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Federal prosecutors deciding whether to try Bonds again
Federal prosecutors are deciding whether Barry Bonds should stand trial again.
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Small Business <b>News</b>: Small Biz Social Media Tips
In recent weeks we've shared articles on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. Now it's time to look at how all these tools are.
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Google <b>News</b> Blog: New Google <b>News</b> for Opera Mini
While the Google News team has been hard at work redesigning our service for smartphones, we've also been thinking about our milllions of users around the world who access the web not from a smartphone, but from a feature phone, ...
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We’ve been hearing all kinds of Chatter that the next version of Final Cut Pro will debut in Vegas at NAB next week. Thing is, we hear this every year and Apple hasn’t really done a NAB properly in awhile. That’s OK, we’ll take that we can get.
Rumors are flying that Apple will be using the Vegas Supermeet to announce the next version of Final Cut Pro. Supposedly, Apple will be taking over the entire event for their announcement, cancelling all other sponsors, including AJA, Avid, Canon, BlackMagic, Autodesk and others, who were set to give presentations.
Philip Bloom just confirmed with me that Canon has canceled his appearance at the Supermeet. Canon was told last night that Apple has demanded ALL “lecturn” or stage time exclusively. Some sponsors who were not using presenters may continue to sponsor the Vegas event, but none of them will be presenting on the stage. I can’t imagine any news that would warrant this kind of “take-over” other than to announce and demonstrate the next full version of Final Cut Pro and possibly an entirely newly designed FCS4.
(UPDATE: Avid confirmed that Supermeet (Michael Horton) told them last night that their sponsorship had been cancelled. According to Avid, “Apple doesn’t want anyone to have stage time but them.”)
Who’s up for Vegas?
We heard the first concrete details about Apple’s all new Final Cut Pro coming during Spring this year, and recently some new information has come to light. Final Cut Studio expert Larry Jordan was one of the people at Apple’s meeting, demonstrating the upcoming upgrade to the professional film-making software.
Jordan can’t say much about the upgrade, due to an NDA with Apple, but he did say it is a “jaw-dropper.” Besides the “jaw-dropper” part, the thing we are taking most from his blog post is the fact that Apple allowed him to write it up. It appears that Apple already considers the software public knowledge. Afterall, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did tell a 9to5mac reader to buckle up for it.
Thanks to Charlie Sanchez
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- Apple says last Xserve orders shipping in April, here’s what’s next for XSAN (9to5mac.com)
- Nasdaq to cut Apple’s weighting in rebalancing (9to5mac.com)
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- iOS 5 pushed to the fall: major revamp, cloud-based, WWDC preview? (9to5mac.com)
Analyst Charlie Wolf with Needham & Company took a closer look at the prospect of a hypothetical "iPhone lite," to see if it would be in Apple's best interest to build such a product. A cheaper iPhone has been viewed as a strategy that would work to Apple's advantage in emerging markets like China.
In February, both Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple is working on a smaller and cheaper iPhone that it could sell contract-free. Soon after, The New York Times chimed in, and claimed that while Apple is not working on a smaller iPhone, it has explored opportunities in developing a cheaper handset.
Wolf largely agrees with the Times, and doesn't see a smaller iPhone with a new form factor as something that would be in Apple's best interest, even though it would be the easiest way to cut costs and created a cheaper handset.
"In our view, the iPhone would not be an iPhone if the display were, say, cut in half," he said. "Such a move would (dramatically) reduce the value of the iPod module for video viewing as well as the size of web sites accessed through the Safari browser. A smaller screen would also degrade the experience in using some applications, not to mention the possibility that some applications would probably have to be rewritten to accommodate a smaller screen."
iSuppli estimated that the 16GB iPhone 4, when it launched last June, carried a bill of materials of $188. The iPhone has an average selling price of $625 with a carrier subsidy, while gross margin is usually around 50 percent, suggesting that additional costs like assembly, software, testing, licenses and warrantees add up to $100 or more.
Ruling out the possibility of a smaller iPhone, Wolf said Apple could reduce internal storage from 16GB to about 4GB, but that would only reduce the bill of materials by $30 to about $157. By his estimation, such a handset would still have a total cost of $270.
"Apple would at best break even if it priced an iPhone Light at $250; and it would earn a modest 16% gross margin if it priced it at $300, which we regard as the high end of the range for a prepaid phone," Wolf wrote.
