Likely GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman is promising to create 2 million private-sector jobs in California within the first five years if she is elected.

She said Tuesday that she would accomplish that by reforming regulations, cutting taxes and realigning government spending with what she believes should be the state's priorities. She offered few details.

The former eBay (nasdaq: EBAY - news - people ) chief executive announced last week that she was forming an exploratory committee to seek the Republican nomination for governor in 2010.

Whitman sounded more like an official candidate on Tuesday as she spoke to about 100 people at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. It's the first of three so-called "vision speeches" she is planning this week in what amounts to a political coming-out party.

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MetaData: Facebook Face-Off

The social network's members fret about how it will turn chitchat into cash.

The blogsphere erupted Sunday evening following an observation by the blog Consumerist that Facebook, the watercooler of this generation, recently tightened its policies for using the data that we all so freely share on its platform. The blog summed up the problem succinctly by asserting the new Facebook rules amount to: "We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever."

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg fired back but sounded a bit wounded by the attack. "We wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want," he said in a blog post on Facebook on Monday. "The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work."

Do people really think that their private information is sacred anywhere on the Web? You can read some detailed accounts of the specifics of this dustup here and here, among other places. Zuckerberg has gone to some lengths to say that Facebook's recent changes in its terms of service simply enable the service to let you save copies of your messages and photos and that of your friends. "We still have work to do to communicate more clearly about these issues," Zuckerberg wrote.

Even so, it's lunacy to think that Facebook isn't scrambling to figure out how to make use of all those comments about what movie you liked the most last week or your favorite brand of jeans. Yes, its traffic is spectacular: in 2008, a staggering 6.6 billion "friendships" were made on Facebook. If real life mimicked Web life, that would mean that just about everybody on the planet could have at least one friend.

But unless Facebook gets better turning chatter into cash, it won't have much of a business.

So far, Facebook has made limited headway in weaving advertising into its site. Small-time operations can pay a few cents per ad to deliver their message to people with a certain set of demographics. But earning pennies for ads isn't a passport to a great business.

If Facebook really wants to collect serious money for sharing its "friends" with the highest bidder, that could mean giving up some of the innocent, playful gestalt of the site and yielding to advertisers' demands for a more intimate look at users' characteristics. That may not sit well with Zuckerberg, who cherishes the aura of Facebook more than he does its income stream.

Even with it is turned off, a new ThinkPad laptop will be able to talk to a BlackBerry phone so their owner will be able to read and send e-mail faster, the companies behind the devices planned to announce Monday.

Lenovo Group Ltd., maker of the ThinkPad, and Research In Motion Ltd. (nasdaq: RIMM - news - people ), maker of the BlackBerry, have together created an accessory card for the laptops that will wirelessly download e-mail through the owner's BlackBerry, even when the computer is off or in standby mode.

That means that when the ThinkPad boots up, new e-mail will already be loaded. There's no need to establish a secure Internet connection to the employer's servers. The user will also be able to send e-mail from the ThinkPad through the BlackBerry without an additional Internet connection.

The "Lenovo Constant Connect" card will let users combine the always-on nature of the BlackBerry with the larger keyboard and screen of the laptop, said Rick Cheston, executive director at Lenovo. For instance, a traveler could flip open the laptop to do some quick e-mailing at an airport layover, rather than spending time to set up Internet access, he said.

The card will cost $150 or less when Lenovo starts selling it in the second quarter in the U.S. It will be available in the rest of the world later this year. Initially it will work only with Microsoft Corp. (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people )'s Outlook e-mail client, but Lenovo is working on supporting IBM Corp. (nyse: IBM - news - people )'s Lotus Notes as well, Cheston said.

ThinkPads made last summer or later will be compatible with the Constant Connect card, and BlackBerrys made in the last few years will work with it, he added.

The card connects to a BlackBerry through the Bluetooth wireless technology. When the computer is off, the card stores new e-mail in flash memory.

It is already possible to connect a computer to the Internet through the Bluetooth feature of some phones, but this is a more lengthy, complicated process, and the computer must be fully on.

Satellite collision highlights risks in a sector that currently has little financial risk protection.

Imagine an object the size of a pea with the potential to destroy a satellite, and you'll get a sense of the potential new risks posed by Wednesday's collision of an Iridium satellite with an inactive Russian military satellite.

