Category: News

Best Buy co-founder Richard Schulze may scrap a buyout bid and instead line up investors to take a minority position in the electronics retailer, writes Reuters. Schulze originally informed the board last August that he was interested in teaming up with private equity partners to buy the company.

Reuters – Best Buy Co Inc (BBY.N) founder Richard Schulze may scrap a buyout bid and instead line up investors to take a minority position in the electronics retailer, sources familiar with the situation said on Wednesday.

The latest twist in Schulze’s months-long quest came two weeks before the deadline set by Best Buy for him to make a bid for the company he founded in 1966.

Schulze originally informed the board last August that he was interested in teaming up with private equity partners to buy the company. He has been unable to get enough support from banks to finance a deal to take it private, three sources said.

He is in preliminary talks with investors to take a minority stake in the chain that would be separate from his own existing position of about 20 percent, two of those sources said.

Schulze said in August that he could acquire Best Buy for $24 to $26 per share, valuing the deal between $8.16 billion and $8.84 billion and if debt was included as much as $10.9 billion.

“We believe the equity raise required for this deal would be a major challenge for Mr. Schulze given the potential size of the deal and the structural challenges facing the company,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Scot Ciccarelli said. “With that in mind, it doesn’t come as a surprise to us that Mr. Schulze is considering alternatives to his original plan.”

Best Buy declined to comment on the news, first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Its shares tumbled more than 10 percent on the initial report, then bounced off session lows to close down 2 percent at $15.12 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Best Buy forced out Schulze’s protégé, Brian Dunn, as chief executive last year amid allegations he was having an inappropriate relationship with a female employee.

That scandal led to the ouster of Schulze from the board. Best Buy hired restructuring expert Hubert Joly as CEO to turn around the company. Schulze remains Best Buy’s largest shareholder.

Best Buy, which has struggled to fend off its discount and online rivals, showed the first concrete signs of a turnaround in its U.S. stores recently when it reported flat same-store sales during the holiday season.

(Reporting By Jessica Toonkel, Dhanya Skariachan and Olivia Oran; Writing by Ben Berkowitz and Dhanya Skariachan Editing by Andre Grenon, Leslie Adler and David Gregorio)

The post Reuters – Best Buy Founder May Scrap Buyout Bid appeared first on peHUB.

The shift to the cloud does bring with it many security risks – just look at the scary stories being told by security vendors such as Arbor Networks for some examples. But the cloud can also mitigate against certain risks, as the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) pointed out today in a new report.

ENISA is the agency charged with co-ordinating the fight, across Europe, against various worrisome things prefixed with “cyber-”: “cybercrime”, “cyber attacks” and so on. Europe’s new cybersecurity strategy would make ENISA what security expert Ross Anderson recently called “a classified network of military and intelligence agencies”, but the fact remains that the agency is a relatively impartial observer of the security landscape.

When it comes to the cloud, ENISA sees the new approach to computing infrastructure as a “double-edged sword”. Its report, entitled Critical Cloud Computing, notes as Arbor Networks did that the concentration of many organizations’ resources in data centers can multiply “the impact of cyber attacks” – effectively, that an attack against one can be an attack against all. It also points to infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service as particularly hot targets:

“The most critical services are large IaaS and PaaS services which deliver services to other IT vendors who service in turn millions of users and organisations.”

There’s also the issue of critical sectors such as finance, transport and energy increasingly putting their crown jewels into the cloud. However, that’s only one side of the coin. ENISA also sees cloud computing as a pretty good defence against, say, distributed denial-of-service attacks on specific services:

“Elasticity is a key benefit of cloud computing and this elasticity helps to cope with load and mitigates the risk of overload or DDoS attacks. It is difficult to mitigate the impact of peak usage or a DDoS attack with limited computing resources.”

With regional power cuts and natural disasters, the agency claimed, cloud computing can also provide “resilience”. That depends on how resources are distributed of course – just ask customers using Amazon’s storm-prone Northern Virginia data center. Nonetheless, ENISA pointed to the 2011 Japanese earthquake as an example of a disaster taking out “traditional IT deployments” but failing to down certain cloud services.

