Montage Beverly Hills |Scarpetta Restaurant | Chef Scott Conant

Baby it's cold outside (62°/ 53°°F°C) So if you're looking for a wonderful place to duck into, by all means, step on over to the Montage Beverly Hills Hotel and make a B line over to Chef Scott Conant's spot - Scarpetta Restaurant. Chef Scott Conant puts it down in the kitchen - using seasonal ingredients that make you want to kiss the Chef! You've seen him on The Food Network's 24 Hour Restaurant Battle, Wednesday nights at 10/9c., as well as a guest judge on The Food Network's Chopped, Tuesday nights at 10pm/9c., Bravo's Top Chef,
Good Morning America and The Travel Channel's Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.
This man, Chef Conant, invites you to this magnificent Mediterranean-inspired interiors that makes one want to stay for hours. Just look at the way Chef Conant makes spaghetti look like a piece of art work. Ummm. Now, when you taste his dishes, you look around the corner to see if you've stepped out of Beverly Hills and into Italy, Honey!
So, do yourself a favor, get out of the cold and into Scarpetta Beverly Hills @ the Montage Beverly Hills Hotel.











Montage Beverly Hills 225 North Cañon Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210 310.860.7800

© Copyright 2010 Montage Beverly Hills. All Rights Reserved

RIM's Q3 Financials: A Tale of Two BlackBerries

People have been asking for my take on RIM's latest quarterly earnings, which were reported last week (link).  The short answer is that I am both less worried and more worried than I was before.  I am less worried because the company has more strength than I realized internationally, and I am more worried because the situation in North America is worse than I thought.

Before I get into my comments, I should point out that I don't think you can use a single quarter to declare a company either dead or saved, especially when it's as big and prominent as RIM.  In the last couple of years, attitudes toward RIM have gone through a couple of cycles in which negative coverage about the company builds up, the company has a good quarter, and the coverage dies down for a while again.  I think it's more useful to look beyond the individual quarters and try to see the long term trends.

In that spirit, I think RIM's earnings were good, but I was more interested in the things management said about moving toward new products and services, and by the very rapid changes happening in RIM's international sales.  Overall, I wouldn't say the company is out of the woods at all, and 2011 will be a decisive test of its viability.  Here's an overview of the earnings, followed by some comments on international and the new products.


Updating the charts

I plugged the latest numbers into the charts from my post on RIM in October (link).  They generally look like good news:


Total BlackBerry Subscribers

(Quarters are RIM fiscal quarters)

Continued nice growth.  But we'll come back to this one in a minute.


Net New Subscribers Per Quarter

This one is encouraging: additions went up compared to the quarter before.  But it's only one quarter; over the year, the rate of additions is flat.  Watch the next several quarters to see if there is a trend.


New Subscribers Per Unit Sold

Continuing to decline.  If you're looking for bad news on RIM, this is probably the chart you focus on. 


Device Gross Margins

Good news, they were stable for the quarter.  This is another statistic where you want to look at the trend rather than just a quarter's results.  And the trend for the last year looks stable, which ain't bad.  (Remember, I have to estimate this number because RIM doesn't report device gross margins separately.) 


Device Average Selling Price

Also stable for the last couple of quarters.  Good news.


Service Revenue Per User
 

 (Dollars per quarter.)  

I didn't chart this one last time, but it's interesting.  RIM currently gets about $15 in service fees per quarter per BlackBerry subscriber.  That's the money operators pay to RIM per user for the email service.  This revenue has been declining slowly but steadily for years, and I don't completely understand why.  RIM says it's due in part to a shift toward prepaid customers, which would fit with the international growth they're seeing.  But I wonder if also the operators are becoming less willing to share revenue with RIM.  Anyway, I think it's a warning sign -- as your market matures you want to find ways to make more money per user, not less.

Adding up all of the results, it looks like a very nice quarter.  But remember, one of my main points was that good short-term numbers can mask long-term problems.  And in this case, the way RIM reports its numbers hides some challenges.


Looking ahead: A Tale of Two BlackBerries

Two issues really stuck out to me as I looked at the RIM announcement: International sales, and the comments by RIM's management.

In the post I wrote in October, I missed the importance of RIM's international growth.  It was a significant oversight.  Several people, starting with mobile analyst Dean Bubley (link), pointed out in comments on my blog that BlackBerry has become very popular among young people in many parts of Europe and elsewhere as a messaging phone.  RIM also claims it is the number one smartphone platform in Latin America.  Its appeal was explained by analyst Horace Deidu, who notes that the BlackBerry Messenger app is more attractive than generic texting because it's free, and because you can see when your messages have been read (link).

Deidu looked at RIM's most recent quarterly financials, and concluded that RIM's revenues had actually declined in North America, a fact masked by the company's rapid growth in other parts of the world (link).  That surprised me, because it wasn't featured prominently in most of the reports on RIM's quarter.  It was also pretty alarming.  All of the charts above look relatively reassuring, but they're a blend of the international business and the North American one.  Since the signs of an impending platform collapse are subtle (something I explained in my October post), it's possible that the international growth is disguising big warning signs in North America.

Unfortunately, RIM doesn't report early indicators like gross margin by region, so I had to look for whatever data I could find.  I managed to dig out the numbers on the RIM subscriber base in North America vs. elsewhere.  RIM doesn't report this directly, but you can calculate it from the quarterly reports.  Here's what I found:

BlackBerry Subscribers

Total subscribers in millions

About half of RIM's subscribers are now outside North America (the crossover will probably happen this quarter).  Growth in North America looks pretty slow.  Here's what the subscriber growth rate looks like:


Quarterly Growth in Subscribers

Percent growth from quarter before

The BlackBerry subscriber base outside of North America has grown rapidly, increasing 15%-25% every quarter for the last three and a half years.  North American growth was also strong until about 18 months ago (the second quarter of FY 2010), when growth softened.  In the last two quarters, subscriber growth in North America dropped to almost zero. 

