e mail

Your Money: Even Capitol Hill Gets the Financial Blues

November 3, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

With their salaries of $174,000 (or more for those in leadership roles), senators and members of Congress are paid more than most of us. These days, many of them need enough money in the first place to jump-start their campaigns.

But there have to be some lawmakers who have suffered as much as many of their constituents in the last four years, have changed the way they legislate because of it and learned some lessons worth sharing, right?

Representative Robert Turner, a Republican from New York City, lost his house in a fire after the storm this week. So for him the wound is still raw.

Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah who may have the lowest net worth of the 100 senators, sold his home in a short sale. I hoped to speak to him about it, but his media representative, Brian Phillips, said in an e-mail that my column idea “has to be the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Then there is Representative Joe Walsh, a freshman Republican who represents the suburbs northwest of Chicago. He proudly claims the mantle of America’s poorest congressman, telling Chicago magazine that he’s “No. 1 in poverty.” In the last few years, he’s had to answer for his tax liens, a foreclosure and an accusation that he owed more than $117,000 in past-due child support.

What do we see of ourselves in him? And what does his opponent’s efforts to brand him a deadbeat tell us about what we ought to be willing to tolerate in our elected officials?

There isn’t much in the historical record on these questions, but one example from 20 years ago is instructive. That was when the public learned that many members of Congress were helping themselves to free overdrafts from banklike government accounts.

Voters who had no such privileges at their own local banks weren’t pleased. Within one election cycle, according to Gary C. Jacobson, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, and Michael A. Dimock, then a graduate student at the university, who later published an academic paper about the scandal, the worst abusers were about three times as likely not to be in Congress anymore as incumbents who steered clear of the issue. This was equally true of Republicans and Democrats, though Democrats were the more egregious of the two parties in this instance.

It wasn’t until after Mr. Walsh won his Republican primary in 2010 that some of his biggest financial troubles emerged. He triumphed with the help of strong Tea Party backing. And given his call for fiscal restraint, it was only natural that local reporters would look at his personal finances.

Sure enough, right after the primary, The Daily Herald discovered that Mr. Walsh had recently lost a condominium to foreclosure. “This experience helped me gain a better appreciation for the very real economic anxieties felt by Eighth District families, many of whom are just a paycheck or two away from facing similar difficulties,” Mr. Walsh told the paper via e-mail.

Voters fed up with the goings-on in Washington seemed to empathize with this and revelations of tax liens he dealt with more than a decade ago, or at least they were willing to hold their noses and look past it. He beat the Democratic opponent in his race by just a couple of hundred votes.

But the revelations didn’t end there. Last year, The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Representative Walsh’s former wife had filed court papers seeking more than $117,000 in what she claimed was past-due child support. She also said that he failed to make his payments at the same time that he was personally lending money to his campaign, putting politics over paternity, in effect. Representative Walsh countered that there was a verbal agreement between him and his former wife that allowed him to skip the monthly payments because he wasn’t earning much money at the time.

Earlier this year, the two resolved the dispute and issued a joint statement saying that “we now agree that Joe is not and was not a ‘deadbeat dad’ and does not owe child support.”

At the time of the initial revelation, Representative Walsh’s lawyer, R. Steven Polachek, told The Sun-Times that he’d “had no more problems with child support than any other average guy.”

About 40 percent of the 500,000 or so child support cases that the Illinois Department of Health Care and Family Services handles involve late payments at any given moment. The half-million cases tend to involve households with lower income, according to a spokesman, where there may be more frequent income disruptions.

Whether the questions about Representative Walsh’s child support make him Everyman or not, however, it’s the original suggestion that he prioritized his campaign over his children that may give voters the most pause.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/your-money/even-capitol-hill-gets-the-financial-blues.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: e mail, free overdrafts, members of congress

Bucks Blog: Gay Couples May Want to File a Protective Tax Refund Claim

November 1, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The recent decision by a federal appeals court regarding the Defense of Marriage Act suggests gay couples may want to file something known as a protective refund claim with the Internal Revenue Service in the event the Supreme Court overturns the law, according to accounting experts.

The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York struck down the law’s definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman as unconstitutional. The decision was the second by a federal appeals court striking down DOMA, as the law is known. The law’s constitutionality is expected eventually to be considered by the United States Supreme Court.

If the high court invalidates DOMA, legally married same-sex couples will be able to file claims for refunds of federal tax overpayments, said Janis Cowhey McDonagh, a partner at Marcum LLP in New York and a specialist in the firm’s national LGBT and non-traditional family practice.

Currently, same-sex marriage is recognized by six states — New York, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont — and the District of Columbia.

Patricia Cain, a law professor at Santa Clara University and an authority on legal issues faced by same-sex couples, said others might want to consider filing a protective claim, too.

For instance, she noted that an additional nine states, as well as Washington, D.C., recognize “marriage equivalent statuses” for same-sex couples, like domestic partnerships or civil unions. While most people presume those relationships aren’t marriages, she said in an e-mail, “there’s a good argument that absent DOMA such relationships should be treated as marriages for tax purposes.”

In light of such uncertainty, she said, some details may end up being settled by further litigation. “I actually would advise anyone who would benefit from joint filing to file an amended return as a protective claim for refund if they are married (no matter where they live) or in a marriage equivalent status.”

