E-commerce in Greece - The right side of the Styx?

JEFF BEZOS founded Amazon in 1994. Apostolos Apostolakis and his mates started e-shop.gr, Greece’s biggest online retailer, just four years later. The comparisons end there. The Seattle juggernaut’s annual sales grow at double-digit rates; e-shop’s have been savaged by Greece’s depression. Amazon made its name selling books. E-shop was stymied by regulated book prices and shifted early into electronics. The Americans have indulgent shareholders while the Greeks were nearly undone by skimpy equity.

Economic woes aside, Greece is tough terrain for online shopping. Less than half of Greeks are regular internet users compared with two-thirds of Europeans overall. More than 40% of Europeans shop online but fewer than 20% of Greeks do. Broadband connections are sparser and consumers are warier. Most refuse to submit credit-card details on line, preferring to pay cash on delivery. Islands make Greece an obstacle course for couriers.

E-shop found clever fixes. It has a fleet of 50 trucks to make deliveries and collect cash (Amazon relies mainly on outsiders for last-mile logistics). Unusually for an e-tailer, it has a network of 52 shops. These do not hold stock. They are another channel for accepting payment and avoid the cost of shipping to a customer’s house. They also serve to advertise the e-shop brand.

This ingenuity did not spare e-shop the ravages of Greece’s economic calamity, which struck just as the investment in the shop network was completed. Sales dropped from a peak of €128m ($169m) in 2009 to €46m in 2011. Unlike a typical Silicon Valley startup, e-shop was not nurtured by a venture-capital fund and passed up a chance to be bought when times were good. When the crisis hit, banks cut credit. Without the working capital needed to hold inventory, e-shop was forced to stretch out delivery times. Its sales dropped by more than those of competitors such as Kotsovolos, which is owned by Dixons, a British electronics merchant.

The worst may be over. E-shop filed for protection from its creditors, which has eased its working-capital squeeze. Now more than half of orders are delivered the next day. It has slashed costs, partly by paring back its bricks-and-mortar network. That is a prelude to a hoped-for debt reduction in 2013. Mr Apostolakis sees signs that Greeks are warming to internet shopping. Online air tickets are popular, and that is getting consumers used to using credit cards. Internet retailing is growing at double the European rate. In 2012 e-shop’s turnover recovered to €60m. Maybe someday the Amazon analogy will not seem far fetched.

Χωρις λογια

Hackers hit U.S. Department of Energy

The U.S. Department of Energy has confirmed that its computer systems were hacked into last month. According to The New York Times, the federal agency sent around an internal e-mail on Friday telling its employees about the cyberattack.

"The Department of Energy has just confirmed a recent cyber incident that occurred in mid-January which targeted the Headquarters' network and resulted in the unauthorized disclosure of employee and contractor Personally Identifiable Information," the e-mail said.
The agency said that it is working to figure out the "nature and scope of the incident" but that so far it believes "no classified data was compromised." It's unclear which divisions within the Department of Energy were attacked or who was behind the hack.

The Department of Energy is in charge of much of the country's vital infrastructure, such as energy production, nuclear reactor production, and radioactive waste disposal. It has troves of classified and sensitive data that if leaked could be detrimental to the country's security. According to Reuters, the most highly classified information is stored on networks that aren't connected to the Internet.

The head of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano recently announced that she believes a wave of cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure is a serious possibility. Dubbing such an event a "cyber 9/11," Napolitano warned that cyberterrorists could take down the nation's power grid, water infrastructure, transportation networks, and financial networks.

While it doesn't seem like the January cyberattack on the Department of Energy compromised any data or infrastructure, it does show that hackers were able to breach the government's computer systems. In the e-mail, the agency said it is working to fortify itself against future attacks.

"Once the full nature and extent of this incident is known, the Department will implement a full remediation plan," the e-mail said. "The Department is also leading an aggressive effort to reduce the likelihood of these events occurring again. These efforts include leveraging the combined expertise and capabilities of the Department's Joint Cybersecurity Coordination Center to address this incident, increasing monitoring across all of the Department's networks and deploying specialized defense tools to protect sensitive assets."

by Dara Kerr

 

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New product announcment, NM-2C BNWAS Interface

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Sea level rise overflowing estimates

Sea levels may swell much higher than previously predicted, thanks to feedback mechanisms that are speeding up ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica.

Climate simulations need to take such feedbacks into account, William Hay, a geologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, told the Geological Society of America meeting in Charlotte, N.C., on November 4. So far the models haven’t incorporated such information because “it just makes them much more complicated,” he says.

Many scientists share Hay’s concerns, says geologist Harold Wanless of the University of Miami. “The rate at which ice melt and sea level rise is happening is far faster than anything predicted,” he says.

