In Tech Buying, U.S. Still Stuck in Last Century

But despite Mr. Obama’s promises in the last two months to “leap into the 21st century,” there is little evidence that the administration is moving quickly to pursue an overhaul of the current system in the coming year.

Outside experts, members of Congress, technology executives and former government officials say the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act’s website is the nearly inevitable result of a procurement process that stifles innovation and wastes taxpayer dollars. The Air Force last year scrapped a $1 billion supply management system. Officials abandoned a new F.B.I. system after spending $170 million on it. And a $438 million air traffic control systems update, a critical part of a $45 billion nationwide upgrade that is years behind schedule, is expected to go at least $270 million over budget.

Longstanding laws intended to prevent corruption and conflict of interest often saddle agencies with vendors selected by distant committees and contracts that stretch for years, even as technology changes rapidly. The rules frequently leave the government officials in charge of a project with little choice over their suppliers, little control over the project’s execution and almost no authority to terminate a contract that is failing.

“It may make sense if you are buying pencils or cleaning services,” said David Blumenthal, who during Mr. Obama’s first term led a federal office to promote the adoption of electronic health records. But it does not work “when you have these kinds of incredibly complex, data-driven, nationally important, performance-based procurements.”

The Standish Group, an information technology firm, deemed just 4.6 percent of large-scale government contracting projects executed in the past decade to be successful. More than half were “challenged,” and about 40 percent simply “failed.”

Multinational companies with large legal teams are often successful at winning years-long government contracts. But officials say technology innovation — particularly on web-based projects like the health care site — is often found in smaller firms, like many in Silicon Valley, that lack the size and the know-how to navigate the costly procurement maze.

“It’s a punishing and punitive environment to work in,” said Stan Z. Soloway, the chief executive of the Professional Services Council, a trade group, and a former Clinton administration official.

Officials said the administration was conducting a “review of options” for improving the government’s use of technology and was beginning to discuss the issue with stakeholders inside and outside government. But they declined to say whether Mr. Obama would call for changes in how Washington delivers technology projects during his State of the Union address early next year and whether the White House had any specific plan to make good on the president’s oft-stated interest in tackling the thorny, bureaucratic issue.

“This administration has made considerable progress in reforming federal I.T. management practices,” said Steven Posner, a spokesman for the White House budget office, citing new open-data and cloud-computing initiatives. “As the president made clear, significant challenges remain in the area of federal I.T., and we need to continue improving the way we deliver technology.”

In Mr. Obama’s first term, the administration pushed agencies to move away from expensive, dedicated hardware by adopting more flexible and cheaper Internet-based services when possible. Officials also began requiring agencies to replace proprietary data with modern open formats that can be easily understood by the public and the private sector.

But lawmakers and others said the Obama administration was doing too little to fix the fundamental problems, and they predicted that the issue would ultimately fall to Mr. Obama’s successor.

Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia, said the budget office, formally known as the Office of Management and Budget, refused to back bipartisan legislation that would consolidate responsibility for technology projects in a single person at each agency and increase the transparency of government spending on technology.

“O.M.B. takes the position, as it usually does, that we don’t need legislation to address these issues,” said Mr. Connolly, who represents a Washington suburb with hundreds of federal technology contractors. “O.M.B. was really our biggest stumbling block. It was maddening.”

Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?

Mondadori Portfolio, via Getty ImagesAt the Solvay Conference on Physics in 1927, the only woman in attendance was Marie Curie (bottom row, third from left).

Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. If they did hire the woman, they set her salary, on average, nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. Surprisingly, female scientists were as biased as their male counterparts.

Meg Urry, professor of physics and astronomy at Yale.

The new study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against women in the sciences. Only one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American; of all the physics professors in the United States, only 14 percent are women. The numbers of black and Hispanic scientists are even lower; in a typical year, 13 African-Americans and 20 Latinos of either sex receive Ph.D.’s in physics. The reasons for those shortages are hardly mysterious — many minority students attend secondary schools that leave them too far behind to catch up in science, and the effects of prejudice at every stage of their education are well documented. But what could still be keeping women out of the STEM fields (“STEM” being the current shorthand for “science, technology, engineering and mathematics”), which offer so much in the way of job prospects, prestige, intellectual stimulation and income?

As one of the first two women to earn a bachelor of science degree in physics from Yale — I graduated in 1978 — this question concerns me deeply. I attended a rural public school whose few accelerated courses in physics and calculus I wasn’t allowed to take because, as my principal put it, “girls never go on in science and math.” Angry and bored, I began reading about space and time and teaching myself calculus from a book. When I arrived at Yale, I was woefully unprepared. The boys in my introductory physics class, who had taken far more rigorous math and science classes in high school, yawned as our professor sped through the material, while I grew panicked at how little I understood. The only woman in the room, I debated whether to raise my hand and expose myself to ridicule, thereby losing track of the lecture and falling further behind.

In the end, I graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with honors in the major, having excelled in the department’s three-term sequence in quantum mechanics and a graduate course in gravitational physics, all while teaching myself to program Yale’s mainframe computer. But I didn’t go into physics as a career. At the end of four years, I was exhausted by all the lonely hours I spent catching up to my classmates, hiding my insecurities, struggling to do my problem sets while the boys worked in teams to finish theirs. I was tired of dressing one way to be taken seriously as a scientist while dressing another to feel feminine. And while some of the men I wanted to date weren’t put off by my major, many of them were.

Mostly, though, I didn’t go on in physics because not a single professor — not even the adviser who supervised my senior thesis — encouraged me to go to graduate school. Certain this meant I wasn’t talented enough to succeed in physics, I left the rough draft of my senior thesis outside my adviser’s door and slunk away in shame. Pained by the dream I had failed to achieve, I locked my textbooks, lab reports and problem sets in my father’s army footlocker and turned my back on physics and math forever.

