mardi 31 janvier 2012
Twitter CEO: 2012 Will Be the Twitter Election
By saying that 2012 would be a “Twitter Election,” Costolo was not suggesting that sentiment analysis of tweets would indicate the winning candidate. Instead, he meant that Twitter has become an essential platform for reaching voters, and for gathering and responding to feedback in real time.
“We already saw this during the State of the Union when [President] Obama made the spilled milk joke and a collective groan went up across the country on Twitter,” Costolo posited. “In the past, you’d have to wait for the networks to cut to the pundits after the address was done to discuss it. You don’t have to do that anymore.”
“Washington is really starting to get that too … [It's] actively engaging in the real-time feedback loop now,” he added. “Instead of waiting for the rebuttal at the end, there were two senators live-tweeting their rebuttals [during the speech].”
He also emphasized Twitter’s role in humanizing public figures. “One of the reasons we’ve gotten so many celebrities from all walks of life [on Twitter] is because it gives them a vehicle to communicate directly with the people.” That capability could be crucial during election season, he suggested.
06:57 0
Want to Print Facebook? Better Get 11.5 Billion Sheets of Paper [INFOGRAPHIC]
Printing a year’s worth of Facebook statuses would be equivalent to printing more than 500 million Oxford English Dictionaries, a new survey found.
Sure, it would be a waste of paper, but a UK online cartridge retailer thought it would be interesting to find out how much paper would be needed to print a year’s worth of Facebook statuses if the website’s 800 million users updated once per day. The answer — 11.5 billion sheets.
Of course, there are a few stipulations for cramming the statuses onto paper — each of the estimated 292 billion status updates would be an average of two lines, which is equivalent to 584 billion total lines; the statuses would be printed on 8.3-by-11.7 inch paper in size 11 point Arial font.
The print job would be expensive — the ink alone would cost about $194.5 million or 147.2 million euros. To compare, England could build two more of the London Eye with that amount of money. It would take 573 million hours to read every Facebook status posted in a year, which is how long it would take to fly around the globe 8.5 million times, according to Cartridge Save, the online ink cartridge retailer who compiled the facts.
The UK company surveyed 2,102 UK Facebook users by email to calculate numbers for the infographic. Of those surveyed, the average UK Facebook user spends 32 minutes per day reading on Facebook, and 62% of respondents write one status about two lines in length per day.
How much paper and ink do you think was used when people sent snail mail on a daily basis to communicate with family and friends years ago?
Infographic created by Cartridge Save
Sure, it would be a waste of paper, but a UK online cartridge retailer thought it would be interesting to find out how much paper would be needed to print a year’s worth of Facebook statuses if the website’s 800 million users updated once per day. The answer — 11.5 billion sheets.
Of course, there are a few stipulations for cramming the statuses onto paper — each of the estimated 292 billion status updates would be an average of two lines, which is equivalent to 584 billion total lines; the statuses would be printed on 8.3-by-11.7 inch paper in size 11 point Arial font.
The print job would be expensive — the ink alone would cost about $194.5 million or 147.2 million euros. To compare, England could build two more of the London Eye with that amount of money. It would take 573 million hours to read every Facebook status posted in a year, which is how long it would take to fly around the globe 8.5 million times, according to Cartridge Save, the online ink cartridge retailer who compiled the facts.
The UK company surveyed 2,102 UK Facebook users by email to calculate numbers for the infographic. Of those surveyed, the average UK Facebook user spends 32 minutes per day reading on Facebook, and 62% of respondents write one status about two lines in length per day.
How much paper and ink do you think was used when people sent snail mail on a daily basis to communicate with family and friends years ago?
06:44 0
Megaupload Data Safe for Another Two Weeks
The data on the file hosting service, whose founders have been accused of piracy and money laundering, was in danger to be erased as soon as Thursday, Feb. 2, as the site’s assets were frozen and it was unable to pay its hosting fees.
“The hosting companies have been gracious enough to provide additional time so we can work out some kind of arrangement with the government,” said Rothken.
The authorities have made backups of some of the data, which is to be used as evidence, but not all of it. The deletion of all the data on Megaupload would harm users which used the service for perfectly legal purposes.
One of the hosting companies which stores some of the Megaupload data, Carpathia hosting, told us they simply cannot return users their data. “Carpathia Hosting does not have, and has never had, access to the content on MegaUpload servers and has no mechanism for returning any content residing on such servers to MegaUpload’s customers.(…) We would recommend that anyone who believes that they have content on MegaUpload servers contact MegaUpload. Please do not contact Carpathia Hosting,” said Carpathia in a statement.
Hopefully, the authorities and Megaupload will find a solution to give the users a way to retrieve their data before it’s erased.
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (a.k.a. Kim Schmitz) and six others who ran the site were indicted by The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in January. They are accused of making $175 and causing $500 million in copyright infringement; if they’re found guilty, they’re looking at a maximum 20 years prison sentence.
06:35 0
lundi 30 janvier 2012
What Piracy? The Entertainment Industry is BOOMING!
We’ve pointed it out
numerous times in the past. Despite the rampant piracy, Hollywood and
other entertainment industries continue to break revenue and sales
records year after year.
In an excellent report commissioned by the CCIA, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has has made an excellent overview of how well things go in the various entertainment industry sectors.
The report titled “The Sky is Rising” was presented at the MIDEM music business conference earlier today.
A summary of some of the key findings:
* According to MPAA, box office revenues grew 25 percent from 2006 to 2010 from $25.5 billion to $31.8 billion.
* Data from PricewaterhouseCoopers and iDATE show that from 1998-2010 the value of the worldwide entertainment industry grew from $449 billion to $745 billion.
* From 1999 to 2009 music concert sales in the US tripled from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion
* Consumers’ choices growing as more movies are produced jumping from 5,635 films produced globally in 2005 to 7,193 in 2009.
* BLS data also show entertainment sector employment also grew 20 percent during that last decade and 43 percent for those identified as independent artists.
In addition to statistics, the report also lists many of the case studies that we’ve covered here at TorrentFreak, from Paulo Coelho to Louis CK.
n large part, the report is meant to counter the entertainment industry claims that their businesses have been ruined by piracy, and that the Internet has to be monitored and censored.
“Unfortunately, it feels like much of the debate about copyright law over the past few decades has been based on claims about the state of an industry that simply don’t match up to reality,” the report reads.
“Rather than decrying the state of the entertainment industry today and seeking new laws to protect certain aspects of the industry, we should be celebrating the growth and vitality of this vibrant part of our economy — while consumers enjoy an amazing period of creativity.”
“We hope that this report will help shift the debate away from a focus on a narrow set of interests who have yet to take advantage of the new opportunities, and towards a more positive recognition of the wide-open possibilities presented by new technologies to create, promote, distribute, connect and monetize. We’re living in a truly amazing time for the entertainment industry, and it’s time that our national debate reflects that reality.”
