Think like Steve Jobs

Do you want to think and innovate like Steve Jobs? Well Apple University is the place that you need to be with. This place is the ultimate galore to take lessons of leadership and long term vision that will benefit your organization.

Way back in 2008, Apple University was launched with the sole motive to teach Apple employees on how to think like Steve Jobs and make decisions he would make. The ultimate goal is to teach the executive team the thought process to be the future leaders Steve Jobs is the person who oversees the whole process surrounding Apple University. Joel Podonly, who was a former Yale professor, is the manager of Apple University. Tim Cook, COO and Apple CEO, and Ron Johnson, senior Vice President is the teachers of Apple University.

According to Forbes, Job is ensuring that his teachings are being collected, curated and preserved so that future generation of Apple's leaders can consult and interpret them.

According to Business Insider, the company prepares case studies of major decisions that Apple executives have made throughout their history, such as why they decided to build Apple retail stores, or focus on having one factory in China manufacture the iPhone, and then they discuss them in class.

These are precious lessons that will shape up the future course of leadership in Apple. And every organization desperately wants to get the format in which apple cultural phenomenon had worked. It has cultivated the tradition of working in a more creative, forward-thinking environment. Their strategy is remarkably common sense more down-to-earth than artsy. Apple ignores what's going on in the tech industry instead the company develops products by paying strict attention to its audience, high-end consumers. And one of the reasons of their high voltage anticipation of its products is their vaunted secrecy that keeps industry buzzing all the time about its next move. They develop their marketing strategies and executions by listening to their audiences instead of aping the competitor up the street. Moreover, the best things get done by top-down leadership. Apple also turns down many more ideas than it approves for production. The company believes in the principle of perfection. Apart from its creative arena, it also outsells all other organization as far as the marketing strategies is concerned. Apple is totally a user experience, especially when it comes to serving their customers.

Google ranked world’s most attractive employer, again

 Internet search giant Google has been ranked as the best company to work for by management and engineering graduates in two separate surveys, which term the company the world’s “most attractive employer” of 2011.

According to the survey conducted by global employer branding firm Universum, Google has been ranked at the top of its 2011 list of the top 50 global businesses and engineering companies to work for - the third year in a row.

The search giant has been dubbed the most attractive employer by more than 160,000 people from Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, Spain, the UK and US looking for the right place to work.

“For the last three years, we have been seeing Google leading the pack and it will take a strong player with a clear talent strategy to steal this number one spot,” Universum Head (Research and Consulting) Lovisa Ohnell said.

The search giant is followed by auditor KPMG, where most B-Schools students want to work, while engineering graduates picked tech giant IBM as their second choice.

For engineering students, software giant Microsoft is the third choice, followed by car-maker BMW (fourth), chip-maker Intel (fifth), electronics company Sony (sixth), tech firm Apple (seventh), GE (eighth), Siemens (ninth) and consumer goods group Procter & Gamble (10th).

The other technology firms that were favoured by engineers are HP, Cisco, Oracle, Nokia, Dell, and Lenovo.

“The software industry is highly dependent on its human capital, hence the efforts to attract and retain the brightest minds in the world,” Universum Global Account Director Carlo Duraturo said.

“There’s a new working culture paradigm today - the relaxed and creative office - and part of it we owe to this industry. Generation Y feels very comfortable working in this new environment and it’s clearly reflected in the attractiveness of the software industry,” Duraturo added.

Meanwhile, in the list of top 50 employers for business students, KPMG is followed by rivals PwC, Ernst & Young and Deloitte at third, fourth and fifth spot, respectively.

In addition, B-Schools students seeking the best employer ranked Microsoft sixth in the list, followed by Procter & Gamble (seventh), financial services entity JP Morgan (eighth), Apple (ninth) and financial services major Goldman Sachs (10th).

Among the other notable names in the list, soft drink major Coca-Cola figured at 12th position in the list, while Citi occupied 29th place and beverages firm PepsiCo bagged 30th place in the list for business students.

“The talent market for business career-seekers is being dominated by the professional services firms, known for being great places to launch a career, and by companies that offer a new working culture in a dynamic environment,” Ohnell added.

Thinnest Nanowire Will Make Computing Super Fast

World's thinnest nanowires will drive computers super fast in the near future using light, a new research claims.

