An investigator works the scene where fire caused damage to a two-story apartment at 1156 N. Cahuenga Blvd. in Hollywood, section of Los Angeles, on Friday, Dec. 30, 2011. An arsonist torched car after car early Friday, sending firefighters scrambling to put out more than a dozen blazes in Hollywood and neighboring West Hollywood. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)
An investigator works the scene where fire caused damage to a two-story apartment at 1156 N. Cahuenga Blvd. in Hollywood, section of Los Angeles, on Friday, Dec. 30, 2011. An arsonist torched car after car early Friday, sending firefighters scrambling to put out more than a dozen blazes in Hollywood and neighboring West Hollywood. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)
A Los Angeles Fire Department engine arrives at a fire in the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles on Friday Dec.30,2011. An arsonist torched car after car early Friday, sending firefighters scrambling to put out more than a dozen blazes in Hollywood and neighboring West Hollywood. The fires started shortly after midnight and occurred over a four-hour span before dawn. (AP Photo/Mike Meadows)
A Los Angeles Fire Department firefighter is shown at a fire in West Hollywood, Calif., on Friday Dec.30, 2011. An arsonist torched car after car early Friday, sending firefighters scrambling to put out more than a dozen blazes in Hollywood and neighboring West Hollywood. The fires started shortly after midnight and occurred over a four-hour span before dawn. (AP Photo/Mike Meadows)
Burning cars are shown at the site of an arson fire in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles on Friday Dec.30, 2011. An arsonist torched car after car early Friday, sending firefighters scrambling to put out more than a dozen blazes in Hollywood and neighboring West Hollywood. The fires started shortly after midnight and occurred over a four-hour span before dawn. (AP Photo/Mike Meadows)
Los Angeles City firefighter Dane Jackson investigates the scene where fire caused damage to a home once occupied by Doors frontman Jim Morrison, at 8021 Rothdell Trail in the Hollywood Hills, section of Los Angeles, on Friday, Dec. 30, 2011. An arsonist torched car after car early Friday, sending firefighters scrambling to put out more than a dozen blazes in Hollywood and neighboring West Hollywood. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)
LOS ANGELES (AP) ? Authorities beefed up patrols and urged the public to remain vigilant following a rash of predawn arson fires that set vehicles ablaze, ignited some nearby houses, and left the Hollywood area reeling.
Fires were reported in nearly two dozen locations in Hollywood and the neighboring city of West Hollywood during a four-hour period before dawn Friday. In nearly every case, the fire started in a parked car.
Another car fire was reported around 7 p.m. Friday in an underground garage in Hollywood that fire officials were investigating for possible links to the series of arson blazes. Los Angeles Fire Capt. Jaime Moore said that a connection hasn't been ruled out.
Arson investigators "consider it to be an incendiary fire similar to the fires from this morning," he told The Associated Press.
Flames from torched vehicles ignited some nearby houses early Friday, including one once occupied by Doors frontman Jim Morrison.
Officials announced at least $35,000 in rewards for information leading to the conviction of the person or persons responsible.
All of the fires were in a 2-square mile area and most were in densely populated residential neighborhoods where residents would likely be asleep.
Authorities were interviewing witnesses and looking for any video footage that may have captured the person, or people, responsible for the spate of crimes. Investigators from four agencies met for a strategy session, while Los Angeles officials summoned investigators from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Fire officials couldn't say whether the rash of fires was the work of a copycat. There was a series of other arson fires early Thursday, also in Hollywood. Two people have been arrested and remain in custody for those blazes, officials said.
One of the homes was in Laurel Canyon, where Morrison and his girlfriend once lived, neighbors said. The winding road was the inspiration for the Doors' hit "Love Street," and the house was listed for nearly $1.2 million earlier this year, according to real estate website Zillow.com.
Sandy Gendel, who owns a nearby restaurant, said he heard explosions from what he later determined were likely car tires. He saw flames 30 feet high coming from the deck of the former Morrison house and a gutted Mazda Miata.
"It was just like a towering inferno," Gendel said.
Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Jaime Moore said it is plausible that one person in a car, on a motorcycle or on a bike could have set all the fires, considering the limited area the blazes broke out in.