Gross margins of just 16 percent would be a number uncharacteristically low for Apple. For example, in its last quarterly results for the 2010 holiday buying season, Apple reported margins of 38.5 percent, or more than twice Wolf's estimate for a low-cost, no-contract iPhone.
"We suspect that the iPhone's designers and engineers have thought about this a lot more than we have so that the cost savings would be somewhat greater than we've estimated," Wolf said. "If, for example, the expenses incurred beyond the cost of components could be materially reduced, Apple might be able to earn a gross margin of 20% pricing the phone at $250 and 33% gross margin pricing it at $300."
The possibility of a cheaper iPhone with fewer features was hinted at by Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook earlier this year. Cook, in an interview with Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi, said Apple doesn't want its products to be "just for the rich."
Cook reportedly said that Apple is planning "clever things" to compete in the prepaid handset market. He also stated that Apple is "not ceding any market." He also referenced China, where Apple has found great success of late, and noted that it is a "classic prepaid market."
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Kevin’s post and David Glenn’s story are deeply troubling in so many aspects that it’s hard to pick out which ones are the worst. The popularity of the business major, the low work-demands made of students, the quirky assignments and exams . . . they add up to, well, what we get as documented in Academically Adrift. That is, low learning outcomes, little coordination between pedagogy and outcomes, and meager effort on the part of students.
But something else in the story bears highlighting, and it might go to the heart of the problems of the business major. In their analysis of CLA scores for undergraduates, Arum and Rooksa found that business majors score the lowest on writing-and-reasoning skills improvement while in the first two years of college.
A big problem, indeed, when set alongside another statement made by Glenn at the end of the piece: “According to national surveys, [employers] want to hire 22-year-olds who can write coherently, think creatively, and analyze quantitative data.” Note what comes first: the writing. We hear it in just about every survey I’ve seen which asks employers about problems or needs in the workplace. They always emphasize communication skills, particularly writing skills. In sum, businesses need competent writers who draft clear prose. Not PowerPoint slides, spread sheets, or Web sites alone, but prose for reports, correspondence, agreements, white papers, etc. Not collaborative composition only, but solitary composition, too.
That’s the reality, but in Glenn’s story, I found only one case in which the examination of writing quality was emphasized, the University of Viriginia’s business school.
Why doesn’t it come up all the time?
Obviously, because writing is a labor-intensive activity for student and for professor. Assign each student a 15-page white paper on some subject or another and the workload for everyone rises considerably. For the student, it means paying attention to punctuation, diction, transitions, and structure, not to mention pursuing one line of thought through 3,000 words. For the professor, it means grading punctuation, diction, transitions, and structure, not to mention one line of thought through 3,000 words.
It is precisely the kind of training that business majors need and employers prefer, but it looks just too darn onerous for students and for teachers. Even if students end up on the job writing more PowerPoints than long papers, the training in prose composition in school pays off.
We should guard against an assumption cited in the article that what people will do in the workplace should be replicated in the classroom. This is to align training and the thing you will eventually do too closely. Students should write papers that are longer than the things they will have to write in the workplace. They should spend more time alone than they will in the workplace. Training should always require practices that exceed the tasks that need to be handled later on.
If business school leaders wish to improve learning outcomes and raise the workplace readiness of graduates, they have a simple option: require a year-long composition course at the beginning of the major. That course should focus on prose and should minimize collaborative work.
The PPIC study Kolko co-authored sheds light on why historically California’s economy has grown on pace with the national economy even though it usually ranks low in surveys of states whose laws are favorable to business.
While the research suggests many factors that determine long-term economic growth lie beyond the reach of policy makers, Kolko cautioned that policy could still someday trump warm, sunny days on the Pacific coast.
“If California loses its ability to incubate and encourage fast growing industries to be here, that would be unfortunate” in the long term, she said.
Kolko identified two policies in particular, a simpler tax structure rather than a lower tax rate, and a lower share of government expenditure on welfare and transfer payments, as means of hastening economic expansion.
(© 2011 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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Fox <b>News</b> Reports That GWU Student's Suicide 'Tragically Coincides <b>...</b>
UPDATE: As of 4:30 p.m. EST, Fox has apparently pulled the article in question from their site.
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ABC <b>News</b> Exclusive: Pat Tillman's Mom Wants General Stanley <b>...</b>
ABC News' Jake Tapper reports: President Obama named retired General Stanley McChrystal to co-chair a White House commission on military families this week, but according to perhaps the most prominent military family of the last decade, ...
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