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Lilyhammer stars E Street band rocker Steven Van Zandt playing a mobster who agrees to move to Norway as part of a stint in the Witness Protection Program. The casting is reminiscent of Van Zandt’s last major TV role, in which he starred as Tony Soprano’s right hand man Silvio Dante on The Sopranos.

Lilyhammer was produced by Rubicon Tv AS for NRK Broadcasting in association with SevenOne International, but it will get its U.S., Canada and Latin America premiere on Netflix. The show’s dialogue is a mix of Norwegian and English, with subtitles to fill in for the other language, depending on where it’s shown.

The Lilyhammer deal adds to the amount of exclusive programming Netflix has invested in recently to differentiate it from other streaming services and cable networks. Earlier this year, Netflix announced an exclusive deal to bring the Kevin Spacey-David Fincher project House of Cards online to its streaming customers, committing to an unprecedented two seasons of the show. In doing so, it beat out traditional cable networks like HBO or Showtime.

Adding more original and exclusive content is one way Netflix is trying to appease a user base angered by a series of missteps which have lowered its customer satisfaction rating pretty dramatically. The bad news for Netflix began in July, when the company announced a change to its pricing that split its DVD and streaming plans and increased costs by as much as 60 percent for users who subscribed to both. Later, Netflix announced that it was separating the businesses altogether and rebranding its DVD-by-mail service Qwikster, which was also met with wide-scale disapproval.

Signing exclusive deals could also help replace some content that will disappear once Starz pulls its TV shows and movies from the streaming service early next year. In addition to Lilyhammer and House of Cards, Netflix has committed to an exclusive deal with Dreamworks Animation to license its movies in the pay TV window when they become available in 2013.

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Continue reading Microsoft and Samsung sitting in a tree, patent s-h-a-r-i-n-g

Microsoft and Samsung sitting in a tree, patent s-h-a-r-i-n-g originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fisker represents one of between six to eight greentech companies that Kleiner thinks will deliver big returns for the firm (out of its 70 or so greentech portfolio companies), and potentially make back a good portion of the hundreds of millions of dollars it’s invested into greentech over the last several years. Lane thinks over the next two years some of Kleiner’s half a dozen top bets will start to bear fruit via IPOs.

While there’s been a perception that Kleiner has been moving away from greentech investing, Lane told me in an interview after the Karma event that Kleiner is not pulling back from greentech investing. We’ve committed a third of our 12th, 13th and 14th funds to greentech, we have 14 active greentech investors, and I just did two more deals this morning, said Lane.

Here’s our lightly edited interview with Lane, who discussed, among other issues, why investing in greentech isn’t like investing in the Internet, what happened to Kleiner’s Think electric car deal, and why he’s more excited about greentech than software.

Q). Have the returns been what you thought they were going to be for greentech? Did you think when you started that it would take a long time?

A). I didn’t expect them to be any different, other than that there was a recession. When we first started investing in green heavily in the ’05 and ’06 timeframe, we went to our limited partners and we said greentech is going to have longer returns than digital. Every limited partner signs onto a 10-year contract with us and 10 years is about what they expect. They are not in a hurry, by the way.

In the VC industry, we’ve gotten used to investing in software companies, which is a lot easier development process. You get a couple of programmers, you get a product out in the first six months, and for the Internet you get customers really fast. And in a year you have a company. Google was 4.5 years. So in digital, they are used to thinking 4 to 5 years.

But when we got into greentech, we said we think it will be longer than digital, it will be more capital-intensive than digital, there will be more government policy involved, and also the fact that we’re trying to replace an existing infrastructure like coal, gas, and oil. And you have to scale it first. For the internet, like Google, Facebook, Twitter, they start small and they just keep going. But you can’t do that with a gas plant, or a car plant. The first car that comes out – my new car for example – can’t kill anybody. Facebook doesn’t risk killing anyone when it first comes out. You can’t build a car company in 3 to 4 years, it’s impossible.

Then you stick a recession in the middle of it. I don’t want to blame the recession, but it did slow everything down. Capital raising was tough. People just went to sleep and left the market. There is no question.

