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As 18 networking hardware and software vendors offer up developer time and sponsoring money to make open-source code for standardizing software-defined networking (SDN) through the newly established OpenDaylight Project, industry people are monitoring the development to see how things might change and how it will impact the rest of the networking industry.

Midokura, an SDN startup with overlay-based software for creating load balancers and other virutal devices in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds, is closely watching the vendor-led consortium and could join depending on what happens, said Midokura’s chief strategy officer, Ben Cherian. IBM is contributing to OpenDaylight a version of the architecture underlying its virtual overlay product for connecting virtual compute and storage resources, according to the OpenDaylight announcement.

That could pose a problem for Midokura if it’s approved for inclusion in OpenDaylight, particularly if OpenDaylight code is able to do what Midokura’s does but for free. “Are they (OpenDaylight) going to be an eventual competitor? Maybe. But it’s too early to tell until we see how some of these things map out,” Cherian said.

There are similar questions about competition around OpenDaylight’s expected controller code, which Cisco and Big Switch Networks are contributing. The Cyan SDN product runs applications on top of its Blue Planet controller. Rafael Francis, senior director of service provider solutions at Cyan, said he views OpenDaylight as less of a threat and more of a validation of an open, vendor-neutral approach. At the same time, Cyan could get involved with the consortium if customers demand it, he said. Beyond that, OpenDaylight controller code could turn out to work best with Cisco gear, said Mike Bushong, vice president of technical marketing at Plexxi. In that case, developers at multiple participating companies would have to work on maintaining code.

Relations among the many companies involved in OpenDaylight looked copacetic on Monday, with no parties quitting the consortium and with even the Open Networking Foundation feeling good about the OpenDaylight premiere. Dan Pitt, its executive director, said in a statement that the organization is glad to hear that OpenDaylight will support the OpenFlow protocol.

But the relative calm is only based on what’s happened before. Jason Edelman, a solutions architect at New York-based channel partner Presidio, pointed out that only Cisco and Citrix appear to have contributed code, while others seem to be planning to do so. Unity could fracture as companies start unveiling their proposals. For example, what will VMware put forth? The official announcement doesn’t say. When that information comes to light, executives at Cisco and other sponsors might change their minds about participating.

Meanwhile there are questions about the fairness of OpenDaylight’s current organizational structure. Jo Maitland, research director for cloud and infrastructure at GigaOM Research, noted in an email that OpenDaylight “will need an elected board, much like the OpenStack Foundation, to offset the competing interests of the more powerful vendors who will throw lots of money and people to make sure the ‘standard’ evolves to suit their position.”

Although the formation of OpenDaylight seems like a significant development on its own, it ought to seen as the beginning of a story. At this rate, the middle and end will be dramatic to witness.

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Vladimir Yuzhikov has released the first beta of SmartDeblur 2.0, a powerful tool for recovering data from blurred images.

Top of the new features list is an “auto-detect blur” option, which allows the program to automatically figure out whether your image is suffering from motion, Gaussian, or just plain old out-of-focus blur, and perform the appropriate corrections.

And as a result, there’s no need to try and guess this yourself (although you can manually choose a blur type, if appropriate) — just open an image, click “Analyze Blur”, and within two or three minutes you’ll be presented with the results.

As with the previous edition, SmartDeblur 2.0 beta comes with a sample image to illustrate its capabilities — and they really can be spectacular. It’s just astonishing how much detail can be recovered in some cases (it’s much more than basic sharpening).

We did also find many images where the first pass delivered terrible results, but there is something else you can try. If you’re trying to highlight one element in particular — a person standing against a wall, say — then click and drag on the image to draw a rectangle around them, and then click “Analyze Blur”. SmartDeblur then restricts its checks to the area you’ve highlighted, and in our tests this frequently made a very great difference.

There is also a down side to the new build, unfortunately. Yuzhikov says the program has been rewritten to use “freely available libraries”, and because of this “performance is several times slower than our internal version”. He hopes to improve this in future, but in the meantime, imported images will by default be resized to 1,000 pixels on their largest side (although it you’re the patient type, you can still increase the limit via SmartDeblur’s settings).

Photo Credit: Olaru Radian-Alexandru/Shutterstock

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Freeman Hrabowski was a 9th grader in Birmingham, Alabama, when he heard a dynamic, impassioned speaker at church — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time, King was organizing a march for children, and Hrabowski begged his parents to let him be a part of it.