As for conclusions, ENISA has a series of recommendations for national cybersecurity agencies that includes a focus on making sure IaaS and PaaS providers stay safe, and figuring out just which public services depend on which cloud services. Interestingly, the agency also sings the praises of standardization in the cloud sector:

“Standardization, especially for IaaS and PaaS services, would allow customers to move workload to other providers in case one provider has suffers a large outages caused by system failures or even administrative or legal disputes.”

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British broadcaster ITV has agreed a deal with Shazam — the popular music identification service — to allow viewers of this year’s The Brits music awards to access exclusive content during the live broadcast — a UK first.

By using Shazam to tag the show between 8pm and 10.15pm on February 20, viewers will get access to exclusive behind-the-scenes content from performers and guest presenters.

Making the announcement, David Jones, EVP Marketing for Shazam said: “We are excited that our first live Shazam-enabled program in the UK is one of the biggest nights of the year for the music industry, the BRIT Awards. People who know and love us for music will now get to experience all the great features we now bring to television”.

The Shazam app, which is typically used to identify recorded music by sampling a few seconds of content and looking it up in its ten million strong song database, is available for a range of platforms including iOS devices, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone.

Cedexis, the company behind the Openmix load balancing service, is drilling down into customers’ infrastructure with Cedexis Fusion, an API that integrates with popular New Relic and AppDynamics application performance software. That integration gives Cedexis a deeper look into how customers’ servers and applications are running. It also ties into Akamai, Level3, Edgecast and ChinaCache content delivery networks (CDNs) and SoftLayer’s server management data.

Big companies — and Cedexis’s customers include EuroDisney, Hermes and Nissan — need to make sure their e-commerce sites run smoothly, that pages load fast, that content gets delivered optimally around the globe. A service that can quickly flag when an application or server is approaching overutilization and automatically redeploy would be a very valuable. The new data from inside customer shops augments data Cedexis already gleans from Radar, a crowdsourced service that collects data about cloud and CDN performance around the world.

“Fusion Radar collects data from outside all the various clouds … [and] Fusion gives us the inside-out view that you’d normally get from a server vendor or monitoring provider,” Cedexis CMO Rob Malnati said in an interview. The company said Fusion can also tap into Catchpoint, Keynote and Gomez to detect slowing e-commerce processes and sniff out cloud outages early, using data from Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer and other cloud service providers.

If it works as advertised, Fusion could help alleviate operational headaches for enterprise customers.

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The stranded Carnival cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico has tragically proven to be quite an experiment in human behavior. The ship has been stranded for 96 hours following an engine fire. Ship engines also generate all the on-board electricity, so once the engine burned…

One month ago, when online learning site lynda.com announced that it had raised $103 million in its first venture round since launching in 1995, we noted that the company would be well-positioned to buy up other companies in its space. On Wednesday, the Carpinteria, Calif. company said it had started doing just that.

To reach international learners and provide courses in different languages, lynda.com said it had made its first acquisition, buyingvideo2brain, based in Graz, Austria. Launched in 2002, the company has provided online courses in web design, programming and other computer skills in multiple languages. It has more than 400,000 subscribers who access the courses via DVD or single-course downloads.

“This is very much like lynda.com, but the lynda.com of Europe and in German, French and Spanish [and English],” said CEO Eric Robison, adding that video2brain was similarly self-funded and shared the company’s culture. Europe’s online learning market isn’t as competitive as in the U.S., but Robison said it is an active space and that video2brain was the dominant player. The company declined to share financial details but said it will add 60 people and about 1,700 new courses in the acquisition.

For most of the last year, as more startups, like Codecademy, LearnStreet, Treehouse and others have launched to offer online classes on business and computer skills, 17-year-old lynda.com has kept a fairly low profile. But its newly-filled coffers now make it a very interesting company to watch — unlike startups just figuring out its business model, the company has been profitable for most if its existence and has figured out to how to attract a strong subscriber base of individuals, corporations and academic institutions.

When the company announced its funding last month, Robison indicated that it would ramp up growth internationally and into new content areas. This acquisition addresses both of those goals and shows that the company isn’t biding its time. But as the company continues to eye other international regions and content areas, it could acquire even more.

