GOP Golden Boy Marco Rubio revealed the magnitude of his star power today, delivering an impassioned speech on immigration that showed exactly why he is the true heir apparent of the Republican Party.
Addressing a crowd of hundreds at the Hispanic Leadership Network Conference in Miami, Rubio laid out a sweeping vision for immigration reform and challenged his party’s presidential candidates to adopt positive positions on the hot-button issue.
The speech was masterful, laced with powerful emotion, humor, and an impressive defense of free enterprise and the American dream.
Here’s an excerpt:
We have always been a nation of haves and soon to haves, a people who have made it and people who believe that given the chance they will make it too. And if we lose that, we lose the essence of what’s made us great in terms of economics.
And so, when the choices that are put before us today are dangerous ones, because if we choose this path of pitting people against each other, if we buy into this notion that our economy really can’t grow fast enough for all of us to prosper so we’re going to have to somehow empower government to distribute the wealth of this country among us, we’ve chosen to become like everybody else. We’ve chosen to become like the countries that your parents and grandparents came here to get away from. And that’s a powerful message. And that’s the message that we need to deliver. And that’s the message we need to work on delivering. It’s a winning message, but it’s a difficult message to get to because the gateway issue of immigration stands in the minds of so many people who we live next to and love.
With the nation’s eyes on Florida’s Republican primary next week, the speech gave Rubio the opportunity to step up as a leader on the immigration issue. The Florida Senator’s rhetorical gifts and genuine charisma underscored the weakness of the 2012 Republican field, and presented Rubio as the man who can give his party the positive message it needs to win elections.
Read the whole speech here, or watch the video below.
The Republican presidential candidacy is still far from decided, based on the split primaries and mixed polls so far. So here’s another source for trying to figure who’s really pulling ahead — the number of new Facebook fans that each candidate is getting, according to the Inside Facebook Election Tracker.
Mitt Romney is finally making some strong gains this month, in contrast to his Facebook performance over December. By “strong gains” I mean he’s been attracting a roughly similar number of fans to Ron Paul, the candidate who normally dominates on the web (and the clear leader last month). The two have fought for the daily lead for most of January, except for when Rick Santorum surged around his Iowa primary win on the 3rd.
Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, managed to win South Carolina on the 21st, which corresponded with his biggest gains on Facebook. But he’s still way weaker than the others. And the rest of the candidates are no longer registering any meaningful gains, whether or not they’ve officially dropped out.
Overall, Romney still has the most Facebook fans among Republicans, with 1.39 million. Paul is a distant second at 800,000. Gingrich is down at 250,000 and Santorum a pitiful 90,000.
Of course, these numbers only say so much about who’s actually the most popular. Fan growth can come through inorganic methods like Facebook ads, fan page promotions, or clever use of the news feed. And fans can come from anywhere in the world; they’re by no means primary voters. But, the gains made by Santorum and Gingrich right when they won their primaries suggests many new fans are Liking candidate pages organically, at least in the sense that users are acting on their because of larger events. Certainly, the low fan counts that these candidates are showing overall on Facebook suggest that they are not doing much of anything to reach more voters.
Paul’s fanbase could also be discounted because he consistently does well in online matchups like these, even though he has trouble winning primaries. But maybe that will change in Florida? He had the biggest day of the month recently, at 9,500 new fans on the 24th. As Brittany Darwell notes over on Inside Facebook regarding the other primary winners, the fan counts seem to start climbing right before they do well with the vote counts.
Otherwise, Romney’s position is looking stronger than ever, similar to the latest polls.
For big companies like Google, Salesforce and Microsoft, being active in charitable causes is practically a must-do. Companies of this size often have entire teams of employees focused on philanthropic initiatives and organizing company-wide volunteering events. But at smaller companies that don’t have the same infrastructure in place, employees often don’t have the same opportunities to give back, on-the-job.
Screenshot of Causecast for Employees (click to enlarge)
That’s where a new software platform built by Los Angeles-based startup Causecastcomes in. This week Causecast debuted its Employee Impact Platform, a web-based program that connects companies and their employees with non-profits and charitable causes. With Causecast, employers can select a group of causes to which they’ll provide matching donations to whatever employees give. The platform can also be used to organize company-wide volunteering events. Non-profits plug into Causecast for free, and companies are generally charged a flat rate of around $1 per user per month.