Not until 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, wondered aloud at a lunchtime talk why more women don’t end up holding tenured positions in the hard sciences, did I feel compelled to reopen that footlocker. I have known Summers since my teens, when he judged my high-school debate team, and he has always struck me as an admirer of smart women. When he suggested — among several other pertinent reasons — that innate disparities in scientific and mathematical aptitude at the very highest end of the spectrum might account for the paucity of tenured female faculty, I got the sense that he had asked the question because he genuinely cared about the answer. I was taken aback by his suggestion that the problem might have something to do with biological inequalities between the sexes, but as I read the heated responses to his comments, I realized that even I wasn’t sure why so many women were still giving up on physics and math before completing advanced degrees. I decided to look up my former classmates and professors, review the research on women’s performance in STEM fields and return to Yale to see what, if anything, had changed since I studied there. I wanted to understand why I had walked away from my dream, and why so many other women still walk away from theirs.

Eileen Pollack is a professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan and author of “Breaking and Entering” and “In the Mouth.” She is at work on a book about women in the sciences.

Editor: Joel Lovell

DealBook: KPN and América Móvil Still in Talks

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Bits: I’m Still Waiting for My Phone to Become My Wallet

A truly mobile wallet — one that would let you easily pay for restaurant meals, subway rides or beers at a bar with a quick wave of your cellphone — has long been described as imminent. But it remains elusive. Some innovations have begun to bridge the gap, but most have been a disappointment or have not yet worked well enough for mainstream adoption.

In 2012, Square, which makes a credit card reader that can be plugged into an iPhone or iPad, worked on a credit-cardless system that let people pay for goods without ever pulling out their wallets or phones. When Square users walk into a store in its network, a Square-enabled register shows pictures of their faces, which are used as authentication for payment. But the app can be awkward to use.

Last summer, Apple introduced Passbook, a digital system for storing boarding passes, movie tickets, loyalty cards and gift cards on the iPhone. But it doesn’t do much beyond that, at least not yet. Google worked with major credit card companies and banks to create its Wallet app, which lets people pay for items at some stores by waving their phones but is available only for Android devices. Visa offers two digital wallets, payWave and V.me, but I’ve never seen anyone use them or signed up myself.  And the major mobile carriers in the United States banded together to form Isis, a mobile payments network, which has yet to roll out nationally.

Starbucks has arguably had the most success with the pay-by-phone idea in the United States. The company has persuaded millions of people to download an application that can be used to pay for their lattes. It works like a digital gift card — but only at Starbucks, obviously, so it’s limiting. (The company also invested $25 million in Square and is incorporating Square’s technology in its stores.)

When I complain to friends and colleagues about the inconvenience of fumbling around for my wallet when I’m shopping — and say I wish I could just use my phone instead — they often give me bewildered looks.

Apparently, that’s because paying with a phone today is rarely easier than paying with a credit card. Paying via phone often involves a series of awkward swipes and taps to start the transaction, and the process can be disrupted by spotty wireless connections, low batteries or other electronic hiccups.

“No one wants to be the guy holding up the grocery line at 6 p.m.,” said Joshua Reich, one of the founders of Simple, a banking start-up company that gives people free checking accounts and offers them data-rich analyses of their spending and saving habits. “You don’t want to look like that dork, the guy riding a Segway.”

Jan Dawson, an analyst at Ovum who covers the mobile industry, agreed.

“Mobile payments are trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist for most people,” he said. “You don’t hear people moaning about how hard it is to pay with their credit cards or debit cards.”

The biggest problem for paying by cellphone is that so many kinds of businesses are competing to offer services. Companies as varied as phone carriers, banks, credit card companies and technology start-ups have had plans to get into the mobile payment business, but many are locking horns over who can profit the most, Mr. Dawson said.

“Everyone wants to be the primary payments provider,” he said.

Wireless carriers, desperate to bolster their revenue, are reluctant to hand over potentially lucrative streams to companies like Apple and Google, which already make billions from devices and the software that runs on them. Banks and credit card companies are also rolling out mobile checking services and applications, both to impress their younger users and to keep a hand in a game where billions of dollars are at stake annually, largely from the endless parade of small fees racked up with each purchase. And industry heavyweights like PayPal and Groupon are also scrambling to get their own offerings into the market.

It’s tough to persuade major retailers to spend money to work with Google Wallet or Apple’s Passbook, for example, when so many other options are still on the table. And what is popular today might be outdated in a few months.

Part of the reason that Starbucks’ own app works so well is that the company invested significantly to build out the infrastructure in its stores — sleek phone-scanning kiosks and mobile apps that work reliably and efficiently.

“There is a lot of reluctance in installing a lot of technology, especially if they aren’t sure it’ll take off,” said Rob von Behren, one of the lead engineers at Braintree, a payment services company that powers and processes transactions for popular services including Uber, the mobile taxi service, and Airbnb, the travel rental site. This reluctance leads to an “infinite waiting period and slows the growth of an industry,” he said.

Mr. von Behren was one of the creators of Google Wallet before he left to work at Square and later at Braintree. He said that while his Google team’s original goal was to simplify online purchases, it quickly realized that nudging mobile e-commerce forward seemed more urgent.

A large portion of shopping begins on cellphones, but getting to the final checkout remains a challenge because entering payment information on a small screen is clumsy. And most traditional big-box retailers that could build infrastructure to support mobile payments came of age “in an era where there wasn’t network connectivity,” making it harder to update their cashier software, payment methods or loyalty programs, Mr. von Behren said.

