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Over the past few years, Mozilla has emerged as a company dedicated to the privacy of its users. It’s going to take that to the next level with Firefox 22 as the browser will start blocking cookies by default. The ad industry isn’t particularly happy about it.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau sent out a press release this week claiming that Mozilla is “undermining American small business” by choosing to block cookies by default. The group says that the makers of Firefox are also undermining consumer choice by automatically blocking cookies, instead of giving users a choice.

“Thousands of small businesses that make up the diversity of content and services online will be forced to close their doors,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB. “This move will not put the interest of users first. Nor does it promote transparency or ‘move the web forward’ as Mozilla claims in its announcement. It will not advance Mozilla Corporation’s objective, as stated in its bylaws, of ‘promoting choice and innovation on the internet,’ but will, instead, impede both.”

As Consumer Affairs points out, Firefox isn’t the first browser to block third-party cookies by default. Apple’s Safari has been doing it for quite a while as well. It’s also not like Mozilla will be blocking all cookies anyway. It will only be blocking cookies from Web sites that users don’t frequently visit. What that means is a user’s one time visit to a blog covering the world of decorative dog sweaters won’t see any tracking cookies installed on their browser.

This isn’t the first or last time that advertisers will be upset with browser makers over controversial pro-privacy practices. Microsoft was caught in the middle of a controversy last year over its decision to make Do Not Track the default option in Internet Explorer 10. That decision has yet to break the Web or online advertisers, and Mozilla’s move will probably not affect much either.

That being said, advertising has a valid purpose on the Internet, and shouldn’t be blocked just because. Many of the things we enjoy for free are paid for with advertising. That’s why there needs to be choice in the matter, and Mozilla will hopefully make that choice clear when it starts to block third-party cookies by default later this year.

There is definitely no shortage of Windows applications created especially for the purpose of cleaning the operating system of clutter and thus claim more free space.

BleachBit is also part of this category, but a tad different from the popular programs you might be accustomed to. This is mostly because of its minimalist interface, but the fact that it is straight… (read more)

Amazon Publishing is launching a new imprint, called Little A, that will publish literary fiction — novels and collections of stories — and memoir.

Little A joins Amazon’s six other imprints, which focus on genres like romance and science fiction. Until now, literary fiction had been published under the general Amazon Publishing division in New York, and Little A will be part of that division.

Upcoming titles from Little A will include James Franco’s novel Actors Anonymous — which Larry Kirshbaum signed back in 2011, and which will be published this October — among others. A digital-only series called Day One will focus on “short stories from debut writers”; those will be for sale in the Kindle Singles store.

As with other titles from Amazon’s New York division, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s New Harvest imprint will distribute print versions of Little A titles.

Here’s the full mini-announcement:

“Little A is a literary fiction imprint under the Amazon Publishing Group, publishing novels, memoirs and story collections. The first titles to be published under Little A are A.L. Kennedy’s The Blue Book (on sale now), an intricate, heartbreaking story of psychics and cruise ships by the dazzling U.K. author; Jake Arnott’s The House of Rumour (on sale 3/19/13), which weaves the secret histories of science fiction and espionage into a modern classic; Jenny Davidson’s The Magic Circle (on sale 3/26/13), a literary thriller about the culture of gaming; and Shawn Vestal’ s Godforsaken Idaho (on sale 4/2/13), stories of the afterlife, the rugged Northwest, and the early days of Mormonism by a ferociously imaginative new writer. Other 2013 Little A titles will include Dan Kennedy’s American Spirit (on sale 5/28/13), Allison Lynn’s The Exiles (on sale 7/2/13), and James Franco’s Actors Anonymous (on sale 10/15/13).

Day One is a digital-only series within Little A that is focused on short stories from debut writers and is available in North America and in the U.K. The first title, Kodi Scheer’s, haunting, fabulist “When a Camel Breaks Your Heart” was released on February 5, 2013. On March 19, Day One will release “Monster” by McSweeney’s contributor Bridget Clerkin, in which a woman struggles to keep her dysfunctional family together amid unsettling events–the family dog goes missing and an unidentified, mysterious animal corpse washes up on the beach.”