Our expectations were always in the 6 to 7 year time frame. That time frame would really feel good to us. We’re about to get there with some of the early companies, with the ’05 investments. We expect returns, IPOs and liquidity events over the next two years. And we’re seeing them.

Q). When you look at Zynga, and they can make back the green fund in an IPO. How does that feel?

A). Sure. So can Fisker. Fisker has the potential to be the same value as Zynga.

Q). In theory you’d think it would be the car company that would be valued higher, right?

A). Not really. Software companies have been worth more than car companies for a long time. GM was worth billion, now it’s at billion. Google at 0 billion, and Oracle 0 billion. So it’s not unusual.

The reason is, the business model of the Internet and software is unique. There are no other industries like it. You can’t apply the rules of it to greentech. It’s a totally different world. Most software companies have 90 percent margins, and after you include development, and services, maybe 50 percent to 60 percent margins. You’re never going to get that with a car company. I’d be thrilled with 20 prcent gross margins for a car company.

Q). Does that make you lean more towards green software, or green IT plays, like an OPower?

A). Not exactly lean, but yes, what we want to do as many of those as we can. But there’s not enough of them. It doesn’t make a portfolio. We’ll continue to aggressively invest in the area, but there are just not enough software companies out there.

Q). What are areas that will continue to be attractive in the greentech space for Kleiner?

A). So, we started out with biofuels, solar, wind, those are some earluy ones. We did then a lot in conversion tech, coal to gas, and thermal electrics, heat to energy, waste heat to energy. Now we’re doing a lot of storage, electron storage batteries. Weve done a lot in water. Two years ago we hadn’t done anything in water and now we’ve done 3 investments in clean water. We’re starting to do a bunch in agriculture. Everything from changing the productivity of seeds to making fuels and producing sugars.

Q). What big returns are you banking on?

A). I’m not going to comment on who files and who goes public. But I think you’ll see 6 to 8 IPOs out of our cleantech portfolio. In terms of big opportunities for companies, though not forecasting IPOs, I think there are big opportunities with Bloom Energy, Miasole, Silver Spring Networks, Enphase Energy, Macoma, Fisker, and GreatPoint Energy. These companies I think will be huge. They’ll probably all IPO but I’m not forecastin when, but these companies will be huge.

I think I’d be close if out of the 70 greentech companies we’ve invested in, 20 of them will make no difference – as in we tried and it was fun, but it didn’t work and its not going to be a big company. Maybe 15 to 20. Then I think there’s another 15 or 20 that are IPOs, big outcomes, return the fund kind of thing. Then everthing else is kindof like, we don’t know — they’re too early, or we’re still removing technical risk. That’s the profile of venture capitalists. We take so much risk so early that we never expect all of our companies to make it. The Kleiner model is that 1 or 2 will return the fund.

Q). So it’s going as you expected?

A). So far, its as expected. But again with a big headache around the recession. I would have expected some early, not on time, but early IPOs. I think without a recession, we could have seen a few of these companies IPO last year.

Q). Do you feel like the greentech investing space as a whole has learned lessons. A lot of the generalist VCs that moved into greentech investing and haven’t been as aggressive as Kleiner have moved out.

A). We had all of the challenges for greentech on the first piece of paper for our limited partners: government policy, capital intensive, regulation, that it’s tough to invent a new business. The only one we didn’t put down was a recession. Actually a recession would have been fine, this was a depression. Kleiner went out and raised extra funds just as an insurance policy, but we never used a dime of that.

GreatPoint Energy is a good example. They were on a capital intensive plan to build plants in the U.S. The combo of a recession and shale gas finds in the U.S. meant that GreatPoint was looking at a very tough time building their plant in the U.S. So we sent them China to start developing partnerships there. So that is where they are going to build their plant: in China. Where they pay three times what we pay for natural gas.

If you and I sit down two years from now and we don’t have a single IPO from this group, I’d say now we are behind. But we do expect IPOs out of a bunch of companies.

