Best Make Money

Spinvox insisted this week that it is “close to securing” a new round of funding, having apparently used up much of its previous $100m funding, raised in March 2008 – out of a total of $200m raised since 2003.

The company’s PR, James Whatley, also posted a robust defence of its systems for translating voicemails to text – the basis of its business – while acknowledging that the company does use people in overseas centres to translate calls. Whatley insisted that “we have extremely high security standards” but said humans only listen to messages if “the [automated translation] machine needs help” and that messages posted on Facebook by workers from an Egyptian call centre were from a site that did not meet “stringent standards” in training, and was not used for live work.

Whatley declined to say what proportion of translated calls are listened to by humans, claiming that this information is too commercially sensitive.

He also insisted that the transmission of the voicemails to locations outside Europe did not break the Data Protection Act – because the information about the owner of the message is not transmitted. That does not, however, prove that personal information is never shown to call centre staff.

Christina Domecq, chief executive of Spinvox, told Moconews (part of the ContentNext Media network, which is owned, like the Guardian, by Guardian Media Group) that the credit crunch and expansion in Latin America were putting new financial pressure on the company, but staff were told 70% had accepted an offer to take stocks in lieu of salary as the company faces what seems to be a prolonged cash crunch. Domecq told Moconews the company would have positive cashflow and scale from a capacity of 30 million up to 100 million users “within 90 days”.

But there is growing evidence online suggesting Spinvox’s cash problems are caused by the cost of using humans, which do not scale as rapidly and as cheaply as a machine. Commenters on a number of blogs say it uses an application called “Tenzing” that agents in call centres use “to listen to, rewind and transcribe” messages. It is said to have predictive text capability and be used at centres in India, South Africa and Ireland.

Money woes may not be the only problem. Google is trialing a new service called Google Voice – which will offer a voicemail transcription service.

By Charles Starmer-Smith
Published: 10:05AM BST 31 Jul 2009

Airline cut-backs could mean less competition, less choice and higher fares Photo: GETTY

According to the OAG, the aviation analysts, up to 140 routes from Britain to mainland Europe have disappeared in the past year. Meanwhile, flights to other destinations have been cut as airlines seek to make savings in the face of falling passenger numbers and rising costs.

Regional airports have been hardest hit as airlines contract after two decades of unprecedented expansion. For many passengers, this could mean less competition, less choice and higher fares. Many may face longer journeys via London, or to alternative regional airports, raising concerns for those who have bought second homes on the back of new routes.

Coventry and Shoreham-by-Sea have already lost all their international flights in the past year.

“We don’t want to get back to 10 or 15 years ago when, if you were able to fly from a regional airport, then it would be hugely expensive – that would be a real shame,” said Simon Evans, chairman of the Air Transport Users Council (AUC). “But if Ryanair is hurting, you can be sure that everyone else is.”

The OAG figures show that in the 12 months to June more than 20 routes to Spain were scrapped. These include Madrid from East Midlands, Birmingham and Leeds/Bradford, Malaga from Coventry and Teesside, and Valencia from Liverpool, Heathrow and Leeds/Bradford. Although new routes to the Balearics, Canaries and Valencia have been introduced, most places are now served by fewer flights.

The Spanish government, rocked this week by terrorist bomb attacks, said the number of British visitors to the country fell by nearly 17 per cent between January and May, compared with the same period last year. Spain’s tourist authorities are now taking drastic action to win back tourists. By cutting landing charges to zero, it has enticed Ryanair into opening 16 new routes to the Canaries this winter.

Last week Ryanair announced it was abandoning dozens of routes from Stansted and Dublin, blaming the “suicidal air taxes” set by the British and Irish governments. Air Passenger Duty is due to increase again on all short-haul departures from £10 to £12 by next November.

BAA said this week that passenger numbers at Stansted have fallen by more than 14 per cent this year, while passenger numbers at Gatwick and Heathrow have fallen by 10 per cent and four per cent respectively.

