Author: Serkadis

Late this afternoon, Microsoft answered a question oft-asked by investors this month: What’s up with Windows 8? The new operating system, which launched October 26, was supposed to lift sagging PC sales and demonstrate the capability to successfully compete with so-called post-PC platforms like Android and iOS. Now we know more. Windows & Windows Live revenue passed Business, making the OS division most-valuable again.

For fiscal second quarter, ended December 31, Microsoft revenue was $21.46 billion, up 3 percent year over year. Operating income: $7.77 billion, a 3 percent decrease. Net income was $6.38 billion, or 76 cents a share.

Average analyst consensus was $21.53 billion revenue and 74 cents earnings per share, for the quarter. Revenue estimates ranged from $19.94 billion to $23.32 billion, with estimated year-over-year growth of 3.1 percent — mighty modest for a holiday quarter when new PC and phone operating systems launched and Microsoft released its first tablet, Surface RT.

Shares dipped by 2 percent in early after-market trading, falling to $27.06 from the $27.63 close. Like Apple yesterday, Microsoft beat earnings consensus but missed on sales.

When adjusting for the impact of Office and Windows upgrade offers (meaning non-GAAP view), revenue grew by 5 percent to $22 billion, operating income by 4 percent to $8.3 billion, and EPS by 4 percent to 81 cents.

“Our big, bold ambition to reimagine Windows as well as launch Surface and Windows Phone 8 has sparked growing enthusiasm with our customers and unprecedented opportunity and creativity with our partners and developers”, CEO Steve Ballmer boasts. “With new Windows devices, including Surface Pro, and the new Office on the horizon, we’ll continue to drive excitement for the Windows ecosystem and deliver our software through devices and services people love and businesses need”.

Windows & Windows Live revenue rose 24 percent year over year to $5.88 billion, buoyed by a deferral from the previous quarter. Without the extra lift, revenue still increased by 11 percent.

Microsoft’s Perception Problem

As I’ve oft said, in business, perception is everything. To many people, Windows is Microsoft and the fate of one influences the other. Perception is a devil. Take Apple, for example, which reported $54.5 billion revenue and $13.06 billion net income yesterday. Today, shares closed down 12.35 percent, in part on perception that growth days are over, despite simply huge quarterly numbers. Microsoft’s problem is by no means comparable, but Apple’s situation makes a point. If investors so punish the company for such a great quarter, what can negative or positive perceptions about Windows’ future do?

Microsoft is no longer bound to Windows, despite marketing hype about “reimagining”. In October, CEO Steve Ballmer described the company’s new direction as “devices and services“. The Business division, with flagship Office, generally generates more revenue than Windows & Windows Live, and last quarter Server & Tools did, too. The company is in process of removing dependence on Windows as top to its hugely successful vertical applications stack built around Office and server software and now extended through cloud services, such as 365,  Azure, Skype and SkyDrive among many others. Windows is still hugely valuable, and anchors a huge ecosystem, but Microsoft can transcend the OS.

The problem: Public sentiment says something else — that Windows can’t compete in the post-PC, what I call connected-devices, era. If Windows can’t, neither can Microsoft. I don’t agree. Microsoft’s apps, datacenter and server software already are primed to serve multiple devices — not just the PC — and that’s a longstanding development strategy now far advanced. Microsoft is ready to move beyond Windows, and the holiday quarter PC shipments show such a future is inevitable. Windows won’t go away but stand alongside other platforms rather than being the overwhelmingly dominant one.

Business and Server & Tools succeed for many reasons, and they will continue to do so as long as enterprises stay the course buying annuity contracts. Combined, more than half the two groups’ revenues come from volume-licensing contracts with Software Assurance.

Companies get the license and annually pay 25 percent or 29 percent of the full price to get upgrades (or even to exercise downgrade rights) over two- or three-year periods. Software Assurance insulates Microsoft from economies’ ups and downs and those for PC purchases. If ever businesses back away in mass from annuity or subscription contracts, that’s the day to seriously worry about Microsoft’s future.