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The Pebble smartwatch has been a great success story for a small startup that launched a Kickstarter campaign last year. Pebble ended up breaking records when it raised more than $10 million on the crowd-funding site and it finally began shipping to customers late last month. The smartwatch features some nice iPhone integration out of the box, but a new jailbreak hack released by developer Conrad Kramer allows all notifications to be displayed on the watch’s E Ink screen instead of just notifications for native Apple (AAPL) apps like Messages, Mail and Phone, and a few third-party apps. The “BTNotificationEnabler” tweak is available right now for free in Cydia, the jailbreak equivalent of Apple’s App Store.

TED2013 kicks off in just 11 days and, in the very first session, will be a lively debate between Robert J. Gordon and Erik Brynjolfsson. While Gordon will talk about how our current ecosystem of innovation is too focused on gadgetry, and thus isn’t enough to solve the big problems of the future, Brynjolfsson will share how the digital revolution is propelling us forward rapidly. It’s shaping up to be a fascinating discussion — one that may well change your mind.

This will hardly be the first time that two TED speakers have verbally jousted oon the TED stage. Here, sets of TED speakers who have disagreed — either in an official debate or in separate talks — to give you a taste of what to expect at TED2013, where the TED Blog will be reporting live every second.

Paul Zak vs. Molly Crockett: Is oxytocin the moral molecule?

In these two talks given a year apart, neuroscience experts Paul Zak and Molly Crockett disagree on what we can say about oxytocin.

Paul Zak: Trust, morality — and oxytocin?Paul Zak: Trust, morality — and oxytocin? Morality is a distinctively human trait and it might be because of the hormone oxytocin. In this talk from TEDGlobal 2011, neuroeconomist Paul shares his 10-year search for what he calls “the moral molecule” and reveals his studies on how oxytocin boosts trustworthiness, empathy and even the desire to give money to charity.

Molly Crockett: Beware neuro-bunkMolly Crockett: Beware neuro-bunk Neuroscientist Molly Crockett wants everyone to spot “neuro-fiction” — claims that overshoot our current understanding of the brain. Crockett evokes Zak’s work with oxytocin. According to Crockett, studies on oxytocin “are scientifically valid and they have been replicated, but they’re not the full story.” She explains, “Other studies have shown that boosting oxytocin increases envy, it increases gloating. Oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group.”

Peter Diamandis vs. Paul Gilding: What will the future look like?

Because these two speakers expressed such different views at TED2012, TED Curator Chris Anderson invited the pair onstage for a formal debate.

Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future At TED2012, activist Peter Diamandis explains that — yes — news reports may sound doomsday, but that we are actually living in the most peaceful and abundant time of human existence. He imagines a future where humans continue to invent and innovate to solve the challenges that face us.

Paul Gilding: The Earth is full Also speaking at TED2012, writer Paul Gilding spoke from a very different viewpoint — saying that humans have not only filled the world with our bodies, waste and things, but that we used up all our resources. He worries that, if we stay on the same path, it could be the end of this civilization.

Rick Warren vs. Dan Dennett: Do our lives have purpose?

Dan Dennett couldn’t help but respond directly to Rick Warren at TED2006, after hearing his talk.

Rick Warren: A life of purpose Rick Warren: A life of purpose At TED2006, pastor Rick Warren said, “I believe spiritual emptiness is a universal disease.” He explained his belief in God, and how he thinks each one of us is here for a specific purpose that matters, and describes his crisis of purpose in the wake of releasing a best-selling book.

Dan Dennett: Responding to Pastor Rick Warren Dan Dennett: Responding to Pastor Rick Warren Speaking at the same conference, philosopher Dan Dennett suggests that religions are natural phenomenon, evolving over time to survive. Dennett says that life — both ours and that of animals — has been designed by evolution, and lacks an individual purpose.

Stewart Brand vs. Mark Z. Jacobson: Nuclear energy?

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Before you watch this debate from TED2010, try this experiment: Ask yourself, who do you agree with now? Watch the debate. And then — ask yourself again.

Stewart Brand: Nuclear energy is our best bet During an onstage debate held at TED2010, futurist Stewart Brand explained why he is in favor of nuclear energy — because it is far more feasible on a large scale than either wind or solar power. “If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear [energy], the waste from that lifetime of electricity would go in a Coke can,” he says.

Mark Z. Jacobsen: Nuclear energy is short-sighted Meanwhile, environmental engineer Mark Z. Jacobsen countered that nuclear power has extreme downsides, producing far more carbon dioxide and air pollution than other alternative energies. To boot, nuclear power plants takes far longer to build, meaning we’ll have to stick with coal power for the foreseeable future. Not to mention that nuclear power could enhance nuclear weapon proliferation.

