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Saturday, December 17, 2011
Netflix Revamps iPad App to Improve Content Discovery
Netflix is rolling out an updated version of its iPad app, an attempt to boost the ease of content discovery on tablets.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Perry double dips state salary and pension (AP)
AUSTIN, Texas ? Texas Gov. Rick Perry is a double-dipper, collecting a salary and retirement benefits simultaneously, according to a personal financial disclosure form made public Friday.
The report filed with the Federal Election Commission shows that Perry is collecting his $7,700 monthly state pension in addition to his nearly $133,000 annual salary as governor. State law allows any employee to begin collecting retirement benefits if their years of military and state service plus their age adds up to more than 80.
To qualify, the 61-year-old Perry counted his five years in the Air Force and 24 years in public service in Texas, including as a part-time legislator, agriculture commissioner, lieutenant governor and governor.
Perry was required to file the disclosure form because he is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
His decision to begin collecting retirement pay while on the public payroll will likely expose him to criticism from conservatives who complain that public sector employees are too generously compensated. The Republican comptroller of Texas said just this week that lawmakers need to review the pension system because it was burdening state finances.
The Texas Democratic Party condemned Perry's decision.
"When you start getting more money from your employer while also continuing to receive your salary, that's called a raise," spokesman Anthony Gutierrez said. "If Perry wants retirement benefits he should do us all a favor and actually retire. Giving himself a raise while thousands of teachers are losing their jobs is unconscionable."
Ray Sullivan, a spokesman for Perry's presidential campaign, issued a terse statement citing the state code that permitted the governor to begin collecting his retirement pay in January of this year.
Sullivan said Perry continues to pay into the state employees' retirement system with a 6.5 percent withholding from his salary.
On the disclosure form, Perry also reported a net worth of at least $1.3 million. The forms only require candidates to report the value of their personal assets in broad ranges, making it difficult to calculate an exact figure.
He reported a total annual income of $290,000. Perry listed his wife's salary of $65,000. Anita Perry is a consultant for a nonprofit organization.
Perry also reported interest and dividend income from his family ranch, a share in an oil and gas company and a money market account.
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(AP)
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New music service courts tech-averse listeners (Reuters)
LONDON (Reuters) ? A simple new online music service will launch across Europe and North America this week aimed at the millions who like music but struggle with the technology to find and listen to it.
Rara.com, which will be pre-loaded on some HP laptops and smartphones using Google's Android operating system, will offer 10 million tracks for a subscription from around 99 pence or cents a month at the outset.
The service, also accessible via an Internet web page, will be in 15 European countries and the United States from Tuesday, and Canada and Mexico later this week, the company said.
"I believe that almost all of the services that are available today are targeted at tech-savvy people who know quite a lot about music," Chief Executive Rob Lewis told Reuters in an interview. "That is only 20 percent of consumers, we are interested in the 80 percent."
Several new online music services have launched in recent years, seeking to tap in to the move to online music and provide an alternative to Apple's iTunes music offering.
Many struggled or eventually disappeared as they spent months negotiating terms with an often inflexible music industry
unwilling to relinquish control of its content at a time when illegal online piracy was raging.
Rara.com's subscription will rise after three months to $4.99 or 4.99 pounds for computer users and 9.99 to include smartphones or tablets.
It will also be available in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore before Christmas and launch soon on Apple's iOS operating system.
"I think there is a recognition throughout the entire industry that despite huge efforts by many parties, digital is nowhere near the penetration that the CD was just 18 months after its launch," Lewis said.
The service, which will carry no advertising, has been heavily tested on elder consumers and those put off from buying digital music because they found it too complicated.
Low initial prices were designed to attract customers unsure about signing up to new services before they knew how they worked, Lewis said.
The service will be run by Lewis, a co-founder of the successful Omnifone music technology service, which provides a white label music platform enabling other companies such as Sony Ericsson to launch their own branded music offerings. Omnifone will power the new rara.com service.
The service will offer curated channels playing different genres of music, which could in time be suitable for cars.
"We put a small team together with the task to build a music service that everyone's grandmother could use," Lewis said. "It's unbelievably easy."
(Reporting by Kate Holton; Editing by David Cowell)
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/tech/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111213/wr_nm/us_rara
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Syrian Alawite figure speaks out against violence (Reuters)
AMMAN (Reuters) ? A Syrian Alawite centrist political figure said on Tuesday that four of his relatives were shot or kidnapped in sectarian violence threatening to undermine a nine-month pro-democracy uprising.