Global sea levels rose an average of about 15 centimeters over the past century. Current data suggest they will rise another 1 meter by the year 2100, and some scientists predict far more. But the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected a rise of just 0.2–0.6 meters over the same time period. “The data weren’t available in 2007 to say Greenland and Antarctica were melting,” says earth scientist Benjamin Horton of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “Sea levels are going to be greater than the upper estimate of the 2007 IPCC, but the big question is, when?”

To help answer that question, Hay is looking at underappreciated feedbacks. For one thing, big infusions of freshwater in the Arctic — from melting sea ice and from northern rivers — are driving cold ocean currents away from the North Pole and bringing up warm ones. This process is helping melt Greenland’s ice sheet, which could cause sea level to change very quickly, Hay says. Also, Arctic melt is exposing large areas of dark water, which absorbs the sun’s heat instead of reflecting it like ice does. As a result, warmer temperatures are disrupting local weather. After a record melt in August, for example, the high-pressure weather system that keeps the Arctic in a deep freeze was seasonally replaced by a low-pressure system that sucked in warm air, causing even more melting. To top it all off, the Arctic Ocean and thawing permafrost are releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that traps atmospheric heat and raises temperatures still more.

The last time Earth’s climate was as balmy as today was about 120,000 years ago, when the planet was 2–3° Celsius warmer and sea levels were 4–6 meters higher. Much of the Greenland ice sheet was melted then. “Those sea level change rates are very, very large, and that was under natural conditions, not the human perturbation that’s going on now,” says Hay.

And Greenland isn’t the only concern — Antarctica contains a vast amount of ice that, if emptied entirely into the ocean, would cause 80 meters of sea level rise. For years scientists suspected the Antarctic ice was frozen to the ground, but evidence now suggests there is liquid water under many regions, lubricating the ice base like a skating rink. The only things stopping that ice from sliding into the sea are ice shelves, which act like corks in a bottle, Hay says. As these ice shelves break up — as some are already doing — “it’s like taking the cork out of the bottle.”

Even modest sea level rise can have far-reaching impacts. Higher sea levels make it easier for storm surges — like those produced by Hurricane Sandy — to reach further inland and inflict damage, Wanless says. “The future of our coastal cities is at stake.”

Climate change may leave many mammals homeless

Some 9 percent of mammal species throughout the Western Hemisphere could, within roughly a century, become climate refugees with no suitable homes, a new study finds. In some areas conditions will be far worse, with 39 to 50 percent of mammals unable to emigrate fast enough to find suitable ecosystems.

“If species can’t migrate spontaneously, they’re going to go extinct. That’s the bottom line,” says Nina Hewitt of York University in Toronto, a biogeographer who was not involved in the new analyses.

The work is not the first study to gauge whether species will keep pace with climate-induced changes to their environments, including a warming or drying. But earlier efforts merely looked at an ideal climate for some species and then evaluated whether and where these conditions might exist decades down the line. Such studies “assumed if a suitable climate existed, the species would move there,” explains Carrie Schloss of the University of Washington in Seattle. Schloss led the new study, which appeared online the week of May 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

The new study accounts for species’ dispersal rates — how far each can travel to establish new homes and how frequently such relocations occur.

Mammals don’t typically move much until they prepare to breed. The new analyses of 493 mammal species found many simply cannot move quickly enough to reach hospitable new ranges. Sometimes they’re too small, as in the case of moles and other small rodents. Biology — what age a species reaches reproductive maturity and how often it breeds — also can severely limit relocation rates. This proved especially true for monkeys, which are especially likely to become climate refugees.

The Washington team looked at projections for the Americas from 10 different global-climate computer programs for periods through 2100. “When dispersal is ignored, the ranges of 149 of the 493 mammalian species in this study are on average projected to expand,” Schloss says. But including how far each species can travel to new homes reversed the trend and projected a range contraction for 86 of these species, or nearly 60 percent.

Even these assessments have probably overestimated the ability of mammals to keep pace with climate, Schloss acknowledges, since her team unrealistically assumed all species will reproduce at the youngest age possible and head for new home ranges in precisely the right directions.

Moreover, adds ecologist Shaye Wolf of the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco, this analysis doesn’t account for additional factors, such as whether a migrating species’ food will exist in its newfound home or whether the animal will confront new or more aggressive predators and competitors.

Still, accounting for species dispersal impacts “represents an important new contribution to evaluating whether animals will be able to keep pace with climate change,” she says.

Hewitt agrees. The new analysis also points to where species conservation biologists may want to focus their efforts for developing migration corridors for animals that will need to move, she says, or programs to otherwise assist imperiled species in reaching a new home range.

Can Apple maintain its shine?

