Twitter Lets Brands Find Viewers of Their TV Ads

For those inclined toward social media, using Twitter while watching television has become a ritual, with viewers commenting on everything from sports events to nighttime dramas. On Thursday, executives from Twitter discussed how they planned to capitalize on that activity by allowing advertisers to send ads to people who are watching specific programming.

The new product will help brands match advertisements with Twitter commentary by viewers. Brands can then send messages to selected Twitter users who have already seen their ad on television.

“When people turn on TV they turn on Twitter,” said Matt Derella, the director of brand and agency strategy, who led a presentation on the product in Manhattan.

Twitter also announced it would work with a number of media companies, including Time Inc., Bloomberg, Discovery, Vevo, Vice Media, Condé Nast Entertainment and Warner Music Group, to sell advertisers content, in a partnership called Twitter Amplify. The content will probably be digital video or television content like clips from shows. It can then be shared on Twitter, and advertisers can run ads before the videos are viewed.

The format is similar to a partnership Twitter announced last year with ESPN and Ford, which embedded replays from football games in posts sent via Twitter. ESPN and Ford promoted the posts to people who had been identified as being interested in sports based on the accounts they followed on Twitter and the subjects of their posts.

Jim Nail, an analyst at Forrester Research, said Twitter would have to be careful about the number of advertisements it allowed on its platform. By injecting too many ads into a user’s feed during a television show, “they risk driving those fans away and having those fans unfollow the show,” Mr. Nail said. A representative from Twitter said the company already had limits on how many ads users would see in a day.

“This will allow us to really align much more of the work we’re doing day in and day out,” said Tim Castree, the chief operating officer at MediaVest USA, part of the Starcom MediaVest Group, of the new advertising offerings. Instead of focusing advertising during major events, advertisers can now “extend the time period for the spot we already had planned.”

Last month, Twitter signed a multiyear deal, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, with Starcom to, among other things, allow the companies to combine some of the resources they use for measuring and tracking data and advertising.

This week, Twitter made other brand announcements including a two-step authentication process that would provide more security for Twitter accounts. The accounts of several prominent brands, including Burger King and Jeep, were hacked in February.

The company also announced a feature that allows users to sign up for offers from brands without having to leave the site.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 24, 2013

An earlier version of this article described the Twitter Amplify program incorrectly. It involves Twitter’s media partnerships, not its advertising targeting program.

Dell Products Make Their Way, Circuitously, to Syria

The disclosure of the computer sales is the latest example of how the Syrian government has managed to acquire technology, some of which is used to censor Internet activity and track opponents of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.

According to internal company e-mails, cash transfer statements, sales receipts and shipping documents, the computer equipment was sold by BDL Gulf, which is based in Saudi Arabia and is a large distributor of computer equipment in the Middle East. It is an authorized dealer for Dell in the Middle East and Africa, and is also a reseller for other computer brands, including Samsung and Acer.

BDL sold the equipment to Anas Hasoon Trading, a Damascus-based company with contracts to provide computers to the Syrian government, according to billings records and e-mail exchanges between the companies.

Jess Blackburn, a spokesman for Dell in Round Rock, Tex., confirmed that BDL was an authorized reseller. He said the company was recently made aware of a possible shipment of Dell equipment to Syria by an anonymous source.

“We are investigating an allegation we received recently that BDL was involved in a possible transaction involving Syria,” Mr. Blackburn said in a statement. “Dell requires its resellers to follow U.S. trade requirements, just as Dell does. Resellers of Dell products and services are contractually prohibited from selling or shipping any technology to a customer in a restricted country.”

The United States has barred the sales of most American-made goods to Syria for nearly a decade and has repeatedly tightened sanctions against the government. An executive order by President Obama, dated April 22, 2012, specifically addresses the sale of computer technology to Syria, barring Americans from helping the Iranian and Syrian governments engage in human rights abuses, including monitoring and tracking of dissidents.

United States officials charged with enforcing sanctions against Syria would not comment on the possible violation of export sanction laws but did say that exporting technology to Syria was illegal unless the sale would promote the free flow of information between the Syrian people and the outside world.

Asked about the evidence of shipments to Syria, a manager at BDL said the company had hundreds of customers and did not keep track of their locations.

“We cannot know if they are from Pakistan, Egypt or Morocco; we just sell in Dubai,” said RamaNarayan Singh, who is listed as BDL’s sales manager for the United Arab Emirates, Africa and Iran. “I’m just an employee doing my duty. I don’t know if a company is from Syria.”

But e-mails between Mr. Singh and a representative from Anas Hasoon Trading show that the Syrian company made it clear to him that it was working on behalf of the Assad government. Mr. Singh signed several invoices that listed a Syrian address for the trading company. Mr. Singh said he did not recall the e-mails or the invoices.

The records, which were provided to The Times by an individual who was briefed on the transactions, showed that BDL sold hundreds of laptops, tablets and desktop computers to the Syrian company.

In e-mails sent between Mr. Singh and Yahya Rifai, who was listed as a purchasing manager for the Anas Hasoon Trading company, Mr. Rifai mentioned several times that he was working to buy the computers for the Syrian government.

The companies dealt mainly in cash, records showed, after transfers from Syrian banks to banks in Dubai were rejected because of financial sanctions against the country.

In an e-mail to Mr. Singh dated Sept. 2, 2012, Mr. Rifai wrote about his difficulties in using bank transfers to pay for the computers because of the sanctions.

“Dear Ram, my problem is how to get money from Syria to you? As you know I’m working on tenders deals with the government which required many documents and approvals!!” he wrote.

“Try please do not worry,” Mr. Singh wrote in response. “I will support you whatever best for you.”

Barred by banks from making electronic transfers, Mr. Rifai made several large cash deposits into the bank account of BDL to purchase the computers, the documents show. Asked last month about the purchases, Mr. Rifai responded in an e-mail: “We are Syrian company so we don’t care about the rules America put, its only for American companies not us.”

Last year, the Syrian government made similar purchases of computer equipment from a reseller of Hewlett-Packard. The equipment, according to various news reports, was used to monitor the e-mail and Internet use of opposition forces. Hewlett-Packard said its computers were sold without its knowledge.

In 2011, Internet-blocking devices from Blue Coat Systems, of Sunnyvale, Calif., were shipped to Syria from Dubai. Blue Coat thinks the gear was sold to the Iraqi government.

“It’s a pattern that we’ve seen across the Middle East from governments trying to avoid democratic changes — using proxies to bypass sanctions and buy equipment to stifle dissent and track Internet activity,” said Charles Dunne, a former National Security Council official and director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Freedom House, a Washington nonprofit group that promotes democratic change. “The U.S. government and companies need to do a better job of making sure this equipment does not end up in the hands of governments like the Assad regime.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 3, 2013

An earlier version of this article and an accompanying picture erroneously identified Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia as the owner of BDL Gulf. Representatives of Prince Alwaleed said that neither he nor his senior advisers are aware of any connection between the prince and BDL Gulf.

