GE's Billion-Dollar Bet on Big Data

General Electric’s (GE) first research laboratory was housed in a barn in upstate New York; its newest is going up in Silicon Valley. In a vivid illustration of how the locus of U.S. innovation has shifted from the East to the West Coast, GE is pouring $1 billion into a facility in San Ramon, Calif., that will be staffed with as many as 400 people.

San Ramon will be home to the new Global Software Center

New hires for the Global Software Center, which is set to open in June, are coming from Oracle (ORCL), SAP (SAP), and Symantec (SYMC). Bill Ruh, the vice president running the venture, was lured away from Cisco Systems (CSCO) last year. The tech industry veteran says persuading developers to forgo windfalls from initial public offerings to come work at an industrial stalwart is not as difficult as one might think. “They want to be in on the Next Big Thing,” he says.

The big thing Ruh is referring to is called “big data,” the fast-growing market for information technology systems that can sift through massive amounts of data to help companies make better decisions. Just as information on millions of Facebook users is prized by advertisers, the details companies amass from their operations can be used to cut costs and boost profits. Norfolk Southern (NSC), which buys diesel locomotives from the Fairfield (Conn.) company, uses customized software to monitor rail traffic, reducing congestion and allowing trains to move at higher speeds. The fourth-largest U.S. railroad estimates that making trains run an average of 1 mile per hour faster will save more than $200 million.

The potential for such technologies is so huge that it’s impossible to come up with an estimate of how much the market is worth, according to Michael Chui, a senior fellow at McKinsey. “It’s just too big,” he says. That doesn’t mean there’s room for all comers, according to Ping Li of Accel Partners, a venture capital firm investing in big-data startups. “If you’re not getting in right now it’s hard to see how you can keep up with the pace of innovation,” he says.

GE’s annual revenue from software already is about $3 billion and on pace to grow to $5 billion in the next couple of years, Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt told investors in December. Ruh says he wants to marry big data with some of GE’s biggest businesses. He sees an opportunity in helping airlines that buy GE jet engines monitor their performance and anticipate maintenance needs, reducing costly flight cancellations. The technology could also help companies that lease commercial vehicles from GE Capital to optimize delivery routes and provide early warning that a truck may need a trip to the repair shop. “If I can begin to see that something is starting to deteriorate and get out there and fix it before it breaks, that’s a foundational change,” Ruh says. “In the end, what everybody wants is predictability.”

When it comes to big data, GE is playing catch-up to IBM (IBM). The world’s biggest computer-services company is working with energy companies to extend the lives of oil and gas fields by improving oil recovery through analytics. IBM also is working with Vestas Wind Systems (VWS) to find better locations for wind farms. Newer entrants are jumping in as well. Splunk (SPLK), a San Francisco-based startup that just went public, says its customer rolls exceeded 3,700 as of the end of January.

GE is counting on its expertise making industrial equipment—from gas-fired electrical turbines to locomotives—to give it an advantage over rivals focused on exclusively providing data solutions, says Ruh. “If you don’t have deep expertise in how energy is distributed or generated, if you don’t understand how a power plant runs, you’re not really going to be able to build an analytical model and do much with it,” he says. “We have deep insight into several very specific areas. And that’s where we’re staying focused.”

The bottom line: GE is establishing a foothold in Silicon Valley as it targets $5 billion in software sales by 2014.

Catts is a reporter for Bloomberg News.

It Doesn't Pay to Be Yourself at Work

The next time you want to speak your mind at work, it’s best to keep your mouth shut. Research by the University of Houston in Texas and the University of Greenwich in London shows that while being yourself around family, friends, and loved ones benefits well-being, being yourself at work has no bearing on life satisfaction.

