All of the big American Wall Street banks have reported their fourth-quarter earnings, and you can pretty much use one word to describe them — rotten.
Most of the talk has centered on a full-on rout in trading revenue, especially in the bond, currency, and commodities markets. Citi's trading revenue was down 14% overall from the same time last year. JPMorgan Chase's bond trading revenue fell 23% from the same time last year.
The lawyer for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden says that his client never uses an iPhone because of fears about its security, Sputnik News reports.
Anatoly Kucherena spoke to news agency RIA Novosti and explained that Snowden is wary of the iPhone because of his knowledge of the NSA's surveillance tactics.
"Edward never uses an iPhone, he’s got a simple phone," the lawyer said. "The iPhone has special software that can activate itself without the owner having to press a button and gather information about him, that’s why on security grounds he refused to have this phone."
Documents leaked by Snowden reveal that iPhone security is an area of interest for the world's spy agencies. British spy agency GCHQ was recently revealed to have used the UDID system to track iPhone users.
Edward Snowden has been living in Moscow since fleeing the US and leaking internal NSA documents. The former government contractor has made appearances at technology conferences using encrypted video streams and telepresence robots during his time in Russia.
Shortly after Marissa Mayer became CEO of Yahoo in 2012, she instituted a new smartphone policy for employees.
In his book on Yahoo and Mayer's tenure as CEO there, Nicholas Carlson writes that Yahoo employees were still issued BlackBerrys instead of modern smartphones like the iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S3.
Mayer believed Yahoo needed to transition into a "mobile-first" company, and its employees should be using the popular devices apps were designed to run on.
Here's how Mayer broke the news to Yahoo employees at an all-hands meeting in September 2012:
We want to make sure that everyone here can experience smartphones. So we are saying goodbye to the BlackBerry. We’re not issuing any more BlackBerrys.
Instead, Yahoo employees were able to pick from an iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S3, Nokia Lumia 920, HTC One X, or HTC Evo 4G LTE, which were all very popular phones on their respective platforms at the time. BlackBerrys were dead.
The move demonstrates BlackBerry's increasing irrelevance at the time, even at big corporations like Yahoo. Today, BlackBerry has about 0.5% of the global smartphone market, which is why developers like those at Yahoo largely ignore the platform. Most developers focus on Android and iPhone because that's where the most users are.
It was also particularly damning for BlackBerry that a well-respected tech executive like Mayer didn't even consider the BlackBerry to be a smartphone.
Want more great stories about Yahoo and Marissa Mayer? You can buy Carlson's book "Marissa Mayer And The Fight To Save Yahoo" on Amazon right here.
Facebook seems ready to kill off FBX, the ad exchange it launched back in 2012. In recent months it has become less and less of a priority for the company, and now it seems the market's shift to mobile is hammering the final nail in FBX’s coffin.
David Fischer, Facebook's vice president of advertising, hinted at FBX's demise at Adexchanger's Industry Preview conference on Thursday, Digiday reports. He said FBX would not be a focal point going forward.
Business Insider has contacted Facebook for a comment on FBX's status.
As Ari Paparo, the CEO of the adtech company Beeswax, tweeted to summarize Fischer's presentation: "David Fischer on FBX: a) it's for desktop retargeting; b) not coming to mobile; c) there are better ways to reach FB audience. Dead."
Other members of the digital ad industry also responded to the news, mentioning that the death knell for FBX had been ringing for some time.
The rumoured death of Facebook's ad exchange reveals the difficulties of adapting desktop tech to a mobile world http://t.co/6VAFop7d6j
— Simon Birkenhead (@SimonBirkenhead) January 23, 2015
Sounds like FBX spending may have peaked, with other FB products scaling further #ip2015
— Marcus Pratt (@mawkus) January 22, 2015@aripap There are still some benefits to FBX, but I agree that it appears that the future is elsewhere.
— AdExtent (@adextent) January 22, 2015@aripap FBX being on road to death has been true for a long time especially since they nuked antonia as fbx prod lead
— todd sawicki (@sawickipedia) January 22, 2015@pkafka I feel like the primary purpose is to hurt the rest of the banner business by lowering prices.
— Ari Paparo (@aripap) January 22, 2015@aripap I think it's been dead for awhile, since Antonio left.
— Elias Guerra (@eliasguerra) January 22, 2015FBX launched as Facebook's answer to Google's DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Yahoo's RightMedia— which, incidentally, Yahoo shut down earlier this month. It was social media's first real-time-bidding ad exchange and let advertisers buy Facebook ad inventory that retargeted users based on their online browsing history. It was largely responsible for those "right-rail" ads you see on Facebook. It fulfilled a very specific marketing objective — demand fulfillment — and very early on produced some stellar results for advertisers against search campaigns.
But just three years from launch, those kinds of ads are outdated for two reasons:
News Feed Facebook's focus is on News Feed ads, not the right rail. FBX inventory did also consist of News Feed ads, but Facebook's big sell to advertisers is about the branding opportunities News Feed ads can offer as Facebook looks to take on other media like TV for ad dollars. FBX inventory was more about direct-response ads, which do not command the expensive ad rates that broadcast ads do. Elsewhere, Facebook has also been prioritizing and embarking on a hiring spree for its Atlas ad server, which allows the company to sell and deliver ads outside of the Facebook platform.
Mobile Facebook has pivoted toward becoming a mobile company. Unfortunately for ad exchanges that specialize in retargeting, cookies don't work on mobile. As Digiday points out, to overcome this, Facebook has been touting its Custom Audiences product, which uses a smartphone's unique identification number to allow advertisers to retarget people who have used their mobile apps.
Facebook's mobile ad revenue is set to completely dwarf its desktop revenue next year, and by 2018, 75% of Facebook’s users will be mobile users, according to estimates released this week from eMarketer. So it's little wonder FBX, Facebook's shiny new ad product a mere three years ago, is being sidelined.
SEE ALSO: Yahoo Has Officially Shut Down The Right Media Ad Exchange
Cairo (AFP) - At least 11 people were killed in unrest in Egypt on Sunday as the country marked the fourth anniversary of its 2011 uprising, state media reported.
Police and protesters clashed after scattered demonstrations in Cairo, and many of the casualties were reportedly from clashes in a north Cairo neighbourhood.
The source of the smell of rain was one of nature's best-kept secrets — until scientists armed with high-speed cameras got a look at it.
After a rainstorm the air is perfumed with a fresh, earthy-mist from tiny air bubbles that form inside of the rain droplet upon impact — a mechanism that had never before been observed.