Note: This post was originally published on August 6, 2012, and was updated with a new introduction and set of examples on Feb. 13, 2013.

“We’re No. 3!” will be BlackBerry’s and Microsoft’s rallying cry this year. Android and iOS so dominate the smartphone market, the best — and quite honestly dismal — hope is third; distant at that. Combined, based on actual phone sales, Android and iOS had 90.1 percent share during fourth quarter, up from 74.9 percent a year earlier, according to Gartner. BlackBerry and Windows Phone are neck-and-neck, with lowly 3.5 percent and 3 percent standings, respectively.

Upstarts want third place, too. Anshul Gupta, Gartner principal research analyst, explains: “2013 will be the year of the rise of the third ecosystem as the battle between the new BlackBerry10 and Widows Phone intensifies. As carriers and vendors feel the pressure of the strong Android’s growth, alternative operating systems such as Tizen, Firefox, Ubuntu and Jolla will try and carve out an opportunity by positioning themselves as profitable alternatives”.

Looked at differently, BlackBerry and Windows Phone combined-share was less in fourth quarter (6.5 percent) than a year earlier (10.6 percent). That said, while starting from a small base, Microsoft’s platform shows promise, with sales up 124.2 percent year over year.

Individual vendor performance tells the story differently. Apple and Samsung combined smartphone sales share rose to 52 percent from 46.4 percent during the quarter.

It’s a free-for-all. “There is no manufacturer that can firmly lay claim to the No. 3 spot in global smartphone sales”, Gupta says. “The success of Apple and Samsung is based on the strength of their brands as much as their actual products. Their direct competitors, including those with comparable products, struggle to achieve the same brand appreciation among consumers, who, in a tough economic environment, go for cheaper products over brand”.

Samsung and Apple smartphone unit sales rose by 85.3 percent and 22.6 percent, respectively. The fruit-logo company accounts for all iOS, “with Samsung commanding over 42.5 percent of the Android market globally”, Gupta says, “and the next vendor at just 6 percent share. The Android brand is being overshadowed by Samsung’s brand with the Galaxy name nearly a synonym for Android phones in consumers’ mind share”.

Samsung’s success is mixed for Android as a platform. The South Korean company, and not Google, largely controls customers’ experience via TouchWiz UI and other features. That can further fragment Android. On the other hand, consumers generally identify with uber-brands, like Samsung or Galaxy S III rather than Android 4.2.

Samsung’s Android lift takes a bite out of Apple. For the second straight quarter, iOS lost smartphone sales share, year over year. Apple’s mobile operating system dropped to 20.9 percent from 23.6 percent during Q4. Meanwhile, Android leaped again, from 51.3 percent to 69.7 percent share. But unit sales jumped more than share suggests: 144.7 million from 77.1 million.

Unlike most other analyst firms, Gartner measures actual sales to end users, not shipments into the channel. So there is no room for Apple apologists to argue about some disparity between the phone maker’s stated sales and those from others. Like competitors, Apple calls shipments sales. The company reported 47.8 million in Q4. Gartner says actual sales were 43.6 million, or 4.2 million less than the number the company gave last month. So while iPhone 5 still had a big launch quarter, sales missed analyst consensus (50 million) by wider margin.

In the broader phone market, Apple share rose to 9.2 percent from 7.4 percent for the quarter and to 7.5 percent from 5 percent for all 2012. The company maintained its third-place ranking for Q4 and the year. Market-leader Samsung grew share to 22.7 percent from 19.6 percent for fourth quarter and to 22 percent from 17.7 percent for all 2012.

More broadly, worldwide mobile phone sales dipped about two percent for the quarter and year, to 1.75 billion and 472.1 million, respectively. Smartphone sales surged 38.3 percent in Q4, to 207.7 million. Meanwhile, feature phone sales fell 19 percent to 264.4 million. At this pace, smartphone sales should surpass feature phones within a couple quarters. Respective share in Q4: 44 percent and 56 percent.

Photo Credit: David Andrew Larsen/Shutterstock

Sweden was the first country to launch an LTE network, and it retains plenty of bragging rights. According to a study by U.K. network-testing firm OpenSignal, Sweden has the fastest 4G networks in the world, averaging download speeds of 22.1 Mbps.