Causecast founder Ryan Scott walked me through a demo of the new platform. To me, the best part to me is how easy Causecast makes it to spend extra-curricular time with your co-workers doing something other than going out for happy hour drinks. Non-profits of course will benefit from more companies donating time and money to their causes — but according to Scott, companies benefit a lot as well. He put it like this:
“Employees who aren’t engaged with their jobs aren’t as productive. And it sounds counter-intuitive, but you often have to leave the office to become more engaged with your work, and with your co-workers. Volunteering is a really great way to get everyone together outside of the office to do something bigger than themselves.”
Causecast, which was founded in 2007, currently has 30 employees. Thus far, Causecast has been self-funded by Scott, who first became known in the late 1990s for co-founding NetCreations, where he created and patented the “double opt-in” process that propelled the email marketing industry. After selling NetCreations in an all-cash deal in 2001, Scott said, he decided to find a way to merge his desire to do some good in the world while still staying active in business.
When Causecast first launched, it was an online platform to let all people contribute to charitable causes touted by celebrities and brands. The shift into the enterprise space is a smart one, as small businesses are becoming increasingly important parts of the employment landscape and the general public is calling more and more for corporations to behave responsibly. With Causecast, small businesses can compete with larger, more established companies when it comes to offering their employees ways to give back. It’ll be interesting to see how the new iteration of Causecast takes off in the months ahead.
And the company is expected to move a step closer to that goal next week: it’s apparently filing for an IPO Wednesday.
While the newly minted millionaires won’t have their hands on the money for a few months, we thought it would be a good time to check out some of the real estate available in the Silicon Valley area.
These homes may or may not still be available in the spring, but it pays to know what’s out there.
Research In Motion Ltd. RIM-T made a “conscious decision” to focus on growing in emerging markets at the expense of its position in the United States, according to the company’s new chief executive officer – a decision for which the Waterloo, Ont., company is now paying a heavy price.
In a wide-ranging discussion broadcast to RIM’s 17,000 employees around the world, Thorsten Heins offered a more frank diagnosis of the company’s challenges, as well as a clearer picture of his strategy and priorities, than in his public statements this week. It was his first address to staff since Mr. Heins took over from RIM’s long time co-CEOs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, and The Globe and Mail obtained a copy of the video.
Mr. Heins assumes the corner office in the most difficult time in the company’s history, with its U.S. market share collapsing and its international growth now at risk from an attack by Google Inc. and its Android operating system, which is growing exponentially. But he attempted to lift spirits at the technology company by stressing the company’s highly successful push into developing countries in Asia, South America and elsewhere.
“When we started this strategy of going global, we knew we had to throw basically most of our resources into the global play, which we did, and look at the success,” Mr. Heins told the employees. “But we had to do this a little bit at the expense of being very, very strong in the No. 1 competitive market of the world, which is the U.S. market. This was a conscious decision that we took. Now we have to get through this.”
In response to questions that the company said were e-mailed from employees, Mr. Heins tried to squash the frequent rumours about a possible sale of the company. He said definitively that the company was not up for sale, adding: “Don’t believe everything you read,” in reference to rumours the company had hired Goldman Sachs or had talked to Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. about a deal. His comments earned applause and cheers from the 100 or so employees in the room with him.
“Simply, simply no,” Mr. Heins continued. “It’s a fantastic growth and profit story. There’s no reason to go and sell the company. You guys are fantastic. We have a fantastic brain base and intellectual base. We have fantastic board members supporting us, and also into the future. Why should we do this? We are going to do this ourselves.”
In his comments, Mr. Heins praised Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Balsillie, hinting that the two former co-CEOs would still play a role in guiding the company’s strategy and future technology. He also stressed the need to straighten out RIM’s dysfunctional internal processes, which have tarnished the company’s reputation by leading to product delays and missed deadlines.
“One of the issues we really need to tackle in the future is not the innovation – that will be always covered as long as Mike and Jim are on the board and help us with strategic advice and counsel, and Mike will run the new innovation committee on the board,” Mr. Heins said.
“It just gives me hurt feelings if we have such great ideas and then we get kind of criticized in the public because we miss it by three months, or we’re not complete when we really want to launch something. That will be a huge focus of mine.”
During the town hall, which lasted roughly one hour, Mr. Heins reiterated that his priorities were marketing the current line of smartphones running the BlackBerry 7 operating system, saying, “we have to get BB7 into the minds and into the brains of people.” It also includes pushing out a software update in February for RIM’s weak-selling PlayBook tablet computer, and then focusing the company’s full attention on the BlackBerry 10 operating system that will run on devices the company has delayed until some time in late 2012.
