Study Gauges Value of Technology in Schools

With school districts rushing to buy computers, tablets, digital white boards and other technology, a new report questions whether the investment is worth it.

In a review of student survey data conducted in conjunction with the federal exams known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nonprofit Center for American Progress found that middle school math students more commonly used computers for basic drills and practice than to develop sophisticated skills. The report also found that no state was collecting data to evaluate whether technology investments were actually improving student achievement.

“Schools frequently acquire digital devices without discrete learning goals and ultimately use these devices in ways that fail to adequately serve students, schools, or taxpayers,” wrote Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of the report.

The analysis of the N.A.E.P. data found that 34 percent of eighth graders who took the math exams in 2011 used computers to “drill on math facts” while less than a quarter worked with spreadsheets or geometric figures on the computer. Only 17 percent used statistical programs.

The federal survey data showed striking differences among racial groups and income levels. More than half of the black students who took the eighth-grade math exam in 2011 said they used computers to work on math drills, while only 30 percent of white students said they did.

Similarly, 41 percent of students eligible for free and reduced lunches said they used computers for math drills, compared with 29 percent of students whose families earn too much for them to qualify for the lunches.

In high school science classrooms, the use of technology evidently has not advanced much past the 1980s. According to the report, 73 percent of students who took the 12th-grade National Assessment science exam said they regularly watched a movie or video in class.

Such data, Mr. Boser said, suggested that technology “doesn’t seem to have dramatically changed the nature of schooling.”

Experts who study the effectiveness of instructional technology say there is potential for some digital programs to improve teaching. John Pane, a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation, said good technology allowed students to work at their own pace and independently while teachers worked with smaller groups.

Mr. Pane conducted a study, financed by the federal Department of Education, of an algebra software program created by Carnegie Learning, a math curriculum developer. He found that high school students who used the program, which was designed to accompany a teacher-led curriculum, showed gains on their state-standardized math tests that were nearly double the gains of a typical year’s worth of growth using a more traditional high school math curriculum.

Whether those gains came from the use of technology or changes in the curriculum, he said, was hard to say. But Steve Ritter, chief scientist at Carnegie Learning, said one of the benefits of the technology was that it used the principles of cognitive science to help students gain a deeper understanding of concepts rather than simply drill math problems.

“We’re not just seeing whether they got the answer right or wrong,” Mr. Ritter said, “but why they got it right or wrong.”

Apple-1 Computers Jump in Value at Auctions

“Of course,” Mr. Spicer added, “I could have paid off my mortgage now with what it would be worth.”

Perhaps so. Last November, an Apple-1, also commonly known as the Apple I, sold for $640,000 at an auction in Germany. That sale surpassed the previous record of $374,500 set only five months earlier at Sotheby’s in New York.

The astronomical run-up in the price of the original Apple-1 machines — made in 1976 and priced at $666.66 (about $2,700 in current dollars) — is a story of the economics of scarcity and techno-fetishism, magnified by the mystique surrounding Apple and its founders, as the company has become one of the largest, most profitable corporations in the world.

The next test of the Apple-1 market comes on Saturday, at the same auction house in Cologne, Germany, where the record sale took place last November.

Even the auctioneer, Uwe Breker, expressed some surprise at the price reached last fall. For this week’s auction, the reserve price — the minimum sale price — is $116,000, and Mr. Breker conservatively estimated the likely range from $260,000 to $400,000. “But we will see,” he said.

The auction market for the vintage machines, experts say, is thin and uncertain. For example, a nonworking Apple-1 failed to attract its reserve price of just over $75,000 at an auction last year in London. The record-setting auctions last year were of working originals, as is the Apple-1 going under the gavel on Saturday.

