Flightfox Lets the Crowd Find the Best Airfares

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Sunday, September 30, 2012

Flightfox Lets the Crowd Find the Best Airfares

By RANDALL STROSS

TRAVEL search sites have made it easy to find the lowest available fares ever since the Web’s early Jurassic period, when pioneers like Expedia and Travelocity opened shop. Many others, like Kayak and Hipmunk, have since joined in.

Travelers with complex travel plans may have noticed, however, that the search results aren’t necessarily consistent. This has created a business opportunity for Flightfox, a start-up company based in Mountain View, Calif., which uses a contest format to come up with the best fare that the crowd — all Flightfox-approved users — can find.

A traveler goes to Flightfox.com and sets up a competition, supplying information about the desired itinerary and clarifying a few preferences, like a willingness to “fly on any airline to save money” or a tolerance of “long layovers to save money.” Once Flightfox posts the contest, the crowd is invited to go to work and submit fares.

The contest runs three days, and the winner, the person who finds the lowest fare, gets 75 percent of the finder’s fee that the traveler pays Flightfox when setting up the competition. Flightfox says fees depend on the complexity of the itinerary; many current contests have fees in the $34-to-$59 range.

Travelers’ savings can be considerable. In a contest for a long, complex trip that began in Sydney, passed through Barcelona and then many South American destinations before returning to Sydney, the difference between the lowest fare, $6,538 a person, and the third-lowest was about $1,400. Why couldn’t every human searcher find the same fare that the winner did? The fact that the travelers specified 15 destinations for their four-month-long trip meant that no single search engine had all the needed information.

Flightfox asks travelers who have already found a good fare on their own to make clear at the outset that they will award the finder’s fee only if a better price is found. The site also encourages travelers to consider awarding a finder’s fee for flights that may not be less expensive but have fewer stops or shorter layovers.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

Fender Aims to Stay Plugged In Amid Changing Music Trends

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Sunday, September 30, 2012

Fender Aims to Stay Plugged In Amid Changing Music Trends

By JANET MORRISSEY

IN 1948, a radio repairman named Leo Fender took a piece of ash, bolted on a length of maple and attached an electronic transducer.

You know the rest, even if you don’t know you know the rest.

You’ve heard it — in the guitar riffs of Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Bruce Springsteen, Mark Knopfler, Kurt Cobain and on and on.

It’s the sound of a Fender electric guitar. Mr. Fender’s company, now known as the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, is the world’s largest maker of guitars. Its Stratocaster, which made its debut in 1954, is still a top seller. For many, the Strat’s cutting tone and sexy, double-cutaway curves mean rock ’n’ roll.

But this heart of rock isn’t beating quite the way it once did. Like many other American manufacturers, Fender is struggling to hold on to what it’s got in a tight economy. Sales and profits are down this year. A Strat, after all, is what economists call a consumer discretionary item — a nonessential.

More than macroeconomics, however, is at work here. Fender, based in Scottsdale, Ariz., is also being buffeted by powerful forces on Wall Street.

A private investment firm, Weston Presidio, controls nearly half of the company and has been looking for an exit. It pushed to take Fender public in March, to howls in the guitar-o-sphere that Fender was selling out. But, to Fender’s embarrassment, investors balked. They were worried about the lofty price and, even more, about how Fender can keep growing.

And that, really, is the crux of the matter. Times have changed, and so has music. In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, electric guitars powered rock and pop. Today, turntable rigs, drum machines and sampler synthesizers drive music like hip-hop. Electric guitars, huge as they are, have lost some of their old magic in this era of Jay-Z, Kanye West and “The Voice.”

Games like Guitar Hero have helped underpin sales, but teenagers who once might have hankered after guitars now get by making music on laptops. It’s worth remembering that the accordion was once the most popular instrument in America.

Granted, Fender is such a powerful brand that it can ride out the lean times. But sales of all kinds of musical instruments plunged during the recession, and they still haven’t recovered fully. Sales of all instruments in the United States totaled $6.5 billion last year, down roughly 13 percent from their peak in 2005, according to Music Trades, which tracks the industry.

Many of the guitars that are selling these days are cheap ones made in places like China — ones that cost a small fraction of, say, a $1,599 Fender Artist “Eric Clapton” Strat. Fender has been making its own lines of inexpensive guitars overseas for years, but the question is how the company can keep growing and compete profitably in a fast-moving, global marketplace. Its margins are already under pressure.

“What possible niche is left unexploited by Fender?” asks Jeffrey Bronchick, founder of Cove Street Capital, an investment advisory firm in El Segundo, Calif., and the owner of some 40 guitars, including four Fenders.

Another big player on the American music scene, Guitar Center, has already had financial strains. Like Fender, Guitar Center, the world’s largest chain of instrument retailers, is also involved with private equity. It’s controlled by Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s old firm.

Analysts say Guitar Center is crucial to Fender, accounting for roughly a sixth of Fender’s sales — and the ties between the two run deep. Fender’s chief executive, Larry Thomas, used to be the chief of Guitar Center. He sold the company to Bain at the top of the market in 2007 for $2.1 billion, including debt.

Guitar Center has been losing money since. Moody’s issued a junk rating of B2 on Guitar Center’s debt in October 2007, and has since downgraded the company two more times, most recently in November 2010, to Caa1.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

Meg Whitman’s Toughest Campaign: Retooling Hewlett-Packard

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Sunday, September 30, 2012

Meg Whitman’s Toughest Campaign: Retooling Hewlett-Packard

By QUENTIN HARDY

PALO ALTO, Calif.