Freeman Hrabowski: 4 pillars of college success in scienceHrabowski won their blessing to march in the Children’s Crusade, a pivotal moment in the American Civil Rights Movement in 1963. He was taken to jail for participating, even though he was just 12-years-old. In today’s talk, Hrabowski shares the words that King said to him and the others inside the jailhouse: “What you children do this day will have an impact on children who have not been born.”

Today, Hrabowski is the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), a college that serves students of all backgrounds and that is known for supporting students of color in two areas of study where they are severely underrepresented — science and engineering. The school currently leads the country in graduating African-Americans who go on complete Ph.Ds and MD/Ph.Ds in these fields.

In today’s talk, Hrabowski notes that only 20% of Black and Latino students who start out as pre-med or pre-engineering stick with these demanding majors. That said, the numbers are low in other groups, too — only 32% of white students and 42% of Asian-American students who start rigorous science and engineering majors complete them. “It’s not just minorities who don’t do well in science and engineering,” says Hrabowski. “Students in general are not making it.”

To hear Hrabowski’s four pillars for setting students up to succeed in science and engineering, watch this talk. As Hrabowski says, these guidelines were designed at UMBC to “help minorities students,” but they can also “help students in general.”

It’s been 50 years since Hrabowski went to jail for marching for equality. Much has changed since then and, yet, so any inequalities persist in the United States. Here, four more talks about heartbreaking imbalances still in play today.

Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injusticeBryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice In the eyes of the American judicial system, we are not one and the same, says public-interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson. A third of the country’s black male population has been incarcerated at some point in their lives – a statistic that should give us all pause. In this powerful talk from TED2012, Stevenson gives a rousing critique of a judicial system that “treats you much better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.”

iO Tillett Wright: Fifty shades of gayiO Tillett Wright: Fifty shades of gay Photographer iO Tillett Wright has been in love with men, and she’s been in love with women. Though marriage was far from her mind in 2008, when California’s Proposition 8 sparked a national debate over gay marriage, the conversation still struck her like a punch. She embarked on a fascinating photo project to document the LGBTQ spectrum and the many, many different shades that exist along it.

Aaron Huey: America's native prisoners of warAaron Huey: America’s native prisoners of war Photographer Aaron Huey headed to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to record images of people living in poverty. There, a shocking 90% of residents live below the poverty line and life expectancy for men is just 47 years. As Huey says in his powerful TEDx Talk, the photo project soon became much more — an effort to understand the history of the native Lakota people, “a time-line of treaties made, treaties broken.”

Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaimLarry Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim In this bold talk from TED2013, legal activist Larry Lessig addresses a central corruption at the heart of our electoral system – that in order to do well in a general election, a politician must first win the blessing of funders. And yet,  this second group represents a scant 150,000 people out of 311 million. While, yes, politicians are responsible to the people, they’re also responsible to their funders—giving this small group far too much influence.

What interesting timing. The same day Ericsson agrees to buy Mediaroom from Microsoft, Nielsen releases fascinating report “Free to Move Between Screens“. The two things are strangely related. A decade ago, the IPTV division made more sense. Today, television habits are changing, something Microsoft brianiacs apparently recognize and others would be wise to do likewise. Nielsen hints at the future.

Consider where we are in just three years. Before iPad’s launch in April 2010, few US television networks (I don’t know that any) offered two-screen experiences. Now they’re commonplace, under the presumption millions of Americans sit with tablets in front of their boob tubes (and they do). HBO Go launched two months earlier. Go back six years, you have Amazon, Apple and Netflix streaming and Hulu’s launch. Along with the DVR’s rise in popularity, how Americans consume television programming dramatically changes.

Zero-TV Households

Among the changes underway: The slow, but steadily, increasing number of people cutting cable’s cord. Nielsen classifies cord-cutters as “Zero-TV” households. There are enough of them (5 million, up from 2 million six years ago), that Nielsen will begin tracking Zero-TV homes for its traditional ratings service starting in the Fall season.

The analyst firm isn’t solitary assessing the significance of this growing population. For example, HTC, which announced dismal quarterly results earlier today, will spend 40 percent of the One smartphone’s marketing budget on digital properties, taking away from TV-ad spending. “Seventy percent of our target audience consumes [TV] content online”, Erin McGee, HTC’s veep of North American marketing, tells AdWeek. Can you say cord cutters?

