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Friday, February 8, 2013

New BlackBerry Will Definitely Not Be Big in Japan

Although Japanese consumers are among the world’s most voracious consumers of smartphones, BlackBerry said on Thursday that they won’t be getting its new line of phones.

Two days after releasing its new BlackBerry Z10 handset in Canada, BlackBerry, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, said it would not follow suit in Japan.

“Japan is not a major market for BlackBerry and we have no plans to launch BlackBerry 10 smartphones there at this time,” Adam Emery, a spokesman for the company said in an e-mail. “We will continue to support BlackBerry customers in Japan.”

Mr. Emery did not respond to questions about the continued sale in Japan of the company’s older line of phones based on the BlackBerry 7 operating system.

Nikkei, the Japanese financial newspaper, first reported the retreat by BlackBerry, the company formerly known as Research in Motion.

Perhaps because the Roman alphabet keyboard that traditionally distinguished BlackBerrys offered relatively littl utility for Japanese users working in their own language, the smartphones never found enormous success in that market.

ComScore, a company that tracks mobile and Web usage, did not break out BlackBerry’s market share in Japan in a study released last August. Instead, BlackBerry was lumped with other unspecified operating system makers, which held a combined total of just 0.4 percent of the market.

The Google Android operating system, ComScore reported, had a market share of 64.1 percent, and Apple’s iOS had 32.3 percent.

The touchscreen based Z10 was released last week in Britain. It will arrive in stores in the United States at a still unspecified date next month.

A second phone with a physical keyboard as well as a touchscreen, the Q10, will be released later in the spring. At the Canadian introduction, Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of BlackBerry, appeared ! to suggest that the Q10 may arrive later than April, the company’s initial delivery date estimate.



Can Big Data From Epic Indian Pilgrimage Help Save Lives

Big data, meet humanity.

The South Asia Institute at Harvard has sent a team of public health specialists to one of the largest gatherings in the world, the Kumbh Mela in India, with a goal of assembling the largest public health data set ever among a transient population.

The Kumbh Mela, a religious festival that is expected to draw nearly 100 million pilgrims, is in full swing near Allahabad, at the confluence of rivers that Hindus consider to be holy.

The pilgrims are there to bathe. The epidemiologists are there to study their health.

They are analyzing data from the four hospitals that cater to the congregants to try to gauge who is ailing from what and when. By mapping “complaints, diagnoses, medications and geographical origins of patients,” the researchers said, they hope to discover disease outbreaks andpatterns.

The real-time surveillance, the researchers say, could be useful if disease breaks out this time and to plan for future Kumbh Melas. It could hold lessons for other countries looking to tap the power of data for public health.

“This will be the largest data set of its kind in a temporary mass gathering, its size allowing us to develop new metrics for detecting epidemics when total population size fluctuates widely from day to day,” said Dr. Satchit Balsari, a fellow at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard and a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

So far, the team has produced a data chart showing that many people are coughing and that cases of dysentery and diarrhea are more pronounced on one river bank than on the others.

In less than two weeks, the team has collected information on 16,000 patients who have come to the clinics, and the most critical day! s are yet to come. Sunday is the most auspicious day for pilgrims to take a dip in the waters where the rivers Ganges, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati meet. The festival runs to March 10.

The public health project is part of a larger pilgrimage by Harvard scholars to study the Kumbh Mela. You can follow their progress on Twitter, using the hashtag #HarvardKumbh.



Can Big Data From Epic Indian Pilgrimage Help Save Lives

Big data, meet humanity.

The South Asia Institute at Harvard has sent a team of public health specialists to one of the largest gatherings in the world, the Kumbh Mela in India, with a goal of assembling the largest public health data set ever among a transient population.

The Kumbh Mela, a religious festival that is expected to draw nearly 100 million pilgrims, is in full swing near Allahabad, at the confluence of rivers that Hindus consider to be holy.

The pilgrims are there to bathe. The epidemiologists are there to study their health.

They are analyzing data from the four hospitals that cater to the congregants to try to gauge who is ailing from what and when. By mapping “complaints, diagnoses, medications and geographical origins of patients,” the researchers said, they hope to discover disease outbreaks andpatterns.

