Mark Zuckerberg cannot build ‘another’ Facebook

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with his three top leutinants, will get about $2 million in just salaries and bonuses, but cannot work on creating a rival to the social networking giant.

This has been disclosed in Facebook’s amended registration document for its upcoming IPO, filed with the US market regulator Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last night.

As per Zuckerberg’s employment agreement with Facebook, his job can be terminated “at any time for any reason or no reason”, either by him or by the company.

Besides, the company’s employment agreement does not allow Zuckerberg to “assist any person or entity in competing with the Company, in preparing to compete with the Company or in hiring any employees or consultants of the Company.”

Similar clauses apply to Chief Operating Officer (COO) Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) David Ebersman and Vice President (Engineering) Mike Schroepfer, for the period these people are rendering their services to Facebook.

The agreements are silent on whether these people, including Zuckerberg, can help create a rival of Facebook after leaving the company.

In addition to in-cash salary and bonus, the pay package of the top four Facebook executives includes millions of dollars in form of stock options, performance pay and other payments.

Besides, the value of shares owned by Zuckerberg and many others at the company could also make them billionaires after the listing of Facebook, which is currently in the process of its USD five billion IPO (Initial Public Offer).

The company said that Zuckerberg, as President and CEO, would get USD 500,000 of base salary and up to 45 per cent of this amount as bonus every year. While the basic wage would be paid in two equal payments a month, he can “over-achieve” the bonus target pursuant to the company’s bonus plan.

Sandberg and Ebersman would get an annual base salary of USD 300,000 each, while the same for Schroepfer would be USD 275,000. All the three executives would be entitled for a bonus payment of up to 45 per cent of their base earnings.

The collective base salary and bonus of the four executives stand at USD 1.99 million (about Rs 10 crore).

In addition to generally common no-conflict obligations, Zuckerberg cannot bring with him to Facebook, or disclose to any person associated with the company, any confidential or proprietary information belonging to any former employer or any other third party.

Noting that his job at Facebook was not any specific period time, the agreement says that the employment would be on an “at will” basis, meaning that either Zuckerberg or Facebook can terminate the employment at any time for any reason or no reason.

While the job duties, title, compensation and benefits, as well as the company’s personnel policies and procedures, might change from time to time, the ‘at will’ nature of Zuckerberg’s employment can be changed only after a written agreement approved by the Facebook board.

The employment agreement of Sheryl Sandberg also carries an ‘at-will’ clause.

Create an Rough Woody Text Effect with Wood Splinters Texture in Photoshop

Check out the Below link for this tutorial best ever tutorial i have ever seen

http://www.psdvault.com/text-effects/create-an-rough-woody-text-effect-with-wood-splinters-texture-in-photoshop/

Creating vector characters in Illustrator

Characters can add a recognisable face to your work. But how do you go from a sketch to the finished product? Peskimo talk through their process.

Character design is such a wide and varied subject that the specifics of each character’s process and gestation are unlikely to be the same for everyone.

However, some of the core principals, especially in the early stages of development, are key to creating a well-executed and memorable character. We talk through the essential steps, from before you even pick up a pen and paper to working your design up as a vector image, and show you some of our processes for adding details to the character.

If you are following this project with a particular brief in mind, think carefully about the target audience and what sort of design elements will be suitable for that audience – the usual concerns apply as they do with all design. The character we created is intended to be a mascot of sorts, and aimed at all ages. It is usable at a variety of sizes, and in both print and animation.

Click here to download the support files (3.94MB)

Click here to download the tutorial for free

Current 15 Web Design Trends

1. Responsive Interface Design

The average user’s experience is possibly the most important aspect to consider when designing a website. You want page elements to respond quickly to keyboard/mouse input and behave as expected. Some examples may include side fly-out menus, drop-down boxes, and popup windows.

Including famous JavaScript libraries such as MooTools and jQuery, it has become much easier to animate these features and even more. Most modern-day browsers support this code and even gracefully degrade when the scripts aren’t available. Ultimately you want to make the user feel comfortable when interacting with anywhere in the design.

Similarly you should take form input and data checking into consideration. On many registration pages you’ll receive small responses as you work through each input area. You can automate checking for valid e-mail addresses, duplicate usernames, and even double-check password inputs. This will save time on the user’s end and provides a handy guide throughout the signup process.

2. Touchscreen Mobile Devices

In the past couple of years it has become evident that smartphones are gaining support among even non-tech enthusiasts. But only since 2011 have we seen an explosion of mobile sites and mobile-specific templates.

