Mobile management vendors like Good Technology and MobileIron are increasing efforts to pitch Android and iOS as alternatives to BlackBerry, thanks to improved security and management tools.
On Monday, BlackBerry announced it had abandoned plans to sell itself and will instead take a US$1 billion loan from a consortium involving shareholder Fairfax Financial Holdings. The company is also getting a new leader in former Sybase CEO John Chen, who joins the company as chairman and interim CEO. Although the deal buys BlackBerry more time and a CEO who knows enterprise mobility, it still faces many challenges and CIOs need to plan for all possibilities. IT faces additional pressure from employees who want to use a wider variety of devices.
Competitors are pouncing on the uncertainties around BlackBerry. "BlackBerry's decision to remain a public company increases the uncertainty their customers feel. It is accelerating the need to develop long-term mobility strategies that account for new mobile platforms," said Jeff McGrath, senior director of product marketing at Good Technology.
Good recently launched consultancy services aimed at enterprises that want to migrate. The company's core offering is Good for Enterprise, which secures email and browser access with Common Criteria EAL-4+ certification and FIPS 140-2 validated encryption for iOS and Android. The platform is compatible with Windows Phone, as well.
Competitor MobileIron also wants a piece of the pie, and today it announced a release of its Android package. The company has worked with Divide, previously Enterproid, to offer native email, contacts and calendar functions. All content is encrypted and stored in a secure container on the mobile device. It too now has FIPS 140-2 validated encryption, MobileIron said. MobileIron has also integrated its management software with Samsung Electronics' Knox platform, and in September announced support for IBM's Notes Traveler client for Android, for which IBM released APIs for MDM vendors to use.
Good Technology and MobileIron aren't the only vendors that offer software to help replace BlackBerry smartphones. Other providers include Absolute, AirWatch, Apperian, BoxTone, Centrify, Citrix Systems, Fiberlink, Fixmo, Samsung, SAP, and Soti. And BlackBerry's own BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES) 10 now can manage iOS and Android devices. In fact, BlackBerry isn't giving up without a fight. It is still a "brand with enormous potential -- but it's going to take time, discipline and tough decisions to reclaim our success," Chen said in statement on Monday.
And although the competition has improved, replacing BlackBerry's integrated device management functionality and excellent security is a tall order. The company is still the gold standard when it comes to mobile security, said Ovum analyst Richard Absalom. Depending on the level of security needed, different measures are required, from regular mobile device management to platforms that can separate enterprise apps from the rest of the OS, said Leif-Olof Wallin, a research vice president at Gartner.
Here's a look at some key moments in the history of the Country Music Association Awards, which honor the best of the country music (the 47th annual CMAs air on Wednesday night).
— 1967: The first CMA Awards were not televised. It is billed as a "Banquet and Show," hosted by Sonny James and Bobbie Gentry. The Jack Greene hit "There Goes My Everything" wins single and song of the year. Greene's album, "There Goes My Everything" is named album of the year. Eddy Arnold becomes the first CMA Entertainer of the year.
— 1968: The CMA gets televised on NBC. It does not air live: It is taped and shown about two weeks later as part of "Kraft Music Hall." Glen Campbell is named entertainer of the year in a ceremony hosted by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.
— 1971: Charley Pride becomes the first black to win CMA entertainer of the year as the CMAs air independently as an NBC special.
— 1972: Loretta Lynn becomes the first woman to win CMA entertainer of the year.
— 1975: In a shocking moment, on live television, reigning entertainer of the year does not announce the name of John Denver when he wins the top prize. He instead sets fire to the card in disgust (some believed Denver was too pop to be considered country). Denver accepts the award via satellite from Australia.
—1981: Barbara Mandrell makes history, becoming the first artist to win entertainer of the year more than once. Meanwhile, the horizon award is introduced to honor new artists, and Terri Gibbs takes that honor.