In a rare named testimony about sectarian killings that have racked the central city of Homs in the last few weeks, Mohammad Saleh told Reuters that the four were targeted because they were Alawites, the same sect as President Bashar al-Assad.
"The violence by the regime has provoked counter violence. But a crime is a crime and it has to be condemned," said Saleh, a former political prisoner, by phone from Homs, a city of one million, 140 kms (88 miles) north of Damascus
"I went to jail for a civilized Syria, not to replicate the values of the regime," said Saleh, who spent 12 years in jail for his opposition to Assad's father, the late president Hafez al-Assad, from whom Bashar inherited power in 2000.
Saleh said armed Sunni men killed Issa Abboud, a 60-year-old relative of his while he was loading a van with his belongings to escape with relatives from the Madina al-Shababiya district of the city.
A youth helping them was hit in the stomach and is in hospital. A third relative present was abducted.
"They are related to me through my wife. The driver of the truck was also killed. My nephew, Shadi Tammour, was separately kidnapped in Homs today," said Saleh.
"I was among a group (of notables) from different sects who went to collect the bodies but the armed men did not let us take them. The bodies were picked up only after armored security vehicles went into the area," he added.
Fearing sectarian killings, thousands of Sunni families have escaped to other cities or to Jordan and Lebanon, according to residents, while thousands of Alawites have fled to ancestral mountain homes in villages to the west.
In the last few weeks reports have increased of kidnappings of groups of Sunnis and Alawites in the city, including women, although Alawite and Sunni figures have been meeting to stop the abductions.
Saleh, 52, helped draft a declaration last month by Burhan Ghalioun, president of the main opposition Syrian National Council, which called for calming of sectarian tensions between Alawites and Sunnis in Homs, but he said the whole opposition should take a firm stance against sectarian killings.
"Those who do not condemn the crimes may just as well be partners in the crimes," he said.
The declaration said kidnappings, assassinations and score-settling "pose a dangerous threat to the gains of the revolution and offer a big service to the regime."
Armed resistance emerged in Homs, along with street protests, in the last two months, after Assad deployed troops and tanks in the city in April to crush large demonstrations against his rule.
The mostly Sunni Muslim city has large Alawite neighborhoods, whose residents were encouraged to move to Homs by offers of jobs in the state sector and its security network.
An offshoot of Shi'ite Islam, members of the Alawite sect rose to power in Syria five decades ago after controlling vital squadrons and intelligence divisions in the military.
Allying with a Sunni merchant class in Damascus and Aleppo, the Alawite ruling elite have since expanded their control on the state, key sectors of the economy, the military and the security apparatus now cracking down on a popular protest movement demanding an end to 41 years of Assad family rule.
The United Nations says the crackdown has killed 5,000 people. The authorities, who blame "armed terrorist gangs" for the violence, say 1,100 army and police have been killed.
"I think the repression has killed far more than 5,000," said Saleh.
He said it may be too late for a peaceful solution unless a stalled Arab League plan that calls for Assad to pull the military from cities and negotiate with his opponents is agreed.
"I wanted the regime to go a long time ago, but dreaming is something and reality is something else," he said. "The most important thing now is to stop the blood."
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Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Tout—The New Obnoxious Way to Tell if People Are Reading Your Emails [Apps]
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China braces as European crisis adds to strains (AP)
HONG KONG ? Europe's festering debt crisis is adding to strains on China just as the country is pricking its property bubble and facing a manufacturing downturn, limiting the ability of the world's No. 2 economy to prop up global growth.
Leaders in Europe are navigating a crucial week as they work to find a breakthrough at a summit Friday to avoid the disintegration of the euro common currency and the global financial panic that could ensue.
Such a scenario would slam China by crimping economic growth through lower demand for its exports. It would also prompt Beijing to slow the rise of its currency to a crawl ? exacerbating trade tensions with the U.S. and other nations that say China's yuan is already too cheap.
Even if the euro common currency shared by 17 nations remains mostly intact, China and other Asian countries will still face the daunting prospect of a recession in Europe next year and anemic growth in the U.S. ? both crucial markets for the region's cars, electronics, textiles and other exports.
During the 2009 global recession, China's 'shock and awe' style stimulus kept its booming economy on track. For Asia and other parts of the world, it helped soften the impact of the economic upheaval. The stimulus also unleashed high inflation, a torrent of low quality bank lending and uninhibited partying in the property market. Beijing is still trying to contain those distortions, meaning its response to a new downturn will be much more restrained.