The popularity of iPhone and iPad devices along with Android-powered phones means you will have visitors fully interacting with your pages through touch commands. This has to become a realistic consideration with every design mockup. Trends in mobile web design have shown that building an entirely separate mobile theme often provides the best results. In this way you can keep all the dynamic content in place on your main layout while serving up a slimmed version of the site to mobile users.

3. Tons Of Freebies!

Who can say they honestly don’t enjoy free downloads? Web designers have been sharing their content online for years, but only recently has this become a very popular trend among digital artists. There have been a few communities built specifically around offering free downloads for web and graphic designers.

Two of my personal favorites are Download PSD and Designmoo, both of which get updated frequently by top-quality members. Additionally the Hongkiat Freebies archive has plenty of sweet goodies to check out. In any era before it has literally never been this easy to download free web interfaces, layouts, logos, banners, and practically any other type of PSD/AI file!

Some Neat Downloads

Below are just a few cool freebies to check out from earlier in 2011. And if you think this list has some great files, just wait until 2012 rolls around!

Mini Web UI Set

Dark Mini Music Player

Sliding Tags

Dark Photo Slider

Search Boxes

Login in/Signin Form

Login Modal Box

Clean Login Form

Pricing Tables

Minimal Loading Bars

Attachment Pop-up

4. HTML5 & CSS3 Standards

Both of these new design archetypes have accumulated an ever-growing following throughout 2011. Semantic web designers have been waiting years to churn out CSS-only designs rendering rounded corners and drop shadows. Additionally the W3C has made a lot of headway in garnering support from the most popular browsers.

I can only see good things for the future of HTML5/CSS3 web development. Front-end designers are often overlooked in today’s field, yet they serve such a great importance to the entire composition process. Try not to squeeze yourself into any set ‘label’ based on the techniques you know and practice daily. We offer a beginner’s how-to guide for HTML5/CSS3 coding if you feel the need to catch up.

Sticking with these new standards will also make developing in JavaScript and jQuery just that much easier. Developers have already been publishing and sharing their HTML5/CSS3 project code online, and if things continue we’ll surely notice a whole lot more of this going into next year.

5. Ribbons And Banners

Although this design technique isn’t exactly “new” it never truly broke through mainstream until just recently. You have probably seen examples of corner ribbons, banner navigation bars, and small ribbon badges. These trends have likely exploded because of the massive accumulation of detailed tutorials which can be found all through Google.

Web designers are more competent these days in launching their own blogs to share information. Now simple techniques can easily be passed around between designers to duplicate the most popular effects. There are even free PSDs you can download to save yourself the effort.

6. Premium WordPress Themes

The final release of WordPress 3.0 included a host of long-awaited features such as custom post types and unique article images. Yet the most profound changes I have seen are coming from WordPress development shops which specialize in premium WP themes.

After you purchase such a theme the installation process is similar to any other. Yet it’s now possible to include custom plug-in functionality, child themes, new admin menus, and a whole bunch of other features right from within the theme! WooThemes, ElegantThemes and Rocket Themes are few brands which stand out to me above all the rest. Their quality is impeccable and I feel their developers go above-and-beyond to create the best templates and most intuitive admin menus.

Going into 2012 I can only imagine WordPress will become even easier to use. This means more high-quality themes to be released, and more amazing blogs to be launched.

7. Online Magazines

Speaking about WordPress themes we should also bring up the quickly-adopted success of online magazines. These websites are not so different from any generic WordPress blog aside from the general structure and page layout. You can spot these larger mags by the sheer presentation of their home page, and collection of authors writing for the site.

As magazines begin moving online they will become a source of income for many writers. Granted a topic such as ‘web design’ targets a smaller niche than, say, gaming or economics. But the fact that we’re seeing moredesign magazines online than print goes to show where the world may be heading in the years to come.

8. Easy Drop Shadows

As a facet of CSS3 it’s now easier than ever for designers to implement a drop shadow anywhere on the page. Box text and box-style elements have been given respective properties to render clear-cut shadow effects.

The text-shadow syntax is very easy to memorize and follows along as box-shadow. With images now unnecessary in rendering these effects, web developers can focus on expanding these basic ideas further. I personally love Matt Hamm’s page curls which were developed entirely with CSS3. You can find all the code on his website to duplicate the effect and implement a similar style onto your own pages.