This information is actually useful too, knowing how this smell is created helps us find the best places to smell the rain.
Using high-speed cameras, a pair of scientists at MIT recorded droplets of water slapping the ground in slow motion. They discovered that Just like bubbles in a glass of champagne, the bubbles in rain droplets shoot to the surface and then burst open. When this happens, they release aerosols — fine solid particles or liquid droplets in a gas. For example, fog is a natural type of aerosol.
The aerosols contain the aroma that we recognize as the scent of rain, the scientists suspect. This aroma likely comes from oils secreted by plants after long dry spells. Once the aroma-carrying aerosols are released, the wind blows the tiny droplets around the atmosphere and into our noses.
The gif below shows a droplet falling in slow motion and the aerosols being blown away:
Upon further investigations into the intensity of rainfall and the type of ground surface, the researchers discovered that some storms and locations are better than others for smelling rain. The researchers published their work in the journal Nature Communications on Jan. 14.
They conducted approximately 600 experiments on 28 different surfaces including dirt, clay, and sand. By releasing drops of water at various heights above the surfaces, they could measure the effects of how the speed at which rain falls effects the amount of aerosols released during a storm.
"When moderate or light rain hits sandy or clay soils, you can observe lots of aerosols," said Youngsoo Joung the MIT press release. Joung is a postdoc at MIT and lead author of the paper. "Heavy rain [has a high] impact speed, which means there's not enough time to make bubbles inside the droplet."
Watch the center boxed-in frame in the gif below that shows the aerosols bubbling to the surface in slow motion:
This explains the phenomenon called petrichor, which refers to the distinct scent following a light rain after a dry spell. Two Australian researchers coined the term in 1964, when they published an article in the journal Nature which linked the smell to oils secreted by plants during dry periods.
"Interestingly, they don't discuss the mechanism for how that smell gets into the air," Cullen R. Buie said in the press release. Buie is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and co-author of the paper. "One hypothesis we have is that that smell comes from this mechanism we've discovered."
Jounng and Buie are continuing to study other, more harmful, affects of the aerosols released from rainfall. In addition to aromatic molecules, these aerosols might also carry pathogens like E. coli. Right now, the two researchers are examining whether aerosols from rainfall with these contaminants can be significantly spread throughout the environment.
Watch more slow-motion video below, uploaded to YouTube by MIT:
READ MORE: 11 Mind-Blowing Physics Discoveries Made In 2014
SEE ALSO: Here's How Many Intelligent Alien Civilizations Might Live In Our Galaxy
"My day starts at 4:30 a.m. and I sort of have two speeds, fast and stop," Mark Hurd quipped cheerfully when we asked about his day.
We were meeting at Oracle's upscale executive offices on the top floor of the main building at its Redwood City, California, headquarters, accompanied by two members of his personal PR team and Oracle's chief marketing officer, Judith Sim. They weren't there as handlers. Hurd was in full control of the conversation, his answers, what he was and wasn't willing to say.
We were there to talk about the journey that landed him in the unprecedented role of the second-ish CEO of Oracle, a job he's sharing with Oracle's longtime finance whiz Safra Catz. (Both of them have the official title of "CEO," not "co-CEO," we were told.)
Hurd is one of the more interesting characters in the high-tech world of celebrity CEOs.
He is closed and private, while also being open, gregarious, opinionated, and always willing to crack a joke, all in a thick East Coast accident ("I grew up in New York City and I moved to Florida in high school." Miami.).
For instance, he won't talk much about stuff other CEOs are normally happy to share, like his parents' professions or his philanthropic interests.
But he did tell us:
(You can read a full transcript of our interview here.)
Hurd became the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company for the third time in his life in September, when Oracle's founder Larry Ellison announced news that no one was expecting to hear – ever.
After 37 years, Ellison stepped down as CEO, promoting his existing right-hand man and woman, Hurd and Catz, who had already been job-sharing the No. 2 role of president.
Ellison became CTO, leading product development (which has always been his favorite focus), and remained their boss by becoming executive chairman of the board.
Shared CEO structures are rare and, typically, temporary. Sooner or later, one of them moves on and the other rules alone. For that reason, industry insiders see this as a giant job interview between Hurd and Catz for the day when Ellison really leaves the company.
Call it a "jump ball."
In fact, Ellison is famously fond of competition. Among Oracle's massive sales organization, the basketball term "jump ball" describes a situation where two or more salespeople compete for the same sale with the same customer. The idea is to squeeze out competitors by having your own hungry salesforce blanket the market.
The "jump ball" is "not a good process," Hurd told us, and he officially got rid of it as he revamped Oracle's sales force over the last two years. (Although we understand from some salespeople we talked to a few months ago that jump balls still happen on occasion.)
As for a jump ball between himself and Catz for the sole CEO job, Hurd says he's not focusing on that but is all about "moving the company forward."
And he's got nothing but praise for Catz.
"I've done this CEO job three times, I’ve done them alone and now I’ve done them with a partner," he says. "When you work with someone like Safra who is smart, knows the business, is a fierce competitor, is easy to work with, it's a hell of lot easier than doing these jobs alone. I love every minute. I see her all the time. Virtually every day."
Jump ball or not, the Oracle co-CEO job is a crowning moment for Hurd in a career filled with epic, and very public, ups and downs.
It's especially sweet given the controversial way he arrived at Oracle.
Hurd's first reign as CEO began in 2003 at computer-equipment and consulting company NCR.
He joined NCR in 1980 as an entry-level salesperson straight from college, after he tried his hand at his dream job: being a professional tennis player.
He had attended Baylor University on a tennis scholarship and gave himself a couple of tournaments after college to chase his dream.
"I wasn’t good enough," he told us. "I got of out of college and I was beating really good guys but not good enough to be a [Roger] Federer, to be the best."
It wasn't just the idea of not being the best that stopped him. He also loved business — he studied marketing in school — and he worried that if he spent years playing tennis without striking it big, he would be risking his chance at a great career.
"It’s tough to reenter the work force," he told us. "So I went out and got a job. And that’s how I wound up at NCR."
It turned out to be a good choice. He spent 25 years at NCR, working his way up to CEO, leaving only when Hewlett-Packard came calling. Hewlett-Packard recruited him to replace Carly Fiorina, the CEO it had just fired.
Hurd was (and still is) known for his "execution" leadership skills, particularly reining in costs.
