Swine flu chatter has been criss-crossing the Internet

Swine flu chatter has been criss-crossing the Internet as the global
spread of the virus became the hottest subject at micro-blogging
service Twitter.

By Tuesday afternoon, Google's trend-tracking website rated swine flu
a "spicy" Internet search topic due to a sudden spike in interest that
earned it a spot in a Top 10 online Hot Trends list.

Meanwhile, a Google Flu website designed to use search query data to
map the spread of influenza virus in the United States indicated the
respiratory illness did not appear to be spreading rampantly there.

"Current estimates of flu activity are still generally low across the
United States, as is expected given the confirmed swine flu case
count," Google.org said in a message atop its Flu Trends home page.

Google's Flu Trends map indicated that influenza activity was "low" in
all US states except Hawaii, where activity was rated as "high."

"Hawaii is a challenging model, but we aren't terribly surprised that
it's marked 'high' on Flu Trends," Google.org said in response to a
French news agency inquiry.

"The state government says they tend to see flu year-round because of
the tropical climate and tourist populations."

Germany will be selling rocket material to Iran

Koblenz, Germany - A 63-year-old German businessman on trial for
selling Iran 16 tons of graphite to make rocket nozzles, has admitted
the offence, a court spokesman said Wednesday.

At the opening of his trial on April 8, the man told a state superior
court in Koblenz, Germany that he rejected all 12 counts of the
indictment.

But in a statement read out by his lawyer this week, the defendant
admitted the charges, the spokesman said.

The man is accused of breaking laws preventing illicit arms exports by
declaring the graphite exported from 2005 to
2007 to be low grade.

This would have avoided the need to apply for a government clearance
which would almost certainly have been refused.

German intelligence suspects the graphite was bought for Iran's
missile programme. Tehran is suspected of secretly developing nuclear
weapons which could be delivered as the payload of the missiles.

MTV Turns To Twitter And Facebook To Power New Flagship Show

In a bid to retain its role as a pop culture staple, MTV has announced
plans to a launch a show that taps into the power of social media,
tightly integrating with Facebook and Twitter to maximize fan
interaction. The show will be hosted by British celebrity and model
Alexa Chun and begin airing this summer, with plans to move it to the
network's coveted after-school timeslot depending on its performance.

Back in the late 90's, an MTV show called Total Request Live was a
staple in dictating what was hot in popular music. That show gradually
lost steam over time (it was finally canceled in late 2008) and while
MTV has maintained some succcessful properties, it's lacking a
flagship show that its audience tunes into on a daily basis. According
to this AP report, viewership is down 18% for the first three months
of this year.<a target="_blank"
href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/28/mtv-turns-to-twitter-and-facebook-to-power-new-flagship-show/">read
more</a>

TellMe Rolls Out Better Speech Recognition And An Almost-Sexy New Voice Called Zira

TellMe, which Microsoft bought two years ago, is rolling out an
upgrade to its call center automation software which should improve
its speech recognition rates. It is also adding Global Crossing as
partner for reselling its VoiP carrier service, along with AT&T and
Verizon. TellMe handles 2.5 billion calls a year for customers such as
American Airlines and ETrade. Even a one percent improvement in
automated call completion rates translates into millions of dollars a
year for large call centers.

TellMe will be deploying a new text-to-speech engine with an
almost-sexy female voice called Zira. She only sounds slightly
robotic. Another set of technologies can break up sentences into their
constituent parts so that if the software doesn't understand something
it can ask for only the piece of missing information instead of
repeating the entire question. or instance, if you say you want to fly
from New york to San Francisco on Wednesday, and it got everything but
the day, it would only ask you what day you want to fly instead of
making you repeat your entire itinerary.

Technorati Gives Blog Network Blogcritics A Much Needed Facelift

Technorati has fully redesigned Blogcritics, a seven-year old blog
network that the media company acquired last August, in an effort to
drive more traffic to the site. We originally wrote about Blogcritics
in 2005. Blogcritics currently is a community of 3,300 writers who
have published more than 84,000 articles, providing bloggers an entry
point to publish their content to a more widely-visited site. The
content on the site hasn't changed much; it's will simply be packaged
in a sleeker, more user-friendly interface. Currently, the site's
design and interface is bland and features very little in terms of
images.

The new design, which will be rolled out at 1 AM PST tonight, features
a new logo, a more colorful interface, and is well-organized. The site
contains a new feature "ObamaNation," that will analyze the impact
President Obama is having on pop culture. It also allows users to
follow their favorite writers by listing all of the content a writer
has created both on and off the Blogcritics platform. All in all, it
is a big improvement in terms of the way the site looks and feels.
Blogcritics, which is similar to Salon's Open Salon, draws about 1
million unique monthly visitors, according to Google Analytics. The
site hasn't increased traffic since its acquisition last summer—the
site had about 1 million monthly uniques at that point as well, so
this is clearly an effort to spruce up the blog community to drive
more traffic. The site currently runs ads completely through
Technorati's ad network.

Steve Jobs On The Value Of Stock Options

On March 18, 2008, Steve Jobs was deposed by the SEC during its investigation of Apple’s stock option backdating scandal. The deposition was never made public until Forbes published it on Friday, after obtaining it through a Freedom of Information Act request. (Full deposition embedded below)

Jobs explains his reasoning for why he asked the board for mega grants of options for both himself and his top executives, but claims ignorance of the mechanics of how that was done after the board approved the grants themselves. (It was the falsifying of board minutes for a meeting that never occurred, not the backdating per se, that got Apple’s former general counsel Nancy Heinen into hot water with the SEC—this deposition was for a case against her). There aren’t too many revelations on the legal front in the document.

But the document provides the first detailed account of the incident from Steve Jobs himself in his own words. What comes through in the deposition is how Jobs sees himself and his’ fierce loyalty to those who work for him. For instance, after selling NeXt to Apple in 1997, his initial reason for acting as a consultant was to get “some of the NeXt people into some jobs where they could help Apple.” He himself was reluctant at first to take on the CEO role at Apple because he didn’t want the people at his other company, Pixar, to “think I was abandoning them.”

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