Throughout his address, Mr. Heins talked about the company’s strong balance sheet and its huge global growth. But he kept coming back to the way RIM’s problems harm the company’s brand in the eyes of its customers – citing, notably, the huge wireless carriers that are some of its most important partners.
“When I came into RIM, I think the biggest orders we got at that time were about [50,000 BlackBerrys] per order coming in, and there were marketing campaigns from carriers around us,” Mr. Heins said.
“Today we sell them millions of units. They commit to marketing promotions that cost them $30, $50-million dollars. It really hurts their business, and our business, if we then have to call them and say, for whatever reason, you know, we’re two weeks late.”
“It was tough to meet with some of our customers in 2008, and you’ve got all these [complaints] – ‘This isn’t working, that ain’t working.’ And it’s because we scaled. We were in this huge growing phase.” Recently, Mr. Heins said, the quality of products RIM was delivering to carrier partners such as Verizon Communications Inc. had improved dramatically.
He also gave some rare insight into his personal life, saying he loved riding his red motorcycle through the Bavarian mountains of his native Germany but that he was learning to love riding in the Waterloo region, as well. “I love riding through the farmland, it refreshes your mind, it’s amazing. Sometimes I ride for about 40 minutes, and all of a sudden I’m here. How did I get here?” he said. “It’s very, very creative. I love it.”
As just about everyone should know by now, the seeds of what grew into Facebook were planted at Harvard. Might there be a bunch of mini-Zucks lurking in the dorms of Cambridge? If so, a new venture capital firm — the first housed right on the Harvard campus — wants to find them.
Dubbed The Experiment Fund, the firm describes itself as “a bridge between America’s oldest universities and storied venture capital firms.” Backed by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the firm is made up of Hugo Van Vurren, NEA co-head Patrick Chung, and NEA General Partner Harry Weller — all of whom have a degree of some form from the school.
When I say it’s “right on the Harvard campus”, I’m not kidding — it’s going to be based out of 33 Oxford Street, which is Harvard’s School Of Engineering And Applied Sciences. It’s a bit more than a stone’s throw from Harvard Yard. With that said, the fund operates with complete independence from the university.
And if you’re not a Harvard student? Don’t sweat it too much. The fund says they’re open to anyone, “regardless of university affilation, nationality, age, or prior experience.” Being a Harvard student (or at least a Cambridge local) probably wouldn’t hurt, though.
While it seems the size of the fund isn’t set in stone yet (or at least, it wasn’t disclosed — I’ll look into it. Update: they’re not setting a cap at this point), the team says they expect to seed “several” companies with up to $250k over the next two years.
Deep in tech land, where the English language is barely recognizable to native speakers, they refer to it as grok, as in “Apple groks the user experience.”
What does that mean? The word has actually been a counterculture fave for decades and first appeared in Robert Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. According to the novel, it means “to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed.” In other words, to grok means you get it, big time.
Apple Inc. AAPL-Q, maker of the iPhone, iPad and iPod, groks like no other tech company, with the possible exception of Google. Nokia, Sony, Myspace, Research In Motion and Eastman Kodak, do not. Microsoft groks in computer operating systems and business productivity software, and is decidedly ungrokky everywhere else.
The proof of Apple’s grok-icity is in the numbers. On Tuesday, it reported a record quarterly net profit of $13-billion (U.S.) on sales of $46.3-billion, way ahead of expectations as the new iPhone 4S took off. The company is sitting on $100-billion in cash, equivalent to the economic output of Bangladesh or Vietnam. Apple shares soared, briefly making it the world’s most valuable company, with a market value of more than $400-billion.
Within days either way of Apple’s blockbuster results, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and Finland’s Nokia, the once unassailable leader in mobile phones, reported a net loss, including a fat write-down of €1.1-billion ($1.46-billion U.S.) in the fourth quarter as its new Windows-based phones failed to challenge Apple’s dominance. Its shares have gone from €25 to €4 in five years. And BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, another tech giant whose shares are on a Titanic run, replaced its joint chief executive officers Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie.
Sony, meanwhile, continues to shed value. Its shares are down by more than half in the last year alone.
There is no assurance that any of the fallen tech giants will ever regain their once-formidable statures in spite of their suddenly heroic efforts to do so. How did they achieve beached-whale status?
It’s not so much that they recognized their faults too late; it’s that they seem incapable of changing quickly. They have the wrong corporate culture, the wrong DNA, the wrong talent for the wrong time.