There have been other funds that followed us and Khosla in and the recession took them out of it. I also think they are feeling the overall crunch of venture capital. We have always said that the VC industry is too large. It’s got too much capacity. There are 900 VC firms in US, there needs to be 300. You’re seeing this macro trend of LP passing on new funds.

Q). So for Kleiner maybe there’s more opportunities now that there are less general investors in cleantech.

A). That’s exactly it. I like it. We don’t like to have VCs that copy ideas or be me-too. Valuations go up. There’s more competition. You have to have a thesis when you are investing in greentech. When I did Fisker and another car company, my partners thought I was out of my mind. But I had a thesis. We can invest in a car company and either have a way to get the valuation high enough so you don’t get crushed on dilution or get low cost loans that are high leverage for equity investors. Or buy cheap assets, which I did not know going in. I did not know we could go to GM Disposal corp and buy a plant for M, that as a big deal for us and Tesla at the NUMMI plant.

Q). What happened with Think?

A). I should probably explain this to the market. think did not turn out well. I did not invest in Think and I passed on it several times. And I got a call from Rockport and they had come up with an idea to invest a little bit of money, million — .5 million each — to buy the North American rights to Think if they ever come here. So right from the beginning I did not see it as an American car. I saw it as a European city car, and to this day, I think Europeans will pay ,000 for a little car to be able to park it in small spaces and scoot around the cities in it. They sold 3,000 of those – no one has sold that many EVs.

So I thought our investment was pretty cool, and we owned some of the rights for .5 million dollars if they brought it here to the U.S. Then when they were starting to restructure Think Inc, they wanted to buy the American rights back, and I said OK, for .5 million. But we ended up getting 1.5% of Think for selling that back. So I thought that was a pretty smart investment.

Q). Anything else I should know about Kleiner’s greentech future?

A). I was one of the first ones to say: this [greentech] is what I want to do. I just did two digital investments because I knew KP wouldn’t do them without me getting involve. But I’m not out there looking for digital investments. I don’t want to do them. I have no interest, I don’t go to the meetings, and I don’t follow all of those social stuff. I volunteered to lead this greentech practice. This is my day job and I like doing it.

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There’s no question that these are useful but there’s one problem, not all of them are correct. The thing here is however that lots of people who make such cards don’t really know what they are doing. They simply just copy cards from what they see on other websites, and in the process make some mistakes.

If lots of other people copy this and too make mistakes, it is easy to see how things can go wrong quickly. However if you take a look at the web’s leading online blackjack site you will find strategy cards that are in fact correct so it’s worth taking a look at.

However getting a strategy card is not the only thing that you need to worry about. You see, strategy cards only tell you what actions to take, they don’t tell you how much too bet or anything like that, you need to make these decisions on your own.

Your first option would just be to use what’s called flat betting where you bet the same amount on every hand. You will however need to win more hands that what you lose her, over the long term this is unlikely to happen.

People tend to use some sort of mathematical progression when they lose in an attempt to try and get round this. Probably the most common out of all of these is the Martingale, you need to start by betting one dollar, then you double your bets after each loss until you get a win.

This can keep you winning for longer but the problem is that you will lose a lot if you suffer a losing streak. The best idea is to play a free blackjack game to get your head around the risks and the maths involved. This way you can rest assured that you will not lose any money if something goes wrong when you play a free game.

What I mean by this is that you will want to place different bets all over the table, for different amounts, just to see what the outcome will be. But, if you are playing a real game, this will most likely cost you a lot.

Playing a free game would therefore be your best option. One of the best places to actually play for free is this free roulette page which you can play as long as you want. Another reason as to why people like free games is that the opportunity will be there for you to test out roulette systems on them.

Searching online will bring you back lots of systems to choose from, including free ones and ones that you have to pay for as well. Some of theses systems are good, and some of them are not very good at all, in order to find out though you clearly need to test them.

It would be madness to use a system that you have no experience with in real money play straight away. When you do tests, you always need to do so with free money, so you will not be out of pocket if the system turns out to be useless.

Once you’re done playing for free and are ready to step over into real money games you will obviously want to do it at a fair casino. You will quickly see that there are lots of casinos to choose from, but the good ones are very few and far between.