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• How to deliver the next-generation web experience
• What to watch in mobile in 2013
• How consumer media will change in 2013

There’s no harder job for a corporate leader than transformation. One key to success is recognizing that transforming a business involves three activities:

• Transforming the core business to maximize its resilience (“Transformation A”)
• Creating a disruptive growth engine (“Transformation B”)
• Building a mechanism to share capabilities between the two (“Capabilities Exchange”)

Those three activities (detailed in an article Gilbert co-authored in December’s Harvard Business Review based on his experience transforming Desert News and Deseret Digital, Utah-based media organizations) don’t happen accidentally. Instead, they require careful, consistent leadership. We suggest leaders that leaders looking to drive corporate transformation remember the “Four P’s” of Transformation.

1. Purpose. Transformation is hard work. On bad days, you will have to deal with stark realities. You may need to cut the core (Gilbert cut 42 percent of newspaper staff in August 2010) or lead a large course-correction in new growth efforts. Naysayers will argue it’s simply easier to sell off or shut down the “legacy business.” But not only are legacy businesses important, they have critical capabilities that, when shared, provide advantages for new growth efforts.

A clarifying purpose — a guiding mission that’s larger than financial returns — provides a reason to pursue both Transformation A and B. Part of that purpose should be a story. What could the organization look like post-transition? Deseret News’ orientation around faith, family, and education gave the organization fortitude to make tough changes and increase long-term sustainability.

2. People. There are plenty of axioms suggesting the importance of people in change efforts. The challenge is that the right people might not be who you think, particularly for new business efforts. Your best people will want to participate in Transformation B. You will be tempted to let them. Don’t. Those people have developed skills and mindsets appropriate for yesterday’s business, not tomorrow’s.

Instead, field a talented team that has honed their skills in the closest comparable business to your new venture. For Gilbert, that meant attracting people who had worked at pure-play Internet companies like Yahoo!, Omniture, and Demand Media to create Deseret’s digital growth business.

3. Paradox. Focus on efficiency and growth. Leverage capabilities and walk away from them. These are just two of seemingly paradoxical demands facing leaders driving transformation. Since dealing with paradox doesn’t come naturally to most, minimize the number of people who have to straddle two sometimes inconsistent paths. This will be a challenge because your management team is used to being involved in strategic decisions. They still will be — for either kind of transformation, but not for both. That is a job for the CEO, a handful of trusted executives and select Board members.

4. Persistence. Transformation doesn’t happen overnight. Historical success stories like Apple and IBM had their dark days; other case examples in the HBR article like Xerox and Barnes and Nobles did (and do) too. Leaders need to stand fast in the face of these challenges, going beyond consistently exhorting the organization to work harder. Leaders need to push for, and celebrate, small wins that reaffirm progress.

Leading transformation sounds daunting. Leaders starting this journey need to ensure the time is right. All organizations transform eventually, but be wary of conducting the corporate equivalent of highly invasive heart surgery prematurely. Use your Board and personal network to build a coalition of advisors that can bring vital outside perspective, and don’t go it alone.

If transformation is on the horizon, train yourself for the ambiguity that will characterize your effort. Ensure your network has artists, entrepreneurs, and others who live lives fraught with uncertainty. Seek out opportunities outside of work characterized by ambiguity. As the old saying goes, fortune favors the prepared mind.

Doing a deep dive into customer data — analyzing and mining the vast stores of information now available to many enterprises — can yield profitable results that provide an enterprise with a strategic advantage over its competitors. It can also improve response time and overall efficiency. This is particularly true in health care, where analyzing patient discharges, real-time clinical transactions and purchasing data can provide insights that improve patient care and reduce costs. The challenge is aggregating the data from multiple sources, analyzing it and then getting the results into the right hands — quickly.

The Premier Healthcare Alliance’s goal is to improve the health of all communities through their people, data and their ability to connect health care organizations across the United States. The stats are impressive:

• Premier currently connects 2,700 hospitals and 90,000 health providers through its database.
• Premier manages the data for 1 in every 4 discharges nationwide with 2.5 million real-time clinical transactions daily.
• Premier also manages nearly $43 billion in annual purchasing data.

