Apple should do the following instead of Beats

Harmon:  to catapult your company into infotainment for the cars
Dreamworks SKG:  Acquihire Katzenberg for animation films, extend your network to David Geffen for music, knowing Speilberg will be icing on current and future iProducts.

I've Got It!!!

"A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way, "Einstein once said.  "But," he hastened to add, "intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience."

Pardon the interuption Albert, but this conversation piece is important:

The president and CFO of a company had the following discussion:

CFO:  If we invest and continuously train the employees our cost will go up.  In addition, what happens if the employees we train, decide to leave?

President:  What happens if we don't train anyone and they all STAY?

A mind of a scientist

Einstein 2.0s

"The thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life even more refined, with a bleak capital gain as the goal was unbearable to me." 

"Well, if you offer gourmet food to peasants like me (given caviar for his birthday), you know they won't appreciate it."

Einstein 2.0c

Did Einstein have ADHD?

"He was known to leave behind clothes, and sometimes even his suitcase, when he traveled, and his inability to remember his keys became a running joke with his landlady."

"He always does something different from what I have ordered."

"Professor Pernet gave Einstein a 1, the lowest possible grade in his course Physical Experiments for Beginners" because he never showed up for class.

Those and many other examples of his absentmindedness, led someone to famously quote:  "That man [Einstein] will never amount to anything because he can't remember anything."

Stop being a Fool, according to Einstein

"A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth."

From the book "Einstein" written by Walter Isaacson and published in 2007

"A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity."

Just My Imagination from The Temptations

"Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or faced a difficult challenge in his work, he would take refuge in music and that would solve all his difficulties"      Hans Albert on his father Albert Einstein

"To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself."

"It is important to foster individuality, for only the individual can produce the new ideas."

Back to the Future with the Twilight Zone

Quiet Please!!

"If somebody skates at top level, I cannot improve it.  So I have to stay quiet...I had nothing to do."
Anonymous

Status UN quo continued

Status "UN"quo

Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider are willing to do and try just about anything if they believe it will result in increased success, as evidenced by a reported 284 roster moves in their first year together. They fear neither criticism nor failure. They draft whom they believe in. They chase the free agents they like. They play whoever earns it on the practice field. They ignore conventional wisdom.

"We really don't care about what other people think and we're not going to be driven by what the status quo might think and we've really trusted our gut on decisions," Carroll said. "We've done a lot of questionable moves that people want to know about … it has helped accelerate the process."

From the outside, Pete Carroll can look like cheerleader-in-chief, just an uplifting motivator. Inside they swear there's a smart football mind obsessed with competition in everything, winning the small battles that lead to winning the big ones, like a Super Bowl.

If no one else recognizes that as great coaching, Carroll doesn't seem to mind. He had practice to run Thursday anyway. Set to music, of course.

"We have fun doing it."

He'll never apologize for that, either.

:-))

Trust, but Verify before you Buy

Another wonderful article from Clark Howard that applies to everything:

See what marketers know about you

By Clark Howard

ClarkHoward.com

Marketing organizations that have been super secretive are now facing scrutiny in the aftermath of continuing revelations about government spying.

One called Acxiom that I've talked about in the past reportedly has massive documentation on who you are, what activities you like, what cars you own, what your mortgage is, what kind of ailments you have, etc.
This data can be continually crunched and packaged for sale thanks to the miracle of parallel computing technology. But now for the first time, you can get a peek at what's in your Acxiom file.

Just go to AboutTheData.com and you can answer a series of questions to fully verify that you are who you say you are. Then you can see the info they have on you that they believe is fact -- but may actually be fiction.

Out of a sample group of 4 people on my show staff, two were able to see their records and two weren't. The two of us who couldn't probably couldn't because we've frozen our credit.

My executive producer Christa was able to see her file. It contained incorrect info including the wrong age of her kids, the wrong number of children, and the wrong income. My associate producer Joel's file was even more radically wrong. It listed him as a blue collar craftsman who completed high school, but had no college education. Joel is, in fact, a graduate of Kennesaw State University and not a craftsman -- unless you count drinking craft beer as a qualifier!

So these data brokers are out marketing what they claim is a precisely fine-tuned dossier they have on you. And in many cases it's kerflooey! "All the inaccurate data, all the time." How's that for an advertising slogan, Acxiom?!

Fortunately, you have the option to go to AboutTheData.com and opt out so they can stop compiling data on you!

One caveat, though: There's been a lot of widespread suspicion that the opt out form may be a backdoor kind of way for Acxiom to collect further data on you. The company denies it, but that hasn't quelled the skeptics. Use your own best discretion before taking the leap.

===========================================================

Quote worth repeating again:

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know that just ain't so."  Mark Twain

Professional, "highly trained" (whatever that means) Stock analysts are a great example, especially when they appear on CNBC or Bloomberg TV :-))

Go Netflix Go!

Much more interesting investor call then having to listen to a bunch of analysts asking questions as though they are trying to sound smarter than each other :-)

Netflix 2nd quarter conference call

Here comes Yahoo!

