Obama Settles on Ashton Carter as Defense Secretary, Officials Say

12/02/2014 21:50
WASHINGTON — President Obama has settled on Ashton B. Carter to be the next defense secretary, senior administration officials said on Tuesday, but is not prepared to announce the move because the White House has not completed its vetting of him.
 
A former deputy defense secretary with a long history at the Pentagon — though no uniformed military service — Mr. Carter was on a short list of prospective defense secretaries from the moment that Chuck Hagel announced his resignation, under pressure, on Nov. 24.
 
Mr. Obama is not expected to formally announce Mr. Carter as his pick on Tuesday or Wednesday, but may do so by the end of the week, an administration official said.
 
Mr. Carter, a physicist, was the No. 2 civilian official at the Pentagon and a candidate to succeed Leon E. Panetta when he stepped down as defense secretary last year. Previously, he served as the Defense Department’s chief weapons buyer, tasked with scaling back or canceling outdated and inefficient weapons programs. He also was in charge of carrying out $500 billion in cuts that began in 2012 and will take more than a decade to complete.
 
Mr. Carter has degrees in physics and medieval history from Yale and a doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford. He has spent the last two years in academia but is widely viewed as a competent manager who would have little trouble in Senate confirmation hearings.
 
Several Republican congressional leaders were preparing statements on Tuesday in praise of Mr. Carter, even before the White House had formally notified anyone that he had been selected. “The assumption is that it’s him,” one congressional staff member said. “And he won’t have trouble getting confirmed.”
 
But in many ways, Mr. Carter was the last man left standing for the top Pentagon post, after a number of candidates withdrew from consideration. Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, asked not to be considered, and Michèle A. Flournoy, a former Pentagon under secretary, did the same, citing family concerns. Jeh C. Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, who also has been mentioned as a candidate, said he was happy in his present job.
 
Selecting Mr. Johnson, who was the Pentagon’s chief lawyer during Mr. Obama’s first administration and who spearheaded the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy concerning gay men and lesbians in the military, would have set up not one, but two, potentially bloody confirmation fights. Mr. Johnson is a controversial figure among Mr. Obama’s supporters on the left because he was one of the legal architects of the administration’s war policy. And Republicans, who are angry about Mr. Obama’s executive action on immigration, could try to hold up a nominee to the top Homeland Security job until the immigration issue is resolved to their liking.
 

Quiet no more: EMC makes noise in hybrid cloud space

10/28/2014 22:07
Call it a hat trick or a trifecta, but EMC Corp.  made some moves today that may quell chatter that its best days are behind it.
The Hopkinton-based company, which has been in the news because of both suggestions that it should decouple from cloud and virtualization software giant VMWare and an actual split with friend/foe? Cisco, announced three acquisitions today as well as a stronger integration with VMWare.
 
The newly announced EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud leverages EMC’s traditional data center storage and backup expertise with VMWare’s own cloud-computing knowledge to create a best-of-both-worlds environment where companies can use the ease and accessibility of the cloud and feel a level of security that the world of physical data backup provides.
 
To further support the venture, EMC announced that it had acquired three cloud-focused businesses, Silicon Valley based Cloudscaling and Maginatics, and Austin cloud protection company Spanning. (The acquisition of Cloudscaling occurred earlier this month but was wrapped into today’s announcement.)
 
All three companies add more features to EMC’s hybrid cloud offering to make it more attractive to companies looking for all-in-one cloud backup and data storage solutions. The three acquisitions provide EMC with more capabilities to protect, manage, store, and connect to data both on the cloud and on servers.
 

A travel ban won't save you from Ebola

10/10/2014 21:43
 
Even before Thomas Eric Duncan, who was being treated in Dallas for Ebola, died on Wednesday, Republicans seemed eager to pressure the Obama administration to implement a travel ban against Ebola-affected countries. Now, that wouldn't be an unreasonable suggestion if it could stop the spread of the disease. But the fact of the matter is that it will do the opposite.
 
