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Chicago Bears tight end Greg Olsen is locked out by a high school
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Taptu allows iPad owners to “DJ your <b>news</b>” | VentureBeat
Anthony is a senior editor at VentureBeat, as well as its reporter on media, advertising, and social networks. Before joining ...
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Great <b>news</b>: Working population percentage drops to three-decade <b>...</b>
Great news: Working population percentage drops to three-decade low.
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Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said in an interview this week that he would consider returning to an active role at the company he helped start if asked.
During an interview in England this week, Wozniak said, "I'd consider it, yeah," when asked whether he would play a more active role if asked, Reuters reports.
Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer in 1976. Wozniak left his full-time role with the company in 1987, but remains an employee and shareholder of Apple.
Since leaving Apple, Wozniak has been involved in a wide range of entrepreneurial and philanthropic endeavors. He currently serves as Chief Scientist for storage company Fusion-io.
Meanwhile, Jobs is currently taking an indefinite leave of absence to focus on his health, though he remains CEO of Apple and continues to be involved in strategic decisions.
Wozniak, who has widely been acknowledged as the technical genius behind Apple's early success, believes that he has a lot to offer the company he helped start, which went on to become the world's second-largest company in terms of market value.
"There's just an awful lot I know about Apple products and competing products that has some relevance, some meaning. They're my own feelings, though," Wozniak said during the interview.
When asked his opinion on Apple today, Wozniak praised the company for its track record with recent products. "Unbelievable," he said, "The products, one after another, quality and hits."
Even so, Wozniak admitted that he'd prefer Apple's devices to be more open, so he can "get in there and add [his] own touches." Last December, Wozniak revealed that he had purchased a DIY kit for the iPhone 4 and "modded" the device into the as-yet-unreleased white version.
"My thinking is that Apple could be more open and not lose sales," said Wozniak, while adding, "I'm sure they're making the right decisions for the right reasons for Apple."
Wozniak has been committed to openness since the beginning. In December, Wozniak told reporters that he didn't design the original Apple I to make a lot of money and had given the designs away for free after his former employer HP showed no interest in the computer.
As rumors of a later-than-usual iPhone launch for 2011 persist, a new report reveals that the notoriously secretive Apple is being even more careful than usual when dealing with overseas suppliers.
"Apple is keeping its iPhone 5 cards extra close to the vest on this launch to avoid a falloff in iPhone 4 demand ahead of a refresh, especially given the February launch of the CDMA iPhone 4 with Verizon," Analyst Brian White with Ticonderoga Securities said in a note to investors on Friday. He believes that the iPhone 5 could still launch in June or July, as previous models have.
White noted that various rumors have pointed toward a launch later than June this year for the fifth-generation iPhone. One report from March alleged that Apple has not even begun ordering components for the anticipated "iPhone 5," and the device is slated to arrive in the company's 2012 fiscal year, which begins in late September.
And a third report alleged that Apple is working on a major revamp of iOS, its mobile operating system, for version 5.0. New features like cloud-based storage of music, photos and video are rumored to arrive in the update this fall, likely alongside new iPhone hardware.
But despite all of those reports, White isn't yet convinced that the iPhone 5 will be introduced later than its typical June or July timeframe.
"Although we do not have a smoking gun that definitively rules out a delayed autumn unveiling or one that supports a launch this summer, there is a pattern of activity in motion with the supply chain that makes us question a delayed launch," he said.
White also cited sources who indicated that iPad sales could reach up to 40 million units in calendar year 2011. And supply chain sources also indicated that disruption from the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan will actually end up benefitting Apple, as suppliers will "rush to support Apple at the expense of competitors."
The analyst already revealed earlier this week that Apple has been offering upfront cash payments to component suppliers in order to secure components in the wake of the disaster in Japan. Apple has apparently also been using a "three cover guarantee," referring to capacity, stock and price, to block out competitors and prevent them from building ample supply of devices.