Hollywood is served by the Los Angeles city police and fire departments. Adjacent West Hollywood is a separately incorporated city served by the Los Angeles County fire and sheriff's departments.
___
Associated Press writers Sue Manning and Greg Risling contributed to this report.
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@WSJmpking Hope they were union members assembling that float or #wiunion is going to be pissed and may boycott the parade!Il y a environ 7 heuresvia web en r?ponse ? WSJmpking
NAIROBI, Kenya ? A resident and a military officer say Ethiopian troops have entered a border town in Somalia in what would be a third front against al-Shabab militants.
Resident Mohammed Abdi said hundreds of residents fled the border town of Beledweyne on Saturday after hundreds of Ethiopian and Somali troops moved in.
Capt. Hashi Nor of the Somali military confirmed that Somali and Ethiopian troops had moved in.
The movement appears to be a third front against al-Shabab, Somalia's strongest militant group. Kenyan troops are fighting al-Shabab in Somalia's south, and African Union troops in Mogadishu have mostly pushed al-Shabab fighters out of the capital.
Boston (Reuters) ? Hackers affiliated with the Anonymous group published hundreds of thousands of email addresses belonging to subscribers of private intelligence analysis firm Strategic Forecasting Inc along with thousands of customer credit card numbers.
The lists, which were published on the Internet late on Thursday, included information on people including former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey. They could not be reached for comment.
The lists included information on large numbers of people working for big corporations, the U.S. military and major defense contractors - which attackers could potentially use to target them with virus-tainted emails in an approach known as "spear phishing."
The Antisec faction of Anonymous disclosed last weekend that it had hacked into the firm, which is widely known as Stratfor and is dubbed a "shadow CIA" because it gathers non-classified intelligence on international crises.
The hackers had promised that the release of the stolen data would cause "mayhem." A spokesperson for the group said via Twitter that yet-to-be-published emails from the firm would show "Stratfor is not the 'harmless company' it tries to paint itself as."
Antisec has not disclosed when it will release those emails, but security analysts said they could contain information that could be embarrassing for the U.S. government.
"Those emails are going to be dynamite and may provide a lot of useful information to adversaries of the U.S. government," said Jeffrey Carr, chief executive of Taia Global Inc and author of the book "Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld."
Stratfor issued a statement on Friday confirming that the published email addresses had been stolen from the company's database, saying it was helping law enforcement probe the matter and conducting its own investigation.
"At Stratfor, we try to foster a culture of scrutiny and analysis, and we want to assure our customers and friends that we will apply the same rigorous standards in carrying out our internal review," the statement said.
"There are thousands of email addresses here that could be used for very targeted spear phishing attacks that could compromise national security," said John Bumgarner, chief technology officer of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a non-profit group that studies cyber threats.
NO THREAT SO FAR - PENTAGON
The Pentagon said it saw no threat so far.
"We are not aware of any compromise to the DOD information grid," said Lieutenant Colonel Jim Gregory, a spokesman for the Department of Defense.
In a posting on the data-sharing website pastebin.com, the hackers said the list included information from about 75,000 customers of Stratfor and about 860,000 people who had registered to use its site. It said that included some 50,000 email addresses belonging to the U.S. government's .gov and .mil domains.
The list also included addresses at contractors including BAE Systems Plc, Boeing Co, Lockheed Martin Corp and several U.S. government-funded labs that conduct classified research in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Idaho Falls, Idaho; and Sandia and Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Corporations on the list included Bank of America, Exxon Mobil Corp, Goldman Sachs & Co and Thomson Reuters.
The entries included scrambled versions of passwords. Some of them can be unscrambled using databases known as rainbow tables that are available for download over the Internet, according to Bumgarner.
He said he randomly picked six people on the list affiliated with U.S. military and intelligence agencies to see if he could crack their passwords.
He said he was able to break four of them, each in about a second, using one rainbow table.
(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria and Mark Hosenball in Washington; Editing by Vicki Allen and Peter Cooney)
SAN FRANCISCO ? It isn?t ?exactly a hostile takeover, but there are some similarities at Illinois as it prepares to play UCLA in the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl on Saturday.
