Small Business Marketing Revolution ? Cost Saving Idea #11 Cloud ...

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Source: http://www.rangrage.com/small-business-marketing-revolution-cost-saving-idea-11-cloud-based-services/

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U.S. earnings beating forecasts but jury's out on rest of season

By Caroline Valetkevitch and Ben Berkowitz

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. companies have easily beaten expectations for first-quarter earnings so far in the reporting season, but nearly half of the members of the S&P 500 are yet to announce results and they are unlikely to be as robust.

With results in from 271 of the S&P 500 companies, year-over-year earnings growth is projected at 3.9 percent, compared with a forecast for 1.5 percent growth at the start of the earnings season, Thomson Reuters data shows. That figure includes those that have reported and analyst estimates for those who have not.

The companies yet to report are expected to post an aggregate earnings decline of 0.4 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data - whereas the companies that have already reported have posted growth of 6.1 percent.

Among the biggest companies yet to report are Dow components Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Home Depot .

Some 69 percent of the S&P 500 have beaten forecasts, once again conforming to the pattern of lowering expectations enough to "surprise" by beating them. The 69 percent figure exceeds the long-term average of 63 percent. This has been the pattern for the last 15 quarters, with growth estimates at the beginning of earnings ultimately being beaten by at least a full percentage point.

From April 1 to April 24, S&P 500 earnings growth expectations fell 170 basis points for the second quarter, 130 basis points for the third quarter and 70 basis points for the fourth quarter.

"If this recent pattern holds, you're going to find that those beats will continue and therefore lead earnings season to be one of continued positive surprise," said Mark Luschini, chief investment strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott in Philadelphia.

So far, this has been good enough for investors. Since earnings season began with Alcoa's report on April 8, the S&P 500 has gained 1.2 percent, and it closed Friday less than 1 percent from its all-time high of 1,593.37 reached on April 11. So far this year, it has climbed nearly 11 percent.

GOING FORWARD, WITH CAUTION

Even though profits have been better than expectations, revenue forecasts have declined, a sign, once again, that companies are exceeding results on the bottom line because of reduced expenses, and not because of stellar sales. So far, just 42 percent of companies are beating revenue expectations, below the long-term average.

First-quarter revenue now is expected to fall 0.3 percent, which is worse than the forecast for 1 percent growth when the season started.

That means companies - yet again - have been able to squeeze out higher profits through cost-cutting and other measures. But that does not bode well for hiring and stands as a potential headwind to the economy in coming quarters.

"It does concern me. It's not sustainable over the medium or the long term. There's only so much companies can do to sustain growth without increasing sales," said Paul Zemsky, head of asset allocation at ING Investment Management, in New York.

There are plenty of examples of major companies that were deeply reserved about the second quarter or the remainder of the year.

Among those were Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc . Apple, until recently the world's biggest company by market value, saw its first quarterly profit decline in a decade and issued a soft outlook for the second quarter that fell short of investor hopes. The stock has lost about 40 percent of its value since September.

"The market was telling you the numbers were too high," BGC analyst Colin Gillis said of Apple's outlook, adding that it was "pretty much even worse than even I was expecting."

(Additional reporting by Rodrigo Campos and Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/u-earnings-beating-forecasts-jurys-rest-season-211946052.html

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CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING IS LACKING IN BOSTON STORY

WASHINGTON -- The first time I met the legendary Sam Jameson we had tea in Tokyo in 1979. He told me with unwavering assurance why he was dedicating his life and talents to Japan.

This tall, stolid Yankee with the open Midwestern smile had arrived in the island nation with the U.S. Army in 1960, when World War II had still not really ended. Parts of Japanese cities were still in ruins and mentalities were still mired in confusion. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the brilliant American substitute for the emperor after the war, had gone home, but the future had not yet arrived.

"I decided I would stay as a correspondent," Sam told me that day. "I wanted to see if two people who had been at war could be friends again."

