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Newsweek colors Dell, IBM, HP the greenest

Tech firms proved dominant in Newsweek's rankings of the greenest companies around the world, with Dell, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard among those singled out.

Out today, Newsweek's rankings looked at the most environmentally friendly companies in the U.S. alone and throughout the world. The goal of the study was to zero in on three factors: environmental impact, policies, and reputation.

Among the 500 public companies tracked in the U.S., Dell came out on top. The PC maker was lauded by Newsweek for its environmental policies, such as free product recycling and a ban on the export of e-waste to developing countries. The company has also been able to drive in customers and sales by designing computers that consume 25 percent less energy than those made a couple of years ago. Dell estimates that it's helped customers save more than $5 billion in energy costs since 2006 through the energy management features on its OptiPlex business computers.

"Dell's focus on environmental stewardship and sustainability helps us to be a more responsible partner to our customers," CEO Michael Dell said in a statement. "The efficiencies we can all achieve through the use of greener products, solutions, services and programs should be an integral part of every corporate culture."

The top 10 in the U.S. also included such tech players as HP, IBM, Intel, Sprint Nextel, Adobe Systems, Applied Materials, and Yahoo. Certain companies were applauded for devising unique ways to cool their data centers, a process that typically demands a huge amount of energy. Yahoo, for example, has been able to build greener data centers, including one in New York that consumes 40 percent less energy and 94 percent less water than conventional data centers.

One company that generally seems to be on the forefront of greener tech is Google. The company has been behind several environmentally friendly initiatives, from an investment in a power backbone for a wind farm to its lawn-mowing goats. But the search giant ranked only 36th on Newsweek's U.S. list, scoring lower than one might expect on its environmental impact and policies.

Looking beyond the U.S. to the entire world, IBM took the top spot among the 100 greenest global companies, followed by HP in second place.

Big Blue has actually been ahead of the curve in looking to cut its use of electricity and water. Between 1990 and 2000, the company was able to reduce its energy consumption by 5.1 billion kilowatt hours, enough to power a medium-sized town, according to Newsweek. IBM has also embarked on a number of green projects, including its Sustainability Management System, which looks to help customers operate their commercial buildings in a greener way.

For many companies, including HP, the effort to create products that cost less to make and use is also saving energy and reducing waste as a result. HP's current IT systems use 66 percent less energy than the ones it designed in 2005.

"A lot of the innovation in this space is coming out of business pressure," Michael Mendenhall, HP's chief marketing officer, said in a statement.

To devise a "green score" for each company, Newsweek worked with some key environmental organizations. The score was based on three factors:

• Environmental impact, which included greenhouse-gas emissions, water use, and solid-waste disposal.

• Green policies, an analysis of a company's environmental policies and initiatives.

• Reputation, which was based on a survey of academics, environmental officers, and CEOs.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20019873-54.html?tag=mncol;title

MacBook Air: Quibbles with an exquisite design

I use a second-generation MacBook Air (R) and Dell Adamo--both sleek, attractive designs. And I use an older first-generation Air as back-up.
(Credit: Brooke Crothers)








The MacBook Air was announced in January of 2008. I've been using one day in and day out since February of that year. Amid rumors of an imminent update, I can't help but wonder whether Apple will address a few outstanding, albeit small, issues with an otherwise stellar design.

I've already stated, pretty much ad nauseam, that I like the Air. A lot. I've never used one design so consistently for so long. That, alone, is testimony to its eminent usability and close-to-perfect design. And I've used a lot of laptops over the years.

Now, with fresh speculation about the new design and even possible photos, I thought it might be a good opportunity to offer a wish list of minor fixes.

Heat: This is a given in any ultrathin design. And, let's be clear, neither Hewlett-Packard, nor Dell, nor anyone else has solved the problem. That said, there are technologies out there that can mitigate heat issues. And Apple, especially, with all of its design prowess, should be able to engineer a cooler ultrathin laptop. I have experienced times (admittedly pretty rare) where the Air is simply unusable because it gets too hot, slowing the system to a crawl.

Battery life: Again, a challenge for any ultraportable because the design, by definition, leaves little room for a big battery. Apple offered probably the best possible battery life for a sub-one-inch thick design when the MacBook Air was designed a few years ago (using a thin-and-wide battery enclosure). I get anywhere from 1.5 hours to four hours, depending on what I'm doing. But it's usually closer to a couple of hours than four hours. Apple opted to go with relatively high-performance, low-power processors. In other words, for the second-generation Air, Apple didn't use Intel's ULV (ultra-low voltage) but went with Intel's LV processors. Does this affect battery life? Yeah, that and Nvidia's graphics-centric chipset. The point: It's now about three years later, Apple can improve on both battery life and performance, as evidenced in the newer MacBook Pros.

