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Come Hear Ken Sawka Speak Dec 8 at Boston SCIP Meeting

(author unknown) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:29:10 PST

SCIP Boston Chapter Meeting

From Implications to Implementation: Executing Strategic Intelligence

Ken Sawka, Speaker

Tuesday, December 8, 2009 – 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM

Vinny T’s Restaurant, Lexington, MA

Program Description

CI Managers frequently express frustration at the inability of their organizations to take action on seemingly sound, actionable competitive intelligence insights. Whether it is due to deficiencies in the way intelligence is delivered, deficiencies in managers’ ability to translate intelligence findings into strategic options, or deficiencies in strategy development and implementation practices, the fact remains: CI functions are experiencing a widening gap between their outputs and the organization’s ability to act on them.

In this session, Outward insights Managing partner Ken Sawka will explore some of the reasons that prevent organizations from acting on intelligence findings. He will then explore several models for decision execution from Stanford University, Jim Collins, and others. Then, session participants will explore practical applications from these models to pinpoint solutions to the forces that prevent strategy implementation from intelligence findings.

Please join us to hear Ken—he is a terrific speaker!

Location

Vinny T’s Restaurant 20 Waltham Street Lexington, MA 02421 (781) 860-5200 Directions to Vinny T’s can be found on the event description on www.scip.org or at http://www.vinnytsofboston.com/locations/lexington/directions.html.

Agenda

6:00PM Registration & Networking, Food & Beverage 6:30PM Presentation 8:00PM Q&A, Networking

Registration Fees

SCIP Members - $40.00 Non - Members -$45.00

To register, please click the link below: http://www.scip.org/Training/EventsDetail.cfm?itemnumber=9068

Cancellations not received in writing by Tuesday, December 1st will not be refunded.

Contact Information

Cynthia Correia, Boston Chapter Chair, (617) 479-7862, ccorreia@knowledgeinform.com

Parmelee Eastman, Boston Chapter Co-chair, (781) 416-3686, eastsight@verizon.net

Robyn Reals, SCIP Education Manager, (703) 739-0696 x107, rreals@scip.org

Google's Notoriously Tough Interviews Are Tough For Marketing Positions Too [Google]

Jason Chen — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:36:13 PST

Having known lots of computer science people who interviewed at Google, we know exactly what kind of questions they're likely to ask potential applicants. Crazy ones. But we didn't know they would ask these questions for marketing positions too.

The first person account over at Business Insider is an interesting one, because it shows that everyone at Google is subject to some high standards. One sample question is "how much money you think Google makes daily from Gmail ads?" To which she blurted out the answer "$70,000," before quickly asking if they could ignore it while she figures out a better one.

Of course there are caveats to her story: She should have prepared more, she's kinda naive about the type of questions they're asking and maybe she's just not really right for the Google culture. Still, it's something worth checking out just for curiosity's sake. [Business Insider]

Grab Your Beta Invites To Wasabi, Netvibe’s Powerful New Stream Reader

Leena Rao — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:55:38 PST

We recently reviewed Wasabi, Netvibes’ powerful new stream reader which consolidates news feeds, blogs, Twitter and Facebook streams, email, and more in an extremely manageable interface. The site entered private beta recently and we have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers. To get an invite, visit Wasabi and enter the code “WASABITC.”

As we wrote earlier, Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini demonstrated parts of Wasabi at our first Realtime CrunchUp in July. In addition to the traditional widget view, which breaks up your feeds and applications into a grid of boxes on your Netvibes homepage, Wasabi now also has a “smart reader” view. The smart reader borrows from traditional RSS readers in that all the feeds and widgets you subscribe to are presented together in one column, updated in reverse chronological order.

You can see just a list of headlines, or an expanded view with the full feed. It looks similar to Google Reader, except that Netvibes supports more than just RSS feeds. You can import your Twitter and Facebook streams (read-only right now), as well as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Flickr photos, weather widgets, stock widgets, and more. Plus, Wasabi has also sped things up to make the stream as realtime as possible. It is caching content from the most popular feeds and pushing that down to users as soon as there are any updates, and it will also be supporting both the Pubsubhubbub (PuSH) and RSSCloud standards aimed at eliminating the lag time inherent in RSS and Atom feeds.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Hammer time

Seth Godin — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:35:00 PST

So, if it's true that to a person with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, the really useful question is, "what sort of hammer do you have?"

At big TV networks, they have a TV hammer. At a surgeon's office, they have the scalpel hammer. A drug counselor has the talk hammer, while a judge probably has the jail hammer.

Maybe it's time for a new hammer...

One study found that when confronted with a patient with back pain, surgeons prescribed surgery, physical therapists thought that therapy was indicated and yes, acupuncturists were sure needles were the answer. Across the entire universe of patients, the single largest indicator of treatment wasn't symptoms or patient background, it was the background of the doctor.

When the market changes, you may be seeing all the new opportunities and problems the wrong way because of the solutions you're used to. The reason so many organizations have trouble using social media is that they are using precisely the wrong hammer. And odds are, they will continue to do so until their organization fails. PR firms try to use the new tools to send press releases, because, you guessed it, that's their hammer.

