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Friday, August 26, 2011

Behind Apple's products is longtime designer Ive (AP) : Technet

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Behind Apple's products is longtime designer Ive (AP) : Technet

Behind Apple's products is longtime designer Ive (AP)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 03:11 PM PDT

By RACHEL METZ, AP Technology Writer Rachel Metz, Ap Technology Writer – Fri Aug 26, 6:11 pm ET

SAN FRANCISCO – Steve Jobs has been Apple's most recognizable personality, but much of its cachet comes from its clean, inviting designs. For that, Apple can credit its head designer, Jonathan Ive.

Ive, a self-effacing 44-year-old Brit, helped Jobs bring Apple back from the brink of financial ruin with the whimsical iMac computer, whose original models came in bright colors at a time when bland shades dominated the PC world. He later helped transform Apple into a consumer electronics powerhouse and the envy of Silicon Valley with the iPod, the iPhone and, most recently, the iPad.

In the wake of Jobs' resignation as CEO, Apple must show that it can keep churning out head-turning products even without its charismatic leader. Apple's chief operating officer, Tim Cook, is now CEO, taking on the role of Apple's public face.

But in many ways the real pressure will fall on Ive to make sure Apple continues its string of gadget successes.

Ive, known to his friends as "Jony," has led Apple's design team since the mid-'90s. Working closely with Jobs, Ive has built a strong legacy at Apple, ushering in products that are sleek and stylish, with rounded corners, few buttons, brushed aluminum surfaces and plenty of slick glass.

Apple's pride in this work is evident even in the packaging: Open up any iPhone box, for example, and see Apple proudly proclaim, "Designed by Apple in California." Six of Ive's works, including the original iPod, are even part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

People who have worked with Ive describe him as humble and sweet, quiet and shy, but also confident, hard-working and brilliant. Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design for MoMA, said she knows "hardly anybody that is so universally loved and admired" as Ive.

"Products have to be designed better now for people to buy them because of Jony Ive and Steve Jobs and Apple," Antonelli said. "All of a sudden people have gotten used to elegance and beauty, and there's no going back."

Design, as well as software that makes the gadgets easy to use, is a crucial part of setting Apple products apart from those of its rivals. Apple didn't make the first music player or smartphone, but it blew past rivals by making ones that looked cool and worked well.

Ive started out far from Apple Inc.'s Cupertino headquarters. He grew up outside London and studied design at Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University) in Newcastle, England. After finishing school, he co-founded a London-based design company called Tangerine. There, he designed a range of products including combs and power tools. It was through Tangerine that he first got to work with Apple.

In 1992, while Jobs was still in the midst of a 12-year exile from Apple, the company's design chief at the time, Robert Brunner, hired Ive as a senior designer. Thomas Meyerhoffer, who worked under Ive at Apple in the `90s, believes Ive came because he understood Apple was different from other computer companies.

"He came to Apple to take that even further," Meyerhoffer said.

And Ive did, but not right away. Ive quickly became a leader, working as the creative studio manager and helping to build Apple's design team during a period in which the company struggled to innovate.

Apple declined requests for an interview with Ive. But during a 1999 interview with The Associated Press, Ive said that for years, designers would produce foam models of computers only to be sent back to their drawing boards because of managers' fixations with focus groups and marketing figures.

"We lost our identity and looked to competition for leadership," Ive said at the time.

Brunner left in 1996 and suggested that Ive take over the post, even though Ive was only 29. When Jobs returned from his exile and became interim CEO in 1997, he named Ive as senior vice president of industrial design.

With Jobs again at the helm and Ive as his style guru, Apple refocused around design and produced a hit that got the company back on track. Apple shook up the personal computer industry in 1998 with the candy-colored all-in-one iMac desktop, the original models shaped like a futuristic TV.

Unlike previous product attempts, the iMac concept was immediately embraced by the top decision makers at Apple, and the design went through very few revisions.

"We knew we had it when we saw it, and with Jobs' support we were able to make it happen," Ive said in 1999.

At a time when most computers were boxy and largely black, beige or gray, the iMac was bulbous and flashy. People snapped up 150,000 of them in the first weekend following its release. Apple sold 800,000 iMacs by the end of the year.

The iMac changed the way consumers thought about personal computers and about Apple itself. It gave Apple a vital boost that helped it usher in a new era of consumer electronics that were quirky, fun and colorful. The marketing team even teased consumers by encouraging them at one point to collect all five — strawberry, blueberry, grape, tangerine and lime.