9. Dynamic Typography

Fonts are a big part of the sphere encompassing web design tradition. The most notable fonts including Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, and Trebuchet MS have been around for years now. Although they continue to serve a deep purpose in web standards, there are plenty of alternate options for advanced webpage typography.

Typekit for example only requires a couple lines of code to be included in your document head. After this you can specify which font names to include and append them into your CSS. The best part about this technique is that it relies mostly on JavaScript, so the end user isn’t required to have the fonts installed.

Another alternative is Google Web Fonts which behaves in a similar manner to Typekit. I recommend interested designers to check out CSS3′s @font-face media query, as you are given much more creativity. This code can be used to import a .ttf or .otf font file from your web server and include it as a usable stylesheet font! With so many alternate systems used for building dynamic fonts I’m expecting 2012 to hold a surge of innovation and design talent in this area.

10. Image Gallery Slideshows

With the subsequent popularity of jQuery I have spotted more and more image slideshows being dropped into web layouts. Galleries are perfect for demonstrating a quick glimpse of inner-page content. This could be a set of portfolio entries, photographs, blog posts with featured images, demo screenshots, etc.

When you consider the many unique sliding and fading animations it has never been easier to construct a quick slideshow for your home page. I’m confident that 2012 will see an uptick in these trends, and not just between designers. Online web applications and software companies have been using slideshows as guided tutorials to display screenshots and unique features.

11. Modal Popup Boxes

I feel that modal boxes are still fairly new to the Internet considering they’ve been appearing in desktop software and mobile apps for years. The purpose of a modal window is to offer box content(such as user registration or login) on top of the current page without loading onto a new one.

Many of the open-source image gallery scripts use a type of lightbox effect where the background fades darker than the popup box. I really enjoy this feature whenever I see it, although it has yet to be adopted by many. And although modal boxes are sexy and sleek, they can also be very difficult to code and get working properly.

To get ideas for your own websites check out some of the more popular social news sharing communities.Reddit and Digg are the first two which come to mind as they both feature register/login modal boxes with a typical layout. Additionally the UI effects for Google+ boast a considerable amount of modal functionality.

12. Inspirational Lists

Collections of list items have appeared since the very early days of web design. As we moved into the new century designers began using HTML ordered and unordered lists to house navigation menus. But nowadays lists can and are being used for much more.

In most of the blog themes I find the entire sidebar is loaded with lists! Not to mention designers who have crafted awesome CSS styles for lists in their article entries. We covered inspiring list styles in another post earlier this year which may give you some more insight to the matter. Looking forward into 2012 I’m expecting some really creative examples, possibly on par with Flowapp’s custom layout for tasks & to-dos.

13. Generated Image Thumbnails

In the web universe we can agree that content is king. But most designers will also agree that a page of blank text becomes boring real quickly. Images can add that extra spice if you know how to sprinkle them in gently. One such method is using dynamic thumbnails to provide previews for each page or article.

Blogs today are continuing to adopt the featured image trend, so why not apply generated thumbnails into your theme as well? These often draw my attention towards the article headline and help to break up a page full of text links.

As another example Dribbble provides a whole gallery listing of thumbnails for each design shot. In such a table row-style layout it’s super easy to catch a glimpse of each thumbnail and scroll through to find what you’re looking for. This tactic has proven to grab the attention of the whole design community! Er, at least the members of Dribbble at best. I can only expect that 2012 will see further exertion of these ideas building upon such examples from the past.

14. Oversized Icons

This unique trend semi-originates from the popularity of Mac OS X icon designs. As programmers began to launch websites for their Mac applications we all too frequently have seen the enormous sizes represented in branding. Accordingly this trend has also been picked up through iOS developers and now comfortably rests within modern design culture.

It’s difficult to predict how these trends will fair as we move into 2012. On the one hand these icons can be clunky and take up more space than necessary. Yet we’re not even close to hitting a shortage of iOS/OSX apps and designers are still churning out pixel-perfect icon specs. Not to mention that web designers are now including oversized icons within just about any page branding! It’s a good way to nab your visitor’s direct attention and build a name for your company.

15. Exaggerated Hyperlinks

Anchor links are certainly within the top five most important elements of any website. These have obviously come a long way since the 1990s and popular design trends have only been growing exponentially. It appears we are moving into an era where exaggerated design takes precedence.