It's not just about new vs. old. Inveterate community-focused social media mavens often bring that particular hammer to other venues. So they crowdsource keynote speeches or restaurants or board meetings and can't figure out why they don't have the impact others do.

The best way to find the right tool for the job is to learn to be good at switching hammers.

Are GE’s Smart Appliances Too Little Too Soon?

Pedro Hernandez — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:52 PST

Smart grid–connected appliances have a long way to go, but here's a few tips for how to get there more quickly.

For those that keep asking for my Competitive Analysis Pubcon 2009 Presentation here ya go ---> http://bit.ly/3OxaZ6

Matt_Siltala (Matt Siltala) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:09:58 PST

For those that keep asking for my Competitive Analysis Pubcon 2009 Presentation here ya go ---> http://bit.ly/3OxaZ6

Apple's iPhone captures 17% of worldwide smartphone market

(author unknown) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:55:00 PST

In less than two and a half years on the market, Apple's iPhone has managed nearly a fifth of the total global smartphone market, thanks to nearly 50 percent year-over-year growth in sales in the third quarter of 2009.

BT CEO hints at mobile return

nick.wood@totaltele.com (Nick Wood) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:18:00 PST

BT CEO Ian Livingston on Thursday once again suggested that the telco is eyeing a possible return to the U.K. mobile market.

When fielding the obligatory 'what is your mobile strategy?' question during BT's fiscal second quarter results, his answer was far more open to interpretation than the usually evasive, 'it's something we look at' type of response.

"What is a mobile service? It's a chunk of spectrum that connects to a base station which connects back to a fixed network," he said.

When asked if BT would participate in any upcoming U.K. spectrum auctions, he said:

"We will be looking ahead to the upcoming spectrum auctions... We will also look at the MVNO option. We're in the wholesale business but we don't mind being wholesaled to."

This is a far cry from the first quarter, when in response to a similar question, Livingston replied:

"I don't feel that our business is compromised by not being able to offer mobility solutions."

Livingston also sparked rumours at the beginning of 2009 when the Observer reported that BT had held informal talks with T-Mobile and 3 UK over a possible return to the mobile sector as part of a three-way joint venture.

New $Num,ber.ss Language Coming Soon

Tony Johnston — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:03:37 PST

Attention CEOs & Business Owners: the language you are using in your financial statements to ‘talk money numbers’ is about to change – so start saying goodbye to GAAP!

IFRS is coming and it will cause a big change to how your financial statements are constructed. Consequently, what and how you communicate your company’s financial situation will have to change. And importantly, you may have to enact this change as early as 2010 if you are in Canada and by 2013 for those in the US.

Because of that, now is the time when your company needs to start getting ready to report your financial numbers differently!

IFRS is a new ‘accounting language’, and if your company is of any size or hopes to be, you will be using it to talk to your shareholders, tax collector, banker and other important groups, including those inside your organization. So, you need to know that IFRS represents a big change, one that will in subtle but important ways significantly alter the way you handle the economic and financial management aspects of your business.

To put IFRS in a context most people can understand, here is an explanation I got just last week from a Canadian Chartered Accountant who does a lot of audits for publicly traded companies. He described the IFRS induced change that’s coming as equivalent to having to switch the language you use from English to Portuguese or Chinese.

Now, if you are in a private company, don’t go thinking you can avoid having to do things differently even though IRFS is primarily a financial reporting standard for ‘publically accountable enterprises’. That’s because private company accounting rules are going to be changing as well. Either you will have to adopt IFRS for one reason or another or you will have to conform to new IFRS-impacted Private Enterprise GAAP rules. The later are new guidelines that accounting standard setting bodies have or will have under development that respond in some measure to the whole new way of communicating a company’s financials that is gaining such wide acceptance all around the globe.

IFRS: What It Is and Why It’s Needed?

IFRS is an acronym that stands for ‘International Financial Reporting Standards’. As the full name implies, IRFS represents a new global agreement between local country accounting authorities about how companies need to communicate their economic and monetary performance and position. This is why today’s status quo in accounting and financial reporting will no longer be an option for you.

IFRS is a global standard that is spreading throughout all developed and developing economies. So far, as the following diagram clearly shows, most of the world has or will soon move to using IFRS as THE reporting standard for companies issuing financial statements.

The goal behind IFRS is to achieve global financial reporting convergence (i.e. sameness). Much of this has been achieved already because IFRS has been adopted by 110 countries so far. In just over 12 months time, three more first world countries will join this group as companies in Canada, Japan and India will be required to use these standards when issuing financial statements for 2011. And a year later, in 2012, Mexico will follow. Then, two years after that comes the US who are slated to start reporting using IFRS in 2014.

