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2011-04-06T00:00:00-07:00

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2011-04-05T00:00:00-07:00

Weekend Retail Shopping Round-Up – Hip2Save - Not Your Grandma's Coupon Site

Getting The Most From Your Charitable Deductions

2011-03-28T11:00:19Z

This post is from staff writer Sierra Black. Sierra writes about frugality, sustainable living, and raising children at Childwild.com.

Charitable deductions can be a complex and confusing area of your tax return. Understanding what you can deduct and what you can’t deduct can be confusing. Documenting it properly adds yet another layer of difficulty. To help sort it all out, I talked to Kelly Erb, (a.k.a. Taxgirl), and Kay Bell (of Don’t Mess With Taxes).

Erb is a tax attorney who runs her own tax law firm with her husband. She’s also been blogging about taxes for the past six years. Before striking out on her own, she clerked for the IRS, specializing in estate and gift taxes. She also worked for a boutique law firm that primarily handled estates and gifts.

Bell is the author of The Truth About Paying Fewer Taxes, and the founding editor of Bankrate’s tax section. She has worked on Capital Hill with the House Ways and Means committee.

Both women offered great tips for getting the most from your charitable deductions while taking care to avoid pitfalls that could get your return flagged.

Should You Be Taking Charitable Deductions?
Most people give at least some money to charity, but few of us take our charitable deductions. In fact, only about a third of households itemize their deductions. The rest simply take the standard deduction, which for the 2010 tax year is:

$11,400 for a married couple filing jointly
$5,700 for individuals

For those taking the standard deduction, charitable donations aren’t deductible.

If you don’t normally itemize your deductions, it’s probably not worthwhile to do it just for your charitable giving. The exception would be if you give a large amount to a charity. Bell mentioned folks who tithe 10% of their income to a church as exceptions who may give enough to make the itemized deduction worthwhile.

To find out if you should be itemizing your deductions, Bell suggests you add up your deductible expenses: things like medical expenses, mortgage interest, property taxes, state income taxes and charitable gifts. If the amount you paid on these taken together is more than your standard deduction, you’ll want to itemize. You always want to take the largest deduction possible.

If you’re itemizing your deductions, you may have overlooked charitable donations. But you don’t want to pay more taxes than you’re obligated, so keep track of everything you give to charities throughout the year. That includes goods and out-of-pocket expenses, as well as money.

Folks in higher tax brackets will benefit the most from charitable deductions. A deduction reduces your taxable income. So, if you’re in the 28% tax bracket and you donate $5000 worth of stuff, you’ll take $1400 off your tax bill. If you’re in the 15% bracket and you donate $5000, you’d get only $750.

If your total donations for the year add up to $100 of Goodwill giveaways, careful record-keeping to claim them on your taxes may not be worth your time. Erb says keeping good records of donations is worthwhile for most people, though, because you’ll be surprised how your charitable donations add up over time.

Handling Cash Donations
Giving cash (or checks or credit card payments) to charities is probably the simplest way to donate. Be sure that you’re donating to a reputable charity approved by the IRS. The charity you give to should give you a receipt in return. You simply deduct the total of your cash donations at the end of the year. Be sure to keep your receipts.

Good record keeping is key. You have to have documentation for your gift. Usually it’s a receipt from the charity you donate to; most will send you a form letter that serves as both a thank you and a receipt for your taxes. If you don’t get a letter from the charity, you need to have some substantiation of your own like your cancelled check. Credit card statements are allowed, Bell says. You don’t have to send these documents in with your tax return, but hold on to them in case you’re ever audited.

“The burden of proof is always on the taxpayer,” Bell says. “You have to prove your deductions were valid.”

There are a few things to watch out for when you’re donating cash. If you get something in return — like a nice tote bag or a dinner — you’ve made what the IRS calls a quid pro quo donation. You can only deduct as a charitable donation the difference between the amount you paid and the value of the goods or services you received. So if you “donate” $100 to NPR and get a $20 Car Talk mug, only $80 of your donation is deductible. Most large organizations will break this out for you on your receipt. If you received something tiny like a bumper sticker, you don’t have to worry about subtracting its value from your donation.

In addition to cash, Bell told me you’re allowed to donate stock you’ve held for at least one year. The value of the stock at the time of the donation is what you’re allowed to deduct on your taxes.

Handling Donated Goods
In addition to money, you can also deduct goods you donate. How you deduct them and what kind of documentation you need varies depending on what you donate and how valuable it is. To deduct donated goods, you want to keep a record of what you donated and what the value of your donations was.

Donations of unwanted household items might be the most common example of donated goods. If you take a box of old clothes to Goodwill, you can deduct those as charitable donations. When donating household items to an organization like Goodwill or the Salvation Army, the IRS suggests that you use thrift store prices to determine the estimated value of your donation.

Be sure that anything you donate is in good or better condition. It’s actually against the law to take a deduction for donations of used items in poor condition. It’s very hard for the IRS to check the condition of your Goodwill donations, Bell says, but the law is designed to make you stop and think before donating.

“Be careful about donating things,” Bell says. “If you wouldn’t buy it at a garage sale, I would say just throw it away.”

The goods must also be something the organization can use. You can’t donate a Picasso to your Girl Scout troop, as Erb put it. If they don’t have a use for it, it doesn’t count as a legitimate charitable donation.

You can deduct donations of goods you make yourself, but you can only deduct what it cost you to make the item, not its fair market value. That means that if you donate a hand-knit scarf to your church holiday fair or a tray of cookies to a school bake sale, you can deduct only the cost of the yarn or the ingredients, not the price the items sell for. Basically, you’re allowed to deduct your out-of-pocket costs, but not the value of the labor you put into making your handmade goods.

For deductions of goods under $250, you’re not required to have a receipt if it’s not practical to get one. That means that if you drop a bag of clothes off at a Salvation Army drop box, you’re still allowed to deduct them. Erb says it’s a good idea to write yourself a detailed note itemizing what was in the bag and roughly how much it would be worth, even if you don’t get a receipt. She suggests recording as much detail as possible. For example, “4 men’s dress shirts, good condition, $2.50 each”.

While you can claim a deduction without a receipt, there’s often no need to. The small extra effort of taking your things into the thrift store and getting a receipt from someone behind the counter can save you a big headache if you wind up being audited. Bell says that it’s always better to have a receipt.

If you’re deducting $250 to $500 worth of goods, you’ll need a receipt and an acknowledgment from the organization. The receipt requirement for this level of donation also means that you can’t drop $400 worth of clothes off at Goodwill’s dumpster and claim it as a deduction. You need something in writing from the recipient.