“There has been a sea change – airlines are responding quicker to market conditions and every route now has to pay,” said Mr Evans. “Five years ago the likes of Ryanair could swoop into obscure destinations on the back of pent-up demand, high levels of disposable income, and migrant workers going back and forth – but the weakness of the pound has changed that.”

As many as 19 routes to Poland have been cut. Destinations in Turkey, Portugal, France, Ireland and Italy have also been hard hit. Although the OAG figures show that 68 routes have been added in the past year, most involve a low frequency of flights.

Aviation analysts expect that the full effect of the recession will not be felt until autumn, when cash flows slow following the peak summer period. The Airport Operators Association, which represents 72 British airports, has given warning that the APD increase would result in the disappearance of one in 10 routes by the end of this year and force airports out of business.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the accountancy firm, reported that 78 travel companies have collapsed in the past 12 months – compared with 49 in the previous year. Among these were several airlines, including XL and Zoom.

“There are quite a few airlines with big fleets and big networks, and I would not be surprised if we saw more go under,” said Mr Evans.

Travel companies are pinning their hopes on a revival of foreign travel on continuing bad weather in Britain and a strengthening of the pound.

Routes that have disappeared this year

Aberdeen

- Barcelona

Belfast

- Budapest

- Katowice

- Prague

- Berlin

- Paris

- Zagreb

Birmingham

- Agadir

- Bordeaux

- Dinard

- Rome

- Lisbon

- Madrid

- Forli

- Geneva

- Llubljana

Blackpool

- Gerona

Bournemouth

- Gdansk

- Katowice

- Nantes

Bristol

- Agadir

- Dinard

- Kos

- Katowice

- Las Palmas

- Malta

- Oslo

- Frankfurt

- Hamburg

- Izmir

Coventry

- Malaga

- Alicante

- Faro

- Gdansk

- Katowice

- Palma

- Pisa

- Ibiza

East Midlands

- Alghero

- Nimes

- Madrid

- Cork

- Oslo

- Poznan

- Lodz

- Copehagen

- Shannon

Edinburgh

- Rome

- Gdansk

- Katowice

- Szczecin

- Pula

Exeter

- Brussels

Glasgow

- Monastir

- Reykjavik

- Knock

Glasgow/Prestwick

- Cork

- Poznan

- Dusseldorf

Guernsey

- Paris

- Dublin

Humberside

- Faro

Leeds/Bradford

- Madrid

- Cork

- Valencia

- Copenhagen

- Shannon

- Hamburg

Liverpool

- Budapest

- Santiago De Compostela

- Valencia

- Lodz

- Basel

London City

- Hamburg

- Stuttgurt

- Vienna

London Gatwick

- Rome

- Katowice

- Nantes

- Poznan

- Sevilla

- Vilnius

- Aalesund

- Bilbao

- Dresden

- Sarajevo

- Malmo

- Kaliningrad

- Baku

London Heathrow

- Funchal

- Naples

- Valencia

- Luxembourg

- Rotterdam

London Luton

- Rome

- Almeria

- Basel

- Shannon

London Stansted

- Malta

- Nantes

- Oslo

- Berlin

- Vilnius

- Forli

- Bergen

- Bourgas

- Reykjavik

- Tromso

- Balaton

- Moss

Manchester

- Brest

- Gdansk

- Krakow

- Madrid

- Poznan

- Salzburg

- Kerry

- Sligo

Newcastle

- Krakow

- Prague

- Galway

Newquay

- Gerona

Norwich

- Faro

- Paris

- Dublin

Shoreham-by-Sea

- Caen

- Le Touquet

- Deauville

- Angers

- Bordeaux

- Paris

- Tenerife

Teeside

- Malaga

- Faro

- Tenerife

By Dwight Cass, breakingviews.com
Published: 11:08AM BST 31 Jul 2009

Key United States lawmakers on Thursday released an outline for legislation that would require standardized contracts to be centrally cleared and traded on exchanges. The European Commission also backs central clearing. It may well make sense for many products – but there’s a danger new rules could go too far.

