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Raleigh, N.C. The state Department of Transportation provided little oversight as a Cary company operated a vanpool program for low-income workers in rural areas of North Carolina and racked up excessive fees, according to an audit released Thursday.

The auditors' findings have been turned over to the State Bureau of Investigation to determine if any criminal charges are warranted.

The DOT hired 2Plus Inc. in late 2000 to operate a fleet of vans to help low-income people in rural areas commute to work. The program peaked at 34 routes in 2006, but only 10 were still running when the state cut ties with the company two years ago.

The audit found that 2Plus operated the program without a contract for the equivalent of six years because officials in the state Division of Public Transportation failed to execute new contracts after old ones expired. That led to disputes over the purpose of the program, such as 2Plus using some vans to transport South Carolina workers to jobs in North Carolina and non-resident aliens to jobs at Outer Banks hotels, according to the audit.

The absence of a contract also led to "excessive and unreasonable" fees for the program, the audit states. Those included an extra $163,272 to cover personal mileage of volunteer van drivers, temporary rentals when state vans weren't available and insurance deductibles, according to the audit.

"It's just poor management every way you look at it," State Auditor Beth Wood said. "It's just mind-boggling to me. You've got this kind of gross mismanagement, and then I have to turn around and cut nine positions (because of a tight budget)."

Byron York, executive director of 2Plus, said neither the company nor its staff received undue benefits.

"The program has been honest, legitimate. We show where the expenses have been and for what," York said.

The state paid 2Plus $4.3 million through June 2010, and the company says it is still owed $617,404, according to the audit. The state also spent $721,590 on the vans used in the program, the audit states.

The DOT didn't have lease agreements with 2Plus for most of the state-owned vans, the audit states.

Go here to read the rest:
Audit: DOT mismanaged rural vanpool program

Four years ago, the shrewdest presidential candidates used YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and a dash of Twitter. They also tried to gain a strange new psychic edge calledin the contrived conceit of the day"mindshare in the blogosphere." Apps were nowhere in campaign strategies. The iPhone was new. The iPad didn't exist.

So who e-campaigned best last time? During Super Tuesday week in 2008, Garlik, a British firm that monitors digital reputations, ranked the day's presidential candidates by online popularity. It didn't take Nate Silver or that Zogby person to call the winner. If you hung around social media even a little, you knew the fix was in.

It wasn't Hillary Clinton. Nor Mitt Romney, John McCain or Barack Obama. Blowing them all awaysealing for himself, in fact, the Presidency of the United Cyberstates of Digital America, commander-in-chief of the Information-Wants-To-Be-Free Worldwas, naturally, Congressman Ronald Ernest "Ron" Paul.

Ron Paul, President of the Internet! Hail to the online chief! Four more years!

Ron Paul. Elfin ob-gyn goldbug. Ayn Randian. Foe of war, abortion and government. Texan. Rejector of Medicaid, rejector of Medicare. Climate-change skeptic. Keeper of odd company. Espouser of tendentious views.

In 2012, he's still kicking back in the Online Oval Office. Ron Paul, commanding the mad and visible support of somebody. Sure he doesn't fare so well with actual flesh-and-blood voters of majority age who are motivated to drive gas-burning cars and appear with their laminated IDs at three-dimensional voting booths. But you can't have everything.

Tim Hwang, a researcher of online movements and memes and the managing director of the Web Ecology Project, says that Ron Paul illustrates a fact we often overlook: "The Internet is not coterminous with the real world." He told me by email, "Like in a rearview mirror communities can be smaller than they appear on the Internet: discussion is often subject to parties who are loudest and can rally the most participants to appear online and participate at that specific moment."

This time around, for Paul, the Internet rally seems to have been sound and fury signifying little.Paul's big hopes for Alaska, Idaho and North Dakota were dashed on Super Tuesday, and he has yet to score a victory in a single contest in this election.

However, he's still logging mindshare in the blogosphere.

So how does he do it? Paul, for all his flat, engineer-like charisma, hardly seems like a Julian Assange mastermind, able to bend the Internet to his Machiavellian hacker will. Instead, it seems the President of the Internet just got lucky.

Link:
Ron Paul's pointless Internet presidency

Germany's Internet community, gathered at the world's biggest high-tech fair, was up in arms Thursday at a draft law forcing Google and other similar sites to pay media firms for content.

"This draft is completely backward," fumed Bernhard Rohleder, director general of Bitkom, the German federation representing high-tech industries.

"We understand that media firms are looking for new ways to make money" when pitted against the Internet and free press, but a new tax "cannot be a substitute for developing genuine strategies for the digital era," he added.

The draft legislation, dubbed the "lex Google" as it targets mainly the Internet giant's "Google News" service, has recently been drawn up by Chancellor Angela Merkel's centre-right coalition.

Demanded for many years by powerful media groups such as Axel Springer and Bertelsmann, the government will put before parliament a law forcing Google and certain blogs and other sites to remunerate the papers providing the content.