Yikes.  That sure smells like market saturation to me, and the process is a lot further along than I thought.

(Note: I had to interpolate the numbers for a few quarters in fiscal 2008 and 2009, because RIM didn't report them every quarter.)

So at the risk of oversimplifying a bit, the data and the anecdotes from around the world paint a picture of two RIMs: A consumer messaging phone company that has tapped into a new demographic and is growing fast in various parts of the world outside North America, and a prosumer e-mail phone company that has hit the wall in North America and needs very badly to re-ignite its growth through new products and services.  It is the best of times, it is the...oh, you get the idea.

This explains a lot of the confusion we're seeing in attitudes toward RIM online.  Like blind men feeling the elephant, we see the RIM that's in front of us -- either the consumer RIM that's growing well, or the prosumer RIM that has stalled out.  Who's seeing the real RIM?  We all are.  The phone market is heavily segmented, and it's common for a company to do well in one region and poorly in another (just look at Nokia).

I have to give a lot of credit to the folks at RIM for managing to crank up the growth internationally just as its North American business faltered.  I don't know if they were lucky or good, but it's a very hard balance to hit.  On the other hand, I don't think RIM is doing any favors to investors by playing down the regional data in its financial reports.  That creates a lot of confusion.

What it means for RIM.  It looks like the North American business may be closer to a platform collapse than I realized.  I think urgent action is needed to keep the company's North American users loyal.  The silver lining in that dark cloud is that RIM's growth in other regions can help fund the changes needed.  But time is short, and I still worry about RIM's ability to quickly focus on new differentiators and create compelling user experiences.

There's another path RIM could choose to follow -- it could milk its North American prosumer base for profits while accelerating its growth with young people overseas.  But if you can trust the comments of RIM's execs, that is not their direction.  They seem to believe they are on the verge of succeeding everywhere, in all segments.  RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie was effusive when he took questions in RIM's recent quarterly conference call (you can read a transcript here). 

His message boils down to this:
     --PlayBook will be a huge hit.
     --The new QNX operating system is great.
     --Unlike other companies (Apple and Google), RIM will work in cooperation with mobile operators, content providers, and banks to produce services for customers.  RIM will not bypass them, so they will steer customers to RIM.
     --Don't worry about the iPhone and Android app base, because mobile applications written to a particular OS will become less important in the near future, as users and developers look to support web standards and intermediate development platforms like Flash.
     --RIM provides the sort of reliability and security that enterprises want, so it will be the leading B2B mobile provider.
     --RIM is growing very fast, and has a lot of plans for 2011 that have not been fully revealed yet.  Adding these all together, the company has tremendous opportunities in the coming year.

I was surprised by how relentlessly upbeat Balsillie's comments were -- most CEOs usually hedge their statements to avoid saying something that could be quoted in a shareholder lawsuit.  Balsillie sounds like he's either extremely optimistic or extremely anxious to convince people not to write his company off.  But I checked some of the previous calls, and it turns out he's always like that. 

It's important that you understand the breadth and depth of RIM's ambition, so here are extended excerpts from his comments:

"We have real differentiation and we have real opportunities for extension of the business in a whole bunch of ways. I mean, just the pent-up interest in the PlayBook is really overwhelming, and then you know the whole aspects of carrier billing and value-added services -- you're just going to see a litany of things happening in that area, both for the BlackBerry tablet and the BlackBerry smartphone over the year....

"We're laying in the pieces here to sustain really exciting growth for a long, long, long time....we'll have some pretty pleasant surprises in what we're doing throughout the calendar 2011....

"We're selling lots...We have good products. Our engagement is good. I feel very, very good about U.S. I mean, we're meeting with the guys that run all the carriers, we've got plans, our carrier partners are in place. There is a real desire to do a lot of things and a lot of these things are locked in and new things are being planned....

"I feel great about where we're sitting for 2011 in the carriers in North America, and we've held our base and we've had growth in shipment and we've had okay net adds, but we're positioned to grow very, very strong. We've really knocked the cover off the ball in so many other markets around the world and yet our penetration in those are still very, very modest....We fell very, very good about the future....

"The product roadmap looks great and the application extension B2B and B2C is so strong.... You're going to see a lot of the stuff come out, really over the next month. So it should be very, very interesting....

"The interest in PlayBook in the B2B is uniformly strong....I can't think of an account that isn't just beating down to get units....Overwhelming interest and overwhelming pressure to get units are a pretty fair characterization. So we're very confident just what it's going to do for businesses....

"The core essence of the business is still just moving along so well and growing so fast. So if you layer in this tablet category, and then you layer in advanced services strategies and then you layer in leapfrog future-proved architectures, I feel very, very good about where we are in the U.S. I feel very good about where we are around the world.... Do I think we're in a position to really take where we are and extend it further in a sustained basis in the U.S. and abroad?  In my view, without a doubt....Just watch the year unfold and watch 2011 unfold and you should know. I'm fine just letting the proof being in the deliverables. We do keep delivering and we're going to keep delivering, so we're just going to keep it up....

"I think the PlayBook redefines what a tablet should do. I think we've articulated some elements of it and I think this idea of a proprietary SDK and unnecessary apps -- though there is a huge role for apps, I think it's going to shift in the market and I think it's going to shift very, very quickly and I think there's going to be a strong appetite for web fidelity and tool familiarity. And I think there's going to be a rapid desire for high performance, and I think we are way ahead on that. I think, CIO friendliness is...we are way ahead on that....So I think the PlayBook clearly sets the bar way higher on performance and you're going to see more. I think the enterprise stuff, we're seriously extending. I think the BlackBerry is still number one in social collaboration. And I think with the PlayBook and that environment we're going to set the new standard on performance and tools, very powerful tools and we're growing very, very fast."

This is called tying yourself to the mast. 