For one thing, there’s still little consensus over what “standardized” means. If regulators end up herding too-complex products into clearinghouses, it could bog legislation down – or backfire by increasing risk.

That’s because clearinghouses, where liability for losses is shared among members, are most effective when they’re used for products with large, liquid markets – such as the $325 trillion interest rate swaps bazaar. That makes it easier for the clearing firm to find buyers for the contracts caught on its books when a member goes bust. This is a big task – when Lehman Brothers imploded, the clearinghouse it used in London alone had to unwind trillions of dollars worth of trades.

It’s much more difficult to find buyers for customised contracts which, by definition, are at best thinly traded. If these quirkier derivatives were included, the other members of the clearinghouse might have to take a bigger hit if one of their fellows went under.

Granted, the clearinghouse would still disperse the risk of a member’s failure among many other firms, lowering the chance that one failure could cause dangerously large knock-on losses at one or more other institutions. But forcing too many idiosyncratic contracts onto a clearinghouse will reduce its effectiveness nonetheless.

Watchdogs may want to require as many types of contracts as possible to be centrally cleared. But they can vastly reduce systemic risk by addressing the massive markets for plain-vanilla – and easily cleared – products like credit and interest rate swaps, or foreign exchange contracts.

Beginning with derivatives everyone agrees are standard is also a way to avoid bogging the legislation down in details of definition. It makes sense to start with the abundant low-hanging fruit.

Plans to prevent another banking crisis are weak and “cosmetic”, MPs have warned.

Risky trading by City banks was blamed for the financial crisis

The Treasury Select Committee said the body which watches over the banks was “toothless” and in “a muddle”.

It is the committee’s final report on the Government’s plans to overhaul the system for regulating banks.

But MPs were largely critical of the white paper, which was published last month, and said it did not go far enough.

It was the excessively risking lending of the banks that was partly to blame for the credit crunch, which pushed the economy into recession.

The report says that banks that are “too big to fail” should be stopped from risky trading if they were propped up by the taxpayer during the crunch.

MPs also attacked recent changes announced to overseeing the tripartite authority – the Financial Services Authority, Bank of England and Treasury – as “largely cosmetic” and simply a “rebranding”.

The committee said responsibility for strategic decisions and action “remained a muddle”.

MPs warned that the FSA would have to be sufficiently strong to make unpopular decisions once the financial crisis is over.

Chairman John McFall said: “All this is very fashionable now; the FSA must develop sufficient teeth in order to be able to go against the tide in the future and take unpopular decisions.”

The FSA said the committee’s report acknowledged that it had “proactively identified and rectified its historic mistakes”.

The global credit crunch has cost governments more than $10 trillion, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says.

The IMF says that rich countries have provided $9.2tn in government support for the financial sector, while emerging economies spent $1.6 tn.

Around $1.9tn represents up-front expenditure, while the rest is made up of guarantees and loans.

Governments are likely to recover most of these sums when the world economy recovers, but big deficits will stay.

The financial bail-out costs include:

Capital injections: $1.1tn

Purchase of assets: $1.9tn

Guarantees: $4.6tn

Liquidity provision: $2.5tn

Budget gaps

The IMF has also been revising its estimates of the cost of the global downturn on government budgets.

It now says that overall, the rich countries of the G20 group will suffer a budget deficit of 10.2% of economic output or gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009, the largest for most countries since World War II.

The largest projected budget deficits are in the US, with 13.5% of GDP, the UK, with 11.6%, and Japan 10.3%.

However, the UK will have the largest projected budget deficit of all G20 countries by 2010, at 13.3% of GDP, compared to 9.7% for the US.

Fiscal boost

The rising budget deficits have been caused by a combination of the severe global economic downturn, which has slashed government revenues, and the stimulus measures introduced by some governments to try and kick-start the recovery.

The IMF estimates that the G20 countries will implement stimulus plans worth 2% of their GDP in 2009, and 1.6% in 2010 – but it says it is difficult to measure how effectively these have actually been implemented.