Check out a few of the link examples from Patterntap to see if any jump out and catch your eye. There are so many incredible ideas for hyperlink design, both in standard and hover effects. CSS3 rounded corners, text shadows, and custom font families add even more great ideas into the mix! One of my favorite examples is from SimpleBits which uses a short dynamic animation on each of their blog entry permalinks.

Top 6 Facebook annoyances and how to fix them

Just when users get comfortable with the latest iteration of “New Facebook,” Zuckerberg and company go and change something else, drawing the ire of its millions of users. Here are six Facebook annoyances that are currently grinding our gears and ways to deal with each.

Problem #1: News Ticker Shoves TMI Updates in Your Face

Sarcastically called the “stalker feed” by some users, the News Ticker has replaced the News Feed. Right above their list of friends available to chat, users are assaulted by an ongoing barrage of inane news including everything their friends liked and what they commented on.

Solution: Users looking to ditch the News Ticker can install Facebook News Ticker Remover ( Google Chrome) or the Facebook Ticker Removal (Firefox) add-on which will automatically remove the offending feature.

Problem #2: Facebook Timeline Shares Your Worst Moments With the World

There used to be a time where you could just delete that embarrassing photo from Facebook, and if you were prone to drunk posting, you could rest easy in the knowledge that soon it would disappear from your timeline never to be seen again. With the new iteration of Timeline, every bad picture and misspelled status update will be on display forever.

Solution: While you might not be able to erase all those regrettable photos and statuses of yore, you can control who gets to see them. Simply pull down the menu next to the Home button on your Facebook page and click Privacy Settings then Timeline Viewer Settings. From there, scroll down to Limit the Audience for Past Posts column and hit the Manage Past Post Visibility tab. Click OK and your timeline goes from public to friends only.

Problem #3: Your Facebook Subscribers Keep Spamming You

People looking to make part of their private Facebook pages public can open themselves up to subscribers, people who can sign up to read your updates without being approved “friends.” Users can then follow those pages and hopefully have an invigorating exchange of ideas. However, many people are complaining of inordinate amounts of spam and inappropriate content filling their news feed.

Solution: Freedom from that unwanted spam is only a few clicks away. To turn off Facebook Subscribe, click on Subscriptions in the left side menu. From there, click Edit under Subscribers and switch On to Off.

Facebook took all the convenience and fun of scrolling through photos and replaced it with theater-style pop-up photos.

 

Problem #4: Gallery Photos Take Too Long to Load

Remember when you could quickly and easily scroll through all your friends’ Facebook photos without being held up by slow loading times? Facebook took all the convenience and fun of scrolling through photos and replaced it with theater-style pop-up photos. Sure the image is bigger, but some images can take longer to load than others, making photo-cruising an unnecessary exercise in patience.

Solution: Installing Revert Facebook Photo Viewer on Google Chrome or Facebook Photo Theater Killer on Firefox will display your photos in Facebook Classic style. Firefox users must have the Greasemonkey add-on installed first.

Problem #5: Facebook Apps Share Too Much Info About You

By default, apps like Spotify, Ticketmaster and Foursquare share every tiny detail of your life with all of your friends. Instead of  just learning about a job promotion or a new relationship, all your contacts can now be privy to what tickets you purchased from Ticketmaster or what song you’re listening to on Spotify. It’s great for advertisers, but an overshare nightmare for everyone else.

Solution: Don’t want everyone to know you just listened to Kenny G. on Spotify? Just go to Privacy Settings, click Edit Settings next to Apps and Websites, and then hit Edit Settings by the Instant Personalizations Header.

From there, uncheck the “Enable instant personalization on all partner sites” tab.

Problem #6: Annoying App Invites

Facebook has become a haven for casual gamers who sink hours into tending their farms, building a criminal empire or creating villages for their virtual insect colonies. Unfortunately many of these misguided souls insist on inviting you to join the “fun,” sending you invite after invite to join the next big “Ville,” deluging your Facebook notifications and annoying you to no end.

Solution: Go to Privacy Settings and select Manage Blocking next to Blocked People and Apps.

Then enter the offending person’s name in the Block App Invites field and voila! It’ll be game over for all those unwanted game invites.

 

Mounting a Tablet in Your Vehicle’s Front Seat

 

Instead of spending thousands to have a sat-nav system that’s built into your vehicle’s dashboard, you can install a tablet mount yourself for less than $35. A bonus is that you can upgrade your technology instead of using the same system for the life of the car. Check laws in your state before installing your tablet mount, though, to make sure you won’t be at risk for breaking distracted driving laws.