He ultimately decided that working with legacy retailers to create a system for in-store shopping with cellphones was a “tremendous juggling act.” He added, “It kind of worked and it kind of didn’t.”

BUT a new generation of innovation is coming, he said, so he thinks that wide use of pay-by-cellphone systems will arrive eventually. Braintree recently acquired Venmo, a company that lets people send money to one another via simple text messages. In addition, some promising newcomers say they are working on more complete alternatives.

Clinkle, a start-up, has persuaded a notable roster of venture capitalists to funnel $25 million into its mysterious and forthcoming mobile payment services. And a new company, Lemon, is working on its own digital wallet.

I guess I’ll have to wait and see. For now, I’ve come up with my own workaround for hot weather: securing my credit card and driver’s license to my iPhone with a rubber band. But it’s not what I had in mind when I pictured paying with my phone.

Havana Journal: Salons or Not, Cyberspace Is Still a Distant Place for Most Cubans

Until last month, though, the closest Mr. García, 59, had been to cyberspace was the painfully slow e-mail service at his local post office. Then on June 4, Etecsa, the state telecom company, opened 118 Internet salons around the island, expanding public Web access — by a fraction, at least — in what is regarded as the least wired country in the Western Hemisphere. Mr. García, a retired military officer, immediately signed up.

“This is like a Three Kings’ Day gift,” Mr. García said of his newfound Internet access, referring to the Jan. 6 holiday when people dressed as the Magi hand out goodies to children.

But as gifts go, it is extremely expensive, he said. At $4.50 an hour, a session at one of the new cybersalons costs almost as much as the average state worker earns in a week, prompting many Cubans to wonder whether President Raúl Castro is serious about bringing the Internet to the masses, or just playing for time.

“At this price, hardly anyone is going to be using it,” said Mr. García, who figured he could afford to buy an hour or two a week because his daughter helped him out and he had just sold his house.

Cuba’s limited Internet access is a source of festering resentment among Cubans, millions of whom have never been online. Some people — medics, for example, or journalists — qualify for a dial-up connection at home. Others use pirated connections, rent time on a neighbor’s line or log on at a hotel, where they pay about $8 an hour. Many trade information on memory sticks or rely on stodgy state-run periodicals for news.

“We are living in the back of a cave,” said Walfrido López, a Cuban blogger and information technology specialist. “People here are asleep, because they don’t have information.”

He added, “Having information is what enables you to make decisions, take positions.”

Government figures indicate 26 percent of Cubans had Internet access last year, but this includes millions who entered only an intranet linked to their work. The International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency for information and communications technology, puts the number of broadband subscriptions in Cuba at 0.04 per 100 inhabitants, or about one in 2,500. That is lower than in Haiti and Sudan, two places that are not considered the least bit tech-friendly.

Even Cuba’s new cybersalons, which operate under the brand name Nauta, amount to just one for every 95,000 Cubans.

The new service is “a gesture of openness within a context of the ability to have monopoly control,” said Ted Henken, a professor at City University of New York who closely follows the Cuban blogosphere, noting that Etecsa requires users to sign a contract warning that they will be monitored for subversive activity. Still, he added, the government has “created a conversation around access that didn’t exist before.”

Harold Cárdenas Lema, 27, a blogger and philosophy teacher at the University of Matanzas, said the cybersalons represented a “transcendental” shift because they put a relatively fast, fairly uncensored Internet service at the disposal of individuals.

However, the government risks a deep digital divide if it does not cut prices in line with most Cubans’ salaries, Mr. Cárdenas said. And despite an official pledge to prioritize “social” use of the Internet, he and others using university or hospital connections complained they were as slow as ever.

Wilfredo González Vidál, vice minister of communications, in an interview with the official news media in May, assured that “the market will not regulate access to knowledge in our country.” But Rogelio Moreno Díaz responded in his acerbic blog, Bubusópia, that this was “the final insult to the public’s intelligence.”

Bits Blog: In Revamping, Apple Wants to Show It Can Still Innovate

Apple wants to prove that it has not lost the ability to innovate in a post-Steve Jobs world, Brian X. Chen reports in The New York Times.

The company on Monday introduced a major redesign of iOS, its mobile software system, as well as upgrades for some of its Mac computers. It also unveiled a new online music service for its music player, iTunes. The company, under intense pressure from investors, introduced the new software and Macs on the first day of its annual conference for software developers.

Apple’s stock has fallen to about $450 after peaking at about $700 in September. Some investors worry that the company’s growth is slowing because it has lost its way after the death of Mr. Jobs, its visionary leader. Apple’s vexation showed at the conference. After unveiling a major upgrade for a Mac computer, Phil Schiller, the company’s vice president for global marketing, offered a sarcastic response to those who have suggested that Apple could no longer innovate.

Charles Golvin, a technology analyst at Forrester Research, said Mr. Schiller’s remarks indicated that “they have a chip on their shoulder.” But Mr. Golvin said that Apple was adding improvements to battery life and other enhancements to software that people would actually find useful. “What customers are getting here is tremendous innovation under the cover,” he said.

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, called Apple’s new mobile operating system, iOS 7, the “biggest change to iOS since the introduction of the iPhone.”

Europe Still Wrangling Over Online Privacy Rules

But because of intense lobbying by Silicon Valley companies and other powerful groups in Brussels, several proposals have been softened, no agreement is in sight and governments are openly sparring with one another over how far to go in protecting privacy.

On Thursday, justice ministers from the European Union’s 27 member states agreed to a business-friendly proposal that what companies do with personal data would be scrutinized by regulators only if there were “risks” to individuals, including identity theft or discrimination.

The ministers debated a proposal that would no longer require companies to obtain “explicit” consent from users whose personal data they collect and process, instead of “unambiguous” consent, which is considered to be a lower legal threshold. And they discussed a proposal on balancing an individual’s right to data protection with other rights, including the freedom to do business.

