Apple’s Feud With Google Is Now Felt on iPhone

SAN FRANCISCO — Once the best of friends, Google and Apple have become foes, battling in courtrooms and in the consumer marketplace. Last week, the hostilities took a new turn when they spilled right onto smartphone screens.

In the latest version of Apple’s iPhonesoftware, which became available Wednesday, Apple removed two mainstay apps, both Google products — Maps and YouTube.

The disappearing apps show just how far-reaching the companies’ rivalry has become, as well as the importance of mobile users to their businesses.

“It’s the two big kids kicking sand in the sandbox,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst who covers Google and Apple for BGC Partners. “They’re now competing against each other with phones, with maps, with content, with search. They’re going head-to-head.”

Maps are particularly crucial on mobile devices, where location-based services and ads have emerged as the pathway to making money. Google and Apple are not the only warriors in the fight. Amazon, Nokia, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo are competing, too.

“If you own a mobile ecology, as Google does, the other mobile ecology owners are not going to allow you to own tons of data in their world,” said Scott Rafer, chief executive of Lumatic, which makes city map apps. “And so neither Apple nor Amazon were going to let Google know where every one of their users was at every time.”

Being kicked off the iPhone has potentially significant consequences for Google, whose Maps service earns more than half its traffic from mobile devices, and almost half of that mobile traffic has been from iPhone users. Apple’s move strikes at the heart of Google’s core business, search, because about 40 percent of mobile searches are for local places or things.

“Local is a huge thing for Google in terms of advertising dollars, and search is very tied to that,” said Barry Schwartz, an editor at Search Engine Land, an industry blog. “Knowing where you are, when you search for coffee, it can bring up local coffee shops and ads that are much more relevant for the user.”

Consumers are innocent bystanders of the brawl. IPhone users now have an extra step to download the YouTube app from the App Store and, so far, Google has given no indication that it will offer a maps app. Apple’s maps, meanwhile, are littered with flaws, some laughable, like a bridge that appears to collapse crossing the Tacoma Narrows Strait of Puget Sound.

Some analysts say, however, that Apple’s maps will quickly improve, and that the long-term result of heightened competition will be better maps all around.

“Apple Maps are apparently not ready for prime time, and that’s a loss,” said Peter Krasilovsky, the program director for marketplaces at BIA/Kelsey, a local media research firm. “But a long-term loss? No. With all the incredible technology being developed by everybody, consumers are the winner.”

The war between Google and Apple escalated abruptly before breaking out on the iPhone screen. At the height of their friendship, their chief executives together unveiled the first iPhone, packed with Google services like maps, search and YouTube. But since Google introduced its own mobile operating system, Android, the companies have battled over everything mobile, from patents to ads and apps.

The brawl has played out most publicly in the courtroom, where Apple and phone manufacturers that use Google’s Android software have sued one another. Most recently, on Friday and Saturday, Apple and Samsung each filed papers to amend or overturn a jury verdict that awarded Apple $1 billion in a patent trial with Samsung. Apple wants more money and Samsung wants a new trial. The companies will return to court Dec. 6 to discuss their demands.

Though Apple’s rejection of YouTube is part of its effort to cut ties with its former friend, it is different from the battle over maps because Apple has no competing video service. Google has introduced a new YouTube app in the App Store, which has become the No. 1 free app.

But with maps, Google, which has long been the dominant digital mapmaker, now must adjust to a new rival, along with the loss of valuable iPhone users.

Even though Android phones far outnumber iPhones — 60 percent of smartphones run Android, versus 34 percent for iPhones, according to Canalys, a research firm — iPhone users account for almost half of mobile traffic to Google Maps.

In July, according to comScore Mobile Metrix, 12.6 million iPhone users visited Maps each day, versus 7.6 million on Android phones. And iPhone users spent an hour and a half using Maps during the month, while Android users spent just an hour.

Those users are a valuable source for Google, because it relies on their data to determine things like which businesses or landmarks are most important and whether maps have errors.

Google also risks losing the allegiance of app developers who build apps that tie in to maps.

“Overnight, Apple has really taken out a significant chunk of Google’s market, and it’s much harder for Google to say to developers, ‘We’re the only game in town, come play with us,’ ” said Tony Costa, a senior analyst who studies mobile phones at Forrester. “It will affect the Google ecosystem, putting it back in the same game of their apps lagging behind Apple, and that’s not a good position for them to be in.”

Still, Google is no doubt feeling a bit of satisfaction as Apple is loudly criticized for the errors in its maps.

Apple Maps users have been tallying its blunders. A Tumblr devoted to the topic included a missing lake in Hyderabad, India, misplaced restaurants in Cambridge, Mass., and the placement of Berlin in Antarctica.

Apple responded Thursday with a statement that its map service was a work in progress and would improve as more people used it.