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Over the years, entrepreneurs and corporate executives have devised any number of clever ways for getting rich off the working poor, but you'd have to look long and hard to find one more diabolically inventive than the RAL. Say you have a $2,000 tax refund due and you don't want to wait a week or two for the IRS to deposit that money in your bank account. Your tax preparer would be delighted to act as the middleman for a very short-term bank loan—the RAL. You get your check that day or the next, minus various fees and interest charges, and in return sign your pending refund over to the bank. Within 15 days, the IRS wires your refund straight to the lender. It's a safe bet for the banks, but that hasn't stopped them from charging astronomical interest rates. Until this tax year, the IRS was even kind enough to let lenders know when potential borrowers were likely to have their refund garnished because they owed back taxes, say, or were behind on child support.
Hewitt didn't invent the refund anticipation loan. That distinction belongs to Ross Longfield, who dreamed up the idea in 1987 and took it to H&R Block CEO Thomas Bloch. "I'm explaining it," Longfield recalls, "but Tom is sitting there going, 'I don't know; I don't know if people are going to want to do that.'"
Tax-prep shops are as common as fast-food joints in many low-income neighborhoods—there are at least half a dozen on one three-block stretch of South Broadway in Yonkers, N.Y., where these photographs were taken. A few offer reasonably priced accounting, while others charge hundreds of dollars for 20 minutes of work. But Longfield knew. He worked for Beneficial Corp., a subprime lender specializing in small, high-interest loans for customers who needed to finance a new refrigerator or dining-room set. His instincts told him the RAL would be a big hit—as did the polling and focus groups he organized. "Everything we did suggested people would love it—love it to death," he says.
He also knew Beneficial would make a killing if he could convince tax preparers—in exchange for a cut of the proceeds—to peddle this new breed of loan on his employer's behalf. Ultimately, Longfield persuaded H&R Block to sign up. But no one was as smitten as John Hewitt—who understood that people earning $15,000 or $20,000 or $25,000 a year live in a perpetual state of financial turmoil. Hewitt began opening outposts in the inner cities, Rust Belt towns, depressed rural areas—anywhere the misery index was high. "That was the low-hanging fruit," he says. "Going into lower-income areas and delivering refunds quicker was where the opportunity was."
Customers wanting a RAL paid Jackson Hewitt a $24 application fee, a $25 processing fee, and a $2 electronic-filing fee, plus 4 percent of the loan amount. On a $2,000 refund, that meant $131 in charges—equivalent to an annual interest rate of about 170 percent—not to mention the few hundred bucks you might spend for tax preparation. "Essentially, they're charging people triple-digit interest rates to borrow their own money," says Chi Chi Wu, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.
In 1988, the first year he began offering the loans, Hewitt owned 49 stores in three states. Five years later, he had 878 stores in 37 states. And five years after that, when Cendant Corp.—the conglomerate that owned Avis, Century 21, and Days Inn—bought Jackson Hewitt for $483 million, his earliest backers received a $2 million payout on every $5,000 they'd invested. Today, with 6,000 offices scattered across the country, Jackson Hewitt is more ubiquitous than KFC, and has about as many imitators.
THERE WOULD BE NO refund anticipation loans, of course, without tax refunds. And by extension there would be no RALs without the Earned Income Tax Credit, the federal anti-poverty initiative that served as the mother's milk nourishing the instant-refund boom. Welfare reform was the catalyst for the EITC, which was aimed at putting extra cash in the pockets of low-income parents who worked. What motive does a single mother have to get a job, conservative thinkers asked, if there was scant difference between her monthly take-home pay and a welfare check? It was Richard Nixon who first floated the idea that led to the Earned Income Tax Credit; Ronald Reagan dubbed it "the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress." In 2007, the US Treasury paid out $49 billion to 25 million taxpayers.
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Small Business <b>News</b>: Small Biz Social Media Tips
In recent weeks we've shared articles on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. Now it's time to look at how all these tools are.
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Daily Kos: Fox <b>News</b> ties suicide to Obama speech
But with the other option being to talk about the Republican plan to abolish Medicare, apparently politicizing this young man's death looked a whole lot better to Fox News. Pathetic. (h/t Balloon Juice) ...
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