Why Lady Gaga Could Deploy a Sound Only Your Smartphone Can Hear

By Eliot Van Buskirk

Audio tags are looking more and more like the new QR code — not only are they way less ugly than those jagged black-on-white squares, but you don’t need to take a picture of anything in order for them to work. (See also: Shazam and the Super Bowl.)

A startup called SonicNotify embeds inaudibly high-pitched audio signals within music or any other audio track. When a compatible app hears that signal, it triggers any available smartphone function to link you to websites, display text, bring up map locations, display a photo, let you vote on which song a performer plays next and so on.

SonicNotify was developed with help from Cantora Records + Labs, which made its name by funding (for $400, initially) and releasing the band MGMT‘s massively popular records. As part of its newly minted technology division, Cantora, which is also a record label and publishing company, is offering $25,000 to $100,000 to promising startups, among the first of which is SonicNotify.

Lady Gaga could have used its technology on her Monster Ball tour1, and Coachella 2013 and other events are next in line. To interact via SonicNotify, fans can use any SonicNotify-enabled app. If you want to see it in action now, you can do so with the official Sonic Experiences app.

“[SonicNotify] transmits a high-frequency sound wave through speakers — we can’t hear the frequency but smartphones can hear it, so we’re able to unlock content at live events, TV shows and through the web,” said Jesse Israel, co-founder of Cantora Records + Labs, at NYC Music Tech Meetup. “We’ve closed deals with Lady Gaga [the deal is not done; Israel now says the company is "working with" Gaga2] for The Monster Ball Tour [which ran from 2009 to 2011], we’re doing Coachella, we’re doing stuff for Fashion Week next week powering 32 stages, college sports, partnerships with Twitter and Spotify — so it’s kind of a cool example of how we’re able to put pieces together and help a technology get off the ground.”

Buyers and journalists with the app installed at Fashion Week will be zapped an image of each model the instant they step onto the catwalk so they can examine the outfits up-close, in real time. Similarly impressive capabilities exist within the music realm. Best of all, the audience doesn’t even need to be actively running the app in order for it to pick up on those inaudible signals.

“With Sonic, we can unlock anything that your iPhone or Android can do, as long as the SonicNotify SDK is built into an app that’s running in the background on your phone,” explained Israel. “For example, some of the stuff we’re doing with Gaga is when she is performing, mid-set, everyone in the arena gets a notification which lets them choose which song she plays for her encore.”

Location is also a part of this, because each speaker in a venue can transmit a different tone, opening up new possibilities for live concert participation along the lines of what we saw with inConcertApp.
“We can also target sections through radius with frequencies, so we can have Section C’s phones turn into purple hearts, while Section F on the other side of the arena has red squares,” added Israel.

According to Israel, Cantora’s basic idea is that app developers are not unlike bands, in that they might have all the skills in the world, but those skills don’t amount to much unless they are properly deployed. The company is currently working with SonicNotify and two other startups, and it plans to fund eight to 10 in total over the next two years.

An Iran-Israel war will be main market mover in 2012: Richard Russell

by John Shmuel

Speculation has been running high in recent weeks that Israel may undertake a military operation to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in a pre-emptive attack.

That speculation went into overdrive last week after the Washington Post ran an article saying that U.S. defense secretary Leon E. Panetta believed an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities could occur as early as spring.

Richard Russell, writer of the Dow Theory Letter, believes that an attack is coming and market behaviour proves it.

“The stock market is acting as though something momentous and frightening is ‘out there,’” he said in a recent note. “The roof of a monster top is building. Gold keeps creeping higher.”

Experts are split on when Iran will be able to produce a nuclear weapon and actually be able to mount it onto a delivery system. The international community is stressing that inspections of nuclear sites in Iran are the main goal right now, but so far those inspections have been a failure.

Speaking last night before the Super Bowl, U.S. President Barack Obama said he does not believe Israel has made a final decision on whether to strike Iran.

“I think they, like us, believe that Iran has to stand down on its nuclear weapons program,” he said in the interview with NBC. “Until they do, I think Israel rightly is going to be very concerned, and we are as well.”

Mr. Russell feels that things are a little more finite than indecision, however. He feels that a war will occur, and that it will be the main market driver for this year.

“If you listen carefully, you can hear the heart-beat of the market,” he said. “It’s a slow, heavy beat, as if the market is waiting for something. That something is going to be [big]. Bigger than what anyone is expecting.”

Mr. Russell’s advice for his readers is to gravitate toward gold and the U.S. dollar this year. He says that if the  price of the greenback collapses, gold will make up for the losses by surging. Mr. Russell also projects that the next target for gold is for the precious metal to hit the $1,800 an ounce range, adding that “it’s getting close.”

“2012 is fated to be a monster year,” he said.” Keep your eyes on the dollar and gold, and the newspaper headlines!”

Catholic outcry over Obama administration's birth control decision could be factor in presidential race

 By James Rosen

Catholic pulpits and pews are increasingly inflamed with talk of a war on religion after the Obama administration's recent decision on employers' birth control coverage.

“There can be no doubt that religious liberty in our country is in jeopardy,” Monsignor W. Ronald Jameson warned on Saturday from inside Washington’s historic Cathedral of St. Matthew. “This is the time to speak up. This is the time for all voices to be heard.”

Jameson’s dire warning to the Catholic faithful was focused on the controversial ruling that President Obama made last week, mandating that all employers, as part of the 2010 health care overhaul, must cover in full the cost of female contraception. The Roman Catholic Church, as a matter of doctrine, opposes the use of birth control.