The sky-high prices suggest irrational exuberance. But technology historians say there is a rational appeal to possessing an Apple-1. “It is Apple’s creation story, the physical artifact that traces this incredible success to its origins,” said Mr. Spicer, a senior curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

The Apple-1, Mr. Spicer added, was instrumental in the early transition in personal computing from its hobbyist roots to becoming a huge commercial business. Others were there too, notably the MITS Altair, which was introduced before the Apple-1, and was the first personal computer that Microsoft’s founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, wrote software for.

But Apple proved to be the enduring computer maker. And its founders embodied the hobbyist-commercial shift. Stephen G. Wozniak was the hardware-hacking engineer and Steven P. Jobs, who died in 2011 after a battle with cancer, was the business visionary.

Apple-1’s are scarce. An estimated 175 to 200 were produced in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos, Calif. Mike Willegal, who maintains an online registry of Apple-1’s, has verified the existence of 46 of them. A software manager at Cisco, Mr. Willegal observed that there was a technical nostalgia to the Apple-1, recalling a simpler time in computing.

“No one understands a whole computer system anymore,” Mr. Willegal said. “But Woz” — Mr. Wozniak’s nickname — “knew that board inside and out, and some people do today.”

A computer motherboard with clusters of chips was all that the bare-bones Apple-1 offered. Users had to supply their own keyboards, monitors and power supplies. It had 4 kilobytes of memory; a basic MacBook Air has more than a million times that. It could be used to run primitive computer games and write simple programs.

The Apple-1 was a reputation-building entry, but it was the Apple II, introduced a year later in 1977, that would sell in the millions and establish the company’s business. When Mr. Wozniak was designing the Apple II, he was also handling customer service for the Apple-1, a distracting time drain.

After the Apple II went on sale, the company began an aggressive trade-in program, offering Apple II’s and sometimes cash incentives in exchange for Apple-1’s, said Bob Luther, who is writing a book on the vintage machines, “The First Apple,” which he plans to self-publish, with help from a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign.

In his book research, Mr. Luther called Michael Scott, Apple’s president from 1977 to 1981, and interviewed him about the trade-in program. As Mr. Luther recalled, Mr. Scott told him, “If we had done a better job, you and I wouldn’t be having this phone call.”

“They just wanted the Apple-1 to go away,” said Mr. Luther, who bought an Apple-1 for $7,600 in 2004. (“Mine’s not for sale.”)

Auction prices for Apple-1’s have not yet settled on firm standards. But according to Richard Austin, head of books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s, who handled the auction of the Apple-1 for $374,500 last year, working machines in pristine condition with documentation command the highest prices. “And a story behind it helps,” Mr. Austin added.

The Apple-1 being auctioned on Saturday has a story. Its original owner was Fred Hatfield, a retired electrical engineer living in New Orleans.

The documentation with the machine includes a letter to Mr. Hatfield, signed by Steve Jobs, offering him a new Apple II and a check for $400 for his Apple-1, said Mr. Breker, the German auctioneer. Mr. Hatfield declined the offer, for whatever reason.

Mr. Breker is irritatingly discreet about the identity of the seller, saying only that he is a young American who works for a software company. “He brought it over here in a blanket,” Mr. Breker said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the identity of the original owner of an Apple-1 being auctioned on Saturday in Germany. The owner was Fred Hatfield, a retired electrical engineer living in New Orleans, not the Fred Hatfield who was a former professional baseball player who died in 1998.

You're the Boss Blog: Putting a Dollar Value on a Facebook Fan

A weekly roundup of small-business developments.

Courtesy of Syncapse Michael Scissons

As noted in Monday’s Dashboard summary of the week’s small-business news, a social media marketing firm, Syncapse, has published a report that says the average value of a Facebook fan is $174.17. Seeking further details about the calculation and its potential impact on a small-business owner’s social media investment, we reached out to the company’s chief executive, Michael Scissons, and had the following conversation, which has been edited and condensed.

How can small-business owners figure out what their fans are worth?