Whither Windows 8

Where the flagship operating system matters most is where Microsoft tries to take it: touchscreen devices, such as hybrids and tablets, with Surface RT and Pro serving as reference-designs for OEM partners to emulate. The Redmond, Wash.-based company announced plans to port Windows to ARM processors in January 2011, then followed up with the tile-based Modern UI that unifies ARM and x86 operating systems, including Windows Phone. Pundits poo-poo PC shipments, which stank in Q4, as evidence Surface and Windows 8 are failures. I ask: By what measure? Seems to me, Microsoft already changed Windows’ course to embrace a broader range of devices, with a unifying UI. Transitions like this take time to succeed, or fail.

There is need. Had Microsoft not made-over Windows, the problem wouldn’t be perception but crisis very real. Three legs support the profit center, and Windows bound to traditional PCs would be one cut off. Instead, Windows 8 holds future device promise. Much depends on the devices the company and its partners produce and apps and services supporting them. Honestly, looking at holiday PC lineup, Surface RT is about the only thing looking good. OEMs failed to deliver compelling products that get people buying.

PCs continued their more-than-year-long collapse during fourth quarter. Windows 8 gave no meaningful lift. Shipments fell 4.9 percent year over year, according to Gartner. For all 2012: down 3.5 percent. Manufacturers shipped 90.3 million and 352.7 million units for the respective time periods. IDC offers grimmer perspective: PC shipments fell 6.4 percent for Q4 — two points more than forecast — and 3.2 percent for the year.

Consumers aren’t buying Windows PCs like they used to, and their infatuation with iPad, some other tablets and smartphones, is spreading. “Tablets have dramatically changed the device landscape for PCs, not so much by ‘cannibalizing’ PC sales, but by causing PC users to shift consumption to tablets rather than replacing older PCs”, Mikako Kitagawa, Gartner principal analyst, says, speaking about Q4 PC shipments.

She no longer believes that PCs and tablets will coexist for a meaningful time. “There will be some individuals who retain both, but we believe they will be exception and not the norm. Therefore, we hypothesize that buyers will not replace secondary PCs in the household, instead allowing them to age out and shifting consumption to a tablet”.

Combine that with the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) to work movement, and the future looks grim. Or does it? Microsoft already has its apps, cloud and server businesses primed for BYOD, as I’ve written here before. Then there is broader context, for those calling Windows 8 a flop because PC shipments fell in Q4. Apple got hit, too. Analyst consensus was for 5.2 million Macs shipped, but only 4.1 million did. Yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook laid blame on late delivery of new iMacs. He said that Mac shipments would have been otherwise higher.

I don’t find that credible. But let’s assume for a moment he’s right. iMac is an expensive beast, starting at 1,299 and selling for as much as $1,999 in standard config. If Apple can command such selling strength, why can’t Microsoft OEMs? They should, by releasing innovative hybrid desktop and portable designs that capitalize on Windows 8’s best features. I contend they did not in fourth quarter.

Something else to consider when looking at the PC market and future of Windows. In a compelling rebuttal to claims the PC is dying, Derrick Wlodarz, who owns a computer repair business, makes an observation often ignored: “Whereas customers of mine were getting 3-4 years out of machines back in the early 2000s, they now push their PCs to 4-6 year replacement cycles without much sweat”. Major reason: Older hardware has more than enough processor and graphics power to meet modern needs.

“Now, a Windows Vista or newer PC could likely run on for five, six, seven or possibly more years without much issue. And this is the untold trend that I see in my customer base”, he asserts. “Solid, secure operating systems installed onto well-engineered computer hardware equals a darn long system life”.

So if the PC in the den or office is good enough and not in need of replacement, why not buy a new smartphone or tablet? Remember: Microsoft pushes ahead with solutions for both these categories. Then there is fourth quarter to consider, where Windows delivered solid growth — now if only the broader ecosystem could capitalize upon it.

Division Highlights

Microsoft reports revenue and earnings results for five divisions: Windows & Windows Live, Server & Tools, Business, Online Services and Entertainment & Devices.

Windows & Windows Live. Revenue soared 24 percent year over year despite weak PC sales, surely buoyed by low-cost Windows Pro upgrade price that ends January 31. A $622 million deferral helped lift revenue to $5.88 billion. Without it, revenue would have grown by 11 percent.

To date Microsoft has sold 60-million Windows 8 licenses.