Take Kodak. The story of its slow-motion suicide, repeated a million times in the last decade, is that it never moved with alacrity to embrace digital photography (unlike archrival Fujifilm of Japan). The theory makes sense if one considered Kodak a leader in the imaging industry.
Yes, it made digital cameras and film, but at heart it was a chemicals company and got bogged down by the chemicals industry mindset. Unlike Apple, for example, it never developed a user-interface and content system like iTunes, one that could have revolutionized the imaging and photo-sharing industry. Note that Kodak never attracted serious corporate or private equity suitors even though it owned one of the most recognizable brand names on the planet. That’s because it had little to offer anyone who wanted to make a splash in the imaging business.
To some degree, Nokia and RIM suffered from the same cultural logjam. Their sins were not just their failure to realize the vast potential of easy-to-use, lightning-fast, touch-screen phones; it was their failure to create ecosystems – the interface that can seamlessly deliver content from music to movies to the user – that could rival Apple’s. To be sure, Nokia and RIM had competitive products (for a time), but it seemed their overriding ambition was to protect the products that had given them gorgeous market share numbers instead of adapting to a fast-changing customer tastes.
Nokia is finally rolling out a family of Windows-inspired smartphones. The new Lumia 800 is getting good reviews. But why would you buy it? It is not just competing with the iPhone and the Google Android devices themselves. It is competing with the entire iTunes ecosystem, which is vastly deeper and richer than Nokia’s.
Even if Nokia develops an ecosystem of sorts, Apple is bound to leap ahead with the Next Big Thing, which may be Apple TV. Imagine a smart LCD-screen TV that’s connected to Apple’s content infrastructure. Using Siri, Apple’s voice-activated personal assistant software, the viewer could order any movie, TV show, game or song available on the Apple network. If Apple TV proves a success, TVs made by Sony or Samsung might seem suddenly primitive.
RIM’s future is equally uncertain. Note that the new CEO, Thorsten Heins, is the former chief operating officer. Promoting an insider, one who owes his livelihood to the outgoing co-CEOs, does not imply that a strategy and product revolution is in the offing. Instead, it implies that the old strategy was sound and just badly executed under the previous management. The market gets this – the shares sank after the management shuffle.
The lack of real change suggests a sore lack of grok.
The twin anti-piracy threats that were being considered by Congress — the SOPA bill in the House and the PIPA legislation in the Senate — have been put aside due to the storm of controversy and criticism they sparked. But the media and entertainment industries are unlikely to give up their battle so easily, author Neil Gaiman said in an interview this week, even though what they’re trying to do amounts to “trying to put genies back in bottles.” Gaiman, who recently signed an open letter protesting SOPA with over a dozen other prominent artists, says the content industries have to recognize the Internet has changed the media landscape just as fundamentally as Gutenberg’s printing press did.
Gaiman is probably best-known for his comics and graphic novels — including the Sandman series — as well as the novels American Gods and Coraline, and the screenplay for the film Beowulf. Although British-born, he lives in Minnesota with his wife, musician Amanda Palmer. In the interview, Gaiman said as someone who creates books and screenplays and other content, he is somewhat conflicted about what the Internet and digital media have done to traditional businesses like books and movies:
I as a creator kind of missed out on the DVD era, which is kind of sad, because I would likely be so much richer if I hadn’t — but that era was really such a tiny fragment of time, really just an eye-blink in the scheme of things, in which Hollywood was able to sell a physical object to people that contained content.
I think people in Hollywood are convinced that people would suddenly start buying DVDs again if only they could stop all this peer-to-peer file sharing and so on. They just are fundamentally missing the point… genies don’t go back in bottles once they’re out.
Gaiman said the Internet represents a fundamental change that is altering the competitive landscape for virtually every business whose product can be digitized and uploaded, and they need to adapt or perish. “Gutenberg put an awful lot of scribes out of work too,” the author said. “They had debates back then that seem nonsensical now, like the debate about the evils of printing bibles that anyone could read, rather than having them interpreted for them by monks and priests.”
That disruption isn’t good or bad, Gaiman said, “it just is. It’s a fact of life now.” And while legislators will no doubt continue to push forward with laws like SOPA and PIPA, he said, they won’t be able to turn back the clock to a time before the Internet was invented. In a video interview he recorded last year for the Open Rights Group, which is embedded below, Gaiman talked about how he was initially incensed about people pirating his work, but eventually came to the realization that they were actually promoting his work, and he was selling more in countries where his books were pirated.
