Thursday, December 14, 2006

Xtra, owned by New Zealand telecommunication monopoly company Telecom, has created a joint venture between themselves and Yahoo!7, creating Yahoo Xtra. Yahoo!7 is the joint venture between Yahoo! and Australian network, Seven.

The join venture replaces the current and long-lasting partnership between Microsoft and Xtra, called XtraMSN. The current partnership’s contract will expire at the end of this year. Telecom chose to change the partnership because Yahoo! has worked together with BT Group, Verizon and Rogers Communications.

The new site, along with new online content will go online on around March 1, 2007.

The partnership will result in Yahoo!7 taking 51% control of the partnership and Xtra taking the remaining 49%.

Kevin Kenrick, chief operating officer of Telecom, said that they will now be able to target the underdeveloped online advertising community. “We see there is a fantastic opportunity to grow online advertising and the share of the online market. Online advertising in New Zealand is getting to a tipping point of growth where there is a critical mass of online connections, broadband connections and an increase in the amount of time people are spending online.”

When the new site is launched, it will include a range of news, sport, weather, enhanced e-mail spam and virus protection, photo sharing, and internet radio.

Theresa Gattung, chief executive of Telecom, said: “The Yahoo Xtra joint venture will provide New Zealanders with access to the world’s best online services in a localised way.”

Ian Smith, chief executive of Yahoo!7, said: “The company was achieving market growth of online advertising of between 50 and 60 per cent a year in Australia and believed it could do the same in New Zealand.” He said that the partnership will give them a great opportunity to showcase its tools, technology and platforms in New Zealand.

Mr Kenrick said that the reason they had gotten a partnership with Yahoo!7 was that it is very difficult for a small player to develop its services in a New Zealand size market.

One other online company Xtra had considered for the partnership was Google, among others. The reason they chose Yahoo!7 over other companies was because Yahoo!7 has the top position in big fields such as TV and video. Mr Kenrick said: “The whole area of content management is one we thought would benefit from others with greater expertise and more scope.”

Telecom manages 80% of the telecommunication market.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Richard Jenkins, an engineer from the United Kingdom, broke a record for the fastest speed attained in a wind-powered land vehicle on Friday.

Jenkins managed to reach a speed of 126.1 miles per hour (202.9 kilometres per hour) in his Greenbird car along the plains of Nevada’s Ivanpah Lake.

Jenkins said that he had worked for ten years to break the record, and that “things couldn’t have been better” on the day he broke the record. “It’s great. It’s one of those things that you spend so long trying to do and when it actually happens, it’s almost too easy,” he said to the BBC.

“It has been an incredibly difficult challenge. Half the challenge is technical, having to create a more efficient vehicle than the previous record holder, then the rest is luck, being in the right place, at the right time, to get the perfect conditions, with the right people watching. I must have been on record standby at some remote location around the world for at least two months of every year for the past ten years,” he said. “Then everything came together perfectly and the Greenbird stepped up to the mark and performed amazingly. I am absolutely delighted.”

The previous record for the fastest wind-powered land vehicle belonged to Bob Schumacher from the United States, who reached 116 miles per hour in his Iron Duck machine.

The Greenbird is a fifth generation in an array of vehicles created by Jenkins in his ten-year effort to break the speed record. It is composed out of carbon fibre composite, and powered only by wind. According to Jenkins, it weighs 600 kilograms.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

A University of Calgary research team developed a new method for extracting carbon dioxide (CO₂) directly from the air — a fundamental shift in carbon capture technology enabling capture of the most common greenhouse gas from so-called diffuse sources like aircraft, trucks and automobiles that represent half of the greenhouse gases emitted globally.

Professor David Keith, Director of University of Calgary’s (UofC) Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy (ISEEE) and a team of researchers from UofC’s Energy and Environmental Systems Group built and operated a prototype system this summer producing results that compared favourably with commercial carbon capture systems. Two ‘provisional’ patents have been filed on the technology but Keith warns there are still “many pitfalls along the path to commercialization.”

