Showing posts with label Apple. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Apple. Show all posts
Monday, March 25, 2013
Where Apple and Dick Tracy May Converge
NICK BILTON
Full Article:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/disruptions-apple-is-said-to-be-developing-a-curved-glass-smart-watch/
Dick Tracy had one. As did Inspector Gadget and James Bond. A watch that doubled as a computer, two-way radio, mapping device or television.
Though such a device has been lost to science fiction comics and spy movies of the era before smartphones, the smart watch might soon become a reality, in the form of a curved glass device made by Apple.
In its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., Apple is experimenting with wristwatch-like devices made of curved glass, according to people familiar with the company’s explorations, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they are not allowed to publicly discuss unreleased products. Such a watch would operate on Apple’s iOS platform, two people said, and stand apart from competitors based on the company’s understanding of how such glass can curve around the human body.
Apple declined to comment on its plans. But the exploration of such a watch leaves open lots of exciting questions: If the company does release such a product, what would it look like? Would it include Siri, the voice assistant? Would it have a version of Apple’s map software, offering real-time directions to people walking down the street? Could it receive text messages? Could it monitor a user’s health or daily activity? How much will it cost? Could Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, be wearing one right now, whispering sweet nothings to his wrist?
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Cheaper iPhone could cost as little as $99
Lance Whitney
January 9, 2013
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57563005-37/cheaper-iphone-could-cost-as-little-as-$99-bloomberg-says
That much-rumored "cheap" Apple iPhone could hit the market at a lowball price of $99, according to a story published today by Bloomberg.
Citing an unnamed source familiar with Apple's plans, Bloomberg said the phone would sell at a price range of $99 to $149 and would pop up late this year at the earliest.
Apple has already been chatting with at least one of the top U.S. wireless carriers about selling the phone, according to the source. The company has reportedly been working on a low-cost iPhone since February 2011 in a bid to grab more customers in developing countries, a tidbit also mentioned by a separate Bloomberg source.
This latest scuttlebutt follows a report from yesterday's Wall Street Journal claiming that Apple is prepping a low-cost iPhone for debut later this year. The Journal's story followed a rumor from DigiTimes pointing to a cheaper iPhone on the way this year geared for emerging markets.
The rumor is hardly new. Back in February 2011, the Journal reported that Apple had already started working on a new line of cheaper iPhones. The phones would be smaller than the iPhone 4 and available to carriers at half the full retail price Apple normally charges them.
More recently, Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston chimed in, saying he believes Apple will launch an "iPhone Mini" in the next few years, possibly as soon as next year, to better compete with Samsung. Jeffries analyst Peter Misek also forecasts a low-cost iPhone but thinks it may launch as early as this summer with a price tag of $200 to $250.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster sees a 60 percent to 70 percent chance that Apple will unveil a lower-priced iPhone this year. In an investors' note out today, Munster reiterated that he feels Apple needs a cheaper iPhone to recapture market share lost to Android phone makers.
In contrast with Bloomberg, the analyst thinks a price range of $149 to $199 is more likely, with the cost trending toward the higher end. Such a range could be justified given Apple's history of charging a premium price tag. Munster also believes the main competition at that level would be Android phones selling for $99 to $199.
"We note that the cheapest iPhone, the iPhone 4, currently costs $450 off contract and more in many countries where additional taxes are levied," the analyst said. "We note that an off contract iPhone 4 is ~$490 in China and $750 in Brazil, thus the sub-$199 price would be a significant discount. Historically, we believe lower-priced products have had a measurable positive impact on overall revenue (iPad Mini, iPod Nano, iPad)."
As with most rumors, some of the "facts" and forecasts from the different sources don't quite match up.
The Journal's sources said the cheaper device would be smaller than the current iPhone models, a belief echoed by Strategy Analytics' Mawston. But DigiTimes' sources say the phone would sport a screen larger than the iPhone 5's 4-inch display. That claim seems dubious given that the phone would be cheaper than the current model.
Most of these reports say the phone will debut before the end of the year. But Mawston feels Apple has little incentive to launch a cheaper iPhone this year in light of the strong sales of the iPhone 5. Instead, Apple is more apt to wait until the iPhone's share of the global smartphone market reaches a higher saturation point.
It's a safe bet Apple has grown weary of being trumped by Android in general and Samsung in particular. The iPhone 5 has seen huge demand, but the company has lost significant sales and market share to its Android rivals over the past couple of years.
Of course, many people would argue that Apple already offers a low-cost iPhone, namely the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 4. With the standard two-year contract, the 4S can be had for just $99, while the iPhone 4 is available for free. But as Munster pointed out, those models sport higher price tags when purchased off contract, especially in other countries.
Apple could conceivably see a cheaper version of the newest iPhone as a more effective way to grab back some of the global sales and market share lost to the likes of Samsung.
Steve Jobs Was Right
John Paczkowski
JANUARY 9, 2013
http://allthingsd.com/20130109/steve-jobs-was-right-tablets-are-cars-pcs-are-trucks
Apple CEO Steve Jobs often compared the transition from desktop/laptop PCs to tablets with the transition from trucks to cars. Just as trucks waned in popularity with the urbanization of America, Jobs theorized, so, too, would desktops and laptops with the advent of the tablet.
“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm,” Jobs said at our D8 conference in 2010. “But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.”
At the time that remark was a bit contentious, but like many Jobs predictions, it would prove prescient a few years later. To wit, the latest PC shipment forecast from NPD DisplaySearch, which predicts that tablets will outship notebooks this year.
The research outfit reckons 207 million notebooks to be shipped in 2013. And it expects tablet shipments to rise 64 percent year over year to top out at 240 million.
And that’s just the beginning of a trend that will slowly see the notebook PC supplanted by the tablet. By 2017, NPD figures, tablets will have captured nearly 75 percent of the combined global tablet-laptop market, spurred on by new screen sizes that are fueling consumer interest in the device.
Indeed, according to NPD the seven-inch to eight-inch screen — like the ones in Google Nexus 7 and Apple’s new iPad mini, for example — is already so popular that it’s become the preferred tablet display size. In 2013, the research firm expects it to account for 45 percent of the market, surpassing the 9.7-inch size pioneered by the original iPad, which will account for about 17 percent.
“The 7.9 size is expected to be the screen size leader in share starting in 2013 because it appeals to supply and demand factors,” NPD DisplaySearch’s Richard Shim told AllThingsD. “From a supply perspective, it will be readily available meaning it shouldn’t face any technical issues to limit its production. And from a demand perspective, since it is used in the lower priced end of the iPad portfolio it will appeals to a wider segment of the mainstream market than the more expensive larger sized iPads.”
But the broader market numbers are what’s of real interest here. The consumer tablet market isn’t even three years old yet, but it’s already poised to surpass the market for laptops. And by such a significant amount — nearly 16 percent. Jobs said the day would come when only one out of every few people would need a traditional computer. Hard to believe it’s arriving so quickly.
Samsung and its rivals show off the future of TVs
Edward C. Baig
January 7, 2013
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/baig/2013/01/07/baig-samsung-ces-2013/1813595
Tech titans Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook rarely come out of hiding at the annual International CES. And after years on center stage, Microsoft has pretty much applied for the CES equivalent of the witness protection program.
So with apologies to a formidable list of consumer electronics show stalwarts that includes LG, Panasonic, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba, Samsung is arguably the biggest of the Big Cheese consumer electronics mainstays left exhibiting at these proceedings.
Above all else, CES is still about televisions. Samsung, as much as any of its rivals, serves as a proxy for where the industry hopes to take you. The path leads to Ultra High-Definition models that boast four times the pixel count of today's 1080p HDTVs. Gee, it was only a few years ago that you cozied up to the thin — and yes, affordable — HDTV that now graces your living room.
Make no mistake, Samsung's upcoming 85-inch flagship UN85S9 UHD TV takes your breath away. It's just that you may have to take out a small mortgage to own this stunning TV, not that you can even buy it yet. Samsung isn't saying what it will cost or when precisely it will go on sale, but says the model will ship this year. I should also point out that there's precious little content out there to take advantage of all those extra pixels — a familiar chicken and egg scenario that slowed the launch of early HDTVs.
The splashy cutting-edge sets are expected to fetch in the $20,000 range, says tech and media analyst Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications. Still, if UHDs go the way of HDTVs — and myriad other consumer electronics categories before them — prices might drop sooner than may now seem likely, though I wouldn't bet a lot on the prospect. (I am in Vegas, after all.)
Samsung executive Joe Stinziano calls the TV a "statement piece" -- to my mind, code-language for, "if you have to ask what it costs, you can't afford it". He says the pixel density of the panels in the set is very expensive to manufacture.
Fortunately, the new TV flaunts other features that will be available on less-expensive 2013 models, notably a newly designed Smart Hub interface. Through the early years of Smart TVs, the various TV makers have done a generally mediocre job when it comes to screen interfaces, perhaps one reason behind all the talk of an eventual Apple-branded television.
My initial impression of Samsung's new Smart Hub is positive, though, as always, you can't really judge these things until you use it outside the boundaries of a trade show.
Samsung's Smart Hub consists of five panels: The "On TV" panel shows the channel you're watching now in a window that's adjacent to a half-dozen smaller windows representing other shows airing at the same time. Below are thumbnails revealing shows that are coming up. The visible content is based on Samsung recommendations generated from your viewing habits.
A "Movie & TV" panel, also based on your viewing history, reveals on-demand flicks, movies available to you as a subscriber to certain services, and material you may have purchased.
Other panels cover your personal "Photos, Videos and Movies," "Apps" (where you'll find Netflix, Hulu Plus, Spotify, Pandora, etc.) and "Social" (feeds and videos from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and so on).
You can manipulate the Smart Hub with a new remote that has a touch panel, as well as left-right, up-down slide bar controls.
Samsung also says the voice interaction in its latest TVs — advancing the state of the art from last year — has improved to the point where the TV understands complete sentences. You'll be able to say "I want to watch CSI" and the TV will serve up all the likely matches. Or you might say, "go to South Park," or, "go to ESPN," since the TV can distinguish the name of a show from a channel.
Inside the UHD TV (and other new models) is a quad-core processor that Samsung claims is 3.6 times faster than last year's dual-core models. No you won't change the channels any faster. But you can speed up the time when you stop watching a stream from one content provider and start searching on
It's fair to say that all the consumer electronics companies with a diverse portfolio of products at this show want you to keep it in the family. So it goes with Samsung. If you have Samsung phones, tablets or home appliances, for example, you can take advantage of "AllShare" features that tie the TV to compatible devices. Via an onscreen TV app, you might be able to monitor the wash cycle of your Samsung washer-dryer or change the temperature of the air conditioner without having to pause the TV content. Samsung will let you stream from the TV to one of its mobile phones.
Moreover, Samsung will soon start selling the Smart Evolution kits it announced at last year's CES, which will enable folks to upgrade certain 2012 (but not older) models to the quadcore generation. You get the new remote control as part of the kit, and can add the latest Smart Hub interface. The kit is likely to cost between $200 and $500, Samsung says.
Not that there's anything wrong with your current HDTV, which you'll be able to safely enjoy watching for quite some time. Samsung expects it to take several years before UHDs begin to overtake today's popular HDTVs. But UHD does reveal a lot about where Samsung, and its industry counterparts who are pushing the same or similar technologies, are directing the near and longer-term future of television.
January 7, 2013
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/baig/2013/01/07/baig-samsung-ces-2013/1813595
Tech titans Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook rarely come out of hiding at the annual International CES. And after years on center stage, Microsoft has pretty much applied for the CES equivalent of the witness protection program.
So with apologies to a formidable list of consumer electronics show stalwarts that includes LG, Panasonic, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba, Samsung is arguably the biggest of the Big Cheese consumer electronics mainstays left exhibiting at these proceedings.
Above all else, CES is still about televisions. Samsung, as much as any of its rivals, serves as a proxy for where the industry hopes to take you. The path leads to Ultra High-Definition models that boast four times the pixel count of today's 1080p HDTVs. Gee, it was only a few years ago that you cozied up to the thin — and yes, affordable — HDTV that now graces your living room.
Make no mistake, Samsung's upcoming 85-inch flagship UN85S9 UHD TV takes your breath away. It's just that you may have to take out a small mortgage to own this stunning TV, not that you can even buy it yet. Samsung isn't saying what it will cost or when precisely it will go on sale, but says the model will ship this year. I should also point out that there's precious little content out there to take advantage of all those extra pixels — a familiar chicken and egg scenario that slowed the launch of early HDTVs.
The splashy cutting-edge sets are expected to fetch in the $20,000 range, says tech and media analyst Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications. Still, if UHDs go the way of HDTVs — and myriad other consumer electronics categories before them — prices might drop sooner than may now seem likely, though I wouldn't bet a lot on the prospect. (I am in Vegas, after all.)
Samsung executive Joe Stinziano calls the TV a "statement piece" -- to my mind, code-language for, "if you have to ask what it costs, you can't afford it". He says the pixel density of the panels in the set is very expensive to manufacture.
Fortunately, the new TV flaunts other features that will be available on less-expensive 2013 models, notably a newly designed Smart Hub interface. Through the early years of Smart TVs, the various TV makers have done a generally mediocre job when it comes to screen interfaces, perhaps one reason behind all the talk of an eventual Apple-branded television.
My initial impression of Samsung's new Smart Hub is positive, though, as always, you can't really judge these things until you use it outside the boundaries of a trade show.
Samsung's Smart Hub consists of five panels: The "On TV" panel shows the channel you're watching now in a window that's adjacent to a half-dozen smaller windows representing other shows airing at the same time. Below are thumbnails revealing shows that are coming up. The visible content is based on Samsung recommendations generated from your viewing habits.
A "Movie & TV" panel, also based on your viewing history, reveals on-demand flicks, movies available to you as a subscriber to certain services, and material you may have purchased.
Other panels cover your personal "Photos, Videos and Movies," "Apps" (where you'll find Netflix, Hulu Plus, Spotify, Pandora, etc.) and "Social" (feeds and videos from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and so on).
You can manipulate the Smart Hub with a new remote that has a touch panel, as well as left-right, up-down slide bar controls.
Samsung also says the voice interaction in its latest TVs — advancing the state of the art from last year — has improved to the point where the TV understands complete sentences. You'll be able to say "I want to watch CSI" and the TV will serve up all the likely matches. Or you might say, "go to South Park," or, "go to ESPN," since the TV can distinguish the name of a show from a channel.