Let’s hope so.
In an excellent report commissioned by the CCIA, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has has made an excellent overview of how well things go in the various entertainment industry sectors.
The report titled “The Sky is Rising” was presented at the MIDEM music business conference earlier today.
A summary of some of the key findings:
* According to MPAA, box office revenues grew 25 percent from 2006 to 2010 from $25.5 billion to $31.8 billion.
* Data from PricewaterhouseCoopers and iDATE show that from 1998-2010 the value of the worldwide entertainment industry grew from $449 billion to $745 billion.
* From 1999 to 2009 music concert sales in the US tripled from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion
* Consumers’ choices growing as more movies are produced jumping from 5,635 films produced globally in 2005 to 7,193 in 2009.
* BLS data also show entertainment sector employment also grew 20 percent during that last decade and 43 percent for those identified as independent artists.
In addition to statistics, the report also lists many of the case studies that we’ve covered here at TorrentFreak, from Paulo Coelho to Louis CK.
n large part, the report is meant to counter the entertainment industry claims that their businesses have been ruined by piracy, and that the Internet has to be monitored and censored.
“Unfortunately, it feels like much of the debate about copyright law over the past few decades has been based on claims about the state of an industry that simply don’t match up to reality,” the report reads.
“Rather than decrying the state of the entertainment industry today and seeking new laws to protect certain aspects of the industry, we should be celebrating the growth and vitality of this vibrant part of our economy — while consumers enjoy an amazing period of creativity.”
“We hope that this report will help shift the debate away from a focus on a narrow set of interests who have yet to take advantage of the new opportunities, and towards a more positive recognition of the wide-open possibilities presented by new technologies to create, promote, distribute, connect and monetize. We’re living in a truly amazing time for the entertainment industry, and it’s time that our national debate reflects that reality.”
Let’s hope so.
14:07 0
8 Crazy Things IBM Scientists Have Learned Studying Twitter
Using these tweets, they've developed technology that allows a machine to understand that some tweets are just background noise and others are newsworthy and important.
06:10 0
Megaupload Data Could Be Erased This Week
The file storage website hires outside companies – Carpathia Hosting Inc. and Cogent Communications Group Inc – to store its users’ data.
Since Megaupload’s assets have been frozen, the service cannot pay the hosting companies to keep hosting the data. According to a letter by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, filed in the case Friday, Jan 27, they could begin deleting data Thursday.
Megaupload attorney Ira Rothken says the company is doing what it can to try to keep the data from being deleted. “We’re cautiously optimistic at this point that because the United States, as well as Megaupload, should have a common desire to protect consumers, that this type of agreement will get done,” he said.
If the data is indeed erased, it will be very bad news for some 50 million people who’ve used Megaupload’s services, many of them legally.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted seven people and two companies which ran Megaupload earlier in January. The site’s founder Kim Dotcom (a.k.a. Kim Schmitz) and six others are accused of making $175 and causing $500 million in copyright infringement.
If they’re found guilty in what the indictment calls a “Mega Conspiracy”, the accused could go to prison for a maximum of 20 years.
05:55 0
dimanche 29 janvier 2012
Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom Loses ‘Call of Duty’ Top Spot While in Prison [VIDEO]
On Wednesday, a judge denied Dotcom bail, meaning he likely won’t be able to usurp Azaros’ Modern Warfare 3 title anytime soon.
But Kim Dotcom, 38, has more troubling concerns than his gaming title. Last week, Dotcom appeared in court to face charges of copyright infringement to the tune of $175 million, and he allegedly cost copyright holders $500 million in lost revenue due to his Megaupload website.
Dotcom became the best Modern Warfare 3 player on New Year’s Eve and celebrated with friends who threw confetti on him [scroll down to see the video]. It appears as though the Megaupload millionaire adores everything “mega” — including his player name on the game: MEGARACER. The New Zealand Herald reported that a room in Dotcom’s New Zealand mansions has seven 60-inch televisions, each with its own Xbox and Lazyboy reclining chair, which from the looks of the background in the video, it may be the place where he took the no. 1 spot.
Kim Dotcom, whose real name is Kim Schmitz and is a German citizen, was arrested and detained on Jan. 20 along with three alleged accomplices in New Zealand. Because some of Megaupload‘s servers were based in Virginia, United States authorities were able to get involved in the case. He is waiting extradition to the United States to face the charges.
A fifth suspect was arrested this past Wednesday in the Netherlands. Authorities are still looking for two more suspects linked to Megaupload.
Nabbing a high-ranking score in a video game that sold more than 15 million copies takes obsessive dedication. Ironically, Megaupload might have made it even harder to reach that top spot by facilitating free downloads of games such as Modern Warfare 3.
19:47 0
HP's Jon Rubinstein Leaves The Company, webOS Dies A Little More
And just like that, he's out. The former head of Palm is leaving HP, and with webOS
all but buried, it's no real surprise. HP's acquisition of Palm proved
disastrous, and after Jon Rubinstein was shifted into a product
innovation role after the first major blow to webOS, we sort of figured
he wouldn't hang around too much longer. He was once a huge proponent of
Palm, even swearing by the Veer 4G handset that most critics wrote off
as too small and not nearly functional enough. Evidently, he had a 1 to 2
year contract at HP to fulfill, and now that's up. All Things D is
reporting that Jon has no immediate plans, only to take some time off
and breathe a little after what has clearly been a wild ride at HP from
Palm.13:54 1
Twitter's new censorship plan rouses global furor
This screen shot shows a portion of the Twitter
blog post of Thursday, Jan. 26, 2012, in which the company announced it
has refined its technology so it can censor messages on a
country-by-country basis. The additional flexibility is likely to raise
fears that Twitter's commitment to free speech may be weakening as the
short-messaging company expands into new countries in an attempt to
broaden its audience and make more money. But Twitter sees the
censorship tool as a way to ensure individual messages, or "tweets,"
remain available to as many people as possible while it navigates a
gauntlet of different laws around the world. (AP Photo/Twitter)
(AP) -- Twitter, a tool of choice for dissidents and
activists around the world, found itself the target of global outrage
Friday after unveiling plans to allow country-specific censorship of tweets that might break local laws.
It was a stunning role reversal for a youthful company that prides itself in promoting unfettered expression, 140 characters at a time. Twitter insisted its commitment to free speech remains firm, and sought to explain the nuances of its policy, while critics - in a barrage of tweets - proposed a Twitter boycott and demanded that the censorship initiative be scrapped.
"This is very bad news," tweeted Egyptian activist Mahmoud Salem, who operates under the name Sandmonkey. Later, he wrote, "Is it safe to say that (hash)Twitter is selling us out?"
In China, where activists have embraced Twitter even though it's blocked inside the country, artist and activist Ai Weiwei tweeted in response to the news: "If Twitter censors, I'll stop tweeting."