The report is based on a questionnaire given to 553 participants—240 students employed part-time at the University of Houston and 313 middle-class working professionals in London. The median age was about 26. The study defines authenticity as vocalizing what you’re thinking and feeling, not making things up to impress people, and feeling confident enough to be honest and open, says Oliver Robinson, a senior lecturer at the University of Greenwich’s Department of Psychology and Counselling. “It’s not a problem to be authentic or inauthentic” at work, he says. “It just didn’t matter.”
While half of respondents report that they don’t lie to impress their parents and partners, only one-third said they don’t provide false information to people at work.
Robinson points to other research that shows that people often are expected to control what they say and to bottle emotions in the workplace. “There is an awful amount of impression management at work, that is required at work,” he says. “Being yourself at work doesn’t work because of a need to put on a front.”
While authenticity may not benefit overall well-being, other studies suggest it does benefit the workplace. “Authentic self-expression at work leads to reduced turnover and increased performance and job satisfaction,” says Francesca Gino, an associate professor at the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets unit of Harvard Business School. Still, most employers don’t value or promote authenticity as they should. “It is rare for organizations to take an authenticity perspective to socialization,” states a working paper she recently coauthored.
“All I can say is, if you’re at work and you’re not expressing yourself—not authentic to yourself—you’re in jolly good company,” says Robinson. The bright side for all us phonies: “It’s really normal and doesn’t have an adverse relationship to quality of life,” he says.

Wong is an associate editor for Bloomberg Businessweek.

Why There Are No Bosses At Valve

Earlier this week, Valve Software—the company behind the Half-Life, Counter-Strike and Portal video game series—released its employee handbook to the public because, according to Valve co-founder Gabe Newell, somebody asked. “I’d mentioned the handbook on a podcast and one of the listeners contacted us and said ‘Hey, can I get a copy?’ So [designer] Greg Coomer sent him a copy and all of a sudden it got posted online,” he said. The handbook attracted a lot of attention because, in addition to offering company massage rooms and free food, Valve has a unique corporate structure rarely seen at such a large company. Valve has 300 employees but no managers or bosses at all. Newell talked to Bloomberg Businessweek about his company’s environment and how it works.

Why did you create a workplace with no managers?
I was at Microsoft for 13 years and one of the things I did was go out and talk to customers. I ended up being exposed to a bunch of different organizations that had very different process models. As a result, I ended up thinking about organizational choices more than I probably would otherwise. It became pretty obvious that different type of organizations were good at different kinds of things.
When we started Valve [in 1996], we thought about what the company needed to be good at. We realized that here, our job was to create things that hadn’t existed before. Managers are good at institutionalizing procedures, but in our line of work that’s not always good. Sometimes the skills in one generation of product are irrelevant to the skills in another generation. Our industry is in such technological, design and artistic flux that we need somebody who can recognize that. It’s pretty rare for someone to be in a lead role on two consecutive projects.
Why is that?
The terminology we use internally is “individual” and “group” contribution skills.  A group contributor’s job is to help other people be more productive, and in doing that you sacrifice some of your own productivity. It’s a higher stress job and you get interrupted a lot more. People will do that for one project. They’ll say, “I really want to do this game!” and everyone will say “Ha ha ha, you’re stuck with it now.” At the end of the project they’re like, “Gee, that was really interesting but I want to go back and work individually on the next thing.” Some of the highest compensated people at the company are relatively pure individual contributors.
Was there a specific company that inspired Valve’s model?
At Microsoft, we had very little visibility into the actions of our customers. You know how a lot of computers came with Microsoft Office pre-installed? There was concern among people who were working on Microsoft Office that people would buy computers and reformat their hard drives and install MS-DOS instead of Windows. So said well, let’s go look at what our customers have on their PCs.  We weren’t going to just ask them. It was a really expensive thing to do. The good news that came out of that was that I think at the time, 20 million people in the U.S. were using Windows.
But what was so shocking to me was that Windows was the second highest usage application in the U.S. The number one application was Doom, a shareware program that hadn’t been created by any of the powerhouse software companies. It was a 12-person company in the suburbs of Texas that didn’t even distribute through retail, it distributed through bulletin boards and other pre-Internet mechanisms. To me, that was a lightning bolt. Microsoft was hiring 500-people sales teams and this entire company was 12 people, yet it had created the most widely distributed software in the world. There was a sea change coming.
Today at Valve, we don’t have that traditional marketing or sales organization. Each developer’s responsible for thinking about how to measure and optimize customer satisfaction.
And this is actually more efficient?
Well, you need the right people. Instead of looking for the cheapest people to do a job, we sort of joke that we look for the most expensive. Take someone like Jeremy Bennett, who was working in the film industry on the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong—he was something like the fourth person on the credits to King Kong—and who’s insanely good at what he does. If we put him at Valve, we’ve taken away studio overhead, he doesn’t have to go to meetings anymore, there’s no PR agency to sit between him and our customers. We’ll be more efficient at taking advantage of his skills.