With Ive in charge of design, Apple then bought out the first iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. In recent years, the company has largely dropped the bright color palette (though you can still find it on some iPods) in favor of black, white and silver hues. Yet they retained simplicity that made them approachable to everyone — from the tech geek to Grandma — as well as the curves, shiny surfaces and expensive appearance.

As a result, Apple's products are more popular than ever, allowing the company to surpass rival Microsoft Corp. last year as the most valuable technology company in the world.

"He wasn't responsible for them, but they definitely couldn't have done them without him," said Leander Kahney, who has written about Apple in several books and on his "Cult of Mac" blog.

Ive and Jobs have worked hand in hand and, in many respects, have contributed to each other's success. Ive has always been in contact with Jobs and speaks the same language as him, Antonelli said, and they clearly have chemistry.

Don Norman, who worked at Apple in the `90s as vice president of the company's advanced technology group, said that while Ive had good design ideas "sitting on the shelves," he needed Jobs to get those designs off the shelves.

"Jony has always been Jony — brilliant," Norman said. "What he needed was a Steve Jobs to say, `Make this happen.'"

Now, the test will be whether Cook can continue to keep that focus at Apple and encourage Ive to continue creating hits.

In a sense, the challenge won't be as difficult as it had been in the 1990s. Now that Apple has developed a style, it can build on it rather than try to reimagine it with each new product.

And that, Norman says, is now in Apple's DNA.

___

Online:

Ive collection at MoMA:

http://bit.ly/niZFGZ

Hurd, Ellison pay valued at more than $77M each (AP)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 07:54 PM PDT

By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology Writer Jordan Robertson, Ap Technology Writer – 1 hr 46 mins ago

SAN FRANCISCO – Mark Hurd may get his $100 million payday after all.

The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co. was negotiating a multiyear contract that size last year when an ethical scandal erupted and he resigned under pressure. The contract talks crumbled, but Hurd found a new home with his friend Larry Ellison at Oracle Corp. On Friday, Oracle disclosed that Hurd's compensation for the year came in slightly higher than even Ellison's.

Taken together, Hurd's severance package from HP and his hiring package at Oracle may put him well north of the amount he was originally seeking, a rich reward that demonstrates Hurd's strategic and symbolic value in Silicon Valley's rapidly transforming tech landscape.

The document Oracle submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission shows that Hurd got a pay package valued at $78.4 million for the company's latest fiscal year, which ended May 31. The package includes a large signing bonus, but most of it consists of stock options that he won't have immediate access to. That means Hurd may never see the full amount, or he may get far more, depending on fluctuations in Oracle's stock price.

Hurd received $12.2 million in severance pay upon leaving HP, and $30 million worth of stock that he got by exercising options that came with that package. The figures would have been even higher if Hurd hadn't surrendered some of his severance in a settlement with HP that allowed him to work at Oracle.

Ellison, one of the world's richest men, spared no expense in hiring Hurd as Oracle mounts a strong attack against HP in computer servers, an HP stronghold in which Oracle is a new entrant. Ellison himself is also richly paid.

Ellison padded his fortune with compensation valued at $77.6 million, a par-for-the-course payday for Ellison. He has been Oracle's CEO since he co-founded the company in 1977 and has been instrumental in building it into one of the world's biggest business software companies.

But Hurd's compensation was especially remarkable considering his compensation during his last full year at HP was valued at $24.2 million, according to calculations by The Associated Press.

Hurd and Ellison are tennis buddies whose alliance has aligned them on the right side of a lucrative trend: Corporations are spending on technology even as their spending on hiring has remained tepid.

Oracle's focus has always been on businesses, and its model has helped lift its stock price over the last year while HP's heavy consumer focus, especially in personal computers, has hurt its market value. In a sign of how seductive the business-centric approach is these days, last week HP announced plans to kill its fledgling tablet and smartphone business. It is also considering selling or spinning off its PC division.

In that fight, Hurd is a crucial ally for Ellison, and his value to the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based corporation was outlined in detail in Oracle's proxy filing Friday.

In the filing, Oracle's board of directors called Oracle's recent performance "outstanding" and noted that the company's stock rose more than 50 percent in the latest fiscal year. Oracle's database software and business applications have sold robustly despite the financial crisis.