Three quarters of Zero-TV households have television sets, but two-thirds get content on other devices and 48 percent watch TV through subscription services, according to Nielsen. In the homes using other devices to view television programs:

• 37 percent PC
• 16 percent Internet TV
• 8 percent smartphone
• 6 percent tablet

Cord-cutting households tend to be younger — 44.4 percent under 35, while 43.7 percent of traditional TV homes are 55 or older and 64.5 percent are 45 or older.

Cost (36 percent) and lack of choice/interesting content (31 percent) rank as major reasons for breaking free from cable, IPTV or satellite providers.

Fox Freaks

While 5 million may not seem to be that high a number, it looms in context of changing habits, where consumers use other devices alongside TVs as first step to displacing or replacing them.

Some networks are increasingly antsy. The annual National Association of Broadcasters trade show is underway, and there New Corp. president Chase Carey threatened to move the Fox network to subscription cable should Aereo prevail in court proceedings permitting the streaming of Live TV broadcasts. Further in a statement, News Corp. explains:

We won’t just sit idle and allow our content to be actively stolen. It is clear that the broadcast business needs a dual revenue stream from both ad and subscription to be viable. We simply cannot provide the type of quality sports, news and entertainment content that we do from an ad supported only business model. We have no choice but to develop business solutions that ensure we continue to remain in the driver’s seat of our own destiny.

This the same company that put up so many Wall Street Journal paywalls and so exorbitantly raised subscription prices that I cancelled my renewal in 2011. That was a digital subscription. You don’t misread. I got my digital sub in 1996, long before most anyone did. Fifteen years gone just like that.

News Corp.’s reactionary stance surely reflects defensiveness and concern that the Internet could do to television what it has done to other media categories. Fox’s problem isn’t free streaming of its broadcasts, particularly if commercials, etc. remain in place, but services like Amazon, Hulu and Netflix — all which broadcast original programming — becoming full-fledged networks.

I’m In

I certainly could join those 5 million. Amazon and Netflix satisfy most of my family’s TV-viewing needs. If Google TV offered Hulu — and I’m strongly considering Roku to get it — we would probably cut the cord. Should HBO Go become a separate, reasonably-priced streamed service and other premiums follow, subscription TV simply wouldn’t make sense for us. But then again, sports and pay-per-view aren’t important to anyone in my household. They’re programming many other people want and that makes cord-cutting impractical for them.

The Wilcox clan rarely watches live TV anymore. We just record shows and skip the commercials. Why bother with any? Streaming services like Amazon and Netflix do away with the ads, Hulu offers far fewer than broadcast and rented or purchased programs have none anyway.

Surely the Microsoft brainiacs see this as a future trend, and one supporting future Xbox and Xbox Live content. Mediaroom made sense when Microsoft got into the IPTV market nearly 15 years ago. Telcos would be better off bundling Roku-like boxes than building out massive server, software and set-top box architecture to support traditional TV. Is that part of Ericsson’s plan? Time will tell.

Circling back to cord-cutters. Are you one?

If there’s one big problem with non-profit organizations, it’s this: they think too much like non-profit organizations and not enough like corporations. Helping people at the individual level and tackling large causes one issue at a time are great and necessary activities, but spending too many resources down in the weeds sometimes results in organizations not being able to see the entire swamp around them. Getting smarter about data analysis could help them get better at seeing the bigger picture.

If there’s one thing smart businesses know, it’s how to keep their eyes on the prize. They analyze everything they do against metrics — often called key performance indicators, or KPIs — that are in theory directly relevant to the company’s overall goals. Once a KPI has been established, it’s easier to assess the value of individual projects, features and other efforts in terms of how much they’re helping or hurting the overall business. KPIs also serve as a nice PR tool, as they give companies a chance to quantify non-bottom-line aspects of the business that the rest of the world can point to when assessing a company’s situation.

Think of things like daily active users for online gaming companies, eBay’s miles-per-gallon metrics for IT operations, or revenue per user at Facebook. DAUs up at Zynga? Hooray! Kilowatt hours per transaction up at eBay? Maybe its solar efforts aren’t paying off. You get the picture.