Rupert Murdoch Not Fit to Lead News Corp., U.K. Lawmakers Say

News Corp. (NWSA) (NWSA) Chairman Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person” to lead a major international company, U.K. lawmakers said, after his U.K. unit misled Parliament about the extent of phone hacking at its News of the World tabloid.

Murdoch “turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications,” the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee said in a report published in London today. “This culture, we consider, permeated from the top throughout the organization and speaks volumes about the lack of effective corporate governance at News Corp.”
The report increases the chances that U.K. regulator Ofcom deems News Corp. unfit to hold a broadcasting license and could ask the New York-based company to reduce its 39 percent stake in British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc. (BSY) The phone-hacking scandal prompted News Corp. to abandon a 7.8 billion-pound ($12.6 billion) bid for the rest of BSkyB, the U.K.’s biggest pay- television provider, last year.
Three executives at the News International unit -- Les Hinton, Tom Crone and Colin Myler -- gave misleading testimony to the committee in 2009, the panel said. The company failed to disclose documents and made statements that “were not fully truthful,” and Murdoch, 81, and his son James must ultimately take responsibility, the lawmakers said.

Cover Up

The 11-member committee has been working on its report since July, when the Murdochs were summoned to testify about their roles in the scandal. They told a media-ethics inquiry last week that underlings, particularly Crone and Myler, were to blame for their failure to detect any wrongdoing at the now defunct newspaper.
“The News of the World and News International misled the committee about the true nature and extent of the internal investigations they professed to have carried out in relation to phone hacking,” the panel said. “Their instinct throughout was to cover up rather than seek out wrongdoing.”
BSkyB shares rose 0.8 percent to 683.50 pence in London trading as of 12:18 p.m.
Six lawmakers of the committee voted for the verdict that Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person” to lead a major international company and four voted against it. Louise Mensch, a member of Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives, said she and other Conservative members of the committee had opposed the verdict on Murdoch’s fitness to run a company.
“We all felt that was ultimately outside the scope of a select committee,” she said.

‘Powers of Recall’

The committee said that, had Murdoch been “entirely open” with shareholders and lawmakers, the extent of the hacking scandal would have been discovered months earlier.
“In his testimony and also the Leveson Inquiry, Rupert Murdoch has demonstrated excellent powers of recall and grasp of detail, when it has suited him,” the committee said.
News Corp. said today it is reviewing the report and will respond shortly, adding that the company “fully acknowledges significant wrongdoing at News of the World and apologizes to everyone whose privacy was invaded.”
U.K. telecommunications regulator Ofcom has said it will draw upon the report for its decision as to whether News Corp. is fit to hold a broadcasting license. Ofcom last week asked News Corp. to provide documents from civil cases involving phone hacking as it decides whether the matter has compromised the company’s ability to run BSkyB.
Ofcom said today it will assess the new and emerging evidence.

‘Containment Approach’

Police probes into phone and computer hacking and bribery have led to about 45 arrests, including former News of the World editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, once Prime Minister David Cameron’s communications chief. News Corp. closed the Sunday tabloid in July after revelations that the newspaper listened to voice-mail messages on the phone of a murdered schoolgirl.
After the hacking scandal first became public in 2006, with the arrest of a reporter, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, the company’s “containment approach” was to blame the crime on one “rogue reporter,” the panel said. It then shifted blame to “certain individual,” including Myler and Crone, “whilst striving to protect more senior figures,” notably James Murdoch, News Corp.’s deputy chief operating officer.

‘Huge Failings’

Myler and Crone ‘cannot be allowed to carry the whole of the blame as News Corp. has clearly intended,” the committee said. “The whole affair demonstrated huge failings of corporate governance.”
Myler and Crone, summoned before the Culture Committee last September, denied having misled it in 2009. Written evidence later sent to the committee and to the Leveson Inquiry showed that both had been told of claims that hacking had been more widely practised. Two years later, when James Murdoch accused them of keeping evidence from him, they replied that they had both known about it and showed it to him.

Hinton didn’t tell the truth about payments to Goodman and the extent of his knowledge of the voice-mail allegations, the lawmakers said today. Crone misled the panel about the significance of the first legal settlement with a victim of hacking, while he and Myler lied about their knowledge of the participation of other News of the World employees in criminal activity.

Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, competes with News Corp. units in providing financial news and information.

