Category: News

Sofia Vergara, one of the stars of “Modern Family”, was hit with a nasty bout of the flu over the weekend and had to skip all the Oscars excitement.

The curvy star says she’s fine but is recovering at home and trying to keep away from anyone who might contract the illness. The flu has been particularly bad this season, with some states declaring emergencies after so many victims checked into the hospital at once that some had to be turned away. Many celebrities have been hit, including actor Burt Reynolds, who had to be briefly hospitalized with the illness.

In fact, so many people fell victim to the flu this year that an ice cream maker decided to unleash a specialty item on the public: Influenza Sorbet. The orange-flavored treat is infused with honey, lemon, ginger, orange, cayenne pepper, and pectin, which is found in cough drops, and many swear by the food as a means to feeling better.

Vergara has made several headlines already this year after she and fiance Nick Loeb were kicked out of a Miami club during an altercation on New Year’s Eve, but she seems in good spirits and tweeted about having to stay home this past weekend.

Follow @SofiaVergara

Sofia Vergara
@SofiaVergara

Watching the Oscars at home

February 26, 2013

Ask anyone in consumer goods why their industry is not more committed to sustainability and you’ll hear the same thing: because the marketplace doesn’t reward us for being so. Sadly, most “socially responsible” goods cost more to produce than alternatives that leave the world worse off, and those costs translate into higher prices. Regarding the merits of passing up the greater bargain for the greater good, most shoppers remain unpersuaded.

But persuading people is what advertising is designed to do. So as marketers become more authentically committed to corporate responsibility goals, expect to see more for-profit companies investing in social marketing — that is, using their messaging powers to change consumer attitudes and behavior.

This is what the British retailing giant Marks & Spencer is doing in its “shwopping” campaign. The term is a conflation of shopping and swapping, and the thing being pushed here is a suggestion: that, before you rush out to buy the latest fashion, you might visit your closet and decide what it will replace. Very likely, there’s an old article of clothing you could recycle — and your Marks & Spencer will make that easy for you through a partnership with Oxfam and helpfully located “shwop drops” in its stores. But chances are also that, now that you look at it, that old thing is perfectly fine to wear again. Perhaps you don’t need a new one.

Andrew Winston, a frequent HBR blogger and author of Green to Gold, explains how the company got the project rolling:

To get the word out, M&S covered a multi-story warehouse entirely with old clothing. The scale of the guerilla marketing effort was not random: the roughly 10,000 garments hanging on the building represented the amount of clothing sent to landfill in the UK every 5 minutes. As Adam Elman, head of Plan A, told me, “we wanted to bring the idea to life.” (“Plan A” is the name of M&S’s sustainability initiative, because “there is no plan B.”)

The building got plenty of attention, but it was only the beginning of a multi-pronged effort to drive the initiative into the business and integrate it with all marketing. M&S is utilizing a range of the hottest marketing techniques, from running temporary “pop-up” Shwop shops, with garments donated by celebrities, to “gamification” efforts that give customers Facebook points and “badges” for donating. The company is also leveraging star power, putting its “Plan A Ambassador,” the actress Joanne Lumley (most famous abroad for co-starring in the sitcom Absolutely Fabulous), at the center of marketing efforts.

Pause for a moment to appreciate all this. Here we have a for-profit company spending limited marketing funds not only to promote something other than the goods it has for sale — but even to some extent to suppress demand for them. It seems like madness until you realize that M&S is playing a longer game. As the UK’s biggest clothing retailer, it can’t afford to be irresponsible; its practices are under heavy scrutiny. And it can’t prosper by being responsible until its customers start to value that. But when its customers do learn to value sustainability, it stands to win big. CEO Marc Bolland is determined to get there: “We’re leading a change in the way we all shop for clothing, forever.” He hopes the movement will catch on to the point where all stores take back one garment for every one they sell. “For us that’s 350 million a year,” he says. “It is a big number, but with our customers’ help, we will do it.”

This is the fifth in a series of posts from our March issue on the future of advertising. Stay tuned for more “Creative That Cracks the Code” over the coming weeks; topics include Variations on a Meme; Collaborating With the Crowd; The Ad as a Game; Just Enough Humor; Ads That “Go Native”; Apps as the New Ads; Personalized Products; and Ads in the Public Sphere.

We also want to know which ad campaigns strike you as innovative; tell us below and we could analyze your pick as part of this series.

