The old logo seemed kinda busy, incoming media chief Steve Burke told employees on Thursday.

Its not clear why purple and white were chosen. However there is some logic to the new logo: Previously a space separated the NBC and the Universal. Now the two have been moved together to reflect the fact that it is one company.

We arent a family of two favorite sons, rather one filled with
talented people and companies all tied for first, according to a
voice-over presentation that introduced the logo to employees.

The logo received a thumbs down all over the internet.

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FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski presiding over an open internet meeting in March 2010. Photo Credit: Greg Elin

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It could mean a huge boost for businesses in the Capital Region and tens of thousands of jobs all across the country.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was in town Friday talking about her proposal for a permanent tax credit for high tech businesses.

The legislation would expand and make the Research and Development Tax Credit permanent.

“The most important investments right now are investments in small business that help the private sector create jobs,” Senator Gillibrand said. “Government doesnt create jobs, individuals, people, ideas, small businesses, they create jobs.”

Businesses like Solid Sealing Technology, Inc. – a manufacturing and design lab in the basement of the Watervliet Arsenal.

“Unless you come inside these walls you have no idea whats inside the Arsenal,” said SST co-founder Gary Balfour.

Balfour and Alan Feuirer founded the business back in 2004.

They make seals and connectors that can withstand extreme conditions and are used at high tech businesses like Global Foundries.

“They come down here and their first reaction in New York State and people around here is ‘oh my god, I can’t believe you guys actually design and build that stuff right here in the Capital District,’” explained Feuirer.

Balfour says SST is the largest manufacturer of this technology in the world.

But despite global success, SST is still considered a small business with only 38 employees.

“As a small business you have to watch every dollar,” Balfour said. “If you have a few more dollars you can expand that research and development group.”

Gillibrand’s plan would create a permanent 20 percent research and development tax credit that could impact more than 2,000 New York businesses and spur job growth across the nation.

“You have to continue to invest very aggressively in high tech businesses or the technology marches by your company and there’s no way were going to let that happen,” Balfour said.

Gillibrand says expanding the tax credit would create 162,000 jobs across the country and increase private investment in research and development by more than $7.5 billion.

She hopes that happens within two years.

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Interest rates are hovering at near-record highs, with the average card user at 14.72 percent.

Those with bad credit could see interest rates as high as 59.9 percent.

The recent Credit Card Act helped crack down on certain fees, but it did not cap interest rates.

New rules prevent banks from raising most interest rates retroactively, but there’s no limit on the rates they can charge new customers.

The website credit.com says those with a credit score below 599 can expect to pay an APR of 24 percent or higher, if you can get a card at all.

A credit score between 600 to 649 can expect rates around 20 percent.

Those with a credit score between 650 and 699 can get rates between 15 and 19 percent.

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Fort Dodge, Ia. – Authorities are searching for two people who robbed a Fort Dodge credit union and escaped in a stolen vehicle.

Police say the pair got away with an undetermined amount of cash on Thursday morning at the Fort Dodge Family Credit Union. No one was injured.

The two fled in a Jeep Grand Cherokee sport utility vehicle that was reported stolen earlier in the day. The SUV was later found abandoned in an apartment building parking lot.

Capt. Quintin Nelson said the robbers may have used another vehicle to leave the area.

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• |
• Jan 19, 2011 – 4:28 PM
• |

Mortgage move really watching out for all of us

Sometimes, we need a little protection from our own follies.
This week’s federal decision to tighten the rules around mortgages addresses the very real problem of growing personal debt among Canadians.
Starting March 18, you’ll be able to refinance only up to 85 per cent of a home’s value, down from 90 cent today. The government has also limited the maximum amortization — the time it takes to pay off the entire mortgage — to 30 years, down from 35 years.
In the short term, the move will cause a stutter in the real estate market while homebuyers, particularly first-time home buyers, adjust.
Long-term, it discourages our own version of the mortgage-related economic collapse the US recently suffered, where home prices plummeted, foreclosures soared and consumers stopped spending any money on anything.
Certainly, government interference in our personal decisions should never go without scrutiny and debate.
When our lawmakers pass regulations or legislation governing our freedom to choose, it’s only acceptable when those personal choices will affect our fellow Canadians.
This is one of those cases where federal decisions to tighten lending are important and necessary.
We have rules governing traffic rules, criminal activity and negligent acts such as drinking and driving for the same reason – to protect everyone from the harm inflicted by individual errors in judgment.
The federal government’s decision to limit options for home financing is intrusive. Certainly, there’s something to be said about allowing citizens to learn the hard way from their own mistakes. But in this case, the move is a farsighted necessity, protecting Canadians from the impact and allure of easy access to borrowed money.