To contact the reporters on this story: Anthony Aarons in London at aaarons@bloomberg.net; Robert Hutton in London at rhutton1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net

شكرا عنتر يحي كفيت ووفيت//

شكرا عنتر يحي كفيت ووفيت//
اعتزل اللاعب الدولي الجزائري اللعب دوليا وضع حد لمشوار مشرف وكبير أبلى فيه البلاء الحسن وقد قاد الخضر الى كأس العالم ووقف سد منيع في وجه من كان لا يتمنى للجزائر الخير
فعنتر يحي كان يأخد على عاتقه جلب اللاعبين واقناعهم للعب في صفوف الفريق الوطني وقد كان لا يتخلى عن الفريق الوطني حتى في أصعب الأوقا ت وقد لبى جميع الدعوات ولم يتأخر يوم عن دلك وقد ترك بصمته في تاريخ كرة القدم بتأهيل الفريق الوطني بهدفه الرائع ضد الفراعنة
فشكرا عنتر يحي

IRS Audit - Not As Scary As You Think

Whenever people talk of the IRS it's usually followed by some moaning and groaning. Citizens of the United States fear the IRS because they are always worrying about their taxes and if they have been correctly filed or if they will receive a dreaded IRS tax audit. Well, here are some simple facts and tips to ease your worries and to hopefully help you maximize your deductions.
The chances of you getting audited - Although many people have this common misconception that the IRS is everywhere, watching your every move - this is simply not the case. The ratio of IRS employees compared to U.S. citizens is so small that it severely restricts the amount of audits the IRS is able to perform. As reported by MSNBC in 2009, if you make under $200,000 in income a year you have a 1 percent chance of being audited. That's right - 1 percent. This number creeps up to more than 6 percent only if you make $1 million dollars in income a year. So for the large majority of Americans your chances are minuscule.
"Legislative Grace" - It has been seen throughout multiple past tax court cases [New Colonial Ice Co. v. Helvering, 292 U.S. 435, 440 (1934); Deputy v. Du Pont, 308 U. S. 488, 493 (1940); Interstate Transit Lines v. Commissioner, 319 U. S. 590, 593 (1943)] that deductions are to be viewed as "a matter of legislative grace." This should be interpreted in two ways. The first is that Congress wants you to use deductions available to you to your advantage! They are graces or gifts that no one should be afraid to take if rightfully entitled to do so. That being said this also says that deductions are...graces or gifts. Do not try to press your luck and be foolish about deducting things on your income taxes that either are not acceptable deductions or deductions you are not qualified to take.
Proper Documentation - It can't be stressed enough how important proper documentation for whatever it is you are planning on receiving a deduction for is. It is most common for taxpayers to forget or misplace documentation, or incorrectly document in the areas of charitable donation receipts and business mileage logs. It is so crucial to have documentation because if an IRS audit takes place you have everything they need to see laid out in front of them. This shows them you were knowledgeable in what you were doing and had nothing to hide. With justification for taking certain tax deductions and proper documentation to prove it is all accurate, the IRS can look all they want, but in the end they will come up empty handed.
The IRS is Afraid of You - Believe it or not, the IRS although eager to audit people for suspicious income tax returns doesn't want to go much further than that. The IRS never wants any found issues or discrepancies to be taken in front of tax court. The IRS does not like to run the risk of having a case go before the tax courts and be decided in favor of the taxpayer thought to be at fault. This is because that case will then automatically become a guideline for all other taxpayers to "beat the system," and that's the last thing the IRS wants. This is why IRS audits are usually resolved long before issues make it to the tax courts. This is not to say that the IRS will not go to court if they find someone to be grossly out of favor with tax law.
Use Your Brain - Everyone always wants to receive the most tax deductions they can possibly get, and some U.S. taxpayers feel the need to sometimes lie on their income tax returns in order to do so. This is just asking for it. Take the deductions you qualify for. If you are uncertain about certain things use your brain and ask yourself if you really think it is fair, and if you are starting to hit some grey areas seek professional help. Using your brain also applies in the scenario that you do find yourself being audited. Be honest to the IRS agent whom you are dealing with and more than likely this will lead to a favorable outcome. If you have made an honest mistake, for example in calculating the amount of unreimbursed business mileage, tell them that. The only punishment likely to come from that is you paying the amount that needs to be adjusted for. Do not try and hide things because this will lead to them searching harder and deeper and then who knows what else they will find that you are either aware of, or unaware.
These few facts and tips may seem obvious to some, but you would be surprised the amount of taxpayers that miss out on deductions due to fear and lack of understanding. And, the amount of taxpayers that receive an audit and are unprepared or misinformed that, in the end, have to pay a penalty.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Constantine_Giannaris

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QuickBooks 2009 Small Business Users Must Decide, Should I Upgrade to 2012?

