Tag Archive for 2010

| October 9, 2010
Comments Off on Dell Number 2 again

Dell Number 2 again

I wrote about Dell losing its #2 role in the PC market but now iSuppli reports that Dell (DELL) has regained its customary rank in the global PC market behind HP. After nine months in third place, the Texas-based OEM retook the number 2 place from Taiwan-based Acer (ACID) in the second quarter of 2010. The change is primarily due to decreased Acer sales and not improved sales for Dell.

Dell logoIn the second quarter shipped Dell shipped 10.5 million units worldwide, down a negligible 1.2 percent from 10.7 million units in the first quarter. This gave Dell a 12.8 percent share of global shipments, down from 13.1 percent in the first quarter according to iSuppli.

However, iSuppli says Acer experienced a 6.2 percent shipment decline in the second quarter, with its shipments falling to 10.2 million units, down from 10.9 million in the first quarter. As a result, Acer’s share declined to 12.4 percent, down from 13.3 percent in the first quarter. Acer’s decline was notable given the global PC market’s 1.1% sequential rise in the second quarter, with shipments amounting to 82.5 million units, up from 81.6 million in the first quarter.

Acer logo“With its product line heavily focused on mobile PCs, Acer’s sequential decline in notebook shipments affected its position at the total PC level more than its competitors, which were able to draw on the upswing in desktop shipments to bolster their total shipments,” said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst, compute platforms research for iSuppli.

Dell’s share of the global PC market had been steadily declining since the second quarter of 2008. At that time the company accounted for 16% of worldwide shipments and held a 6.5% point lead over Acer. However, by the third quarter of 2009, Dell’s share had dwindled to 12.9 percent, allowing Acer to slip past and take the world’s No. 2 position.

“The second-quarter results show the market-share battle between Dell and Acer is not over and that it will continue to rage,” Wilkins said.

The second quarter marked HP’s 16th consecutive quarter as the No. 1 worldwide PC brand, with a market share of 18.1 percent.

Top 5 PC OEM Ranking Q2 2010

Q2 2010 RankOEMQ2 2010 ShipmentsQ2 2010 ShareQ1 2010 ShipmentsQ1 2010 Share
1Hewlett-Packard14,99518.1%15,96519.6%
2Dell10,54112.8%10,66813.1%
3Acer10,19112.4%10,87013.2%
4Lenovo8,32710.1%7,0208.6%
5Toshiba4,4565.4%4,5755.6%
Others34,02041.2%32,49939.8%
TOTAL82,490100%81,596100%
iSuppli (Ranking by Unit Shipments in Thousands)

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , ,
| October 2, 2010
Comments Off on BP Oil Spill Still in the Gulf

BP Oil Spill Still in the Gulf

BP Oil Spill Still in the Gulf Greenpeace has found traces of oil from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico at a depth of 3,200 feet and up to 300 miles from the spill site, according to a report from AFP. A team of scientists aboard the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise reported the results. After 10 days of sampling around areas affected by the worst oil spill in history. “From the measurements we’ve taken, we see clear signs of oxygen deficiency on a large transect starting at the Macondo wellhead, all the way 300 miles to the west,” said Rainer Amon, a Texas A&M scientist who participated in the research in the AFP article. “How much of oil and gas components are still in the water is something that we need to now investigate in the laboratory.”

The expedition had four points plotted to the west of the well to investigate the main path of oil after the April accident that led to a massive release of crude oil. They concluded that the dissolved oxygen level was not as low as scientists would have expected if a greater proportion of oil and gas had dissolved in the water.

This suggests that oil has not “disappeared” some have suggested and that as much as three to four million barrels of crude from the disaster have still not been accounted for. “Despite everything that BP and the government would like us to think, the truth is, the oil spill’s impact is not over,” said Greenpeace US research director Kert Davies. “Scientists know better, fishermen know better, the people of the Gulf and certainly the clean-up crews endlessly picking up tar balls know better. The government and BP need to be honest with everyone about the extent of the damage.”

Pelican is seen on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast on June 3, 2010.

Charlie Riedel/AP

The researchers conducted a parallel study of sealift and obtained samples of sediment on the ocean floor at a depth of 4,20 feet, five miles from the disaster site. The article says that some of the samples contained visible amounts of oil with a strong smell said Greenpeace in the AFP article. The samples have been sent to an independent laboratory for study and to determine the presence of chemical dispersants.

“When we’ve analyzed all the samples we’ve collected for our work and that of our colleagues, we hope to come up with a pretty good estimate of how much of the oil and gas was put into the system. Hopefully, we can then come up with good ideas of where that missing oil and gas has gone” Texas A&M’s Amon says in the AFP article.

Some 205 million gallons of oil flowed into the Gulf after the April 20 explosion aboard the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig, impacting the crucial fishing and tourism industries and destroying hundreds of miles of the region’s fragile coastal ecosystems.

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The rest of us will have to live with the long-lasting impact, but not BP. Politico reports

During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.