White-Collar Boutiques Find Their Niche in a Crowded Market

For more than a decade, the provenance of white-collar defense work has been shifting away from boutiques to large corporate firms that have wooed prominent former prosecutors and built strong white-collar practices.

Nevertheless, boutiques continue to form, prompting many in the defense bar to ask whether there's enough white-collar work to go around.

In interviews with the New York Law Journal, a few white-collar defense lawyers said they felt the field was getting crowded, but others said there is a role for boutiques that find a niche and develop an expertise.

"There are many more fish chasing the same business," said Gordon Mehler, who started his own firm in 2000. While he said he thought older, established lawyers like himself would survive, younger lawyers entering the field in boutiques "will have a rough time."

There are more small firms focused on white-collar practice than there were five years ago, Mehler said. "The dynamics have dramatically changed" among the boutiques, he added.

One partner at a white-collar boutique who did not want to be identified said that "the practice area now feels to me very crowded and it seems unlikely that there's enough work to go around."

"As work has slowed down for big firms, you see more lawyers at top firms competing with boutiques to represent individuals," the partner said. "For the people who want to get into it, it's a tough market to crack."

Others are more optimistic.

"You don't need to do any more than open the newspaper and see that there's another investigation," said Steven Molo, a partner of boutique MoloLamken. "The opportunities have increased for boutiques in several ways."

Increased government enforcement and regulation have propelled the growth of the white-collar practice. In just one example, the Securities and Exchange Commission said that in fiscal year 2012 it filed 734 enforcement actions, including those against insider trading, broker-dealers, delinquent filings and other actions, just one shy of the record in 2011. The government said the last two years reflect the highest numbers of total actions brought by the SEC.

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Some Schools Urge Students to Bring Their Own Technology

Officials at the schools say the students’ own devices are the simplest way to use a new generation of learning apps that can, for example, teach them math, test them with quizzes and enable them to share and comment on each other’s essays.

Advocates of this new trend, called B.Y.O.T. for bring your own technology, say there is another advantage: it saves money for schools short of cash.

Some large school districts in Central Florida and near Houston and Atlanta have already signed on, and they are fielding calls and providing tours to administrators from hundreds of other districts that are considering whether to follow their lead.

But B.Y.O.T. has many skeptics, even among people who otherwise see benefits of using more technology in classrooms.

“The schools are hoping, hoping there’s going to be a for-free solution because they don’t have any money,” said Elliot Soloway, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who consults with many school districts about the use of computers to promote learning.

“If you look at initiatives in public education, this has the momentum.”

But Mr. Soloway also said he was “frightened” by the notion of schools using B.Y.O.T. as a quick budget fix because there was no evidence that a classroom full of students using different personal devices would enhance learning. Roy Pea, a professor of learning sciences at Stanford University, also has doubts. He is the co-author of a White House-backed National Educational Technology Plan published in 2011 that advocates for technology-centric classrooms.

But he said the B.Y.O.T. approach could be counterproductive if teachers were forced to build lessons around different devices — in effect, subverting curriculum to technology.

“Why are they so happy to have these devices when just a few years ago they didn’t want them in the classroom?” Dr. Pea asked about school administrators.

The Volusia County School District in Central Florida, bordering Daytona Beach, is one of the places that used to have signs around its schools that admonished students: no cellphones allowed. But the signs have been replaced over the last two years with new ones that read: B.Y.O.T.

Volusia school officials say that they realized they should take advantage of, rather than fight, students’ deep connections with their devices. At the same time, the district found that the cost of providing and maintaining computers for students was becoming prohibitive.

Since the change, Volusia officials say, they have not encountered many tech support problems or complaints from teachers. Rather, students are more engaged, they say, and the only problem that regularly crops up is that students forget to charge the batteries in their devices.

“It’s almost like bringing your homework,” said Jessica Levene, manager of learning technologies for the Volusia district, where 21 of 70 schools are using B.Y.O.T. “Make sure you have your device and that it’s charged.”

She conceded that students could text each other more easily now but said the school was keeping them busy on their devices. And while district administrators worried initially that poorer students would not own devices, they discovered something of “an inverse relationship” between family income and the sophistication of their devices, particularly smartphones, said Don Boulware, the district’s director of technology services.

At Woodward Avenue Elementary School in the Volusia district, fifth-grade teacher Dana Zacharko said her students tended to bring in smartphones or iPod Touches. She said she had found apps that allowed her to teach all kinds of subjects.

Gadgetwise Blog: How Users Rate Their Phones

If you are phone-shopping and wonder about the reliability of various brands, you are in luck. FixYa, a volunteer technical assistance Web site, has analyzed more than 720,000 support requests to come up with complaint-per-phone ratios, which the company said represent reliability.

The study also showed what owners generally liked — and did not like — about their phones.

The short answer is that iPhones were found to be by far the most reliable, almost three times more reliable than the second-place Samsung phones. Third was Nokia, followed by Motorola.

Apple

That is not to say the iPhones were problem free. Most complaints, 35 percent in fact, concerned the iPhone’s battery life. Apple recently released a system update (6.1.2) to address battery drain, but it’s too soon to know if it has worked. That was followed by complaints over a lack of new features in later models.

What iPhone owners liked was the simplicity — it was easy to guess how to use the phone’s main features. That was followed by the reliability of features like phone, data and text functions. And finally they liked the vast number of apps in the iTunes store.

Samsung

Samsung owners made 40 percent of their complaints about microphone problems and 20 percent over speaker problems. Owners said the microphone occasionally cut out so the person on the other end could not hear. Less often, the speaker cut out so that the caller could not hear.

Owners of one specific model, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, complained about battery life. Conversely, owners of the Samsung Galaxy S III cited battery life as one of its best features.

Over all, owners liked the sharp screen quality on the Samsung phones, and the Android operating system’s on-screen controls.

Nokia

Nokia owners, in 35 percent of complaints, said the phones responded slowly in comparison to competing phones. The next most common complaints, at 20 percent, were about a lack of available apps.

What owners liked about their Nokia phones were the durability of the screen, performance of the touch screen, and the Windows “Live Tiles” user interface that uses animated rectangles as controls.

Motorola

In 30 percent of complaints about the Motorola phones, Droids and Razrs included, people wanted help with removing preinstalled apps, sometimes known as “bloatware.” Next most common, in 25 percent of complaints, were problems with the touch screen, such as its refusing to unlock. That was followed, in 20 percent of the complaints, by dissatisfaction with speaker and camera quality.

Owners liked the design of the phones and their battery life. Motorola claimed when the Droid Razr Maxx was released that it had the longest battery life of any phone.

Michael Cronan, Who Gave TiVo and Kindle Their Names, Dies at 61

The cause was colon cancer, said his wife, Karin Hibma, with whom he founded the marketing firm Cronan in the early 1980s.

Mr. Cronan, who studied art in college, had many corporations and cultural institutions as clients, but he was most remembered for the pair of brand names he came up with a decade apart.

