Why Obama can`t use an iPhone

The troubled mobile phone maker BlackBerry still has at least one very loyal customer like US President Barack Obama.

At a meeting with youth to promote his landmark healthcare law, Obama said he is not allowed to have Apple`s smartphone, the iPhone, for "security reasons," though he still uses Apple`s tablet computer, the iPad.

Apple was one of several tech companies that may have allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) direct access to servers containing customer data, according to revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The companies deny the allegation.

Obama fought to keep his BlackBerry after coming to the White House in 2009, though he said only 10 people have his personal email address. Neither George W. Bush nor Bill Clinton used email during their presidencies.

BlackBerry, a Canadian company formerly known as Research In Motion, virtually invented the idea of on-the-go email, but lost its market stranglehold as rivals brought out more consumer-friendly devices, like Apple`s iPhone and phones using Google`s Android software.

The company recently

Snow bigger worry than strikers

We are talking about a minority who take part in actions brought on by the union," Ralf Kleber told Reuters in an interview.

"Amazon is a fair employer. Many of our workers have been with us for more than 14 years. The majority of workers would say it is a good, well-paid job."

Trade union Verdi has staged a series of strikes this year in a dispute over pay and conditions at distribution centers in Leipzig and Bad Hersfeld. On Monday, the union said about 1,000 employees walked out, almost a fifth of the regular workforce there. Amazon said less than 800 staff had joined the strike.

"Snowfall in Germany is the bigger problem in the Christmas business ... that is what gives me worry lines," Kleber said, adding that the strikes had not affected deliveries so far.

E-commerce sales in Germany are seen growing 12 percent for the full year to 33.1 billion euros ($45 billion), expanding an even faster 15 percent in the Christmas period, when the sector should make 8.5 billion euros in sales.

Amazon employs 9,000 warehouse staff in Germany plus 14,000 seasonal workers and sales there grew almost 21 percent in 2012 to $8.7 billion, representing a third of its overseas total.

BLACK SHEEP?

The union, which plans more strikes before Christmas, wants Amazon to accept a collective agreement on pay and conditions similar to deals it has in the mail order and retail industry and accepted by Amazon's biggest German rival, the Otto Group.

Michael Otto, chairman of the firm which has transformed itself from a mail order firm into Europe's second biggest online retailer, said last week unnamed competitors were tarnishing the image of e-commerce with poor working conditions.

"These black sheep are trying to get to the feeding trough and are creating short-term advantages for themselves with their social dumping," he told a retail congress in Berlin. "We need a consensus that minimum standards must be maintained."

Amazon says it pays staff in its nine German distribution centers well according to the standards of the logistics industry, and does not think the terms of the mail order and retail sector are justified for its largely unskilled staff.

"We are a logistics company. Trucks arrive, are unloaded. Goods are sorted, packed and loaded into trucks again," Kleber said, adding Amazon hired staff with no qualifications and many who had previously been unemployed for a long time.

A BBC documentary this week alleged that tough working conditions could threaten the health of Amazon logistics employees after an undercover reporter secretly filmed inside a British warehouse where he walked 11 miles in the course of night shift lasting 10-1/2 hours.

Kleber agreed that logistics was a demanding job, but rejected suggestions that Amazon drives staff too hard.

"People in logistics don't want their staff to walk more. They want staff to walk less, because walking less means being more efficient," Kleber said.

Amazon has announced recently it would build three new logistics centers in Poland and two in the Czech Republic, prompting speculation that it could seek to shift work across the border from strike-hit centers in Germany.

But Kleber said Amazon expected to keep expanding in Germany, including eventually delivering fresh groceries too, without giving a timetable. Its newest distribution center outside Berlin held its formal opening on Thursday.

"We have bonuses for the whole team rather than for the individual so nobody has an incentive to rush," said Karsten Mueller, head of the new Brieselang center, whose 1,000 staff will shift about 110,000 parcels on a busy day.

Sorting goods in six halls spread across the area of 10 football pitches, staff work 9-1/2 hour shifts in the peak period before Christmas, including a 45-minute break, with order pickers walking an average of 8-10 km a shift.

In addition to strikes, Amazon has faced criticism in Germany for a low tax bill and from the antitrust watchdog, which forced it to stop demanding third-party merchants offer their cheapest price when selling products on its platform.

Amazon testing delivery with drones

Bezos said the drones, unmanned vehicles that fly through the air, could deliver packages that weigh up to five pounds (2.3 kg). That represents roughly 86 percent of packages that Amazon delivers, he said.

The drones, which would pick up items from Amazon's distribution centers and fly them to customer's homes, probably won't be put into use for four or five years, Bezos said.

