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URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: ETHICS (92%); GOVERNORS (90%); US REPUBLICAN PARTY (90%); POLITICAL PARTIES (89%); POLITICS (89%); US STATE GOVERNMENT (89%); US DEMOCRATIC PARTY (78%); LEGISLATORS (78%); REGIONAL & LOCAL GOVERNMENTS (77%); EXECUTIVE ORDERS (77%); LEGISLATIVE BODIES (77%); MEDICAID (72%); MARKETING & ADVERTISING (72%) Governors (US); Inaugurations; Ethics; Lobbying and Lobbyists; Gifts; Advertising and Marketing ORGANIZATION: MEDICAID (57%) PERSON: ELIOT SPITZER (96%) Danny Hakim; Eliot (Gov) Spitzer; George E (Gov) Pataki GEOGRAPHIC: ALBANY, NY, USA (91%) NEW YORK, USA (94%) UNITED STATES (94%) New York State; New York State; New York State LOAD-DATE: January 2, 2007 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Photos: Eliot Spitzer climbed the Capitol steps with his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, as his predecessor, George E. Pataki, waited at the top with his wife, Libby. (Photo by James Estrin/The New York Times)(pg. A1) Gov. Eliot Spitzer, in his inaugural address yesterday, vowed to elevate the economy and ethical standards. (Photo by James Estrin/The New York Times)(pg. B5) PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1255 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Dollars In The Sand BYLINE: By ORLANDO PATTERSON; Nicholas D. Kristof is on vacation.. Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, is a guest columnist. SECTION: Section A; Column 6; Editorial Desk; Pg. 17 LENGTH: 753 words DATELINE: OCHO RIOS, Jamaica Tourism is a modern global marvel. Every year, according to the World Tourism Organization, some 700 million people leave for foreign lands. They spend more than $575 billion, making tourism the world's leading item of foreign trade. Fifteen million of those travelers, mainly from North America, head for the Caribbean, which is by far the most tourist dependent region of the world. On smaller islands like St. Lucia, tourism's contribution to the economy exceeds 70 percent, and the annual number of visitors far exceeds the resident population: Antigua's 64,000 residents put out the welcome mat for 231,000 visitors one recent year. Why do the tourists come? Most analysts cite the three S's: Sun, Sand and Sea. Others add a fourth: Sex. The sex part is gender neutral, as a stroll though Ocho Rios immediately confirms. Wickedly handsome young men with flowing dreadlocks, some dyed blond, provide rent-a-dread services for women of every nationality. For most, it is a four-day fling; for a few, there is the hope that life will imitate art and, like Stella, they'll get their groove back. What do the islands gain? Tourism generates desperately needed foreign revenue for the government, creates employment (as high as 60 percent of the jobs in the Bahamas), and makes possible a wide range of support services and industries. For many of the smaller islands, it is a godsend, especially in the face of the collapsing traditional banana and sugar industries. Nonetheless, the literature on Caribbean tourism is surprisingly critical. Foreign anthropologists complain about the ''tourist gaze'' and the distortion of local cultures; local chauvinists declaim that ''tourism is whorism.'' These criticisms are largely puerile. In Jamaica, it's the locals who do the gazing while the tourists are busy baking themselves behind the high walls of all-inclusive hotels. If anything, tourism enhances residents' awareness of indigenous cultures, and it supports large numbers of entertainers. Reggae artists have no problem singing dated versions of Harry Belafonte's ''Day-oh! Day da light an' me wan' go 'ome'' if it allows them to get nasty and ragamuffin the next night in the thriving dance hall music culture. The criticisms of economists seem more substantial. The two buzzwords are linkages and leakages. On most islands, most of the money spent by tourists leaks right back out of the country to pay for supplies for the tourists, or for the repatriation of profits and salaries. Thus there is little linkage, or integration, with the rest of the economy, leaving the islands solely dependent on a fickle industry. Leakage runs as high as 80 percent on the smaller islands. Here is the critics' problem: The islands with the highest leakage and tourist dependence are all doing better, per capita, than the larger islands with more integrated economies. The Bahamas and Antigua have almost no unemployment and per-capita incomes three times that of Jamaica. And these islands have substantially higher human development indexes, the gold standard of how well a country is meeting a broad range of basic needs. Barbados's index of .864 approaches European levels. The main cost of tourism is its effects on the environment. The disposal of solid waste from cruise ships and