IT’S not as easy being Meg Whitman as Meg Whitman might have expected.

At 56, Ms. Whitman, the eBay billionaire who spent a fortune unsuccessfully trying to become the governor of California, has found her Act III. She has been chief executive of Hewlett-Packard for a little more than a year, and many people are still waiting for her to get her message out about the place.

Here it is:

Meg Whitman believes in H.P., and believes that this company matters to Silicon Valley, to California, to the world. She believes that Wall Street doesn’t quite get it — doesn’t quite see the promise she sees. She believes that mobile devices, cloud computing and Big Data will re-energize H.P., a company that for a decade has grabbed more headlines for boardroom soap operas than for bold innovation.

“I believe in creative destruction,” Ms. Whitman says in a conference room near her executive cubicle.

Even, it seems, when the stakes include her company and reputation. In all likelihood, this is Ms. Whitman’s last great public performance. She became rich by building eBay, then spent more money than any candidate for public office in the nation’s history trying to become California’s governor. She was sometimes portrayed in that race as an aloof 1 percenter — as someone who pushed around subordinates, once literally, and who was unkind to her housekeeper, an illegal immigrant. “I left a little bruised,” Ms. Whitman, a Republican, says of the 2010 race she lost to Jerry Brown. “It was hard, it was personally very hard.”

So now Ms. Whitman is focusing her energy on H.P., the company founded by the tech legends William Hewlett and David Packard. Bill and Dave, as they are referred to at the company, spawned Silicon Valley. Last year, H.P. posted revenue of $127 billion. It employs 320,000 people directly, and easily that many again through a network of manufacturers and computer resellers across 170 countries.

Ms. Whitman has plenty of impressive-sounding stats at her fingertips. H.P., she says, employs thousands of people in Costa Rica, Houston and Boise, Idaho. “In India, we have 60,000 people,” she says. A new program for selling printer ink is in exactly 87 countries. Every 15 seconds, the company turns out 60 new printers, 30 personal computers and one powerful computer server. Still, she yearns for even more data, something closer to the command of the day-to-day process she had at eBay.

THE fact is, H.P. isn’t what it used to be. Next to Apple or Google, it looks like a bit of a loser. In the most recent quarter, as Apple soared to new heights, H.P.’s revenue fell 5 percent and its operating margins dwindled. Profit margins at I.B.M. and Apple are several times that of H.P. And H.P.’s share price, at just over $17 on Friday, is about where it was in 1995.

“It’s staggering,” says A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “This is now the cheapest big stock in the last 25 years. That reflects an industry belief that the company is going to decline.”

Ms. Whitman is impatient to move H.P. closer to a global computing explosion that is transforming the industry. Smartphones and tablets from Apple, Google and others are now flying into consumers’ hands worldwide. Those computers are tied via the Internet to cloud computing data centers operated by Amazon, Microsoft, and hundreds of multinational companies. Information from all the consumer devices, in addition to data from billions of sensors and Web-crawling robots, is crunched in these supercomputing clouds, creating a Big Data revolution full of business opportunities and dangers.

From Ms. Whitman’s high vantage, the trends of mobile, cloud and Big Data resolve into a single phenomenon: the creation and exploitation of Information Everywhere. H.P. makes consumer devices, in addition to servers for the cloud, sensor networks, and analysis software. Instead of standing at the confluence of the phenomenon, though, H.P. is on the sidelines, with most of the parts but none of the integration to make it a leader.

H.P. sometimes seems like a place of siloed relics, as quaint as the autographed picture of Herbert Hoover in the shrine that is Mr. Packard’s office (along with Mr. Hewlett’s, untouched since the day Mr. Packard left in 1993). The stock is down 24 percent since Ms. Whitman took over. H.P. spends $4 billion a year on marketing, and, according to an arm of the ad agency WPP, has one of the fastest-eroding brands among major companies.

So why did Ms. Whitman take the job? Part of the answer may be in her new slogan for the company: “Make it matter.” She plans to unveil her strategy to Wall Street analysts on Wednesday.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

When Banks Erase a Debt That Isn’t There

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Sunday, September 30, 2012

When Banks Erase a Debt That Isn’t There

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

GREETINGS, unhappy homeowners! Here’s some wonderful news:

“We are canceling the remaining amount you owe Chase!” says a letter that JPMorgan Chase sent recently to thousands of home loan borrowers. “You are approved for a full principal forgiveness of your Home Equity Account,” says another, from Bank of America.

Jackie Esposito, of Guilford, Conn., got a letter like that. But she wasn’t elated — because she doesn’t owe the money anymore. She and her husband filed for bankruptcy three years ago. The roughly $64,000 they owed Chase has been legally wiped out.

What’s going on?

Cast your mind back to February. Five of the nation’s big banks, including Chase and Bank of America, agreed to pay $25 billion to settle state and federal claims over questionable mortgage practices and promised to work harder to help borrowers who were in trouble. To prod the banks, the government said it would give them credits against the amounts they agreed to pay.

So, to the ire of customers who couldn’t get banks to work with them before, banks are now forgiving debts that no longer exist.

“When I got this letter that said they were going to relieve our debt, I just about fell over,” Ms. Esposito said last week. “You can’t forgive a debt that you’re legally unable to collect.”

