Wanderers chiefs are cool over losing Reo-Coker (From The Bolton News) - The Bolton News
Wanderers chiefs are cool over losing Reo-Coker
9:10am Wednesday 23rd May 2012 in Sport By Marc Iles
PHIL Gartside insists Wanderers will be perfectly fine without departing midfielder Nigel Reo-Coker.
The 28-year-old quit the Reebok last week after triggering a get-out clause in his contract.
The departure of the man who arrived on a free transfer from Aston Villa last summer, had not been part of Wanderers’ plan.
But chairman Gartside reckons the ball-winner, who missed just one Premier League game last season, can be replaced as the club prepare for life in the second tier for the first time in 11 years.
“It was important that we kept what was going to be a Premiership squad together,” he said.
“The only disappointment is Nigel Reo-Coker decided to invoke his get-out clause.
“You move on and we’ll replace him with somebody else that’s going to be as good, if not better.”
The chairman also confirmed that winger Martin Petrov would be part of the first team squad next season as his contract was extended by 12 months because he featured in 30 games for the club last term.
“Martin has indicated that he is more than happy to stay with us,” he added.
Owen Coyle was also sure that there will be life after Reo-Coker, pledging to invest the player’s £40,000-a-week to good use.
The Wanderers boss is hoping to add one more midfielder to his ranks this summer, and has already declared his intention to shrug off any interest in Mark Davies from Newcastle United in a bid to keep his squad together.
But while Reo-Coker’s influence may well have been a valuable asset next season, the Scot believes he has enough quality to cover the loss, with the return of some of his injured players.
“If Nigel would have said he was staying, I would have said ‘great’ but he had that clause and he chose to use it,” Coyle told The Bolton News.
“Now he was at the top end of those salary earners, so that money can now be utilised cleverly in whatever way we can. When one door closes another can open very quickly.
“And you’d have to say that when Stuart Holden comes back fit, Darren Pratley gets right again after being ill at the end of last season, and with Mark Davies and Josh Vela in there as well, who’s to say whether it’s a good or a bad thing that Nigel went in the end?
“We might just add one player to that, as well. It’s happened and now we’ll move on quickly.”
YOUR MONEY: Will investors take to crowdfunding? - Reuters UK
(The writer is a Reuters contributor.)
By Lou Carlozo
CHICAGO May 23 (Reuters) - Artists are not renowned for financial savvy, but their success in raising money on the Internet through donations to crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo could lead the way for a new class of investing. Soon investors will be able to pile money into startups through such sites with the hope of getting more than a lousy t-shirt in return.
Before April 5, U.S. regulators only allowed donation-based crowdfunding projects, which raise money from the general public via the Web.
While businesses have used such sites to get working capital, they have generally taken preorders for yet-to-be-created merchandise instead of selling equity. But new possibilities are opening up because of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups, or JOBS, Act, which President Obama signed into law last month.
The act provides crowdfunded businesses and investors with exemptions to the Securities Act of 1933, which prohibited people with a net worth below $1 million from investing in private companies. For the first time, businesses can advertise for investors without filing the standard disclosures required of companies with more than $1 billion in revenue.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission still has 270 days from the JOBS Act signing to review and make final changes to its regulation, but if the statutes stay in effect as-is, just about anyone will be able to invest in a startup or small company.
"What's new is being able to offer equity in return," says Slava Rubin, chief executive officer and co-founder of major crowdfunding site Indiegogo.
"And it's just the beginning," said Rubin, whose site has helped fund more than 5,000 projects since he unveiled it at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2008. "We're talking about a law that hasn't changed in 79 years."
So is a crowdfunded investment opportunity any different from pouring cash into junk bonds or penny stocks? It's impossible to say, since the first crowdfunded investment offerings have not hit cyberspace just yet.
But they will soon enough. Since the beginning of May, at least two new investment-oriented crowdfunding initiatives have been announced -- a partnership between EarlyShares.com and Navocate, and one by the US Crowdfunding Exchange LLC.
GETTING FLEECED?
Critics of the JOBS Act worry that small investors will get fleeced.
"Institutional investors can make choices based on the information they have," says James Allen, head of capital markets policy for the CFA Institute, a global nonprofit organization of investment professionals. "It's the mom-and-pop investors who are the bigger concern in this case, particularly the people on fixed incomes, the retirees."
Allen says these people are vulnerable because under the JOBS Act, many investor protections (some put into place after the Enron debacle) have been bypassed.
Others, including Brookings Institution senior fellow Robert Pozen, also say the act will open a new avenue for stock scams and the highly speculative investing that gives birth to bubbles. Meanwhile, state regulators fear a Wild West mentality where unscrupulous wheeler-dealers, now able to bypass any disclosure requirements, could siphon millions from naive investors.