If you make multiple trips to Goodwill throughout the year, Erb says it’s important to keep good records and receipts even for smaller donations. Donations of similar goods will be counted cumulatively. So while you wouldn’t be required to have a receipt for a $100 donation of children’s clothing, if you make four similar donations throughout the year, you’d be expected to have receipts for that $400 total donation. If, on the other hand, you give $100 worth of clothes to Goodwill and an old car to the Salvation Army, those are different enough that you wouldn’t need a receipt for the clothes. Though it’s still a good idea to have one if it’s practical to get it.

For donations valued over $500 but under $5000, you need the same written acknowledgment of your gift, and you need to fill out Form 8283, which will require you to have not only a receipt but also to explain how you got the property you are donating. Did you buy it? Was it a gift? An inheritance? For these larger donations, the IRS places restrictions on how they can be valued.

Most donated vehicles will fall into this value range. You want to use special care when donating a car, Bell says. When you donate a vehicle, you get a statement from the charity you give it to after they dispose of it. What they got for the vehicle is what you can deduct. If they don’t sell it, or they use it themselves, then you can use the blue book value of that vehicle as your deduction. Be careful not to overvalue the car you donate.

When you donate goods over $5000, you’ll need a written acknowledgment of your gift and a qualified written appraisal. If you’re donating works of art or collections, special rules apply and you always need an appraisal. In those cases, you will probably want to involve a tax professional. Erb says its a good idea to involve a tax attorney, accountant, or CPA whenever you find yourself scratching your head and wondering how to handle a donation.

“If it’s complicated for you, it’s probably also worth it to pay somebody,” she says. “You don’t want to lose your deduction because you did something silly. It’s rare that you’re donating $25 of inherited property. You’re usually looking at bigger numbers.”

Not only can a tax professional protect you from costly mistakes, they can help you make the most of your donation. If it’s something simple, Erb says a good tax attorney will be honest enough to say, “You don’t need me for this.” If you do need professional help, the cost of consulting a tax professional should be deductible on your Schedule A under miscellaneous expenses.

Other Deductions You Can Take
You can take as a charitable deduction any expenses you incur in the service of a non-profit. For example, if you buy pizza for your Girl Scout troop and aren’t reimbursed by the Girl Scouts, you can count the cost of pizza as a charitable donation. This is true for any out-of-pocket expense, like art supplies or event tickets. You can also deduct the cost of uniforms worn during volunteer work, if you pay for them out-of-pocket.

There are whole volunteer vacation packages sold on the basis of this deduction. If you go to Costa Rica to do volunteer work, you may be able to deduct the entire cost of your trip so long as your primary purpose is volunteering for a legitimate charitable organization.

For local travel, bear in mind that you can deduct mileage expenses for any driving you do for a non-profit organization. Your mileage is always deducted at 14 cents a mile.

What You Can’t Deduct
There are some things that seem to many people like they should be deductible — but aren’t. Here are a few non-deductible things Erb gets a lot of questions about:

Your time. Erb says she gets asked about this more than anything else. People give many hours of their time to volunteer efforts, and often donate specific services for which they would ordinarily be paid. Your time is never deductible as a charitable donation, though, even if you can quantify what the time is worth. For example, if you’re a massage therapist and donate an hour-long massage to a charity auction, you cannot deduct the cost of the massage as a donation. You can deduct any material expenses for the equipment you use to give the massage, though. While you can’t deduct your time, Erb stresses that it’s still worthwhile to donate it. “You can’t discount the amount of warm fuzzies that you get,” she says.
Donations to individuals.. No matter how good a cause it is, you can’t deduct donations of cash or goods to individuals. For example, if a family at your church loses their home in a fire, and you give $20 to a collection that goes directly to the family, you cannot deduct that $20. (On the other hand, if you give $20 to the church and the church then gives money to the family, you can deduct your donation to the church.)
Personal expenses. While you can deduct expenses incurred on behalf of a charity, you can’t deduct personal expenses incurred while doing volunteer work. Erb gave the example of buying herself lunch while doing free tax returns for the elderly in her community. Not deductible, unlike the earlier example of buying dinner for your whole Girl Scout troop, which is allowed.
Donations to political organizations or candidates. Be sure you understand whether or not an organization is a qualifying non-profit. Political groups are not — even if they’re not associated with a political party. For example, donations to the ACLU are not tax-deductible. Bell says a reputable charity will always be able to document their tax status for you. If they can’t, they probably aren’t recognized by the IRS.
Tuition at religious schools. Even though money given to your church is tax-deductible, tuition paid for a Catholic school is not. This is because you’re getting something in return for your money, just like the earlier examples with the Car Talk mug and charity dinners.

Common Red Flags
Erb says the biggest red flag is donating too much. The IRS expects you to donate within certain norms, which work out to be about 3% of your gross income. If you claim charitable deductions worth much more than that on your taxes, they’ll expect very careful documentation. There might be legitimate cases when you’ll donate a lot more than normal. For instance, if you’re giving away your father’s valuable stamp collection or donating a work of art. Just be sure you have all your paperwork in order.

“If the IRS says ‘no’, you always want to be able to say ‘yes’,” Erb says.

A related mistake people make, Erb says, is overestimating the value of your donations. Bell says concerns about overestimating the value of donations have led to a lot of changes to the tax laws and increased scrutiny of charitable deductions. No one is really going to pay $30 for your used jeans with the frayed cuffs, so don’t say so when you estimate your Goodwill donations. People also tend to err towards deducting too many expenses when they itemize costs for a volunteer vacation. Yes, your plane tickets and accommodations are deductible, but you can’t deduct your shampoo or the cost of your new bathing suit.

“You have to be really careful about being greedy on your return,” Erb says. “Take the actual deduction, don’t tag on the $80 swim suit. It will get your return flagged. Just take what you’re entitled to and move on.”

Erb says it’s rare that the IRS will beat up on you for an honest mistake. Generally those who get in trouble are doing something wrong on purpose.

The bottom line take away for charitable deductions is simple: Keep good records and receipts. Ask for help when you need it. Don’t be greedy.