One of the best ones has to be Bet365 Casino, they will treat you fairly every time. In addition to this, you will get your winnings from them very quickly indeed, when playing in an online casino, this is without a doubt the most important thing.

Golf Player Statistics

Every golf player stands uniquely when it comes to golf tournament and how they are ranked is based on their actual performance. Their statistics are based on the golf scored on every tournament they played. It shows relevant details on every player and it will be a complete competitive advantage to know these facts before placing wagers.

Each and every golf gambler should remember that research is very important and learning about the different players’ statistics will be a great benefit. This will be a good reference on to whom to place the bet and increase their chance on winning more money on their next betting game.

Prior to placing your bets, it is important to consider top ranking and consistent golf player in the season’s tournament, there are ranking records available online that you can use. Considering that you can get performance statistics of every single player, a thorough research and good analysis can improve your odds of winning.

Several factors should be considered for comparison and criticism. These include score tabulations, type of golf tournaments, golf players playing in the tournament, the weather and the amount that you can put as stake.

Statistics and performance chart of your most wanted golf player is an effective way to commence your research before placing bets. This can definitely aid narrow down your list before wagering.

Golf Gambling Strategy

Golf betting is like other sport betting which involves probability strategy. First thing on golf betting strategy, after a thorough exploration on players’ data and tournament recaps, there are pros and cons on betting on the best golfer.

Bookmakers often place possibility of 2-1 on the best golfer on the said tournament . However, pick the player who is the best among the participating players to increase your chance on winning. Still, it is very difficult to win over a hundred players. Even if he does win as estimated, the payout is smaller and not worth the danger of waging on.

Secondly, placing bets in the middle ranking or average players can be valuable. On the other hand, the probability of winning on these players comparable to the high ranking golf players may be small but the payout is bigger and more often than not there are players who have high chances of winning and that holds to 15-1 odds or more. Make sure to conduct a good research on their performance and compare them with other players as well.

Thirdly, look for players’ history that plays well on the event’s course. There are certain players who do not play well on other golf courses but on a certain one. They may have not won on different courses but won several times on the event’s course or perhaps never win on other course events.

Playing golf can mean a good swing or an ugly play and the same notion applies with golf betting. Practice and experience plays part with each success of golfers in each tournament, but at the end of the day it is relaxing and comforting experience. As a beginner there are many things that you need to go through don’t worry, chances are you may possibly win on your first think.

Find out the best poker games and learn how to strategically place your bets by visiting the links. Read the different golf betting and other sports bet updates when you pay a quick visit to the website now.

In some countries like the US, Australia and UK, bookmakers can rightfully carryout their operations. Countries like Sweden, Singapore, Japan, Canada and Hong Kong, the only official bookmaker is the one that is operated by the state.

Here are some of the top bookmakers. They are known for their excellent quality assistance, monetary guarantee, good reputation and express payouts.

Bet365

Bet365 is famous as one of the leading and most popular online betting sites. It provides a wide range of betting choices on horse racing. It started servicing ever since 1974 and from then on, they still deliver phenomenal service to people who want to take their chance in having a bet.

The betting options of Bet365 is still reliant on the race. Prior to placing bet, they highly recommend contacting a member of staff through their Live Chat support mechanism as to ascertain whether a specific wagering method is still offered or not.

Popularly, they provide single and multiple bets like Each Ways, Forecasts and even tricast betting.

Any person who is engrossed to make bets on Bet365 may deposit through credit cards, UK debit cards, moneybookers, NE Teller, Pay Pal, online bank transfer, Ukash, Click2Pay, EntroPay, Paysafecard, Bank Wire, Fast Bank Transfer or Cheque. While they may well withdraw funds by means of credit cards, UK debit cards, Moneybookers, NE Teller, Pay Pal, Click2Pay Fast Bank Transfer, Bank Wire and cheque.

Diamond Sports Book

One more reliable bookmaker that is consistent in providing phenomenal sports book options is Diamond Sports book. For over 15 years they have been earning a repute as the easiest and hassle-free online bookmakers today. They presently hold the title of being the fastest payouts among the other bookmakers.