The ministers deferred discussion of the other most fractious provision, the so-called right to be forgotten. But in recent weeks, public comments by lawmakers and draft language suggested a softening of approach.

“The right to be forgotten has been softened, made more palatable,” said Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of Internet governance at the University of Oxford. “But it is by no means dead.”

Although a final version of the legislation is not expected to be completed for many months, and maybe not until next year, the developments on Thursday are an early signal that the technology industry’s lobbying efforts are gaining some traction.

The lobbying has been “exceptional” and legislators in Europe need “to guard against undue pressure from industry and third countries to lower the level of data protection that currently exists,” said Peter Hustinx, the European data protection supervisor, referring to countries outside of the European Union.

“The benefits for industry should not and do not need to be at the expense of our fundamental rights to privacy and data protection,” Mr. Hustinx warned in e-mailed comments.

In the last year, American technology companies have dispatched representatives to Brussels and issued white papers through industry associations arguing that stringent privacy regulations would hamstring businesses, already suffering from the recession in Europe.

United States government officials have also made trips across the Atlantic to press policy makers like Viviane Reding, the union’s justice commissioner, who drafted the original, strict measures, to press for a less restrictive approach to data privacy.

The industry’s arguments have found a ready audience among some European governments. They include Ireland and Britain, where there are acute worries that the European Union is failing to take advantage of growth opportunities from Internet businesses that might help revive the economy. Apple, Facebook and Google all have European headquarters in Dublin.

“Europe is not sleepwalking into unworkable regulations,” said Richard Allan, Facebook’s director of policy for Europe, echoing a cautious optimism among industry officials about the data privacy law. “What’s positive is that over the last year, the debate has broadened out. There are other voices in the debate, who are saying: ‘Hang on a minute. What about the economic crisis?’ ”

The proposed law would affect most companies that deal in personal information — including pictures posted on social networks or information on what people buy on retail sites or look for using a search engine.

Whatever is enacted would serve as the privacy law in every country in the European Union and potentially have a bearing on other countries drafting data protection laws of their own.

The ministers took up their version of the law on Thursday; another version is under discussion by the European Parliament.

James Kanter reported from Brussels and Somini Sengupta from San Francisco.

Foxconn Audit Reveals Workweek Still Too Long

The auditors, supervised by the Fair Labor Association, said Foxconn was still working toward lowering the average workweek to the 49-hour cap. And labor unions at the plants that are supposed to represent the workers’ interests are still dominated by management, the group said.

Still, the average workweek has come down sharply from the typical 60 hours or more that has been common practice at the Chinese suppliers of Apple and other technology companies.

Although the auditors declined to be specific about the length of the Foxconn workweek, Apple has said that it has been working to reduce the long hours put in by workers at its suppliers, which are mostly in China.

In a statement on its supplier responsibility Web site, the company said for more than a million workers in its global supply network that it tracked in 2012, “the average hours worked per week was under 50.”

An Apple spokesman, Steve Dowling, declined to discuss the specifics of the Fair Labor Association audit, which he said was done independently of Apple. In a statement, Foxconn said the F.L.A. report confirmed the company’s recent improvements in its operations. “We will continue to build on that success as we work toward compliance with the F.L.A. Code,” the company said.

But Mr. Dowling said Apple has been working closely with its suppliers and conducting its own monitoring to improve conditions at the factories that make its products, and the company has posted public progress reports.

Foxconn, part of the Taiwan-based company Hon Hai Precision Industry, employs about 178,000 workers at the three factories inspected. It has about 1.2 million workers at plants making products for Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Microsoft and other technology companies.

Foxconn has been under intense scrutiny for several years because of working conditions inside its factories. Investigations by The New York Times, outside groups and Apple’s own supplier responsibility officials have found illegal amounts of overtime, crowded working conditions, under-age workers and improper disposal of hazardous waste. Industrial accidents have injured and killed Foxconn workers, and the company also experienced a wave of worker suicides.

Labor and consumer activists have pressured Apple, one of the most profitable companies in the world, to do more to improve conditions for the people who make its products. The monthly earnings of Foxconn workers making Apple products are currently about $500.

Apple joined the Fair Labor Association, or F.L.A., in January 2012, and asked the group to audit its suppliers, beginning with Foxconn. The labor group has periodically inspected Foxconn factories in Guanlan, Longhua and Chengdu since February 2012 and interviewed thousands of workers. Apple pays for the audits.

After the first inspection, Apple and Foxconn agreed to an action plan of 360 items to be completed by July 1, 2013. As of January, 98.3 percent of them had been achieved, the group’s report said.

Most of the items were “housekeeping issues,” said Auret van Heerden, chief executive of the F.L.A., in an interview Thursday. “Those things they plowed through.”

But Foxconn has also addressed more substantive problems, Mr. van Heerden said. For example, in fire safety, the company added more escape routes and cleared choke points after the auditors asked it to test the evacuation of buildings during shift change, when plants are most crowded. “We were, in a way, looking for trouble,” he said.

He noted that Foxconn has also overhauled many processes, including using robots instead of people to polish the aluminum backs of iPad cases and water to capture and dispose of the resulting dust. An aluminum dust explosion in May 2011 at Foxconn’s Chengdu factory killed three workers and injured more than a dozen others.

Critics of the F.L.A. and Foxconn said the most recent audit played down problems found by other investigators, such as unpaid overtime and Foxconn’s use of unpaid interns.

“Over all, the F.L.A.’s reporting on Foxconn continues to be unjustifiably rosy,” Scott Nova, executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, a university-backed group that monitors apparel factories worldwide, said in an e-mail.

