boards

Reiner Knizia's Ra is the universal iOS adaptation of the popular European-style board game Ra (by German game-design legend Reiner Knizia), a fast-paced game of bidding and building that's nominally about achieving fame in ancient Egypt.

Ra is a pure auction game, with simple rules and a shallow learning curve once you get its basic flow. It's always easier to learn a board game from somebody who knows how to play it, but the app does include complete rules and a good bit of in-game help for novices.

Ra is divided--and scored--in three separate stages ("epochs&… Read more

A week before Hewlett-Packard's annual meeting, a shareholder advisory firm is urging clients not to endorse the company's newly nominated board members.

International Shareholder Services sent a report to clients that accuses HP and its new CEO Leo Apotheker of not following the board's own guidelines for director appointments, in particular saying Apotheker should have had no role in the process. ISS says HP board members are to be nominated by independent directors only, which would rule out Apotheker.

Bloomberg got its hands on the report and published excerpts today. According to the report, ISS writes: "… Read more

This year's Toy Fair in New York City was a little lacking in big-ticket excitement, but there were a few surprises for office geeks such as myself. Nanodots are high-powered mini magnetic balls, perfect for whiling away fidgety minutes at a desk. They come in packs of 216, cost around $30-$40 a set, and are tremendously addictive (just keep them away from small children--they're quite dangerous if swallowed). The problem with them generally tends to be finding a place to put them. They roll, they damage sensitive electronics, and they're easy to misplace.

The $20 Nanopad is a mat woven with iron, heavy and dense like one of those aprons you wear for dental X-rays. Nanodots stick to it like glue, and won't slide around and glom on to each other. On one side is a printed chessboard, perfect for building your own chess/checker/made-up board game set, if your inner geek dares. … Read more

A cyberattack against Canada that tried to access classified government information and forced two key departments to go offline has been traced back to China, according to a story today from CBC News.

Sources told the CBC that the attacks were initially discovered in early January but that it's unknown whether the attackers themselves were in China or just directed their attacks through the country to hide their true source.

Specifically, the attacks reached computer systems at the Canadian government's Finance Department and Treasury Board in an attempt to capture passwords for government databases. In response, the government … Read more

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Kyocera sees double

Facebook is replacing Craigslist for prostitute recruitment and matchmaking

Fixed Sandy Bridge chipsets will ship in mid-February

Win $10,000 in this Internet video safety contest

White House proposes new copying rules

Facebook firing case will settle

Today we are talking about the lines of succession at big and influential technology companies. There are two big news hooks for this show: First, Apple CEO Steve Jobs will be stepping out of his day-to-day role for a time for health reasons, leaving operation of the company with Tim Cook. Also, just yesterday Google announced that CEO Eric Schmidt is moving into an evangelist role and handing the CEO title over to co-founder Larry Page.

Reading the tea leaves of CEO moves and succession is like reading a good sports story. We've had other great tales in tech history: Bill Gates leaving Microsoft to his polar opposite Steve Ballmer; and the charismatic Carly Fiorina getting bounced out of HP to be replaced by the disciplined Mark Hurd in 2005, who was himself forced out last year. There are many other stories like this.

How much of a tech company rides on the CEO, and what can a company do to ensure it maintains a working strategy when the CEO leaves -- for whatever reason? Today we're going to talk about CEO succession, with two experts:

First up, Beverly Behan of Board Advisor LLC. She's a board fixer. She's worked with more than 100 boards of directors over the past decade on issues including CEO succession planning, board engagement, board and director evaluation, and other board topics. Bev is author of "Great Companies Deserve Great Boards," which will be out in June, and has a BusinessWeek column called, The Boardroom.

Also joining us is professor Charles Elson, the director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. Charles is a former law professor, a writer for both corporate and popular media, a frequently quoted expert in publications like The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and The Washington Post, and a board member himself, at the heath care company HealthSouth.

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Some of our discussion points… Read more

Just a few months removed from the Mark Hurd scandal, Hewlett-Packard's board of directors is getting a makeover.

HP said today that it is replacing four board members and adding an additional seat. Out are Joel Hyatt, John Joyce, Robert Ryan, and Lucille Salhany.

In are newcomers Shumeet Banerji, CEO of Booz & Company; Gary Reiner, former CIO at GE; Patricia Russo, former CEO of Alcatel-Lucent; Dominique Senequier, CEO of AXA Private Equity; and Meg Whitman, former president and CEO of eBay and recent California gubernatorial candidate. That brings the HP board seat count to 13, up from 12. … Read more

Kitchens aren't the cleanliest of places. Oh, sure, we like to pretend they are, but in reality they are populated with more than the eye can see. However, just because kitchens are breeding grounds for harmful germs, it doesn't mean we all must go running into the night. All it takes to make those kitchen surfaces we use every day to be as cleanly as we need them to be is a little common sense and precaution. Oh, and a bright UV light doesn't hurt, either.

The Germ Killing Ultra Violet Cutting Board System, which will run … Read more

As a U.S. senator and presidential candidate, Barack Obama pledged to "strengthen privacy protections for the digital age."

But it wasn't until today, nearly two years after taking office, that the president finally began appointing members of a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

Obama's first two picks: Jim Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Elisebeth Cook, a former assistant attorney general under President Bush now in private practice at the Freeborn and Peters law firm. The positions are subject to Senate confirmation.

A 2007 law requires Obama to appoint … Read more