viernes, 25 de febrero de 2011
viernes, 11 de febrero de 2011
La Colombiana que conmovió al jurado en el concurso de 'American Idol' en EE.UU.
COPYRIGHT © 2011 CEET Prohibida su reproducción parcial, así como su traducción a cualquier idioma sin autorización escrita de su titular
jueves, 10 de febrero de 2011
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop rallies troops in brutally honest 'burning platform' memo
Tomado de: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-rallies-troops-in-brutally-honest-burnin/
Autor: Chris Ziegler
Autor: Chris Ziegler
"The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable." This is just one of many, many pieces of stark knowledge allegedly dropped by recently-appointed Nokia CEO Stephen Elop -- formerly of Microsoft -- in a roughly 1,300-word memo to the company's employees that we've received today. Though we can't vouch for the authenticity, it's notable that the memo contains a portion previously reported by The Register and heard by sources at TechCrunch Europe, so it would seem that we've simply received the whole thing. Elop goes on to suggest that his company is "standing on a burning platform" and must "change [its] behavior," suggesting that the adoption of a non-homegrown platform like Android or Windows Phone 7 is a more realistic possibility than ever before.
Update: We've now heard from multiple trusted sources that this memo is indeed real, and was posted to an internal Nokia employee system. That makes it one of the most exciting and interesting CEO memos we've ever seen -- and we're absolutely dying to see how Elop plans to shake things up.
Overall, the communique laments Nokia's lateral movement while Apple and Google have started eating its lunch on the mid- and high end and Shenzhen-based off brands have started to cut into its traditional dominance in emerging markets, leaving Espoo with virtually zero market leadership. It's a stark revelation that seems befitting of a man brought in from the outside -- he's neither Finnish, nor raised in the Nokia system -- and he promises to start revealing the way forward this Friday at the company's Capital Markets Day event where grandiose plans have been unveiled in the past.
Whether the memo is legitimate or not, the frequency and intensity of big-time rumors floating around Nokia ahead of Capital Markets Day (and MWC next week) have been pretty wild: we've heard they'll be announcing a partnership with Microsoft possibly revolving around Windows Phone 7, that a boatload of executives would be shown the door, and that Elop would start looking to Nokia's new Silicon Valley campus as its center of gravity, with execs and senior management expected to start spending more time outside Finland.
We'll know far, far more about what's going on over in Espoo in the next few days, but in the meantime, here are some choice quotes from the memo:
Update: We've now heard from multiple trusted sources that this memo is indeed real, and was posted to an internal Nokia employee system. That makes it one of the most exciting and interesting CEO memos we've ever seen -- and we're absolutely dying to see how Elop plans to shake things up.
Overall, the communique laments Nokia's lateral movement while Apple and Google have started eating its lunch on the mid- and high end and Shenzhen-based off brands have started to cut into its traditional dominance in emerging markets, leaving Espoo with virtually zero market leadership. It's a stark revelation that seems befitting of a man brought in from the outside -- he's neither Finnish, nor raised in the Nokia system -- and he promises to start revealing the way forward this Friday at the company's Capital Markets Day event where grandiose plans have been unveiled in the past.
Whether the memo is legitimate or not, the frequency and intensity of big-time rumors floating around Nokia ahead of Capital Markets Day (and MWC next week) have been pretty wild: we've heard they'll be announcing a partnership with Microsoft possibly revolving around Windows Phone 7, that a boatload of executives would be shown the door, and that Elop would start looking to Nokia's new Silicon Valley campus as its center of gravity, with execs and senior management expected to start spending more time outside Finland.
We'll know far, far more about what's going on over in Espoo in the next few days, but in the meantime, here are some choice quotes from the memo:
- "...there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem."
- "They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range."
- "Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry's innovation to its core."
- "We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market."
- "...Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements..."
- "Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem."
- "We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven't been delivering innovation fast enough. We're not collaborating internally. Nokia, our platform is burning."
Hello there,
There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform's edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters.
As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a "burning platform," and he needed to make a choice.
He decided to jump. It was unexpected. In ordinary circumstances, the man would never consider plunging into icy waters. But these were not ordinary times - his platform was on fire. The man survived the fall and the waters. After he was rescued, he noted that a "burning platform" caused a radical change in his behaviour.
We too, are standing on a "burning platform," and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour.
Over the past few months, I've shared with you what I've heard from our shareholders, operators, developers, suppliers and from you. Today, I'm going to share what I've learned and what I have come to believe.
I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform.
And, we have more than one explosion - we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us.
For example, there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem.
In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent. They are enjoying a tremendous growth trajectory with a 78 percent earnings growth year over year in Q4 2010. Apple demonstrated that if designed well, consumers would buy a high-priced phone with a great experience and developers would build applications. They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range.
And then, there is Android. In about two years, Android created a platform that attracts application developers, service providers and hardware manufacturers. Android came in at the high-end, they are now winning the mid-range, and quickly they are going downstream to phones under €100. Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry's innovation to its core.
Let's not forget about the low-end price range. In 2008, MediaTek supplied complete reference designs for phone chipsets, which enabled manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China to produce phones at an unbelievable pace. By some accounts, this ecosystem now produces more than one third of the phones sold globally - taking share from us in emerging markets.
While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind.
The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.
We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.
At the midrange, we have Symbian. It has proven to be non-competitive in leading markets like North America. Additionally, Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements, leading to slowness in product development and also creating a disadvantage when we seek to take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead.
At the lower-end price range, Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, "the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation." They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us.
And the truly perplexing aspect is that we're not even fighting with the right weapons. We are still too often trying to approach each price range on a device-to-device basis.
The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we're going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.
This is one of the decisions we need to make. In the meantime, we've lost market share, we've lost mind share and we've lost time.
