Information Of Batteries: March 2012

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Top ten apps that help make classes managable

Top ten apps that help make classes managable

By Ashley G. Terrell.

For the life of a college student there's always a continuous juggle of work, school and social lives that keeps one busy. Anything to lessen the load would be a miracle. But what if that miracle came from just an app?

Through the thousands of choices at your fingertips, many go above and beyond to enhance the educational experience. Here are the 10 best Smartphone/tablet apps to help you become a better student:

1. Evernote: A digital note taking app that can record in text, video, notes and photos, plus sorting the information in order of date. It can also sync from a phone to computer. (For: iPhone, iPad, Windows, Android and Blackberry)

2. myHomework: Tracks homework, classes, projects and tests with ease while syncing information to myHomeworkapp.com for review. Once your class schedule and assignments have been entered, you'll receive notifications of due dates regarding to

your work. (For: iPhone and iPad)

3. Amazon Student: Need affordable textbooks? Don't we all? Amazon Student includes a barcode scanning feature used to compare prices to validate if a campus bookstore overcharges you (most likely yes). This app has helped students tremendously with saving money while being aware of competitive pricing in order to get better deals. (For: iPhone and Android)

4. Mint: The life of a student revolves around money for many reasons: cars, food, clothing, supplies and many more. This personal finance app is a perfect guide to help students create a budget and stretch their money too. With a budget set, inputting a point-of-transactions will track your overall expenses. (For: iPhone and Android)

5. EZ Read: Contains the literature sources of SparkNotes.com providing plot overviews, quizzes, characters analysis, chapter summaries and key facts for popular books. (For: iPhone and Android)

6. iTunes U: Available to various colleges, including Eastern Michigan University, students have access to audio lectures, videos, books and documents for class assignments. (For: iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch)

7. Recordoid: Specifically for Android, this is a great app for recording audio notes or lectures that can be sent via email and is supported with an auto-backup.

8. Wi-Fi Finder: When you're off campus but want to stay on top of emails, assignments or contact fellow group members, free internet is helpful. The GPS- monitor can locate Wi-Fi networks nearby along with the location type, directions and contact information. (For: iPhone and Android)

9. Dictionary.com: A popular app among college students, this dictionary and thesaurus has nearly two million words to search at ease. (For: iPhone, Android and Blackberry)

10. Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock: We're all guilty of hitting the snooze button or sleeping in lectures. But would you believe that your smartphone can analyze your sleep cycle? Receiving five stars from 148Apps.com, this accelerometer monitors sleep movement and stages from drowsiness to REM (dream) sleep. It wakes you during the lightest sleep phase, stage 2, resulting in less grogginess throughout the day. (For: iPhone, $0.99)

Gowalla officially closes its doors three months after acquisition by Facebook

Ailing location-based application Gowalla has finally shuttered its doors, three months after Facebook's talent acquisition of Gowalla. This leaves Foursquare to prove that its pivot will keep its location-based services relevant for users.

It's official. Gowalla shuttered its doors only three months after Facebook's acquisition and five years after its founding. Today, Foursquare stands as the lone giant lumbering in location-based check-ins, despite the fact that the majority of its users aren't in fact using Foursquare for checking-in.

Knowing that Gowalla was in its final stretch, Facebook purchased Gowalla in exchange for $3 million of Facebook's shares, prior to what will be an undoubtedly fruitful IPO. While Gowalla had pivoted to become a travel guide destination, which was leading to its slow death, its purchase was entirely a talent acquisition. With plans to expand Facebook's location-based API for statuses and updates detailing user's visits on their Timelines, the majority of Gowalla's team settled in Facebook's Palo Alto, while the remainder stayed in Austin to work in Facebook's Austin office.

Gowalla's landing page simply states:

"Thank you for going out with Gowalla. It was a pleasure to journey with you around the world. Download your check-ins, photos and lists here soon."

While Gowalla has been acquired, all the data that has been logged since 2007 will remain behind, available for downloading.

Its competitor, Foursquare, had begun a series of changes to its services beginning in October 2011 with the Radar recommendation engine, which notifies its mobile users when they're near a venue or restaurant that they may like.

Its latest venue discovery and recommendation feature, Explorer, allows users to search for recommended places based on the, "time of day, places your friends have been or left tips, places on lists you follow, and places we think you'll like based on the 1,500,000,000 check-ins on Foursquare," as its blog post states.

Following its Explorer update, Foursquare, using SinglePlatform's API, added 250,000 restaurant menus. The latest update has included hours of operation for local businesses, including hours for discounts and happy hours.

