$100 million in new funding will keep the woodchip-to-gasoline company Kior afloat, for now.

Yesterday Kior, a company that turns wood chips into gasoline and diesel fuel, announced that it had raised $100 million, which should be enough to keep it in business for another year or so and help it build a new biorefinery. The funding is a lifeline for a business that just a couple of months ago looked close to failure. But the company, which operates the largest U.S. refinery for converting cellulosic biomass into fuel (see “Kior ‘Biocrude’ Plant a Step Toward Advanced Biofuels”), is still a long way from being profitable.

Cellulosic biofuels could, at least in theory, reduce oil imports and greenhouse-gas emissions, and the U.S. Congress has required fuel companies to buy billions of gallons of it. But in spite of this mandate, very little is produced. Although dozens of companies have trotted out lab-scale technologies for breaking down recalcitrant biomass and turning it into fuel, they’ve struggled to commercialize these systems, in part because it’s been difficult to raise funds to build large refineries and in part because the methods often fail to perform as well at a large scale as they do in the lab. (For example, one company, Range Fuels, found that its system became clogged up with tar.) As result, the government mandate has repeatedly been waived (see “The Death of Range Fuels Shouldn’t Doom All Biofuels” and “The Cellulosic Industry Faces Big Challenges”).

Kior itself has run into technical difficulties that have kept it from running its huge biofuel plant at full scale. The plant is designed to produce 13 million gallons of fuel per year and started producing its first fuel—diesel—in March 2013. The company said it would ship a total of 300,000 to 500,000 gallons by midyear, but it only managed to ship 75,000 gallons. The shortfall in production resulted in lower-than-expected revenue and a loss of $38.5 million in the second quarter, up from $23 million for the same quarter a year before. With little revenue and high costs, some analysts started to worry that the company would run out of money.

The $100 million investment buys the company time, and by some measures it’s making good progress, says Mike Ritzenthaler, a senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray. For example, he notes that production levels are increasing, and the company looks on track to produce a million gallons of fuel by the end of the year. Kior also has the advantage of making gasoline rather than ethanol, the market for which is saturated in the United States.

But big challenges remain. If Kior hopes to break even and eventually turn a profit, it needs the economies of scale that come from even bigger refineries, and building those will require more funding. Funding for cellulosic plants has been particularly hard to come by, since investors are reluctant to take a risk on the new technology.

Fixes are planned for Internet anonymity tool Tor after researchers showed that national intelligence agencies could plausibly unmask users.

By Tom Simonite on October 25, 2013

Tests of Google’s autonomous vehicles in California and Nevada suggests they already outperform human drivers.

By Tom Simonite on October 25, 2013

Data gathered from Google’s self-driving Prius and Lexus cars shows that they are safer and smoother when steering themselves than when a human takes the wheel, according to the leader of Google’s autonomous-car project.

Chris Urmson made those claims today at a robotics conference in Santa Clara, California. He presented results from two studies of data from the hundreds of thousands of miles Google’s vehicles have logged on public roads in California and Nevada.

One of those analyses showed that when a human was behind the wheel, Google’s cars accelerated and braked significantly more sharply than they did when piloting themselves. Another showed that the cars’ software was much better at maintaining a safe distance from the vehicle ahead than the human drivers were.

“We’re spending less time in near-collision states,” said Urmson. “Our car is driving more smoothly and more safely than our trained professional drivers.”

In addition to painting a rosy picture of his vehicles’ autonomous capabilities, Urmson showed a new dashboard display that his group has developed to help people understand what an autonomous car is doing and when they might want to take over. “Inside the car we’ve gone out of our way to make the human factors work,” he said.

Although that might suggest the company is thinking about how to translate its research project into something used by real motorists, Urmson dodged a question about how that might happen. “We’re thinking about different ways of bringing it to market,” he said. “I can’t tell you any more right now.”

Urmson did say that he is in regular contact with automakers. Many of those companies are independently working on self-driving cars themselves (see “Driverless Cars Are Further Away Than You Think”).

Google has been testing its cars on public roads since 2010 (see “Look, No Hands”), always with a human in the driver’s seat who can take over if necessary.