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Joe Heller is editorial cartoonist for the Press-Gazette. Since he started Nov. 1, 1985, he figures hes created about 6,500 cartoons for this newspaper.

Hellers work space is an office off the third floor newsroom. Through the office door can be heard crackling police and fire scanners, ringing phones, conversations, the light click of computer keyboards and a buzz of excitement when news is breaking.

Its a good spot, Heller says. Its just quiet enough that you can work, but noisy enough that you still feel like youre in a newsroom.

Part of Hellers job as cartoonist is low-tech — paper, pencil, pen and ink.

I occasionally use a brush to fill in full black in large areas, but mainly I love cross-hatching, he says. Cross-hatching is very relaxing to me. Theres a rhythm to it, and I can create different patterns and textures.

I really enjoy that. I dont think Id ever give it up. But, because of my deadlines, I have to come up with a cartoon every day. That means I have to come up with the idea, stage the cartoon on paper, figure out what I want to say and do all the words, lettering and colorize it, all within a certain number of hours.

Among other tools, Heller uses a crow quill pen, Bristol board thats uncoated and machine finished, white paint for correcting mistakes and solid black Pelican ink. He figures he goes through a pen tip a week and a 1-ounce container of ink every two weeks. The ink has no solvents.

Its the one thing that I usually stress to art students — know your materials — because if Im going to be sniffing ink for the next 30 years, it better not have solvent because you can wreck your liver and kidneys.

Hellers office also contains computers, including a large electronic tablet for colorizing.

Once a cartoon is completed on the drawing board, I scan it in bit-MAC format and clean it up and save a copy in just the regular black-and-white format, he says. From there, Ill change the format to go into my colorization, which I apply a color layer beneath the black layer. And from there it goes to the press.

Colorizing involves touching a screen with an electronic pen. Heller wears a glove on his pinkie finger so he can slide his drawing hand wherever he needs.

The pen is very responsive, he says. Theres like 2,600 different sensitivity settings right in the pen, plus the millions of colors that I can do. And the palette rotates. There are different angles, and you have close-ups, zooms. You can zoom in and out. And buttons to shrink the brush size or increase the brush size.

Heller has other obligations at the Press-Gazette — many on the technical side — but hes best known for his editorial cartoons that are syndicated to 350 newspapers.

I get to draw cartoons for a living, he says. Its a wonderful thing.

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Jan 29, 2011 (The Wilson Daily Times – McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) —

Time Warner Cable plans to offer higher Internet speeds in Wilson this year along with its customers in the Triangle area.

Time Warner Cables Wideband Internet will be available to residents and businesses in Raleigh, Cary, Durham, Chapel Hill and Wilson in the spring. Wideband Internet will provide Internet download speeds of 50 megabits per second and upload speeds of 5 Mbps. The cost of the service will be released closer to the spring launch, said Keith Poston, TWC director of communications.

For our residential customers, Wideband Internet gives all home network devices — desktops, laptops, gaming consoles and smartphones — our fastest connection, said Christine Whitaker, TWC area vice president of operations for TWCs Raleigh, Fayetteville and coastal region. Time Warner Cable is committed to delivering products that speak to the high-speed data needs of businesses, as well as both the tech-savvy user and multi-media families who simply want the fastest speeds at home right now.

Wideband Internet will allow customers to download files, stream television shows and upload photos at faster speeds than TWC currently offers. Wideband Internet has wireless capability, which provides the convenience of mobility within the home. Customers will have the ability to connect up to five devices simultaneously.

Wilson residents have for years been able to tap into higher Internet speeds, following the 2008 launch of the city of Wilsons Greenlight fiber-optic technology. City leaders invested in the system because higher speeds were not offered in the private market. Greenlight sells Internet speeds of 60 Mbps, 80 Mbps and 100 Mbps.

Greenlights speeds are still much faster, said Brian Bowman, Wilson public affairs manager. In fact, Greenlight has offered the states fastest broadband speeds since 2008.