He's been called a human calculator with a near-photographic memory. ("I like numbers," he says when asked about this stuff. "I remember a lot of things. I’ve had to tell people, ‘Don’t tell me something you want me to forget.’ I usually get the question, ‘How do you remember that?’ — well you told me!")
Hurd led HP for five years after Carly Fiorina's reign. He was at first praised for cleaning up the company's financials. But then he was criticized for cost-cutting actions that some felt were too heavy-handed. (We've heard stories of employees being told to work at home, and pay for their own internet and phone.)
He was forced to resign in 2010 over a scandal accusing him of sexual harassment with an HP contractor. HP's board investigated the claim and concluded no sexual harassment took place, and the woman making the accusations later recanted some of them. But HP's board said that they did find issues with his expense account. He publicly apologized for"instances in which I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity" and left with a $40 million severance package.
HP and Oracle had been close business partners. HP sold a lot of expensive computer servers designed to run Oracle's software. Mark Hurd and Larry Ellison knew each other and became friends.
Ellison not only scooped him up after he left HP, but publicly defended him, too.
In an email to The New York Times, Ellison said, "The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago." (Steve Jobs was Ellison's next-door neighbor and friend, too, by the way.)
Ellison had just completed the acquisition of hardware company Sun Microsystems, and was set to start competing with HP. The software business and hardware businesses are two very different beasts and Oracle didn't have the expertise in-house to run Sun.
Hurd did. It was still a bumpy ride to integrate Sun. Ellison's game plan wasn't to become another HP. He simply wanted to stop having to depend on HP or IBM to build systems to run his software. Ellison wanted to create his own machines specially tuned to make Oracle's software, particularly its flagship database, run faster and do more.
HP turned around and hired Leo Apotheker as its next CEO. He had just been sent packing from Oracle's long-time archenemy, SAP.
When Oracle hired Hurd, HP sued over that, and over Oracle's decision to stop selling a version of its software that would run on HP's high-end servers. The lawsuit led to the disclosure of some interesting and sometimes embarrassing emails from Oracle employees who didn't seem very excited to sell Sun's products.
HP won the server lawsuit and the two settled over hiring Hurd, with Hurd agreeing to give back some of the HP stock options included in his $40 million severance package.
And Oracle has since released a whole bunch of special servers that it says are selling well.
Hurd had no comment to our questions about HP. He and current HP CEO Meg Whitman are neighbors, both living in the affluent Silicon Valley town of Atherton. But Hurd doesn't see her around town and has no opinion to share on whether or not he likes her.
There is one area of his time at HP that he openly discussed: his reputation for excessive cost-cutting — "fable as much as anything," he told us.
HP simply wasn't getting enough return for the money it spent, he explained.
"You’re never wanting to have a day when you have extraneous costs," he said. "Frankly, I think some of this is fable as much as anything, but when you have spending levels whether it's in sales or R&D, etc., people tend to equate more spending on R&D means you’re going to have more good products ... That’s not true."
"Anytime you have spends, your objective is make them as effective and efficient as you can. One of the things I’m proud about at Oracle, it isn’t just our R&D spend (which, by the way is large), but our yield for it is incredible. You have to look at both sides of the equation."
At Oracle, revenue growth is the big goal. He's been telling employees to spend what they need to get it.
During his first few months at Oracle he asked every one of his direct reports for a three-year plan. He then said, “Make that three-year plan a one-year plan." And he told them: "We are going to invest, but we are not changing our revenue goals. If you tell me something will grow the top line, you have unfettered access to the checkbook.’’
Last year, just before the holidays, Hurd met with a sales group and asked the sales manager (several layers of management from him) what she needed most. Her response: "More reps.” Hurd shocked her when he agreed to hire them on the spot.
As for his plans for Oracle, next up is to change the company's reputation for being hard to work with.
"We’ve had tremendous yield out of our R&D. We also acquire companies. The good news is we get a ton of new products through R&D and acquisitions," he said.
The bad news?
"My number-one issue with customers is this statement: 'I didn’t know you did that. I didn’t know you had that.'"
Hurd also hired more than 4,000 salespeople and turned them into product "specialists" on particular products, restructured quotas to boost hardware sales, and changed territories. It was a tough transition for some salespeople — some complained while others left, sources told us.
Now Hurd has to figure out how to tell customers about this tide of new Oracle products without subjecting them to a constant wave of sales calls from different salespeople.
"To a degree, when you wind up as a specialist (for instance a specialist selling to HR, to the CFO, selling to the head of sales), in many cases our customer won’t feel all of that is coordinated as well as it needs to, [to] get a holistic multiyear plan with Oracle," he told us.
Oracle says that it's making progress on that front, citing improvements on internal customer satisfaction surveys that it wouldn't share with us. (The company did point us to a glowing column recently written by a CIO who is head of the Independent Oracle Users Group).
But that doesn't mean Oracle is going to become some kind of kinder, gentler Kumbaya company.
The most famous anecdote about Hurd in the halls of Oracle is this one: He was speaking to his sales team and pacing the room, as he often does when he speaks. And he stepped on a power cord taped to the floor.
He stopped, looked down and said, “You see this cord? This is the oxygen flowing to our competitors. I want you to step on this cord and stop the flow of oxygen.’’
SEE ALSO: We Had A Surprisingly Fun Conversation With Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. This Is What He Told Us
Sports psychologist Dr. Jonathan Fader helps professional athletes overcome adversity using techniques that rely on various types of imagery. One method incorporates elements of the approach used by the ancient samurai warriors.
Dr. Fader also uses the concept to motivate bankers and traders working in high-pressure environments where millions are at stake.
Produced by Graham Flanagan
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Since we can't all be like Warren Buffett — who famously spends much of his day reading — Business Insider has summarized 50 of the most influential business books ever written.
Below, you'll find nuggets of insight from game-changing executives, hard-charging startup founders, and ground-breaking researchers.
It's also a great reading list.