One often-relayed tweet bore the headline of a Forbes magazine technology blog item: "Twitter Commits Social Suicide"
San Francisco-based Twitter, founded in 2006, depicted the new system as a step forward. Previously, when Twitter erased a tweet, it vanished throughout the world. Under the new policy, a tweet breaking a law in one country can be taken down there and still be seen elsewhere.
Twitter said it will post a censorship notice whenever a tweet is removed and will post the removal requests it receives from governments, companies and individuals at the website chillingeffects.org.
The critics are jumping to the wrong conclusions, said Alexander Macgilliviray, Twitter's general counsel.
"This is a good thing for freedom of expression, transparency and accountability," he said. "This launch is about us keeping content up whenever we can and to be extremely transparent with the world when we don't. I would hope people realize our philosophy hasn't changed."
Some defenders of Internet free expression came to Twitter's defense.
"Twitter is being pilloried for being honest about something that all Internet platforms have to wrestle with," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "As long as this censorship happens in a secret way, we're all losers."
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland credited Twitter with being upfront about the potential for censorship and said some other companies are not as forthright.
As for whether the new policy would be harmful, Nuland said that wouldn't be known until after it's implemented.
Reporters Without Borders, which advocates globally for press freedom, sent a letter to Twitter's executive chairman, Jack Dorsey, urging that the censorship policy be ditched immediately.
"By finally choosing to align itself with the censors, Twitter is depriving cyberdissidents in repressive countries of a crucial tool for information and organization," the letter said. "Twitter's position that freedom of expression is interpreted differently from country to country is unacceptable."
Reporters Without Borders noted that Twitter was earning praise from free-speech advocates a year ago for enabling Egyptian dissidents to continue tweeting after the Internet was disconnected.
"We are very disappointed by this U-turn now," it said.
Twitter said it has no plans to remove tweets unless it receives a request from government officials, companies or another outside party that believes the message is illegal. No message will be removed until an internal review determines there is a legal problem, according to Macgilliviray.
"It's a thing of last resort," he said. "The first thing we do is we try to make sure content doesn't get withheld anywhere. But if we feel like we have to withhold it, then we are transparent and we will withhold it narrowly."
Macgilliviray said the new policy has nothing to do with a recent $300 million investment by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Mac or any other financial contribution.
In its brief existence, Twitter has established itself as one of the world's most powerful megaphones. Streams of tweets have played pivotal roles in political protests throughout the world, including the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States and the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia and Syria.
Indeed, many of the tweets calling for a boycott of Twitter on Saturday - using the hashtag (hash)TwitterBlackout - came from the Middle East.
"This decision is really worrying," said Larbi Hilali, a pro-democracy blogger and tweeter from Morocco. "If it is applied, there will be a Twitter for democratic countries and a Twitter for the others."
In Cuba, opposition blogger Yoani Sanchez said she would protest Saturday with a one-day personal boycott of Twitter.
"Twitter will remove messages at the request of governments," she tweeted. "It is we citizens who will end up losing with these new rules ... ."
In the wake of the announcement, cyberspace was abuzz with suggestions for how any future country-specific censorship could be circumvented. Some Twitter users said this could be done by employing tips from Twitter's own help center to alter one's "Country" setting. Other Twitter users were skeptical that this would work.
While Twitter has embraced its role as a catalyst for free speech, it also wants to expand its audience from about 100 million active users now to more than 1 billion. Doing so may require it to engage with more governments and possibly to face more pressure to censor tweets; if it defies a law in a country where it has employees, those people could be arrested.
Theoretically, such arrests could occur even in democracies - for example, if a tweet violated Britain's strict libel laws or the prohibitions in France and Germany against certain pro-Nazi expressions.
"It's a tough problem that a company faces once they branch out beyond one set of offices in California into that big bad world out there," said Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices Online, an international network of bloggers and citizen journalists. "We'll have to see how it plays out - how it is and isn't used."
MacKinnon said some other major social networks already employ geo-filtering along the lines of Twitter's new policy - blocking content in a specific jurisdiction for legal reasons while making it available elsewhere.
Many of the critics assailing the new policy suggested that it was devised as part of a long-term plan for Twitter to enter China, where its service is currently blocked.
China's Communist Party remains highly sensitive to any organized challenge to its rule and responded sharply to the Arab Spring, cracking down last year after calls for a "Jasmine Revolution" in China. Many Chinese nonetheless find ways around the so-called Great Firewall that has blocked social networking sites such as Facebook.
Google for several years agreed to censor its search results in China to gain better access to the country's vast population, but stopped that practice two years after engaging in a high-profile showdown with Chain's government. Google now routes its Chinese search results through Hong Kong, where the censorship rules are less restrictive.
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt declined to comment on Twitter's action and instead limited his comments to his own company.
"I can assure you we will apply our universally tough principles against censorship on all Google products," he told reporters in Davos, Switzerland.
Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, said it was a matter of trying to adhere to different local laws.
"I think what they (Twitter officials) are wrestling with is what all of us wrestle with - and everyone wants to focus on China, but it is actually a global issue - which is laws in these different countries vary," Drummond said.
"Americans tend to think copyright is a real bad problem, so we have to regulate that on the Internet. In France and Germany, they care about Nazis' issues and so forth," he added. "In China, there are other issues that we call censorship. And so how you respect all the laws or follow all the laws to the extent you think they should be followed while still allowing people to get the content elsewhere?"
Craig Newman, a New York lawyer and former journalist who has advised Internet companies on censorship issues, said Twitter's new policy and the subsequent backlash are both understandable, given the difficult ethical issues at stake.
On one hand, he said, Twitter could put its employees in peril if it was deemed to be breaking local laws.
"On the other hand, Twitter has become this huge social force and people view it as some sort of digital town square, where people can say whatever they want," he said. "Twitter could have taken a stand and refused to enter any countries with the most restrictive laws against free speech."
13:11 0
Computer viruses infecting worms to create hybrid 'Frankenmalware,' says BitDefender
While the notion is frightening, it's important to keep the threat in perspective. Symantec product manager John Harrison told MSNBC that his company has seen no examples of this kind of malware mash-up, and it's impossible to know if the discovered examples were the true result of malware breeding in the wild, or simply the work of malicious programmers combining previous efforts into new creations. Fortunately, BitDefender notes that the multiple signature code elements within a hybrid may make it even easier for anti-virus software to detect the mutant strains and remove them from your system.
13:04 0
Megaupload in pictures
A week has already passed since the closure of Megaupload (file hosting) and Megavideo (video player). Seven people were arrested in this case two of which were released yesterday afternoon, while the demand for release of the iconic boss Kim Dotcom, was rejected by New Zealand authorities. Today we present the case Megaupload images.