The companys decision to sell higher speeds in Wilson verifies what weve seen for several years — that people want better speeds and service than they had before. I should also point out that Wilsons inclusion in this announcement is because of Greenlight.

rochelle@wilsontimes.com — 265-7818

To see more of The Wilson Daily Times or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to

http://www.wilsondaily.com/. Copyright (c) 2011, The Wilson Daily Times, NC

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For more information

about the content services offered by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services

(MCT), visit www.mctinfoservices.com.

For full details on Time Warner Cable Inc (TWC) TWC. Time Warner Cable Inc (TWC) has Short Term PowerRatings at TradingMarkets. Details on Time Warner Cable Inc (TWC) Short Term PowerRatings is available at This Link.

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Enlarge Associated Press

In this undated photo provided by Central Vermont Public Service, a sign is displayed during rural electrification. Up in rural northern Vermont, it took until the 1960s to run power lines to some towns _ decades after the rest of America got turned on. These days, it’s the digital revolution that remains but a rumor in much of rural America.

Associated Press

In this undated photo provided by Central Vermont Public Service, a sign is displayed during rural electrification. Up in rural northern Vermont, it took until the 1960s to run power lines to some towns _ decades after the rest of America got turned on. These days, it’s the digital revolution that remains but a rumor in much of rural America.

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EAST BURKE, Vt. January 29, 2011, 02:55 pm ET

Up in rural northern Vermont, it took until the 1960s to run power lines to some towns — decades after the rest of America got turned on.

These days, it’s the digital revolution that remains but a rumor in much of rural America.

Dial-up user Val Houde knows this as well as anybody. After moving here four years ago, the 51-year-old mother of four took a correspondence course for medical transcription, hoping to work from home. She plunked down $800, took the course, then found out the software wasn’t compatible with dial-up Internet, the only kind available to her.

Selling items on eBay, watching videos, playing games online? Forget it. The connection from her home computer is so slow, her online life is one of delays, degraded quality and “buffering” warning messages. So she waits until the day a provider extends broadband to her house.

“I feel like these companies, they don’t care about these little pockets of places,” she said one night recently, showing a visitor her computer’s slow Internet service. “And I know we’re not the only ones.”

For Houde and millions of other Americans laboring under slow or no Internet service, help is on the way.

Bolstered by billions in federal stimulus money, an effort to expand broadband Internet access to rural areas is under way, an ambitious 21st-century infrastructure project with parallels to the New Deal electrification of the nation’s hinterlands in the 1930s and 1940s.

President Barack Obama emphasized the importance of Internet access in his State of the Union address last week.

“To attract new businesses to our shores, we need the fastest, most reliable ways to move people, goods, and information — from high-speed rail to high-speed Internet,” Obama said.

In the Depression, it was power to the people — for farm equipment and living-room lamps, cow-milking machines and kitchen appliances. Now, it’s online access — to YouTube and digital downloads, to videoconferencing and Facebook, to eBay and Twitter.

“Rural areas all across the country are wrestling with this, somewhat desperately,” said Paul Costello, executive director of the Vermont Council on Rural Development. “Young people who grow up with the media will not live where they can’t be connected to digital culture. So most rural communities have been behind the eight ball.”

Seventy years ago, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt realized that if private industry wouldn’t run power lines out to the farthest reaches of rural areas, it would take government money to help make it happen. In 1935, the Rural Electrification Administration was established to deliver electricity to the Tennessee Valley and beyond.

Now, money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is doing the same with broadband, which is typically defined as DSL (digital subscriber line), cable modem, fiber optic or fixed wireless.

The stimulus act set aside $7.2 billion for expansion of broadband access, believing it will spur economic growth, boost educational opportunities and create jobs. The money has jump-started what were existing efforts by states and telecom providers to bridge the digital divide of rural America.

In its national broadband plan issued last year, the Federal Communications Commission pinpointed schools’ use of online resources as one of the key targets of the stimulus-funded expansion efforts.

“With broadband, students and teachers can expand instruction beyond the confines of the physical classroom and traditional school day,” the plan says. “Broadband can also provide more customized learning opportunities for students to access high-quality, low-cost and personally relevant educational material.”

Schools in many rural districts lack that now.

“We sorely need fiber-optic in our community,” said Robert Brinkley, director of technology for the North Country Supervisory Union school district in Vermont.

The 13 schools in his district share a T-1 line whose bandwidth is so small that whenever a video field trip is planned for a class, all the other users on the system have to stop using e-mail first.

“The picture doesn’t just get poor, we lose the connection. Whether it’s NASA or the Cleveland Museum of Art, we’ll lose the connection or it’ll drop completely,” said Brinkley.