Maybe Balsillie is right.  Maybe RIM's on the verge of enormous opportunity and explosive growth.  I hope it is (seriously; I like RIM and I'd like it to succeed).  But RIM is fighting on an enormous number of fronts, and that scares me for a company that has problems creating high-quality knockout products and is transitioning to a new operating system.  The effect could be like flooring the gas in a car with a bad transmission -- you might get a surge of power, or you might leave half the engine on the highway.  Restoring momentum to a stalled-out platform is a very difficult task, and it rarely goes smoothly, or succeeds in a single year.  With all the hype the company is putting into PlayBook and the rest of its strategy, anything less than stellar success in all regions and all product lines in 2011 is going to be seen as a big disappointment.  And that sort of disappointment could be the signal that causes users to turn away from its platform in North America.

As I said two months ago, I think RIM's future depends on its ability to focus, differentiate, and execute.  I think the latest earnings just reinforce that.

[Note:  This post was revised Dec. 22 to add a paragraph and clarify some explanations.]

Have a Riffstick Art Christmas!

You say that you want to make sure that you keep your Christmas eco-friendly?

You remember David Hrobowski
(the H is silent - pronounced ro-bow-ski) from his original creation of chairs, lamps, coffee tables and more - made out of ice cream sticks?
Just look at the Riffstick Artwork - it is soooo creative and beautiful!
As of this moment, David Hrobowski has created something so magical for the holidays in the form of a Christmas tree!

David says, "The tree stands at almost 7 feet tall and 42 inches at the widest point. There are 88 branches ranging in size from 17" to 3" and of course 88 ornaments. The ornaments are in three colors (red, green & blue) and wrap around the tree like garland. The top of the tree lights up and has a removable crown so one can easily change the light bulb and/or bulb color.
There are in excess of 18,000 sticks used to make the tree and 5 months to complete. I started the tree in June and completed it in November. "
David is a brilliant man that completes what he starts.

You can view this beautiful tree and more of Riffstick Art, in the window of Reborn Antiques, located at 853 N. LaCienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90069 - 310. 289.7785












photography by Mark Dierickx and Steven Tassopoulos

Happy Hanukkah - Come Celebrate w/ the Menorah Lighting at Two Rodeo Drive

On Monday, Dec 6th, at 7:30pm, Two Rodeo and Chabad Beverly Hills will have
Rabbi Mendel Shusterman lead the lighting of the crystal Menorah. This is truly a family event, a cultural exchange that all can enjoy - no matter what race, creed or religious background. Won't you come and enjoy traditional ethnic Jewish food and so many other goodies with the Community?

On Thursday, Dec 9th, starting at 4:00pm, Cañon Drive will kick off a fabulous street party. There will be all kinds of family oriented things to do! Come shop, sample delicious food from the different varieties of restaurants - stay warm sipping hot cider and hot coco with everyone.
At 6:00pm. Beverly Hills High School Madrigal Singers (Vocal Ambassadors) will treat all to a holiday concert in Beverly Cañon Gardens (and yes, your pet pooch is welcomed). There will be face painting, a scavenger hunt and live entertainment all along Cañon Drive. The Amanda Foundation will brighten several spots on Cañon with some of the cutest pets available for adoption. The event really builds up momentum as you stroll towards Spago Beverly Hills.

Pop in and have a nosh and say hello to man with mad skills, Wolfgang Puck and the eloquent Barbara Lazaroff, the woman that is also the brain that created all the beauty that you see @ Spago Beverly Hills.

Hope to see you there!
Love & light,
C
Art work the sole property of Beverly Hills Conference & Visitors Bureau

May I Suggest You Stop on By...

There are plenty of things to do and see in Beverly Hills during these oh so cool winter Californian days and evenings.
Check out 85 years of Cinematic History at the Academy’s Grand Lobby Gallery; it is free and open to the public. Exhibit hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm and weekends, noon – 6:00 pm. For additional program information, please call (310) 247-3600 or visit online:
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd. Beverly Hills, CA 90210

Roddy McDowell Photographic Archive Margaret Herrick Library all rights reserved

Hope to see you there.
Smooches, C

Is Symbian dead? And if so, who killed it?

"We should declare victory and go home."
--Apocryphal quote attributed to George David Aiken

I hesitate to write anything about Symbian, because it's a great way to get branded a parochial American, or an Apple fanboi, or a "member of the US-protectionistic mobs braying for blood," to paraphrase a comment from a tech discussion forum in the UK this month.

But there's been a huge cloud of smoke and very little light in the recent online discussions of the changes at Symbian. Is Symbian dead? Is it stronger than ever? What's really going on? I wanted to see if I could make sense of the announcements. Besides, there are some important lessons from the Symbian experience, and I'd like to call those out.

Here's my take on what's happened: The business entity called Symbian was originally designed to prevent Microsoft from controlling the mobile OS standard, without having Symbian itself seize control over the mobile phone companies that funded it. In that task it succeeded. However, as a company run by a consortium, Symbian's governance was politicized and inefficient. This left Symbian woefully unequipped to compete with Apple and Google. A different approach was needed, and Nokia's new management has finally come to terms with that. As a result, Symbian as an organization is now defunct, and Symbian as an OS is becoming background infrastructure that has little relevance to the mobile platform wars.


To explain why I reached that conclusion, I have to start with a quick refresher on Symbian's history, for readers who haven't been following it closely...

There are two things named Symbian: Symbian the company and Symbian the OS. Some of the confusion this month was caused by people mixing up the two things. Symbian OS began as EPOC, the operating system used in Psion's handheld devices. EPOC was spun out of Psion in 1998 as a separate company called Symbian, co-owned by Psion and most of the leading mobile phone companies of the day, led by Nokia. The idea was that all of them would use the renamed Symbian OS in their smartphones, enabling them to put up a unified front against Microsoft, which they feared would rule the smartphone market.