the poor treatment of hotel sewage threaten marine fauna, and degrade coral reefs and fishing grounds. Water sports are a menace. Beaches are eroded and landscape violated by bad architectural planning. Noise pollution is often unbearable. Corrective efforts have had limited success. However, the industry is too often criticized for the wrong reasons. In Jamaica, tourism is booming, and 2007 promises to be the industry's best year. Most American tourists go to the all-inclusives, which are criticized for greedily gating them off from the rest of the local economy. The real situation is more complex, as explained by Dr. Noel Lyon, a Harvard-trained economist and entrepreneur experienced in both farming and tourism. Jamaica has terrible crime rates, but that has little effect on tourism because travelers know they are safe inside the all-inclusives. Furthermore, the all-inclusives draw substantially on local suppliers. Over all, Jamaica, with a high ratio of local ownership and management, has relatively lower leakage. All-inclusives are actually a nimble adaptation to a volatile social environment. Jamaica's socioeconomic failures cannot be linked to tourism, without which it would be in even more dire straits. URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: EDITORIALS & OPINIONS (91%); TOURISM DEVELOPMENT (79%); POPULATION SIZE (78%); INTERNATIONAL TRADE (73%); WAGES & SALARIES (70%); FOLK & WORLD MUSIC (66%); ANTHROPOLOGY & ARCHAEOLOGY (64%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (87%) Travel and Vacations; Travel and Vacations ORGANIZATION: UNITED NATIONS WORLD TOURISM ORGANIZATION (84%) PERSON: Orlando Patterson GEOGRAPHIC: CARIBBEAN ISLANDS (93%); NORTH AMERICA (92%); JAMAICA (92%); SAINT LUCIA (92%); ANTIGUA & BARBUDA (79%); BAHAMAS (79%) Caribbean Area LOAD-DATE: January 2, 2007 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH DOCUMENT-TYPE: Op-Ed PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1256 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Correction Appended Late Edition - Final
John Curtis Perry is the director of the maritime studies program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Scott Borgerson is a recent graduate and Rockford Weitz is a Ph.D. candidate there. SECTION: Section A; Column 1; Editorial Desk; Pg. 17 LENGTH: 725 words DATELINE: MEDFORD, Mass. IN October President Bush signed the Safe Port Act, authorizing an investment of $6.7 billion to tighten security at American ports. This is a vitally important and overdue step. But it ignores another major problem in maritime commerce: the phenomenal decline of American shipping. While it's true that the United States Navy still dominates the world ocean -- its total tonnage equals the combined tonnage of the next 17 smaller navies -- American commercial shipping is but a puny remnant of its former self. In 1948, more than a third of the world's merchant fleet flew the stars and stripes; today that figure is down to 2 percent. Half a century ago, America built more ships than any other nation, and New York City could boast that it was the world's busiest seaport. Sliding from the top since the 1980s, New York now barely ranks among the top 20. The only American port now on the top-10 list is Los Angeles-Long Beach, an indication of how much maritime trade has shifted from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. A major factor in the decline of American shipping has been an antiquated law that prevents American coastal shippers from buying ships made in other countries. By amending this law and, at the same time, encouraging the development of domestic coastal shipping, Congress could help restore America's status as a great and proud maritime nation. The slump in American shipping is especially surprising when you consider that it was American entrepreneurs who, in the mid-20th century, revolutionized oceanic transport by creating both the standard-size steel shipping container and the supership capable of transporting 50 times as much cargo as a World War II-era merchant ship could. Shipping has always been the most economically efficient way to carry goods from place to place; it requires no investment in highways or rails, and thanks to the relatively frictionless ease with which ships move across water, fuel costs per ton are low. The arrival of containerized shipping pushed transport costs even lower, swelling world trade and expanding global wealth. The export-driven economies of Pacific Asia built much of their enormous success upon the new maritime technologies. The United States did not. The Merchant Marine Acts of the 1920s and '30s are one reason why. Intended to protect the domestic shipbuilding industry, the acts decreed that the only ships allowed to call on two or more consecutive American ports would be those built in the United States, owned by