Price: This is probably the biggest gripe I hear from others. Yes, it's an elite MacBook. I understand that. But most people don't. They marvel at the design but not the price. The next Air doesn't have to go as low as $699, but Apple could at least make the design more accessible to average MacBook consumers. Many see it simply as an expensive MacBook without an optical drive. A contradiction not easy to reconcile.

Google offers instant-search interface standard

With Google Instant, the close link between the company's browser and search service is getting even closer--but Google wants to ensure that the Chrome-Google pairing isn't the only one possible on the Net.

If a proposal from the search giant catches on, browser users might, for example, be able to see Yahoo search results in Firefox--or more likely, Microsoft Bing search results instantly in Internet Explorer. The proposal, if accepted, holds the potential to help both Google and its rivals--at least if they can match the new Google Instant interface.

Google Instant shows search results as a person types, refreshing the window contents as the search terms are added or modified, and Google is building it into Chrome's omnibox. That's a significant expansion over existing browser abilities to suggest completed search terms using a drop-down list.

Google now is proposing an interface to let others link people's search box use with instant-search results.

"We're adding instant search integration to Google Chrome, allowing the search provider to communicate suggestions to the user agent [browser]. If there is interest, we'd like to make sure that we do this in such a way that any search provider or user agent can implement it," Google programmer Tony Gentilcore said last week on a mailing list for WHATWG, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group that has worked for years to advance Web technologies.

The interface would share information from the browser that the search engine needs before it can send instant-search results to the browser. Under the proposed interface, the information sent--to the default search engine only--would include potential search terms that have been typed in, the user's cursor location within them, and whether the user has changed search terms, hit the enter key, or selected an item with an arrow key.

The move shouldn't come as a huge surprise. On the defensive front, such an interface makes life harder for critics concerned that Google is benefiting from its search dominance in a way that its browser competitors can't. And on the offensive front, it could make it easier for Google to extend instant search results to other browsers.

On Windows, Chrome's omnibox gets Google Instant results when enabled through about:labs.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)



It's not clear whether others will be interested, however.

Two days after raising the matter at WHATWG, Gentilcore mentioned the proposal on a mailing list for WebKit, the open-source browser engine used in Chrome, Apple's Safari, and many mobile browsers. He suggested a WebKit-wide interface that would faciltate the feature, but didn't drum up much enthusiasm.

"I do have an objection," Apple programmer Darin Adler said in his response. The feature is the kind of thing that is best suited for higher-level browser work based on WebKit, not the underlying engine itself, he said. "WebKit has an architecture that allows this to be done without WebKit code changes. I suggest we put this feature in browsers, not the engine."

Perhaps Microsoft would be more interested. Not only does it have a search engine it's trying to promote, but Its IE9 beta makes much more aggressive use of the combined search and address bar, displaying some search results as people type.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20019864-264.html?tag=mncol;title

AMD's new 'Llano' chip targets sleek designs

Currently-available HP Pavilion dm1z ultraportable features AMD processors and an 11.6-inch design.










At the AMD Technical Forum & Exhibition in Taipei, Taiwan, the chip supplier held the first public demonstration of its future AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) codenamed "Llano." Due in the first half of next year, the system-on-a-chip (single piece of silicon) is targeted at ultrathin and mainstream laptops, among other designs.

Llano will use 32-nanometer technology, feature up to four CPU processor cores, and integrate AMD's 5000 series graphics technology.

The demo involved three "workloads" running simultaneously on Microsoft Windows 7: calculating the value of Pi to 32 million decimal places; running a complex physics simulation using DirectX 11; and decoding HD video from a Blu-ray disc, AMD said. "Microsoft's n-Body DirectCompute application is shown achieving around 30 GFLOPS, according to a statement. GFLOPS, or gigaflops, means billions of floating point operations per second.

AMD is in the unique position of being a supplier of both central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) and therefore can combine both technologies to create what it calls APUs.

By comparison, Intel's newest Atom processors integrate a CPU and low-end GPU onto one piece of silicon, while the upcoming Sandy Bridge processor--due in systems early next year--has a higher-performance graphics function integrated onto the CPU.