OEM revenue grew by 17 percent, outpacing the broader PC market.

Server & Tools. “We see strong momentum in our enterprise business”, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner says. “With the launch of SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012, we continue to see healthy growth in our data platform and infrastructure businesses and win share from our competitors. With the coming launch of the new Office, we will provide a cloud-enabled suite of products that will deliver unparalleled productivity and flexibility”.

Revenue rose 9 percent, or $347 million, to $5.19 billion. As previously mentioned, the division is insulated against economic maladies, because about 50 percent of revenues come from contractual volume-licensing agreements.

New bookings increased by 15 percent. Meanwhile System Center revenue grew by 18 percent and SQL Server by 16 percent.

Business. “We saw strong growth in our enterprise business driven by multi-year commitments to the Microsoft platform, which positions us well for long-term growth”, Microsoft CFO Peter Klein says. “Multi-year licensing revenue grew double-digits across Windows, Server & Tools, and the Microsoft Business Division”.

Despite touted growth, revenue fell by 10 percent year over year to $5.69 billion. However, when removing adjustments for Office upgrade offer and pre-sales, revenue grew by 3 percent.

Bookings increased by 18 percent and multi-year licensing by 10 percent. However, consumer revenue fell by 2 percent.

Like Server & Tools, Business division is largely insulated against sluggish PC sales. Sixty percent of revenue comes from annuity licensing to businesses.

Online Services Business. Online services revenue rose by 10 percent, or $109 million, to $823 million. However, the division remains unprofitable. Search and display ads drove up online advertising revenue by 15 percent.

Entertainment & Devices. Microsoft shipped 5.2 million Xbox consoles, down from 8.2 million a holiday quarter earlier. As a platform, Xbox 360 revenue fell 29 percent, or $1.1 billion.

Xbox Live subscriptions now exceed 40 million.

Windows Phone sales are up 4 times year over year, which is a polite way of saying they’re not good enough. If they were, Microsoft would say how many.

Users made 138 billion Skype calls, up 59 percent year over year.

A new, energy-efficient air chilling system could keep troops on the front lines cool while using about half as much diesel as current systems. The system’s decreased fuel consumption could also save lives by reducing attacks on American soldiers who deliver fuel to field operations.

The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will receive up to $2.8 million over three years to develop the system, the Department of Defense, Navy and DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, also known as ARPA-E, announced Wednesday. PNNL’s project was among five awarded a total of $8.5 million to improve the efficiency of battlefield heating and air conditioning systems by 20 to 50 percent.

“PNNL is looking forward to adapting its ongoing research into advanced, energy-efficient cooling technologies and apply it toward important military needs,” said PNNL Laboratory Fellow and project leader Pete McGrail. “Our team has a strong emotional connection to the success of this project, as it could help prevent American soldiers from being injured or killed while moving fuel in dangerous supply convoys around the battlefield.”

PNNL is partnering with Oregon State University and Power Partners, Inc. of Athens, Ga. on the project.

PNNL’s system will be a next-generation adsorption chiller that is specially designed to be smaller, lighter, more efficient and operate under the extreme temperatures experienced at bases on the frontlines, also called forward operations. The chiller will use a novel nanomaterial called a metal organic framework, or MOF. MOFs are crystal-like compounds made of metal clusters connected to organic molecules, or linkers. Together, the clusters and linkers assemble into porous 3D structures. PNNL developed a MOF that can hold up to three times more water than the silica gel used in today’s adsorption chillers. This helps make PNNL’s test adsorption chiller system much smaller and lighter. This project will build on advances in adsorption cooling technology PNNL has already made under ARPA-E’s Building Energy Efficiency Through Innovative Thermodevices, or BEET-IT, program.

Further improvements for this project will include breakthroughs in microchannel heat exchanger technology and improvements in the MOF’s thermal properties. Both advances will help reduce the size and weight of the chiller further and squeeze out more cooling efficiency.

“This will be the most advanced adsorption cooling system ever developed, and these advances are needed to meet very demanding military requirements,” McGrail said.

PNNL’s military system will run off of waste heat coming from a diesel generator. This could reduce the diesel fuel use needed to cool field military installations by up to 50 percent. The planned 3-kilowatt unit will weigh about 180 pounds and take up about 8 cubic feet.