American companies, flying the American flag and operated by American crews. At the time, the United States still had a large merchant marine. But the acts' restrictions handicapped coastal shipping within American waters, opening the way for the growth of the trucking and freight-rail industries. To revive the maritime trade, Congress should give shipping companies as much choice in buying ships as their land-based rivals have when buying trucks and train cars. Freed from the restraints of the Merchant Marine Acts, commercial shippers could not only begin to resume their position in global trade but also handle much more of the freight that moves within our borders. Before railroads and highways were developed, a network of water transportation routes connected America's port cities and towns. Today coastal shipping handles only 2 percent of domestic freight, even though coastal counties hold more than half of the nation's population. The trucks that carry nearly a third of our cargo clog the highways. That is one reason why Americans now lose at least 3.7 billion hours and 2.3 billion gallons of fuel each year sitting in traffic. Ships could take on a larger share of this freight -- and even some of the passengers now traveling by highway and rail -- and carry it at lower cost. Congress could further encourage domestic shipping by improving port facilities, just as it maintains interstate highways. And it could invest in developing ship propulsion technologies -- to increase still further maritime savings in fuel costs and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Americans are rightfully concerned about security, but part of protecting the nation is generating a strong economy. Revitalized coastal shipping could shorten our morning commutes as it begins to rejuvenate America's wider maritime economy.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1257 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Paid Notice: Deaths POMERANTZ, STEPHEN SECTION: Section B; Column 3; Classified; Pg. 7 LENGTH: 119 words POMERANTZ--Stephen. Son of Isidore Pomerantz and the late Evelyn Pomerantz; husband of Ku; father of Ken and Eve; and brother of Melvin. He was a lifetime student, teacher and lecturer of William Shakespeare. Loved by all his friends, brought joy and pleasure to all his audiences for many years of his conducting the Master Players Orchestra. Brought many years of joy doing the summer evenings at the Vanderbilt Museum in Huntington, Long Island. Also, he was an Entrepreneur in the men's clothing industry. Funeral services, January 2nd at 12:45 pm, at Riverside Memorial Chapels, 76th St and Amsterdam Avenue. In lieu of flowers, please contribute in his memory to your favorite charity or Jewish Philantrophy. URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: DEATHS & OBITUARIES (90%); MEN (88%); CHARITIES (82%); MEN'S CLOTHING (52%); TEACHER EDUCATION (90%) Terms not available from NYTimes LOAD-DATE: January 2, 2007 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH DOCUMENT-TYPE: Paid Death Notice PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1258 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Everybody Wants a Slice Of the Web Search Pie BYLINE: By MIGUEL HELFT SECTION: Section C; Column 2; Business/Financial Desk; Looking for the Next Google; Pg. 1 LENGTH: 1585 words DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 29 In brand-new offices with a still-empty game room and enough space to triple their staff of nearly 30, a trio of entrepreneurs is leading an Internet start-up with an improbable mission: to out-Google Google. The three started Powerset, a company whose aim is to deliver better answers than any other search engine -- including Google -- by letting users type questions in plain English. And they have made believers of Silicon Valley investors whose fortunes turn on identifying the next big thing. ''There's definitely a segment of the market that thinks we are crazy,'' said Charles Moldow, a partner at Foundation Capital, a venture capital firm that is Powerset's principal financial backer. ''In 2000, some people thought Google was crazy.'' Powerset is hardly alone. Even as Google continues to outmaneuver its main search rivals, Yahoo and Microsoft, plenty of newcomers -- with names like hakia, ChaCha and Snap -- are trying to beat the company at its own game. And Wikia Inc., a company started by a founder of Wikipedia, plans to develop a search engine that, like the popular Web-based encyclopedia, would be built by a community of programmers and users. These ambitious quests reflect the renewed optimism sweeping technology centers like Silicon Valley and fueling a nascent Internet boom. It also shows how much the new Internet economy resembles a planetary system where everything and everyone orbits around search in general, and