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2011-03-25T00:00:00-07:00

Amazon.com: Appstore for Android
Find, shop for and buy at Amazon.com

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2011-03-24T00:00:00-07:00

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2011-03-22T00:00:00-07:00

Contacts News Adoption Base L
Amazon.com: RoomMates RMK1282SCS GI Joe Peel & Stick Wall Decals: Home Improvement
Amazon.com: RoomMates RMK1282SCS GI Joe Peel & Stick Wall Decals: Home Improvement

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2011-03-20T00:00:00-07:00

eCards, Free Greeting Cards Online, Birthday Cards and Funny Animated eCards at American Greetings
American Greetings has free eCards, animated greeting cards and invitations for any birthday or holiday. Personalize an eCard or online greeting card with a message and photos to make it special. All eCards can be sent to arrive on any date. Send a free eCard today!
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Explore our U.S. Presidents on a map

2011-02-18T17:02:00Z

(Cross-posted from the Students Blog and Lat Long Blog)

When I was in elementary school, I got two days off every February; one for George Washington and another for Abraham Lincoln. I remember classrooms were usually wallpapered with a potpourri of decorations left over from Valentine’s Day and token silhouettes of these two Presidents thumb-tacked to the bulletin board. My teachers would talk about the significance of the holiday during class but with lack of visuals to pique my interest, it was always hard to retain (and fully enjoy!) the information. With that in mind, we’re pleased to celebrate the President’s Day holiday in the U.S. by letting you go back in time to learn more about our past presidents in a visually fun and interactive way.

We’ve created a U.S. Presidents Showcase to map the birthplaces of all 44 presidents, and provide details about their presidential terms, using the Google Earth plug-in. You can also see the states that voted during each president’s election by clicking on the tours in the left column of the showcase.

Whether you’re a history buff or simply curious to learn more about U.S. presidents, we hope you enjoy exploring a little further using Google Earth. In addition to the U.S. Presidents map, educators can use some of our other resources in their classroom to explore more aspects of history. Here are a few ideas:

Explore the White House, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial and other historical monuments in 3D and have students explain how architecture is used to honor people, concepts and establishments
View a 3D model of Valley Forge National Park in Google Earth
View a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln and map the areas where slavery ended, as well as the areas that were not initially covered by this executive order
Discuss the famous painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” by German American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze and use the ruler tool in Google Earth to measure the width of the Delaware River

We hope you have fun exploring and learning a little more of the history behind the President’s Day holiday. And when you’re done, go out and enjoy your day off!

Posted by Tina Ornduff, Geo Education Program Manager

Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office

2011-02-24T19:58:00Z

After three months of beta testing, Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is available for everyone. The rebranded version of DocVerse, a software developed by the homonymous company acquired by Google last year, integrates with Google Docs and provides a bridge for Microsoft Office users who want to use online collaboration features without upgrading to Office 2010.

"Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office brings collaborative multi-person editing to the familiar Microsoft Office experience. You can share, backup, and simultaneously edit Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents with coworkers," explains Google. The software works with Microsoft Office 2003, Office 2007 and Office 2010.

By default, the plugin automatically saves online and syncs all the files you edit in Microsoft Office, but you can change this setting.

I created a new document in Word 2010, but Google saved it as a read-only Word file in Google Docs. Apparently, the document can only be edited using Microsoft Office and not using Google's online word processor. Since you can't even open existing files from Google Docs, this software seems to be too limited. It's useful if you and all your collaborators only use Microsoft Office and Google's plugin.

Rework – Book Review

2011-02-23T10:46:51Z

I had the fortune to read Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. I first heard of the book by seeing an ad for it in Inc magazine. In the ad was a recommendation by Seth Godin, whose blog I occasionally read (I don’t read it near enough). I looked up the book on Amazon to see what the book was about and check out some reviews. I was intrigued to say the least.

Who wrote Rework?

The authors are from the software company 37signals. The book is pretty much their business guide to what has worked for them as a company and why it will work for you.

What’s Rework about?

I should go into what the book is. It’s a business book. But not one of those overly boring, technical business books that talks terms and concepts that are over your head. Rework is an easy read that I think anyone who has a business, or is thinking about starting a business, would do well to read. It’s full of easy-to-understand advice to get you on your way to running a successful business.

Why read Rework?

The advice given in the book makes sense. Reading the book, I kept thinking to myself how simple the concepts where but also how powerful and “right” they sounded. If you feel like the way you run your business is bloated and not working, this just might be the read for you. If you have an idea for a company that you are afraid to start on, this might be a great read for you. If you are looking for an efficient way to work, then check the book out.

In the book, Jason and David tell you what has worked for their software company. They also give plenty of examples of other companies that have become successful. They do this in a way that sets off light-bulb after light-bulb in your head. I found myself highlighting and making lots of notes.

Here are some of the ideas I’ve highlighted and notes I took:

p.19 “These People scratched their own itch and exposed a huge market of people who needed exactly what they needed. That’s how you should do it too.” – The point here is that a company can spend too much time worrying about the customer’s needs. Figure out what YOU need and create that. If the product is good, other’s will want it as well. There are examples of people who created something to fits their own needs that later translated to the market in general such as Vic Firth the drum stick maker and Bill Bowerman of Nike.

p.20 “When you want something bad enough, you make the time-regardless of your other obligations. The truth is most people just don’t want it bad enough.”

p.26 “Great companies start in garages all the time. Yours can too.” You don’t need a lot to start a company. Don’t think you need a big office, lots of money, or huge corporate backing to get going with your ideas. Start!

p.32 “Whenever you can, swap ‘Let’s think about it’ for Let’s decide on it.’ Commit to making decisions. Don’t wait for the perfect solution. Decide and move forward.” … “Decisions are progress.” … “You’re as likely to make a great call today as you are tomorrow.” I tend to be one who gets stuck in analysis paralysis so the section spoke to me.

p. 36 “Use whatever you’ve got already or can afford cheaply. Then go. It’s not the gear that matters. It’s playing what you’ve got as well as you can. Your tone is in you fingers.” Anyone who is a musician understands this. Yet, I still get stuck sometimes thinking I need something else or something upgraded to get going.

p.37 “When you impose a deadline, you gain clarity. It’s the best way to get to that gut instinct that tells you, ‘We don’t need this.’”

p.41 “If you’re constantly staying late and working weekends, it’s not because there’s too much work to be done. It’s because you’re not getting enough done at work. And the reason is interruptions.” Yup, that’s me.

P.91 “Inspiration is a magical thing, a productivity multiplier, a motivator. But it won’t wait for you. Inspiration is a now thing. If it grabs you, grab it right back and put it to work.”

I have a bunch more notes and things I highlighted but I think you get the point. Either the book seems interesting to you by now or it doesn’t.

I found the book to be really inspiring and it made a lot of sense to me. If you get a chance, find a copy somewhere and thumb through it. See if what’s being said can help you. I think you’ll be pleased reading it.

You can get Rework and check some reviews on Amazon.

Have you read Rework? What did you think?

5 Credit Cards to Avoid at All Costs

2011-02-15T19:56:37Z

It’s true: There are some ways that credit cards can help you. With proper planning, you can get a credit card that provides you with free merchandise, travel discounts and cash back. The right rewards card, when used responsibly and paid down, can be a boon to your finances. Additionally, the responsible use of credit can help you build a financial reputation that can save you money when you get home loans and auto loans.