Inside the UHD TV (and other new models) is a quad-core processor that Samsung claims is 3.6 times faster than last year's dual-core models. No you won't change the channels any faster. But you can speed up the time when you stop watching a stream from one content provider and start searching on
It's fair to say that all the consumer electronics companies with a diverse portfolio of products at this show want you to keep it in the family. So it goes with Samsung. If you have Samsung phones, tablets or home appliances, for example, you can take advantage of "AllShare" features that tie the TV to compatible devices. Via an onscreen TV app, you might be able to monitor the wash cycle of your Samsung washer-dryer or change the temperature of the air conditioner without having to pause the TV content. Samsung will let you stream from the TV to one of its mobile phones.
Moreover, Samsung will soon start selling the Smart Evolution kits it announced at last year's CES, which will enable folks to upgrade certain 2012 (but not older) models to the quadcore generation. You get the new remote control as part of the kit, and can add the latest Smart Hub interface. The kit is likely to cost between $200 and $500, Samsung says.
Not that there's anything wrong with your current HDTV, which you'll be able to safely enjoy watching for quite some time. Samsung expects it to take several years before UHDs begin to overtake today's popular HDTVs. But UHD does reveal a lot about where Samsung, and its industry counterparts who are pushing the same or similar technologies, are directing the near and longer-term future of television.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
The top 10 tech 'fails' of 2012
Doug Gross
Fri December 28, 2012
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/28/tech/web/tech-fails-2012/index.html
Well, you can't win 'em all.
In 2012, we saw big tech advances. Smartphones got bigger. Tablets got smaller. Social media played a role in everything from a presidential election to disaster relief.
But with advances come clunkers.
When you're in a field that demands near-constant innovation and unprecedented levels of creativity, sometimes even the most successful players are going to shoot and miss.
So, at the risk of playing Scrooge in this season of good will, here we come to wallow in it. Because, let's face it: The Internet loves a good fail.
Behold the top 10 tech "fails" of 2012, with wishes for happier days ahead to all involved.
Apple Maps
Apple's unofficial slogan, "It Just Works," took a beating on this one.
Along with the rollout of the much anticipated iPhone 5 in September, Apple overhauled iOS, the operating system that runs the phone, its iPad and other mobile devices. A much-hyped feature of the change was Apple's first effort at its own mapping app -- after dumping rival Google's map software.
The result was so bad that a few days later Apple's CEO was essentially telling customers to use Google Maps.
Entire cities appeared in the wrong place. Landmarks such as the Washington Monument showed up submerged in bodies of water, and big chunks of the globe appeared as roadless wastelands.
"At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers," CEO Tim Cook wrote in a rare apology. "With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better."
It was a little more than a month later when Scott Forstall, vice president in charge of iOS, was ousted from the company, reportedly, in part, for not wanting to apologize for Maps.
The company has been gradually improving Maps, but as recently as this month Australian police complained that an Apple Maps glitch could endanger motorists by mislocating a city of 30,000 people in the middle of the outback.
Facebook's IPO
Everybody uses Facebook. And everybody likes to make money. So everybody's going to gobble up Facebook stock, right?
So went the conventional thinking -- at least among those of us who spend more time thinking about mobile phones than mutual funds. But on Wall Street? Not so much.
It's hard to remember a stock opening more hyped than Facebook's when it hit the market in May. The stock began the day worth about $38. Then, after what everyone predicted to be a dynamic day of trading for the social media superstar, it closed at ... well ... about $38.
It wouldn't take long for the pinstripe-suit types to decide it wasn't even worth that. Facebook's stock bottomed out in September, falling below $18. Since then, it's been steadily rebounding and currently sells for about $28.
Facebook says it has solid financial plans for the future. And the stock may well keep climbing, eventually turning a profit for folks who bought early.
But that fateful day in May will be a reminder that Wall Street and Silicon Valley don't always play well together.
Airtime
When the man who created Napster and helped launch Facebook talks, the tech industry listens.
And when Sean Parker and partner Shawn Fanning tease something new called Airtime, techies fall all over themselves to see what the next great innovation will be.
But then, at a fancy launch event featuring celebrities such as Alicia Keys and Snoop Dogg, Parker announces that it's ... basically, a random Web chat tool.
Cue the collective, "Huh?"
It didn't help that, at that fancy event, Airtime crashed over and over again. Or that folks had a hard time seeing how it would be different than Chatroulette (although Parker promised more users would actually be wearing pants).
In October, Parker admitted that Airtme, launched with more than $33 million in backing, had just 10,000 active users. (That's $3,300 spent per user, if you're scoring along at home.)
"Running a startup is like eating glass," he said at the All Things D conference. "You just start to like the taste of your own blood."
Ouch.
Online coupons
"These aren't your grandma's coupons!" the digital generation so brashly declared.
With their mobile apps and irreverent style, daily-deal offerings such as Groupon and Living Social were all the rage as 2012 dawned.
Now? Um, not so much.
Groupon, perhaps the best-known player in the field, watched its value plummet 79% in 2012. Its stock value dropped about three-quarters since opening in November 2011 as high-profile investors washed their hands of it.
And this is the company Google reportedly tried to buy for $6 billion in 2010.
LivingSocial, meanwhile, announced last month it was laying off 400 people. That's after announcing months of revenue losses.
So what happened? Inbox fatigue made some users stop checking the deals. A glut of offers you don't care about (pottery classes?) can make your eyes glaze over. And some businesses quit making offers, saying they never saw the promised returns on their investment.
Nexus Q
When Google gets something right, they get it really, really right.
Redefining Web search? Yep. World's leading mobile system? Check. A car that drives itself? Vroom!
But some of the Big G's outings in the gadget world have hit with a thud. Enter ... the Nexus Q.
The size and shape of a Magic Eight Ball, the Nexus Q is (or was ... it's hard to say) a media streamer that uses Android to play audio and video. It's also made in the United States, no small thing in a world where virtually all gadgets come from China.
Unfortunately, in the grand tradition of Google Wave, nobody really knew what it was when it was released in June. Its release date was pushed back and, eventually, Google just gave everybody who pre-ordered a free one.
The Q has not officially been canned. But on Google's online store, the never-released gadget is listed as "not available at this time."
Stop Online Piracy Act
The new law was supposed to be about fighting online piracy. Who's going to be against that, right?
Answer: Pretty much the whole Internet.
Members of Congress sponsored the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and related bills to make it easier to shut down websites that illegally share music, movies and other content.
But opponents argued it went too far and could end up shutting down legitimate sites while stifling free expression in the process.
Unfortunately for backers of SOPA, Web heavyweights such as Google, Facebook, Reddit and Wikipedia joined the fight against the bill. Sites went black on January 18 to raise awareness. Members of communities such as Reddit put intense pressure on lawmakers (including soon-to-be GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan) until they dropped their support or went on record opposing the bill.
The unprecedented backlash eventually caused supporters to shelve SOPA, and quite possibly ushered in a new age of Web activism.
'Social discovery' apps
If the first wave of social networking was about hooking up with friends, the next wave would be about meeting strangers -- or so the thinking went.
Tech-world pundits predicted a new wave of "social discovery" apps that would change the way we meet people. The basic idea was that, by using phones' GPS, users could see who else was nearby and then meet up with other users with shared friends or similar interests.
"If we get this right, I cannot think of a bigger thing to be working on right now," Paul Davison, CEO of the app Highlight, told CNN in June. "We can take billions and billions of dollars."
Significantly, he also chose not to tell a reporter how many users the app had at the time.
Banjo and Glancee were apps that did something similar. Others, such as Skout and Grindr, were even more specific -- they let you hunt down willing partners for a quick hookup.
But here's the thing -- some users, particularly women, found the apps a little creepy.
OK, so you know that somebody sitting in the same bar as you likes the Pixies, "Firefly," the fantasy stylings of George R.R. Martin and the Atlanta Braves. Are you really just going to start waving around your smartphone to get their attention?
Sure, they've got good taste. But they still might be jerks.
Color
It was supposed to be a tech-world slam-dunk. Instead, it became a cautionary tale about what some feel could become a tech "bubble."
Color, a photo-sharing mobile app, stoked excitement in the startup community that was virtually unrivaled. Before it had a single user, Color had raised $41 million from investors. So certain were its Silicon Valley creators that, reportedly, they turned down a $200 million buyout offer from Google.
With much fanfare, Color launched in March 2011. But users soon complained that the app, designed to share photos with the people around you, often didn't find anyone for them to share with. Its creators were forced to announce they were working on a major overhaul on the same day it was released.
Color tallied about 1 million users at its peak and, more recently, was reportedly down to about 100,000. Compare that to the roughly 100 million users of photo app Instagram (it had about 27 million when Facebook bought it last year), and you see the problem.
Color will be shutting down on New Year's Eve.
Zynga
It reads like an old VH1 "Behind the Music" episode.
"Zynga was riding high. Love them or hate them, its games like "Mafia Wars" and "FarmVille" were everywhere, clogging up Facebook pages and spurring millions of bored casual gamers to pay real cash for virtual cows. Then, it all came crumbling down."
OK, maybe "crumbling down" is an overstatement. But things in The 'Ville definitely didn't go Zynga's way in 2012.
In October, Zynga announced it was laying off 5% of its employees, shutting down its studio in Boston and proposing the closure of others in Japan and England.
(It would be entirely cynical to suggest Zynga hoped to bury that news by making the announcement during Apple's much-hyped iPad Mini event. So we won't suggest that here.)
Facebook, which gets a cut when people spend money on games such as "FarmVille," said that income from Zynga was down 20% over last year.
And, like unskilled mafia warriors, Zynga shot itself in the foot again in March when it bought the company that makes mobile game "Draw Something" for an eye-popping $180 million. But fascination with "Draw Something" dropped off fast. When's the last time you played?
Twitter twits
OK, so you can post something stupid anywhere. But there's something about Twitter's rapid-fire, 140-character bursts that brings out the stupid in people.
From companies embarrassing themselves to celebrities behaving badly, it's hard to name just one Twitter doofus. But here are a few nominees:
• Chris Brown, the hip-hop star, consistently used Twitter to make himself look like a foul-mouthed rage monster. Instead of thanking fans after winning a Grammy, he launched a profanity-laced bromide at his "haters." Then there were the misogynistic, scatological insults he hurled at comedian-critic Jenny Johnson before "quitting" Twitter. (He's back.)
• McDonald's thought it would get a little of that social media love it had been hearing about in January when it created the #McDstories hashtag -- asking customers to share their favorite McDonald's memories. Then it found out what happens when you give the Internet open access to your advertising effort. McDonald's yanked the campaign after just two hours and countless food-horror stories about fingernails, insects and bouts of food poisoning.
• Spike Lee was, like many Twitter users, angered by the killing of Florida teen Trayvon Martin. Tweeting the home address of shooter George Zimmerman would have been questionable enough. But Lee mistakenly tweeted out the address of a couple who have a son by that name. They had to leave their home after being besieged by reporters and threats. Lee would later apologize and "reach an agreement" with the aggrieved family.
• Greek triple jumper Paraskevi Papachristou was on her way to the Olympics when she tried a little ill-advised Twitter humor. With so many African Olympians in London, "the West Nile mosquitoes will at least eat homemade food!" she wrote. Her tweet was quickly criticized as racially insensitive, and Greece's Olympic Committee barred her from participating in the Games.
• Oprah Winfrey had been gushing for weeks about how much she loved the new Microsoft Surface tablet, culminating in this tweet: "Gotta say love that SURFACE! Have bought 12 already for Christmas gifts." Unfortunately for her, those words were followed by ... "via Twitter for iPad."
The top 12 tech stories of 2012
Heather Kelly
Fri December 28, 2012
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/27/tech/web/top-tech-stories-2012/
Facebook struggled with its new life as a publicly traded company, and Instagram, the photo-sharing network it acquired in April, was dragged along for the ride.
There were inspiring stories, such as the Internet coming together to protest anti-piracy legislation. And there was darker news, like the Israeli military live-tweeting its strikes against Gaza.
And as always, the world's dominant and most closely watched tech company was all over the news. Apple did a little bit of everything in 2012, from hit new products (the iPad Mini) to high-profile failures (Apple Maps) to some old-fashioned courtroom drama in its patent war with Samsung.
Here are our picks for the top 12 tech stories of 2012. What did we leave out? Let us know in the comment section below.
Microsoft's big push
This was the year Microsoft took a big, bold and surprisingly fun step with a new version of Windows, an updated mobile operating system and its very own iPad rival.
The company, best known for its efficient but stodgy desktop software, needed to do something fresh to get customers' attention in 2012 and started with its flagship product. Windows 8 is a complete overhaul of the Windows operating system. Microsoft nixed the Start button and mixed a playful touchscreen interface with a more traditional desktop experience that runs on tablets, traditional computers, and hybrid machines.
The company also made a leap into the hardware market, releasing its first tablet, the Microsoft Surface, which ran a truncated version of the new Windows 8 operating system. And finally, there was Windows Phone 8, a major revamp of its smartphone operating system, which Microsoft hopes can compete with Apple's iOS and Google's Android.
It's still too soon to judge any of the new releases as successes or failures, but give Microsoft credit for taking chances.
SOPA backlash
In January, a pair of anti-piracy bills united the Internet in outrage. The proposed legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and the Protect IP Act, or PIPA, would have restricted access to sites associated with pirated content, including the search engines and ad networks that do business with them.
The Internet cried censorship, and on January 18 some of the most popular sites blacked out their pages in protest. Reddit, Craigslist, Boing Boing, The Oatmeal, the English-language version of Wikipedia and thousands of other sites went dark. Even Google put a black censorship box over its logo. There were also petitions and organized boycotts of companies that supported the bills.
The protests worked, as both SOPA and PIPA were shelved. It was an impressive demonstration of the power of an organized Internet community.
Live-tweeting war
Violence and war have long been documented on Twitter and other social networks -- typically by journalists and by regular people on the ground (notably the Pakistani witness to the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden).
But in November, the Israeli military took this concept to a new level. During its conflict with Palestinian forces in Gaza, the Israel Defense Force tweeted updates, including the news it had "eliminated" Hamas leader Ahmed Jabari. The military arm of Hamas responded on Twitter with its own provocations.
The back-and-forth between the warring sides signaled a jarring evolution in how war is broadcast in real time.
iPhone 5 and Apple Maps stumble
Every Apple hardware release is a big news story, starting with rumors months in advance and peaking with a well-oiled Apple press event, followed by usually glowing reviews and huge sales numbers. But in 2012, Apple made a major misstep when it released the iPhone 5 and its new operating system, iOS 6.