Urmson dismissed claims that legal and regulatory problems pose a major barrier to cars that are completely autonomous. He pointed out that California, Nevada, and Florida have already adjusted their laws to allow tests of self-driving cars. And existing product liability laws make it clear that a car’s manufacturer would be at fault if the car caused a crash, he said. He also said that when the inevitable accidents do occur, the data autonomous cars collect in order to navigate will provide a powerful and accurate picture of exactly who was responsible.

Urmson showed data from a Google car that was rear-ended in traffic by another driver. Examining the car’s annotated map of its surroundings clearly showed that the Google vehicle smoothly halted before being struck by the other vehicle.

“We don’t have to rely on eyewitnesses that can’t act be trusted as to what happened—we actually have the data,” he said. “The guy around us wasn’t paying enough attention. The data will set you free.”

(Reuters) – The total value of the claims that market makers can recover after suffering losses due to Nasdaq OMX Group Inc’s botched handling of Facebook Inc’s initial public offering is $41.6 million, the exchange operator said Friday.

The claims figure, which was calculated by Wall Street’s industry-funded watchdog the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, falls short of the $62 million that Nasdaq had initially set aside to repay brokerages that lost money.

Nasdaq said the figure is lower in part because some claims did not qualify for compensation under its plan.

The main reason for the lower figure, however, was because one firm opted to try to recover funds through arbitration.

The announcement did not name the brokerage, which was UBS AG.

UBS has pegged its losses from the glitch-ridden IPO at $350 million and was vocal in its decision to file an arbitration demand which claimed Nasdaq had violated a contract agreement.

U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet, however, blocked the bank’s arbitration proceeding over the summer on several grounds, including a determination that the bank’s claims did not fall within the scope of the arbitration provision in their services agreement.

“Nasdaq has demonstrated that the arbitration should be enjoined because it is likely to succeed on the merits and will suffer irreparable harm,” Sweet wrote.

“Given the substantial federal issues posed by UBS claims, the threat of an arbitration panel issuing a decision that may conflict with the decision of a federal court in a parallel litigation also weighs strongly against permitting UBS to proceed with its arbitration proceeding,” he added.

Megan Stinson, a spokeswoman for UBS, told Reuters on Friday that the bank has since appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She could not comment further, as the case is currently under seal.

Facebook’s problematic debut on the Nasdaq exchange on May 18, 2012, resulted from a systems failure that prevented the timely delivery of order confirmations and left more than 30,000 Facebook orders stuck in Nasdaq’s system for more than two hours.

Many brokerages were left in the dark wondering if their trades went through. Major market makers estimated they lost collectively up to $500 million in the IPO.

Nasdaq devised a plan to compensate firms up to $62 million, and laid out the criteria for how firms can be eligible to file claims.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved the compensation plan in March, and FINRA was put in charge of processing the claims for restitution.

Several months after approving the plan, the SEC in May filed civil charges against Nasdaq, saying the exchange’s “ill-fated decisions” on the day of the Facebook IPO led to a series of regulatory violations.

Nasdaq settled the charges and agreed to pay a $10 million fine.

(Reuters) – Twitter Inc has set a relatively modest price range for its closely watched initial public offering, but some financial advisers say their clients are not clamoring to invest in the social media phenomenon.

“Nary a tweet,” says William Baldwin, president of Pillar Financial Advisors in Waltham, Massachusetts, when asked about client interest in the deal.

Out of 29 broker-dealers and independent advisers contacted by Reuters, 23 said they are not recommending Twitter shares. Only one said he would recommend it – and only to certain clients. Five others said they would wait to snap up the stock if it plunges after it begins to trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

While retail interest might be low, tech industry analysts say there is expected to be a good appetite for Twitter stock from institutional investors at the current valuation. Actual institutional investor sentiment still remains unclear. Retail investors typically account for 10 to 15 percent ofIPOs.

Twitter said on Thursday it will sell 70 million shares at between $17 and $20 apiece, valuing the online messaging company at up to about $11 billion, less than the $15 billion that some analysts had been expecting. If underwriters choose to sell an additional allotment of 10.5 million shares, the IPO could raise as much as $1.6 billion.

Blame last year’s botched Facebook Inc IPO for the diminished interest from Mom and Pop in Twitter.