But, not all credit cards are created equal. Here are 5 credit cards to avoid at all costs:

1. Aspire Visa

The Aspire Visa is considered the worst credit card ever by Tim Beyers of Fool.com. This credit card comes with a hefty annual fee, as well as a fee to open the account. On top of that, you have to pay a monthly fee. These are just the regular fees. You still have to pay your interest charges — and that interest charge can be quite large, when you consider that it is probably going to be north of 19%. It starts accruing immediately on your fees.

2. First Premier Card

If you are looking for a credit card with an awe-inspiring rate, the First Premier Card is for you. This card has a rate of 59.9% (the issuer did test it out at a 79.9% rate at one point). On top of that, there is an annual fee of $45 (the first year it’s “only” $30), and you have to pay a processing fee to open your account. You are also subject to a monthly fee. And if you are paying 59.9% interest, you can imagine how much this can start to cost you.

3. Total Visa

Watch out for all the fees when you sign up for this credit card. You will have to pay a monthly fee, and then you will have a set-up fee, a program fee, and an annual fee. All of these fees are charged up front. This means that when your credit card arrives at your mailbox, almost all of your $250 credit limit will be gone. The rest of it, of course, will be devoured as you carry a balance subject to an interest rate of more than 19%.

4. New Millennium MasterCard

Many of the credit cards on this list have credit limits of $250 or $300. The New Millennium card, though, has a limit of $500 — buy only because this is a secured credit card. You will have to pay your up front deposit, and then you will be charged an annual fee and a processing fee. And, of course, the interest starts accruing immediately. If you don’t get ahead quickly, you will never, in fact, be able to pay down this credit card.

5. Anacott Financial Credit Card

Don’t be fooled by this credit card! It seems like a great deal. You get an unsecured limit of more than $1,000, and an intro rate of 6.9%. Not bad at all — especially if you are trying to rebuild credit. Only problem? The “credit” you receive is only good for Anacott services. Plus, you have to pay a $99 application fee to get this card. What a scam!

It’s true that most of these cards are marketed those with questionable credit. If you are trying to rebuild your credit, you might not have much choice. But there are some credit cards that, though not great, still offer better terms. Be discerning as you look for your next credit card, and try to avoid those on this list.

(Photo: menetekel)

5 Credit Cards to Avoid at All Costs from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

New AWS feature: Run your website from Amazon S3

2011-02-17T15:45:51Z

Since a few days ago this weblog serves 100% of its content directly out of the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) without the need for a web server to be involved. Because my blog is almost completely static content I wanted to run in this very simple configuration since the launch of Amazon S3. It would allow the blog to be powered by the incredible scale and reliability of Amazon S3 with a minimum of effort from my side. I know of several other customers who had asked for this greatly simplifying feature as well. I had held out implementing an alternative to my simple blog server that had been running at a traditional hosting site for many years until this preferred simple solution became available: today marks that day and I couldn't be happier about it.

The Amazon S3 team launched a new feature today that makes serving a complete (static) web site out of Amazon S3 dead simple: you set a default document for buckets and subdirectories, which is most likely an index.html document. This enables Amazon S3 to know what document to serve if one isn't explicitly requested: for example http://www.allthingsdistributed.com returns the index.html at the bucket level and http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/12/ the index.html from that subdirectory. The other document you can specify is a customer error page that is presented to your customers when a 4XX class error occurs (e.g. non-existent page is requested), so they get something more appropriate than just the barebones response from the browser. Click on http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/doesnotexist.html if you want to see what this blog's error page looks like. The background is courtesy of @nalden.

All of this can be done from the AWS console as well as with the AWS SDK's. You will also need to set access control to make sure that your content is publicly accessible. I have used a bucket policy to make all documents world readable, but you could create one that restricts it to referrers, network address range, time of day, etc. I can now turn on Amazon Cloudfront, the content delivery service, with one simple click, whenever needed.

There are a few small pieces of the blogging process that I still need a server for: editing postings, managing comments and to serve search and all of these can easily be run out of a single Amazon EC2 micro instance. [update: I have since removed these last two dependencies as well, see the next blog post].

Amazon S3 FTW! More details about the website feature of Amazon S3 can be found here and in Jeff Barr's blog post on the AWS developer blog.

Simplifying IT - Create Your Application with AWS CloudFormation

2011-02-25T00:00:01Z

With the launch of AWS CloudFormation today another important step has been taken in making it easier for customers to deploy applications to the cloud. Often an application requires several infrastructure resources to be created and AWS CloudFormation helps customers create and manage these collections of AWS resources in a simple and predictable way. Using declarative Templates customers can create Stacks of resources ensuring that all resources have been created, in the right sequence and with the correct confirmation.

Earlier this year I met with an ISV partner who transformed his on-premise ERP software into a software-as-a-service offering. They had taken the approach that they would not only be offering their software as a scalable multi-tenant product but also as a single tenant environment for customers that want to have their own isolated environment. When a new customer is onboarded, the ISV has to spin up a collection of AWS resources to run their web-servers, app-servers and databases in a multi-AZ (availability zone) setting to achieve high-availability. There are several resources required: Elastic Load Balancers, EC2 instances, EBS volumes, SimpleDB domains and an RDS instance. They also setup Auto Scaling, EC2 and RDS Security Groups, configure CloudWatch monitoring and alarms, and use SNS for notifications. They have a centralized control environment for managing all their customers, but creating and tearing down environments is a lot of work and it is challenging to manage the different failure scenarios during these procedures. Next to that they are often doing specialized development for these customers, meaning that for each production environment there may also be development and testing environments running. Creating and managing these environments was a pain that AWS CloudFormation set out to relieve.

AWS CloudFormation solves the complexity of managing the creation of collections of AWS resources in a predictable way. CloudFormation centers around two main abstractions: the Template in which the customer describes, in a simple text based format (JSON), what resources need to be created, what their dependencies are, what configuration parameters are needed, etc. The Template can then be used to create a Stack, which is an instantiation of the collection of AWS resources described in the template, created in the right sequence with right configuration of resources and applications. If anything goes wrong during the creation process, automatic rollback will be executed and resources created for this stack will be cleaned up. The resources in a Stack once they are created can be managed with the usual tools and controls.

Customers also frequently asked us for the ability to assign unique names to the collections of resources such that during operations administrators know exactly which resources are assigned to which application and to which of their customers. A simple scenario is for example the ability to clearly identify production from staging and development environments. AWS CloudFormation tags resources and lets you view all the resources for a Stack in a single place allowing you to quickly identify which resources are production and which are test.