Yahoo Weather App:   Forecast for Yahoo:  Bright and Sunny

 Yahoo 2013 Q2 earnings video

Buyer Beware

(the author of the following article, Clark Howard is top notch)

By Clark Howard

Should you pay more when you're shopping online simply because of the browser you're using? Some popular online retailers think so!
The New York Times  reports shoppers are getting widely different prices based on whether they use Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari. Here are just two examples:

• For the same Samsung TV on NewEgg.com, a Chrome user was offered a price of $997. Meanwhile, the price was $1,399 when using Firefox or Internet Explorer.
• Another Samsung television model at Walmart.com was offered for $199 on Firefox and $168 on Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Meanwhile, Mac users could be paying a higher rate for hotel rooms on Orbitz.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Orbitz has been experimenting with a 30% premium on Mac users when they search for select hotel rooms versus PC users. That effectively works out to be around $20 to $30 more than a PC user.

When asked for explanation, Orbitz basically stated that Mac users make more money and are interested in fancier hotels. (There were no happy campers in the Apple world based on those comments!)

The best way for you to stay one step ahead of online retailers who are manipulating price is to use technology to fight back.

If you want an easy way to see if a quoted price is a deal or not, you can compare prices on websites like Decide.com or ShopoBot.com, or use a browser bookmarklet such as Hukkster.

Another alternative would be to install a browser plug-in like Invisible Hand that automatically pops up an alert while you're shopping if a better price is available on another website.

Finally, Amazon customers can typically get a better deal if they put something in their cart and then abandon it before the final purchase. That usually signals to Amazon that you're willling to walk away and triggers a lower price the next time you put it in your cart to checkout. Give it a try!

So many know it all's

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know that just ain't so."  Mark Twain

A great quote from recently released A's pitcher Travis Blackley

Blackley lamented his fate after a nightmarish spring in which he posted a 14.21 ERA and allowed 27 hits in 12  2/3 innings. Opponents hit .450 against him.

"I kind of saw it coming, just from previous experiences," said Blackley, 6-4 with a 3.86 ERA in 24 games last season including 15 starts. "You've got to be making a lot of money to get away with the spring I had and still make the team."

Incredible....another article from a brainless author concerning an analyst and his Apple rating.  Wait....this is from 2010.  Read carefully!!!

An ‘I told you so’ moment for early Apple bear

 

Has Apple analyst Edward Zabitsky finally been proven right?

By Quentin Fottrell

In 2010, when Apple stock was trading at $199, Edward Zabitsky, CEO of ACI Research in Toronto, was the only analyst on Wall Street to rate the stock a “sell.” Over the next two years, shares went on a tear, peaking at just over $705 and making Apple the world’s largest company as measured by stock-market value. Today, shares have fallen by more than a third from that high. Through it all, Zabitsky has stuck to his bearish call; and while he has since been joined by a couple other pros who have sell ratings on the stock, including Adnaan Ahmad at Berenberg Bank and Per Lindberg at ABG Sundal Collier, Zabitsky retains the distinction, and in some circles the notoriety, of having gotten there first.


COMMENTS:  How could this be an "I told you so" moment?  "Proven right???"  I realize too well that aapl stock has performed very poorly since Sept. of 2012.  Nevertheless, the price of the stock as of the end of 03/28/2013, is 442.66.  Is 442.66 still a higher number than 199.00????  (OH, I should have known, "analysts" math is JUST different).

I thought the other analyst giving aapl a $710 price target was bad enough.  Here, this analyst is being lauded and applauded for rating aapl a sell at $199 back in 2010, even though the stock price today is 442.66.  Unbelievable... :-))

Read the green highlighted section carefully and stop vilifying Marissa Mayer for her 100% correct, proper and justifiable decision to ban telecommuting at Yahoo, for now at least.  This should serve as a warning to all remote workers.  Remote workers doesn't mean turning on the television with your tv remote control and watching soap operas or talk shows.  It doesn't mean going to the gym or finishing up your weekend project on that lousy, crooked looking wood work thing, you call a cabinet :-)))

How Marissa Mayer Figured Out Work-At-Home Yahoos Were Slacking Off (YHOO, GOOG)

Nicholas Carlson, provided by

Yahoo banned employees from working from home.

How did CEO Marissa Mayer decide to make such a controversial decision?
According to a source, the only way Mayer is comfortable making any decision: with the help of data.

Like a lot of companies, Yahoo has something called a Virtual Private Network or VPN. Remote workers can use it to securely log into Yahoo's network and do work.
(LifeHacker has a really good explanation of what a VPN is.)

After spending months frustrated at how empty Yahoo parking lots were, Mayer consulted Yahoo's VPN logs to see if remote employees were checking in enough.

Mayer discovered they were not — and her decision was made.

Kara Swisher first reported the news that Mayer was showing executives Yahoo's VPN logs to justify her work-from-home ban.  Mayer is famously obsessed with metrics and data.

 

Once, a Google designer quit the company in a huff because he was tired of how Mayer, in charge of how Google.com homepage looked, would choose design elements like color or font not based on taste, but raw data.

For every design variable, she looked at how users inteacted with Google with one design — and then the other.

If the data showed users were using Google.com faster one way instead of the other, that particular design choice won out.

It's hard to argue that Mayer's process didn't work for Google. It was not the first search engine on the market, but it's just about the only one anybody uses now.

Likewise, we're hearing from people close to Yahoo executives and employees that she made the right decision banning work from home.  "The employees at Yahoo are thrilled," says one source close to the company.  "There isn't massive uprising. The truth is, they've all been pissed off that people haven't been working."