Don't hold your breath for 7-inch iPad

  Jobs threw cold water on the usability of 7-inch tablets like Samsung's Galaxy Tab--and the rumors of a 7-inch iPad.
(Credit: Kent German/CNET)      














Steve Jobs thinks you're fat. Or at least your fingers are.

Jobs dialed in to Apple's earnings call this afternoon and took on, among other topics, the usability of a 7-inch touch-screen tablet. Though many of Apple's competitors are introducing or plan to introduce tablets in that size, it's not ideal for a touch-screen device, he told investors.

"It's meaningless unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size," he said.

Normal-size human fingers are too big to be able to accurately hit icons on a screen that size, he claimed.

"Apple has done extensive user testing and we really understand this stuff," he said. "There are clear limits on how close you can place things on a touchscreen, which is why we think 10 inch is the minimum screen size to create great tablet apps."

But it's not just our pesky fingers that are the problem. He also trashed the screen size and resolution of 7-inchers 

"One naturally thinks that a 7-inch screen would offer 70 percent of the benefits of a 10-inch screen...this is far from the truth. Seven-inch screens are 45 percent as large as an iPad," Jobs said. "This size isn't sufficient for making great tablet apps."     

No tablet can compete with a smartphone. And given that all tablet users will already have a smartphone in their pocket, giving up screen area to fit in a pocket is a bad trade-off," he said.

Jobs is obviously doing some marketing countermeasures ahead of the holidays when several new tablet models may become available that compete with the iPad.

But he was also sending this message to those reporting rumors that a 7-inch iPad is on its way: it's not happening.       

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20019982-260.html?tag=mncol                               

Ray Ozzie stepping down from Microsoft

                                          Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect


 In a surprise move, Microsoft announced today that Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie is leaving the company.

The move, which raises questions about the company's future technology direction, was announced in an e-mail to employees from CEO Steve Ballmer. Ozzie is leaving after an unspecified transition period, expected to be several months.

"With our progress in services and the cloud now full speed ahead in all aspects of our business, Ray and I are announcing today Ray's intention to step down from his role as chief software architect," Ballmer said in the memo, which was posted to Microsoft's Web site. "He will remain with the company as he transitions the teams and ongoing strategic projects within his organization--bringing the great innovations and great innovators he's assembled into the groups driving our business. Following the natural transition time with his teams but before he retires from Microsoft, Ray will be focusing his efforts in the broader area of entertainment where Microsoft has many ongoing investments."

Ozzie's departure is just the latest in a string of high-level exits from Microsoft. Business Division President Stephen Elop left Microsoft last month to become CEO of Nokia, while Entertainment and Devices unit president Robbie Bach announced in the spring his plans to leave. (Bach has not left Microsoft's employ as yet, but is expected to leave later this fall.)

Ozzie joined Microsoft when the company bought Ozzie's Groove Networks back in April 2005. Initially, he was one of three chief technical officers and was named to his current role in 2006, at the same time the company announced Bill Gates plan to retire.

Microsoft said it has no plans to fill the chief software architect role.

Ozzie was already a computing industry legend by the time he joined Microsoft, having worked on several early PC programs before creating Lotus Notes. Ozzie ventured out on his own after IBM acquired Lotus, creating Groove, a collaborative document creation engine.

"Ray contributed significantly to the early success of Windows," Ballmer noted in his memo to Microsoft employees. "Since being at Microsoft, both through inspiration and impact he's been instrumental in our transition toward a software world now centered on services."

Microsoft's acquisition of Groove was widely seen as the cost of bringing in Ozzie.

During his time at Microsoft, Ozzie is best known for his Internet Services Disruption memo five years ago, which outlined the need for all of the company's businesses to move to the cloud. Since then, Microsoft has launched plans for Windows Live, Windows Azure, and Office Web Apps, among other cloud efforts.

However, Ozzie's tenure has also been marked by clashes with various product teams over both resources and technical direction.

As Ballmer noted, one of Ozzie's final projects will focus on the company's entertainment strategy. Microsoft has been trying to flesh out its notion of a "personal cloud," which is in many ways the consumer parallel to the business cloud strategy that the company has laid out.

One of Ozzie's pet projects at Microsoft was Live Mesh, a technology incubation that aimed to offer people the ability to have their content automatically synchronized with the Web and their other devices. Parts of Live Mesh are now part of Windows Live, although more work is needed to fulfill the broader vision, including securing broader rights from Hollywood to allow users to take purchased content, such as movies and TV shows, to whichever device they are on.