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), who is clearly positioning himself for a possible 2016 presidential run, issued a press release noting that the ban would "seem to be an obvious step to protect public health in the United States." Donald Trump, who is threatening the country with another presidential run, tweeted that the president was being either "arrogant or stupid" in resisting it.
 
And then there is the master of understatement, Rush Limbaugh, who alleged that the main reason why the administration was rebuffing the ban was "political correctness" — as if America would have slammed its doors shut more speedily if the concerned country were, say, Great Britain or Belgium or Hong Kong. (The lone voice of sanity questioning this burgeoning conservative narrative is Texas Gov. Rick Perry, which in itself speaks volumes about the state of the GOP.)
 
The main argument of ban proponents is that without it, infected Africans will flood the United States looking for treatment. But the U.S. embassy isn't exactly handing out visas like Halloween candy in affected countries. And if it were, the solution, beyond implementing more rigorous screening of passengers (which is already happening), would be stricter medical controls for visas — not an official travel ban.
 
That's because such a ban would be both unnecessary and counterproductive.
 
Unnecessary because there is already a de facto private ban in place, given that U.S.-based airlines stopped flying to Ebola-afflicted countries two months ago (to protect their crew and passengers from exposure — and themselves from lawsuits). And counterproductive for a whole host of reasons.
 
For starters, the most reliable study modeling the effect of the ban concluded that even if the world managed to scale back air traffic flows by 80 percent, it would delay the international spread of the disease by only a few weeks. But the 80 percent goal is itself completely unrealistic. Why? Because it would require a far wider ban than one against Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, the three countries at the epicenter of the outbreak. It would require, for example, America to ban flights from countries that themselves have not banned travel to the affected countries. Otherwise, potentially infected people could simply fly to some country where they could get a connecting flight to their final destination, just like Duncan did, flying from Monrovia to Brussels before boarding a flight to the U.S.
 
But even if it were possible to impose a blanket travel ban, it wouldn't be advisable, because it would undermine the world's ability to fight the spread of the disease in the source countries, ultimately leaving everyone far more vulnerable.
 
The vast majority of the aid and relief efforts are being organized not by government agencies with access to government planes but private volunteer organizations such as Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders that rely on commercial travel. These entities are providing crucial protective gear and expertise to handle and treat Ebola patients safely without spreading the disease. If they are not able to respond expeditiously, thanks to a travel ban, we'll be basically consigning a whole lot of people to a death sentence.
 
This would only heighten their sense of desperation, increasing their desire to leave, and thus producing political instability, especially if their governments try and stop them due to pressure from the international community. Many African countries have already announced their own travel bans. But it is unlikely that they'll be able to enforce them without very draconian measures in the face of a mass exodus of people, making the spread of the disease across the African continent that much harder to contain.
 
French novelist Jean Raspail, in his dystopian The Camp of Saints, presented liberal France with an imagined dilemma like this. When confronted with a flotilla of leperous Indians seeking to enter its shore, should the French abandon their lofty principles and shoot the infected — or stick to their ideals and court self-annihilation by allowing them in?
 
Fortunately, in our civilized world, humanity's survival depends not on killing fellow human beings as Raspail's fevered imagination suggested, but maintaining the delicate balance between altruistic impulses for humanitarian work and selfish desire for protection. In fact, government action that prevents people from acting on the first might also undermine the second.
 

Chinese investors surged into EU at height of debt crisis

10/06/2014 21:14
 
As investors fled Europe in the worst days of its sovereign debt crisis, China-based companies moved in the other direction and surged in, with cash flowing from China into some of the hardest-hit countries of the eurozone periphery.
 
In 2010, the total stock of Chinese direct investment in the EU was just over €6.1bn – less than what was held by India, Iceland or Nigeria. By the end of 2012, Chinese investment stock had quadrupled, to nearly €27bn, according to figures compiled by Deutsche Bank.
 
The buying spree, analysts say, was nothing short of a transformation of the model of Chinese outbound investment. It is expected to increase steadily over the next decade.
 
“We saw a massive spike in Chinese investment in Europe, particularly [mergers and acquisitions] during the height of the debt crisis,” says Thilo Hanemann, an expert in Chinese outbound investment and research director at Rhodium Group, a research consultancy.
 