The U.S. was the second country to deliver commercial LTE networks on the world stage, but it ranks far lower in terms of 4G bandwidth delivered. OpenSignal found that networks in Hong Kong, Denmark, Canada, Australia, South Korea and Germany all performed better. The U.S. placed eighth, averaging downlink speeds of 9.6 Mbps.

Why the low scores? It probably has to do with the configuration of U.S. carriers’ networks. While most operators around the world secured 40 MHz of spectrum with which to launch their new 4G networks, U.S. carriers have been working with smaller swatches of airwaves. Verizon and AT&T are using 20 MHz for their initial rollouts, while Sprint and MetroPCS are dealing with as little as 10 MHz. If you’re working with half the spectrum, your connections will sport half the bandwidth.

Based in both London and Laguna Hills, Calif., OpenSignal collects its data through crowdsourcing, aggregating measurements recorded by millions of smartphones users who have downloaded its free Android app. There are a lot of similarities between the OpenSignal and Seattle’s RootMetrics. Root supplements its smartphone data with professional testing (see our video on one such drive test in Chicago), while OpenSignal relies entirely on crowdsourcing, but both have started generating very detailed maps of cellular network coverage and performance in different areas of the world. OpenSignal recently expanded its scope to encompass Wi-Fi.

What’s particularly noteworthy about OpenSignal’s latest report is just how far LTE has penetrated around the world in the last two years. OpenSignal tracked LTE signals in 62 countries, including multiple African countries and in the central Asian nations of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

LTE image courtesy of Shutterstock user Inq

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Between downloading the archive of all your tweets ever and entering search queries to bring up more-than-a-few-days-old tweets, it would seem like the world, or the historical twittersphere at least, is your oyster. But in reality? It’s a little more complicated, and a little less complete than that.

Twitter announced last week that historical tweets would now be included in search archives, whereas in the past only tweets from the last few days would appear in results. Twitter has been unfolding its search ambitions over the past year, figuring out how to surface relevant information in a search product that for a long time, hasn’t been all that relevant.

“Now we’re able to look back at old tweets and think about how they should look and how people can relive past moments on Twitter,” said Sam Luckenbill, a senior engineering manager in charge of search at Twitter. “So you can find specific events in the past that weren’t previously available.”

Most of the company’s opportunities in search lie with real-time search, since companies like Oreo want to take advantage of current trends, like the Super Bowl, rather than old news, and Twitter’s clearly betting on the service’s value as a second screen to television with the Bluefin acquisition. But a more complete, historical search provides serious opportunities for the company around monetization (marketers can purchase promoted tweets for specific search terms) and intent (knowing that someone is looking certain information is more valuable than passively viewing something, even if you obviously intended to follow that brand or person.)

But even as the company is now including historical tweets in search results, it’s not all tweets ever that you can uncover — it’s really only a small percentage. The company has worked to develop an algorithm that will figure out which are the most interesting tweets that people would want to revisit, and then ranks those higher than potentially less interesting tweets.

While the company naturally wouldn’t disclose exactly how the algorithm was put together, they said Twitter is attempting to figure out both the most relevant tweets for a specific person and search term (so likely based on your interest and friend graph) and the most engaging tweets overall (which could be reasonably understood as those with lots of retweets, replies, etc.)

“You’ll see tweets from people you care about about and topics that you care about even if the word you chose was a bit vague,” Luckenbill said.

And the filtering doesn’t just apply to tweets that come up in your specific search results — it goes for the tweets Twitter chooses to make available to all searchers as well.

“We’ve started with a small percentage of tweets, looking at the ones that have been engaged with most. And then we plan to steadily increase the size of the index over time to capture more and more,” Luckenbill said. “We’re going to make more and more tweets available that are older, but it’s not necessarily that we want all the tweets ever to be in the index. Because we don’t want to put tweets that get no engagement ever in the index.”