Steven Greenhouse contributed reporting.

PC Sales Still Slumping, Despite New Offerings

But not only have the new offerings failed to stop the downward slide in PC shipments that has been going on for the last year, they appear to have made it worse.

On Wednesday, the research firm IDC reported that worldwide PC shipments declined 13.9 percent during the first three months of the year compared with the same period a year earlier.

To put those numbers into perspective, that is the most severe decline in the PC market since IDC began tracking the business almost two decades ago and almost double the rate of decline that the firm was expecting for the quarter.

Gartner, another research firm, had estimates that were only slightly better, showing an 11.2 percent decline in PC shipments for the first quarter.

This is the fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year declines in shipments for the PC.

Many of the challenges facing the PC business have not changed during the last year. Smartphones and tablets, while not perfect substitutes for PCs, are pulling dollars out of consumers’ wallets that might have otherwise gone to laptop or desktop computers. People are simply more excited about those mobile technologies, with their touch-screens, than they are about buying conventional computers.

In this environment, Microsoft introduced Windows 8 last October. The software, a bold redesign of the company’s flagship operating system, is tailored to run on tablets, traditional keyboard-and-mouse computers and hybrid devices that combine elements of both. But it seems that the changes Microsoft made with Windows were so extreme that they scared off buyers.

“At this point, unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only failed to provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market,” Bob O’Donnell, program vice president for clients and displays at IDC, said in a statement. He said that “radical changes” to elements like the user interface and higher costs had made PCs less attractive compared with tablets and other devices.

“Microsoft will have to make some very tough decisions moving forward if it wants to help reinvigorate the PC market,” Mr. O’Donnell added.

The severity of the decline in the market is further evidence that the “post-PC era” heralded several years ago by Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive, was not an empty slogan. Mr. Jobs, who died in 2011, predicted that PCs would endure, but that smartphones and tablets would become the devices people favored for most of their computing needs.

That shift has big implications for the balance of power in the tech business. Last week, Gartner estimated that by 2017, the dominant operating system for all computing devices, including smartphones, computers and tablets, would be Google’s Android, with software from Microsoft and Apple far behind.

Crowdfunding for Small Business Is Still an Unclear Path

Mr. Caldbeck and his peers on the panel fumbled for a response. The fact is, most private equity investors and venture capitalists won’t touch a consumer products company until it has surpassed $10 million in sales — anything else is too small to bother with.

The best advice the panel could offer was for the entrepreneur to tap his credit cards.

“The purpose of the panel was to help entrepreneurs raise money, but we had no answers,” Mr. Caldbeck remembers. “That’s when I knew that there is a big issue here.”

That big issue caused Mr. Caldbeck to leave his job to start CircleUp, a company that aims to connect up-and-coming consumer products companies with investors.

Right now, the people allowed to invest through CircleUp must be accredited, meaning they have a high net worth. CircleUp hopes that soon not just the wealthy few, but the general public — whether friends, family members, customers, Facebook friends, or even total strangers — will be able to invest in deserving companies through a hot new area of finance known as crowdfunding.

To its advocates, crowdfunding is a way for capital-starved entrepreneurs to receive financing that neither big investors nor lenders are willing or able to provide. To others, it represents a potential minefield that could help bad businesses get off the ground before they eventually fail, and in some cases could even ensnare unsophisticated investors in outright fraud.

Those fears are partly why the Securities and Exchange Commission has delayed rules allowing crowdfunding that were supposed to take effect this month as part of the JOBS Act (Jump-Start Our Business Start-Ups), signed by President Obama last April. The S.E.C. is wary of loosening investor protections that have been in place since the 1930s.

Despite the uncertainty, the outlines of a new industry are emerging as a few crowdfunding start-ups have found ways to raise money within current rules. They include companies like CircleUp and SoMoLend, which lends money to small, Main Street-type businesses that typically wouldn’t interest private investors.

By themselves, of course, a few start-ups can’t completely democratize finance. But they begin to illuminate what the future of crowdfunding could look like, as the debate continues over a vast widening of the private investor pool.

Mr. Caldbeck formed CircleUp last fall along with Rory Eakin, a former business school classmate who was working for a philanthropic foundation. Through their start-up, the two men seek to finance food, personal care, apparel and pet-related companies, often with an environmental or social bent.

CircleUp considers applications from companies with $1 million to $10 million in revenue. Companies whose applications are accepted make their pitches to investors behind a firewall on the CircleUp Web site, offering equity stakes in return for capital. CircleUp, which helps companies raise up to $3 million, takes a small cut of the money.

Under current federal regulations, CircleUp wouldn’t be able to arrange such deals on its own. But it struck a partnership with W. R. Hambrecht, a registered broker-dealer that can handle investments from accredited, or high-net-worth, individuals whom the S.E.C. considers sophisticated enough to invest in private companies.

“Living here in Silicon Valley, a lot of people don’t understand the need,” Mr. Caldbeck says. “If you’re a tech company with a good idea, you can raise money. But it’s a different story for food, agriculture, retail and other consumer-oriented businesses.”

Mr. Caldbeck sees a big opportunity. Consumer goods companies account for a sizable portion of the nation’s businesses, yet very little capital — from private equity funds or from accredited investors — flows to them, he says.

What’s more, only a tiny percentage of those who qualify as accredited investors actually invest in private companies, he says. (These are people with a net worth of at least $1 million, not including their primary residence, or who have earned more than $200,000 — $300,000 for couples — in each of the last two years.)

Amy Cortese is the author of “Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit From It.”

CHRIS BROWN’S EX Rihanna Doesn’t Faze Me I Still Want Chris Back

Chris Brown's recently-dumped ex Karrueche Tran still believes she has a future with the singer — in fact, Karrueche is telling friends, she's not gonna stop trying to get with CB just because Rihanna's back in the picture. 