Here are the links you need to nab each one:
• "Give and Take" by Adam Grant
• "Positioning" by Al Ries and Jack Trout
• "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie
• "Decisive" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
• "Getting Things Done" by David Allen
• "So Good They Can't Ignore You" by Cal Newport
• "Emotional Intelligence" by Dan Goleman
• "My Years With General Motors" by Alfred Sloan
• "Man's Search For Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl
• "The Progress Principle" by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer
• "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely
• "Quiet" by Susan Cain
• "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen
• "Influence" by Robert Cialdini
• "Good to Great" by Jim Collins
• "The Effective Executive" by Peter Drucker
• "Rework" by Jason Fried and David Heinemeir Hansson
• "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell
• "Purple Cow" by Seth Godin
• "Drive" by Daniel Pink
• "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries
• "Lean In" by Sheryl Sandberg
• "The Signal and the Noise" by Nate Silver
• "The Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb
• "The Mythical Man-Month" by Frederick Brooks
• "Capital" by Thomas Piketty
• "Mindset" by Carol Dweck
• "StrengthsFinder 2.0" by Tom Rath
• "The 48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene
• "Thinking, Fast And Slow" by Daniel Kahneman
• "#Girlboss" by Sophia Amoruso
• "Start With Why" by Simon Sinek
• "Creativity, Inc." by Ed Catmull
• "Crossing the Unkown Sea" by David Whyte
• "Make It Stick" by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel
• "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz
• "Hooked" by Nir Eyal
• "How Google Works" by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg
• "Zero to One" by Peter Thiel
• "Daring Greatly" by Brené Brown
• "The End of Power" by Moisés Naím
• "Real Happiness at Work" by Sharon Salzberg
• "Getting to Yes" by Roger Fisher
• "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Tim Ferriss
• "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni
• "Business Adventures" by John Brooks
• "The Virgin Way" by Richard Branson
• "Growth Hacker Marketing" by Ryan Holiday
• "Smartcuts" by Shane Snow
• "Scarcity" by Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir
SEE ALSO: 9 Books Billionaire Warren Buffett Thinks Everyone Should Read
Athens (AFP) - 16:11 GMT - WELCOME to AFP's Live Report on the Greek general election, with the radical Syriza party predicted to win the largest shares of votes as hard-pressed citizens back the party's anti-austerity policies.
Etsy, the e-commerce company that Bloomberg reports could IPO this quarter, has been happily based in Brooklyn, New York, since it launched in 2005.
Business Insider visited the company's gorgeous DUMBO headquarters in September (DUMBO stands for Down Under The Manhattan Bridge Overpass), but Etsy is in the midst of designing a new space, also in DUMBO, that will be able to accommodate more than 300 new local employees (there are currently more than 350 in New York).
Amanda Carroll, who works with technology companies for the architecture, design, and consulting firm Gensler, told Business Insider she's loved working with Etsy on its new space because, more than nearly any company she's worked with, the team is committed to making its office reflect its values.
Etsy is all about helping small business owners, artists, and craftmakers sell their (often-homemade) goods. That over-arching goal is reflected in its location choice: the creative atmosphere in DUMBO is inspiring, and CEO Chad Dickerson has said the independent, innovative businesses flourishing in Brooklyn influence the company.
Carroll says Etsy is focusing on supporting the local economy as much as possible as it works on its new office.
"Etsy is making decisions that aren’t just based on costs," she says. "Nothing that they put into their space goes with out thought. They’re using their new office to really put their stake down in DUMBO and really solidify their commitment to that community."
Furniture is locally sourced, recycled materials are chosen over new ones, and the company is trying to reduce the carbon footprint of its transition as much as possible.
Etsy has been a Certified B Corporation since 2012, which means it gets held to rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, and its new office will also be LEED-certified.
Although most people think of major tech companies as having their roots in Silicon Valley, Dickerson has said New York is actually a more attractive place for people to work because it's a thriving, vibrant city, and can fulfill the desire for an urban atmosphere unlike suburbs like Cupertino, California (where Apple is based).
SEE ALSO: How Getting Rid Of Individual Trash Cans Changed E-Commerce Company Etsy’s Culture
Broken down to its parts, "Black Sea" sounds like a predictable genre thriller with a kooky twist — it's a heist film, set entirely in a submarine. But by combining elements of these classic genres, director Kevin MacDonald ("The Last King of Scotland") has crafted an efficient and exciting old school thriller that proves familiarity is nothing to be afraid of.
A laid-off English submarine captain (Jude Law) gets lured by his old buddies to assemble a team of professional submarine operators to find a lost, sunken U-boat filled with millions of dollars of Nazi gold. Since the submarine they'll need to use to accomplish this is Russian, Law assembles a crew of half Brits and half Russians.
As soon as the vessel begins its journey, the two groups of men are at each other's throats. Jude says from the start that each man will get an equal share of the bounty, and this doesn't sit well, as some crewmembers deem themselves more essential than others. Why should a homeless teenage boy (recruited by Law at the last minute) get the same amount of money as the hulking Russian who does all the heavy lifting?
Jude Law is presented as a sort of working-class-hero: In his first dialogue exchange, we learn he's been working on submarines for over thirty years, and that he essentially lost his wife and kid to the job. When the opportunity for "one last big score" comes up, he has no reason not to abandon what little is left of his life and just go for it.
The majority of "Black Sea" takes place on the submarine itself, and the camera work makes the audience feel just as confined as the men on the boat. These men are far from civilized and all have severe tunnel vision about the mission at hand.
It's not long before the actions of one rogue man puts the lives of those on board and the mission itself in jeopardy, and from that point forward, there's no telling what may happen next. It becomes a matter of life and death rather than a matter of becoming rich. The cinematography is gorgeous in spite of all this ugliness, and there are some particularly chilling shots when some men leave the boat to find the gold.
It's hard not to compare the film to those that inspired it, as Law's descent into madness is remisicent of the Humphrey Bogart classic "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." And there's a "company man" character pulling the strings (Scoot McNairy, in his most obnoxious role yet) that feels airlifted out of James Cameron's "Aliens."
"Black Sea" is an amalgam of submarine thrillers and "one-last-job" heist films that succeeds on all fronts, borrowing ideas we've seen before and executing them so well that they feel new again. In January, a "dump month" utilized by studios to unload their disasters ("Mortdecai,""Strange Magic"), Black Sea sticks out like a Russian sub and is easily the best 2015 release thus far.
"Black Sea" is now playing in limited release and will expand wide Friday, January 30th.
SEE ALSO: 'A Most Violent Year' Is A Gripping Take On The American Dream
The first official exit poll in Greek election has been released showing the anti-austerity Syriza party leading with between 35.5%-39.5% of the national vote.
Potentially HUGE night for SYRIZA pic.twitter.com/e3B317J1sm
— Joseph Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) January 25, 2015The party looks to be comfortably ahead of closest rivals the centre-right New Democracy party, which the poll suggests is on track to gain between 23%-27%. The far-right Golden Dawn party and newly formed centre-left To Potami (The River) are duelling for third place with between 6.4%-8% of the vote.