It starts with a new CEO, athletic director Mike Thomas, who was hired in August. He then brought in a new chief operating officer, coach Tim Beckman, on Dec. 9.
It?s awkward for the lame-duck middle managers (assistant coaches) who are leading Illinois while looking for their next job. It?s really awkward for the three assistants who are haggling with the university over the exit terms of their contracts.
When Ron Zook hired coordinators Vic Koenning and Paul Petrino and several new position coaches two years ago, they were given two-year contracts because of the uncertainty of Zook?s situation.
Before this season, Koenning and Petrino traded that security for reduced buyouts in their new contracts. Three other assistants ? Jeff Brohm, Chip Long and Ron West ? followed the guidelines of the Koenning/Petrino contracts, apparently without reading them closely, a source said. Now they?ll only be paid through February.
Four other assistants ? Joe Gilbert, Keith Gilmore, Mike Gillhamer and Deandre Smith ? signed contracts, on the advice of legal representatives, that will pay them through the 2012 season if they don?t find new jobs, the source said. (Gilmore already has been retained by Beckman).
Saying that Zook and retired athletic director Ron Guenther promised to honor their rollovers even though they?re not in their new contracts, Brohm, Long and West are arguing their position through legal representatives.
Thomas has chosen to stick to the letter of the contracts.
??The university intends to abide by all the language in the agreed-to contracts,?? team spokesman Kent Brown said Tuesday, ??and we expect the coaches to do the same.??
It?s a tricky deal for interim coach Koenning, who reportedly will become North Carolina?s defensive coordinator.
??Considering the way everything?s gone down, anything I can get from these [assistants] is great,?? Koenning said. ??A lot of guys don?t have pay coming after February, so they need to be on the phone, trying to find jobs. There?s a lot of uncertainty. We just need to do what?s best for the players, and that?s what we?re trying to do.??
Where does that leave the employees (aka the players)?
Determined not to let all of the turmoil spoil their bowl game.
??It?s a reality of the business,?? quarterback Nathan Scheelhaase said of the oddity of going to a bowl even though the coach has been fired. ??Change happens. You have to adapt.??
That?s the approach Beckman has been stressing as he takes the reins.
Since telling the players ??change is always difficult?? at his first meeting with them, Beckman has softened his phrasing.
??Change is sometimes uneasy, but change is also good,?? he said last week. ??Everybody?s on a level playing field. I?ve been watching to see what type of practice players they are and what type of gamers. What a great opportunity for them to showcase what they can do [in the bowl].??
Like Illinois, UCLA is led by an interim coach after firing Rick Neuheisel. Like Illinois, which has lost its last six games, UCLA is limping in. The Bruins needed a waiver from the NCAA to play in a bowl with a 6-7 record.
But in an age where 70 of 120 teams are playing in bowls, the ?Illini are determined to enjoy this end game.
??It?s definitely a celebration,?? linebacker Jonathan Brown said. ??We?re celebrating the end of a season, trying to wrap it up good, trying to win back-to-back bowl games, which has never been done here.
??We?re eager to play. We?re not thinking about anything else. We?ll deal with the coaching change when we get back in January.??
As Scheelhaase, defensive end Whitney Mercilus and other ?players have said, it?s a business. Three assistant coaches can attest to that.
Twitter / Cesar Diaz: Project GOAL Teams With Sp ...Project GOAL Teams With SportsCorps/Sport and Development Project at Brown University: Il y a environ 6 heuresvia web
In my last column, I wrote about wishing that the Christmas spirit of Carson City would rub off on Congress so they could pull together and do some great things for America.
Well, you can imagine my astonishment to pick up my Nevada Appeal and see that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, and Sen. Dean Heller, a Republican, actually got together and sponsored a jobs bill that emphasizes and pushes for more job opportunities for veterans.
?This legislation is an example of what can get done when Congress engages in a real bipartisanship dialog. These joint efforts are long-overdue,? Heller said.