Its strategy is a dramatic pivot that will see Foursquare taking the form of a mobile recommendation engine coupled with Yelp. "There are a lot of people using Foursquare who aren't checking in. People use the app to consume data. That's a really important and interesting trend," Dennis Crowley, Foursquare's CEO, informed the Wall Street Journal.

With Foursquare's pivot and the old Gowalla team now building out Facebook's location-based API, the friendly competition between Foursquare and Gowalla continues to exist. But while Facebook intends to use its location API to leave memories of experiences shared, Foursquare will try to recommend future experiences.

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GM's Buyers Snub 'Obamamobile' Volt as Campaign Gets Hot

GM's Buyers Snub 'Obamamobile' Volt as Campaign Gets Hot

By Tim Higgins.

Pity the Chevy Volt. Ever since it became known that the plug-in hybrid car's batteries had burst into flames after government crash tests, the Volt has become the whipping boy of Republican politicians.

Conservatives have equated General Motors Co. (GM)'s Volt with everything from government bailouts to radical left-wing environmentalism.

"Although we loaded the Volt with state-of-the-art safety features, we did not engineer the Volt to be a political punching bag," GM Chief Executive Officer Dan Akerson said during a Congressional hearing on the Volt in January. "And that, sadly, is what the Volt has become."

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich faulted the Volt for its lack of space for a gun rack. Front-runner Mitt Romney called it "an idea whose time has not come." American Tradition Partnership Inc., a conservative group, referred to Volts as "exploding Obamamobiles."

Akerson said all the trash talk about the Volt has been pinching sales. Obama's challengers, though, see it as an effective way to resonate with their voters. Republicans buy Silverado pickups and other Chevrolets in greater numbers than Democrats do, said Art Spinella, who studies new-vehicle buyers as president of CNW Marketing Research in Bandon, Oregon.

While Chevy customers tend to lean conservative, less than 14 percent of Volt buyers so far this year identify themselves as Republicans while about 53 percent call themselves Democrats, according to CNW survey of 1,416 people. Buyers of the Chevrolet brand as a whole were 37 percent Republican, 22 percent Democrat and 41 percent independent.

Disappointing Sales

Politics aside, Volt sales have been a source of disappointment for GM. The Environmental Protection Agency gave it a 95 mpg rating for city driving, less than half the 230 mpg rating GM had anticipated in 2009. After the battery fires became public in November, 2011 sales fell short of Akerson's goal and following slow sales in January and February, GM decided to stop making the cars for five weeks.

While the government's investigation found the Volt to be as safe as other vehicles, they are complicated and expensive for a small car at nearly $40,000 before a federal tax credit. Nissan Motor Co. (7201)'s Leaf electric car missed its sales targets last year, too, raising questions about the size of the market for technology-laden fuel-efficient vehicle.

Republican Bashing

It's impossible to know to what degree political rhetoric is hurting Volt sales, but Akerson isn't alone in believing the numbers would look better without the Republican bashing. Chevrolet dealers in the U.S. sold 7,671 Volts last year, missing GM's target of 10,000. About 1,600 Volts were sold in the first two months of the year, a pace that doesn't match Akerson's plans to deliver 45,000 in the U.S. this year. At least part of that gap is a result of attacks on the campaign trail, Spinella said.

Buyers from the political center to the right, "will not buy a car that has anything at all that they perceive being associated with the administration," Spinella said.

While the Volt accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the world's largest automaker's sales last year, it is getting heightened attention because "it's a hallmark car," Akerson told reporters in San Francisco this week.

After the announcement last week that work would stop for five weeks at the Detroit-Hamtramck where the Volt is made, Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, posted on Twitter about it with the hashtag "#ObamaonEmpty."

The Volt, introduced a month before Obama said he would run for president, can go more than 30 miles on electricity before its gasoline engine kicks in and powers a generator to recharge the battery. The car has a range of 379 miles with both electric and gasoline power combined.

Lutz Outraged

Bob Lutz, the former vice chairman at General Motors who helped develop the Volt, said he's angered that the car has become politicized.

"I don't mind criticizing Obama, I don't mind criticizing the Democrats and, you know me, I think global warming is a huge hoax perpetrated by the global political left," Lutz said. "But when it comes to starting to tell outright lies to advance your political purposes and damage an American company that is greatly on its way back, hurt American employment in Hamtramck, Michigan, I just think it's totally outrageous."

Lutz, a Republican, said he voted for former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum in the Michigan Republican primary in part because former Massachusetts Governor Romney wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in 2008 headlined "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" about his opposition to a GM bailout.

Obama's Role

After President George W. Bush extended emergency loans to GM's predecessor, Obama's administration managed its $50 billion bailout. The U.S. still holds 32 percent of the GM shares, which have gained 26 percent this year after falling 45 percent in 2011.