The Future of Advertising
An HBR Insight Center

• Martin Sorrell on What’s Next
• Invest in Your Customers More Than Your Brand
• The Decline and Fall of Product Placement
• Advertisers Must Be Inventors

“It was a crazy time.” That comment sums up the experience of Jay Adelson, co-founder of Equinix, describing the effort to build the first major colocation provider. Adelson, known to many for his role in creating the news portal Digg, founded Equinix in 1998 with the late Al Avery. Adelson and Avery had worked at Digital Equipment Corp., and saw the need for carrier-neutral facilities where companies could interconnect their networks. The attractiveness of that business model, along with its early-mover advantage, made Equinix a key player in the data center sector. In this video from the Equinix Interconnections blog, Adelson discusses the company’s history and progress. “Equinix is the most powerful Internet infrastructure company in the world,” said Adelson. “It’s a powerful position. But you can use that position of power to make a diffference, and to enable the Internet in places it’s never been before.” Adelson also cited the power of culture at Equinix, and the connections that resulted. ”At the time I left, there had been 17 marriages of people who met at Equinix,” he says. This video runs

For additional background on the history of Equinix, see the Vision & History area of the company web site.

For more news about Equinix, please see our Equinix Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

For the first time, anyone can find out the current conditions on thousands of rivers and streams across the country, right from their phone, using USGS’ latest system WaterNow. WaterNow makes the water conditions monitored by more than 16,000 streamgages and other sites across the country available via text or email. 

Like its predecessor and companion program, WaterAlert, WaterNow seeks to make USGS gage information for streamflow, groundwater levels, springs, water quality, and lake levels more readily available to the general public. These data have been available for over 10 years at USGS Water Data for the Nation, which requires a web browser to access.

“USGS is the world’s largest provider of hydrologic information, and our streamgages are a vital part of that water infrastructure,” said USGS Associate Director for Water Bill Werkheiser. “WaterNow brings that information straight from our streamgages to your smartphone, and keeps USGS data flowing at the cutting edge.”

Knowing about current water conditions is important for a variety of purposes, from disaster planning and response to recreation. For example, water levels in streams can be checked during floods to guide evacuations or on a bright weekend morning to plan a day of paddling. 

Land and resource managers can benefit from WaterNow too. Not only can water levels be obtained, but also water temperatures can be checked to determine when it is necessary to release water from a reservoir to protect downstream trout fisheries.

WaterNow expands on the service provided by the USGS WaterAlert service. WaterAlert provides a notification only when conditions exceed a threshold set by a user, whereas WaterNow provides data anytime on demand.  These data are collected typically at 15 to 60-minute intervals, stored onsite, and then transmitted to USGS offices every hour.

So how does it work? It’s easy! All you have to do is find the gage you are interested in using instructions found on the WaterNow page, and then send a message to [email protected] with the site number of the gage you would like to get updates from.

You will receive a reply within a few minutes that includes the most recent values of water level and streamflow, if available for that site.  These data are by far the mostly frequently requested; therefore, they have been pre-set as defaults.  Data values are also available for other kinds of data-collection sites such as wells, springs, and lakes.

For complete instructions and guides on what types of data might be useful to you or which streamgages might be of interest to you, visit the USGS WaterNow site!

In early 2011, Foursquare and American Express launched a partnership that allowed card-owners to score discounts and cashback by using Foursquare to check-in and spend at certain participating businesses around the country. The program made a big splash on Small Business Saturday (the shopping day after Black Friday) and featured offers like “spend $25 get $25 off.”

Later, Foursquare and AMEX extended those deals, even launching them across the pond.

Now, Foursquare is making a move to expand these offers to more types of plastic.

The company will announce new partnerships with both Visa and MasterCard to provide similar check-in offers alongside participating businesses.

The AMEX/Foursquare deal has morphed over time to start producing more revenue for Foursquare, and the company says that the new deals with Visa and MasterCard will earn them a fee for every offer redeemed. It’s unclear whether that will be a flat fee per offer claimed or some sort of percentage deal.

“This is going to be a pretty core part of our revenue model going forward,” said Foursquare Product Manager Noah Weiss.

According to AdAge, the first offer that should be available today involves $1 off for $10 spent at 8,000 participating Burger King locations.

Since this is going to be a “core part of the revenue model,” it shouldn’t surprise you that Foursquare is also making these credit card deals more prominent within the app.

All you’ll have to do is sync your Visa, MasterCard, or AMEX with your Foursquare account to start earning cashback on purchases made through the app.

Apple was issued a couple of interesting new patents today (spotted by AppleInsider), including one that could make an iPhone aware of changes in a user’s situation, and alter phone settings accordingly. That would make for a mobile phone that might be able to automatically switch to silent mode when in a movie theatre, for instance, or which could wake from sleep upon being pulled out of a pocket.