But supporters of the JOBS Act say the new legislation creates a sort of social media trading pit where entrepreneurs can now give everyday investors the possibility of getting in on the next Google Inc or Microsoft Corp.
Others who back the new law's crowdfunding provisions say it will open up investor dollars to creating, as the act's name suggests, new jobs. Even Allen acknowledges that crowdfunding comes at a time when "banks aren't lending to small businesses, or much of anything. They don't have much of an incentive."
NEW RESOURCE
Members of the National Association for the Self-Employed view crowdfunding as a vital new resource for startups and job creation.
"This will really open the floodgates to a whole new arena of entrepreneurs who are trying to help other entrepreneurs finance their dreams," says NASE CEO Kristie Arslan. "The great thing about crowdfunding is that it allows people to choose; you're putting your business idea out there and asking people to invest in you and your idea. The good ideas will hopefully rise to the top."
At least the money looks good.
Indiegogo now raises "millions of dollars a month" worldwide, Rubin says.
And Kickstarter, a three-year-old major crowdfunding service, went from $1 million pledged per month in March 2009 to $7 million in March 2011. As of May 2012, more than $200 million has been pledged to more than 22,000 successfully funded creative projects, according to Kickstarter spokesman Justin Kazmark.
Among them was "Blue Like Jazz," which smashed previous film crowdfunding efforts by more than $145,000. The movie adaptation of Donald Miller's bestselling memoir came out in theaters nationwide last month to glowing reviews. Director Steve Taylor says that last year, the project seemed doomed because a financial backer walked out hours before production was to start.
Then two of Miller's fans jumped in on Kickstarter and raised $346,000 in a few months. For their trouble, all the funders got thank-you phone calls from Taylor (it took him about a year to call back all 4,500 people), and those who gave at higher levels were offered bigger perks, including a cameo role in the film.
Will Taylor fund his next film in a similar way? He says he would not rule it out. But if he markets it as an investment opportunity, those who fork over cash will want more than a simple "thank you" -- unless it's written on the back of a check. (Follow us @ReutersMoney or here. Editing by Beth Pinsker Gladstone, Chelsea Emery and Lisa Von Ahn)
BSkyB to escape restrictions in pay-TV film market - Media Week Online
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The Competition Commission has found that BSkyB does not hold a competitive advantage in the pay-TV film market, because of the arrival of competition from Netflix and LoveFilm, and the imminent launch of BSkyB's internet TV service. In a major U-turn by ...The expert's guide to Instapaper - PC Advisor
They arrive by Twitter, by RSS, and by email. They're passed around on social networks. They’re embedded in online articles and blog posts. I’m talking about all of those links to things you'd like to read but can’t. Making time to read everything you find on the Web the moment you find it is hard, so you probably don’t read it at all—unless you use a read-it-later service like Instapaper.
Instapaper makes it easy to save online articles for later reading: Just click a bookmarklet in your browser, and the story you’re looking at is saved, stripped down to just its text and essential images. You can then access your saved articles on the Instapaper website or using the Instapaper apps for iPhone and iPad.
If you’ve never heard of Instapaper, here are a few tips on how to get started. If you’re already an Instapaper fan, I’ve also got some ideas about using it efficiently.
Saving articles
If you don’t already have an Instapaper account, go to the Instapaper site, click on Create an Account, and sign up. (You just supply an email address and password.) That done, you’re ready to start saving articles. It’s so easy to do so in a variety of contexts.
On the Mac. Sign in to your Instapaper account online and go to the Extras page, then drag the Read Later bookmarklet from there up to your OS X browser’s bookmarks bar. One other option on the Mac: the popular RSS client NetNewsWire ( Macworld rated 5 out of 5 mice ) has its own Send to Instapaper button.
From iOS apps. Instapaper is integrated into a number of apps where you’re likely to encounter new articles. For example, my favorite RSS reader for iOS, Reeder ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ) lets me save articles I’m interested in to Instapaper with a couple of taps. My Twitter app of choice, Tweetbot ( Macworld rated 5 out of 5 mice ), does the same. So do Flipboard ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ), Twitter ( Macworld rated 5 out of 5 mice ), Twitterific ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ), and Instacast ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), to name a few more. You'll find these apps listed on that Extras page or by tapping Settings in the iOS app (at the bottom-left of the app’s main screen) and then tapping App Directory.
From email. You can email URLs to Instapaper. To do so, go back to that Extras page. There, you’ll find your unique Read Later email address. Send a message to that address, with a URL in the body, and the content of that webpage will be saved to your Instapaper account. I recommend adding that address to your address book for ease of access. If you’re using Instapaper for iPhone or iPad, go to the app’s Settings and tap Add Read Later by Email. Any URLs you email to that address will show up in your Read Later folder.