It’s this disparity in thinking between non-profits and corporations that the SumAll Foundation is trying to address. The foundation — a non-profit entity that’s part of cloud-analytics startup SumAll and funded with a portion of the company’s venture capital investment — is gathering data on specific issues and trying to raise awareness of the problems and highlight some possible solutions. In the process, it hopes to help the non-profits in those spaces understand why they should use data and how they can make the best use of it.

How do you quantify suffering?

KPIs are a critical part of foundation’s efforts. To non-profits, SumAll CEO Dane Atkinson said, helping one person might be a victory, but data can help them rally them around helping more people. It can be tricky to disassociate this type of thinking from revenue and try to quantify KPIs in different areas, SumAll Foundation’s Stefan Heeke added, but the results can be amazing when it’s done right.

In its first data-driven project on human trafficking, for example, SumAll settled upon cost-per-slave. This helped set a baseline for comparisons among countries and industries, as well as providing a benchmark to measure improvement against. And, Atkinson noted, the metric in this case is something that should resonate with people who take the time to read the entire infographic the foundation released:  “You can buy a human for cheaper than you can buy a cow.”

A snippet of the foundation’s slavery infographic.

However, you can’t develop a meaningful KPI like cost-per-slave until you actually amass some good data and know what you’re working with. Atkinson called the current state of information on slavery “a data wreck,” noting that many organizations were using data from a graduate student’s report in order to estimate the number of slaves currently in the United States. The SumAll Foundation spent about 300 man-hours trying to track down quality data both within non-profit organizations and elsewhere and then cross-analyzing it to get accurate numbers.

This actually highlights another area where non-profits could use help: learning to leverage the data they do have in meaningful ways both internally and across the non-profit ecosystem. As it stands now, Atkinson said, the non-profit organizations he’s seen have been pretty bad at using the data collect in new or creative ways within their own walls, and even worse at sharing their data with other organizations fighting for similar causes.

You’re safe in assuming, then, that many non-profits aren’t even in a position to start thinking about big data techniques such as analyzing their data against external sources. However, Heeke said, this type of creative data sourcing is an important step when you’re trying to develop the most-relevant KPIs. Census data could be used to add color to a list of addresses, he explained, or social media or other web data could be valuable for detecting popular sentiment about particular issues or perhaps even detecting instances of an activity that’s difficult to track by conventional means.

Already, there are at least a handful of examples of how using these new types of data might help non-profits get a broader view of the problems they’re trying to solve. We’ve covered a university study that uncovered trends in bullying by analyzing tweets, as well as Google Flu Trends and Flu Near You as methods for crowdsourcing the intensity of flu season. Last week, news broke of Hatebase, a new project from the Sentinel Project that aims to crowdsource instances of hate speech in order to detect future instances of genocide.

More issues, more techniques, more results

Right now, the SumAll Foundation’s strategy is to put its own resources to bear on issues — future endeavors include the effects of social engagement on local theaters, the online behavior of pedophiles and something on the Syrian crisis — and share that data and some of the strategies with relevant organizations. And although an infographic was the tool of choice for the first project on slavery, Heeke said he’d like to do dashboards for issues where there’s frequent updates to the data, as well more calls to action such as petitions, donations and email-your-congressperson campaigns. Hopefully, he added, the non-profits the SumAll Foundation is working with will get inspired and start rethinking their approaches to data, as well.

The foundation’s efforts are already helping spur some change. SumAll’s Korey Lee said that non-profits working with government agencies to prosecute human traffickers are having an easier time convincing authorities to act because they’re able to put a price on human freedom within those countries. Additionally, the foundation found that many people enter into indentured servitude as a way to pay back debts, which suggests microloans might be an effective way for anyone donating money to make the most of their resources. Looking into the future, Heeke suggested the organization’s research into pedophilia might inspire gatekeeper institutions (e.g., Google, in this case) to take preemptive actions against certain telltale behaviors.

As laudable as the SumAll Foundation’s mission is, though, one organization can only do so much. This is why I wrote recently about the need for a data democracy in which everyone has the means to access and analyze, at least at a base level, the data that’s important to them or their causes. To the extent that data can help quantify and solve problems such as slavery, online predation or even climate change, anything that can help bring the people, data and technology together is a good thing.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Goran Bogicevic.

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The JC Penney board was looking for a silver bullet. They thought former Apple retail leader Ron Johnson had one. Turns out the guns were empty and a couple of years later, he has been handed his walking papers.