The patent was originally designed to apply to iPod devices way back in the days of the click wheel controller, but it has been amended to account for wireless mobile devices like the iPhone. The whole point of the invention is to limit GUI requirements for certain functions, and to instead use a device’s sensors, combined with a “situational awareness module” to trigger changes to things like audio settings, music playback and more.

It’s a tech that sounds like it could easily go wrong; you obviously wouldn’t want your iPhone screen locking when a set of conditions are met that, while similar to another situation, actually isn’t the same one. But you can also see the advantages: Already, Siri can be set to activate when you bring the iPhone to your head. Imagine if other functions, like composing an email, could be auto-triggered via similar functions, like gripping the phone with two hands horizontally as if to begin typing. And an auto-lock function when you slide your phone into a pocket would actually add a lot of convenience in the aggregate, even if it seems like a small thing at first.

Another patent issued to Apple today by the USPTO describes a way for iPhones to share their location data with secondary, external devices, or vice versa. The system could be used in tandem with a standalone GPS module to help your Wi-Fi-only iPod touch become a fully functional navigation device when you get into a car, for instance. But the more interesting potential behind this patent lies in how it might be applied to an iWatch.

The patent describes a method for two-way communication between a handset and an accessory, which is capable of transmitting location data from one to the other. In its most basic iteration, it beams GPS info from an iPhone, for example, to a larger display, which can output the map visuals based on data received. That could allow your iPhone to wirelessly (or via wired connection, as both methods are described) relay navigation info to an in-car entertainment system, for example.

It could also be very useful in making an iWatch design location-aware even without building internal sensors into such a device. Apple doesn’t make mention of this type of implementation specifically in the patent granted today, which was granted in 2009, but it’s no great leap to imagine its benefit in that context. If an iWatch is already tethering to an iPhone for cellular data and other info, then it just makes sense to add in location information. Wrist-mounted maps for walking navigation sounds like it would be a very useful feature.

Neither of these patents seem too far-fetched to rule out inclusion in future devices, and in fact I’d say it’s likely we’ll see something along the lines of Apple offering up location data to thin clients in external devices, because that really goes a long way towards unlocking the value of mobile devices and broadening the appeal of an iOS hardware ecosystem.

Piriform Software has released CCleaner 3.28 and CCleaner Portable 3.28, updated versions of its popular freeware Windows cleaning tool. Version 3.28 is a minor release, promising better performance and compatibility, plus support for cleaning up behind two new programs.

Piriform has also announced that the release of CCleaner 3.28 will be the last of the 3.x branch, with CCleaner 4.0 the next release slated. It also hints that this is the first of a number of major updates to its product line planned over the coming months.

Key changes in CCleaner 3.28 include the promise of improved compatibility with Windows 8 machines. Windows 7 users should also benefit from faster performance through enhanced memory usage, while version 3.28 also improves cleaning of the Windows log files.

The new build adds cleaning options for Gadu-Gadu, a Polish instant messaging client, as well as Foxit Phantom PDF, while existing cleaning options for Adobe Flash Player and ConvertXToDVD have also been tweaked for a more thorough cleaning experience.

Pro users will benefit from faster automatic updates, while the update is rounded off with the usual mixture of updated translations, minor interface improvements and bug fixes.

Piriform has also announced that the next release of CCleaner will be version 4.0, which will add system monitoring tools and file-finding capabilities alongside a minor interface refresh and will also debut a brand new program icon. Piriform also claims to be finalizing details of other “exciting” releases. It appears these may be brand new tools to add to its stable, which currently include Recuva 1.45 and Defraggler 2.13 as well as CCleaner for Mac.

CCleaner 3.28 and CCleaner Portable 3.28 are both available as free-for-personal-use downloads for PCs running Windows 2000 or later. Pro and Business Editions are also available.

Photo Credit: Amy Walters /Shutterstock

Alan McMahon works for Dell. He has worked for Dell for the last 13 years involved in enterprise solution design, across a range for products from servers, storage to virtualization, and is based in Ireland.

ALAN McMAHON
Dell

Every company has a stockpile of data – loads and loads of data. That data may not be that useful however, if you are unable to even access it without dedicating copious amounts of time and effort to the endeavor. That’s where an effective data warehouse strategy comes in.

Contrary to what some companies may still believe, effective data warehouse solutions do not have to be costly. Nor do they have to be complex or limited to a single size and scope.

What No Longer Works

In the so-called olden days, which in the high-tech world can be as recent as last year, data warehousing was attempted using two fairly common methods.

