passcode on Symbian and BlackBerry devices by using the Trojan to ask victims to install an app on those devices; the malicious app forwards the SMS code to the attackers, who can then complete the transaction.

DUO Security has focused on making the technology simple to integrate with banking websites, requiring the addition of only a few lines of code. Customers don't have to enter in codes, and banks don't have to run specialized hardware in their network or significantly modify their site. The company's hope is that by making it simple enough, a wider audience will adopt the technology.

"We think we can really expand where multifactor [authentication] is offered, where multifactor could be offered [to secure] your Facebook account, your Twitter account," Oberheide says. "These things might seem trivial to you, but you could have that extra protection without the headaches that traditionally go along with multifactor authentication."

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Republicans Block U.S. Health Aid for 9/11 Workers

The 9/11 health bill, a version of which was approved by the House of Representatives in September, was among several initiatives that Senate Democrats had hoped to approve before the close of the 111th Congress. Supporters believe this was their last real opportunity to have the bill passed.

The action by the Senate created huge uncertainty over the bill?s future. Its proponents were working on Thursday to salvage the legislation, with one possibility being to have it inserted into a large tax-cut bill that Republicans and Democrats are trying to pass before Congress ends its current session.

But such a move seemed unlikely, since it might complicate passage of the tax package, which includes another provision that Democrats, including President Obama, sought in return for supporting the extension of tax cuts for all income levels that Republicans wanted: a continuation of unemployment benefits for jobless Americans.

In a vote largely along party lines, the Senate rejected a procedural move by Democrats to end debate on the 9/11 health bill and to bring it to a vote; 60 yes votes were needed, but the move received only 57, with 42 votes against.

Republicans have been raising concerns about how to pay for the $7.4 billion measure, while Democrats, led by Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, have argued that there was a moral obligation to assist those who put their lives at risk during rescue and cleanup operations at ground zero.

The bill is formally known as the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, named after a New York police detective who participated in the rescue efforts at ground zero. He later developed breathing complications that were common to first responders at the site, and he died in January 2006. The cause of his death became a source of debate after the city?s medical examiner concluded that it was not directly related to the 9/11 attacks.

After the vote, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, a chief sponsor of the bill in the House, argued that Democrats should include the 9/11 health bill in the larger tax-cut legislation and, in the process, dare Republicans to oppose it in that context. Ms. Maloney added that the tax- cut bill was the one piece of legislation that ?Republicans won?t leave this town without passing.?

As the day wore on, it appeared increasingly unlikely that the Senate would include a provision providing health care for ground zero workers in any tax package it brought to the floor, according to senior Hill officials. But supporters of the 9/11 legislation said there was a possibility that they could persuade Democratic leaders in the House to include it in any tax-cut plan that that chamber approves, and pull the Senate along in conference committee.

The Senate vote earlier in the day was a blow to sponsors of the bill, who mobilized a network of allies across the political spectrum to lobby on its behalf, including the New York City police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Ms. Gillibrand, the chief sponsor in the Senate, even reached out to former President George W. Bush. But her aides say Mr. Bush did not respond to her entreaties.

In a statement, Mr. Bloomberg chastised Senate Republicans for their ?wrongheaded political strategy? and called on them to allow the bill to come to the floor for a vote. ?The attacks of 9/11 were attacks on America,? he said, ?and we have a collective responsibility to care for the heroes ? from all 50 states ? who answered the call of duty, saved lives, and helped our nation recover.?

The bill calls for providing $3.2 billion over the next eight years to monitor and treat injuries stemming from exposure to toxic dust and debris at ground zero. New York City would pay 10 percent of those health costs.

The bill would also set aside $4.2 billion to reopen the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund to provide payments for job and economic losses.

In addition, the bill includes a provision that would allow money from the Victim Compensation Fund to be paid to any eligible claimant who receives a payment under the settlement of lawsuits that 10,000 rescue and cleanup workers recently reached with the city. Now, those who receive a settlement from the city are limited in how much compensation they can get from the fund, according to the bill?s sponsors.

There are nearly 60,000 people enrolled in health monitoring and treatment programs related to the 9/11 attacks, according to the sponsors of the bill. The federal government provides the bulk of the money for those programs.

If the bill is not adopted by the current Congress, its supporters will have start over again next year. With Republicans set to take over the House, passing the bill in that chamber will be extremely difficult, the bill?s supporters say. That is a large part of the reason backers of the measure were pleading with Senate leaders to get it passed by this Congress.