When the social networking giant’s stock hit the market in May 2012, it encountered allocation problems, trading glitches and a selloff – shares did not recover their IPO price until a year later.

“People are still smarting from that experience,” says René Nourse, a financial adviser at Urban Wealth Management in El Segundo, California. Part of the problem is that investors do not understand Twitter the way they “got” Facebook, Nourse and other advisers say.

NO CALLS ON TWITTER

Three brokers with Morgan Stanley, which was lead underwriter on the Facebook IPO, said clients are showing little or no interest in Twitter.

“With the debacle over Facebook, I haven’t had one client ask about it,” said one of the brokers, based in the southeast. The broker asked not be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Another broker, based in northern California, said, “Silicon Valley deals have been super-red hot, but I’ve had no inquiries from clients” about Twitter.

All in all, Twitter is no Facebook.

While Twitter relies on advertising like Facebook to make money, it is not profitable.

Twitter also has a smaller, less-engaged audience and it is not issuing as much stock, argues Kile Lewis, co-chief executive and founder of oXYGen Financial, an independent financial advisory firm that focuses on clients in their 30s and 40s, also known as Generation X and Generation Y.

“In spite of the ‘glow’ from most on Wall Street, I find it hard to make a recommendation for a company that is running a…loss,” Lewis says. “Until they have a clear plan to monetize their product it seems too risky.”

Twitter more than doubled its third-quarter revenue to $168.6 million, but net losses widened to $64.6 million in the September quarter, it disclosed in a filing earlier this month.

Since its creator Jack Dorsey sent out the first-ever tweet in March 2006, the micro-blogging platform has grown to more than 200 million regular users posting more than 400 million tweets a day.

Twitter is expected to set a final IPO price on November 6, according to a document reviewed by Reuters, suggesting that the stock could begin trading as early as November 7.

INVESTORS POLL ON PRICE RANGE

For individual investors, however, the pendulum is swinging the other way.

An online poll conducted through Friday morning on Reuters.com found that 57 percent of 225 respondents want to invest in the IPO at the range of $17 to $20, while 28 percent are not interested in the stock. Fifteen percent say they are waiting to buy the shares on the open market.

One cautious investor is Betty Tanguilig, a 75-year-old retiree and mother of eight. Back when Facebook launched, she was furious that her financial adviser Alan Haft, with California-based Kelly Haft Financial, could not get her more than $46,000 worth of shares from a $400,000 account to buy shares of the social networking site.

Now, Tanguilig is taking a more measured approach to the Twitter IPO. Even though her investment in Facebook is up 40 percent, she says she wants to wait and see how Twitter performs before jumping into the stock.

Tanguilig’s hesitance about Twitter is not the result of a lesson learned from the mishaps of the Facebook IPO, but because like many of her peers, Tanguilig does not quite get Twitter.

“I use Facebook, I read what people are doing … but I have never used Twitter,” she said.

“I will give it a week,” she said. “And if it does well, I would put in around $20,000.”

Several independent advisers said it suited their investment styles more to wait and see how Twitter performed after the offering.

“We expect that Twitter will fall in value eventually post-offering,” said Stacy Francis, president and CEO of Francis Financial in New York. “That is the ideal time to buy.”

An adviser at Raymond James said he would also advise certain clients to buy at the post-IPO price if the stock tanks on the first day. The adviser asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Betsy Billard, an adviser at Ameriprise Financial with offices in Los Angeles and New York, said most large-company mutual funds will be buyers. “My clients will own it – whether they want it or not,” Billard says.

By Trevor Mogg

The Pebble seems to be doing OK in the smartwatch space considering its humble beginnings, though we’re not so sure about the recently released Galaxy Gear. It’s pretty pricey, after all, and only pairs with a couple of Samsung devices. There’s Sony’s offering too, though you don’t seem to hear much about that.

What we really want to see is a device so stunning it blows the market wide open, a watch that leaves us reaching down to the ground to pick up our jaw so that we can fit it back in place to verbally express our glee and happiness that an awesome wrist-based gadget has finally made it to market.

Could Google’s smartwatch be the one? According to a 9to5Google report Monday, we may be about to find out.