Ms. McDonagh said couples should file a protective refund claim now because there is a three-year statute of limitations on tax refund claims. By filing a claim now, couples will have standing for overpayments dating to 2009, while DOMA wends its way through the court system. The claim applies to income taxes, estate taxes as well as gift taxes, she said.

It’s possible, Ms. McDonagh said, that if the Supreme Court voids the law, the I.R.S. could waive the three-year statute of limitations. That would seem the fair thing to do, she said, but there isn’t any precedent for the agency doing so. So to be safe, filing a protective claim makes sense.

Couples should consult their accountants for advice about filing a protective claim, which essentially involves filing an amended tax return, she said.

The case decided earlier this month was brought on behalf of Edith Windsor of New York City, who married her longtime partner, Thea Clara Spyer, in 2007 in Canada. When Ms. Spyer died in 2009, Ms. Windsor inherited her property. Because the I.R.S. was not allowed, under the Defense of Marriage Act, to consider her as a surviving spouse, she faced a tax bill of $363,053 that she would not have had to pay if the marriage had been recognized.

Do you intend to file a protective claim?

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/gay-couples-may-want-to-file-a-protective-tax-refund-claim/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Your Money Tagged With: e mail, gay couples, law professor

Bits Blog: RIM Shows Off New BlackBerry Phones, but Gives No Release Date

September 25, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Eric Risberg/Associated Press Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of RIM, did not offer a specific date for the coming line of BlackBerry 10 phones.

OTTAWA — Research in Motion said on Tuesday that its coming line of BlackBerry 10 phones would include the company’s popular BlackBerry Messenger service, a feature still absent on its tablet computers.

But during his presentation to software developers in San Jose, Calf., Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of RIM, still did not offer a specific date for what he called “our most important launch ever.” Mr. Heins said, however, that the new phones, which have been delayed twice, will be on sale at some point early next year.

At the meeting, the company displayed the second version of a prototype BlackBerry 10 phone. Outwardly, it appeared little different from a prototype given to developers in May. But the software on the phone demonstrated on Thursday looked much more refined and advanced. In addition to BlackBerry Messenger, it included apps for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Foursquare, which were integrated with the phone’s calendar, datebook and e-mail apps.

RIM also showed how corporations and governments would be able to segregate their data and app from users’ personal selections and information.

The software linking all the features, Mr. Heins said, will allow users to perform a variety of tasks from a single screen without switching applications.

Although creating new phones and a new operating system has clearly been a struggle for the company, Mr. Heins made no effort to temper expectations.

“We are convinced that the BlackBerry 10 platform will shape the next 10 years as profoundly and significantly as BlackBerry shaped the last 10 years,” he said. Recent demonstrations of the prototype to people at telephone companies and elsewhere, he said, have made “believers out of those who had previously written BlackBerry off.”

Still, the success of the new phones remains to be seen. On Thursday, Mr. Heins will have to face a much less cheery group, RIM’s investors, when he announces the company’s second-quarter results. A Bloomberg survey of 35 analysts found that they expected the company to report that earnings fell 41 percent from the same period last year.

Leading up to Tuesday, some analysts speculated that the total number of BlackBerry users had not grown or had even declined during the quarter, which would have been a first for the company. But Mr. Heins said RIM had counted 80 million BlackBerry users during the quarter, up from 78 million the last time the company reported.

Article source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/rim-shows-off-new-blackberry-10-phones-but-gives-no-firm-release-date/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: e mail, research in motion, tablet computers

DealBook: Behind the Scenes, Some Lawmakers Lobby to Change the Volcker Rule

September 21, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Elise Amendola/Associated PressSenator Scott Brown broke with Republicans to support the expansion of federal financial regulation.

As regulators put the finishing touches on new rules for Wall Street, they remain entangled in a partisan fight over the overhaul.

In public letters and closed-door meetings, more than 100 lawmakers have lobbied the Federal Reserve and other authorities over the Volcker Rule, records show. The rule, intended to restrict banks from placing risky trades and investing with hedge funds, has drawn an outcry from Republicans who want to mute its effect and some Democrats who want to strengthen it.

The wrangling has been on display at public hearings and in letters posted on regulatory Web sites. Still, some lawmakers have applied pressure behind the scenes.

Internal government documents provide a glimpse of one such lobbying effort last year, when an aide to Senator Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, appealed to the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve.

The documents show a back-and-forth between the Fed’s top lawyer and Mr. Brown’s staff. “I have a very urgent request,” Nathaniel Hoopes, Mr. Brown’s aide, wrote in an April 2011 e-mail. Seeking to fine-tune an exemption, he argued that a broad range of bank customers should be allowed to invest with hedge funds under the Volcker Rule. “My boss has been hearing it from constituents,” he added, referring to the rule’s impact on Massachusetts-based financial firms.

In a first draft of the rule released last fall, regulators agreed with that broad definition.

In response to Mr. Hoopes’s e-mail, the Fed’s general counsel, Scott G. Alvarez, acknowledged that “there are many difficult issues raised by the Volcker Rule.” In another e-mail, Mr. Alvarez encouraged Mr. Brown’s office to publicly voice its concerns, according to interviews with government officials and the documents. The Fed initially released the documents to a Democratic aide who obtained them through a public records inquiry.