So what’s so different? IFRS are financial reporting standards that are "principles based", meaning they establish broad rules as well as dictating specific treatments. The previous approach called GAAP or ‘Generally Accepted Accounting Principles’ unfortunately deteriorated over time, particularly in the US, into a mind-numbing maze of far too narrowly focused, specific ‘rules’ which obscured and even compromised the purpose of financial communications.

The truth of this statement can easily be seen if you consider all the ‘doctored results’ and accounting scandals we’ve seen in the last 10 to 20 years. While no approach to accounting can or will prevent new frauds from being perpetrated by white collar criminals and shady accountants, experience since 2005 from Europe suggests IFRS will significantly cut down the risk of such fraud while making financial statements more consistent and understandable by a greater number of users.

IFRS’s Impact on Private Company Reporting

Now, mistakenly in my opinion, private Canadian companies (and maybe US ones too) are going to be given a choice whether to adopt IFRS or GAAP for Private Companies.

GAAP for Private Companies is a new set of standards being formulated in Canada for ‘non-publicly accountable enterprises’. As currently proposed, these are a hybrid set of standards that take some from the old Canadian GAAP and some from the IFRS concepts. Personally, I see this move as an unreasonable and needless proliferation of rules which undermines, even compromises, the IFRS objective. I say this because I thought the debate over ‘Big (company) GAAP’ and ‘Small (company) GAAP’ ended basically some ten years ago when only limited ‘differential accounting’ practices were allowed for private companies, which is something that will be eliminated under the new financial reporting standards being proposed. The better alternative for dealing with private company financial reporting, in my view, would have been to adopt a less intensive or rigorous version of IFRS, something that may yet come to pass in some five years time when GAAP for Private Companies is next scheduled for re-evaluation.

As of mid November 2009 in Canada, the situation for private companies is that we are waiting for the Canadian Accounting Standards Board (AcSB) release of their finalized Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) for Private Enterprises now that the comment period on their exposure draft has been closed off. So this will result in a situation where, beginning with financial reporting years commenting January 1, 2011, Canadian private enterprises will be required to choose between following International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) or Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) for Private Enterprises. Given how the prior year’s comparative statements will have to conform to the same standard, it effectively means that private companies will need to be able to report their 2010 financial statements in the new way as well.

Importantly, take note that the decision about which reporting standard a private company should use is not so straight-forward and nor is it something that owners will get to decide all on their own. That’s because the principal users of a private company’s financial statement are to be the ones effectively calling the shots, not issuers or just their shareholders. Even beyond that, there are a number of other reasons why IFRS may be the best or desired alternative for a private company, namely if you:

have an ownership exit strategy that involves getting acquired by an IFRS reporting entity, be it public or private;
have plans (firm or tentative) to sell or raise more capital by going public;
have key suppliers or customers in jurisdictions that have adopted IFRS;
are a subsidiary of a publicly accountable enterprise;
have international operations in IFRS only jurisdictions;
have or could have significant dependency on external sources of financing;
have competitors which use IFRS, or
decide voluntarily to hold the company to publicly accountable enterprise reporting standards.

Why CEOs Should Care About IFRS?

Here are five reasons why CEOs (and boards of directors) should care about IFRS and the change it will cause:

IFRS related change is change your organization cannot avoid.
IFRS will reduce opportunities to manage or manipulate financial results.
IRFS will make performance comparison between companies easier and quicker.
IRFS will materially increase investor and lender understandings and confidence.
IFRS will help cut your and the market’s average cost of capital through better communications-based risk identification and reduction.

As such, IFRS will help focus owners, directors and their management on getting their businesses to go right, not on getting their numbers to look right.

How Much Change Does IFRS Represent?

IFRS represents a significant, multi-level change to how your company compiles and presents its financial results and its financial position. The reasons that drove this change are that Accounting Standards Boards came to see (i) how the existing presentation guidelines have made i too difficult to understand the relationships between the various financial statements and (ii) how the information shown in different statements is inconsistently presented. Because of these factors, it is too difficult for GAAP financial statement users to properly or fairly assess the financial health of an organization.

In developing IFRS, the International Accounting Standards Board had three objectives they sought to achieve in the new financial reporting standards for publicly accountable enterprises. These were that that under IFRS, financial statements should:

present a cohesive financial picture of an entity’s activities (meaning that there should be a clear and observable relationship between items across all financial statements and that all of an entity’s financial statements should complement each other as much as possible);
present disaggregated information so that what is presented is useful in predicting an entity’s future cash flows; and
present information in such a way that helps users assess an entity’s liquidity and financial flexibility.

In comparison to GAAP accounting, this means:

IFRS changes the way companies compile their financial reporting numbers;
IFRS changes the way companies organize their financial reporting numbers; and
IFRS changes the way companies present their financial reporting numbers.

1) Let’s first talk about how IFRS changes the way companies compile financial reporting numbers.

While the overall logic of IFRS is similar to that used under GAAP, there are many situations in which IFRS differs from GAAP in application. Most people will notice much more change on the Income Statement than on the Balance Sheet or Statement of Financial Position. That’s because there has been general agreement for a long time about what is thenature of assets and liabilities, though under IFRS there is more application of revaluations to report fair values as of a particular reporting date with gains or losses from such showing up in the Statement of Comprehensive Income.

