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Click here to view Figure 1.
With August right around the corner, the apex of summer heat is nearly upon us, offering an incentive to escape to a breezy beach, secluded mountain hideaway, or perhaps somewhere more exotic. No matter where you go, there is a certain set of gadgets you should have at the ready.
From smartphones to drones, geeks on vacation usually can't completely cut the cord, and with our collective obsession with email, social media, and a general addiction to the internet, keeping yourself connected is part of the vacation package deal in this day and age.
But aside from the spare battery packs, fitness trackers, and waterproof mini boom boxes, there is a whole ecosystem of more interesting gadgets that could add to your vacation in ways you perhaps hadn't expected.
Take for example the CliMate, a pocket-sized gadget -- and successful Kickstarter concept -- that tracks the humidity, UV rays, and temperature (HUT) of your immediate environment, wherever you are, allowing you to soak up the sun -- in moderation -- without putting your skin at risk.
[Want to see more tech outside of Silicon Valley? Check out these nine cities.]
If you're looking to take your vacation videos and photos one step beyond the norm, there are a variety of drones -- from compact models to 4K monsters -- that will suit your needs.
With gadgets like that in mind, we've compiled a list of eight great devices, ranging from the standard pack it in your backpack gear to some of the more imaginative inventions out there on the market.
Here's our look at some of the best we could find.]]>
Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook Wednesday challenged the next White House administration to increase STEM education funding and reform immigration policy during an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation panel in Philadelphia as part of a Democratic National Convention public policy forum.
Representatives from the tech companies expressed the challenges faced in finding enough qualified IT professionals and how it sets the nation up for losing its stature as a technology leader, according to a CNET report.
"This is no longer a Microsoft, Facebook or Amazon issue," Microsoft's chief legal officer Brad Smith is quoted in CNET. "Companies are only as good as the people we hire."
Click here to view Figure 1.
The three tech giants are no strangers to advocating for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education funding. The companies, along with other industry behemoths including IBM, Google, Twitter, and Dropbox are members of the Computer Science Education Coalition, which formed earlier this year and called on Congress to invest $250 million in K-12 computer science education.
The coalition has put in a lot of effort. In April, it helped organize a private donation of $48 million from a number of its members to improve access to computer science. Earlier this month, Facebook stepped in with a $15 million pledge to Code.org, which will use it to increase diversity in K-12 computer science classes, according to a GeekWire report.
There are over 600,000 computing jobs that are currently unfilled, yet the nation's universities only graduate 43,000 computer science students each year, according to the coalition. In order to establish a healthy pipeline of potential IT college graduates, the coalition says it wants lawmakers to approve funding.
[See 8 Biggest H-1B Employers in 2015.]
At the start of the year, President Obama announced his Computer Science for All initiative, in which the White House calls for:
In a move also meant to address a shortage in IT professionals, the companies speaking on the industry panel also pointed to the need for immigration reform to bring in more skilled workers from other countries.
The panelists, according to CNET, challenged lawmakers to allow foreigners who come to the US to get their college education to have the ability to remain in the country after they receive their degrees.]]>
Smartphone manufacturers shipped a total of 343.3 million devices worldwide in the second quarter of 2016, essential flat compared to numbers from the same period in 2015, according to a July 28 report from IDC.
Though Samsung and Apple retained their positions as the top two smartphone makers in the world, iPhone shipments suffered a 15% year-over-year decline, while the success of Samsung's Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge flagship handsets helped secure the South Korean company's lead.
Apple shipped 40.4 million iPhones in the second quarter, down from the 47.5 million units shipped in the second quarter of 2015, while Samsung shipments rose 5.5%, from 73 million to 77 million.
Apple's introduction of the lower-cost SE -- billed essentially as an iPhone 6s in a 5s body -- helped reduce the overall average selling price (ASP) for an iPhone in the quarter.
Click here to view Figure 1.
The ASP for an iPhone in the second quarter of 2016 was $595, down around 10% from $662 one year ago. The IDC report also noted that Apple saw strong sales in both established and emerging markets due to the launch of the iPhone SE.
"Outside of Samsung's Galaxy S7 flagship, a majority of vendors, including Apple, have found success with more affordable models compared to their flagship handsets," Anthony Scarsella, IDC research manager for mobile phones, wrote in a statement. "As smartphone prices continue to drop and competition escalates at the high-end, vendors will need to continue to push flagship-type devices at affordable price points to encourage upgrading on a more frequent basis."
Thanks to strong domestic sales and even stronger European sales, Chinese smartphone maker Huawei saw year-over-year shipments jump nearly 9%, to 32.1 million in second quarter 2016 from 29.6 million in the same period last year.
The report noted the company's premium lineup of smartphones, such as the P9 and Mate 8 handsets, also pushed 25% of the quarter's volume to the high-end, which IDC defines as smartphones costing $500 to $600.
[Read about Apple's latest quarterly report that saw iPhone sales decline again.]
"With Huawei number one in China at the moment, Huawei's remaining challenge will once again be penetrating the U.S. market at the high-end to compete with both Samsung and Apple," the report noted.
Landing in fourth place was OPPO, which thanks to aggressive marketing and strong demand for the R9, saw shipments grow an impressive 136.6% --the highest rate of growth among the Top Five.
The company, which does particularly well in Tier 3 to Tier 5 cities in China, shipped 22.6 million handsets in the second quarter of 2016, up from under 10 million in the same period last year.
Rounding out the top five was Chinese OEM vivo, which saw shipments jump 80%, to 16.4 million in the second quarter of this year from 9.1 million in the second quarter of 2015, thanks in part to the celebrity endorsement of popular South Korean star Soon Joong Ki, who is popular in China.
"Interestingly enough, our early findings show low-end Chinese OEMs that predominantly built their business domestically in China are having success penetrating non-China markets, despite low-end competition from local brands already in place," Ryan Reith, program vice president with IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Device Trackers, wrote in a statement.]]>
When Apple debuted the original iPhone in 2007, Nokia had already sold more than one billion phones. Nokia reached that mark in 2005, in fact, when the Nokia 1100 was a hit thanks to its solid build and low price. Now, Nokia is nowhere to be found and Apple has sold its billionth iPhone.
Apple CEO Tim Cook announced the milestone at a recent company meeting.
"iPhone has become one of the most important, world-changing and successful products in history," Cook said in the statement. "It's become more than a constant companion. iPhone is truly an essential part of our daily life and enables much of what we do throughout the day. Last week we passed another major milestone when we sold the billionth iPhone. We never set out to make the most, but we've always set out to make the best products that make a difference. Thank you to everyone at Apple for helping change the world every day."
Click here to view Figure 1.
Apple fans were frothing at the mouth after Apple announced the first iPhone, but there were plenty of skeptics in the then-entrenched industry dominated by Nokia, Motorola, BlackBerry, Palm, and Sony Ericsson.
BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie said at the time the iPhone "had rapid battery drain and a lousy keyboard." Mike Laziridis, BlackBerry's other CEO, said, "It's going to collapse the network" due to its full web browser, according to Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry.
The Atlantic reported that Google engineer and part of the original Android team Chris DeSalvo had said, "As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought 'We're going to have to start over.'"
Microsoft CEO at the time Steve Ballmer openly scoffed at the iPhone. "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get," he told USA Today.
[Read Top 10 All-Time Favorite Apple Commercials.]
In 2007, it was hard to see just how much the wireless industry would change in the years ahead, but change it did. It took Apple only 74 days to sell one million iPhones. Ballmer, Balsillie, and others probably began to reevaluate their opinion of the iPhone at that point.
Looking back at the carnage now shows entire companies laid waste by the iPhone's wake. Nokia is gone, as are Sanyo, Pantech, and Palm. BlackBerry and Microsoft have completely ceded the market to Apple and Android, but are still clinging on for dear life. Motorola is a shadow of its former self, as is Sony. Apple's only real competition is Samsung, which is now the world's largest maker of phones.
"Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone," said former Apple CEO Steve Jobs when he introduced the first iPhone. Did it ever. Jobs would surely be proud of Apple's latest accomplishment.]]>
Taking a cue from the technologies used in autonomous vehicles, students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and automaker Ford have developed a small fleet of on-demand electric shuttles that can measure pedestrian traffic.
In addition, the project uses Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors and inexpensive cameras to route the shuttles toward areas with the highest demand based on data-driven models, which could help improve ride-sharing efficiency.
LiDAR technology emits short pulses of laser light that precisely pinpoint the vehicle's location on a map and detect the movement of nearby pedestrians and objects. It's also considered to be far more accurate than GPS technology.
Researchers plan to introduce the service to a group of students and faculty in September. They will use a mobile app to order one of three electric shuttles to their location and request to be dropped off at another destination on campus.
Click here to view Figure 1.