In the spring of 1997, he was asked to forge a name and an identity for a new device, a digital video recorder developed by a company called Teleworld that offered more sophisticated television recording choices than the videocassette recorder.

“We reviewed probably 1,600-plus name alternatives, seriously considered over 800 names and presented over 100 strong candidates to the team,” Mr. Cronan told Matt Haughey for his blog PVR (the letters stand for personal video recorder) in 2005.

“We spent the early meetings trying to place a cultural context on the product,” he said. Among the possibilities were Bongo and Lasso, which never got far.

Believing that “we were naming the next TV,” Mr. Cronan recalled, “I thought it should be as close as possible to what people would find familiar, so it must contain T and V.”

“I started looking at letter combinations,” he added, “and pretty quickly settled on TiVo.” (The “Vo” portion, he said, had a connection to the Latin and Italian words for vocal sound and voice.) Then came the search for a mascot that Mr. Cronan hoped “would become as recognizable as the mouse ears are to Disney.” He created a TV-shaped smiley character with the name TiVo inscribed on its face, rabbit ears suggesting an early TV set and large, splayed feet. Teleworld changed its name to TiVo Inc.

When Amazon prepared to introduce its first electronic reader in 2007, it turned to Mr. Cronan, who envisioned imagery reflecting the reading experience as an embryonic but rising technology.

Ms. Hibma said in an interview on Friday that in pondering a brand name, Mr. Cronan “wanted to create something small, humble, with no braggadocio,” while choosing an image that “was about starting something, giving birth to something.” He found the name, she said, by likening use of the new e-reader to “starting a fire.”

Michael Patrick Cronan was born on June 9, 1951, in San Francisco. He studied painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), where he later taught, and received a degree in art from California State University, Sacramento. He was a founder and past president of the San Francisco branch of AIGA, the professional association for design.

Mr. Cronan and his wife expanded their focus in 1992 to create the Walking Man clothing collection, featuring loose-knit tops and pants. Mr. Cronan also designed a pair of 1999 postage stamps, one commemorating the 50th anniversary of NATO and the other promoting prostate cancer awareness, and painted portraits and watercolors.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Cronan is survived by his sons, Shawn HibmaCronan and Nick Cronan; a brother, Christopher; a sister, Patricia Cronan; and a granddaughter.

For all his devotion to marketing and branding, Mr. Cronan felt that sometimes the demands of commerce went too far, as in the often-changing corporate names attached to sports stadiums and concert halls.

“There was a time in American life where going to a sporting event or a concert was sort of magical, because a lot of these places had these fun names,” he told The Denver Post in 2010. “But these days, with the amount of people craving advertising exposure, the sponsors have found a way to sell everything. They’re selling our nostalgia, and it’s sad.”

Some Companies Seek to Wean Employees From Their Smartphones

Atos, an international information technology company, plans to phase out all e-mails among employees by the end of 2013 and rely instead on other forms of communication. And starting in the new year, employees at Daimler, the German automaker, can have incoming e-mail automatically deleted during vacations so they do not return to a flooded in-box. An automatic message tells the sender which person is temporarily dealing with the employee’s e-mail.

No one is expected to be on call at all hours of the day and night, and “switching off” after work is important, “even if you are on a business trip,” said Sabrina Schrimpf, a Daimler spokeswoman, referring to the company’s recently released report, “Balanced! — Reconciling Employees’ Work and Private Lives.”

Disconnecting can be more challenging for business travelers who frequently work across time zones.

And there is a ripple effect, said Leslie A. Perlow, a professor of leadership at Harvard Business School and the author of “Sleeping With Your Smartphone.” “These guys fly in the middle of the night and send e-mails back to colleagues” who wait up, ready to respond.

A study conducted last spring by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project found that while mobile phones were valued as a way to stay productive, there were downsides to being available at all times. The nationwide survey of 2,254 adults found that 44 percent of cellphone owners had slept with their phone next to their bed and that 67 percent had experienced “phantom rings,” checking their phone even when it was not ringing or vibrating. Still, the proportion of cellphone owners who said they “could live without it” has gone up, to 37 percent from 29 percent in 2006.

Sam Chapman, chief executive of Empower Public Relations in Chicago, said he used to feel phantom vibrations and frequently read and sent e-mail on his BlackBerry in the middle of the night. He slept poorly, did not feel refreshed in the morning and considered himself addicted. “I wanted to make sure that what happened to me didn’t happen to my employees,” he said.

So Mr. Chapman adopted what he called a BlackBerry blackout policy. He and his staff of about 20 turn off their BlackBerrys from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. on weekdays and completely on weekends for all work-related use, with rare exceptions. “When I’m well rested, I show up to work ready to go,” he said.

He maintains that regimen while traveling, and said the policy had increased company productivity.

Professor Perlow agreed that companies could improve their bottom line by encouraging employees to disconnect at times. “Being constantly on actually undermines productivity,” she said.

But it is not always easy. In early 2012, when Michelle Barry, Mark Jacobsen and a third partner created Centric Brand Anthropology, a Seattle-based company that advises clients on brand strategy, design and culture management, they gave serious thought to the issue.

“A huge priority for us was to have a good balance between work-life,” said Mr. Jacobsen, Centric’s vice president and creative director. “Yet we have found that very difficult to do while working with large multinational clients,” which often require international travel and constant availability.

Being a start-up compounded those challenges. “Just because you can e-mail at 2 a.m., doesn’t mean it’s a good thing,” he said.

Centric encourages employees to prepare a week before a trip, designating a colleague as backup, informing clients about their travel plans, and trying to avoid deadlines immediately after they return. Employees are also encouraged to take spouses or partners on longer assignments and to build in downtime, said Ms. Barry, the company’s president and chief executive. When traveling, she said, “I make a commitment to myself not to stay up all night answering e-mails.”

Experts say there is no firm data for how many companies have policies restricting the use of electronic devices outside the office. “The companies I know actively encourage workers to stay connected after hours and on weekends,” said Dennis J. Garritan, a managing partner of the private equity firm Palmer Hill Capital and an adjunct professor at Harvard Business School.

Workstation: More Companies Are Outsourcing Their Human-Resources Work

It used to be that H.R. was a single, physical place that workers could visit — to pick up a form, ask a question, seek advice, lodge a complaint. Now if a company still has a stand-alone H.R. office, it’s probably much smaller than it used to be. If workers need help, they may have to call an “800” number, consult a Web portal or use a software program.

The outsourcing of H.R. has accelerated over the last decade and will continue to do so, said Lisa Rowan, a research vice president at IDC, the market research firm. While some companies may entrust their H.R. needs to a single outside firm, it’s more common to parcel out functions to a range of outside providers, she said.

Outsourcing allows companies to offload work that isn’t part of their core business. It also saves money. But some H.R. experts are concerned that the trend has gone too far, to the point that employees are suffering in areas like training and career development, and that employers are losing crucial business opportunities.