Their satisfaction translated to bigger pay for top executives.

Ellison's salary was $1, he got a $13.3 million bonus, had $1.5 million in miscellaneous compensation that went mostly for home security, and got stock options worth $62.7 million. The value of the options will fluctuate based on Oracle's stock price.

Ellison owns nearly a quarter of Oracle's outstanding shares, which makes up the bulk of his fortune. The stock closed Friday at $26.65, which made Ellison's 1.1 billion shares worth roughly $30 billion.

The pay package was an increase from last year, when Ellison received compensation valued at about $70 million, according to calculations by the AP.

Hurd received a salary of $698,106, bonus pay of $9.3 million, miscellaneous compensation of just over $16,000, and options worth $68.3 million on the day they were granted.

Hurd's severance from HP was raised eyebrows considering the circumstances of his departure.

A former HP contractor had accused him of sexual harassment. The company's board said it found no evidence of harassment, but voted unanimously to seek his resignation anyway over faulty expense reports. Hurd insists that he didn't prepare his own expenses and that he wasn't responsible for any oversights on them.

In a statement announcing the resignation, Hurd said obliquely that there were "instances in which I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity that I have espoused at HP and which have guided me throughout my career." He said he believed it would be difficult for him to continue as an effective leader at HP.

Ellison sharply criticized HP's decision, and Hurd's hiring was a strategic as well as a symbolic move, illustrating Oracle's new direction.

The AP's formula is designed to isolate the value the company's board placed on the executive's total compensation package during the last fiscal year. It includes salary, bonus, performance-related bonuses, perks, above-market returns on deferred compensation and the estimated value of stock options and awards granted during the year.

The calculations don't include changes in the present value of pension benefits, and they sometimes differ from the totals companies list in the summary compensation table of proxy statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which reflect the size of the accounting charge taken for the executive's compensation in the previous fiscal year.

Oracle set its annual shareholders meeting for Oct. 12.

Apple gives Tim Cook 1 million shares (AP)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 05:34 PM PDT

By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology Writer Jordan Robertson, Ap Technology Writer – Fri Aug 26, 8:34 pm ET

SAN FRANCISCO – Apple has given Tim Cook 1 million shares of restricted stock as he takes over as reins of the company from Steve Jobs. At current prices, the stock package is worth more than $383 million.

Cook assumed CEO duties this week when Jobs stepped aside after 14 years, saying he was no longer able to do the job.

Cook won't immediately have access to the stock. Half of the award vests over five years, and the other half five years after that. So the full value won't be known for years.

But it has the potential to be even more rewarding if certain expectations of Apple Inc. come true.

Some analysts forecast Apple's stock, which closed Friday at $383.58, could hit $500 or more per share within the next year.

Tecca TV: TechLife on holographic flight attendants, beer can cars, the end of a Steve Jobs era, and more (Yahoo! News)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 07:04 PM PDT

Just Show Me: How to change your inbox view in Gmail (Yahoo! News)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 06:56 PM PDT

Medify Simplifies Medical Research (Mashable)

Posted: 25 Aug 2011 04:14 PM PDT

Sarah Kessler Sarah Kessler – Thu Aug 25, 7:14 pm ET

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Medify

[More from Mashable: HOW TO: Space Out Your Tweets Without Being Online All Day]

Quick Pitch: Medify mines data from millions of studies to make assessing medical experts and treatments easier.

Genius Idea: Visually explaining how medical conditions and their treatments have been studied.

[More from Mashable: iPad App Creates Continuous Playlists From YouTube Videos]

A 2010 study by the Pew Internet Project found that searching for health information online was the third most popular online pursuit. But what you find when you search is not necessarily what you need if you're managing a disease.

Searching "autism," for instance, brings up a Wikipedia page, a fact sheet from the National Institutes of Health and an overview from MayoClinic. If I get more specific with my search, and type in "Risperdal," a drug that is sometimes used to treat autism symptoms, I get a result titled "What Risperdal did to me" and another for a dense 2002 study by the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Derek Streat, Medify's co-founder and CEO, didn't find these sorts of search results helpful when his daughter was diagnosed with a rare and threatening illness.

"If you spend any decent amount of time with a doctor," he says, "you will surpass what a WebMD will tell you within a half hour conversation."

Meanwhile, sifting through troves of studies intended for medical professionals was frustrating.