Reid noted that the jobs bill had been a priority of his for a long time and he was pleased to have Heller sign on. I just hope that this bipartisanship can continue and that Reid and Heller can set an example for the rest of Congress that good things can happen when people work together, rather than have the constant bickering that accomplishes nothing and which America is sick of.
A tip of the hat and kudos to the two senators, and let this not be just one shot at compromise or a re-election ploy, as suggested by Jon Ralston on ?Face to Face,? but an honest attempt at ?getting along,? which I truly wish to believe.
On a less happy subject, I see that the Republican-controlled House on Monday dropped its objections to a two-month extension of the Social Security payroll tax cut that President Obama called ?the only viable way? to prevent a drop in take-home pay for 160 million workers on Jan. 1.
The standoff had caused confusion in business as the clock ticked on the need to adapt to any new payroll tax measures.
In the meantime, stay vigilant, as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid still are on the chopping block come 2012 and don't let anyone tell you differently. Don't be caught napping.
I hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas, and let's hope for the best in 2012. Stay tuned.
? Janice Ayres is president of Nevada Senior Corps Association.
A radar for ADAR: Altered gene tracks RNA editing in neuronsPublic release date: 25-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Orenstein david_orenstein@brown.edu 401-863-1862 Brown University
Biologists use technology to observe individual differences in fruit flies
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] To track what they can't see, pilots look to the green glow of the radar screen. Now biologists monitoring gene expression, individual variation, and disease have a glowing green indicator of their own: Brown University biologists have developed a "radar" for tracking ADAR, a crucial enzyme for editing RNA in the nervous system.
The advance gives scientists a way to view when and where ADAR is active in a living animal and how much of it is operating. In experiments in fruit flies described in the journal Nature Methods, the researchers show surprising degrees of individual variation in ADAR's RNA editing activity in the learning and memory centers of the brains of individual flies.
"We designed this molecular reporter to give us a fluorescent readout from living organisms," said Robert Reenan, professor of biology and senior author of the paper, which appears Dec. 25, 2011. "When it comes to gene expression and regulation, the devil is in the details."
Biologists already know that errors in transcribing RNA from DNA can lead to improper gene expression in the nervous system and might contribute to diseases such as epilepsy, suicidal depression, and schizophrenia. More recently they've gathered evidence that ADAR is associated with disease. For instance in a study in Nature Neuroscience two months ago, Reenan and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania described profound connections between ADAR and a model of Fragile X mental retardation in fruit flies.
Reenan said that using the new "reporter" tool to look for correlations between ADAR activity levels and behavior or disease might yield new insights into how RNA editing errors lead to such variations. But he also speculated that the mechanics of how he and his research group created the fluorescent ADAR tracking system could be adapted to someday allow therapies based on targeted RNA repair. Their reporter works by requiring ADAR to fix a purposely broken individual letter of RNA on an engineered gene.
"We're actually repairing RNA at the level of a single informational bit, or nucleotide," Reenan said. "Here we've shown we can take a mutant version of a gene and restore its function, but at the level of RNA rather than DNA."
A reporter of an editor
Reenan and third author Kyle Jay began working to create the reporter in 2006 when Jay was an undergraduate student just embarking on what would become a celebrated senior thesis at Brown. They started with a well-known tool of molecular biology: a jellyfish gene that produces a protein that glows green upon exposure to ultraviolet light. The strategy was to intentionally break the gene in a way that ADAR is uniquely suited to fix.
First they engineered the gene to include necessary "intron" code that requires a specific splicing operation to take place. Then they inserted the "stop codon" T-A-G in place of T-G-G, which causes transcription to cease, effectively preventing production of the green fluorescent protein. But before splicing occurs and when ADAR finds the stop codon U-A-G in the RNA transcript, it edits the A to an I, which restores the correct information, and translation of the whole gene proceeds as if there were no stop mutation in the DNA. So when splicing and ADAR editing occurs, neurons with the gene reporter glow green.
To see where ADAR editing and splicing were occurring, compared to just splicing alone, they also rigged up an engineered gene with the splicing requirement, but not the T-A-G codon. That would produce yellow fluorescent protein when splicing alone occurred.