This isn’t the first time the two systems have received support. PNNL began developing its MOF adsorption chiller for commercial buildings in 2010, when PNNL received ARPA-E funding for the BEET-IT, program. PNNL also received ARPA-E funding in 2011 to adapt the adsorption chiller to heat and cool electric vehicles with minimal impact on driving distance.

Last week, news came out that NECA’s Django Unchained action figures had been discontinued after drawing controversy from groups like the National Action Network and Project Islamic Hope.

Since then, naturally, the toys became instant eBay shopper bait. Today, TMZ is reporting, however, that eBay has banned the toys from sale on the site, providing a statement from the company that they were removed because they violate its Offensive Materials Policy. However, you can go to eBay right now and find numerous listings for the toys. Here’s one:

Apparently they haven’t been able to keep the toys off the site. This could end up hurting some sellers, as the company “cautioned sellers not to re-list the items,” according to TMZ, which also shares this quote from an email eBay has been sending sellers:

“Since the manufacturer of this product has discontinued the item’s sale due to its potentially offensive nature, we are not allowing it to be sold on eBay.”

Here are some things that are still perfectly acceptable to sell on eBay, according to its Offensive Materials Policy:

– KKK memorabilia pricing guides
– News and magazine articles about the KKK
– Documentaries about the KKK
– Books about the KKK
– The film “Birth of a Nation” and the book it is based on, “The Clansmen”
– Stamps, letters and envelopes displaying Nazi postmarks
– Currency issued by the Nazi German government
– Replica or novelty stamps or currency of Nazi Germany

Listings for the toys are also showing up on other big ecommerce sites. You can currently find them listed on Amazon, Bonanza, and even in Google Shopping, which is now based solely on product listing ads.

Russian search engine company Yandex has launched a new social search app for the iPhone and iPod Touch for people in the U.S. It’s called Wonder, and taps into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, iTunes, and Last.fm to provide answers to questions based on data from your friends, as well as location and music info and options (such as previewing and purchasing songs).

Take a look:

The app uses natural language voice search first and foremost, but includes a keyboard input option. Right now, it only works in English and understands a few types of questions pertaining to places, music and news. It utilizes speech recognition and text-to-speech technology from Nuance Communications. Here are some examples Yandex provides for the types of questions it works for:

– If you are looking for a proven sushi place in New York, you can just ask: what sushi restaurants do my friends go to in New York?

– Want to catch up on news, ask: news shared by my friends.

Wonder’s launch comes at an interesting time, amidst a slow roll-out of Facebook’s own attempt at social search. Of course this is a mobile app, and Facebook’s launch does not include mobile (though that will come in time). It’s unclear whether or not Yandex intends to release Wonder on Android.

A new supercomputer expected to rank among the world’s fastest machines will be ready to run computationally intense climate and biological simulations along with other scientific programs this summer. This computational work will aid research in climate and environmental science, chemical processes, biology-based fuels that can replace fossil fuels, new materials for energy applications and more.

Chosen by a competitive process, Atipa Technologies in Lawrence, Kan., will provide the machine to EMSL, the Department of Energy’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory. EMSL is a national user facility on DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s campus that provides experimental and high performance computing capabilities to enable users to address environmental and energy challenges through molecular-level theory and experiment. It is also home to the new supercomputer’s predecessor, Chinook. As a national user facility resource, the new system will be available to scientists everywhere,who will be able to apply on a competitive basis to use it. Currently, about 400 scientists use Chinook.

“We’re developing a supercomputer that will aid energy, environment and basic science missions important to DOE,” said PNNL computational scientist Bill Shelton, the associate director at EMSL who manages high performance computing. “Enhanced computing power will benefit our users who conduct experiments and want to verify them with modeling. Integrating computational theory with experiment is critical to accelerating scientific discovery.”

Funded by DOE’s Office of Science, the new $17 million machine will likely peak at 3.4 quadrillion — 3.4 million billion — calculations per second and be more than 20 times faster than the four-year-old Chinook. The new supercomputer’s capacity and speed are expected to rank it among the world’s top 20 fastest machines when it comes online. Peaking at 3.4 petaflops, the new computer will be able to do in one hour what would take a typical laptop more than 20 years to do.