“This was partly opportunistic buying because assets were cheap and partly it was a structural secular shift in Chinese outbound investment, from securing natural resources in developing countries to acquiring brands and technology in developed countries.”
 
The Financial Times this week investigates the modern trail of Chinese investment, migration and ambition in Europe. A series of reports from Beijing to Milan to Madrid to Lisbon to Athens reveal the scale of China’s expansion in Europe, the flow of investment and the strategies of Chinese investors and migrants caught up in a national effort – a “going out” policy in place since 1999 – to find new markets and enhance China’s economic strength.
 
The incursion has not been all plain sailing. When a Chinese state-owned consortium won the bid to build a road from Warsaw to the German border, the government in Beijing presented the deal as a model for Chinese contractors in Europe.
 
But after cost over-runs and repeated breaches of local labour law, the Polish government cancelled the contract with Covec, the Chinese consortium, in 2011 – less than two years into the project.
 
What befuddled the Chinese company most were Polish environmental laws requiring tunnels for wildlife to be built beneath the road and a two-week work stoppage while seven rare species of frogs, toads and newts were moved out of the way.
 
The disaster has become business folklore in Beijing – a parable of the legal and cultural issues Chinese investors face when trying to do business or buy companies in Europe. Still, the obstacles faced by Covec, as well as other pioneering companies, have not dented China’s confidence in European ventures even in times of turmoil.
 
Total annual Chinese investment in Europe has dropped somewhat from the peak years of 2011 and 2012, but analysts across the continent see robust deals in the making and signs that investment will increase significantly this decade.
 
Official data on Chinese outbound – and inbound – investment are notoriously unreliable because the government does not measure most activity by Chinese companies’ offshore subsidiaries and does not attempt to work out where investment ends up.
 
Independent entities such as Rhodium Group and the Heritage Foundation, a conservative US-based think-tank, have chronicled a recent shift in Chinese money from resource-rich developing countries in Africa to partnerships in developed countries, including Europe.
 
Private Chinese enterprises are playing an important role in the transition. State-owned Chinese companies were the vanguard for China’s outward investment, with state-owned businesses accounting for 78 per cent of investment in Europe between 2008 and 2013, according to Deutsche Bank. At home, state behemoths dominate industries such as telecoms, transport, energy and finance.
 
But between 2011 and 2013, private companies’ share in Chinese M&A activity in the continent rose to over 30 per cent – compared to 4 per cent in the previous three years, Deutsche Bank research shows.
 
 
 
 
 
 

4 simple, impactful ways to optimize customer support on mobile

09/30/2014 01:02
 
Our lives revolve around our mobile devices. As bold as that statement may seem, it’s wholly accurate. Our smartphones and tablets provide the connection point between every aspect of our lives — from arranging transportation to staying in touch with friends and family, and keeping on top of work.
 
According to the Pew Center, some Americans are so glued to their mobile devices that they’ll sleep next to them – presumably, to make sure that that they are fully ‘connected’ during every moment spent conscious.
 
Mobile is critical to business
 
Business leaders know how important it is to focus on mobile as a touch point during the buying journey – to ensure that websites are mobile-friendly during the discovery and engagement stages. Responsive design and app development, as a result, have become hot topics that virtually every marketer acknowledges as a ‘must have.’
 
But what happens after the point of sale?
 
Research consistently shows that repeat customers are worth more than first time buyers. Not to mention, customer-stakeholders are likely to generate word-of-mouth referrals for your business. Support has evolved from a sunk-cost to a revenue-generating retention and upselling engine.
 
With smartphones and tablets at the center of peoples’ lives, it’s mission-critical for brands to have an end-to-end mobile customer support system. People are becoming increasingly accustomed to problem-solving while on the go – and as they become more efficient from their mobile devices, they’re becoming less and less tolerant of buggy live chat options and long telephone hold times.
 
Mobile, to them, is the antithesis of wasted time – and mobile customer support programs can help maximize their productivity.
 
