Now it appears that Sarah Palin will have to eat crow, as Tesla has repaid the entire government loan nine years early.

Tesla today announced that it has paid off the loan with one final, huge payment of $451.8 million. The funds were paid out of nearly $1 billion in funding that was raised in Tesla common stock and convertible senior note offerings this month. The company now employs more than 3,000 U.S. citizens.

“When you’re talking about cutting-edge clean energy technologies, not every investment will succeed – but today’s repayment is the latest indication that the Energy Department’s portfolio of more than 30 loans is delivering big results for the American economy while costing far less than anticipated,” said U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.

The loan repayment is yet more good news for Tesla investors. Earlier this month, the car company’s Tesla Model S car was given a 99 out of 100 score in Consumer Reports – the highest rating the publication has ever given a car.

“I would like to thank the Department of Energy and the members of Congress and their staffs that worked hard to create the ATVM program, and particularly the American taxpayer from whom these funds originate,” said Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla. “I hope we did you proud.”

(Image courtesy Tesla Motors)

“The Google Publisher Toolbar will continue to include the same popular functionality as before in addition to a new feedback mechanism and blocking capabilities,” says AdSense product manager Fiona Herring.

The new toolbar features pop-up account overview, ad details and a feedback box.

The overview shows you your estimated account earnings summary for today, yesterday, this month and last month, in addition to data on your top 5 channels or sites by revenue over a variety of date ranges.

The bar also gives you detailed info about specific impressions including buyer and advertiser details, the creative, and the ability to block the ad buyer.

Google says 234,000 people have installed the Google Publisher Bar since it launched.

This included eSolar and Makani Power. News is out today that Google has now acquired the latter. Brad Stone at BusinessWeek writes:

Last February, Astro Teller, the director of Google’s (GOOG) secretive research lab, Google X, went to seek approval from Chief Executive Officer Larry Page for an unlikely acquisition. Teller was proposing that Google buy Makani Power, a startup that develops wind turbines mounted on unmanned, fixed-wing aircraft tethered to the ground like a kite. The startup, Teller told Page, was seeing promising results, and, he added proudly, its prototypes had survived all recent tests intact.

Page approved Google X’s acquisition of Makani, which was being completed for an undisclosed amount at press time. He also had a demand. “He said we could have the budget and the people to go do this,” Teller says, “but that we had to make sure to crash at least five of the devices in the near future.”

According to TechCrunch, Google invested $10 million in Makani Power in 2006 and another $5 million in 2008. Frederic Lardinois shares a statement from Teller:

Creating clean energy is one of the most pressing issues facing the world, and Google for years has been interested in helping to solve this problem. Makani Power’s technology has opened the door to a radical new approach to wind energy. They’ve turned a technology that today involves hundreds of tons of steel and precious open space into a problem that can be solved with really intelligent software. We’re looking forward to bringing them into Google[x].

Makani Power has the following statement up on its site:

We are happy to announce that Makani Power is being acquired by Google. This formalizes a long and productive relationship between our two companies, and will provide Makani with the resources to accelerate our work to make wind energy cost competitive with fossil fuels. The timing couldn’t be better, as we completed the first ever autonomous all-modes flight with our Wing 7 prototype last week. Makani could not have reached this point without the support of the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program and the hard work of our talented team, past and present. We look forward to working with our new colleagues at Google[x] to make airborne wind a cost-effective reality.

Earlier this year, Google put $200 million into a wind farm in Texas.

For setting up Goals, you now find a profile in your account, click the admin tab, and navigate to the account, property, and and profile of choice. From there, click Goals, and Create a Goal. From there, you will be guided further:

New templates have been added to the set-up flow.

“When you use a template, the Goal setup flow is prefilled with suggested values (based on your industry) that you can either keep or change as you walk through the process,” explains product manager Stefan F. Schnabl. “The templates are organized into four business objectives (Revenue, Acquisition, Inquiry, Engagement) to help you think about the purpose of each Goal, plus you can still create custom goals. Note that ‘revenue’ goals don’t necessarily imply a direct sale — these goals are user activities which have a strong impact on your desired business outcomes. Depending on your business model, a Revenue Goal could be a purchase, such as a completed checkout; or it could also be a successful lead submission, such as a scheduled appointment. Some Revenue Goals might lend themselves to Ecommerce tracking as well.”

Templates are based on Industry Categories selected in your property settings. There are also twenty new categories.

“In addition to the templates, we’ve added a way for you to check your setup before you save,” says Schnabi. “You’ll find a verify option at the end of the setup flow that lets you see what the conversion rate would have been for the past seven days had this Goal been setup. Using the verify option gives you immediate feedback, so you can decide to save or modify the Goal configuration you’re working on.”