— 1991: President George H.W. Bush and first lady Barbara Bush attend the ceremonies, which were dominated by Garth Brooks. He wins four trophies, including entertainer of the year, album of the year for "No Fences" among others.
— 1999: Shania Twain becomes the first female to win entertainer of the year in 13 years.
— 2000: The Dixie Chicks take home four awards, including entertainer of the year and album of the year for "Fly." Brad Paisley wins the horizon award.
— 2005: For the first time, the awards are held outside of Nashville, airing from New York City. Keith Urban wins entertainer of the year.
— 2009: Taylor Swift becomes the youngest person to win CMA entertainer of the year at age 19.
— 2012: Blake Shelton takes home three trophies, including a song of the year trophy with wife Miranda Lambert, but the biggest win is for entertainer of the year.
NEW YORK (AP) — Twitter has set a price of $26 per share for its initial public offering, which means the company's stock can begin trading Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange in the most highly anticipated IPO since Facebook's 2012 debut.
The price values Twitter at more than $18 billion based on its outstanding stock, options and restricted stock that'll be available after the IPO. That's more than Macy's, which has a market capitalization of $17 billion, and Bed Bath & Beyond, which is around $16 billion.
The pricing means the short messaging service will raise $1.8 billion in the offering, before expenses. The company is offering 70 million shares in the IPO, plus an option to buy another 10.5 million. If all shares are sold, the IPO will raise $2.09 billion, making it the biggest IPO for an Internet company since Facebook raised $16 billion last year.
The company, named after the sound of a chirping bird, is set to begin trading Thursday morning under the ticker symbol "TWTR."
Twitter, which has never turned a profit in 7 years of existence, had originally set a price range of $17 to $20 per share for the IPO, but that was an obvious lowball designed to temper expectations. It was widely expected that the price range would go higher. Back in August, for example, the company priced some of its employee stock options at $20.62, based on an appraisal by an investment firm and it's unlikely to have lost value since.
On Monday, Twitter raised the price range to $23 and $25 per share, signaling an enthusiastic response from prospective investors. That Twitter's final price was above the expected range bodes well for the company's stock.
Twitter's public debut will be one of the most closely watched IPOs since Facebook's in May 2012.
But Twitter has valued itself at just a fraction of Facebook and sought to cool expectations in the months and weeks leading up to the offering. With that, the San Francisco-based company is likely hoping its stock avoids the fate of Facebook's shares, which didn't surpass their IPO price until more than a year after the offering.
Tempering expectations was a big theme in the weeks leading up to Twitter's IPO. The company tried to avoid the trouble that plagued Facebook's high-profile offering. Facebook's public debut was marred by technical glitches on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. As a result, the Securities and Exchange Commission fined Nasdaq $10 million, the largest ever levied against an exchange. Those problems likely led Twitter to the NYSE.
Still, $18 billion is a lofty valuation for Twitter compared with its peers. At its current price, Twitter valued at roughly 28 times its projected 2013 revenue —$650 million based on its current growth rate. In comparison, Facebook trades at about 16 times its projected 2013 revenue, according to analyst forecasts from FactSet. Google Inc. meanwhile, is trading at about 7 times its net revenue, the figure Wall Street follows that excludes ad commissions.
Research firm Outsell Inc. puts Twitter's fundamental value at about half of the IPO price, says analyst Ken Doctor. That figure is based on factors such as revenue and revenue growth.
"That's not unusual," Doctor says. "Especially for tech companies. You are betting on a big future."
Earlier on Wednesday, Barclays Capital said Twitter had hired it to be its "designated market maker," a critical role when a stock starts trading. A DMM is an experienced trader who supervises the trading of a company's stock on the NYSE. If technical problems arise, the NYSE uses DMMs to bypass electronic trading systems, allowing humans to trade a company's stock. That is not possible on all-electronic stock exchanges such as the Nasdaq.