Nanowires will use a 'photonic chip' at its core to perform functions in computing and electronics.

Researchers from Swinburne University of Technology and the Australian National University engineered a nanowire thousand times thinner than a human hair in a special type of glass known as chalcogenide. The photonic chip is the primary goal of the Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), involving six universities, says doctoral student Elisa Nicoletti, who led the study.

The internet is connected by miles of optic fibre cables and electronic routers. However, these routers work at much slower speeds than the optic cables, slowing the system down, according to a Swinburne statement.

 Photonic chip would solve this problem, powering ultra-fast telecom networks that transfer information at the speed of light.

 The realization of the chip will rely on a range of factors, including the fabrication of extremely tiny materials and the researchers' ability to harness a unique optical property known as the 'non-linear effect'.

 Chalcogenide exhibits non-linearity, which means its optical density changes according to the applied light intensity. Simply told, it can handle the passage of greater or lesser intensity of light, without breaking down.

Heat-resistant fungal spores found in Western Ghats

  The spores survived and germinated after being exposed to 115 degree C for two hours

Can the mesophilic fungal spores that normally grow at 20 degree C to 35 degree C survive higher temperatures and still be able to germinate when the conditions are right? Believe it or not, laboratory studies have shown that some species of mesophilic spores can indeed survive even when exposed to 115 degree C for two hours! The duration of survival was longer at lower temperatures.

“The fungi are among the most heat-resistant eukaryotes on record and are referred to as ‘Agni's Fungi,' after the Hindu God of Fire,” notes the paper published recently in the Fungal Biology journal.

Serendipitous

This has been a serendipitous finding of a Chennai based scientist T.S. Suryanarayanan and his team. Dr. Suryanarayanan is the Director of the Vivekananda Institute of Tropical Mycology.

“We were studying the fungi for enzymes of pharmaceutical interest and discovered the heat-resistant trait accidentally,” said Dr. Suryanarayanan. “We were very surprised by the find.”

Leaf litter became the natural choice to look for new species as bacteria and fungi facilitate the degradation of the leaves. And the search was further narrowed down to endophyte fungi that normally live inside living leaves and turn into leaf-litter degrading fungi once the leaf dies.

Tropical forests are one of the best habitats to search for new endophyte species. Hence the search for leaf litter naturally took him to a forest adjacent to the Mudumalai wildlife sanctuary.

As Dr. Suryanarayanan recalls, the fungi were isolated from the dead leaves and cultured for extracting the enzymes of interest. In the process, the fungi with the spores had to be heated to 115 degree C for two hours to completely remove the water content.

However, after weighing the fungi along with the spores, for some inexplicable reasons, the scientists did not discard the waste material. Instead they cultured the spores of Bartalinia sp.

What happened next was totally unexpected. “The spores germinated and produced fungus after a few days,” he said. The ability to germinate was sufficient proof that the spores had indeed survived the heat treatment.

The scientists repeated the experiment several times to be sure that the phenomenon was real and not due to any contamination. Having observed this strange phenomenon in one species, the researchers studied a few more species and saw them behaving the same way.

There is something more important than the spores' ability to withstand higher temperatures. “The change in temperature was not gradual. There was a sudden and steep increase in temperature from 20 degree C to 115 degree C,” said Dr. Suryanarayanan. “But the fungal spores still survived.”

Another aspect is the nature of the heat. “It was dry heat, and this type of heat has a very different effect on the fungal cells,” he underlined.

The mechanism of survival may be very different as the temperature shift was very sudden and steep, and the heat was dry in nature.

The temperature inside the oven and the kind of heat that they were subjected to were very different from what even the higher temperature resistant thermophilic fungi can withstand. The optimum temperature at which thermophilic fungi grows is around 50 degree C.

So how did the mesophilic fungi withstand such high temperatures? The answer lies in the original habitat from where the litter was collected.

“The location from where we collected the litter is often subjected to forest fires,” he said. “Our hypothesis is that periodical forest fires have made the spores adapt to and survive high temperatures.”

Dr. Suryanarayanan is leaving this month-end as a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Fellow to the Department of Biochemistry, Ohio State University to study the feasibility of using fungi to produce biofuel from plant waste.  

