Executives from IBM and INTEL were arrested for Insider Trading scam

Executives from IBM and Intel have been arrested amid allegations they were involved in an insider trading scam.

According to a report from the Associated Press, six people were arrested today as part of an insider trading case, including Bob Moffat, senior vice president and general manager of IBM's Systems and Technology Group; Rajiv Goel, director of strategic investments at Intel Capital; Anil Kumar, a director at management consultancy McKinsey & Co; and Raj Rajaratnam, the founder of the $7bn Galleon Group hedge fund.

The AP reports that these executives (as well as two others who were not named) had passed insider information concerning Google, Polycom, and Hilton Hotels to Rajaratnam, who then executed trades that helped Galleon Technology Funds to get more than $20m in profits between January and July 2007. A report from Reuters says that trades took place at Intel Capital as well and that insider information was used in the trading of stocks for IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Advanced Micro Devices.

Other reports say that Rajaratnam has been charged with four counts of conspiracy and eight counts of securities fraud and that insider trading was also done with Clearwire and Akamai stocks. A report at the Financial Times adds that Danielle Chiesi, an executive from the former Bear Sterns investment bank (now part of JPMorgan Chase) has also been charged with conspiracy along with Rajaratnam.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is filing civil charges relating to the insider trading and will host a press conference this afternoon in New York. The original complaints were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Four Reasons not to Tweet

As any Twitter enthusiast can tell you, tweeting can become an addiction. This platform has given brands, companies, and individuals the ability to broadcast their thoughts and insights on a real-time basis, which allows for immediate connections, engagement, and valuable conversations.

We know that Twitter is a platform that is meant to be used frequently and consistently.

There are times, however, when it is vital that you not reach for your phone or double-click on your Twitter client of choice.

At the 140 Twitter Conference held recently in Los Angeles, Twitter experts expounded on how they used Twitter to effectively reach out to clients and consumers, and to promote their own brands. But a running theme of discussions was that there are definite instances when is it not a good idea to tweet.

Here are a few examples of when it might be best to keep your "twap" shut.

Twitter can be an invaluable tool in your arsenal when your brand or company is plunged headlong into a crisis. However, it depends on how you use it.

At the 140 Conference, Mike Prasad, the brain behind the Twitter sensation Kogi BBQ, spoke about how savvy use of his Twitter account helped Kogi one-up its competitor, Baja Fresh.

This summer, when Baja Fresh announced a new item on its menu -- the "Baja Kogi Taco" -- Prasad was understandably shocked and concerned that Baja Fresh was "ripping off" Kogi's trademark name.

Prasad and @kogibbq wisely refrained from going on the attack and, instead, allowed followers to voice their unhappiness at Baja Fresh itself.

Within hours, Baja Fresh was overwhelmed with a deluge of tweets criticizing the company's move and declaring their support for Kogi BBQ.

Baja Fresh, unable to ignore the power of Twitter, set about changing the item's name from "Kogi" to "Gogi," another spelling of the Korean transliteration for "meat."

This move alone could have settled the crisis. In an effort to conciliate the Twitterverse, however, @BoldBajaFresh replied to almost every single one of the disgruntled tweets. Each of the replies mentioned and sometimes praised its competitor, with phrases such as "Kogi truck is in a class of its own" and "Kogi taco truck is a marvel."

Kogi BBQ, by wisely refraining from tweeting extensively on this issue, emerged from this episode looking classy and unscathed, secure in the power of its loyal and passionate core audience.

Baja Fresh, on the other hand, not only had to do an embarrassing about-face, but wound up dedicating its Twitter stream -- for a brief period of time -- to lauding and praising its competitor.

Two very simple rules on when not to tweet can be gleaned from this episode:

1. Don't tweet when your followers can tweet for you. Allowing your core audience to shout your brand message from the rooftops is infinitely more powerful than you doing it yourself.
2. Don't "tweet down the food chain." Baja Fresh was the bigger corporate brand. Kogi was just a local business. One single tweet acknowledging the change of the taco name could have sufficed. Instead, Baja Fresh conceded power to Kogi by feeling the need to tweet incessantly about its competitor.

Kogi won this round by staying silent, while Baja lost it through its lack of restraint on Twitter.