However, it says that such plans have had a big effect on limiting the severity of the recession.

It estimates that such spending has boosted growth in G20 countries by between 1.2% and 4.7% this year.

The IMF says increased spending is more effective than cutting taxes in boosting demand, and works best when implemented in conjunction with looser monetary policy and in a coordinated fashion around the world.

Long-term damage

The IMF estimates – prepared ahead of the G20 summit of world leaders in Pittsburgh in September – also show how much long-term damage the crisis is doing to public finances.

It estimates that by 2014, government debt will reach 239% of GDP in Japan, 132% in Italy, 112% in the US, and 99.7% in the UK.

Proportionately, however, the rise in the UK is the biggest – with debt more than doubling from 44% in 2007.

Rating agencies have recently warned that a UK debt of 100% of GDP would force them to consider downgrading the credit rating of UK government bonds.

This could make it more costly for the government to raise money.

The IMF says that it is important for governments to show a credible path for reducing deficits in the long-run, although it urges them to continue the fiscal stimulus in the short-term.

A "lack of policy credibility (either real or perceived)" makes fiscal expansion less effective by raising risk and raising real interest rates.

G20 leaders are set to discuss the state of the world economy at their next summit in September, and look at the effectiveness of measures to revive the economy and regulate the banking sector.

Hundreds of miles of the English coastline are inaccessible to the public, according to Natural England.

And miles of footpaths which provide public rights of way by the coast could vanish into the sea within 20 years because of coastal erosion, it warned.

Maps drawn up as part of plans for a coastal path around England showed 34% of the 2,478 miles (3,988km) of shore does not have full access for walkers.

On average, people can walk about two miles before finding their way blocked.

Natural England, which advises the government on the natural environment, is aiming to create a coastal path around the whole of England in a £50m scheme over the next decade.

ENGLAND’S COASTLINE ACCESS

Percentage of coastline with "satisfactory, legally secure path"

North East – 67%

North West – 44%

Yorkshire and The Humber – 70%

East Midlands – 61%

East of England – 68%

South East – 63%

South West – 76%

Source: Natural England

The path would have recreational space or "spreading room" around it, and is being created under the Marine and Coastal Access Bill, which is due to become law this autumn.

But an audit carried out before the process of creating the path begins has shown much of the coast is not fully accessible, including beaches people can only walk along at low tide, areas shut off by private landowners and pathways which are dangerous or do not have views of the sea.

A total of 921 miles (1,482km) of coastline was judged not to have "satisfactory, legal secure paths" with about half of that land considered completely inaccessible to the public, with no walked path at present.

The remainder has some kind of access, such as with the permission of a landowner, but is not legally secure and offers no guaranteed right of way.

One aim of the pathway scheme is to create walkways not at risk to erosion

The greatest provision of accessible shoreline is in the South West, where 76% was judged fully accessible, and the least is in the North West where just 44% is considered to have a satisfactory, legally secure path.

Paul Johnson, Natural England’s coastal access policy manager, said the issue of erosion was central to the need to get the legislation passed.

He said: "At the moment the real problem is when a right of way falls into the sea, as it often does, effectively you lose it."

The Ramblers Association has welcomed the scheme with chief executive Tom Franklin urging the government to "hold firm and introduce legislation that will make access to our coast the envy of Europe and the world".

Some landowners have voiced concerns, fearing a public path being created through their property.

But the legislation now provides scope for appeals and Natural England has insisted the drawing up of the path will be done in full consultation with affected locals.

In a daring experiment in Europe, scientists used mosquitoes as flying needles to deliver a…

In a daring experiment in Europe, scientists used mosquitoes as flying needles to deliver a “vaccine” of live malaria parasites through their bites. The results were astounding: Everyone in the vaccine group acquired immunity to malaria; everyone in a non-vaccinated comparison group did not, and developed malaria when exposed to the parasites later.

