The power of anthropologists

Bell's official title at Intel is director of interaction and experience research. Simply put, she's the "right brain" in a sea of scientists and engineers. Her mission: to help the chipmaker power new devices, make new software, and enter new markets by providing its technologists with a better understanding of how people all over the world use computers, phones, and other gadgets.

Indeed, Bell, who has a doctorate in cultural anthropology, fought hard to get chip designers to rethink their impulse to build ever-faster processors and market them outside the U.S. For great swaths of the world the Internet is, and will continue to be, mostly text on a phone, she says. And so Intel is pursuing that market with its Atom chips, which are cheaper and consume less power than, say, Intel Core i3 or Celeron processors. Bell has also been key in helping Intel move into the smart-TV market, studying how people behave when they are entertained by television in a living room, and how that experience is distinct from sitting in front of a computer.

She recounts meeting a Muslim boy in Kuala Lumpur who used his phone to orient him toward Mecca for prayer. She relates the story of coming across a ceremonial store in a city in Malaysia that had paper facsimiles of the latest cellphones. The paper models were burned so that dead relatives could talk to each other in the afterlife. "Technology is starting to manifest itself in every part of our lives," Bell says. "Not just at work and home but in religious practices, our love lives, and how we keep our secrets."

She spends most of her time in homes and other social centers all over the world, just hanging out with people living their daily lives. Bell has emerged as one of the world's foremost thinkers on the intersection of technology and humanity. "As an anthropologist, I couldn't have picked anything more fertile," she declares. "But let me be clear: I don't believe that technology changes us; we choose to be changed by it.

Intel's ultimate task is to enable technologies that are intimately connected to our lives. It is that "stickiness" that makes Apple products so adored, or explains why BlackBerry devices are addictive. But for all her talk of connectedness and serving the emerging world, Bell remains very much a killer: "If you do it right, if you make the thing in such a way that people love it, it will be part of everything," Bell says. "It sounds macabre, but it has to be so important that you bury people with it."

Credits -cnn

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Exalogic

Oracle, the world's No. 3 software maker unveiled a new all-in-one product to help companies manage cloud computing.

Its called Exalogic - this combined server, storage and networking technology with Oracle's software - that companies can use to run their business applications.

"The whole idea of cloud computing is to have a pool of resources that is shared among many different applications inside your company," Ellison said.

He said that Exalogic takes advantage of virtualisation technologies and is elastic enough to meet surgers in demand for computing power within companies.

For those of you that are not sure of the term, virtualisation, it is simply the process of presenting the set of computing resources such that they can be accessed in ways anywhere and is not restricted by physical configuration.

Cloud computing is the hottest issue right now. Gone are the days, where you have to use a particular desktop or laptop of yours to see the information stored.

You do not need to fear about the inconvenience whereby you have to switch on your desktop to look for something in it when you are actually using your laptop now.

In today's century, you can just store the thing you need in the cloud and you can access it via a laptop or a desktop.

Right now, the storage systems online are being developed and soon, you will be able to store tonnes of information online and you will be able to retrieve it at lightning speed too. The servers in the various data centers are being developed and the data centers are, too being expanded.

It is just a matter of time when cloud computing takes over the world.



Credits -Reuters (SAN FRANCISCO)

What Is An Offer?

Hi all, I'm currently reading up on Business Law and I thought that it might be really interesting to share with you all some of my notes

This is the small portion of my notes on the "Formation of Contract - Offer"

Do read through if you are interested to find out what actually constitutes an offer. You will be surprised that some things that you said actually can be construed as an offer and that can be very dangerous because you might just be bound by it.

I will be posting more parts later on if you guys are interested.

Enjoy

Over the years the courts have had to work out what constitutes an offer. This is obviously of some importance because once you have made an offer you are immediately vulnerable to being bound by a contract because of someone else's action. As the famous American contract text book writer Corbin has noted, an offer confers a power on the offeree. It confers a power on another to bind you in contract.

Of course, you have some control over this power because you can withdraw an offer so long as it has not been accepted. We will look at this a little later. But so long as the offer continues, it merely has to be accepted by the other party to create a legally binding relationship.

As well as being the penultimate act leading to formation of contract, an offer also serves the purpose of stating the terms on which you are prepared to be bound.

Because an offer is so important, the courts have had to focus on what precisely constitutes an offer in various circumstances. We have already seen in the Gibson case that an offer must be definite, not tentative or qualified in some way. It is no good saying something like: "I might be prepared to sell my dog to you for $100." That is not an offer. Nor is it any good saying "I offer you this but I don't intend to be bound to anything if you accept." This was made clear by the judgment of Barwick CJ in the MacRobertson Miller Airline case.

