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At next week's mobile trade show in Barcelona you can find a program that measures how high you can throw a Nokia smartphone, an apt metaphor for Nokia's efforts to raise its game.
But gravity might not favor the world's biggest maker of cellphones, as the focus of the $169 billion industry shifts to software and services, the "mindshare" that is lifting nimble competitors such as iPhone maker Apple and Google.
For the first time, Nokia has opted out of the Mobile World Congress this year, another trend set by Apple, which eschews industry get-togethers in favor of its own, carefully choreographed events.
Nokia will host some meetings nearby, but is reported not to be planning any new phone launches. -
It seems to me unlikely that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab will be known to future generations of lawyers for generating any groundbreaking legal principle or issue. But when it comes to illuminating our public discourse about the "global war on terror," he is right up there with Clarence Earl Gideon, Ernesto Miranda or even Jose Padilla. His case presents in one tidy package virtually all the issues that arise from the role intelligence plays in this struggle and compels us to examine what the law requires and what it doesn't.
Author: stevewoda Page 6 of 13
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Many small businesses that deal with PayPal do so because they don't see any viable alternatives. In some cases, however, I wonder if these companies are really aware of the risks they are taking.
Do a little digging, and you will discover that PayPal's customer service record is nothing short of horrific. The company is notorious for quietly jacking up its transaction fees, and a small army of Web sites are dedicated to publicizing complaints about the service.
PayPal's pat response to such complaints reminds me of Lily Tomlin's spoof of The Phone Company: "We don't care. We don't have to."
For small businesses that rely upon PayPal, however, this is a deadly serious business. Many complaints involve cases where PayPal has frozen seller accounts without warning or explanation. These incidents can take weeks or months to sort out — and if a cash-strapped business doesn't survive the appeals process, well, that's just too bad. -
Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux kernel, has an absolute disdain for mobile phones. All of the ones he has purchased in the past, the man writes on his personal blog, ended up being "mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights" even though they were naturally all phones run on open source operating systems.
Things have changed now, he adds, now that he has caved and bought Google's Nexus One a couple of days ago.
Torvalds has owned a number of phones before, including Google's G1 device and 'one of the early China-only Motorola Linux phones', but it took for Google to add multi-touch capabilities to the Nexus One before he finally broke down and bought one from the company's web store.
And he's loving it:
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The Washington region was paralyzed by a blizzard that dumped more than two feet of heavy snow on the area by late Saturday, knocking out power for hundreds of thousands of people, toppling trees and reducing many streets to pedestrian pathways.
Almost 218,000 homes and business were without power at the outages’ peak, and many had no heat midday Saturday at the height of the storm. By late last night, about 140,000 were still in the dark. Pepco advised customers to seek other lodging, saying it could take days to restore power to everyone. Some residents abandoned their cold, dark houses and checked into hotels. Others were trapped on side streets as snowplows concentrated on keeping major arteries clear. -
For a company that makes no products, Acacia Research (ACTG) spends a lot of time fighting over patents in court. Acacia has filed at least 337 patent-related lawsuits in its 18 years. To make money—sales are expected to rise to $68.8 million this year, from $34.8 million in 2006—Acacia acquires patents from inventors and then seeks fees from companies that it says infringe on those patents. Because Acacia licenses technologies it doesn’t design or distribute, it is known as a “nonpracticing entity.”
Executives at many tech companies—and their investors—call Acacia and its peers a different name: “patent trolls.”
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Nice timing, Acacia Research Corporation. The mother of all patent trolls patent acquisition, development and licensing company, which was profiled in depth by BusinessWeek just two days ago, this morning announced that it has been awarded a total of $12.4 million in a patent infringement case against Yahoo.
On May 15th, 2009, a federal court jury decided that Yahoo's messenger program with IMVironments ¿ which revolves around interactive backgrounds that users can add to IM conversations ¿ infringes US Patent Number 6,205,432, filed by a trio of inventors and published back in 2001.
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Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has called for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming, according to a new audiotape released Friday.
In the tape, broadcast in part on Al-Jazeera television, bin Laden warned of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring “the wheels of the American economy” to a halt. -
As an online retailer, Web forms are your bread and butter. There’s no use putting effort into designing great product pages and getting your customers to the checkout with bulging shopping carts only to have them bail out because your checkout process sucks.
All businesses lose a percentage of customers during the checkout process; what percentage you lose depends on how badly your forms perform. Here are several ill-conceived practices that create bad checkout experiences — and how to avoid them.