Here are four simple, yet impactful tips for optimized mobile customer support program:
 
1. Make it easy for customers to call
 
Imagine that your customer is running to catch a flight, hailing a cab, or dealing with a broken dishwasher in between taking the kids to school and going to work. This person is in a rush and does not want to spend time fumbling when she is already stressed out and looking for immediate help. Instead, she needs to talk to a real human being – and talk to someone on your support team.
 
Some companies, particularly those who perceive customer support as an expense, will ‘bury’ their phone numbers on their websites – thinking that customers will feel more encouraged to browse through FAQ sections.
 
On mobile, this process can be incredibly frustrating. Customers want to be able to make a phone call with no more than one click of a button. That’s why you should make your phone number obvious and ever-present throughout your website.
 
2. Create an email ticketing system
 
Your customers want answers swiftly, with little to absolutely no wait time. But admittedly, this ‘perfect’ response time is unrealistic. Instead of forcing people into a queue and be stuck on hold, create an email ticketing system.
 
This technology will create a centralized repository of support requests between staff members so that questions are answered swiftly and efficiently.
 
“Ticketing systems make providing support easier when several staff members are involved, because you’re able to see whether a request is being responded to and who’s working on it, not to mention that it makes it much easier to keep track of how much time is being spent on the incoming tickets,” says Ian Aronovich, president and co-founder of GovernmentAuctions.org, a site that compiles and provides information about government auctions of seized and surplus merchandise from all over the country.
 
Be transparent with this data so that your customers can easily track the status of their pending requests. The end result will be a much more efficient system, and not to mention, your customers will be able to connect with a real human without the hassle of a phone call.
 
3. Rely on text messages
 
Text messages facilitate swift, rapid communication. According to one report, 98 percent of texts are read with an average response time of 90 seconds, compared to 2.5 days for email.
 
In addition to offering live chat, phone, and email-based support, your company can also offer an SMS based option for relatively straightforward questions that don’t require a lengthy response.
 
“We have nearly 3 million members between the ages 13-25 who take action on different causes, and one of the biggest ways we reach our members is via SMS,” says Colleen Wormsley of DoSomething, a nonprofit for young people and social change.
 
As you can imagine – because you’ve been in your consumers’ exact shoes — people rely on mobile tech to optimize their brain breaks, but they don’t want to be stuck on a phone call or waiting in an email queue. Texts can help facilitate real-time conversations.
 
4. Use social media
 
Online audiences rely heavily on social media to learn about and communicate with brands. One way to harness this ecosystem is to create dedicated support resources on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
 
“These are platforms where problems can be reported and tickets can be assigned,” says Aronovich. “Direct messages, tweets, and post comments are all potential channels. It’s a quick and easy way to connect with mobile users without having to do a whole lot to your mobile website.”
 
Social media won’t be the right platform for a lengthy conversation, so you should be prepared to redirect support requests to a central system. Think of social as the first touch point for creating a ticket — rely on email or text messages to keep the conversations going.
 

Awesome Employee Perks You've Never Heard Of

09/25/2014 19:44
While traditional employee incentive programs are important, they just don't pack the punch that perks do. According to MetLife's 10th annual survey of employee benefits trends, there's a strong correlation between satisfaction with benefits and overall job satisfaction. Employees in various roles and companies all placed a high value on personalized benefits, for which they are even willing to pay for.
 
At the end of the report, researchers cautioned that an economic recovery could result in "unanticipated setbacks for retention and productivity" for many employers unless they start ramping up their incentive programs. Basically, if you want your employees to work hard and stay engaged and loyal, you better start treating them well. Very well. 
 
The concept of incentivizing and retaining employees with incredible perks isn't new to some industries, like the tech scene in Silicon Valley. Big name companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple blazed an employee incentive trail that played a big hand in creating for competitive recruitment.
 
In an effort to make their companies even more desirable place to work, these top Silicon Valley players have continued to pull out all the stops to make sure that their employees stay happy. Google’s insane perks have long been referenced as some of the most impressive, but plenty of other companies give them a run for their money.
 