Others have received similar letters about phantom debts. A borrower in Florida received word this month that Chase was erasing $190,065.10 of debt that had already been wiped out. Bank of America told a Virginia resident that a $231,767 home equity loan was being forgiven, even though the debt was discharged last May.

Neil Crane is a lawyer in Hamden, Conn., who represented Ms. Esposito and her husband in their bankruptcy. He says four of his other clients have recently received letters from banks claiming to forgive discharged debt.

“I never thought in my wildest dreams that the banks would do this properly,” Mr. Crane said last week. “But I think it’s really wrong to be foreclosing on mortgages you don’t own and relinquishing debt you don’t own.”

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

Measuring the Impact of Impact Investing - Wealth Matters

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Saturday, September 29, 2012

Measuring the Impact of Impact Investing - Wealth Matters

By PAUL SULLIVAN

ALL philanthropists want their donations to mean something, be it for a new wing for a hospital or to finance a program aimed at doing social good. Increasingly, though, philanthropists are looking for a way to measure the impact of their dollars.

There is certainly a lot of interest in impact investing — essentially investing money in an organization, either profit-making or nonprofit, with the expectation that it will generate a social benefit and perhaps a financial return. But people who embrace impact investing as the future of serious philanthropy often seem to me like scolds. Shouldn’t people be able to give away their money however they want?

Sure, you get a tax break for making a charitable donation, and some advisers to philanthropists argue this means you have a responsibility to give your money away wisely. The same could hold true for people making smaller donations.

Still, I had an interest in understanding impact investing better and was eager to sit down with Matt Bannick, managing partner of the Omidyar Network, an organization started by the founder of eBay that makes grants and investments in groups focused on economic and social change.

Mr. Bannick’s visit to New York coincided with the Clinton Global Initiative, an annual conference that has gained a reputation for encouraging people to make and fulfill bold promises about social change. Mr. Bannick and Paula Goldman, a director at the Omidyar Network, wanted to talk about a series of blog posts on the future of impact investing that they have written for the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Their posts argue that impact investors should focus less on individual enterprises and more on entire sectors, like education or mobile technologies. It is a lofty idea, and I wanted to know how it could really be done.

Mr. Bannick pointed to Bridge International Academies, a Kenyan group that has created a “school in a box” that can be set up inexpensively in poor areas. Omidyar invested $1.8 million in 2009, and the group has built 83 schools, each of which cost less than $40,000 to build. Each one educates 343 students on average at a tuition of $4 a month.

“Education is generally where there should be sector-level change,” he said. “Bridge can scale up and affect millions. The real breakthrough is if others say, ‘How do we bring this to Nepal or Cameroon?’ ”

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

When Non-Driving Factors Affect Auto Insurance Premiums

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Saturday, September 29, 2012

When Non-Driving Factors Affect Auto Insurance Premiums

By ANN CARRNS

Automobile insurers may use factors unrelated to driving, like education and occupation, in determining rates.

Now, a consumer group is urging state insurance commissioners to restrict insurers' ability to use those factors, arguing that the result has been unfairly high rates for lower-income drivers. Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the Consumer Federation of America, said in a call this week with reporters that premiums should mainly reflect factors like accidents, speeding tickets and miles driven.

The federation analyzed auto insurance premiums quoted on the Web sites of the five largest insurers (State Farm, Allstate, Geico, Progressive and Farmer's) to price minimum liability coverage in five cities. Using an example of coverage for a 35-year-old woman with a good driving record, the study obtained quotes while varying characteristics like marital status, education level, occupation, home ownership and gaps in insurance coverage. Her driving record was the same in all instances.

The group found that in most cases, annual premiums were much lower if the woman was a married homeowner with a college degree, a professional job and continuous insurance coverage. In four of the examples, the premiums fell by at least 68 percent.

Premiums tended to be high if the woman was single, rented in a moderate-income area, had a high school degree, worked as a bank teller or clerical worker and had a gap in insurance coverage.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

Spain Needs $76 Billion to Recapitalize Its Banks, Audit Finds

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Saturday, September 29, 2012

Spain Needs $76 Billion to Recapitalize Its Banks, Audit Finds

By RAPHAEL MINDER

MADRID — Spain’s ailing banking industry could need as much as 59.3 billion euros, or $76.4 billion, in additional capital, according to an independent banking assessment published on Friday. The report paves the way for Madrid to request bank rescue loans that European finance ministers have agreed to extend.

The number was within the range of previous estimates and well below the potential 100 billion euros, or $128.8 billion, in bailout money that Spain negotiated with other euro zone countries in June.

And of the 14 banks assessed by the consulting firm Oliver Wyman, half are not in need of emergency funds. These include Santander, BBVA and La Caixa, the country’s three largest financial institutions.

Presenting the report, Fernando Jiménez Latorre, the Spanish secretary of state for the economy, said at a news conference that Spain would probably soon request about 40 billion euros, roughly $50 billion, of the European bailout offer. The audit, he said, should end the debate among investors about whether the Spanish banking sector can survive the consequences of a decade of reckless property lending. After Spain’s real estate bubble burst in 2008, many of its banks found themselves holding growing numbers of loans in or near default.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

Carmakers Try to Figure Out the New Generation

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Saturday, September 29, 2012

Carmakers Try to Figure Out the New Generation

By JACK EWING

PARIS — The digital generation is apathetic about cars. And that’s a problem for automakers.

Among car companies, which are displaying their latest products at the Paris Motor Show now under way, there is a growing recognition that young people may simply not care about cars as much as their elders. Smartphones now rival automobiles as the default symbol of adulthood, and the portals to the world beyond home and school. Electronic technology competes ever more for the younger generation’s disposable income.