Those words stayed with me, as from afar I watched Sam go from writing for Pacific Stars & Stripes to the Chicago Tribune and, finally, to a quarter-century as the Los Angeles Times' bureau chief in Tokyo. His first "trick" was to learn perfectly fluent and nuanced Japanese, itself a tremendous accomplishment.

While other correspondents flocked to the "new Japan" and did their jobs well, Sam stood alone in his talents. Whenever his friends from home visited, he took us to his favorite piano bars, and at a certain time, the big Yank got up and sang in perfect Japanese, and the crowd went wild.

Another evening we were having dinner at The Foreign Correspondents' Club in Tokyo, and I began complaining that I had been unable to get an interview with Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, already an international leader of considerable note. Sam picked up the phone on the table, dialed Nakasone's private number, spoke a moment in Japanese and hung up.

"Shall we go over there now?" Sam asked, with that wonderful smile hovering on impishness. And that very night, I had an excellent interview with the notably evasive Nakasone.

As Bob Gibson, the L.A. Times foreign editor who worked with Sam, noted this week, "Whereas other reporters often use Western diplomats as sources, Western diplomats in Japan used Sam as a source."

Unfortunately, Gibson was speaking for Sam's obituaries after Sam died at 76 on April 19 of a stroke -- in Tokyo, naturally -- after half a century's work and dedication not only to a profession, but to an idea.

It may seem that I am simply reminiscing here, about someone I greatly admired professionally and had deep affection for personally, but it is more than that. In a time when we have more need in understanding the Chechens, the Afghans, the Sunnis and the Shiites, the Syrians and the Iraqis, and the Malians and the Mauritanians, I am trying to throw much-needed light on how understanding between peoples is best accomplished.

When those two nitwit Tsarnaev boys committed mass murder in Boston, people asked, "Chechen? Chechnya? Maybe, Czech?" And all most writers could come up with was the rather obvious information that Chechnya was a small Muslim tribal area in the Caucasus, and that the Tsarnaev family had come out of Chechnya's wars with the Russians.

This week I found the best analysis to be from Russian writer Konstantin Kazenin, who wrote in Moscow that the Tsarnaev family were not among the Chechen exiles after the wars as expected, but part of a different tragedy.

Instead, this family, which ended up in a unique and unusual diaspora in Boston, is "an example of a Caucasus family which existed in the last Soviet and post-Soviet decades without communal supports and in a vacuum of new unfriendly spaces in which it was necessary to find a way to survive without having any accustomed support," according to Kazenin.

In short, they were not villagers, with a village to support them. They were not city dwellers who fought off the Russians together. They were part of the groups written about by the great writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn in "The Gulag Archipelago" -- effectively atomized individuals and individual families, lost without any support except themselves.

To me, this means that the brothers could be at least as much against America as against Russia: to the Tsarnaevs, both countries are equally huge, impersonal entities in which they are lost and afraid; both are enemies undeserving of pity.

Another excellent analyst of the Chechens, Almut Rochowanski, coordinator of the Chechnya Advocacy Network, also writes brilliantly about the Chechens' "exaggerated masculinity, the way a 'real man,' a 'real Chechen,' has to conduct himself, and the treatment he is entitled to expect from others."

The Chechen boy in a world like America brings with him the idea that "he should get respect from everyone and tolerate no slights; he should control 'his' women or else lose his honor." And if he doesn't, he strikes out against the society that ignores him.

In Japan after World War II, Douglas MacArthur relied on total victory, but also upon cultural wisdom about Japan from American anthropologists he hired, such as the great Ruth Benedict. In Vietnam, Cambodia, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, our forces instead treated locals as if they were poor copies of ourselves. We know the tragic outcomes.

Now, as we try to figure out the "whys" of Chechen and other terrorists -- and as more and more talk is given to "getting into Syria" -- it is time that we dig deeper, as my dear friend Sam and even MacArthur so surprisingly did.