Factory-supplied satellite navigation and entertainment systems can add thousands to the cost of a new vehicle. Plus, the speed at which consumer electronics come to market is significantly faster than a car’s development cycle, so your in-vehicle equipment is outdated before the car leaves the new car lot.

Even an aftermarket OEM kit is in the thousands. Consumer advocate Which? reckons that hardly any used car buyers will pay extra for this expensive kit when they can pick up a basic handheld sat-nav unit for a few hundred dollars.

 

Why are we ordering vehicles with this stuff?

I decided to explore upgrade options for my gracefully aging Dodge Ram pickup, and along with most of America, quickly settled on keeping the truck. I planned to service the four-wheel-drive and upgrade the navigation and entertainment.

I settled on a longish, Chinese/Taiwanese-manufactured, 18-inch gooseneck tablet floor mount made by Arkon, sold by ChargerCity and fulfilled by Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) with free shipping. Cost of the navigation and entertainment upgrade: US$33.99.

This bendy, steel mounting pedestal would accept my heavy, existing 10-inch Toshiba Androidtablet neatly. It also came with a free, un-needed USB cable. Internet functionality could optionally be provided by a tether to my Android smartphone, and the 3.5mm headphone jack could provide connectivity to the existing cassette player.

 

 

Know the Law

Check laws in your state. California is particularly tough on distracted driving and even has an originally federally funded California Highway Patrol crackdown on it that expires in Sept. 2012. Generally, you can’t text or make handheld calls. You also can’t block the windshield.

The State of California cites reading as a primary action that causes distracted driving, and California recommends you get your passenger to operate any satellite navigation.

Installing the Mount

Undo the passenger seat track bolt with a socket wrench. It’s under the seat and above the seat track. Then slide the included fork bracket over the seat bolt. This will form the foundation for the gooseneck.

If the seat bolt points upward, use the fork bracket as it comes from the manufacturer. If the bolt points forward and toward the front foot well, you will need to separate the fork from the already attached plate with a Philips (NYSE: PHG) screwdriver and realign the fork so that the plate provides a vertical mount for the gooseneck.

Screw the gooseneck into the orifice in the plate and tighten. Note that the gooseneck must attach vertically. A sideways attachment will cause the tablet to swivel excessively in use.

Bend the gooseneck so that the mounting head end points toward your seating position. Look for airbag locations, which often have embossed designations on the dash, and keep the kit from obstruction airbag deployment.

Mounting the Tablet

Attach the supplied tablet holder by sliding the tabs on the tablet holder onto the mounting head on the gooseneck. Unintuitively, the two tablet-holding legs that are closer together on the holder should be positioned so they are located at the bottom. This allows the top two legs, which are farther apart, to be raised for inserting the tablet.

Raise the top of the tablet holder and slide your existing tablet into the holder. Then fasten the lever at the back of the tablet holder to hold the tablet in place. Check for an ergonomically comfortable position, and tighten everything up.

Making Connections

Connect the tablet to the car stereo system. I use an existing Sony (NYSE: SNE) cassette adapter-to-35mm headphone jack. Other options: a 3.5mm-to-3.5mm auxiliary jack; 3.5mm-to-FM radio; or Bluetooth. Check your nearest consumer electronics box store for more connectivity options.

Tether the tablet to your phone using the tools provided by the phone carrier. On carriers, including Sprint (NYSE: S), this involves purchasing an add-on and making settings changes within the phone. There are other methods of tethering that involve rooting the phone and may have implications relating to your phone carrier agreement, which you should check if you go that route.

User Interface

Launch the Android Market on your tablet and look for a car interface by searching for “Car Mode.” These phone-designed interface apps allow you to customize shortcuts for vehicle-oriented apps like free Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Navigation.

I’ve been using Car Home Ultra, which shows a compass, provides big app-launch buttons and has day and night lighting schemes. The app’s native resolution renders acceptably on the tablet. Car Dashboard appeared pixilated and others I tried were too fussy.

Charge Your Phone and Your Car from Afar

Charging systems that send power farther through the air will soon be on sale

Eric Giler points a remote control at a small black pad leaned up against a wall, and three lamps instantly light up and a tablet computer starts charging. The funny thing is, the devices all sit several feet away from the black pad, which provides power, and aren’t plugged in.