An unnamed source told the site the watch would be coming “sooner rather than later” – admittedly a vague forecast, certainly unspecific, and definitely not that useful. But it could mean we see something before the holiday season, rather than next year. Or next week rather than the week after. Or today instead of tomorrow. Sure, it really depends on how you look at it, although one date mentioned in the report is October 31.

The source also told the site that Google Now would be very much at the center of the Mountain View company’s high-tech watch – which is apparently going with the codename ‘Gem’ – with users able to ask a question and receive a response on its interface, as well as receive lots of contextual information via Google Now’s info-laden cards.

The company is also said to be working on ways to extend the battery life of its smartwatch – a major challenge for makers of a little device like this – as well as focusing heavily on Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity.

The Google Now integration could certainly work to loosen those jaw joints a little, though what’ll really send it groundward will be an awesomely cool design the likes of which we’ve never seen. Can Google come up with the goods? Hopefully all will be revealed sooner rather than later.

A startup pays people around the world to log prices in their local stores each day, offering a real-time way to track how economies are doing.

In early September, news outlets reported that the price of onions in India had suddenly spiked nearly 300 percent over prices a year before. Analysts warned that the jump in price for this food staple could signal an impending economic crisis, and the Research Bank of India quickly raised interest rates.

A startup company called Premise might’ve helped make the response to India’s onion crisis timelier. As part of a novel approach to tracking the global economy from the bottom up, the company has a daily feed of onion prices from stores around India. More than 700 people in cities around the globe use a mobile app to log the prices of key products in local stores each day.

Premise’s cofounder David Soloff says it’s a valuable way to take the pulse of economies around the world, especially since stores frequently update their prices in response to economic pressures such as wholesale costs and consumer confidence. “All this information is hiding in plain sight on store shelves,” he says, “but there’s no way of capturing and aggregating it in any meaningful way.”

That information could provide a quick way to track and even predict inflation measures such as the U.S. Consumer Price Index. Inflation figures influence the financial industry and are used to set governments’ monetary and fiscal policy, but they are typically updated only once a month. Soloff says Premise’s analyses have shown that for some economies, the data the company collects can reliably predict monthly inflation figures four to six weeks in advance. “You don’t look at the weather forecast once a month,” he says.

Premise uses a mixture of in-store logging and online prices to measure U.S. inflation. The company has continued to publish new figures each day even as the federal shutdown triggered by Congress has halted the U.S. government’s indexing program.

The people who check store shelves for Premise are located mostly in cities in Latin America and Asia, including the largest emerging economies: China, India, and Brazil. Soloff says that custom price indexes for food or specific crucial commodities will be of interest to many financial and consumer product companies. “In these developing, huge economies this isn’t an alternative—it’s primary,” he says. “We’re building a map for the first time.”

Each day, Premise’s workers receive a kind of to-do list on their smartphones via a mobile app for Android devices. They’re asked to go to particular stores and log the prices of certain products, and to snap a picture of that product on the shelf. Workers receive between 5 and 15 cents for each price logged and may be asked to record as many as 250 in a day, a workload that would take a couple of hours. The tasks, done with the permission of store managers, are designed to be something workers can fit in around another job or university studies.

Premise can also collect customized data for clients by sending specific questions to its crowd of workers. Consumer goods companies might be interested in paying for information on how its own and competing products are being priced in certain markets, Soloff says.

Soloff says Premise is already working with some consumer goods companies and has begun to feed data to financial companies including Bloomberg, which has since August offered access to certain Premise data feeds on inflation indexes. The company is backed by venture capital firms Harrison Metal, Andreessen Horowitz, and Google Ventures. Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, is an advisor.

Premise’s data could be a useful new way to monitor prices and unearth new information about how they are changing within economies, says Alberto Cavallo, an assistant professor of economics at MIT and a cofounder ofPriceStats, a company that calculates inflation and price indexes by monitoring online prices for goods in over 70 countries.

However, Cavallo says that Premise will have to constantly check that its workers are recording the price of the exact same items each time they log prices in a store. Research projects that looked into using mobile apps to track prices in stores have sometimes produced unreliable data because people sometimes record the price of a different version or packet size of a product by mistake, says Cavallo.

“That’s potentially the greatest challenge of crowdsourcing,” says Cavallo. “If they can control for that and make sure it is always the same items, it could be a very useful approach.”