Our panel of experts will discuss:

• How does the term “platform” apply to big data?
• What criteria can an enterprise in other verticals use to determine whether its data is suitable for use as a platform?
• How can combining data into a platform provide efficiencies and reduce costs?
• What are some ideas to reduce the cost of moving data and get faster results?

Speakers include:

• Paul Miller, founder, The Cloud of Data

• Piyanka Jain, GigaOM research analyst, GigaOM Research

• Todd Wilkes, VP, Enterprise Solution Development, Premier Healthcare Alliance

• Nancy Kopp Hensley, Director, Big Data Strategy, IBM

Register here to join GigaOM Research and our sponsor IBM for “Transforming health care with big data: Premier Healthcare Alliance,“ a free analyst webinar on Tuesday, March 26, 2013, at 10 a.m. PT.

As you probably know, Twitter just started allowing line breaks inside tweets on the web this week. Before, users could only experience fragmented tweets on mobile.

This new functionality is particularly useful in three scenarios. Only three, ok? First, it allows users to tweet poetry in the line-by-line format in which in was meant to be seen. Haikus, anyone?

Next, it allows advertisers to make their promoted tweets stand out in the crowd. If you’re going to pay to promote a tweet, you might as well make it take up as much space as possible, right?

And lastly, it allows everyone to be super annoying. We wondered what the most useless, rage-inducing tweet looks like, now that users can insert line breaks. Turns out, the most terrible thing anyone can do now is create a tweet that takes up 70 lines (70 characters + 70 breaks = 140 total characters)

May I present the worst thing you can do on Twitter:

Ugh.

Jack Curran, the winningest high school sports coach in the U.S., has died. Curran reportedly died in his sleep at his home in Rye, N.Y. on Thursday. He was 82 years old.

Curran coached both baseball and basketball at Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens, New York. His combined wins for both the sports total over 2,600 – more than any other high school coach in the U.S. His winning record and longevity as a coach have earned Curran a place in the National High School Athletic Coaches Association Hall of Fame, the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame, and seven other halls of fame.

“It’s a very sad day for all of us here at Molloy,” said Richard Karsten, president of Archbishop Molloy. “Coach Curran built a legacy that transcends any traditional notion of coaching high school athletics. To him it was always about the kids. They were the reason for his success. His passing will not only be felt by today’s students, faculty and staff, but generations going back over 50 years.”

Curran was the son of a New York City police officer and grew up in the Bronx. After graduating from St. John’s University, he went on to play minor league baseball. in 1958 he began his coaching career at Archbishop Molloy. Throughout his years of coaching, Curran coached several players who went on to join the NBA, including Kenny Anderson and Kenny Smith.

(Image courtesy Archbishop Molloy High School)

Fans of The Office have been preparing for withdrawal: The British version ended ten years ago, after two seasons, and the American version is now in its final season. On Friday, though, Ricky Gervais launched his new YouTube channel, which will feature new clips by “David Brent,” his British Office character, as well as non-Office-related content. 

“Working with YouTube is a fantastic opportunity for new content to be made available without the limitations of schedules and international restrictions,” Gervais said in a statement (via Deadline Hollywood). “Viewing habits are changing. And anyone who doesn’t realize that will be left behind.”

Gervais’s new channel is part of a multi-million-dollar push by YouTube to offer more original content on its platform. Gervais is the probably the biggest star so far to launch his own channel; British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver signed up in January.

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An old joke says that if you laid all the world’s economists end to end, you wouldn’t reach a conclusion. We see that truth in the policy debates over a carbon tax. Just when NERA released its study documenting the …

Sniper: Ghost Warrior 1 was a pretty decent game that tried to put a more strategic spin on the first-person shooter experience by casting players in the role of a sniper that needs to go on all sorts of missions around the world.