The value of a Facebook fan is determined by comparing actual fans versus nonfans across key criteria that determine enterprise value. In our study, the fan value calculation considers: One, product spending within the past 12 months. Two, loyalty and purchase intent in the future. Three, the propensity to recommend the brand to other potential customers. Four, the media and messaging value that is inherent with fan membership. Five, the propensity for fans to organically lure more fans. And Six, the emotional draw felt by brands or brand affinity.

You surveyed 2,000 panelists. Would you recommend that small-business owners looking to understand the value of their fans undertake a similar exercise?

The scale and precision in our research requires an investment that is likely out of range of most small businesses. However, a small business could execute a lightweight version that attempts to measure the key value factors across its fans and nonfans. A benchmark is always helpful in understanding where you stand and if Facebook is a worthwhile investment for customer growth and loyalty.

Your survey found that 11 percent of Facebook brand fans are more likely to continue using the brands than a non-Facebook fan. Do you think this seems low?

The 11 percent is an average, so that number will be higher or lower depending on the brand. Regardless, we view 11 percent as significant, especially considering that brand fans also spend 43 percent more in respective categories versus nonfans, despite not having a higher income. Those numbers can have compounding impact on the long-term performance of a brand.

Can a similar methodology be applied to sites like Pinterest, LinkedIn or Twitter?

Our methodology can be applied to any sort of membership within a larger customer group.

Do you think a Facebook fan is more valuable than a LinkedIn Connection or a Twitter follower?

Our public study did not compare the average value of Facebook fans versus Twitter or LinkedIn connections. However, our experience working with many of the world’s largest global marketers shows that fan value varies among brands as well as networks. Many mass-market global brands with low price points may see a higher value with Facebook fans versus connections on other social networks, because that’s where their customers are. Conversely, high-end or luxury brands may see a higher fan value on LinkedIn, because that’s where their customers frequent. The key is to experiment and find out the facts for your own individual brand.

Are there three things you would suggest small businesses do to leverage the value of their Facebook fans?

First, it’s important to observe your customers and see how they use Facebook. If they are on Facebook, then you have an amazing opportunity to connect with them in a new way — as do your competitors. Second, you should experiment and learn firsthand. This is new territory, so trial-and-error and learning from others is key. As you scale up, you’ll want to designate formal accountability for the social marketing efforts, and that often falls under the person responsible for marketing and customer acquisition. The biggest barrier to success is the time investment. Third, connect social marketing to business outcome. That may be awareness, lead generation, trials or even cold, hard sales. State your goal, define the success criteria, measure, and invest accordingly.

Gene Marks owns the Marks Group, a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., consulting firm that helps clients with customer relationship management. You can follow him on Twitter.

Disruptions: How Deal Makers Put a Value on Start-Ups - Disruptions

Annie Tritt for The New York Times Otis Chandler and his wife, Elizabeth Khuri Chandler, the founders of Goodreads, a social media site that recently sold for a reported $150 million.

I have a vision of how suitors decide how much to offer for a start-up they want to buy. Several executives go into a conference room. Each scribbles a number on a piece of paper and places it in a hat. Then the chief executive pulls out a number, and there it is.

It might sound like a stretch, but given the seemingly random and sometimes nonsensical amounts for which start-ups with no revenue, or no users, or even no product are bought, I might not be far off.

But let’s say there is a logical way to value a company. During Bubble 1.0 there seemed to be — at least sometimes. Tech start-ups were valued by the number of eyeballs they attracted. When Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo for $5.9 billion in stock in April 1999, it was estimated that the company paid $10,000 per user.

Today, when eyeballs mean much less, how do start-ups with no revenue come up with a valuation? Well, it depends on a buyer’s reason for wanting the company.

One of the growing forms of acquisitions is an acqui-hire, in which a company is bought for its talent.

“If the company has no revenue and no users, then it comes down to the price of each engineer, which on average ranges between $750,000 to $1.5 million per person,” said Sam Hamadeh, chief executive of PrivCo, a firm that follows privately held companies, who noted that such acquisitions were up 91 percent from a year ago. “Facebook certainly pioneered and popularized this phenomenon as it made acquisitions to essentially snuff out competition.”