Medify attempts to find a productive compromise between these two extremes of online health information. It aggregates published research from the U.S. National Institutes of Health's Medline, a database that contains more than 18 million references to journal articles going back to 1946. Then it scrapes data points like the number of patients studied, their treatments, symptoms and side effects to generate insights about medical treatments and experts.

It arranges these datapoints in easy-to-read graphs. At a glance, it's easy to see what treatments are being studied the most and where most of the research is coming from.

A "strength of evidence" graph, for instance, uses an algorithm that bases rankings of treatments for a given medical condition on factors such as how far the drug has gotten in clinical trials, how often it has been studied, how many people it has been studied on and how quickly that treatment is evolving. Users can personalize the search by selecting their demographic information or symptoms to see studies that involved only people like themselves or their loved ones.

Ranking treatments this way might make doctors and researchers -- whose papers include pages of caveats for a reason -- squirm in their lab coats.

"Every patient is different, but if you get a big enough signal, that matters," Streat argues.

He says that the platform intends to make it easier to have informed conversations with doctors rather than deliver a verdict on one treatment or another.

"At the end of the day, there's no drug that you're going to be able to look at on Medify that you can go buy yourself. It's not going to spit out a pill."

If nothing else, Medify helps narrow down relevant studies that might be hard to extract from Medline's database without assistance. Each customized graph the site creates cites the long version of the studies from which it has pulled data.

Medify is still in beta and without a revenue stream. It is considering either offering premium research services or opt-in marketing services in the future, and Streat says that unexpected attention from the medical community might make a version for doctors another viable source of income.

For now, the company is operating on $1.8 million of funding from Voyager Capital and several angel investors.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, peepo

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

U.S. believes Google's Page knew about pharmacy ads: report (Reuters)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 08:33 PM PDT

– 1 hr 7 mins ago

(Reuters) – Justice Department investigators believed that Google Inc's Chief Executive Larry Page knew about improper online pharmacy ads that Google carried, and allowed the ads for years, the Wall Street Journal said.

On Wednesday, Google agreed to pay $500 million to settle a criminal probe into ads it accepted for online Canadian pharmacies selling drugs in the United States.

"Larry Page knew what was going on," Peter Neronha, the Rhode Island U.S. Attorney who led the probe, told the Journal.

Neronha was not immediately available for comment.

Prosecutors found internal emails and documents that, they say, show Page was aware of the allegedly illicit ad sales, the newspaper said.

The Justice Department said earlier this week that the advertisements led to illegal imports of prescription drugs into the country.

The Justice Department contends that Google knew it was potentially violating U.S. law since at least 2003, but didn't take effective action to ban the ads until it mounted an undercover sting operation against the Internet search giant in 2009, the journal said.

"As we've said, we take responsibility for our actions. With hindsight, we shouldn't have allowed these ads on Google in the first place," a spokesperson for Google said in an email.

(Reporting by Anand Basu in Bangalore; editing by Carol Bishopric)

Failed experiment: Apple pulls TV rentals from iTunes (Reuters)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 04:29 PM PDT

By Jake Weinraub Jake Weinraub – Fri Aug 26, 7:29 pm ET

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – "Modern Family" fans will no longer have the option to rent or buy -- at least when it comes to iTunes.

On Friday, Apple dropped the TV rental service from its popular online store.

The company unveiled the 99-cent service last October for a six-month trial, using only ABC and Fox programing. The trial period lasted a bit longer than expected, an individual with knowledge of the deal told TheWrap.

"After carefully considering the results of the rental trial, it became clear that content ownership is a more attractive long-term value proposition both for iTunes customers and for our business," Fox said in a statement. "To further enhance the value of ownership, we are working with Apple to make content available within their new cloud-based service."

Movies will continue to be available for rent as well as purchase.

BlackBerry Debuts Its Social BBM Music Service (NewsFactor)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 02:49 PM PDT

Jennifer LeClaire, newsfactor.com Jennifer Leclaire, newsfactor.com – Fri Aug 26, 5:49 pm ET

The recently rumored BBM Music is a reality. Research In Motion has announced its socially connected, cloud-based music service for BlackBerry users. BBM Music debuts with millions of songs from the likes of Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI.

"We have partnered with leading music companies to provide a 'full track' music sharing and discovery experience that will provide users with quality music on demand and allow them to connect with friends on a whole new level," said Mike Lazaridis, RIM president and co-CEO. BBM has more than 45 million users.