Little imagination on gender diversity

Male-heavy boards dominate in the start-up mecca of Silicon Valley, which prides itself on progressive thinking and putting talent first. A Reuters survey of the 10 top venture-backed start-ups, as measured by venture funds raised, shows that six do not have any women on the board, including Pinterest. And none has more than one.
Reuters' research relied on publicly available data and discussions with start-up executives and board members.
The gender imbalance has been the norm for years despite some recent signs of change. Google, Facebook and Twitter all went public without a woman on the board. They are more diverse now.
Big, established companies, by contrast, frequently have two or more female directors, based on the 10 largest US tech companies by market value. All of the top 20 have at least one.
The dismal record of start-ups when it comes to gender diversity was highlighted last month when Twitter came under fire for its all-male board on the eve of its public offering. On Thursday, the company announced that it had added former Pearson chief Marjorie Scardino to its board.
Entrepreneurs and executives contacted by Reuters did not question the conclusion that there are few women directors at start-ups, but they frequently described it as unintended, and some such as Pinterest say their executive ranks are more balanced.
Start-ups tend to blame the lack of women on their boards on factors such as their youth, their small boards, their single-minded focus on growth to the exclusion of other priorities, and a scarcity of women steeped in technology. They also blame venture capitalists, who are usually male, usually hold the bulk of board seats - and don't want to see their voting power diluted by adding noninvestor board members.
Critics counter that entrepreneurs who pride themselves on creativity and innovation simply aren't trying hard enough when it comes to gender diversity.
At Pinterest, the focus is on work, said Chief Executive Ben Silberman, whose board consists of himself and two male venture capitalists. "It's pretty heads down," he said. If the company expands the board and a qualified woman emerges as a candidate, "we'd be open to it," he added.
"Diversity across all dimensions, including gender, is important to our success," a Pinterest spokesman said. The company's leadership is roughly 40 percent female, including its heads of engineering, finance, sales and recruiting, he added.
Public companies think about board diversity all the time - whether it's because they are constantly being scrutinized, or because they face public investor pressure.
"The companies that want to do it will do it. Those who don't will not," said Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, a computer scientist and a board member at software giant Microsoft and chipmaker Broadcom. "This stuff doesn't happen by chance."
The issue is not simply one of social equity. A study by the Credit Suisse Research Institute, a bank-funded group, looked at 2,360 public companies and found that over six years, the share price of large-capitalization companies with at least one woman on the board outperformed companies with no women on their board by 26 percent.
For small and mid-capitalization stocks, the outperformance totalled 17 percent.
The study identified a handful of factors that could explain the better performance, including a healthier mix of leadership skills, better corporate governance, greater understanding of consumer decision-making, and access to a wider pool of talent.
Even though it's now conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that a lack of women in leadership and technical roles is a big problem, progress has been very slow, especially at the top.
"Meritocracy is the word you hear all the time here. Everyone can get ahead," said Heidi Roizen, a venture capitalist at Draper Fisher Jurvetson and a former software-company founder and Apple executive. "I don't think it's as clean and pure as people think."
Women board members set an important tone, said Roizen and others, signalling to employees that talented women can succeed in the organization.
The Boys Club
That matters especially at a time when skilled technology workers are in high demand, but women are not pursuing tech careers in anywhere near the numbers as men. While women receive 43 percent of US bachelor's degrees in math and 40 percent in physical sciences, they receive only around 30 percent of doctorates in those areas, according to the National Science Foundation. They receive around one-fifth of bachelor's and doctorates in computer sciences.
Only 27 percent of entrepreneurs are women, says Ross Levine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is researching the gender gap in entrepreneurship. Only 20 percent of start-ups across industries have one or more female senior-level executives, according to a study of start-ups by Dow Jones VentureSource.
And about 89 percent of all venture capitalists are male, according to the National Venture Capital Association, directly affecting the lack of women on start-up boards.
"If my investors don't have more women working for them there's not much I can do to get more women on the board," said Dave Goldberg, the chief executive of SurveyMonkey, also one of the 10 start-ups surveyed by Reuters. Goldberg is married to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, one of the most successful female executives in Silicon Valley.
One of Goldberg's two independent board members, former VeriSign chief financial officer Dana Evan, is female.
Roizen and other female venture investors say their industry is beginning to change. More women are starting companies, they say, and as some of those companies achieve success that will bolster the number of female VCs, since many VCs cut their teeth as company founders.
"It's been in the last two, three, four years," says Theresia Gouw, a VC at Accel Partners, pointing to examples such as her portfolio company Birchbox, a beauty-products subscription business launched by two women in 2010.
Indeed, a handful of women have achieved celebrity status in the start-up world, including Sandberg, Google's head of ads and commerce Susan Wojcicki and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.
High-profile female venture capitalists include Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who is on the board of payments-service Square and funding service Lending Club, and Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures, who has backed companies such as Dollar Shave Club and Philz Coffee.
If a company doesn't land a female VC on its board in its early years, when most start-up boards consists of the founder and a few key investors, it acquires a built-in chance later: when it weighs going public. Both New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq board rules, such as building audit committees, generally require bolstering board seats.
Still, many start-ups duck and weave rather than bringing a woman onto the board. Facebook dallied until after its 2011 IPO before appointing Sandberg to the board. Google added two women to its board a year after its 2004 IPO. Now three of Google's 10 directors are women.
Some female directors of start-ups say they are sometimes reluctant to overtly suggest the topic of adding more women for an open board seat. That is because they know it might raise the hackles of existing board members who want to make sure the best person gets the seat, not somebody who was less qualified but female.
"People don't want to just stuff women on these boards," said Ann Winblad, a venture capitalist at Hummer Winblad, who says she tends to suggest women candidates without highlighting their gender as an asset.
Many people, both male and female, assume the woman is the weaker candidate, said Meiko Takayama, founder and chief executive of advocacy organisation Advancing Women Executives.
"It's based on unconscious bias," Takayama said. "It's not malicious."
Roizen herself was the subject of a Columbia Business School study that asked students to evaluate her accomplishments - but with half the students seeing her name as "Howard," not "Heidi." The students seeing her true name thought she seemed selfish, not the type of person they wanted to hire or work for. The students who saw the name "Howard" thought he seemed likeable.
'Cop Out'
Many young companies acknowledge the issue, often saying they go out of their way to try to hire from a relatively small pool of technical women. But critics roll their eyes when that qualification comes up.
"I personally think that's a bit of a cop out," said Carol Bartz, the former chief executive of Yahoo and a Cisco board member. "There are all kinds of expertise that you need on a board. And if the entire board is technical then it is not diverse enough."
"They're more comfortable with their VC boys' network and really don't want to rock the boat," she added.
Bartz said that sometimes the companies can make the specifications - or 'spec' as it is known in the recruiting industry - for the recruitment of board members so narrow that it automatically eliminates women from the candidate pool.
That spec always sounds the same, said Martha Josephson, Silicon Valley-based partner with recruiting firm Egon Zehnder: someone from the C-suite who has experience running big parts of a company's operations.
Even if existing board members are actively looking for a woman to bolster their ranks, unacknowledged biases can come into play, said investor and former analyst Esther Dyson, whose board seats include genealogy company 23andMe, local-organizing network Meetup, and advertising company WPP Group.
"A just-okay guy seems suitable," she said. "But a just-okay woman doesn't quite match the awesome-woman image they have in their heads."
Dyson forms part of a small group of sought-after female board members for start-ups that also includes Evan, the SurveyMonkey board member, and former Macromedia CFO Betsey Nelson, whose board seats include LivingSocial.
"Can you show us a pool that has more than the same names that circulate?" Nelson said she often finds herself asking when the subject arises of ensuring that women win consideration for an open seat. Evan says she is approached at least 3-4 times a quarter to join a board.