To get a sense on how much of a change IFRS represents, let’s consider just one area, revenue recognition. Considering things from a high level point of view, be aware how the IASB (the International Accounting Standards Board – the arbitrator of what is and is not in IFRS) and the US Accounting Standards Board are currently working together on a revenue recognition focused project, one which seeks to change how revenue is defined from something that is a consequence of the occurrence of critical events to something that is the result of changes in assets and liabilities.

As to a more detailed comparison about how GAAP and IFRS currently define when and how revenue is recognized, consider the following charts showing respectively the situations in the US and Canada:

In summary, under IFRS there will be a much greater focus on recognizing revenue when the risks and rewards of control have been transferred to the acquiring counterparty, which will do away with the all-too numerous rules for specific types of transactions and industries.

As for differences in other areas of accounting and financial statement reporting, such as for expenses, taxes, equity, etc, there are as well many situations where the two sets of standards differ at the application level while still keeping the overall logic the same or similar. These are too numerous and detail oriented, however, to discuss here.

2) So let’s now consider how IFRS changes the way companies organize their financial reporting numbers.

The most evident change under IFRS most people will notice quickly is how the names IFRS uses for the statements presented are different. The following diagram summarizes these changes:

3) Because the way IFRS sets out the numbers in their statements is so obviously different, let’s now lastly consider how IFRS changes the way companies’ present financial reporting numbers.

The new financial statement names are just the beginning of how a company will present its financials differently. In order to achieve the objective of cohesiveness between the statements, the format of the statements will change. All statements are to be subdivided into the same general categories:

a business section (subdivided further into operating and investing components),
a financing section,
an income taxes section,
a discontinued operations
an other section, and
an equity section.

Here is a quick peek at how the two main financial statements will look under IFRS:

As for the Statement of Changes in Equity under IFRS, it is similar to the GAAP Statement of Changes in Retained Earnings, but it will be much more comprehensive. It will show the balance of each component of equity at the beginning and end of the period and identify the changes resulting from income, each item of other comprehensive income, transactions with owners (such as contributions, dividends, and changes in ownership interests of subsidiaries) and retrospective application or restatements.

Turning finally to the Statement of Cash Flows, while its name does not change under IFRS, the content will for most companies. That is because in future, it will only report cash balance changes directly. No use of the indirect, or what I think of as the reconciliation approach, will be permitted. While a reconciliation of income to cash flow is still considered important and relevant, under IFRS it is information that will be reported only in the notes to the financial statements.

The bottom line is that IFRS represents both big change and global evolution in best-practice financial reporting. Consequently, wherever you are in business, you won’t be able to avoid its impact.

How IFRS Will Benefit Us All

Based on post implementation experience to date, IFRS will benefit to everyone by:

Enhancing worldwide company comparability for investors;
Ensuring more efficient capital allocation through better risk-based decision making that results from clearer, more informative financial communications;
Enhancing credibility of local markets to foreign investors through globally consistent financial communication;
Providing for a more company receptive securities market for foreign listings; and
Removing need to develop and maintain separate national accounting standards.

Judging from the positive reaction of investors in Europe to their 2005 IFRS adoption, I expect IFRS will fully deliver these benefits in Canada, Mexico and the US as promised.

Recommendations

The biggest recommendation I have for you is this: make sure you and your organization jump on board the IFRS band wagon as early as possible because these seemingly behind the scenes changes will have a big impact on all your accounting and internal and external reporting activities. To put it another way: these are changes that will change your bottom line!

Additionally, if your company is a private (Canadian) one that could opt for the about to be proposed GAAP for Private Companies, I recommend you chose IFRS because that’s the standard big public-market companies will be using, and not going with it will stunt your company’s growth potential.

How to Learn More About IFRS & Private Enterprise GAAP

If you want to learn more about IFRS and GAAP for Private Companies, here are some great sources to turn to:

Four of the best high-level overviews of IFRS I found were:

IFRS Brings a Radical Change to Financial Statement Presentation is anarticle by Karine Benzacar, MBA, CMA, CPA (Del.) that was published in the Feb 2009 CMA Management Magazine – http://www.knowledgeplus.org/pdfs/CMA_IFRS_statements_February09.pdf
IFRS – The Next Accounting Revolution is earlier article by Karine Benzacar, MBA, CMA, CPA (Del.) published in the Jun 2008 CMA Management Magazine – http://www.knowledgeplus.org/pdfs/IFRS_CMAmagazine_june_08.pdf
IFRS / International Financial Reporting Standards overview from Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Financial_Reporting_Standards
A very informative and more detailed, US-oriented May 2009 presentation on IFRS on The Major Differences Between US GAAP and IFRS can be found at – http://www.swensonadvisors.com/assets/MajorDifferencesBetweenUSGAAPandIFRS.pdf

The best overview of Canadian Private Enterprise GAAP vs IFRS I found was:

Canadian GAAP or IFRS? An important choice to be made by private companies by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, a 4 page whitepaper – http://www.pwc.com/en_CA/ca/private-company-services/publications/gaap-or-ifrs-canada-2009-05-en.pdf

Other sources for IFRS information are:

Comparison of IFRS and Canadian GAAP as of July 31, 2008 – http://www.acsbcanada.org/international-activities/ifrs/item18492.pdf
IFRS In Canada: Evolution Or Revolution? Which is an insightful overview online article written in 2007 by Michel Blanchette, CMA – http://www.allbusiness.com/legal/banking-law-banking-finance-regulation/10586395-1.htm
International Accounting Standards Board – http://www.iasb.org/Home.htm
American Institute of Certified Public Accountants IFRS Resources Website – http://www.ifrs.com/

© Blog.TonyJohnston.biz & Compass North Inc. 2009

Article by –

Tony Johnston, CMC, CGA, MBA, BA (Econ)
President
Compass North Inc.
18 Balding Court
Toronto ON
M2P 1Y7
Office: 416-342-5652
Mobile: 416-346-4140
www.CompassNorthInc.com
www.CNiRapidResearch.com

Tony Johnston is a top level executive & management advisor who is a business results specialist with success in 4 turnarounds and many significant other operations, deal making and finance oriented accomplishments to his credit. He helps companies drive:
  › top line growth (revenue)
  › bottom line improvement (profits)
  › cashflow management (credit line control)
  › growth strategy (more / new)
  › financing & stakeholder relationship management (debt / equity)
  › enterprise value maximization (mkt price)
  › acquisition planning & execution (find / close)
  › divestiture preparation & execution (prep / negotiate)
  › information gathering (competitive intel / market research)
  › crisis control (turnarounds & wind-downs)
  › enterprise leadership (CEO / CRO / CFO)

Compass North Inc. is a management & advisory services firm that helps companies achieve important, challenging operational, financial and transaction oriented goals. Examples of what we do include helping companies and their owners:
   – make better decisions by providing customized competitive intelligence,
   – grow by crafting strategic plans and implement them,
   – get turned around by dealing with their debt or other business problems,
   – borrow more money and/or raise more equity, and
   – plan, prepare, negotiate and close acquisitions, divestitures and ownership
      transitions.

Bottom-line: The benefit that Tony and Compass North Inc. deliver is helping company owners maximize both what they earn while they own their business and what they bank when they sell.

> Follow me on Twitter @CompassNorthInc

Google, Clearwire, and Subscriber Growth

Rob Powell — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:13:33 PST

As soon as WiMAX upstart Clearwire (CLWR: chart, news) announced its new funding package this week, you could hear the mumbling. Google didn’t pitch in! Google must not believe in the company any more. Now, I can’t speak for Google directly, but the market consistently misunderstands the companies intentions. Google didn’t invest in Clearwire in order to take over telecom, or even to make a start at it. They did it because it’s worth far more to them to have another last mile alternative in the system than it costs them to help get one started. If they’re not needed to keep it going, then they will … [visit site to read more]

Palm Pre Sales in “Substantial Decline”: Analyst

Colin Gibbs — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:03:08 PST

Palm’s bet on webOS isn’t paying many dividends, according to a research note issued by Northeast Securities analyst Ashok Kumar this morning. Domestic sell-through checks point to a “substantial decline” in recent sales of the Pre, Kumar said, and slashing the price to $99 hasn’t helped much. Nor is the upcoming launch of the Pixi likely to reverse the trend.

Those slowing sales are whittling away at the prospects for webOS, which Palm had positioned as a worthy competitor to the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry platforms. From the note:

“As a fading brand, carriers are likely to see better returns on their promotional and advertising dollars with other vendors…WebOS has negligible smartphone OS share, 0.2 percent per Gartner estimates, and is unlikely to attract any meaningful third-party application support. Palm has bet the farm on webOS and there is a real possibility that they may not achieve critical mass.”

The Pre failed to live up to expectations out of the gate — thanks largely to Sprint’s unwillingness to heavily market the gadget (GigaOM Pro, subscription req.) — and Palm’s next best hope for webOS appeared to be an upcoming launch with Verizon Wireless early next year. But as Verizon’s Droid initiative demonstrates, the Google OS has captured the attention of the nation’s largest carrier. If it overlooks the Pre in favor of the Droid, that could put one more nail in Palm’s coffin.

Google Wave Adds Follow/Unfollow Feature for a Cleaner Inbox [Google Wave]

Adam Pash — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:30:00 PST

When we taught you the first Google Wave search you should know (with:public), Wave automatically added public waves you read to your inbox, and an empty inbox quickly became hard to come by. Today, Wave fixes that with a handy Follow/Unfollow button.

Now, rather than automatically adding a public wave to your inbox as soon as you look at it, you have to explicitly choose to follow public waves.