The scale of the damage is still being assessed, but so far the U.S. Joint Space Operations Center has identified 600 pieces of debris greater than the size of a tennis ball that were thrown off in the crash (pieces smaller than that are untrackable). Traveling at around 5.0 miles a second, an object much smaller could do a lot of damage, particularly when colliding with one coming from the opposite direction at a similar speed.

"The issue of debris has been hugely underestimated for a long time," said Sima Adhya, senior technical officer at risk analysis firm Sciemus. "It’s a massive problem that the space industry needs to get a grip on."

"There was an incident where a speck of paint chipped the windscreen of a spacecraft," David Wade, space underwriter at Atrium Space Insurance in London, told Forbes.

Most commercial insured satellites operate in geosynchronous orbit, around 22,400 miles above the Earth, where there is hardly any debris, and onboard control ensures that collision risks are small. For these satellites, the main risks covered tend to be mechanical troubles, or a failure at launch, according to Ernst Steilen, head of space underwriting at Munich Re.

Wednesday's collision occurred much closer to Earth, at a level where the majority of satellites, belonging to research institutes or governments, aren't covered by insurance.

Underwriters have so far been unwilling to predict the impact that Wednesday's collision will have on the space insurance industry, which generates around $800.0 million a year. "It is too soon to tell if the recent collision is likely to affect insurance terms, as we do not yet understand the nature of the debris caused by the collision or the ultimate orbit of that debris," said Jeff Cassidy, chief operating officer of specialist insurer Global Aerospace "We will continue to base every policy on its individual risk characteristics and any risk of damage from debris of any origin is just one of the risks faced by in-orbit satellites."

Munich Re's Steilen agrees that the collision, if it remains a one off and doesn’t result in massive losses, is unlikely to have any immediate impact on the industry. "We have had a reminder of what can happened and will be tracking it closely in the future."

The satellite, belonging to Iridium Satellite LLC, collided with the Russian satellite about 500 miles above Siberia, around midday Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday. With increasing demand for satellite coverage for industry from shipping and mining, to Web sites such as Google Maps, lower space orbits are gradually becoming more crowded.

Shoichi Nakagawa faces questions about wobbly performance at G-7 meet as government announces economy shrank at 12.7% rate in fourth quarter.

It wasn't the biggest economic contraction in more than three decades that piqued the attention of Japan's media on Monday. It was the apparent drunken attempt of the country's finance minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, to respond to questions at a press conference in Rome following the end of a Group of Seven meeting that fueled chatter in Tokyo.

Eyes drooping and red-faced, Nakagawa slurred his replies and fumbled his answers to reporters in Italy's capital on Saturday. Greeting him back at work in Tokyo on Monday was unequivocal evidence that Japan's economy is the worse for wear. In the three months to the end of the year, the world's second-biggest economy shrank by an annualized rate of 12.7% as exports collapsed. (See "Japan Hits The Skids" and "Asia's Economic Dragons Wheezing")

In a sign of how consumers have shunned made-in-Japan products, Toyota Motor (nyse: TM - news - people ), the nation's leading manufacturer, expects to lose close to $5 billion this year compared with a profit of almost $7 billion a year earlier. (See "Moody's Puts The Boot Into Toyota") Toyota and the rest of the Japanese economy may be in for an even bumpier ride going forward.

"Everything indicates that Q1 will be worse. It's a very severe economic adjustment," said Glenn Maguire, chief Asia-Pacific economist for Societe Generale in Hong Kong. Making matters worse for Japan is the yen. As investors take refuge in the Japanese currency, its value against the dollar and other currencies has gained some 40% in recent months. That means "further retrenchment in capacity and labor," added Maguire, who predicts that average real GDP contraction in 2009 will be between 5% and 8%.

In Rome, Nakagawa, along with other G-7 finance ministers and central bank heads, agreed that the state of the world economy was dire, describing it in a statement as "severe." The group also committed itself to "act together using the full range of policy tools to support growth and employment and strengthen the financial sector.

Back in Tokyo, Nakagawa reportedly blamed his condition on having imbibed too much cough medicine. Speaking on television, one former prime minister, Yoshiro Hori, admonished Nakagawa for his Rome performance.

Nakagawa's boss, Prime Minister Taro Aso, is struggling to deliver on the G-7 commitment. Stimulus measures have been bogged down by political wrangling both within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and with the opposition Democratic Party Of Japan, which controls the upper chamber of Japan's parliament. With an approval rating dipping below 10% and a national election looming, the beleaguered prime minister, who promised that Japan would be the first industrialized nation to emerge from recession, may have to leave it to his successor to fix the economy.