As a result, in Paris automakers seem to spend more time talking about how well their cars interact with an iPhone than they do about engine performance. Connectivity is the new horsepower.

“Before we talked about steering, ride and all those elements,” said Gunnar Herrmann, vice president for quality at Ford of Europe. “You could argue those are dropping down in importance. Connectivity is getting more important.”

That means not only docks for smartphones but also technology like voice recognition to allow devices to be used while driving, or Internet radios that can stay tuned to the hometown station even when hundreds of miles away. Audi showed a concept car in Paris with onboard Wi-Fi so that passengers could remain connected while on the road.

In essence, for the generation of mobile apps, carmakers are offering app-mobiles.

“I think it’s true that the generation coming up now, who will be the car buyers for the next 20 years, are fairly unique,” said Douglas C. Speck, senior vice president for marketing and sales at Volvo. “They grew up in a world where computers and cellphones and connectivity all came together at the same time.”

Few auto executives are ready to concede that young people will not want actual cars.

“‘They like iPhones and iPods more than they like cars’ — you hear that,” said Ralf D. Speth, chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover, which is undergoing a renaissance due to investment from its new owner, Tata Motors of India. But, he said in an interview here, “everyone still needs to get from A to B.”

There is a consensus, though, that younger buyers will want to get from A to B in a different kind of car. It must be more stylish. Performance is still important, but it must come wrapped in technology that appears more environmentally responsible.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

Australians Surge in Quest to Build Quantum Computer

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Saturday, September 29, 2012

Australians Surge in Quest to Build Quantum Computer

By JOHN MARKOFF

Competing teams of Australian scientists have given that country a significant lead in an increasingly intense international competition to build a working quantum computer.

In an article that appeared on Thursday in the journal Nature, a team of Australian and British scientists, led from the University of New South Wales, reported that they had successfully constructed one of the basic building blocks of modern quantum computing by relying on manufacturing techniques now used by the modern semiconductor industry.

Quantum computing will potentially lead to a new generation of supercomputers that are not intended to replace today’s machines but will instead open new computing vistas, from drug and material design to code breaking, by offering speed to address a new class of problems.

“We are used to designing cars and airplanes with computers,” said Andrew Dzurak, a physicist who is director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility and lead researcher on the latest advance. “Imagine if you could start building your molecule or your material on a computer and then completely simulate its behavior.”

The basic building blocks of quantum computers are quantum bits, or “qubits.” Unlike today’s digital computers, which process information in a binary fashion based on logic states of “on” and “off,” a qubit can for brief periods represent multiple states simultaneously. Potentially, this means it is possible to tackle vast new problems by performing parallel computations using a relatively small set of qubits — perhaps as few as several hundred. The advance by Dr. Dzurak’s team involves placing a single electron — embedded in a silicon chip — in a “quantum state,” and then repeatedly measuring the state.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

F.C.C. Backs Plan on Reclaiming Spectrum for a Wireless Auction

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Saturday, September 29, 2012

F.C.C. Backs Plan on Reclaiming Spectrum for a Wireless Auction

By EDWARD WYATT

WASHINGTON — The government took a big step on Friday to aid the creation of new high-speed wireless Internet networks that could fuel the development of the next generation of smartphones and tablets, and devices that haven’t even been thought of yet.

The five-member Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved a sweeping, though preliminary, proposal to reclaim public airwaves now used for broadcast television and auction them off for use in wireless broadband networks, with a portion of the proceeds paid to the broadcasters.

The initiative, which the F.C.C. said would be the first in which any government would pay to reclaim public airwaves with the intention of selling them, would help satisfy what many industry experts say is booming demand for wireless Internet capacity.

Mobile broadband traffic will increase more than thirtyfold by 2015, the commission estimates. Without additional airwaves to handle the traffic, officials say, consumers will face more dropped calls, connection delays and slower downloads of data.

The F.C.C. will issue proposed rules for what it calls incentive auctions — the sale of airwaves that are voluntarily given up by broadcasters in exchange for a portion of the auction proceeds.

A proposal detailing the program will be released next week, officials said.

The commission will seek public comments over the coming months.

“In this flat, competitive world, capital and talent can flow anywhere,” Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, said before the vote. “We’re in a global bandwidth race. It’s similar to the space race in that success will unleash waves of innovation that will go a long way toward determining who leads our global economy in the 21st century.”

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

T.S.A. Is Finding More Guns at Airport Security Checkpoints

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Saturday, September 29, 2012

T.S.A. Is Finding More Guns at Airport Security Checkpoints

By JOE SHARKEY

The list of potentially lethal weapons was certainly eye-opening: 47 guns (38 of them loaded, including six with rounds in their chambers), three inert hand grenades, supplies of black powder, hunting knives, timing fuses and a sword.

Then, consider that the list was compiled by the Transportation Security Administration, of weapons found in airline travelers’ carry-on bags in the seven days that ended on Sept. 20.

In fact, the T.S.A. says the number of guns found at airport security checkpoints has been steadily rising for the last couple of years. Through Friday, 1,105 guns have been found this year, a pace that is higher than last year’s. In 2011, the total was 1,320, up from 1,123 in 2010, the agency says.

Security experts attribute the increase to two factors: a rise in gun sales and the sharp growth of so-called right-to-carry laws across the country that significantly relax regulations on carrying guns in many areas of public life, from colleges to hospitals.