Obama has embraced the Volt's fuel-saving technology and said it's his choice for a new car once he's no longer president.

"It was nice," he told a United Auto Workers audience on Feb. 28 about sitting in one. "I'll bet it drives real good. And five years from now when I'm not president anymore, I'll buy one and drive it myself."

Representative Mike Kelly, a Republican from Pennsylvania, who owns a Chevrolet dealership in Butler, said he doesn't sell the Volt at his store because it's too expensive for his customers, who would be better served with a cheaper Cruze. While it may be an engineering marvel, it's too far out for his customers, he said.

"It's still just not a viable alternative to the market that I serve in western Pennsylvania," he said. "I just don't have people coming in to buy that car."

Social Issues

The Volt not only personifies the bailout for Republican candidates, it also plays to other controversial issues such as class and environment. On the campaign trail, for example, Gingrich, the former U.S. House speaker, has peppered his stump speech with comments about the Volt, including during a stop Feb. 17 caught by C-Span.

"The average family that buys it earns $170,000 a year and this is Obama's idea of populism and in his new budget he wants to increase the amount given to every Volt buyer to $10,000, which is an amount which would allow a lot of people to buy a decent secondhand car but it wouldn't be an Obama car," Gingrich said to cheers in Peachtree City, Georgia. "But here's my point to folks: You can't put a gun rack in a Volt."

"So let's be clear what this election is all about," Gingrich continued. "We believe in the right to bear arms and we like to bear the arms in our trucks."

The Volt "can do a lot of things," including tote a gun rack, responded Selim Bingol, vice president of GM's global communications, on a company blog. "But if you are looking for a vehicle for your next hunting trip, it may not be your first choice."

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Soldier's Rampage May Fuel Calls for Obama to Accelerate Afghan Withdrawal

Soldier's Rampage May Fuel Calls for Obama to Accelerate Afghan Withdrawal

By Viola Gienger and Mark Drajem.

The fatal shootings of 16 Afghan civilians, allegedly by an American soldier, add to a series of incendiary incidents that threaten to drain remaining U.S. and European support for the decade-long mission.

In Afghanistan, the deadly attack also may reinforce Afghan suspicions that foreigners are seeking to conquer their Islamic country. They may conclude the U.S.-led coalition will end up leaving in defeat just as have outsiders from Alexander the Great to the British to the Soviet Union.

"This is a major setback," said Seth Jones, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corp. in Arlington, Virginia, who worked for the U.S. Special Operations Command in Afghanistan last year. Beyond influencing Afghan attitudes, he said yesterday in an interview, "it undermines certainly U.S. trust of the Afghans because I'm sure there are going to be concerns about the local reaction."

Any violent backlash by Afghans to the shootings in the southern province of Kandahar may add to domestic pressure on President Barack Obama to speed troop withdrawals, ahead of the the security handover now set for 2014. Asked yesterday on CBS's "Face the Nation" if it's time to withdraw U.S. forces, Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich said, "I think it is."

In offering condolences to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta expressed resolve to continue to "work hand in hand with our Afghan partners," according to a statement from his office.

2014 Timetable

Two U.S. officials said the killings may prove to be the fatal hit to the administration's hopes for maintaining a large international military and civilian presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014. That plan is intended to improve the performance of the Afghan government, degrade the Taliban and strengthen Afghan security forces.

Whether that's the case will depend on how Afghan civilians, government officials and security forces respond to the killings, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they aren't authorized to discuss the matter publicly. This incident follows the burning of Korans in a trash dump at a U.S. base last month and a video in January showing at least four U.S. Marines urinating on Taliban corpses.

If Afghan anger, frustration, and resentment of foreigners turns violent as it did after the Koran burning, whatever political and public support remains in America and Europe for the NATO mission in Afghanistan will almost certainly dissipate, both officials said.

Administration Divisions

Already, Vice President Joe Biden and some White House officials have been pressing for a faster exit from Afghanistan, according to the officials. CIA Director David Petraeus, a former NATO commander there, and some U.S. military officials have been arguing that there's been progress and that a hasty exit would open the door to the Taliban's return and perhaps to a new civil war, the officials said.

The U.S. soldier allegedly shot to death 16 Afghan civilians in their homes before returning to his base and being taken into custody, Afghan and NATO officials said. The soldier, whose name was withheld by U.S. authorities, is from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, Washington, said one official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to comment publicly.

Statements of condolences yesterday from Obama and a reassuring message from the acting U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan posted on YouTube clashed with photos linked on Twitter of the victims, who included women and children.