Top Tech Stories of 2011

2011 is been full of excitement for the tech world. It was phishers and hackers who were making news for the first 6 months. The epic hack on the play station network by Geohotz will be noted forever in the history of technology. It was all about awareness for the cyber and web security. The new inventions and innovation like Google bringing out Google+, MySpace and Friendster coming with a different look and Facebook itself announced plans to unveil "something awesome".


1. The PS3 Hacking The major hacking the led to the disablement of the Sony play station network, made the techies realize how weak their technology is. The compromising of credit card information anguished the gamers. The hacker group called anonymous threatened and hacked the Sony play station to compete with the PS3 hacker Geohotz. The other sect of hackers called Lulzsec split-up after they cluttered with the digital bits of plenty of organizations including the CIA and Arizona police. The hacking led to the widespread adoption of ironclad security across the Web. In some way we should be thankful to the hackers.


2. AT&T Announces Fusion with T-MobileThe announcement of AT&T acquiring T-Mobile (mobile with 4G facilities) for $39 Billion through a press release joggled up a sleepy Sunday in the month of March. The later declaration of new 4G modems for Albequerque led to a conspiracy since this would create a monopoly which is a great threat for GSM carriers. But many big players supported the AT&T mobile as it would be helpful for people living in rural areas.

3. Twitter Takes Down Anthony WeinerThis news was a less of awareness and more of a caution. May 27th Anthony Weiner's 45,000 followers on twitter checked out his photo with a bulge on his face. Weiner alleged that his account was hacked and the photo posted was a hoax. But later when he was found guilty his fate was all sealed. He had to step down from his position. He was also following random young women on twitter was considered to be a lousy act by a reputed politician.

4. Apple, Google, and Amazon Take Music into the CloudAmazon unveiled its cloud music locker and player which later Google was about to bring out. In the June starting apple announced iCloud. iCloud has the features that the cloud service offers but didn't have parallel users. Steve jobs flattered about the major music labels which sadly Amazon and Google didn't do. There are rumours that iCloud must have cost Apple around $150 million.

5. Microsoft Windows EvolvesThe Announcement of Microsoft designing windows8 to work on ARM devices which has been modified to run on Intel's x86 chips. The metro tablet interface enjoyed the gossips and rumors about their brand new OS.

6. Nintendo Announces Wii UNintendo's Wii U was sensationalized as they announced about their games to be more superior to PlayStation 3, Xbox 360. But their ideas and plan were vague so no one got the answer for the question "what are they upto?" A sophisticated tablet motion controller, and the console itself will have HD graphics, but the experience of using a tablet just isn't as intuitive as waving a Wiimote. This will be a mystery till 2012.

7. Verizon gets the iPhoneVerizon iPhone was expected to be a myth among many people which was later proved to be a true fact. The Verizon version was a CDMA version ofiPhone 4. The upcoming iPhone 5 which will be the world's top phone would work on both CDMA and GSM networks.

8. Location Tracking brought to light Apple was sued by 2 scientists when they found the company tracking locations of iPhone users. Apple was mum about this issue in
the start but later it broke its silence and said they had a location tracking database to make it more secure which tranquilized the issue a bit. The database was confidential and no one would see the location services on their phones in a same way again.

9. Google Announces Its Facebook Competitor, Google+This is news that was spread like a virus and was the craze among the all the Facebook fans. Every person wanted to try out Google+. Google+ was actually brought to bring down Facebook; can also be called as an alternative of Facebook. The innovation of google+ led to a serious rivalry between Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page.

10. Microsoft Buys SkypeMicrosoft investing and acquiring Luxembourg-based VoIP upstart Skype for $8.5 billion shows that they have loads of cash.

New light shed on how memory is organised

  A method that allowed measurements right down to the millisecond level was used

In an article published  in Nature, researchers describe exactly how the brain reacts during the transition between one memory and the next.

Consider these situations: You're rudely awakened by the phone. Your room is pitch black.

It's unsettling, because you're a little uncertain about where you are — and then you remember. You're in a hotel room.

Similar disorientation

Sound like a familiar experience? Or maybe you've felt a similar kind of disorientation when you walk out of an elevator onto the wrong floor?

But what actually happens inside your head when you experience moments like these?

The study by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience employed a method that allowed them to make measurements right down to the millisecond level.