Over time Nokia came to be the dominant manufacturer of Symbian OS phones outside of Japan, largely (in my opinion) because the Symbian phones made by other mobile phone companies didn't sell well. Eventually the other mobile phone companies no longer wanted to pay for a joint venture that was mostly just supplying software to Nokia. Linux was gaining momentum as a free, open source mobile OS, so the Symbian partners, led by Nokia, decided in 2008 to convert Symbian OS into an open source project. Nokia hired most of the Symbian engineers, and gave away their code through the foundation.

Symbian the company was replaced by the Symbian Foundation, a nonprofit tasked with managing the open source process and encouraging other companies to sign up to use the software. The idea was that Nokia, the other Symbian licensees, and a growing hoard of academics and developers would work on various parts of the OS, contributing back their modified code to the shared base. The move to open source kept some level of engagement from several other mobile phone companies, most notably Samsung and SonyEricsson.

But both companies continued to have poor sales for their Symbian phones, and this fall they announced that they had no further plans to use the OS. That left DoCoMo in Japan as the only other major user of Symbian. Nokia was stuck with an open source foundation that mostly just supplied its own software back to it. That wasn't going to be viable. So earlier this month, Nokia and Symbian announced three significant changes:

--The Symbian Foundation is being dramatically scaled back to "a legal entity responsible for licensing software and other intellectual property, such as the Symbian trademark." (link). In other words, it's just a shell. Symbian is now truly Nokia's OS. Nokia will plan, develop, and manage the Symbian code base, and distribute it directly to anyone who still wants it (presumably DoCoMo). You can read a biting commentary on the changes here.

--At the same time, Nokia reaffirmed an announcement it made in October that it is focusing all of its application development support on the Qt software layer that it purchased several years ago (link). Qt will now apparently be Nokia's one and only application layer, deployed on both Symbian and the upcoming MeeGo OS being codeveloped with Intel (link).

--The EU is putting 11 million Euros into a new organization, called Symbeose (which stands for "Symbian – the Embedded Operating System for Europe"), which will help fund the development of advanced Symbian OS features, including asymmetric multiprocessing, dev tools, memory management, image processing, video acceleration, speech to text, mobile payment, multimedia formats, and embedded systems beyond mobile. There are two semi-conflicting explanations of what Symbeose is all about. Some people say it's aimed at turning Symbian into an embedded OS that can run in all sorts of devices (why Europe needs that instead of Linux is unclear to me, but you can hear some discussion of the wrongheaded North American mobile paradigm here). Others say the intent is to resurrect Symbian OS as a smartphone OS used by companies other than Nokia. In a presentation, Symbian Foundation said the investment is intended to "combat mobile device and service homogeneity exemplified by Android and iOS" (link). Apparently taxpayer support is needed because Nokia isn't willing to pay for some infrastructure needed by other phone companies (link). A Symbian Foundation employee explained: "I would say that the main focus of the developments will be advancing existing, as well as building new tools and services relevant for smartphone manufacturing at the beginning of the manufacturing process. We want to make it easier for any manufacturer to take the Symbian codebase and develop new smartphones" (link).


What it means

Symbian isn't dead. It's just irrelevant. After the announcement, Nokia professed its strong support for Symbian OS (link). Nokia has no choice but to support the OS because it's built into the whole middle to top end of the Nokia product line. Given all of the legacy Nokia code written in Symbian OS, the Symbian-based phones still in development, and all of the Nokia development teams who are used to working in Symbian, it would probably take years to flush all of the Symbian code out of Nokia's products even if it wanted to. Symbian at Nokia is kind of like Cobol at IBM -- you're going to go on tasting that particular meal for a long time to come.

But the decision to focus on Qt for applications means that Symbian OS is effectively no longer an app development platform. It's embedded software; the background plumbing that powers Nokia's smartphones (and maybe other embedded systems, if the EU has its way). There's nothing wrong with that, but it makes Symbian irrelevant to most of the folks who talk about mobile technologies online. We don't spend much time online debating which OS kernel a device should use, and that's now the world Symbian lives in. The real competition for developer and smartphone user loyalty in most of the world is now Qt vs. iOS, Android, and RIM. Plus that Windows thing.


What it means for Nokia: Hope. Nokia's app recruitment efforts have been hamstrung for years by what I think was an incoherent software platform story. What should developers write their software on? Symbian native, S60, Silverlight, Qt, Adobe Air, Java...at one time or another Nokia romanced just about every mobile platform on the market. Nokia said that was a strength, but actually it was a sign of indecision and internal conflict. Developers crave predictability; they want to know that the platform they choose today will still be supported five years from now. By flitting from platform to platform like a butterfly, Nokia sent the unintentional signal that developing for it was dangerous.

Many developers did support Nokia anyway, especially in places where the Nokia brand and market share were so dominant that the decision was a no-brainer. But I think their loyalty did a disservice to Nokia in some ways, because it blinded the company to the shortcomings in its developer proposition. When Nokia had trouble recruiting developers in places like Silicon Valley, it seemed to think they were just biased against it. Time and again, I attended Nokia developer events in California where Nokia concentrated on telling people how big its installed base was, and showing off its latest hero device (N97, anyone?). I can see Nokia's logic -- after all, developers in Europe seemed happy. But the reality was that developers in Europe had given it the benefit of the doubt, despite its poor overall proposition.

So the decision to focus on Qt (pronounced "cute," get used to it) is a positive one, in my opinion. This is one of those cases where making any decision is better than the status quo. Qt isn't perfect, but if all of Nokia aligns behind it, any problems in it can be ironed out.

Unfortunately for Nokia, this is just the beginning of the changes it needs to make, rather than the end. Nokia's Qt development tools still reportedly need work (link). And app developers don't just need a coherent technical story, they also need a coherent business story. How do they make money? Although Nokia sells a huge number of Symbian-based smartphones, most of their users seem blissfully unaware that they can add applications. That's why Nokia has a much smaller base of applications than iPhone, even though its customer base is far larger.