(Georgie Anne Geyer has been a foreign correspondent and commentator on international affairs for more than 40 years. She can be reached at gigi_geyer(at)juno.com.)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/cultural-understanding-lacking-boston-story-220039656.html

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Google offers $1 Billion to buy '' WhatsApp'' | Morocco World News

By Aissam El Hani

Morocco World News

Targuist, Morocco, April 07, 2013

The Arabic version of Al Arabiya Channel has reported that the IT giant Google is close to buying the popular instant messaging WhatsApp.

Google has been in negotiations for five weeks with the owner of WhatsApp and offered him $1 billion.

DigitalTrends, a well-known IT news site, has announced that there are rumors that Google Babble will combine Google?s disparate communication services under one roof, but the platform still needs to do something to innovate this service. Mobile messaging has been taken over by smaller apps and Facebook has made a major push as well.

Google hasn?t yet received an answer to its offer. Google Product Manager Nikhyl Singhal confessed to GigaOM in June of last year that ?We have done an incredibly poor job of servicing our users here.? ?Messaging is a huge, gaping hole in Google?s mobile strategy?, he added.

WhatsApp is considered one of the best mobile Apps for instant messaging platforms. The latest statistics show that it is used in 100 countries and on over 750 mobile networks.

WhatsApp developers have confirmed that users exchange over one billion messages daily all over the world, which is what led them to undertake immense efforts to improve the service for Android, iOS, Windows mobile and Blackberry users.

Some reports have claimed that Facebook already tried to buy WhatsApp last year but a deal was not made.

? Morocco World News. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, rewritten or redistributed

Source: http://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2013/04/85716/google-offers-1-billion-to-buy-whatsapp/

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Death toll hits 68 in India building collapse

MUMBAI, India --?

The death toll in the collapse of a residential building being constructed illegally in India's financial capital rose to 68 Saturday amid diminishing hopes of finding any survivors alive, police said.

Another 70 people were injured when the eight-story building on forest land in the Mumbai suburb of Thane caved in into a mound of steel and concrete Thursday evening, police said.

Thirty-seven of the injured were still in city hospitals and the rest discharged after medical treatment, said Sandeep Malvi, a spokesman for the local municipal corporation.

Most bodies have been recovered, but some people might still be trapped in the debris, said Malvi. He expected the rescue operation to be completed later Saturday.

Police officer Dahi Phale said that rescue workers with sledgehammers, gasoline-powered saws and hydraulic jacks worked through Friday night to break through the tower of rubble in their search for possible survivors. Six bulldozers were brought to the scene.

Malvi said 16 bodies were recovered overnight.

Prithviraj Chavan, the top elected official of Maharashtra state, said a government probe has been ordered into the accident, and that a deputy municipal commissioner and a senior police officer have been suspended for dereliction of duty.

At the time of the collapse, between 100 and 150 people were in the building. Many were residents or construction workers, who were living at the site as they worked on it, said Sandeep Malvi, a spokesman for the Thane government.

The dead included 17 children, police said.

A nearby hospital was filled with the injured, many of whom had head wounds, fractures and spinal injuries. Hospital officials searched in vain for the parents of an injured 10-month-old girl who had been rescued.

At least four floors of the building had been completed and were occupied. Workers had finished three more floors and were adding the eighth when it collapsed, police Inspector Digamber Jangale said.

It was not immediately clear what caused the structure to collapse, but local police commissioner K.P. Raghuvanshi said it was weakly built. Police were searching for the builders to arrest them, he said.

Police with rescue dogs were searching the building, which appeared to have buckled and collapsed on itself.

Raghuvanshi said rescue workers had saved 15 people from the wreckage.

Building collapses are common in India as builders try to cut corners by using substandard materials, and as multi-storied structures are built with inadequate supervision. The massive demand for housing around India's cities and pervasive corruption often result in builders adding unauthorized floors or putting up illegal buildings.

The neighborhood where the building collapsed was part of a belt of more than 2,000 illegal structures that had sprung up in the area in recent years, said Malvi, the town spokesman.

"Notices have been served several times for such illegal construction, sometimes notices are sent 10 times for the same building," he said.

G.R. Khairnar, a former top Mumbai official, said government officials who allowed the illegal construction should be tried along with the builders.