The company dropped the Google-powered maps that had come pre-installed on every iPhone since 2007. In its place, Apple introduced its own mapping app. Apple Maps looked stunning, with 3-D graphics and neat features like Flyover and turn-by-turn directions. All it was missing was transit directions and accuracy -- the maps were riddled with mistaken locations and outdated information.
The resulting criticism inspired an apology from CEO Tim Cook and led to an executive shakeup at Apple. Customers turned to third-party map apps until Google finally released an iOS version of its popular maps in December.
Apple vs. Samsung
It was the biggest tech trial of the year. Two of the top phone and tablet manufacturers went to war when Apple accused Samsung of infringing on its iPad and iPhone patents for a variety of tablets and smartphones. The drama culminated in a federal jury trial over the summer that offered a rare peek into how notoriously secretive Apple operates.
The story became huge because of the large amount of money at stake and the implications that its verdict would have on Samsung's business and the Android platform.
The jury decided in Apple's favor, awarding the company just over $1 billion in damages. But the case is far from over. Lawyers for both sides will continue bickering over potential appeals for months and possibly years to come.
Facebook's botched IPO
It was the most anticipated IPO of the year, and one of the largest ever for a tech company. Social-media darling Facebook looked primed for a big public opening: The company was valued at $104 billion, snapped up popular photo-sharing app Instagram and was still growing.
But then an array of problems and misjudgments led to a botched IPO in May, and the company's stock plummeted. The initial offer price of $38 was too high, too many shares were issued, its opening day was marred by Nasdaq's technical glitches, and underwriter Morgan Stanley was fined for improperly influencing share sales.
The stock price dropped significantly, hitting a low of $17.55 on September 4. Facebook is still struggling to recover some of its early-2012 luster.
The Instagram boom
Instagram started out scrappy two years ago as a fun little app for sharing sepia-shaded photos with friends. But when its user base skyrocketed, Facebook bought it for $1 billion in cash and shares of Facebook stock. That amount later dropped to $735 million as the value of Facebook shares plummeted.
By September, Instagram had more than 100 million users. The app capped off its big year with a rite of passage for social networks: a bungled update to its terms of service that sparked user outrage and led to a hasty backtrack by founder Kevin Systrom.
Instagram's challenge for 2013 is to figure out how to grow its free service into a business that makes money so that Facebook can begin to get its money's worth.
Megaupload and Kim Dotcom
The Megaupload case would have been mildly interesting on its own. A popular file-sharing company and its various sites were shut down by the F.B.I for piracy. But when Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom was arrested in January at his lavish New Zealand estate, he went from unknown entrepreneur to a flamboyantly rich cult hero.
Dotcom (he legally changed his last name from Schmitz in 2005) did what any self-respecting boy video-game nerd would do with millions of dollars. He bought a yacht, helicopter, luxury cars and motorcycles. He lived with his model wife in a $24 million rented mansion in New Zealand where he spent hours playing "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3," earning a spot as the top-ranked player in the world.
But after Dotcom was jailed and his assets were seized, he slowly emerged as a leader for Internet freedom activists who thought he was unfairly targeted. He's still fighting the charges and using his newfound fame to launch new projects. His current plans include a new file-sharing site that encrypts all its files, and a streaming music service called Megabox.
Mid-sized tablets take off
It was the rare case of Apple following a trend instead of setting it. Apple introduced its 7.9-inch iPad Mini in October to take on its new rivals in the tablet market: cheaper 7-inch devices from Google and Amazon. While the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 were only selling modestly compared to the iPad, Apple quickly recognized the growing demand for a smaller, more portable device.
The iPad Mini proved especially notable because Apple's late CEO, Steve Jobs, famously stated a 7-inch tablet would never make it in the market because it was "too big to compete with a smartphone; too small to compete with an iPad." This may have been one of those rare cases in which Jobs was wrong.
Nintendo launches Wii U
In November, Nintendo released a new version of its popular Wii game console, which while groundbreaking when launched in 2006 was badly in need of a refresh.
The Wii U's most novel feature is a touchscreen tablet controller called a GamePad, which communicates with the main console. Inside the tablet are motion control sensors, speakers, a camera, buttons and other bells and whistles -- all of which the gamer uses to interact with what's happening on the larger screen.
It's a bold move for the company and brings a new perspective to console gaming, although the Wii U has received mixed reviews so far.
Yahoo hires Marissa Mayer
Aging Internet giant Yahoo was facing slumping revenues and internal strife in July when it hired Google exec Marissa Mayer as its new chief executive. The hire made headlines for many reasons: Mayer was a bold choice that showed Yahoo was serious about shaking things up. She was also young, a Silicon Valley power player, and a woman who was expecting her first child.
There was much media hand-wringing over her pregnancy, with some pundits wondering aloud whether Mayer could juggle a newborn baby and a demanding new job. Many saw her as a role model for working mothers.
But when the news settled, the real question returned: Could Mayer save the floundering Yahoo? So far she has shaken up Yahoo's executive team, given employee morale a much-needed boost and begun to improve the company's mobile offerings, including a stunning new Flickr app.
It will take a while to properly gauge her impact, but investors seem optimistic. Yahoo's stock price has risen $4 a share since her hiring was announced.
Tech's role in the presidential election
Technology issues such as net neutrality weren't discussed much during the 2012 presidential election, but tech played a huge role in rallying supporters and getting out the vote. President Obama, arguably the most tech-savvy of U.S. presidents, went on Google Plus and Reddit to take questions from voters.
And both his campaign and that of his GOP challenger, Mitt Romney, sent social media messages almost daily in attempts to sway media reports and public opinion.
But the most impressive use of tech took place behind the scenes, where both sides used new and powerful computer databases to target voters. The Romney campaign's get-out-the-vote program, called Orca, suffered technical glitches on Election Day and was perceived to have been outflanked by Obama campaign software which compiled massive amounts of data on voters and dispatched volunteers to pinpoint locations across the country.
Monday, October 29, 2012
Shit Apple Fanatics Say
Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFhjDX-DUew
Part 2 is here:
http://youtu.be/kTTSsB92L_s
WRITERS
Scott Rose & Andrew Baird
DIRECTOR
Scott Rose
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Andrew Baird
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
Alessandra Burenin
EDITOR
Andrew Baird
ASSISTANT EDITORS
Scott Rose & Alessandra Burenin
APPLE FANATIC
Scott Rose
CAST
Alessandra Burenin
Natalie Conti
Claire Harrier
Sean McBeth
Marissa Seiferman
Angie Smith
SPECIAL THANKS TO THE LOCAL BUSINESSES OF AUSTIN, TEXAS
Austin Parks Foundation
Austin Vision Center
Blue Velvet Vintage Clothing
BookPeople
Central Market
Daily Juice
Dominican Joe's Coffee
Freebirds
Pinballz Video Arcade
SoCo on the Lake Apartments
Urban Squared Realty
Monday, September 17, 2012
Kool Photos
SpongeBob Squarepants & Friends
Photo of my pop in the 1980s while on his second job as stunt double on Magnum PI...
Kill Drones...
The Gay Oreo
Snow White Meets Apple
Blueboy & Fluffer, Konformist executive meeting...
Robert DeNiro's actual taxi driver license, which he received during research and preparation for his role as Travis Bickle
Photo courtesy DangerousMinds.net
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Foxconn's Other Dirty Secret: The World's Largest 'Internship' Program
Alex PasternackWednesday, Feb 15, 2012
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/2/15/foxconn-s-other-dirty-secret-the-world-s-largest-internship-program
In June 2010, a university student named Liu Jiang arrived in the southern Chinese city of Foshan to begin his summer internship, at a factory that produces LCD screens for laptops and cell phones for the manufacturing giant Foxconn. As a student at the Dongfang Vocational School of Technology in the northern city of Shijiazhuang, Liu had traveled hundreds of miles for a chance to get hands-on experience working for China’s leading electronics maker.
But his internship was brief. Less than a month later, in the early morning of July 18, the eighteen-year-old would climb to the roof of his six-story dormitory and leap to his death.
Liu quickly became a statistic in Foxconn’s ugly worker history, a blip on the Internet radar: his was the seventeenth suicide attempt, and the thirteenth death, at a Foxconn factory that year alone. (The suicide rate at Foxconn is still lower than that of the general population in China, but striking for its concentration among a group of workers at a single company.) Apart from his school, few details emerged about Liu’s life or the conditions of his particular internship, a gig that landed him among other full-time workers his age and younger.
But in light of a series of reports that have emerged in the years since, Liu’s suicide points at one of the under-reported but more unsavory aspects of the much-criticized labor practices that produce gadgets for Apple and many other popular computer brands: with the help of schools and government officials, the company runs a massive internship program built not on voluntary education but on “compelled” factory work for teenage students. According to Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation, Foxconn may be running “the world’s single largest internship program – and one of the most exploitative.”
By Foxconn’s standards, Liu’s internship — which he landed through a labor placement firm in the nearby city of Guangzhou — would have included housing, food, and a small stipend estimated to be about half the salary of a typical factory worker, all in the name of hands-on education. But according to independent studies, and by Foxconn’s own admission, interning in a gadget factory is often less about job training and more of a lesson in the crude economics of globalization.
Foxconn says it relies on as many as 180,000 interns during the summer months to fulfill the needs of the voracious beast of Western gadget demand — and the requirements of companies like Apple, Amazon, HP and nearly every other major electronics brand. The Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), a longtime critic of Foxconn, estimates the number is much higher, and that interns have at times made up as much as a third of the company’s 1.3-million-strong workforce, or 430,000 interns. Either way, it’s an intern workforce more sizable than Disney, Congress and Hollywood combined.
But neither Apple nor recent widely-spread reports in the mainstream media make mention of interns. Sourced from schools and third-party recruitment firms, SACOM reports that interns tend to fall into a class of indirect workers, for whom Foxconn is not directly responsible. At the time of Liu’s death, Foxconn deflected responsibility for his case because he was hired by an outside recruitment company in Guangzhou.
“Because [indirect workers] are not directly hired by the factories, the factories will say, ‘we are not responsible for taking care of them,’” Fan Yuan, of the New York-based China Labor Watch, told me. “They usually work longer hours than regular workers. If there is an inspection or auditing from these companies, these workers will disperse.”
As a result, the use of interns can complicate attempts to surveil the supply chain for labor violations. “If we want to dig deeper, if we want to find the factories that are selling raw materials to Foxconn, in these factories the conditions may be even worse,” says Yuan. “But it’s really difficult for any organization to have specific data about them.”
This isn’t the venerated internship of the privileged college student, building valuable work and life skills with school credit and on-the-job training in place of pay – if such an internship even still exists. Historically, Foxconn’s low-wage internships involve essential factory labor by poor students, some of whose areas of study have nothing to do with electronics, and turn the “school credit” idea on its head. According to SACOM, vocational students, including those studying journalism, tourism and languages, have had practically no choice but to participate in such internships if they want to graduate from their schools. As temporary workers, they have little legal protection or recourse in the event of injury, over-work, or underpayment. And if they complain, they could jeopardize their diplomas.
“It is evident that this use of student workers is a form of involuntary labour, which is supposedly prohibited by Apple,” says a recent letter by SACOM to Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook. Apple, which is only one of dozens of Western brands that contract to Foxconn, has taken steps to address concerns at the manufacturer, including threats to workers’ health and safety, a heavy emphasis on overtime, and the use of underage workers. This week Apple announced, to some skepticism, that the independent auditor Fair Labor Watch was beginning to examine the company’s supply chain.
Apple’s most recent 27-page Supplier Responsibility Report, however, makes no mention of student internships. And while Foxconn’s internships have been reported in Chinese media, in Perlin’s book and in a recent Alternet story, student workers were not mentioned in recent reports by the Times, This American Life and others.
School work
Even if Foxconn is the largest employer of interns, the system is far larger than Foxconn, and depends upon the collusion of local governments and schools. Observers like the Hong Kong-based China Labor Bulletin and SACOM say the system is abetted by a network of government officials, who are paid fees for recruiting students, work with an unruly system of public and private vocational schools that funnel students into internships and reap fees and other benefits in the process. Such schools have proliferated across the country in recent years, often targeting rural and low-income high school graduates not privileged or accomplished enough to make it through the testing gauntlet and enter China’s middle- and top-tier universities.
On June 26, 2010, a week after Liu Wang began his internship in Foshan, the official China Daily newspaper described a striking approach to labor supply at Foxconn, which was then reeling from a string of suicides and rising labor demands. The Henan provincial government declared that 100,000 vocational and university students would be sent on three-month internships at Foxconn’s Shenzhen plants.
At one vocational school in Zhengzhou, wrote Hu Yinan, students were informed of the government’s requirement after the summer semester had begun, and that “all those who refuse would have to drop out.” That elicited ironic resignation from at least one student who spoke to the paper: “Everybody is going, ‘I can go find out why all those Foxconn employees killed themselves.’ It’s kind of fun.”
Meanwhile, a study that year by Beijing University and Tsinghua University found that local government agencies were given recruitment fees in exchange for filling worker quotas. One student interviewed for the study said she and 30 other students were dispatched from a vocational school in Guizhou Province to intern at an electronics factory in Changzhou, Jiangsu. There they were paid 500 yuan per month, half the pay of an average Foxconn worker, over the course of four months, with their internships tied to their eligibility for graduation.
In exchange for sending interns, schools are compensated, to the detriment of the interns: “it was not unusual for schools to deduct a ‘commission’ from the interns’ salary or get paid directly by factories for providing cheap labour,” according to the 2011 report by China Labor Watch.
The 2010 report concluded that Foxconn was “systematically” abusing internships offered by over 200 vocational schools in Southern China since 2009. Rather than performing “training”-related tasks, they were pressed into factory work, in some instances, forced to work 14-hour days in a standing position with low pay. Foxconn, it said, was as a “concentration camp of workers in the 21st century,” with students “kidnapped” to work overtime in the name of “just in time” production.
The “Internship”
The appeal of internships to employers at Chinese factories is not unlike that for many employers at white-collar offices in Los Angeles or London: free or low-cost labor by eager, energetic workers who earn few, if any, benefits, doing essential work. In China, where the “internship” has migrated from the West, Foxconn may be the tip of the iceberg. “What Foxconn and Apple’s other Chinese suppliers do—and Apple’s willingness to tolerate it—is completely par for the course for manufacturing in China,” says Perlin, who’s spent years working and studying in the country. “Forced labor is a major part of the Chinese economy, in many different respects, and our dependence on Chinese goods binds us to that every day. Forced internships like the ones at Foxconn appear to be somewhat common as well. What may be different here is the scale and the high-level government collusion.”