His firing from JC Penney is a good reminder that just because an executive is part of a winning team doesn’t mean an individual was the sole reason that team kept winning. Instead, it is the whole team effort that keeps the winning streak intact. (And more importantly, there is this little thing called luck and timing.)

A lot of people came together at Apple at precisely the right time and created magic. Similar plot lines unfolded at Google and then at Facebook. It happened at Microsoft and Sun. It is a story that repeats itself, and yet we forget about these magical confluences of luck and talent, and tend to believe in the power of one.

Johnson was awesome as Apple’s retail chief because he had a great product, great brand, great supply chain and most importantly a great think tank that wanted to change retail. He failed at JC Penney because he had none of those things. He was trying to rework a brand and change the culture at a company which had little or no time for his way of doing things.

Maybe he should come back to Cupertino.

Update: I had originally incorrectly spelt JC Penney as JC Penny. The error is regretted. 

Continue reading…

Tumblr launched a fresh new look for its Android app on Monday, updating the navigation with a launcher button that pops out all of a user’s different options on mobile — making the app look a lot more like Path.

Path has been noted for its design on mobile, and both Facebook’s Home on Android and Tumblr’s new Android design share navigation features with the social network. The new Tumblr navigation lets a user tap on the compose button to bring up a variety of options for blogging:

The company has over 200 million visitors per month and 18 billion pageviews, and CEO David Karp will be speaking with my colleague Mathew Ingram at PaidContent Live next week in New York about where the company is headed. Karp spoke at our Roadmap conference in November, where he talked about the challenges of good design on the company’s platforms, saying that it comes down to having a team that would personally want to use its own products.

“Good products are built by people who want to use it themselves,” Karp said at the time, pointing to Apple’s Steve Jobs and Instagram’s Kevin Systrom as examples. Karp also said that for many users, the app’s design serves as a form of self-expression, so it’s crucial for the company to get it right.

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Ron Johnson is out as CEO of J.C. Penney. After less than two years on the job, it’s not quite clear what the next step would be for him. Luckily for him, it just so happens that Johnson’s former employer, Apple, has an opening for someone with his qualifications: SVP of Retail.

Yes, that’s Johnson’s old job, the one that he held for more than 10 years. And he was really, really good at it. The establishment of Apple Stores in 2001, which he helped implement, ushered in Apple’s greatest era of prosperity. With the physical stores’ minimalist design that perfectly reflected Apple’s ethos and aesthetic appeal, and a tightly curated range of products for sale, Johnson’s Apple Store concept has attracted millions of visitors each year and inspired many imitators, even among the company’s most direct competitors.

Granted, that’s partly why he left; to find a new challenge in the post-Steve Jobs era at Apple. But funny enough, Apple hasn’t found anyone to fill the position (at least anyone that would accept the job) that could live up to Johnson’s legacy. It certainly made an effort. But that effort involved hiring John Browett away from the U.K. discount electronics retailer Dixons, and it was a total bust. Browett was let go as SVP of Retail after less than a year; even he now says he was “a bad fit” at the company.

Johnson has been on the rocks for a while now at J.C. Penney too. The stock has tanked during his tenure.

Meanwhile, since Browett left in October, there has been no replacement. Cook has reportedly been searching for the right candidate, though it’s curious it has taken this long to find someone to fill such a plum post.

Perhaps today’s news offers a clue as to what Cook has been waiting for: to make an offer to Johnson.

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T-Mobile launched its new Simple Choice plans last month and according to an internal document, Best Buy will offer the new plans by the end of its fiscal year, February 2014. Until then, Best Buy will continue to offer T-Mobile Classic plans. For customers wanting a Simple Choice plan, they will only be available directly from T-Mobile online or through one of its retail locations. Also, if you are on a Classic plan and want to stay on it, purchasing through third-party retailers like Best Buy are your only option. T-Mobile is wanting to move completely away from its Classic plans and contracts altogether, but it’s going to take time to fully transition over to this new, no-contract model.

Source: TmoNews

Come comment on this article: Best Buy Will Offer T-Mobile Simple Choice Plans By February 2014

Is IPTV an epic fail, or just for Microsoft? Ericsson is buying Mediaroom, ending weeks of rumors and leaving me (and presumably others) wondering what this means for Xbox 720 (or whatever Microsoft calls it) as an entertainment hub. Perhaps the visionaries up in Redmond, Wash. see something the Stockhom, Sweden-based telecom equipment giant should: IPTV has no long-term future.