In a statement, the Fed said that it routinely “seeks comment from the public and all interested parties on our rule-makings and carefully evaluates and weighs each comment.”

The Fed, like all regulators, provides feedback to lawmakers and has held several meetings with advocacy groups that support the Volcker Rule, including Americans for Financial Reform.

Still, the e-mails — while not improper or unusual — show that such discussions are not always public. The exchange with Mr. Hoopes came months before regulators opened a public comment period or even publicly released a draft version of the Volcker Rule.

The e-mails also indicate how, even after passing the Dodd-Frank Act, some lawmakers are still tinkering with its machinery.

Mr. Hoopes, who previously worked for an arm of Lehman Brothers, also pressed his case with the Treasury Department. In an e-mail to a Treasury official, he said, “This should be very simple and straightforward and I think the Fed is over-complicating it.”(The Boston Globe first reported about the e-mail this summer.)

Mr. Brown, one of three Republicans to vote for Dodd-Frank, is in a tight re-election fight with Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat. She made her name in Washington as a fierce critic of Wall Street and supporter of changes like the Volcker Rule.

The partisan haggling over the rule affects a number of regulators. But much of the pressure has centered on the Fed, where some lawyers have questioned whether the rule is too burdensome for Wall Street, according to government officials briefed on the matter. Officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the rule-writing process is private.

“The Volcker Rule regulations have unfortunately been long delayed, obviously in my mind because the agencies are having difficulties reaching agreement,” said Michael Bradfield, the former general counsel at the Fed. “The well-known skepticism of some in the Fed about the workability of the Volcker Rule has undoubtedly contributed to this situation.”

Few rules present a greater challenge — or have provoked more political squabbling — than this one. Named for Paul A. Volcker, a former Fed chairman who campaigned for the rule, it aims to curb the sort of risk-taking that led to government bailouts in the financial crisis. The rule would largely prevent banks from making bets with their own money, a practice known as proprietary trading. It would also limit how banks invest in hedge funds.

But a draft proposal, released last fall, granted several broad exemptions to the proprietary trading ban. Regulators recently entered a final stage of rule-writing after a group of lawyers from the Fed and other agencies ironed out concerns over several exemptions, according to people briefed on the matter. While regulators initially hoped to complete the rule by September, the people said, they now expect a final version around the November election.

Several Democrats, echoing the antibank animus of the election season, have pushed the Fed to narrow the Volcker Rule exemptions.

Some regulators have stepped up their focus on the rule, too.

Bart Chilton, a Democratic member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is helping to write the overhaul, said in a letter to the Fed last week that certain exemptions would “significantly undercut the fundamental purposes of the rule.”

Republican lawmakers counter that Dodd-Frank could jeopardize an already anemic economic recovery.

Mr. Brown, whose donors include major mutual funds like Fidelity, has been particularly vocal.

He supported the Volcker Rule after chipping away at one of its core tenets. During the debate on Capitol Hill, Mr. Brown championed an exemption that allowed banks to invest up to a 3 percent stake in hedge funds. Banks can also offer hedge fund investments to outside investors like pension funds.

Now, Mr. Brown is fighting over the details of the exemption. While Democrats want to restrict access to customers who already have an account with the bank, Mr. Brown wants to expand the definition of “qualified investors.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Brown said he was “proud to cast the deciding vote” for Dodd-Frank and that he worked “to protect Massachusetts jobs.”

In his lobbying, Mr. Hoopes first appealed to the Treasury Department, but then took his concerns to the Fed. A “narrow definition,” Mr. Hoopes warned in an April 2011 e-mail to the Fed, “was not intended for this purpose” and would shift money to unregulated pockets of the market.

In reply, Mr. Alvarez of the Fed suggested that Mr. Brown file a public comment letter. “Others have been commenting on various ways we should interpret the statute, and we would consider very carefully any comment from you as well,” Mr. Alvarez wrote.

What happened next is unclear. While Mr. Hoopes had a brief phone call with the Fed, people briefed on the matter said, no one can recall specifics or whether Volcker was even discussed.

Mr. Hoopes soon filed a comment letter and thanked Mr. Alvarez “for all the quick responses to my questions, etc.” It is unclear to what questions Mr. Hoopes was referring.

Article source: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/behind-the-scenes-a-lawmaker-pushes-to-curb-the-volcker-rule/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: bank customers, e mail, outcry

DealBook: Documents Shed Light on Early Concerns About Former Barclays Chief

September 19, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Stefan Wermuth/ReutersHector Sants, the former chief of the Financial Services Authority, raised concerns about Robert Diamond Jr., the former chief of Barclays.

Documents released by the British Parliament on Wednesday shed new light on regulators’ early concerns about Robert E. Diamond Jr., the former chief executive of Barclays who stepped down amid the rate-manipulation scandal.

An e-mail in 2010 detailing a meeting between Hector Sants, then the chief executive of Britain’s Financial Services Authority, and Marcus Agius, the outgoing chairman of Barclays, indicates that authorities raised questions about Mr. Diamond’s ability to run Barclays. While regulators eventually approved Mr. Diamond’s appointment as chief executive, they said their position could change in light of the rate-manipulation investigation.

The e-mail helps to clarify recent testimony by regulators over the rate-manipulation scandal.

Libor Explained

Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated PressRobert E. Diamond Jr., the former chief of Barclays, resigned in July because of a scandal involving interest rate manipulation.