If you want to see an example of how a simple application such as the Wordpress blogging platform can configured and created using AWS CloudFormation see the detailed posting by Jeff Barr at the AWS developer blog. Wordpress is just one of the many ready-to-run Templates that are available and that demonstrate how easy it is to get infrastructure for your application up and running.

Just as with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS CloudFormation comes at no additional cost, you only pay for those resources that you actually consume. CloudFormation make it easier for customers to run their applications in the cloud, templates are already available for many popular applications and many application vendors will be providing their templates along with their applications.

For more information on AWS CloudFormation see their detail page and read more on the AWS developer blog.

Underachievement and the All-or-Nothing Mindset

2011-01-04T11:00:56Z

This post is from staff writer April Dykman.

There have been a slew of great articles lately on why resolutions fail, and I agree wholeheartedly with them. I’ve never had much success with resolutions myself — they always fall by the wayside after a few months, and by summer I don’t even remember that I’d set resolutions in the first place.

Nevertheless, I set a lot of goals in 2010 that I reached. For example, last year I accomplished the following goals:

Learned how to hang out in the pose pictured at right, which gave me a lot of confidence on and off the yoga mat
Completed yoga teacher training
Quit my job to freelance full-time
Started learning to play piano (again, but with some dedication this time)
Traveled to New York City at Christmastime
Began to explore cooking French cuisine, starting with crème brulée
Saved up a decent sum of money to start building our house

These weren’t New Year’s resolutions. They were goals I’d had for anywhere from six months (headstand) to 10 years (piano). I decided to achieve them and made small changes that would get me closer to reaching them, such as adding a 15-minute appointment to my calendar to practice piano. Sometimes I slacked off and ignored my small-step to-dos, but most of the time I stuck with it.

The difference was that in the past, slacking off a bit usually meant I’d drop the whole thing. If I can’t do it perfectly, I won’t do it at all. That was my attitude, and it stopped me from getting back on the proverbial horse too many times to count.

All-or-nothing
If you have perfectionist tendencies, you probably identify with what I’ve described. The all-or-nothing mindset is one of five characteristics of perfectionists that contribute to underachievement, according to research published Gifted Child Today. (The other four are procrastination, fear of failure, paralyzed perfectionism, and workaholism.)

Sometimes perfectionism is cast in a positive light. After all, being the valedictorian, the Olympic gold medalist, or even the parent who bakes the best chocolate chip cookies feels pretty good. It impresses others, earns us pats on the back, and besides, does anyone even remember the name of the second runner up?

But I think perfectionism is harmful, and it sucks the fun out of life. The all-or-nothing mentality paralyzes you. I quit playing piano a few times because I slacked off on practice and didn’t want to go to my lesson unless I had made enough progress. But if I had started playing 10 years ago and kept going to my lessons every week, even when I didn’t think I’d practiced enough, imagine how much farther along I’d be right now. My teacher isn’t expecting perfection from me, and I’m not looking to become a concert pianist, so the only thing my all-or-nothing mentality has done is hold me back from something I enjoy.

The shades of gray
Seeing goals as all-or-nothing is like seeing the world in black and white. But most would agree that’s a limiting view. Is the silver medalist a failure because she didn’t win gold? Hardly! She’s still one of the top athletes in the world, and it’s a tremendous accomplishment. Even if she never wins gold, it was still worth the effort.

Another trait of the all-or-nothing mindset is a fixation on the goal. I will be X when I have accomplished Y. That’s one reason why perfectionism sucks the fun out of life. What about the moments in between X and Y? Instead of focusing on playing Moonlight Sonata without making a single mistake, why not enjoy the rainy afternoons when I play for longer than I had intended, simply because it’s fun? Or the times I’m struggling with a measure of music and have a breakthrough during my lesson?

Perfectionism and personal finance
It’s the time of year when most people think about goals of some sort (even if they resolve to reject resolutions). If one of your goals is to take control of your finances in 2011, watch out for the all-or-nothing attitude. It was part of the reason it took me so long to get a clear picture of how much I owed on my credit cards. Doing the math meant coming to terms with the fact that when it came to my finances, I was far from perfect. It was easier to pay extra on my cards and not look at the whole picture, like an ostrich with its head in the sand. (I just found out that an ostrich doesn’t bury its head in the sand when in danger, it flops to the ground and remains still — which is still an accurate description of how I was handling my finances.)

When I finally got a plan to become debt-free, so many times I wished the slate could be wiped clean — that I could just start over with my new, responsible habits. But of course that’s not how it works. I had to do it one payment at a time. Even then, I was so fixated on paying off every debt that I never congratulated myself along the way on how far I’d come. I couldn’t be satisfied during the moments in between, knowing that I’d made big changes and I was on the right track. I wasn’t going to be good until I was debt-free.

This year, I’m setting goals, but I’m going to loosen my grip even more on the all-or-nothing way of thinking. (I’ve also decided to stop calling myself a perfectionist. Instead, I’m a person working to overcome perfectionist tendencies. Perfectionism doesn’t define me.) No matter what goals you set, either as New Year’s resolutions or just because you’re ready for a change, don’t let the all-or-nothing mentality stop you in your tracks. And if you’re like me and struggle with that mindset, try to remember to enjoy the here and now. Being hard on yourself robs you of living in the present.

Finally, I’d like to end with a quote by Anaïs Nin that I read often because it’s particularly relevant for people who struggle with perfectionism: “You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right, too.”

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Six Ways to Kill Your Credit Score

2010-03-31T11:16:40Z

Somewhere out there in the wild is a credit score with your name on it. It’s wandering the plains, being scoped by employers and lenders, seeing if it makes you worthy of a job or a loan. Perhaps you’ve even seen it, maybe once a year as the government would prefer, or perhaps you’ve just lived blissfully ignorant of what your little score has been doing all by itself. Well today I’m going to tell you six ways you can try to trap your credit score and kill it. I don’t mean hurt it a little, knocking it down a few points, I mean absolutely crush it so that it will be years before it can spread lies about you. I can guarantee that with these tips your credit score will never be the same.

Invariably someone will not recognize the sarcasm in this post so here’s the warning, prominently front and center: This post is a joke. If you do this and tank your score, I am not responsible because I’m telling you right now that by doing these six things you will lower your credit score and endanger your ability to get a loan, job, insurance, or cell phone in the future.

Let’s go credit score hunting!