To attract more developers, Nokia will need to do a lot of marketing, both in advertising and on the device, to make sure Qt users know they can get apps, and are stimulated to try them out. Nokia has the resources to do this, but once again it'll need consistent and well coordinated execution to make it happen, something that the company has failed to deliver in the past. (For example, spamming people with SMS messages telling them to try other features is probably not the right approach (link).)

To give you an idea of how much ground Nokia needs to make up, Apple iOS has 60 million users and 225,000 applications, a ratio of about 3.75 applications per thousand users. Android is close behind, with 3.5 apps per thousand users. In contrast, Symbian has 390 million users and 7,000 native apps, a ratio of about .02 apps per thousand users. (link). Yes, I know, there are additional Nokia apps written in Java, but that kind of proves the point that Symbian is plumbing rather than a platform.

All of these changes need to be carried out against a backdrop of cost cutting, as Nokia brings its expenses in line with its revenues. One of these days when I get the time I'll write more about Nokia's overall situation, but for now suffice it to say that Nokia is working off the after-effects of several years of growing expenses while revenue was stagnant. Nokia's circumstances aren't quite as bad as the California state budget (if you are in Europe, think Greece), but it's ugly enough to distract from all of the other things the company needs to fix.


What it means for developers: Wait. First, the bad news: The switch to Qt means that current Symbian OS developers who aren't already using Qt will need to rewrite their applications. This is the latest in a series of rewrites that Nokia and Symbian have forced on developers over the years. If they had more developers it probably would be causing a big ruckus right now. The fact that you don't hear a lot of screaming speaks volumes.

The good news is that Nokia may be getting its act together for developers at last. But if I were working on a mobile application today...wait a minute, I am working on a mobile application today. So here's what I'm doing about Nokia: I'm waiting. If Nokia creates a great business proposition for developers and sticks to it, our team would be delighted to support Qt aggressively. Who wouldn't want to sell to a base of 400 million users? But given Nokia's history of whipsawing its developers, we won't take anything for granted. In particular, we want to see if Qt is actually the exclusive development platform for MeeGo, rather than just a secondary option. You've got to show us the consistency, Nokia.


Oh, and ignore Symbeose. I don't know exactly how the Symbeose initiative got started, but to me it looks like the Symbian Foundation lobbied for it for a long time, prior to the recent changes in the Foundation. For the old Foundation, Symbeose made sense, because it was a clever way for a nonprofit to get some OS development done in areas that Nokia didn't care about. But with the Foundation mostly gone, Nokia has no incentive to turn Symbian into a general embedded OS, and in fact it says MeeGo is its OS for use in non-phones. In that situation, I can't picture a lot of other companies committing to build Symbian OS into their products.


Lessons from the Symbian Foundation's demise

I'm seeing a lot of interesting rationalization online about Symbian's fate. For example, Tim Ocock, a former Symbian employee, wrote a fantastic post (link) in which he argues that Symbian was very successful as an OS for phones with PDA features, but was never designed for running browsers and lots of applications. That's a pretty shocking statement, considering how many times I heard Symbian advocates boast about the sophistication of their modern, general purpose OS compared to clunky old PDA-centric Palm OS. Remember, this is a company that until very recently was bragging about its superior implementation of symmetric multiprocessing (link), hardly something you need for a PDA.

But I think Tim is dead-on in most of his analysis. He did a great job of detailing the technical and attitudinal flaws within Symbian itself, so I won't bother repeating them here. Instead, I want to talk about the flaws in Symbian's governance.

Did Symbian fail? The companies that founded Symbian had two goals in mind: to prevent Microsoft from dominating the market for smartphone software, and to prevent Symbian itself from becoming a power that could dictate to the phone companies that funded it. As a result, Symbian's governance structure was designed with a complex system of checks and balances that wouldn't apply to a normal company. To make major decisions, Symbian had to negotiate a consensus among its owners the mobile phone companies, who understood little about the management of a mobile platform and were suspicious of each other and of Symbian itself.

This bureaucratic, highly politicized oversight process repeatedly forced Symbian into blind alleys, and prevented it from doing things that a "normal" OS company would take for granted. When Symbian was founded, there was talk of an eventual IPO. The prospect of an IPO is an important recruitment tool -- it lets you use stock to hire ambitious engineers and managers. But the idea was eventually shot down by the owners; it would have made Symbian too independent.

Crippled by design. Once the threat from Microsoft receded, the owners' second goal for Symbian -- preventing it from competing with them -- seemed to dominate their treatment of Symbian. I'm not saying there was some central evil plan to hamstring Symbian; there wasn't. But everything the company planned to do had to be approved by the handset companies, and on a case by case basis they vetoed the things that sounded threatening to them. Over time, this forced Symbian away from initiatives and features that would cause users and developers to be loyal to the OS rather than the handset.

So Symbian didn't create an app store, and Symbian's developer relations were very confused because Nokia wanted to do a lot of that itself. But the most egregious example was user interface, which Symbian worked on from time to time, but was eventually forced out of by its owners. When I was at Palm, the Symbian project I feared most was "Quartz," the effort to create an icon-driven touchscreen UI for Symbian. Quartz looked very nice, and if it had survived Symbian would have had a dandy iPhone competitor on the market before the iPhone launched. But politics between Symbian's owners forced it completely out of the UI business, and Quartz was spun out into a separate company called UIQ, which went bankrupt in 2009.

You can get more details on the whole sad Quartz saga here.


Quartz circa 2001

An OS without a single consistent user interface is a nightmare for software developers, because they can't write apps that run across the installed base of devices.

Eventually, in the face of all the restrictions, the most ambitious, nonconformist people at Symbian -- the ones who drive innovation in any organization -- seemed to drift away in frustration or were forced out when they irritated the owners. Symbian itself retreated into focusing on technological esoterica like symmetric multiprocessing -- things that didn't really differentiate the platform to users, but that the licensees wouldn't object to.

From one perspective I guess you can say Symbian was a complete success, because it fulfilled the two negatives that its founders wanted: Microsoft didn't dominate mobile software, and Symbian itself didn't exercise any control over its founders.