The reality, reckons Societe Generale's Maguire, is that Japan will be "first in and last out," as a quarterly recovery is unlikely until the second half of 2010. With little hope to sustain it, reaching for the bottle may be the only way for some Japanese to dull the economic pain.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was greeted by more evidence of an economic chill in Japan, the first stop of her weeklong diplomatic sweep through Asia. Official data showed the Japanese economy shrank at the fastest pace in over three decades in the last quarter, throwing Tokyo stocks into the red. Other Asian markets didn't fare much better, on losses among Hong Kong banks, Australian miners and other exporters.

Japan's Nikkei 225 skidded 50.07 points, or 0.6%, to 7,729.33 in early afternoon trading, as the government said the economy shrank by 3.3% in the fourth quarter, in the biggest contraction since 1974 and the country's third consecutive quarterly contraction. Analysts had expected a 3.1% dip, based on a Reuters poll. Prime Minister Taro Aso's approval rating fell to 9.7%, according to a Nippon Television poll. Another stimulus package is in the works, but investors may not harbor great hope as the administration's first stimulus plan has been stymied by a deadlocked parliament.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - President Barack Obama has decided to launch a government task force for restructuring the struggling U.S. auto industry instead of naming a "car czar" with sweeping powers, a senior administration official said Sunday.

Obama is appointing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as his "designee" for overseeing auto bailout loans and as co-head of the new high-level panel together with White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, the official said.

But Obama, who took office on Jan. 20 and last week won congressional approval of a $787 billion economic stimulus program, has dropped the idea of having a single appointee empowered to handle the politically sensitive task of revamping America's once-mighty auto sector.

"There is no 'car czar,"' the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

There was no immediate word on when or how Obama, due to return to Washington on Monday after spending the long Presidents Day holiday weekend back home in Chicago, planned to unveil his strategy for dealing with the auto crisis.

But General Motors Corp (nyse: GM - news - people ) and Chrysler LLC, are required to submit new turnaround plans by Tuesday showing how they can be made viable after receiving $13.4 billion in emergency aid in the final weeks of the Bush administration.

President Barack Obama's economic team tried to keep Democratic allies negotiating the stimulus bill from limiting paychecks for executives at banks in need of a bailout. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and economic aide Lawrence Summers failed.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, inserted strict rules into the $787 billion economic stimulus package over the White House's objections. Dodd's limits on bankers' bonuses are significantly more aggressive than those sought by Obama or Geithner in recent days, with much fanfare.

Dodd, D-Conn., said the restrictions - an executive making $1 million a year in salary could receive only $500,000 in bonus money, for example - are necessary if Obama plans to ask Congress for more money to save the financial sector.

"It will never happen as long as the public perceives that there are people getting rich," Dodd said in an interview. "Save their pay or save capitalism."

That tone among Democrats flavored much of the discussion about how to write the stimulus bill, which the president could sign as early as Monday. Despite direct appeals from Geithner, Summers and White House officials, Democrats didn't budge, according to administration officials.

The Obama administration's proposed restrictions applied only to banks that receive "exceptional assistance" from the government. It set a $500,000 cap on pay for top executives and limited bonuses or additional compensation to restricted stock that could only be claimed after the firm had paid the government back.

The stimulus bill, however, sets executive bonus limits on all banks that receive infusions from the government's $700 billion financial rescue fund. The number of executives affected depends on the amount of government assistance they receive. But as a rule, top executives will be prohibited from getting bonuses or incentives except as restricted stock that vests only after bailout funds are repaid and that is no greater than one-third of the executive's annual compensation.

A parallel set of talks between Chrysler LLC and the UAW over similar concessions were continuing over the weekend but little progress had been made in the past week, a person briefed on those negotiations said.

The breakdown of talks at GM and the stalled negotiations at Chrysler come with just three days remaining until both automakers must submit new restructuring plans to the U.S. government as a condition of their $17.4 billion bailout.

At GM, the UAW negotiators walked away from the bargaining table because of differences over how to pay the health care costs of retirees. No high-level negotiations were underway as of Saturday afternoon, although some working-level discussions continued, the person familiar with the talks said.

"It doesn't seem like the stakeholders are really prepared to give a whole lot," said independent auto industry analyst Erich Merkle. "It's a high stakes game of poker right now."