Since the 2010 suicides, Foxconn has pledged to improve its approach to interns, in addition to pay and worker safety. In an October 2010 statement, Foxconn responded to SACOM’s claim that a third of its workforce was interns, insisting that interns comprised 7.6% of its total employee population in China, “and at no time has this percentage ever exceeded 15% even during the summer peak seasons.”
“While we have found a small number of incidents where interns have voluntarily and legally worked overtime hours,” read the statement, “we are working hard to institute a ban on any overtime work by interns and we are in the process of ensuring that this important policy is enforced across all of our operations.” For its internships – “short-term, on-the-job” training managed by individual schools for students aged 16 and up – compensation levels are now “equivalent to that of the basic workers and higher than the government regulated levels and the average internship period is between two and six months.”
In the electronics industry, which has been called the most labor-abusive in the world, internships are not often addressed, even though guidelines by Apple and others forbid unpaid work and stipulate minimum pay. But those guidelines can mean little in practice when operations like Foxconn are squeezed at the margins to provide unpredictable, overnight deliveries of new products. The tide may be turning though, as a groundswell of labor unrest – and the uncensored reporting of labor abuses by the Chinese press – seem to illustrate.
Though Foxconn raised wages in 2010, they’re still reported to be 50-60 percent of the minimum living wage of the cities where factories are based, according to SACOM. That means overtime is necessary. One student worker in Chengdu explained, “If there is no overtime at all, I will only receive the basic salary. Hence, I have no choice.”
To young workers from the countryside, the ability to work long hours, even in violation of local labor laws, can be seen as a benefit. But the costs are high. Following the string of suicides, an undercover report published by China’s leading investigative newspaper, Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern Weekend), laid bare the grim circumstances: 300,000 employees working and living on a 2 square kilometer patch of land – three times the population density of Manila, the densest city in the world – with ten workers to a dorm room, and little to no time for relationships (cheap prostitutes tend to set up shop just outside the factories). The coverage was excellent (part one, two and three), perhaps because its reporter, Liu Zhiyi, was able to fit in so well with the young workers: he too was a 23 year old intern for the newspaper.
“I know of two groups of young people,” was how he started his first article. “One group consists of university students like myself, who live in ivory towers and are kept company by libraries and lake views.”
The other group are treated more like robots. “They often dream, but also repeatedly tear apart their dreams, like a miserable painter who keeps tearing up his or her drafts,” he wrote. "They manufacture the world’s top electronic products, yet they gather their own fortune at the slowest possible pace. The office’s guest network account has a password that ends with “888” — like many businessmen, they love this number, and they worship its homonym [“rich,” “lucky”]. Little do they know that it’s their own hands protecting the country’s “8,” as their overtime hours, lottery tickets, and even horse racing bets struggle to find the “8” that belongs to themselves."
Few protections
In China, where inflation is colliding with higher wages, and placing a stronger reliance on white-collar internships, few protections for interns exist. Because interns are classified as students rather than workers, they are not protected by the country’s Labor Contract Law or other labor laws. Guidelines issued by the Ministry of Education and other government departments that do govern internships “do not necessarily carry the weight of law,” according to a report by the China Labor Bulletin.
A report published in 2011 by the Chinese Ministry of Education emphasized that the nation’s goal was to improve the supply of skilled workers to a distressed labor market – not necessarily to protect the rights of student interns and workers. “China has entered a critical moment of economic and social development,” it read. “However, secondary vocational education, which is supposed to shoulder the responsibility of cultivating China’s skilled workers, is still weak. Its quality, structure, scale and efficiency have yet to catch up with social and economic development.”
The lack of protections for interns is widespread. Because interns are not permanent workers, a range of employers, from Foxconn to Fox Searchlight – which has recently been named in a class-action lawsuit over “The Black Swan” – can ultimately deflect responsibility.
In October, a spokesman for Fox pointed the finger at director Darren Aronofsky: “These interns were not even retained by Fox Searchlight … which has a proud history of supporting and fostering productive internships.” After Liu’s suicide in July 2010, a spokesman for Foxconn said that because the victim was not an official employee of Chimei Innolux, but a temporary worker employed by a labor dispatching firm, it would not be “handling” the case.
In that same statement, Foxconn revealed that Liu’s internship had been terminated about a week after it began, on July 7, because he failed to show up for work for several days, and that the company had been trying to arrange to have him sent back to his hometown. It’s not clear why he stopped working, what kept Foxconn from buying him a ticket home, or what led him to suicide.
But Liu’s death might be read as the stark sign of an abusive practice that stretches far beyond China’s factories. And it’s another reminder, if we needed one, that calculating the cost of a new gadget is much harder than the price tag suggests.
Editor’s note: Liu Jiang is an alias. Liu is the surname of the intern who died in 2010, but his given name could not be confirmed.
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/2/15/foxconn-s-other-dirty-secret-the-world-s-largest-internship-program
In June 2010, a university student named Liu Jiang arrived in the southern Chinese city of Foshan to begin his summer internship, at a factory that produces LCD screens for laptops and cell phones for the manufacturing giant Foxconn. As a student at the Dongfang Vocational School of Technology in the northern city of Shijiazhuang, Liu had traveled hundreds of miles for a chance to get hands-on experience working for China’s leading electronics maker.
But his internship was brief. Less than a month later, in the early morning of July 18, the eighteen-year-old would climb to the roof of his six-story dormitory and leap to his death.
Liu quickly became a statistic in Foxconn’s ugly worker history, a blip on the Internet radar: his was the seventeenth suicide attempt, and the thirteenth death, at a Foxconn factory that year alone. (The suicide rate at Foxconn is still lower than that of the general population in China, but striking for its concentration among a group of workers at a single company.) Apart from his school, few details emerged about Liu’s life or the conditions of his particular internship, a gig that landed him among other full-time workers his age and younger.
But in light of a series of reports that have emerged in the years since, Liu’s suicide points at one of the under-reported but more unsavory aspects of the much-criticized labor practices that produce gadgets for Apple and many other popular computer brands: with the help of schools and government officials, the company runs a massive internship program built not on voluntary education but on “compelled” factory work for teenage students. According to Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation, Foxconn may be running “the world’s single largest internship program – and one of the most exploitative.”
By Foxconn’s standards, Liu’s internship — which he landed through a labor placement firm in the nearby city of Guangzhou — would have included housing, food, and a small stipend estimated to be about half the salary of a typical factory worker, all in the name of hands-on education. But according to independent studies, and by Foxconn’s own admission, interning in a gadget factory is often less about job training and more of a lesson in the crude economics of globalization.
Foxconn says it relies on as many as 180,000 interns during the summer months to fulfill the needs of the voracious beast of Western gadget demand — and the requirements of companies like Apple, Amazon, HP and nearly every other major electronics brand. The Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), a longtime critic of Foxconn, estimates the number is much higher, and that interns have at times made up as much as a third of the company’s 1.3-million-strong workforce, or 430,000 interns. Either way, it’s an intern workforce more sizable than Disney, Congress and Hollywood combined.
But neither Apple nor recent widely-spread reports in the mainstream media make mention of interns. Sourced from schools and third-party recruitment firms, SACOM reports that interns tend to fall into a class of indirect workers, for whom Foxconn is not directly responsible. At the time of Liu’s death, Foxconn deflected responsibility for his case because he was hired by an outside recruitment company in Guangzhou.
“Because [indirect workers] are not directly hired by the factories, the factories will say, ‘we are not responsible for taking care of them,’” Fan Yuan, of the New York-based China Labor Watch, told me. “They usually work longer hours than regular workers. If there is an inspection or auditing from these companies, these workers will disperse.”
As a result, the use of interns can complicate attempts to surveil the supply chain for labor violations. “If we want to dig deeper, if we want to find the factories that are selling raw materials to Foxconn, in these factories the conditions may be even worse,” says Yuan. “But it’s really difficult for any organization to have specific data about them.”
This isn’t the venerated internship of the privileged college student, building valuable work and life skills with school credit and on-the-job training in place of pay – if such an internship even still exists. Historically, Foxconn’s low-wage internships involve essential factory labor by poor students, some of whose areas of study have nothing to do with electronics, and turn the “school credit” idea on its head. According to SACOM, vocational students, including those studying journalism, tourism and languages, have had practically no choice but to participate in such internships if they want to graduate from their schools. As temporary workers, they have little legal protection or recourse in the event of injury, over-work, or underpayment. And if they complain, they could jeopardize their diplomas.
“It is evident that this use of student workers is a form of involuntary labour, which is supposedly prohibited by Apple,” says a recent letter by SACOM to Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook. Apple, which is only one of dozens of Western brands that contract to Foxconn, has taken steps to address concerns at the manufacturer, including threats to workers’ health and safety, a heavy emphasis on overtime, and the use of underage workers. This week Apple announced, to some skepticism, that the independent auditor Fair Labor Watch was beginning to examine the company’s supply chain.
Apple’s most recent 27-page Supplier Responsibility Report, however, makes no mention of student internships. And while Foxconn’s internships have been reported in Chinese media, in Perlin’s book and in a recent Alternet story, student workers were not mentioned in recent reports by the Times, This American Life and others.
School work
Even if Foxconn is the largest employer of interns, the system is far larger than Foxconn, and depends upon the collusion of local governments and schools. Observers like the Hong Kong-based China Labor Bulletin and SACOM say the system is abetted by a network of government officials, who are paid fees for recruiting students, work with an unruly system of public and private vocational schools that funnel students into internships and reap fees and other benefits in the process. Such schools have proliferated across the country in recent years, often targeting rural and low-income high school graduates not privileged or accomplished enough to make it through the testing gauntlet and enter China’s middle- and top-tier universities.
On June 26, 2010, a week after Liu Wang began his internship in Foshan, the official China Daily newspaper described a striking approach to labor supply at Foxconn, which was then reeling from a string of suicides and rising labor demands. The Henan provincial government declared that 100,000 vocational and university students would be sent on three-month internships at Foxconn’s Shenzhen plants.
At one vocational school in Zhengzhou, wrote Hu Yinan, students were informed of the government’s requirement after the summer semester had begun, and that “all those who refuse would have to drop out.” That elicited ironic resignation from at least one student who spoke to the paper: “Everybody is going, ‘I can go find out why all those Foxconn employees killed themselves.’ It’s kind of fun.”
Meanwhile, a study that year by Beijing University and Tsinghua University found that local government agencies were given recruitment fees in exchange for filling worker quotas. One student interviewed for the study said she and 30 other students were dispatched from a vocational school in Guizhou Province to intern at an electronics factory in Changzhou, Jiangsu. There they were paid 500 yuan per month, half the pay of an average Foxconn worker, over the course of four months, with their internships tied to their eligibility for graduation.
In exchange for sending interns, schools are compensated, to the detriment of the interns: “it was not unusual for schools to deduct a ‘commission’ from the interns’ salary or get paid directly by factories for providing cheap labour,” according to the 2011 report by China Labor Watch.
The 2010 report concluded that Foxconn was “systematically” abusing internships offered by over 200 vocational schools in Southern China since 2009. Rather than performing “training”-related tasks, they were pressed into factory work, in some instances, forced to work 14-hour days in a standing position with low pay. Foxconn, it said, was as a “concentration camp of workers in the 21st century,” with students “kidnapped” to work overtime in the name of “just in time” production.
The “Internship”
The appeal of internships to employers at Chinese factories is not unlike that for many employers at white-collar offices in Los Angeles or London: free or low-cost labor by eager, energetic workers who earn few, if any, benefits, doing essential work. In China, where the “internship” has migrated from the West, Foxconn may be the tip of the iceberg. “What Foxconn and Apple’s other Chinese suppliers do—and Apple’s willingness to tolerate it—is completely par for the course for manufacturing in China,” says Perlin, who’s spent years working and studying in the country. “Forced labor is a major part of the Chinese economy, in many different respects, and our dependence on Chinese goods binds us to that every day. Forced internships like the ones at Foxconn appear to be somewhat common as well. What may be different here is the scale and the high-level government collusion.”
Since the 2010 suicides, Foxconn has pledged to improve its approach to interns, in addition to pay and worker safety. In an October 2010 statement, Foxconn responded to SACOM’s claim that a third of its workforce was interns, insisting that interns comprised 7.6% of its total employee population in China, “and at no time has this percentage ever exceeded 15% even during the summer peak seasons.”
“While we have found a small number of incidents where interns have voluntarily and legally worked overtime hours,” read the statement, “we are working hard to institute a ban on any overtime work by interns and we are in the process of ensuring that this important policy is enforced across all of our operations.” For its internships – “short-term, on-the-job” training managed by individual schools for students aged 16 and up – compensation levels are now “equivalent to that of the basic workers and higher than the government regulated levels and the average internship period is between two and six months.”
In the electronics industry, which has been called the most labor-abusive in the world, internships are not often addressed, even though guidelines by Apple and others forbid unpaid work and stipulate minimum pay. But those guidelines can mean little in practice when operations like Foxconn are squeezed at the margins to provide unpredictable, overnight deliveries of new products. The tide may be turning though, as a groundswell of labor unrest – and the uncensored reporting of labor abuses by the Chinese press – seem to illustrate.
Though Foxconn raised wages in 2010, they’re still reported to be 50-60 percent of the minimum living wage of the cities where factories are based, according to SACOM. That means overtime is necessary. One student worker in Chengdu explained, “If there is no overtime at all, I will only receive the basic salary. Hence, I have no choice.”
To young workers from the countryside, the ability to work long hours, even in violation of local labor laws, can be seen as a benefit. But the costs are high. Following the string of suicides, an undercover report published by China’s leading investigative newspaper, Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern Weekend), laid bare the grim circumstances: 300,000 employees working and living on a 2 square kilometer patch of land – three times the population density of Manila, the densest city in the world – with ten workers to a dorm room, and little to no time for relationships (cheap prostitutes tend to set up shop just outside the factories). The coverage was excellent (part one, two and three), perhaps because its reporter, Liu Zhiyi, was able to fit in so well with the young workers: he too was a 23 year old intern for the newspaper.
“I know of two groups of young people,” was how he started his first article. “One group consists of university students like myself, who live in ivory towers and are kept company by libraries and lake views.”