"There are a lot of people involved (in illegal construction) - builders, government machinery, police, municipal corporation - everybody is involved in this process," he told CNN-IBN television.

The building that collapsed was illegally constructed on forest land, and the city informed forestry officials twice about it, Malvi said.

A local resident, who did not give his name, said the site was meant to hold a smaller structure and accused officials of turning a blind eye to the problem.

"They made an eight-story building of what was supposed to be a four-story building. People from the municipality used to visit the building but the builder still continued to add floors," he said.

In one of the worst recent collapses, nearly 70 people were killed in November 2010 when an apartment building in a congested New Delhi neighborhood crumpled. That building was two floors higher than legally allowed.

Source: http://www.fortmilltimes.com/2013/04/05/2600993/death-toll-hits-68-in-india-building.html

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Facebook Home 'Airplane' ad brings one traveler's News Feed aboard -- literally

Sure, Facebook had a weird ad with Blink-182 for the HTC Status, but its sneak peek at its newest TV spot for the First and Home is on another level. Posted today on its Facebook profile, the campy piece literally brings one traveler's feed to life inside the cabin of his flight during boarding. We won't spoil the goods for you, but it's interesting to see Facebook's first thrust at marketing this skin and smartphone combo out to the masses. Catch the full clip after the break.

Filed under: Cellphones, Misc, Software, Mobile, HTC, Facebook

Comments

Source: Facebook

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/06/facebook-home-airplane-ad-brings-one-travelers-news-feed-aboa/

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Shift of language function to right hemisphere impedes post-stroke aphasia recovery

Apr. 4, 2013 ? In a study designed to differentiate why some stroke patients recover from aphasia and others do not, investigators have found that a compensatory reorganization of language function to right hemispheric brain regions bodes poorly for language recovery. Patients who recovered from aphasia showed a return to normal left-hemispheric language activation patterns.

These results, which may open up new rehabilitation strategies, are available in the current issue of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience.

"Overall, approximately 30% of patients with stroke suffer from various types of aphasia, with this deficit most common in stroke with left middle cerebral artery territory damage. Some of the affected patients recover to a certain degree in the months and years following the stroke. The recovery process is modulated by several known factors, but the degree of the contribution of brain areas unaffected by stroke to the recovery process is less clear," says lead investigator Jerzy P. Szaflarski, MD, PhD, of the Departments of Neurology at the University of Alabama and University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center.

For the study, 27 right-handed adults who suffered from a left middle cerebral artery infarction at least one year prior to study enrollment were recruited. After language testing, 9 subjects were considered to have normal language ability while 18 were considered aphasic. Patients underwent a battery of language tests as well as a semantic decision/tone decision cognitive task during functional MRI (fMRI) in order to map language function. MRI scans were used to determine stroke volume.

The authors found that linguistic performance was better in those who had stronger left-hemispheric fMRI signals while performance was worse in those who had stronger signal-shifts to the right hemisphere. As expected, they also found a negative association between the size of the stroke and performance on some linguistic tests. Right cerebellar activation was also linked to better post-stroke language ability.

The authors say that while a shift to the non-dominant right hemisphere can restore language function in children who have experienced left-hemispheric injury or stroke, for adults such a shift may impede recovery. For adults, it is the left hemisphere that is necessary for language function preservation and/or recovery.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by IOS Press BV, via AlphaGalileo.

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Journal Reference:

1. Jerzy P. Szaflarski, Jane B. Allendorfer, Christi Banks, Jennifer Vannest and Scott K. Holland. Recovered vs. not-recovered from post-stroke aphasia: The contributions from the dominant and non-dominant hemispheres. Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, 31:4 (July 2013) DOI: 10.3233/RNN-120267

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/B5c3o72Sgh8/130404121925.htm

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Samsung partners with Best Buy to bring Experience Shops to 1,400 stores