You can use the Goals Overview report under Conversions to see how goal completions happen over time. From there, you can also choose relevant metrics with the metric selector.

The updates are now live in Google Analytics.

Amazon announced Kindle Worlds today – a new publishing platform that licenses popular series and then allows amateur authors to publish fan fiction based on those series. Right out of the gate, Amazon has secured the rights to Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars and Vampire Diaries. I can already see the latter inspiring plenty of fan fiction.

“At Kindle, we’re not only inventing on the hardware and software side of the business, we’re inventing new ways to create books,” said Philip Patrick, Director, Business Development and Publisher of Kindle Worlds. “Our goal with Kindle Worlds is to create a home for authors to build on the Worlds we license, and give readers more stories from the Worlds they enjoy. We look forward to announcing additional World licensing deals in the coming weeks.”

So, how will the payment system work? Here’s how Amazon describes it:

Amazon Publishing will pay royalties to both the rights holders of the Worlds and the author. The standard author’s royalty rate (for works of at least 10,000 words) will be 35% of net revenue. As with all titles from Amazon Publishing, Kindle Worlds will base net revenue off of sales price—rather than the lower, industry standard of wholesale price—and royalties will be paid monthly.

In addition, with the launch of Kindle Worlds, Amazon Publishing will pilot an experimental new program for particularly short works—between 5,000 and 10,000 words. For these short stories—typically priced under one dollar—Amazon will pay the royalties for the World’s rights holder and pay authors a digital royalty of 20%.

It’s not a bad deal for something that people generally write while expecting no monetary return. It might even be a great platform for an aspiring author to launch their own career. There’s numerous stories out there of fan fiction authors getting their big break after somebody discovered their work.

Kindle Worlds will officially launch in June with over 50 commissioned works from famous authors. After that, anybody can submit their fan fictions to the Kindle Worlds publishing portal. To get a head start, head over to the official site to learn more.

During the hearing, Cook slammed the current U.S. tax code for not keeping up with the “digital age.” He also said that the “tax system handicaps American corporations in relation to our foreign competitors who don’t have such constraints on the free flow of capital.”

So, what does Cook suggest the U.S. do about it? He says that the corporate tax rate needs to be slashed. His suggestion calls for a drop from a 35 percent tax rate to a mid-20s tax rate. He also encourages Congress to lower the tax rate on foreign earnings being brought into the U.S.

The result of the above, Cook says, would encourage more investment in the United States and create more jobs. He even explicitly said that Apple will not bring billions in cash back to the U.S. unless Congress lowers the tax rate.

There are many congressman who no doubt agree with Apple on this issue, but one vocally came out in defense of the company yesterday. The Hill reports that Sen. Rand Paul said the subcommittee’s hearing on Apple’s alleged tax avoidance was offensive. He called upon the subcommittee to immediately apologize to the company.

Even after all of this, Apple isn’t quite done defending itself against accusations of tax avoidance. Reuters is reporting that major European leaders will be meeting to discuss what it sees as tax dodging from major tech corporations like Google, Apple and Amazon. Investigations have found that governments within the EU miss out on over €1 trillion, or $1.3 trillion USD, in tax revenue.

[h/t: The Hill] [Image: lemagit/flickr]

This week, Google announced that in six months, Google Checkout will officially be dead to merchants. They will no longer be able to accept payments using Google Checkout starting November 20th.

“If you don’t have your own payment processing, you will need to transition to a different solution within six months,” says Google Wallet senior product manager Justin Lawyer. “To make things easier, we’ve partnered with Braintree, Shopify and Freshbooks to offer you discounted migration options.”

“If you are a U.S. merchant that does have payment processing, you can apply for Google Wallet Instant Buy, which offers a fast buying experience to Google Wallet shoppers,” adds Lawyer.

Developers for Google Play the Chrome Web Store and Offers Marketplace will continue to be supported, and will automatically transition to the Google Wallet Merchant Center in the coming weeks. Shoppers will simply be able to use Google Wallet to make purchases on merchant apps and sites, as well as on Google properties.

Netflix will unveil all 15 new episodes from season 4 on May 26th at 12:01 am PT. While you wait, enjoy this awesome supercut of 18 running gags from the first three seasons. “No touching,” questionable magic tricks, and “I’ve made a huge mistake,” – they’re all here.

And while you’re here, bask in the glory of the official season 4 trailer:

[via Slacktory]

Is this acquisition going to be good or bad for Tumblr users? Good or bad for Yahoo? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Even before the acquisition was announced formally, a lot of users who got wind of the deal started jumping ship to alternative platforms. WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg wrote a blog post on Sunday night about a huge spike in imports from Tumblr.

“Imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000,” he wrote.

He later updated the post to say that some people are reading too much into those numbers, adding, “I don’t think there will be an exodus from Tumblr.”

In the comments section, he said, “I don’t think there will be any sort of exodus from Tumblr. For most folks habits overcome internet-outrage. Even if a million people left, that’s just about a week’s worth of signups.”

We haven’t seen an update on the number of imports now that the deal has been officially public for a day, but my guess is that it has increased significantly.

A petition to “Stop Yahoo! from Buying Tumblr” quickly racked up nearly 169,000 signatures. Of course there is no way that this will actually keep the deal from happening, but it does show that there is a great deal of discontent among users (and you have to think there are many more with a similar attitude who did not bother to sign, or even see the petition).

User concerns have ranged from “Yahoo is going to make Tumblr uncool” to “Yahoo is going to clutter up Tumblr with ads” to “Yahoo is going to eliminate porn on Tumblr” among other things.

Yahoo and Tumblr have both indicated from the start that they “promise not to screw it up”. Here’s a line straight out of the press release:

Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp will remain CEO. The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators.

Yahoo says Tumblr will deploy Yahoo’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to “help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love”. This could actually be a good thing for Tumblr, as its current content discovery features could use a great deal of improvement.

“Tumblr is redefining creative expression online,” said Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. “On many levels, Tumblr and Yahoo! couldn’t be more different, but, at the same time, they couldn’t be more complementary. Yahoo is the Internet’s original media network. Tumblr is the Internet’s fastest-growing media frenzy. Both companies are homes for brands – established and emerging. And, fundamentally, Tumblr and Yahoo! are both all about users, design, and finding surprise and inspiration amidst the everyday.”

“Our team isn’t changing,” said Tumblr CEO David Karp. “Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission — to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve — certainly isn’t changing. But we’re elated to have the support of Yahoo! and their team who share our dream to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas. Tumblr gets better faster with more resources to draw from.”

His statements in a blog post were a little more colorful.

So, let’s address some of those concerns users have.

1. Will Yahoo make Tumblr uncool?

Well, this is obviously subjective. To some, simply being part of a major corporation makes you uncool. It certainly didn’t help Myspace. Yahoo itself hasn’t exactly been considered “cool” by portions of the Internet in recent years either, however, the company is making a lot of moves (particularly since Mayer took over as CEO) to change things. That includes some big acquisitions and some new apps.

In fact, even since the Tumblr announcement, Yahoo announced a major revamp of its popular photography service, Flickr. This is a property that has historically had a massive following, and has remained one of Yahoo’s bright spots throughout the dark times, but through the revolving door of CEOs in recent years, many think Flickr has been neglected. Well, no more. You can read about the new experience here.

Other recent Yahoo acquisitions include: Loki Studios (mobile gaming), MileWise (travel search), GoPollGo (real-time surveys), Astrid (productivity), Summly (news aggregation/summarization), Jybe (social recommendation), Alike (social recommendation), Snip.it (social), OnTheAir (video chat) and Stamped (recommendation). These are all under Mayer. Tumblr makes 11 acquisitions (or at least announcements) since October. The company made only that many from February 2008 all the way up to this past October, with the last one before October coming in November, 2011.

So while it remains to be seen if Yahoo can truly become cool again, it is at least trying its damnedest, and spending a lot of money to do so. Whether that translates into making Tumblr uncool, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Hunter Walk, the director of Product Management at Google, who focuses on YouTube, wrote an interesting blog post called, “Don’t Mess Up Tumblr: Five Lessons Learned From YouTube”. In a nutshell, his lessons are: protect Tumblr from “helpful” Yahoos, avoid locality bias in product development, stop short term monetization that won’t scale, infrastructure (tech, process) on Tumblr terms, and separate identity/separate space.

“When Google purchased YouTube there was lots of skepticism and outright derision,” Walk recalls. “Today analysts estimate its enterprise value is approaching $20 billion. So I guess it all worked out, eh? Being one of the first Googlers to join YouTube after the acquisition taught me a lot about what works, and doesn’t work, when you bring a fast growing community property into a larger entity. There are clearly parallels between our situation in 2007 and what Tumblr will experience with Yahoo. Marissa is a friend from our time together at Google and I’m impressed, but not surprised, by her decisiveness and vision. I don’t know David Karp but we share a number of mutual friends and at a 2012 group dinner he passed me the salt, so we’ve got that.”

He goes on to elaborate on each of the lessons.

2. Is Yahoo going to clutter up Tumblr with ads?

I guess it depends on your definition of clutter, but it does look like Tumblr will be getting some new ads. At least one report indicates that they could come as soon as today.