Think you're funny? Maybe you are, and maybe you aren't -- it's not always up to you to decide. As every good comedian knows, a joke that can work brilliantly with one audience can bomb with another. With Twitter, you don't really have the luxury of choosing, or even truly knowing, your audience. So why risk alienating and offending a significant chunk of your following?

Take the example of agency representative James Andrews (@keyinfluencer), whose snarky tweet regarding Memphis, the global HQ of his client, FedEx, landed him in hot soup. Early this year, Andrews landed in Memphis and tweeted his reaction to the city.

Needless to say, FedEx was not amused, and Andrews was subject to a chastising email that quickly made the rounds of the blogosphere.

The 140 Twitter Conference featured a special panel of professional comedians who use Twitter to stay connected with their fans and networks, and to try out new jokes in 140 characters or less. However, when asked if they thought it would be appropriate to use humor for a corporate or business account, all panel members immediately voiced their hesitation. Since a good joke, by its very nature, always walks the line between funny and offensive, it would not be wise to take that risk.

Stand-up comedian and actress Loni Love (@lonilove) advised that if you can't be funny, focus on being positive and inspirational on Twitter. That will put a smile on your followers' faces without running the risk of a backlash.

In a way, tweeting is like dating. If you know everything about the person by the end of the first meal, then the mystery and intrigue have vanished, and you don't see the point in sticking around for coffee. Or a second date.

During the music business panel at the 140 Twitter Conference, artists such as Curt Smith (@curtsmith) and hip-hop star Chamillionaire (@chamillionaire) discussed the idea that some musicians just should not be on Twitter, as their entire brand is built around their mystique. For instance, could you imagine Jack White of the White Stripes tweeting?

While the advantages of being on Twitter outweigh the disadvantages for most consumer and corporate brands, it would be wise to give some thought as to whether you're tweeting too much. There is a fine line between transparency and over-exposure. If your brand is exclusive, high-end, mysterious, and playful, make sure that your Twitter account stays true to that tone. Make your followers feel special, and keep them intrigued.

Going back to Kogi BBQ -- imagine if it posted a monthly or yearly calendar detailing exactly where the truck would be and when. The long lines would shrink pretty fast, as the main appeal of that brand is its unpredictability.

Don't give it all away on the first tweet, as your mother might say.

That might sound obvious, but clearly not so for ABC's Terry Moran. President Obama, while being interviewed by CNBC, made an off-the-record comment about Kanye West's behavior at the MTV Video Music Awards. "He's a jackass," said the president.

Moran, who was in the room, was so clearly tickled by this rather un-presidential statement that he tweeted about it immediately. (source: Madhuri Shekar)

Handheld eLearning

Reflections on Learning

In any event, judging from the lively twitter feed, especially in the morning, opinions related to this trend were divided. Some people wanted to see more mobile learning stuff, others thought that the keynotes were provocative and forced the audience to think outside of the box. I would tend to agree with the latter, although at least some references to mobile learning would have been helpful.

The keynotes kicked of with Zenna Atkins, the chair person of Ofsted, who talked about the current status of schools and technology in the UK to some extent and argued that change is needed and needs to be consumer-driven. She mentioned that mobile technologies are becoming increasingly important in schools, but not necessarily in ways intended. She mentioned that in some cases, camera phones were used by students to capture bad teaching. In addition, Like doctors, teachers will soon have pupils knowing more about outcomes/paths of their education, as some are looking up curriculum online and calling on teachers on not covering certain objectives. This consumer revolution in education will be about content, context, and how to get access. I still have some questions about what her vision would look like in reality and how it would be funded, as current educational structures and funding schemes most likely would not work.

Atkins was followed by Malcom McLaren, who admitted that he was speaking at a conference that was definitely not in his comfort zone, and proceeded by telling the audience his schooling/educational experiences, in rather colorful language. He talked about how Britain is broken, and its culture is failing many, by saying how too much of it supports the notion that it is cool to be stupid (karaoke culture), at least in the Anglo-Saxon world. In addition, he argued that failure and struggle are important to succeed. As far as the role of technology is concerned in all of this, McLaren said it was just a tool; don’t become a slave to it. Don’t let it replace experiencing the world.