Soloff says he is confident his company can do that, because it offers multiple layers of quality control. The company’s workers are carefully trained to be reliable, he says, and Premise can check the location fix and other metadata gathered by its app each time a price is recorded.

The company is also investigating whether image processing software could be used to automatically check the images uploaded with each price check. That could ensure that the correct item was logged and might even allow more sophisticated measures to be added—recording, for example, what condition fresh food is in, or whether shelves are running low on stock.

Premise’s data may have other uses outside the financial industry. As part of a United Nations program called Global Pulse, Cavallo and PriceStats, which was founded after financial professionals began relying on data from an ongoing academic price-indexing effort called the Billion Prices Project, devised bread price indexes for several Latin American countries. Such indexes typically predict street prices and help governments and NGOs spot emerging food crises. Premise’s data could be used in the same way. The information could also be used to monitor areas of the world, such as Africa, where tracking online prices is unreliable, he says.

A wearable depth-sensing camera may soon give sightless people a better way to master their environment.

WHY IT MATTERS

Economist Simon Johnson says governments will feel the urge to suppress the crypto-currency Bitcoin.

Governments and established financial institutions are likely to launch a campaign to quash the decentralized digital currency Bitcoin, according to a leading economist and academic. Simon Johnson, a professor of entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, expects Bitcoin to face political pressure and aggressive lobbying from big banks because of its disruptive nature.

“There is going to be a big political backlash,” Johnson said on stage at MIT Technology Review’sEmTech conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last Thursday. “And the question is whether the people behind those currencies are ready for that and have their own political strategy.”

The system of cryptographic software behind Bitcoin represents a significant technical advance, and the currency has inspired many cyber-libertarians (see “What Bitcoin Is and Why It Matters”). Mathematical and computer networking principles are used to underpin a system through which financial transactions can be made digitally, without the need for any central authority or financial institution.

The code that supports and regulates the Bitcoin network is built into the software needed to use the currency. It works in a distributed network across the Internet to confirm transactions and prevent counterfeiting. Adding to the mystique, the technical expert or experts who developed the Bitcoin protocol are still unknown.

After several years as a nerdy curiosity, the currency has recently gained momentum as a legitimate means of payment. Many Bitcoin-based businesses are springing up, some backed by major Silicon Valley venture capitalists (see “Bitcoin Hits the Big Time, to the Regret of Some Early Boosters”).

However, Johnson says that Bitcoin’s success will draw increased attention from governments and regulators, who are used to having tight control over currencies. He believes they will be egged on by established financial institutions, which will likely seek to quash the currency. Bitcoin enables very rapid, cheap transfers and payments that could compete with existing fee-based ways of moving money around. “Any bankers watching this should be very afraid,” said Johnson.

Bitcoin opponents could get ammunition for their campaign from the recent case of Silk Road, an online marketplace where bitcoins were traded for illicit drugs. The FBI arrested a man on suspicion of running the site and seized the servers that ran Silk Road. The site was hidden from the open Internet using the anonymous networking technology Tor.

Johnson suggested that this kind of controversial association could certainly put pressure on Bitcoin. “People care a lot about how monies are used,” he said. “They care about the various behaviors associated with monies.”

Indeed, it appears that Bitcoin is coming under increased scrutiny from lawmakers and politicians. Stephen Pair, cofounder and CTO of the Bitcoin payments company Bitpay, says his company has been contacted by state and national officials who have subpoenaed information about its activities.

Pair rejects any suggestion that the currency has any special association with illegal activities. “Just because you use Bitcoin and Tor doesn’t mean you can get away with breaking the law,” he says. “I would not advise people to see Bitcoin as a means of subverting the legal system.”

Johnson, who served as chief economist for the International Monetary Fund in 2007 and 2008, said he thinks supporters of the “crypto-currency” could head off opponents by persuading politicians and legislators that it represents an opportunity for international innovation. “They shouldn’t sit back and wait for other people to define them in terms of Silk Road or anything else,” he said in an interview after the conference. “They should be proactive and explain why this would be a great industry for the U.S. to develop, and why they should have appropriate regulation around that.”

He also said that some governments outside the U.S. may feel threatened by Bitcoin because it allows citizens and companies to sidestep restrictions on the movement of funds across their borders.