Microsoft declined to make Ozzie available for an interview, nor did it have any comment on his plans once he leaves the company. Ballmer left the door open to continuing further work with Ozzie.

"He's always been a 'maker' and a partner, and we look forward to our continuing collaboration as his future unfolds," he said.

Another blow-out quarter for Apple: $20 billion in revenue

CEO Steve Jobs, shown here demonstrating the iPad earlier this year, made a surprise appearance on the earnings call today.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET )

After selling more iPads, iPhones, and Macs than ever, Apple has posted its best quarterly earnings yet.

For its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings, revenue clocked in at $20.34 billion, and earnings at $4.31 billion, or $4.64 per share. That's an increase in revenue of 67 percent from the same quarter a year ago. Investors were expecting revenue between $17.87 billion and $19.86 billion, and earnings between $3.43 and $4.41 per share.

The breakdown of sales in each business area looks like this: 3.89 million Macs sold during the fourth quarter, 27 percent more than a year ago; 14.1 million iPhones, 91 percent better than a year ago; 9.05 million iPods, up 11 percent; and (the number everyone had been waiting on) 4.19 million iPads during their second quarter of availability.

iPad sales can only be compared to the one previous quarter of sales (around 3 million), but were lower than the 4.7 million unit sales many analysts were expecting. COO Tim Cook cited supply issues, saying inventory was up to three to four week's worth, but not up to his ideal four-to-six week supply.

Investors reacted to that news negatively, sending Apple shares more than $18 to $299.95 in after-hours trading. That was after Apple shares closed at their highest price ever, $318, this afternoon.

CEO Steve Jobs took the opportunity to compare his company's results to the current market leader in smartphones in North America: "iPhone sales of 14.1 million were up 91 percent year over year, handily beating the 12.1 million phones RIM sold in their most recent quarter," he said in a statement. "We still have a few surprises left for the remainder of this calendar year."

iPhone sales almost doubled from the number sold last year: from 7 million units a year ago to the 14.1 million iPhones sold during the most recent quarter. That was due to sales doubling in Japan, Asia Pacific, and European sales markets, CFO Peter Oppenheimer said during a call with investors and analysts this afternoon. Revenue from iPhones only, without accessories, was $8.6 billion.

Jobs also made a surprise appearance on the earnings call and had some pointed words for Google, Android phone makers, and competitors in the tablet market, including calling Google's framing of the "closed" iOS versus "open" Android platform "disingenuous." He also indirectly dismissed rumors of a 7-inch iPad by trashing the screen size, resolution, and ease of use of a number of 7-inch tablets planned by Apple competitors.

He also addressed the competition between the iPhone and Android phones, laying out how he perceives the difference between the two.

"Android is our biggest competitor. They out-shipped us as we were transitioning to iPhone 4. So we're waiting to find out what happened to this quarter," he said. "I imagine we'll be competing with them for quite some time. We believe in our approach very strongly, providing users products that just work. Their approach is very different."

For the first time ever, Jobs revealed sales numbers for Apple TV, something the company had merely held as a "hobby."

"In a short time, we've already sold more than 250,000 (Apple TVs) and we're thrilled with that," Jobs said.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20019928-260.html?tag=topStories2

French strikes force petrol stations to shut

Police and protesters clash in Nanterre as vehicles are set on fire

About 1,500 petrol stations in France have run dry or are about to close as fuel supplies are hit by strikes over government pension reforms, officials say.
 A blockade of oil refineries has lasted a week and the body that supplies most supermarkets says one in four petrol stations is affected.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has called a crisis cabinet to protect supplies.

He told reporters that the reforms were "essential" and would be carried out.

The exact number of France's 12,000 petrol stations affected by the strikes is unclear, but oil company Exxon Mobil has described the situation as "critical".

A spokeswoman said that anyone looking for diesel around Paris or in the western area of Nantes would face problems.

Severe shortages have been reported in Brittany in north-west France and the International Energy Agency says that France has begun tapping into its emergency oil reserves.

Workers at France's 12 oil refineries have been on strike for a week and entrances to many of the country's fuel distribution depots have been blocked.
Panic-buying was blamed for a 50% increase in fuel sales last week.
The head of the Leclerc chain of supermarkets, Michel Edouard Leclerc, warned that at the current rate his company's petrol stations would be empty within two to three days if the blockade of refineries remained and fuel imports were paralysed.

