Byline: By richard siklos section: Section C; Column 5; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1 Length

1184 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 29, 2007 Monday

Late Edition - Final

Billboards That Know You by Name
BYLINE: By BARNABY FEDER
SECTION: Section C; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 827 words
Each day, it seems, marketers go further in their quest to deliver messages so engaging and personalized that one cannot help feeling special. The latest step will be seen today in four cities when Mini USA begins delivering custom messages to Mini Cooper owners on digital signs the company calls ''talking'' billboards.

The boards, which usually carry typical advertising, are programmed to identify approaching Mini drivers through a coded signal from a radio chip embedded in their key fob. The messages are personal, based on questionnaires that owners filled out: ''Mary, moving at the speed of justice,'' if Mary is a lawyer, or ''Mike, the special of the day is speed,'' if Mike is a chef.

The experiment adds a new wrinkle to the wrangling among marketers and safety experts over whether drivers might be dangerously distracted by messages flashed on the growing number of digital billboards around the nation. Some communities have forced billboard owners to modify or turn off such signs, and the federal government has said it will soon publish a review of the research on the subject.

The enthusiastic guinea pigs for the Mini experiment will be more than a thousand Mini owners in New York, Miami, Chicago and San Francisco who have signed up for what the company calls ''an ever-changing array of unique, personal, playful and unexpected messages.''

In addition to employment-related comments, the signs will affirm the driver's favorite things about their car and driving habits (''Turns are made to be carved''), urge them to treat themselves to whatever customization feature is on their wish list (''You've earned your spoiler'') and wish them a happy birthday on the appropriate day. Since more than a third of Mini owners have named their cars, the messages will sometimes refer to the car by name.

''People buy Minis because they really want to have more fun in their days,'' said James L. McDowell, head of North American operations for the company, which is a subsidiary of BMW of Germany. ''We want everything about our marketing to fit that.''

Mini mailed invitations to 4,500 of the 150,000 Mini owners in the country. Mr. McDowell said that Mini would monitor reaction to the test signs for about three months before deciding whether to expand to other billboards in the first four cities, to more cities or to other applications, like using the tags to display personal welcomes when drivers approach their local Mini dealership.

Fun is the last thing generally associated with the technology that is making the experiment possible -- radio frequency identification, or RFID. Researchers and entrepreneurs have labored for decades to extend the practical uses of wireless tracking using radio tags.

The technology is now widely used in chips implanted in pets and livestock, in cards that control access to buildings, and in devices for automated payments of highway tolls. Major retailers and manufacturers are investing in systems to tag and follow products as they move through the supply chain.

Along the way, though, RFID supporters have run into technical and financial roadblocks for many applications, and are also contending with strong opposition from privacy advocates concerned about the potential of RFID to track motorists and pry into consumer behavior.

But Mini executives say they are confident that even RFID skeptics will take Motorby, as the trial is called, in stride.

''There's no piece of this that's invasive,'' said Trudy Hardy, manager of Mini's marketing department. ''It's a completely voluntary program, and there is zero confidential information in the fob.''

On blogs where Mini owners congregate, the questions about Motorby have tended to be less weighty. What happens if several Minis arrive at the same time? (The sign picks up the nearest car, then switches after 10 seconds.)

Can the system be hacked so that unexpected messages appear? (No more so than a digital billboard with no RFID links.)

And what happens when a Mini is under a sign and traffic is not moving? (After running through three personal messages, the sign switches back to the standard Mini advertising).

The program was first suggested to Mini a year ago by Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners, a San Francisco advertising agency that wanted to intensify the already strong ''tribal'' feeling among Mini owners and stimulate their desire to support the brand, according to Greg Stern, a partner with the firm.

''Building evangelists is the holy grail of marketing for a number of industries,'' said Michael Megalli, a partner in Group 1066, a marketing strategy firm in New York. ''This is interesting because the marketing is integrated into the product.''

Mr. McDowell declined to say how much Mini had invested in the billboard trial but characterized it as modest.