The other group are treated more like robots. “They often dream, but also repeatedly tear apart their dreams, like a miserable painter who keeps tearing up his or her drafts,” he wrote. "They manufacture the world’s top electronic products, yet they gather their own fortune at the slowest possible pace. The office’s guest network account has a password that ends with “888” — like many businessmen, they love this number, and they worship its homonym [“rich,” “lucky”]. Little do they know that it’s their own hands protecting the country’s “8,” as their overtime hours, lottery tickets, and even horse racing bets struggle to find the “8” that belongs to themselves."
Few protections
In China, where inflation is colliding with higher wages, and placing a stronger reliance on white-collar internships, few protections for interns exist. Because interns are classified as students rather than workers, they are not protected by the country’s Labor Contract Law or other labor laws. Guidelines issued by the Ministry of Education and other government departments that do govern internships “do not necessarily carry the weight of law,” according to a report by the China Labor Bulletin.
A report published in 2011 by the Chinese Ministry of Education emphasized that the nation’s goal was to improve the supply of skilled workers to a distressed labor market – not necessarily to protect the rights of student interns and workers. “China has entered a critical moment of economic and social development,” it read. “However, secondary vocational education, which is supposed to shoulder the responsibility of cultivating China’s skilled workers, is still weak. Its quality, structure, scale and efficiency have yet to catch up with social and economic development.”
The lack of protections for interns is widespread. Because interns are not permanent workers, a range of employers, from Foxconn to Fox Searchlight – which has recently been named in a class-action lawsuit over “The Black Swan” – can ultimately deflect responsibility.
In October, a spokesman for Fox pointed the finger at director Darren Aronofsky: “These interns were not even retained by Fox Searchlight … which has a proud history of supporting and fostering productive internships.” After Liu’s suicide in July 2010, a spokesman for Foxconn said that because the victim was not an official employee of Chimei Innolux, but a temporary worker employed by a labor dispatching firm, it would not be “handling” the case.
In that same statement, Foxconn revealed that Liu’s internship had been terminated about a week after it began, on July 7, because he failed to show up for work for several days, and that the company had been trying to arrange to have him sent back to his hometown. It’s not clear why he stopped working, what kept Foxconn from buying him a ticket home, or what led him to suicide.
But Liu’s death might be read as the stark sign of an abusive practice that stretches far beyond China’s factories. And it’s another reminder, if we needed one, that calculating the cost of a new gadget is much harder than the price tag suggests.
Editor’s note: Liu Jiang is an alias. Liu is the surname of the intern who died in 2010, but his given name could not be confirmed.
When will workers share in Apple's wealth?
Scott Nova, Special to CNNFri February 17, 2012
http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/17/opinion/nova-apple-foxconn
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Scott Nova: Labor rights problems at Apple's supplier factories an issue for years
Apple joined an organization called the Fair Labor Association to audit its supply chain
Nova: If Apple wants to improve labor practices, it should reach out to independent groups
Nova: If Apple genuinely "cared about every worker," it would pay every worker a living wage
Editor's note: Scott Nova is executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent, nonprofit labor rights-monitoring organization that investigates working conditions in factories around the world.
(CNN) -- Apple's CEO Tim Cook says the company "cares about every worker" in its factories and that "no one in (the) industry is doing more to improve working conditions than Apple."
Of course, when it comes to issues of corporate responsibility, talk is cheap. What matters is not what Apple says, but what it does.
And what Apple does in its vast global supply chain has been well-documented, which is why the company is in public relations overdrive, frantic to protect its once pristine corporate image.
Consider the fate that befell workers at a factory in Chengdu, China, that makes products for Apple. In May, independent investigators issued a report documenting grave dangers to workers at the facility. They warned the factory was failing to control the profusion of dust produced by the manufacture of aluminum cases for the Ipad 2. When a factory is suffused with aluminum dust, there is a high risk of explosion. Apple ignored the report and refused to meet with the authors, the investigators said. It did nothing to address the danger.
Two weeks later, the factory exploded, killing four workers and injuring 18. In the wake of the explosion, Apple said its suppliers took measures to control aluminum dust. But despite this, in December 2011, another explosion, at an Apple supplier factory in Shanghai, injured 61 workers.
Grievous labor rights problems at Apple's supplier factories have been known for years, including the spate of worker suicides in 2010 at the giant plant in Shenzhen, China, known as "Ipod City." At this factory -- owned, like the Chengdu plant, by Apple's biggest supplier, Foxconn -- more than a dozen workers took their own lives by throwing themselves from the roof of the factory's overcrowded dormitories, in apparent protest of the brutal treatment facing workers at the facility. (Foxconn reportedly responded by putting up nets outside the dorms and making workers sign pledges not to kill themselves.)
In recent weeks, public awareness of these issues has increased exponentially, thanks to a huge jump in media interest, raising Apple's public relations problems from a low simmer to a rolling boil.
When a company comes under this kind of pressure, sometimes genuine change in policy can occur. The more typical response is a mere change in rhetoric. This is the route Apple is choosing.
Apple's major move has been to announce that it has joined an organization called the Fair Labor Association, which will "audit" Apple's factories. According to Apple, the Fair Labor Association is an independent watchdog that will work tenaciously to hold Apple and its suppliers accountable.
Unfortunately, while there are some fine people at the association, the organization is not the independent watchdog Apple claims it to be. Indeed, most of its money -- millions of dollars per year -- comes from the very companies whose labor practices it is supposed to scrutinize. Although Apple has not disclosed its financial relationship with the Fair Labor Association, it is likely now the organization's largest funder. Moreover, on the association's board of directors sit executives of major corporations such as Nike, Adidas and agribusiness giant Syngenta. The job of these executives is to represent the interests of other member companies, such as Apple. Under the Fair Labor Association's rules, the company representatives on the board exercise veto power over major decisions.
Independence, as most people understand the term, means an organization is not funded and governed by the companies it is charged with investigating. Despite the financial relationship, Apple argues that the Fair Labor Association will act independently and that the association's review of Apple's factories will probably be "the most detailed factory audit in the history of mass manufacturing."
Early indications are not encouraging. Just one day after launching what was supposed to be a long and uncompromising investigation of Foxconn's Ipad plant in Shenzhen, the association was already issuing public praise of Foxconn and Apple.
On Wednesday, CNNMoney/Fortune ran an article with the headline, "Apple iPad plant is 'way, way above average,' says inspector." Fair Labor Association President Auret van Heerden said this about Foxconn to Reuters: "The facilities are first-class. ... I was very surprised when I walked in the door how tranquil it is. ..." The CNNMoney/Fortune article notes that "whether intended or not, van Heerden's remarks served to support (Apple CEO) Cook's contention that no one has done more than Apple to address the working conditions at factories."
Van Heerden reached these conclusions after a guided tour of the factory provided by Foxconn's owner, Terry Gou. The views of Gou, one of the wealthiest men in Asia, are well-known to Foxconn workers because, as punishment for displeasing their managers, workers are sometimes forced to spend hours writing out copies of his personal sayings. Clearly, Apple's partnership with the Fair Labor Association is not, in and of itself, going to usher in radical change.
So what steps would Apple take if it were genuinely committed to improving its labor practices? For starters, it would open its factories for inspection and worker trainings to genuinely independent groups such as Hong Kong-based SACOM, the organization whose report on the Chengdu factory could have saved the lives of the workers killed there in May, had Apple paid it heed.
And if Apple genuinely "cared about every worker," it would pay every worker a living wage -- enough for workers to achieve a minimally decent standard of living, support their families and even save a bit toward a better future. Today, barely 1% of the retail price of an Ipad goes to the workers who make it; 33% goes to Apple's profits. Apple's profits are so high, and its global labor costs so low, that it could triple the wages of its 700,000 manufacturing workers and help them achieve a living wage (just a few dollars an hour in China), and still make $40 billion a year. A wage increase of 16% to 25% at Foxconn, announced today as Apple's public relations blitz reaches a crescendo, doesn't come close.
Next time you are at the Apple Store, consider bellying up to the Genius Bar and asking why the most profitable company in the history of technology can't pay its workers a living wage and why, if Apple is really ready to open itself to independent scrutiny, it doesn't allow inspections by organizations in which it is not a dues-paying member.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/17/opinion/nova-apple-foxconn
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Scott Nova: Labor rights problems at Apple's supplier factories an issue for years
Apple joined an organization called the Fair Labor Association to audit its supply chain
Nova: If Apple wants to improve labor practices, it should reach out to independent groups
Nova: If Apple genuinely "cared about every worker," it would pay every worker a living wage
Editor's note: Scott Nova is executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent, nonprofit labor rights-monitoring organization that investigates working conditions in factories around the world.
(CNN) -- Apple's CEO Tim Cook says the company "cares about every worker" in its factories and that "no one in (the) industry is doing more to improve working conditions than Apple."
Of course, when it comes to issues of corporate responsibility, talk is cheap. What matters is not what Apple says, but what it does.
And what Apple does in its vast global supply chain has been well-documented, which is why the company is in public relations overdrive, frantic to protect its once pristine corporate image.
Consider the fate that befell workers at a factory in Chengdu, China, that makes products for Apple. In May, independent investigators issued a report documenting grave dangers to workers at the facility. They warned the factory was failing to control the profusion of dust produced by the manufacture of aluminum cases for the Ipad 2. When a factory is suffused with aluminum dust, there is a high risk of explosion. Apple ignored the report and refused to meet with the authors, the investigators said. It did nothing to address the danger.
Two weeks later, the factory exploded, killing four workers and injuring 18. In the wake of the explosion, Apple said its suppliers took measures to control aluminum dust. But despite this, in December 2011, another explosion, at an Apple supplier factory in Shanghai, injured 61 workers.
Grievous labor rights problems at Apple's supplier factories have been known for years, including the spate of worker suicides in 2010 at the giant plant in Shenzhen, China, known as "Ipod City." At this factory -- owned, like the Chengdu plant, by Apple's biggest supplier, Foxconn -- more than a dozen workers took their own lives by throwing themselves from the roof of the factory's overcrowded dormitories, in apparent protest of the brutal treatment facing workers at the facility. (Foxconn reportedly responded by putting up nets outside the dorms and making workers sign pledges not to kill themselves.)
In recent weeks, public awareness of these issues has increased exponentially, thanks to a huge jump in media interest, raising Apple's public relations problems from a low simmer to a rolling boil.
When a company comes under this kind of pressure, sometimes genuine change in policy can occur. The more typical response is a mere change in rhetoric. This is the route Apple is choosing.
Apple's major move has been to announce that it has joined an organization called the Fair Labor Association, which will "audit" Apple's factories. According to Apple, the Fair Labor Association is an independent watchdog that will work tenaciously to hold Apple and its suppliers accountable.
Unfortunately, while there are some fine people at the association, the organization is not the independent watchdog Apple claims it to be. Indeed, most of its money -- millions of dollars per year -- comes from the very companies whose labor practices it is supposed to scrutinize. Although Apple has not disclosed its financial relationship with the Fair Labor Association, it is likely now the organization's largest funder. Moreover, on the association's board of directors sit executives of major corporations such as Nike, Adidas and agribusiness giant Syngenta. The job of these executives is to represent the interests of other member companies, such as Apple. Under the Fair Labor Association's rules, the company representatives on the board exercise veto power over major decisions.
Independence, as most people understand the term, means an organization is not funded and governed by the companies it is charged with investigating. Despite the financial relationship, Apple argues that the Fair Labor Association will act independently and that the association's review of Apple's factories will probably be "the most detailed factory audit in the history of mass manufacturing."
Early indications are not encouraging. Just one day after launching what was supposed to be a long and uncompromising investigation of Foxconn's Ipad plant in Shenzhen, the association was already issuing public praise of Foxconn and Apple.
On Wednesday, CNNMoney/Fortune ran an article with the headline, "Apple iPad plant is 'way, way above average,' says inspector." Fair Labor Association President Auret van Heerden said this about Foxconn to Reuters: "The facilities are first-class. ... I was very surprised when I walked in the door how tranquil it is. ..." The CNNMoney/Fortune article notes that "whether intended or not, van Heerden's remarks served to support (Apple CEO) Cook's contention that no one has done more than Apple to address the working conditions at factories."
Van Heerden reached these conclusions after a guided tour of the factory provided by Foxconn's owner, Terry Gou. The views of Gou, one of the wealthiest men in Asia, are well-known to Foxconn workers because, as punishment for displeasing their managers, workers are sometimes forced to spend hours writing out copies of his personal sayings. Clearly, Apple's partnership with the Fair Labor Association is not, in and of itself, going to usher in radical change.
So what steps would Apple take if it were genuinely committed to improving its labor practices? For starters, it would open its factories for inspection and worker trainings to genuinely independent groups such as Hong Kong-based SACOM, the organization whose report on the Chengdu factory could have saved the lives of the workers killed there in May, had Apple paid it heed.
And if Apple genuinely "cared about every worker," it would pay every worker a living wage -- enough for workers to achieve a minimally decent standard of living, support their families and even save a bit toward a better future. Today, barely 1% of the retail price of an Ipad goes to the workers who make it; 33% goes to Apple's profits. Apple's profits are so high, and its global labor costs so low, that it could triple the wages of its 700,000 manufacturing workers and help them achieve a living wage (just a few dollars an hour in China), and still make $40 billion a year. A wage increase of 16% to 25% at Foxconn, announced today as Apple's public relations blitz reaches a crescendo, doesn't come close.
Next time you are at the Apple Store, consider bellying up to the Genius Bar and asking why the most profitable company in the history of technology can't pay its workers a living wage and why, if Apple is really ready to open itself to independent scrutiny, it doesn't allow inspections by organizations in which it is not a dues-paying member.
Apple Partner Foxconn Has ‘Tons of Issues,’ Labor Group Says
Peter BurrowsFeb 17, 2012
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-17/foxconn-auditor-finds-tons-of-issues-.html
The Fair Labor Association, a watchdog monitoring working conditions at makers of Apple Inc. products, has uncovered “tons of issues” that need to be addressed at a Foxconn Technology Group plant in Shenzhen, China, FLA Chief Executive Officer Auret van Heerden said.
Van Heerden made the comments in a telephone interview after a multiday inspection of the factory. Apple, the first technology company to join the FLA, said on Feb. 13 that it asked the Washington-based nonprofit organization to inspect plants owned by three of its largest manufacturing partners.
“We’re finding tons of issues,” van Heerden said en route to a meeting where FLA inspectors were scheduled to present preliminary findings to Foxconn management. “I believe we’re going to see some very significant announcements in the near future.”