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Google Docs Advanced Editing Comes to the iPad [TNW Google]

Hot from the GooglePlex is that iPad users can now not only view docs in Google Docs, edit them in Google Docs, but now we can also switch to the Desktop view to get the full power of Google Docs editing:

This update comes on the heels of Google turning on editing on for the mobile version of Docs.

We?re going to take this update for a test drive and check back in here with a update shortly.

Update?. I tried this out on my iPad and recorded the fun on my FlipCam, but while it?s processing I have some first thoughts:

  • Using Desktop mode isn?t perfect. Don?t expect things to work like it would on your laptop.
  • The toolbar works better in landscape mode, but the keyboard works better in portrait mode (because the keyboard takes up less room).
  • I think using a Bluetooth keyboard would make the whole editing process smoother
  • If you really need to edit a Google Doc on the go, and really need to use the extra formatting, then this is worth a try, however you might be frustrated in the process (especially if you don?t have a keyboard with you).

Recommendations: Better than a sharp stick in the eye and will do in a pinch, but I think using Pages or another iPad-centric application for editing will be a lot easier and less frustrating.

Here?s the video of me using Google Docs on my iPad in Desktop Mode?yeah it wasn?t easy and I?d opt for SimpleNote or Pages over this any day:

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Republicans Block U.S. Health Aid for 9/11 Workers

The 9/11 health bill, a version of which was approved by the House of Representatives in September, was among several initiatives that Senate Democrats had hoped to approve before the close of the 111th Congress. Supporters believe this was their last real opportunity to have the bill passed.

The action by the Senate created huge uncertainty over the bill?s future. Its proponents were working on Thursday to salvage the legislation, with one possibility being to have it inserted into a large tax-cut bill that Republicans and Democrats are trying to pass before Congress ends its current session.

But such a move seemed unlikely, since it might complicate passage of the tax package, which includes another provision that Democrats, including President Obama, sought in return for supporting the extension of tax cuts for all income levels that Republicans wanted: a continuation of unemployment benefits for jobless Americans.

In a vote largely along party lines, the Senate rejected a procedural move by Democrats to end debate on the 9/11 health bill and to bring it to a vote; 60 yes votes were needed, but the move received only 57, with 42 votes against.

Republicans have been raising concerns about how to pay for the $7.4 billion measure, while Democrats, led by Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, have argued that there was a moral obligation to assist those who put their lives at risk during rescue and cleanup operations at ground zero.

The bill is formally known as the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, named after a New York police detective who participated in the rescue efforts at ground zero. He later developed breathing complications that were common to first responders at the site, and he died in January 2006. The cause of his death became a source of debate after the city?s medical examiner concluded that it was not directly related to the 9/11 attacks.

After the vote, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, a chief sponsor of the bill in the House, argued that Democrats should include the 9/11 health bill in the larger tax-cut legislation and, in the process, dare Republicans to oppose it in that context. Ms. Maloney added that the tax- cut bill was the one piece of legislation that ?Republicans won?t leave this town without passing.?

As the day wore on, it appeared increasingly unlikely that the Senate would include a provision providing health care for ground zero workers in any tax package it brought to the floor, according to senior Hill officials. But supporters of the 9/11 legislation said there was a possibility that they could persuade Democratic leaders in the House to include it in any tax-cut plan that that chamber approves, and pull the Senate along in conference committee.

The Senate vote earlier in the day was a blow to sponsors of the bill, who mobilized a network of allies across the political spectrum to lobby on its behalf, including the New York City police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Ms. Gillibrand, the chief sponsor in the Senate, even reached out to former President George W. Bush. But her aides say Mr. Bush did not respond to her entreaties.

In a statement, Mr. Bloomberg chastised Senate Republicans for their ?wrongheaded political strategy? and called on them to allow the bill to come to the floor for a vote. ?The attacks of 9/11 were attacks on America,? he said, ?and we have a collective responsibility to care for the heroes ? from all 50 states ? who answered the call of duty, saved lives, and helped our nation recover.?

The bill calls for providing $3.2 billion over the next eight years to monitor and treat injuries stemming from exposure to toxic dust and debris at ground zero. New York City would pay 10 percent of those health costs.

The bill would also set aside $4.2 billion to reopen the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund to provide payments for job and economic losses.

In addition, the bill includes a provision that would allow money from the Victim Compensation Fund to be paid to any eligible claimant who receives a payment under the settlement of lawsuits that 10,000 rescue and cleanup workers recently reached with the city. Now, those who receive a settlement from the city are limited in how much compensation they can get from the fund, according to the bill?s sponsors.