''Marketing is like a horse race,'' he said. ''We want to start more and more horses down the racetrack and see which ones are winning.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: OUTDOOR ADVERTISING (92%); RADIO FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION (87%); DRIVER BEHAVIOR (76%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (72%); EMPLOYMENT (51%); MARKETING & ADVERTISING (91%) Roads and Traffic; Advertising and Marketing; Radio Tags; Accidents and Safety; Outdoor Advertising
ORGANIZATION: Mini Cooper Division of Bmw
PERSON: Barnaby Feder
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (79%); CHICAGO, IL, USA (69%) CALIFORNIA, USA (79%); NEW YORK, USA (79%); ILLINOIS, USA (69%) UNITED STATES (92%); NORTH AMERICA (79%); GERMANY (66%)
LOAD-DATE: January 29, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photo: A sign in San Francisco, starting today, identifies approaching Mini Cooper drivers by using a signal from a radio chip embedded in their key fobs.
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1185 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 29, 2007 Monday

Late Edition - Final

Silicon Valley Rebounds, Led by Green Technology
BYLINE: By LAURIE J. FLYNN
SECTION: Section C; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk; TECHNOLOGY; Pg. 8
LENGTH: 936 words
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 28
After five years of job losses, Silicon Valley is hiring again. The turnaround coincides with a huge increase of investment in the emerging category of clean environment technology.

''We're looking at a tremendous market opportunity,'' said David Pearce, founder and chief executive of Mirasole, a manufacturer of solar cell technology in Santa Clara, Calif. ''Supply is the only constraint.''

Mr. Pearce founded the company in 2001, but it was not until the middle of 2006 that Mirasole embarked on an ambitious plan to grow from 25 people a year ago, to at least 300 employees by the end of 2007. Today, Mirasole has 95 employees, most of them engineers and scientists.

Mr. Pearce's company may serve as a harbinger in this region. For Mirasole, which in October closed a $35 million round of venture financing, the time is finally right for quantity sales of the solar cell product it has spent the last few years designing.

In Silicon Valley, investment in clean technology -- from alternative energy products, like solar panels and hybrid cars, to the use of nanotechnology to solve environmental problems -- went from $34 million in the first quarter of 2006 to $290 million in the third quarter, according to an annual report released Sunday by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, a research organization in San Jose, Calif.

''It's the hottest area of investment right now,'' said Tom Werner, chief executive of SunPower, a solar technology company.

Russell Hancock, chief executive of Joint Venture, said the emerging need for clean technology is a good fit with the skills and companies already in the area. ''A new cluster is emerging in Silicon Valley that provides leadership around global climate change,'' Mr. Hancock said.

Clean technology crosses many industries, with nearly a quarter of the venture capital in clean technology going to software companies, followed by 15 percent going to semiconductor companies. While it is unclear precisely how many jobs were added in the field, the increase is substantial.

But Silicon Valley's job gains are not limited to clean technology. Overall nonfarm employment in Silicon Valley, a region sprawling across 1,500 square miles over four counties, grew by more than 33,000 from the second quarter of 2005 through the second quarter of 2006, an increase of nearly 3 percent. Overall venture capital investment in Silicon Valley was $5.2 billion in the first nine months of 2006, compared with $4.6 billion in the same period in 2005.

While the job growth is still far from what the area enjoyed during the boom years of the late 1990s, it is a major reversal. After the dot-com bubble burst six years ago, thousands of engineers and technology workers were unemployed, with suddenly little demand for their skills. In 2002 alone, Silicon Valley lost more than 10 percent of its jobs. During the downturn, it had a net loss of 220,000 jobs.

Stephen Levy, an economist with the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy, said the growing demand for clean technologies might well make this emerging boom cycle a lasting trend. Developments on the legislative front may help stimulate that growth. In September, California lawmakers set a goal of cutting the state's greenhouse emissions 25 percent by 2020.

''Every time there's a new technology, Silicon Valley does pretty well,'' he said. ''That's beginning to happen again.''

The region first started to show a reversal in late 2005, Mr. Levy said, a trend he attributed to an increase in worldwide demand for technology products. ''Silicon Valley sells more to international markets than any other region, so we can grow as the international market grows, even if the U.S. market isn't growing,'' he said.

These days, signs of a recovery in Silicon Valley are widespread. Office vacancy rates are declining, while road traffic, an unofficial barometer of employment in California, is noticeably increasing.

Median household income in Santa Clara County, the largest county of Silicon Valley, was up in 2005 for the first time since the downturn. It reached $76,300 in 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available, compared with $72,000 in 2004, the lowest point since the downturn.

Mr. Hancock points out that Silicon Valley has been characterized by boom-and-bust cycles for decades. Industries based on military contracting, personal computing and electronic commerce have thrived and then were followed by a period of contraction. Now, almost everyone agrees that Silicon Valley is coming back again.

''These waves are nothing new,'' Mr. Hancock said. ''But the last one was full of hype and excess, and we had to go through a powerful period of readjustment. This time the investing feels more sober and well thought out.''

Besides clean technology, the region is seeing an increase of jobs in the creative sector, a trend that Mr. Hancock attributes to the growing needs of new-media companies. Much of the job growth is in small companies. More Silicon Valley companies have offices overseas, the study says, and there has been a sharp rise in the joint patents with foreign companies.