He declined to elaborate on the findings. The FLA plans to release more information about its inspection in the coming weeks. By then, the company will have had a chance to contest or agree to steps to prevent further violations.
“Foxconn is cooperating fully with this audit and we will review and act on all findings and recommendations,” Foxconn said in an e-mailed statement today. “This is a very professional and thorough review and any deficiencies the FLA might find in the implementation of customer or Foxconn policies will be addressed.”
Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Cupertino, California-based Apple, referred to the company’s Feb. 13 statement about the audits.
Hard-to-Find Violations
Van Heerden said in an interview with Reuters published Feb. 15 that Foxconn’s plants were “first class.” He said he was surprised “how tranquil it is compared with a garment factory.”
Heather White, the founder of Verite, another monitoring group, said that many alleged violations -- say, forced overtime or use of certain toxic chemicals -- can be hard to detect.
“Those are not things one would see on a hosted tour that was planned in advance,” she said.
Van Heerden said the comments reflected his previous interactions with Foxconn.
Apple had commissioned the FLA to carry out smaller projects in the past two years, in order to try out some of the inspection techniques used by the group to more effectively root out workplace problems.
Responses to Hazards
Van Heerden said he had been impressed with Apple and Foxconn’s responses to hazards related to the polishing of aluminum, which led to explosions at Foxconn and another Apple supplier, Pegatron Corp. (4938), that killed at least three workers and injured more than 70 people last year. Van Heerden said that Apple researched the problem and hired a respected consultant.
Apple shares were little changed at $502.12 yesterday. The stock has risen 24 percent this year, extending Apple’s lead as the world’s most valuable company.
In response to the consultant’s recommendations, Foxconn bought state-of-the-art extraction and ventilation equipment to prevent dust buildup, and developed an automated approach so that no humans are involved in the polishing work.
“I’ve seen the improvements that have been made, and they’re dramatic,” he said. “The room is full of robots. It’s totally automated. But people need to see the proof.”
Random Interviews
Van Heerden said that FLA’s 30-person inspection team will interview 35,000 Foxconn employees, via meetings with small groups of randomly picked workers, chosen to reflect the demographics of the campus in terms of age, gender and skill levels. As part of the process, workers log answers to questions on tablets connected to FLA servers so they can be tabulated.
White, who is now a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, says group meetings on Foxconn’s premises may not yield honest responses. She says she found it more productive to talk to workers in their homes or other off- site locations.
“It’s very hard to get people to speak openly about very serious issues,” she said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Peter Burrows in San Francisco at pburrows@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-17/foxconn-auditor-finds-tons-of-issues-.html
The Fair Labor Association, a watchdog monitoring working conditions at makers of Apple Inc. products, has uncovered “tons of issues” that need to be addressed at a Foxconn Technology Group plant in Shenzhen, China, FLA Chief Executive Officer Auret van Heerden said.
Van Heerden made the comments in a telephone interview after a multiday inspection of the factory. Apple, the first technology company to join the FLA, said on Feb. 13 that it asked the Washington-based nonprofit organization to inspect plants owned by three of its largest manufacturing partners.
“We’re finding tons of issues,” van Heerden said en route to a meeting where FLA inspectors were scheduled to present preliminary findings to Foxconn management. “I believe we’re going to see some very significant announcements in the near future.”
He declined to elaborate on the findings. The FLA plans to release more information about its inspection in the coming weeks. By then, the company will have had a chance to contest or agree to steps to prevent further violations.
“Foxconn is cooperating fully with this audit and we will review and act on all findings and recommendations,” Foxconn said in an e-mailed statement today. “This is a very professional and thorough review and any deficiencies the FLA might find in the implementation of customer or Foxconn policies will be addressed.”
Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Cupertino, California-based Apple, referred to the company’s Feb. 13 statement about the audits.
Hard-to-Find Violations
Van Heerden said in an interview with Reuters published Feb. 15 that Foxconn’s plants were “first class.” He said he was surprised “how tranquil it is compared with a garment factory.”
Heather White, the founder of Verite, another monitoring group, said that many alleged violations -- say, forced overtime or use of certain toxic chemicals -- can be hard to detect.
“Those are not things one would see on a hosted tour that was planned in advance,” she said.
Van Heerden said the comments reflected his previous interactions with Foxconn.
Apple had commissioned the FLA to carry out smaller projects in the past two years, in order to try out some of the inspection techniques used by the group to more effectively root out workplace problems.
Responses to Hazards
Van Heerden said he had been impressed with Apple and Foxconn’s responses to hazards related to the polishing of aluminum, which led to explosions at Foxconn and another Apple supplier, Pegatron Corp. (4938), that killed at least three workers and injured more than 70 people last year. Van Heerden said that Apple researched the problem and hired a respected consultant.
Apple shares were little changed at $502.12 yesterday. The stock has risen 24 percent this year, extending Apple’s lead as the world’s most valuable company.
In response to the consultant’s recommendations, Foxconn bought state-of-the-art extraction and ventilation equipment to prevent dust buildup, and developed an automated approach so that no humans are involved in the polishing work.
“I’ve seen the improvements that have been made, and they’re dramatic,” he said. “The room is full of robots. It’s totally automated. But people need to see the proof.”
Random Interviews
Van Heerden said that FLA’s 30-person inspection team will interview 35,000 Foxconn employees, via meetings with small groups of randomly picked workers, chosen to reflect the demographics of the campus in terms of age, gender and skill levels. As part of the process, workers log answers to questions on tablets connected to FLA servers so they can be tabulated.
White, who is now a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, says group meetings on Foxconn’s premises may not yield honest responses. She says she found it more productive to talk to workers in their homes or other off- site locations.
“It’s very hard to get people to speak openly about very serious issues,” she said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Peter Burrows in San Francisco at pburrows@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
Foxconn Plans to Lift Pay Sharply at Factories in China
DAVID BARBOZAFebruary 18, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/technology/foxconn-to-raise-salaries-for-workers-by-up-to-25.html
BEIJING — Foxconn Technology, one of the biggest manufacturers of products for Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other electronics companies, said Saturday that it would sharply raise worker salaries at its Chinese factories.
Foxconn said that salaries for many workers would immediately jump by 16 to 25 percent, to about $400 a month, before overtime.
The company also said it would reduce overtime hours at its factories.
Labor rights groups say that over the years, many Foxconn plants have violated Chinese labor laws by pushing workers to endure excessive amounts of overtime.
Criticism has grown over working conditions at several Apple suppliers in China, including Foxconn, which employs more than one million workers to assemble some of the world’s most popular devices.
Apple announced last Monday that the Fair Labor Association, a nonprofit group, would provide independent audits of its supplier factories in China and elsewhere. Apple said the group’s findings would be made public. The association began inspecting Foxconn operations in China this week.
Apple and Foxconn, which is based in Taiwan, have strongly denied allegations that the workers are treated poorly. But Apple has acknowledged in its own audits that some of its suppliers in China violate Apple’s own code of conduct, with instances of child labor, forced overtime and unsafe working conditions and evidence that employees are sometimes exposed to hazardous and toxic chemicals.
In recent years, Foxconn facilities in China have experienced a series of worker suicides, and labor rights groups have documented varied abuses.
Last year, four workers were killed and about 20 were injured because of a dust explosion at a Chinese factory that was producing the Apple iPad.
According to Bloomberg News, the auditor at the Fair Labor Association said recently that he had already found “tons of issues” at Foxconn plants. He did not detail the problems.
A Foxconn spokesman could not be reached late Saturday.
A version of this article appeared in print on February 19, 2012, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Foxconn Plans To Sharply Lift Workers’ Pay.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/technology/foxconn-to-raise-salaries-for-workers-by-up-to-25.html
BEIJING — Foxconn Technology, one of the biggest manufacturers of products for Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other electronics companies, said Saturday that it would sharply raise worker salaries at its Chinese factories.
Foxconn said that salaries for many workers would immediately jump by 16 to 25 percent, to about $400 a month, before overtime.
The company also said it would reduce overtime hours at its factories.
Labor rights groups say that over the years, many Foxconn plants have violated Chinese labor laws by pushing workers to endure excessive amounts of overtime.
Criticism has grown over working conditions at several Apple suppliers in China, including Foxconn, which employs more than one million workers to assemble some of the world’s most popular devices.
Apple announced last Monday that the Fair Labor Association, a nonprofit group, would provide independent audits of its supplier factories in China and elsewhere. Apple said the group’s findings would be made public. The association began inspecting Foxconn operations in China this week.
Apple and Foxconn, which is based in Taiwan, have strongly denied allegations that the workers are treated poorly. But Apple has acknowledged in its own audits that some of its suppliers in China violate Apple’s own code of conduct, with instances of child labor, forced overtime and unsafe working conditions and evidence that employees are sometimes exposed to hazardous and toxic chemicals.
In recent years, Foxconn facilities in China have experienced a series of worker suicides, and labor rights groups have documented varied abuses.
Last year, four workers were killed and about 20 were injured because of a dust explosion at a Chinese factory that was producing the Apple iPad.
According to Bloomberg News, the auditor at the Fair Labor Association said recently that he had already found “tons of issues” at Foxconn plants. He did not detail the problems.
A Foxconn spokesman could not be reached late Saturday.
A version of this article appeared in print on February 19, 2012, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Foxconn Plans To Sharply Lift Workers’ Pay.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Samsung & Apple Now Account for 86% of Smartphone Industry Growth
Samsung and Apple Now Account for 86% of Smartphone Industry Growth
Samsung and Apple have proven to be the only smartphone makers hanging strong in a highly-competitive market.
Michael Comeau
Jan 27, 2012
http://www.minyanville.com/businessmarkets/articles/smartphone-market-share-q4-2011-smartphone/1/27/2012/id/39068
Does a rising tide lift all ships?
In some cases maybe, but in the smartphone-manufacturing world, it's becoming increasingly apparent that two companies are overpowering the competition.
Now, we all know that the two superpowers in smartphone operating systems are Apple's iOS and Google's Android.
Apple's iPhones are obviously the only phones using iOS, and as evidenced by the company's spectacular fiscal first-quarter earnings report, they are selling like crazy. To be exact, Apple sold a whopping 37 million units during the December 2011 quarter, a year-over-year increase of 128%.
Over in Android territory, results for the hardware makers haven't been hot across the board. Motorola Mobility, which is set to be acquired by Google, lowered fourth-quarter guidance in early January as its smartphone sales rose by just 8.2%. And Motorola hasn't been the only Android smartphone maker to disappoint. Former hotshot HTC also saw dramatically slowing sales through the holiday season.
Elsewhere in the industry, Research In Motion remains on the ropes, and Nokia's still losing share.
However, Korea electronics giant Samsung just proved that Apple still has one tough competitor left on the hardware side, and the numbers show that the two companies are dividing the smartphone world up between them.
Samsung just reported its fourth-quarter earnings results, and despite some weakness in areas like LCD panels, Samsung is more than hanging tough within the smartphone world.
Samsung's Android-powered Galaxy phone line appears to have squeezed out much of its Android competition, allowing it to survive the assault of the iPhone 4S, which was the first iPhone to debut in the fourth quarter.
Samsung didn't report unit sales numbers, but the research firm Strategy Analytics estimated that Samsung sold 36.5 million smartphones in Q4, equaling a 241% year-over-year increase. In fact, while Apple sold more units, Samsung's growth rate was actually far greater.
Regardless, Apple's and Samsung's combined fourth-quarter market share was 47.4%, up from 26.7% the year before.
Put another way, as the two titans' sales rose a combined 173%, versus a miserable 10% for the remaining players.
Put a third way, the two companies accounted for an insane 86% of the industry's unit growth in the quarter.
Which of these guys will ultimately win?
It doesn't really matter. Given how fast the rest of the competition is falling off, there's plenty of money for them to split.
Samsung and Apple have proven to be the only smartphone makers hanging strong in a highly-competitive market.
Michael Comeau
Jan 27, 2012
http://www.minyanville.com/businessmarkets/articles/smartphone-market-share-q4-2011-smartphone/1/27/2012/id/39068
Does a rising tide lift all ships?
In some cases maybe, but in the smartphone-manufacturing world, it's becoming increasingly apparent that two companies are overpowering the competition.
Now, we all know that the two superpowers in smartphone operating systems are Apple's iOS and Google's Android.
Apple's iPhones are obviously the only phones using iOS, and as evidenced by the company's spectacular fiscal first-quarter earnings report, they are selling like crazy. To be exact, Apple sold a whopping 37 million units during the December 2011 quarter, a year-over-year increase of 128%.
Over in Android territory, results for the hardware makers haven't been hot across the board. Motorola Mobility, which is set to be acquired by Google, lowered fourth-quarter guidance in early January as its smartphone sales rose by just 8.2%. And Motorola hasn't been the only Android smartphone maker to disappoint. Former hotshot HTC also saw dramatically slowing sales through the holiday season.
Elsewhere in the industry, Research In Motion remains on the ropes, and Nokia's still losing share.
However, Korea electronics giant Samsung just proved that Apple still has one tough competitor left on the hardware side, and the numbers show that the two companies are dividing the smartphone world up between them.
Samsung just reported its fourth-quarter earnings results, and despite some weakness in areas like LCD panels, Samsung is more than hanging tough within the smartphone world.
Samsung's Android-powered Galaxy phone line appears to have squeezed out much of its Android competition, allowing it to survive the assault of the iPhone 4S, which was the first iPhone to debut in the fourth quarter.
Samsung didn't report unit sales numbers, but the research firm Strategy Analytics estimated that Samsung sold 36.5 million smartphones in Q4, equaling a 241% year-over-year increase. In fact, while Apple sold more units, Samsung's growth rate was actually far greater.
Regardless, Apple's and Samsung's combined fourth-quarter market share was 47.4%, up from 26.7% the year before.
Put another way, as the two titans' sales rose a combined 173%, versus a miserable 10% for the remaining players.
Put a third way, the two companies accounted for an insane 86% of the industry's unit growth in the quarter.
Which of these guys will ultimately win?
It doesn't really matter. Given how fast the rest of the competition is falling off, there's plenty of money for them to split.
Apple’s Foxconn Auditing Group ‘Surrounded With Controversy’
Apple’s Foxconn Auditing Group ‘Surrounded With Controversy,’ Critics Say
Christina Bonnington
February 13, 2012
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/02/apple-foxconn-investigations
Following ongoing public outcry and organized protests at Apple stores last week, Apple has announced that an organization called the Fair Labor Association is conducting independent assessments of worker conditions inside the factories of Foxconn, its manufacturing partner in China.