Google, meanwhile, has been reminding people of its seven years of experience in mapping.

But the company would not say whether it was building an iPhone app for users to download. Its only public statement on the matter has been vague: “Our goal is to make Google Maps available to everyone who wants to use it, regardless of device, browser, or operating system.”

Google could decide not to build an app, as a gamble that iPhone users depend on its maps so much that they might switch to Android.

If it does build an app, Apple would have to approve it. Its guidelines for developers are ambiguous, but exclude apps that “appear confusingly similar to an existing Apple product.”

Rejecting Google’s app would most likely set off a brouhaha similar to that over the Google Voice app, which Apple rejected in 2009, prompting an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission, and a year later was approved.

More likely, analysts say, Google is waiting for the right time to swoop in and save the day by offering its own iPhone app. One benefit of making its own app: It could add features and sell ads, which it could not do on the old app because Apple controlled it. The situation with the YouTube app was the same.

In the meantime, Google is encouraging people to use maps on the iPhone’s browser, where it shows instructions to install it on their home screen.

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Source: NYTimes

For Weight Loss, Less Exercise May Be More

Most people who start working out in hopes of shedding pounds wind up disappointed, a lamentable circumstance familiar to both exercisers and scientists. Multiple studies, many of them covered in this column, have found that without major changes to diet, exercise typically results in only modest weight loss at best (although it generally makes people much healthier). Quite a few exercisers lose no weight. Some gain.

But there is encouraging news about physical activity and weight loss in anew study by researchers at the University of Copenhagen. It found that exercise does seem to contribute to waist-tightening, provided that the amount of exercise is neither too little nor, more strikingly, too much.

To reach that conclusion, the Danish scientists rounded up a group of pudgy and sedentary young men, a segment of the population increasingly common in Denmark, as elsewhere in the world. The volunteers, most in their 20s or early 30s, visited the scientists’ lab to undergo baseline measurements of their aerobic fitness, body fat, metabolic rates and general health. None had diabetes, high blood pressure or heart disease and, while heavy, they were not obese.

The men were then randomly assigned to exercise or not. The non-exercisers, who served as controls, returned to their former routines, with no change to their diets or sedentary ways.

A second group began 13 weeks of almost daily moderate workouts, consisting of jogging, cycling or otherwise sweating for about 30 minutes, or until each man had burned 300 calories (based on his individual metabolic rate).

A third group tackled a more strenuous routine of almost hourlong workouts, during which each man burned 600 calories.

The men were asked not to consciously change their diets, either by eating more or less, and to keep detailed daily food diaries throughout the 13 weeks.

On certain designated days, they also were asked to don sophisticated motion sensors that would measure how active they were in the hours before and after exercise.

At the end of the 13 weeks, the members of the control group weighed the same as they had at the start, and their body fat percentages were unchanged, which is hardly surprising.

On the other hand, the men who had exercised the most, working out for 60 minutes a day, had managed to drop some flab, losing an average of five pounds each. The scientists calculated that that weight loss, while by no means negligible, was still about 20 percent less than would have been expected given the number of calories the men were expending each day during exercise, if food intake and other aspects of their life had held steady.

Meanwhile, the volunteers who’d worked out for only 30 minutes a day did considerably better, shedding about seven pounds each, a total that, given the smaller number of calories that they were burning during exercise, represents a hefty 83 percent “bonus” beyond what would have been expected, says Mads Rosenkilde, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Copenhagen who led the study.

That impressive weight-loss windfall for the light-duty exercisers “was a bit of a shock,” he says.

And it’s not completely clear from the experiment’s additional data just why participants in that group were so much more successful at dropping pounds than the other men.

But there are hints, Mr. Rosenkilde says. Food diaries for the group burning 600 calories a day reveal that they subsequently were increasing the size of their meals and snacks, although the additional caloric intake wasn’t enough to explain the difference in their results. “They probably were eating more” than they jotted down, Mr. Rosenkilde speculates.

They also were resolutely inactive in the hours outside of exercise, the motion sensors show. When they weren’t working out, they were, for the most part, sitting. “I think they were fatigued,” Mr. Rosenkilde says.

The men exercising half as much, however, seemed to grow energized and inspired. Their motion sensors show that, compared with the men in the other two groups, they were active in the time apart from exercise. “It looks like they were taking the stairs now, not the elevators, and just moving around more,” Mr. Rosenkilde says. “It was little things, but they add up.”

The overall message, he says, is that the shorter exercise sessions seem to have allowed the men “to burn calories without wanting to replace them so much.” The hourlong sessions were more draining and prompted a stronger and largely unconscious desire to replenish the lost energy stores.

Of course, the study involved only young men, whose metabolisms and weight-loss motivations may be quite different from those of other groups, including women.