Armed with their new ADAR reporter, Reenan and lead author James Jepson set out to make some biological observations in flies. One was that ADAR activity is more pronounced in certain parts of the brains of developing larvae than it is in the brains of adults. The team also found wide variation in ADAR activity in the brains of flies of similar ages from individual to individual. This was a surprise, Reenan said, because all the flies were essentially genetically identical.
A versatile new tool?
Reenan said he is confident that the ADAR reporter could be useful in more organisms than the fruit fly. The idea of creating the reporter grew out of his lab's studies of comparative genomics in a number of species. ADAR, meanwhile, is found in both invertebrates and vertebrates. In fact, in the paper the researchers describe testing the flexibility of their engineering by inserting into their engineered jellyfish gene destined as it was for a fruit fly the splicing intron of a moth.
"Thus it was, a jellyfish-moth gene chimera was crippled by mutation, and repaired by a fruit fly enzyme," Reenan said. "Rube Goldberg would be proud."
Reenan said he plans to use the ADAR reporter in flies to continue the investigation of the genes associated with Fragile X and is eager for someone who works on the disorder in mice to give it a try.
The idea of adapting this method to direct ADAR to fix mistranscribed RNA or reverse DNA damage at the RNA level in a therapeutic fashion is farther into the future. But in a sense, at least ADAR is now on the radar.
###
In addition to Reenan, Jepson, and Jay, the paper's other author is Yannis A. Savva. Jepson is also affiliated with Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and Jay now works at the University of CaliforniaSan Francisco.
An Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar award funded the research.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
A radar for ADAR: Altered gene tracks RNA editing in neuronsPublic release date: 25-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Orenstein david_orenstein@brown.edu 401-863-1862 Brown University
Biologists use technology to observe individual differences in fruit flies
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] To track what they can't see, pilots look to the green glow of the radar screen. Now biologists monitoring gene expression, individual variation, and disease have a glowing green indicator of their own: Brown University biologists have developed a "radar" for tracking ADAR, a crucial enzyme for editing RNA in the nervous system.
The advance gives scientists a way to view when and where ADAR is active in a living animal and how much of it is operating. In experiments in fruit flies described in the journal Nature Methods, the researchers show surprising degrees of individual variation in ADAR's RNA editing activity in the learning and memory centers of the brains of individual flies.
"We designed this molecular reporter to give us a fluorescent readout from living organisms," said Robert Reenan, professor of biology and senior author of the paper, which appears Dec. 25, 2011. "When it comes to gene expression and regulation, the devil is in the details."
Biologists already know that errors in transcribing RNA from DNA can lead to improper gene expression in the nervous system and might contribute to diseases such as epilepsy, suicidal depression, and schizophrenia. More recently they've gathered evidence that ADAR is associated with disease. For instance in a study in Nature Neuroscience two months ago, Reenan and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania described profound connections between ADAR and a model of Fragile X mental retardation in fruit flies.
Reenan said that using the new "reporter" tool to look for correlations between ADAR activity levels and behavior or disease might yield new insights into how RNA editing errors lead to such variations. But he also speculated that the mechanics of how he and his research group created the fluorescent ADAR tracking system could be adapted to someday allow therapies based on targeted RNA repair. Their reporter works by requiring ADAR to fix a purposely broken individual letter of RNA on an engineered gene.
"We're actually repairing RNA at the level of a single informational bit, or nucleotide," Reenan said. "Here we've shown we can take a mutant version of a gene and restore its function, but at the level of RNA rather than DNA."
A reporter of an editor
Reenan and third author Kyle Jay began working to create the reporter in 2006 when Jay was an undergraduate student just embarking on what would become a celebrated senior thesis at Brown. They started with a well-known tool of molecular biology: a jellyfish gene that produces a protein that glows green upon exposure to ultraviolet light. The strategy was to intentionally break the gene in a way that ADAR is uniquely suited to fix.
First they engineered the gene to include necessary "intron" code that requires a specific splicing operation to take place. Then they inserted the "stop codon" T-A-G in place of T-G-G, which causes transcription to cease, effectively preventing production of the green fluorescent protein. But before splicing occurs and when ADAR finds the stop codon U-A-G in the RNA transcript, it edits the A to an I, which restores the correct information, and translation of the whole gene proceeds as if there were no stop mutation in the DNA. So when splicing and ADAR editing occurs, neurons with the gene reporter glow green.