Trace dubious SMS senders: BTRC

The BTRC made the order on Wednesday in a meeting with representatives of the operators.

BTRC Chairman Sunil Kanti Bose told bdnews24.com that the operators were given five instructions to trace the SMS senders.

He said the operators would soon begin work on the instructions.

Bose declined to elaborate the instructions. “The five instructions cannot be divulged for security reasons,” he said.

Scores of users in Bangladesh received SMSes on Monday and Tuesday from unknown senders on execution of Molla, who was convicted of war crimes during the country’s Liberation War in 1971.

They said the country would face a civil war if the Jamaat leader was hanged.

The government earlier announced that Molla would be hanged on Tuesday midnight but the Supreme Court’s Chamber Judge stayed the execution few hours before the time.

A top official of BTRC told bdnews24.com the SMSes were being sent from abroad in the last several days. “They could have been identified easily had they been sent from inside the country.”

He said the operators had to install some new technologies to identify overseas SMS senders.

Earlier on Jun 23, unknown people sent SMSes with a call to say ‘no’ to the chiefs of the two major political parties.

I’m not allowed an iPhone’

 US president Barack Obama admitted Wednesday he was not allowed to have an iPhone owing to security fears, explaining why he is sometimes seen with a bulky super secure Blackberry.

‘I’m not allowed for security reasons to have an iPhone,’ Obama told a group of young people at the White House for an event promoting his health care law, The Straits Times publishes this report on Thursday.

He added that his daughters Sasha and Malia spend a lot of time on their iPhones.

Blackberry is renowned for its strong security encryption - one reason why it is still popular in official Washington, even as the device loses market share to other smart phones including those manufactured by Apple.

Apple consumer lawsuit dismissed over data privacy

The four plaintiffs claimed in 2011 that Apple had violated its privacy policy, saying the iPhone maker had designed its iOS environment to easily transmit personal information to third parties that collect and analyse such data without user consent or detection.

They also claimed that they suffered damages by paying too much money for their iPhones and by losing storage space, among other things, according to court documents.

US District Judge Lucy H Koh in San Jose, California dismissed the case.

"Plaintiffs must be able to provide some evidence that they saw one or more of Apple's alleged misrepresentations, that they actually relied on those misrepresentations, and that they were harmed thereby," Koh said in the November 25 ruling.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs and Apple either did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment.

The case is one part of nationwide litigation Koh is overseeing that consolidates 19 related lawsuits.