Although the exit polls have proven a relatively unreliable predictor of the eventual result in recent years, it at least provides the first indication of whether Syriza has succeeded in bringing its poll lead to bear at the voting booth. With the share suggested by the exit poll the party still has a chance of winning an overall majority.
Whether its achieves that feat will now depend heavily on how many of the smaller parties reach the 3% threshold needed to get representation in parliament. Yet even if it falls short, winning the largest share of any single party would still be testament the remarkable rise of a party that was only formed in 2004 as a loose coalition of leftist parties and groups.
As Lorcan Roche Kelly points out on Twitter, only three years ago PASOK (which the exit poll suggests could get 4.2%-5.2% of the vote) had 160 seats in Greece's 300-seat parliament. Syriza had 13.
The table below shows the percentage of the vote needed for any single party to gain an overall majority in the Greek parliament:
In case you 've missed it - An excellent graph on the % needed for single-party #Greece government in #ekloges2015pic.twitter.com/1O31AifzsL
— Manos Giakoumis (@ManosGiakoumis) January 25, 2015
Whether you're applying for a job, pitching your business, or communicating with coworkers, the subject line of your email is one of the best tools you have for grabbing the reader's attention and getting a response.
It's also one of the most misunderstood. Being too wordy, vague, or eager in the subject line is a great way to get your email deleted rather than read.
We asked career and email experts what not to do in your email subject line. Here are the most common mistakes:
Not including a subject line is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Amanda Augustine, career expert at professional job-matching service TheLadders, stresses that the subject line can be the most important part of the email, since it often determines whether an email is opened and how the recipient responds. An email with a blank subject line will likely get deleted, lost, or immediately irritate the recipient, who is forced to open the email to figure out what it's about.
A typical desktop inbox reveals about 60 characters of an email's subject line, while a mobile phone shows just 25 to 30 characters, says Augustine. What's more, 50% of emails are now read on mobile phones, according to Dmitri Leonov, a VP at email management service SaneBox. If you write more than six to eight words and don't put the most important words at the beginning, you could lose the recipient right from the start.
The subject line should communicate exactly what the email is about so that the recipient can prioritize the email's importance without having to open it. For example, writing "Do you have a sec?" is too vague, says Augustine, since the reader will have to open the email or reply to figure out what you want. Don't make the reader guess. Keep it specific, straightforward, and use logical keywords that will make it searchable later.
Since you only have so much space to work with, don't waste it with unnecessary words like "hello,""nice to meet you," and "thanks," which can easily be included in the email's body. For instance, if you're applying for a job:
Don't write: Hello! May I ask about a job opening?
Do write: Referred by Jane Brown for Technical Writer position
Using all caps may get someone's attention, but in the wrong way. It's the digital equivalent of yelling, and your job is to make the email as easy as possible for the recipient to read rather than giving them anxiety, says Leonov. Instead, use dashes or colons to separate thoughts, and avoid special characters like exclamation points.
If you begin a thought or question that ends in the email body, then the reader is forced to open the email. It's annoying, and since clarity and being respectful of the recipient's time is the goal, it's not very helpful, says Augustine. Consider whether instant message, a call, or an in-person chat might be a better medium for your question.
Augustine says copy-and-paste errors are all too common. Sometimes when people are sending a similar email to multiple people, they forget to tailor it to each reader and end up with the wrong name or title in the subject line. The easiest way to avoid this is to reread the subject line before you hit send.
"People want to know whether they really need to read this now and if they have to respond," says Augustine. If you need a response, make it clear in the subject line and set a deadline. For instance, you could say: "Please reply by Friday." If not, tack on "no response needed" or "FYI" to the end.
If you've been referred by a mutual acquaintance, do not save that for the body of the email, says Augustine, since you risk it getting trashed before the recipient opens it. To grab the reader's attention, she suggests beginning the subject line with the full name of the person who referred you.
SEE ALSO: Here's What You Should Put In The Subject Line Of Work Emails
In September, nearly four years to the day after joining Oracle, Mark Hurd became CEO, a job he's sharing with Oracle's other CEO, long-time finance chief, Safra Catz.
We were told in no uncertain terms that their title was not "co-CEO," but simply "CEO," by the way.
This is the third CEO job for Hurd in a long and sometimes rocky journey. We met with Hurd in the executive offices of Oracle in Redwood City to talk about how he got here. (Here are some more anecdotes of Hurd's journey and management style at Oracle.)
We found Hurd to be a cheerful, tough, but funny guy. He is who he is and you are never left guessing as to what he's thinking.
He cracked jokes throughout our talk, most of them preceded with the words "off the record ..." which, naturally, we honored. (We'll share what we can, just to give you a taste.)
He's full of opinions and not (at all!) shy about expressing them in his fast East Coast accent, although he wasn't willing to put them all of them on the record. We wrangled him on that as best we could. (One thing you quickly learn about Hurd: he doesn't do anything he doesn't want to do.)
Many of his personal stories indicated that this is man who loves competition, particularly winning, something he clearly shares with Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
And yet he seems open to constructive criticism, at one point even asking for our opinion on the columns and blog posts he writes, and taking our less-than-glowing remarks in stride.
Here's a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Business Insider: You're a family man, aren't you? Husband, father? Tell us about you family.
Mark Hurd: My family, I’m very much protective of them. I have two girls, one’s in her early 20s just graduated from college, one’s in her late teens just going into college. They’re great kids and their dad loves them a lot. I have a wife who’s a great mom.
BI: How long have you been married?
MH: Going on 25 years.
BI: This is your first marriage?
What I'll say is that these kids are by my wife’s first husband.
BI: But are they by your wife’s husband’s first wife?
[Laughing.] Yeah.
BI: I understand that you attended college on a tennis scholarship at Baylor, a Christian school. Tell me a little bit about how you grew up.
MH: I grew up in New York City and I moved to Florida in high school. I got to Miami in 9th grade and I started playing tennis. And I wasn’t all that good. I started playing every day from the day I got there until the day I left.
And every day I just got better until the point where I earned a scholarship to college. I went from being not very competitive, to being competitive nationally during high school.
BI: Were you ranked?
MH: I was ranked Top 10 in the state of Florida (which was more competitive than New York).
I was good enough to get scholarship offers from most of the good tennis schools with the exception of the very best. At that time USC, UCLA, and Stanford were really the top-rung tennis programs and Baylor was really good. It is now a top-rung tennis program.