Here's how following works: When someone adds you directly to a wave, or if you contribute to a wave, you will automatically be following that wave. When you see a public wave that you would like to get updates on, you can chose to follow it by hitting the follow button in the wave panel toolbar. You can remove these waves from your inbox by hitting the "archive" button, but when there is an update they will pop back in. You can switch between following and unfollowing a wave as much and as often as you like.

As old public waves you were automatically added to update, they'll start disappearing from your inbox unless you go back in and explicitly follow them. Keep in mind that Unfollow has replaced Mute, so you can also Unfollow waves you've started or been explicitly added to if you no longer want to receive updates in your Inbox.

We realize many of you are still waiting on invites (we'll continue to do our best to hand some out every week), but trust us when we say this is a nice update.

Follow your waves [Google Wave Blog]

What If You Could Recreate Live Performances By Dead Artists On A Computer?

Mike Masnick — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:01:00 PST

Via Shocklee comes this story of a company that claims to have created software that can recreate live performances by famous musicians (even dead ones). Basically, the software learns (or so its creators claim) exactly how certain musicians played, and then can mimic that style exactly. Here's how Pocket Lint describes it:

Zenph Studio's approach is to work out how the musician and the instrument acts and responds, then get a computer to play that track again as a real-time, real-life performance, which in turn can be recorded using modern techniques. The new track isn't a re-mastering, but a re-performance, as if the musician was actually playing it even though the artist may or may not be dead.

The technology works by ascertaining how an artist strikes a note and then recreating that note again. For the piano, the company takes into account everything from how an artist strikes a note to their hand movement, how they play when tired (yes, it can recreate fatigue) and even, as for the case of Jerry Lee Lewis, how they play with their feet. For the guitar there is even more to take into account, like pad placement, fingernails, and bending of the strings, the list goes on.

The result is that songs recorded 100 years ago can and will be able to be re-recorded with modern recording equipment, allowing old songs to be revitalised and enjoyed once more "in surround sound or headphone listening".

And, of course, the technology goes well beyond just remastering. In theory, you could create entirely new recordings by long-dead artists, matching their exact styles. As the article suggests, you could toss John Lennon into a Rolling Stones song.

Of course, if this sounds sorta familiar, that's because we were just talking about the legal mess associated with Bluebeat.com's claims that the music it offers from its site for sale are not the original works by bands like the Beatles, but an entirely new recording through a "psycho-acoustic simulation."

So, now, take this software that supposedly can perfectly mimic a certain musician's playing, and have it record a song. Say it's a new song. Who owns the copyright? What if it's adding John Lennon to a Rolling Stone's song? Who owns the copyright? What if it's an old song, updated in some slight way? Who owns the copyright? What if it's just the same song but "remastered"? Who owns the copyright? The legal questions raised by this kind of software are going to keep copyright lawyers busy for a long, long time.

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Google Doesn't Rely On Intellectual Property For Its Leadership Position

Mike Masnick — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:11:09 PST

In the various debates we have on intellectual property, we often hear people insisting that Google's dominance is based on intellectual property -- even though there's very little evidence to support this at all. The people who make this argument are guilty of the same mistake made in studies that count all things covered by intellectual property laws as if they only exist because of those laws. Entertainment industry lobbyists, like The Copyright Alliance, love to tout that "$1.52 trillion of the nation's GDP" comes from intellectual property. But that's both misleading and wrong. The number itself is exaggerated, but it also gives credit to intellectual property for anything that touches IP. For example, when we dug into the methodology, we saw that the study counts things that clearly were not because of IP law: such as furniture and jewelry. Are the Copyright Alliance and its entertainment backers really trying to suggest that without copyright law we would have no furniture or jewelry?

Similarly, Google often gets lumped into these discussions, with people insisting that its position in the market is due to copyright and patents. Google does, in fact, have a bunch of patents -- but I watch the patent app filings and patent grants on a bunch of different companies each week, and Google tends to file significantly fewer patents than other comparable companies. Furthermore, I don't know of a single case where Google even hinted at or threatened another company with a patent infringement suit (if there are any examples, please let me know). It appears that Google has focused very much on just using patents for defensive purposes, since it is regularly sued by others for infringement.

Matt Asay, over at News.com, has now highlighted an even stronger example of how Google is showing that it's not relying on intellectual property, but on execution, for its business position. The company recently open sourced its Closure tools, which it uses to build its web services (disclosure: I'm good friends with one of the folks involved in this project, and yes, he reads Techdirt regularly). As Asay puts it:

In many ways, Google is giving away the recipe to those that would like to build a Google clone.

The problem? Google is so much more than software.

In fact, one of the primary reasons that Google can write and open-source so much software is that it isn't a software company. Not even remotely. I could have every line of Google's software, both open source and proprietary, and I couldn't hope to compete with Google.

Google is what Google does with the software, and not the software itself.

It's the execution, not the idea. It's the service, not the code.

In fact, this sort of activity confuses the hell out of companies that do rely on intellectual property. Again, Asay makes this clear:

Google and Red Hat have moved beyond software. Software enables their operations, but software doesn't define such operations. Google, for its part, is open sourcing Microsoft, one line of code at a time, and Microsoft hasn't a clue as to how to respond, because it only knows the old world: competition through better IP.