Giler is the CEO of Witricity, a startup that hopes to revolutionize electronics by replacing wireless charging systems with ones that send power safely through the air. The nearly five-year-old company uses technology developed at MIT that extends the range of inductive wireless charging.

Witricity says its first products—for charging portable electronics—could be on the market later this year. Within a year or two, similar technology could allow electric-vehicle owners to charge their cars without plugging them in. This could be followed by wireless power for heart pumps and other medical implants.

The idea of wireless power transfer is hardly new. Nikola Tesla demonstrated a version of it a hundred years ago, and inductive chargers for electric toothbrushes and video game controllers are now widespread. But the inductive chargers available today work over only very short distances and require physical contact between the charger and electronic device, which isn’t much more convenient than plugging a device in.

Inductive charging systems work by passing a current through a coil to generate a magnetic field, which creates another electric current in a similarly sized and oriented coil in the other device. Move these coils apart, and the efficiency of energy transfer drops off quickly. To increase the distance at which the power is transferred efficiently, Witricity tunes the sending and receiving coils to resonate with each other at a specific frequency with very little energy loss within each resonator.

The distance that power can be transferred in this way depends on the size of the coils. If both the sending and receiving coils are small, as may be the case with a system for mobile phones, the charger and the phone need to be placed within several centimeters to charge efficiently. But Witricity has also shown prototypes with larger coils that can send power at distances of about a meter. (Power can also be beamed with lasers and microwaves, but this requires a direct line of sight and can raise safety concerns.)

Park and charge: These pads transmit power wirelessly from the floor of a garage to the bottom of a car.
Credit: Witricity

It’s also possible to boost the signal with coils called repeaters. In the demonstration Giler gave, coils installed under carpet squares allow power to leapfrog from a wall outlet to anywhere in the room.

Witricity is one of a handful of companies working to extend the range of electric chargers.  The company has developed a prototype table that charges devices placed anywhere on its surface—even if they remain inside a backpack or purse—and a wireless keyboard and mouse that can be powered from a computer monitor, eliminating the need for batteries. (Apple has patented a similar idea.) The company has also developed a charger for electric cars. It’s a half-meter-wide pad that sits on the floor of a garage—just drive over it, and the car starts to charge.

Witricity is partnering with several companies to bring the technology to market. It has a multimillion-dollar contract with Toyota to develop charging for battery-powered vehicles (soon it might not make sense to call them plug-in electric vehicles), and has also announced a partnership with Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Mediatek to develop products for charging portable electronics.

Katie Hall, Witricity’s chief technology officer, says the company is working on components that will add the necessary electronics to a portable device. It’s also working to make charging sleeves for mobile phones that are no larger than the covers people typically use to protect their phones. The company isn’t certain how much these will cost, but Hall says the system for charging cars wouldn’t cost much more to make than the chargers that electric-vehicle owners often install in their garages anyway.

Several other companies are developing inductive chargers that can send power efficiently through the air. Siemens and BMW are developing chargers for electric cars, and Qualcomm recently bought a startup that had developed its own wireless electric-car chargers. A company called Fulton Technologies has technology that sends wireless power through a few centimeters of marble, as well as from the floor of a garage to an electric vehicle.

A handful of researchers are even working to extend the concept to allow charging of electric vehicles while they are out on the road. Researchers at Oak Ridge and Stanford recently developed detailed concepts for such a system. In a $2.7 million federally funded project, researchers at Utah State University are installing a system to charge buses as they stop along a route in Salt Lake City.

In the Oak Ridge model, 200 coils would be embedded in a section of the roadway and controlled by a single roadside device; successive coils would be energized as electric vehicles pass over them, providing enough power for the vehicle to reach the next series of coils a mile down the road.

John Miller, a research scientist at Oak Ridge, estimates that each series of coils plus the controller would cost less than a million dollars. “Wireless chargers for electric vehicles are so convenient. You don’t have to mess with plug cables. You don’t care what the weather is. You don’t even have to think about it. I think it’s going to catch on superfast,” Miller says.

Enterprise Web Apps: The Next Generation

Social media and other consumer websites have embraced new technology to ensure a positive experience for millions of online users, handle large volumes of complex, unstructured data, and ensure reliability and security in the public cloud. Programmers, armed with the right tools, will likely become the heroes for the next generation of enterprise Web applications.

