concept
JC Penney Shares Are Collapsing After A Dismal Earnings Report
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/jcp-shares-fall-after-earnings-2012-11
Shares of JC Penney are tanking over 11.5% this morning after the retailer reported earnings.
Revenue of $2.9 billion is way below estimates of $3.2 billion.
EPS of $-0.93 per share is well worse than the loss of seven cents that were expected.
And same-store sales are down 26.1%
CEO Ron Johnson offers up:
Ron Johnson, chief executive officer of jcpenney said, “While the quarter overall was challenging, the performance of jcp’s new brands and shops reinforces our conviction to transform jcpenney into a specialty department store. Today, jcp is really a tale of two companies. By far the largest part of our store is the old jcpenney, which continues to struggle and experience significant challenges as evidenced by our third quarter results. However, the new jcp, centered around the shop concept, is gaining traction with customers every day and is surpassing our own expectations in terms of sales productivity which continues to give us confidence in our long term business model.”
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Why Michael Kors Is Having A Blockbuster Year
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-michael-kors-is-successful-2012-9
The Michael Kors brand has achieved unstoppable momentum even in the age of discount retailers.
The company recently raised its guidance again after blockbuster sales in the second quarter.
Meanwhile, other aspirational brands like Tiffany & Co. and Restoration Hardware are struggling.
Michael Kors succeeded because it was the first retailer to hit the market’s sweet spot: people with money to spend but who aren’t rich.
Luxury marketing expert Pam Danziger calls these people HENRYs, for “High Earners Not Rich Yet.” They are the people who make between $100,000 and $250,000, she says.
HENRYs are a growing segment, while the wealthiest people are making less than they used to.
Danziger explained the concept to us in a recent note:
Ultra-affluents (i.e. those at the top 2 percent of U.S. households with incomes starting at $250,000) cut their spending by nearly 30 percent from 2010, while the HENRYs (High Earners Not RichYet with incomes $100,000-$249,999) increased their spending on luxury by some 11 percent from 2009 levels. Even though HENRYs individually have a far lower spending threshold than ultra-affluents, there are nearly ten HENRY households for every ultra-affluent. That is why with a total of 21.3 million households, the HENRY segment is a critically important part of the consumer market.
With Michael Kors’ $450 handbags and $250 watches, HENRYs can show off their success without feeling like they’re going overboard.
Kors wisely chose the exact right audience, and now it’s pay! ing off.
DON’T MISS: The Real Reason People Line Up At The Apple Store >
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/5943788/developers-suspect-the-new-kindle-fires-will-be-hack+resistant
If you were banking on hacking a new Kindle Fire to take advantage of cheap hardware without Amazon’s modded Android OS, you perhaps better think again. Developers over at XDA are speculating that they expect the new range of Fires to be too sophisticated to hack.
In particular, a forum post provides evidence which suggests that the new devices will come with more sophisticated protection, including locked bootloaders and “high security” features offered by Texas Instrument processors.
Of course, with Amazon really pushing its device-as-service concept hard, the news likely won’t ruffle the majority of Fire-user feathers. But for those who were cheekily hoping to grab a Fire HD and mod it from the off, there may well be something to grumble about. [XDA via Engadget]
Intel, IDT to make resonance charging a reality, see reference chipset coming in first half of 2013
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/29/idt-to-make-intel-resonance-charging-a-reality/
Intel has been talking up wireless charging for years, to the point where we thought its implementation would forever remain a concept for the lab. Not so: Intel is having Integrated Device Technology (IDT) build a real-world chipset to support resonance charging in our gadgets. The lofty goal is to have a ready-made platform for charging up a mobile device or peripheral just by keeping it close to another device with a charger built-in, such as an Ultrabook; there’s none of the unseemly contact plates used with inductive wireless power. Intel’s commitment is still very much early and won’t put a full, two-way resonance chipset into the hands of hardware makers until sometime during the first half of 2013, let alone into a shipping product. We’ll take it all the same, as it just might be the first step toward embracing wireless power on a truly large scale.
Filed under: Cellphones, Laptops, P! eriphera ls
Intel, IDT to make resonance charging a reality, see reference chipset coming in first half of 2013 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
What if a virus were a shapeshifter, able to change its appearance each time it infects a machine? What if a virus used your own files against you, able to ransack the programs on your computer for the bits of code it needs? Judging from the progress made on the Frankenstein virus, a venture sponsored by the U.S. Air Force, that may soon be a reality.
Developed by two professors at the University of Texas at Dallas, New Scientist says the Frankenstein virus is essentially a program compliler with directions about the algorithms it needs to assemble. Once unpacked and functional, it begins searching the software on your computer for the code it needs—generally taking little snippets called gadgets. These gadgets are written to perform specific actions and thus can be transposed over to another program more easily. The researchers only had the Frankenstein virus create two simple algorithms as a proof of concept, but they believe it can assemble any program, including full-scale malware.
And though there have been other viruses that can change their code, Frankenstein is believed to be more dangerous because it can also change its every aspect of itself to hide on your computer.