The real-time surveillance, the researchers say, could be useful if disease breaks out this time and to plan for future Kumbh Melas. It could hold lessons for other countries looking to tap the power of data for public health.

“This will be the largest data set of its kind in a temporary mass gathering, its size allowing us to develop new metrics for detecting epidemics when total population size fluctuates widely from day to day,” said Dr. Satchit Balsari, a fellow at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard and a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

So far, the team has produced a data chart showing that many people are coughing and that cases of dysentery and diarrhea are more pronounced on one river bank than on the others.

In less than two weeks, the team has collected information on 16,000 patients who have come to the clinics, and the most critical day! s are yet to come. Sunday is the most auspicious day for pilgrims to take a dip in the waters where the rivers Ganges, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati meet. The festival runs to March 10.

The public health project is part of a larger pilgrimage by Harvard scholars to study the Kumbh Mela. You can follow their progress on Twitter, using the hashtag #HarvardKumbh.



Social Media Images From Tunisia, as an Opposition Leader Is Buried

Video from the Tunisian news site Jadal showed clashes on Friday in Tunis during the funeral of an opposition leader.

Activists, bloggers and journalists in Tunisia posted a stream of images on social networks Friday, showing thousands of mourners packed into the largest cemetery in the capital, Tunis, for the funeral of Chokri Belaid, a leading opposition figure assassination two days ago triggered a wave of street protests against the Islamist ruling party.

Among those uploading images of the funeral â€" which took place as the poice fired tear gas at protesters and cars were set on fire during clashes outside the graveyard â€" were my colleagues Kareem Fahim and Tara Todras-Whitehill, Thierry Brésillon of the French news site Rue 89, and Tunisian activists including Selim Kharrat of the rights organization Al Bawsala.

In video streamed live during the funeral by the activist blogger Slim Amamou, the 2011 revolutionary chant calling for the downfall of the regime could be heard echoing around the graveyard.

Acha3b Yurid Isqat Al Nidham http://t.co/VPkX3JDq

â€" Slim Amamou (@slim404) 8 Feb 13

A photograph in a set uploaded to Facebook by the blogger Mon Massir appeared to show that even the late opposition leader’s young daughter was forced to shield her face from the tear gas fired by the police.

Social Media Images From Tunisia, as an Opposition Leader Is Buried

Video from the Tunisian news site Jadal showed clashes on Friday in Tunis during the funeral of an opposition leader.

Activists, bloggers and journalists in Tunisia posted a stream of images on social networks Friday, showing thousands of mourners packed into the largest cemetery in the capital, Tunis, for the funeral of Chokri Belaid, a leading opposition figure assassination two days ago triggered a wave of street protests against the Islamist ruling party.

Among those uploading images of the funeral â€" which took place as the poice fired tear gas at protesters and cars were set on fire during clashes outside the graveyard â€" were my colleagues Kareem Fahim and Tara Todras-Whitehill, Thierry Brésillon of the French news site Rue 89, and Tunisian activists including Selim Kharrat of the rights organization Al Bawsala.

In video streamed live during the funeral by the activist blogger Slim Amamou, the 2011 revolutionary chant calling for the downfall of the regime could be heard echoing around the graveyard.

Acha3b Yurid Isqat Al Nidham http://t.co/VPkX3JDq

â€" Slim Amamou (@slim404) 8 Feb 13

A photograph in a set uploaded to Facebook by the blogger Mon Massir appeared to show that even the late opposition leader’s young daughter was forced to shield her face from the tear gas fired by the police.

Updates on the Winter Storm

Local authorities from New York City to Maine started working to battle what forecasters said could be the biggest blizzard in a century for some cities. Journalists from The Times are monitoring the storm and will be providing updates throughout the day.

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Google Changes Its Ad Program to Try to Solve the Mobile Ad Riddle

Google has a mobile problem, and it is trying to fix it.

Searches on desktop computers, Google’s most lucrative way to sell ads, are slowing. Searches on mobile devices are increasing, but mobile ads cost less.