According to the e-mail, Mr. Sants of the Financial Services Authority warned the Barclays chairman that Mr. Diamond “had not reached the level of openness, transparency and willing to air issues” with regulators. The e-mail also shows that John Varley, then the chief executive of Barclays, promised to “coach” Mr. Diamond before handing over the reins at the beginning of 2011.

In the 2010 e-mail, regulators also took aim at Barclays’ “risk appetite and control framework,” while acknowledging that the bank had made progress in this area. Mr. Agius moved to reassure regulators, according to the e-mail, saying Mr. Diamond was “fully on board with the processes in place and will not want to risk failing in this area.”

“I’d like to record that in that conversation, I made clear that our concerns about Barclay’s culture were not some generic observation but specific to Barclays,” Mr. Sants wrote in a 2012 letter to Parliament.

Regulators approved Mr. Diamond’s new role in 2010, but offered a caveat. In a conversation with Mr. Agius, Mr. Sants noted the appointment “at this time was on the basis that the current view of the investigation does not have an adverse affect,” according to the e-mail.

Article source: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/documents-shed-light-on-early-concerns-about-former-barclays-chief/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: e mail, mr diamond, robert e diamond

Pogue’s Posts Blog: New iOS 6 Loses Google Maps, but Adds Other Features

September 19, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The arrival of the iPhone 5 isn’t the only big news for phone fans this week. Wednesday, Apple is also making iOS 6 available to anyone with a recent iPhone (3GS, 4, or 4S), iPod Touch (fourth generation) or iPad (2 or 3). It comes installed on the iPhone 5 and the new fifth-generation iPod Touch.

(Caution: Not all features are available on the older models. I’ve noted the biggest such exceptions below, but you should check here for full details.)

Apple’s Maps app for iOS 6.
The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.
Sign up | See Sample

The challenge in creating a new operating system is always this: How do you add features without adding complexity?
On a tiny phone screen, that challenge becomes even more difficult. The answer, of course, is, you can’t — but few companies try harder to minimize the complexity than Apple. In iOS 6, for example, Apple counts more than 200 new features, but you’d know it with a quick glance.

Here’s the best of what’s new:

Maps. Apple, as you may have noticed, has been quietly dismantling its relationship with Google. In iOS 6, for example, there’s no longer a built-in YouTube app (Google owns YouTube); fortunately, YouTube offers a new app of its own.

And now Apple has replaced the iPhone’s longstanding Google Maps app. Apple says that Google had been steadily improving its Maps app — but only for Android phones, leaving the iPhone in the dust. For example, the iPhone app didn’t have spoken turn-by-turn directions. And on Android, the maps are composed of vector art—smooth lines generated by the computer — rather than the square tiles of pixels that you saw on the iPhone.

In any case, the new iOS Maps app offers those features — spoken navigation, vector maps — and more. You can just tell Siri where you want to go (“Give me directions to LaGuardia Airport”), and let the app start getting you there with one of the cleanest, least distracting navigation screens ever to appear on a GPS unit. The visual cues are big, bold and readable at a glance, and the spoken cues are timed perfectly so that you don’t miss a turn. You can even turn the screen off and let the voice alone guide you.

Real-time traffic and accident alerts are built in — no charge, courtesy of crowdsourced speed and position data from millions of other iPhone owners out driving.

Not all is rosy in Mapsland, though. Apple’s database of points of interest (stores, restaurants, and so on), powered by Yelp, is sparser than Google’s. There’s no built-in public-transportation guidance. For big cities, you get Flyover, a super-cool 3-D photographic model of the actual buildings — but losing Google’s Street View feature is a real shame.
During navigation guidance, you can’t rotate the map with your fingers or zoom in by more than a couple of degrees—to see your entire route, for example. Turns out you have to tap the screen and then tap Overview to access that more detailed, zoomable, rotatable map.

Flyover and the vector maps require a fast Internet connection, by the way. When you’re not in a 4G cellular area, it can take quite awhile for the blank canvas to fill in. (Navigation and Flyover don’t work on the iPhone 3GS or 4, the original iPad, or pre-2012 iPod Touches.)

Call smarts. These are some of my favorite new features. If you’re driving or in a meeting when a call comes in, you can flick upward on the screen to reveal two new buttons: Remind Me Later and Reply With Message. The first button offers choices like “In 1 hour” or “When I get home” (a message will remind you to call back); the second offers canned text messages, like “I’ll call you later” or a custom message, that let your caller know you can’t take the call now. Excellent.

Do Not Disturb is also incredibly useful. It’s like Airplane Mode — the phone won’t buzz, ring or light up — except that (a) it can turn itself on during certain hours, like your sleeping hours, and (b) it can allow certain people’s calls or texts through (people on your phone’s Favorites list, for example). You can sleep soundly, knowing that your boss or family can reach you in an emergency, but idiot telemarketers will go straight to voice mail.

(Similarly ingenious: The option called Repeated Calls. If someone calls you twice in three minutes — possibly someone who needs to reach you urgently — that call is allowed to ring during Do Not Disturb.)

Siri. Siri, the voice-activated servant, now understands questions about movies (“When is the next showtime of ‘Finding Nemo 3D?’” or “Who directed ‘Chinatown?’”), sports (“Who won the Yankees game yesterday?”) and restaurants (“Where’s the closest diner?”). In each case, Siri’s responses are visual and detailed—for restaurants, you can even make a reservation with one tap, courtesy of Open Table.