BI: In large part because of you. [Hurd is on Baylor's board of regents and has donated so generously to Baylor's tennis program that they named the tennis building after him.] Did you dream of being a pro?
MH: Yeah, sure.
BI: So why didn’t you do that?
MH: The simple reason was that I wasn’t good enough.
I got of out of college and I was beating really good guys, but not good enough to be a [Roger] Federer, to be the best. Let’s say I was good enough to tour for 10 years. By the time I’m done, I’m 31 or 32, I may have a family. I may have no other work experience. My ability to go back [into business] and start at the bottom rung, it’s just tough. It’s tough to re-enter the work force.
BI: So ultimately you’re a realist?
MH: Well, I made a commitment to myself, in my senior year, that I would make a judgement whether I was good enough to pop. So I played some pro tournaments right after I got out of college. I did, “ok” and “ok” isn’t going to be good enough to pop.
So I went out and got a job. And that’s how I wound up at NCR.
[Note: Hurd spent 25 years at NCR, starting as an entry level salesperson and working his way up to CEO. He was hired away to become CEO of HP in 2005.]
BI: What did you’re parents do in their careers?
MH: My dad was in financial services.
BI: Did you grow up wealthy? Middle-class? Struggling?
MH: We did fine.
BI: You continue to be a huge supporter of Baylor. I take it you loved college?
MH: I got a great education. I had to learn a lot of structure. When you are a tennis player, you have to travel a lot. You are on the road some ridiculous number of days from tournament to tournament, so your ability to balance your studies is a major challenge.
BI: What did you major in?
MH: Marketing management. It’s what I wanted to do.
BI: You figured out how to balance tennis and school I take it. Were your grades exceptional?
MH: They were good.
BI: I've heard people call you a human calculator ...
MH: I like numbers.
BI: Do you have a photographic memory?
MH: I remember a lot of things. I’ve had to tell people, "Don’t tell me something you want me to forget." I usually get the question, "How do you remember that?"— well you told me!
BI: Did you have any role models in your life?
MH: People ask me that a lot and I say, not really. You have to be your own person. There’s things people do that you can respect and emulate maybe to a degree. I have respect for a whole set of people. But the term role model, to me, implies that you will try to imitate to a degree and that’s not something I aspire to do.
BI: Is there a fantastic immigration story in your family history about your parents or theirs?
MH: The last thing I’ll say about my family is that my mom was once or twice removed from this country and my dad’s family was here longer. I love my parents, I just don’t like putting them into the spotlight. I’m actually fairly private.
BI: Tell me about your charity work, non-profit boards you’re on or other interests?
MH: I’m on the board of Baylor and I can testify that it's a not-for-profit. When you are in these [executive] jobs, you don’t have a lot of time for other things. I do participate on the board and do everything I can to help the school.
BI: Are there other particular charitable causes that you like to support? It sounds like education?
MH: Obviously, I’ve got a love of education because what I’ve done with my university and given a lot to that. I believe in the mission of the school. Other things I do for charity I purposely don’t publicize. When you do these things you don’t do them for recognition.
BI: Has Bill Gates come and talked to you about his Promise Pledge?
MH: No.
BI: Morning person or night owl?
MH: I get up at 4:30. I'm not as regular about the go-to-bed time as I am about the get-up time. If you ask me why that is, I can't explain that. I sort of have two speeds: fast and stop.
BI: So: iPhone, Android or something else?
MH: I’m an iPhone guy. I found I’m able to use something smaller and I can do most of what I can do now using a tablet, an iPhone and a tablet. Not having to lug a laptop around is frankly just a blessing. I do find it favorable that you can get an eco-system from the tablet to the PC and all of that promise.
BI: Do you have a favorite, not-business-related app?
MH: I’m a big sports fan. I’ve got everything from an ATP app [the Association of Tennis Professionals], ESPN app, college football app. If you got my iPhone it would be pretty boring.
BI: I know you work a lot, but when you aren’t working are you playing tennis?
MH: Yes, a bit.
BI: Are there other sports that you love to play?
MH: I’m not good at them anymore.
BI: Who do you play tennis with?
MH: People my age.
If I get on the court now with a guy who's 23 or 24, you realize just how strong you were. It’s a lot better for me ego-wise to get on the court with somebody who’s in their mid-40s on. If you play competitively and get some kind who’s 24 years old, it just isn’t how they hit the ball, it’s their ability to do it for a long time.
[Note: Hurd is 58.]
BI: You have a Twitter account, but you don’t tweet much. You do write the occasional column for LinkedIn. Are you into other social media? Facebook with your kids?
MH: My kids, I learn a lot from them with how they and their friends deal with social media. I’d say they are less into Facebook these days. They don’t send emails. When I say, "I’ll send you an email," they are like, "email?" They do a lot of Snapchatting.
BI: Do you Snapchat with them … here I am, in Paris …?
MH: I do not Snapchat with them but at some point I’m going to have to acquiesce. Their group are not big Facebook users, they've gone on from that. They are constantly changing. It’s amazing the speed by which they move to new apps.
BI: You live in the same small Valley town as Meg Whitman, right? Do you know her, do you see her?
MH: I know her, but no, in Atherton I don't see her.
BI: So you know where I'm going with this ... do you have any thoughts about HP breaking up?
MH: No, no I don't.
BI: Is this going to be good for Oracle?
MH: I don't think it will matter.
BI: It seems like the shared CEO role is a really a job interview and that the board will ultimately choose one of you ...
MH: Well listen, I’ve done this CEO job three times, I've done them alone and now I've done them with a partner. When you work with someone like Safra who is smart, knows the business, is a fierce competitor, is easy to work with, it is a hell of lot easier than doing these jobs alone. I love every minute. I see her all the time. Virtually every day.
BI: When you were at HP, there were some fantastical stories about cost-cutting. Can you talk about your approach to spending, investing, cutting costs?
MH: Always my thought is to put the company in the best competitive position that you possibly can. There’s a number of factors that go into it. What is the strategy of the company? Does the company have a clear strategy? Meaning I know what I’m trying to get done to better position it in the market relative to the competition and to better help customers.
Second, how do you get the operations of the company in the best position to execute strategy. So I've got a strategy. Then I've got to get operations to execute strategy. Then you've got to get operations in the best position to execute the strategy. And then you got to get the best people in place to execute operations.
So it's really all three, and the three have to work in unison to get a company going in the right direction.
BI: So when cost getting gets extreme, or when employees are starting to feel like cost cutting gets extreme ...?