Whatever trust and credibility remained between the U.S. and the Afghans after last month's burning of Korans at the main American base in Afghanistan probably is gone after this latest attack, said David Cortright, director of policy studies at the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

'Fatal Hammer Blow'

"This is a fatal hammer blow on the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan," Cortright, author of "Ending Obama's War: Responsible Military Withdrawal from Afghanistan," said in an e-mailed statement. "This may have been the act of a lone deranged soldier, but the people of Afghanistan will see it for what it was -- a wanton massacre of innocent civilians."

The shooting spree yesterday compounds the difficulty of sticking to the U.S. military's strategy of gradually reducing its troop levels while strengthening the Afghan army, police and government ministries to take over fully at the end of 2014.

White House and Pentagon officials are confronting decisions on how many forces and what types to leave in place after the last of 33,000 personnel that were added in 2010 leave in September. The American public has made clear it has little stomach left for the battle, according to results of a Washington Post/ABC News poll that shows a majority consistently opposing the war for almost two years.

U.S. Public Opinion

The latest survey found 54 percent of Americans want to pull out U.S. forces even if the Afghan army isn't ready to pick up the fight. The poll was conducted March 7 to March 10, among a random national sample of 1,003 adults with a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points for the full results.

Obama convened a meeting of his senior White House national security staff yesterday to discuss the incident before calling Karzai with condolences and a pledge to investigate thoroughly.

Right now "you have a policy that is lurching from headline to headline," Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in an interview. "We forgot the lessons learned from Vietnam about how long this takes."

"Our being in the middle in a country like Afghanistan is probably counterproductive," Gingrich said on CBS. "We are risking the lives of men and women for a mission frankly that is not worth doing," he said earlier on "Fox News Sunday."

Koran-Burning Aftermath

Dozens of U.S. military advisers had returned to Afghan ministries with extra security since being withdrawn after two were killed in one of the offices in the violence set off by the Koran-burning incident. Hundreds remain under orders to stay in secure NATO coalition compounds.

"One incident like this can change the equation," Virginia's Republican Governor Bob McDonnell said on NBC's "Meet the Press" yesterday when asked about the killing of Afghan civilians. "It's tragic because we have so many brave" soldiers serving in Afghanistan, he said.

Such incidents exacerbate a sense of instability even as U.S. defense officials and military officers say violence is declining.

Intelligence Estimate

A National Intelligence Estimate given to Obama in January concluded that the Taliban remain resilient and determined to re-impose their brand of strict Islamic rule on the country, and that Afghan forces and the civilian government are still plagued by corruption and ineffectiveness. The estimate, the consensus view of the intelligence community, was described by two U.S. officials on condition of anonymity because it isn't public.

Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has said such continuing instability is all the more reason for the U.S. to continue fighting.

"I understand the frustration and I understand the anger and the sorrow," McCain said on "Fox News Sunday" yesterday. "I also understand, and we should not forget, the attacks on the United States of America in 9/11 originated in Afghanistan. And if Afghanistan dissolved into a situation where the Taliban were able to take over or a chaotic situation, it could easily return to an al-Qaeda base for attacks on the United States."

Military Justice

The U.S. military justice system's handling of the case, in what is likely to be a lengthy process, also may affect the perception among Afghans.

The country's Defense Ministry issued a statement yesterday saying it "strongly condemns this inhuman and devastating incident." The statement said officials asked the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led coalition to "capture the perpetrators of the merciless action as soon as possible and punish them for their despicable crime."

In the phone call to Karzai, Obama expressed "his administration's commitment to establish the facts as quickly as possible and to hold fully accountable anyone responsible," according to a White House statement.

The shooting "would only be an incident without this larger chronology we've seen in recent weeks," said Cordesman, the military analyst. "It's a much broader problem than people understand," he said.

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IPhone Failing to Gain Market Share in China as Samsung Lead Triples

IPhone Failing to Gain Market Share in China as Samsung Lead Triples

By Bloomberg News.

Apple Inc. (AAPL) got a second partner in China to sell the iPhone in the world's biggest mobile-phone market. The deal may be too late to catch Samsung Electronics Co. (005930), with a market share that's three times larger and growing.

China Telecom Corp. (728) began selling the iPhone last week as Apple tries to build on its 7.5 percent share of the country's smartphone sales. Samsung controlled 24.3 percent of the market for phones that can play videos and games, according to Gartner Inc., using a strategy of allying with all three of the nation's third-generation networks since such services started in 2009.