Twitter got its start 7 years ago, first with Jack Dorsey and then Evan Williams as CEO. Its current chief is Dick Costolo, a former Google executive who once aspired to be a stand-up comedian. On March 21, 2006, Dorsey posted the world's first tweet: "Just setting up my twttr." Noah Glass, who helped create Twitter —but is not mentioned in the company's IPO document — posted the same words just 10 minutes later.
Since then, the social network that lets users send short messages, or "tweets," in 140-character bursts has attracted world leaders, religious icons and celebrities, along with CEOs, businesses and a slew of marketers and self-promoters. Twitter now has more than 230 million users, more than three-quarters of them outside the U.S.
The outsized proportion of international Twitter users is both a challenge and an opportunity for the company. Only 26 percent of Twitter's revenue comes from abroad, though the company has said that it plans to generate more international revenue by hiring additional sales representatives in countries such as Australia, Brazil and Ireland.
__
AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco and AP Markets Writer Ken Sweet in New York contributed to this story.
Educational video games can boost motivation to learn, NYU, CUNY study shows
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
6-Nov-2013
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Contact: James Devitt james.devitt@nyu.edu 212-998-6808 New York University
Math video games can enhance students' motivation to learn, but it may depend on how students play, researchers at New York University and the City University of New York have found in a study of middle-schoolers.
While playing a math video game either competitively or collaboratively with another playeras compared to playing alonestudents adopted a mastery mindset that is highly conducive to learning. Moreover, students' interest and enjoyment in playing the math video game increased when they played with another student.
Their findings, which appear in the Journal of Educational Psychology, point to new ways in which computer, console, or mobile educational games may yield learning benefits.
"We found support for claims that well-designed games can motivate students to learn less popular subjects, such as math, and that game-based learning can actually get students interested in the subject matterand can broaden their focus beyond just collecting stars or points," says Jan Plass, a professor in NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and one of the study's lead authors.
"Educational games may be able to help circumvent major problems plaguing classrooms by placing students in a frame of mind that is conducive to learning rather than worrying about how smart they look," adds co-lead author Paul O'Keefe, an NYU postdoctoral fellow at the time of the study and now at Stanford University's Department of Psychology.
The researchers focused on how students' motivation to learn, as well as their interest and performance in math, was affected by playing a math video game either individually, competitively, or collaboratively.
Specifically, they looked at two main types of motivational orientations: mastery goal orientation, in which students focus on learning, improvement, and the development of abilities, and performance goal orientation, in which students focus on validating their abilities. For instance, in the classroom, a student may be focused on improving their math skills (mastery), or, instead, trying to prove how smart they are or trying to avoid looking incompetent compared their classmates (performance).
Researchers consistently find that a mastery goal orientation facilitates learning because students are focused on accruing knowledge and developing abilities. They also view mistakes and difficulties as part of the learning processrather than an indictment of their lack of ability. By contrast, performance goal orientations may hurt the learning process, particularly for those who do not feel competentfor instance, students who fear looking less intelligent than their classmates may avoid opportunities that would, in fact, bolster their understanding of the material.
However, scholarship has shown that typical educational contextsnotably, classroomslead students to adopt stronger performance goal orientations than a mastery goal orientation.
Consequently, researchers have sought to understand how to promote students' mastery goal orientations and weaken the performance goal orientations that lead students to avoid potential learning opportunities.
One candidate is educational video games, which, at first glance, would seem to result in performance rather than mastery orientations given their competitive focus and that they are often played with others. But, given the popularity of gaming among school-aged students, exploring their potential value intrigued the study's authors.
To test this possibility, the researchers had middle-school students play the video game FactorReactor, which is designed to build math skills through problem solving and therefore serves as diagnostic for learning.
In order to test the impact of different settings on learning, students were randomly assigned to play the game alone, competitively against another student, or collaboratively with another student. The researchers controlled for students' abilities by conducting a pre-test.