You can also speak Twitter or Facebook posts (“Tweet, ‘I just broke my shin on a poorly placed coffee table’”) and—hallelujah!—open apps by voice (“open Camera”). That’s a huge win.

Siri is also available in more languages and on more gadgets (the new iPod Touch; the iPad 3).

FaceTime over cellular. FaceTime is Apple’s video-chatting feature — and until today, it worked only in Wi-Fi hot spots. Now, at last, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5 and cellular iPad 3 owners can make video calls (to other iPhone, iPad, Touch and Mac owners) even when they’re out of Wi-Fi range, out in cellular land. When the signal is decent, the picture looks great. (ATT doesn’t let you use FaceTime over cellular unless you have one of its complicated and expensive shared-data plans.)

Camera panoramas. You can now capture a 240-degree, ultra-wide-angle, 28-megapixel photo by swinging the phone around you in an arc. The phone creates the panorama in real time (you don’t have to line up the sections yourself). Available on iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, and iPod touch (5th generation), and very welcome.

Passbook. This app collects and consolidates barcodes: for airline boarding passes, movie tickets you bought online, electronic coupons and so on. The feature hasn’t gone live yet, so I couldn’t test it except with phony coupons and boarding passes supplied by Apple to reviewers. But the apps for Delta, American, Starbucks and Fandango will be Passbook-compatible almost immediately, and that should be a great time-saver—your boarding-pass barcode appears automatically when you arrive at the airport (thank you, GPS), even on the Lock screen.

Safari browser. You can now save a Web page to read later, when you don’t have an Internet connection, and in landscape mode, a full-screen browsing mode maximizes screen space by hiding toolbars. (I don’t think the third new Safari, feature, iCloud Tabs, will be as useful. It lets you open up whatever browser tabs you left open on your Mac or iPad—if, that is, they’re all signed into the same iCloud account.)

Shared photo streams. You can “publish” groups of photos to specified friends; they can view the pictures on their Apple gadgets or on a Web page. They can add comments or “like” them.

Mail. In Mail, you can indicate the most important people; they get their own folder in the Inbox, helping to lift them out of the clutter. And at long last, you can now attach photos to a Mail message you’re already writing, instead of having to start in the Photos app — better late than never, I guess.

Miscellaneous. The option to publish utterances, photos or other bits to Facebook pops up in a bunch of different apps. In the Weather app, you now see an hour-by-hour forecast for today, in addition to the five-day outlook. A new Privacy settings page gives you on/off switches for the kinds of data each app might request (access to your contacts, location and so on). Tweaks have been made to the App Store app, Reminders, Videos and other apps.

And you no longer have to enter your Apple password just to download an update to an app you already have. Hosannah.

In the end, iOS 6 is to software what the iPhone 5 is to hardware: a big collection of improvements, many of which are really clever and good, that don’t take us in any big new directions. Lots and lots of nips and tucks — that’s Apple’s motto lately.

Unlike the iPhone 5, however, upgrading to iOS 6 doesn’t cost anything. It’s free and available now. In general, you should go get it—and you sacrifice very little (a few Maps features) and gain a lot.

Article source: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/new-ios-6-loses-google-maps-but-adds-other-features/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: e mail, mail newsletter

Pogue’s Posts: Google Glass and the Future of Technology

September 13, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

New gadgets — I mean whole new gadget categories — don’t come along very often. The iPhone was one recent example. You could argue that the iPad was another. But if there’s anything at all as different and bold on the horizon, surely it’s Google Glass.

That, of course, is Google’s prototype of a device you wear on your face. Google doesn’t like the term “glasses,” because there aren’t any lenses. (The Glass team, part of Google’s experimental labs, also doesn’t like terms like “augmented reality” or “wearable computer,” which both have certain baggage.)

Jason LongoDavid Pogue wearing Google Glass.
The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.
Sign up | See Sample

Instead, Glass looks like only the headband of a pair of glasses — the part that hooks on your ears and lies along your eyebrow line — with a small, transparent block positioned above and to the right of your right eye. That, of course, is a screen, and the Google Glass is actually a fairly full-blown computer. Or maybe like a smartphone that you never have to take out of your pocket.

This idea got a lot of people excited when Nick Bilton of The New York Times broke the story of the glasses in February. Google first demonstrated it April in a video. In May, at Google’s I/O conference, Glass got some more play as attendees watched a live video feed from the Glass as a sky diver leapt from a plane and parachuted onto the roof of the conference building. But so far, very few non-Googlers have been allowed to try them on.

Last week, I got a chance to put one on. I’m hosting a PBS series called “Nova ScienceNow” (it premieres Oct. 10), and one of the episodes is about the future of tech. Of course, projecting what’s yet to come in consumer tech is nearly impossible, but Google Glass seemed like a perfect example of a breakthrough on the verge. So last week the Nova crew and I met with Babak Parviz, head of the Glass project, to discuss and try out the prototypes.

Now, Google emphasized — and so do I — that Google Glass is still at a very, very early stage. Lots of factors still haven’t been finalized, including what Glass will do, what the interface will look like, how it will work, and so on. Google doesn’t want to get the public excited about some feature that may not materialize in the final version. (At the moment, Google is planning to offer the prototypes to developers next year — for $1,500 — in anticipation of selling Glass to the public in, perhaps, 2014.)