There are nearly 60,000 people enrolled in health monitoring and treatment programs related to the 9/11 attacks, according to the sponsors of the bill. The federal government provides the bulk of the money for those programs.

If the bill is not adopted by the current Congress, its supporters will have start over again next year. With Republicans set to take over the House, passing the bill in that chamber will be extremely difficult, the bill?s supporters say. That is a large part of the reason backers of the measure were pleading with Senate leaders to get it passed by this Congress.

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Tax Deal Is Key to Avoid Recession, Obama Adviser Says

But Democrats in the House and Senate were still seething with anger ? both about the substance of the deal, which includes keeping the Bush-era rates even on the highest incomes, and the way they were iced out of the negotiations. It was unclear that the ominous economic forecast by the adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, would help. Senate Democrats said they were still pressing for changes to the plan, but Republicans and the White House showed no signs of flexibility.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who failed on Tuesday to persuade many of his old Senate colleagues to get behind the plan, met with House Democrats for more than an hour on Wednesday. Dozens of lawmakers lined up to voice their displeasure, and to ask if there was any chance of reworking the plan, especially a provision setting a generous tax emption for wealthy estates.

?There is a substantial amount of dissatisfaction with the deal that was cut,? Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, said after the meeting. ?The Democratic caucus put itself on notice that it would not vote for tax cuts for the wealthy because we can?t afford them and because they are not needed, and that?s the point one Democrat after another is making.?

The continuing anger in Congress raised the likelihood that the tax deal would be approved largely with Republican votes. Enough Senate Democrats were expected to support the plan to surmount any filibuster. And in the House, given Republican support, it seemed possible for the tax plan to be adopted even with two-thirds or more of Democrats voting against it.

The deal would extend for two years the Bush-era tax cuts at all income levels, not just on income up to $250,000 per couple as President Obama had sought. In exchange, Republicans agreed to the administration?s demands for a 13-month continuation of jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed, a one-year reduction in the payroll tax for nearly all workers, and other steps aimed at lifting the economy.

The plan also includes an agreement to reduce the estate tax, which lapsed completely this year but is set to return on Jan. 1 with an exemption of $1 million per person and a maximum rate of 55 percent. The deal will set the exemption, or unified credit, at $5 million per estate, and the maximum rate at 35 percent ? a higher exemption and lower tax than many Democrats want.

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, excoriated Democrats for trying to bring up several other issues, including an immigration bill and a Pentagon policy measure that includes authorization to repeal the military?s ?don?t ask, don?t tell? ban on open service by gay men and lesbians. Mr. McConnell urged the Democrats to bring the tax plan to the floor.

?Are we here to perform or to legislate?? Mr. McConnell asked.

The majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, struggled on Wednesday to chart a path on several major items, including the tax proposal. Votes were tentatively scheduled for Thursday morning on the immigration measure, which would create a path to citizenship for certain illegal immigrants brought to the United States as young children, and on the military bill.

As attention focused mainly on the tax issue, House Democrats muscled through a stripped-down spending bill that would finance the federal government through Sept. 30 of next year, freezing the budgets of most agencies but including money for the war in Afghanistan.

The bill cuts nearly $46 billion from the president?s requested budget, and includes provisions for a two-year pay freeze for non-military federal employees.

The vote was 212 to 206, with 35 Democrats and all 171 Republicans in opposition.

With the president on the defensive with his own party, the White House marshaled an offensive that included circulating dozens of private-sector economic analyses and endorsements from public officials.

But the big gun was the economic warning from Mr. Summers, the soon-departing director of the White House National Economic Council.

?Failure to pass this bill in the next couple weeks would materially increase the risk that the economy would stall out and we would have a double-dip? recession, Mr. Summers told reporters at a briefing.

Mr. Obama, in a brief appearance with the president of Poland, rebutted a reporter?s question alluding to Congressional Democrats? sense of betrayal.

?It is inaccurate to characterize Democrats writ large as feeling ?betrayed,? ? Mr. Obama said. ?I think Democrats are looking at this bill, and you?ve already had a whole bunch of them who said this makes sense. And I think the more they look at it, the more of them are going to say this makes sense.?

The fight over the Bush-era rates would resume in the coming two years, Mr. Obama said, adding that he would make the case for ?tax reform, that we?ve got to simplify the system.?

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