And that -- right there -- is the key point we keep trying to make around here. You don't need to rely on intellectual property. And, if you do, you are opening yourself up wide to competition that doesn't rely on IP and innovates in a way that simply cuts your legs out from under you. Yet... we'll still hear stories for years about how all of Google's billions are because of its intellectual property, even as it gives away more and more of it each and every day.

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AT&T responds to Verizon's 3G ad campaign -- by bragging about EDGE

Nilay Patel — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:17:00 PST

My iPhone 3GS, in downtown Chicago, as I wrote this post.

Verizon certainly seems to be getting under AT&T's skin with its ads focused on comparing 3G coverage -- not only is Ma Bell suing over 'em, it's now issuing PR to clarify what it sees as the inaccuracies of the entire campaign. If you'll recall, AT&T thinks Verizon's 1:1 comparison of 3G coverage maps makes it look like AT&T doesn't have any coverage at all across most of the country -- which means that our nation's largest wireless carrier is now in the sad position of pimping its gigantic EDGE network in response. Let's all gloss over the absolutely huge difference in 3G versus EDGE together, shall we?

With both 3G and EDGE coverage, customers can access the Internet, send e-mail, surf the Web, stream music, download videos, send photos, text, talk and more. The only difference - with some data applications, 3G is faster than EDGE.

Right, right -- the only difference. That must be why Apple named it the iPhone EDGE Slightly Faster.

Now, AT&T has a valid point when it says that its 3G map covers 75 percent of the nation's population, and that Verizon's conflation of total 3G coverage with actual network quality is slightly misleading. But you know what? We watch our iPhones drop from 3G to EDGE and even to GPRS all day long in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and that has nothing to do with the damn map, and everything to do with AT&T's actual network quality. Let's put it this way: Verizon's ad campaign would be totally ineffective if it didn't ring so true, and the best way for AT&T to counter these ads is to build a rock-solid network, not filing lawsuits and issuing press releases bragging about freaking EDGE. We all clear on this? Good.

Filed under: Cellphones

AT&T responds to Verizon's 3G ad campaign -- by bragging about EDGE originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gizmo5 Currently Closed To New Users [Google]

Rosa Golijan — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:32:11 PST

We knew that Gizmo5 was acquired by Google, but now we're seeing the first effect of that merger as Gizmo5 has closed its doors to new users until the Google-powered re-launch. [Cool Geex]

BT profits tumble 45% as cost cutting swells - Times Online

(author unknown) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:54:21 PST

AFP

BT profits tumble 45% as cost cutting swells
Times Online
British Telecom today revealed that profits for the first six months of the year plunged by 45 per cent and increased its cost-cutting target for the year ...
Cost-cutting impacts on BT half-year profitsFinance Markets (blog)

all 49 news articles »

The future of business is in ecosystems

Jeff Jarvis — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:39:22 PST

Last week, I said that the future of news is entrepreneurial (not institutional). Today, a sequel: The future of business is in ecosystems (not conglomerates or industries).

At the Foursquare conference last week, I was struck by the miss-by-a-mile worldviews held by the chiefs of big, old conglomerates and the entrepreneurs starting new, nimble companies. The conference is off the record, so I won’t quote anyone by name. And in truth, these are the same conversations I hear often elsewhere. Having these different tribes conveniently in the same room merely focused the contrast for me.

In one moment, a very successful mogully man was slack-jawed in amazement at how little money – “$50,000!” – one of three entrepreneurs had used to start another fast-growing enterprise. The big man thinks big – that’s what made him big. The small guys think small and get big by using existing platforms and depending on their users to like and market them. To the new guys, it’s so obvious.

Here was the key moment for me last week: In a discussion about the importance of distribution, some start-up guys – each the creators of new enterprises that took off like gun shots – were asked by a representative of the big, old club which company they would most want to do distribution deals with. The start-up guys cocked their heads like confused puppies. Why would we want to do that? they asked. What was unsaid: Doing a deal with one company would be so limiting. We get our distribution through customers and developers, through embedding and APIs and social connections. That’s how we grew so big so fast for so little. Don’t you see that?

No, they don’t.

This week, we see this contrast, too, in Rupert Murdoch’s threat – he thinks it’s a threat – to cut off Google. Nose. Face. Cut. Spite. Murdoch – whodoesn’t use the internet – does not see how distribution works today. He does not understand that being open to the link economy brings him free distribution, free marketing, great benefit. That’s because he, like his fellow old machers, won by taking control rather than giving it up. This new world is utterly inside-out from the world they built. It breaks all their rules and makes new ones (which is what I tried to analyze in What Would Google Do?). That’s what makes it so damned hard for them to understand it.

In our New Business Models for News at CUNY, we saw quickly that a big, old newspaper company was not going to be replaced by a big, new newspaper company but that instead, news would come more and more from ecosystems made up of scores of companies operating under different means, motives, and models, each dependent on the others to optimize their success. That is why we built in networks that enable separate sites to join, creating critical mass they can sell to advertisers. That is also why we factored in the benefit of platforms, cutting their infrastructure costs to near-zero.