For their $77K investment, BP is now getting special treatment according to CBS News. CBS has reported

A dead bird covered in oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, June 2010

Charlie Riedel/AP

BP and the Obama administration are discussing a possible settlement over fines for the company’s massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill in an effort to avoid a costly legal fight  ….  Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La.,  said the goal of the talks between BP PLC and the government is to reach a deal instead of having to fight it out in court.

CBS News further reports that BP faces penalties and fines under a variety of environmental protection laws, including fines of up to $1,100 under the Clean Water Act for each barrel of oil spilled. If BP were found to have committed gross negligence or willful misconduct, the fine could be up to $4,300 per barrel.  That means that based on the 4.9 million barrels released from the Macondo well, BP could face civil fines under the Clean Water Act alone of between $5.4 billion and $21.1 billion.

Any reduction in fines that BP can leverage out of the administration would give a healthy return on investment for BP and will show the value of the environment to Washington.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Oil | Tags: , , , , , , ,
| October 1, 2010
2 comments

Banks & Bosses Use Social Media to Assess Risk

Updated 10-22-10 – GigaOm has a post about Rapleaf here.

If you’re among the 67% of the global online population which Nielsen Online says uses social media networks to stay in touch with friends, grow their business, or just have fun then your information is for sale to banks, insurance companies, employers, and the government. Some banks are turning to social media analytics firms to enhance their credit-check procedures.

Banks are now looking at an applicant’s social media profile, behavior, and associations on sites like Facebook (FB), Twitter, and MySpace according to a recent article on the banking industry site CreditCards.com. The banker’s theory is that people run with folks who share their values and behavior. If your Facebook friends are deadbeats, the banks theorize you are a deadbeat also. These assumptions may make it harder to get a credit card or mortgage, according to CreditCards.com.

Many banks are now outsourcing their social network data mining operations to firms such as Rapleaf. Rapleaf, is a San Francisco, CA-based company that specializes in social media monitoring. According to CreditCard.com, Rapleaf compiles everything you and your network do – including status updates, “tweets,” joining online clubs, linking a Web site or posting a comment on a blog or news Web site. These firms turn the conversations into consumer profiles called social graphs. Social graphs give companies insight into behavior patterns: what you like and dislike, want and don’t want, do well and do poorly.

Banks & Bosses Use Social Media to Assess RiskIn the article, Rapleaf characterizes its social network data mining operations as “a unique way to improve customer experience by whitelisting customers based on their social circles and friend relationships.”  Since the firm uses data to “whitelist” people, it may also very easily be used to “blacklist” people and deny them a credit card or a job. “Who you hang around with has empirical implications with how you behave,” Joel Jewitt, Rapleaf’s vice president of business development told FastCompany.

“It’s a marketing trend as opposed to a credit score trend,” says Jewitt.  Despite his assurances, Rapleaf’s Web site suggests that clients “use friend networks to enhance … credit scoring” according to FastCompany. Jesse Torres, president, and CEO of Pan American Bank in Los Angeles told CreditCards.com that online information aggregators fill a need within the banking community. “They’re able to scour the social media universe. They are constantly listening and reporting back.”

The bankers are protecting their bottom line, “credit card companies have been stung very hard during this downturn, and they’re going to work that much harder to avoid extending credit…,” Ken Clark, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Boosting Your Financial IQ told CreditCards.com. Rob Garcia, senior director of product strategy at The Lending Club, a peer-to-peer lender, says his firm uses multiple sources of “social information collateral” for its decision-making processes “It’s a wealth of information about a person,” says Garcia.

Not everyone in the industry is data mining social networks. “It’s difficult to make a judgment about an individual’s credit based on the people around them,” says Gregory Meyer, community relations manager for Meriwest Credit Union in San José, CA.  Meriwest only assesses credit reports and application data to make lending decisions. “[Social media] is a great way to keep up with what my 10-year-old nephew is up to, but it doesn’t have a place in the credit process.”

What you divulge can have an unintended impact. “We’ve seen this with applicants not getting jobs and employees getting fired for their Facebook and Twitter-based escapades,” financial personality Clark told CreditCards.com, “so we shouldn’t imagine this to be any different.” There are steps to take to guard your privacy. “I think it is crucial that everyone visit the privacy notices for the sites they use, read them, and change their settings to limit who can see their information,” says Clark. “For example, on Facebook, you can change your privacy settings so that only your acknowledged friends can see the majority of your information.” You can also enable “private filtering” on your browser. Do so and your activity will be entirely out of the Web profiling system.

Scott Stevenson, president, and CEO of EliminateIDTheft.com told CreditCards.com people should:

  1. Don’t accept invitations until you check the profile out first.
  2. Be acutely aware of what you write. Don’t make public anything you don’t want public.
  3. Take an annual inventory of all your social networking sites and delete people and information that can potentially damage you in the eyes of a creditor or employer.

Rapleaf offers a service to discover your online footprint and see what others might see on your social graph. Google (GOOG) offers a similar tool, the Google Privacy Dashboard. which presents an overview of the accounts and information you are connected with through Google. Take advantage of tools like these to check your own online reputation. What you don’t know can hurt you. Rapleaf’s Jewitt reminds users that, “The custodian of the information is you.”