(AP Photo)

In a daring experiment in Europe, scientists used mosquitoes as flying needles to deliver a “vaccine” of live malaria parasites through their bites. The results were astounding: Everyone in the vaccine group acquired immunity to malaria; everyone in a non-vaccinated comparison group did not, and developed malaria when exposed to the parasites later.

The study was only a small proof-of-principle test, and its approach is not practical on a large scale. However, it shows that scientists may finally be on the right track to developing an effective vaccine against one of mankind’s top killers. A vaccine that uses modified live parasites just entered human testing.

“Malaria vaccines are moving from the laboratory into the real world,” Dr. Carlos Campbell wrote in an editorial accompanying the study in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine. He works for PATH, the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, a Seattle-based global health foundation.

The new study “reminds us that the whole malaria parasite is the most potent immunizing” agent, even though it is harder to develop a vaccine this way and other leading candidates take a different approach, he wrote.

Malaria kills nearly a million people each year, mostly children under 5 and especially in Africa. Infected mosquitoes inject immature malaria parasites into the skin when they bite; these travel to the liver where they mature and multiply. From there, they enter the bloodstream and attack red blood cells — the phase that makes people sick.

People can develop immunity to malaria if exposed to it many times. The drug chloroquine can kill parasites in the final bloodstream phase, when they are most dangerous.

Scientists tried to take advantage of these two factors, by using chloroquine to protect people while gradually exposing them to malaria parasites and letting immunity develop.

They assigned 10 volunteers to a “vaccine” group and five others to a comparison group. All were given chloroquine for three months, and exposed once a month to about a dozen mosquitoes — malaria-infected ones in the vaccine group and non-infected mosquitoes in the comparison group.

This handout photo provided by the journal Science shows the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial…

This handout photo provided by the journal Science shows the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s (CSIRO) Dr. Cathy Belman inspecting a trawl of orange roughly in the Australian Fishing Zone in the late 1980′s. Crabcakes and clambakes may remain on the menu after all. Two years after a study warned of a potential collapse in seafood stocks by 2048 a detailed new report says the tide is turning, at least in some areas.

(Rudy Kloser/CSIRO, via AP)

Crabcakes and fish sticks won’t be disappearing after all. Two years after a study warned that overfishing could cause a collapse in the world’s seafood stocks by 2048, an update says the tide is turning, at least in some areas.

“This paper shows that our oceans are not a lost cause,” said Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, lead author of both reports. “I’m somewhat more hopeful … than what we were seeing two years ago.”

It’s personal as well as scientific.

“I have actually given thought to whether I will be hosting a seafood party then,” Worm said, meaning 2048.

Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington challenged Worm’s original report, leading the two — plus 19 other researchers — to launch the study that led to the new findings. They’re being published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

The news isn’t all good.

Of 10 areas of the world that were studied, significant overfishing continues in three, but steps have been taken to curb excesses in five others, Hilborn and Worm report. The other two were not a problem in either study.

Hilborn noted that 63 percent of fish stocks remain below desired levels. It takes time to rebuild after steps are taken to reduce the catch.

Michael Fogarty of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration noted a dramatic recovery of haddock on Georges Bank, off New England, as well as improvements in redfish, scallop and other fish. But still others, such as cod and flounder, remain vulnerable, he said at a briefing.

“We feel confident that the tide of overexploitation can be reversed on a global basis,” Fogarty said, citing such steps as exclusion areas, changes in fishing gear, assignments of rights to harvest and incentives for fishers to take a long-term view.

Two areas, Alaska and New Zealand, have led the world in terms of management success by not waiting until drastic measures are needed to conserve, the report said. These areas were not a problem in either study.

(07-26) 04:00 PDT DALLAS –

Scott Hintz needed more miles with American Airlines to book a free trip to Morocco this spring, and he had several thousand miles from another carrier that he thought might be just the ticket.