If you look at the wide-ranging traditional duties of human resources, it’s no wonder that companies are seeking outside help. “H.R. is supposed to be responsible for finding, developing, retaining and training the best people,” Suzanne Lucas, author of a blog called the Evil HR Lady, said in an e-mail. It can also be responsible for benefits, compensation, employee and labor relations, business partners, data collection and legal issues.

Outsourcing firms can take up various tasks, from payroll to benefits to recruiting, to free up a client to focus on its strengths, said Don Weinstein, senior vice president for product management at ADP, a large H.R. outsourcing firm. The new health care reform legislation, for example, will have a big impact on employers, some of whom may be overwhelmed by its complexities. Firms like ADP have expertise in areas like this, and thus relieve a big burden, Mr. Weinstein said.

In the last 10 years, the focus of human resources has shifted toward legal compliance and data collection, said Ms. Lucas, who now lives in Switzerland but has 10 years of H.R. experience in the United States. At a company that doesn’t have the means to hire specialists, she said, outsourcing can allow it to “gain vast resources for a relatively small amount of money.”

Problems arise if outside vendors are concerned mainly with maximizing their income and lowering their costs, resulting in “low flexibility and poor service,” Ms. Lucas said. It’s in the best interest of employees at this kind of vendor “to provide as little service as possible,” she said. And at such a vendor’s call center, she said, “I don’t even have to care about morale at your site, because it doesn’t affect my day.”

(Mr. Weinstein asserted that ADP is able to maintain high-quality, individualized service through its call centers.)

MS. LUCAS said that if human-resources professionals work for the same company as the employees they serve, their interests are more closely aligned. If your performance is good, “the company will make more money,” she explained. “A better-performing company means a better bonus for me, a happier workplace, and fewer problems all around.”

But many internal H.R. functions have been “cut to the bone,” said Peter Cappelli, a management professor and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Therefore, the idea that companies will be more strategic about human resources after they outsource “requires some heroic assumptions,” said Professor Cappelli, author of “Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs.” Supervisors may be able to take over some important roles, but many of the people who were experts at recruiting, training and career development have been laid off, he said. So is it any surprise, he added, that companies complain that they can’t find good people?

“The world has moved toward self-service,” he said, and that puts the emphasis on technology, and on information over advice. Sometimes, he said, “there’s literally no one to talk to.”

Other times, there’s the call center. There, Ms. Lucas said, you may find someone who is reading from a script — and often that’s enough. But when your problem is complex, it can be hard or downright impossible to have it solved, she said.

“The best outsourcing leaves some competent H.R. staff as employees,” she said. “When the call center can’t answer a question, they can refer you to the in-house person. It saves money and still provides individualized expertise for employees.”

(Photo) Diddy & Cassie Step Out In Their Halloween Costumes!

Diddy and Cassie used try to play coy all the time about their romance, but that seems to have went out the window and the couple is showing public affection often whether it be in person, on Twitter, or on Instagram. The duo stepped out yesterday for a Halloween themed party and although they weren’t dressed in a certain theme, they still looked great together! Check out their costumes below.

Julie A.

Diddy dressed up as singer Prince while Cassie was dressed as Egyptian Queen, Cleopatra

Big Sean & E-40 Clash For Their Cities: "[You] Must Be High Off Bath Salt"

Tuesday, Oct 23, 2012 11:20AM

Written by Cyrus Langhorne

The World Series trash talk has officially begun as West Coast rapper E-40 has told Detroit-bred emcee Big Sean his San Francisco Giants will beat the Tigers in the best of seven match-up.

Although he respects the city of Detroit, E-40 let the world and Big Sean know the 2010 World Series champs are back for more.

"Let me make my self clear! I love the city of Detroit like I love the bay but my SF Giants gone beat that aaasssss!!!," he tweeted Monday (October 23) night moments before the Giants won a Game 7 after rallying from a 3-1 series deficit to beat the St. Louis Cardinals.

"Hey @BigSean you know i love yo city my nig but me & my @SFGiants Finna " WIN THIS THANG BREH ""

"Lol @BigSean you seen that cold demonstration we put down! This the Yay & I ain't talkin bout Kanye ha ha!" (E-40's Twitter)

Standing behind his Detroit Tigers, Sean downplayed E-40's proclamation.

"U must be high off bath salt RT @E40: Hey @BigSean you know i love yo city my nig but me & my @SFGiants Finna " WIN THIS THANG BREH "" (Big Sean's Twitter)

Last night, St. Louis' Nelly congratulated 40 after seeing his team fall to the Giants.

"Congrads to San Fran !!!hats off they did they thing!!!congrads og @E40 go gettem!!!!!!"

"Wtf they beat us!no hate in my blood!!i played sports allmy life wen u get out played u give it up!we choked #fact so what!!cya #nextyear" (Nelly's Twitter)

The Detroit Tigers are expected to have a slight advantage of winning the World Series.

The early odds at Las Vegas sportsbooks suggest the Tigers have a 60 percent chance of winning the World Series, said RJ Bell, president of handicapping information website Pregame.com. Detroit is a -160 money line favorite, meaning a winning $160 wager would return $100. The Giants opened at +140, so a winning $100 bet would yield a $140 profit. (SF Gate)

The World Series is slated to start Wednesday, October 24th night in San Francisco.

In Europe, Speed Cameras Meet Their Technological Match

BERLIN — When Marc Guerin, a software salesman, drives the 38 kilometers from his home west of Paris to Roissy Charles de Gaulle Airport, he seeks out the fastest route for his Audi Q5 crossover and powers up his Coyote, a radar warning and traffic service that alerts him to the locations of France’s 3,000 speed cameras.

When Mr. Guerin comes within four kilometers, or two and a half miles, of a speed camera, his Coyote screen warns that he has entered a “risk” zone, and he closely monitors his speed.

Since he began using Coyote three years ago, Mr. Guerin said, he has not received a speeding ticket. He said he used to average three or four tickets a year which cost him about €400, or about $515.

“For one thing, I no longer get caught by the speed cameras, which are all over France,” Mr. Guerin said. “For another, it advises me constantly of the legal speed limits and traffic conditions, so I am better informed and much more relaxed when driving.”

Smartphone applications have been developed to monitor sleeping babies, open garage doors and analyze the nutritional content of a restaurant meal. Now in Europe, where the police in many countries use stationary and mobile radar cameras to catch speeders, the smartphone is being honed into a highly effective — and controversial — mobile radar detector.

“This type of technology is going to soon be standard in most vehicles,” said Serge Bussat, the vice president of sales at Coyote, a company based in Paris whose driving applications are being used by 1.7 million people in Europe, a third of them in France.

Mr. Bussat said that 6 percent of all French drivers now use radar driving apps.

Tolerated in many European countries, the use of radar-detection services like Coyote’s, which also monitors a driver’s speed against posted limits and advises of traffic jams, was applauded last year by the French government as a useful driver education tool, which helped legitimize the service.