If you have not received notification from Intuit and you are a registered user of QuickBooks 2009, you need to be aware that on May 31, 2012 Intuit will no longer be supporting the QuickBooks 2009 software versions. What does this mean? If you are one of the many users still using 2009, this means you need to seriously think about upgrading to QuickBooks 2012. This does not just mean software support will cease but on June 1st you will no longer be able to use the following services and for many 2009 users this will greatly impact how you will continue to use the software and will affect how you run your business. The services to be suspended include:
· Assisted Payroll/Basic Payroll/Enhanced Payroll/Standard Payroll
· Online Banking and Bill Pay
· Merchant Services
· Billing Solutions
· QuickBooks Email
· Terminal Download
· Intuit Support Plans and Services
With the loss of support in QuickBooks 2009, there are many other features besides what was added and improved in QuickBooks 2012 but also in past versions 2010 and 2011 to make it worth your while to consider upgrading. For QuickBooks 2012, Intuit really ramped up this version with many new tools to also assist you with.
Some of those new features or product enhancements in the QuickBooks 2012 version include:
· DocumentCenter is new to 2012. Document Center allows you to attach receipts and other documents to invoices and customer files. Intuit has included local storage with your QB purchase.
· Another new features added to 2012 QuickBooks is the Lead Center for keeping track of your prospects. One area that many small business owners struggle with. The new Lead Center allows you to keep track of your sales leads and when the lead becomes a client, you can move the contact information into the Customer Center quite easily.
· Batched Time Sheets allow you to create and use the same time sheet for both employees and vendors who work the same hours.
· New to QuickBooks 2012 is industry specific report templates which have been created by other QB users. You can now access Contributed Reports pertaining to your industry searching by industry, user rating and popularity. Select template you like and QB will populate the report with your data in one easy click.
· Calendar view: you can now view your invoices and billing using the new Calendar View. This allows you to quickly scan glance when invoices and payables are due.
· Memorized transactions has been improved. You can set up transactions for those recurring bills and invoices and either process each individually by selecting the entry to run now or which can be run later.
· If you create reports in Excel from exported QuickBooks reports, you can now save the format so that when updated data is imported to Excel, you no longer need to reformat the document.
To highlight a few features added or enhanced since you purchased QuickBooks 2009:
· Access customer and vendor balance and transaction history
· CollectionsCenter for staying on top of your receivables
· Batch Invoicing
· Customer Snapshot to see all your key customer information
Another option for you to consider - do you really need to be the holder of the QuickBooks software? Perhaps when you started your business in 2009 you were able to handle the bookkeeping yourself. Well over the past 3 years, your business has grown and your time is pretty much spent on client projects and continuing to market and grow your business.
You find yourself months behind in reconciliations, client invoicing is also falling behind which is now starting to affect your cash flow - now may be the time to partner with a virtual bookkeeper and QuickBooks Certified ProAdvisor and take this burden off your shoulders allowing you to do what you excel at and allowing them to do what they love to do. QuickBooks ProAdvisors will be able to keep your accounting software updated using the latest QuickBooks software so you do not need to continually purchase upgrade software.
To find a QuickBooks Certified ProAdvisor, you can select the Help menu in QuickBooks and scroll to Find a Local QuickBooks Expert. You can also contact your accountant or other colleagues and ask for a recommendation and of course you can do an internet search "looking for a QuickBooks ProAdvisor."

Linda Siniscal, is the owner of Third Hand Bookkeeping Service which she started in 1994. Linda is a certified bookkeeper with the AIPB and a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor. Third Hand Bookkeeping Service can assist clients on both the MAC and PC platform. She is the former Treasurer for the International Virtual Assistants Association and served on their Board of Directors for the term 2005-2008. She is currently serving on the Board of Directors for the Delaware Virtual Assistants Association as their Treasurer for her second term 2009-2013. Linda can be reached at linda@yourextrahand.com or at 732-899-0810. Website: http://www.yourextrahand.com.

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