Next up was Yvonne Roberts from the Young Foundation, who also talked (well, sort of rambled) about failure and grit, but said she sees Britain not as broken but as bursting with potential. She emphasized the importance of stories, and expressed the hope that testing and standards don’t drive out inquiry and children’s inquisitive nature. With regards to technology use for learning, Rogers disagreed with McLaren, calling it an ingredient, not a tool. She noted that research says that the best ratio of kids to computers is 2:1. She did not cite any research, but Yvonne Rogers made the same argument in Mobile technology for children: Designing for interaction and learning. How substantial the evidence is for this argument I do not know, but to some extent there is something to say for children collaborating face-to-face using digital tools, although I can think of plenty of examples where 1:1 ratios work well also. It all depends on the teacher and the pedagogy, not on the technology. Many in the audience disagreed with her arguments for 2:1 ratios.

The morning keynotes ended with a good talk by James Paul Gee, who discussed that video games have qualities to enhance learning that are based on solid educational research, and that formal education does not. He made the case that we learn by using experiences within which we can develop thoughts and understanding about concepts and ideas (situated meaning). He used the analogy that learning in school is like reading the manual to a video game without having seen the game, i.e. learning in school is learning devoid of context. Outside of school, kids are learning much more complicated things because something is at stake, e.g. when playing or modding video games or games like Yu-gi-oh. Gee emphasized the importance of passion and persistence. You learn if you’re passionate about something, but you can only become good at it if you put in the time (10,000 hours).

In sum, themes of the morning key notes seemed to be the importance of struggle and failure, and how current educational systems are not providing students with learning that is relevant, authentic, and motivating. Students need to be passionate and persistent about their learning, but it will not be easy to get to that point. In this regard, the key notes left some big questions unanswered;

* Technology can motivate students to learn, but how do you turn motivation into passion? (and 10,000 hours of persistence?)
* What are viable alternatives to current educational systems, what would they look like, and how would they be funded?
* How would we prepare pre-service and in-service teachers for such a system?
* What roles can mobile technologies play? For example, nobody, except maybe for Gee, discussed the role/importance of learning outside of school.

In sum, the morning was interesting and thought-provoking, and while not really providing concrete solutions, it left much food for thought.

New Product: Garmin Nuvifone G60 - GPS+Smartphone

From the beginning, certain high-tech pairings have made eminent sense: Clock+radio. Camera+cellphone. Fridge+freezer.

This week, after many delays, Garmin and AT&T have unveiled a new candidate for the Gadget Combo Hall of Fame: GPS+cellphone.

It’s called the Garmin Nuvifone G60, and it costs $300 (after a $100 rebate and a two-year AT&T contract at $70 a month or more). And except for one small niggling detail, it’s a surprisingly successful mating.

First of all, it’s a fantastic auto or pedestrian GPS unit. The suction-cup windshield mount is brilliantly designed: when you’re in the car, the Nuvifone snaps in neatly and securely with no effort at all. But when you’re using it as a smartphone, it pops out cleanly, with no latches or protuberances to ruin its handsome rectangular lines.

Garmin has endowed this thing with its top-of-the-line navigation goodies. For example, it speaks street and place names (“Turn right on Bayberry Lane” rather than “Turn right in 400 feet”). Better yet, the speech doesn’t sound as if it’s stitched together from canned chunks, like most talking gadgets (“In half of a mile — turn left on — forty — first — street”). Instead, it speaks flowingly, in complete sentences.

The software is easy to navigate. (Evidently, Garmin has realized the importance of simple software in a moving car. After all, in the end, driver distraction equals fewer potential customers.)

When you pop the unit off its car mount, it memorizes its location, so you can easily find your car again when you return.

The Nuvifone includes a national White Pages and Yellow Pages; you can look up any residence or business in seconds. A gas-station app shows current gas prices at stations near you. A movies app instantly shows you what movies are playing nearby, complete with today’s show times, and can even add a selected showing to the phone’s calendar for you. (An included Windows-only synching program keeps your phone up to date with your PC’s calendar and address book.) The Nuvifone also receives real-time traffic details; color-coded road lines represent traffic speed, and the unit offers to route you around them.

Sadly, the bundle of real-time information services (traffic, gas, movies, weather, White Pages, Local Events) costs $6 a month forever.

Now, the Nuvifone is a cellphone, too, so it can perform all kinds of cool tricks that a regular GPS unit can’t. For example, when you tap an address or a point of interest, you’re offered not just a Go button, but also a Call button. It makes perfect sense, as you’re steered toward some restaurant or store, to call ahead from the same screen to find out what time they close.