An investor report released by PrivCo in late March found that 12 of the acquisitions by Facebook last year were of this type. Often Facebook integrated the engineers and then shut the newly purchased company. The report also found that Twitter had acquired eight companies to get their engineering talent. Yahoo, Google, Apple, LinkedIn and Airbnb have also done transactions just for engineers.

Given Mr. Hamadeh’s estimate, we can begin to guess at a start-up’s value if it’s clearly an acqui-hire. If a company has 10 employees, no revenue and no users, it could be worth about $15 million. Throw in the cost of some office equipment, shutting down the technology and paying back investors, and it’s valued at $30 million.

Chris Dixon, a general partner at the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, said in an interview that although some of the recent start-up acquisition prices might seem high, many are amortized over four years, which makes some deals seem more rational. “If you’re paying $1 million per engineer in an acqui-hire, that’s split up over four years and ends up equaling the salary of other engineers in the Valley,” he said.

But some of these transactions have people scratching their heads — like that of Summly, a news-reading app built by a 17-year-old with two employees, which Yahoo bought for a reported $30 million last month. As Emin Gün Sirer, an associate professor at Cornell, noted, Summly didn’t use any unique technology and has only a couple of employees.

When a company has users and it is a straight-up product acquisition, the numbers can be more difficult to figure out. Amazon recently purchased Goodreads, a social media site built around sharing books, for a sum said to be $150 million. Mailbox, which had not properly begun, sold for $100 million last month to DropBox. And, of course, there is Instagram, which was bought for $1 billion.

Thomas R. Eisenmann, a professor at the Harvard Business School, said that when companies weren’t being acquired just for their talent — like Goodreads and Instagram — three possible calculations were used to determine a valuation. The first requires exploring how much time and effort it would take to build the product from scratch and attract new users. The second is potential cash flow.

The third is “in the realm of, ‘What number do we need to put on the table to convince the management and investors to part with their dream?’ ” he said. “Often, they end up somewhere in the magic middle.”

Of course, all of this math starts to fall apart when a start-up receives an exorbitant amount of press and exposure on social networks. Then suitors become irrational, making the price people are willing to pay seem as if it were plucked out of a hat.

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

A Clash Across Europe Over the Value of a Click

PARIS — Google got rich by selling a simple proposition: The links it provides to other Web sites are worth a lot of money, so much that millions of advertisers are willing to pay the company billions of dollars for them.

Now some European newspaper and magazine publishers, frustrated by their inability to make more of their own money from the Web, want to reverse the equation. Google, they say, should pay them for links, because they provide the material on which the Web giant is generating all that revenue.

In several of the biggest European countries, they are close to getting their way.

A bill working its way through the German Parliament would enable publishers to collect a fee from Google and other search engines and news “aggregators” when they display excerpts from news articles alongside links to newspaper and magazine Web sites.

This week, President François Hollande of France threatened Google with similar legislation unless it came up with a way to compensate news sites by the end of the year. Last week, publishers in Italy said they would also lobby for such a law.

But Google so far is standing its ground. Already facing possible sanctions from European antitrust and privacy regulators, Google says that having to pay for links could threaten its “very existence.”

And it warned that the demand for money could backfire. If Google had to pay up, it “would consequently be forced to stop indexing the French sites,” Google wrote in a “position paper” it sent to the French government. Because 30 percent to 40 percent of the traffic on French news sites comes from Google’s links, the company’s threat is not an idle one.

Google said such laws would undermine its commitment to an open Internet and the free flow of information. It would also invert the company’s main business model. A majority of the company’s $38 billion in annual revenue comes from the sale of “sponsored links,” which appear alongside free search results. Google also sells advertisements on behalf of outside partners, including news sites, and shares revenue with them.