around Google in particular. Silicon Valley is filled with start-ups whose main business proposition is to be bought by Google, or for that matter by Yahoo or Microsoft. Countless other start-ups rely on Google as their primary driver of traffic or on Google's powerful advertising system as their primary source of income. Virtually all new companies compete with Google for scarce engineering talent. And divining Google's next move has become a fixation for scores of technology blogs and a favorite parlor game among technology investors. ''There is way too much obsession with search, as if it were the end of the world,'' said Esther Dyson, a well-known technology investor and forecaster. ''Google equals money equals search equals search advertising; it all gets combined as if this is the last great business model.'' It may not be the last great business model, but Google has proved that search linked to advertising is a very large and lucrative business, and everyone -- including Ms. Dyson, who invested a small sum in Powerset -- seems to want a piece of it. Since the beginning of 2004, venture capitalists have put nearly $350 million into no fewer than 79 start-ups that had something to do with Internet search, according to the National Venture Capital Association, an industry group. An overwhelming majority are not trying to take Google head on, but rather are focusing on specialized slices of the search world, like searching for videos, blog postings or medical information. Since Google's stated mission is to organize all of the world's information, they may still find themselves in the search giant's cross hairs. That is not necessarily bad, as being acquired by Google could be a financial bonanza for some of these entrepreneurs and investors. But in the current boom, there is money even for those with the audacious goal of becoming a better Google. Powerset recently received $12.5 million in financing. Hakia, which like Powerset is trying to create a ''natural language'' search engine, got $16 million. Another $16 million went to Snap, which has focused on presenting search results in a more compelling way and is experimenting with a new advertising model. And ChaCha, which uses paid researchers that act as virtual reference librarians to provide answers to users' queries, got $6.1 million. Still, recent history suggests that gaining traction is going to be difficult. Of dozens of search start-ups that were introduced in recent years, none had more than a 1 percent share of the United States search market in November, according to Nielsen NetRatings, a research firm that measures Internet traffic. Amassing a large audience has proved to be a challenge even for those with a track record and resources. Consider A9, a search engine owned by Amazon.com that received positive reviews when it began in 2004 and was run by Udi Manber, a widely recognized search specialist. Despite some innovative features and early successes, A9 has captured only a tiny share of the market. Mr. Manber now works for Google, where he is vice president of engineering. The setback apparently has not stopped Amazon or its chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, from pursuing profits in search. ChaCha said it counts an investment company owned by Mr. Bezos among its backers, and Amazon is an investor in Wikia. An Amazon spokeswoman said Mr. Bezos does not comment about his personal investments. Some start-ups are similarly bullish. ''We expect to be one of the top three search engines,'' said Riza C. Berkan, the chief executive of hakia. It is a bold claim, given that hakia's technology is not yet ready for prime time, and Mr. Berkan readily concedes it will take time to perfect it. The dream, however, is quintessential Silicon Valley. ''It is hard for me to believe that anybody thinks they can take Google's business from Google,'' said Randy Komisar, a venture capitalist who was once known as Silicon Valley's ''virtual C.E.O.'' for his role as a mentor to scores of technology firms. ''But to call the game over because Google has been such a success would be to deny history.'' In some ways, the willingness of so many to make multimillion-dollar investments to take on Google and other search companies represents a startling change. In the late 1990s, when Microsoft dominated the technology world, inventors and investors did everything they could to avoid competing with the software company. Yet many of today's search start-ups are putting themselves squarely in the path of the Google steamroller. Most explain that decision in similar ways. They say that Google's dominance today is different from Microsoft's in the late 90s when its operating system was a virtual monopoly and nearly impossible to break. In the Internet search industry, ''you earn your right to be in business every day, page view after page