"The onboard sensors and cameras gather pedestrian data to estimate the flow of foot traffic," Ken Washington, vice president of research and advanced engineering at Ford, wrote in a July 27 statement. "This helps us develop efficient algorithms that bring together relevant data. It improves mobility-on-demand services, and aids ongoing pedestrian detection and mapping efforts for autonomous vehicle research."
The shuttles, which are small enough to be able to navigate the campus's sidewalks, come equipped with weatherproof enclosures that protect occupants from the harsh winters and inclement weather New England is famous for.
Other factors researchers will take into account during the testing phase will include class schedules, the habits of students and professors across different semesters, and weather conditions.
The research is being conducted by MIT's Aeronautics and Astronautics Department's Aerospace Controls Lab (ACL), which focuses on topics related to autonomous systems and control design for various types of vehicles.
[Read about Tesla gearing up production at its "Gigafactory."]
Ford also plans to use the technology and the data to improve its own Dynamic Shuttle project, which provides point-to-point rides to employees through a mobile application on its Dearborn, Mich., campus.
In addition to the advances the project offers in terms of pedestrian safety and sensor-based automotive technology, the collaboration between MIT and Ford is part of a broader, industry-wide effort to take ride-sharing programs to a new level.
Volkswagen's recent $300 million investment in Gett, for example, is based on a strategy to expand on-demand mobility services in Europe. Toyota and Uber announced they have entered into a partnership to start trials in countries where ride-sharing is expanding.
But it's not all about passengers and pedestrians. Uber recently updated its application to capture data about the way the company's drivers operate their vehicles, including measuring braking, acceleration, and speed.
The update also added notifications designed to promote better driving, like reminders to take breaks and to mount the phone used for the driver app on the dashboard, rather than keeping it in-hand. It adds daily driving reports that compare driving patterns to those of other drivers.]]>
Many enterprise organizations are getting ready to move more aggressively to leverage the cloud and data analytics to compete with digital natives like Uber. But the professionals with the big data skills needed to make it happen remain in short supply.
Yet new vendors are popping up to meet the opportunity by making big data analytics technology easier to manage and deploy.
One such provider is Snowflake Computing, a cloud-based data warehousing company. Snowflake is a relative newcomer to the data warehouse market. It released its first product just about a year ago, but its management has many decades of experience in the database space. These people include former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia as CEO, as well as several cofounders from Oracle and other database specialist companies.
Click here to view Figure 1.
The company formed to build a new kind of data warehouse from the ground up, designed for the cloud and new unstructured data types, as well as traditional relational data. The warehouse would be nimble and scale for the volumes of data that companies work with today. To do that, Snowflake created a new kind of data warehouse and deployed it in Amazon's AWS public cloud.
[The data warehouse market is about to change radically. Read Data Warehouse Disruptions 2016: Gartner Magic Quadrant.]
Snowflake's goal was to create a data warehouse that could bring together all kinds of data quickly and easily, make it accessible to a broad range of users, and offer it for a lower cost and less complexity than the existing solutions on the market.
The Snowflake architecture separates the three components of the data warehouse -- storage, compute, and a meta-analysis and management layer.
This month the company updated the platform's features and added automated administration capabilities to further reduce the complexity that comes with large and diverse data sets. It added a multi-cluster virtual warehouse that improves the efficiency of queries made frequently by storing results.
Snowflake currently works with 200 contracted customers large and small, including Ask.com, the University of NotreDame, CapSpecialty, PDX, and education platform provider Blackboard.
This nearly 20-year-old company's customers were concentrated among higher education and other providers of online and traditional education and training services -- a vertical market that has hasn't been as quick to jump on the analytics bandwagon as healthcare and financial services have.
But Blackboard wanted to step up and offer predictive analytics services to its customers in order to report on factors that lead to student attrition. It wanted to predict students who are at risk for dropping out by analyzing all the data related to each student.
Attrition is a costly problem for universities. Blackboard Predict is designed to be used by teachers and student advisors to help look for warning signs and provide the guidance that is needed to make students successful.
Blackboard senior product manager Dan Rinzel told InformationWeek in an interview that Blackboard first tried to create its own stack of big data technologies to implement this predictive analytics capability on open source big data technologies such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark.
His product development team worked in consultation with the IT department. While Blackboard was successful in creating the capability, at the end of the project there were only a couple of people inside the company who could maintain, troubleshoot, and support those technologies.
So Blackboard looked around for other organizations that could do it better. The company considered data warehouses from AWS and Microsoft Azure, but ultimately chose the smaller startup. Rinzel said that Snowflake's separate pricing for storage and compute helped make the platform a better and more cost-effective choice. The choice also made best use of the professional skill sets of its existing workforce.
"We have a bunch of experienced, tenured DBAs who have been working with student information systems for a long time," he said. "We can take their expertise right into Snowflake, because the SQL compliant layer is just what they are used to."
Blackboard signed the contract with Snowflake in January and announced its first product rollout this month at its users conference. Rinzel expects to roll the product out to in-production user customers for the spring semester.
Snowflake's vice president of product development Jon Bock told InformationWeek in an interview that the solution made sense for Blackboard because it allowed the company to focus on its strengths.
"Universities' purpose in life is not to have the biggest, most skilled, most adaptable IT teams," Bock said.
Snowflake's new features are designed to make it easier for people to get access to data and insights faster.
"Nobody ever says the words Hadoop and simple in the same sentence," Bock said.]]>
Collaboration remains one of the primary selling points for cloud services, but the desktop metaphor used in cloud service interfaces in order to present lists of files hails from the era of personal computing.
On Wednesday, Dropbox turned the familiar folder from a personal storage container into a communal directory. The company introduced a team folder for Dropbox Business users as part of its AdminX initiative to rethink the Dropbox IT admin experience for teams.
"IT needs visibility and control over how company information is shared, ensuring that the right people have the right access to content," said Dropbox product manager Marcio von Muhlen in a blog post. "The new team folder delivers on both, centralizing file collaboration and providing the security businesses need."
Click here to view Figure 1.
The team folder includes more fine-grained sharing controls that allow administrators to set precise access levels for people inside and outside the organization. It also provides a single, unified view of content that makes sharing and policy settings more straightforward. The folder also includes sync management, which lets administrators specify what content gets synced to company computers.
Everett Plante, CIO and VP of IT at Silicon Labs, praised the utility of the team folder. "In less than a month, the Dropbox team folder has already transformed the way we collaborate across geographies -- internally and externally," he said in a statement.
The AdminX initiative has also brought interface improvements to the Dropbox Business admin console in the hope that better design will enhance productivity. What's more, file event logging has been expanded to include file additions, edits, and deletions. The result is more comprehensive audit logs.
[Read How Dropbox Moved 500PB of Customer Files Off AWS.]
IT admins may be pleased to see company-managed groups, which can be less problematic than individually managed groups when group permissions or membership has to be reorganized or transferred.
According to von Muhlen, Dropbox Business admins will soon have access to lightweight device management controls that will include the ability to set a limit on the number of devices that can be synced. These controls are intended to complement more comprehensive enterprise mobile management products employed by many organizations.
Dropbox says that the team folder is being rolled out gradually, starting Wednesday, and that administrators in the early access program can try it upon request.
(Cover image: Alexander Bedrin/iStockphoto)]]>
Click here to view Figure 1.
Around the globe, CIOs report facing the highest level of skills shortage since the Great Recession that began in 2008. Large enterprises are struggling to hire data analytics savants, project managers, and enterprise architecture experts. Small companies are in dire need of workers in big data analytics and development.
But that is only part of the hiring issues that CIOs are facing, according to the recently released 2016 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey. The survey of 3,352 CIOs and technology leaders across 82 countries was conducted from Dec. 12, 2015 to April 10, 2016.
[See 10 Strange Job Interview Questions Big Tech Companies Ask.]
The survey delved into the skills shortage, as well as the regions that are impacted the greatest by it. Additional results from the survey examined whether CIOs believe they are able to grow their IT teams during this shortage, the degree that IT organizations are seeking to diversify their workforce, and the type of employment they are offering, such as full-time permanent, or full-time contract work.
CIOs are having to deal with these hiring issues at a time when their own role as a top technology executive is fundamentally changing to expand beyond the role of technology strategist to ones of revenue generator and business leader.
Despite these challenges, CIOs must find skilled IT workers in a difficult climate. Is your CIO encountering the same difficulties as the 10 hiring issues cited here?]]>
Apple CEO Tim Cook provided insight into his company's interest in augmented reality (AR) and his views on the platform, as the iconic computer maker's competitors gain a greater foothold in emerging technology.
Apple, which has been coy in discussing its move into virtual and augmented reality, acquired Metaio, an AR authoring tool and software development kit maker, in 2015. But Apple was unwilling to confirm or deny its purchase.
Earlier this year, Apple began to visit Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab more frequently. But it also remained mum about the purpose of those visits to the VR lab.
Cook, however, during the company's third-quarter earnings conference call on Tuesday, finally addressed Apple's interest in augmented reality when questioned by an analyst.