While a law prohibiting radar-detection technology remains on the books in Germany, it is rarely enforced and may be amended to permit some driver alerts.

Only in Switzerland, where border guards are trained to spot and seize radar detection consoles, is the ban still strictly enforced. In the United States, where speed cameras are not as widely used, services like Coyote’s, which costs $63 a year or $185 when purchased by the month, are harder to justify. Also, receivers that can detect the Doppler radar waves emitted by police speed guns — like the original Fuzzbusters — are legal in the United States.

But in Europe, Doppler receivers tend to be outlawed and hidden, and permanent cameras are prevalent, so the market for app-based speed camera detection is growing. The two biggest makers of auto navigation devices, Garmin and TomTom, both bundle speed camera alert services with most of their latest products. A string of specialty services has also sprung up, including Coyote in France, Blitzer.de in Germany and Radardroid in Spain.

Most of these companies rely on their users to scout and report the locations of speed cameras, which are then forwarded to others using the same application. Drivers passing the same points are asked to confirm or amend the sightings.

Across Europe, at least 25,000 speed cameras are in use, said Arpad Nemeth, the owner of Poiplaza, a firm in Budapest that manages a database of 4.7 million points of interest logged by their precise geographic coordinates. Mr. Nemeth, a retired television news editor, said the locations of mobile and fixed speed cameras in his database had been compiled by the 80,000 people who had downloaded and used his free application.

Governments in many European countries, Mr. Nemeth said, voluntarily publish the locations of permanent speed cameras, which tend to be installed at sites of frequent accidents. Like Coyote and Radardroid, Mr. Nemeth’s Web site warns users that the use of radar detection databases is illegal in Germany and Switzerland. But enforcement, especially of apps on smartphones, is difficult if not impossible, he and others said.

Coyote, while warning of the legal ban in Germany, still provides data on German fixed and mobile cameras to users of its European service. So does Radardroid, a €6 application sold through Google’s Android app store that is made by Ventero Telecom of Madrid.

“Our app is being used in Germany right now,” said Felix Ventero, the software engineer who created Radardroid, which is used by a million people, mostly in Europe. “The reality is, people are using these services because the technology makes it possible.”

Regardless of how prevalent they are, radar detection applications remain controversial and services like Radardroid, which report the exact locations of mobile speed cameras, may have to change to satisfy the concerns of the law enforcement authorities, who view the services as enabling speeding and increasing the risk of injury and death.

Digital Domain: Smartphone Ads and Their Drawbacks — Digital Domain

That’s one reason smartphones are not working well as a medium for many advertisers. The evidence is telling: advertisers are willing to pay much more to reach a thousand pairs of eyes gazing upon a computer or tablet than a thousand pairs looking at a smartphone screen.

“Size absolutely does matter,” says Christine Chen, director of communication strategy at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, an ad agency in San Francisco. “If you look at the real estate available on a smartphone, it’s really sad compared to not just banner ads on the Web, but also to TV, print and outdoor advertising.”

Size isn’t the only problem. Advertisers are also limited by what they can find out about smartphone users. It’s not technically possible to use cookies with smartphone apps the way it is with a browser. On the Web, publishers typically record users’ actions so that advertisers can make an educated guess about a user’s identity and interests.

“What makes Web ads so attractive to advertisers is the ability to track actions and optimize accordingly,” Ms. Chen says. Because a smartphone cannot use the same technology, she says, “your ability to track and optimize is much more blunt, or in some cases nonexistent.”

These limitations depress demand for smartphone ads and lead to low prices. A banner ad on a Web page that costs $3 to $5 for every thousand impressions may cost only 75 cents or $1 for a thousand impressions on a smartphone, Ms. Chen says.

Another reason advertisers don’t value smartphone ads highly is that users tend to lack a receptive mind-set when using their phones. “It’s an activity you do for a short burst of time,” Ms. Chen says. “It’s very functional.” That is not a good time to try to make users stop what they are doing and give their attention to an advertiser’s message.

Ms. Chen says she tells her firm’s clients not to bother advertising on smartphones.

Jeff Lanctot, global chief media officer at Razorfish, says context is much more important on smartphones than on larger devices. “Requesting a marketing-related action while looking at wedding photos would be considered intrusive,” he says, “but while playing a game, it might feel very natural.”

Mark Himmelsbach, director of digital strategy at BBDO North America, sees some potential uses for cell phones as an advertising medium, but he says most marketers take care to limit the size of ads on phones “so as not to irritate people.”

“Mobile ads are relegated to a tiny portion of the screen and are often invisible or ignored by consumers,” Mr. Himmelsbach says.

Phones do have some benefits, like the ability to serve up ads based on location or to integrate advertising into apps that are used for something else, he says. But of all the possible options, he says, “mobile display ads give us the least amount of creative opportunity.”

Location-based mobile advertising, known as geofencing, is directed only at nearby prospects, and it has proved to work well, says Doug Ray, president of Carat North America, a media planning and buying firm. “Knowing where you are geographically and delivering a contextually relevant offer has been effective in driving conversions and sales,” he says. “Geofencing is not possible with a desktop PC.”

Consumers, however, don’t necessarily want to be reminded that their phones are location-tracking devices for advertisers. “A mobile device is one of the most personal forms of technology we have,” Ms. Chen says. Location tracking is perfectly legal but apps ask users’ permission during installation.

Using the Web on a desktop, laptop, or even a tablet, isn’t likely to feel as tightly bound to our personal selves. Much Web content is mass media, broad in reach, and that’s good for the advertising business because users do not treat the accompanying ads as an intrusion into their personal space.

“Media consumption is less personal than, say, a Facebook page, a text message or a phone conversation,” says Mr. Lanctot of Razorfish, “and so historically is better suited to be ad-supported.”

MR. LANCTOT mentions three companies that are doing well with mobile advertising: Pandora, Twitter and Foursquare. But each of these is fortunate to be in a business where it doesn’t have to contend with “banner blindness” among users.

Pandora inserts audio commercials into its music stream, Twitter puts sponsored ads into tweet streams and Foursquare lets advertisers try out geofencing.

“The advertising on all three is a very natural part of the user experience,” Mr. Lanctot says. “It’s not intrusive.”

What doesn’t make his list is the smartphone’s minuscule display ad. Digital advertisers working with smartphones must somehow make their ads large enough to be noticed, but not so large as to be an interruption. And they must be chosen to match a user’s interests, but not so closely as to induce a shiver.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

In Silicon Valley, Showing Off Their Louboutins

LAST winter, Chanel flew planeloads of style setters to Las Vegas for a party celebrating Numéros Privés, an exhibition showcasing the brand at the Wynn hotel. There, guests including Diane Kruger, Jessica Alba and Rachel Zoe mingled inside a giant red-lighted replica of a black Chanel 2.55 handbag.

But when it came time for dinner, Chanel’s president, John Galantic, didn’t sit at a table with actresses, but one with Silicon Valley tech executives, like Marissa Mayer (wearing a gray beaded Chanel cocktail dress) and Alison Pincus (in a classic black Chanel shift).

