Private probation companies add huge fees for probation.
Gina Ray, 31 and unemployed was fined $179 for speeding three years ago. She failed to show up at court (she says the ticket bore the wrong date), so her license was revoked.
Ratio Of PCs to Macs sold has fallen to levels not seen since the 1990s
Horace Dediu’s chart
An excellent chart has from analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco shows the ratio of PCs sold to Macs sold each year since the early 1980s (via Philip Elmer-Dewitt, who notes that the peak year for Microsoft dominance was 2004).
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The downfall of Microsoft
Microsoft C.E.O. Steve Ballmer
Two-time George Polk Award winner Kurt Eichenwald analyzes one of American corporate history’s greatest mysteries—the lost decade of Microsoft— traces the “astonishingly foolish management decisions” at the company that “could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success.” Relying on dozens of interviews and internal corporate records—including e-mails between executives at the company’s highest ranks—Eichenwald offers an unprecedented view of life inside Microsoft during the reign of its , in the August issue. Today, a single Apple product—the iPhone—generates more revenue than all of Microsoft’s wares combined.
Turmoil Ahead for the Automotive Industry
Futurist Thomas Frey: In 1954, Brook Stevens, a well-known industrial designer gave a keynote speech at an advertising conference titled “Planned Obsolescence.”
By his definition, planned obsolescence was “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than necessary.”
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What your e-reader knows about you
Is your e-book reading you?
On the Kobo e-reader the average reader will take just seven hours to read the last book in Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy, that’s about 57 pages an hour. Nearly 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the second book in the series: “Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.” And on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the first thing that most readers do upon finishing the first “Hunger Games” book is to download the next one.
The serial entrepreneur myth
A serial entrepreneur is an entrepreneur who starts a number of new businesses.
When it comes to learning about startups, that landscape is largely made up of the books you would find in the average library, They are books about “how to deal with your company finances”, “10 steps to marketing success” and other dispiriting works, along with more inspiring but largely useless biographies of successful businessmen.
New twist on trash pickup in Portland, Ore.
Portland’s new policy encourages composting.
Forty years ago, Portland, the largest city in Oregon, pioneered five-cent deposits on beverage container. Now they are advocating a new approach to garbage collection that has some U.S. communities taking notice.
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Apple rules the mobile market
Apple overshadows other mobile phone companies where it counts the most: profits.
The Apple iPad rules the tablet market and the iPhone is a popular among smartphone users, even though a panoply of devices running Google’s Android owns the majority of the smartphone market. We also know Research in Motion is in serious decline, and Nokia is struggling to reverse its slide through Windows Phones — a strategy set back at least temporarily as customers wait for Windows Phone 8, given that current Nokia smartphones won’t run Microsoft’s first serious version of Windows Phone.
‘Local’ will be biggest of Social-Mobile-Local
“Social-Mobile-Local” is an overused buzz phrase and most of the attention has been placed on the “social” and “mobile” parts of the phrase. In social, the spectacular rise of Facebook and Twitter is clearly a disruptive and critical trend. In mobile, the adoption of the smartphone (led by Apple’s iPhone and now catapulted forward by Android) is also a fundamentally important platform transition. Much less attention has been paid to the third concept, “local,” which is ironic since it may be a much larger real business opportunity than either social media or Smartphone application revenue. Over the next five years, this massive opportunity will come into focus as local businesses embrace the Internet and adopt new interactive technologies that increasingly automate the connections between their customers and themselves.
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Apple: The face and the brand
Apple Store in Boston
Since the iPhone launched five years ago, Apple has created a total of 35,852 retail jobs.
The Disruptive Underground Vs. the Banking Industry
Futurist Thomas Frey: In 1997 Reed Hasting returned his copy of “Apollo 13” to the video store and was hit with a late fee so big that he was embarrassed to tell his wife about it. Out of this moment of humiliation the idea for Netflix was born, a business that would eventually take down the entire video rental industry, and its excessive fee-charging practices in the process.
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Augmented reality is the future of retail
Augmented reality will completely change retail.
What is the future of retail? In the next couple of years, customers will be able to try on clothes and products at home with no shipping required. Technology will allow shoppers to virtually wear garments — smelling, hearing and feeling the fabric as if it were real.
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