The study also was short-term, and the results might shift over the course of, say, a year of continued exercise, Mr. Rosenkilde says. The men working out for 60 minutes were, after all, packing on some muscle, while the 30-minute exercisers were not. That extra muscle offset some of the vigorous exercisers’ weight loss in the short term — they sloughed off fat but added muscle, decreasing their net loss — but over the longer term it could amp up their metabolism, aiding in weight control.

Still, if the relationship between working out and losing weight remains complicated and tangled, one point is unequivocal. The men who were sedentary “lost no weight at all,” Mr. Rosenkilde says, so if you hope to shed pounds, “any amount of exercise is better than none.”

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

Sourcce: NYTimes

Finding the Roots of Your Office Anger

Q. Sometimes at work, you feel angry or distressed and lose your composure, snapping at your colleagues or wanting to burst into tears. How can you defuse your feelings before you act on them?

A. When you are losing control emotionally, it’s hard to step back and see what’s really happening, says Lynn Friedman, a psychologist, psychoanalyst and career consultant in Washington.

When you feel an intense reaction at work, ask yourself if it’s realistic and reasonable. Sometimes what’s driving those intense feelings has little to do with what’s happening at the time. “It could have more to do with your professional relationship with this person, circumstances that led up to this upsetting event, self-confidence — or it could spring from earlier life experiences,” Dr. Friedman says.

Rather than reacting in the moment, buy yourself some time by saying: “This is disappointing to me and I want to think about it. Can we talk about it in a day or two?” Then try to look at what is angering and upsetting you as objectively as possible. “If, for example, you’re very disappointed about a decision affecting a project of yours, think about what might be behind that decision,” Dr. Friedman says.

Your reactions could even be linked to your childhood. If, for example, your boss speaks to you in a patronizing way that upsets you, “it could be that you’re not thinking like a 40-year-old man but catapulted back to being a 4-year-old boy whose father is arrogant and condescending,” she says. Making connections like that can help you recognize your emotional triggers and control your responses.

It might help to vent by writing down your feelings and thoughts, says Deborah Grayson Riegel, founder of Elevated Training in Hewlett, N.Y. The writing process may help you resolve your feelings — and you may want to share what you’ve written with friend, a spouse or someone at work you trust. “That person can read it and tell you if they see something in the situation you aren’t seeing,” Ms. Riegel says.

Q. Can suppressing feelings like anger, frustration or sadness affect your performance?

A. Yes. We avoid expressing emotions at work by twisting ourselves in all kinds of ways, creating an enormous amount of stress, says Karen Steinberg, a therapist and coach specializing in work and relationships and founder of the Possibility Practice, a counseling and coaching center in Manhattan. Suppression also thwarts creativity, says Ms. Steinberg, because energy that could be used for creative thinking is being “siphoned off to help you handle the boss or manage the situation.”

When you keep strong emotions bottled up, you don’t think as clearly as you do when you’re calm, says Ms. Riegel, who is also the author of “Oy Vey! Isn’t a Strategy.” “You’re not able to make good judgments,” she says. “You might have a physical response, too — your heart starts pounding, you get nauseated or your voice shakes.”

Although you may think you’re doing a good job of containing your feelings, they usually show in other ways, whether in your facial expressions, the comments you make or your attitude, says Aubrey Daniels, a psychologist who is founder of the management consulting firm Aubrey Daniels International and author of “Bringing Out the Best in People.” He says stifling your feelings makes you “physiologically uptight, and you are much less flexible both in your muscles and your thinking.”

Q. Are there socially acceptable ways to express negative feelings at work?

A. That’s more a question of timing than anything else, Dr. Friedman says. If possible, give yourself a day to think about what’s upsetting you. When you do speak to your boss or colleagues, use the same kind of language they use. If your boss can’t talk about feelings, for instance, use language that’s more task- and bottom-line-oriented, like, “I devoted a lot of the organization’s resources and my internal resources to this project and I’d like to learn more about what happened.”

Being emotional — appearing visibly agitated, red-faced or raising your voice — is generally considered unprofessional, so you want to have fully calmed down before you speak to a manager or colleagues. Before you detail your frustrations, let them know that you value your working relationship with them, Ms. Riegel says. “Then you can say, ‘Let me explain why this is a hot button for me,’ and ask, ‘Can you tell me what was going on from your perspective?’ “

By EILENE ZIMMERMAN

Source: NYTimes

The Michael Phelps Diet: Don’t Try It at Home

Swimmer Michael Phelps’s next career may be in competitive eating. Besides grabbing five gold medals at the Beijing Olympics so far, making him the winningest Olympic athlete ever, he’s got to be setting new marks on the chow line.

A New York Post account of Phelps’s… wait for it… 12,000-calorie-a-day diet, gave us a stomachache. Could one human being really consume that much and still be in Phelps’s shape? And could this possibly be healthy for Phelps, even considering his five-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week exercise regimen?