Sources close to Karrueche tell TMZ, she was hurt when Brown gave her the axe a few weeks ago … but she never stopped loving him — and now, she is on a mission to get him back. 

We're told Karrueche got used to a certain level of celebrity while dating the singer, and she's not ready to "go back to being basic" — even if that means messing around with Brown, while he's messing with RiRi. 

Eventually, we're told Karrueche hopes to edge Rihanna back out of the picture.

Case in point — Karrueche and CB were spotted hanging out together Monday in Burbank, CA … two days after Rihanna and CB were spotted together in L.A. 

As we previously reported, CB broke up with Karrueche earlier this month — citing RiRi as the reason — saying, "I love Karrueche very much but I don't want to see her hurt over my friendship with Rihanna."

Read more: http://www.tmz.com/2012/10/24/chris-brown-rihanna-karrueche-tran-break-up/#ixzz2AE2WwAtE

High & Low Finance: A Computer Lesson From 1987, Still Unlearned by Wall Street

On one day, the Dow Jones industrial average lost 23 percent of its value. People wondered if that heralded a new Depression. A front page headline in The New York Times asked, “Does 1987 Equal 1929?”

It did not. The next recession, a mild one, was more than two years away.

What it did signify was the beginning of the destruction of markets by dumb computers. Or, to be fair to the computers, by computers programmed by fallible people and trusted by people who did not understand the computer programs’ limitations. As computers came in, human judgment went out.

That process, then in its infancy, gained speed over the next two decades. By 2008, it really did threaten a new Depression. But we’ll get to that later.

The 1987 villain was something called portfolio insurance. It was a product that used stock index futures and options to assure institutional investors that they need not worry if market prices seemed to be unreasonably high.

Portfolio insurance would let them get out with minimal damage if markets ever began to fall. They would simply sell ever-increasing numbers of futures contracts, a process known as dynamic hedging.

The short position in futures contracts would then offset the losses caused by falls in the stocks they owned.

Portfolio insurance did not start the widespread selling of stocks in 1987. But it made sure that the process got out of hand. As computers dictated that more and more futures be sold, the buyers of those futures not only insisted on sharply lower prices but also hedged their positions by selling the underlying stocks. That drove prices down further, and produced more sell orders from the computers. At the time, many people generally understood how portfolio insurance worked, but there was a belief that its very nature would assure that it could not cause panic. Everyone would know the selling was not coming from anyone with inside information, so others would be willing to step in and buy to take advantage of bargains. Or so it was believed.

But when the crash arrived, few understood much of anything, except that it was like nothing they had ever seen. Anyone who did step in with a buy order quickly regretted the decision.

I was then the stock market columnist at Barron’s and I spent most of that October week on the trading floor at Salomon Brothers, then a leading brokerage firm in stock trading. Near the end of that Monday, I remember looking up and seeing dozens of young investment bankers lining the trading floor. There was really nothing for them to see; the ticker tape rolling across the side wall was hours behind actual trading. But many no doubt wondered if their world was coming to an end.

Stan Shopkorn, the Salomon vice chairman and chief equity trader — and a man who had not had a great day — noticed them soon after I did, and loudly suggested they must have something better to do. They didn’t, but they quickly left.

The next day, a Tuesday, the Wall Street establishment effectively came together to stem the panic, although what happened gained little attention at the time. As sell orders forced the New York Stock Exchange to halt trading in stock after stock, word came that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange was threatening to halt trading in stock index futures. With many stocks not trading, there was no way to calculate an accurate value of a stock index. The system threatened to grind to a panic-induced halt.

It was then that Mr. Shopkorn got on the phone with Bob Mnuchin, the head stock trader at Goldman Sachs, and Salomon’s principal competitor. I don’t know who initiated the call, but I heard the result. They agreed to tell their floor traders to tell the stock exchange specialists that Goldman and Salomon would submit buy orders to reopen any stock in the Standard & Poor’s 500. Within minutes, prices began to recover.

Despite a Slowdown, Smartphone Advances Are Still Ahead

The iPhone 5 that Apple introduced last week with only incremental changes seemed to signal that the industry has entered an era of technological bunny hops.

Faster chips, bigger screens and speedier wireless Internet connections are among the refinements smartphone users can count on year after year in new models, most of them in familiar rectangular packages. They are improvements, to be sure, but they lack the breathtaking impact the first iPhone had, with its pioneering fusion of software and touch screens.

“Since then, it has been kind of incremental,” said Chetan Sharma, an independent mobile analyst. “It does not feel like there is a big shift.”

But big innovations in smartphones are not a thing of the past. Incremental improvements can add up over a span of years, providing the computing horsepower to enable big advances in software. Breakthroughs in smartphone materials, software and even batteries could lead to substantial changes in how smartphones look and function in the years ahead.

One of Apple’s most intriguing recent efforts to redefine the iPhone is Siri, the voice-activated virtual assistant that it introduced in October with the iPhone 4S. The feature has the potential to change how consumers retrieve information on their iPhones, giving them the ability to find information on the Web with natural voice commands and to perform other tasks. The product, though, has been criticized for its inaccuracies.

As Apple continues to improve Siri, Google, the maker of the Android phone operating system, improves on its voice search products. Google and some of its mobile phone partners have also moved toward replacing the credit card with the smartphone using a technology called near-field communications that lets users make payments wirelessly at cash registers.

That system has been slow to take off because most merchants do not support it yet. Apple is taking a more cautious approach to new mobile payment systems, offering a feature in its new iPhone software called Passbook for storing electronic versions of store payment, gift and loyalty cards.

