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Many employers are apparently monitoring home-based workers, because who wouldn't want to know whether the minions were working hard or hardly working. And if something technical is going on in general, you know it's happening in high tech. But there are some big dangers that the employers may not be aware of, which could land them in sticky situations whether the worker is an employee or independent contractor.
Apple is so concerned about its resellers that it has warned them to place about a month's worth of orders for top selling iPod models and three weeks of MacBook models. That means retailers pay the price for Apple's convenience.
Google's Knol is catching a lot of attention -- no surprise there. And a lot of the attention comes from Google itself, which apparently is pumping up the page rankings that determine how high up in Google's search results a site appears.
Hundred dollar laptop? A dream for at least three more years says Gartner. But it turns out there is a $99 laptop from Join Tech in Hong Kong, based on Windows CE. (Because it's under a c-note, does that technically make Gartner right?) And apparently India is pursuing a $10 laptop. Did some Gartner analyst forget to do a web search before going to press? Nope, it's a matter of definition, and the difference between calling one machine a "laptop" and denying the label to another underlies a major mistake the industry makes that is probably costing it lots of money.
I've long wondered about the fascination with outsourcing manufacturing work overseas, particularly to China. The premise is simple: low wages and lack of regulation combined with a proven interest in economic growth meant that products were cheaper to make, and those savings dropped to the bottom line. It seems like solid business logic, but the analysis has been incomplete.
Apple is again shooting itself in the foot by making it more difficult for developers to write better code for the iPhone.
Is Steve Jobs or isn't he sick? Is he or isn't he (or Apple) being honest? Although you could reasonably argue that much of Apple's success is due to Jobs, the second question doesn't matter, because it's not the real issue.
Today's the day that Cuil -- pronounced "cool" -- goes live. Started by Anna Patterson, who sold her previous search technology to Google in 2004 and then went to work there, the new engine claims well over 121 billion pages indexed. But there are already visible problems.
Proxy advisory service PROXY Governance has just released its report on Yahoo and is recommending that shareholders vote against three board members: Chairman Roy Bostock and directors Ron Burkle and Arthur Kern. These are the same three directors, who constitute the board's compensation committee, that another proxy advisory service, Glass Lewis & Co. , 0also recommended against earlier this week.
I wish the headline was an attempt to be clever, but it's not. A series of low-powered and synchronized bombs went off during the Indian high tech capitol's lunch hour, killing two so far and leaving a dozen others injured. (There's some dispute in reports as to whether there were eight or nine bomb...
Lately it seems that every third high tech company has been going on about how it can help customers save money in energy, improve the environment, and otherwise save the world. In just the last couple of weeks I've heard from a number of entities pitching their particular green spin.
Kevin Johnson, one-time Microsoft president of Microsoft's Platforms & Services division, has just left the building to become CEO of Juniper Networks. You can hear the speculation humming â€" he left because he was supposed to make the Yahoo deal work and it didn't, or he left because Steve Ballmer was planning to split the Windows and online businesses into separate groups, or he left because Vista and Microsoft's online efforts were simply sucking wind. Or some combination.
Virtual goods in gaming is an area that seems to be heating up on Facebook. But is the activity sustainable, or a collection of fads?
Just when you thought that the Yahoo shareholder meeting might be calm, proxy advisory service Glass Lewis & Co. has recommended that three board members, including the chairman, be shown the door.
Investors decided to punish Apple for its indication that it will lower prices on products going forward. Instead, they might consider voting management a bonus for doing something the company has needed to do for a long time.