Here’s Phelps’s typical menu. (No, he doesn’t chooseamong these options. He eats them all, according to the Post.)

Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg omelet. One bowl of grits. Three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar. Three chocolate-chip pancakes.

Lunch: One pound of enriched pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo on white bread. Energy drinks packing 1,000 calories.

Dinner: One pound of pasta. An entire pizza. More energy drinks.

Does a diet like this make sense even for a calorie-incinerating human swimming machine? We checked in with Mark Klion, a sports medicine doc and orthopedic surgeon at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. He reminded us that the eating game all comes down to basic math.

If you eat fewer calories than you burn exercising, you lose weight. But an athlete like Phelps, who exercises up a storm, has to worry about eating enough to replenish the scads of calories he’s burned. If he doesn’t, Klion explains, his “body won’t recover, the muscles will not recover, there will not be adequate energy stored for him to compete in his next event.”

But what about the choice of foods? All those eggs and ham and cheese can’t possibly be good for him, can they? Says Klion, “I think for him, because of his caloric demands, he can probably eat whatever he wants to.” And besides, Klion says, if you’ve got to eat that much, it better be enjoyable, or you won’t be able to keep up. Phelps might not be so eager to shovel down a pound of tofu in a sitting, Klion points out.

Still, Klion cautions that he knows plenty of athletes who’ve been training for marathons and have gained weight because they thought they could eat whatever they wanted. So it really does take some planning. Some resources on the Web might help, such as thiscalorie-use chart from the American Heart Association and a calorie calculator fromRunner’s World magazine. This calculator from the Calorie Control Council includes a bunch of different activities, from dusting to playing ice hockey.

But these kinds of calculators don’t really apply to a someone like Phelps, who exercises way more vigorously than the typical person, says Kathleen Laquale, an athletic trainer and nutritionist who teaches at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. Even by athletic standards, Phelps is in his own league. Laquale says cyclists in the Tour de France commonly consume a paltry 8,000 to 10,000 calories a day.

By Sarah Rubenstein

Source:WSJ

Indian PM ‘tragic figure’, govt deeply corrupt: US daily

New Delhi: After the Time magazine dubbed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as an ‘underachiever’, influential US newspaper The Washington Post has tagged him as ‘a tragic figure’.

The government reacted testily and demanded an apology from The Washington Post.

In the story published with the headline ‘India’s silent prime minister becomes a tragic figure’, the newspaper has described 79-year-old Singh as someone who helped set India on the path to modernity, prosperity and power, but now is in danger of going down in history as a failure. 

Referring to the slew of corruption scandals that have surfaced during his tenure as PM, the daily opines that Manmohan Singh’s image of the scrupulously honorable, humble and intellectual technocrat has slowly given way to a completely different one: a dithering, ineffectual bureaucrat presiding over a deeply corrupt government.

The daily said that for the past two weeks, the Indian Parliament has been adjourned every day as the opposition demands Singh's resignation over allegations of waste and corruption in the allocation of coal mining concessions.

“The story of Singh’s dramatic fall from grace in his second term in office and the slow but steady tarnishing of his reputation has played out in parallel with his country’s decline on his watch. As India’s economy has slowed and as its reputation for rampant corruption has reasserted itself, the idea that the country was on an inexorable road to becoming a global power has increasingly come into question,” the paper said. 

greeing to political historian Ramachandra Guha’s assessment that Manmohan Singh has become a tragic figure in our history, the paper says that the irony is that Singh’s greatest selling points — his incorruptibility and economic experience — are the mirror image of his government’s greatest failings.

“Under Singh, economic reforms have stalled, growth has slowed sharply and the rupee has collapsed. But just as damaging to his reputation is the accusation that he looked the other way and remained silent as his cabinet colleagues filled their own pockets,” it added.

Detailing the history of his being anointed as Prime Minister, the paper says that Congress party led by Italian-born Sonia Gandhi had surprised many people by winning national elections that year, but she sprang an even bigger surprise by renouncing the top job and handing it to Singh.

“In him she saw not only the perfect figure­head for her government but also a man of unquestioning loyalty, party insiders say, someone she could both trust and control. From the start, it was clear that Sonia Gandhi held the real reins of power. The Gandhi family has ruled India for most of its post-independence history and enjoys an almost cultlike status within the Congress party. Sonia’s word was destined to remain law,” it said.

Under attack from a combative opposition over alleged corruption in the allocation of coal blocks and a spate of other scams, the government said it would seek an apology from the newspaper.

"How can a US daily take the matter such lightly and publish something about the prime minister of another country? I will speak to the Ministry of External Affairs and the government will seek an apology from the daily," Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni told reporters.

Soni termed the report by The Washington Post as a piece of "yellow journalism" and "baseless".

The Washington Post, meanwhile, denied it has offered an apology for the 

article.

Source:Zeenews Bureau

Image:Facenfacts