And for good reason; Fortune Magazine’s Leigh Gallagher, who oversees creation the of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” list, says that “power perks can produce happier employees who "work harder, are more engaged, have stronger feelings of attachment to the company and are less likely to leave. They pay dividends in so many ways."
 
Here are some of the companies around the world that are effectively participating in “perk wars” with the incredible benefits they offer their employees, and what those incentives are. Get your résumés ready...
 
Airbnb
On the top of our list of incredible perks is the revolutionary accommodation company, Airbnb. In addition to some other cool perks like a pet-friendly office and daily meals and snacks, Airbnb’s lucky employees get a $2,000 travel credit to explore the world as they see fit.
 
Yes, please!
 
Zappos.com
Zappos has long been known as a company that works for it’s employees, not the other way around. In fact, employee happiness is one the online retailer’s top priorities. Not only does the company give their employees daily meals, have an onsite gym and Weight Watchers meetings, but they also have game and nap rooms to be enjoyed while at work.
 
You read that right—sleeping on the job is now a good thing.
 
Clif Bar
Clif Bar’s tagline is “Feed Your Adventure” and when it comes their employees, they make sure to do just that. Their insanely cool HQ office features a 40-foot rock climbing wall and a state-of-the-art fitness center, and what’s more—they pay their employees to workout. Each employee gets 2.5 hours of paid time to exercise each week.
 
Plus, if you stay with the company longer than seven years, you can take a six- to eight-week sabbatical. Seven years hardly seems a task when working for a company like Clif Bar.
 
Burton
Snowboarding culture is a pretty cool one, so it goes without saying that the iconic, leading brand Burton has a company culture to match. Their Vermont headquarters is conveniently located near some of the country’s best ski spots, so when it snows more than two feet, the office gets a “snow day” and employees head to slopes, armed with their free season pass c/o Burton.
 
No snow? You’ll just have to enjoy the skate park in the back of the office.
 
Ask.com
What’s a way to make employees super happy, you ask? Ask.com just might have the answer. Sure, they have the standard free snacks, tuition reimbursement, and pet insurance, but it’s their paid time off policy, or lack there off, that is a major differentiator.
 
In their own words, “We believe the best measure of success is what you accomplish, so we don’t need to measure how much time you take off to enjoy life.”
 
Takeaway: As a small- to medium- size business owner, some of these perks may probably not within your wheelhouse of providing, and that’s okay.
 

Apple iPhone sales hit record 10M sold in first weekend

09/24/2014 12:47
It gets reiterated every single time Apple puts out a new version of the iPhone: people just love them. Sure, tech-heads love to rag on them, and talk about how all of their new features are just copies of what Android did years ago, but the average person doesn't care about that.
 
So, yet again, Apple has set a new record with The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus having now become the fastest selling versions of the device yet, with 10 million combined units sold in the first weekend, the company announced on Monday.
 
It's no surprise that the launch was huge, given that Apple had already touted a record four million pre-orders for the phones last week. Still, some analysts had low-balled the numbers, making the actually numbers for the new iPhones look even more impressive.
 
So how does this actually compare to previous launches? Well, it should be noted that, yes, the sales set a new record, but just barely. 
The launch of the new iPhone 5s and 5c last year saw nine million units sold, meaning that the iPhone 6 models broke the record, but not by much. Compare that to the growth that Apple saw between the launch of the iPhone 5, which sold five million units in its first weekend in 2012, and then the newer iPhone models, and things maybe don't look so rosy. It has gone from nearly doubling sales between releases, to just barely squeaking by.
 
Still, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, sounded the happiest possible note about the sales record. 
 
“Sales for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus exceeded our expectations for the launch weekend, and we couldn’t be happier,” Cook said in a statement. “We would like to thank all of our customers for making this our best launch ever, shattering all previous sell-through records by a large margin. While our team managed the manufacturing ramp better than ever before, we could have sold many more iPhones with greater supply and we are working hard to fill orders as quickly as possible.”
 