Kim Dotcom
12:01 0
vendredi 27 janvier 2012
Angry Birds on Facebook Launching Your Way on Valentines Day
Rovio, the studio behind the game, has put out a trailer (above) and dropped lots of little hints that the Angry Birds on Facebook won’t be exactly like its mobile counterparts. Rovio CEO Mikael Hed said the game will have completely new aspects and a more collaborative feel. It’ll also focus more heavily on the hapless pigs.
From the trailer above it looks like the same gameplay that made Angry Birds a viral (and financial) sensation are still the focus: Flinging birds across a screen to knock out pigs and build high scores. This being Facebook, expect social posts and friend challenges to play a role, though Rovio so far has stayed mum on what those “collaborative” features will be.
It may seem like a bad idea to launch a game on Valentine’s Day, but given Angry Birds‘
success, Rovio can pretty much do what it wants. The game — and its
spin-offs — have been downloaded more than 500 million times, prompting
Rovio CMO Peter Vesterbacka to say the company was worth more than $1.2 billion.Angry Birds games have been developed for nearly every major mobile platform or device but this is the first time the game will be coming to a browser on the social network. It’s a move designed to get the game into more hands and more news feeds, but at some point will we just be Angry Bird-ed out?
14:41 0
Can Regular Investors Buy a Piece of Facebook ?
Mashable is not a financial publication, and we’re not in the business of giving stock market tips. But we can break down the IPO process — and gauge the likelihood of a regular investor getting in on the ground floor.
Don’t Get Your Hopes Up
We’ll cut to the chase — unless you’re a close personal friend or relative of a Facebook executive, or you manage an enormous amount of capital, you have almost no chance of getting IPO pricing on a stock like Facebook.
Why? Well, as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) points out, “the underwriters and the company that issues the shares control the IPO process.” The SEC doesn’t regulate how these primary shares are allocated.
In Facebook’s case, the Wall Street Journal reports that Morgan Stanley will likely be the lead underwriter for the IPO, with Goldman Sachs also expected to play a large role.
These investment banks are going to target large customers and institutional investors. The goal is to move shares by the millions, not the hundreds or thousands.
Even if you have an account with Morgan Stanley or Goldman, you’re probably not going to get to make any purchases as an individual — not unless you are a big-time celebrity or business mogul. (Ashton Kutcher, it’s your lucky day.) In most cases, the underwriter will call you and let you know if you can get in on the action.
What Can Average Investors Do?
Aside from buying pre-IPO shares on something like SecondMarket — which, again, has some basic financial requirements that will exclude most individual investors — investors interested in a Facebook IPO have a few options:
- Buy into a mutual fund that invests in IPOs. There are a few of these funds in the market, such as the Global IPO Plus Aftermarket fund from Renaissance Capital. The returns on these funds tends to be flat, however — and with a stock like Facebook, it’s unlikely that this fund will get much of the action.
- Buy on the aftermarket. This is where it can get tricky. Putting in a market order the day a stock opens can be risky. In fact, many retail investors were burned during the dotcom era for moving too fast on IPO stocks that never again exceeded their order price. Placing a limit order or stop market order can help alleviate some of the risk, but it won’t guarantee a buyer a piece of the action.
- Watch from the sidelines. Sometimes it pays to take a step back and watch the market from afar before jumping in. An IPO Facebook could be the next Google — but there’s also a chance it could also be the next Yahoo. Wait and see.
14:29 0
Eight Easy Ways to Boost Your Website on a Budget
The following tips from small-business owners will make your site discoverable to potential clients and attractive to a multiple-visit viewer. These ideas won’t cost you a dime or take forever to accomplish.
Boot-up your printer.
Blog strategically
If you don’t have a blog attached to your website, now is the time to set it up. Log on to WordPress and create a blog for free. Then, link the blog to your website or incorporate it by adding an extra page to your toolbar (YouTube tutorial).
Now that your blog is set up, what will you write about?
Write Q&As on influencers in your industry, suggests Rusty Shelton, founder of Shelton Interactive. If you're launching an accounting firm, reach out to accounting professors in your area and ask to interview them. Ask them about the latest accounting trend or related news, and transcribe the interviews into blog posts. Ask the professors to link their own Facebook pages or websites to your post to give you more exposure.
Shelton recommends blogging at least three times a week and writing 500 to 750 words per post. You don’t have to interview influencers in each post. Write about current events through the lens of your business expertise. You might even attract journalists looking for a credible expert to comment on a news story.
“Last year, a neurologist client wrote a blog post about the Gabby Giffords tragedy,” says Shelton. “He got a call from 20/20 to comment. It was tremendous publicity for him.”
You can also write up case studies. If you see someone in your industry doing something interesting, call and ask for an interview. Chances are they’ll be thrilled to get the publicity and the two of you can cross-promote—a win-win.
Incorporate video
Adding video to a website has never been easier. Just take a smartphone or Flip video camera (available for about $70) and start recording. Begin with a welcome video that explains what your business is about and introduces you as the owner, says Shelton. Put the video on YouTube or Vimeo and upload it to your homepage.
“Having a video on your homepage is a great way to instantly connect with the site visitor,” he says.
Consider posting a video blog every few weeks. Focus on a topic area you're passionate about or ask a client to give an on-camera testimonial. Interview industry thought leaders and record how-to videos.
“Plumbers can do a video on how to unclog a drain or how to deal with a flood,” Shelton says. “Think about real issues people are facing and provide valuable information that will help them. It will build good will among potential customers and they'll share it with others.”
Offer free resources in exchange for e-mails
Post valuable information and you may snag a client for life. Shelton suggests that you create a box on your homepage called "Free Resources." Write a list of useful information and save it in PDF format.
For example, if you are a home designer, make a checklist for people to run through before choosing a color palette. If you’re an accountant, create a checklist of documents needed to prepare taxes accurately.
Post the downloadable PDF in your Free Resources box, and allow downloads only if viewers subscribe to your e-mail newsletter.
“The exchange is important; it allows a business owner to build a direct line to potential customers,” notes Shelton. “Just make sure to change out resources often. You don’t want your website to look like a brochure where there is no reason to go back.”
Register with business-listing sites
Discoverability is vital to the success of a small-business website. Entrepreneurs should register business sites on Yelp and Yahoo Local. Try Bing Local and Google Places. Peter T. Boyd, founder of PaperStreet Web Design says doing this will not only help your search engine optimization (SEO), it will also validate your existence to customers searching for your services.
Add social media-sharing tools
Have you noticed how every article on The New York Times website gives you the option to Tweet it and share it on your Facebook page? This helps to spread the word about articles and brands.
Small-business owners should offer social media-sharing tools on their sites.
“Search is shifting to social,” says Alicia Marie Phillips, a digital-marketing consultant. Every time you type a search term into Google, the first few links that appear are related items shared by people in your network. Adding sharing tools on your site broadens your reach to potential customers.