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With the recent release of the Mojo software development kit, Palm is hoping to open the floodgates of application for its Palm Pre smartphone. But early impressions suggest webOS SDK won’t be as strong as Apple’s iPhone platform for high-end mobile gaming.
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It might seem an odd move for a company that relies on money from advertising. Yet AOL is reducing the number of ads it shows on its home page and some other Web sites it runs.
The maneuver is one of the changes new CEO Tim Armstrong, 38, has brought to the long-struggling Internet company since he took over AOL in April. The former Google Inc. executive was hired to recharge AOL and lead its spinoff from Time Warner Inc., undoing a legendarily disastrous deal.
To prepare for AOL’s rebirth as an independent company later in the year, Armstrong and other executives say they are trying to recapture elements of the culture AOL had when it was a startup — back when it was America Online and on its way to becoming the dominant provider of dial-up Internet access.
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After nearly eight months without a leader, the Tech Council of Maryland plans to announce Monday that it has tapped Renée M. Winsky, a current board member, as its new executive director.
Winsky, 46, spent the past nine years at the Maryland Technology Development Corp. — she has been president and executive director since 2007 — and has long been involved in the state's technology community. She previously worked at the Information Technology Association of America and the National League of Cities.
"I'm looking forward to getting back to my true association roots," she said last week. Winsky will start her new gig in September.
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It might seem an odd move for a company that relies on money from advertising. Yet AOL is reducing the number of ads it shows on its home page and some other Web sites it runs.
The maneuver is one of the changes new CEO Tim Armstrong, 38, has brought to the long-struggling Internet company since he took over AOL in April. The former Google Inc. executive was hired to recharge AOL and lead its spinoff from Time Warner Inc., undoing a legendarily disastrous deal.
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Nokia (NYSE: NOK) sold its Symbian Professional Services unit to Accenture for an undisclosed amount, the companies said Friday.
The unit handles product development and engineering consulting services for the Symbian operating system and its clients include cellular carriers, chip manufacturers, and handset makers. The 165 employees of the division will transfer to Accenture, and the deal is expected to close in September. -
On the Official Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Docs blog, Google posted an entry with the headline “Pardon our Dust.” This is Google’s way of saying that change is on the way, with a brand new interface due to appear on Google Docs in short order. Anything interesting? You betcha.
According to Google, the changes will take place over time, and not all at once. Google says that the small changes will be implemented over the coming weeks, with the final result being “a brand new shiny interface.” Oh, the rapture.
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As the recent financial crisis has showed so dramatically, networks exist everywhere. Global inter-linkage of loans and mortgages — which were intended to distribute risk — actually ended up spreading it far and wide. Similar network-based impacts are at work in fields as diverse as information security and supply chain management. But while networks create new risks, they also generate new opportunities, write Paul R. Kleindorfer, Yoram (Jerry) Wind and Robert E. Gunther in their new book, The Network Challenge: Strategy, Profit and Risk in an Interlinked World (Wharton School Publishing). In an interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Kleindorfer and Wind discuss the themes of many of the 28 essays in their book.
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In What You Don’t Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen (Wharton School Publishing), author Michael A. Roberto aims to help leaders identify problems before they become major disasters. He discusses why problems go undetected for so long, how to spot patterns across an organization and how to avoid the “isolation trap” that prevents senior executives from seeing problems that are festering beyond their control, among other topics. Roberto, a management professor at Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I., wrote an earlier book entitled, Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer. Below is an excerpt from a chapter in his current book.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
— Shunryu Suzuki, Japanese Zen priest
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Google just announced that Tasks will be the first feature to graduate from Gmail Labs to become a default feature for all Gmail users.
Gmail Labs, which launched about a year ago, holds a collection of experimental additions to Gmail that users can try out by enabling them within their Gmail’s settings. It also provides an interesting window into Google’s application development philosophy.
Tasks provides a to-do list within Gmail optimized for mobile access and integration with Google Calendar. Senior product manager Keith Coleman says the decision to add it to the main product was partly based on how many users had signed up to try it, and how many have continued to use it. Coleman adds that a handful of other Labs experiments will likely graduate in the near future. -
Gmail has had Gmail Labs for a while now. Gmail Labs are a great place to try out experimental Gmail features if you are so inclined. The mad scientists who are Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s engineers have cooked up an entirely new set of Labs, this time for the Google Calendar.
Google says it has been pleased with the response its Labs has seen in Gmail. There are tons of features in Gmail Labs for users to test out. I have quite a handful activated that have become essential to my Gmail experience.