The FLA audit began this morning in Shenzen’s “Foxconn City.” In the inspections, FLA representatives will interview thousands of factory employees about their living and working conditions, delving into topics such as compensation, health and safety, working hours, and the workers’ communication with management. The results of the inspections will be posted on the FLA’s website in early March.
“We were hoping for a quick response, but I don’t know if we were actually expecting such a fast response from Apple,” said Sarah Ryan, a human rights organizer at Change.org, one of two groups that orchestrated last week’s protests at Apple stores. “It’s especially exciting that these audits are going to be transparent and public.”
The FLA said the audits will be conducted by “a team of labor experts” composed of FLA staff and representatives from two accredited service providers, Openview and INFACT. They’ll be visiting another Foxconn facility in Chengdu, China in the coming weeks.
While encouraged by today’s Apple announcement, Ryan also conceded the FLA is “surrounded with controversy in terms of effectiveness and objectiveness.” Still, Ryan says Change.org recognizes Apple has an existing relationship with the FLA, and as long as its findings are open and transparent, that’s a good thing.
But another key advocate of the Foxconn workers was even less impressed with Apple’s Monday announcement. Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, executive director of SumOfUs.org, told Wired, “We’re hopeful that this is a step towards the solution, but it’s not even close to the solution itself. The FLA does not have a great track record of conducting effective investigations.”
SumOfUs and Change.org co-sponsored a petition asking Apple to respond to allegations of Foxconn worker abuse, and to commit to developing “ethical” products. More than 250,000 people signed the petition, which was hand-delivered to Apple Stores across the globe on Thursday morning. A second petition, from Hong Kong group SACOM, takes last week’s protest one step further by outlining five specific areas in which Apple needs to improve, including ending the use of student workers and providing a living wage for factory employees.
Although knowledge of poor working conditions inside Foxconn has existed for years, after Apple’s record earnings in 2011, the issue struck a big nerve with much of the public. A New York Times piece that highlighted some of the dire conditions inside Apple’s Chinese factories motivated people to start taking action against the status quo.
The new FLA investigations, detailed in an Apple press release, appear to be a direct response to this outcry. Apple has conducted more than 40 supply chain audits of Foxconn since 2006 and over 500 audits of its factories total.
“We believe that workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment, which is why we’ve asked the FLA to independently assess the performance of our largest suppliers,” Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said in the release.
“As an Apple consumer, I’m relieved to hear that Tim Cook is taking this seriously and is breaking ground in the industry with Fair Labor Association auditing,” said Mark Shields, the consumer who originally launched the Change.org petition, in a statement. “But Apple still needs to use some of their trademark creativity and problem solving to create a worker protection plan for new products — especially the upcoming iPad 3 — so that they’re proactively taking care of their workers.”
But for those looking for Apple (as well as other tech companies) to really change their ways, the FLA may not be the best company to perform these assessments, if its history is anything to go by.
Stinebrickner-Kauffman pointed out a site called FLA Watch that’s dedicated to monitoring the company’s well-publicized audits. It calls the FLA “a public relations mouthpiece” for corporations (particularly the apparel industry).
“The FLA was created in response to student protests around the sweatshop issue in the late 90s, specifically to monitor garment shops, with NIKE as a founding member,” Teresa Cheng, international campaigns coordinator with United Students Against Sweatshops (the organization behind FLA Watch), told Wired. “Ten years later, we see little to no reform of sweatshop conditions in NIKE’s supply chain, and no positive changes can be attributed to the FLA.”
Another veteran of the garment industry backs up Cheng’s opinion of audits.
“Reading that Apple has been auditing their vendors since 2006 does not mean anything,” says Sindy Sagastume, production manager for a fashion c'ompany called Aimee Lynn, which imports clothing for distribution to companies like Walmart, Target, and Sears. “Audits are truly a tool used by retailers in the US to make themselves seem to be socially compliant, but in fact does nothing to ensure factories are acting appropriately,” Sagastume told Wired.
So how much teeth does the FLA really have behind its audits? The organization has developed a code of conduct with which it judges workplace conditions, but all it does is investigate and report on working conditions; it doesn’t actually instigate any change itself. According to the organization’s website: “The FLA is a brand accountability system that places the onus on companies to voluntarily achieve the FLA’s labor standards in the factories manufacturing their products.”
In other words: The FLA is a reporting agency, not a policing agency. Any real change for Foxconn workers will come from either Foxconn itself, or pressure from the Chinese government or Apple.
“This is at best a decent first step,” echoed Stinebrickner-Kauffman of SumOfUs.org. “At worst, the beginning of a white-washing campaign.”
When asked to comment on its Foxconn investigations, the FLA supplied Wired with an official statement that mirrors the language of Apple’s press release. We will continue to reach out to the FLA for comment.
Christina Bonnington
February 13, 2012
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/02/apple-foxconn-investigations
Following ongoing public outcry and organized protests at Apple stores last week, Apple has announced that an organization called the Fair Labor Association is conducting independent assessments of worker conditions inside the factories of Foxconn, its manufacturing partner in China.
The FLA audit began this morning in Shenzen’s “Foxconn City.” In the inspections, FLA representatives will interview thousands of factory employees about their living and working conditions, delving into topics such as compensation, health and safety, working hours, and the workers’ communication with management. The results of the inspections will be posted on the FLA’s website in early March.
“We were hoping for a quick response, but I don’t know if we were actually expecting such a fast response from Apple,” said Sarah Ryan, a human rights organizer at Change.org, one of two groups that orchestrated last week’s protests at Apple stores. “It’s especially exciting that these audits are going to be transparent and public.”
The FLA said the audits will be conducted by “a team of labor experts” composed of FLA staff and representatives from two accredited service providers, Openview and INFACT. They’ll be visiting another Foxconn facility in Chengdu, China in the coming weeks.
While encouraged by today’s Apple announcement, Ryan also conceded the FLA is “surrounded with controversy in terms of effectiveness and objectiveness.” Still, Ryan says Change.org recognizes Apple has an existing relationship with the FLA, and as long as its findings are open and transparent, that’s a good thing.
But another key advocate of the Foxconn workers was even less impressed with Apple’s Monday announcement. Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, executive director of SumOfUs.org, told Wired, “We’re hopeful that this is a step towards the solution, but it’s not even close to the solution itself. The FLA does not have a great track record of conducting effective investigations.”
SumOfUs and Change.org co-sponsored a petition asking Apple to respond to allegations of Foxconn worker abuse, and to commit to developing “ethical” products. More than 250,000 people signed the petition, which was hand-delivered to Apple Stores across the globe on Thursday morning. A second petition, from Hong Kong group SACOM, takes last week’s protest one step further by outlining five specific areas in which Apple needs to improve, including ending the use of student workers and providing a living wage for factory employees.
Although knowledge of poor working conditions inside Foxconn has existed for years, after Apple’s record earnings in 2011, the issue struck a big nerve with much of the public. A New York Times piece that highlighted some of the dire conditions inside Apple’s Chinese factories motivated people to start taking action against the status quo.
The new FLA investigations, detailed in an Apple press release, appear to be a direct response to this outcry. Apple has conducted more than 40 supply chain audits of Foxconn since 2006 and over 500 audits of its factories total.
“We believe that workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment, which is why we’ve asked the FLA to independently assess the performance of our largest suppliers,” Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said in the release.
“As an Apple consumer, I’m relieved to hear that Tim Cook is taking this seriously and is breaking ground in the industry with Fair Labor Association auditing,” said Mark Shields, the consumer who originally launched the Change.org petition, in a statement. “But Apple still needs to use some of their trademark creativity and problem solving to create a worker protection plan for new products — especially the upcoming iPad 3 — so that they’re proactively taking care of their workers.”
But for those looking for Apple (as well as other tech companies) to really change their ways, the FLA may not be the best company to perform these assessments, if its history is anything to go by.
Stinebrickner-Kauffman pointed out a site called FLA Watch that’s dedicated to monitoring the company’s well-publicized audits. It calls the FLA “a public relations mouthpiece” for corporations (particularly the apparel industry).
“The FLA was created in response to student protests around the sweatshop issue in the late 90s, specifically to monitor garment shops, with NIKE as a founding member,” Teresa Cheng, international campaigns coordinator with United Students Against Sweatshops (the organization behind FLA Watch), told Wired. “Ten years later, we see little to no reform of sweatshop conditions in NIKE’s supply chain, and no positive changes can be attributed to the FLA.”
Another veteran of the garment industry backs up Cheng’s opinion of audits.
“Reading that Apple has been auditing their vendors since 2006 does not mean anything,” says Sindy Sagastume, production manager for a fashion c'ompany called Aimee Lynn, which imports clothing for distribution to companies like Walmart, Target, and Sears. “Audits are truly a tool used by retailers in the US to make themselves seem to be socially compliant, but in fact does nothing to ensure factories are acting appropriately,” Sagastume told Wired.
So how much teeth does the FLA really have behind its audits? The organization has developed a code of conduct with which it judges workplace conditions, but all it does is investigate and report on working conditions; it doesn’t actually instigate any change itself. According to the organization’s website: “The FLA is a brand accountability system that places the onus on companies to voluntarily achieve the FLA’s labor standards in the factories manufacturing their products.”
In other words: The FLA is a reporting agency, not a policing agency. Any real change for Foxconn workers will come from either Foxconn itself, or pressure from the Chinese government or Apple.
“This is at best a decent first step,” echoed Stinebrickner-Kauffman of SumOfUs.org. “At worst, the beginning of a white-washing campaign.”
When asked to comment on its Foxconn investigations, the FLA supplied Wired with an official statement that mirrors the language of Apple’s press release. We will continue to reach out to the FLA for comment.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Doh! The top 10 tech 'fails' of 2011
Doug Gross, CNN Thu December 29, 2011
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/29/tech/web/2011-tech-fails/index.html
Netflix's short-lived plan to split itself into two services didn't go over so well this year. Qwikster?
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
The highs were high but the lows were lower in the tech world in 2011
U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner makes our top 10 list for using Twitter to send lewd photos
PlayStation outage, "Duke Nukem Forever" and failed tablets also made the cut
It was a rough year for RIM and its BlackBerry, with a handful of "fails"
(CNN) -- Can't win 'em all, can you?
The highs were pretty high in the tech world in 2011, as new gadgets, updates and advances delighted the masses. I mean, Facebook made a change that most people (so far) seemed to actually like. What are the odds?
But the lows were lower. For every moment of digital bliss, it seemed, there was a clunker of equal or greater magnitude.
So, who are we to not rub salt in the wounds of those who got it oh-so-wrong this year?
In fairness, some of these "Doh!" moments came from folks who had otherwise good years. And nobody, not even perennial tech darling Apple, is perfect. (One hard-working journalist even had to write this very story twice after he accidentally deleted it and was forced to start over. Sweet, sweet irony.).
Sure, tech successes are nice. But these social-media miscues, foot-in-mouth e-moves and other digital duds gave us more to talk about in 2011.
Here are our 2011 "Tech Fails of the Year." Feel free to jump in the comments and let us know what we missed.
Weiner on Twitter
In a crowded and competitive field, former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner grabs our "What Were You Thinking?" award for this one.
The congressman (we're staying away from name jokes because ... well ... too easy) was being talked up as possibly the next mayor of New York City when his Twitter account was apparently hacked by someone who sent lewd photos to some of his female followers. That's the story Weiner gave, anyway.
Except, as it turned out, that someone was him.
Many of us gave Weiner the benefit of the doubt in the scandal's opening hours. I mean, what public official would be dumb enough to get raunchy on a platform like Twitter, where anyone who wants to can follow your every tweet?
Turns out ...
He wasn't alone. Comedian Gilbert Gottfried tweeted jokes about the Japan tsunami and earthquake that killed more than 15,000 people. Actor and Twitter pioneer Ashton Kutcher posted a hasty tweet defending Penn State coach Joe Paterno -- before, he says, learning the full extent of the school's child-sex scandal. The resulting backlash even led him to quit Twitter, at least temporarily.
But for so badly misunderstanding the public nature of Twitter, for the whirlwind of lies that followed before he fessed up and resigned and ... yes ... for thinking women like it when you send them closeup pictures of your crotch on the Internet, Weiner earns this bulging "Fail."
Go Daddy's SOPA misstep
When the vast majority of the Web's most active players are against something, and when your livelihood depends on the Web's most active players, it's probably best to either go along or keep quiet about it, right?
Not so for Go Daddy, the Web registrar and hosting company known for its titillating TV ads. In December, the company made the ill-fated decision to come out in support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
Google, Yahoo and Facebook are just some of the Internet heavyweights that have lined up to stop the proposed federal law, which would penalize websites that host pirated content. The bill has come under fire from Web-freedom advocates, who say it could dampen online expression.
Go Daddy, which had submitted testimony to Congress in support of the bill, issued a public statement supporting it -- even doubling down with a stronger statement when the Web backlash began.
Fast forward 24 hours and the company -- which had already earned ire in some quarters for its racy (some might say sexist) TV commercials and its founder's penchant for elephant hunting -- changed its mind amid a rash of defections.
Tens of thousands of domains, including more than 50 owned by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, were moved from Go Daddy, and that's before a Reddit-organized boycott planned for Friday. Oops.
'Duke Nukem Forever'
When video gamers wait 14 years for a follow-up to one of their favorite titles, they sort of expect it not to suck. In the minds of many, "Duke Nukem Forever" failed that important test.
First announced in 1997, "Forever" was to be a follow-up to a game that got lots of love for good-heartedly pushing the boundaries of sex, violence and naughty language in the emerging field of shooter games.
It was delayed. And delayed. And delayed. What finally emerged in June hit with a thud.
"At best, it can look a few years out of date; at worst, it is a blurry, stuttering mess," wrote CNN's Ravi Hiranand, in what actually was one of the kinder reviews of the game "Playing the game feels like being thrown back into the mid-'90s, and not in a happy, nostalgic sense."
In a post-"Grand Theft Auto" world, maybe waiting "forever" would have been a better idea after all.
The other tablets
As 2011 dawned, it appeared that Apple had created a thriving new space in personal computing with its iPad.
Beginning in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, a host of competing companies stepped forward with their rival tablets. The Motorola Xoom. BlackBerry's PlayBook. Samsung Galaxy Tab. The HP TouchPad.
One problem: Nobody bought them.