“If you don’t have a way to tap into Facebook, Twitter and Google+ on your site, you are missing out,” Phillips says. “People really pay attention to what their friends share.”
If you're not sure how to add social media tools to your site (YouTube tutorial).
Offer daily or weekly deals
As a consumer, nothing catches my eye more than a great deal. Try offering a daily or weekly deal that is exclusive for your online customers and publicize it on your homepage. Talk to your customers in person about these deals, too, recommends Ben Nesvig, social media manager at Snap Social Media.
“Do what you can to blur your offline and online business worlds,” Nesvig suggests. “Consider doing merchandising that promotes your website, along with an incentive to go there.”
Pay attention to keywords
The better your search-engine ranking, the better your potential to capture more page views and, ultimately, more customers. How do you cement yourself on Google’s first page?
“Pay attention to the Google Keywords Tool,” recommends Phillips. “Run a few searches for words that describe your business. The tool will tell you what keywords perform well in search and the ones that don’t. Incorporate popular words into your site to increase your ranking.”
Watch your analytics
Check out the backend workings of your website and you might be surprised by what you find. Register for Google Analytics and you'll be able to see which blog posts are doing best on your site, what keywords are bringing up your homepage and which pages are getting the most clicks.
“Pay attention to these analytics," says Jann Mirchadani, owner of Marketing Café, a digital marketing firm. "They will help guide you in creating more content that is meaningful to your audience."
What website improvement ideas can you share with small-business owners?
14:22 0
mercredi 25 janvier 2012
"We're just like YouTube," Megaupload lawyer tells Ars
The week has been a busy one for Rothken, a San Francisco Internet law attorney who has previously represented sites like isoHunt and video game studios like Pandemic. When I call, he's eating crab cakes and waiting for yet another meeting to start, but he has plenty of time to attack the government's handling of the Megaupload case.
In Rothken's words, the government is acting like a "copyright extremist" by taking down one of the world's largest cloud storage services "without any notice or chance for Megaupload to be heard in a court of law." The result is both "offensive to the rights of Megaupload but also to the rights of millions of consumers worldwide" who stored personal data with the service.
The best way to look at Megaupload, he says, is through the lens of Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube—an ongoing civil case which Viacom lost at trial. (It is being appealed.)
For instance, Viacom dug up an early e-mail from a YouTube co-founder to another co-founder saying: "Please stop putting stolen videos on the site. We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn’t put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it."
"Whatever allegations that they can make against Megaupload they could have made against YouTube," he says of the government. "And YouTube prevailed!" (Rothken made a similar case when he represented search engine isoHunt in 2010, saying it was just like Google.)
Under this view, Megaupload should have been served with DMCA takedown notices (the site did have a registered DMCA agent, as required by law, though not until 2009). If rightsholders believed that was insufficient, they should have conferred with Megaupload's US counsel (the company has retained US attorneys for some time before the current action). And if that wasn't satisfactory, a civil copyright infringement lawsuit should have been filed, one that would not have taken the site down first and asked questions later.
Instead, the government's willingness to pursue the case as an international racketeering charge meant "essentially only sticking up for one side of the copyright vs. technology debate." The result, Rothken says, is "terrible chilling effect it's having on Internet innovators" who feature cloud storage components to their business.
The US Department of Justice released a lengthy statement to the press detailing the charges against Megaupload, while New Zealand police publicly offered crazy details of their bid to arrest Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz). "Police arrived in two marked Police helicopters," said New Zealand Detective Inspector Grant Wormald at a press conference. "Despite our staff clearly identifying themselves, Mr. Dotcom retreated into the house and activated a number of electronic locking mechanisms. While Police neutralised these locks he then further barricaded himself into a safe room within the house which officers had to cut their way into. Once they gained entry into this room they found Mr Dotcom near a firearm which had the appearance of a shortened shotgun. It was definitely not as simple as knocking at the front door."
This sort of thing makes Rothken furious. Using "James Bond tactics with helicopters and weaponry, and breaking into homes over what is apparently a philosophical debate over the balance between copyright protection and the freedom to innovate, are heavy-handed tactics, are over-aggressive, and have a detrimental effect on society as a whole," he said. In addition, the raid was a reminder that bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act "ought not to ever be passed, because these tactics [the helicopters, etc.] are so offensive that if you take the shackles off of government, it may lead to more abuse, more aggression."
Rothken also suggested that the timing of the raid was suspicious; "over a two-year period, they happened to pick the one week where SOPA started going south."
I asked about specific allegations in the indictment, including the government's quotation of internal e-mails showing employees asking for and uploading copyrighted material. Rothken wouldn't address any specifics, but he did claim the government had engaged in some highly selective editing, choosing a few "bad communications" out of terabytes of seized data. It's as if one were to "judge the character of a person by the three worst things they ever did as a college student and ignored all the things they did as an adult."
For now, the case remains in New Zealand, where questions of bail and then extradition are being handled by local courts. Though the entire case could take a long while to wind its way to completion, Rothken concludes, "Megaupload believes strongly it's going to prevail."
Spin room
This is not a view that convinces either the US government or major copyright holders. Michael Fricklas, general counsel of Viacom and the man overseeing the company's litigation against YouTube, finds the Megaupload/YouTube comparison to be "quite a spin.""The indictment shows that Kim Dotcom was deeply involved in every aspect of the site, designed the site to encourage infringement, helped specific users find pirated content and improve the piracy experience, paid uploaders who were also in it for money, and knew about lots of very specific infringement," he told me this afternoon. "Thus, even under YouTube's extreme view of the DMCA protections, the DMCA would provide no defense. Criminal and civil proceedings each have a different set of processes and outcomes, and are certainly not mutually exclusive. There are many times—such as in the case of Megaupload—where it is entirely appropriate for both types of action to take place."
A Department of Justice spokesperson told me that the government only goes after groups that show enough evidence of "willful" criminal conduct to take them beyond the realm of merely civil litigation, and that Megaupload certainly qualifies thanks to the same factors mentioned by Fricklas.
As for the timing of the arrests, the DOJ says it had nothing to do with the SOPA debate. After nearly two years of investigation involving many different countries, the indictment against Megaupload was returned by the grand jury investigating the group on January 5 of this year—almost two weeks before the big anti-SOPA protests captured the Web's attention. The arrests themselves—complete with their police helicopters and safe room in-breaking—took place shortly after New Zealand police obtained arrest warrants.
What the case may show more than anything else is the sheer disparity between the dueling worldviews involved. Was the Megaupload takedown an offensive assault on innovators who may have, on a few occasions, done something a tiny bit naughty—or was it a massive Mega-conspiracy worthy of an international police takedown?
07:59 0
Is Manufacturing the New Black?