Invariably, according to the T.S.A., travelers at airports with guns in their carry-on bags say they simply forgot they had them. “It’s almost always inadvertent rather than intentional,” said David Castelveter, a spokesman for the agency

Like other professionals in security, law enforcement and firearms safety, Mr. Castelveter was baffled by how anyone could forget that they were carrying a gun. “I’m a Vietnam vet, and when I went through training I was taught that my gun was my best friend — and God forbid you should ever lose sight of that fact. I would never, ever not know that I have a gun in my bag.”

Yet that was the exactly the excuse offered by a 27-year-old flight attendant who was stopped at a checkpoint at the Philadelphia airport on Sunday. The flight attendant, arriving for work on a US Airways flight, had a valid handgun permit — but of course, not a permit to carry it on an airplane. As it routinely does in such cases, the T.S.A. notified local law enforcement. A Philadelphia police officer who responded tried to unload the 38-caliber handgun weapon but instead accidentally fired it. No one was hurt, and the flight attendant was issued a summary citation for disorderly conduct.

It could have seemed like a Keystone Kops episode. Instead, it occurred as air travel has become increasingly tense. The potential for trouble posed by prohibited guns on crowded airplanes is obvious, even beyond any overt issues of terrorism or premeditated crime.

Except in rare instances where T.S.A. officials believe the Federal Bureau of Investigation needs to be notified, local law enforcement officials usually handle reports of guns at airport checkpoints.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

Apple Apologizes for Misstep on Maps

The following is an excerpt from an article in:

The New York Times

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Apple Apologizes for Misstep on Maps 

By NICK WINGFIELD and BRIAN X. CHEN 

IPhone users grew more annoyed all week. When they used Apple’s new mobile maps, they found nonsensical routes and misplaced landmarks. Bloggers and talk-show hosts mocked the sometimes bizarre errors. 

Nine days after the maps’ release, the Washington Monument was still on the wrong side of the street. But something else changed. Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, released an apologetic letter to customers on Friday, making the remarkable suggestion that they try alternative map services from rivals like Microsoft and Google while Apple improves its own maps. “We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers, and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better,” Mr. Cook wrote. 

The map problems were an embarrassing misstep for a company that strives for perfection in its products and, in the eyes of consumers, often gets pretty close to the mark. Its track record in delivering quality is one reason Apple is now the most valuable public company in the world. 

Apple executives have tried to explain their move into maps by saying that the company could no longer afford to rely on Google, its former map provider and growing rival, for such a crucial function. Many analysts and technology executives agree that this was the right move for the long term. But Apple appears to have rushed its map service out prematurely, even though it could have continued to rely on Google until next year. 

The outcry shows how map services, which Apple treated as an afterthought when it built the first iPhone, have become critical tools for millions of people. And the company’s stumble fits in with its pattern of bungling services that rely heavily on the Internet. 

Apple has a reputation for obsessive attention to detail in its hardware and software products, down to the beveled edges of the iPhone 5 and the shade of the icons on its screen. But it has stubbed its toe again and again when it comes to releasing reliable, well-designed Internet services. Its less proud moments include Ping, a social network for music that never took off; MobileMe, an error-plagued service for synchronizing data between devices; and, more recently, Siri, the voice-activated virtual assistant that is often hard of hearing. 

The company’s weakness in this area could become a bigger problem over time as smartphones become more intimately tied to information and software on the Internet — a field where Google, which makes the competing Android phone software, has the home-turf advantage. 

“I always felt if you had to name an Achilles’ heel at Apple, it’s Internet services,” said Andrew Borovsky, a former Apple product designer who worked on MobileMe and now runs his own design firm in New York. “It’s clearly an issue.” 

An Apple spokeswoman, Natalie Kerris, declined to comment. 

Some have sought to pin the blame for the maps debacle on a relaxing of standards under Mr. Cook, who was elevated from the No. 2 position at Apple just over a year ago. He took over shortly before the death of Steven P. Jobs, a notorious perfectionist known to shelve products that did not pass muster. 

But numerous interviews with former Apple employees in the wake of the maps controversy made it clear that Mr. Jobs and other executives rarely paid as much attention to Internet services as they did to the devices for which Apple is best known. Nor did they show the kind of consistent foresight in this area that has served the company so well in designing hardware and software. 

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

U.K. Office of Fair Trading Approves SAP Acquisition of Ariba, Inc.

Press release:

U.K. Office of Fair Trading Approves SAP Acquisition of Ariba, Inc.

September 28, 2012 | SAP - Cloud Computing

WALLDORF, Germany and SUNNYVALE, Calif. - SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) and Ariba, Inc. (Nasdaq: ARBA) today announced that the UK Office of Fair Trading has advised it will not refer the acquisition of Ariba by SAP to the UK Competition Commission. SAP and Ariba anticipate completing the acquisition at the beginning of the fourth quarter of calendar year 2012 after receiving clearance from the U.S. Department of Justice, the last remaining regulatory condition for the transaction.

For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom.

About Ariba, Inc.
Ariba, Inc. is the world’s business commerce network. Ariba combines industry-leading cloud-based applications with the world's largest web-based trading community to help companies discover and collaborate with a global network of partners. Using the Ariba® Network, businesses of all sizes can connect to their trading partners anywhere, at any time from any application or device to buy, sell and manage their cash more efficiently and effectively than ever before. Companies around the world use the Ariba Network to simplify inter-enterprise commerce and enhance the results that they deliver. Join them at: www.ariba.com

About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 195,000 customers (includes customers from the acquisition of SuccessFactors) to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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Oracle Press Release

Oracle Introduces Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle E-Business Suite for Mission-Critical Environments

Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4-Based Solution Costs Up to 56 Percent Less Upfront Than IBM and HP

Redwood Shores, Calif. – September 28, 2012

News Facts

Oracle today announced the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle E-Business Suite.