Atipa Technologies has been providing high performance computers to DOE and its labs for more than a decade.

“We’re excited to have the opportunity to provide the new  supercomputer with a theoretical peak performance of 3.38 petaflops and 2.7 petabytes of usable storage. It will be built and deployed by Atipa Technologies in collaboration with Supermicro,” said Mike Zheng, president of Atipa Technologies.

As EMSL’s flagship high performance computer, researchers from around the world will be able to use it. The EMSL team designed it for researchers who typically need resources of this scale but don’t generally have access to such a powerful computer. This wide availability makes it stand out from other supercomputers.

“Its uniqueness is that it will be optimally configured for climate and chemistry simulations and biological analyses,” said Shelton.

For example, the new machine will offer added speed for improved climate models. “The new computer provides a wonderful opportunity for climate scientists to get more work done and get each simulation done more quickly,” said PNNL climate scientist Phil Rasch. “It is a huge jump in the computing power available to us.”

And it will produce more details about how organisms work. “I’m excited because with the amount of data researchers are generating in biology, this supercomputer will open up new avenues for our users,” said EMSL biology science lead Scott Baker. “More computing power is like having more pixels in a picture. We’ll be able to look at proteins and complex biological interactions more realistically. This will allow us to better understand and control organisms like microbes so that we can develop new renewable fuels.”

The design’s 196,000 processing units are Intel processors combined with Intel Phi many integrated core (MIC) accelerator cards. The accelerator cards will ratchet up the power. They work with the conventional processors and memory and allow up to 120 extra calculations per node to be performed simultaneously rather than one at a time. (Anyone with a graphics card in their personal computer has taken advantage of a hardware accelerator.)

The system’s 23,000 Intel processors have 184,000 gigabytes (184,000 billion bytes) of memory available, about four times as much memory per processor as other supercomputers. The additional memory will allow scientists to use the processors more efficiently for biology, climate research, chemistry and materials science.

Atipa will deliver the computer’s components by July 2013 and assemble it at EMSL. The EMSL team will spend a few months installing and configuring the system and getting it up to speed. They expect to have it running for national and international researchers in October 2013. In the meantime, EMSL will be sponsoring a naming contest among EMSL users and friends.

The New Supercomputer’s Fast Facts:

• Theoretical peak processing speed of 3.4 petaflops
• 42 racks
• 195,840 cores
• 1440 compute nodes with conventional processors and Intel Xeon Phi “MIC” accelerators
• 128 GB memory per node
• FDR Infiniband network
• 2.7 petabyte shared parallel filesystem (60 gigabytes per second read/write)
• Working reference: HPCS4A

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit the Office of Science website.

Entertainment Tonight has posted the first clip we’ve seen from the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic jOBS, starring Ashton Kutcher and Josh Gad as Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The clip features the duo in a scene talking about Wozniak’s operating system.

Kutcher and Gad will appear at Macworld/iWorld next week to talk about their experiences playing the roles of Apple’s co-founders.

The film also got an official release date this week: April 19.

[via Slashgear]

The best TV show about advertising of all time (to be fair, I haven’t seen many others) returns on April 7. AMC announced the news on Wednesday, and now, the network has released a handful of new cast photos from the upcoming season.

It will be interesting to see if the show can generate another vial hit this season on par with that of last season’s Fat Betty Draper.

Credit for all photos: Frank Ockenfels/AMC (via blogs.amctv.com)

As previously reported, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo previewed what an upcoming Twitter video-sharing experience would look like when he tweeted, using Vine, which the company acquired last year.

Today, the company officially launched the offering in the form of a downloadable iOS app. From the company blog:

Today, we’re introducing Vine: a mobile service that lets you capture and share short looping videos. Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity. Now that you can easily capture motion and sound, we look forward to seeing what you create.

I understand Twitter’s long-standing philosophy of brevity, but I’m not sure it works as well in video form. Is there really a great deal of demand to share six-second video clips? I’m sure you can point to any number of potential use cases, but I just can’t see this being a huge thing among Twitter users. Of course, there’s always the strong possibility that I’m completely wrong. Plenty of similar sentiments were expressed by many when Twitter itself came out.