Sadly, problems with the AI angered lots of players and developer City Interactive promised to do a better job with the seq… (read more)

NFC payment technology is on the cutting edge and Samsung has implemented Visa payWave into the Galaxy S 4 which completely bypasses carriers. Visa payWave works by storing encrypted payment information on an embedded secure element within the phone versus storing payment information on your SIM card. Samsung claims the Galaxy S 4 is the world’s first device to do this with Visa payWave. NFC payment services like Google Wallet have had issues with carriers, Verizon being the largest. Back in December, the carrier delayed approval of Google Wallet while not surprisingly developing their own mobile payment service, Isis. Samsung seems to have been aware of carriers interfering and has developed a better way for users to pay with their smartphones.

Source: CNET UK

Come comment on this article: Samsung Galaxy S 4 Bypasses Carriers With Latest NFC Technology

The UFC broadcasts its mixed martial arts programming to 800 million TV households throughout 145 countries, as well as via UFC.com and every major mobile gaming platform. The company now uses Aspera to speed its digital asset delivery backbone. (Photo: UFC)

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) has built a sports empire atop massive streams of video, delivering mixed martial arts action to a global audience via live pay-per-view events, reality TV shows and an endless stream of promotional videos. The UFC has turned to Aspera, which specializes in software to move large data at maximum speed, to serve as the back-end for its video services.

“We needed to push large volumes of high-quality content from locations that sometimes have poor connectivity, so we developed a solution using Aspera,” said Christy King, vice president of digital and technology research and development at UFC. “There is simply no way we could have ever distributed this much content as broadly as we can today without the ability to deliver video as quickly as Aspera does.”

UFC programming is broadcast to 800 million TV households throughout 145 countries, and content is hosted on UFC.com and delivered on every major mobile gaming platform including iTunes, Hulu, Xbox, Amazon, Roku, and Sony PS3. Exclusive footage offered includes fighters in training, event week activities such as workouts, weigh-ins and press conferences, and behind-the-scenes interviews.

Huge Shift from Tape to Digital

Eighteen months ago, the UFC delivered 90 percent of its content on tape. It has since overhauled its operation using transport technologies from Aspera, which is now delivering around 95 percent of UFC video. The relationship has had a chain reaction, as UFC’s partners also moved to digital delivery. Aspera now has over 200 clients who push and pull assets.

UFC deployed Aspera as the backbone of its digital asset management system allowing field production teams to quickly pull existing content from venues all over the world for inclusion in the live broadcasts. The same system links UFC’s Las Vegas headquarters and Los Angeles office, with video editors transferring gigabytes of file-based media on a daily basis.

The UFC team has a small mobile staff that has to travel frequently, working from hotels and conference centers. “The company oftens drops a 60 foot office trailer and we do a lot of our operations on site because we have so much content that rolls into the broadcast,” said Tim O’Toole, VP Event production.

“They’re pulling in content behind the scenes, editing, and pushing it out in a matter of hours. Production wise, on a given week, we can be creating 4-5 post-produced shows, along with promo videos for upcoming fights,” said Mike Saindon, Production Engineer with UFC.

Over the last year, it has completely changed its workflow over to Aspera. Aspera enables a small team of people to create massive amounts of content and distribute it out over a wide variety of partners. Aspera is also at the heart of UFC’s content delivery to over 150 international partners.

“We are thrilled to support UFC in their exponential growth by allowing them to scale and accelerate their content delivery workflow,” said Richard Heitmann, vice president of marketing at Aspera. “With Aspera software deployed on-premise and in the cloud, UFC can confidently rely on its technology investments to meet the growing worldwide demand for mixed martial arts content.”

Here’s a behind the scenes look at the UFC’s operation:

The UFC has an entire mobile video production operation housed in a 60-foot truck that travels to event venues for its mixed martial arts cards. (Photo: Aspera)

The UFC deploys an array of on-site IT to handle video ingest – the capture, storage and transport of MMA video. The cases are used to repack the gear for transport to the next venue. (Photo: Aspera)

Here’s our review of some of this week’s noteworthy links for the data center industry:

Western Digital invests in Skyera.  Skyera, which makes enterprise solid state storage systems,  announced that it has received strategic funding from Western Digital Capital as part of its recently announced Series B round of financing.  The $51 million round is an extension of the strategic relationship between the two companies that also includes joint technology development. Western Digital had previously funded Skyera as its initial outside investor. “One of our primary goals in developing strategic relationships with technology  innovators in the broader storage ecosystem is to enable customers to develop highly optimized storage solutions that meet their changing data management needs,” said Steve Milligan, president and chief executive officer, Western Digital. “We see companies like Skyera as offering a dramatic improvement over traditional approaches to emerging storage challenges. We will continue to support innovation by collaborating with customers and partners, and investing in companies who are addressing today’s most exciting storage opportunities.”