Most of the new tablets, many running Google's Android operating system, came in at roughly $500 -- about the same price as Apple's new iPad 2. And the public showed that at that price, they were happy going with the industry leader.
Some tablets got pulled. Others never made it off the production line. HP had some luck selling TouchPads -- after throwing up its hands and slashing prices to fire-sale levels.
One exception. Amazon may have cracked the code late in the year with its Kindle Fire, a smaller, simpler tablet that, at $199, is $300 cheaper than the least-expensive iPad 2.
Game off at PlayStation Network
When roughly 70 million users lose access to your gaming and entertainment network, it's a "fail."
In April, a hacker accessed account information for users of Sony's PlayStation Network, ultimately knocking the network offline in late April. It wasn't completely restored until early June and some gamers lacked access for weeks.
While getting hacked was bad, some users were even madder after Sony took a week from the time of the attack to let them know what happened.
Another, much smaller, attack happened in October. In the end, it looks like most of the network's fans stuck around -- a fact no doubt aided by multiple blockbuster game releases this year.
iPhones and bars don't mix
Seriously, Apple employees?
No ... seriously?
In 2010, the tech world was aflutter after an Apple employee, reportedly celebrating his birthday, lost a prototype of the unreleased iPhone 4 in a California beer hall.
Tech blog Gizmodo bought the phone, showcased it on their site, and touched off a firestorm that included everything from police raids to legal threats.
Well, at least we know that after all of that, it could never possibly happen again.
No ... wait. It happened again.
Tech blog CNET reported that an Appler left a prototype of the iPhone 4S in a Mexican bar and restaurant in San Francisco.
As our John Sutter wrote: "Here's a theory: Maybe there's some sort of connection between drinking and losing things?"
Netflix-Qwikster
Netflix, the Web's most popular movie-rental service, first rattled some customers by raising prices in July.
Then, in September, the company announced it was, basically, splitting itself in half. Web-streaming video would still come from Netflix. DVD-by-mail rentals would come from a separate company.
Called ... "Qwikster."
Where to start here? Customers who wanted both services complained about having to set up and maintain two different accounts on two different websites. Then there was the new name, which felt dated (Napster and Friendster, anyone?) and like it was spat out by some zany-misspelled-startup name generator.
Oh yeah ... and there was the fact that the "Qwikster" Twitter handle was already owned by a guy whose avatar was a weed-smoking Elmo muppet.
Chris Taylor, of Mashable, questioned whether Qwikster was "the worst product launch since New Coke."
It didn't even last as long as that syrupy mistake. About three weeks later, Netflix announced that Qwikster was dead.
PayPal plays Scrooge
Shutting down a fund to give presents to children in need at Christmas? Sounds like something one-percenter Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life" would endorse.
But that's essentially what Web-payment titan PayPal was doing before getting popped in the nose by the Internet.
Snarky blog Regretsy, when not mocking regrettable craft projects, has long maintained various charity funds. With the holidays approaching, actress and blog runner April Winchell (who writes on the site as "Helen Killer") announced a fund drive to buy toys for 200 children submitted by community members.
It was hugely successful, meeting its fundraising goal in the first 24 hours. Then PayPal, which was processing the donations, stepped in and froze the fund because it said Winchell used a "Donate" button that's supposed to be for nonprofits only.
The Web wasn't pleased.
Winchell used her popular blog to blast PayPal in less-than-friendly terms. Twitter users and other sites amplified the outrage.
A day later, PayPal said it "recognized our error" and even offered to donate to the fund.
God bless us ... every one.
iPhone 4S battery life
OK ... this one never reached the fever pitch that the iPhone 4's antenna problems did last year.
And maybe it's a sign that, when millions of people buy your product in the first few hours it exists, there are bound to be problems.
Despite not being the mythical iPhone 5, the 4S flew out of Apple stores when it was released October 14. But within hours, users started flocking to Apple's support forum to complain their batteries were running out of juice faster than Herman Cain's presidential campaign.
Apple publicly ignored the complaints for a little over two weeks. Then the company issued a statement saying that "a small number of customers" had complained about the battery and that an update to the phone's operating system was on the way.
As with the iPhone 4 "death grip," we'll call this a modest "fail" wrapped inside an epic win. The battery gripes didn't stop Apple from selling an iLoad of the new phones.
Bad year for BlackBerry
Alas, poor BlackBerry.
Research in Motion's crack-like gadget was once synonymous with "smartphone," effectively ushering in the era of messaging, e-mail-checking and other Phone 2.0 behavior.
But, 2011 wasn't kind.
It's bad enough that the iPhone and the rise of the Androids continue to muscle BlackBerrys out of the limelight. Then the BlackBerry PlayBook, RIM's effort in the burgeoning tablet space, arrived with a thud in April.
The capper, however, was an October outage at a data center that caused users to lose messaging ability in parts of Europe, the Middle East, India, Africa, Latin America and North America. (To their credit, RIM ultimately gave away a pile of free apps to the folks affected).
The outage lasted for several days and was the final straw for some users, who abandoned ship for other phones.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/29/tech/web/2011-tech-fails/index.html
Netflix's short-lived plan to split itself into two services didn't go over so well this year. Qwikster?
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
The highs were high but the lows were lower in the tech world in 2011
U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner makes our top 10 list for using Twitter to send lewd photos
PlayStation outage, "Duke Nukem Forever" and failed tablets also made the cut
It was a rough year for RIM and its BlackBerry, with a handful of "fails"
(CNN) -- Can't win 'em all, can you?
The highs were pretty high in the tech world in 2011, as new gadgets, updates and advances delighted the masses. I mean, Facebook made a change that most people (so far) seemed to actually like. What are the odds?
But the lows were lower. For every moment of digital bliss, it seemed, there was a clunker of equal or greater magnitude.
So, who are we to not rub salt in the wounds of those who got it oh-so-wrong this year?
In fairness, some of these "Doh!" moments came from folks who had otherwise good years. And nobody, not even perennial tech darling Apple, is perfect. (One hard-working journalist even had to write this very story twice after he accidentally deleted it and was forced to start over. Sweet, sweet irony.).
Sure, tech successes are nice. But these social-media miscues, foot-in-mouth e-moves and other digital duds gave us more to talk about in 2011.
Here are our 2011 "Tech Fails of the Year." Feel free to jump in the comments and let us know what we missed.
Weiner on Twitter
In a crowded and competitive field, former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner grabs our "What Were You Thinking?" award for this one.
The congressman (we're staying away from name jokes because ... well ... too easy) was being talked up as possibly the next mayor of New York City when his Twitter account was apparently hacked by someone who sent lewd photos to some of his female followers. That's the story Weiner gave, anyway.
Except, as it turned out, that someone was him.
Many of us gave Weiner the benefit of the doubt in the scandal's opening hours. I mean, what public official would be dumb enough to get raunchy on a platform like Twitter, where anyone who wants to can follow your every tweet?
Turns out ...
He wasn't alone. Comedian Gilbert Gottfried tweeted jokes about the Japan tsunami and earthquake that killed more than 15,000 people. Actor and Twitter pioneer Ashton Kutcher posted a hasty tweet defending Penn State coach Joe Paterno -- before, he says, learning the full extent of the school's child-sex scandal. The resulting backlash even led him to quit Twitter, at least temporarily.
But for so badly misunderstanding the public nature of Twitter, for the whirlwind of lies that followed before he fessed up and resigned and ... yes ... for thinking women like it when you send them closeup pictures of your crotch on the Internet, Weiner earns this bulging "Fail."
Go Daddy's SOPA misstep
When the vast majority of the Web's most active players are against something, and when your livelihood depends on the Web's most active players, it's probably best to either go along or keep quiet about it, right?
Not so for Go Daddy, the Web registrar and hosting company known for its titillating TV ads. In December, the company made the ill-fated decision to come out in support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
Google, Yahoo and Facebook are just some of the Internet heavyweights that have lined up to stop the proposed federal law, which would penalize websites that host pirated content. The bill has come under fire from Web-freedom advocates, who say it could dampen online expression.
Go Daddy, which had submitted testimony to Congress in support of the bill, issued a public statement supporting it -- even doubling down with a stronger statement when the Web backlash began.
Fast forward 24 hours and the company -- which had already earned ire in some quarters for its racy (some might say sexist) TV commercials and its founder's penchant for elephant hunting -- changed its mind amid a rash of defections.
Tens of thousands of domains, including more than 50 owned by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, were moved from Go Daddy, and that's before a Reddit-organized boycott planned for Friday. Oops.
'Duke Nukem Forever'
When video gamers wait 14 years for a follow-up to one of their favorite titles, they sort of expect it not to suck. In the minds of many, "Duke Nukem Forever" failed that important test.
First announced in 1997, "Forever" was to be a follow-up to a game that got lots of love for good-heartedly pushing the boundaries of sex, violence and naughty language in the emerging field of shooter games.
It was delayed. And delayed. And delayed. What finally emerged in June hit with a thud.
"At best, it can look a few years out of date; at worst, it is a blurry, stuttering mess," wrote CNN's Ravi Hiranand, in what actually was one of the kinder reviews of the game "Playing the game feels like being thrown back into the mid-'90s, and not in a happy, nostalgic sense."
In a post-"Grand Theft Auto" world, maybe waiting "forever" would have been a better idea after all.
The other tablets
As 2011 dawned, it appeared that Apple had created a thriving new space in personal computing with its iPad.
Beginning in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, a host of competing companies stepped forward with their rival tablets. The Motorola Xoom. BlackBerry's PlayBook. Samsung Galaxy Tab. The HP TouchPad.
One problem: Nobody bought them.
Most of the new tablets, many running Google's Android operating system, came in at roughly $500 -- about the same price as Apple's new iPad 2. And the public showed that at that price, they were happy going with the industry leader.
Some tablets got pulled. Others never made it off the production line. HP had some luck selling TouchPads -- after throwing up its hands and slashing prices to fire-sale levels.
One exception. Amazon may have cracked the code late in the year with its Kindle Fire, a smaller, simpler tablet that, at $199, is $300 cheaper than the least-expensive iPad 2.
Game off at PlayStation Network
When roughly 70 million users lose access to your gaming and entertainment network, it's a "fail."
In April, a hacker accessed account information for users of Sony's PlayStation Network, ultimately knocking the network offline in late April. It wasn't completely restored until early June and some gamers lacked access for weeks.
While getting hacked was bad, some users were even madder after Sony took a week from the time of the attack to let them know what happened.
Another, much smaller, attack happened in October. In the end, it looks like most of the network's fans stuck around -- a fact no doubt aided by multiple blockbuster game releases this year.
iPhones and bars don't mix
Seriously, Apple employees?
No ... seriously?
In 2010, the tech world was aflutter after an Apple employee, reportedly celebrating his birthday, lost a prototype of the unreleased iPhone 4 in a California beer hall.
Tech blog Gizmodo bought the phone, showcased it on their site, and touched off a firestorm that included everything from police raids to legal threats.
Well, at least we know that after all of that, it could never possibly happen again.
No ... wait. It happened again.
Tech blog CNET reported that an Appler left a prototype of the iPhone 4S in a Mexican bar and restaurant in San Francisco.
As our John Sutter wrote: "Here's a theory: Maybe there's some sort of connection between drinking and losing things?"
Netflix-Qwikster
Netflix, the Web's most popular movie-rental service, first rattled some customers by raising prices in July.
Then, in September, the company announced it was, basically, splitting itself in half. Web-streaming video would still come from Netflix. DVD-by-mail rentals would come from a separate company.
Called ... "Qwikster."
Where to start here? Customers who wanted both services complained about having to set up and maintain two different accounts on two different websites. Then there was the new name, which felt dated (Napster and Friendster, anyone?) and like it was spat out by some zany-misspelled-startup name generator.
Oh yeah ... and there was the fact that the "Qwikster" Twitter handle was already owned by a guy whose avatar was a weed-smoking Elmo muppet.
Chris Taylor, of Mashable, questioned whether Qwikster was "the worst product launch since New Coke."
It didn't even last as long as that syrupy mistake. About three weeks later, Netflix announced that Qwikster was dead.
PayPal plays Scrooge
Shutting down a fund to give presents to children in need at Christmas? Sounds like something one-percenter Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life" would endorse.
But that's essentially what Web-payment titan PayPal was doing before getting popped in the nose by the Internet.
Snarky blog Regretsy, when not mocking regrettable craft projects, has long maintained various charity funds. With the holidays approaching, actress and blog runner April Winchell (who writes on the site as "Helen Killer") announced a fund drive to buy toys for 200 children submitted by community members.
It was hugely successful, meeting its fundraising goal in the first 24 hours. Then PayPal, which was processing the donations, stepped in and froze the fund because it said Winchell used a "Donate" button that's supposed to be for nonprofits only.
The Web wasn't pleased.
Winchell used her popular blog to blast PayPal in less-than-friendly terms. Twitter users and other sites amplified the outrage.
A day later, PayPal said it "recognized our error" and even offered to donate to the fund.
God bless us ... every one.
iPhone 4S battery life
OK ... this one never reached the fever pitch that the iPhone 4's antenna problems did last year.
And maybe it's a sign that, when millions of people buy your product in the first few hours it exists, there are bound to be problems.
Despite not being the mythical iPhone 5, the 4S flew out of Apple stores when it was released October 14. But within hours, users started flocking to Apple's support forum to complain their batteries were running out of juice faster than Herman Cain's presidential campaign.
Apple publicly ignored the complaints for a little over two weeks. Then the company issued a statement saying that "a small number of customers" had complained about the battery and that an update to the phone's operating system was on the way.
As with the iPhone 4 "death grip," we'll call this a modest "fail" wrapped inside an epic win. The battery gripes didn't stop Apple from selling an iLoad of the new phones.
Bad year for BlackBerry
Alas, poor BlackBerry.
Research in Motion's crack-like gadget was once synonymous with "smartphone," effectively ushering in the era of messaging, e-mail-checking and other Phone 2.0 behavior.
But, 2011 wasn't kind.
It's bad enough that the iPhone and the rise of the Androids continue to muscle BlackBerrys out of the limelight. Then the BlackBerry PlayBook, RIM's effort in the burgeoning tablet space, arrived with a thud in April.
The capper, however, was an October outage at a data center that caused users to lose messaging ability in parts of Europe, the Middle East, India, Africa, Latin America and North America. (To their credit, RIM ultimately gave away a pile of free apps to the folks affected).
The outage lasted for several days and was the final straw for some users, who abandoned ship for other phones.
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