The Wall Street Journal reports that Clearwire may decide to skip on a big, looming debt payment. The company can afford to make the payment, but it also needs to raise lots of money to stay in business after the next 12 months. Thus it’s debating the unusual step of failing to make a payment. Investors did not take kindly to the news, sending the stock down 30 percent.

Teardown experts at IHS iSuppli found it costs Amazon $201.70 to build the new Kindle Fire, less than $3 above the $199 retail price. Computerworld reports that many analysts expected Amazon to take a much larger loss on the device, if only to compete against other tablets such as the iPad 2, which has a starting price of $499 or the Nook Tablet at $249. Amazon is expected to make up the loss with products and apps sold through the device.

Logitech, which lost tens of millions of dollars building set-top boxes for Google TV, would back the project again, but would be much more cautious, its chief executive said. Guerrino de Luca told Reuters that set-top boxes for Google TV, coupled with a failed revamp of European retail operations, in total cost the company around $100 million.

Federal investigators are looking into a report that hackers managed to remotely shut down a utility’s water pump in central Illinois last week, in what could be the first known foreign cyber attack on an industrial system on U.S. soil.

Yelp, another consumer review website, filed for a $100 million IPO. Yelp features more than 22 million reviews of businesses ranging from dentists to restaurants to plumbers, and says it has 61 million unique visitors on a monthly average basis in its latest quarter. Business Insider takes a look at how the company makes money.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Eastman Kodak wants to sell its online photo-sharing unit, sending shares of the struggling photography company up almost 8 percent. The Journal said the company had approached photo-sharing websites, rivals, private equity firms and retailers about buying the online business.

Amazon may be plotting an iPhone rival. A stake in the smartphone market could better position it against Apple and Google for digital media sales as it strives to become an all-encompassing retail powerhouse, reports Scott Martin in USA Today.

Mashable reports that Windows 8 will make automatic updates far less painful. Apparently Microsoft is re-architecting the process for automatic updates in Windows 8, with a focus on minimizing restarts and reducing interruptions.

Social media and mobile communications will be the two big targets for Google Inc when it unveils a new music store for users late Wednesday, according to people familiar with its plans. However, the giant web search company’s new music partners have already labeled the service “unexciting.” Music executives had been hoping for a more groundbreaking, fully functional cloud-based service; but after licensing talks broke down earlier this year, Google scaled back their ambitions.

Rambus lost an antitrust trial against Micron Technology Inc and Hynix Semiconductor Inc, with a jury snatching away the chip designer’s chance at a multi-billion dollar reward and decimating the company’s stock market value. Rambus attorneys had argued that South Korea’s Hynix and Idaho-based Micron colluded to fix prices of memory chips used in personal computers and to prevent Rambus’s technology from becoming widely used. Rambus claimed the deal cost it up to $4.38 billion in lost profits. When Rambus shares resumed trading Wednesday afternoon following the decision they fell 60 percent.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Sony has already started talking to big media companies like NBCUniversal, Discovery Communications and News Corp. about launching an alternative to cable TV. In what would be a threat to the well-established business of cable and satellite distributors, the Sony service would offer live programming over an internet-enabled Sony device, cutting out the need for cable boxes, satellite dishes or regular antennae.

IDG News reports that Apple’s Steve Jobs initially hoped to create his own network with the unlicensed spectrum that Wi-Fi uses rather than work with mobile operators.

Western institutions such as the IMF, Louis Vuitton and Unilever have joined Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging platform with over 250 million mostly educated and white collar users. Reuters reports Weibo has quickly become the place to promote, lobby and win over the important Chinese audience, as Twitter, Facebook and other social media are blocked there by a government worried that unfettered Internet access could undermine Communist Party rule.

This journey led him to conclude that the U.S. needs to shift from “quarterly capitalism” to “long-term capitalism.” (McKinsey defines long-term as the time it takes to invest in and build a new business, roughly five to seven years.) Barton outlines his suggestions for the new capitalism in the March issue of the Harvard Business Review.

The biggest problem he identifies is a breakdown in trust between the public and big business. Forcing CEO’s to focus on rolling three-month targets leads to the type of decision making that leads to the global financial crisis.

He believes that everyone — the public, governments and most importantly, business — would benefit if big corporations adopted a longer-term view when making strategic decisions.

In the article, Barton suggests some key changes to corporate boards. Most intriguing is a policy adopted by some French companies that gives two votes to shareholders who’ve held their stock for more than one year. He believes that handing more control to shareholders who have bigger, longer-term stake in the business would remove some of the pressure to meet quarterly targets.

Despite the bad press the quarterly earnings treadmill receives, Garett Jones, a professor for the Study of Capitalism at George Mason University, thinks the system that exists now serves as a reasonably effective way to “make sure the company isn’t just creating vaporware.”