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There is nothing illegal about social network data mining banks and firms like Rapleaf do. Facebook and the other social networks are legal commercial enterprises that openly broker user data for exactly these kinds of purposes. People freely put information on Facebook with the full knowledge that it will become permanent parts of the public Internet record. Users need to know about this kind of data mining for two reasons. First, the stakes are high. It’s about getting access to credit that might be necessary for your family or business or even getting your next job.

Second, data mining gives the lenders insights into relationships that are unknown to and often completely out of the control of the applicant. Maybe being a Facebook fan of NASCAR says something in the sum about your socioeconomic status and your creditworthiness or employability, according to some second-order derivative analysis of millions of data records.

The asymmetry in the relationship between data-driven marketers and consumers is structural and permanent. Institutions like banks (and, potentially, insurance companies, employers, and the government) will use it to gain an advantage, because that’s what they do.

Related articles

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Social Networking | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| September 27, 2010
One comment

PAETEC Buys Again

PAETEC Buys AgainPAETEC has expanded again. PAETEC Holding Corp.(PAET) recently announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Cavalier Telephone Corporation. The acquisition will add Cavalier’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Intellifiber Networks’ fiber-optic network to PAETEC’s existing service footprint.

Intellifiber Networks is Intellifiber Networks logoone of the largest network providers in the nation with a high-capacity fiber network spanning nearly 17,000 route miles and representing over $2 billion of investment. The expansive 12,262 route mile intercity network spans the Midwest and Eastern U.S., as well as 4,689 route miles throughout several existing PAETEC metro areas,  allowing for broad connectivity options for customers. Intellifiber offers scalable network solutions for service provider, enterprise, and government customers. Their offerings include private networks, low latency routing, SONET services, wavelengths, Ethernet, and data options.

The expanded PAETEC fiber network will encompass a combined 10,609 metro fiber-route miles and 37,023 total fiber-route miles and a combined 1,178 collocations. After the closing of this transaction, PAETEC expects to have a local presence in 86 of the top 100 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs). The transaction will further solidify PAETEC as one of the largest competitive local communication service providers in the United States

PAETEC logoMarketWatch reports PAETEC Holding Corp. will acquire Cavalier Telephone Corporation in an all-cash $460 million transaction. Cavalier will become an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of PAETEC Holding Corp. Cavalier is a privately held company whose majority owner is M/C Venture Partners, a private equity firm based in Boston.

“This planned acquisition of Cavalier fits our strategic plan to add both fiber assets and regional density to better serve our customers and realize increased network synergies, both in the local loop and long haul,” Arunas A. Chesonis, chair, and CEO of PAETEC told MarketWatch. “Cavalier’s fiber infrastructure, network assets, and corporate culture make it a perfect match for PAETEC and dramatically strengthen the company in the Eastern United States.”

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| September 24, 2010
Comments Off on Hourglass Syndrome

Hourglass Syndrome

Hourglass SyndromeA July 2010 technology online study conducted by Harris Interactive (NASDAQ: HPOL) and sponsored by Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC), reveals that eight out of 10 (80%) U.S. adults get frustrated waiting for technology, and over half (51%) have done something out of character when frustrated while waiting for technology. Intel calls this the “Hourglass Syndrome.”

Intel logoIntel says that of those who suffer from the hourglass syndrome:

  • 69% admitted acting inappropriately while waiting.
  • 62% of U.S. adults admit to yelling or cursing out loud when their technology can’t keep up with them.
  • 29% hit their computer mouse.
  • 24%  bang on their computer screen and keyboard, hopefully not to the extent as the guy in the video.

The integral role technology plays in everyday life causes the hourglass syndrome phenomenon says the chipmaker. Intel marketing experts say the “malady” has developed with the modern pace of life. In an environment where mobile devices are constantly on to answer emails within minutes of receiving them, people feel anger and frustration when outdated technology fails to keep up with the speed of life.

Margaret (Margie) Morris, a clinical psychologist and health technology researcher at Intel, states in the Intel press release;”We are closely connected with our devices  … They become extensions of ourselves and become critically involved in our relationships with others, how we express ourselves, and our efforts to manage stress. We enjoy the freedom to communicate and work from anywhere, so we rely on the technology to work. When it lets us down, the disappointment runs high and sometimes spills over into our feelings about ourselves.”

Of those who have acted or seen someone act inappropriately in public due to frustrations with technology:

  • 70% saw strangers.
  • 46% have seen family or friends.
  • 33% have seen co-workers act out in frustration while waiting for technology.

According to the online survey taken between July 27-29, 2010 sluggish technology often causes people to miss out on something while they are waiting. 35% of U.S. adults said that they missed out on something while waiting for technology, such as losing an opportunity to take part in an online sale (13%) or buy airline, concert, or sporting event tickets. “Intel understands how stressful technology can be,” said Karen Regis, Director of Intel’s Consumer PC Marketing in the press release. “We are determined to design products that can improve the quality of your life and lower your stress levels, as opposed to increasing them.”

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Kudos to Intel for the imaginative use of pseudo-science to wrap a marketing message for Intel Turbo Boost Technology in a factoid.  GigaOm points out that Intel, “helpfully notes that Hourglass Syndrome “is not a real syndrome or medical condition.”

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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