meltdown

Japan radiation monitoring goes crowd, open source

A new open and crowdsourced initiative to deploy more geiger counters all over Japan looks to be a go. Safecast, formerly RDTN.org, recently met and exceeded its $33,000 fund-raising goal on Kickstarter, which should help Safecast send between 100 and 600 geiger counters to the catastrophe-struck country.

The data captured from the geiger counters will be fed into Safecast.org, which aggregates radiation readings from government, nonprofit, and other sources, as well as into Pachube, a global open-source network of sensors. Safecast is one of the larger crowdsourced monitoring efforts, not unlike a similar effort in the United States that predated the Japanese disaster.… Read more

Overheating, radiation troubles mount at Japan reactors

Problems are cascading at a Japanese power plant, where explosions and fires are making it dangerous for workers to try to keep new overheating problems in check.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant on the northeast coast of Japan, with six reactors, was damaged by last week's magnitude 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunamis. When the natural disaster struck, reactors 1, 2, and 3 were running and units 4, 5, and 6 were shut down for a regular inspection.

The first overt problems appeared at the three operating reactors, where heat remains an issue even though control rods were automatically inserted … Read more

Even Steve Jobs has demo hiccups

SAN FRANCISCO--For a short time Monday morning the demo gods were not smiling on Steve Jobs.

About 40 minutes into the Apple CEO's keynote speech in which he was introducing his company's latest gadget, the iPhone 4, his demo came to an abrupt halt. He was attempting to show the difference in how Web site text was displayed between the new retina display feature on the iPhone 4 versus the iPhone 3GS, but the conference hall Wi-Fi set up at Moscone West was not cooperating. Only one of the phone's browser windows was loading. The other was … Read more

Tips for surviving the market meltdown

Guest post: Christopher Lochhead, the retired chief marketing officer at Scient and Mercury, offers a follow-up from his post in August on how companies can thrive in a prolonged economic downturn.

Reading The Wall Street Journal and watching CNBC lately can drive a person (namely me) to drink. Which is fun, but beyond answering the question, "Which scotch will I drink?" the seminal question is "How do we thrive in a downturn?"

Downturns are the best time to take market share. Most companies overreact. They get too conservative. They also forget that they are not the … Read more

No escape from the perfect financial storm

The proverbial wheels are coming off. The financial crisis is spreading across the globe. The political mudslinging is getting into full gear as the U.S. presidential election nears its conclusion and inflation continues to rise. Basically, everything costs more, with the exception of gasoline spurred by slowing demand as consumers look for ways to stay afloat financially.

The well-heeled country of Iceland, with 320,000 residents (about half the population of Alaska in an island the size of Kentucky) is nearly underwater financially. Europe, not just the U.S., is in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis.

Governments, … Read more

More companies bracing investors for current quarter

With only a week into the fourth quarter, the number of companies that have already rejiggered their financial forecasts--even before they've reported their third-quarter results--has gone up two-fold, according to a company that tracks earnings estimates.

SAP and Netflix are two of the latest examples of companies that have retooled Wall Street's expectations for how to perceive their fourth quarter financial performance, even though they have yet to announce their third quarter results that ended on September 30.

To date, 43 companies have issued preliminary guidance for the fourth quarter, and while the aggregate numbers are low, it … Read more