Despite the surge in jobs, Silicon Valley faces considerable challenges. According to the report, the percentage of first-time home buyers who can afford a median-priced home declined to 26 percent, from 31 percent in 2005. The high school graduation rate is down, while the crime rate is up.

''We face all the same challenge we did before,'' Mr. Levy said. ''We can add jobs, but we still have a lot to do to make this a place where people want to live.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ENVIRONMENTALISM (90%); SOLAR ENERGY (90%); ENGINEERING (89%); VENTURE CAPITAL (89%); EMPLOYMENT GROWTH (78%); CLIMATE CHANGE (78%); ELECTRONICS (78%); RECRUITMENT & HIRING (78%); NON FARM PAYROLLS (78%); ANNUAL REPORTS (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (76%); SOFTWARE MAKERS (73%); FINANCIAL RESULTS (73%); SEMICONDUCTORS (73%); CAPITAL EXPENDITURES (72%); BIOTECHNOLOGY & GENETIC SCIENCE (72%); SEMICONDUCTOR MFG (72%); AUTOMOTIVE TECHNOLOGY (71%); NANOTECHNOLOGY (66%); JOINT VENTURES (53%); ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES (78%); EQUITY FINANCING (78%); COMPUTER SOFTWARE (50%) Terms not available from NYTimes
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (73%)
GEOGRAPHIC: SAN JOSE, CA, USA (79%); SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA (79%); SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CA, USA (95%) CALIFORNIA, USA (95%) UNITED STATES (95%)
LOAD-DATE: January 29, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Graph: ''Clean Technology''Venture capital investment in clean-technology companies in Silicon Valley soared in 2006.Graph tracks Venture capital investment in clean-technology companies in Silicon Valley since the first quarter of 2005. (Source by Cleantech Venture Network)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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The New York Times
January 28, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

BYLINE: By SAM ROBERTS
SECTION: Section 14; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk; NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: READING NEW YORK; Pg. 6
LENGTH: 1224 words
BY most benchmarks, Nicky Barnes ought to be dead by now.

When he was born, the average life expectancy for a black man in America was less than 50 years. Before he turned 10, he had a robbery arrest under his belt. He later served hard time at Green Haven state prison. When he was released in 1998, he resumed his high-risk, high-profile career -- drug dealing.

Tales From Mr. Untouchable, and a Stroll Among the Statues

He was a target of murderous rivals and dogged federal investigators (supposedly on Jimmy Carter's personal orders, after a natty photograph of Mr. Barnes appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine next to the headline ''Mr. Untouchable'').

Finally, after returning to prison, he felt forsaken by his friends. So he ratted them out.

But instead of being dead, Nicky Barnes has written a book.

It's hard to imagine Harlem's most notorious heroin peddler still alive at the age of 74, much less reminiscing, a la Steve Martin as the urban mobster transplanted to suburbia in ''My Blue Heaven.''

But in fact Mr. Barnes now lives under a pseudonym in a retreat provided courtesy of the federal witness protection program. There, presumably, he can still fulfill his entrepreneurial urges by pursuing career goals that, we learn, have included operating a chain of automated car washes and marketing something called a flake-burger made from remnants of butchered beef (he once rejected an associate's offer to steal recipes from the Parks Sausage Company; ''as a Muslim,'' he says dryly, ''I didn't eat pork, so that didn't interest me'').

''Mr. Untouchable'' (Rugged Land, $24.95), written with Tom Folsom, a documentary film producer, offers a very raw, inside (and, by its nature, one-sided), video-game-paced view of how Leroy (Nicky) Barnes's ''council'' of drug dealers thrived, collaborated with the Mafia, laundered money and invested in legitimate businesses. And it reveals how Mr. Barnes finally was persuaded by canny federal investigators and prosecutors to exact revenge on his wayward former associates.

Because there is no statute of limitations, he volunteers no leads on unsolved murders. He says he omitted some details ''to prevent anyone else from getting killed.'' He also offers few new insights into how he corrupted and evaded cops (''our surveillance was better,'' he writes). And we're left wondering what happened to his children, who were placed in some form of foster care after he cooperated.

For an author whose reading list has included ''The Prince'' and ''Roots,'' Mr. Barnes sometimes sounds pedestrian in his commentary (''Life without parole. Even when you know it's coming, it still stings.''). His book's peppered with gratuitous product placements (a virtual catalogue of his accouterments, from Van Cleef, Armani, Hermes). It can be self-serving (''We were the living embodiment of the whole Horatio Alger myth'') and self-justifying (what distinguishes him from other Harlem drug dealers, he maintains, was his willingness to give back to the community).