Images

View Larger Image

Get Quote

Symbol Lookup

More Business

Microsoft, Yahoo finally sign search deal 07.29.09

Men at Work loses first stage of copyright lawsuit 07.29.09

Review: Yahoo's shift to Bing could be risky bet 07.29.09

Source: Pfizer, Nigeria settle antibiotic lawsuit 07.29.09

The San Francisco travel executive went online, found a willing trader for his Alaska Airlines miles and made a swap. In May he was roaming North Africa.

“I took miles out of some programs I don’t use and got some value out of them,” says Hintz, who calls himself “a miles junkie.”

Frequent-flier programs have been around for nearly three decades and billions of miles go unused. Airlines once prohibited swaps of frequent-flier miles – it’s still in the fine print of many loyalty programs. But now some are perfectly fine with exchanges like the one that Hintz made – they collect a fee on every trade.

Hintz used one of the little-known swap Web sites, Points.com, which operates like a crude stock exchange or commodities trading floor.

Users list what they’ve got – the number of miles and in which airline – and the number of miles they want in another airline. There is no charge for listing, but consumers on both ends of a completed swap pay a fee, most of which goes to the airlines.

Some trades are straight up – 10,000 miles in one airline for 10,000 at another. But some traders put a higher value on some carriers, such as Delta and American, the two largest.

Another site, LoyaltyMatch.com, lets members sell miles or use them to buy merchandise.

Travelers say mileage trades are a quick and convenient way to add miles in a snap.

But others say they’re a bad deal for consumers.

Tim Winship, publisher of frequentflier.com, a Web site dedicated to the use of airline miles, says at current fares travelers get less than 2 cents per mile when they redeem their collection for a flight.

“Keep that per-mile value in mind,” Winship says. If you’re paying a fee for the exchange, “then you’re kidding yourself. Usually when I look at these things, it ends up being a pretty questionable value.”

Points.com says its trading forum, called Global Points Exchange or GPX, levies fees that match what the airlines charge to transfer or share miles within their own programs.

Even critics of the trading programs see a few cases where they make sense: If you have leftover miles with an airline you rarely use, or if you are very close to earning a trip that you want to book right away.

This article appeared on page D – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Submarine cables world map (Graphic: Telegeography.com)

Forget the travails of technology giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple: the biggest news on the internet this week has been bubbling somewhere under the Indian Ocean. After years of development, a new 10,000 mile internet pipeline is bringing broadband to east Africa.

Finally we can update our lovely map of the internet’s web of undersea cables.

To say this moment has been long-awaited by netizens in Africa is an understatement: it’s sending the continent into a frenzy. But what’s the impact actually going to be?

To find out, I asked Erik Hersman, the author of the Afrigadget blog and founder of crisis information service Ushahidi – and as good as expert on the internet in east Africa as you’re likely to find.

“First, it will drive down business costs for organisations,” he told me by email. “I’m hearing of business high-speed internet costs dropping from $5000 per month to around $500-1000 now. That’s pretty significant in and of itself.”

“Second, hosting can now feasibly be done in east Africa, instead of having to host all of the apps and services on European or American servers.”

What about the knock-on effect on mobile development? We’ve heard a lot about successful mobile innovation in Kenya and other countries – payment system Mpesa is the most famous example, but there are others too. Would a sudden boost for internet service mean people turned away from mobile development? Hersman didn’t think so.

“The main reasons for that are that it’s lack of regulation that allows services like Mpesa to come into being,” he said. “But, beyond that, it’s also about what most consumers have. Yes, due to costs dropping we’ll see more people getting access to the internet. However, the devices that people have access to on the personal level are still rudimentary (Nokia 1100-type) mobile phones. It’s not like those are going to all be thrown out and everyone upgrade to data phones all of the sudden. So, entrepreneurs will continue to build apps for those uses first.”

He also noted that the Seacom installation hasn’t been without controversy: nobody is yet clear whether increased access will drive down prices for ordinary people, and the company isn’t releasing the names of cooperating ISPs – much to the chagrin of web-heads.

“That lack of transparency is causing a bit of a problem,” he said. “Kenyans tend to be great conspiracy theorists, so whispers of collusion and price fixing are already being bandied about.”