Click here to view Figure 1.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster asked the CEO how augmented reality, especially given the hyper-popularity of Pokémon Go, affects the way Cook views the future of the technology.
Cook responded:
In terms of AR and the Pokémon phenomenon, it's incredible what has happened there. I think it's a testament to what happens with innovative apps and the whole ecosystem and the power of a developer being able to press a button, so to speak, and offer their product around the world.
This certain developer has elected not to go worldwide yet because of the pressure on their servers, because of the demand, but I'm sure that they will over time.
It also does show, as you point out, that AR can be really great. We have been and continue to invest a lot in this. We are high on AR for the long run. We think there are great things for customers and a great commercial opportunity. And so, we're investing and the number one thing is to make sure our products work well with other developers' kind of products like Pokémon and so on. And that's the reason you see so many iPhones out in the wild right now chasing Pokémon.
I know there are people that want to call it [augmented reality] a new computer platform, and we'll see. I think there's a tendency in this industry to call everything new the next computer platform. However, that said, I think AR can be huge. So, we'll see whether it's the next platform. Regardless, it will be huge.
Worldwide shipments of augmented reality glasses are projected to soar to nearly 5.4 million units annually by 2020 from less than 114,000 units annually in 2015, according to a research report from Tractica.
[See 10 Tools to Bring Virtual Reality to Life.]
Google, for example, has established a dedicated virtual reality department for its VR efforts, including its Cardboard headset that aims to serve the mass market with its inexpensive user-friendly goggles. On the other spectrum is Microsoft's high-end HoloLens that is expected to find a home, not only with gamers, but also in business applications. Facebook has its Oculus virtual reality company, which it purchased for $2 billion in 2014.
Apple also has some plans in the works. It filed a patent for head-mounted googles in 2013 and began laying the groundwork for its VR team in 2014.
Time will tell what Apple's CEO has been cooking up in its VR lab.]]>
The internet of things took a step toward becoming better at management as GE released its Predix Developer Kit on July 26. It's a bundle of GE-supplied hardware and software that makes it easier to collect machine data from the internet.
Developers supply an IP address, an Ethernet connection, an electrical socket, and enough programming to indicate what data they want to collect. The Predix Kit appliance automatically establishes the connection, registers its presence with a central version of Predix, and starts transmitting time-series data that may have to do with the temperature, pressure, speed, flow readings, or other data from the device sensors that it's attached to.
GE Digital owns and operates the hardware and software combination on behalf of the user, who subscribes to its output. That's for the most secure form of IoT device data collection, based on a GE Field Agent (PDF) piece of hardware using a ruggedized PC. Developers may also opt to use an Intel Edison board with a dual core CPU and WiFi connection, or a Raspberry Pi mother board running an ARM CPU.
Without a Predix Developer's Kit, an IoT programmer would set up a board to connect to a device, download software for operation of such a device, and build screens to visualize those operations. Then a programmer would have to do the type of programming that can recognize the device monitored and the hardware on which it was sitting, a task likely to take many hours, Mark Bernardo, professional services leader for GE Digital, Americas, wrote in a blog posted Tuesday.
"Predix Kits can reduce that time to less than 15 minutes," Bernardo wrote.
Click here to view Figure 1.
Predix is GE Digital's analytics system that can capture and store machine data and then apply analytics to it to learn from it and predict possible trouble points or future failures and how they can be addressed.
It became generally available Feb. 22 at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona.
Included in the kit is the Predix UI or user interface that GE Digital released in early March, a week after the Predix analytics system became generally available. It includes a set of software components that can be used by an interface designer or developer to create an IoT application that makes use of Predix services.
In addition, GE Digital announced Tuesday that it has opened the first "digital foundry" for IoT applications in Paris. Three more will be operating by the end of the year. Market researcher Evans Data has reported that IoT is attracting developers at a breakneck pace; there are already 6.2 million developing for it worldwide.
[Want to see how GE Predix works with the cloud? Read Microsoft, GE Partnership Targets Industrial Cloud.]
GE has seen 500 developers sign onto the Predix.io website as programmers each week since it became available in February. It counts 12,000 Predix developers as of today, and expects 20,000 by the end of the year.
GE Digital is using Predix to help it better manage electricity-generating turbines in aging Italian power plants.
Bernardo wrote that the Predix Kits would also be good for building applications to collect data from and manage solar energy projects. They can be used in creating mine safety systems that monitor oxygen levels in operations deep underground or monitor other factors in a difficult to work in environment.
They can also be used to help create smart buildings that can track movements and room temperatures inside to improve comfort and security.]]>
Apple's earnings Tuesday highlight a company in limbo. Its core products, the iPhone and iPad, are mature, and it's unclear if or when Apple will shake things up. Ever the optimist, CEO Tim Cook during the company's call with investors hinted that big things are yet to come.
Apple generated $7.8 billion in profit based on revenues of $42.4 billion. That's a drop from the previous quarter, when Apple generated $10.7 billion in profit on $49.6 billion in revenue. Apple's quarterly numbers are lower than they were in the year-ago period, and the company saw its cash on hand decline for the first time in two years.
Sales of the iPhone continue to slow. The company shipped 40.4 million iPhones in the three months ending June 30, a decrease from 51.2 million in the previous quarter and 47.5 million in the year-ago quarter. While consumers were quick to snap up the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in the fall of 2014, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus haven't generated the same level of interest.
Click here to view Figure 1.
Cook admitted during the earnings call that consumers' buying habits may be changing. Phone prices, for example, "can be a shock for people who are used to paying $199 for their smartphone. They come back in and they pay less for their service but more for their smartphone."
Cook is referencing carriers' shift away from two-year contracts in favor of month-to-month pricing for phones. More to the point, Apple is expected to keep the design of the iPhone 7 largely unchanged, something that is a deciding factor for some consumers.
One bright spot in Apple's iPhone business is the iPhone SE. "I really like what I've seen with the iPhone SE, and the fact that it's opening the door to customers that we weren't reaching before, and likely convincing some people to upgrade that wanted a smaller form factor," said Cook.
Apple said the device is doing exactly what it was intended to do -- get people to try the iPhone for the first time. The iPhone SE starts at $399, while the larger iPhone 6s and 6s Plus start at $649 and $749, respectively.
iPad sales are down, but the rate of decline has slowed somewhat. The company shipped 9.95 million during the quarter, which is down from 10.25 million in the previous quarter and down from 10.93 million in the year-ago quarter. Interestingly, iPad revenues increased to $4.88 million, suggesting the more expensive iPad Pro models are finding buyers. Cook said about half of iPad Pro sales are going to enterprise customers.
Mac shipments increased from 4 million in the three months ending March 31 to 4.25 million in the three months ending June 30.
One especially good development in Apple's earnings appears in the form of services revenues. The company says sales from iTunes and the App Store reached $5.9 million for the quarter, which is up 19% from the year-ago period. Apple Music, which costs $10 per month, may be playing a big role here.
[Read Snowden Designs iPhone Add-On to Thwart Surveillance.]
"App Store revenue was the highest ever, as our installed base continued to grow and transacting customers hit an all-time record," said Luca Maestri, Apple's CFO, in a prepared statement.
Curious about sales of the Apple Watch? So is everyone else. The company shared no data on sales of its pricey wearable. The Apple Watch falls under Apple's "other" category, which generated $2.22 million in revenue in the quarter, down from $2.64 million in the year-ago period. IDC says sales of the smartwatch are slowing.
Apple's research and development costs are the one clue it provided about new products.
"We do continue to invest significantly in R&D," said Cook. "The products that are in R&D, there is quite a bit of investment in there for products and services that are not currently shipping or derivations of what is currently shipping. So, I don't want to talk about the exact split of it, but you can look at the growth rate and conclude that there's a lot of stuff that we're doing beyond the current products."
In other words, Apple is spending a lot of money creating brand new stuff that we haven't yet seen. Could that stuff be a car? A TV? Who is to say?]]>
Tesla Motors has opened a part of its massive Gigafactory, where the electric carmaker plans to house most of its manufacturing process under one roof, while reducing costs and allowing the company to vastly increase production.
The factory, located outside Sparks, Nev., is where Tesla expects to begin cell production in 2017. By 2020, the facility will reach full capacity and produce more lithium ion batteries annually than were produced worldwide in 2013.
The Associated Press reported July 26 that the facility, while open, is only 14% complete. When it's finished the massive building will be one of the largest in the world, with an area of about 10 million square feet.
Tesla says centralizing operations will drive down the per kilowatt hour (kWh) cost of the company's battery pack by more than 30%, an important cost savings for a company that has not yet turned a yearly profit.
Click here to view Figure 1.
The Gigafactory will be managed by Tesla, with Panasonic as the principal partner responsible for lithium-ion battery cells. The Japanese electronics firm will occupy approximately half of the planned manufacturing space.
