2008 April 01 | money news blog

01 04 2008

Dell eyes $3 billion in cost savings

Posted by: in Companies Competitive Strategy

Filed under: Bad news, Management, Competitive strategy, Dell (DELL)

The world’s second largest personal maker announced yesterday that it would close the doors of a desktop manufacturing plant in Austin, which involves laying-off 900 of 17,500 workers. The company’s move is aimed at slicing expenses, which should result in $3 billion savings over the course of the next three years.

The decision is part of a strategy announced last year, with a target of cutting at least 8,800 jobs, or about 10% of its work force. Thus, the computer maker axed 3,200 jobs during the last nine months of the company’s fiscal 2008.

As part of its cost slicing, Dell close 140 kiosks “to improve” competitive advantage and “to rationalize” operations. Dell believes that selling direct to retailers instead of using kiosks to capture customers’ interest will help the company increase revenue.

The company will seek the $3 billion in savings by slashing production costs in all areas, from design, manufacturing, logistics, materials, and operations. Dell is also considering selling its financing arm, Dell Financial Services.

Dell’s strategy to save costs seems promising for the computer maker’s goal to efficiently compete against its rivals. The competition has become even tougher with the slowing U.S. economy adding pressure on consumer spending. However, the company’s decision will dissatisfy many people, especially those who lose their jobs.

Eliza Popescu is a financial writer for the on the web investment advisory service Investor’s Observer.

01 04 2008

Wal-Mart brews its own coffee

Posted by: in Companies Competitive Strategy

Filed under: Launches, Industry, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Wal-Mart (WMT), Starbucks (SBUX)

Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) is rolling out its own brands of “green” coffee. The coffee is organic and comes from “carbon neutral” planters. According to Reuters: “This month, the world’s largest retailer will start selling six coffees under the Sam’s Choice brand in all of its U.S. stores.”

The news is probably not so hot for in-store brands like Maxwell Home, Folgers, Chock full o’Nuts and Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX). Wal-Mart likely doesn’t care. If it is an important outlet for these brands, there is not much they can do about it but suffer.

Wal-Mart is a curious retailer. Most of its shoppers are low income. They probably care much more about price than they do about where the coffee is grown and how. The move might be good PR for Wal-Mart and give it that “warm and fuzzy” felling with the press. its shoppers probably won’t notice at all. Unless it is cheaper than what they have the ability to get now.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

01 04 2008

Woopra: Real time stats and chat for your web page coming soon

Posted by: in Services

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Web services, Beta, web 2.0

GBTV #337 | Introducing Woopra from Neal Campbell on Vimeo.

There’s no shortage of packages for tracking statistics on visitors to your blog or web site. But we have to state, Woopra looks enjoy it could blow the competition out of the water. That’s because it offers real-time stats tracking, showing you a list of who’s on your site right now, where they came from, and what they’re looking at. And if they’ve left comments or otherwise identified themselves to Woopra, you can check out their user profiles and even send them an invitation to chat in real-time while they’re visiting your site.

The service is currently in beta, but the plan is to make it available free of cost to Linux, Mac, and Windows users. You can sign up for a free account today, but you might have to wait a little while for Woopra to approve your web site. The developers are still working on scaling the system to support a massive number of accounts.

[via GeekBrief.Television and TechCrunch]

01 04 2008

New 20″ iMac Screens Show 98% Fewer Colors

Posted by: in Rights Online

Trintech writes points us to an AppleInsider article about another class-action lawsuit directed against Apple Inc. This one claims that the displays on new 20″ iMacs are only capable of 6-bit-per-pixel color, 98% fewer colors than Apple advertises. Rather than the 8-bit, in-plane switching (IPS) screens used in 24″ iMacs and earlier 20″ models, “The new 20-inch iMac features a 6-bit twisted nematic film (TN) LCD screen,” according to the article, “which the [law] firm claims is the ‘least expensive of its type,’ sporting a narrower viewing angle than the display of the 24-inch model, less color depth, less color accuracy, and greater susceptibility to washout.” Apple recently settled a very similar class-action suit about the displays on MacBook and MacBook Pro models.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

01 04 2008

IdentiFight: What can people learn about you from your email address?

Posted by: in Services

Filed under: World wide web, Security, Web services, web 2.0

If you’re like most of us, you probably spend at least 16 hours a week Googling your name to see what the internet says about you, and more importantly, what other people will find out if they look you up. IdentiFight provides a new tool in the effort to protect, hide, or at least identify your publicly available data.

Here’s how it works. You enter your email address into IdentiFight’s search engine, and it will look you up on a list of popular social networks and then display the results. The service appears to be facing some scaling issues and has disabled Facebook, Digg, MySpace, and Yelp searches for now. But we were still able to track down some slightly inaccurate data using IdentiFight (apparently someone forgot to update his Friendster profile when he moved from Princeton to Brooklyn).

[via Lifehacker]

01 04 2008

US Military Explored Hiring Bloggers As Propagandists

Posted by: in Rights Online

Zeinfeld writes “Wired reports that one time Clipper Chip supporter Dorothy Denning wrote a report on using blogs for information warfare in 2006 (a report available from cryptome). Amongst the proposals were hiring bloggers directly as propaganda agents and using military media resources to ‘make’ a blogger posting favorable material. Notably, and most unfortunately absent from the report, is the very real question of whether the military should be manipulating domestic media.” Is meme warfare just another battleground, or is this dirty pool?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

01 04 2008

Omnisio: on the web video editing with YouTube and others

Posted by: in Services

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Utilities, Video, Web services, Google, web 2.0

Omnisio is a free web-based video editor that lets you snip and paste videos from YouTube, Google Video, and blip.tv, with support for more sites coming soon. The site is similar to online photo-editing sites like FotoFlexer, but applies the same idea to video. You don’t need any desktop software other than a sturdy online browser with Flash support.

The three sites still provide for a very big library to choose from, and you could always add your own videos to a YouTube account should you need some extra content. We can see Omnisio being very useful for all types presentations — professional or student related — in which the subject is heavily documented on those video sites (what subject isn’t heavily documented on YouTube?).

We can also see the on the internet video-editing service spawning a whole new breed of online-content-remixers, which traditionally take funny and interesting videos , pictures, etc. to turn them into into (what’s supposed to be) funnier but fairly stupid creations that usually make fun of the subject and gain mass notoriety. Thank you, Omnisio, for helping us clutter the World wide web with even more Star Wars Kid edits.

01 04 2008

Lawsuit Against RIAA Tries To Stop Them All

Posted by: in Rights Online

I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “Tanya Anderson has filed an amended complaint against the RIAA. One of the more interesting provisions in it is in the 18th claim, which seeks to cease the RIAA from ‘continuing to engage in criminal investigation of private American citizens’, no doubt referring to the unlicensed MediaSentry investigations. If allowed, that could shut down the RIAA lawsuits entirely. Naturally, the RIAA doesn’t like this at all. First, they got the judge to agree that the original complaint was too light on the details, so it was amended. Now the RIAA complains that it’s too long, because it’s 108 pages filled with the RIAA’s dirty laundry. You might remember this as the countersuit to the lawsuit where RIAA lawyers tried to grill a 10-year-old girl, only later to drop their case for lack of evidence and have the mom sue them for malicious prosecution.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.