Mediaroom is great. I’ve used the product since February 2008, when AT&T U-Verse came to the neighborhood. The program guide is straightforward and functional, and there are lots of trendsetting features, or were. Not much changed over the past two years, even while rivals added more HD-channel recording capabilities, among other enhancements. Many of the best, early features, such as streaming recorded shows among other boxes in the home, are mainstream from rivals. Mediaroom was not high on Microsoft’s priority list.

The company made its first inroads into IPTV nearly 15 years ago, with Microsoft TV being the first, major branded product for telecos. Microsoft renamed Mediaroom in June 2007. In the United States, Verizon developed a solution based on Microsoft TV, but dramatically changed the user interface about a year after launch. I first subscribed FiOS TV about a decade ago and kept the service until moving from the Washington, DC area to San Diego in October 2007.

AT&T deploys purer Mediaroom, which competes with Cox cable in my neighborhood. U-Verse uses an IP network to provide television broadcasts and Internet service. Telco, rather than cable company, provides the service, which in my home failed only twice in more than five years. The first time AT&T had service problems. The second time, there was a massive electrical outage in San Diego, which took down everything. I have never had cable service so reliable as this.

Besides AT&T, Entertain of Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom, Telefonica and TELUS Optik TV all use Mediaroom, but reach is limited: Just 22 million set-top boxes worldwide. That’s a puny market that makes more sense for a telecom than a software company.

“Ericsson’s vision of the Networked Society foresees 50 billion devices to be connected via broadband, mobility and cloud”, Per Borgklint, a senior veep, says. “Future video distribution will have a similar impact on consumer behavior and consumption as mobile voice has had”.

That sounds like Ericsson might be looking beyond the traditional subscriber-TV model. There has to come a time when cable operators and telecos providing Internet pipes to homes adapt the business model. The Internet has gutted many traditional media markets, why not television, too?

When I look at what syncs more with Microsoft’s business, particularly entertainment strategies, cloud services to Xbox and other devices makes more sense than developing a platform architecture with limited reach. C`mon, 22 million set-top boxes globally might as well be nothing to Microsoft. But they matter more to Ericsson.

“This acquisition contributes to a leading position for Ericsson with more than 40 customers, serving over 11 million subscriber households”, Borgklint says. “In addition, Ericsson will be powered with senior competence and some of the most talented people within the field of IPTV distribution”.

See my next post for more on changing TV trends, focusing on cord-cutting. I originally wrote for this story but decided to separate content into two shorter posts.

Photo Credit: Joe Wilcox

Heading to a Yeah Yeah Yeahs concert in the near future?

You better leave that smartphone in your pocket.

“Please do not watch the show through a screen on your smart device/camera,” says the band. “Put that shit away!”

SPIN magazine tweeted out this hilarious sign posted by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at a recent show in New York.

I know it’s tempting, but they’re right. Live life through your own eyes. Maybe snap a photo or two, but you’re going to want to put away your smartphone for most of the show. If not for you and your experiences, at least do it for the guy behind you that may “accidentally” pour his beer down the back fo your shirt.

Google is always hosting authors for “At Google Talks” these days, and fortunately, it’s made for a great deal of interesting content for the rest of us. Goole regularly shares the talks on YouTube for all to enjoy.

In one of the latest additions to “At Google Talks,” Robert Greene, author of “Mastery” talks to a room full of Googlers:

More recent At Google Talks here.

Conventional wisdom is to innovate via lower-cost, feature-poor technologies that meet the needs of a small group of early adopting, underserved customers, and to decide on one strategic “discipline” or “generic strategy.”

But big-bang disruptions upend the conventional wisdom. Larry Downes and Paul Nunes write in the March 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review, “The classic ‘rules’ of business don’t apply to them [big-bang disruptions].”

In this interactive HBR webinar, Downes and Nunes share insights from their HBR article. They explain what big-bang disruptions are, how they are different, why they are so devastating, and how to survive them.

Spanish actress Sara Montiel has died at the age of 85.

According to an Associated Press report, the actress died at her home in Madrid. The cause of death was not revealed, though it was stated that Montiel passed out.

Montiel began her acting career in 1944, and starred in over a dozen Spanish films before finding international fame in movies such as Vera Cruz, a 1954 western in which she co-starred with Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster. Throughout the 60s, Montiel starred in popular films such as Mi Ultimo Tango, La Bella Lola, Samba, La Femme Perdue, and Esa Mujer.