Worried about saving multi-page articles? Don’t be. Instapaper automatically merges multi-page articles into a single, continous article.
Read anywhere
Instapaper’s greatest value may be the way it allows you to regain control over when and where you read. (Instapaper’s maker, Marco Arment, describes this as “time-shifting” your reading.)
There are actually three ways to access your saved articles: pointing a browser to the Instapaper website; syncing Instapaper with your Kindle account; and using the Instapaper apps for iPhone and iPad.
Of those three, reading Instapaper on my iPad is my favorite. When you launch the iPhone and iPad apps, they automatically download new articles that you’ve saved. The articles then stay on your device so they’re available even when you’re offline. And the new iPad’s high-resolution Retina display makes reading Instapaper’s beautiful fonts a true pleasure.
Once you’ve read an article in Instapaper, you can do one of four things with it: archive, delete, share, or like it. (You could, I suppose, do nothing at all, but your story list will become cluttered quickly.)
The easiest way to rid your Read Later folder of articles you've read is to archive or delete them. In iOS, archiving or deleting can be done with a simple swipe and a tap. If you archive an article, it can be found in (you guessed it) your Archive folder. If you delete it, it’s gone.
When you read something interesting, you might want to share it with others. Instapaper lets you post articles to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinboard, and Evernote. In the iOS app, tap the Friends button in the left-hand sidebar, tap Accounts, and add your credentials for whichever accounts you want to link. Once you’ve linked an account or two, you can share stories with them by tapping the Send To button (the one with the arrow) and selecting Share. That will summon a Share pane in which you can select the service you want to share to.
From that Share pane, you also have the options of emailing or copying the link or text of the story. It also enables you to turn the article into an item in other apps. Depending on which apps you have installed, your options could include turning stories into tasks in Omnifocus or Things (perhaps to remind yourself to create blog posts) or into notes in Simplenote.
If you particularly admire a story you've read and want to be able to find it later, mark that story as Liked by clicking the heart icon next to it at the Instapaper website or at the top of the iOS app’s screen. To go back to the stories you’ve liked, tap the Liked icon in the main screen’s sidebar. The iOS app can be configured to automatically post liked articles to the social-network accounts you’ve linked. Other Instapaper users can find you and see your liked articles via Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr—if you’ve linked those accounts.
Beyond the basics
Instapaper’s basic functionality—collecting articles for later reading and tidying them up for easier reading—is pretty straightforward. But there are two tools that can make the service much more powerful.
Folders. By default all saved articles land in your Read Later folder. But you can create folders of your own, too, and those folders can serve a variety of purposes.
For example, you could create folders for specific projects or purposes. I’ve used folders to temporarily store Cliffs Notes pages for books I’ve read. You might want to make folders that organize articles by length (long-form vs short ones). Or maintain folders according to where you want to view the content they contain—articles with videos that you’d rather watch on your Mac than on the iPhone, say. You could even set up a “greatest hits” folder for articles so good you want to revisit them once in a while.
Because each Instapaper folder has its own RSS feed, so you could use a folder as a way to build a custom feed, which could be published on your website. Articles can be sent directly to folders by adding folder-specific bookmarklets to your Web browser; each folder’s bookmarklet is found on the right side of the folder’s page at Instapaper.com.
Search. Instapaper isn’t really meant to be a long-term content storage facility. But if you’re like me, at some point, you’ll want to track down an article you’ve archived. There are several ways to do that.
The easiest option is to become a paid Instapaper subscriber. While virtually all of the benefits of Instapaper are completely free, full account search is available to those who purchase a subscription (currently $1 per month).
If you aren’t interested in subscribing, there are two other ways to search your Instapaper content: First, you could export your archived articles as a CSV file using the Export CSV option at Instapaper.com. The resulting comma-separated file will contain article titles and URLs, which are searchable in a text-editor.
The second approach utilizes Pinboard, my favorite bookmarking service. In your Instapaper account settings, you link your Instapaper and Pinboard accounts. Once you do that, any article you star in Instapaper will be automatically added to Pinboard as a bookmark, making it easy to find later using Pinboard’s search field.
My preferred approach is to enter the URL for the RSS feed of any Instapaper folder in my Pinboard board account settings. I have Pinboard set up to bookmark every single article I archive in Instapaper. This effectively makes Instapaper a front-end service for capturing any article I encounter that makes any sort of impression on me. As long as I can remember any piece of the article’s title, I know I can find it later.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t use the Internet—and I don’t know anyone who uses the Internet who doesn’t read articles there. That’s why I recommend Instapaper to everyone. When you gain control over the experience of reading on the web, you read more, and you read it whenever and wherever you want.
Eddie Smith (@eddie_smith) is an actuary who writes about Apple technology, productivity, personal improvement, and more at his blog, Practically Efficient.
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