So in any particular case it is necessary to examine what was said or written and see if it is capable in law of amounting to an offer. The basic test is: is it complete so that merely saying "I accept" is sufficient to constitute a contract? We will see later that the courts have struggled with the unavoidable fact that ordinary people, let alone lawyers, do not go around saying with great precision what they are offering nor do people say with great clarity "I accept". Instead, the likelihood is that one of the parties will be arguing that a contract was made arising out of a desultory or somewhat vague conversation or exchange of letters. The other party will be saying: "Huh! You thought we made a contract? You must be joking!" The courts have to sort this out and, in doing so, they apply the objective test: would a reasonable observer have concluded that an offer had been made?

Credits -law.anu.edu.au

Just for Fun report about Smart Phones

 If you use the iPhone you may be likelier to have more sexual partners than users of other popular smart phones, new data suggests. Meanwhile, BlackBerry owners tend to be more business-minded and Android users are bird lovers.

Sound like you? As smart phones make inroads into the cell-phone market, a growing number of companies are collecting data that profiles who uses which type of phone or phone operating system.

Android hits BlackBerry's turf

For the past few years, Research In Motion has been fighting a rear-guard defense of its BlackBerry smart phones against Apple iPhones. Now there's another competitor on the horizon in the business market: Google Android phones.

Just as your car, dog or job can offer clues to your personality type, now your phone, in some ways, may help to define you.

People who use phones with the Android operating system are younger; a higher proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds use Androids than iPhones, according to Nielsen Co.’s Mobile Insights survey.

BlackBerry users are mostly in the 37- to 55-year-old range and tend to use their phones more for business purposes than entertainment. BlackBerry(RIMM 46.72, +0.23, +0.49%) has been around longer and has a larger share of the U.S. market — 35% to iPhone’s 28% and Android’s 9% — though the latter two are starting to gain.

IPhone users tend to be more affluent and better educated. As with all smart-phones users, iPhone owners are mostly male.

“Younger, male, higher income, more education — that’s along the lines of what you see with a typical early-adopter consumer-products profile,” said Don Kellogg, senior manager of research and insights at Nielsen.

“Apple customers tend to be a little more affluent but then also some of the Apple(AAPL 275.37, -1.20, -0.43%) products tend to be more expensive in the phone world,” he said.

IPhone users prefer chicken

They also apparently prefer chicken to pork ribs, which is a favorite among Android users, according to Coupons.com.

Patrick Crisp, a spokesman for Coupons.com, said he stumbled upon some notable differences between iPhone and Android users based on their digital coupon behavior with the company’s Grocery iQ shopping-list application, which isn’t available to BlackBerry users.

While women’s body wash was the top coupon used in the body-wash category among iPhone users, men’s body wash topped the list among Android users.

Telling, too, of the iPhone profile was that baby products are overwhelmingly more popular with those users — nearly 42 times more — than Android users, who used pain-relief coupons at double the rate of iPhone users.

And who knew? Android users are bird lovers while iPhone owners prefer the serenity of fish for pets, based on which pet-food coupons they download.

Also, it turns out iPhone owners may be a bit more promiscuous than other smart-phone users, according to OkCupid.com, an online dating service.

OkCupid collated data in its files -- on an anonymous basis -- and found indications that the sexual history of its 9,785 members who own smart phones varied depending on the type of phone. The findings: Women iPhone users had an average of 12.3 partners by the time they turned 30, compared with 8.8 partners for their counterparts who use a BlackBerry, and a mere 6 for those who use Androids. The numbers were similar for 30-year-old men iPhone users.

Android users can take comfort in knowing that they are considered more valuable than iPhone users to advertisers, according to Chitika, an online ad network. That’s because they clicked on ads a whopping 81% more often than people on the iPhone.

And teenagers are far more receptive to mobile ads than their parents or grandparents, according to a separate study by Nielsen. That makes them a perfect target for mobile advertising. Fifty-eight percent of 13- to 17-year-olds said they always or sometimes look at ads compared with 42% in the 35- to 44-years-old range and 28% of those older than 55.

Fun facts, and possibly a coincidence

Of course, none of this data has any grounding in social science or human behavior. It could all be pure coincidence, not causality: iPhone users tend to be more affluent, which means they may be apt to spend more lavishly than their business-minded colleagues on Blackberries.

Android users are less educated than users of other phones, but they’re much younger too. Of course, they wouldn’t have masters and doctoral degrees in their early 20s.

In other words, don’t try to pick your next mate based on what kind of phone he or she uses. 

Jennifer Waters is a MarketWatch reporter, based in Chicago.

Credits -marketwatch