Go On an App-O-Rama

An app-o-rama is a term I picked up on the Fatwallet Finance forums that goes back many many years. Back in the days of credit card arbitrage, you could apply for a lot of 0% balance transfer credit cards in a single day to amass as large a credit limit as possible. The strategy worked because by applying in a single day, there wasn’t enough time to update your credit report. You could be applying for your 12th credit card and your report would look inquiry free. Your credit would be significantly lower once all the inquiries and new credit lines appeared but by then you’d have amassed a ton of credit.

While this strategy probably isn’t as crazy today, it’s certainly a strategy you can use to trash your credit (inquiries account for around 10% of your score) and give you even more power to execute this next way to trash your score.

Go On A Spending Spree

This is by far the easiest way to tank your credit score but it requires that you not only go on a spending spree but fail to pay it back. See, if you go on a spending spree and then pay the balance in full, it won’t hurt your score that much. If you max out your cards, you increase your credit utilization temporarily, which is bad, but it goes back to “normal” once you pay off your debt. You need to max them out and just pay interest, that way the percentage of your total limit is as high as possible.

Kill or Reduce Your Credit Lines

Once you’ve maxed out your credit cards, start asking to have the limits reduced. If you have cards you haven’t maxed out, cancel them. The key here is to get as many of your cards to 100% as possible, so dropping limits after you make the minimum payments is the easiest way to do that (unless you just want to buy more stuff). If you have really old cards that you just don’t like anymore, you can cancel those too. The longer your history, the better your score, so you can nip that in the bud by killing off old cards. It won’t have an immediate effect but it will have one if you wait long enough.

Pay Off Non-Revolving Debt

If you have a car loan, try to pay it off. Student loans? Get rid of them, they’re only helping your score (unless you stop paying, but you want to keep your car right?) because having a good mix of different credit types helps. By having only unsecured revolving credit, like credit cards, you hurt your score by not having a good mix of different types.

Miss A Payment for 60+ Days

Most credit card companies won’t report a missed payment until it’s 60 days late and payment history makes up about 35% of your score. Sixty days can be a long time but if you’re patient it’ll be here sooner than you know it. By missing a few payments, the misses start appearing on your credit report and will lower your score, more so if you’ve been keeping a pretty tight ship before then. If you really want to go all out, just stop paying your bills and eventually they’ll go into collections – which remain on your report for years. Getting something put into collections is probably second only to going bankrupt in terms of “bad” things you can do.

Declare Bankruptcy

This is actually really hard but, if you’re successful, it is the holy grail for credit score trashers. Bankruptcy is hard because you will usually be required to go to counseling beforehand and then there’s the whole bureaucracy aspect of filing the proper documents with the court. You can go for either Chapter 7 or Chapter 13, both will hurt, but Chapter 7 is worse. Chapter 7 is the liquidation variety, where you are forced to sell a bunch of your stuff, but both remain on your credit report for 7 years from filing. They lose their potency after a few years but remain on the list for the seven. Oh, and in an ironic twist, these cost money so remember to budget for it.

There you have it, six ways to kill your credit score. If you have any good tips on hunting down this elusive beast, please share them in the comments!

(Photo: jeffonsafari)

Six Ways to Kill Your Credit Score from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

What is a Highly Compensated Employee?

2010-03-31T16:05:00Z

Are you a highly compensated employee? No matter what you make, you probably don’t feel like a highly compensated employee (what’s that old saying – happiness is making a dollar more than you’re wife’s sister’s husband? ), but you might just be one. Whether or not you’re a highly compensated employee has an impact on your employer’s retirement benefits package. The retirement program has to prove that there is no bias towards highly compensated employees or it could lose the tax breaks it gets for having a retirement package.

A highly compensated employee is someone who owns more than a 5% interest in your business at any time during the year. Or, they could be considered highly compensated if they, in the preceding year, received compensation in excess of a specified amount (see the list below) and, if you choose to add this criteria, be in the top 20% of employees when ranked by compensation.

Highly compensated employee compensation limits:

2006-2007: $100,000
2008: $105,000
2009-2010: $110,00

So if you earned more than $110,000 last year (2009) then you could be considered a highly compensated employee. Congratulations!

The bias becomes a factor because many companies contribute to a defined benefit or defined contribution plan based on the employee’s salary. Those earning more will naturally get a bigger benefit from the employer’s retirement package and the IRS wants to avoid this bias towards more richly compensated employees. They compare the amount the company contributes to the pool for highly compensated employees to the amount the company contributes to the remaining employees. if the difference is too great, as fined in this document, then the company could lose its tax benefits.

OK so what? If you are a highly compensated employee, you might be limited in how much you can contribute to your retirement plans. While the typical 401(k) plan limits employee contributions at $16,500, your employer may drop that limit to account for potential pension (defined benefit) contributions they are making on your behalf because of your salary. So if you are like my friend, who just recently received this letter, now you know what it means to be highly compensated.

Congratulations!

What is a Highly Compensated Employee? from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

I Bought a Zenith Men’s Defy Xtreme Tourbillon Titanium Chronograph Watch

2010-04-01T11:26:53Z

Like many folks who spend a lot of time at a computer, I’m not a big fan of watches until I laid my eyes on the Zenith Men’s Defy Xtreme Tourbillon Titanium Chronograph Watch.

The first thing most people jump to is the price, which I think is a mistake. It’s hard to justify paying $87,714.97 on a timepiece, even if it defies extreme, but remember that you’re getting $145,000 of value. This watch is worth as much as the first floor of my two story townhouse yet it is so awesome that it has tricked Amazon.com into offering it at almost half price. That’s like trading in my living room for the entire first floor, that’s a steal.

But, before you go out an buy it yourself, let the reviews give you confidence that this is eighty-seven grand well spent. Jon McAwesome said …”when I take my summer trips to the Marianas Trench, I have no more worries that I am going to miss Tea Time back on the yacht, because water ruined my watch again. It can withstand the immense pressures of the deep due to the wicked awesome titanium. Deep seas, cant beat this. Bullets cant beat this. Heck, I can deflect cruise missiles and the apocalypse. With a watch like this you don’t need to tell time, you tell people what time it is.” I think it’s pretty McAwesome that he took time out of his awesome day to leave such a detailed review of the watch.

I probably won’t be diving down into the Marianas Trench or deflecting cruise missiles, but I’m comforted by the fact that I could and that I’ll be comfortable wearing this $1625 air conditioned army t-shirt.

Hurry, only one watch left in stock! (free shipping too!)

I Bought a Zenith Men’s Defy Xtreme Tourbillon Titanium Chronograph Watch from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

Netflix Is Surveying Interest In An iPhone App

2010-03-02T08:43:47Z

There has never been a shortage or rumors that Netflix streaming is coming to the iPhone. It just makes sense that eventually, the hot device and the hot service will meet. And that may be happening sooner rather than later if a survey being sent out by Netflix is any indication.