And there, I believe, is the structure of the future of business in the new, post-industrial, decentralized, opened economy. Oh, sure, every economy has always been an ecosystem made up of interdependent relationships. But they were based on zero-sum arithmetic: take and control so others cannot. They work at arm’s length. They negotiate every relationship.

Sure, even in the huggy ecosystem, companies fight and compete. But in an ecosystem-based economy, companies benefit – they find efficiency and growth – by working collaboratively. As I see it, the new economy and its opportunities will be built in three layers:

1. Platforms. There’s tremendous benefit in building a platform and the more people use to succeed, the more the platform succeeds. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay – you know all the examples.

2. Entrepreneurial enterprises. Thanks to the platforms, it’s incredibly inexpensive to start new companies. It’s also a helluva lot cheaper to fail (and try again). This is why I believe that the future of news – and many other industries – is entrepreneurial: because it can be. It’s not just media and its bits. It’s manufacturing (because you can use others’ factories and distribution channels and your own customers as your platforms).

3. Networks. It is still necessary to gather the smalls together into bigs: audience brought together so advertisers can buy access to them more easily; purchasing brought together to get better prices. So there is business in creating and serving these networks.

For the sake a PowerPoint, a diagram of the three layers of an ecosystem-based economy:

In our New Business Models for News Project, this is how I (crudely) drew the ecosystem for news.

How do you draw the conglomerate-based industry? With boxes, each separate, with arrows pointing to each other at a distance. Simplistic? Sure, but the change in the worldview of the new economy looks that basic when you hear the two tribes trying to understand each other.

And if you haven’t had enough of my silly charts, here’s another on video.

Cisco goes Social

Jim Lundy — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:59:51 PST

I just spent the last 2 days at Cisco’s annual Analyst and Partner Summit in San Francisco, where they unleashed over 61 different products. Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers was at his best and he delivered a keynote that was as good as any I’ve seen in recent years. Focusing on what it calls The New Collabortion Experience, Cisco cemented itself as a world class producer of events and the opening video (produced by Cisco’s Lynn Lucas) was awesome. To ensure that the right tone was set, Cisco SVP Tony Bates (who has multiple business units reporting to him) personally did most of the demonstrations on-stage.

We have published two Gartner First Takes (Cisco Collaboration Shows Promise and Cisco Confronts Microsoft with Cloud Email Service ) on these announcements and there are more Research Notes on the way.

The things that struck me can be captured in three words: video, social, and software. It is clear that John Chambers believes in the power of video as a transformative technology and Cisco had some new offerings, such as Show and Share, that will allow people to have a corporate grade you-tube for the enterprise.

Social inferences were everywhere. Its ECP platform is its foray into Enterprise Social Software and Cisco already has its Salesforce deployed on that platform, which Cisco refers to as the Integrated Workforce Experience (iWe). Its new WebEx email offering features a new Ajax email client that can be configured to enable social features, which we describe as The Social Inbox. Cisco also showed off a concept called Pulse that enables expertise location and a slew of other Social Network analysis capabilities.

Finally, Cisco didn’t say it over the last two days, but the biggest thing they did was make a major shift into software, with products that enable on-premise or cloud based offerings (note, not all products do both). To pull all this off, Cisco also recently hired Debra Chrapaty, who most recently was a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft.

Cisco still has lots of work to do, but it was clear their partners were stunned with the sheer number of products they introduced and also excited about the possibilities that they represent. We’ll be watching these developments as they unfold….

Verizon to Launch an iPhone Next Year?

Colin Gibbs — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:56:02 PST

The mobile space has long buzzed with rumors of a Verizon Wireless version of the iPhone, and according to Northeast Securities, the device may finally arrive next year. Citing its supply-chain checks, the financial services firm said in a research note issued today that Apple will launch a WCDMA/CDMA2000-enabled version of the device — not an LTE version — through Verizon by the summer of 2010.

Northeast Securities’ note jibes with a new report from OTR Global via AppleInsider, which claims that Apple plans to roll out a hybrid iPhone — enabling the Cupertino company to sell a single global handset “to all carriers” — by the third quarter of next year. Similar to Northeast Securities, OTR Global said the phone would use a new hybrid chip produced by Qualcomm that would allow the iPhone to support Verizon’s network in addition to retaining compatibility with UMTS 3G networks.

As Sebastian noted last month, Apple could benefit greatly from loosening AT&T’s stranglehold on the iPhone in the U.S., and Verizon would surely love to kick out a key pillar of AT&T’s growth from the past year. While Verizon’s former lone-wolf strategy wouldn’t play well with Apple’s tightly controlled App Store, the nation’s largest carrier seems to have softened its go-it-alone stance as it embraces Google with its Droid initiative. A Verizon/Apple tie-up might have been unthinkable to many of us a year ago, but it’s looking more and more like an inevitability.