NEW YORK (AP) — For many investors, Apple's best days are behind it. Competitors are catching up, they believe, and the latest iPhone is stumbling.
The company's doubters have backed their conviction with billions of dollars. Last week, the stock fell below $500 for the first time in 11 months. Since Apple's stock peaked at $705.07 on Sept. 21 —the day of the iPhone 5's release— it has fallen nearly 30 percent, cutting Apple's market capitalization by nearly $200 billion.
On Wednesday, Apple —still the world's most valuable public company— gets a chance to rebut the skeptics as it reports financial results for the holiday quarter. But the report could also end up confirming beliefs that the company is losing its edge as an arbiter of innovation and a pacesetter in sales growth.
Apple's perception problem centers on the iPhone. Many investors believe the company has painted itself into a corner with the high-priced gadget. The iPhone is more expensive than other smartphones that do many of the same things. The company created the modern smartphone, but because of its strategy to sell the iPhone at a large premium, it will be unable to capitalize fully as smartphones continue conquering the world. The iPhone seems destined to remain the phone of the elite who can afford it.
In many ways, the iPhone's global battle with phones running Google's Android operating system is a replay of the Mac-PC battles of the 80s and 90s, when Apple saw its innovative-yet-expensive Mac outflanked by cheaper PCs running Microsoft's DOS and Windows software.
Analyst Michael Morgan at ABI Research believes Apple's share of the global smartphone market will grow from 20.5 percent in 2012 to 22 percent this year and then remain flat. Meanwhile, South Korea's Samsung Electronics —the world's No. 1 maker of smartphones— is already at 30 percent of the market, and is set to leverage its chip- and display-making capabilities into further dominance, he said.
"Barring an unlikely collapse in Samsung's business, even Apple will be chasing Samsung's technology, software, and device leadership in 2013 —through the foreseeable future," Morgan said.
Investors also see short-term difficulties for Apple. Last week, the Japanese newspaper Nikkei and The Wall Street Journal said the company has slashed its orders for iPhone 5 parts because the device isn't selling as well as hoped. Both publications cited unidentified people familiar with the situation.
Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu believes the press reports are misleading. IPhone 5 demand, he says, remains robust. He attributes the reports of lower orders to shifts to other suppliers and an improvement in production, which means fewer components are wasted while building the complicated phone.
Apple usually reports the number of iPhones it sells each quarter, so Wednesday's financial update should give investors some indication of where the company is heading. Analysts on average expect the company to show sales of 48 million iPhones, which compares with the 37 million it sold in the same period a year prior.
The wrinkle is that Apple doesn't break out how many iPhones it sells of each type — it has kept selling the cheaper, two-year-old iPhone 4 and last year's 4S alongside the flagship 5.
A key tenet among investors who remain optimistic about Apple: Although the iPhone 5 is too expensive, buyers will shift their attention to the older Apple phones, which they find "good enough."
Analyst Andy Hargreaves at Pacific Crest Securities says demand for new iPhone models is going to falter. Last week, he downgraded Apple's stock from "Outperform" to "Sector Perform" because he believes consumers aren't going to clamor for new hardware features anymore. They'll hang on to older phones longer, and when they buy, they'll buy cheaper models, he says.
This means the total dollar value of the iPhones sold in the quarter may be more indicative than the number of phones sold. Analysts expect the sales were worth $30.8 billion in the quarter, or 56 percent of Apple's overall revenue. Deviations from this figure could cause big movements in the stock price.
There is renewed speculation that Apple could make a cheaper iPhone for the developing world, but most analysts believe the company will stick to its practice of keeping older iPhones in production and cutting their prices as new models come out. The problem is that the price cuts are relatively minor. A two-year-old iPhone 4 costs more than many new Android phones.
When reporting results for the July to September quarter three months ago, Apple shocked Wall Street by saying it expected earnings of just $11.75 per share for the October to December quarter. The company usually lowballs its estimates, but this was unusually far from the $15.59 per share average analyst estimate at the time. The reason, Apple said, was that it had so many new products coming out — including the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini — and fresh production lines are more expensive to run than mature ones.
Analysts then pulled back sharply on their estimates. Their average forecast is now $13.45 per share, according to FactSet.
In terms of sales, Apple said it expects to report about $52 billion in revenue, and analysts have wavered only slightly above that figure — they now expect sales of $54.9 billion.
While Apple's future prospects are in doubt, the company's supporters have one strong argument in their favor: the stock is cheap compared to current earnings, and even if the iPhone's sales growth slows, Apple will continue to generate plenty of revenue. The stock trades at 11 times the past 12 months of earnings, compared with 15 for Microsoft Corp. and 22 for Google Inc. Those figures don't take into account Apple's enormous cash pile —$121 billion— which boosts its value even further.
Despite its size, Apple's stock is no stranger to corrections. In 2008, in the midst of recession, Apple's stock fell by more than half, to under $100 per share. At the time, the iPhone was a year old and hadn't revealed its full potential.
It was only in early 2012 that its market capitalization decisively outgrew that of Exxon Mobil Corp., previously the world's most valuable company.
A smaller correction last year, also prompted by speculation about the future of the iPhone, took the stock down 16 percent before it rebounded.
"We believe investors that can look through this noise will be rewarded in 2013," said Brian White at Topeka Capital Markets. "The negative sentiment around the stock has reached epic levels that we haven't seen in recent memory and yet we believe the product portfolio has never been stronger."