European publishers say their existence is even more precarious, unless they can start to generate more money from their Web sites and other digital products, like mobile applications. While advertising revenue continues to rise at Google, it has flattened out or is even falling at many European online publications.

“We effectively feed the search engine and the algorithm, constantly giving them fresh content, content that you can rely on, because it’s checked and it’s accurate,” said Nathalie Collin, the head of the I.P.G., an organization of French newspaper and magazine publishers. “This is why they can sell advertising.”

Mr. Hollande appears to agree with them. In a meeting with Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, at the Élysée Palace this week, the president “expressed his desire that negotiations between Google and news publishers begin rapidly and conclude by the end of the year,” his office said in a statement.

Mr. Hollande “stressed that dialogue and negotiation between partners appeared to him to be the better option, but that if necessary, a law could be implemented on this question, following the example of Germany.”

In a statement, Google played down talk of an ultimatum, saying Mr. Schmidt had “been to France many times to meet government officials and discuss how the Internet can help create jobs as well as export French culture globally.”

The German proposal cited by Mr. Hollande would create a so-called ancillary copyright, protecting online news content and regulating secondary uses of it, including the snippets that search engines and aggregators like Google News display to detail links to other sites.

Business users, like Google, would have to pay royalties in order to display news publishers’ material, even short excerpts. A collecting society, like the agencies that gather royalties on behalf of musicians, would collect the payments and distribute the money owed to publishers.

Bits Blog: Google's Market Capitalization Leapfrogs Microsoft's Value

Brendan McDermid/Reuters Steve Ballmer, the chief of Microsoft, showing the new Windows Phone software on HTC smartphones at an event last month.

8:34 p.m. | Updated

SEATTLE — For Microsoft, it was bad enough when Apple’s stock market value surpassed its own in 2010. Now Google, a company that didn’t even exist 15 years ago, just did the same thing.

On Monday, a slight bump in Google’s share price and a drop in Microsoft’s gave Google a market capitalization of $249.19 billion, just ahead of Microsoft’s $247.44 billion. Google’s market value also edged past that of Wal-Mart Stores, making it the third most valuable United States company behind Apple and Exxon Mobil. Market value is determined by multiplying a company’s stock price by the number of shares it has outstanding.

It was one more sign that the technology industry had entered what some call a post-PC era. Investors are becoming more bullish on the growth opportunities ahead for Google, a company whose fortunes are predicated on the Internet and, increasingly, on mobile devices and services.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has not been able to shake the view that its software business is still largely beholden, in one way or another, to the PC, a technology that is now looking stale next to younger, faster-growing devices like the smartphone and tablet. Microsoft’s software business, though still highly profitable, is not growing the way it once was.

Microsoft once had one of the technology industry’s highest-flying stocks, but its shares have stagnated over the past decade after many big investments by the company, especially in the consumer market, failed to pay off. Its Bing search engine is a big money-loser and a distant second in the market behind Google. Its mobile software business has been marginalized by Apple and Google with their iPhone and Android products.

Microsoft’s Xbox video game business is a bona fide hit, but it delivers nowhere near the profits of venerable Microsoft franchises like Office and Windows. Brent Thill, an analyst at UBS, said that Microsoft had done a respectable job of delivering revenue and profit growth, but that the weakness of its newer products had clouded the company’s future in the minds of investors.

“People have failed to give them a deeper multiple because everyone thinks they’re on the downhill,” Mr. Thill said.

Tony Imperati, a spokesman for Microsoft, declined to comment, as did Niki Fenwick, a spokeswoman for Google.

Even though Google has reliably been a moneymaking machine, its stock has been held back for several years because investors have wanted proof that it can make money in ways other than selling search ads. These ads account for a large majority of Google’s revenue, and their growth is slowing.

Google’s attempts to find other sources of revenue, like display and mobile ads, have potential. But many investors had not been convinced, because it takes new businesses some time to grow, and because a business must be very profitable to be more than a drop in the bucket of Google’s earnings from search ads. At the same time, Google’s experiments, like self-driving cars or Groupon-style deals, made some worry that it was throwing money at the wrong places.