Frankenstein is different because all of its code, including the blueprints and gadget-finder, can adapt to look like parts of regular software, making it harder to detect. Just three pieces of such software are enough to provide over 100,000 gadgets, so there are a huge number of ways for Frankenstein to build its monster, but it needs blueprints that find the right balance. If the blueprint is too specific, it leaves Frankenstein little choice in which gadgets to use, leading to less variation and making it easier to detect. Looser blueprints, which only specify the end effects of the malware, are too vague for Frankenstein to follow, for now.
Obviously the military wants this for its ongoing cyberwarfare efforts. But if this ever gets in the hands of script kiddies, we’re in trouble. [New Scientist]
Image by gualtiero boffi/Shutterstock
Best Buy Canada Has A Plan To Crush The Online Competition (BBY)
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/best-buy-canada-showrooming-online-competition-2012-7
Best Buy’s biggest problem these days is “showrooming.“
Showrooming is when a consumer walks into a store, tests out a products, and buys it on the cheap elsewhere online.
Best Buy has been called Amazon.com’s showroom, a nickname that the big-box retailer has been trying to shake.
Well, it seems Best Buy Canada has an obvious plan to address this problem. The Financial Post’s Hollie Shaw reports:
“We always had a price-match guarantee, but now we have extended that to all Canadian online competitors,” [Canada operations president Mike Pratt] said while touring a Best Buy in downtown Toronto. “Showrooming is a completely price-based concept — it’s about the perception of getting a lower price somewhere. When Web pure-play competitors don’t have price, they don’t have any other advantage, quite frankly.”
If you’re in the store and you know they’re giving you the best price, then you’ll probably buy it then and there.
The issue will be profitability. Online retailers have much lower overhead costs. They don’t operate store fronts and they require fewer employees.
SEE ALSO: Best Buy Is Laying Off 1,800 Store Employees And 600 Geek Squad Workers >
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/5892170/does-this-zip+together-chair-bend-the-laws-of-physics/gallery/1
At first glance Igor Lobanov’s Wormhole chair looks like an impossible object that could only exist as a computer physics simulation. But once you wrap your head around its zip-together design, it not only seems plausible, but also pretty genius.
Each chair is composed of two flat, but rounded, frame pieces that each fold into a C-shape and completely zip together. So they end up creating a self-supporting place to sit that looks like someone has torn a wormhole into another dimension. It won a much-deserved Red Dot design award, but is sadly still just a concept waiting for an unnamed yet popular Swedish maker of flat-pack furniture to license the design. [Igor Lobanov via Core77]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5892170/does-this-zip+together-chair-bend-the-laws-of-physics/gallery/1
At first glance Igor Lobanov’s Wormhole chair looks like an impossible object that could only exist as a computer physics simulation. But once you wrap your head around its zip-together design, it not only seems plausible, but also pretty genius.
Each chair is composed of two flat, but rounded, frame pieces that each fold into a C-shape and completely zip together. So they end up creating a self-supporting place to sit that looks like someone has torn a wormhole into another dimension. It won a much-deserved Red Dot design award, but is sadly still just a concept waiting for an unnamed yet popular Swedish maker of flat-pack furniture to license the design. [Igor Lobanov via Core77]
Gamers Redesign a Protein That Stumped Scientists for Years [Science]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5878459/gamers-redesign-a-protein-that-stumped-scientists-for-years
Folding: it’s detestable and boring, as any Gap employee can tell you. But it’s also a totally fun thing you can do in a video game! And today it’s particularly exciting because players of the online game Foldit have redesigned a protein, and their work is published in the science journal Nature Biotechnology.
It seems nobler than shooting people in the face, somehow. Granted, Foldit attracts a unique kind of gamer who enjoys obsessing over biological protein folding patterns. Proteins get their function from the way they are folded into coils like in the image above. When the amino acids in a protein interact, they create that coiled, three-dimensional structure. Scientists can manipulate the structure to make the protein more efficient. In Foldit, designs that create the most efficient proteins garner the highest scores.
University of Washington in Seattle scientists Zoran Popovic, director of the Center for Game Science, and biochemist David Baker developed Foldit (which is different from Folding@home, Stanford software that lets people donate their idle computer processing power to create a protein-folding supercomputer). By playing it, at-home gamers have redesigned a protein for the first time, and they did it better and faster than scientists who have trained their entire careers to build better proteins. Justin Siegel, a biophysicist in Baker’s group told Scientific American:
I worked for two years to make these enzymes better and I couldn’t do it. Foldit players were able to make a large jump in structural space and I still don’t fully understand how they did it.
Here’s how it works: Researchers send a series of puzzles to Foldit’s 240,000 registered users. The scientists sift through the results for the best designs and take those into the lab for real-life testing. They combed through 180,000 designs to get to the version of the protein published today. The paper details an enzyme that thanks to the crowdsourced redesign is 18-fold more active than the original version.
Now for the anticlimactic part: this particular enzyme doesn’t really have any practical uses. But the researchers say it’s a proof of concept, and future Foldit designs will be more useful. In fact, Baker has fed players a protein that blocks the flu virus that led to the 1918 pandemic—and their puzzle solving for this one could lead to an actual drug.
Nature via Scientific American
Image: Foldit
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