When you actually handle these things, you can’t believe how little they weigh. Less than a pair of sunglasses, in my estimation. Glass is an absolutely astonishing feat of miniaturization and integration.

Inside the right earpiece — that is, the horizontal support that goes over your ear — Google has packed memory, a processor, a camera, speaker and microphone, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi antennas, accelerometer, gyroscope, compass and a battery. All inside the earpiece.

Google has said that eventually, Glass will have a cellular radio, so it can get online; at this point, it hooks up wirelessly with your phone for an online connection.
And the mind-blowing thing is, this slim thing is the prototype. It’s only going to get smaller in future generations. “This is the bulkiest version of Glass we’ll ever make,” Babak told me.

The biggest triumph — and to me, the biggest surprise — is that the tiny screen is completely invisible when you’re talking or driving or reading. You just forget about it completely. There’s nothing at all between your eyes and whatever, or whomever, you’re looking at.

And yet when you do focus on the screen, shifting your gaze up and to the right, that tiny half-inch display is surprisingly immersive. It’s as though you’re looking at a big laptop screen or something.

(Even though I usually need reading glasses for close-up material, this very close-up display seemed to float far enough away that I didn’t need them. Because, yeah — wearing glasses under Glass might look weird.)

The hardware breakthrough, in other words, is there. Google is proceeding carefully to make sure it gets the rest of it as right as possible on the first try.

But the potential is already amazing. Mr. Pariz stressed that Glass is designed for two primary purposes — sharing and instant access to information — hands-free, without having to pull anything out of your pocket.

You can control the software by swiping a finger on that right earpiece in different directions; it’s a touchpad. Your swipes could guide you through simple menus. In various presentations, Google has proposed icons for things like taking a picture, recording video, making a phone call, navigating on Google Maps, checking your calendar and so on. A tap selects the option you want.

In recent demonstrations, Google has also shown that you can use speech recognition to control Glass. You say “O.K., Glass” to call up the menu.

To illustrate how Glass might change the game for sharing your life with others, I tried a demo in which a photo appeared — a jungly scene with a wooden footbridge just in front of me. The theme from “Jurassic Park” played crisply in my right ear. (Cute, real cute.)

But as I looked left, right, up or down, my view changed accordingly, as though I were wearing one of those old virtual-reality headsets. The tracking of my head angle and the response to the immersive photo was incredibly crisp and accurate. By swiping my finger on the touchpad, I could change to other scenes.

Now, there’s a lot of road between today’s prototype and the day when Google Glass will be on everyone’s faces. Google will have to nail down the design — and hammer down the price. Issues of privacy and distraction will have to be ironed out (although I’m not nearly as worried about distraction as I was before I tried them on). Glasses wearers may have to wait until Glass can be incorporated into actual glasses.

We may be waiting, too, for that one overwhelmingly compelling feature, something that you can’t do with your phone (beyond making it hands-free). We’ve seen that the masses can’t even be bothered to put on special glasses to watch 3-D TV; it may take some unimagined killer app to convince them to wear Google Glass headsets all day.

But already, a few things are clear. The speed and power, the tiny size and weight, the clarity and effectiveness of the audio and video, are beyond anything I could have imagined. The company is expending a lot of effort on design — hardware and software — which is absolutely the right approach for something as personal as a wearable gadget. And even in this early prototype, you already sense that Google is sweating over the clarity and simplicity of the experience — also a smart approach.

In short, it’s much too soon to predict Google Glass’s success or failure. But it’s easy to see that it has potential no other machine has ever had before — and that Google is shepherding its development in exactly the right way.

Article source: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/google-glass-and-the-future-of-technology/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: e mail, new gadgets, smartphone

DealBook: Former Senior Barclays Executive Faces Scrutiny in Parliament

July 16, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Simon Dawson/Bloomberg NewsJerry del Missier, former chief operating officer of Barclays, arriving to give testimony to Parliament on Monday.

LONDON — Jerry del Missier, a former senior Barclays executive, faced tough questioning on Monday about his role in the bank’s rate-manipulation scandal during a tense parliamentary hearing, indicating that he had instructed bank employees to report lower rates at the behest of regulators.

Mr. del Missier, 50, stepped down from the British bank this month, shortly after Barclays settled British and American claims that it had submitted false rates to improve its earnings and deflect concerns about its financial health.

The case centers on a benchmark known as the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, which is used to help determine the pricing for trillions of dollars of financial products, including home loans and credit cards.

On Monday, the Canadian-born Mr. del Missier, a top deputy of the former Barclays chief executive, Robert E. Diamond Jr., faced questions from British politicians about whether he directed employees to report artificially low rates. In testimony, Mr. del Missier indicated that he had received instructions from Mr. Diamond to lower the rates, after the chief’s discussions with bank regulators on the matter.

In 2008, Mr. Diamond sent Mr. del Missier and another senior executive an e-mail regarding the government’s concerns about the bank’s Libor rate submissions. Mr. Diamond also discussed the issue with Mr. del Missier by phone, according to Mr. del Missier’s testimony on Monday.