Socializing Music

So what does BBM Music let you do? How does it compare with Pandora or Spotify or other streaming music services? Overall, it's similar to what is already on the market -- it's just leveraging an exclusive BlackBerry audience.

BBM lets you build a personal music profile with 50 of your favorite songs. You can refresh your profile by swapping out up to 25 songs every month. The cost is $4.95 a month.

But here's an interesting twist in RIM's model: You can invite your BBM friends to subscribe to the service and join your BBM Music Community. Each time you add a friend, you expand your music collection. That's because the songs from the profile of each BBM Music friend are available to you at any time. The more friends you have, the more songs you can access. Of course, that doesn't mean you will enjoy your friends' music tastes.

"The combination of a premium music solution and instant messaging will enable viral music discovery and emphasize the social power of digital music," said Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business, U.S. sales and corporate strategy at Sony Music Entertainment. "It also offers an effective way of serving younger consumers by integrating music into the fabric of an important hub of their digital activity."

Too Little, Too Late?

You can also comment on your friends' songs and playlists, create multiple playlists from music in your profile as well as all of your friends' profiles, and with one click shuffle the entire collection. Those are a few of the many social features RIM hopes will set its music service apart from the pack.

"What's interesting about this music service is that it's tied to BBM, and BBM is growing so rapidly, particularly outside the U.S.," said Avi Greengart, a principal analyst at Current Analysis. "That instantly gives it a social aspect that most other services don't have quite as directly."

That's the positive. The negative, Greengart added, is that music services are nothing new. In other words, launching a music service today and expecting it to have any sort of industry-wide impact is unlikely. Still, RIM is betting it will be a value-add for its die-hard users.

"The widespread adoption of mobile devices provides the perfect foundation for consuming and sharing music," said Maribel Lopez, principal at Lopez Research and Constellation Research Group. "Brands that want to deliver a unique interactive experience must create services that are mobile, social and contextual."

Spin out panoramic photos with ease using 360 for Android (Appolicious)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 11:30 AM PDT

Facebook gets rid of Deals (Digital Trends)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 09:20 PM PDT

Jeff Hughes Jeff Hughes – 20 mins ago

facebook-logoFacebook announced late Friday that it would be bowing out of the daily deal business. The Groupon-inspired Facebook Deals was discontinued after only four months of testing.

In a statement received by Reuters and other outlets, a Facebook spokesperson wrote:

"After testing Deals for four months, we've decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks. We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local business. We've learned a lot from our test and we'll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses."

The end of Deals seems like a logical follow after the nixed Facebook Places app, though the company insists that it will still maintain the Check-in feature as well as Ads, Pages, and Sponsored stories; local business aren't being completely shuffled aside.

Facebook Deals began its short-lived existence in April this year, sparking anticipation of heated and frenzied competition with Google Offers, Living Social Groupon and the other sites packed into the cramped pool of local-discount services. Deals had already put down roots in five major cities, set up deals with merchants in the area and set up offers with other daily deal companies such as ReachLocal, OpenTable, Tippr, aDealio and more.

Does Facebook's retreat say something about the daily deals business?

The vacancy means less pressure for those still in the game (looking at you S-1 filing Groupon), but there has been some criticism of Groupon's business model and talk of the daily deals enthusiasm waning.

Co-founder of Yipit.com Vinicius Vacanti weighed in on the topic, telling Reuters, "I don't believe this means daily deals are not a viable business. It more suggests that large media and tech companies can't just 'turn on' daily deals and expect them to work. It has to be more thoughtfully integrated into their existing product."

IBM building largest drive ever, can hold 24 million HD movies (Yahoo! News)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 01:19 PM PDT

Get your football food covered from head to tailgate with these iPhone apps (Appolicious)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 03:00 PM PDT

Research in Motion (Investor's Business Daily)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 03:30 PM PDT

– Fri Aug 26, 6:30 pm ET

Research in Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM - News) was raised to buy by Sterne Agee, which expects the BlackBerry maker to gain from its new smartphones that feature the Blackberry 7 operating system. The analyst also said carriers want a viable option other than Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL - News) iPhone and handsets using Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG - News) Android software. The other top contender to be the 3rd long-term smartphone contender: Nokia (NYSE:NOK - News), with its Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT - News) Windows Mobile alliance. RIM shares rose 3.4% to 29.18.