Go-slow

Strike action against the government's reform plans is being ramped up, with lorry drivers starting the week by staging a go-slow on motorways around several major cities including Paris, Lille and Lyon.

A further day of strikes is scheduled for Tuesday, on the eve of a key Senate vote on the pensions bill.

Half of all flights to and from Paris's Orly airport and one in three flights at other airports are being cancelled, according to aviation officials.

Airport operator ADP said there were already some delays at the capital's largest airport, Charles De Gaulle, on Monday because of strikes by oil workers.

Street protests have been planned in a number of cities and disruption is also expected on public transport and in schools.

The government wants to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the full state pension age from 65 to 67.

Burning cars

There were already demonstrations outside 261 schools on Monday, which the education ministry said had been blockaded.

In the western suburb of Nanterre in Paris, dozens of students clashed with riot police who fired rubber bullets.

Shop windows were reported broken in the Saint-Denis suburb, where education officials said more than half the areas secondary schools had been blockaded.

In Lyon, several cars were burned and one teacher whose car was badly damaged by fire complained: "They want to fight [against the pension reform]. OK, but they have to understand the meaning of what they are doing".

In other developments:
Outside the Grandpuits refinery, east of Paris, strikers burned tyres in defiance of a government order that the facility should be reopened.
In some cities, such as Toulouse (south-west) or Saint-Etienne (centre), public transport depots were blocked on Monday morning, preventing buses and tramways from operating for several hours.
Rail traffic was being disrupted with one in two fast TGV trains running, and one in three normal-speed trains running.
Although the Eurostar train service between Paris and London is normal, there is no Eurostar service between Brussels and London on Monday due to a strike in Belgium.
A key fuel pipeline that supplies the two airports in Paris has been restored, but the civil aviation authority is warning airlines operating at Charles de Gaulle to arrive with enough fuel to make the return journeys.

Crisis cabinet

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has ordered key ministers to form a crisis cabinet with the role of ensuring the continuity of fuel supplies.


Three departments are being charged with coordinating the state's services to maintain the supply: the interior and economy ministries as well as the energy and environment department.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon has insisted he will not allow the refinery strikes to hit the French economy.

Several other figures have said the country is not at risk of fuel shortages.

"The government is in control," Industry Minister Christian Estrosi told French radio on Monday.

"There will be no blockade for companies, no blockade for transport and no blockade for road users."

The head of the French Petrol Industries Association, Jean-Louis Schilansky, has said fuel shortages are not yet at crisis point.

"If the lorry drivers go on strike, if people block the refineries, then we will have a very big problem. But we're not at that stage yet," he said.

France has a strategic fuel reserve which holds up to three months of supplies, the government says.

Public support

According to the latest opinion polls, more than 70% of French people continue to support strike action.

On Saturday, a fifth day of protests brought 825,000 people on to the streets, police said, although unions put the figure at 2.5 million to three million.

The pension reforms have already been approved by the National Assembly, the lower house of the French parliament.

The upper house, the Senate, has endorsed the key articles on raising the retirement age, and is due to vote on the full text on Wednesday.

                                        http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11567457

World tunes in to miners' rescues in Chile

Much of the world tuned in to watch what started off more than two months ago as a tragedy, but appeared Wednesday to be headed for a happy ending.

That's when 33 miners who had been trapped nearly half a mile underground outside Copiapo, Chile, began to emerge individually from the depths of the Earth.

As the "Phoenix" capsule carrying one miner at a time made its ascent, families from as far away as Sri Lanka and China huddled around televisions, their eyes glued to the screen.

"I'm overwhelmed with happiness," Shari Atukorala said from Sri Lanka, tears rolling down her face as she watched the events unfold on CNN. "This is a very emotional moment."

Juan Lopez was watching from his home in Mexico City.

"I can't help but think of my grandfather, Cristino, who was a silver miner in San Luis Potosi -- a state in the center-east of Mexico," he said in a submission to CNN's iReport. "My grandfather would be happy to have the focus on miners because the world rarely focuses on the dangerous conditions they work in."

With each miner's rescue, the world seemed to heave a collective sigh of relief.

"I mentioned on Twitter how, 41 years ago, the world watched men walk on the moon," said Connie Preti, a New York resident. "Today we are seeing men come out from the earth. It's equally striking."

Even the pope spoke about the ongoing rescues, saying in Spanish on Wednesday that he entrusted the miners to "the divine goodness" of Angela of Foligno, who was beatified in the 1600s.