He occasionally digresses into sociology and even pop psychology (comparing black and Italian mobsters, he says that fractures in his associates' personal lives had ''something to do with the inability of the council members to bind together as a family when the father was gone'').

But Mr. Barnes also comes across as shrewd, even witty. Mulling where all his money went, he accuses one former girlfriend of having had a black belt in shopping; he wonders why President Carter considered him smug in the Times photograph, writing that he was wearing his least flashy duds: ''It's a wash-and-wear blue denim suit.''

He writes: ''Maybe it was 'cause I used to be an addict, but I could never get enough money.''

For his role in reducing the prison sentence, Rudy Giuliani is one of his ''straight-up'' heroes; his tormentors include Mario Merola, the former Bronx district attorney, and Senators Charles E. Schumer and Alfonse M. D'Amato.

The author also seeks to settle old grudges, starting immediately, with the dedication. It exhorts an unnamed federal prison inmate to read the book, which has the subtitle ''The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Heroin's Teflon Don''; when he gets to the last page, writes Mr. Barnes, ''I want you to look up, see where I put you and ask yourself, was it worth it? Ask yourself that every day until you die.''

Mr. Barnes seems so intent on revenge against those who betrayed him that a reader might wonder whether all the events and conversations occurred precisely as he describes them. As he said about being resentenced to a lesser term, ''I told the judge what he wanted to hear; only now, it was kind of true.''

Nicky Barnes cited the statute of limitations. In ''Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide'' (NYU Press, $18.95 paperback, $60 cloth), Dianne Durante suggests that there are few limitations to statues.

''They can make you stop, look and think when you'd swear your brain was too tired to function,'' she writes. ''The achievements and the virtues of the people represented in these statues can help supply the emotional fuel -- the psychological energy -- that keeps you going.''

Her guidebook is a perfect walking-tour accompaniment to help New Yorkers and visitors find, identify and better appreciate statues famous and obscure (honoring, among others, the ''father of gynecology'' and the general who had an unremarkable military and business career but composed taps, the bugle call).

While the tone is sometimes preachy and pedantic (the book concludes with a tutorial on how to read a sculpture), Ms. Durante winsomely places 54 monuments in historical and artistic perspective.

We learn that a trumpet is an allegory for announcing fame, that the monument to Admiral Farragut in Madison Square Park altered the course of American sculpture, that the figure with the winged hat atop Grand Central Terminal is Mercury and that the statue of Atlas at Rockefeller Center was reviled when it was unveiled in 1937 because it supposedly resembled Mussolini.

Let's hope Ms. Durante follows up in the other four boroughs.

Which neighborhood personifies Brooklyn?

''If one word were to describe the heart, soul and spirit of Brooklyn,'' Brian Merlis and Lee A. Rosenzweig write, ''that word would be Flatbush.'' I would have chosen Brownsville, but the authors of ''Brooklyn's Flatbush: Battlefield to Ebbets Field'' (Brooklyn Editions, $40) make a convincing case that it is the historical and geographic heart of the borough.

This latest book in their series on the borough's neighborhoods is richly illustrated with black-and-white photographs that are bound to evoke pangs of nostalgia in former Brooklynites of a certain age.

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URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: INVESTIGATIONS (89%); ORGANIZED CRIME (89%); SPECIAL INVESTIGATIVE FORCES (89%); WRITERS & WRITING (88%); LITERATURE (88%); MURDER (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (76%); HEROIN (71%); WITNESSES (70%); JUSTICE DEPARTMENTS (70%); AUTOMOTIVE SERVICES (69%); CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES CRIME (89%); CAR WASHES (64%); MOVIE & VIDEO PRODUCTION (62%); MONEY LAUNDERING (60%); STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS (50%); DOCUMENTARY FILMS (66%); JAIL SENTENCING (77%) Reviews; Books and Literature; Books and Literature
COMPANY: NEW YORK TIMES / MAGAZINE GROUP (56%); PARKS SAUSAGE CO (66%)
ORGANIZATION: WITNESS PROTECTION (55%)
PERSON: JIMMY CARTER (57%); MICHAEL MCMAHON (50%) Sam Roberts; Nicky Barnes; Tom Folsom; Dianne Durante
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (71%) NEW YORK, USA (92%) UNITED STATES (92%) New York City
LOAD-DATE: January 28, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photos: Nicky Barnes, shown in 1977, tells of his days as a Harlem drug dealer

above, a new work extolling Flatbush.

Some New Yorkers reviled Atlas, says a new book on city monuments. (Photo by Tyronne Dukes/The New York Times)

(Photo by William P. O'Donnell/The New York Times)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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