Succeeding in China is important for Apple as shipments of smartphones in the country are projected to jump 52 percent this year to 137 million units, overtaking the U.S. for the first time as the world's biggest market. Unlike Samsung's strategy of partnering with all carriers, Apple has limited its own success by not making a device compatible with the nation's biggest operator, China Mobile Ltd. (941)

"I don't expect Apple to replace Samsung any time soon," Gartner analyst Sandy Shen said in an interview. "China Telecom is the nation's smallest carrier, so the extent to which they can help Apple is quite limited."

The 16.8 percentage-point gap in China between Cupertino, California-based Apple and Samsung almost doubled from the third quarter. While Samsung is No. 1 and Apple No. 5 in China, the global story is different: Worldwide, Apple passed its Suwon, South Korea-based competitor to become the biggest smartphone vendor in the fourth quarter, according to Gartner.

China Mobile

Apple's partnerships with China's second- and third-largest carriers give it access to about 34 percent of the nation's 988 million mobile users, while Samsung targeted the whole market. iPhones aren't sold to China Mobile's 655 million subscribers, a number almost equal to the combined population of the U.S., Brazil and Mexico.

"Having access to more subscribers gives vendors like Samsung an advantage," said Teck Zhung Wong, a Beijing-based analyst with IDC China, who forecast the 52 percent jump in smartphone sales this year. "If Apple is going to continue to grow in the Chinese market, it has to consider very seriously a handset with China Mobile."

China Telecom had a total of 129.3 million wireless users at the end of January, including 38.7 million 3G subscribers.

Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007 in the U.S. exclusively with AT&T Inc. (T) and added a second carrier partner last year in Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ)

Pelting Eggs

Apple chose not to make a phone with China Mobile because the operator had a unique 3G standard called TD-SCDMA, even after the Chinese company's Chairman Wang Jianzhou met with the then Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs in early 2010. Wang told the company's annual meeting in May that he didn't expect Apple to introduce an iPhone until the carrier rolled out the fourth- generation TD-LTE network by end of this year.

China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd. (762) was the nation's first carrier to offer the iPhone with a service contract in October 2009.

Even though Apple trailed Samsung, Nokia Oyj (NOK1V), Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp (000063) in China's smartphone market, people still crave an iPhone.

Apple's oldest store in China was pelted with eggs from a crowd of customers on Jan. 13 when the shop, in Beijing's Sanlitun district, failed to open on the first day of sales for the iPhone 4S. After police sealed off the area to remove more than 500 people, Apple said it would suspend sales of iPhones at all its stores.

'Didn't Bet High Enough'

The maker of iMac computers and iPad tablets underestimated the "staggering" demand for the iPhone 4S when it started sales in China in January, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said. "We thought we were betting bold," Cook said Jan. 24. "We didn't bet high enough."

The iPhone 4S has been "an incredible hit" with customers around the world, Apple spokeswoman Carolyn Wu said in an e-mail. Apple "can't wait to get it into the hands of even more customers in China," Wu said, declining to comment further on the company's handset strategy in China.

Samsung's approach to China is "the same" as other markets, Juha Park, senior vice president of product strategy, said in an interview in Barcelona.

"We make product innovation and make our brand very desired in the market," Park said. "That's what we do to become a major player. We have been doing quite strong growth in the China market."

Unlocked IPhone

Even without an agreement with Apple or a device that's compatible with its high-speed 3G network, China Mobile still has 15 million iPhone users, spokeswoman Rainie Lei said. Those China Mobile users buy unlocked devices and surf the web at slower 2G speeds, or else connect to Wi-Fi hotspots for a faster connection.

China Telecom projects that the iPhone will "significantly enhance its long term sustainable growth and value creation despite the short term pressure on its profitability," spokeswoman Lisa Lai said in an e-mail.

"For China Telecom, its 4S launch comes late and the low- hanging fruit may already be exhausted," said Lisa Soh, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Macquarie Group Ltd.

The egg pelting also resulted in Apple losing one advantage it had over Samsung -- its own retail stores stopped selling iPhones. Apple said at the time the move was "for the time being." Apple's Wu said the phones remain available through Apple's online store in China, and declined to provide an update on when the shops would resume sales of the devices.

That leaves Samsung free to further widen its gap.

"It's just one country, but it's such a big market and its portion in the global market is huge, so Samsung is trying to act fast to capture the market," said Kim Young Chan, a Seoul- based analyst at Shinhan Investment Corp. "Dealing with different network standards will give them a pretty valuable competitive edge."

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Information Of Batteries

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Top ten apps that help make classes managable

GM's Buyers Snub 'Obamamobile' Volt as Campaign Gets Hot

Soldier's Rampage May Fuel Calls for Obama to Accelerate Afghan Withdrawal

IPhone Failing to Gain Market Share in China as Samsung Lead Triples

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