However, the cumulative effect of the handset companies pursuing their short-term interest was that Symbian was utterly unready to respond when Apple and Google entered the market. I don't think either Nokia or Symbian really understood how the game had changed. Apple designs phones as integrated systems, with the software and hardware tightly coordinated. Nokia could never achieve that level of coordination with an operating system managed through standards committees.

And as for Android, Nokia apparently thought that open sourcing Symbian would create a level playing field with Google's free OS. But I think the structure of the Symbian Foundation made that impossible.

The fatal flaw of the Symbian Foundation. Although Android is a free product, it's supported by a for-profit corporation that has massive resources. The attraction of Android to phone companies isn't just its price, but its safety -- Google stands behind it with marketing and technical support.

In contrast, Symbian Foundation was designed as a rigorously noncommercial institution banned from any business activity. People at the Foundation told me Nokia was adamant about enforcing the ban on commercial activity because it was afraid the tax authorities might rule that the foundation wasn't a nonprofit, endangering the tax credit that Nokia got for donating its Symbian code base.

Most open source companies give away their software in order to make money from some other mechanism -- consulting, or support, or a for-fee version of the same code. Symbian Foundation was banned from making money on any of these activities, meaning it could never become financially self-supporting.

Forget about marketing support; Symbian couldn't even offer enhanced technical support to licensees who were begging to pay for it. That was especially crippling because Symbian OS is notoriously complex and difficult to program (link).

Consider this quote from Tim Ocock's article:

"The difficulty of writing good Symbian code was hugely beneficial to Symbian as a business in the early days. For many years, 80% of Symbian's revenues were earned through consulting for licensees....Symbian’s licensees...each had their own proprietary telephony chipsets that needed to be integrated and their own customisations to the platform in mind....Despite talk of Symbian enabling differentiation, the reality was licensees' budgets were squandered on hardware porting and making the core platform fit for purpose."

Picture yourself as a manager at a handset company, choosing an OS for your smartphone. The Symbian option has no advertising support, requires customization, is hard to program, has few third party consultants to support it, and the company licensing it won't help you do the programming. Meanwhile, Google Android is more modern, is based on Java and Linux so it's easy to find programmers, has lots of support, and has user-friendly features like an app store. Which one seems the safer bet?

How could the Symbian Foundation ever succeed in that situation?

Although people advocating for a "European" mobile OS often complain that Android had unfair financial advantages, the fact is that Symbian was ripe for the picking, a situation that was almost entirely self-inflicted.

The lesson for other tech companies: Open source is not magic pixie dust that you can sprinkle on a struggling product to turn it into a winner. Open source is a tactic, not a business strategy. It has to be paired with a business plan that says how you'll make money and drive innovation.


This is the end, my friend, of our elaborate plans

Like an army refighting the last war, Symbian was designed to defeat Windows Mobile, but never came to terms with its new adversaries Apple and Google. There's no shame in that for most of the folks who worked at Symbian; they did the best they could to navigate the politics of Nokia and all the other Symbian licensees. But radical change was necessary. I hope Nokia's Qt strategy will be successful. And I'm sure that Symbian code will continue to serve for years as the underlying technology for millions of Nokia smartphones. But except in the dreams of a few EU officials, Symbian OS is now just legacy plumbing.

It's time to move on.

Will E-Readers Eat the Tablet Computer?

The consensus prediction in the tech industry is that tablet computer sales will swamp sales of ebook readers. The Huffington Post is taking bets on which e-readers are dead meat (link), and Informa predicts that e-reader sales will start declining in 2014 as tablets out-compete them (link). I've seen similar (and more pessimistic) private forecasts from other analysis firms. They all argue that it's just a matter of time until general-purpose tablet computers displace more limited e-readers.

Yes and no. I think tablet features will eventually take over, but it would be very premature to assume that tablet computer companies will be the long-term winners. They're actually at a huge disadvantage that almost no one is talking about.

What brought this home to me was a brief hands-on experience I had last week with the Barnes & Noble Nook Color. I usually think of Nook as the poor stepchild to Amazon Kindle, and in unit sales it certainly is. But Nook Color isn't just an ebook reader. It's a full tablet computer, or at least it will be if Barnes & Noble allows it to be. And it sells at a great price.

The easiest way to explain my reaction to Nook Color is to compare it to the Samsung Galaxy Tab. The first thing I noticed was basic ergonomics. As I wrote recently, when I first picked up the Galaxy Tab it worried me because it was hard to hold -- its slick plastic surface felt like it was going to slip out of my hand, and so I couldn't hold it comfortably without putting my thumb on the screen (link). The Nook Color is almost identical to the size and weight of the Galaxy Tab, so I expected to have the same problem. But the Nook has a brushed metallic-feeling surface that's much easier to grip. Attention to detail has a huge impact on mobile products, and Nook Color shows far more attention to detail than the Galaxy Tab.

The Galaxy Tab definitely has more features than the Nook: two cameras, 3G options, and an accelerometer. But Nook Color has all the basics, including Android OS, a touchscreen, and very nice color display that I think is the equal of Samsung's. And it has one important feature that The Galaxy Tab lacks -- an affordable price. A Nook Color with WiFi is $249, literally half the price of a similarly-equipped Galaxy Tab.

That's a stunning difference, especially considering that Samsung usually tries to be a price leader in new technologies. At $499, I think the Galaxy Tab will be a very difficult purchase for the average consumer. At $249, Nook Color isn't cheap, but it's a mainstream consumer product.

So how in the world does a book-seller get a 50% price advantage over a major consumer electronics company?