Silicon Valley has long been known for semiconductors and social networks, not stilettos and socialites. But in a place where the most highly prized style is to appear to ignore style altogether and the hottest accessory is the newest phone, a growing group of women is bucking convention not only by being women in a male-dominated industry, but also by unabashedly embracing fashion.

Despite the geek stereotypes of hoodie sweatshirts, flip-flops and thick glasses, it makes perfect sense, these women say, for people interested in technology to be intrigued by fashion.

“Designing software and products isn’t all that different from the design of clothes,” Ms. Mayer, 37, the new chief executive of Yahoo, said in an interview last February. She once paid $60,000 at an auction for lunch with Oscar de la Renta. “Like components of software,” she said, “fashion designers learned how to do this shoulder, put pleats on the skirt that way.”

Ms. Mayer, who for years was responsible for the design of Google’s search engine, proved her point when she asked Naeem Khan to make the dress for her wedding to Zachary Bogue, a financier, in 2009. She gave the designer a spec (a set of requirements that engineers write for new products) for the gown, including scalloped trim, an A-line skirt and lace, preferably with snowflakes.

“A side zip was eliminated because it would get caught on the lace and embroidery, so we realized that wasn’t feasible from an engineering perspective,” Ms. Mayer said.

Not every fashionable techie is so collaborative, but designers are nonetheless eager to explore a client base with not only money to burn but also a forward-looking ethos.

“Definitely my New York clients want to penetrate the valley,” said Allison Speer, founder of Allison Speer Public Relations, who helps introduce designers to customers in Northern California. “When we opened Bottega Veneta, they said: ‘We don’t want the social girls who do everything. We want the up-and-coming tech girls.’ ”

Alice & Olivia recently opened a San Francisco store and started a career line of peplum blouses, blazers and cropped pants to cater to women in tech, said Stacey Bendet Eisner, the brand’s designer.

“Women in the tech world aren’t confined to wearing a standard black suit, so they can have more fun with their day clothes,” Ms. Bendet Eisner said. “They also want an element of sophistication to their clothes because they want to be taken seriously. Hollywood women are more focused on sex appeal.”

FOR the men who have so long dominated Silicon Valley, the casualness of their clothing has seemed to bear an inverse proportion to the magnitude of their innovations. But despite Steve Jobs’s baggy dad jeans, his black turtlenecks were made by Issey Miyake. And Mark Zuckerberg’s signature hoodies and shower sandals are nothing if not a style statement.

As the area ages and settles, however, more of its denizens are starting to think about dressing for the office rather than the dorm room. And while some women here still worry that they will not be considered serious technologists if they care about clothes, as Katrina Garnett was in 1998, when she wore a slinky black Hervé Léger bandage dress in ads for her business software company, many are confident enough to dress the way they want to.

In Silicon Valley, Showing Off Their Louboutins

LAST winter, Chanel flew planeloads of style setters to Las Vegas for a party celebrating Numéros Privés, an exhibition showcasing the brand at the Wynn hotel. There, guests including Diane Kruger, Jessica Alba and Rachel Zoe mingled inside a giant red-lighted replica of a black Chanel 2.55 handbag.

But when it came time for dinner, Chanel’s president, John Galantic, didn’t sit at a table with actresses, but one with Silicon Valley tech executives, like Marissa Mayer (wearing a gray beaded Chanel cocktail dress) and Alison Pincus (in a classic black Chanel shift).

Silicon Valley has long been known for semiconductors and social networks, not stilettos and socialites. But in a place where the most highly prized style is to appear to ignore style altogether and the hottest accessory is the newest phone, a growing group of women is bucking convention not only by being women in a male-dominated industry, but also by unabashedly embracing fashion.

Despite the geek stereotypes of hoodie sweatshirts, flip-flops and thick glasses, it makes perfect sense, these women say, for people interested in technology to be intrigued by fashion.

“Designing software and products isn’t all that different from the design of clothes,” Ms. Mayer, 37, the new chief executive of Yahoo, said in an interview last February. She once paid $60,000 at an auction for lunch with Oscar de la Renta. “Like components of software,” she said, “fashion designers learned how to do this shoulder, put pleats on the skirt that way.”

Ms. Mayer, who for years was responsible for the design of Google’s search engine, proved her point when she asked Naeem Khan to make the dress for her wedding to Zachary Bogue, a financier, in 2009. She gave the designer a spec (a set of requirements that engineers write for new products) for the gown, including scalloped trim, an A-line skirt and lace, preferably with snowflakes.

“A side zip was eliminated because it would get caught on the lace and embroidery, so we realized that wasn’t feasible from an engineering perspective,” Ms. Mayer said.

Not every fashionable techie is so collaborative, but designers are nonetheless eager to explore a client base with not only money to burn but also a forward-looking ethos.

“Definitely my New York clients want to penetrate the valley,” said Allison Speer, founder of Allison Speer Public Relations, who helps introduce designers to customers in Northern California. “When we opened Bottega Veneta, they said: ‘We don’t want the social girls who do everything. We want the up-and-coming tech girls.’ ”

Alice & Olivia recently opened a San Francisco store and started a career line of peplum blouses, blazers and cropped pants to cater to women in tech, said Stacey Bendet Eisner, the brand’s designer.

“Women in the tech world aren’t confined to wearing a standard black suit, so they can have more fun with their day clothes,” Ms. Bendet Eisner said. “They also want an element of sophistication to their clothes because they want to be taken seriously. Hollywood women are more focused on sex appeal.”

FOR the men who have so long dominated Silicon Valley, the casualness of their clothing has seemed to bear an inverse proportion to the magnitude of their innovations. But despite Steve Jobs’s baggy dad jeans, his black turtlenecks were made by Issey Miyake. And Mark Zuckerberg’s signature hoodies and shower sandals are nothing if not a style statement.

As the area ages and settles, however, more of its denizens are starting to think about dressing for the office rather than the dorm room. And while some women here still worry that they will not be considered serious technologists if they care about clothes, as Katrina Garnett was in 1998, when she wore a slinky black Hervé Léger bandage dress in ads for her business software company, many are confident enough to dress the way they want to.

Bits Blog: Bots Raise Their Heads Again on Facebook

Kimihiro Hoshino/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Any business that advertises on Facebook wants eyes looking at its ads and then fingers clicking on them. Facebook gets paid based on how many clicks that ad receives – effectively, on how many users it can send to a particular brand.

On Monday came an explosive claim that could give pause to brands trying to figure out if advertising works on Facebook. A Long Island start-up company said it was pulling its ads from the social network because it discovered that its ad clicks were far more likely to be coming from Web robots – or bots, as they are known — than human Facebook users.

The company, called Limited Run, helps bands and record labels sell music and merchandise online. It bought advertisements for itself on Facebook this spring. It wanted to know who was clicking, so it built its own analytics tool. It discovered that only one in five clicks seemed to be from human beings. The rest, it said, came from bots, which, in essence, are bits of software performing automated tasks.