In addition to the cutting-edge technology inside, Tesla is also using the Gigafactory to demonstrate its commitment to sustainability at all levels of production. The facility will be powered, at least in part, by solar panels on the roof.
Getting the facility up and running will also be integral to the success of the latest production vehicle, the Model 3, which debuted to much fanfare earlier this year and led to a crush of pre-sales orders, which some analysts doubt the company will be able to fill.
At the same time, some analysts see the risk in producing a massive amount of batteries at once: A dearth of actual sales or production delays could leave Tesla exposed.
[Read more about Tesla's recent problems with Autopilot.]
"They could be left with a lot of excess capacity in the near term," Navigant Research's Sam Abuelsamid told the AP.
The opening of the Gigafactory follows the publication of CEO Elon Musk's broader vision for the company. That plan includes proposals to move his company beyond electric cars and batteries, including ones for heavy-duty trucks and for high-passenger-density urban transport, which is something luxury carmaker Daimler is currently developing.
In other Tesla news, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the carmaker has parted ways with Israeli company Mobileye, a key supplier of its Autopilot system, which was responsible for handling the ADAS and semi-autonomous driving components of the system.
"I think in a partnership, we need to be there on all aspects of how the technology is being used, and not simply providing technology and not being in control of how it is being used," the paper quoted Mobileye's chief technical officer Amnon Shashua as saying during an earnings call.
The decision comes in the wake of a fatal crash involving a Tesla vehicle, which was in autopilot mode at the time of the accident. The collision raised fresh concerns over the safety of self-driving vehicles.]]>
The trouble with many analytics projects is that even though they are designed to deliver information and insight to users, the process of moving data, cleaning data, and integrating data can take time. And when business users want to turn on a dime and make decisions, they don't want to wait.
So sometimes they go around IT to get alternate solutions implemented.
Platforms such as Tableau have tried to speed up the process by offering self-service tools to users, enabling non-IT workers to create data visualizations quickly without the need to involve IT. Now, with its upcoming release of Tableau 10, the data visualization company is putting some control back into the hands of the IT organization.
[Tableau is one of the market Leaders in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics. Find out who the other two are. Read Gartner BI Magic Quadrant: Inflection Point Has Arrived.]
Tableau's vice president of product development Francois Ajenstat spoke with InformationWeek. He provided a preview on the strategy behind the improvements in the soon to be released update to the company's data visualization and analytics platform.
Among the new features: Data integration or mashups of data from multiple different sources; the addition of many different new advanced analytics including drag-and-drop clustering; greater mobile responsiveness, and new capabilities for developers.
Click here to view Figure 1.
For IT organizations, one of the most welcome new features is probably the greater levels of control over the platform itself. Ajenstat said Tableau 10 is not just an analytics platform itself. The platform also has an additional analytics platform built on top of it to provide visibility into how users are using Tableau.
"In the past with traditional business intelligence tools, IT controlled everything and built the reports, and delivered them to the users," Ajenstat said. "In the new modern analytics world everything is self-service, so IT doesn't have the same control or understanding of what is going on out there. So having this ability back means they can better tune their environments. They can provide oversight and governance over what is being used."
Tableau 10 also adds analytics version control. That means when users are working on analysis projects and decide they want to make changes or revert back to a previous version, they can revert natively inside the platform, Ajenstat said.
Tableau 10 is also adding data mashups. The company has already supported over 50 different data sources out of the box, from Oracle to DB2 to cloud databases, to SQL on Azure, to Hadoop. It also supports applications such as Salesforce and Google Analytics. Version 10 adds native support for Google Sheets and QuickBooks.
Plus, it expands the capabilities related to linking to these data sources. On previous versions of the platform you had to connect to one source at a time. Tableau 10 enables users to connect to any data source and combine it with any other data source with a simple point-and-click action. A user could now work with SQL Server, Oracle, and Hadoop as a single integrated data source, Ajenstat told InformationWeek.
"If you didn't have this capability, you would struggle with ETL or put it in Excel," he said. "This is one of the game-changer capabilities in Tableau 10."
That's not to say it can't be done. But it's not something that a non-IT user would be able to do.
"You don't have to be technical to do this," Ajenstat said. "It feels as if it is just one data source. This will open up new scenarios."
Tableau 10 is also making some sophisticated advanced analytics capabilities, such as clustering, available to end-users via drag-and-drop functions. Ajenstat says this unleashes capabilities that have been available to data scientists via tools such as SAS, SPSS, and R, and makes them available to more people.
Another new capability in the platform enables dashboards, apps, and reports that are sometimes delivered to mobile devices to be automatically optimized for consumption on those devices.
The company is running the largest beta its ever done -- two-times bigger than ever before -- with 13,000 people from Tableau's 42,000 customers. Tableau officials said that the official release is coming shortly.
"This is the most significant release we've ever made," Ajenstat told InformationWeek.
(Cover image: Deepak Budhraja/iStockphoto)]]>
SparkCognition, a company that applies machine learning to predictive analytics, has begun working with Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) to develop an automated threat identification and remediation system that works in conjunction with IBM's Watson.
As part of the arrangement, SparkCognition says it plans to train researchers at SEI's CERT Division how to use IBM Watson to record and index vulnerabilities in the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) list and CERT Secure Coding Rules. By doing so, the researchers will make vulnerability information more accessible and more useful to those focused on protecting critical national infrastructure.
To fight automated attacks, organizations need automated defenses in order to help security professionals separate signal from noise.
"Cybersecurity has evolved to a point that without AI, it's really hard to keep up with all the attacks today," said CEO Amir Husain in a phone interview. "The purpose of this partnership is to combine our collective capabilities, and to be able to predict attacks even when the specific threat is not something that's been seen before."
Click here to view Figure 1.
Through automated modeling and machine learning, which the company uses outside the security industry to anticipate wind turbine failure, SparkCognition can predict the behavior of unknown software and flag it for analysis. Husain said these sort of models can help people make better decisions by presenting them with better information.
"AI will find things for me to pay attention to," said Husain, stressing that companies should not seek to completely automate their defenses out of concern for liability, "for the same reason the military does not want AI to pull the trigger."
It's an approach that Husain argues is superior to traditional antivirus tools like blacklists and signatures.
"The rate at which these attacks are being created is so rapid no blacklist can keep up," said Husain.
SparkCognition's SparkSecure automates the process of analyzing inbound and outbound server log data to aid in the detection of malicious software, bot traffic, and suspect IP addresses. It looks at how software is built and the resources it uses before the code gets run.
[See 10 Hot Security Technologies Enterprises Need Now.]
Husain said his company's system has flagged malware that was missed by more than 60 antivirus engines. When analyzed by a security researcher, the flagged software turned out to be a common decompression utility that had been injected with a previously unseen -- and thus undetectable by signature -- strain of malware.
The role of IBM Watson in this ecosystem is to provide advice, available through natural language queries, to those responsible for dealing with threats. Having been fed massive amounts of security-related information, like device manuals and vulnerability data, Watson acts as a AI help desk.
Husain contends his company's technology is ideal for organizations that have a security information and event management (SIEM) system in place that either is being underutilized or is overloading administrators with alerts.
More than half of all website traffic comes from bots, many of which are trying to scrape data, scan for vulnerabilities, or facilitate identity theft, said Husain. AI can make sense of that vast amount of data more readily than a person.
(Cover image: alengo/iStockphoto)]]>
Click here to view Figure 1.
Your organization probably already has more data than it knows what to do with. Yet, it's quite likely you're overlooking, disregarding, unaware of, or unable to access important information that could directly affect analyses and business outcomes.
It doesn't matter what your universe of data is -- enterprise data or a combination of internal and external data sources -- important nuggets of information may be missing.
"Companies are collecting more data, but often struggle with what to do with it," said Dave Hartman, president and founder of technology advisory firm Hartman Executive Advisors. "Data can be extremely overwhelming in its raw form."
[What's hot in data science? Read 10 Programming Languages and Tools Data Scientists Use Now.]
Data silos are one culprit causing blind spots, which result in missed opportunities and can expose your company to risk. Today's companies need cross-functional views of their data in order to serve customers and to compete effectively.
"The untapped gems lie in the cross-links between data sources that relate to customers across channels and derive future value. This includes creating consistent and comprehensive customer profiles across the board," said Dominik Dahlem, lead data scientist at customer intelligence cloud platform vendor Boxever.
Achieving that kind of visibility isn't easy, since it requires organizations to tie together enterprise systems, which can be difficult to do despite the number of APIs available. Businesses also have to consider external data sources, such as social media or weather data, which help provide a complete view of customer behavior or serve to identify overlooked issues that might negatively affect business performance.
Constellation Research vice president and principal analyst Doug Henschen said unused data tends to fall into two broad categories. These are data exhaust and dark data, both of which have been aided by NoSQL technologies. Data exhaust is information an organization is currently not saving. Dark data is information companies may be saving but not exploring.