HP selected by European Commission.  HP (HPQ) announced that it has been selected by the European Commission to supply HP Integrity servers and related offerings to support critical workloads, including database-intensive applications and other critical environments, across multiple EC countries. HP will also provide associated equipment, including software,  services and support, including maintenance and professional services. “Fuelled by trends in cloud computing, big data and mobility, mission-critical demands are evolving and increasing,” said Ric Lewis, vice president and interim general manager, Business Critical Systems, HP “HP Integrity servers with the HP-UX operating environment will allow the contracting authorities to continue to confidently deploy mission-critical solutions with high levels of reliability, performance and efficiency.”

Teradata Launches Warehouse Appliance 2700.  Teradata (TDC) announced the immediate worldwide shipment of the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2700. Configurable from 7 terabytes to 82 terabytes of uncompressed user data per cabinet, the new appliance is a part of the Teradata Unified Data Architecture (UDA).  It features InfiniBand interconnects, 8-core Intel processors, parallel compression engines, and data-at-rest encryption for increased data security and compliance. “There is a perception that appliances are not enterprise-ready. However the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance product line drives strategic intelligence and advanced analytics for some of the world’s largest enterprises,” said Ed White, general manager, Teradata Appliances. “The scalable Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2700 extends the enterprise capabilities by enhancing workload management so organizations can easily manage multiple applications. On one Teradata appliance, organizations can meet the demanding service level agreements for many different groups.”

America’s scientists are a national treasure. Every day, idea by idea, innovation by innovation, they are developing new technology that will help secure our energy future. If we want to keep moving forward, we need scientists to keep inventing and innovating, to keep unlocking new solutions and pushing new breakthroughs. 

In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to create an Energy Security Trust Fund, which would free American families and business from painful spikes in gas prices. The President’s plan builds on an idea that has bipartisan support from experts including retired admirals and generals and leading CEOs, and it focuses on one goal: shifting America’s cars and trucks off oil entirely.

So how does it work? The Energy Security Trust will invest in research that will make future technologies cheaper and better – it will fund the advances that will allow us to run cars and trucks on electricity or homegrown fuels, and on the technology that will enable us to drive from coast-to-coast without a drop of oil.

Over 10 years, the Energy Security Trust will provide $2 billion for critical, cutting-edge research focused on developing cost-effective transportation alternatives.The funding will be provided by revenues from federal oil and gas development, and will not add any additional costs to the federal budget. The investments will support research into a range of technologies – things like advanced vehicles that run on electricity, homegrown biofuels, and domestically produced natural gas. It will also help fund a small number of real-world experiments that try different transportation techniques in cities and towns around the country using advanced vehicles at scale.

In each of the last four years, domestic production of oil and gas has gone up and our use of foreign oil has gone down. And while America uses less foreign oil now than we’ve used in almost two decades, there’s more work to do. That’s why we need to keep reaching for greater energy security. And that’s why we must keep developing new energy supplies and new technologies that use less oil. The Secure Energy Trust will ensure American scientists and research labs have the support they need to keep our country competitve and create the jobs of the future.

See the graphic full sized

Allen Engstrom left his iPad on a plane, where it was apparently stolen (unless you belong to the “finders keepers” camp). He still doesn’t have the device in his possession, but he’s gaining plenty of entertainment value from it.

The person who Engstrom believes has the iPad has been taking photos of herself, and they’ve been appearing in his iCloud account, so he can see what she looks like and the faces she is making.

ABC 10 News out of Little Rock reports:

Engstrom says the woman is taking “selfies” — or self portraits — with the iPad.