One was relying on external resources to cobble together a system as the company went along. Such systems could contain any number and types of servers, storage arrays and software. When combined, companies hoped such a collection would work as an effective data warehousing solution, although that has become less and less likely of being the case. Disparate units thrown together can create an increasingly complex system that is difficult to monitor, track or manage in an effective manner.

The do-it-yourself approach also runs into trouble for companies who have limited internal IT resources to dedicate to the creation and management of an effective warehousing system. IT resources may not be large enough or enjoy the availability to focus on implementing or managing a sprawling warehousing system.

Another old-school method of data warehousing was going for a system based on proprietary technology. While this type of system may offer the capabilities and technology to meet the needs of many businesses, the cost was typically high. Outlay was costly, as were the ongoing contracts required to ensure the systems would be continuously optimized and maintained. Reaching for proprietary systems could also often result in over-provisioning for the small and medium business. Smaller businesses would not necessarily need such an extensive system but were forced to pay for it anyway, believing it was the only available option.

The drawbacks of former data warehousing methods include high cost, low efficiency, and the simple inability to make any useful sense of the data being stored.

What You Can Do with a System That is Much More Effective

Instead of having vast amounts of unorganized and inaccessible data, an effective data warehouse strategy lets you access the data easily and rapidly for a number of uses. Reviewing various types of data allows you to track past and current trends, while predicting future trends and issue – resulting in meaningful business intelligence reports.

Vast amounts of data stored in an inefficient manner can result in drastically reduced system performance. As data volume increases, so can the amount of time it takes for data to load for even the simplest routine operations. Throw a few queries in there for an attempt to locate a specific item, and the system can lag even further as the system  attempts to sift through or process existing data. These time lags not only affect the employees’ productivity, but they can also affect the company as a whole if downtime or bottle-necked traffic results.

Extensive and ever-expanding data collections are a major challenge for today’s businesses. Internal and external source are constantly adding more data to the mix in a variety of formats and complexity levels. Duplications and redundant data are neither uncommon nor of any practical use.

Online Analytical Processing, or OLAP, can be a very handy application for mining data from different data bases, but it places an extreme workload and pressure on a system that may not be designed to handle anything as complex or large.

Effective data warehousing can also eliminate archaic data storage systems that have long outlived any useful purpose or free up other devices that are too stocked with data to perform additional functions.

What to Look for in an Efficient Data Warehousing System

Capacity and performance are the two big factors to review when choosing a data warehouse strategy. The framework should be capable of supporting and balancing the hardware and software comprising the system can contain important features that are vital to today’s enterprises. These include:

• Ability to handle extensive sequential scans
• Capabilities compatible with OLAP systems
• Configurations that implement next-generation servers and storage arrays
• Rapid installation with minimal impact on daily operations and operational systems
• Scalability to meet business needs without over-provisioning
• Ability to increase scale for business growth with cost-effective additions down the road
• Cost-effectiveness to fit a variety of price points and budgets
• Available upgrades and updates as technologies advance

Size Matters

The option to size availability is a must, to keep processing speeds high and cost low. Small, medium and large data warehousing options should be available to meet the specific needs of your business. Small and medium businesses, for instance, may do well with a 5 TerraByte (TB) platform consisting of a single server with internal storage. Slightly larger businesses may be able to create an effective strategy using a 10 TB platform with a larger server and internet storage array. The largest enterprises, by contrast, may want nothing less than a 20 TB platform based on a large server and fibre channel storage array that can handle the massive loads.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

In-app purchases are a lucrative revenue stream for both Apple and the developers who embrace it. It provides a way to try a game and then unlock the full thing, or gain access to additional features. In Temple Run 2, for example, you can use real money to buy coins and gems to use on unlocking new characters and abilities.

The problem is a lot of game makers offer this facility in their apps, and until Apple made a change to its purchasing system in iOS 4.3, it was possible for children to spend money on in-app purchases without their parents knowledge. This, inevitably, lead to a lawsuit against Apple, with the technology giant accused of failing to adequately publicize the existence of the feature in certain App Store games aimed at children.

In response to the lawsuit — which was originally brought by a Californian man in 2011 after his daughter racked up $200 of charges without his permission — Apple is now proposing to pay compensation to parents who have lost money in this way.

At the moment this offer only extends to US parents and guardians, and will need to be signed off by a judge on Friday before it can be actioned.

If agreed, American App Store shoppers will receive an email offering them a minimum of $5 compensation in iTunes credit or cash, provided they can show they have had a child spend at least $30 on in-app purchases without permission (and assuming the parents haven’t already complained and been refunded of course). The key catch is the child will need to have spent the money in the fifteen minute window originally allowed by Apple for additional purchases made after the password was entered. If your child knows — and used — your password to go on their spending spree, it’s tough luck.