"Historically, companies used to throw away historical data simply because they couldn't afford to retain it. So they would keep, say, one or two years' worth of data," said Henschen. "Most people keep durable goods, such as beds and furniture, for at least five years. So targeted promotions based on two-year-old buying information may not [enable] deep enough analysis."
Dark data includes semi-structured and unstructured data that are hard to compute against. Although it's been possible to retrieve the metadata, deciphering the meaning has been a one-time, manual task. With modern search, natural language processing, semantic analysis, sentiment analysis, and machine learning, such data is now becoming computable, according to Henschen.
"The text in a CRM comment field can be analyzed and segmented across the entire customer base, rather than just looking at sentiment, one customer at a time," said Henschen. "The same goes for social network comments about your brand and products."
One way to identify missing gaps is to focus on the key metrics the organization wants to improve, which may turn out to be different than the current KPIs. For example, if the goal is to improve customer satisfaction, it's important to understand the cause of customer dissatisfaction, as well as its symptoms.
"The drivers of lower customer satisfaction might be inadequate product features and the symptoms would be lower customer adoption or product sales," said Sanjay Sidwani, SVP of marketing analytics at financial services company Synchrony Financial. "Getting a deep understanding of the drivers requires persistence in analyzing data and slicing it in multiple ways."
What data is your company missing? Once you've reviewed our 12 examples, tell us about your own experiences with hidden data in the comments section below.
[Editor's note: On page 3, the reference to Hartman Executive Advisors was corrected. Also, the quote on page 13 was updated to correct its attribution. It was said by Scott Masker, business systems engineer at MacLean Fogg.]]]>
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced its latest Office 365 updates that will utilize its machine learning and natural language processing to bring smarter capabilities to Word, and also tweaks to features in PowerPoint and Outlook.
With the updates, Redmond introduced Researcher for Word, which aims to make it easier to find material and incorporate it word document, and also Editor for Word, which uses machine learning and natural language processing to improve proofreading documents. Meanwhile, it tweaked PowerPoint for greater flexibility when doing presentations and Outlook to ease scrolling and responding to messages.
"We are releasing a new set of cloud-powered intelligent services in Office apps designed to save you time and produce better results. These features help you improve your writing in Word, deliver dynamic presentations in PowerPoint and prioritize the emails that matter most to you in Outlook," Microsoft said in a blog post Tuesday.
In drilling down into the details of these updates, Editor for Word will use machine learning and natural language processing to suggest alternative words and phrases. It might suggest you replace "the majority of" with the single word "most." Word will also take on the additional role of your high school English teacher and explain why words or phrases are incorrect.
For those who struggle over comma placement and hyphen anxiety in addition to spelling, Word will make some tweaks to its color-coded grammar prompts. The red misspelled word squiggles will remain as is, but the blue squiggle grammar alerts will change to a solid blue underline. Writing style issues will be flagged with a dotted gold line. Editor for Word will be available in the fall.
The new feature helps users research information while staying in a Word document, which avoids the dreaded toggling back and forth between an Internet browser and Word document. It will also incorporate the information and add its properly formatted citation with one click. Researcher is available to Office 365 subscribers using Word 2016 on Windows desktops.
Click here to view Figure 1.
Microsoft is adding a feature called PowerPoint Zoom to PowerPoint 2016. It allows users to zoom into desired portions of a presentation. They have the flexibility to jump from one part of the presentation to another without having to rely on its previously ordered sequence. This feature is available to Office Insiders using PowerPoint 2016 on Windows desktops.
Microsoft is rolling out two updates to Outlook this month. One is a Focused Inbox, in Outlook on iOS and Android, coming to the desktop on Windows and the Mac and Outlook on the web.
[See Google Apps vs. Office 365: Which Suite Reigns Supreme?]
Focused Inbox will automatically separate email in a user's inbox into two tabs, into one group that is labeled with the "Focused" tab and the other for less important emails goes into the "Other" tab.
Additionally, Microsoft is also adding @mentions, which identifies emails that need the user's attention as well as flag actions for others.
In addition to the Office 365 updates, Microsoft is offering its Windows 10 Anniversary Update for free up until July 29 for Windows 7 and 8.1 users, according to a report in Ars Technica. The Windows 10 Anniversary update is scheduled to be released on Aug. 2.]]>
If a smartphone is made by Alcatel and runs Android, could it possibly be a BlackBerry? Leaked details about the BlackBerry DTEK50 would appear to suggest just that. The onetime smartphone king accidentally posted details about the BlackBerry DTEK50 to its own website hours before the official unveiling Tuesday, and the device looks strikingly similar to the Alcatel Idol 4.
Based on the images and specs spotted by CrackBerry, the DTEK50 is a slab-style smartphone with a 5.2-inch, full HD screen, and no physical keyboard. The phone is powered by an octa-core Snapdragon 617 processor with 3GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. Other features include a 13-megapixel main camera, 8-megapixel selfie camera, 2,610 mAh battery with Quick Charge 2.0, and support for memory cards up to 2TB.
These specs match those of the Alcatel Idol 4, announced back in February. More to the point, photos of the DTEK50 show a metal frame, stereo speakers, and a distinct round button on the side -- all hallmark physical features of the Idol 4. The only visible difference between the two is the rear panel, which has a dimpled texture and BlackBerry's iconic logo.
Click here to view Figure 1.
BlackBerry noted that the DTEK50 ships with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, BlackBerry Hub, Password Keeper, DTEK, BBM, and other BlackBerry apps. BlackBerry pulled the listing before too long, leaving a host of unanswered questions in its wake.
For instance, why would BlackBerry use Alcatel to ODM the device rather than design and manufacture the phone itself? Does BlackBerry not have the resources or talent to design hardware anymore? What does this portend for the future of BlackBerry's hardware business as a whole? Is BlackBerry done making its own phones?
[See Beyond BlackBerry: Outdated Tech the Feds Should Dump.]
Obviously, it is less costly for BlackBerry to rely on an ODM hardware partner to design and manufacture its smartphones. BlackBerry is focusing more on its software than its hardware anyway. A shift away from in-house hardware makes sense. Further, BlackBerry CEO John S. Chen has spent the majority of his tenure slicing and dicing costs, with the hardware team facing the deepest cuts.
Alcatel's role here is even more surprising. The Idol 4 is one of Alcatel's two flagship devices for 2016. In fact, Cricket Wireless plans to sell the Idol 4 later this year. Alcatel is working hard to improve its image around the world, so it's curious to see the company strip the brand name off its most important phone of the year.]]>
Apple's Project Titan, the worst kept secret in the self-driving vehicle space, is shifting into higher gear with the appointment of longtime Apple hardware engineer Bob Mansfield, who will reportedly lead the project.
A July 25 report in The Wall Street Journal, which quoted unnamed sources familiar with the situation, reported that Apple employees learned of Mansfield's return to the company when they noticed in a company directory that all employees working on the car project were now reporting to him.
Although Mansfield's official retirement came in 2012 after more than a decade with the company, he has remained connected to the consumer electronics giant to work on future projects, where he reports to company CEO Tim Cook.
Although Project Titan is talked about, few details of what Apple is up to have leaked. Apple's super secretive workplace society has keep all details tightly under wraps so far -- but Apple has reportedly launched a clandestine lab in Berlin to speed up development of the initiative, according to an April report in Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
The staff in the Berlin lab is made up of hardware and software engineers, among others, and considered "progressive thinkers" who felt stymied by their bosses at their former jobs, according to the German publication.
Click here to view Figure 1.
It's been a bit of a bumpy road for the company so far. Apple's momentum was dealt a blow at the beginning of the year following the departure of veteran Steve Zadesky.
As reported by the Journal, Zadesky, who was thought to be the project lead on Titan, is leaving the company for personal reasons, according to unnamed sources with knowledge of the situation.
Zadesky's departure put additional pressure on the Titan team, which according to the Journal report has been faced with unattainable targets and no clear goals. Bloomberg reported in February 2015 that Apple is pushing the team to have an electric car in production by 2020.
Apple is far from the only technology company investing in electric vehicles and self-driving cars. Rival Google has been testing its own autonomous car around various parts of the US, with a stop in London potentially next on the list.
[Read more about the race to create self-driving vehicles.]
Tesla Motors, which is also seen as a leader in the up-and-coming electric vehicle market, has come under scrutiny in recent days following a fatal crash that involved one of its sedans that was in Autopilot mode at the time of the accident. The collision raised new questions about the safety of self-driving cars.
New capabilities are being tested. Some of the world's largest automakers are investing heavily in self-driving vehicle technology.
Nissan announced July 13 that its Serena minivan, scheduled to go on sale in in Japan later in August, would come equipped with the company's ProPILOT autonomous drive technology.
In Northern Europe, meanwhile, the Mercedes-Benz Future Bus with CityPilot, a self-driving vehicle designed for cities deploying bus rapid transit (BRT) programs, reached a milestone after the company put the bus through a complicated route covering almost 12 miles.