The research was conducted in the laboratory of May-Britt and Edvard Moser, co-director and director respectively of NTNU's Kavli Institute, by first author Karel Jezek.

Their findings show that memory is divided into discrete individual packets, analogous to the way that light is divided up into individual bits called quanta. Each memory is just 125 milliseconds long — which means the brain can swap between different memories as often as eight times in one second, according to a Norwegian University of Science and Technology press release.

“The brain won't let itself get confused,” says Professor May-Britt Moser. “It never mixes different places and memories together, even though you might perceive it that way.

This is because the processes taking place inside your head when your brain is looking for a map of where you are take place so fast that you don't notice that you are actually switching between different maps. When you feel a little confused, it is because there is a competition in your brain between two memories. Or maybe more than two.”

Brain researchers Edvard and May-Britt Moser are trying to understand exactly how the brain works. Their approach is to meticulously monitor electrical activity in different parts of the rat brain, while the rats explore different mazes.

Painstaking approach

It's a painstaking approach that provides them ever more pieces to the puzzle that is the workings of the brain.

To explore the question of whether the brain mixes memories together, the researchers created a special box for their laboratory animals that effectively enabled them to instantaneously ‘teleport' a rat from one place to another — without the help of the Starship Enterprise as featured in the science fiction teleseries ‘Star Trek.'

Then, they tested how the brain handled the memory of place when the experience of that place suddenly changed from one location to another.

“We tricked the rats,” May-Britt Moser explains. “They're not really teleported of course, but we have an approach that makes them believe that they have been. The features of the box, which give the rats a sense of where they are, are actually ‘constructed' out of different lighting schemes. So we can switch from one group of location characteristics to another with the flick of a light switch.

Apps to Survive TRAI's SMS Cap

Should we really feel disappointed with TRAI's limitation on SMS? The answer is "NO". There is always a solution for everything. Similarly, to avoid this restriction of 100 SMSes per day for each SIM card, listed below are a few practical and handy apps for your phone, that help you be connected for ever and a day.


WhatsAppLacking qualm, it's the best available IM App for any policy! The mobile number is your login ID and a nickname to keep your friends closer. Friends from your address book that are using WhatsApp are positioned in the Favorites category. You can have simple and clean text chats, share pictures, videos, voice recordings, and your location on a map. Although paid on iOS, it is liberated on platforms like Blackberry, Android, Symbian, and Windows Phone 7 Mango.
Fring-The great way to stay connected to your buddies is through Fring. It's available for iOS, Symbain and Android for free. You can have an access to video chats
or group video chats, live chats and voice chats. All you need to do is just register for an account and link your GTalk, AIM, ICQ or MSN accounts to it and get started. It can be downloaded from your phone App Store, or head on to m.fring.com!
Kik Messenger-Available for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7, Kik Messenger has over 4 million users. It has features like real-time chatting which informs you whe
n a message has been sent, read, and even when the opposite person is typing. You can also share pictures, and even have group chats. You have to create a username and login, and then add those of your friends that are using Kik Messenger, and get going. eBuddyeBuddy is an awesome messenger that allows chat on Facebook, AIM, Yahoo!, GTalk, MSN and ICQ. It can be downloaded for free from the iOS App Store, Android Market, and Nokia Ovi Store. For other phones like Blackberry, you can check out get.ebuddy.com for the download. One more fact about eBuddy is that it also has a web messanger that allows you to chat directly from your phone's web browser
Meebo-Meebo, available for iOS, Android, and Blackberry, comes free of cost. Alike eBuddy, it also has a web chat feature. The platforms that do not have the app av
ailable can log on to meebo.com/mobile and chat. Meebo allows you to chat on Facebook, AIM, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo!, Google Talk, ICQ, and Jabber. It can be easily downloaded from the respective App Stores. NimbuzzNimbuzz is software that links you to friends via the internet. The finest part is, even a low-end phone can run the service. You need to just Log in and you will be flooded with multiple options. Chat using text messages, make phone calls or send pictures and multimedia files, all this for free. All you need to pay is the internet usage charged by your telecom provider.
Cnectd-Cnectd works on BlackBerry, Symbian, iPhone and Android phones. It can be downloaded from cnectd.getjar.com. The software uses very little of your phone's me
mory yet the user interface are very refined, almost like BlackBerry Messenger.