More from the Vine blog:

Posts on Vine are about abbreviation — the shortened form of something larger. They’re little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life. They’re quirky, and we think that’s part of what makes them so special…We also believe constraint inspires creativity, whether it’s through a 140-character Tweet or a six-second video.

Twitter makes no mention of an Android app, or an app for any other mobile platform, but it stands to reason these will come in time.

It should be noted that you don’t need a Twitter account to use Vine. Perhaps Vine will find its own user base, completely independent of Twitter.

Joyent announced a new Apache Hadoop-based solution, built using the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), that allows companies to run enterprise-class Hadoop on the high-performance Joyent Cloud.

As a new entrant into the big data landscape Joyent is addressing industry demand to reduce costs and decrease query response times. Software product development services company Altoros Systems said that Hadoop clusters on Joyent Cloud produced a nearly 3X faster disk I/O response time versus identically-sized infrastructure. Through the use of the Joyent operating system virtualization and CPU bursting technology, Joyent says it is able to extract better response times and deliver results to data scientists and analysts faster.

“We are pioneering a new era of big data and our Hadoop offering is just the start of our 2013 agenda,” said Jason Hoffman, CTO and Founder, Joyent. “We intend to continue bringing our technical expertise to the market and reverse the typical understanding of big data implementations – that they’re expensive and hard to use. We’re committed to meeting the insatiable demand for faster analytics and data retrieval, changing how computing functions for the enterprise.”

Global telecom Telefonica was an early adopter of Joyent’s Hadoop solution.   “Joyent technology powers our service – Instant Servers – and is providing Telefonica Digital an advantage to deliver the fastest performing Hadoop big data solution in our marketplace,” said Carlos Morales Paulin, Global Managing Director, M2M, Cloud Computing and Apps, Telefonica. “Joyent has inversed the big data cost equation while at the same time innovating how computing on large distributed and unstructured data can be accomplished for large enterprises. Our customers can now get insight from their data quicker than ever before without the massive cost that’s typically associated with high-performance big data solutions.”

The Apache Hadoop solution is available immediately for Joyent customers.

What do you do when you already have the coolest job in the world? You start a business where you can have another amazing job on evenings and weekends.

Daric Schlesselman is an editor for the Daily Show in Manhattan who lives in deepest Red Hook, a small, cool community on the edge of Brooklyn. There he rents a former paint factory where he’s set up the Van Brunt Stillhouse and storage facility where he makes some of the nicest grappa, whiskey, and rum this side of the Gowanus.

Schlesselman started out as a homebrewer but has taken investment to build a small, artisinal distillery in Red Hook. He makes booze to match the season – rum in the summer, whiskey in the fall, and grappa anytime – and he’s the perfect example of someone who followed his dream to sweet fruition.

The stillhouse is compact and well-appointed with plenty of barrels of delicious whiskey aging in white oak. He may not be making 3D printers or electronic eyes, but the Van Brunt Stillhouse shows us that even a mild-mannered TV editor can, with a little time, energy, and perseverance, build a real business making some amazing stuff.

TechCrunch Makers is a video series featuring people who make cool stuff. If you’d like to be featured, email us!.

A primary school teacher answering questions in her class. Picture: Neema Kambona/DFID

You know that heart stopping feeling when you crest the first peak of a big roller coaster as it goes into free fall? That feeling of dread is perhaps only equalled by the torture of opening up your exam results – at the time it seems your whole life might depend on the hidden grades inside!

In the UK last year, GCSE (Grade 10 for 16 year olds) pass rates finally were reported as having ‘dropped’ for the first time ever by an ‘under whelming’ half of one percentage point, reversing a decades long upward trend. Many have commented that exams, and increasingly interwoven coursework, have become easier to pass – ‘grade inflation’ – potentially to allow more students to enter tertiary education. There were howls of protest and legal challenges this year over how the pass mark for English GCSEs were being adjusted and its effect on grades and students’ career prospects.