Its path, on one of Europe's longest BRT routes in the Netherlands, links Amsterdam's Schiphol airport with the town of Haarlem. It includes a number of tight bends, tunnels, several bus stops, and stretches requiring high speeds.]]>
The amount of data collected by enterprises continues to grow, and yet organizations still struggle with getting value out of that data because of a gap in cloud and data skills. To bridge the gap, many vendors from the major Hadoop distributors, to online course providers, to Microsoft are providing online training. This training helps companies teach their existing employees and assists IT workers who want to enhance their careers by acquiring in-demand data analytics and management skills.
That's the backdrop for a new acquisition this week by established data warehouse company Teradata of a company called Big Data Partnership, a three-year-old big data solutions and training business with expertise in in big data technologies such as Apache Hadoop.
[IT workers say they will play a part in their companies' digital transformations. Read IT Organizations Unprepared for Digital Business.]
Teradata, which Gartner ranked as a Leader in its most recent Magic Quadrant report for Data Warehouse and Data Management Solutions for Analytics, is buying this EMEA-based startup for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition will become part of Teradata's Think Big consulting practice, and help Teradata expand its customer data science education and consulting efforts into new territory. These services are part of the company's efforts to close the data analytics skills gap for its customers.
"Big Data Partnership brings exciting new capabilities and broadens our analytic services portfolio, enhancing Think Big's expertise and giving our customers more choices, outcomes tailored to their goals, and valuable knowledge transfer," Rick Farnell, senior vice president of Think Big, a Teradata company, wrote in a prepared statement released July 25.
"We continue to strengthen our world-class solutions business to help our customers design, build and run analytics, and the Big Data Partnership consultancy fits well with Teradata's increasingly strong global analytics practice."
Click here to view Figure 1.
Worldpay, a global payments company based in London, is among Big Data Partnership's customers. It anticipates gaining greater support from the company, now that it is part of Teradata's Think Big.
"The combination of Big Data Partnership and Think Big will provide us with quality data engineering and data science talent [that] will complement our teams in the successful delivery of our big data strategy," Worldpay CIO Mark Kimber wrote in a statement.
The combination of these two organizations may also solidify what analysts already considered a strength for Teradata -- customer experience. In its Magic Quadrant report released this year for Data Warehouse and Data Management Solutions for Analytics, Gartner said that existing Teradata customers reported above-average customer experiences, particularly in the delivery of professional services.
Big Data Partnership's team has expertise in big data technologies including the Apache Hadoop ecosystem, Apache Spark, NoSQL, and search technologies.
Teradata named Victor Lund as its new president and CEO in May following a first-quarter earnings report that showed a revenue decline of 6% from this year's $545 million compared to the same period last year. The company reported a net loss of $46 million compared to a net income of $22 million for the same quarter a year ago.
Teradata made its database and associated tools available for the first time on AWS by the end of the first quarter of this year. Teradata also recently signed a definitive agreement to sell its marketing applications business.
The company held its annual user conference earlier this month. It featured sessions about the internet of things and sensor data; strategies and frameworks to monetize data assets; real-time, advanced, and predictive analytics; cloud computing and cloud-based analytics; and cyber-security, privacy, and governance.]]>


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Enroll Now for Young Fives and Kindergarten
Registration Packets for 2016-2017 can be picked up at any of our elementary buildings, at the Karl Richter Campus located at 920 Baird Street, or by clicking this link.
|Inspiring learners to shape tomorrow's world!
Back to School Health and Enrollment Fair on August 6th!
Join us for a day of fun-filled activities aimed to help you and your preschool through 12th grade chrildren prepare for the school year! All activities are Free and include Dental and Vision Screening, Haircuts, Immunizations, MI Child Insurance, New Student Enrollment, Family fun with bounce houses and face painting, and much more! Please view our flyer and plan to join us on August 6th from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm at the Karl Richter Campus located at 920 Baird Street in Holly.
District Calendar for 2016-17 School Year
Tentative Calendar pending School Board approval and HEA ratification has been posted on the right.(Note: Spring Break may move to April 3-7)
Summer Meet Up and Eat Up!
Holly Area Schools is pleased to provide FREE Breakfast and Lunch to all children 18 years and younger this Summer. Lunch Menus are available on the Food Service Department Page.
Locations, dates, and times are listed below:
Holly High School - June 20th through August 26th
Breakfast 8:30 am - 10:30 am and Lunch 11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Holly Elementary - June 20th through August 26th
Breakfast 9:00 am - 10:00 am and Lunch 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Patterson Elementary - June 22nd through August 10th
(No Breakfast) Lunch 11:00 am - 1:00 pm
Patterson Summer Blast!
Be sure to check the Patterson Elementary web page for downloadable packets!
Blessings in a Backpack - Golfing "Fore" Backpacks Event
Help support Holly Blessings in a Backpack by joining us in the Golfing "Fore" Backpacks event on August 21st. See registration/sponsor flyer for more details!
These artists were honored on Friday evening with a dinner and awards ceremony in Rochester as a part of the council's Earth Day Festival.
Thank you to Mrs. Marchbanks for making this experience available to her students again this year!
Art Exhibit and Empty Bowl Event
Our Empty Bowls Event raised $2,567.35 for Blessings in a Backpack-Holly. The art educators want to thank our supporters for providing delicious treats--Bittersweet Cafe, Crust, Cupcakes and Kisses, Holly Donut Shop, Kroger of Clarkson, Subway of Holly and the parents and staff of our elementary schools.
We are also grateful for our talented students who created the handmade bowls and students who volunteered by setting up, hosting, painting faces, and playing the ukulele.
Finally, we appreciate the students, parents, community and staff who generously donated to the Empty Bowls event and ultimately, Blessings in a Backpack.
Relay For Backpacks
Holly Middle Schools National Junior Honor Society, along with Holly High Schools National Honor Society and Spanish National Honor Society, are sponsoring a relay event to benefit Blessings in a Backpack-Holly. This non-profit organization provides backpacks of food each weekend for our children who might not have enough food available to them at their homes. Click here for more information and here for the Registration Form.
Thank you to the Holly Community for all your support. Go Bronchos!!
Holly High Schools Marching Band wins Comerica Banks March the Park national anthem contest.
Holly High School will receive a $5,000 grant and perform the national anthem at Comerica Park opening weekend.
DETROIT/March 21, 2016 Comerica Bank today announced Holly High Schools Broncho Marching Band as the winner of the March the Park national anthem contest. The band will receive a $5,000 grant for its schools marching band program, the opportunity to perform the national anthem at Comerica Park for the April 9 Detroit Tigers game, and 130 tickets to the game.
Band is an important program for our schools. It provides an outlet for students to express their musical talents while teaching discipline, teamwork and other essential life skills, said Michael T. Ritchie, president, Comerica Bank-Michigan. I want to congratulate Holly High Schools marching band on their achievement. I look forward to watching them perform at Comerica Park.
High school marching bands from across southeast Michigan submitted videos of their bands performing the national anthem. Submissions were reviewed by a panel of judges from the Detroit Tigers and Comerica Bank to narrow down the submissions to a group of 10 finalists. Public voting on Comerica Banks Facebook page determined the contest winner.
More than 70,000 votes were cast during the nearly two-week public voting period. The Lincoln High School Marching Band finished in second place followed by Roosevelt High Schools Wyandotte Marching Chiefs in third place. This is the fourth year of the national anthem contest. Previous contests have supported local choir groups, as well as police officers, firefighters, military members and veterans from across southeast Michigan.
Young Fives and Kindergarten Enrollment Information
Please click here for enrollment dates and information
Registration Packets for 2016-2017 can be picked up at any of our elementary buildings, at the Karl Richter Campus located at 920 Baird Street, or by clicking this link.
There was a lot of support for the 9th and 10th grade fundraiser to
"Duct Tape Mr. LoFiego to the wall"!
Holly Sculptors Win "People's Choice Award" at Frankenmuth Snowfest!
Sculpture is titled "Flow of Life"
New Students Enrollment for the 2016-17 School Year
Packets are available for download here if you would like to complete prior to arrival. If you have any questions, please contact the Pupil Services Office at 248.328.3106.
Free preschool for children ages three and four. Families must meet eligibility guidelines. For more information, please contact:
Audrey Winglemire at 248.328.3027
Healthy Kids - Healthy School
The Oakland County Health Department has provided a guide to help keep your children healthy.
Calling all Future Kindergarten and Young Five Students
Registration Packets for Young Fives for 2016-2017 can be picked up at any of our elementary buildings, at the Karl Richter Campus located at 920 Baird Street, or by clicking this link.
New Families - Enroll now for the 2016-2017 School Year!
Registration is occurring daily from 7:30 am to 3:30 pm at the Holly Area Schools Administration office in the Karl Richter Campus located at 920 Baird Street. Packets are available for download here if you would like to complete prior to arrival.
If you have any questions, please contact the Pupil Services Office at 248.328.3106.