The difference isn't mostly due to features. I bet the accelerometer and cameras in the Galaxy Tab don't add more than $20 to its cost, probably less. The Tab probably has a faster processor as well, but no way does that justify the cost difference. I think two other factors are involved. The first is that B&N owns its own retail stores, and so it doesn't necessarily have to mark up the price of the Nook with the full traditional retail margin. In contrast, Samsung will be expected to fork over the usual 20 points or so of margin to its dealers, plus additional comarketing dollars to buy shelf displays and Sunday newspaper ads. Second, since B&N makes money from the content it sells to Nook users, it can afford to sell the hardware at lower cost.

In other words, the Nook is a subsidized product, like a cellphone. So is Kindle.

I think the people predicting that tablets will swamp e-readers haven't thought through the economics of the situation. As long as e-readers are based on e-ink displays, they can't compete directly with tablets, because the displays are grayscale and are too slow to display animation and video. But an e-reader with an LCD display is physically a tablet, at a much more attractive price.

Subsidized products usually beat unsubsidized ones. Even Apple had to move the iPhone onto subsidies after it first launched it without.

The only thing stopping Nook Color from competing directly with tablets is software. Although Nook Color runs the Android OS, same as Samsung, Barnes & Noble is reportedly planning to severely restrict the applications that will run on Nook Color. The idea is to keep the device focused as an e-reader rather than allowing it to become a general-purpose tablet.

It's unusual for a company to artificially restrict what you can do with a computing product, but there is a perverse logic to what Barnes & Noble is doing. If someone buys Nook Color as a tablet and doesn't buy any books or other content for it, Barnes & Noble will make less money. By restricting the apps, Barnes & Noble can chase away those lower-margin customers who aren't hardcore readers.

But I think that's a very short-sighted policy, for two reasons:

First, as a dedicated e-reader, Nook has important drawbacks. Its battery life is much shorter than an e-ink device, and it's a lot more expensive. If the apps are restricted, Nook Color is a tweener. It's inferior as an e-reader and as a tablet.

Second, B&N is missing a huge opportunity. It's not like they're losing money on Nook Color sales (the hardware cost is probably in the $150 range, or lower). As long as you're making some money per unit, I think it makes sense to grab as many customers as you can now, while you have a structural advantage in the market.

The ultimate payoff for an ebook distributor like B&N is to displace the publishers and start selling ebooks (and other content) directly to the public. To get to that goal, B&N should be trying to grow the e-reader installed base as quickly as possible. Instead of restricting Nook Color to people who already want ebooks, B&N should sell it to everyone and then entice them into becoming e-reading users.

Historically, some of the most successful computing products were sold first as single-purpose devices that then blossomed into multipurpose devices. PCs were first adopted in volume to run spreadsheets, and the first successful PDAs were sold as electronic calendars. Nook Color could be the e-reader that ate the tablet market.

And it's easy to do -- all B&N has to do is say yes to all types of third party apps. Get out of the way, and the customers will take care of the rest.

The Brotherhood Crusade Honors 3 Time GRAMMY® Award Winner Miss Nancy Wilson

Even a temporary black out in Beverly Hills could not prevent over 800 people from arriving at the Beverly Hilton Hotel to attend the annual Brotherhood Crusade's* Pioneer of African American Achievement Award Dinner. On Friday, Nov 5th, the evening's event honored the incomparable Song Stylist, Miss Nancy Wilson - who actively broke down the racial barriers and negative stereotypical images of Black Women, paving the way for so many in the radio/television/music/film/ industry. From the looks of the diverse crowd, most all would have stayed even if to enjoy the event via candle light,
because everyone in attendance truly was smitten by the legendary Miss Nancy Wilson.
President and CEO, Charisse Bremond -Weaver, continues to take large strides forward, carrying the baton that was passed on to her via her father, the founder of the Brotherhood Crusade, the late Walter Bremond. Mr. Bremond in conjunction with past President, Danny J. Bakewell Sr** consciously set the pace for Mrs. Bremond-Weaver .

The City of Los Angeles' Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa personally presented Nancy Wilson with a proclamation.

Miss Wilson was surrounded by people who truly love her - her daughter and son in-law, as well as long time friend, Congresswoman Diane Watson. Chris Shauble was the Master of Ceremony and Patti Austin serenaded the audience with her melliflous vocals for the evening and it was wonderful! (photo L-R Danny Bakewell Sr., Charrise Bremond-Weaver, Nancy Wilson, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa)
There were so many people there happily celebrating this momentous event - Sir Sidney Poitier, Berry Gordy Jr., Florence LaRue, Bill Duke, Arsenio Hall, Dawnn Lewis, Congresswoman Elect - Karen Bass, Dr. Bernard and Shirley Kinsey, Councilmember Bernard C. Parks,
Wendy Greuel, LA City Controller, Dominique DiPrima,Guillermo Cespedes, along with state, and local governmental and civic leaders.
I was fortunate enough to sit down and talk briefly with Miss Nancy Wilson.

Carla: "Who instilled faith, courage and wisdom into your life?"
Nancy Wilson: " I was fortunate to have 3 sets of grandparents (I was raised Apostolic) that instilled faith, courage and wisdom into me at an early age. They lovingly guided me."

Born the first of six children to Olden Wilson and Lillian Ryan, in Chillicothe, Ohio, and raised in Columbus, Ohio, Miss Nancy's three sets of grandparents instilled life's lessons that placed
her feet firmly on the path that she selected, allowing her to visualize early, on the road of life, what would become her reality. By the time she was 4 years old, she knew that she wanted to be a singer. At the tender age of 8 years old, Miss Wilson said, "God told me that I had a gift."

Knowing that she was being led by faith, it allowed her to have the courage to pursue her dreams. At the ripe age of 15, Miss Wilson's professional career was launched via her own local t.v. show entitled "Skyline Melody". Week after week, doors continued to open for Miss Wilson. She met the late Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, who recognized her talent, which led to an opportunity to fill in for Irene Reid, in New York at The Blue Morocco. It was a huge success!

Once getting a venue lined up, a call was made to John Levy, the man that managed Julian "Cannonball" Adderley's career - the man that Miss Wilson needed to manage her career - asking him to stop by The Blue Morocco to see her perform. John Levy did stop by the Blue Morocco.