MH: You’re never wanting to have a day when you have extraneous costs. Frankly, I think some of this is fable as much as anything, but when you have spending levels, whether it's in sales or R&D, etc., people tend to equate more spending on R&D with meaning you’re going to have more good products.
If I’m the first one to tell you this, count that as a good thing: That’s not true.
Anytime you have spends, your objective is make them as effective and efficient as you can.
So one of the things I’m proud about at Oracle, it isn’t just our R&D spend (which, by the way is large), but our yield for it is incredible. The yield you get for what you spend, you have to look at both sides of the equation.
BI: So that’s it. You were looking at the yields and felt "we’re still spending too much" even though employees were feeling the pinch …
MH: Employees are important. At the end of the day, employees will be much happier if the company is in a position to win. If the company isn’t in a position to win, in the long run you’ll never make anyone happy.
BI: There are two sides to leadership, strategy (coming up with ideas) and execution (putting ideas into action). You are especially known for execution. What is it that people don’t understand about execution and typically do wrong?
MH: Listen, it’s great to have ideas when you come up with a strategy. You can ask a question: Is the strategy worth working on? Is there a prize at the end worth working on? Many people make this mistake. They have a great idea but even if in the end, they executed perfectly, it's not worth the effort to have worked on it.
Second, you also have strategies, while very attractive, are not executable by the group that’s working on it. So when you say, "that's a great idea." But the talent or the market positioning is not executable by "me," me being the company with the idea.
There’s many filters that strategies have to go through. I’d actually argue that one of the things about execution is having a strategy that’s actually executable before lining up to go get it done.
MH: Do you have an example of something that sounds like a great idea but wasn’t the right fit for the people who had it?
Let’s say a company that specializes in hardware wants to expand into software. The strategy may have sounded good at the outset, but the company may not have the assets in place to execute the transition. Having the right strategy is key, but it isn’t enough. You also need the right team in place to execute the strategy.
BI: So you’re saying, that’s what people do wrong: They never ask the questions of which specific person will do which specific task?
MH: Yes. I would say that [to execute any business plan well] you need to say: Here’s the strategy, here’s the results if we execute that strategy well and here’s the actual people that are going to go do it.
Then and only then should you go do it.
BI: One of your first big projects when you got here was revamping the sales force, where you hired a bunch of sales people. That’s complete now, right?
MH: Yes, for a while.
BI: Some salespeople recently told me about something unique to Oracle, this concept of “jump balls." It’s when there are some customers that are up for grabs to any salesperson, and it leads to stealing of accounts and hard feelings among the team. What’s the strategy of having your own sales team compete amongst themselves like that?
MH: Some of that pre-dates me. There was a concept when I got here of "un-deployed accounts" meaning that Mark, Julie, and Glenn had territories. And in the middle of table was a bunch of accounts that were in none of our territories. And if something came in from one of those accounts, some manager would make a determination whether Mark, Julie, or Glenn would work on it or get credit for it.
That’s not a good process. The reality is, what we do now is to make sure that those accounts are fully distributed.
BI: What other changes did you make to territories?
MH: You brought up one case, where the account wasn't distributed. In many a case, the accounts were over-distributed.
Historically, if Mark, Julie, or Glenn had territories, we each had lots and lots of accounts in our territories. Let's say we each had 100 accounts in our territories. We're all very good, very talented people. We could probably handle four or five accounts a year.
So the natural question, what do you do with the other 95 accounts? "Well, I have no idea, explain it to me." The reality is, most of those accounts lay dormant.
So when you look towards expansion, much of our work was not to redistribute the accounts that weren't distributed but to resize our territories into a manageable set of accounts per territory.
BI: You’ve publicly acknowledged that Oracle isn’t always easy for customers to do business with and you want to change that. What are doing there?
MH: A couple of things. We’ve had tremendous yield out of our R&D. We also acquire companies. The good news is we get a ton of new products through R&D and acquisitions.
My number one issue with customers is this statement, “I didn’t know you did that. I didn’t know you had that.” So there’s an awareness issue on the part of our customers to things we’ve acquired or things we released.
It’s a good news issue, but also a bad news issue of making sure our customers are fully aware or our portfolio.
We believe very much in the specialization of our salesforce, meaning if you are an Oracle salesperson you know your product, you know your competitor and you know your customer.
To a degree, when you wind up as a specialist, for instance a specialist selling to HR, to the CFO, selling to the head of sales, in many cases our customer won’t feel all of that is coordinated as well as it needs to be [to give them] a holistic multi-year plan with Oracle.
BI: What about enterprise software contracts with draconian terms intended to trap customers into paying more for software?
MH: When you hear draconian deals, almost all of the time, that centers around [the fact that] Oracle acquires a lot of companies and often we have to renegotiate contracts with customers of those companies to bring them in line with our standards. We’re working on making those experiences better for our customers.
BI: Given all the turmoil going on in the enterprise tech industry, do you think the world understands Oracle's strategy?
MH: Since I came here the stock has more than doubled. More times than not, you transform [a company] and then you get a pop. We’ve been able to double the company’s market cap while transforming.
[Note: the stock was trading around $23 in September 2010 and is now hovering near $45, hitting a 10-year high of about $46 in December].
I think our market position is strong. If you ask me, would we want to change places with SAP or IBM? No.
Let me say that again. No.
SEE ALSO: A Rare Glimpse Inside The Life And Mind Of Oracle CEO Mark Hurd
Athens (AFP) - Radical leftwing party Syriza won Greece's general election on Sunday in a victory that could impact the course of austerity in Europe, exit polls showed.
Syriza took between 35.5 percent and 39.5 percent of the vote, according to the polls, compared to between 23 percent and 27 percent for the conservative New Democracy party.
If the result is confirmed, Syriza's 40-year-old leader Alexis Tsipras could become Greece's youngest prime minister in 150 years.
Neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn and pro-European party To Potami are in a neck-and-neck race for third place with between 6.4 percent and 8.0 percent apiece.
It was not a good weekend for Johnny Depp.
His newest movie, "Mortdecai," flopped at the box office making just $4.1 million on an estimated $60 million budget.
Analyst predictions for the weekend suggested the film may make closer to $8.5 million.
The Lionsgate movie, featuring Depp as a mustachioed art dealer, received terrible reviews.
Disney's small cameo in "Into the Woods" aside, "Mortdecai" marks Depp's fifth box-office opening weekend bomb.