Over the Christmas holidays, Tanzanians were shocked and bemused to receive the outcomes of the Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE) taken by students around 14-15 years old in age and are usually considered necessary to enter secondary school. National pass rates (grades A-C) were reported as having plummeted from 57% in 2011 to 30% in 2012, that’s almost halved – not one half of a percentage point drop. It was reported that in two rural Western regions that 48 schools had no students pass at all. However, not all failing students face ruin. It appears that entry requirements into secondary school will be relaxed, as the government continues to expand access to secondary education (enrolment rates have tripled since 2005).

Secondary school enrolment since 2000

Exam results can be used for different purposes to filter out students for a limited intake into more advanced levels of education or as an absolute measure of competences. Major changes in pass rates are not that unusual if one looks at Tanzanian results in past years, but this one does seem unexpectedly large and has left many people scratching their heads for solutions. If failing students are being sent en masse to secondary schools, is the problem merely being shunted up the system?

Did the switch to automated marking of multiple choice questions cause confusion or did it prevent cheating? For an exam taken by close to a million students the benefits of automation are clear, in previous years teacher training colleges stopped lessons for weeks as trainee teachers were co-opted in for marking by hand. Were the questions or curriculum made harder, or the grade boundaries adjusted? If you have any ideas please let me know; we are also discussing with government colleagues for possible explanations.

MDG 2: Achieve Universal Primary Education

Over the past decade the emphasis in developing countries has evolved from education expansion – ‘bums on seats’ in pursuit of the MDG 2 on access – to all children learning at school (or elsewhere).  Clearly examination pass rates are one measure of learning; as posted earlier, other approaches such as civil society led testing of children on basic literacy and numeracy skills now provide useful alternative measures that demonstrate disturbingly low levels of ability in children in Africa and South Asia. We face a real challenge to determine how best to support Tanzania’s children to learn. Primary School Leaving Exam (PSLE) pass rates are one of the key indicators agreed to measure progress between the UK, other development partners and government, but in this instance it appears our tape measure or stopwatch may have malfunctioned!

Say you’re building a gadget. You’ll probably need several widgets, gizmos and electronic thingymabobs. CircuitHub is now here to help. The startup launched today and is attempting to be the world’s first free online, collaborative parts library. Best of all, it works seamlessly with popular design programs.

This tool is aimed squarely at makers. By offering a comprehensive and detailed parts library, CircuitHub hopes to be the main resource for finding electronic components. But CircuitHub will only be successful if it can build this massive database. The entire system is open for group collaboration. Spend a few minutes and add some parts to the database.

Using Dropbox for cloud storage, CircuitHub integrates nicely with Altium, Eagle, OrCAD and Allegro. Use CircuitHub’s library with your design software. That’s the genius here. CircuitHub isn’t attempting to disrupt a maker’s workflow; the startup is trying to improve it.

By sourcing the right part from the start, makers will experience less hassle when approaching manufacturing.

“Kickstarter is the largest crowd-funding site where anyone can help fund ideas proposed by anyone else” explained Andrew Seddon, CircuitHub’s co-founder, in a released statement. “The single biggest project and the highest funded category are both dominated by electronics. Yet 84 percent of the top physical product-based projects were severely delayed primarily due to problems with interfacing design data into and through factories. This problem is exactly what the CircuitHub library is designed to address.”

CircuitHub is backed by Y Combinator with investments from Google Ventures and notable angel investors including Paul Buchheit (the inventor of Gmail), Matt Cutts (creator of Google SafeSearch), Alexis Ohanian (cofounder of Reddit), Harj Taggar (cofounder Auctomatic), and Garry Tan (cofounder of Posterous), among others.

When we launched We the People, none of us knew how popular it would be, but it's exceeded our wildest expectations. Through the past year, interest in We the People exploded and we're closing in on 10 million signatures.

When we first raised the threshold — from 5,000 to 25,000 — we called it "a good problem to have." Turns out that "good problem" is only getting better, so we're making another adjustment to ensure we’re able to continue to give the most popular ideas the time they deserve.

Starting today, as we move into a second term, petitions must receive 100,000 signatures in 30 days in order to receive an official response from the Obama Administration. This new threshold applies only to petitions created from this point forward and is not retroactively applied to ones that already exist.

In the last two months of 2012, use of We the People more than doubled. In just that time roughly 2.4 million new users joined the system, 73,000 petitions were created and 4.9 million signatures were registered.

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