It is thought Apple will need to contact around 23 million users, alerting them that they may be entitled to compensation. No word at the moment if or when this offer will be extended outside of the US.

Photo Credit: Serhiy Kobyakov /Shutterstock

Back when the Porsche Cayman was released back in 2005, most enthusiasts simply dismissed it as a Porsche Boxster with a roof. Those in the automotive know however knew the car was much, much more. A mid-engine coupe with a near perfect weight balance, the Porsche Cayman gain a loyal following as soon as the automotive press jumped behind the wheel. Chris Harris recently got a chance to sample the new 2013 Porsche Cayman S and found out what most of us already knew. It’s awesome!

Source: Youtube.com/DRIVE

Leaders must be firm and foster accountability, but they also must know when to forgive past wrongs in the service of building a brighter future. One of the most courageous acts of leadership is to forgo the temptation to take revenge on those on the other side of an issue or those who opposed the leader’s rise to power.

Instead of settling scores, great leaders make gestures of reconciliation that heal wounds and get on with business. This is essential for turnarounds or to prevent mergers from turning into rebellions against acquirers who act like conquering armies.

Nelson Mandela famously forgave his oppressors. After the end of apartheid, which had fostered racial separation and kept blacks impoverished, Mandela became South Africa’s first democratically elected President. Some in his political party clamored for revenge against members of the previous regime or perhaps even all privileged white people. Instead, to avoid violence, stabilize and unite the nation, and attract investment in the economy, Mandela appointed a racially integrated cabinet, visited the widow of one of the top apartheid leaders, and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that would clear the air and permit moving forward.

Forgiveness can be costly, like the massive amounts of debt forgiveness toward countries like Greece to help create a stable foundation for restoring growth to Europe. Forgiveness can sometimes mean investing in groups that have done something negative — a counterintuitive but often very effective strategy. A striking example, which I recount in my book SuperCorp, occurred in South Korea, not a country known for being kinder and gentler, and yet forgiveness and seeking harmony were at the heart of a major business success.

Shinhan Bank, a fairly new entrepreneurial bank, was set to acquire Chohung Bank, a larger, much older establishment-oriented bank that had hit hard times, when Chohung employees staged an embarrassing action. To protest the takeover, 3,500 men shaved their heads and piled the hair in front of Shinhan’s headquarters in downtown Seoul. Shinhan signed an agreement with Chohung’s union that astonished some observers. Far from taking revenge for the protest (or walking away from the deal), Shinhan agreed to raise wages, promise no layoffs, have equal representation of both banks on key committees, and wait three years for full integration. These and other investments in the future generated a significant payoff. Within a year, shareholder value had increased (it decreases in a majority of mergers) and employees from both banks were informally integrating, with the union neutralized. Within three years, Shinhan Financial Group was outperforming not only the industry but the entire South Korean stock market.

“Revenge is not justice,” says General Douglas MacArthur, as played by Tommy Lee Jones in Emperor, an engrossing new feature film about the surrender of the Japanese to American troops at the end of World War II. Like the hit movie Lincoln, the movie Emperor dramatizes a turning point in history replete with leadership lessons. (The movie will be released March 8; I saw an early screening thanks to producer Gary Foster, a personal friend.) The question requiring leadership judgment is whether to hang Japan’s Emperor Hirohito for war crimes. There’s pressure from Washington and his fellow officers to punish the emperor, but General MacArthur, seeing that Japan teeters on civil unrest and reveres its emperor, refuses to give in. He instead uses his power for reconciliation. The emperor remains in place, though stripped of his divinity. In a gesture of contrition, Hirohito leaves the palace to go to American headquarters for the first time. In the mesmerizing final scene, MacArthur and Hirohito pose side by side for a photograph. As we know from history, the rebuilding of war-torn Japan was an economic and social triumph.

If revenge is not justice, it is not strategy either. The founder of a second-tier computer company was pushed out a few years after the company went public. I watched him gather investors and regain control with something to prove — that they were wrong to push him out. Once back at the helm, he had no clear alternative direction. The company foundered and was sold at a low valuation. Let’s hope that revenge against critics isn’t the motivation for Michael Dell to take Dell private or the founder of Best Buy to attempt a takeover.

Anger and blame are unproductive emotions that tie up energy in destroying rather than creating. People who want to save a marriage, for example, must let go of the desire to hurt a partner the way they think the partner has hurt them and instead make a gesture of reconciliation.