Using a process adapted from the pulp-and-paper industry that halves the cost of CO₂ air capture in their custom-built tower, Professor Keith and his team captured the equivalent of about 20 tonnes per year of CO₂ (approximately equal to the yearly output of one person in North America) directly from the air with less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity per tonne of carbon dioxide on a single square metre of scrubbing material.

“This means that if you used electricity from a coal-fired power plant, for every unit of electricity you used to operate the capture machine, you’d be capturing 10 times as much CO₂ as the power plant emitted making that much electricity,” explains Professor Keith.

A report co-authored by Keith in the American Chemical Society’s journal Environmental Science & Technology explains “nearly all current research on carbon capture and storage (CCS) focuses on capturing CO₂ from large, stationary sources such as power plants. Such plans usually entail separating CO₂ from flue gas, compressing it, and transporting it via pipeline to be [stored] underground.”

Using CO₂ air capture technology, “a company could, in principle, contract with an oil sands plant near Fort McMurray to remove CO₂ from the air and could build its air capture plant wherever it’s cheapest — China, for example — and the same amount of CO₂ would be removed,” says Professor Keith in a UofC press release.

“While it’s important to get started doing things we know how to do, like wind power, nuclear power, and ‘regular’ carbon capture and storage,” Professor Keith continues, “it’s also vital to start thinking about radical new ideas and approaches to solving this problem.”

ISEEE’s Executive Director David Layzell points out that “energy-efficient and cost-effective air capture could play a valuable role in complementing other approaches for reducing emissions from the transportation sector, such as biofuels or electric vehicles.”

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

A man identified as Aaron Richard Snyder showed up on Monday around 2:25 p.m. outside the Colorado Capitol offices of Governor Bill Ritter. He was carrying a 357-caliber 7 shot Smith and Wesson revolver with 20 extra rounds of ammunition and started screaming “I am the emperor” and “I am here to take over the state”.

When he was confronted by a Colorado State trooper, Snyder opened his jacket showing that he was carrying a gun. The trooper ordered Snyder to drop the gun, but instead he moved “menancingly” in the direction of the trooper who then shot him once in the head and twice in the chest.

Snyder died from the multiple gunshot wounds on the floor of the Capitol office building. The Capitol went on a full lockdown with employees, tour groups and visitors in the building at the time ordered to stay where they were.

Governor Ritter was interviewing a judge candidate in his office at the time of the shooting. He held a press conference on the Capitol step two hours later.

Mr. Snyder was under doctors care for delusional behavior. The Northglenn, Colorado police issued a BOL “Be On the Lookout” to all law enforcement agencies in Colorado for Snyder and his car, a 2004 black Kia, around 25 minutes before the shooting occurred.

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Reports say that authorities in Brisbane, Australia have arrested an individual connected with the failed Glasgow and London bombings in the United Kingdom on June 29 and June 30. Australian media reports that the man was arrested at Brisbane International Airport yesterday at 11:00 p.m. AEST (UTC+10).

The man has since be named as Mohammed Haneef and Australian Attorney-General Philip Ruddock says that Haneef is cooperating with authorities and has not been charged with any crime as of yet.

Police in the U.K. confirm that the arrest has been made saying, “he remains in custody.”

“Yes there was an arrest last night but I will stress at no stage was there any threat to the Brisbane Airport,” said Jim Carden, a spokesman for the airport.

Mohammed Haneef is being described as a 27 year-old male who is a qualified medical doctor and reports say that he was leaving the airport and had a one-way ticket to Pakistan.

Haneef is employed at the Gold Coast Hospital in Queensland. Haneef is not an Australian citizen. It is reported that Haneef is from India.

A total of eight suspects have been arrested, six of which are doctors or studying to be doctors.

The terror threat level in the UK remains critical, indicating that an attack could be expected imminently and high security is in evidence on mass transport routes, while the police continue their investigations.

Earlier this morning, a controlled explosion took place on a suspicious package discovered outside Hammersmith Station on the London Underground system. The scare led to the closure of Hammersmith and Barons Court stations for one hour.

Two other stations, Tower Hill and East Ham, were closed in similar circumstances. All four stations have now been reopened.