The effects of Europe buckling beneath debt, austerity and financial market turmoil, and sloth-like growth in the U.S., are already being felt in China. Factory production shrank in November for the first time in nearly three years, and labor unrest is increasing as employers cut staff.
"Our suppliers here in China are beginning to be a lot more aggressive in trying to get business, which I put down to the fact that they're beginning to feel the pinch," said Christopher Devereux, who runs a company in Guangzhou, southern China sourcing high-quality lightweight parts for the automotive and mining industries.
"We're getting calls from suppliers looking for business ? that I've only noticed in last three weeks," he said. Suppliers are now open to negotiating over prices, a sharp change from the past when their attitude was take-it-or-leave-it.
Other Chinese exporters say orders have dropped by 10 to 30 percent from normal times because of slumping demand in Europe and the U.S., according to Stanley Lau, deputy chairman of the Hong Kong Federation of Industries.
Factories that are getting orders say they are smaller than before and customers are placing them at the last possible moment because they want to be as sure as possible a product will sell, he said.
"We will not expect that there will be great improvement until fourth quarter of next year," said Lau, who also owns a watch factory in southern China. "Of course this is only a hope. We never know what will happens in Europe ? whether the situation will go further downhill."
In a sign of what might lay ahead, China's exports to troubled Italy tumbled 17 percent in October from a year earlier. Sales to the full 27-nation European Union rose 7 percent, buoyed by strength in Germany and France, according to customs data.
"It's very likely that a recession is going to mean that demand for goods from China is going to sink precipitously," said Doug Guthrie, dean of the George Washington University School of Business.
That could drive down China's economic growth rate from this year's forecast of above 9 percent to as low as 6 percent, he said. The Asian Development Bank trimmed its forecast on Tuesday for Chinese growth next year to 8.8 percent from 9.1 percent. But in a worst-case scenario, with both Europe and the U.S. contracting at levels similar to 2009, it expects Chinese growth to slow to 6.8 percent.
Others think the hit could be much smaller because China's economy is less dependent on exports than it was before the 2008 global financial crisis. Exports now make up about a quarter of China's gross domestic product, down from about 40 percent in 2007 as investment and domestic consumption rose.
But millions of jobs still depend on manufacturing, especially along the southeast coast, where thousands of factories supply Europe and the United States with low-cost shoes, toys, furniture and other goods.
"There will be joblessness, loss of consumption power for a part of the population that has just come out of poverty. There will probably be a fair amount of social unrest that comes along with that," said Guthrie.
On top of interest rate cuts and lower bank reserves to spur lending and backstop growth, it's likely China would slow the appreciation of the tightly controlled yuan to keep its exports competitive on world markets.
That would be even more the case if especially fragile countries that use the euro such as Portugal and Greece ditch it in favor of a weak, export-boosting national currency. That in turn would raise the risk of bigger economies such as Italy doing the same.
A splintering of the euro grouping would send the common currency plummeting while acting as jet fuel for other currencies such as the dollar and the yuan, which is also known as the renminbi.
"We suspect that Chinese policymakers will respond by slowing the renminbi's pace of appreciation to a crawl," said Mark Williams, chief Asia economist for Capital Economics.
Some see the crisis as an opportunity for China's leaders to raise their global clout by stepping in to shore up the world financial system. But over the weekend they sent their clearest signal yet that they intend to stay out of the fray. A senior diplomat rejected the idea that China's $3.2 trillion in foreign currency reserves could be used to help dig Europe out of its mountain of debt.
"The argument that China should rescue Europe does not stand, as reserves are not managed that way," Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying said in remarks reported on the weekend by Chinese state media.
Fu said China's reserves ? some of which are invested in the bonds of European governments ? are akin to money in a savings account and should not be "relocated randomly."
The idea of a possible Chinese role in Europe has caused unease among Europeans. It wouldn't come off well at home either, analysts said.
"It doesn't make sense for China to give money from a relatively poor population, on average, to Europeans who don't want to cut their lifestyle," said Dariusz Kowalczyk, a senior economist at Credit Agricole CIB.
"This kind of logic will be deeply unpopular domestically, and I don't think China will make such moves. They will show some gesture of support because they want to be seen as a player on the global scene."
________
AP Business Writer Joe McDonald in Beijing contributed to this report.
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