Those whose main motivation is to settle scores and get payback — to obstruct rather than construct — are on the wrong side of history. Their legacy is not rebuilding, but rubble. From (ahem) members of Congress to leaders in any turnaround situation, it’s a lesson worth remembering: Taking revenge can destroy countries, companies, and relationships. Forgiveness can rebuild them.

Although it’s Tuesday, it’s not “Patch Tuesday”, which means we shouldn’t expect any updates from Microsoft, but the software giant is rolling out patches none-the-less. The updates are across a broad spectrum of platforms too — Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server, and even Windows RT are included in this update.

Curiously, many of the Windows updates are listed as “non-security”. The company generally only pushes out-of-cycle updates when there is a major security flaw that cannot wait for the next month. In the case of today’s patches, many are listed as a fix for “issues in Windows”.

There are also a few security patches as well. Both Windows Server 2012 and Server 2008 are receiving security patches, while .NET Framework 4 on XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP also have security updates coming.

There are also security-related fixes for Internet Explorer. According to Knowledge Base articles KB2792100 and KB2797052, “A security issue has been identified that could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to compromise your system and gain control over it”. These updates cover Internet Explorer versions 6 through 10.

The entire list of updates is quite long. Those with automatic updates turned on should receive the patches today without having to do anything. Otherwise you will need to install them manually via the Windows Update option in Control Panel.

Photo Credit: zimmytws/Shutterstock

If your browser has been taken over by an aggressive addon then you can try the standard routes to remove it (the “Manage Addons” dialog in IE, for instance). These can be confusing for beginners, though, and may not always work, so avast! has developed a custom Browser Cleanup tool as a simpler alternative.

The program is portable, a compact 1.75 MB download which runs on Windows XP, 7 and 8, so it’s generally convenient to use. It supports IE, Firefox and Chrome, and on launch checks each of these to evaluate your browser addons.

If any of your extensions are particularly dubious then they’ll be highlighted on a Summary screen which is displayed first. On a test PC, for instance, one addon was reported as either “having a poor reputation” with avast! users, or engaging “in aggressive tactics to manipulate your settings”. If you also have something listed on this page then clicking its “More details” link explains why.

If the extensions on the Summary page are unnecessary, then you can remove them all with a click. But if you don’t agree with avast! Browser Cleanup’s report then you also have the option to remove highlighted addons individually, or maybe do nothing about them at all.

It’s quite possible you might have nothing listed on the Summary page, of course, and in that case you can just click one of the left-hand tabs to view the addons for a particular browser. As we’ve mentioned, this can be done from within the browser anyway, but the Cleanup tool does have a small advantage: by default it excludes add-ons with a “good” rating, so cutting the list down to size and helping you focus on any potential threats.

Spot a potential problem here and clicking Disable will disable that addon completely. There’s no “Remove” option, unfortunately, but presumably avast! think it’s safer to do this from your browser (and if the addon is disabled then maybe the browser’s own uninstall tool will be more reliable).

And if your browser’s home and search pages have been hijacked then there’s a “Reset browser settings” button to restore their default values.

Avast! Browser Cleanup isn’t exactly the most powerful of aware removers, then. But PC novices will appreciate its ease of use, and the program’s “user rating” for extensions could be a helpful way to highlight any addons you need to check. If your regular extension management tools don’t work then this may be worth a try.

At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from Silver Linings Systems, which is seeking a Business Development Manager in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The Business Development Manager is responsible for developing and executing a tactical sales plan that will start moving Silver Linings into the number one position among modular data center providers. To view full details and apply, see job listing details.

Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our jobs RSS feed.

Want to learn how to build and design a website? Thanks to a boom in online education companies, from Codecademy and CodesSchool to LearnStreet and lynda.com, the Web is your oyster.

But despite the plethora of options — or, rather, because of it — New York-based Thinkful believes it can still make a splash with its three-month-old online learning startup.

Launched by Darrell Silver and Dan Friedman, one of the first recipients of the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowships, the startup combines education content already available online with one-on-one tutoring and mentorship. It opened its doors at the end of 2012 and on Tuesday said that it had raised $1 million in seed funding from Peter Thiel’s FF Angel, RRE Ventures, Quotidian Ventures and others. Thinkful also said it’s the first startup founded by a Thiel Fellow to receive funding from Peter Thiel.

“We launched Thinkful because we saw that the skill sets we need to be productive workers are changing so quickly,” said Friedman. “I saw this in my peers — as they discovered what work they love, there’s this huge gap in the skills that they need to get these jobs and there aren’t great ways to fill those gaps.”