To see where ADAR editing and splicing were occurring, compared to just splicing alone, they also rigged up an engineered gene with the splicing requirement, but not the T-A-G codon. That would produce yellow fluorescent protein when splicing alone occurred.
Armed with their new ADAR reporter, Reenan and lead author James Jepson set out to make some biological observations in flies. One was that ADAR activity is more pronounced in certain parts of the brains of developing larvae than it is in the brains of adults. The team also found wide variation in ADAR activity in the brains of flies of similar ages from individual to individual. This was a surprise, Reenan said, because all the flies were essentially genetically identical.
A versatile new tool?
Reenan said he is confident that the ADAR reporter could be useful in more organisms than the fruit fly. The idea of creating the reporter grew out of his lab's studies of comparative genomics in a number of species. ADAR, meanwhile, is found in both invertebrates and vertebrates. In fact, in the paper the researchers describe testing the flexibility of their engineering by inserting into their engineered jellyfish gene destined as it was for a fruit fly the splicing intron of a moth.
"Thus it was, a jellyfish-moth gene chimera was crippled by mutation, and repaired by a fruit fly enzyme," Reenan said. "Rube Goldberg would be proud."
Reenan said he plans to use the ADAR reporter in flies to continue the investigation of the genes associated with Fragile X and is eager for someone who works on the disorder in mice to give it a try.
The idea of adapting this method to direct ADAR to fix mistranscribed RNA or reverse DNA damage at the RNA level in a therapeutic fashion is farther into the future. But in a sense, at least ADAR is now on the radar.
###
In addition to Reenan, Jepson, and Jay, the paper's other author is Yannis A. Savva. Jepson is also affiliated with Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and Jay now works at the University of CaliforniaSan Francisco.
An Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar award funded the research.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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VIDEO BUZZ - Justin Bieber - Mistletoe & Santa Clause is Coming to Town - Disney World Christmas Parade ow.ly/1gn6ExIl y a environ 5 heuresvia HootSuite
The Motorola ACTV (read our review of the Android powered watch thingy here) has been rooted. While this registers a solid 11 on the awesome-meter, we really shouldn't be that surprised -- it's running Android, and by now all the evil scientists Android hackers know their way around things and nothing running Google's OS is safe. But I still have to sit and smile because not only is there a fitness meter/music player/watch that runs Android, but now it can be hacked, too. Damn nice work, CMW.
What's really cool about this one is the way it was rooted. CMW was able to exploit the OTA update code and files, extract a copy of the boot image, and enable adb in it. Flash it through fastboot (the ACTV's bootloader isn't locked), connect via adb and run a standard exploit against the system. He gives full instructions at his site, and even has a link to a set of Google apps that will run on the 1.6-inch ACTV. If Santa dropped a Motorola ACTV in your stocking this morning, of if you're just the curious type, have a look at the link below.
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AGORA ---> Todo mundo ligando na Mix TV pra ver a retrospectiva hil?ria dos maiores virais de 2011. @Nairbello apresentando t? #LOL.Il y a environ 13 heuresvia HootSuiteRetweeted by 6 people
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Each weekend, Mashable selects startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.
[More from Mashable: ConnectYard Connects Students and Profs Via Text, Social Media]
This week, we chose three startups that are helping to tailor content in a digital environment that has become over-saturated with information.
BetaBait connects startups with early adopters who love trying new products and apps. Subjot is a social network in which you follow topics rather than people. Movable Ink is adding dynamic graphic elements to emails, helping your message stand out in a flat inbox.
[More from Mashable: New iPhone App Connects Strangers Around the World Through Instagram Photos]
BetaBait: Connecting Startups With Early Adopters
Quick Pitch: BetaBait connects startups with their target group of beta users, who love to test new apps and products.
Genius Idea: Connecting eager users with exciting new products.
Mashable's Take: BetaBait's daily email service makes it easy for startups to find consumers and professional early adopters. Both the consumers and the startups get what they want, so the service is mutually beneficial.