Similarly, you can tap someone’s name in your address book and see on a map to (or navigate to) that person’s house.

Unfortunately, your happiness with this gadget begins crashing the moment you snap it off that ingenious windshield mount.

Oh, it feels great as a smartphone. It has almost exactly the same dimensions as an iPhone, but is thicker (by a hair) and blockier (by lots of hairs). The screen is big and bright.

But whatever technology Garmin (and Asus, its computing collaborator) chose for the Nuvifone’s touch screen was a balky mistake. You have to really bear down to make it register a click, and “flicking” to scroll a list works only sometimes. The rest of the time, it registers a click on whatever item was beneath your finger at the start of the flick. It’s wildly frustrating.

The Nuvifone has Wi-Fi built in, so you can hop onto wireless Internet hot spots to check your e-mail or consult a Web page. But this Web browser gives “crude” a whole new meaning. There are + and – buttons to zoom into or out of a Web page, but of course you can’t control what it’s zooming into, meaning that after each zoom, you have to re-center the page, which means you have to flick to scroll, which means ... well, see above.

There’s a long list of other frustrations, all of which scream, “Garmin’s a GPS company, not a smartphone designer!” For example: Incredibly, there’s no way to advance from one e-mail message to the next; you have to return to the Inbox after reading each one. To save power, the screen turns off when you’re on a call — but since there’s no proximity sensor, it doesn’t turn back on when you pull the phone away from your face. So to hang up, you have to first wake the phone up. Grrr.

There’s no Home button, only an on-screen Back button. (You can get Home by holding down that Back button, but a proper button would have been simpler.) There’s a so-so camera, but it’s slow, and it doesn’t record video. And although it has a basic MP3 music player, this “smartphone” can’t play video, either.

You’re supposed to enter information (e-mail, for example) by tapping an on-screen keyboard. But considering the amount of force required by this screen, it’s tough slogging.

The speaker, and thus the driving directions, are feeble; you’ll want to use a Bluetooth headset or external speaker if you drive more than 40 miles per hour.

You keep running up against these weird design decisions. For example, when you get a text message, a notice pops on the screen, saying, “You have an unread text message from 1 (273) 513 3201.” Well, good heavens — if you’ve got room to say all that, why not just display the message itself?

Even in light of all of these annoyances, though, the Nuvifone could still be a contender. Plenty of smartphones have balky touch screens and the occasional brain-dead feature.

No, for most people, the real deal-killer boils down to one word:

Why?

Why does this phone exist? Who would buy a two-trick pony that costs $100 or $200 more than a proper smartphone like an iPhone, BlackBerry or Palm Pre?

Now, I’m not going to argue that an iPhone with a downloaded GPS app is just as good as a Garmin. Integration, polish and depth make a huge difference to a feature’s usefulness.

For example, most iPhone or BlackBerry GPS programs don’t come with windshield mounts; some GPS apps require insane monthly fees for the navigation service; incoming phone calls turn off the navigation; important features like spoken street names may be missing; the phone book and GPS aren’t integrated; and so on.

But even if an iPhone or Pre or BlackBerry isn’t as good at GPS, it trounces the Nuvifone in virtually every other category: e-mail, Web browsing, text-message handling, games, music, video, photos, camera, typing, and on and on and on. There’s no app store for the Nuvifone, for example, and precious few accessories. (One of them is the cigarette-lighter charger, for which AT&T has the gall to charge $25 extra. And without it, you’re lost; on battery power alone, my Nuvifone battery was dead after two hours of driving and 15 minutes of phone calls.)

So yes: if you live in your car in unfamiliar neighborhoods, and GPS is the main thing you want from a phone — well, the Nuvifone is the best GPS phone there is.

But you’ll pay dearly for the privilege. Not just because you’ll sacrifice so much awesomeness in every non-GPS corner of the phone, but also because the Nuvifone is darned expensive. Even those $6-a-month information services ought to be free; on regular smartphones, traffic, gas prices, weather and the like are free.

