Khazen – Page 795

Warren Buffett sticks with what he knows, and that now includes newspapers

Warren Buffett doesn’t buy Google.
Last week, he didn’t buy Facebook, the social-media phenomenon that started trading Friday on the Nasdaq, ending the day with a market capitalization of about $105 billion.
"I kind of ventured quite a ways out to buy IBM," Buffett said in an interview with the Fox Business cable network. "Facebook would be — my doctor would require a checkup."
No, Buffett puts money in things he understands. Among them: trains, insurance and newspapers.
Yes. Newspapers.
Atop his shopping list last week was a cluster of Southern newspapers in an industry that is — as Buffett himself said during this month’s shareholders meeting of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., his $200 billion company — declining.
In fact, he agreed to put $142 million in newspapers, buying the Winston-Salem Journal and all but one of Media General Inc.’s newspapers in a deal announced last week.
"Warren Buffett is the guy who orchestrated this transaction," said Terry Kroeger, president of BH Media Group, a holding company set up by Berkshire.
Efforts to contact Buffett were unsuccessful. In previous interviews, Buffett has said newspapers can do fine as long as they provide content that no one else does, and as long as they don’t provide it for free.
When the transaction goes through, probably by June 25, the ownership structure will have a few layers.
Kroeger said BH Media owns World Media Enterprises, which will be the actual owner of the Journal and 62 other dailies and weeklies in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama, in addition to digital assets, including websites and mobile and tablet applications.

The world’s worst traffic

IBM’s "Commuter Pain 2011" survey doesn’t look at the causes of congestion or offer any solutions. Too difficult. Instead, IBM merely asks people how they commute and how much their commute sucks. Congratulations Mexico City, you suck and you know it.

The chart above shows how people in 20 cities react to their commute, with drivers in China and Russia describing traffic that sounds like the premise of a Jacques Tati movie. More than a quarter of respondents in Moscow claim to have spent more than three hours stuck in traffic. And we all know how crazy China is.

Tellingly, the 8,042 people surveyed were people who lived in a major city, were 18-65 years old, and drove a vehicle alone as their main mode of transportation. Considering there are decent transit options in most of these places it means IBM interviewed the people who were mostly to blame for their own congestion.

The Inrix study shows that drivers in other major cities are still spending a fair number of hours stuck in traffic, too. While Los Angeles ranked a close second to Honolulu, those in San Francisco spent almost 48 additional hours in the car because of traffic.

The news wasn’t all bad, though. Inrix says overall congestion was down 30 percent in 2011 from the year before, and notes that of the 100 cities it surveyed, 70 of them logged lower rates of congestion year over year.

These cities had the worst traffic in 2011, according to Inrix, which lists the average hours wasted per driver after each city:

10)      Chicago – 32.8 hours
9)         Boston – 35 hours
8)         Austin – 30 hours
7)         Seattle – 33 hours
6)         Washington, D.C. – 45 hours
5)         Bridgeport, CT – 42 hours
4)         New York – 57 hours
3)         San Francisco – 48 hours
2)         Los Angeles – 56 hours
1)         Honolulu – 58 hours

The study also finds that, nationally, the worst morning commute occurs on Tuesday, while the worst evening commute is on Friday.

IBM worries iPhone’s Siri has loose lips

adminMay 23, 2012UncategorisedComments are off for this post

The art of Apple collecting data from users. Difference it does it in an artful transparent way without havings its user on alert on what they may be discussing or sharing with Sirus vs Facebook and Google does it in a more classical way.

This display a new strategy of Apple for the next decate seeking to get to business analytics and data management. I would see them competitors with the many other websites that have unlimited ways of reaching and studying behavior of their customers.

IBM is keeping them honest and reminding privacy importance.

(WIRED) — If you work for IBM, you can bring your iPhone to work, but forget about using the phone’s voice-activated digital assistant. Siri isn’t welcome on Big Blue’s networks.

The reason? Siri ships everything you say to her to a big data center in Maiden, North Carolina. And the story of what really happens to all of your Siri-launched searches, e-mail messages and inappropriate jokes is a bit of a black box.

IBM CIO Jeanette Horan told MIT’s Technology Review this week that her company has banned Siri outright because, according to the magazine, "The company worries that the spoken queries might be stored somewhere."

It turns out that Horan is right to worry. In fact, Apple’s iPhone Software License Agreement spells this out: "When you use Siri or Dictation, the things you say will be recorded and sent to Apple in order to convert what you say into text," Apple says. Siri collects a bunch of other information — names of people from your address book and other unspecified user data, all to help Siri do a better job.