When the bright folks at Zeebox, a killer social TV site, decided to build their website, they naturally turned to cloud services because they are a startup and had to use their money wisely. They also turned to the Scala language and open source community because they had very specific scalability and performance needs, like processing 60+ TV channels (knowing it will grow to thousands in the future) in real time, and juggling the social streams of users from sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Social media and other consumer websites like Zeebox have embraced new technology to ensure a positive experience for millions of online users, handle large volumes of complex, unstructured data, and ensure reliability and security in the public cloud. While visionary IT leaders in some more traditional companies have adopted similar technology, the broad mass of enterprise IT has yet to dive in.

With the new year just underway, companies are reassessing their infrastructure needs to accommodate fast-paced changes driven by cloud computing and big data workloads. Developers will face many challenges maintaining the volume of queries and messaging on their websites while keeping underlying frameworks running smoothly for staff, customers and business prospects.

Web Apps: The New Batch

Programmers, armed with the right tools, will likely become the heroes for the next generation of enterprise Web applications and will be instrumental in helping determine whether a company can make or break it in the new market. Those that can’t keep up will be left behind. This sentiment is shared by Aaron Levie of Box.net, Mark Benioff of Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), and other entrepreneurs who recognize the value of building lightweight, agile and scalable solutions to trump the antiquated solutions of the past.

Since modernization doesn’t come without its own set of challenges, I thought it might be useful to take a look at what the big names in the social world have done to assess issues like performance, scalability and reliability.

Perform Like Foursquare

Web application developers of high volume sites face many challenges, but performance tops the list. Consumers now demand blazing computing speeds and uninterrupted service. A wait time of 250 milliseconds can mean the difference between a successful service and a failed one.

For key user operations, such as interactive, real-time slicing and dicing of large data sets, and servicing API calls from other applications, performance is essential. The application needs to perform flawlessly and correctly in order to attract and keep consumers’ attention. Similarly, today’s enterprises need fast and robust infrastructure to help them make sense of the terabytes of information streaming in. Making sense of business analytics of all types in a timely fashion is essential for businesses to remain current and engaged with their customers.

Scale Like Twitter

When operating services on a massive scale, it’s essential to make the most efficient use of hardware assets — for example, optimizing the use of memory and available processing resources. In practice, this often means considering event-driven and distributed architectures like node.js or the more powerful Scala-based Akka framework, versus previous generation thread-based models like traditional Java Servlets.

Developer productivity represents a different facet of efficiency. Fewer lines of code, made possible by concise languages like Scala and Ruby, and streamlined frameworks like Rails and Play, generally translates to higher productivity for application developers. In fact, the scalability limits of the Ruby language were one of the leading causes of the “Fail Whale” for Twitter. Since adopting Scala, Twitter has scaled somewhere around 1,000 times.

Run Like LinkedIn

Enterprise developers interested in keeping their systems resilient against component failures, including hardware, software and network crashes, can look at LinkedIn as an example. An ever-expanding ecosystem of applications depends on reliable access to user-generated content like LinkedIn’s, for instance. As such, the network needs to target “five nines” availability goals that have previously been benchmarks for the telecommunications and electrical power industries.

In the last few years, many new open source technologies have emerged to help Web application developers. Open source projects such as Norbert, now available under the open source Apache license at sna-projects.com, are readily available to Web developers charged with tackling such challenges.

Open source programming languages and frameworks that enable parallel and distributed computing have proved themselves in today’s most trafficked websites. These technologies can also help enterprise infrastructure run steadily and smoothly. Below are key considerations to keep in mind when programming for today’s multicore paradigm:

• For applications that benefit from highly interactive user experiences, developers should consider breaking data-intensive functionality into asynchronous Web services that can be integrated into the Web-based user interface using REST-style APIs.

• To encourage “efficiency by default” for today’s enterprise applications, developers should look to modern frameworks like Akka that incorporate capabilities like event-driven processing, asynchronous I/O and cluster-aware fault tolerance.

• For applications that can truly scale up and scale out, developers should favor languages like Scala that provide first class-support for a functional style of programming, which discourages the use of mutable state and provides higher-level abstractions for dealing with concurrency and parallelism. This allows developers to more easily build applications that scale to hundreds of cores on a single server, and thousands of servers on a network.

Enterprise applications and their supporting infrastructure need to be robust and efficient as more and more business is dependent on huge flows of data. Fundamental advances in technology, many driven by the open source community, are making it possible for today’s developers to stay ahead of the scalable computing needs of consumers and businesses.