As the site Hacking Netflix reports tonight, Netflix is asking certain users about their interest in streaming movies and television shows to the iPhone. Notably, this would apparently only work over WiFi, which is hardly surprising given AT&T’s reluctance to let stream-heavy fare on its network.

Here’s the full text of what’s being asked in the survey:

“Imagine that Netflix offers its subscribers the ability to instantly watch movies & TV episodes on their iPhone. The selection availability to instantly watch includes some new releases, lots of classics and TV episodes. There are no advertisements or trailers, and movies start in as little as 30 seconds. You can fast-forward, rewind, and pause or watch again. The movies & TV episodes you instantly watch are included in your Netflix membership for no additional fee.

Whenever you want to instantly watch content on your iPhone, your iPhone must be connected to a Wi-Fi network (such as one you might have at home or at work, or in public places like coffee shops, book stores, hotels, airports, etc.)

If this functionality were available, how likely would you or someone in your household be to instantly watch movies & TV episodes on your iPhone via a Wi-Fi network?”

So that’s obviously very straightforward. Clearly, Netflix is thinking about providing an app that would do this on the iPhone, iPod touch, and the upcoming iPad as well, but recent remarks by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings suggests that none of this is a priority for the company.

Hastings has also noted in the past that eventually the service will likely be on the iPhone. But if they’re already gauging interest among users, hopefully it will be sooner than he’s let on in the past. As Hacking Netflix notes, earlier surveys from Netflix gauging interest in the Wii and PS3 consoles with Netflix were early indicators of the service on both of those devices.

Of course, you have to wonder if Apple would approve such an app that would compete directly with iTunes.

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Netflix

iPhone

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Mobclix Compares Android and Apple; Android Devs More Likely To Give Their Work Away

2010-03-03T21:45:30Z

Apple and Google are engaged in a fascinating battle of mobile OS’s. Among other things, they’re duking it out on patent infringement, developer relations and carrier support. Lines are being drawn, and everyone’s taking sides.

That begs the question: what’s the difference between the App Store and Android Market for developers? And how does this affect their bottom line? Mobclix, a TC50 Company, just released a report comparing the Android Market to Apple App Store. They are a mobile analytics and advertising platform whose footprint includes over 6,500 publishers including ngmoco, SGN, and NewToy (creators of Words with Friends).

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Android Market Gets A $13,000 Per Month Success Story Of Its Own

2010-03-02T03:58:35Z

In the months following the iPhone App Store’s launch in July 2008, it became clear that the platform was turning into a gold rush. Success stories of one-man companies earning $250,000 in a few months became common. And even though the odds of striking it rich were clearly much lower than the media portrayed, a huge surge of developers started building iPhone applications. Android Market, where meager sales have been the norm, was left in the dust.

Now Android Market is getting its own glimmers of hope. Edward Kim, who built the application “Car Locator” around five months ago, has just announced that he’s pulling in $13,000 a month from the application, which “started as a little side-project while [he] was vacationing with [his] family”.

Kim writes that the free version of the application has been downloaded around 70,000 times, while the paid application has been downloaded 6,590 times. The price was initially $1.99, but he moved it up to $3.99 (he notes that despite doubling the price, the number of downloads didn’t decrease too much).

So what was Kim’s secret to success? Well, a big part of it seems to have come from the fact that Car Locator is now a featured app on Android Market, which means Google more prominently displays it to users than ‘normal’ applications. Getting featured increased the app’s revenue by over four fold. This probably comes as bittersweet news to developers (you can’t exactly count on being featured by Google), but Kim says that he’s ranked between 100 and 200th place in the Market’s ‘Paid’ category, which means that there are probably at least 100 other applications seeing similar success. Android Market is still far behind the App Store in many respects (except for openness), but it looks like it’s finally starting to mature.

Kim is very optimistic about the future of the platform, telling me “Android appears to have grown enough that developers can make some money off of it, but there’s not SO many developers that you’ll never get noticed.”

Here are some of Kim’s other observations:

The application was netting an average of about $80-$100/day, until it became a featured app on the Marketplace. Since then, sales have been phenomenal, netting an average of $435/day, with a one day record of $772 on Valentine’s Day. Too bad I didn’t have a Valentines date this year — we would’ve gone somewhere real special!

There appears to be clear peaks on the weekends and during holidays. This was always my hunch, but I think I can finally say this with certainty since the signal-to-noise ratio is much better now.

Some may be quick to point out that a featured Android application is only able to net $400/day, while top iPhone apps make thousands. But the Android market appears to rotate applications in and out of the featured apps list in some psedo-random fashion. Every time I open the Marketplace app, the featured list is different and most of the time, I don’t even see my app on there.

The price of the application was increased from $1.99 to $3.99. I ran a few price experiments and was surprised to see that though I doubled the price of the app, the number of purchases decreased by much less than half. Android users appear to have a willingness to pay more than a couple dollars for apps.

Piracy appears to be an increasing problem. A quick search for Car Locator on Twitter reveals links where people can download the .apk file without paying. I tend to have the same attitude on piracy as Balsamiq, so I’m not too worried about it, but I would love to hear some typical statistics on Android piracy.

CrunchBase Information

Android

App Store

Information provided by CrunchBase

BookRenter Opens Up Textbook Rentals To Campus Bookstores And Other Partners

2010-03-03T21:07:35Z

Anyone who has bought a textbook, whether during college or graduate school, understands how expensive they can be. College textbook rental startup BookRenter is trying to make the process of buying textbooks more affordable through its online site which loans books to students for a fixed duration. Today, the startup is opening up its platform to other sites to allow any college or business to launch its own online textbook rental store. Competitors Chegg and Barnes & Noble College are pursuing similar partnerships.

Partners, such as universities or campus bookstores, will be able to use BookRenter to set up a virtual store on their sites. Partners have access to the same selection of textbooks available on BookRenter’s site (which are electronically sourced from the largest textbook supplier)s. Partners can also use BookRenter’s dynamic pricing engine, which updates textbook prices in real time by responding to shifts in market supply and demand, as well as its customer service support. And BookRenter offers partners analytics platform and on-demand reporting capabilities, to give them intelligence on what’s selling.

BookRenter allows partners to take 8% of the rental price. The site currently has 3 million titles and and promises to rent books for 75% off the list price of the textbook. The expansion of BookRenter’s platform to other sites makes sense for the startup to expand its userbase. But, 8% is a low cut for a partner and many campus bookstores may see the rental platform as competition for their own textbook sales.