Along with her acting career, Montiel was a singer who recorded songs in five different languages. She also performed throughout Europe and Latin America. Montiel retired from film in 1974, but continued to record songs and perform live.

Montiel published an autobiography in 2000 titled Memories: To Live is a Pleasure, which became an international best-seller.

(Image courtesy Jose Santiago/Wikimedia Commons)

Last week, the Associated Press announced its decision to remove the term “illegal immigrant” from the AP Stylebook. In a blog post by Director of Media Relations Paul Colford, AP’s executive editor Kathleen Carroll revealed the news: “The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term ‘illegal immigrant’ or the use of ‘illegal’ to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that ‘illegal’ should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally.”

TEDx speaker and former Washington Post reporter Jose Antonio Vargas has been one of the outspoken critics of this term. At age 16, he found out he’d been brought to the United States illegally as a child. In a frank and moving talk given at TEDxMidAtlantic, “I am an illegal immigrant,” Vargas reveals what it’s like to “come out” as a person living in the United States without documentation, and explains his objections to using the word “illegal” to describe people.

“It’s actually legally inaccurate to refer somebody as an illegal, because to be in this country without papers is a civil offense, not a criminal one,” he says. “As I stand here right now, there are tens of thousands of students across America who are here without papers, and I would hate to think that they’re sitting in their classrooms listening to us talk about them and internalizing the word ‘illegal.’ … It’s incredibly dehumanizing and pejorative and [so many connotations] come with it — negative, all of them. That we’re criminals. That we’re not supposed to be within even the block that you live in or the school that you go to. Actions are illegal — never people. Something is terribly wrong when we refer to people as ‘illegal.’”

Watch Vargas’ talk, above.

There has probably been at least one time when you noticed that one of your pages used to rank for a certain search query, but then later dropped for some unexplained reason. Matt Cutts, in the latest Google Webmaster Help video, talks about why this might be the case.

Cutts responds to the following submitted question:

When we create a new landing page with quality content, Google ranks that page on the top 30-50 for targeted keywords. Then why does the rank get decreased for the next 2 to 3 weeks? If pages didn’t have required quality, then why did it get ranked in the first week?

“That’s a fun question because it sort of opens up how writing a search engine is kind of a complex task,” says Cutts. “You’re basically trying to make sure that you return the best quality result, but you also have to do that with limited information. For example, in the first minute after an earthquake, you might have different people, you know, saying different things. You know, ten minutes after an earthquake you have more information. An hour after an earthquake you have a lot more. With any event that has breaking news, it’s the sort of thing where it can be hard to know, even if multiple people are all saying the same thing, and one person might be the original author, one might be using that RSS. It can be difficult to try to suss out where was this content appearing originally.”

“And over time – over the course of hours, or days, or weeks – that gets easier,” he continues. “But it can be harder over the course of just minutes or hours. So a lot of the times whenever you see something ranking for a while, we’re taking our best guess, and then as more information becomes available, we incorporate that. And then eventually, typically, things settle down into a steady state. And then when there’s a steady state, we’re typically able to better guess about how relevant something is.”

As Cutts goes on to note, Google finds that freshness is deserved for some queries, while evergreen content works better for others. In my experience, Google struggles with this a lot, but seems to give more weight to freshness more often than not. Of course, I’m typically writing about newsy topics, so that makes sense to some extent (though there are plenty of times in researching topics that freshness gets a little too much weight).

Court Square Capital Partners has agreed to sell CompuCom Systems. The buyer is Thomas H. Lee Partners. Financial terms were not announced but  THL is paying about $1.1 billion in cash, according to a person familiar with the matter. Citigroup Global Markets Inc, J.P. Morgan, BMO Capital Markets and Jefferies Finance are providing committed financing. Dallas-based CompuCom is an IT outsourcing company. Court Square acquired the company in 2007 for $504 million. BMO Capital Markets and Jefferies advised THL, while Citigroup provided financial advice to CompuCom/Court Square. UPDATE: Ed Wehle lead the deal team at Citi that included Ethan Zweig and Hugo Doetsch.  Gerrie Sinatra of Dechert along with Ken Young, Adam Rosenthal, Victoria Alff, Allyson Levy, Edward Lemanowicz and Ken Wang provided legal advice to CompuCom/Court Square. Weil, Gotshal & Manges was the attorney for THL.