Take, for instance, New Orleans-based Jolie & Elizabeth, started by Jolie Bensen, 28, and Sarah Elizabeth Dewey, 24, two southern girls who met at BCBG in Manhattan. When the two decided to start their own company, they hit the road for Bensen’s home turf of New Orleans—far from the hyper-competitive fashion scene in New York and Los Angeles. With Bensen as the chief designer and Dewey handling sales and marketing, the two launched their line in the Spring of 2010 with help from a manufacturing partner in New Orleans East. “The factory was really hurt by Katrina and was about to shut down,” recalls Bensen. “We begged them to let us help them.” The owners agreed and the young partners got cracking on their first line.
Today, says Bensen, Jolie & Elizabeth, which makes feminine, functional dresses with a Southern-girl flair, is “one of the only completely vertically integrated clothing companies in the South.” The company has six-figure revenues, a growing network of retailers and, say the partners, a strong commitment to remaining in New Orleans—where their dresses now account for 45 percent of production at their manufacturing facility. “At BCBG, we saw that if you wanted to change something minor, you just couldn’t get it done,” says Bensen, referring to the downside of manufacturing overseas. “And if they make a mistake, then you get 700 of the wrong dress.” Bensen and Dewey, on the other hand, are at their factory almost every day to keep a close eye on production. If a button needs to be moved, or the length of a sleeve changed, then adjustments can be made without the communications snafus that frequently come with distant partners.
From a brand and marketing standpoint, the company’s New Orleans roots give it a strong point of differentiation. “We have a 'Made in Louisiana' label in every dress, and that’s one of our best sales strategies,” says Dewey. “We sell to some boutiques that only carry products made in the U.S., and I think we’ll see more and more retailers favoring goods made here.” Jolie & Elizabeth dresses are now carried by 30-plus retailers and revenue for their fall and winter collection doubled over last spring. Bensen and Dewey also speak frequently to girls at southern high schools and universities, hoping to spread the word that the south is a great breeding ground for young designers, and that manufacturing at home helps build local economies.
07:46 0
Google Offers Expands to Five New Cities.
These five cities bring the total number of locales where Google Offers is available to 38.
Furthermore, this number will soon be 40, as two more cities – Oklahoma City and Omaha – are on the “coming soon” list.
For starters, Google is offering a beer tasting deal in Charlotte, cheap burgers in Milwaukee and a deal on Greek cuisine in Tampa.
You can check all the debut deals for the new cities here and sign for the service over at www.google.com/offers.
07:35 0
Bill Gates Recalls Final Talks With "Steve Jobs"
“You gotta pick important stuff because you only have a limited amount of time,” Gates says, reflecting on Jobs’ passing, mortality and his own philanthropic goals in a segment posted to Yahoo.
Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography of Steve Jobs noted that Gates visited his house and the two would have in-depth conversations about their lives, work and families.
In Gate’s official statement after Jobs’ death, he said it was “an insanely great honor” to work with Jobs. Gates said the two were, “colleagues, competitors and friends over the course of more than half our lives.”
Jobs was well-known to have an obsessive, sometimes abrasive personality, which the world became privy to when Isaacson released the biography of Jobs shortly after the Apple co-founder’s death.
Jobs stepped down from Apple in August 2011 and died that October. His passing was marked by his family, friends and colleagues — as well as untold millions fascinated with Jobs’ work — who paid tribute to him through eulogies, books and shines.
The full Bill Gates interview is scheduled to air Tuesday at 8:35 p.m. PT on ABC.
07:17 0
mardi 24 janvier 2012
How to Become a Tech Guru in One Year ?
Up until August 2011, this was a major roadblock, usually resulting in entrepreneurs scrapping ideas altogether or hiring expensive programming partners. Thankfully, two former Columbia University students have come to the rescue.
Last year, Ryan Bubinski, 22, and Zach Sims, 21, founded Codecademy, a New York City-based startup that provides online learning opportunities in the programming space. The company offers classes and videos on how to code, and this month launched Code Year, a free and interactive yearlong coding class. The company sends out weekly e-mails with homework assignments and class notes and since it’s launch, more than 300,000 people have signed up, according to the company. Participants are not just wannabe tech entrepreneurs; they are every day code knowledge-aspiring residents, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
I sat down with Sims to hear about his background and to see how things are going at Codecademy.
Could you tell me a little about your and Ryan’s backgrounds?We met at Columbia. Ryan was a computer science, biophysics major and I was a political science major. I’ve been interested in startups for a while and have worked on a couple as a product and businessperson, but never on the programming side. Ryan is so good at programming that he started teaching me and would teach some of our friends, too, on the weekends.
It was really frustrating for me not to know how to code, so Ryan and I came up with an idea to build something I would have wanted to learn from and Ryan would have wanted to teach. Ryan graduated in May 2011 and I dropped out at the same time [with one year left until graduation] to start Codecademy.
Were you worried about dropping out?No. This is what I want to do. With my political science degree, I would have wanted to work at startups anyway. I think compared to what I would have been doing post-graduation, this is pretty intense. I’m really thankful that I was given this opportunity.
How many people do you have on staff?We have five people in our Soho office, including Ryan and me.
Are you sleeping much?Not really. We are working seven days a week and about 18 hours a day. But it is such a passion for us and we love to help people learn a skill that can help them get employed. It isn’t really work to me.
Code Year sounds like a great idea, but how are you able to offer a year’s worth of coding classes for free?We’ve been really lucky; we raised $2.5 million in October, so we have a good cushion.
What’s been your biggest challenge so far?Hiring. The reason we are doing this is because there aren’t enough qualified software engineers out there that aren’t already employed. There are tons of jobs for those people, so the trick is convincing them to join our team. The average starting salary out of college for a software engineer is somewhere around $90,000 to $100,000, so that has been a challenge.
What’s been the best part of your first six months in the startup world?The best thing is learning things really, really fast. Every day is pretty awesome. It’s been a crash course in how to run a business.
How can Codecademy help aspiring technology entrepreneurs?I think our classes can help entrepreneurs know how to speak the programming language. I still think you always need a very good engineer or team if you are building a technology company, but it is difficult to find a good technical co-founder if you don’t know what to look for. Our classes really give you the tools to interface with engineers, and soon I hope we can help people create their own startups as well.
Can your product help entrepreneurs not in the technology space?Absolutely. By learning how to code, you can automate processes in any type of business. Lawyers can automate files, retailers can automate inventory tracking, for example.
What does the future hold for Codecademy?We would like to increase our course offerings. Right now we are offering classes in JavaScript. By the end of the year, we will have courses in other programming languages.
We also want to ramp up our hiring efforts. I think we will have about 15 employees by yearend.
How long will you stay at Codecademy?I want to do this forever. We are building this company for the long-term.
What advice can you give to aspiring entrepreneurs?Do your research and start something that you really care about.