The result has been that an important business metric for Google â€" the amount that advertisers pay each time someone clicks on an ad â€" has declined for five quarters in a row.

This week, Google tried to reverse this trend by introducing one of the biggest changes in years to its AdWords program, which it called enhanced campaigns. The program, which will force advertisers onto mobile devices, has become the talk of the ad industry,and some advertisers are already protesting against it.

Until now, advertisers have had to create separate campaigns for different devices and audiences. Now, they will create a signal campaign and give Google directions about how they want to target the campaign by bidding higher on certain devices, locations and times of day. Then, Google’s algorithms will place the ads.

Say a pizza restaurant in San Francisco wanted to advertise. If someone searched for “pizza” using a computer at noon in the financial district, Google might show an ad with a link to the take-out menu. If someone did the same search on a cellphone at 8 p.m. a half-mile from the restaurant, Google might show a click-to-call ad and walking directions.

The theory is that the distinctions among devices have blurred. People use their phones on the sidewalk and on the sofa, and switch indiscriminately between tablets and computers. Now, according to Google, context is most important, like time of day and whether ! someone is on the go or at home.

The change will make things simpler for some advertisers, and enable many who did not have the resources to try mobile advertising to jump onto mobile devices.

But many advertisers are also complaining. Google’s ads are sold in an auction system, and mobile ads have been less expensive partly because their demand has been relatively low. But now all Google ad campaigns will include mobile devices by default, driving more bidders into each auction and likely forcing up mobile ad rates. This is good for Google but disappointing to advertisers.

Advertisers also do not want to lose their fine-grained control over their ad campaigns and cede that ontrol to Google. For example, iPad users generally spend more on e-commerce sites than users of other kinds of tablets, so many retailers showed ads only to iPad users, but now they will lose that option.

Like any change Google makes to its advertising rules, this will force advertisers â€" who, following Google’s previous instructions, have spent money and time creating separate campaigns for separate devices â€" to revise their ad campaigns for the new, multi-device era.



Daily Report: H.P. Directs Its Suppliers in China to Limit Student Labor

Hewlett-Packard, one of the world’s largest makers of computers and other electronics, is imposing new limits on the employment of students and temporary agency workers at factories across China, report Keith Bradsher and David Barboza of The New York Times.

The move, following recent efforts by Apple to increase scrutiny of student workers, reflects a significant shift in how electronics companies view problematic labor practices in China.

Many factories in China have long relied on high school students, vocational school students and temporary workers to cope with periodic surges in orders as factory labor becomes increasingly scarce. Students complain of being ordered by school administrators to put in long hours on short notice at jobs with no relevance to their studies; local governments sometimes order schools to provide labor, and the factories pay school administrators a bonus.

For much of the last decade, many of the world’s big electronics companies have largely neglected te problem, beyond in some cases tracking reports of the abuses. Apple made the unusual move last year of joining the Fair Labor Association, one of the largest workplace monitoring groups, which inspects factories in China that make computers, iPhones and other devices under contract from Apple. And last month, Apple said it would begin requiring suppliers to provide information about their student workers.

Now H.P. is pushing even harder. Its rules, given to suppliers in China on Friday morning, say that all work must be voluntary, and that students and temporary workers must be free “to leave work at any time upon reasonable notice without negative repercussions, and they must have access to reliable and reprisal-free grievance mechanisms,” according to the company.

The rules also require that student work “must complement the primary area of study” â€" a restriction that could rule out huge numbers of students whose studies have nothing to do with electronics or manufacturing.

Enforcing workplace rules in China has always been difficult, as even Chinese laws on labor practices are flagrantly ignored by some manufacturers as they struggle to keep up with production demand amid labor shortages. The Chinese government announced last month that the nation’s labor force had begun to shrink slowly because of the increasingly rigorous one-child policy through the 1980s and 1990s.



Daily Report: Europe\'s Plan for GPS Limps to Crossroads

Europe's commitment to a new, European-controlled satellite navigation system will be decided in Brussels this week, when European leaders will try to hash out a long-term budget for the 27-nation bloc.

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