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There’s no doubt that the Xbox 360 is one of the best things Microsoft (MSFT) has going for itself right now — not only has the popular console sold 76 million units, but it’s rapidly moved beyond the gaming sphere to become a well-rounded entertainment center thanks to popular content streaming apps for Netflix (NFLX) and Hulu. Per Engadget, Microsoft Interactive Entertainment Business senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi told the D: Dive Into Media conference on Tuesday that Microsoft really doesn’t see the Xbox as a mere gaming console anymore and now views it as a comprehensive “entertainment console.” And what’s more, Mehdi said that this gives Microsoft a big long-run advantage over Sony’s (SNE) rival PlayStation console since it “isn’t as good of an entertainment console” as the Xbox. It will be very interesting to see how much Microsoft plays up the “entertainment console” aspect when it launches its Xbox 720 later this year and if the company plans to add any features to the device to improve its appeal as a living room hub.

Today, Heather Zichal, Deputy Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, answered questions from the public about President Obama's State of the Union Address in an “Open for Questions” session moderated by Popular Science. Check it out below.

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Clay Christensen literally wrote the book on disruption, so it’s worth paying attention to him when he talks about where the disruption fueled by the web is going to strike next. The Harvard business professor and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma spoke to Jeff Howe — the Wired writer who coined the term “crowdsourcing” — and had some interesting things to say about where disruption is occurring now and where it is likely to strike next.

At one point, Howe asks Christensen to name some industries that are “either in a state of disruptive crisis or will be soon,” and the professor says:

“Journalism, certainly, and publishing broadly. Anything supported by advertising. That all of this is being disrupted is now beyond question. And then I think higher education is just on the edge of the crevasse. Generally, universities are doing very well financially, so they don’t feel from the data that their world is going to collapse. But I think even five years from now these enterprises are going to be in real trouble.”

Christensen recently co-wrote a study for Nieman Reports entitled “Breaking News,” which focused on the media industry and the disruption< that is going on there. He also described some of his thinking about what has happened to the newspaper and traditional media business in an interview with the Nieman Journalism Lab — in which he said that many newspapers were lulled into a false sense of security and then “very quickly, all of a sudden, you go off the cliff.”

When it comes to education, Christensen said that the availability of fairly high-quality online learning would be the disruptive force because “it will take root in its simplest applications, then just get better and better.”

“You know, Harvard Business School doesn’t teach accounting anymore, because there’s a guy out of BYU whose online accounting course is so good. He is extraordinary, and our accounting faculty, on average, is average. Some [universities] will survive. Most will evolve hybrid models, in which universities license some courses from an online provider like Coursera but then provide more-specialized courses in person.”

For more on the question of disruption in education, see the ongoing debate between media theorist and journalism professor Clay Shirky and Aaron Bady, a PhD student in African literature at the UC Berkeley. Shirky started it with a piece about the disruptive effect of “massively open online courses” from companies like Udacity, and Bady responded with a rebuttal, followed by a response from Shirky.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock / Don Skarpo

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The Nation increasingly relies on the Internet to run the systems that light our houses, provide gas for our cars, and ensure our water is safe to drink. Collectively, these diverse systems represent our cyber critical infrastructure. Linking our critical infrastructure to the Internet brings considerable benefits, but our daily reliance on this critical infrastructure means that we are vulnerable to disruptions in our ability to use it. Unfortunately, the threats against our cyber critical infrastructure are numerous, ranging from sophisticated nation states to common criminals.

The government’s senior-most civilian, military, and intelligence professionals all agree that inadequate cybersecurity within this critical infrastructure poses a grave threat to the security of the United States.  Most recently, we have seen an increased interest in targeting public and private critical infrastructure systems by actors who seek to threaten our national and economic security. Along with dissuading their actions, we must better protect the critical systems that support our way of life.

Because of the importance of our cyber critical infrastructure, and the seriousness of the threats, the President issued an Executive Order yesterday directing federal departments and agencies to use their existing authorities to provide better cybersecurity for the Nation. These efforts will by necessity involve increased collaboration with the private sector and a whole-of-government approach.

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If you accidentally drop your Surface Pro while breakdancing with it, you probably shouldn’t try to open it up to repair it yourself. The repair gurus at iFixit have found that the Surface Pro is one of the least repairable devices they’ve ever encountered, with a whopping 90 screws to untangle and a case construction that makes it nearly impossible to open your tablet without irreparably harming it. In fact, iFixit says that “unless you perform the opening procedure 100% correctly, chances are you’ll shear one of the four cables surrounding the display perimeter,” which means that “you risk killing your tablet by trying to open it.”

