jobs

Apple has dedicated the majority of the free space on its home page to honor company director Al Gore on having received the Nobel Peace Prize earlier Friday.

Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the coveted prize for their evangelism regarding the causes and effects of climate change. Apple put up a simple message honoring Gore on its site, as well as several news articles about the prize in its "Hot News" section.

The prize also spurred Fake Steve Jobs into a frenzy of posts Friday praising Gore and urging him to run for president … Read more

Every morning, each one of us wakes up a ragged mess and eventually, presumably after cleaning up a bit, exits the house dressed in attire that expresses his or her inner feelings.

Don't believe me? It's true; ask a shrink. The way you dress is a window into the subconscious. Of course, it helps if you know how to interpret the data. Sometimes the conscious mind overrules the inner self, so what you get is the opposite of what the person is feeling. It's complicated.

Okay, enough psychobabble. The premise here is that the way you dress matters and it matters in the workplace. Over the course of my career, I've noticed a lot going on with clothes, but nobody talks about it. Case in point, people have been commenting on the way I dress for decades, and I have no idea why.

Way back in 1981 - when I was an engineer designing chips for Texas Instruments - my manager told me I might consider dressing differently if I wanted to get ahead. I was wearing torn overalls at the time. Hey, I was just an engineer ... and it was Texas!

Anyway, he did have a point. Years later I read Dress for Success and began taking this stuff a bit more seriously. When I became a sales executive calling on customers, I began wearing a jacket and tie or a suit.

However, when it comes to really working, i.e. in the office, I'm strictly a blue jeans, untucked shirt, and sneakers or other comfy shoes kind of guy. I guess that's what comforts my neurotic subconscious.

When I worked at microprocessor upstart Cyrix in the mid-90s, Jack Kemp - quarterback turned politician extraordinaire - sat on our board of directors. That didn't entirely make sense to me, but he was a great guy and really fun at dinner parties.… Read more

Vuvox is a handy slide show service we've taken a look at before, and yesterday it launched a new tool called Cut-Out Express that lets you cut away at pictures to add embedded photo slide shows. Like the rest of its tools, you can add shots from your hard drive or pull them in from other services like Flickr, Picasa Web albums, or any old RSS feed with photos in it. What makes Cut-Out neat, though, is its lasso tool, which intelligently lets you wrap around a shot like you would using a high-end photo-editing application. It doesn't have a "magnetic" mode, but there's a helpful vertical and horizontal line that tracks the pointer to help you guide around whatever you're lassoing.

The end result is a pleasingly cheesy open area where your photos will fade from one to the next--sure to be a hit with the social-networking crowd, or people who feel like having a little fun with shots of friends, family, or celebrities. Speaking of which, I've embedded a Cut-Out of a Steve Jobs keynote after the break using pictures of historically faked Apple products (via Macrumors Guides). The service also recommends you do the same with your pet's mouth, billboards, and graffiti. Cute.

On a side note, if you're planning on using Vuvox for photo sharing with your family, the service has a neat feature that lets you privatize your content channel. So unlike a service like Flickr, there's no registration or mutual friendships necessary on your recipient's behalf to see your pictures, while they remain unseen by everyone else. All you need to send out is the URL. Unfortunately this can't be done toggled on individual slide shows (yet), but you can add a separate public channel, letting you group together slide shows you'd like to keep separate from your openly shared work.

[via Go2Web2]… Read more

The New York Observer reported Monday that Greg Atwan and Evan Lushing, two recent Harvard graduates living in New York, have reportedly earned a five-figure book deal for a satirical take on social-networking phenomenon Facebook. The book pitch, called The Facebook Book, sold to Harry N. Abrams, Inc. for somewhere around $50,000, according to The Observer.

Facebook famously started in a Harvard dorm in 2004, with founder (and eventual dropout) Mark Zuckerberg and several friends creating the social network as an alternative to the school's physical "facebook" with photographs and contact information for the student body.… Read more

Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs was brought in to Yahoo as a sort of motivational speaker at a managers' meeting on Friday, according to GigaOm.

And what did he say? Basically, that like Apple in its troubled days, Yahoo has valuable assets and just needs to execute. Easier said than done.

Kara Swisher at The Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital blog writes that co-founder and Chief Executive Jerry Yang, at the same meeting, talked about the Yahoo ecosystem, which includes: "the building out of Yahoo's ad network, taking advantage of its 'consumer insights'; the creation of … Read more

Steve Jobs shows no signs of retiring any time soon, but Jess McMullin, who runs the great Business+Design blog, thinks ahead and pre-emptively wraps his head around Apple's succession planning. In an open letter to the Apple board, he urges the directors to consider Jonathan Ive, Apple's SVP of industrial design, as Jobs' successor, if need be. (Mullin was obviously inspired by Bruce Nussbaum's "CEOs Must Be Designers, Not Just Hire Them" post several months ago.)

And yet--a designer as CEO? (Wearing the marketing hat for a renowned design consultancy, I am posing this … Read more

That's the feeling you get while surfing the Web this week. The iPhone price-drop brouhaha was largely stopped in its tracks by Steve Jobs' $100 mea culpa, but a string of successive snafus have cropped up in Apple-land in the weeks thereafter. Digg users are asking, Is Apple giving up on its customers? According to The Consumerist, the answer may well be yes. Meanwhile, iPod enthusiast site iLounge highlights four of the recent sticks in the collective eye of iPod fans--the need to rebuy iPod games for new models, the breaking of backwards compatibility with iPod video accessories, bad … Read more

Apple CEO Steve Jobs will have to appear before federal investigators as part of the Securities and Exchange Commission's lawsuit against Nancy Heinen, Apple's former head lawyer, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

In April, the SEC filed suit against Heinen and Fred Anderson, Apple's former CFO, charging them with orchestrating the backdating of stock options at the company. Anderson agreed to settle his suit with the SEC at the time it was filed, but the proceedings are under way against Heinen. Bloomberg's report said that the SEC is not opening an investigation of Jobs with this move, but … Read more

With Apple announcing its entry into the European cell phone market on Tuesday on the back of O2, the United Kingdom has officially rejoiced at the possibility of having the iPhone that Americans have been coveting for so long.

But amid the excitement and hype, everyone seemed to gloss over one important fact from yesterday's announcement: Apple's iPhone business model is second to none, and Steve Jobs really is smarter than the rest of the world.

The new deal with O2 highlighted two interesting points: first off, O2, much like AT&T, is more than happy to share revenue with Apple. Secondly, it displayed the naivete of O2 to actually believe that Apple will stand by it through thick and thin. Hasn't O2 watched any of the iPhone-unlocking news hitting the wire in the past few weeks? Steve Jobs doesn't care about O2; he only cares about profits. And with this new deal, Great Britain may become the best profit center Apple has ever seen.… Read more