American Express OPEN Forum
15:20 1
Why Apple says it can't build an iPhone in the US
It's not just about cheap labor — flexibility in staffing, supply chains and reconfiguring factories matter
By CHARLES DUHIGG and KEITH BRADSHER
When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for
dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a
question for the president.
But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted
with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the
United States? Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.
Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.
Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.
However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.
Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States.
Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.
“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.
“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.
But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.
“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”
Companies and other economists say that notion is naïve. Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.
To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged.
Life Inc.: US employers say they can't find enough workers
Apple was provided with extensive summaries of The New York Times’s reporting for this article, but the company, which has a reputation for secrecy, declined to comment.
This article is based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former Apple employees and contractors — many of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs — as well as economists, manufacturing experts, international trade specialists, technology analysts, academic researchers, employees at Apple’s suppliers, competitors and corporate partners, and government officials.
Privately, Apple executives say the world is now such a changed place that it is a mistake to measure a company’s contribution simply by tallying its employees — though they note that Apple employs more workers in the United States than ever before.
They say Apple’s success has benefited the economy by empowering entrepreneurs and creating jobs at companies like cellular providers and businesses shipping Apple products. And, ultimately, they say curing unemployment is not their job.
“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”
‘I want a glass screen’
In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.
Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.
People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”
After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.
For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?
The answers, almost every time, were found outside the United States. Though components differ between versions, all iPhones contain hundreds of parts, an estimated 90 percent of which are manufactured abroad. Advanced semiconductors have come from Germany and Taiwan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from Europe and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of it is put together in China.
In its early days, Apple usually didn’t look beyond its own backyard for manufacturing solutions. A few years after Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983, for instance, Mr. Jobs bragged that it was “a machine that is made in America.” In 1990, while Mr. Jobs was running NeXT, which was eventually bought by Apple, the executive told a reporter that “I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.” As late as 2002, top Apple executives occasionally drove two hours northeast of their headquarters to visit the company’s iMac plant in Elk Grove, Calif.
But by 2004, Apple had largely turned to foreign manufacturing. Guiding that decision was Apple’s operations expert, Timothy D. Cook, who replaced Mr. Jobs as chief executive last August, six weeks before Mr. Jobs’s death. Most other American electronics companies had already gone abroad, and Apple, which at the time was struggling, felt it had to grasp every advantage.
In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.
For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.
The impact of such advantages became obvious as soon as Mr. Jobs demanded glass screens in 2007.
For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.
Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.
When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.
The Chinese plant got the job.
“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”
In Foxconn City An eight-hour drive from that glass factory is a complex, known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.
That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.
The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.
Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.
Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.
“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”
In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That’s when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms — white and black shirts for men, red for women — and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.
Foxconn, in statements, declined to speak about specific clients.
“Any worker recruited by our firm is covered by a clear contract outlining terms and conditions and by Chinese government law that protects their rights,” the company wrote. Foxconn “takes our responsibility to our employees very seriously and we work hard to give our more than one million employees a safe and positive environment.”
The company disputed some details of the former Apple executive’s account, and wrote that a midnight shift, such as the one described, was impossible “because we have strict regulations regarding the working hours of our employees based on their designated shifts, and every employee has computerized timecards that would bar them from working at any facility at a time outside of their approved shift.” The company said that all shifts began at either 7 a.m. or 7 p.m., and that employees receive at least 12 hours’ notice of any schedule changes.
Foxconn employees, in interviews, have challenged those assertions.
Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.
In China, it took 15 days.
Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.
Some aspects of the iPhone are uniquely American. The device’s software, for instance, and its innovative marketing campaigns were largely created in the United States. Apple recently built a $500 million data center in North Carolina. Crucial semiconductors inside the iPhone 4 and 4S are manufactured in an Austin, Tex., factory by Samsung, of South Korea.
But even those facilities are not enormous sources of jobs. Apple’s North Carolina center, for instance, has only 100 full-time employees. The Samsung plant has an estimated 2,400 workers.
“If you scale up from selling one million phones to 30 million phones, you don’t really need more programmers,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, who oversaw product development and marketing for Apple until he left in 1990. “All these new companies — Facebook, Google, Twitter — benefit from this. They grow, but they don’t really need to hire much.”
It is hard to estimate how much more it would cost to build iPhones in the United States. However, various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense. Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward.
But such calculations are, in many respects, meaningless because building the iPhone in the United States would demand much more than hiring Americans — it would require transforming the national and global economies. Apple executives believe there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility. Other companies that work with Apple, like Corning, also say they must go abroad.
Manufacturing glass for the iPhone revived a Corning factory in Kentucky, and today, much of the glass in iPhones is still made there. After the iPhone became a success, Corning received a flood of orders from other companies hoping to imitate Apple’s designs. Its strengthened glass sales have grown to more than $700 million a year, and it has hired or continued employing about 1,000 Americans to support the emerging market.
But as that market has expanded, the bulk of Corning’s strengthened glass manufacturing has occurred at plants in Japan and Taiwan.
“Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”
Corning was founded in America 161 years ago and its headquarters are still in upstate New York. Theoretically, the company could manufacture all its glass domestically. But it would “require a total overhaul in how the industry is structured,” Mr. Flaws said. “The consumer electronics business has become an Asian business. As an American, I worry about that, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Asia has become what the U.S. was for the last 40 years.”
Middle-class jobs fade The first time Eric Saragoza stepped into Apple’s manufacturing plant in Elk Grove, Calif., he felt as if he were entering an engineering wonderland.
It was 1995, and the facility near Sacramento employed more than 1,500 workers. It was a kaleidoscope of robotic arms, conveyor belts ferrying circuit boards and, eventually, candy-colored iMacs in various stages of assembly. Mr. Saragoza, an engineer, quickly moved up the plant’s ranks and joined an elite diagnostic team. His salary climbed to $50,000. He and his wife had three children. They bought a home with a pool.
“It felt like, finally, school was paying off,” he said. “I knew the world needed people who can build things.”
At the same time, however, the electronics industry was changing, and Apple — with products that were declining in popularity — was struggling to remake itself. One focus was improving manufacturing. A few years after Mr. Saragoza started his job, his bosses explained how the California plant stacked up against overseas factories: the cost, excluding the materials, of building a $1,500 computer in Elk Grove was $22 a machine. In Singapore, it was $6. In Taiwan, $4.85. Wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities. Rather it was costs like inventory and how long it took workers to finish a task.
“We were told we would have to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays,” Mr. Saragoza said. “I had a family. I wanted to see my kids play soccer.”
Modernization has always caused some kinds of jobs to change or disappear. As the American economy transitioned from agriculture to manufacturing and then to other industries, farmers became steelworkers, and then salesmen and middle managers. These shifts have carried many economic benefits, and in general, with each progression, even unskilled workers received better wages and greater chances at upward mobility.