Now, however, Google is beginning to convince investors that it is more than a one-trick pony. There is evidence that it has successfully expanded beyond search ads, including with display ads on YouTube and mobile ads on Android phones and other devices. The stock is up 18 percent this year.

Google is expected to topple Facebook and Yahoo this year as the leader in online display advertising, bringing in $2.31 billion in display ad revenue, according to eMarketer. The speed at which Google has come to dominate display advertising surprised analysts who study the company and the advertising industry.

Microsoft’s revenue is still larger than Google’s and is likely to remain so for a while. For the quarter that ended June 30, Microsoft posted revenue of $18.06 billion, while Google reported revenue of $12.21 billion. But while analysts expect Microsoft’s revenue to grow in the high single digits for the next couple of years, they say they believe Google’s revenue could rise roughly 27 percent next year.

“They have vastly different growth prospects,” said Bill Whyman, an analyst at International Strategy & Investment.

Two years ago, Steven P. Jobs, then Apple’s chief executive, began promoting the idea that the rise of the iPhone, iPad and other mobile devices heralded the arrival of a post-PC era. That argument gained credence with investors, helping to propel Apple’s market value past Microsoft’s.

Google has a long way to go before it catches Apple, which has a market value of $618.44 billion.

Nick Wingfield reported from Seattle, and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco.

State of the Art: Placing a Dollar Value on Apple’s Mountain Lion Software - State of the Art

Apple takes a different approach with its OS X software for the Mac. It intends to offer a modest new version every year. Installation is a 15-minute, one-click operation, and the price is piddling. For OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion, which came out Wednesday, Apple wants $20 — and you can install one copy on as many Macs as you have, without having to type in serial numbers or deal with copy protection hurdles.

If you’re a Mac owner, then, here’s the question: Is Mountain Lion worth $20? (A note: I have written a how-to manual to Mountain Lion for an independent publisher; it was neither commissioned by nor written in cooperation with Apple.)

There’s only one precise way to answer that, of course: assign a dollar value to each new feature.

Now, Apple claims “over 200 new features.” But some of them are tiny tweaks (Safari checks for software updates every day! Ooh!) or techie-only treats (“Xsan, the high-performance cluster file system”). Fifteen are improvements for Chinese customers, which is great for Apple’s world-domination plans but irrelevant to non-Chinese speakers.

So how many are real steps forward?

Mountain Lion continues to put velvet handcuffs on people who own iPhones, iPads and other Macs. For example, three iPhone/iPad apps are now on the Mac, too: Notes (a yellow pad, now with formatting and graphics), Reminders (a to-do list); and Game Center (lets you play against people on their Macs, iPhones and iPads, although few compatible games exist yet).

All of these sync with other Apple machines wirelessly, courtesy of Apple’s free, increasingly sophisticated iCloud service. The new apps join Mail, Calendar (formerly called iCal) and Contacts (formerly Address Book), which already sync with your iGadgets. Change a phone number on your phone, and it’s instantly updated on your tablet and computer; set up a reminder on your Mac, and your phone will chirp at the appointed time or even place.

It’s all useful and a bit magical — if you own more than one Apple device. Clearly, the company wants to keep you a happy prisoner inside its beautiful walled garden.

So what’s the value for these new syncing apps? Well, if phone apps cost $1 or $2, and computer shareware $20 or $30, then these new apps are probably worth about $7.

The new Notification Center is also modeled on an iPhone/iPad feature. It’s a dark gray panel that slides onto the screen when you drag two fingers onto your trackpad (or click a menu-bar button). Here are all the nags, messages and alerts that your programs have issued, consolidated into one tidy, customizable list: today’s appointments, incoming messages, software updates, Twitter updates and so on.