"Thank you very much!" Pope Benedict XVI said. "God blesses you!"

As cheers and applause from the rescue team in Chile rang out, the nation's ambassador in Washington was hosting an outdoor "watch party" filled with frenzied fans.

"Chi! Chi! Chi! Le! Le! Le!" the crowd in the U.S. capital chanted every time a miner surfaced.

"This is more than a story, it's a global community event," said Yuen Ying Chan, professor of journalism at the University of Hong Kong.

"People are mesmerized by it because it's not only a strong human interest story, but it involves a great number of people, has a lot of suspense, deals with life and death, and ultimately sparks people's curiosity," Chan said.

She added that viewers were captivated because they could be a part of it online through social media and other outlets.

While many social media tools from the West -- Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare, for example -- are blocked in China, China has developed homegrown versions of Twitter-like program, which have become widely popular.

A user by the name "@days up in the air david" posted a comment on Sina Weibo, China's version of the microblogging site Twitter, stating:

"Chile invites all the media around the world, and turns the accident to an opportunity for world to know about Chile's rescue technology and know about Chileans," the post said. "On the contrary, mine accidents in China are about concealing and tragedy."

China, one of the world's largest producers and consumers of coal, has one of the world's deadliest records for miners. Reports of miners being injured or killed appear regularly in state media.

For Chile, it was a moment of national pride.

"This rescue operation has been so wonderful, so clean, so emotional, so there was no reason not to let all the eyes of the world see it," Chilean President Sebastian Pinera told reporters. "This is why you had access."

One by one, the miners -- wearing sunglasses and clad in green "breathable" suits -- arrived at the surface and stepped out of the capsule -- images that were broadcast around the world from a government camera.

Then, following a protocol devised by the rescuers to ensure the miners' safety, each man was placed on a gurney and wheeled into a private medical area out of view of the cameras.

U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday praised the rescue workers and government in Chile for the effort, saying the story "inspired the world."

Obama said the world watched the rescue of the first miner and his embrace of his family upon reaching the surface.

"The tears they shed after so much time apart expressed not only their own relief, not only their own joy, but the joy of people everywhere," he said.
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/10/13/chile.world.watches/index.html 

'Original' Buena Vista Social Club album finally out... 14 years later

London, England (CNN) -- It's been 14 years in the making -- an album combining the sensual rhythms of Cuban music with the desert-inspired sounds of west Africa.

Chance and circumstance delayed its birth -- when the American guitarist Ry Cooder and the British record producer Nick Gold arrived in Havana in the late 1990s intending to record an Afro-Cuban album, the African musicians had, as Cooder said at the time, "got hung up in Paris" with visa problems.

With a studio already booked, the pair thought they should record something anyway, so they asked the singer-songwriter Juan de Marcos González to round up some Cuban musicians.

González spent a day or two knocking on the doors of some of Cuba's greatest muscians, many of whom were retired on modest pensions or had been long forgotten, like Compay Segundo and Ibrahim Ferrer.

The resulting album was called the Buena Vista Social Club -- the group eventually played at the Carnegie Hall in New York, won a Grammy, spawned an acclaimed film by the award-winning director Wim Wenders and sold eight million albums.

Now 14 years later and another chance meeting has resulted in Malian musicians from west Africa and Cuban musicians playing together to record AfroCubism, officially released this week.

"The success of the original albums meant we got sidetracked, but we were always asking ourselves, 'When are we going to do this?' then we were alerted to the fact that Eliades Ochoa and the Malian musicians were going to be in Madrid at the same time," Gold told CNN.

The album was recorded in Madrid over four days and Cooder helped with the "sequencing" said Gold.

The album features, among others, the veteran Cuban singer-guitarist Eliades Ochoa and the acclaimed Malian singer Kasse-Mady Diabaté.

Ochoa had been Cooder and Gold's original choice to record with the Malians.

Gold says the inspiration for this album originally came from hearing Malian musicians playing "languid" Cuban music in an outdoor club in Bamako, the Malian capital.

There is a long history of fusing Malian and Cuban music -- during the 1960s the former Cuban president Fidel Castro was a close ally of a newly-independent Mali, resulting in the promotion of Cuban music there and some musical cross-pollination.

In the end it also transpires that the special relationship between Cuba and Mali meant that the Malian musicians did not even require a visa to enter Havana from Paris all those years ago.

AfroCubism begins a world tour in November, including dates in London, New York and Boston, Mass.
 http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/10/12/cuba.mali.afrocubism.africa/index.html