A U.S. Commerce Department report last year showed that 65.9 percent of urban households subscribed to broadband in 2009, compared with 51 percent of rural households. There are several reasons for the rural shortfall, but lack of availability is the most often cited.

Consumers in rural states have been left behind, either because their homes are too far from one another, mountains make construction expensive or providers have lacked the capital to justify the investment:

– In Kansas, Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc. got $100 million in stimulus loans and grants to extend broadband into unserved areas.

“Because of the economic climate that we live in — declining population, small farms being bought up by larger operators — the more technology and more access to information that those customers can have, the more likely they are to be able to stay in business,” said Rhonda Goddard, the company’s chief operating officer. “It’s revolutionary out there, for them to have access to the information they need to keep their business running — access to the markets, being able to buy supplies and equipment from the region instead of just from their local market. It opens doors. It increases competitiveness. It props up business.”

– In Colorado, mountains and vast stretches between farms and ranches on the plains have made it difficult for companies to justify spending millions of dollars to lay fiber optic cable to connect far-flung residents.

There, a public-private partnership won $100 million in stimulus money to try to expand high-speed Internet access to all Colorado school districts and to libraries and key institutions across the state. Some of the money will go to laying fiber and erecting new microwave towers to deliver broadband — at least — into areas that need them.

– In Texas, where 96 percent of households have broadband, $8 million in stimulus money is funding a five-year effort that includes mapping, data collection and technical assistance in hopes of reaching the 285,550 now-unserved households. Dave Osborn, CEO of Valley Telephone Cooperative Inc., said his company serves an area of roughly 1,700 square miles in south Texas with a population of 30,000. Stimulus money is key, he says.

“It takes a whole lot of money to serve this (population),” Osborn said. “At the end of the day, there’s no way I can spend $14,000 on a line and bill a customer $16 a month. We couldn’t do it without (the federal dollars).”

Obama said the broadband goals far exceed convenience.

“This isn’t just about faster Internet or fewer dropped calls,” the president said. “It’s about connecting every part of America to the digital age. It’s about a rural community in Iowa or Alabama where farmers and small business owners will be able to sell their products all over the world. It’s about a firefighter who can download the design of a burning building onto a hand-held device; a student who can take classes with a digital textbook; or a patient who can have face-to-face video chats with her doctor.”

In some parts of rural America, the issue isn’t just making broadband available. It’s convincing holdouts that there’s a benefit to it.

A survey released Jan. 13 by the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association — a trade association for rural telecoms — found that the overall broadband subscriber “take rate” for its member companies is only 55 percent, up from 38 percent a year ago.

“It’s kind of one of those `If you build it, will they come?’ things,” said CEO Shirley Bloomfield. “It’s one thing when you put in phone service. You may only have five customers at first, but you knew people would sign up.

“Now, you put out the broadband … and you’re doing a proposition of `Do you get enough customers to make it worth your while?’”

In Vermont, the rugged landscape of the Green Mountains, combined with the spread-out locations of the state’s 620,000 people, has blocked or impeded building before — the infrastructure for telephone, transportation and electricity infrastructure, among other things.

The last towns to get electricity were the hamlets of Granby and Victory, in 1963, following years of fundraising, including a “Holiday in the Hills” weekend in 1959 in which residents showed visitors how to get by using oil lamps and wood cookstoves.

Even now, utility crews have to use draught horses to haul poles and cables to places that trucks can’t go.

“It’s not as easy as some of the other big flat states in the Midwest, where you put the plow down and you just head on out, because they’re in sandy soil they can bury their cable in,” said Kurt Gruendling, vice president of marketing and business development for Waitsfield and Champlain Valley Telecom.

“In Vermont, in particular, we say we’re `topographically challenged.’ We have a lot of nooks and crannies,” said Deborah Shannon, director of broadband outreach and coordination for the Vermont Telecommunications Authority.

Former Gov. Jim Douglas and various providers had pledged to get broadband to all corners of Vermont by the end of 2010, but a combination of factors — including the market’s collapse in 2008 — prevented that.

Enter the stimulus.

Vermont Telephone is getting $116 million in grants and loans to extend wireless broadband to anchor institutions and unserved homes and businesses in Vermont and parts of neighboring New York and New Hampshire.