In an op-ed published Monday in USA Today, the president’s top health official, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, defended the ruling as striking the right balance between respecting religious freedom and providing critical health services to women.

“This is not an easy issue,” Sebelius wrote, adding that the Obama administration had taken pains to make allowances for the church. “We specifically carved out from the policy religious organizations that primarily employ people of their own faith. This exemption includes churches and other houses of worship, and could also include other church-affiliated organizations.”

In a rebuttal editorial published on the same day, however, USA Today condemned the rule as “bad policy and bad politics.” If enacted, the paper’s editors said, Catholic-run institutions that employ diverse populations “would be put in the impossibly awkward position of facilitating contraception even though the church teaches that it is ‘intrinsically wrong.’”

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney also noted the exemption, but told reporters Monday: “Those institutions where women of all faiths, many faiths work need to have the same kind of coverage that all other American women have.”

Leading Catholics and other religious figures pointed out that large Catholic-affiliated organizations – schools and colleges, hospitals, charities and the like – employ tens of thousands of people of all religious faiths, and as such will not qualify for the administration’s exemption. The White House and HHS, in turn, have granted such organizations an extra year to come into compliance with the rule.

On the campaign trail, the Republican presidential candidates have turned the issue into a rallying cry. Front-runner Mitt Romney on Monday used Twitter to appeal to Catholic voters and link them to a petition his campaign crafted. “If you've had enough of the Obama Administration's attacks on religious liberty,” Romney tweeted, “stand with me & sign the petition.”

That was mild compared with the strong medicine doled out by Newt Gingrich. “The Obama administration has declared war on religious freedom in this country,” the former House speaker sternly told reporters in a news conference in Las Vegas on Saturday night. “This is a decision so totally outrageous, an illustration of such radical secular ideology, that I believe [the church’s] hierarchy will oppose it every inch of the way.”

In an interview with Fox News religion correspondent Lauren Green, John Garvey, the president of Catholic University of America, framed the issue more charitably. “I don’t think that this is a case of the government as out to get religious institutions, as though they’re the focus of its attack. It's more a kind of lack of concern or appreciation for real religious concerns and values,” Garvey said.

“It shows an attitude on the government's part that religion is something we'll protect if it's just happening in church on Sunday, or in the mosque on Friday, but if it has to do with your daily activity or the life you want to lead, it's not something we want to protect.”

What remains uncertain is whether President Obama, who won the Catholic vote in 2008 by a 9 percentage-point margin, will pay a political price for the ruling this coming November.

Even if Gingrich’s prediction of robust opposition from the church hierarchy proves true – and the nationwide spate of sermons devoted to the topic over the last two weekends suggests it will – the predilections of ordinary Catholic parishioners appear more difficult to gauge. Polling conducted by the Pew Research Center has found Catholics as evenly divided over the legality of abortion, for example, as the rest of the country.

However, the importance of the Catholic vote cannot be underestimated. Of the 68 million Catholics in America, roughly 35 million voted in 2008, accounting for 27 percent of the total electorate. And a review of data from seven battleground states – Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin – shows Catholics comprising roughly one-quarter or more of the electorate in each.

CITI'S BUITER: There's A 50% Chance Of A Greek Exit From The Eurozone And Here's How It Would Happen

by Simone Foxman

Citigroup economists Willem Buiter and Ebrahim Rabhari revised their predictions of a Greek exit from the eurozone—or "Grexit"—in the next 18 months up to 50 percent from 25-30 percent in November.

That's not only because Greece's failure to meet spending and austerity goals has angered the rest of the euro area and made other countries less willing to extend aid, but because the risks to the rest of the eurozone have been moderated as investors priced in this possibility.

However, halting tail risk is dependent on a few criteria, the most important being swift and strong action from EU leaders:

Clearly, the Grexit scenario that we describe here is subject to major downside risk, namely that exit fear contagion following Grexit could be much stronger than anticipated, leading to a sequence of sudden stops in the external financing of periphery sovereigns, banks and other private entities.

Unless an official ECB/EFSF/ESM/IMF firewall/ big bazooka can deter or negate such a withdrawal of market funding, there could be a sequence of forced exits from the EA, reducing the euro area to a greater DM zone.

There is also some circumstantial evidence in historical bond yields and GDP growth which suggests that investors do consider Greece to be a distinct case from Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and Italy.

Still, Grexit is not Citigroup's baseline scenario—Buiter and Rabhari expect that a Greek default will indeed provoke a credit event, and that future debt restructuring will have to happen, but that it will stay in the eurozone.

N. Korea developing unmanned attack aircraft

by Staff Writers

North Korea is developing unmanned attack aircraft using US target drones imported from the Middle East, a report said Sunday.

They are based on MQM-107D Streaker target drones, which are used by the US army, and imported from a Middle East nation believed to be Syria, Yonhap news agency reported.

It cited an anonymous Seoul military official, adding the communist state would likely deploy them, once completed, near the tense maritime border with the South on the Yellow Sea.

The US drone, which flies at 40,000 feet (12,000 metres) at a maximum speed of 575 miles (920 kilometres) per hour, is commonly used for testing missiles.

The North has conducted several tests by mounting high explosives on the imported drones but has not been able to produce a new weapon yet, said the source quoted by Yonhap.

The disputed sea border off the west coast was the scene of deadly naval clashes in 1999, 2002 and 2009. The North also shelled a frontier island in a November 2010 attack that left four South Koreans dead.