Get Connected!
Comcast Internet Essentials
If your child receives free or reduced school lunches, you may qualify for Internet Essentials from Comcast. Click here for more information.


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By Hand: Celebrating the Manuscript Collections
By Hand celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library with an exploration of its manuscript collections. The exhibition begins where the Yale College Library collection of early manuscripts began, with a mirror of humanity, a copy of the Speculum humanae salvationis given by Elihu Yale. It ends with the manuscripts and drafts of "Miracle of the Black Leg," a poem written by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey while she was a research fellow at the Beinecke Library in 2009.
Manuscript, from the Latin term "written by hand," derives from the ablative case: locational, instrumental, situated always in relation to something or someone else. Like the term, this exhibition explores the reflections of humanity in the Beinecke's manuscript collections, presenting them as markers of the social contracts of love, creativity, need, and power that bind us into historical record even as they bind us to one another.
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
121 Wall Street | New Haven, CT 06511
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Tel: (203) 432-2977 Fax: (203) 432-4047
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email: Ask a Librarian
The exhibition gallery is closed while the library's building is under renovation.
Temporary Reading Room Hours
Monday - Friday: 9 am to 4:45 pm
The temporary reading room is located in Yale's Sterling Memorial Library, across Wall Street from the Beinecke.
Beginnig September 6, 2016 our hours will be
Monday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Tuesday-Thursday 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Friday 9 a.m. to 5


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Yogurt in a tube. Usually marketed for kids.
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the gogurt commercial from like 10 years ago is disturbingly phallic. It's a bunch of 9 year olds jamming gogurts into their mouths while the announcer says "Just grab and glurp!"
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I always read review & think "get a grip people" but this place was tired , in poor shape and the manager was a joke. The staff was great & deserved a better manager. We arrived to a room that was like a blast furnace when we opened the door. The lamp shade was ripped & hanging off. Picture frames were broken,water stains on walls, a/c leaked so bad we had to put a waste pail under it & then a towel to soften the noise. The manager walked around with his shirt off smiling ,what a putz!!!!, he should have been checking room conditions & maybe turning ac's on if he knew guests were arriving.ECO lodge NOT!What a joke. (If you want to visit a real ECO lodge go to Savegre Mountain Lodge...we stayed here earlier & it was beyond our wildest expectations. ) Receptionist at Whales & dolphins didn't know a thing about booking tours, couldn't speak English, she was really sweet though. We felt sorry for the staff as they were great & deserved a better place to work at.Food was NOT 4 star , after 1 meal we ate all our meals out in town , those were all great.
- Official Description (provided by the hotel):
- Our hotel is dramatically located on a bluff overlooking Ballena Marina Park, the pacific coast and Cano Island, This national park includes the largest coral reef on the pacific side of Costa Rica. This wildlife sanctuary protects different species of whales and dolphins together with other marine life. We can offer you the best of both worlds: rich rainforest combined with abundant marine life. Walk into the "green world" of immense biodiversity right on your doorstep. ... more less
- Reservation Options:
- TripAdvisor is proud to partner with Hotels.com, Priceline, Agoda, Booking.com, Despegar.com and Odigeo so you can book your Vista Ballena reservations with confidence. We help millions of travelers each month to find the perfect hotel for both vacation and business trips, always with the best discounts and special offers.
- Also Known As:
- Whales & Dolphins Ecolodge Hotel Uvita
- Whales And Dolphins Ecolodge
- Vista Ballena Costa Rica/Uvita


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PARIS — There's the cool, calm and collected side of the couture, and then there's its mad, extravagant side. Emanuel Ungaro, of course, prefers the latter, and he showed it with a fall collection featuring wildly exotic, opulent layers of patterns and textures, among them lavish embroidery and lace. Here, one of his bold mixes. For more on the season, see pages 4 and 5.
This story first appeared in the July 11, 2002 issue of WWD. Subscribe Today.


text: 000 FXUS63 KAPX 240034 AFDAPX Area Forecast Discussion National Weather Service Gaylord MI 834 PM EDT SAT JUL 23 2016 .SHORT TERM...(This evening through Sunday) Issued at 313 PM EDT Sat Jul 23 2016 High impact weather potential: Thunderstorms possible later tonight into Sunday. Pattern synopsis/expected evolution: Water vapor imagery says it all early this afternoon, with energetic flow rotating around steadily flattening central Plains heat dome. Embedded mid level waves within the former, working on northern extent of instability axis, continues to kick off clusters of showers and thunderstorms back across the Corn Belt and Northern Mississippi Valley. Much more defined shortwave trough rotating across southern Saskatchewan, with low pressure and a developing cold front helping drive an area of storms across the northern Plains. No such weather closer to home, with high pressure and still dry air through the low/mid levels resulting in another sun-filled and warm mid-summer day. Above features remain transient overnight into Sunday, with the developing cold front and mid level waves working on a northward surging moisture/instability axis likely to drive additional showers and storms (MCS?) through this evening and overnight. Strong late night moisture advection will likely allow at least some of this activity to survive into our area, with the actual "cold" front passage perhaps driving additional showers and storms through the day Sunday. Primary forecast concerns/challenges: Shower and thunderstorm evolution and intensity tonight and Sunday. Details: Per the usual with summer convection, a rather complex and low confidence forecast heading through tonight and Sunday. With that said, confidence is actually rather high that additional clusters of showers and thunderstorms will continue to develop this evening to our west in favored moisture/instability advection axis along nose of developing low level jet. This jet steadily veers and weakens with time, although remains strong enough to drive rather substantial moisture into northern Michigan by morning (precipitable water values reach near 2 inches levels during Sunday morning). However, steady loss of mass convergence on nose of weakening jet and loss of better instability will likely cause a diminishing trend in shower/storm intensity and areal coverage as they push into our area later tonight and Sunday morning. Really think per the above any storms will remain sub-severe, although may result in some brief gusty winds and heavy rains (heads up Chicago to Mackinac race participants!). Atmosphere will likely take quite a bit of time to recover behind the morning activity Sunday given lingering cloud cover and simple post convection subsidence. Timing of actual arrival of front still uncertain, with a later day frontal timing allowing that much more time for destabilization to occur. Kinda feel lack of good morning heating may give a nod to some of the faster frontal progs, which would suggest most additional late day activity focusing across central and southern Michigan into Ontario. Unfortunately, simply cannot be this deterministic just yet, so will continue to advertise at least some potential for more showers and thunderstorms through the afternoon. If storms can indeed fire, some limited severe weather potential is there with deep layer shear ranging from 25 knots south (in a region of potentially more instability) to 40 knots north. Isolated severe wind gusts and large hail would be the primary threat. Of course, above is completely conditional on frontal timing and ability to destabilize before frontal passage. Area remains in latest SPC day 2 marginal risk, with they too citing much uncertainty on exact convective evolution. .LONG TERM...(Sunday night through Saturday) Issued at 313 PM EDT Sat Jul 23 2016 Sunday night through Tuesday... (7/24)Sunday night...As the 500 mb trough moves into the Upper Great Lakes, drier and cooler air will begin to push into the region. The Showers and thunderstorms look to end by the early evening as the cold front pushes the rain out over Lake Huron by 03z. Overnight, the trough begins to dig a bit into the Upper Great Lakes, as the 850 mb cold front pushes into the region as well. Will be expecting breezy conditions by morning with clearing skies. (7/25)Monday...Sfc high pressure builds into the Upper Great Lakes, with 500 mb heights building as well. This will keep the region dry, with temperatures around the normal highs. Skies will clear out during the day and remain that way through the night. (7/26)Tuesday...The high pressure pressure remains over the region through the day, keeping the region dry with light winds. The GFS shows that it may have some clouds moving in from Wisconsin late in the afternoon, but for the most part, thinking it will remain mostly sunny. Tuesday night through Saturday... After a prolonged period of well above normal temperatures, there looks to be a pattern change taking shape through the extended period. Temperatures will still be above normal going into mid-week, but the broad riding setup across much of the southern CONUS will begin to shift westward as height falls work their way from the northern Plains and through the Ohio Valley. By the end of the extended period, there will be noticeable troughing through the Great Lakes and into the Tennessee Valley, with amplified ridging spanning from the desert SW through the Great Plains. This should help to get temperatures back into more normal ranges as we go into the weekend. With shortwaves moving through the pattern, wouldn`t be surprised to see some scattered to isolated showers through the week but nothing that looks to be producing large amounts at this time. && .AVIATION...(For the 00Z TAFS through 00Z Sunday evening) Issued at 834 PM EDT Sat Jul 23 2016 Mainly VFR conditions anticipated through the next 24 hours. Watching evolution of convection upstream in Wisconsin. Trends suggest the northern extent of shra/tstm will largely fall apart before getting into northern lower Michigan. But high resolution guidance suggests renewed convective development will take shape overnight and may press into the region Sunday morning. TSTMS will be possible Sunday morning at the terminal sites, but have not explicitly put TSTMS in the forecasts given timing uncertainties. && .MARINE... Issued at 313 PM EDT Sat Jul 23 2016 Light winds into early this evening will become increasingly gusty out of the southeast and south later tonight, with winds veering more southwesterly Sunday morning. Wind gusts will likely approach/exceed SCA criteria across much of northern Lake Michigan and Whitefish Bay on Lake Superior very late tonight into Sunday. A passing cold front will veer winds around more westerly Sunday night, with wind speeds also decreasing. Marginally gusty west to northwest winds are expected to start the work week. In addition, the threat for showers and thunderstorms will be on the increase late tonight into Sunday. Some of these thunderstorms could bring locally very heavy rain and brief periods of gusty/variable winds. && .APX Watches/Warnings/Advisories... MI...NONE. LH...NONE. LM...SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY from 5 AM to 6 PM EDT Sunday for LMZ342- 344>346. LS...SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY from 5 AM to 6 PM EDT Sunday for LSZ321. && $$ SHORT TERM...MSB LONG TERM...JSL/Mayhew AVIATION...Adam MARINE...MSB


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Style Note
This card holder from hidekraft is a must-have accessory for the style conscious male. Carry your cards in style with this classic holder.