So what do you think? Does American capitalism need to be rethought? Or do quarterly earnings updates provide a valuable check on what companies are doing with investors’ money?

According to a productivity and competitiveness report from the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., the U.S. economy requires dramatic productivity gains to ensure that future workers will benefit from economic growth. How to achieve these gains will be the focus of a discussion between Reuters global editor-at-large Chrystia Freeland and McKinsey’s global managing director Dominic Barton for a Thomson Reuters Newsmaker event on March 1, “Thriving in the New Global Economy.”

The McKinsey report says past GDP growth was driven primarily by adding workers to the U.S. labor force. But as baby boomers retire and the number of working women peaks, these sources of labor are starting to dry up.

Without that increased labor input, McKinsey says productivity must rise by at least 30% to sustain past GDP growth rates. The consequences of inaction are stark: Americans born in 1960 saw their per capita GDP grow 2.5 times by the age of 40; Americans born in 2000 are forecast to see an increase of 1.6 times.

McKinsey identifies a handful of key areas where the U.S. economy can tackle the looming productivity challenge. They include training workers for high-demand sectors like science, healthcare and engineering, building modern infrastructure and increasing investment in research and development, which has typically been a strong suit of America.

But Economic Outlook Group chief economist Bernard Baumohl believes that focusing solely on productivity fails to address the most pressing problem facing the U.S. economy: how to deal with the glut of long-term, unemployed workers.

He says the U.S. actually has already made impressive productivity gains and that there is no country on earth that displays a similar level of innovation in consumer goods and business technology.

“We have got lots of other issues we need to face in this economy,” Baumohl says. “Most of all, is how to get 50 million people back into the workforce.”

Photos; Top: David Dennis works on the installation of a new robot, which will help to increase productivity of the Mercedes-Benz M-Class All Activity Vehichle, July 1 at the M-Class plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. REUTERS/HO, Bottom: Old Graduates of Columbia University on May 18, 2005. REUTERS/Chip East.

By Helen Hughes — Special to GlobalPost

SANTIAGO, Chile — Jacquelin Marin has no running hot water at home. For a while, she had no real home at all. But soon she’ll have both, with the sun heating water for her showers.

Marin and her neighbors are part of a pilot program to install solar water heaters in the houses of low-income families. For Chile — a country with stark economic inequality and few fossil fuels — it’s a way to help the poor while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Chile’s drastically different climate zones mean it’s hard to devise any nationwide energy solution. For now the program will begin in three disparate locations: 125 houses in the capital Santiago; 68 houses in Curanilahue, a rainy former coal-mining town 370 miles to the south; and 115 houses in Combarbala, 330 miles north in shrubby desert.

“I never had a water heater before, a husband who could install one, nor the money to fuel it,” said 39-year-old Marin.

In 2002, Marin joined a land takeover on the edge of a shantytown called Vista Hermosa, located in the poor western periphery of Santiago. Riot police, water cannon tanks and tear gas were not enough to dissuade the determined squatters. They stayed, constructing their homes with whatever materials they could purchase or find.

Marin and her neighbors from the shantytown went on to create a housing committee to change their flimsy abodes into real houses. They saved up, organized the neighborhood, staged protests and badgered authorities, until finally 125 families were awarded subsidies from the Chilean housing ministry to start a new housing project.

“Only 20 of the applicants were men,” said Leonardo Dujovne from the Housing Ministry. “All the rest were women.”

It was a long struggle and Marin, president of the housing committee Juntas Podemos (We Women Can), admits to fits of depression along the way, especially when they had to move their shacks down the road so construction could begin.

The squatters endured a prolonged lack of water and electricity at the new site, the cold of winter and rain leaking through tin roofs and flooding the neighborhood.

Some abandoned the project, moving back to swell the households of relatives as poor as themselves. Allegados, “added” relatives under the same roof, is a technical term in the overcrowded slums of Chile. Others, like Jacquelin, her husband and two children, stuck it out.

Today, Marin earns the minimum monthly wage of about $300 as the key keeper at the construction site of the 125 new homes that will go to as many families from Vista Hermosa. Her job is to ensure that fixtures and other finishes on the new homes stay put until she and her neighbors move in next April. “It’s like getting a brand new car,” she said, “and this one is a Mercedes!”

The basic unit has two stories, two bedrooms, and a floor space of just over 500 square feet. But it can be enlarged to three stories, up to four bedrooms and more than 750 square feet. Interior walls can be moved or removed, and floors added or subtracted.

Outer walls feature aerated concrete blocks with central cells, like cinder blocks, and millions of minute air bubbles in their walls for extra thermal insulation. The ceilings and bathroom walls are insulated with sheets of polystyrene foam covered by drywall.