They tie into Mountain Lion’s new alert system, in which each incoming alert bubble slides quietly into the corner of your screen. It’s like a butler who tiptoes into your room with lunch, sees that you’re busy, and sets the tray down on the side table before quietly withdrawing.

But being bombarded with bubbles would be a big bummer. So the Mail app’s new V.I.P. feature lets you designate certain people whose messages you never want to miss — your spouse, your boss, the cable guy. You can set it up so that alert bubbles appear only when those people write. That’s so smart. Notification Center: easily worth $3.50.

Dictation has come to the Mac, too. When you double-tap the Fn button on your keyboard, you can speak to type.

It’s exactly the same recognition technology as the iPhone’s. So it requires no voice training and no special microphone, but it requires an Internet connection. And the accuracy is not quite what you see in the Martin Scorsese Apple commercials for Siri. Still, dictation fast and useful, to the tune of $5.75.

The new Share button is a keeper, too. It pops up everywhere — in shortcut menus, window edges, programs like Safari and Preview, and so on.

State of the Art: Placing a Dollar Value on Apple’s Mountain Lion Software — State of the Art

Apple takes a different approach with its OS X software for the Mac. It intends to offer a modest new version every year. Installation is a 15-minute, one-click operation, and the price is piddling. For OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion, which comes out Wednesday, Apple wants $20 — and you can install one copy on as many Macs as you have, without having to type in serial numbers or deal with copy protection hurdles.

If you’re a Mac owner, then, here’s the question: Is Mountain Lion worth $20? (A note: I have written a how-to manual to Mountain Lion for an independent publisher; it was neither commissioned by nor written in cooperation with Apple.)

There’s only one precise way to answer that, of course: assign a dollar value to each new feature.

Now, Apple claims “over 200 new features.” But some of them are tiny tweaks (Safari checks for software updates every day! Ooh!) or techie-only treats (“Xsan, the high-performance cluster file system”). Fifteen are improvements for Chinese customers, which is great for Apple’s world-domination plans but irrelevant to non-Chinese speakers.

So how many are real steps forward?

Mountain Lion continues to put velvet handcuffs on people who own iPhones, iPads and other Macs. For example, three iPhone/iPad apps are now on the Mac, too: Notes (a yellow pad, now with formatting and graphics), Reminders (a to-do list); and Game Center (lets you play against people on their Macs, iPhones and iPads, although few compatible games exist yet).

All of these sync with other Apple machines wirelessly, courtesy of Apple’s free, increasingly sophisticated iCloud service. The new apps join Mail, Calendar (formerly called iCal) and Contacts (formerly Address Book), which already sync with your iGadgets. Change a phone number on your phone, and it’s instantly updated on your tablet and computer; set up a reminder on your Mac, and your phone will chirp at the appointed time or even place.

It’s all useful and a bit magical — if you own more than one Apple device. Clearly, the company wants to keep you a happy prisoner inside its beautiful walled garden.

So what’s the value for these new syncing apps? Well, if phone apps cost $1 or $2, and computer shareware $20 or $30, then these new apps are probably worth about $7.

The new Notification Center is also modeled on an iPhone/iPad feature. It’s a dark gray panel that slides onto the screen when you drag two fingers onto your trackpad (or click a menu-bar button). Here are all the nags, messages and alerts that your programs have issued, consolidated into one tidy, customizable list: today’s appointments, incoming messages, software updates, Twitter updates and so on.

They tie into Mountain Lion’s new alert system, in which each incoming alert bubble slides quietly into the corner of your screen. It’s like a butler who tiptoes into your room with lunch, sees that you’re busy, and sets the tray down on the side table before quietly withdrawing.

But being bombarded with bubbles would be a big bummer. So the Mail app’s new V.I.P. feature lets you designate certain people whose messages you never want to miss — your spouse, your boss, the cable guy. You can set it up so that alert bubbles appear only when those people write. That’s so smart. Notification Center: easily worth $3.50.