Designed, tuned, tested and fully documented, the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle E-Business Suite is based on Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4, Oracle Solaris and Oracle VM Server for SPARC, and is ideal for customers looking to modernize their mission-critical Oracle E-Business Suite environments, lower operating expenses and maximize user productivity.

The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle E-Business Suite can deliver significant cost savings versus both new and existing hardware infrastructure.

Up to 56 percent lower acquisition cost versus new IBM POWER7 and HP Superdome2-based configurations(1).

Up to 40 percent lower five-year TCO when consolidating existing IBM and HP infrastructure, while reducing rackspace footprint up to 73 percent(2).

The new solution helps customers meet service level agreements (SLAs). A half-rack SPARC SuperCluster easily supports hourly throughput of approximately 200,000 Oracle Financials transactions with 2,000 concurrent users in the application tier domain with 80 percent additional capacity available for higher loads or further consolidation.

The new solution also helps expedite Oracle E-Business Suite deployments by up to 5x using its tested, documented sizing guides and High Availability best practices(3).

The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle E-Business Suite will be demonstrated at Oracle Open World, September 30 – October 4, in DEMOgrounds pod S-101, demo #3248.

It will also be discussed in more detail in “Accelerate Oracle E-Business Suite Deployment with SPARC SuperCluster” on October 1, at 12:15 pm, Moscone West, Room 2001.

Oracle Hardware and Software Engineered Together Delivers Better Performance, Helps Streamline Operations

Customers can further enhance their Oracle E-Business Suite and other application environments using the Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery, which provides end-to-end data protection and faster backup and recovery via the SPARC SuperCluster’s native high performance networking. It also provides virtually unlimited scalability and no-single points of failure with a flexible multi-tier architecture to meet SLAs as data capacity grows.

Additionally, using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c customers can manage and monitor their infrastructure with a single tool, streamlining management and simplifying operations.

Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services and Oracle Premier Support Services can also help shorten time to value, providing mission critical support for Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade and consolidation projects.

Supporting Quotes

“The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle E-Business Suite delivers high volume batch and OLTP performance with mission critical availability and disaster recovery for Oracle E-Business Suite environments, while reducing risk and enabling significant savings in TCO,” said Ganesh Ramamurthy, vice president of engineering, Oracle. “Built on the SPARC SuperCluster, our newest solution takes advantage of Oracle hardware and software engineered together to deliver the high performance and availability needed for business-critical applications.”

"The major benefits of the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle E-Business Suite to us are better flexibility, reduced costs and also reduced implementation timeline for the project,” said Hamid Ben Daas, Deputy Head of IT Operations, Accor. “It was then much easier to provide disaster recovery for our solution and our application."

Supporting Resources

Oracle Optimized Solutions

Solution Brief: Modernize Global Oracle E-Business Suite Environments

SPARC SuperCluster

Oracle Solaris on OTN

Oracle VM Server for SPARC

Oracle Hardware on Facebook, Twitter

Connect with Oracle Solaris via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

Oracle OpenWorld 2012

Join us for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 San Francisco. Register to attend.

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About Oracle

Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit http://www.oracle.com/.

Trademarks

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

This document is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into a contract or agreement.

Footnotes

(1) Comparison based on current published list pricing of a half rack SPARC SuperCluster solution: one SPARC SuperCluster half-rack with eight 3.0 GHz SPARC T4 processors, eight channels, eight cores each with built in storage (36 × 600GB) and one Exadata Storage module versus IBM configuration example of the IBM POWER 780: one IBM Power 780 with eight 3.8 GHz POWER7 processors, 1 channel, 8 cores, and 512GB memory and IBM storage DS8700 (384 × 146GB FC, one base cabinet and one expansion cabinet) and HP Superdome2: two Superdome2 each with sixteen 1.73 GHz Itanium 9350 processors, two channels, eight cores, and 1TB memory with HP EVA8000 storage (182 × 300 GB FC, one base cabinet and one expansion cabinet). Actual deployments and configurations will vary.

(2) Comparison based on occupied rack space and current published list pricing of a half rack SPARC SuperCluster solution (one SPARC SuperCluster half-rack with eight 3.0 GHz SPARC T4 processors, eight channels, eight cores each with built in storage (36 × 600GB) and one Exadata Storage module versus IBM POWER p595: two IBM Power 595 each with eight 5 GHz POWER6 processors, four channels, eight cores, and 512GB memory with IBM storage DS6000 (192 × 300GB drives, 12 enclosures) and HP Superdome2 (two Superdome2 each with sixteen 1.73GHz Itanium 9350 processors, two channels, eight cores, and 1TB memory with HP EVA8000 storage (182 × 300 GB FC, one base cabinet and one expansion cabinet). Actual deployments and configurations will vary.

(3) Comparison based on Oracle internal testing of the number of days required to deploy Oracle E-Business Suite using the Oracle Optimized Solution versus a standard new installation: Hardware including servers, storage, data center switches, corporate network, OS and virtualization; Oracle E-Business Suite installation including app tier and Oracle Database plus patches, auto config, customizations and cloning; Solution tuning including Oracle E-Business Suite OLTP tuning, Oracle Database tuning for OLTP and batch, network and OS tuning and database partitioning; HA/DR implementation including HA software, cloning and failover testing.