The claim resurrects an issue that the social network has faced before – the scourge of bot farms – but it comes at a particularly inopportune time, when Facebook, now that it is a public company, is trying to increase advertising revenue to assuage shareholders. One of its nagging challenges is to prove to advertisers, big and small, that Facebook advertising yields results. News of robots doesn’t help.

Facebook has said that it scours the site regularly to detect and filter out bots. The company said in an email statement that it was “currently investigating” the claims of Limited Run.

Debra Williamson, an analyst with the market research firm eMarketer, says bots and spammers are an unfortunate byproduct of Web advertising. “Most advertisers should use additional analytics to determine more information about who is actually responding to their ads,” she said. “Many advertising technology companies that place ads on Facebook offer these kinds of services. As businesses get smarter about targeting and bidding on ads on Facebook, the likelihood that they will get bogus ad clicks will diminish.”

Dennis Yu, chief executive of BlitzMetrics, which develops and crunches the numbers for Facebook advertisers, says he often sees less than a 10 percentage point difference between the clicks that an ad actually gets and what Facebook reports.

Tom Mango, a co-founder of Limited Run, said Monday that he had devoted his modest advertising budget to Facebook and that the revelation of bogus ad clicks were enough to get him to suspend it for now.

“If we’re going to spend money on advertising, we want to make sure people are looking at us,” he said. “If a bot visits us through a Facebook ad, that costs us money. That ends up being not worth it to us.”

He said he had no idea who had created the bots, and he took pains to say he wasn’t blaming Facebook.

“Do we know who the bots belong too? No,” the company wrote on its blog. “Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes.”

Limited Run seems to have had another gripe with Facebook. It changed its company name – it called itself Limited Pressing in the past – but faced difficulties in changing the name on its Facebook brand page. The one big upside for the company was this: Since Monday’s blog post, its followers on Facebook have doubled to 800 people.

Mr. Mango is now weighing whether the company should spend its advertising budget on Twitter.

Digital Domain: Cellphone Cases Can Imitate Their Makers - Digital Domain

Some devices, like my Android phone, a Galaxy Nexus by Samsung, have a back cover that slides off and a battery that pops out. And when evaluators at iFixit, a Web site offering do-it-yourself repair manuals and parts, disassembled Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet for a “teardown” review, they found that it was easy to open and repair.

In iFixit’s video review, the narrator describes how the battery can be replaced without unscrewing a single screw. She is moved to declare, “The sustainability-geek inside me wants to hug Google for this.”

Other vendors — Apple, would you please take a bow? — make products that are designed to keep users out. The case on my wife’s iPhone 4 is closed with screws of Apple’s own devising that require a special screwdriver.

IFixit offers a tool kit for replacing those screws with standard ones. It mischievously markets this as a “Liberation Kit.”

It isn’t surprising that Apple, the epitome of the closed organization and overlord of the iPhone’s tightly controlled software ecosystem, would design screws that, in effect, serve as locks. And one can see how it would be in Apple’s interest to make it hard for users to extend the life of older models — it’s a way to encourage the purchase of the newest, greatest Apple stuff.

Google, which until now has not done much in consumer electronics hardware with its own brand name, is positioning itself as a conspicuous alternative to Apple, in design as in other aspects. As long as Apple embraces closed systems — and closed cases — Google can take advantage of an opportunity to be the un-Apple and to open up.

Using components that are easy to recycle is one way to score points for selling an environmentally friendly product. Apple’s products rank high in that regard, says Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit. But Apple doesn’t want its users to service its devices, he says. So it scores lower in another important aspect of being “green”: extending a product’s useful life by making it easy to repair.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

In January, Sprint announced a “sustainable design” effort, in partnership with the environmental unit of UL, the independent testing and certification group. Sprint encourages all of its partner manufacturers to submit their handsets for evaluation of the “repairability and recyclability” of the devices. Those that attain a certain number of points will be designated as “certified” or, greenest of all, “platinum.”

Lois Fagan, Sprint director of product development, says, “We have a self-imposed goal that at least 50 percent of our portfolio of new phones in 2012 will be certified.”

Consumers who want to know which phones are the easiest to repair won’t get much guidance from UL Environment. It will say only whether a device has earned its “certified” or “platinum” designations. It does not say what points were earned for any particular criterion, like ease of removing the external enclosure or the battery, or availability of replacement parts. Nor does it disclose which handsets fail to earn enough points to be certified.

The ability to remove the battery is especially important to frequent phone users, because the original battery may not last the two-year commitment required in a standard contract.

Apple says its iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80 percent of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles. For phones out of warranty, it offers a battery replacement service for $79 if you send the phone to its repair center; shipping costs are extra. (Being without one’s phone is an inconvenience not reflected in the price.)

IFixit provides an alternative. It sells replacement batteries and the necessary tools and offers its free online repair manuals, prepared by fellow users. A replacement battery for the older iPhone 3G model is only $14.95, and there’s no painful parting with the phone in the process.

According to Mr. Wiens, iPhone batteries aren’t hard to replace, with the right screwdriver, available online. “Under five minutes; no technical skills required,” he says.

Even replacing the glass on an iPad 3 can be done by amateurs, he contends, but guidance is needed: “I have a pile of iPad 3s that we broke while trying to learn how to repair them. Last week we finally broke the code.”

IFixit offers manuals covering computers, cameras, game consoles and household appliances, too; its credo is “repair is recycling.”

Hooman Morvarid, president of

CellularDR.com, a repair business that handles phones from many manufacturers, says the most frequent problem he sees is broken glass, followed by a broken LCD screen that sits behind the glass. Increasingly, he says, the glass and LCD are fused together in a way that makes them impossible to separate if one or the other is broken. “So phones are actually becoming more expensive to repair,” he says.

The more that designers of mobile devices avoid fusing parts together, the easier they are to repair. And the repairs most likely to be undertaken are those we can do ourselves.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Digital Domain: Cellphone Cases Can Imitate Their Makers - Digital Domain

Some devices, like my Android phone, a Galaxy Nexus by Samsung, have a back cover that slides off and a battery that pops out. And when evaluators at iFixit, a Web site offering do-it-yourself repair manuals and parts, disassembled Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet for a “teardown” review, they found that it was easy to open and repair.

In iFixit’s video review, the narrator describes how the battery can be replaced without unscrewing a single screw. She is moved to declare, “The sustainability-geek inside me wants to hug Google for this.”

Other vendors — Apple, would you please take a bow? — make products that are designed to keep users out. The case on my wife’s iPhone 4 is closed with screws of Apple’s own devising that require a special screwdriver.

IFixit offers a tool kit for replacing those screws with standard ones. It mischievously markets this as a “Liberation Kit.”