view, click after click,'' said Barney Pell, a founder and the chief executive of Powerset, whose search service is not yet available. They also say that the market for search simply is too large to resist. Google, which, according to Nielsen, handles about half of all Internet searches in the United States, is valued at an astonishing $141 billion. So, the reasoning goes, anyone who can grab even a small slice of the search market could be well rewarded. ''You don't need to be No. 1 to be worth billions of dollars,'' said Allen Morgan, a partner at Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm that invested $10 million in Snap. The company is also backed by Bill Gross, an Internet financier who pioneered the idea of linking ads and search results, only to see Google seize the powerful business model and improve on it. Almost all of today's search entrepreneurs also say that Google's success lends credibility to their own long-shot quest. When Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin first started tinkering with what would become Google, other search engines like AltaVista and Lycos and Excite were dominant. But the companies that owned them were distracted by efforts to diversify their businesses, and they took their eye off the ball of Internetsearch and stopped innovating. Some now say that search has not evolved much in years, and that Google is similarly distracted as it introduces new products like word processors, spreadsheets and online payment systems and expands into online video, social networking and other businesses. ''The more Google starts to think about taking on Microsoft, the less it is a pure search play, and the more it opens the door for new innovations,'' said Mr. Moldow, the Foundation Capital partner. ''That's great for us.'' But at the same time, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have thousands of engineers, including some of the world's top search specialists, working on improving their search results. And they have spent billions building vast computer networks so they can respond instantly to the endless stream of queries from around the world. Search ''is becoming an increasingly capital-intensive business,'' said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president for search. That makes it harder for start-ups to catch up to the giants, she said. That is not stopping entrepreneurs from betting that they can. Powerset has search and natural-language experts among its two dozen employees, including former top engineers from Yahoo and a former chief linguist from Ask Jeeves, Ask.com's predecessor. They are the kind of people who could easily land jobs at Google or Microsoft or Yahoo. Steve Newcomb, a Powerset founder and veteran of several successful start-ups, said his company could become the next Google. Or, he said, if Google or someone else perfected natural-language search before Powerset, then his company would make a great acquisition for one of the other search companies. ''We are a huge story no matter what,'' he said. Ms. Dyson, the technology commentator and Powerset investor, captured the optimism more concisely and with less swagger. ''I love Google,'' she said, ''but I love the march of history.'' URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: INTERNET & WWW (92%); SEARCH ENGINES (90%); INTERNET SOCIAL NETWORKING (90%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (90%); VENTURE CAPITAL (89%); STARTUPS (89%); NEW ECONOMY (77%); PLANETS & ASTEROIDS (73%); BLOGS & MESSAGE BOARDS (72%) Computers and the Internet; Computers and the Internet COMPANY: GOOGLE INC (90%); MICROSOFT CORP (56%) ORGANIZATION: Powerset; Hakia (Co); ChaCha (Co); Snap (Co); Wikipedia; Google Inc TICKER: GOOG (NASDAQ) (90%); GGEA (LSE) (90%); MSFT (NASDAQ) (56%) INDUSTRY: NAICS518112 WEB SEARCH PORTALS (90%); SIC8999 SERVICES, NEC (90%); SIC7375 INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SERVICES (90%); NAICS511210 SOFTWARE PUBLISHERS (56%); SIC7372 PREPACKAGED SOFTWARE (56%); NAICS519130 INTERNET PUBLISHING & BROADCASTING & WEB SEARCH PORTALS (90%) PERSON: JIMMY WALES (55%) Miguel Helft GEOGRAPHIC: SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CA, USA (93%) CALIFORNIA, USA (93%) UNITED STATES (93%) LOAD-DATE: January 1, 2007 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Photo: From left, Steve Newcomb, Lorenzo Thione and Barney Pell are the founders of Powerset, a search engine. (Photo by Jessica Brandi Lifland for The New York Times)(pg. C2)Drawing (Drawing by James C. Best Jr.)(pg. C1) PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company Directory: ~hesterj -> Entrepreneur Entrepreneur -> Byline: By armand limnande section: Section mm; Column 0; T: Men's Fashion Magazine; Pg. 76 Length Download 4.36 Mb. Share with your friends:
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