They offer a free monthly payout to their customers which can be processed on the same day of the request. Monetary transactions are always easy.

Diamond Sports book is also offering mobile betting for faster betting transactions. It provides great convenience for customers since it made placing wagers easy where one can place bets anywhere and anytime.

BetUS

BetUS was established in 1994 in Costa Rica and it is considered to be one of the original legal sports book or bookmakers online. Its 12 years of experience has provided its costumers with professional, secure and fully accredited online sports betting service. They also have been serving for over 100,000 sports betting customers not only in the United States but in other part of the world as well.

Incontestably, BetUS is a fully licensed bookmaker. It covers all major sports event in US and internationally as well. BetUS also offers race betting, online casino gaming and poker rooms.This bookmaker not only provide odds in horse racing but in other sports as well like basketball, hockey, baseball and the like. The paradoxical part is that they also cater to odd betting in politics and entertainment. They offer betting types as Money lines, point spreads, parlays, half times, teasers, futures, IF bets, In game, Buy points, action points and quarter lines.

Customers find BetUS very reliable and trustworthy. Their services provide everything that any sports gambler could ever wish for.

Sports betting is becoming popular today. More people are now getting into this kind of betting and a lot of bookmakers are being established.

In placing bets, it is critical to choose a reliable, trusted, monetarily stable and has a good quality service bookmaker. Conclusively, decide on a bookmaker who has a reputable and identified to produce fast payouts. It is vital to do your research prior to placing bets to make sure that the services that these bookmakers are legitimate.

Betting on horse races is a very prevailing game today. Discover the leading betting online guide and learn how you can develop your own betting systems through variations and combination of these types of bets when you click on the links today!

To begin with, a player must learn how he or she can calculate the odds for the game. Roulette, as opposed to multiple card deck casino games, have thirty eight numerical slots. These thirty eight slots makes the game very easy to predict the odds for players in terms of determining winning or losing odds. Keep in mind though, that determining your odds is not classified as a game or betting strategy; rather it is a solution to determine the mathematical chance of you winning or not.

Another reason for understanding roulette basics is learning about the house edge. As its name implies, a house edge determines the odds that favor either the house or the person who is playing the game. An example is the American roulette game that has a house edge of 5.26 percent that is used on bets with eh sole exception of five number bets.

However, it is very important to understand that the odds are not exactly so simple as that. European roulette, on the other hand, offers better odds than its American counterpart. The odds are better in European roulette because it only has 37 numerical slots, making it friendlier to players, as far as odds go. So now you’re probably thinking how come there’s only 37 numerical slots. This is because the wheel for European roulette does not have a double zero slot, something that its American counterpart has.

Another difference is that players find European roulette to be more lucrative since it is easier to play and the odds are better. Also, expert roulette players often advise first time roulette players to try out easier versions of the game first as the odds of winning are higher.

Before trying your hand at real money roulette games you should check out a free game first. A good site for free games is freeroulettesite.com where you will not only find a free game, but free systems and advice as well.

In fact, at some point, all roulette strategies will work, but the vast majority of them will ultimately fail. They wont work because of the house edge that exists, and no matter what sequence of bets you use, nothing will overcome it.

There are not actually a lot of differing roulette strategies out there, as the mathematical sequences you can employ will soon run out. Most commonly you will find the Martingale, and more or less everyone that has ever played the game has tried this one.

All you do with this one is bet on red or black and double your bets after each loss until you get a win. This is effective for a short amount of time, like with most strategies, but your bank roll will eventually be wiped out with a losing run. What you need is a realistic profit goal, and never play for too long at once. To get guided through these systems and what works and what can go wrong, a free roulette strategy site will be able to help you.

You also find lots of systems that you have to pay for but usually these are just copies of each other. They are usually just sleeper systems that you can easily get for free all over the internet. Only ever buy a system like this is they have a money back guarantee with them, and before you use them for real you need to thoroughly test them.

You need to always bear in mind the fact the roulette is all dependant on chance, and guaranteed wins just do not exist. Always play with money that you have no problem parting with, and before you use the strategies for real, test them out.