Depp's latest tentpole film, Warner Bros.' sci-fi "Transcendence,"failed to connect with audiences over the summer and made just $23 million domestically after a $10.8 million opening weekend.
As a result, many have questioned Depp's ability as a lead man capable of drawing in a big audience anymore.
That isn't the issue, rather it's the roles he's been taking on as of late.
If his past few movies were for a franchise like "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "Alice in Wonderland," the conversation would be completely different. Both of those are huge money makers for Disney — the first "Alice" made over $1 billion at theaters — and Depp plays familiar bizarre characters that he has become known for on screen.
Here's a look at Depp's latest movie performances:
| Movie | Opening Weekend | Domestic Box Office | Foreign Box Office | Estimated Budget |
| "Mortdecai" | $4.1 million | $60 million | ||
| "Transcendence" | $10.9 million | $23 million | $80 million | $100 million |
| "The Lone Ranger" | $29.2 million | $89.3 million | $171.2 million | $215 million |
| "Dark Shadows" | $29.7 million | $79.7 million | $165.8 million | $150 million |
| "The Rum Diary" | $5.1 million | $13 million | $10.8 million | $45 million |
In three of the past movies listed above, Depp plays a pretty normal, looking guy ("Mortdecai,""Transcendence,""The Rum Diary"). Audiences are used to seeing Depp in bizarre roles. Still, "Dark Shadows" didn't perform as well as analysts thought it would at the box office.
The reason I broke up Depp's movies into domestic vs. foreign box office grosses instead of just worldwide grosses is to show how much more appeal the actor has with an overseas audience.
While Depp's audience has appeared to fade stateside, his movies still perform significantly well overseas.
Look at how much better "Dark Shadows" and "The Lone Ranger" performed overseas.
Depp's next movies include a few other potential misfires including "Yoga Hosers" described as a film about "two teenage yoga enthusiasts" who "team up with a man-hunter to battle with an ancient evil presence."
If all else fails, next year should start to turn things around for the actor when a sequel to 2010's "Alice in Wonderland" is released in theaters.
The following year, another "Pirates of the Caribbean" is set for release.
SEE ALSO: Johnny Depp's latest movie receives terrible reviews
Microsoft’s 2.5-hour event on Wednesday was suddenly enlivened by the surprise introduction of the HoloLens, a new piece of hardware that will run on Windows Holographic, Microsoft’s new platform for virtual and augmented reality experiences.
The initial reactions to the HoloLens have been overwhelmingly positive.
Business Insider’s Matt Rosoff got to try it for himself on Wednesday. He says he’s “convinced personal computing is on the verge of a major change,” predicting head-mounted displays like these will “be a huge leap over the flat-screen computing that we’ve all become used to over the past 30 years.”
New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo also had a HoloLens demo, and shared his Windows Holographic impressions with Business Insider’s deputy editor Jay Yarow. You can hear their full conversation here. (In short, he was blown away.)
By all accounts, it sounds like augmented reality devices like these are “the next big thing.” And at this point, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Samsung, and others have invested hundreds of millions — even billions — of dollars into these new virtual and augmented reality experiences.
Apple, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found.
Last June, I wrote about how Apple’s patent for “interactive holograms” was one I wanted to see become a reality. Filed in October 2012 but published in April 2014, Apple had created a system that allows you to interact with projected images that appear to hang in mid-air, even letting you control and manipulate those virtual objects with the swipes and gestures iOS users are used to (pinch to zoom, etc.)
It’s not too late for Apple to use this patent. And by all means, the company should get on it right away.
Apple’s iPhone business is bigger than most businesses as a whole — heck, even most countries’ GDP — but if Tim Cook and co. don’t take part in the big push for augmented and virtual reality, it could risk missing out on the next “personal computer” as we know it.
People are convinced AR is the next big thing. Thomas Tull, CEO of Legendary Pictures, got to try Magic Leap, the startup that’s raised $542 million from companies like Google to bring its “3D light sculptures” to market with a blend of proprietary hardware and software.
Tull told Fast Company, “It’s so badass you can’t believe it. It’s one of the few things I’ve ever experienced in my life where I came out and said, ‘This changes everything. This is a marker of the future.’”
Experiences like the ones Microsoft and Magic Leap will provide are soon going to be invaluable tools we couldn’t have imagined living without.
In Matt Rosoff’s brief demo with the HoloLens, he learned how to install a light switch by having an expert instruct him on what to do by speaking to him via the headset, as well as “drawing” what he needed to do on top of real world objects. For instance, the expert drew a little diagram on how he should hold the light switch as Rosoff was attaching it to some wires.
Rosoff was also able to play the video game “Minecraft” in a real living room, and even visit Mars for a brief time.
Right there, that’s three experiences your smartphone — and frankly, no other device — can currently provide. To be able to draw virtual elements that appear in people’s perceivable worlds, or turn your living room into a video game, or even Mars, are things we could’ve only dreamt up, or shown in movies. Hardware and software working together seamlessly... you'd think this category would be right up Apple's alley.
Since the early days of the Macintosh, Apple has always believed in creating hardware and software together to provide "magical experiences" that help people do work and achieve their goals. And frankly, it would be crazy for Apple to pass up on this next trend. Not with all the money it has, including its $140+ billion war chest.
Luckily for Apple, there is still time. All the current AR and VR headsets from Microsoft, Magic Leap, and Oculus are still in their respective “prototype” stages.
Apple could bring so much to the table, considering it’s known for creating first-class, trustworthy, stylish, intuitive devices that anyone can learn to use, young or old. And as the company showed with its Apple Watch, Apple knows how to make wearable devices, and make them look attractive and feel comfortable. Apple won’t get the benefit of saying it was “first," but there’s still time to make the best augmented reality product possible. The killer app is out there, just waiting to be found.
SEE ALSO: The Satya Nadella Era At Microsoft Is A Smashing Success So Far
People in the path of Winter Storm Juno seem to be turning to alcohol as they get ready for what could be one of the worst blizzards New York City has ever seen.
Drizly, an on-demand app for alcohol deliveries, says orders in NYC and Boston are up 477% since 2pm ET compared to a normal Monday. That's nearly six times as much as usual.
Some liquor stores have decided to close early to prepare for the storm, Drizly tweeted earlier.
The National Weather Service is predicting Juno will dump 18 to 24 inches of snowfall on Manhattan and even more on the outer boroughs.
Keep an eye on the National Weather Service's website for more info.
SEE ALSO: 11 Startups That Will Let You Enjoy A Life Of Leisure