Apple Makes Moves on TV: No More iTunes Rentals (The Atlantic Wire)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 02:14 PM PDT

Rebecca Greenfield Rebecca Greenfield – Fri Aug 26, 5:14 pm ET

Lots of people think, including us, that Apple's TV is going to be its next big project. And today they have made at least one change that should put them in the right direction, reports AllThingsD's Peter Kafka. "Apple has completely removed customers' ability to rent shows from iTunes; the remaining options are to buy individuals or in some cases a 'Season Pass' for a year’s worth of shows." At first Apple thought the rental model was the way to go, but few customers were interested in doing that. The latest update of their TV's software now allows users to stream purchased--not rented--shows directly from their sets, which viewers much prefer. And with iCloud coming soon, customers should have no problem storing purchased shows to their hearts' content.

Insight: Apple's board set for bigger role under new regime (Reuters)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 06:10 PM PDT

By Dena Aubin and Nick Carey Dena Aubin And Nick Carey – Fri Aug 26, 9:10 pm ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The departure of Steve Jobs as Apple's CEO is likely to trigger some major changes for the company's board.

Rather than acting as mere advisers to one of the world's great visionary leaders, the board may have to take more control, be less deferential to the new CEO Tim Cook than it was to Jobs, and meet more often.

"Over time that board is going to have to step up to greater responsibility and a more traditional role," said Jim Post, a professor of management at Boston University School of Management.

Jobs, after a lengthy battle with a rare form of pancreatic cancer and other health problems, on Wednesday said he could no longer fulfill his duties at the world's most valuable technology company and handed the CEO reins to his long-time lieutenant Cook.

Initially at least, the board will be chaired by Jobs himself, though there are questions over whether he will be in that position long, or play a major role, given the state of his health.

The creation of a chairman's position is a first step in restructuring the board. Apple was one of the few U.S. companies that lacked a chairman, raising concerns that there was no one to balance the power of the CEO.

The company had defended the lack of a chairman, saying it was in the best interests of the company and shareholders for the CEO to instead interact with two co-lead directors, Art Levinson and Andrea Jung.

That leadership structure "enhances the board's oversight of and independence from management...and the company's overall corporate governance," Apple had said in a proxy statement in January.

BOARD'S LIGHT TOUCH MAY CHANGE

Yet Apple's corporate governance had raised questions.

"You could ask how much control Jobs has exercised over the board and some would argue that it was quite a lot," said Charles Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. "The problem is we just don't know much about Apple, it's pretty opaque."

There were signs that Jobs has at times kept the board in the dark. Over the past two years, for example, board members have confided to friends their concern that Jobs, in his quest for privacy, wasn't being forthcoming with directors about the true condition of his health.

The board doesn't, on the surface at least, appear to have been the most active.

According to executive search firm Spencer Stuart, it met just four times in 2010 -- a year in which the company launched the iPad, and faced growing concerns about Jobs' health, as well as a public relations black eye over antenna issues on the iPhone 4. By comparison, boards in the S&P 500 index overall met an average of 8.6 times.

That may change now that Cook is in charge.

"The board has to be thinking hard about the new responsibilities that they're going to have to step up to," said Post from Boston University. For example, it may be challenged to hang on to Apple's leadership team, which was held together in some part by Jobs' magnetism, Post said.

In Jobs' three health-related absences in recent years, Cook has taken over the helm.

But the 50-year-old Alabama native, a former Compaq executive and an acknowledged master of supply-chain management, remains largely untested in Wall Street's view. He wasn't even on the Apple board before this week -- also unusual for someone who had been the No.2 executive in a company.

Overall, he is being viewed as a safe bet to run Apple's sprawling empire, but it would be difficult to find many people who think Jobs won't be badly missed.

COOK MAY FACE TOUGH QUESTIONS

Cook's biggest test will come after the launch of the products that are in the pipeline for the next year or so -- which are seen as having the Jobs' imprint on them.

If product development slows after that, it will be up to the board to begin asking tough questions of Cook, corporate governance experts said.

The board is not lacking experience. But whether some of its members, mainly CEOs or former CEOs, have much time to commit to their Apple roles is another question.

For example, co-lead director Jung also runs Avon Products Inc, the world's largest direct seller of cosmetics with 40,000 employees, and serves as a director or trustee for other organizations.