For $750 for three months (or $250 a month, in case students want to move at a faster or slower pace), students on Thinkful get online access to instructional videos and other content, a cohort of students with similar goals and a personal mentor. To start, students complete a skills assessment, which helps Thinkful create a custom curriculum. Then, throughout the course, they meet with their mentor weekly, communicate with their peers and have the option to attend daily office hours, all online.

Content is a commodity; the experience makes the difference

But, interestingly, unlike most other online education companies, the startup doesn’t produce its own content. It pulls in mostly free content from across the web, from sources like Codecademy and others, but it is open to paying as well. For example, it has a partnership with CodeSchool to access the startup’s paid lessons. Instead of competing with other providers of instructional content, Freeman said his company is complementary.

“There’s just a limitation to something that’s primarily about learning in the browser and watching videos,” he said. “We have a much more deep educational experience and we consider them potentially partners.”

To Thinkful, he added, quality online content is a commodity and it’s more like the “textbook” for the course. Any given student will spend just 20 percent interacting with content (online videos, browser-based lessons or text) and the other 80 percent completing projects guided by trained Thinkful mentors, who are domain experts with field experience and, ideally, teaching or tutoring experience.

I agree that there’s no need to reinvent the wheel if good content exists and that one-on-one instruction will likely lead to better course completion and engagement rates. But I wonder how the providers of the free content will react as the startup grows. For now, Thinkful is small and new — just 30 students have enrolled, with five completing a course so far. But as the startup adds users and increases profits, its relationship with companies that create the content could be tested.

On one hand, Thinkful could say that given all the possible free content — from places like Khan Academy, Codecademy, LearnStreet and others — it is giving content providers exposure to new users. On the other hand, over time, content providers might feel entitled to a piece of the profit made from the use of their content (or something in-kind).  Friedman said they don’t know how the relationships will play out long-term but emphasized that it wouldn’t change their business. And he added that the CodeSchool partnership shows that they’re willing to pay for high-quality content. Even though Thinkful only focuses on web development for now, Friedman says it has plans to expand into other subjects.

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Cricket Communications plans to capitalize on the success of its Muve subscription music service by spinning it off as a new company and licensing the platform to carriers around the world. The company already has one international licensing deal in place with an unnamed carrier, but Cricket feels more operators would find Muve attractive if they weren’t forced to buy it from another carrier, said Bill Ingram, EVP of Strategy for Cricket’s parent company Leap Wireless.

In the two years since it launched, Muve has attracted more than 1 million subscribers, making it the second-largest music subscription service in the U.S. behind Spotify – that’s despite the fact that Cricket is only a regional carrier mainly serving smaller U.S. cities.

In June, Cricket began packaging Muve into all of its smartphones plans, which explains why subscriptions ballooned by 500,000 in the last six months. But Ingram said that Muve has been a key feature in attracting new subscribers to the Cricket network, and expects between 40 and 50 percent of its customer eventually will sign up for a Muve plan.

Speaking at a Cisco System’s event at MWC, Ingram said the spin-off company would offer the music distribution, discoverability and licensing platform as a managed service, though operators would be free to name it whatever they liked as well as set their own rates. While Cricket includes the Muve subscription in the price of its plans, other operators may choose to make it an add-on service or offer more limited subscription plans.

There are a lot of mobile users that can’t afford or are simply unwilling to pay $1 or more per song, which is the digital music model iTunes established, Ingrams said. Muve’s flexibility would allow operators to start pricing music in much more accessible ways, for instance selling subscription for 10 cents a day or restricted plans for as low as 50 cents a month, Ingram said.

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If you’re an employer, there are lots of signals about a young person’s suitability for the job you’re offering. If you’re looking for someone who can write, do they have a blog, or are they a prolific Wikipedia editor? For programmers, what are their TopCoder or GitHub scores? For salespeople, what have they sold before? If you want general hustle, do they have a track record of entrepreneurship, or at least holding a series of jobs?

These days, there are also a range of tests you can administer to prospective employees to see if they’re right for the job. Some of them are pretty straightforward. Others, like Knack, seek to test for attributes that might seem unrelated, but have been shown by prior experience to be associated with good on-the-job performance.

And there’s been a recent explosion in MOOCs — massive, open, online courses, many of them free — on a wide range of subjects. Many of these evaluate their students via a final exam or other means, and so provide a signal about how well someone mastered the material. MOOCs are still quite young so it’s not clear how accurate their evaluations are, but I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen so far. I’d give serious consideration to a job seeker who had taken a bunch of MOOCs and done well in all of them.