To top off these cozy improvements, thermal-siphon solar water heaters crown the roofs.

The water heaters include a a flat solar collector and a holding tank for sanitary hot water, plus a kit to connect the water, pre-heated by the sun, to an auxiliary water heater. Fueled by conventional gas, the second heater can maintain or increase water temperature in the winter. The cost of each solar package with the auxiliary heater is $2,250.

The construction of an additional 297 houses nearby is planned to begin this year nearby. The per-house investment is close to $21,500.

For a family of four, using 10.5 gallons of water per day at a temperature of 115 degrees Fahrenheit, consumption of gas for heating water should drop by 62 percent. The new insulation standards should reduce energy demands for heat in winter by 45 percent and cooling demands in summer by 35 percent, said Minister of Energy Marcelo Tokman, while touring the site with then-President Michelle Bachelet.

Chile is a particularly poor country regarding fossil fuels. Almost three-quarters of its energy consumption during 2007 was based on fossil fuels: crude oil, natural gas and coal. The same year, the country had to import almost 100 percent of the crude oil and coal used, and most of its natural gas.

Petroleum products in Chile are as high as $4.35 per gallon of gasoline. Of course, with Chile’s minimum wage set at about $2 an hour, most laborers use public transport to get to work and, increasingly, bicycles to save on fare costs.

Solar water heaters are already popular in China, Israel and Spain. California recently approved rebates for switching from gas or electric water heaters to solar units, and beginning this year Hawaii will make solar water heaters mandatory on all new homes.

The first housing project in Chile with these energy savers will be christened “We Woman Can.” Jacquelin Marin said she regrets that Bachelet won’t be president when ribbons on her new neighborhood are cut, but she intends to invite Bachelet to the opening anyway. Maybe even to try her new hot shower.

Read the original story at GlobalPost.com

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The 11-year-old would not stay still and kept jousting with other children at the practice. So Nubani, a self-confessed strict disciplinarian, pulled everyone to the middle of the ice rink and asked the child his name.

“Shani Davis,” came the reply. Nubani promptly booted the rambunctious youngster off the ice and told him not to return until he was ready to behave.

“He had a little meltdown, he went and stood in the stands, and then by the next workout he fell right in line and was a good trooper,” Nubani told Reuters in a telephone interview.

That moment of boyhood rebellion foreshadowed a skating career seemingly always on the edge of controversy. But Nubani also remembers Davis’ hard work, a trait that now has the 27-year-old on the verge of Olympic glory.

Davis is heavily favored to be the first American in 16 years to win multiple speedskating gold medals in one Olympics — probably in the 1000 and 1500 meters — following Bonnie Blair’s feat in Lillehammer.

Davis was born and raised in Chicago’s predominantly African-American south side, where most children never try speed skating never mind achieve the success he has.

He started roller skating when he was two years old and began ice skating when he was six. His mother moved them to Chicago’s northern suburbs so he could get better training.

It paid off. At Turin in 2006, Davis became the first black athlete to win an individual gold medal at a Winter Olympics, in the 1000m.

PUBLIC FEUD

Prior to the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, there were rumblings that his teammates worked together in a race to help Davis qualify for the final spot on the short-track team. An arbitration panel later decided there was no wrongdoing.

Then, at the 2006 Olympics, he declined to race with the U.S. men’s speedskating relay team, kicking off a public feud with team mate Chad Hedrick.

He even got into a war of words last year with comedian Stephen Colbert before seemingly patching things up in a mock race on The Colbert Report, a cable television show that spoofs U.S. politics and culture.

But portraying Davis as a rebel against the system is misleading, at least when it comes to his off-ice personality.

“He’s always joking and having fun, and in that respect he’s always friendly to all the skaters,” said former U.S. speedskating bronze medalist Kip Carpenter, who is Davis’ equipment manager.

“I don’t think he walks around feeling that he’s not accepted at this point.”

Carpenter, who sometimes “bounces ideas” off the skater when it comes to the technical aspects of his racing, stresses one thing, though; he is definitely not Shani Davis’ coach. Davis does not have a coach.

A firm belief in the unorthodox method of coaching himself — which includes keeping a detailed personal log of training sessions stretching back years — is the key to Davis’ success, according to Carpenter.

Past controversies, not to mention his standing as the lone African-American speedskater in an otherwise homogeneous world of top-level speed skating, ensure Davis will again draw attention in Vancouver.

But the big test will be whether his on-ice success can overshadow anything that happens off it.

“What he’s done is amazing, and what he’s going to do this year is going to be additionally amazing,” says Carpenter.

(Editing by Frank Pingue)