Another director, Millard Drexler, is chief executive of retailer J. Crew Group, while director Al Gore, the former U.S. Vice President, serves as partner of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and chairs another investment management firm.

The board is also smaller than average, with just eight members, up from seven before this week's change, versus an average of 10.7 members for S&P 500 companies, based on the Spencer Stuart data.

Of course, the light touch has not raised many eyebrows while Apple has been prospering -- its shares have risen more than five-fold in the past five years -- but it would be surprising if such an astonishingly smooth ride could continue.

Corporate governance pioneer Robert Monks pointed to Microsoft Corp as an example of how the star quality can dim. Its shares have slipped in the past 10 years even as sales and earnings have climbed.

"There comes a time when the magic isn't there and they become ordinary companies...then you begin to worry about governance," he said.

(Additional reporting by Poornima Gupta. Editing by Martin Howell)

Microsoft Previews Tablet with Quad-Core ARM Chip (NewsFactor)

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 02:36 PM PDT

Mark Long, newsfactor.com Mark Long, newsfactor.com – Fri Aug 26, 5:36 pm ET

Microsoft previewed a new quad-core media tablet identified as a Windows "Slate" at the Tech Ed 2011 conference in New Zealand on Friday. Microsoft principal architect Patrick Hevesi said the software giant is currently working with its OEM partners to produce next-generation tablets that make better sense from a business perspective.

"We are seeing people bringing in iPads with a Bluetooth keyboard, a mouse, a pen, and all this other stuff," Hevesi noted. The goal at Microsoft is to "find that middle ground" that will enable business users to have "all this other stuff [in a] hybrid form factor [that] is a lot more critical [to business users]," he said in a Tech Ed video interview.

For example, Microsoft is working with selected partners to bring "instant on" PC capabilities to next-generation Windows tablets, Hevesi noted. What's more, Windows-powered mobile devices are already available that offer eight to 14 hours of battery life.

Even better, Hevesi expects ultrathin notebooks and tablets running Windows to be able to operate for up to 24 hours from a single battery charge by late this year or early 2012. The new Windows slates also will sport "brilliant HD screens in a very thin form factor" and be equipped with quad-core processors, he added.

TI's quad-core OMAP Chip

Several chipmakers are poised to launch quad-core chips based on the ARM architecture that will offer support for Microsoft's next-generation Windows 8 operating system. For example, the 1.8-GHz OMAP4470 quad-core chip announced by Texas Instruments in early June will integrate ARM CPUs with enough moxie to run Windows-style applications and offer support for Microsoft's DirectX technology for gaming applications.

TI's chip will feature HD user interfaces for connecting the host machine with as many as three high-definition screens simultaneously, and also integrate HDMI technology for supporting stereoscopic 3D. Mobile devices running TI's new chips are expected to arrive in the consumer marketplace in the first half of 2012.

"Fast and crisp web browsing, HD and liquid UIs, support for the latest applications -- these are the elements consumers judge and buy their devices on," said TI Vice President Remi El-Ouazzane. "The OMAP4470 processor delivers the maximum experience possible with an unmatched, power-efficient architecture."

Quad-Core Tegra Chip

Rival chipmakers such as Nvidia and Qualcomm also have developed quad-core chips based on the ARM architecture that will be able to run Windows 8 by the time Microsoft is ready to launch the next-generation OS. Nvidia showed off its next-generation Tegra processor at the Mobile World Congress last February.

"This is the first mobile quad-core processor, [and it] contains a new 12-core GeForce GPU," noted Michael Rayfield, the general manager of Nvidia's mobile business unit. He said OEMS received samples of the new quad-core chip earlier this year. So the first consumer products with the new chip might arrive in time for this year's holiday shopping season.

Windows 8 isn't expected to launch until the latter half of next year, which will hamper Microsoft's ability to gain market share for Mango -- the company's fledgling Windows Phone 7 mobile platform released to manufacturers last month. Still, some analysts believe the evolving Phone 7 platform will benefit in the long run from its compatibility with Microsoft's next-generation OS for desktop PCs and notebooks.

"Microsoft will claw its way to success and market share over the next couple of releases," said Al Hilwa, director of applications development software at IDC. "Its chances will be helped significantly with a successful Windows 8 release in 2012, which will create synergies between the PC and the phone in new ways."
at 9:54 PM

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