Not content with a gazillion Galaxy phone sales, Samsung is hoping to continue winning the smartphone war in one of the biggest battlegrounds any manufacturer can face: retail. The Korean OEM has partnered with Best Buy to bring its Experience Shops to the big box retailer nationwide -- 1,400 of them by early summer (with 900 launching this month), to be precise. So what does Sammy hope to achieve? In addition to the standard shopping setup, the company wants to give customers the ability to actually use its products and get a first-hand feel of what they have to offer: phones, accessories, Smart TVs and tablets will be on display. Each shop will be manned by Samsung-employed consultants as well as specially trained Best Buy employees. This appears to be Samsung's way of offering a thorough retail experience without actually launching its very own stores across the country. It'll be interesting to see if it will be a more effective retail alternative to what companies like Apple and Microsoft have adopted, but Samsung sure seems quite optimistic about its chances. Find the press release below for the full experience.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Samsung

Comments

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/04/samsung-best-buy/

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HTC infographic details one day with the HTC One

The folks who can get one are loving their HTC One, and everyone loves infographics - this had to happen

While you're waiting to have a look at the new HTC One, you're probably thinking of how you might use the phones features. We're covering them to give you the in-depth story on what they can do and how to use them, and HTC is now showing you why you may want to.

Blinkfeed and Zoes and the rest of the new Sense 5 can be a bit confusing. We get it. HTC gets it. This is the sort of material HTC needs to produce to cut some of that confusion away, and show folks that they can be productive and have fun with their smartphone. Be sure to click the source link for the mega-huge not safe for mobile version.

Source: HTC

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/OIcAeCFCXLQ/story01.htm

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Norovirus sweeps through Portland nursing home, almost gone ...

An employee in a Southwest Portland retirement community got sick with norovirus a week ago.

Within days, the highly contagious virus spread, infecting nearly 40 people. But on Tuesday, a week later, only two residents were sick.

"We immediately went into action because it spreads so quickly," said Pat Holahan, executive director of Regency Park Assisted Living Center. "We did everything that we had to do."

That included keeping residents in their rooms, sanitizing surfaces with a bleach solution, having staff wear gloves and masks and asking family members to stay away.

"It's best to leave everybody in place," Holahan said. The facility at 8300 S.W. Barnes Road has about 130 residents.

There's no treatment for norovirus. The only remedy is to stay hydrated, as? comfortable as possible and wait.

The bug is passed directly among people or indirectly through food, water or surfaces. Though rarely fatal, it does pose a risk to elderly people and those with compromised immune systems.

With winter over, norovirus outbreaks are expected to wane. The outbreak at Regency is now the only one in the tri-county area, said Dr. Paul Lewis, deputy health officer for Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington county.

-- Lynne Terry

Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/health/index.ssf/2013/04/norovirus_sweeps_through_portl.html

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Muppets matriarch Jane Nebel Henson dies at age 78

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Jane Nebel Henson, the former wife of Muppets creator Jim Henson who was influential in the creation of the popular U.S. TV puppet program, died on Tuesday following a long bout with cancer, The Jim Henson Company said. She was 78 years old.

Henson, who died at her home in Connecticut, was an "integral creative and business partner" in the Muppets, the company, owned by the Hensons' five children, said in a statement.

Jane Henson, born in Queens, New York, in 1934, was an early puppeteer, as well as puppet designer for the Muppets, best known for characters Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy, who starred in numerous television programs and films.

She first met Jim Henson in puppetry class at the University of Maryland in the mid-1950s and the two went on to create together the five-minute television program "Sam and Friends," a precursor to the Muppets.

The show served as a lead-in to "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" news show and "The Tonight Show Starring Steve Allen" on a Washington, D.C., NBC affiliate.

Although Henson stopped working as a puppeteer to raise her children in the early 1960s, she was still responsible for recruiting top talent and performing on occasion on the children's show "Sesame Street."

Henson legally separated from her husband in 1986 prior to his death. She later founded The Jim Henson Legacy to promote his work. She is survived by her five children.

Jim Henson died in 1990 of organ failure following a bacterial infection at age 53.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey, Editing by Jill Serjeant and Todd Eastham)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/muppets-matriarch-jane-nebel-henson-dies-age-78-124650838.html

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