Το MIT ερευνά την υπόθεση «Aaron Swartz»

Το πανεπιστήμιο Massachusetts Institute of Technologhy (MIT), ανακοίνωσε την διεξαγωγή έρευνας για την υπόθεση του πρόωρου θανάτου του ηλεκτρονικού ακτιβιστή Aaron Swartz, εκφράζοντας ταυτόχρονα, τα συλλυπητήρια του στους συγγενείς και φίλους του αδικοχαμένου νέου.

Η έρευνα διεξάγεται από τον ιδρυτή των Creative Common και Free Software Foundation, Hal Abelson, που είναι επίσης καθηγητής στο γνωστό πανεπιστήμιο, δίνοντας μεγάλη έμφαση στην «ενδελεχή ανάλυση της ανάμειξης του MIT στην υπόθεση, από την πρώτη κιόλας στιγμή που αντιληφθήκαμε ασυνήθιστη δραστηριότητα στο δίκτυο μας το φθινόπωρο του 2010».

Σε συνεντεύξεις τους στο περιοδικό Wall Street Journal, ο δικηγόρος του Swartz, Elliot Peters και η κοπέλα του, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, δήλωσαν πως την εβδομάδα του θανάτου του, ο νεαρός έχασε κάθε ελπίδα για συμβιβασμό της ποινής του με τις αμερικανικές αρχές.

Η Taren μάλιστα τόνισε το γεγονός πως «ήταν πολύ δύσκολο για τον χαρακτήρα του Aaron να δημοσιοποιήσει την κατάσταση και να ζητήσει βοήθεια. Ένα από τα πράγματα που ήταν πιο δύσκολο να συμβιβαστεί, ήταν να ζητήσει χρήματα από άλλους».

Παρά το γεγονός, πως το διάστημα μετά την σύλληψη του από την αστυνομία του Cambridge, ο Swartz ήρθε σε συμβιβασμό με το MIT, το πανεπιστήμιο παρέδωσε στις Μυστικές Υπηρεσίες των Ηνωμένων πολιτειών, στοιχεία που είχε συλλέξει και είχαν να κάνουν με τη δράση του Swartz. Το γεγονός αυτό, έκανε του δικηγόρους του νεαρού να χαρακτηρίσουν το ίδιο το MIT, «μυστικό πράκτορα» των Ηνωμένων Πολιτειών για το εκείνο το διαστήμα.

Σε δηλώσεις τους το περασμένο Σάββατο, οι συγγενείς και ο συνεργάτης στου Swartz τόνισαν πως «οι αποφάσεις του MIT και οι δικαστικές αρχές των Ηνωμένων Πολιτειών, έπαιξαν σημαντικό ρόλο στον πρόωρο χαμό του Aaron. Οι κατηγορίες που απαγγέλθηκαν, από τις δικαστικές αρχές ήταν τουλάχιστον υπερβολικές, τιμωρώντας τον με 30 χρόνια φυλάκιση για ένα φημολογούμενο έγκλημα χωρίς θύματα. Ταυτόχρονα, σε αντίθεση με το JSTOR, το MIT αρνήθηκε να υπερασπιστεί τον Aaron και τις αρχές του».

Ο ερευνητής της Microsoft, Danah Boynd, τόνισε μάλιστα πως «ο λόγος που η ποινή ήταν τόσο βαριά, δεν είχε να κάνει με το πάρει ένα μάθημα ο Swartz, ήταν καθαρά για λόγους επίδειξης δύναμης στους φιλόδοξους Hackers της κοινότητας του Cambridge».

Πηγή: newsbeast

Mobile Ubuntu vs Android

Android is undoubtedly the mobile OS to beat in 2013. iOS has loyal fans, but it simply can't achieve Android's volume driven by multiple OEMs producing phones and tablets in countless form factors.

That said, Android has problems. Big ones. The first is Google itself. If you don't opt in to at least a substantial subset of Google's services, you can forget using an Android device. The second is ongoing patent issues, both for Android and manufacturers that use it. Finally, both Apple and Microsoft are ahead of Google in terms of enterprise management and deployment

Ubuntu can address all of these issues on mobile devices, bringing a platform which is at once trusted in the enterprise, unencumbered by patent and privacy issues, and still more open than Android.

Will mobile Ubuntu kill Android?
No.

Can it steal its thunder, though, and put a squeeze on Google, especially in the enterprise?
Yes.