Mayer said flat out in the announcement that the two companies will be working together to create advertising opportunities that are “seamless and enhance user experience”.

Business Insider has some more from the conference call about deal:

Mayer says that Yahoo released “Yahoo Stream Ads” in May, which take text ads and put them in the news stream on Yahoo.com. She says you can expect more of that on Tumblr. On Tumblr, there is the dashboard, which is like Facebook’s News Feed or inbox. Today, Tumblr does some advertising there. Yahoo would like to “introduce a very light ad load” there. Yahoo also might work with some bloggers who want ads on their blogs. That would only be done with permission. Mayer says the ad units will be native and follow the form and function of Tumblr. She says that you can tell interests of users.

In fact, Business Insider also managed to obtain Tumblr’s ad sales pitch deck describing the ad experience to potential clients.

“With Tumblr’s newest ad product, brands finally are front and center, with the world’s greatest creators,” one of the slides says. “Welcome to the richest content stream in the world.”

According to the pitch deck, the ads will be delivered directly in the native dashboard streams of millions of users. The “Web In-Stream” product is in beta, and Tumblr is offering an exclusive launch partnership opportunity to a handful of select brands for the ad unit’s debut, according to the slides, which say that all Tumblr post types are supported. Partners are apparently being offered category-exclusivity.

For $200K, according to the slides, partners can get ten desktop Radar posts within a 30-day span (between May 21 and July 21), 24 hours each for 5% of all Dashboard page views, support from the Tumblr team, U.S. guaranteed impression serving only, over 25 million dashboard impressions ($8.00CPM on Radar impressions), and multi-week exposure as premier sponsor in Spotlight. They also get ninety-day access to Tumblr Analytics and three weeks as an exclusive beta in-stream launch sponsor partner with ten in-stream posts within a 21 day span (June 1 and June 21).

Regardless of what users think of the ads, businesses will certainly have new opportunities with Tumblr’s massive audience.

3. Is Yahoo going to eliminate porn on Tumblr?

Regardless of whether or not you consider porn to be a taboo subject, it makes a big difference in Tumblr’s stats. Tumblr is full of it. If Tumblr gets rid of it, it’s going to drive away some percentage of users, not to mention become less cool to some percentage of users.

Mayer was asked about it at the Flickr event on Monday evening. She said they will not censor content. “No, we won’t,” she is quoted as saying. “It’s the nature of user-generated content.”

It doesn’t stop YouTube, but, Mayer probably earned some “cool” points with that one.

Tumblr currently has over 300 million monthly unique visitors, and gets 120,000 signups every day. It sees 900 posts per second and 24 billion minutes are spent on the site each month. Over half of its users are using the mobile app, and on average, participate in seven sessions per day. Yahoo expects the acquisition to grow its audience by fifty percent to over a billion monthly visitors, and to grow traffic by about twenty percent.

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, and is expected to close in the second half of the year.

Was this a good acquisition for Yahoo? Will this hurt or benefit Tumblr users? Can Yahoo become cool again? Is Yahoo already cool again? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Image: NMA (YouTube)

“In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love,” she said in the announcementl. “In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience.”

On a conference call Monday, she said we could expect more ads like Yahoo’s “Yahoo Stream” ads on Tumblr, and that they would introduce a “very light ad load” on the dashboard, and might work with bloggers who want ads on their blogs. Ad units would be native.

Well, we might be seeing some new ads sooner rather than later. Tumblr will be launching a test of in-stream ads on desktop users’ dashboards as soon as Tuesday, according to Business Insider, who has obtained Tumblr’s ad sales pitch deck. Here’s the first of a handful of a slides, BI shared:

“With Tumblr’s newest ad product, brands finally are front and center, with the world’s greatest creators,” one of the slides says. “Welcome to the richest content stream in the world.”

According to the pitch deck, the ads will be delivered directly in the native dashboard streams of millions of users. The “Web In-Stream” product is in beta, and Tumblr is offering an exclusive launch partnership opportunity to a handful of select brands for the ad unit’s debut, according to the slides, which say that all Tumblr post types are supported. Partners are apparently being offered category-exclusivity.

For $200K, according to the slides, partners can get ten desktop Radar posts within a 30-day span (between May 21 and July 21), 24 hours each for 5% of all Dashboard page views, support from the Tumblr team, U.S. guaranteed impression serving only, over 25 million dashboard impressions ($8.00CPM on Radar impressions), and multi-week exposure as premier sponsor in Spotlight. They also get ninety-day access to Tumblr Analytics and three weeks as an exclusive beta in-stream launch sponsor partner with ten in-stream posts within a 21 day span (June 1 and June 21).

A lot of Tumblr users are already freaking out.