The findings revealed that students who played the math game either competitively or collaboratively reported the strongest mastery goal orientations, which indicates that students adopted an optimal mindset for learning while playing the video game with others.
Their results also showed that students playing under competitive situations performed best in the game. In addition, those playing in both competitive and collaborative conditions experienced the greatest interest and enjoyment.
"The increased interest we observed in the competitive and collaborative conditions suggests that educational games can promote a desire to learn and intentions to re-engage in the material, and in the long run, may create independent and self-determined learners," notes O'Keefe.
The authors caution about generalizing their results, however.
"Although we found a host of beneficial outcomes associated with playing the game with a partner, our results may be limited to the educational content of the game, its design, or our experimental procedure," says Plass. "Future research will need to examine design features that optimize learning across curricula."
###
The study's other co-authors included: Elizabeth Hayward, Murphy Stein, and Ken Perlin of New York University and Bruce Homer and Jennifer Case of the City University of New York's Graduate Center, all of whom are members of the multi-institutional Games for Learning Institute (G4LI), co-directed by Perlin and Plass. The Games for Learning Institute is funded by Microsoft Research.
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Educational video games can boost motivation to learn, NYU, CUNY study shows
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
6-Nov-2013
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Contact: James Devitt james.devitt@nyu.edu 212-998-6808 New York University
Math video games can enhance students' motivation to learn, but it may depend on how students play, researchers at New York University and the City University of New York have found in a study of middle-schoolers.
While playing a math video game either competitively or collaboratively with another playeras compared to playing alonestudents adopted a mastery mindset that is highly conducive to learning. Moreover, students' interest and enjoyment in playing the math video game increased when they played with another student.
Their findings, which appear in the Journal of Educational Psychology, point to new ways in which computer, console, or mobile educational games may yield learning benefits.
"We found support for claims that well-designed games can motivate students to learn less popular subjects, such as math, and that game-based learning can actually get students interested in the subject matterand can broaden their focus beyond just collecting stars or points," says Jan Plass, a professor in NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and one of the study's lead authors.
"Educational games may be able to help circumvent major problems plaguing classrooms by placing students in a frame of mind that is conducive to learning rather than worrying about how smart they look," adds co-lead author Paul O'Keefe, an NYU postdoctoral fellow at the time of the study and now at Stanford University's Department of Psychology.
The researchers focused on how students' motivation to learn, as well as their interest and performance in math, was affected by playing a math video game either individually, competitively, or collaboratively.
Specifically, they looked at two main types of motivational orientations: mastery goal orientation, in which students focus on learning, improvement, and the development of abilities, and performance goal orientation, in which students focus on validating their abilities. For instance, in the classroom, a student may be focused on improving their math skills (mastery), or, instead, trying to prove how smart they are or trying to avoid looking incompetent compared their classmates (performance).
Researchers consistently find that a mastery goal orientation facilitates learning because students are focused on accruing knowledge and developing abilities. They also view mistakes and difficulties as part of the learning processrather than an indictment of their lack of ability. By contrast, performance goal orientations may hurt the learning process, particularly for those who do not feel competentfor instance, students who fear looking less intelligent than their classmates may avoid opportunities that would, in fact, bolster their understanding of the material.
However, scholarship has shown that typical educational contextsnotably, classroomslead students to adopt stronger performance goal orientations than a mastery goal orientation.
Consequently, researchers have sought to understand how to promote students' mastery goal orientations and weaken the performance goal orientations that lead students to avoid potential learning opportunities.
One candidate is educational video games, which, at first glance, would seem to result in performance rather than mastery orientations given their competitive focus and that they are often played with others. But, given the popularity of gaming among school-aged students, exploring their potential value intrigued the study's authors.
To test this possibility, the researchers had middle-school students play the video game FactorReactor, which is designed to build math skills through problem solving and therefore serves as diagnostic for learning.
In order to test the impact of different settings on learning, students were randomly assigned to play the game alone, competitively against another student, or collaboratively with another student. The researchers controlled for students' abilities by conducting a pre-test.