Oracle Press Release

CRM Pavilion to Showcase Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service Integrations at Oracle® OpenWorld 2012

CRM Partners Deliver Innovation with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service

Redwood Shores, CA – September 28, 2012

News Facts

Back by popular demand, Oracle will host an Oracle® CRM Pavilion at Oracle OpenWorld. The Pavilion will showcase a select group of independent software vendor partners (ISVs) and system integrators (SI’s) that have integrated their solutions with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service, demonstrating commitment to the current and future Oracle CRM product direction.

CRM ISVs and SIs will be on hand to demonstrate integration with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service, discuss concepts and show customers how to leverage integration capabilities to make the most of their CRM deployment.

The CRM Pavilion is located at Moscone West Hall, Booth 3841, directly across from DEMOgrounds.

CRM Partners Deliver Added Value

Oracle and its partners collaborate on product integrations, leveraging domain expertise to create demonstrable integrations that address customer needs.

Select ISVs that integrate to Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service bring unique value to complement Oracle CRM. They include:

ActivePrime (Real time and Batch Data Quality Tools)*

BigMachines (Configuration, Pricing, and Quote Generation)*

Box (Enterprise Content Collaboration)

CallidusCloud (Cloud Based CPQ and Sales Productivity Solutions)

Clicktools (Surveys, Call Scripts and Webforms Integrated with CRM)

InsideSales.com (Phone Dialer and Lead Management Software)*

InsideView (Sales Intelligence, Social CRM and Sales 2.0 Solutions)*

Eloqua (Marketing Automation and Revenue Performance Management)*

Marketo (Marketing Automation and Sales Effectiveness)*

Nuance Communications (Voice and Language Solutions)*

PerspecSys (Cloud Data Encryption and Tokenization)

Revegy (Collaborative Sales Planning & Execution Software)*

Riva CRM Integration (Server-side and Cloud Synchronization to Exchange)*

White Springs (Embedded Learning and Training Methodologies)*

Xactly Corporation (Sales Compensation Management)*

*Partners showcasing Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service integration.

In addition to the above ISVs, the Pavilion will also host system integrators who have worked with key CRM ISVs to deploy combined solutions, including:

CRMIT Solutions (Global CRM Solutions Provider for Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service)

Eagle Creek Software Services (Specialist in Implementations, Upgrades, Integration and Testing Oracle Fusion CRM)

WIPRO (Global IT Services, Consulting and Outsourcing services provider)

Supporting Quotes

“The CRM Pavilion is the best way to see the latest integrations for Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service that our partners bring to our customers,” said Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President of Oracle CRM.  “Working closely with these partners has led to many customer successes and product innovations that solve very complex requirements and we're pleased to showcase them at Oracle OpenWorld.”

“As a long-time Gold level member in Oracle PartnerNetwork, White Springs has seen the benefits of delivering tightly integrated joint solutions that generate strong business value to our customers,” said Gary White, CEO, White Springs. "We are excited to participate in the CRM Pavilion at OpenWorld, demonstrating our integration with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service- the new standard in CRM."

Supporting Resources

Join us for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 San Francisco.  Register to attend.

Oracle Fusion CRM

Oracle CRM On Demand

Oracle OpenWorld 2012

Oracle OpenWorld Pavilions

Oracle CRM Activities at OpenWorld

Connect with the Oracle Partner community at OPN on Facebook, OPN on LinkedIn, OPN on YouTube and OPN on Twitter

Oracle Validated Integrations

Oracle OpenWorld Blog

About Oracle

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's most complete, open, and integrated business software and hardware systems company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

About Oracle OpenWorld

Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco is the most important educational and networking event of the year for Oracle technologists, customers, and partners. This information technology event is dedicated to helping businesses optimize existing systems and understand upcoming technology breakthroughs. The conference, which draws more than 50,000 attendees from over 144 countries, offers more than 2,500 educational sessions, 400 product demos, exhibitions from 450 partners and customers showcasing applications, middleware, database, server and storage systems, industries, management and infrastructure – all engineered for innovation. Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is being held September 30-October 4 at The Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information or to register, please visit www.oracle.com/openworld. Watch Oracle OpenWorld keynotes, sessions and more live on YouTube. Join the Oracle OpenWorld discussion on Twitter, Facebook and the Oracle OpenWorld Blog.

About Oracle PartnerNetwork
Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized is the latest version of Oracle's partner program that provides partners with tools to better develop, sell and implement Oracle solutions. OPN Specialized offers resources to train and support specialized knowledge of Oracle products and solutions and has evolved to recognize Oracle's growing product portfolio, partner base and business opportunity. Key to the latest enhancements to OPN is the ability for partners to differentiate through Specializations. Specializations are achieved through competency development, business results, expertise and proven success. To find out more visithttp://www.oracle.com/partners.

Oracle Press Release

Oracle’s PeopleSoft Customers Showcase Success at Oracle OpenWorld

Strong Presence of PeopleSoft Customers at Oracle OpenWorld Illustrates PeopleSoft Momentum and Oracle’s Commitment to PeopleSoft

Redwood Shores, Calif. – Sept. 28, 2012

News Facts

Oracle OpenWorld 2012 will include over 25 Oracle customers sharing their Oracle’s PeopleSoft success stories, along with Oracle-delivered PeopleSoft roadmap content, and PeopleSoft partner presentations.