She probably has no idea that her pictures are backing up to my iPhone, Engstrom said.

So far, he’s received more than a dozen photos.

Engstrom is not only having fun viewing the photos with his family, however. He’s taking it a step further and uploading them to Facebook for the world to enjoy. Here are some he shared on Facebook along with the captions he provided:

Hey cool! This is an actual pic of the wonderful person who stole my iPad. Apparently the pics she is taking of herself are backing up and appearing on my phone. No I’m not kidding, this is really happening. — with Ugly McCrazy Shirt.

Looking right… Camera still works when you are looking away!

Looking left! — with Rhonda Burgandy.

The wonderful person who snaked my iPad continues to take glamour shots of herself apparently unaware that they are backing up to my iPhone. So naturally I’m blasting them out to the entire world. Enjoy!

The pictures are already generating a great deal of buzz on the web, and are even hitting the search trends. I wonder how long it will be until the the subject of the photos sees them in an article like this.

Investment advisor Courage Capital Management has added John Klinge and Scott Imbach as senior managing directors. Both distressed debt industry veterans, they will open Courage Capital’s Los Angeles office and lead investment efforts for its credit opportunities strategy. Klinge and Imbach will also join Courage’s investment committee.

PRESS RELEASE
Courage Capital Management LLC (“Courage”), a privately held SEC-registered investment advisor that offers alternative investments to institutional and private clients, today announced that John E. Klinge and Scott A. Imbach have joined the firm as Senior Managing Directors. Mr. Klinge and Mr. Imbach, distressed debt industry veterans, will open Courage’s Los Angeles office and lead the firm’s investment efforts for its credit opportunities strategy. Messrs Klinge and Imbach will also join Courage’s investment committee.

Richard Patton, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Courage said: “We are pleased and excited to welcome John and Scott to the Courage team. These gentlemen bring to Courage over 50 years of collective experience investing in all forms of stressed and distressed opportunities, longstanding relationships that provide a sourcing and research advantage, and demonstrated track records of realizing value in businesses confronting operational or financial challenges. Both John and Scott are experienced investors across market cycles. In addition, they have helped build successful investment businesses and managed significant amounts of institutional capital. The addition of John and Scott will bolster Courage’s dedicated, lower middle market stressed and distressed debt investment strategy which is part of our broader focus on event-driven, special situation investing.”

Founded in Nashville, Tennessee in 1998, Courage is an established alternative asset manager that has developed a highly successful track record of employing opportunistic event-driven, special situation investment strategies focused on investments in U.S. middle market companies. The firm has maintained longstanding relationships with many respected investors and has a history of committing significant capital alongside its partners.

Mr. Klinge brings to Courage 29 years of banking and investment experience including an 18-year track record of investing institutional capital in a variety of stressed, distressed, control-play, high yield, and leveraged loan opportunities. Mr. Klinge has extensive transaction experience in out-of-court restructurings, Chapter 11 reorganizations, and Chapter 7 liquidations. Mr. Klinge joins Courage from Levine Leichtman Capital Partners (“LLCP”), where he worked for eight years and was a Senior Managing Director and Chief Credit Officer. While at LLCP, Mr. Klinge co-led the firm’s efforts to build a new distressed debt business and directly participated in raising the $508 million Deep Value Fund (“DVF”) established to realize superior long-term returns through opportunistic investments in debt and other securities of companies in the U.S. middle market. Mr. Klinge served as Portfolio Manager of DVF and managed all day-to-day efforts associated with the origination of investment opportunities, due diligence, and portfolio management. Prior to LLCP, Mr. Klinge spent six years as a Principal at William E. Simon & Sons Special Situation Partners (“WES”), where he co-founded the Special Situations Group. At WES, Mr. Klinge structured, marketed and managed three dedicated distressed debt funds with over $225 million of investment capital focused on making opportunistic investments across the capital structure in a variety of special situations with a particular emphasis on undervalued bank debt and high yield notes. Prior to WES, Mr. Klinge spent 15 years at Bank of America (“BoA”) where he served as a Portfolio Manager and a member of the team responsible for managing the bank’s proprietary global distressed debt fund, which deployed over $1 billion of capital during the 1990s. Mr. Klinge also represented BoA as agent and lender in the management of its troubled U.S. corporate loan portfolio where he developed an in-depth knowledge of both financial and operational restructuring strategies. Mr. Klinge holds an M.B.A from the University of California at Los Angeles where he earned honor society admission to Beta Gamma Sigma, and a B.S. in Accounting from Golden Gate University graduating summa cum laude. Mr. Klinge is a Certified Public Accountant.