The findings revealed that students who played the math game either competitively or collaboratively reported the strongest mastery goal orientations, which indicates that students adopted an optimal mindset for learning while playing the video game with others.
Their results also showed that students playing under competitive situations performed best in the game. In addition, those playing in both competitive and collaborative conditions experienced the greatest interest and enjoyment.
"The increased interest we observed in the competitive and collaborative conditions suggests that educational games can promote a desire to learn and intentions to re-engage in the material, and in the long run, may create independent and self-determined learners," notes O'Keefe.
The authors caution about generalizing their results, however.
"Although we found a host of beneficial outcomes associated with playing the game with a partner, our results may be limited to the educational content of the game, its design, or our experimental procedure," says Plass. "Future research will need to examine design features that optimize learning across curricula."
###
The study's other co-authors included: Elizabeth Hayward, Murphy Stein, and Ken Perlin of New York University and Bruce Homer and Jennifer Case of the City University of New York's Graduate Center, all of whom are members of the multi-institutional Games for Learning Institute (G4LI), co-directed by Perlin and Plass. The Games for Learning Institute is funded by Microsoft Research.
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Share
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2010, AT 6:19 PM Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma
FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2011, AT 3:07 PM Obama Gets Firsthand Look at a Tornado Damage
TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2010, AT 6:19 PM Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long. Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long.
TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2010, AT 6:19 PM Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long. Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long.
Red Hat's long been one of the big go-to outfits for deploying Linux in the enterprise. Now, after its announcements at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong this week, it's angling to move up a level and become synonymous with deploying OpenStack in the enterprise, too.
OpenStack, an open source infrastructure for creating private cloud environments, has much of the same aura of an open source success story as Linux did. Its major corporate backing distinguished it from the competition posed by rivals (in this case, CloudStack and Eucalyptus), and it enjoyed the release of a new major point revision of the product earlier this year.
But OpenStack is still a sprawling, complex product that takes patience and hard work if you want to wring results from it. It doesn't offer the kind of out-of-the-box cloud experience the likes of Amazon have striven to deliver, which has translated into a good deal less corporate adoption than its developers and boosters (who are often one and the same) would like. Still, those difficulties have only encouraged Red Hat to double down on its efforts to get OpenStack into the enterprise.
Red Hat's plan to tame OpenStack Could Red Hat tame OpenStack in the way it made Linux into a genuinely deliverable product, not just a technology with a fun name? Its Hong Kong announcements make it sound that way, as it described several steps toward making OpenStack more of an integral part of Red Hat's existing product family.
First step: Provide better management tools. To that end, Red Hat's integrated OpenStack with the new version of Red Hat CloudForms (3.0), its system for managing public, private, and hybrid clouds. Setup and deployment of OpenStack resources can be done automatically through CloudForms, meaning there's one less command line to monkey with when you want to provision or retire instances.
Second step: Do something about the way OpenStack handles storage. OpenStack has three distinct storage components: one for managing system images (Glance), one for block storage (Cinder), and one for object storage (Swift). Red Hat has consolidated management for all of those under Red Hat Storage Server, so you can now treat them as you would any other storage object managed by Red Hat Linux. (Red Hat's Unified File and Object Storage technology for Storage Server was actually already built on top of OpenStack's Swift.)
Gliding down the red carpet as she prepares to play hostess with the mostest, Carrie Underwood arrived at the 2013 CMA Awards earlier tonight (November 6) in Nashville, Tennessee.
Before joining co-host Brad Paisley, the "Blown Away" starlet smiled for fans and shutterbugs alike.
In addition to her hosting duties, the 30-year-old songstress is up for three awards, including Female Vocalist of the Year, Album of the Year, and Music Video of the Year.
Competition will be fierce as things get underway tonight, with Taylor Swift and Kacey Musgraves each scoring a whopping six nominations.
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