The e-mail detailed a conversation between Mr. Diamond and Paul Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank of England, the country’s central bank. The two men discussed the bank’s financial position at the height of the financial crisis. After receiving the e-mail, Mr. del Missier instructed Barclays officials on Oct. 29, 2008, to lower the bank’s Libor submissions in line with those of rivals, according to regulatory filings.

In testimony, Mr. del Missier said he had acted in response to the conversation with Mr. Diamond. Mr. del Missier said he believed that senior government officials had instructed the bank to alter the rates. Mr. del Missier, however, did not speak to anyone at the Bank of England or other senior regulators about the issue.

“I expected that the Bank of England’s views would be incorporated into our Libor submissions,” Mr. del Missier said during his testimony on Monday. “The views would have resulted in lower submissions.”

Barclays agreed last month to a $450 million settlement with American and British authorities about the manipulation of Libor. According to regulatory documents, a number of the bank’s traders and some senior executives altered the firm’s Libor submissions for their own benefit between 2005 and 2009.

Several top Barclays executives, including Mr. Diamond, Mr. del Missier and the bank’s chairman, Marcus Agius, have resigned in the wake of the scandal.

Mr. del Missier’s testimony appears to contradict earlier statements by Mr. Tucker, the Bank of England deputy governor.

Mr. Tucker told the same parliamentary committee last week that his conversation with Mr. Diamond was related to fears that the financial markets might view Barclays to be at risk if its Libor submissions continued to be higher than those of other international banks.

Mr. Tucker said he called Mr. Diamond to remind him that people in the markets were questioning whether Barclays had access to capital. In the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, officials worried that the bank might have to be bailed out if the financial markets perceived the firm was a credit risk.

“I wanted to make sure that Barclays’ day-to-day funding issues didn’t push it over the cliff,” Mr. Tucker told the parliamentary committee.

The testimony by Mr. del Missier comes after statements from Mr. Diamond that he never told his deputies to report false Libor rates. Mr. Diamond said his discussions were misinterpreted.

Mr. del Missier, however, said the e-mail outlining the conversation between Mr. Tucker and Mr. Diamond represented an instruction from government officials to alter Barclays’ Libor submissions.

During his hourlong testimony, Mr. del Missier said he would not have instructed Barclays officials to lower the rate if he had not been asked to do so by senior British government officials. He also told the committee that he never followed up with the Barclays officials about the effect of lowering the submissions

British politicians repeatedly asked him whether lowering the bank’s Libor submissions in line with those of rivals was illegal, improper and wrongful.

“It didn’t seem an inappropriate action given it was taken from the Bank of England,” he said.

British lawmakers repeatedly asked Mr. del Missier why he was not aware of the manipulation of Libor at Barclays dating back to 2005. He said he was not aware of that activity until the beginning of 2010.

Barclays was “up to its armpits in dishonest activity in the run up to that phone call,” Pat McFadden, a British politician who sits on the committee overseeing the testimony, said in reference to Mr. Diamond’s phone call with Mr. Tucker in 2008.

Mr. del Missier’s career mirrors the rise of Barclays Capital, as the firm’s investment banking division was known. He joined the bank in the late 1990s, and became co-chief executive of the investment banking division in 2009 after holding several other senior positions.

He rebutted lawmakers’ accusations that he was taking responsibility for the rate manipulation in an effort to save Mr. Diamond’s reputation.

“I’m not the fall guy for anything,” he said. “I have resigned my position for the good of the bank.”

Article source: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/former-senior-barclays-executive-faces-scrutiny-in-parliament/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: e mail, libor rate, robert e diamond

Disruptions: Life’s Too Short for So Much E-Mail

July 9, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesRoyal Pingdom, which monitors Internet usage, said that in 2010, 107 trillion e-mails were sent. Corporate employees sent and received 105 e-mails a day.

Just thinking about my e-mail in-box makes me sad.

This month alone, I received over 6,000 e-mails. That doesn’t include spam, notifications or daily deals, either. With all those messages, I have no desire to respond to even a fraction of them. I can just picture my tombstone: Here lies Nick Bilton, who responded to thousands of e-mails a month. May he rest in peace.

It’s not that I’m so popular.

Last year, Royal Pingdom, which monitors Internet usage, said that in 2010, 107 trillion e-mails were sent. A report this year from the Radicati Group, a market research firm, found that in 2011, there were 3.1 billion active e-mail accounts in the world. The report noted that, on average, corporate employees sent and received 105 e-mails a day.

Sure, some of those e-mails are important. But 105 a day?

All of this has led me to believe that something is terribly wrong with e-mail. What’s more, I don’t believe it can be fixed.

I’ve tried everything. Priority mail, filters, more filters, filters within filters, away messages, third-party e-mail tools. None of these supposed solutions work.

Last year, I decided to try to reach In-box Zero, the Zen-like state of a consistently empty in-box. I spent countless hours one evening replying to neglected messages. I woke up the next morning to find that most of my replies had received replies, and so, once again, my in-box was brimming. It all felt like one big practical joke.

Meanwhile, all of this e-mail could be increasing our stress.

A research report issued this year by the University of California, Irvine, found that people who did not look at e-mail regularly at work were less stressed and more productive than others.

Gloria Mark, an informatics professor who studies the effects of e-mail and multitasking in the workplace and is a co-author of the study, said, “One person in our e-mail study told us after: I let the sound of the bell and pop-ups rule my life.”