Mr. Klinge commented: “I am delighted to join Courage Capital and work closely with Richard Patton and other members of the firm to help grow its alternative asset investment business. Courage has a demonstrated history of putting the interests of its investment partners first and maintains longstanding relationships with many highly respected institutional and high net worth investors. Consistent with both the investment strategy deployed by Courage in its first two credit opportunities funds, and the strategies implemented during my 18 years of managing institutional capital dedicated to the distressed debt and leverage finance space, we will continue to pursue a focused influence and control distressed debt investment strategy designed to capitalize on the constant flow of investment opportunities in the U.S. lower middle market.”

Mr. Imbach brings to Courage over 23 years of banking and investment experience including 16 years of investing in stressed, distressed and other special situation credit opportunities including restructurings, reorganizations, liquidations, leveraged loans, high yield debt and proprietary private debt financings. Mr. Imbach joins Courage from LLCP where he was a Managing Director and where he worked closely with Mr. Klinge on DVF for almost three years. During that time, Mr. Imbach and Mr. Klinge successfully invested together in a variety of U.S. middle market stressed, distressed, restructuring and reorganization opportunities. While at LLCP, Mr. Imbach also served as Portfolio Manager for two credit-focused, special situation investment vehicles. Prior to joining LLCP, Mr. Imbach was a Founding Partner and Director of Research for approximately three years for Empyrean Capital Partners, L.P. (“ECP”), a $1.5 billion multi-strategy hedge fund. At ECP, Mr. Imbach focused on event-oriented corporate investments across the capital structure in stressed and distressed debt and other special situations including privately negotiated debt financings. Prior to joining ECP, Mr. Imbach was a Principal at Canyon Capital Advisors LLC (“CCA”), where he worked for over a decade. CCA is a leading global alternative asset manager, one of the largest multi-strategy hedge funds in the United States, and a prominent credit investment and distressed debt fund manager. Before joining CCA, Mr. Imbach spent a total of seven years at Citicorp in its Securities Markets, Leveraged Capital and Corporate Banking divisions and approximately one year at Drexel Burnham Lambert in its Los Angeles Corporate Finance Department. Mr. Imbach holds an M.B.A from the Harvard Business School where he earned Second Year Honors and a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Southern California where he graduated cum laude.

Mr. Imbach commented: “I am excited to join Courage and become part of the Credit Strategies team. I have known Richard Patton for over 20 years and we have collaborated together on a number of investment opportunities in the past. I have a great deal of respect for Richard and the business he has built. In addition, I have known John for over 20 years and recently worked closely with him for almost three years at LLCP pursuing a U.S. middle market control and influence distressed debt strategy that is very similar to the one we will pursue at Courage. I believe these longstanding relationships and years of working together will allow the Courage team to collectively operate seamlessly to deliver superior investment results to our investors and to expand the firm’s dedicated, lower middle market stressed and distressed debt investment effort over time.”

About Courage Capital Management

Courage is a privately held, SEC-registered alternative asset manager based in Nashville, Tennessee. The firm serves institutional investors including endowments, foundations, family offices, pension funds and fund of funds, as well as high net worth individuals. Courage was founded in 1998 and has a 14-year history of focusing primarily on opportunistic and special situation investment strategies including stressed and distressed obligations of lower middle market companies. Courage’s investment objective is to deliver attractive absolute rates of return across all market environments while preserving capital by employing a deep value, bottom-up, fundamentally-based investment approach. In addition to its Nashville operation, the firm is opening an office in Los Angeles.

The post Courage Capital Hires Klinge, Imbach appeared first on peHUB.