The Vermont Telecommunications Authority, in conjunction with Internet service provider Sovernet Communications, is using $33.4 million in stimulus funds to build a 773-mile fiber-optic backbone that will make up the so-called “middle mile” of service, allowing schools, state buildings and community centers to hook up to the main trunk. The “last mile” is from there to the home.

“Without the stimulus, the private sector would not have been able to do this and the state would not have been able to develop its plans to push higher-capacity fiber connections out into our most rural areas,” Shannon said.

Meanwhile, Valerie Houde waits.

“I know there are a lot of people out there, like us, who would greatly benefit from having broadband, and with the money the state got for expanding service, it seems something should change, finally, as long as the money goes where it’s supposed to and not into politicians’ and corporate executives’ pockets,” she said.

——

Associated Press writers Catherine Tsai in Colorado and Danny Robbins in Dallas contributed to this report.

 

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Hanging in the balance is whether customers who live in Tennessee, and who buy from Amazon.com, will have to pay sales taxes on their purchases.

Opposition storeowners want Amazon to collect sales tax from Tennesseans even after the Internet sales giant opens two distribution centers in east Tennessee. They say other retailers with brick-and-mortar locations in the state collect taxes on their Web-based orders, and Amazon shouldnt get a free pass.

But state leaders might give the Internet Goliath just that as a thank you of sorts for the jobs the company will create at the distribution complex.

I think thats unfair, said Laura Hill, co-owner of Reading Rock Books in downtown Dickson. We also sell books online, and we have to charge sales tax. So why shouldnt they? Our state needs that money.

A Virginia-based group is working to call attention to what it calls the Amazon loophole and build opposition to it. Dubbed Alliance for Main Street Fairness (its website is StandWithMainStreet.com), it has bought full-page newspaper ads urging citizens to call Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam to stop Amazons gambit.

The opposition group could end up working with state lawmakers to require Amazon to collect the tax, said Daniel Diaz, a spokesman for Main Street Fairness.

Small businesses are concerned about how theyre being negatively impacted by the preferential treatment of online-only retailers, Diaz said. He declined to say where the group gets its funds to operate.

Although the alliance presents itself as looking out for the little guy, trade groups like the Retailer Industry Leaders Association, whose members include Best Buy, Target, Walmart, Dollar General and Home Depot, have worked with the alliance in other states and support its efforts here.

A company the size of Amazon with $14 billion in sales should not be given a government-sponsored advantage over brick-and-mortar retailers, said Jason Brewer, a spokesman for Retailer Industry Leaders Association.

Up to now, Amazon (as a Web-only retailer) hasnt collected sales taxes on customers orders in Tennessee or in most other states. States can generally require Internet retailers to charge sales taxes to in-state customers only when it has a physical presence in that state.

Amazon executives have argued, though, that the Tennessee facilities would not be a retail outlet, but that the company would just be a shipper, thus exempting it from the tax collection requirements.

State revenue officials wont divulge taxpayer-specific information about the extent of any deal with Amazon, citing confidentiality laws, according to Sara Jo Houghland, spokeswoman for the State Department of Revenue.

Last month, Amazon announced it would build two huge distribution centers in southeast Tennessee. The 1-million-square-foot centers would be a $139 million investment and create 1,400 full-time jobs and employ more than 2,000 people seasonally once the centers are fully ramped up, according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

The issue of collecting sales taxes on Internet and catalog sales has long been brewing, and its especially urgent now, with many state budgets strapped for cash.

Federal legislation was filed last year over the issue, and several states are mounting challenges, including in Texas, where Amazon was presented with a $269 million sales tax bill.

Heck, no, they shouldnt get a special break, said Powell Phillips, owner of Phillips Toy Mart in Belle Meade. That would be like giving Toys R Us a break and not making it pay sales taxes, he said.

Bookseller Hill said she plans to contact the governor, and shell urge others to do so, too.

She only recently became involved with the Main Street Fairness group through her membership in the American Booksellers Association, another national group lined up against Amazon.

If you buy a book from them, and they dont have to charge (nearly a) 10% sales tax, that amounts to a government subsidy of our competitors, said Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association.

I understand the economic development argument, and certainly Tennessee ought to do what it can to get jobs, but what about the retailers in Tennessee and all the folks they employ, Teicher said. The booksellers group represents about 1,500 locally owned stores.

One Tennessee lawmaker who deals with economic development issues said he expects Amazon to get its way.

I find it difficult to believe theyd move to Tennessee without it, said Republican state Rep. Steve McManus, chairman of the House Commerce Committee.

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