On Tuesday, Standard & Poor's informed that they will put our A long term and A-1 short term ratings on negative credit watch. This is a similar rating action to the one that Moody's took last week. Basically it means that during the next few weeks they will make an analysis of Nokia, and decide on a possible credit rating downgrade. Why are these credit agencies contemplating these changes? Because they are concerned about our competitiveness.
Consumer preference for Nokia declined worldwide. In the UK, our brand preference has slipped to 20 percent, which is 8 percent lower than last year. That means only 1 out of 5 people in the UK prefer Nokia to other brands. It's also down in the other markets, which are traditionally our strongholds: Russia, Germany, Indonesia, UAE, and on and on and on.
How did we get to this point? Why did we fall behind when the world around us evolved?
This is what I have been trying to understand. I believe at least some of it has been due to our attitude inside Nokia. We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven't been delivering innovation fast enough. We're not collaborating internally.
Nokia, our platform is burning.
We are working on a path forward -- a path to rebuild our market leadership. When we share the new strategy on February 11, it will be a huge effort to transform our company. But, I believe that together, we can face the challenges ahead of us. Together, we can choose to define our future.
The burning platform, upon which the man found himself, caused the man to shift his behaviour, and take a bold and brave step into an uncertain future. He was able to tell his story. Now, we have a great opportunity to do the same.
Stephen.
© 2011 AOL Inc. All rights Reserved.
jueves, 3 de febrero de 2011
Copycat? Google Says Bing Copies Search Results
Tomado de: http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=003000C9B5WF
Autor: Jennifer LeClaire
Autor: Jennifer LeClaire
The search wars have heated up, with Google charging that Bing is copying Google's search results, even gobbledygook queries. Google says an experiment found URLs from Google searches turned up on Bing and proved Microsoft is mining Google search results. Microsoft called Google's experiment a stunt and a "backhanded compliment."
Is Bing copying Google's search results? Google says yes and Microsoft says no -- and it's stirring up plenty of drama in the search world this week.
Google offers sophisticated experiment results that it says proves Bing is using its search results. Google said it first noticed Bing's alleged copycat behavior last summer and took a closer look over the following months. According to Google, URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries -- even results Google considered mistakes from its algorithms.
"We created about 100 'synthetic queries' -- queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]," said Google Fellow Amit Singhal. "As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google's top result a unique (real) web page which had nothing to do with the query."
Tapping Google Data?
Google then gave 20 of its engineers laptops with a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, Singhal said Google opted in to the Suggested Sites feature of IE8 and accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.
"We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page and click on the results -- i.e., the results we inserted," Singhal said. "We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing."
Singhal said the experiment confirmed Google's suspicions that Bing is using some combination of Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature, and the Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft's Customer Experience Improvement Program, or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on Google and the Google search results they get.
A Spy-Novelesque Stunt
Microsoft quickly responded to Google's allegations. Harry Shum, corporate vice president for Bing, called the issue a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking.
"It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we'll take it as a backhanded compliment," Shum said. "But it doesn't accurately portray how we use opt-in customer Relevant Products/Services data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience."
Shum went on to say that many companies across the Internet use collective intelligence to make their products better every day and defended Bing's "distinct approach to search."
A Bitter PR Turn
So who's right? Is Bing all-out copying Google's search results? Or is Bing simply improving its search engine based on collective intelligence?
As Greg Sterling sees it, the verbal brawl marks a bitter public-relations turn in the intensifying competition between the two companies.
"Arguably Google did catch Bing doing something improper and copying selected Google results. But people also defend what Bing was doing as capturing 'public' user behavior and clicks and factoring that into its algorithm," Sterling said. "As it stands now, this isn't going to have much of an impact on consumers in the end, but among tech insiders it would appear to tarnish Bing's brand."
Is Bing copying Google's search results? Google says yes and Microsoft says no -- and it's stirring up plenty of drama in the search world this week.
Google offers sophisticated experiment results that it says proves Bing is using its search results. Google said it first noticed Bing's alleged copycat behavior last summer and took a closer look over the following months. According to Google, URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries -- even results Google considered mistakes from its algorithms.
"We created about 100 'synthetic queries' -- queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]," said Google Fellow Amit Singhal. "As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google's top result a unique (real) web page which had nothing to do with the query."
Tapping Google Data?
Google then gave 20 of its engineers laptops with a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, Singhal said Google opted in to the Suggested Sites feature of IE8 and accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.
"We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page and click on the results -- i.e., the results we inserted," Singhal said. "We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing."
Singhal said the experiment confirmed Google's suspicions that Bing is using some combination of Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature, and the Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft's Customer Experience Improvement Program, or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on Google and the Google search results they get.
A Spy-Novelesque Stunt
Microsoft quickly responded to Google's allegations. Harry Shum, corporate vice president for Bing, called the issue a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking.
"It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we'll take it as a backhanded compliment," Shum said. "But it doesn't accurately portray how we use opt-in customer Relevant Products/Services data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience."
Shum went on to say that many companies across the Internet use collective intelligence to make their products better every day and defended Bing's "distinct approach to search."
A Bitter PR Turn
So who's right? Is Bing all-out copying Google's search results? Or is Bing simply improving its search engine based on collective intelligence?
As Greg Sterling sees it, the verbal brawl marks a bitter public-relations turn in the intensifying competition between the two companies.
"Arguably Google did catch Bing doing something improper and copying selected Google results. But people also defend what Bing was doing as capturing 'public' user behavior and clicks and factoring that into its algorithm," Sterling said. "As it stands now, this isn't going to have much of an impact on consumers in the end, but among tech insiders it would appear to tarnish Bing's brand."
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