The two new iPhone models became available in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Puerto Rico, Singapore and the UK on September 19th, and will be available in more than 20 additional countries on September 26 including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Isle of Man, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey and United Arab Emirates.
 
In all, they will be available in 115 countries by the end of this year.
 
Part of the reason for the lower estimates on the new phones, according Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi, is because China was not a part of the initial rollout.
 
"We note that China has typically accounted for ~20% of total global iPhone sales – accordingly, an initial launch in China would have added an additional ~25% demand pull on iPhones, which may have significantly pushed out availability issues in other countries," he wrote. "By contrast, we estimate that the second wave of 20 countries being added this week, account for an estimated 12% of iPhone sales."
 

Retailers ramping up holiday hiring efforts

09/19/2014 22:52
Wal-Mart and other retailers say they are boosting holiday hiring this year as they prep of what they hope will be a rosier shopping season.
 
The ramp-up in temporary hiring could hit more than 800,000 workers in the last months of the year, the highest level since 1999, according to career counseling firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.
 
"The last two years saw hiring return to pre-recession levels," said John Challenger, chief executive of the company. "This year, we could see hiring return to levels not seen since the height of the dot-com boom."
 
The planned hires indicate retailers are expecting a decent but not blockbuster holiday season, a crucial period in which they can bring in as much as 40% of their total annual sales, observers said. Retail sales are also considered a bellwether of consumer spending, which makes up two-thirds of U.S. economic activity.
 
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced plans Thursday to hire 60,000 seasonal workers, including up to 5,000 in Southern California. That's nearly 10% more than the retail giant brought on board last year. The chain has previously said it would keep all its cash registers open at more than 3,800 stores during peak shopping hours from Thanksgiving through Christmas.
 
Crystal Garcia, a Wal-Mart store manager in West Covina, said many customers had already used the chain's holiday layaway option, which was rolled out Sept. 12. It is the fourth straight year the chain is offering such a service.
 
"It's actually doing really great," Garcia said. "We have been getting a lot of high-ticket items like PS4s and Xboxes put on layaway, as well as a lot of toys."
 
Other companies are also increasing their holiday staff.
 
Kohl's said it would hire more than 67,000 employees to staff its stores, up from about 50,000 last year. FedEx is upping its holiday hiring 25% to 50,000, while UPS said it would add 95,000 seasonal workers, nearly double from last year.
 
Analysts say falling gas prices and an improved job market have brightened consumers' financial outlook. But many said stagnant incomes will keep people from spending lavishly for presents this year.
 
Nearly 70% of Americans say they will spend the same as last year during the holidays, and 16% said they planned to spend less, according to Bob Shullman, chief executive of the Shullman Research Center. Only 13% planned to dig deeper into their wallets and splurge more compared with last year.
 
About half of those surveyed plan to spend less than $500. An additional 19% said they will spend between $500 and $750.
 
"If we can do as well as we did last year, it will be a good thing," Shullman said. "There is quite a bit of anxiety in the world."
 
Slow sales in the first half of 2014 prompted the National Retail Federation to drop its annual sales forecast to 3.6%, down from a previous estimate of 4.1%. The trade group hasn't issued its holiday forecast.
 
Last year, retail sales in November and December rose 3.8% from a year earlier as consumers spent $601.8 billion at stores and websites, the group said.
 
Observers said delivery companies such as FedEx may not actually be expecting big growth in business this year but want to avoid a repeat of last year's staffing problems.
 
Both UPS and FedEx were heavily criticized in 2013 after failing to deliver some packages before Christmas amid an Internet shopping surge. UPS and Amazon.com ended up offering refunds to customers who did not get their orders in time.
 
"People are less likely to trudge to brick-and-mortar stores. They are shopping online," Shullman said. "FedEx and UPS just didn't have enough people last year."
 
Customers who choose to shop from their laptops and smartphones will help drive down the need for workers at stores and malls during the holidays, analysts said.
 
 

Apple HealthKit apps are on hold due to last-minute problems

09/17/2014 21:57
Hundreds of developers are working on health apps that tap into data collected on Apple’s HealthKit platform. They expected to be able to launch their apps today with the release of iOS 8, but Apple is now alerting app developers that it’s putting their apps on hol
 
VentureBeat has now heard from several app developers in this boat, and one says it has been contacted by Apple about problems with the launch.
 
WebMD is set to launch a new HealthKit-connected app called Healthy Target today. “Our new app had been available for download in the app store until 10:30 this morning, at which point it became unavailable, WebMD spokesman Adam Grossberg said in a note to VentureBeat. “We have been in contact with Apple about this issue, and expect to see the previous version of our app (v 5.2) back in the store on a temporary basis.”
 
Carrot Fit’s creator Brian Mueller was one of the first to tweet out the problem today. “I can confirm that CARROT Fit was pulled from sale, and I’m working on resubmitting an older version that will go up on a temporary basis until Apple can correct the problems they’re seeing with HealthKit,” Mueller says in an email to VentureBeat.
 
Some developers on Twitter have attributed the problems to data management issues on the HealthKit platform.
 

How To Quit Your Job (The Right Way)

05/22/2014 09:14

There are many ways to quit a job, and some ways are nothing short of epic. There's Steven Slater, a JetBlue flight attendant, who, at the end of yet another flight where he felt abused by passengers, announced that he was quitting his job, deployed the aircraft's evacuation slide, and slid down it with two beers he had grabbed from the service cart.
 
Then there's writer Marina Shifrin, who worked all hours of the day and night creating videos for her employer, a Taiwanese animator. Fed up, she created one final video, set to the tune of Kanye West's "Gone," showing her dancing around the office as she describes exactly why her job is so bad.
 
Apparently her boss was obsessed with how many views the company's videos were getting, which makes it quite ironic that her "I Quit" video has thus far garnered 17,399,027 views on YouTube.
 
And then there's Gwen Dean, who may have just eclipsed all past epic job resignations smack dab in the middle of Super Bowl XLVIII. During a commercial for Go Daddy, the 36-year-old machine engineer from Yonkers, New York had just two words for her boss, Ted: "I quit." One of her puppets, Mr. Frank, added "Ciao Baby." According to Nielsen, the 2014 Super Bowl garnered 111.5 million views, which makes it the most watched game, and likely the most publicly viewed job resignation, ever.
 
So, what did Boss Ted have to say about being told he would no longer have the services of Gwen in such a public matter? "You've got to be kidding. Wow. Great commercial." In an interview with the Today Show, Gwen said he was "laughing his can off. It was super cool."
 
On the surface, it sounds like a reckless way to quit a job and a great way to burn those bridges down to the ground. But Gwen actually did some things right here.
 
Be prepared
Before Gwen gave her turbo-charged resignation, she got all her ducks in a row. She got her website up and running (PuppetsbyGwen.com -- with help from Go Daddy, of course), so the minute she tendered her resignation, she could take her business live. She also built her clientele (and puppets) in her hours away from work. Don't wait to line the stuff up you need to make a successful transition until after you've quit -- get ready while you are still working and earning a paycheck, whether that entails furthering your education, starting a savings account, getting the proper licenses or certifications, etc.
 
Get pumped ... but stay realistic
Gwen left her job to pursue her passion for puppetry. While it might sound a little "out there" at first, Gwen has been doing puppetry since high school and had imagined doing it for a living since then. Even if you're quitting for another job and not striking out on your own, it's important you understand that every workplace has good and bad things about it and you need to be realistic about what lies ahead.
 
Company rules still matter
Even though Gwen quit her job on a national stage, she still followed up immediately with a formal resignation letter. And even though her employer only requires a one-week notice, she is giving two.
 
Keep those bridges intact and fireproof
Aside from the sensationalistic way she quit, she still kept it short and to the point and didn't belittle her job or her boss. Because she is entering a field where some of her business might come from word-of-mouth and because she is working with children, she wants to keep things on a positive, upbeat note. Whether you are staying in your current field or trying something totally new, remember there are only a few degrees of separation between your old job and your new one. Gwen has been careful not to give her boss's last name or the name of the company she works for because she said it's been a good work experience.
 

 

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