In each daily email blast, BetaBait profiles new apps, businesses, social networking tools and educational resources that early adopters can get their hands on.
Since BetaBait's recent launch, it has amassed more than 500 beta users and 100 startup partners. The startups featured have reported dozens of new users after they've entered a partnership with BetaBait.
The startup's main source of revenue is currently startup sponsorships for its daily emails. Each email blast offers one startup sponsor the top section of the email body, ensuring their content is the first thing the community reads.
Subjot: Follow the Topics You Care About
Quick Pitch: Subjot is a social network that lets you follow people's topics, rather than everything they say.
Genius Idea: Fine tuning just the content you want to see.
Mashable's Take: You know when you only care about half of the tweets sent by someone you follow on Twitter? Say they have great taste in music, but you couldn't care less about their thoughts on sports. Subjot can help. On this new social network you only follow the subjects that interest you from the people you follow.
You use it just like Twitter -- post about whatever you'd like -- but your followers will only see posts about the subjects they've chosen to follow. You also don't need to follow everyone who follows you. You get a bit more space to "jot your thoughts" than you do on Twitter: 250 characters to be exact.
You can share links, photos, videos and engage in conversations on the nascent social network.
Movable Ink: Brings Your Emails to Life
Quick Pitch: iStockphoto, izusek
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
McHale, after a spell coaching the Minnesota Timberwolves, has taken over at the Rockets this year and brought in an entirely new coaching team including Finch who has made a big impression these last two years at the Vipers who are an associate and feeder team for the Rockets.
"Kevin is a really great guy to work for and tries to mix it up for all the assistant coaches," said Finch. "I'm working a lot on the offensive side of the things mostly but I am also heavily involved in "scouting" the up-coming opposition ? we have divided the future games amongst and I will scout a third of them which is a really challenging part of the job.
"Once the schedule kicks in on Christmas Day its going to be pretty intense because after the lockout we have still been left with a 66 game regular season in just about four months. The games and the quality opposition comes at you thick and fast but you still need to get your homework done and make the best of any preparation time you have.
"We have escaped fairly lightly at the Rockets in terms of tripleheaders ? we have got just the one ? but we have got a brutish run of six road games in ten days in February and we have also got a hell of a start over the first ten games, probably the toughest in the NBA with play-off opposition almost all the way.
"Being a young team and with a brand new set of coaches we might have benefited more than most from a traditional pre-season camp and eight or nine warm-up games but this is nor a normal season and we will have to learn on the run this time round. We will get an opportunity to catch our breathe after that first run of ten games, absorb the lessons and then go again."
Finch and everybody at the Rockets will be fully engrossed with the NBA until at least the end of April and hopefully a bit longer after that if the play-offs beckon so Olympics thoughts and plans go on the back burner for a while. Mind you that's the nature of the beast and the challenge facing just about every top level Basketball player and coach from all the participating nations ahead of London.
"Whether you are a player or a coach your sole focus for the next six months or so has to be your club and maximising your game or contribution. That is your Olympic preparation because no matter where you are until that first Olympic camp comes around sometime in early June or so and the pre Olympic warm-up games there is not a whole lot you can do collectively. First and foremost you are a professional Basketball player or coach.
"I had a good spell during the lockout when I was able to watch a lot of matches on TV or online featuring GB players and just recently I've also seen a couple of our College lads in America. Andrew Lawrence was absolutely phenomenal for Charleston in one of them and earned a good deal of publicity."
Probably the biggest news GB wise is that Pops Mensah Bonsu is fit and healthy again, a little ahead of prediction after his shoulder surgery, and is already getting some good game time in Turkey with Besiktas. HE seems to have hit the ground running in a strong league.
"I can't imagine there is anybody out there more "up" for 2012 than Pops," added Finch. "He is living and dreaming the opportunity to play at a London Olympics and he is an important individual for us. We missed him last summer as a player and we missed him around the place, the energy and passion he brings to everything.
"For the next chunk of time though its all about the Rockets and getting the season under way. It's a huge challenge but like everybody else I can hardly wait."
Bobacheck 
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Public release date: 25-Dec-2011
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