Google personalizes local search with Hotpot - Digitaltrends.com

Google's second stab at a social network goes heavy on the practical and light on the personal. Places with Hotpot gives users a way to find local businesses they and their friends like.

Google has launched a new service tied in with its Places feature that helps you and your friends rank and recommend local businesses. The tool, called Hotpot, is its new business-integrated search engine that helps you find what you’re looking for based on what you and your friends like.

Location is taking over the digital scene, with companies like Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Facebook Places (meets Deals, of course) ruling the territory. Wisely, Google is beefing up its Places application with a social side to compete.

A significant advantage that many of Hotpot’s competitors have, however, is their integration with Facebook. It’s no secret at this point that Facebook and Google are on less than good terms, which puts Hotpot in the tough position of having to rely on its own social graph. Many Google account holders don’t create profiles for the site, choosing instead to use Google for Gmail alone. The built in viewership that comes with Facebook integration is invaluable, and Hotpot simply won’t have access to it.

Still, Google’s working with what it’s got, and the “Add friends” tool is simple and non-committal enough that it should be effective. Users are shown their Gmail contacts list and invited to “Add” friends from it, which sends an e-mail inviting the selected person to see your ratings.

The user interface definitely leans toward a traditional social networking format, and includes the option of an alias, profile picture, and the friends list. Aside from that, there’s no personal information available – something Google may have learned from its Buzz debacle. The focus is on Places, your rankings, and the recommendations eventually generated for you. By offering a social service with functionality at its core, Google is making a smart, safe step into the arena.

If it can get users beyond that annoying first round of sending and receiving invites to use Places with Hotpot, it will be a worthwhile service. Google Maps is many consumers’ default for directions and business’ locations, and a more accurate ratings system – not to mention those ratings being authored by people you know and presumably trust – would be a benefit for anyone.

And even if it can’t get people to collectively jump on and invite entire contact lists, Hotpot is still useful for an individual. Based on the ratings you give, it will generate recommendations for you. Who needs friends when you’ve got Hotpot?

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Crisis of Democracy Faces Euro Zone - Wall Street Journal

Tiny Ireland and the major powers of the European Union were still engaged in their strange dance last night The EU and the European Central Bank want the Irish to ask for a bailout. Ireland, crippled by the guarantee it gave its banks and all but bust, says it doesn't need bailing out, thank you very much. Oh yes you do, says everyone else. Oh no we don't, say the Irish, but while you're on the line: what would the terms be?

One has to admire the Irish for their pluck, and for their striving to protect a rather weak negotiating position. If Irish ministers resist they know it would mean the spread of more investor panic to other countries. In theory, this could in time blow up the euro zone, trigger a depression and derail the European project.

Reuters Christine Lagarde of France and Germany's Wolfgang Schäuble Tuesday.

Herman Van Rompuy, the EU's president, acknowledged this yesterday: "We all have to work together in order to survive with the euro zone, because if we don't survive with the euro zone we will not survive with the European Union."

But he said he was confident the Irish end of the crisis could be handled. And in one sense he's right. Barring an earthquake, the euro zone is not going to blow up.

Any country leaving would find that its new currency dropped like a stone (which would increase the relative size of its debts, still denominated in euros). It might default but it could not raise a penny on the markets to fund itself. Unless there is gold at the end of the rainbow, or 870 million barrels of oil off the west coast of Ireland, as was claimed yesterday, Ireland's only option appears to be the euro. It long ago passed the point of no return.

As I have argued several times in this space before, and Ireland is discovering, the events surrounding the sovereign debt crisis are driving much closer integration in the euro zone. In exchange for German guarantees, and EU-sponsored bailouts, the other countries in the single currency must learn to live by German rules.

But then what? Accelerated by the crisis, a new model of government without direct accountability to voters is being constructed. And the democratic consequences have been given very little thought other than by a hardened band of opponents.

To listen to European leaders speak in public, one would imagine there really are no implications. It is as it ever was, only a little bit more so. Ireland's Finance Minister Brian Lenihan was interviewed recently and suggested it was the same old story: "Ireland has always been linked to a fixed currency arrangement. We are currently linked to the euro, we were linked with sterling for more than 150 years. Small countries don't have the luxury of having a separate currency, they link themselves to another currency, there's nothing unusual about that."

In reality, the political end of the European project is now being completed, having been parked because it was too difficult a subject when the single currency was founded. So Ireland is not just "linked" to another currency—its independence is no more than notional. In return for its bailout it will lose control over its corporate tax rates, if not this time then a little further down the line. There will be extraordinary oversight not just of budgets but all manner of other aspects of euro-zone countries' economies. That goes well beyond a pooling of sovereignty. If it walks like a government, and it talks like a government, then it probably is a government.

But what happens when enough voters, in what might be called a nation state, inside the euro zone, one day soon decide that they want to change their government? I don't mean reshuffle their political elite, drilled by the bond markets and common currency orthodoxy, but vote to really head off in a new direction right or left, a direction that requires an independent economic policy. Perhaps such voters in countries including Ireland will always be relaxed when they discover the option has been permanently removed by the ECB and EU. But what happens if they are not so relaxed?