Sony’s Hirai to extend PlayStation strategy

Incoming CEO Kazuo Hirai aims to re-shape Sony Corp by linking hardware and software through online networks — a model he used at its PlayStation unit — dismissing any suggestion the battered brand would revert to a gadget-centered strategy under his management.

In the meantime, he said, he would focus on paring costs at its TV unit and look to squeeze expenses elsewhere to return Sony to profit.

The Sony Computer Entertainment model “is a bigger concept we can grow into a bigger space,” Hirai, 51, said in a group interview at the company’s Tokyo headquarters. “Hardware drives software and software drives hardware,” he added, referring to online sales of games and other content PlayStation owners.

Hirai oversaw the phenomenal rise of the PlayStation gaming system in the United States and since last March headed Sony’s consumer products and services business.

He didn’t say what changes the wider application of that strategy would have on Sony, which unlike its consumer electronics rivals such as Samsung Electronics and Apple Inc, owns significant content in movies, music and games software.

A more immediate task for Hirai, however, is to stem losses with cost savings that will add to cuts made by outgoing boss, Howard Stringer.

Hirai formally succeeds Stringer as CEO on April 1, with the once-stellar consumer electronics brand heading for what it warned last week would be a much bigger-than-expected $2.9 billion annual loss, its fourth in a row.

The surge of red ink has put Hirai under intense pressure from investors and ratings agencies to quickly staunch losses at the sprawling electronics group. Hirai pledged not to flinch from tough decisions to trim costs and renewed a promise to return the TV business to profit in two years.

“We have to make some hard decisions on where there are some redundancies and reduce the fixed costs in a variety of different areas,” he said, pointing to sales units in Japan, Europe and the United States, supply chains and Tokyo headquarters functions as areas where cuts could be made.

Credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s on Wednesday cut its long-term debt rating on Sony and warned it may drop it another notch within a year if Hirai fails to stem TV losses and deliver a significant boost to profitability. [ID:nL4E8D861P] Sony was also downgraded by Moody’s last month.

BIG BLEED

The TV division has lost more than $11 billion over eight fiscal years. Together, Sony, Panasonic and Sharp expect to lose $17 billion this year alone, highlighting the savaging of Japan’s electronics industry by foreign rivals led by Samsung, weak demand and a strong yen.

A goal for Sony to end that bleeding in two years was “tracking where we said it would be at the end of the year, or a little ahead of that,” Hirai said.

Better products would, he said, add as much as 40 billion yen ($520 million) in profit, with cost improvements adding another 50 billion yen, as part of a strategy he described as “defense and offense.”

As well as weak global TV demand, Sony has been hammered by last year’s flooding in Thailand that ruptured supply chains, a big one-off charge for exiting a flat-panel joint venture with Samsung, and smart competition from Apple and Samsung that has squeezed market share in TVs, smartphones and other gadgets.

Hirai predicted that LCD technology would remain the main battlefield in TVs for at least three years, before next generation technology takes hold.

STRATEGY ROLE

Hirai has yet to reveal his management line-up, naming only Tadashi Saito, a former Sony chief financial officer at Sony Electronics in the United States, as the company’s first chief strategy officer since 2005.

Saito will work with senior managers “to formulate strategies for group companies overall, as well as giving us a lot of input and advice on M&A activity,” Hirai said.

Hiroshi Yoshioka, previously identified by Stringer as one of “Four Musketeers” who could succeed him, along with Hirai, will take Sony into the medical imaging business and head up the group’s innovation center, “seeking out new business opportunities,” Hirai said.

As of Thursday’s close, Sony shares had gained 13 percent to a 14-week high of 1,544 yen since Hirai was named as the next CEO, outperforming a 2.1 percent gain on the benchmark Nikkeiaverage.

The stock, which slumped more than 60 percent during Stringer’s seven-year reign, was down 0.4 percent in early trading Friday.

A Sony veteran of 28 years, Hirai was credited with reviving the PlayStation gaming operations through aggressive cost-cutting, in competition with Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Xbox.

A year ago, Hirai, a fluent English speaker, was promoted to head the consumer products and services business, overseeing Sony’s network operations. He was also at the forefront of efforts to counter hackers who accessed Sony customers’ personal details.

He takes over after a period of cost-cutting by Stringer, a rare foreign CEO in Japan who sold off TV factories in Spain, Slovakia and Mexico and outsourced more than half of the group’s production to outside companies, including Hon Hai Precision Industry, a Taiwanese contract electronics maker whose key customer is Apple.

Courtesy (Reuters)