The media groups argue that a user of "Google News" can simply read the short summaries offered on the front page to get his or her fix of the daily news, rather than clicking through to the paper concerned.

The US Internet giant, so the argument goes, therefore benefits via advertising without paying a penny for the actual content.

On the other side of the fence is an unusual coalition bringing together Google and campaigners for Internet freedom, who say the papers receive more clicks from the service and also gain more visibility.

Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, who opened the CeBIT high-tech fair along with the leaders of Germany and Brazil, said the tax "could slow the development of the Internet," according to local news agency DPA.

"It's a bit like the Yellow Pages paying companies for showing consumers their names and addresses," said the blogger Stefan Niggemaier, who believes the tax is akin to a government hand-out to the rich and powerful media lobby.

See the article here:
German Internet community cries foul over Google news law

From Groupon

The trick, the Mad Money host explained, is to forget about anything that seems the slightest bit sexy. He would avoid the red hot dotcoms, especially the Internet initial public offerings that generate a lot of hype.

When you've got an Internet IPO that's got tons of hype, yet not much in the way of earnings, the only way to profit is by getting in on the actual deal, and then selling into the initial spike, Cramer said. I know I've said this before, but I'll keep repeating it either until I'm blue in the face or people stop making the rookie mistake of paying up for these names after they've begun trading.

Investors should, however, look for overlooked and undervalued dot-coms that have been around a while, he continued. Take IAC/InterActiveCorp

The recent Internet IPOs are still trying to figure out their business models, but IACs formative years passed long ago. Since founded in 1986 by billionaire Barry Diller, the company has been through numerous incarnations. It was one of the hottest growth stocks of the 1990s. The company made a number of acquisitions and became so large and complex that few people could wrap their heads around it, Cramer said. In 2008, the company broke itself up into five separate public companies: a home shopping network, a travel and leisure business, Ticketmaster and Lending Tree. IAC kept its core and high-growth Internet business, though.

Perhaps became of tis contused legacy, Cramer said IAC has largely been dismissed or ignored by most investors. Even so, the stock is up 248 percent since the generational low in March 2009. It rallied 49 percent in 2011 and has posted a 10 percent gain year-to-date.

Cramer thinks IACs stock has more room to run because the company has a proven ability to turn a profit. Match.com, for example, is a subscription-based business model that attracted 1.7 million core subscribers last quarter. In turn, Match.coms revenues were up 46 percent year-over-year last quarter.

(RELATED: 12 Unique Dating Sites)

Meanwhile, the company also has a strong search market, where search revenues increased by 35 percent year-over-year last quarter.

So IAC might not be as exciting as some of the red hot dotcom names out there, but Cramer thinks it will likely produce solid profits for your portfolio something every investor can get excited about.

Continued here:
Cramer: IAC/InterActiveCorp Is a Buy

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire -03/08/12)- China's internet stocks have taken a beating of late. On Tuesday alone, TickerSpy's China Internet Stocks Index (CHDOT) collapsed more than 4 percent after Chinese officials cut the country's 2012 target growth rate to 7.5 percent -- the lowest year-on-year growth projection in eight years. The Paragon Report examines investing opportunities in China's Internet Sector and provides equity research on Sohu.com Inc. (NASDAQ: SOHU - News) and Ctrip.com International Ltd. (NASDAQ: CTRP - News). Access to the full company reports can be found at:

http://www.paragonreport.com/SOHU

http://www.paragonreport.com/CTRP

China's Premier called "expanding consumer demand" one of his priorities for the upcoming year. The move comes after a decade in which building vast infrastructure projects and boosting the country's exports took center stage in the Chinese economy, Reuters reports. Last year, China's gross domestic product (GDP), or annual economic output, grew by 9.2%. In 2010 gross domestic product grew 10.4%.

"I wish to stress that in setting a slightly lower GDP growth rate, we hope... to guide people in all sectors to focus their work on accelerating the transformation of the pattern of economic development and making economic development more sustainable and efficient," Premier Wen Jiabao explained.

The Paragon Report provides investors with an excellent first step in their due diligence by providing daily trading ideas, and consolidating the public information available on them. For more investment research on China's Internet Sector register with at http://www.paragonreport.com and get exclusive access to our numerous stock reports and industry newsletters.

In the internet sector, the number of people online in China stood at 513 million by the end of 2011, according to a recent report from eMarketer. Although the report predicts growth to slow, with the internet reaching a majority of people only by 2015, China still has the world's largest population exposed to online ads.

Despite a lack of Facebook, China's social networking population reached nearly 257 million in 2011. Meanwhile half of internet users have been attracted by local weibo and other domestic social networking sites, with the proportion expected to rise to nearly two-thirds by 2014.

The Paragon Report has not been compensated by any of the above-mentioned publicly traded companies. Paragon Report is compensated by other third party organizations for advertising services. We act as an independent research portal and are aware that all investment entails inherent risks. Please view the full disclaimer at http://www.paragonreport.com/disclaimer

Read more:
China's Growth Targets Slide -- Shares of Sohu and Ctrip Fall