Oracle’s dedicated PeopleSoft development team will showcase rich new planned features and functions included in the planned upcoming PeopleSoft release, new planned mobile solutions, new planned solutions that revolutionize how customers maintain their PeopleSoft applications, streamlining PeopleSoft lifecycle management and reducing total cost of ownership.

Together, these sessions demonstrate strong continued momentum of PeopleSoft in both human capital management (HCM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) and of Oracle’s commitment to PeopleSoft.

PeopleSoft customers have been quick to adopt the latest version of the application suite, with nearly two-thirds of all PeopleSoft customers either on or deploying PeopleSoft 9.1.

In addition, there have been more than 200 net-new PeopleSoft customers each year since introducing PeopleSoft 9.1, demonstrating strong growth.

The rich PeopleSoft experience at Oracle OpenWorld includes:

More than 25 PeopleSoft customer presenters sharing their PeopleSoft successes, including: CBRE, Dell, First Data, Kaiser Permanente and Nationwide.

Over 170 content sessions focusing on PeopleSoft.

13 dedicated PeopleSoft demo stations showcasing key capabilities included in Oracle’s planned next release of PeopleSoft, including a new slate of mobile applications for PeopleSoft designed to work on both tablets and smartphones.

A hands-on lab to gain real world experience with new planned features within Oracle's PeopleSoft PeopleTools.

More than 25 exhibitors highlighting their PeopleSoft offerings and the strength of the PeopleSoft ecosystem.

PeopleSoft Customers Highlight Their Successes in Oracle OpenWorld Sessions

Oracle OpenWorld attendees will learn how Nationwide successfully launched Oracle’s PeopleSoft eCompensation 9.1 and shifted from 4,000 managers using numerous custom salary tools to an automated and integrated process for modeling and submitting salary changes.

CBRE will tell Oracle OpenWorld attendees how it is successfully using Oracle’s PeopleSoft Human Capital Management 9.1 to manage its worldwide operations and support their global expansion which currently includes the deployment of PeopleSoft Global Payroll in nine Asian countries.

Audience members at the University of Texas System’s Oracle OpenWorld session will hear how the University is using the profile management capabilities in Oracle’s PeopleSoft Human Capital Management as the foundation for a complete and integrated talent management solution.

For a full list of PeopleSoft sessions, presenters and demos, please see the PeopleSoftFocus On Documents.

Supporting Quotes

“CBRE was happy to share our experience migrating several regional PeopleSoft instances into a single instance on the current PeopleSoft 9.1 release. PeopleSoft is enabling us to effectively manage our worldwide operations and support our global expansion,” said Kiran Jalakam, director, HRIS, CBRE.

“On behalf of the many large enterprise customers that Cognizant’s strong and growing PeopleSoft practice works with, we welcome Oracle’s investment and new capabilities in the next planned version of PeopleSoft. The breadth and depth of information that we are seeing at Oracle OpenWorld will enable us to help our customers both understand and realize the business value they can achieve through PeopleSoft 9.2,” said Ronan O’Flaherty, Assistant Vice President, Enterprise Application Services, Cognizant.

Supporting Resources

Focus On Document

A welcome to Oracle OpenWorld’s PeopleSoft attendees from Paco Aubrejuan, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle’s PeopleSoft Applications

Oracle OpenWorld 2012

Join us for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 San Francisco. Register to attend.

Oracle’s PeopleSoft Applications

Oracle PeopleSoft Webcasts YouTube Channel

PeopleSoft Apps Strategy Blog

About Oracle OpenWorld

Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco is the most important educational and networking event of the year for Oracle technologists, customers, and partners. This information technology event is dedicated to helping businesses optimize existing systems and understand upcoming technology breakthroughs. The conference, which draws more than 50,000 attendees from over 140 countries, offers more than 2,100 educational sessions, 400 product demos, exhibitions from 450 partners and customers showcasing applications, middleware, database, server and storage systems, industries, management and infrastructure – all engineered for innovation. Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is being held September 30-October 4 at The Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information or to register, please visit www.oracle.com/openworld. Watch Oracle OpenWorld keynotes, sessions and more live on YouTube. Join the Oracle OpenWorld discussion on Twitter, Facebook and the Oracle OpenWorld Blog.

About Oracle Applications

Over 65,000 customers worldwide rely on Oracle's complete, open and integrated enterprise applications to achieve superior results. Oracle provides a secure path for customers to benefit from the latest technology advances that performance. Oracle Applications Unlimited is Oracle's commitment to customer choice through continuous investment and innovation in current applications offerings. Oracle's next-generation Fusion Applications build upon that commitment, and are designed to work with and evolve Oracle's Applications Unlimited offerings. Oracle's lifetime support policy helps ensure customers will continue to have a choice in upgrade paths, based on their enterprise needs. For more information on the latest Oracle Applications releases go to www.oracle.com/applications.

About Oracle PartnerNetwork

Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized is the latest version of Oracle's partner program that provides partners with tools to better develop, sell and implement Oracle solutions. OPN Specialized offers resources to train and support specialized knowledge of Oracle’s products and solutions and has evolved to recognize Oracle’s growing product portfolio, partner base and business opportunity. Key to the latest enhancements to OPN is the ability for partners to differentiate through Specializations. Specializations are achieved through competency development, business results, expertise and proven success. To find out more visit:http://www.oracle.com/partners.

About Oracle

Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com.