Gaiman said in his interview with GigaOM that the biggest single change the Internet has sparked is an explosion of information — and that has been both good and bad. It’s good because anyone can reach an audience, he said, but it can also be bad because there is so much noise, and it’s hard to find the good content in that sea of information:
The biggest change between the 20th century and the 21st is that all of the gatekeepers are going away. For the first million years or so of humanity, information was incredibly scarce, and it was an incredibly powerful thing that people devoted their entire lives to uncovering… but somewhere around 1997 it changed, and we moved from famine to glut.
I read somewhere that there were more books published in a week than there were published in all of 1950, or something like that. Is that a good thing? I’m not sure. It makes it harder to find the things that you like… It’s now the job of the crowd and the hive mind to do that.
And while SOPA and PIPA proponents see only the negatives of the Internet and content sharing, there are some positives as well, Gaiman said — including the ability any artist has to reach an audience with their work. The author described how he and his wife wanted to record part of a performance tour they were on, and set up a donation through the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. “We asked for $20,000, because that was the absolute minimum we needed to do it, and we wound up with $133,000,” he said. “That showed me there was this completely different way of monetizing something.”
That kind of phenomenon allows creators to reach their fans directly, without having to go through a traditional middleman, Gaiman said — and that obviously makes industries that are composed primarily of middlemen rather nervous. But while they will undoubtedly continue to fight for laws like SOPA and PIPA, the author said they are “fighting on the wrong side of history.” At some point, “It’s like King Canute railing against the waves; the waves will continue to come in, and the landscape will continue to change.”
Cheap cameras and accessible network technologies have made remote home monitoring the sort of thing you can set up yourself on a whim over lunch.
But not all do-it-yourself security solutions are made equal. Each has its own set of irks, quirks and perks.
We took a look at a couple of systems currently gaining steam – the Stem iZON Remote Room Monitor and the iWatchLife security service – and discovered some make-or-break differences.
This iOS-only product from American gadget-maker Stem desperately wants to appeal to fans of Apple’s clean design philosophy via its minimalist aesthetic and easy, breezy app.
The white, cylindrical camera connects to a small hemispheric base via a magnet and can be adjusted with simple pushes and twists. It’s a brilliant bit of engineering. You can just place it on a shelf or attach the base to the ceiling with a couple of screws, included.
It also comes with an optional breakaway power cord segment meant to facilitate immediate disconnection should kids get tangled in the wire. Stem clearly believes some parents will want to use the iZON in place of a tradition child monitor in kids’ rooms.
Setup is simple. Just plug the camera into the wall, download Stem’s free iOS app, and follow a quick set of steps that connect the camera to your home router, creating a live video stream from the camera to your phone or tablet wherever you happen to be.
Then it’s just a matter of adjusting settings. One-tap buttons allow you to switch motion and audio alarms on and off, and sliders allow for quick sensitivity adjustments to help you decide how large a disturbance is required to trigger an alert.
You can also adjust the active area – the portion of the frame that can create an alert – by dragging a square across the screen, but it’s clumsy. You can only drag from the upper left corner of the screen, and you’re limited to rectangular shapes.
Still, so far so good. We’ve got well-engineered hardware and a pretty simple app. But the iZON stutters in a crucial area: Delivering alerts.
When something trips the alarm it gets logged in the app’s alerts tab. The only way to learn about alerts is by checking your app or waiting for a tinkling notification. I found the latter unreliable, sometimes arriving late if at all. I’d have preferred the option to receive an email.
Plus, videos are uploaded to your YouTube account, which means you have to wait minutes or more for them to process before viewing. It’s a slow and clunky process, especially if you have multiple alerts to work through.
I want to like the iZON, but in the end it feels more like a toy than a real security solution. It can capture images of burglars breaking in and kids raiding the fridge, but you’ll likely only find out about these events well after the fact.
iWatchLife, by comparison, feels like a home monitoring system for people who take security seriously.
The Ottawa-based company’s service consists of a browser application that runs on both PCs and Macs, plus downloadable apps for iOS devices, Android handsets, and select smart TVs.
I accessed the service from my PC, where I was able to add cameras, manage settings, and flip through recorded events. I also viewed live camera feeds and alerts on my phone. In both cases the software was all business. No frills or flair; just simple, straightforward buttons and icons.
iWatchLife differentiates itself from its competition by offering what it calls “smart event detection,” a fancy way of saying that it tries to keep false alarms at a minimum. It does this in a couple of ways.