Product Details
Three-fold black card holder
Has twelve card slots and an id card holder
Branding embossed on the front
Material and Care
Genuine leather
Wipe surface with a clean, dry cloth to remove dust
Dimensions: 12.5 cm x 7 cm


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Styling Jeans
Weekend Going Out Look: Current/Elliott Tattered Destroyed Boyfriend Jeans
For my weekend going out look this week, as it's the Holiday season, I thought it would be good to do something festive and really comfortable. You might be picking up some last minute gifts or popping out to a friends to watch a movie, so why not dress the part?
I chose these Current/Elliott Fling Mid Rise Boyfriend Jeans in Tattered Destroyed as I think they are perfectly worn in and comfortable! For the sweaters, depending on what your mood is, I opted for a Vero Moda Roll Neck Sweater to keep things subtle, or I chose a Reindeer Sweater if you want to spruce things up a bit more! Either work with this look! To finish it off, I chose the Sam Edelman Petty Booties for comfort and then a Santa hat, but you can switch it out for a beanie if you prefer! Which sweater and hat would you pick? I would definitely choose the festive option!
Weekend Going Out Look: FRAME Le Skinny Leather Pants in Washed Black
I chose these FRAME Le Skinny Leather Pants in Washed black because I loved seeing them on Reese Witherspoon this past week, but wanted to style a cozier, more casual look around them. I chose this gray sweater from Helmut Lang because the cropped length really shows off the pants. For accessories, I chose this M2Malletier python clutch because it adds a nice touch of color and texture, plus I love the unique shape. I finished with a bit more texture from these velvet loafers from Cantarelli and a chunky gold chain necklace from Adia Kibur.
3 Ways to Wear the Hudson Slash Jeans
I wanted to choose a pair of jeans that were a bit different from the usual classic cut and the Slash jeans by Hudson are just that. The exposed zip and the lace-ups on the side add a cool vibe to them that is edgy and modern. The details standout, yet being kept tonal to the wash of the jeans, it keeps them versatile and can take you from chic to something more casual. See the three ways I styled them below.
I wanted to take these jeans to a more feminine route with this look here, something that is very prim. I chose to pair the jeans with a t shirt by Rag & Bone and boots by Saint Laurent. I then added a few feminine touches to the look with a coat by Scotch & Soda and a Vita Fede cuff to finish it all off.
I wanted to go for something that was a little in between with this look here. Something that still felt chic while still having a casual sense. Pairing the jeans with an old school pair of Adidas Superstars was the first thought. The cropped fit along with the details gives off a Parisian chic vibe when paired with the sneakers. As I am not the biggest fan of pairing together white shoes with a white top, I went for a black men's t-shirt by Theory for the slouch that it'll offer. Then to pull it all together and take it away from casual, a long tailored coat by TOPSHOP.
This is the most casual of the looks, but unlike most of the my other takes on casual, I chose a pair of Sam Edelman ballet flats as the shoe of choice. We don't see much of them lately and I find that they play off the jeans really well. To keep that casual/Marant-feel going, I chose a slouchy sweater by TOPSHOP (similar) and a woven belt by Caputo & Co.. Then to finish the look, a heavy knit scarf by White + Warren to keep the chill away.
-From running errands to heading to a meeting, how many of you are looking to update your classic looks with a pair like these?
Weekend Going Out Look: A GOLD E Sophie High Rise in Luxe
I am such a fan of a high rise skinny at the moment and when the proportions of them are right, like the Sophie in Luxe by A GOLD E, I could not be more elated. These are the perfect pair to style a look that is casual yet chic like this look here.
I chose a heavy knit sweater by Rag & Bone to pair with the jeans. One thing I love about this season is all the heavy knit sweaters. They can take the simplest pair of jeans to feeling a bit Parisian chic. For shoes, I wanted something classic, like these navy suede Vans. They add just enough color to the look, in my opinion. For finishers, a hat by Etudes and one of my favorite backpacks to hit the market by Elizabeth and James. The backpack definitely elevates the look to something cooler. How many of you are pairing your knits with jeans right now?


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For the first time ever SIGA is looking to partner their Dengue program, getting rid of their preclinical programs and trimming their staff. They have over 100 million dollars cash and a contract with BARDA that ends in March, 2015. They claim that they will not submit the NDA for ST-246 until after March/2015. Also, the appealed lawsuit with PIP is still ongoing. Will BARDA ever give them another contract? Probably not. Will they lose the lawsuit with PIP - probably. Is ST-246 worth anything? The answer is, "yes". ST-246 kills pox viruses and not just smallpox - it kills every pox virus known to mankind. So, even if they never get another contract with BARDA, ST-246 is a very valuable asset and by the time that they complete their ongoing initiatives, it will be their only late-stage asset. It looks to me like they should either sell the entire company, privatize it or buy another late-stage asset. To me, a sale makes total sense. Let big pharma take over and get ST-246 approved. SIGA has dragged their feet long enough.
This one thing that's up with SIGA( from the last 10Q):
" Our lead product, Arestvyr (tecovirimat), also known as ST-246, is an orally administered antiviral drug that targets orthopoxviruses. On May 13, 2011, we signed the BARDA Contract pursuant to which we agreed to deliver two million courses of Arestvyr to the Strategic Stockpile. The base contract, worth approximately $463 million, includes $54 million related to development and supportive activities and contains various options to be exercised at BARDA's discretion. The period of performance for development and supportive activities runs until 2020. As originally issued, the BARDA Contract included an option for the purchase of up to 12 million additional courses of Arestvyr; however, following a protest by a competitor of the Company, BARDA issued a contract modification on June 24, 2011 pursuant to which it deleted the option to purchase the additional courses. Under the BARDA Contract as modified, BARDA has agreed to buy from SIGA 1.7 million courses of Arestvyr. Additionally, SIGA will contribute to BARDA 300,000 courses manufactured primarily using federal funds provided by HHS under prior development contracts. The BARDA Contract as modified also contains options that will permit SIGA to continue its work on pediatric and geriatric formulations of the drug as well as use Arestvyr for smallpox prophylaxis....." !
We believe Arestvyr is among the first new small-molecule drugs delivered to the Strategic Stockpile under Project BioShield. Arestvyr is an investigational product that is not currently approved by FDA as a treatment of smallpox or any other indication. FDA has designated Arestvyr for "fast-track" status, creating a path for expedited FDA review and eventual regulatory approval."!
Sentiment: Strong Buy


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Ivory Coast Election Body 'Still Working' on Results
Ivory Coast's election commission said it was still tabulating ballots from the country's Nov. 28 presidential runoff, missing a key deadline amid calls from international groups to announce a result.
The commission is "not ready" to release any figures, spokesman Baba Coulibaly told reporters outside the Abidjan headquarters of the agency, less than an hour after a deadline passed that was meant to see the outcome announced within three days of the vote. Coulibaly said the results may be announced later today.
Only votes of Ivorians overseas have been given so far. The election was meant to unite Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa producer, which remains divided between a rebel-held north and government-controlled south, eight years after a military uprising.
President Laurent Gbagbo is trying to extend his decade in power and faces a challenge from former Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara. Both candidates traded accusations of fraud following the vote. The European Union's observation mission in the country said Nov. 30 that any irregularities on election day weren't enough to affect the outcome.
Yesterday, the EU and the United Nations urged the commission to respect the midnight deadline and release the results. Agence France-Presse reported yesterday that missing the deadline may mean the country's Constitutional Court would be given the power to certify, or not, the results. The news agency said the court was headed by a Gbagbo loyalist.
Cocoa futures for March delivery lost $49, or 1.7 percent, to settle at $2,758 a metric ton in New York.