Technology analysts say smartphones could again see big changes akin to the one Apple introduced in 2007. Wearable computers are a source of fascination among many Silicon Valley companies, especially at Google. The company has put tremendous effort behind Project Glass, eyeglasslike frames that can display texts, e-mails and other information from a smartphone on a miniature screen in front of the wearer’s eye.

Google has said it plans to release a version of the technology for developers that would cost $1,500 in the first half of next year and a consumer version sometime after that.

Although it could take years of work before the technology reached mass market prices, researchers and some intrepid technology companies said they believe wearable computers could be crucial to unlocking a new category of applications called “augmented reality.” Virtual objects and information could be overlaid on the real world. Imagine visiting ancient ruins and seeing, through a pair of glasses connected to a smartphone, how the site looked before its decay. People could eventually play augmented reality games that could involve laying virtual ambushes around corners in the real world.

“A lot of people are thinking about augmented reality as a possible game changer in mobile computing,” said Tobias Hollerer, a computer science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who is researching the field.

Changes in materials could also allow for more radical designs for smartphones and peripherals that connect to them. Corning, a company that makes the glass used in iPhone and other smartphone screens, has developed a flexible product called Willow Glass. Paul Tompkins, director of commercial technology at Corning, said the thin and strong glass could give designers a way to make devices that have more curves conform to a part of the body. A wrist device, for example, could display much of the information that’s now on a smartphone.

“We’re really working hard on that with a couple of companies,” he said. “You can achieve more organic designs.”

Then there are seemingly mundane technical breakthroughs that could take away some of the more vexing aspects of smartphones, like the need to worry constantly about keeping them charged. In 2010, Apple filed a patent application for a small fuel-cell power supply that could potentially give the iPhone and iPad enough juice to last for weeks without the need to plug them in.

Why Death Still Matters in Superhero Comics

Spoilers for Avengers vs. X-Men #11 within.

As far as I’m concerned, there are only two certainties in life. One is that we will all die. Eventually (sorry). The other, less grim, certainty is that death in superhero comics is a revolving door. It always has been and it always will be, regardless of what the current mandate is. But that’s not a bad thing.

Anytime a major character kicks the bucket like (last chance to avoid spoilers) Professor X did this week in Avengers vs. X-Men #11, inevitably the reaction from longtime fans – particularly ones that have seen Xavier die many times before – is understandably riddled with frustration. But I would argue that death and resurrection in and of themselves shouldn’t be scoffed at. In fact, they should be celebrated as something that makes comics as wonderful as they are.

I think we can all agree that superhero comics are power fantasies. The escapism that forms the core of these books is based around the characters’ abilities to circumvent the rules of physics and do things we’ll never be able to: flight, super-strength, x-ray vision, telepathy, shape-shifting, and time travel, the list goes on and on. These things are all welcomed with open arms. But what about that one great big inevitability that we’re all faced with? What greater superpower is there than cheating death? It doesn’t compute that as readers, we can willfully accept people from other planets punching giant robots or mutants so powerful that they can destroy universes, but coming back from the great beyond is a bit too far-fetched.

The usual argument is that when death is used as a device too often it loses its impact. However, that shouldn’t be a blanket statement; it’s not a given. There are instances of that happening, of course, but the impact of a death falls on the lap of the creators that are handling it. Bucky Barnes was always one of the “untouchable” few that could never, ever return from the dead. But when Ed Brubaker brought him back, he wound up as a fan-favorite. That’s an incredible example of what death and resurrection can do; Bucky’s return was a storytelling triumph against all expectations.

I really don’t think the fact a particular death has occurred before necessarily affects the impact of the most recent occurrence. It all comes down to how the creators and editorial staff plan on using that death and what implications it will have on the characters left standing. In the case of Xavier, Bendis said it best in our interview with him: “We started talking about why Xavier had outgrown the X-Men franchise. He wasn't really part of it. I thought that was interesting. Is he more interesting now in death than he was in life? Does the idea of him being sacrificed to all of this make the X-Men as characters that much more interesting? And if so, what kinds of stories can we get out of it? And that's when the serious talks started happening."

Read our full interview with Brian Bendis about Professor X's death!

As tied to the X-Men as Xavier is, in recent years, he hasn’t been doing much. Where do you draw the line between respecting legacy and promoting progression? I’m not saying Xavier won’t ever come back, but for now, his absence makes for better potential stories than his existence. How will Cyclops react to his own actions once he’s free of the Phoenix? What will the original X-Men think of the situation when they time travel to the present day in All-New X-Men? Xavier’s death was a sacrifice not only in the context of battle, but also a sacrifice to the narrative as a means to push the characters around him to a different place.

The real miracle is that, when his current death has been explored and the storytelling exhausted, he can come back to a whole different world and thus open up new story possibilities. Because comics say that’s okay. Death and resurrection is part of what makes superhero comics unique; it’s a contributing factor to keeping these stories continuing for 75+ years. Instead of chastising a publisher just for killing a character, we should think about how that event could affect the universe and let it unfold. If it turns out to be pointless, then by all means, complain away.

Readers tend to follow characters and not the creative talent (which is a terrible thing to do, and here’s why), it’s easy to forget that it’s not as if the same people that killed Xavier 20 years ago are killing him again now. With different people running the show, the universe is different, and his death in 2012 will have a different impact than his death did in any past incarnation.

The larger problem, I think, is the way that publishers use these deaths to grab headlines. I’m not talking about the comic book sites that routinely cover the industry on a day-to-day basis. I’m talking about major news outlets that only cover comics when something of this magnitude occurs. I’m 100% for comics publishers snagging mainstream attention – the industry needs it – but issuing press releases that spoil the story actually lessens the impact of the event. The attention is then centered on the "gimmick" of death rather than the implications in the story.