It isn’t surprising that Apple, the epitome of the closed organization and overlord of the iPhone’s tightly controlled software ecosystem, would design screws that, in effect, serve as locks. And one can see how it would be in Apple’s interest to make it hard for users to extend the life of older models — it’s a way to encourage the purchase of the newest, greatest Apple stuff.

Google, which until now has not done much in consumer electronics hardware with its own brand name, is positioning itself as a conspicuous alternative to Apple, in design as in other aspects. As long as Apple embraces closed systems — and closed cases — Google can take advantage of an opportunity to be the un-Apple and to open up.

Using components that are easy to recycle is one way to score points for selling an environmentally friendly product. Apple’s products rank high in that regard, says Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit. But Apple doesn’t want its users to service its devices, he says. So it scores lower in another important aspect of being “green”: extending a product’s useful life by making it easy to repair.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

In January, Sprint announced a “sustainable design” effort, in partnership with the environmental unit of UL, the independent testing and certification group. Sprint encourages all of its partner manufacturers to submit their handsets for evaluation of the “repairability and recyclability” of the devices. Those that attain a certain number of points will be designated as “certified” or, greenest of all, “platinum.”

Lois Fagan, Sprint director of product development, says, “We have a self-imposed goal that at least 50 percent of our portfolio of new phones in 2012 will be certified.”

Consumers who want to know which phones are the easiest to repair won’t get much guidance from UL Environment. It will say only whether a device has earned its “certified” or “platinum” designations. It does not say what points were earned for any particular criterion, like ease of removing the external enclosure or the battery, or availability of replacement parts. Nor does it disclose which handsets fail to earn enough points to be certified.

The ability to remove the battery is especially important to frequent phone users, because the original battery may not last the two-year commitment required in a standard contract.

Apple says its iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80 percent of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles. For phones out of warranty, it offers a battery replacement service for $79 if you send the phone to its repair center; shipping costs are extra. (Being without one’s phone is an inconvenience not reflected in the price.)

IFixit provides an alternative. It sells replacement batteries and the necessary tools and offers its free online repair manuals, prepared by fellow users. A replacement battery for the older iPhone 3G model is only $14.95, and there’s no painful parting with the phone in the process.

According to Mr. Wiens, iPhone batteries aren’t hard to replace, with the right screwdriver, available online. “Under five minutes; no technical skills required,” he says.

Even replacing the glass on an iPad 3 can be done by amateurs, he contends, but guidance is needed: “I have a pile of iPad 3s that we broke while trying to learn how to repair them. Last week we finally broke the code.”

IFixit offers manuals covering computers, cameras, game consoles and household appliances, too; its credo is “repair is recycling.”

Hooman Morvarid, president of

CellularDR.com, a repair business that handles phones from many manufacturers, says the most frequent problem he sees is broken glass, followed by a broken LCD screen that sits behind the glass. Increasingly, he says, the glass and LCD are fused together in a way that makes them impossible to separate if one or the other is broken. “So phones are actually becoming more expensive to repair,” he says.

The more that designers of mobile devices avoid fusing parts together, the easier they are to repair. And the repairs most likely to be undertaken are those we can do ourselves.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Digital Domain: Cellphone Cases Can Imitate Their Makers - Digital Domain

Some devices, like my Android phone, a Galaxy Nexus by Samsung, have a back cover that slides off and a battery that pops out. And when evaluators at iFixit, a Web site offering do-it-yourself repair manuals and parts, disassembled Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet for a “teardown” review, they found that it was easy to open and repair.

In iFixit’s video review, the narrator describes how the battery can be replaced without unscrewing a single screw. She is moved to declare, “The sustainability-geek inside me wants to hug Google for this.”

Other vendors — Apple, would you please take a bow? — make products that are designed to keep users out. The case on my wife’s iPhone 4 is closed with screws of Apple’s own devising that require a special screwdriver.

IFixit offers a tool kit for replacing those screws with standard ones. It mischievously markets this as a “Liberation Kit.”

It isn’t surprising that Apple, the epitome of the closed organization and overlord of the iPhone’s tightly controlled software ecosystem, would design screws that, in effect, serve as locks. And one can see how it would be in Apple’s interest to make it hard for users to extend the life of older models — it’s a way to encourage the purchase of the newest, greatest Apple stuff.

Google, which until now has not done much in consumer electronics hardware with its own brand name, is positioning itself as a conspicuous alternative to Apple, in design as in other aspects. As long as Apple embraces closed systems — and closed cases — Google can take advantage of an opportunity to be the un-Apple and to open up.

Using components that are easy to recycle is one way to score points for selling an environmentally friendly product. Apple’s products rank high in that regard, says Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit. But Apple doesn’t want its users to service its devices, he says. So it scores lower in another important aspect of being “green”: extending a product’s useful life by making it easy to repair.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

In January, Sprint announced a “sustainable design” effort, in partnership with the environmental unit of UL, the independent testing and certification group. Sprint encourages all of its partner manufacturers to submit their handsets for evaluation of the “repairability and recyclability” of the devices. Those that attain a certain number of points will be designated as “certified” or, greenest of all, “platinum.”

Lois Fagan, Sprint director of product development, says, “We have a self-imposed goal that at least 50 percent of our portfolio of new phones in 2012 will be certified.”

Consumers who want to know which phones are the easiest to repair won’t get much guidance from UL Environment. It will say only whether a device has earned its “certified” or “platinum” designations. It does not say what points were earned for any particular criterion, like ease of removing the external enclosure or the battery, or availability of replacement parts. Nor does it disclose which handsets fail to earn enough points to be certified.

The ability to remove the battery is especially important to frequent phone users, because the original battery may not last the two-year commitment required in a standard contract.

Apple says its iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80 percent of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles. For phones out of warranty, it offers a battery replacement service for $79 if you send the phone to its repair center; shipping costs are extra. (Being without one’s phone is an inconvenience not reflected in the price.)

IFixit provides an alternative. It sells replacement batteries and the necessary tools and offers its free online repair manuals, prepared by fellow users. A replacement battery for the older iPhone 3G model is only $14.95, and there’s no painful parting with the phone in the process.

According to Mr. Wiens, iPhone batteries aren’t hard to replace, with the right screwdriver, available online. “Under five minutes; no technical skills required,” he says.

Even replacing the glass on an iPad 3 can be done by amateurs, he contends, but guidance is needed: “I have a pile of iPad 3s that we broke while trying to learn how to repair them. Last week we finally broke the code.”

IFixit offers manuals covering computers, cameras, game consoles and household appliances, too; its credo is “repair is recycling.”

Hooman Morvarid, president of

CellularDR.com, a repair business that handles phones from many manufacturers, says the most frequent problem he sees is broken glass, followed by a broken LCD screen that sits behind the glass. Increasingly, he says, the glass and LCD are fused together in a way that makes them impossible to separate if one or the other is broken. “So phones are actually becoming more expensive to repair,” he says.

The more that designers of mobile devices avoid fusing parts together, the easier they are to repair. And the repairs most likely to be undertaken are those we can do ourselves.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.