But in the last two decades, something more fundamental has changed, economists say. Midwage jobs started disappearing. Particularly among Americans without college degrees, today’s new jobs are disproportionately in service occupations — at restaurants or call centers, or as hospital attendants or temporary workers — that offer fewer opportunities for reaching the middle class.
Even Mr. Saragoza, with his college degree, was vulnerable to these trends. First, some of Elk Grove’s routine tasks were sent overseas. Mr. Saragoza didn’t mind. Then the robotics that made Apple a futuristic playground allowed executives to replace workers with machines. Some diagnostic engineering went to Singapore. Middle managers who oversaw the plant’s inventory were laid off because, suddenly, a few people with Internet connections were all that were needed.
Mr. Saragoza was too expensive for an unskilled position. He was also insufficiently credentialed for upper management. He was called into a small office in 2002 after a night shift, laid off and then escorted from the plant. He taught high school for a while, and then tried a return to technology. But Apple, which had helped anoint the region as “Silicon Valley North,” had by then converted much of the Elk Grove plant into an AppleCare call center, where new employees often earn $12 an hour.
There were employment prospects in Silicon Valley, but none of them panned out. “What they really want are 30-year-olds without children,” said Mr. Saragoza, who today is 48, and whose family now includes five of his own.
After a few months of looking for work, he started feeling desperate. Even teaching jobs had dried up. So he took a position with an electronics temp agency that had been hired by Apple to check returned iPhones and iPads before they were sent back to customers. Every day, Mr. Saragoza would drive to the building where he had once worked as an engineer, and for $10 an hour with no benefits, wipe thousands of glass screens and test audio ports by plugging in headphones.
Paydays for Apple As Apple’s overseas operations and sales have expanded, its top employees have thrived. Last fiscal year, Apple’s revenue topped $108 billion, a sum larger than the combined state budgets of Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Since 2005, when the company’s stock split, share prices have risen from about $45 to more than $427.
Some of that wealth has gone to shareholders. Apple is among the most widely held stocks, and the rising share price has benefited millions of individual investors, 401(k)’s and pension plans. The bounty has also enriched Apple workers. Last fiscal year, in addition to their salaries, Apple’s employees and directors received stock worth $2 billion and exercised or vested stock and options worth an added $1.4 billion.
The biggest rewards, however, have often gone to Apple’s top employees. Mr. Cook, Apple’s chief, last year received stock grants — which vest over a 10-year period — that, at today’s share price, would be worth $427 million, and his salary was raised to $1.4 million. In 2010, Mr. Cook’s compensation package was valued at $59 million, according to Apple’s security filings.
A person close to Apple argued that the compensation received by Apple’s employees was fair, in part because the company had brought so much value to the nation and world. As the company has grown, it has expanded its domestic work force, including manufacturing jobs. Last year, Apple’s American work force grew by 8,000 people.
While other companies have sent call centers abroad, Apple has kept its centers in the United States. One source estimated that sales of Apple’s products have caused other companies to hire tens of thousands of Americans. FedEx and United Parcel Service, for instance, both say they have created American jobs because of the volume of Apple’s shipments, though neither would provide specific figures without permission from Apple, which the company declined to provide.
“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”
What’s more, Apple sources say the company has created plenty of good American jobs inside its retail stores and among entrepreneurs selling iPhone and iPad applications.
After two months of testing iPads, Mr. Saragoza quit. The pay was so low that he was better off, he figured, spending those hours applying for other jobs. On a recent October evening, while Mr. Saragoza sat at his MacBook and submitted another round of résumés online, halfway around the world a woman arrived at her office. The worker, Lina Lin, is a project manager in Shenzhen, China, at PCH International, which contracts with Apple and other electronics companies to coordinate production of accessories, like the cases that protect the iPad’s glass screens. She is not an Apple employee. But Mrs. Lin is integral to Apple’s ability to deliver its products.
Mrs. Lin earns a bit less than what Mr. Saragoza was paid by Apple. She speaks fluent English, learned from watching television and in a Chinese university. She and her husband put a quarter of their salaries in the bank every month. They live in a 1,080-square-foot apartment, which they share with their in-laws and son.
“There are lots of jobs,” Mrs. Lin said. “Especially in Shenzhen.”
Innovation’s losers Toward the end of Mr. Obama’s dinner last year with Mr. Jobs and other Silicon Valley executives, as everyone stood to leave, a crowd of photo seekers formed around the president. A slightly smaller scrum gathered around Mr. Jobs. Rumors had spread that his illness had worsened, and some hoped for a photograph with him, perhaps for the last time.
Eventually, the orbits of the men overlapped. “I’m not worried about the country’s long-term future,” Mr. Jobs told Mr. Obama, according to one observer. “This country is insanely great. What I’m worried about is that we don’t talk enough about solutions.”
At dinner, for instance, the executives had suggested that the government should reform visa programs to help companies hire foreign engineers. Some had urged the president to give companies a “tax holiday” so they could bring back overseas profits which, they argued, would be used to create work. Mr. Jobs even suggested it might be possible, someday, to locate some of Apple’s skilled manufacturing in the United States if the government helped train more American engineers.
Economists debate the usefulness of those and other efforts, and note that a struggling economy is sometimes transformed by unexpected developments. The last time analysts wrung their hands about prolonged American unemployment, for instance, in the early 1980s, the Internet hardly existed. Few at the time would have guessed that a degree in graphic design was rapidly becoming a smart bet, while studying telephone repair a dead end.
What remains unknown, however, is whether the United States will be able to leverage tomorrow’s innovations into millions of jobs.
In the last decade, technological leaps in solar and wind energy, semiconductor fabrication and display technologies have created thousands of jobs. But while many of those industries started in America, much of the employment has occurred abroad. Companies have closed major facilities in the United States to reopen in China. By way of explanation, executives say they are competing with Apple for shareholders. If they cannot rival Apple’s growth and profit margins, they won’t survive.
Life Inc.: US employers say they can't find enough workers
“New middle-class jobs will eventually emerge,” said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist. “But will someone in his 40s have the skills for them? Or will he be bypassed for a new graduate and never find his way back into the middle class?”
The pace of innovation, say executives from a variety of industries, has been quickened by businessmen like Mr. Jobs. G.M. went as long as half a decade between major automobile redesigns. Apple, by comparison, has released five iPhones in four years, doubling the devices’ speed and memory while dropping the price that some consumers pay.
Before Mr. Obama and Mr. Jobs said goodbye, the Apple executive pulled an iPhone from his pocket to show off a new application — a driving game — with incredibly detailed graphics. The device reflected the soft glow of the room’s lights. The other executives, whose combined worth exceeded $69 billion, jostled for position to glance over his shoulder. The game, everyone agreed, was wonderful.
There wasn’t even a tiny scratch on the screen.
This story, "How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work," oringinally appeared in The New York Times.
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