Compare the amount of discussion about the narrative itself in the New York Daily News article that broke the news to those of comic book websites that cover this stuff day in and day out, you’ll see a stark contrast. The news shouldn’t be another death in comics. That’s nothing new. The news should be talking about why this one is unique and how it will move the universe forward into new places.

The language of comic books has a great many assets; sound effects, use of gutter space, lettering technique, the juxtaposition of words and pictures, and, in the case of superhero comics, death and resurrection. Just like we embrace all the quirks of the comics medium, so too should we embrace this one that’s traditionally been frowned upon.

Superman died and came back, but from it we were given fan-favorite characters like Kon-El and Steel (not to mention mullet Supes). Batman died and came back and we got to see Dick Grayson take the mantle. Captain America died and came back and we got to see Bucky atone for his past since as the Winter Soldier, cementing his role as an integral member of the Marvel Universe.

Death itself in superhero comics might not be permanent, but its impact on the characters often is, and in the end, that’s what matters.

Joey is IGN's Comics Editor and a comic book creator himself. Follow Joey on Twitter, or find him on IGN. He loves superhero pets so hard.

Workstation: Pen and Paper, Still Practical in the Office - Workstation

Paper, says the productivity expert David Allen, is “in your face.” Its physical presence can be a goad to completing tasks, whereas computer files can easily be hidden and thus forgotten, he said. Some of his clients are returning to paper planners for this very reason, he added.

Mr. Allen, the author of “Getting Things Done,” does much of his writing on a computer, but there are still times when writing with a fountain pen on a notepad “allows me to get my head in the right place,” he said.

Paper printouts also serve an important function, he said. For long texts, a printout can allow a reader to better understand relationships between sections of writing. And paper handouts are still a presence at meetings partly because they are useful for taking notes.

Reading a long document on paper rather than on a computer screen helps people “better understand the geography of the argument contained within,” said Richard H. R. Harper, a principal researcher for Microsoft in Cambridge, England, and co-author with Abigail J. Sellen of “The Myth of the Paperless Office,” published in 2001.

Today’s workers are often navigating through multiple objects in complex ways and creating new documents as well, Mr. Harper said. Using more than one computer screen can be helpful for all this cognitive juggling. But when workers are going back and forth between points in a longer document, it can be more efficient to read on paper, he said.

A study released in 1997 showed that people’s comprehension is superior when they read texts on paper as opposed to online, Mr. Harper said. That finding, of course, doesn’t consider the vast improvements in screen technology that have occurred since then, among them e-readers.

Mr. Harper is currently doing research on e-readers, which are now used mostly for leisure reading. In the future, office workers might make more use of e-readers “alongside other devices for reading and creation, and this will add to the spread of screen collateral on the desk” while not necessarily making reading more efficient, he said.

STEVE LEVEEN, co-founder and C.E.O. of Levenger, maintains that digital technology is better for socializing and sharing, while paper is best for quiet contemplation. His company is in the business of promoting paper as an aesthetic experience, offering high-end notebooks, journals and pens, even as it expands to sell items like laptop desks and smartphone cases.

Paper, Mr. Leveen said, “can be a luscious and beautiful thing — the way we savor fine food and wine, we can savor paper and ink and what it does for us.”

Paper reminds us that “we’re physical beings, despite having to contend with an increasingly virtual world,” he said. People complain that writing by hand is slow, but that can be good for thinking and creating, he said: “It slows us down to think and to contemplate and to revise and recast.”

Computer styluses, too, can “force you to think more carefully about which words you put down and how to plan what you say,” Mr. Harper said. But a stylus can’t replace the physical experience of pen on paper, he said.

A stylus has the advantage of cutting down on the heedless use of paper, as does typing and reading on screens. And that’s good news for trees.

As a nation, “we’re doing more with less paper, and recycling more of what we do use,” said Joel Makower, chairman and executive editor of the GreenBiz Group, which aims to help businesses become more environmentally responsible.

Mr. Makower doesn’t do a great deal of writing on paper because he has trouble reading his own handwriting. And he is more organized with his computer files than with paper.

“I don’t know where to put things in the real world,” he said, “but I know exactly where to put them on my computer.”

But, he said, he knows that some people are just the opposite, and that there is still a place for paper in the office. Although he conducts almost all his work digitally, he still prints out his group’s “State of Green Business” report — more than 80 pages this year — for proofreading.

“I can do a pretty good job on the screen, but there’s something about reading it in hard copy” Mr. Makower said, that makes it easier for him to understand.

Nintendo Still Losing Money, But 3DS Sales Improving

Nintendo's first-quarter financial results, released this morning, saw the publisher post a loss as projected - but 3DS sales are on the up.

The net operating loss stood at ¥17.2 billion/$220.4m, an improvement on the previous year's ¥25.5 billion Q1 loss, with sales down by ¥9.1bn ($116.4m) on this time last year. Nintendo sold 1.86 million 3DS units during the quarter, in comparison to 710,000 over the same period in 2011, at the time of the console's European and North American launch, which means an increase of 162%. Software sales stood at 7.39 million, a 63% increase.

Nintendo has been selling the 3DS at a loss since the post-launch price cuts, but the financial results report that as of July 25th it is no longer selling at less than the manufacturing price, meaning that the company can start making money from sales of the console from this point onwards.

Lifetime sales of the 3DS now stand at 19 million. The Wii is sitting at 96.56 million, meaning it's still currently the third best-selling home console of all time behind the PlayStation and PlayStation 2.

We can expect the 3DS XL to boost 3DS sales yet further in the next quarter - and with the Wii U out before the end of the year, it's sensible to expect that Nintendo's Q1 results for next year will rather different.