PRESS RELEASE
CompuCom Systems, Inc., the leading IT services and solutions specialist, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement under which Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P. (“THL”), a leading private equity firm, will acquire CompuCom from Court Square Capital Partners, a private equity firm with a legacy of building lasting companies.
CompuCom specializes in full lifecycle infrastructure services from assessment, design, procurement and integration through program deployment and management services of complete enterprise IT infrastructures. CompuCom’s clients are among the most recognized Fortune 100 and 500 businesses, including high growth companies and vertical market leaders. CompuCom, which has more than 11,500 associates worldwide, has had more than 20 years of profitable growth and had $2.3 billion of gross revenue in 2012.
“We at CompuCom are delighted to announce this partnership with THL. This heralds a new era for us with continued focus on value added services to our customers. THL has a great track record in supporting focused growth, customer delight and associate satisfaction within outsourcing and managed IT services companies. Our mission is fully complemented by the resources that a partnership with THL provides,” said Jim Dixon, CompuCom CEO.
Tony Doye, CompuCom Divisional CEO, added, “CompuCom is well positioned for growth, particularly in the mobility, end user and cloud arenas. It is very exciting for us that THL shares and is investing in our strategy.”
“Companies across all industries are increasingly turning to third parties to enhance how they meet their business service needs, particularly with respect to IT. Meanwhile, technology continues to evolve quickly; organizational compliance requirements are becoming an expensive burden due to the rise of mobile devices and cloud computing; and end-user computing services require integration of an increasing number of components. CompuCom has demonstrated that it has the tools and human capital to help companies to navigate these challenges. This investment is also consistent with our long history of investing in and partnering with business processing and managed IT services firms, including Systems Maintenance Services and Fidelity National Information Services,” said Soren Oberg, Managing Director at THL.
“CompuCom has established itself as a clear leader in providing cost-effective IT service management and solutions and is well known for its exemplary customer service. We believe the Company is well-positioned to capture additional market share in its traditional areas of strength as it deepens its expansion into new services towers. We look forward to partnering with the talented CompuCom management team to further grow the business and to continue building value,” said Seth Lawry, Managing Director at THL.
The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013, subject to regulatory approvals and the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Citigroup Global Markets Inc., J.P. Morgan, BMO Capital Markets and Jefferies Finance LLC are providing committed financing for the transaction. BMO Capital Markets and Jefferies LLC acted as financial advisors and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP acted as legal advisor to THL. Citigroup Global Markets Inc. acted as financial advisor and Dechert LLP acted as legal advisor to CompuCom and Court Square.

About CompuCom Systems, Inc.
CompuCom, the leading IT services and solutions specialist, delivers IT your way. Our clients like working with us because they know that, with CompuCom, it’s all about them. Our unique ITSM strategy blends your data center, network, voice, and end user computing environments in an innovative fashion. This radically simplifies your IT, allowing you to focus on growing your business and serving your customers. We are highly regarded around the world for our balance of industry-leading tools, a pragmatic approach to best practices, and our highly skilled workforce. We are the perfect alternative to address the revolutionary IT transformations facing you today and in the future. More than a trusted advisor, CompuCom is your trusted doer. To learn more, visit www.CompuCom.com.
About Thomas H. Lee Partners
Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P. (“THL”) is one of the world’s oldest and most experienced private equity firms. The firm invests in growth-oriented global businesses, headquartered principally in North America, across three broad sectors: Consumer & Healthcare, Media & Information Services and Business & Financial Services. THL’s team of investment and operating professionals partner with portfolio company management teams to identify and implement business process improvements that accelerate sustainable revenue and profit growth. Since its founding in 1974, THL has raised approximately $20 billion of equity capital and invested in more than 100 businesses with an aggregate purchase price of more than $150 billion. THL strives to build great companies of lasting value and generate superior investment returns. For more information, please visit www.thl.com.
About Court Square Capital Partners
Court Square is one of the most experienced teams in the private equity industry. Since 1979, the team has made over 200 investments including several landmark transactions and has developed numerous businesses into leaders in their respective markets. Court Square invests in companies that have compelling growth potential. The firm manages over $5.5 billion in aggregate capital commitments while focusing on the following four sectors: business services, general industrial, healthcare and technology/telecommunications. For more information please visit www.courtsquare.com.

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