GPS+cellphone might well have become one of the classic gadget pairings — if it had had its debut in 1999. Today, in the face of competition from so many overachieving superphones, the Nuvifone winds up looking eccentrically out of touch. (Source: David Pogue -NYT)

Amazon.com will release new Kindle for global eBook Downloads

Amazon.com announced on Tuesday evening that it would soon begin selling a new version of the Kindle that can wirelessly download books both in the United States as well as in more than 100 other countries.

The move pits Amazon.com, based in Seattle, against a range of other players in the growing global market for digital reading. The rivals include iRex, a division of Royal Philips Electronics, the Dutch consumer electronics company; Sony; and China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile carrier, which said last month it would soon begin selling several kinds of electronic reading devices.

The new Kindle is physically identical to Amazon’s current Kindle, with its slender profile, six-inch black-and-gray screen and angular keyboard. The main difference: it will use the wireless networks of AT&T and its international roaming partners, instead of Amazon’s existing wireless partner for the Kindle, Sprint. Sprint’s network is incompatible with most mobile networks outside of North America.

The new Kindle will sell for $279. It begins shipping on Oct. 19.

“We regularly ship millions of English-language books to non-English speaking countries and people have to wait for the delivery,” said Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive. “Now they can get books in 60 seconds. That is a pretty exciting part of what we are announcing.”

In addition, Amazon also announced a price cut for the United States-only Kindle, which will continue to be sold alongside the new global Kindle. The domestic Kindle is now $259, down from $299. Amazon previously dropped the price in July, from $359, to stimulate demand and to match the prices of rivals like Sony, whose least expensive e-reader now costs $199. Amazon also sells the larger-screen Kindle DX for $489.

International users of the new Kindle will have a slightly smaller collection of around 200,000 English-language books to choose from, and their catalogs will be tailored to the country they purchased the device in. Amazon said it would sell books from a range of publishers including Bloomsbury, Hachette, HarperCollins, Lonely Planet and Simon & Schuster.

Among the apparent holdouts: Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate. Stuart Applebaum, a Random House spokesman, said the company’s “discussions with Amazon about this opportunity are ongoing, productive and private."

One challenge for publishers is navigating complex foreign rights issues: Books are often published by different companies and bear different prices in each country.

Though exact sales numbers are hard to come by, it appears electronic reading devices are having a breakout year. In a report being released on Wednesday by Forrester, the research firm revised its prediction for the industry, saying that three million e-reading devices would be sold in 2009, up from its previous estimate of two million.

Mr. Bezos declined to offer specific information about Kindle sales. But he said Kindle titles were now 48 percent of total book sales in instances where Amazon sold both a digital and physical copy of a book. That was up from 35 percent last May, an increase Mr. Bezos called “astonishing.”

“This has grown much faster than any of us ever anticipated,” Mr. Bezos said. (source:NTY)

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple's BOD

This morning, a strong tie between Google and Apple was dissolved. Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, resigned from Apple's board of directors.

This development doesn't necessarily mean that Google and Apple are becoming hostile. The two companies have been good corporate friends for many years, with Schmidt serving on Apple's board of directors since August of 2006.

Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, also said in a statement, "Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful." And he characterized Schmidt's departure as a mutual decision.

But Jobs pointed out, "Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple's core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric's effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest."

Then there's the controversial business about Google Voice getting banned from Apple's App Store to consider.

Anyway, the FTC and other groups with an eye for antitrust issues may appreciate this move, and Apple hasn't yet named a replacement for Schmidt.

McKinsey Global Survey: Economic Condition August 2009

Executives’ optimism about the economy has continued to grow over the past month and a half, according to the results of a McKinsey Quarterly survey in the field during the week that US stock markets hit their highest point so far in 2009.¹ More companies are pursuing a range of growth initiatives than were doing so six weeks ago, and the proportion expecting increased profits this year has risen to 40 percent, from 33 percent. Similarly, the share of those saying that their nations’ economies have improved since September 2008 has risen, though only to 26 percent, from 20 percent.

More executives—42 percent—pick the description “battered but resilient” for the global economy than any other. Yet their other responses indicate that they see the economy as battered enough to prevent a large-scale economic recovery from arriving anytime soon. The share expecting an upturn to begin in 2009, for example, has fallen to 20 percent, from 28 percent, over the past six weeks, and the percentage of respondents who think that their national economies will be better at the end of the year—37 percent—equals the percentage who think their national economies will be worse.