Miss Wilson went on to say:
"John called me the very next day. He set up a session to record a demo, Nancy recalls.“Ray Bryant and I went in and recorded “Guess Who I Saw Today,” “Sometimes I’m Happy,” and two other songs. We sent them to Capitol and within five days the phone rang. Within six weeks I had all the things I wanted.”

I call that the power of visualization.Nancy Wilson and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley recorded an album in 1962.

Nancy Wilson: "I started singing the song, Guess Who I Saw Today at the age of 17 and people would say, ' What do you know about that?' and I'd say, "You don't have to be old to recognize hurt."

Carla: "I hear you. Thank you, Miss Nancy Wilson, for sharing your wisdom and gift of voice with so many."
Nancy Wilson: "Thank you, Darling."
Miss Wilson kept on climbing higher and higher, winning her first GRAMMY® in 1964 for “How Glad I Am” and her second GRAMMY® Award in 2005, for Best Jazz Vocal Album and the 2005 NAACP Image Award for Best Jazz Artist. She released her 70th album, the GRAMMY® Award-winning Turned to Blue, in 2006. Whenever Danny Bakewell Sr. reached out to Miss Wilson, requesting her help in opening doors for the Brotherhood Crusade; she never hesitated to assist those in less advantaged communities with the odds stacked against them - never forgetting to reach back and help those who were placed on a bumpy road of life, helping to smooth the surface as often as possible, giving back her time and financial support, working shoulder to shoulder, preparing our youth with the proper skills to build a brighter future, with faith, courage and wisdom.

Miss Nancy Wilson's current release is available on line at Amazon.com and in stores now - The CD is called Nancy Wilson Turned to Blue.





Love, C

*Charisse Bremond - Weaver, President and CEO, - The Brotherhood Crusade, founded in 1968, is a 501(c)3 non-profit institution

**Danny Bakewell Sr., Developer, Businessman, Financier, Community Activist, Humanitarian and owner of the Los Angeles Sentinel Newspaper
Ginger Campbell, President - Snap Productions - Thank you

Charles Bush - Photographer 2006 All photos are the sole property of Charles Bush and Miss Nancy Wilson unless otherwise notedMiss Nancy Wilson, Song Stylist CD - MCG Jazz Company 2006

TuneUp Utilities 2011 v10.0.2011.65 + Crack

TuneUp Utilities can make your Windows operating system faster, more comfortable and more secure with just a few mouse clicks. And all operations performed on the operating system are completely safe, because all changes are monitored by TuneUp Rescue Center and can be undone at any time. All TuneUp Utilities modules can be accessed through a common interface that is divided into six categories. The software helps both beginners and experts to make Windows meet their needs in a way that is better, easier and safer. All important system options are explained in an easy way and can be turned on or off at the click of your mouse. TuneUp Utilities will then make the necessary changes in the registry or boot files automatically. We place a high value on system stability, so that Windows won’t stop working reliably. And most changes that you make can be undone in TuneUp Rescue Center – easily and safely. TuneUp Utilities automatically runs important maintenance tasks for you, makes you aware of any problems and offers simple solutions. This ensures performance is always at its best. A slow and untidy computer is now a thing of the past for you. You can also use TuneUp Utilities to customize the appearance of your Windows system – to make working on your computer more enjoyable.

link

HWK UFS LATEST VER POSTED BY IRFAN

 

DOWNLOAD 1

DOWNLOAD 2
DOWNLOAD 3
DOWNLOAD 4
DOWNLOAD 5 
download 6
download 7

   download 8
   download 9

 

The Women's Conference - The Grand Finale 2010

It was wonderful to actually have the First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama, California's First Lady Maria Shriver, Previous First Lady of the United States Laura Bush, The Honorable Sandra Day O'Connor, Oprah Winfrey - and her best friend Gayle King, Mary J. Blige, Sarah McLachlan, Deepak Chopra, Holly Robinson-Peete and her husband Rodney Peete, and a whole host of other intelligent people, all under one roof. I mean, it felt a little like what I'd imagine it would be having dinner with Queen Hatshepsut, Queen Yaa Asantewa, Madeleine Albright and Thomas Robert Malthus. This is one of those moments in my life where I am so amazed by the sheer awesomeness of what can be accomplished if an over abundance of people who are problem solvers, get together in the same space/time continuum. People who have shown that authenticity, positivity, creativity, coupled with faith, courage and wisdom (key ingredients to being an Architect of Change)
It's called California's First Lady Maria Shriver's Women's Conference. It was where all of this massive amounts of positive energy circulated over these past three days.

(If I were you, I'd go to the website and watch the entire 3 day event. It was absolutely wonderful.)

Why? Because now, more than ever, we as a people, need to collectively get together and discuss what it is that needs to be done to make this world a better place - eradicating the world of Breast Cancer, Alzheimer's disease, Autism*, obesity, poor nutrition, homelessness - then put into action what our ideas are. If one can visualize and idea, one can make it happen. Mary J. Blige, who has an organization called FFAWN, bravely stood up and told us about the abuse that ran through 2 generations in her family and not only did it touch my heart, but had everyone in my section in tears. The Asian woman sitting two rows up from me had to be handed tissue because she couldn't stop crying. All different nationalities yelling out, "We hear you Mary, We feel you, Mary!" Lord, have mercy! Just ask the women who were the recipients of the Minerva Awards 2010 - Carolyn Blashek, Oral Lee Brown, Sister Terry Dodge, Sandra Day O'Connor and Oprah Winfrey.

I'm hoping that this note motivates you to discover how you too, can be an Architect of Change. I'd like to thank Lena Cole Dennis for a wonderful day. Now, what are WE going to do? That's the question. Remember, it starts with you.

Love & light,
C

Deepak Chopra - Deepakchopra.com
Gayle King - The Gayle King Show
* Holly Robinson-Peete - Hollyrodfoundation.org