Ms. Mark says one of the main problems with e-mail is that there isn’t an off switch.

“E-mail is an asynchronous technology, so you don’t need to be on it to receive a message,” she said. “Synchronous technologies, like instant messenger, depend on people being present.”Although some people allow their instant messenger services to save offline messages, most cannot receive messages if they are not logged on. With e-mail, it is different. If you go away, e-mails pile up waiting for your return.

Avoiding new messages is as impossible as trying to play a game of hide-and-seek in an empty New York City studio apartment. There is nowhere to hide.

I recently sent an e-mail to a teenage cousin who responded with a text message. I responded again through e-mail, and this time she answered with Facebook Messenger. She was obviously seeing the e-mails but kept choosing a more concise way to reply. Our conversation moved to Twitter’s direct messages, where it was ended quickly by the 140-character limit.

Later, we talked about the exchanges, and she explained that she saw e-mail as something for “old people.” It’s too slow for her, and the messages too long. Sometimes, she said, as with a Facebook status update, you don’t even need to respond at all.

Since technology hasn’t solved the problem it has created with e-mail, it looks as if some younger people might come up with their own answer — not to use e-mail at all.

So I’m taking a cue from them.

I’ll look at my e-mail as it comes in. Maybe I’ll respond with a text, Google Chat, Twitter or Facebook message. But chances are, as with many messages sent via Facebook or Twitter, I won’t need to respond at all.

Article source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/life%E2%80%99s-too-short-for-so-much-e-mail/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: e mail, next morning, nick bilton

Shortcuts: Putting a Price on Your Work

January 29, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

WHEN I first started as a freelance writer, I was eager to sell myself — but not eager to have to discuss money. So I more or less took whatever was offered.

Then I read somewhere that no matter what price a new client states, you always say in a polite but firm tone, “I expected more.” The first time I tried it, I was sweating and I doubt my tone was firm — it probably sounded more like pleading — but to my great surprise, it worked. With that one sentence, I made an extra few hundred dollars.

Negotiating a salary when you have a job can be stressful enough. But as more people are choosing, or being forced, to strike out on their own, they face the issue of deciding what to charge prospective clients.

Ask for too little and you feel cheated. Ask for too much and you may be pricing yourself out of the market. So what do you do?

At the most basic, you need to know what people in your field charge. This is true whether you are a marketing consultant, graphic designer or, like Mike Stoner, a professional magician.

“You have very little information to go on and it’s very easy to aim too high or even worse, too low,” Mr. Stoner said in an e-mail. “You really don’t want someone to say, ‘Wow, that’s a bargain,’ which basically translates as ‘We would have been happy to pay much more than that!’ ”

But how do you find out? Consult with others in the field. Especially if you are just starting, many professionals will be eager to help. Roy Cohen, a career counselor who has provided outplacement services to Goldman Sachs employees, said that when he first started, his competitors were not threatened. “They didn’t consider me competition,” he said, “and therefore shared information.”

Surveying friends or colleagues who have hired consultants in your area is a “very efficient way to determine a fee structure,” said Mr. Cohen, who wrote “The Wall Street Professional’s Survival Guide” (Financial Times Press, 2010).

Professional organizations are another great way to find out information. I belong to the American Society of Journalists and Authors. In one section of the group’s Web site, members can anonymously report what they were paid for jobs.

Colleen Plimpton, a garden consultant for the last three years, said she joined the Garden Writers Association to learn about prevailing wages.

“There is a lot of free information available, but with many sites it’s not easy to find, so you have to hone your research skills,” said Leanne Hoagland-Smith, whose company, Advanced Systems, offers executive coaching focusing on small businesses. She found that the American Society for Training and Development and SherpaCoaching were valuable resources.

But money is only one part of the negotiation, and it’s crucial to know what all your objectives are before talking to a client.

What does the contract say? If you’re a writer or graphic artist or logo designer, say, will you own the rights or will someone else? For how long? Will the work appear under your name or someone else’s? Is the client well known and possibly helpful to your career? If so, are you willing to take less for the long-term benefits that may offer?

Sometimes, especially when starting, underpricing yourself is a good strategy.

My sister, who was a marketing consultant, then took time off, is just returning to the job market. When bidding on her first job recently, she deliberately lowballed her work.

“I wanted to get some practice and get my confidence up,” she said.

It’s also important to realize that you have to constantly revise and change as a business develops. Kate M. Gilbert, a Web developer in Massachusetts, said, for instance, that she started out charging hourly rates when working by herself.

But when she teamed up with a friend who is a Web designer and started a business, Wide Open Sites, last year, “we had dozens of different clients and we were constantly asking each other, ‘What’s the rate for this one?’ It made it difficult when dividing up the payments.”

So they decided to set a flat rate based on an hourly fee, which they do not disclose to customers, because they want clients to focus on the project, not on the time it will take.

“Back in 2005, when I started as an independent contractor, I charged about $30 an hour,” Ms. Gilbert said. She started hearing from potential clients that her fees were lower than average, “so we kept pushing the envelope.” Now they charge $80 to $140 an hour.

E-mail: shortcuts@nytimes.com

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d5afe9c0360d6b193b66e0f92aa5e494

Filed Under: Your Money Tagged With: client states, e mail, roy cohen