Continue reading…

In his State of the Union address last night, President Obama made several sweeping statements about how he’d like to improve education, but he saved a specific mention for Brooklyn, NY-based P-TECH, or Pathways in Technology Early College High School.

Talking about the importance of aligning education with employment opportunities, he said in countries like Germany, students finish high school armed with the skills they need for the jobs that are available.

“Now at schools like P-TECH in Brooklyn, a collaboration between New York public schools and City University of New York and IBM, students will graduate with a high school diploma and an associate’s degree in computers or engineering,” Obama said. “We need to give every American student opportunities like this.”

Opened in September 2011, P-TECH is an IBM-backed, six-year program for New York City public high school students. At the end of the program, students get a high school degree, an associate’s degree and better chances for an entry-level position at IBM upon graduation. Even before the president’s endorsement, educators in Chicago, Maine, Massachusetts and elsewhere had started to explore the model, but given last night’s recognition you can be sure P-TECH will be getting even more attention.

In a chat with GigaOM Wednesday, Rashid Davis, P-TECH’s founding principal, talked about what makes P-TECH work, how it could be replicated and what could make the model even better.

GigaOM: As we write about frequently on GigaOM, the digital economy is creating the demand for new skills and new ways of learning those skills. From your perspective, what’s driving the momentum behind P-Tech and new schools like it? 

Davis: I think, really, it’s industry coming forward and saying these are the skills that are important and working with secondary and post-secondary institutions to say how do we make sure those gaps and skills are filled.

GigaOM: Corporations have worked with educators in the past but what really distinguishes P-Tech’s model?

Davis: Every student has a mentor from IBM and the expectation is for students to complete the post-secondary credential, not just earn a college credit. And it’s an open-admission school that starts in grade 9. We’re not taking students that have taken an academic test or have been academically screened for this particular model. 

GigaOM: Why is it a model that can succeed in different cities and school districts across the country?

Davis: Because you’re talking about the diversification that’s necessary – how do you get people who are underrepresented and you’re broadening the applicant pool for areas where jobs are not getting filled. … It can also be replicated for other industries – not just IT. It could be manufacturing, it could be fashion, it could be sports.  It really depends on the industry and the skills that you want to address and the post-secondary institutions that could give you that credential.

GigaOM: The first wave of students will graduate in 2017, but what early indicators can you look at to evaluate how the program is doing and measure success?

Davis: There are some students that may complete this program in four years or five years. But so far, we have 103 students who started with us in grade 9 last year and, of those, 62 are enrolled in at least one college course. … It’s important to understand that this an open-admissions population, with many students who may be the first in their family to even graduate from high school. I don’t want people to try to compare these students to traditional students who may have a different economic background or different levels of support and then [give less value to] measures of success from not really understanding [that difference].

GigaOM: What kinds of challenges have you encountered so far? 

Davis: The challenge is to have 13- and 14-year-olds who may have thought of themselves as students who have not done well, and now we’re telling them that they’re college students from day one. That becomes a challenge because students need to not only make a mental shift, but change their habits so they can… believe in themselves and be consistent in their outcomes.

GigaOM: How do you support them in that shift?

Davis: In addition to every student having a professional IBM mentor, every teacher mentors students and we’re having students adopt each other.

GigaOM: If you could do more to make this model a success, what would it be?

Davis: I would add a boarding component for six months in the summer and I’d try to find a way to house the students for the last two years… 85 percent of my students are on free or reduced lunch and they’re not coming from within walking distance of the community. And it’s important to remember that 76 percent of our population are boys, with 73 percent being young men of color. Every day they go into their communities and we’re at risk of losing them or having them sidetracked to other realities. With boarding, I think it’s essential to make sure we can continue the learning.

GigaOM: Aside from schools like yours, what else would you like to see in NYC schools?

Davis: I’d like to see every high school in NYC attached to one of the [City University of New York] schools to allow this same opportunity to exist for all NYC public school students. We know it’s hard for students to actually get meaningful employment – we need to start off by saying that it’s important for every NYC student who graduates from public school leaves with a post-secondary credential or associates degree.

GigaOM: And, as other schools around the country create P-Tech like schools, what would you advise them?

Davis: They should keep in mind: how do we move quicker? How do we really think of the ways that postsecondary schools could be dual-credentialed for students to actually let them do more while they’re younger and before life gets in the way?

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