We’d already noted this long before he got fired, but Apple’s former SVP of Retail, John Browett, confirmed in an interview this week that he no longer works there because he did not fit in with Apple’s company culture.

Browett led Apple’s retail empire for all of two minutes (actually more like six months, but it was an absurdly short tenure) and it was apparent that the former Dixon’s CEO probably wasn’t going to work out to many Apple watchers — including my former colleague Bobbie Johnson, who noted the cultural differences of Dixon’s and Apple when Browett was hired. Just a few months after his start, Browett started experimenting with a new “staffing formula” that included reduced hours for store employees and cutting back on new hires.

But despite his brief tenure, the Browett episode serves as CEO Tim Cook’s first big hiring error, so it’s useful to examine what went wrong, especially as Apple is still in the hunt for someone to replace Browett since he was fired in October.

Now CEO of Monsoon Accessorize, Browett made his first comments about his time at Apple at the Retail Week Live conference this week. MacRumors has the video. Here’s part of what Browett says in the clip:

“Apple is a truly fantastic business. The people are great, they’ve got great products … I loved working there. The issue is I just didn’t fit with the way they ran the business. It was one of those shocking things where you’re rejected from an organization for fit rather than competency. The learnings there, is it’s probably, actually the best thing that’s ever happened to me from a business perspective. Because you learn humility and it makes you rather a much kinder person … it also got me very clear on how I am and what I actually am like to work with.”

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• Forecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• The state of cross-platform media measurement

The White House Photo Office just released their latest behind-the-scenes photos, covering President Obama’s State of the Union Address, his visit to a pre-k classroom in Georgia, and around the White House.

Check out some of the best images below, and see the full set of 33 photos on our Flickr gallery.

To learn more:

• February 2013: Photo of the Day
• 2013 State of the Union Address
• Celebrating the Third Anniversary of “Let’s Move!”
• On Tour for the Third Anniversary of “Let’s Move!”

One thing you can’t argue about is the success Samsung has enjoyed with the Galaxy S and Note line. Each newer version has always exceeded the results of the previous version, and it doesn’t look like that will change with the Galaxy S 4. One UK retailer, Phones4U, says that pre-registrations are going through the roof. In fact, they are seeing a 40% increase over what they experienced with the Galaxy S III, and it has only been 48 hours since they opened pre-registrations.

“The anticipation surrounding the next Samsung Galaxy has been astounding and it has already received the most pre-registrations as Phones 4U of any other smartphone launch in 2013,” said Scott Hooton, Chief Commercial Officer at Phones 4U. He also went on to say that it could be the “biggest selling smartphone of 2013.”

It doesn’t seem limited to Phones4U as EE is seeing some action. ”The interest we’ve received from consumers and businesses has almost reached fever-pitch levels,” said Paul Jevons, Director of Products and Devices at EE.

source: TechRadar

Come comment on this article: Phones4U say that pre-registrations for the Samsung Galaxy S 4 now 40% greater than Galaxy S III

Pat Boone made a name for himself as a pop star and film actor in the 50s and 60s. While he was well-known for his voice, many might not remember that he is also well-known as a highly religious political conservative. That, in and of itself isn’t too odd, but it seems that Boone has now adopted the idea that the president of the United States want to turn the country into a Marxist dictatorship.

Fox Business News anchor Neil Cavuto brought Boone on his program recently to help critisize President Obama for some economic promises that didn’t pan out. Instead, Boone brought a copy of Rules For Radicals and stated that the book, written by Saul Alinsky, trained the president “to be a community organizer, a Marxist, a socialist, a progressive.” It was unclear exactly whether Boone was accusing Obama of being trained to be all of those things or if he was simply stating that they were qualities of the book’s author, but his message about the president was clear either way.

Even Cavuto couldn’t go as far as Boone, and ended up defending the president against Boone’s accusations. Cavuto tried to get Boone back on track by insinuating that such wild theories aren’t needed to criticize the president, but Boone powered through, and even made it personal by claiming Obama had placed him on some sort of “enemies list.”

“Well, I am a target,” said Boone. “I was on his enemies list in the first year of his presidency.”