BookRenter, which just raised $6 million in funding, faces competition from Barnes and Noble, Chegg, a heavily-funded player in the space (Chegg offers an affiliate API to partners). But BookRenter claims a competitive advantage over Chegg and others by offering more flexible loan schedules and faster delivery (they offer next-day delivery on many titles, and use UPS). Chegg and BookRenter recently got into a tussle over a trademark to the phrase “#1 In Textbook Rentals.”

CrunchBase Information

BookRenter.com

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Google Puts SearchWiki Out Of Its Misery, Replaces It With Cute Stars

2010-03-03T21:59:27Z

Personalized search is something that we all know Google feels strongly about. Today, the search giant is adding a new feature to help users mark searches: Stars. So when you see search results, you can click to mark a star next to a result that you feel is relevant. The next time you perform a search relevant to a starred item, the result will appear in a special list right at the top of your results.

The feature will be rolled out to users over the next few days and will be available to users who are signed into their Google accounts. Google says that stars will make it it easier for users to remember their favorite results because they don’t have to keep track of them after they star them. Google will essentially do all the heavy lifting by remembering starred items and presenting those results when appropriate. Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar, so you can access your list of starred items in one place if you’d like to see them. Stars can also be used to mark pages when browsing the web; you can click the star icon in Toolbar to create a bookmark, which will show up in your starred items.

Google says that stars in search will replace SearchWiki, a tool which we weren’t very fond of. Searchwiki allowed users to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. Apparently others felt the same way, because Google said that users disliked changing the order of Google’s “organic search results.” Stars appears to be an effort to personalize search results in a simpler way. Google notes that if you have been using SearchWiki, your edits will be preserved with your Google Account.

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Google

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WordPress Makes A Big PuSH To Speed Up 10.5 Million Blogs

2010-03-03T19:17:51Z

All 10.5 million blogs on WordPress.com, including TechCrunch, just got more realtime. Any blog hosted on WordPress is now PuSH-enabled, meaning that new posts get pushed out to feed readers such as Google Reader the second they are published. There were WordPress plug-ins that did this before, but now WordPress is doing it automatically for all hosted blogs.

PuSH stands for Pubsubhubbub, a realtime protocol designed to speed up RSS which launched at our first Realtime CrunchUp last year. Instead of waiting for your RSS reader to ping the servers for each blog and news site you subscribe to, which can cause a noticeable delay before it actually shows up in your feed reader, it will now be pushed out immediately.

The PuSH protocol does away with the constant polling required by RSS. Another way to speed up RSS is through a different protocol called RSSCloud, which WordPress also supports. There are subtle differences between RSSCloud and PuSH, the most significant being that RSSCloud just notifies your feed reader there is something new, while PuSH actually sends the content with the notification via so-called fat pings.

Google Reader also supports PuSH, so if you use Google Reader, all WordPress blogs will be updated much faster than before. Not that you’d necessarily notice unless you just came from a blog’s site or saw a link on Twitter, Facebook, Buzz or some other stream first. Let us know in comments if you notice any difference to how fast TechCrunch posts appear in Google Reader.

(Photo credit: Flickr/joiseyshowwa)

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WordPress.com

Pubsubhubbub

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Google's Server Side Clipboard

2010-02-17T06:59:52Z

Google is implementing or testing a server side clip board for Google Docs. I don’t see this rolled out yet, but there’s a help entry available. It’s like a Ctrl+C shortcut, but the clipboard contents will actually be saved to Google’s servers for 30 days, ready to be pasted into another document. Who knows, we might see this clipboard be integrated across different apps at Google, not just Google Docs. But if this is supposed to be an online OS, how could copying on the server side from one company’s service to another company’s service work? [Via Google OS.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google's Server Side Clipboard | Comments]

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No, we can't translate "Yes we can"

2010-03-10T15:37:19Z

Ten years ago, the best-available translation software analysed the source text to determine its structure: subject, object, nouns, verbs, phrases, etc. From the structure tree, a new text could be generated in the target language.

The precise details of Google’s translation algorithms are not published, but the structure tree is not the main mechanism. Instead, there is a corpus – an enormous database of parallel works. These are works available in more than one language as a result of a previous human translation.

Based on equivalents found in the corpus, Google obtains translations for various multi-word fragments from the source text, then blends those together into what is usually a coherent sentence in the target language.

The system doesn’t work so well on fragments that weren’t translated in the corpus. For example, the phrase “Yes we can” was used prominently in Barack Obama’s election campaign, and was therefore included untranslated in many foreign language news reports. You can see this in a search for [obama “yes we can”] on google.de.

As a result, Google Translate is not always able to translate that phrase, even when used in a context unrelated to Barack Obama.

In a test I performed today, I found that the phrase “Yes we can” was not translated into these languages:

Catalan, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portugese, Slovak, Spanish, Turkish.

It was translated into these languages:

Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Estonian, Filipino, Galician, Greek, Haitian, Hebrew, Hindi, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swahili, Thai, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish.

What can we conclude from this? Probably that the corpus for each language on the first list includes a higher proportion of Obama campaign reports than the corpus for any language on the second list.

[Thanks Ilan and Philipp!]

[By Roger Browne | Origin: No, we can't translate "Yes we can" | Comments]

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Variable Speed for YouTube Videos

2010-03-08T13:16:31Z

If you’ve opted in to YouTube’s HTML5 experiment, the videos will play in your own browser’s player, instead of in an Adobe Flash player. This was discussed in the Forum a few weeks ago.

YouTube can serve HTML5 videos if you have an HTML5-capable browser with the h.264 video codec (i.e. Chrome but not Chromium, Safari v4+, or IE with Google Chrome Frame). Videos containing ads continue to use the Flash player.

YouTube has implemented a variable speed control for their HTML5 videos. Next to the play/pause button is a small arrow. When clicked, it opens up a panel containing a slider and two icons: a hare and a tortoise.

As you can probably guess, moving the slider towards the hare makes videos play faster, and moving the slider towards the tortoise makes them play slower.

The pitch of the sound is compensated, so that the audio doesn’t become squeaky at high-speed and deep at low-speed. However, the audio adjustment is not quite smooth enough for listening comfortably to accelerated speech, even at the minimum speed-up.

The “slow speed” feature works well for action replays. The “fast speed” feature is great for quickly finding the part of a move that you want to watch. But the audio processing needs to be just a little better before it will be practical to save time by watching long talks at an accelerated pace.

I used Safari 4.0.4 on OS/X Leopard to view the HTML5 videos and to take the screenshot, because Firefox on my Linux computer doesn’t have the h.264 codec.

[Thanks Qrczak!]

[By Roger Browne | Origin: Variable Speed for YouTube Videos | Comments]

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