Skepticism about the European project leads to nationalism and extremism, said Mr. Van Rompuy last week. It is equally possible that designing a new form of government that does not have democracy at its heart will anger voters and provide an opening for extremists.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Irish border, the U.K. government is already considering how Northern Ireland might gain a competitive advantage as the celtic tiger licks its wounds.

Intriguingly, in a speech last night in London the Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Paterson raised the possibility of allowing Ulster to have lower corporate tax rates than the rest of the U.K. About 70% of economic activity in the north is in the public sector, and the government hopes to gradually wean Ulster off state dependency.

Mr. Paterson said: "Despite its current economic problems in the first six months of this year the Republic of Ireland attracted over 50 foreign direct investments, including a number of big global hitters. There's an obvious reason for this and it does put us at a real competitive disadvantage. That's why, by the end of the year and working with the [Northern Ireland] executive, the Government will produce a paper on rebalancing the Northern Ireland economy. This will look at possible ways of turning Northern Ireland into an enterprise zone and potential mechanisms for giving it a separate rate of corporation tax to attract significant new investment."

Never waste a serious crisis, as someone once put it.

Write to Iain Martin at iain.martin@wsj.com

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Rep. Charlie Rangel found guilty of 11 ethics violations - Washington Post

Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), who was until his recent troubles one of the House's most powerful members, was found guilty Tuesday of breaking 11 separate congressional rules related to his personal finances and his fundraising efforts for a New York college.

The eight-lawmaker subcommittee that handled the trial - and reached a unanimous verdict on 10 of the counts - will now send the case to the full ethics committee for the equivalent of sentencing. Potential punishments include a formal reprimand or censure, with either of those needing to be ratified by a vote on the House floor. Expulsion is another possible penalty but is considered highly unlikely.

The full committee will begin considering Rangel's punishment Thursday.

Rangel was not present for the ruling. He walked out of the trial Monday after the panel rejected his request to delay the proceedings because he had no campaign money left to pay for a legal team. He had already spent $2 million on his defense.

He released a statement blasting the decision. "How can anyone have confidence in the decision of the Ethics Subcommittee when I was deprived of due process rights, right to counsel and was not even in the room?" it said. "I can only hope that the full Committee will treat me more fairly, and take into account my entire 40 years of service to the Congress."

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who chaired the trial, praised her colleagues for their handling of the case, which landed uncomfortably in their laps in July after talks with Rangel over a plea deal broke down.

"This has been a difficult assignment, time consuming, and we have approached our duties diligently," Lofgren said.

The trial subcommittee, divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans, essentially ratified all but one of the original 13 charges filed against Rangel by an investigative panel in July.

Those charges pointed to a collection of infractions related to four central elements of the case: that Rangel improperly used his congressional staff and official letterhead to raise seven-figure donations from corporate charities and chief executives for a college wing named in his honor; violated New York City rules by housing his political committees in his rent-controlled apartments in Harlem; did not pay taxes on a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic; and did not properly disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal financial assets.

This occurred while he served as the ranking Democrat or chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, which has oversight of tax issues. He resigned as committee chairman in the spring when he was found guilty of a more minor infraction related to accepting corporate-financed travel.

After Tuesday's decision, most Democrats declined to address the issue or, as Rep. Anthony Weiner (N.Y.) did, described it as a "regrettable" moment. New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) emerged as one of Rangel's strongest supporters, rejecting any call for the 20-term congressman to resign. At the Capitol to lobby for his city's interests, Bloomberg called Rangel a friend and defended his storied career. "Whatever happens to Charlie, I wish him well. As a human being, he's certainly a nice guy, and he has done a lot for New York," the mayor said.

The Lofgren panel deadlocked, 4 to 4, on one count against Rangel: that he violated the gift ban by raising money for the Charles B. Rangel Center at the City College of New York. In his testimony before the committee Monday, the top ethics staff investigator acknowledged that raising donations of $1 million or more for a charity, even from corporate executives with business before Rangel's committee, was not in itself a rules violation. The problem was the official, taxpayer-funded methods the lawmaker used to raise the money, a point that Democrats highlighted during Monday's public trial.

Two other counts from the original charges were deemed so similar that the committee rolled them into one. On one other charge - that Rangel's actions brought "discredibility on the House" - the vote was 7 to 1 in favor. The subcommittee members were forbidden from naming the holdout.

This case will be very familiar to the 10-member ethics committee. All eight members of the trial subcommittee sit on the full ethics panel, and another lawmaker who worked on the investigative subcommittee also serves on the full panel. So just one of the lawmakers on the full committee will be new to the case.

Rep. Michael McCaul (Tex.), the ranking Republican on the subcommittee, said he hopes that the public exposure of the trial will "begin an era of transparency and credibility" in Congress.

Staff writer Jason Horowitz contributed to this report.

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