You’ve noticed by now that ‘a college degree’ is not in this list of signals. That’s because I think it’s a pretty lousy one, and getting worse all the time. In fact, I think one of the most productive things an employer could do, both for themselves and for society at large, is to stop placing so much emphasis on standard undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Unfortunately, employers are doing exactly the opposite — they’re putting more emphasis over time on old-school degrees, not less. As a recent New York Times story put it, “The college degree is becoming the new high school diploma: the new minimum requirement, albeit an expensive one, for getting even the lowest-level job.” Dental lab techs, chemical equipment tenders, and medical equipment preparers are all jobs that require a degree at least 50% more often than they used to as recently as 2007.

There are two huge problems with this approach. One is that college is really expensive, and getting more so all the time. According to figures compiled by Jared Bernstein, while median income for two-parent, two-child families went up by 20% between 1990 and 2008, the cost of a four-year public college education went up by three times that amount. Total student loan debt is now larger than credit card debt in the US, and it can’t be discharged even in bankruptcy. As a 2011 graduate working as a receptionist put it in the Times article, “I am over $100,000 in student loan debt right now… I will probably never see the end of that bill”

The even bigger problem is that, as I mentioned above, I believe college degrees are getting less valuable over time even as they’re getting more expensive. There’s a lot of evidence piling up about what’s happening with actual learning on campuses these days, and most of it is not pretty. Fewer students are entering the tougher STEM majors and completing degrees in them, even though graduates in these fields are much in demand. It’s taking students longer to complete their degrees, and dropout rates are rising. The most alarming and depressing stats I’ve come across are that 45% of college students didn’t seem to learn much of anything during their first two years, and as many as 36% showed no improvement after four years. Whatever’s going on with these kids at these schools, it’s not education.

I think what’s going on in my home industry of higher education at present is something between a bubble and a scandal. And I don’t think it’ll change unless and until employers shift, and start valuing signals other than college degrees. I can’t think of a single good reason not to start that shift now. Can you?

Europe’s digital chief, Neelie Kroes, wants to fix the EU mobile industry. Still stung by the loss of her funding for ensuring the roll-out of high-speed fixed broadband across the EU, she wants mobile to take up the slack, and to that end she has thrown €50 million ($65 million) at 5G research and urged member states to get their act together regarding wireless spectrum.

Kroes has a 2020 goal for the “delivery” of 5G. That seems like a tall order, although the proliferation of IP-connected sensors in the internet of things may well necessitate a shift to even more efficient technologies than 4G.

“Rolling out today’s networks is important,” she said. “But what comes after? For the next global standard, and the next generation of technology, will Europe lead the world, or merely follow?”

The €50 million for 5G research includes €16 million for the METIS project we reported on in December. The goal here is to research faster, more spectrally efficient and more power-efficient mobile broadband than 4G – which in itself seeks to tick all those boxes, but which is not as Europe-led as 2G and even 3G were.

The EU’s investment is for the public part of an industry-wide public-private partnership – the companies involved, including some of the continent’s big carriers (Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Portugal Telecom) and infrastructure players (Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NSN), will have to stump up more, although they would be doing that anyway.

“Europe used to lead the world on wireless… European 5G is an unmissable opportunity to recapture the global technological lead,” Kroes said.

Of course, coming up with the technology is one thing, and deploying it is another. That’s where those complaints over EU spectrum harmonization come in – as Kroes puts it, the continent’s spectrum allocation map currently resembles “a bowl of spaghetti”, which is one reason why South Korea (population 50 million) has more 4G subscriptions than the whole of the EU (population 500 million). Kroes is really not happy that 17 of the 27 EU member states still don’t have 4G at all:

“We’ve already fixed a target to find a total of 1200MHz of spectrum for wireless broadband. But on average national governments have only awarded 65 percent of the spectrum we have already harmonised in the EU. So when Member States aren’t implementing legal commitments, we will use our full… powers.”

This should come as music to the carriers’ ears, as will her promise to cut down on the bureaucracy around infrastructure planning permits and inter-operator network sharing. Kroes has traditionally used her MWC speeches to lambast the carriers over issues such as roaming charges – this time she’s on their side:

“I am still determined to deliver broadband for all: and for that we must improve the market. So that it works for you in the industry, works for consumers, works for the economy. A European telecoms market more coherent, more integrated, more efficient; with lower investor risks and higher investor rewards.”

Spectrum allocations are a pain to fix, but they are fixable. As for 5G, €50 million isn’t a game-changing amount but it may be enough to stimulate research at this very early stage of the technology’s development. It’s true that Europe let itself fall behind on 4G, and that has real knock-on effects in terms of competitiveness. The EU would be smart to avoid making that mistake again.

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