Dictation has come to the Mac, too. When you double-tap the Fn button on your keyboard, you can speak to type.

It’s exactly the same recognition technology as the iPhone’s. So it requires no voice training and no special microphone, but it requires an Internet connection. And the accuracy is not quite what you see in the Martin Scorsese Apple commercials for Siri. Still, dictation fast and useful, to the tune of $5.75.

The new Share button is a keeper, too. It pops up everywhere — in shortcut menus, window edges, programs like Safari and Preview, and so on.

DealBook: Square Near a Deal to Value It at $3.25 Billion

Square Register uses the company’s reader and an app to turn an iPad into a credit card register.

For all of Square’s challenges, raising money has not been one.

Square, the mobile payments start-up best known for its pint-size credit card reader, is close to raising roughly $200 million, which would give the company an implied valuation of $3.25 billion, people briefed on the matter said. This financing round is expected to be led by Suhail Rizvi, the head of Rizvi Traverse Management, a small private equity firm that has made investments in Twitter and Playboy, these people added.

The hefty investment — the company’s third in less than two years — will help Square battle with the likes of Google, Intuit and PayPal. But it also puts enormous pressure on Square, led by Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and executive chairman of Twitter, to prove its worth.

The company, which is three years old and based in San Francisco, still has to prove that it will be a big winner in mobile payments — and that it will grow into a highly profitable business.

On paper, at least, Square’s value has soared in just a short period of time.

Last summer, it raised $100 million, valuing the company at $1.6 billion. Several months before that, Square had another investment at a $240 million valuation. All told, the company’s valuation has grown by 13.5 times in less than two years.

Still, it may have wanted more from this round.

In recent months, Square had been seeking an investment that would peg its value as high as $4 billion, people familiar with the discussions said. Although it found some investors willing to participate at that level, it ultimately preferred a different group. And those investors didn’t have the stomach for $4 billion, these people said.

Unlike Square’s previous financing rounds, which prominently featured big venture capital names like Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, this one was not led by a traditional Silicon Valley backer. In fact, several major venture capital firms declined to participate at the lower level.

A Square spokeswoman declined to comment.

In the increasingly competitive and crowded world of mobile payments, Square stands out.

Its marquee product is a square-shaped credit card reader that plugs into smartphone earbud jacks. It helps individuals and small vendors, like taxi drivers and nail salons, accept credit card payments on their mobile phones. Square provides the reader and the software free, but charges the users 2.75 percent of the transaction. Of that fee, it collects a small amount and sends the rest to credit card companies.

Adoption has been fast. In the first six months of this year, the company has roughly doubled the number of users to two million. At its current pace, it is processing $6 billion in transactions a year.

Since introducing the hardware, Mr. Dorsey has expanded the company’s offerings to include Square Register, an application that turns an iPad into a credit card register for small businesses, and Pay With Square, an app for customers to use.

Under Pay With Square, users can link their credit card accounts to trusted merchants and open “tabs” with these vendors. Once a tab is set up, a user can then walk into a store and simply tell the cashier to put purchases on his tab. The cashier, using Square’s software, will then see a photo of the user and confirm the purchase.

But Square, despite its early success, is still just one of many players trying to own the future of real-world payments.

Google recently introduced Google Wallet, a mobile app that lets users pay by tapping a phone on special readers at participating vendors. Several companies now have their own hardware, including Intuit, Verifone and PayPal, which has a triangle-shaped card reader named PayPal Here. Apple, with its loyal fan base and giant cache of credit card information, is expected to get in the game soon.

Square, meanwhile, will also have to prove success outside of its signature reader. Because of the fees it pays to third parties, the company makes very little on each transaction. And given the competition, margins will remain under pressure.

Instead, its financial future may hinge more on apps like Pay With Square, which could deliver customized ads and promote premium merchant services. The company has signed up more than 75,000 vendors, but it is unclear how many consumers are regularly using the app.

Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting.