U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said financial stability is no longer a “junior partner” to monetary policy and central banks should try to defuse threats in the future.

“The crisis underscored that maintaining financial stability is an equally critical responsibility,” Mr. Bernanke said Thursday in Washington in the last of four lectures to a class of undergraduate students at George Washington University.

“As much as possible, central banks and other regulators should try to anticipate and defuse threats to financial stability and mitigate the effects when a crisis occurs,” Mr. Bernanke said.

Mr. Bernanke’s comments align him with German central bankers such as Otmar Issing, the former chief economist for the European Central Bank, who have long argued that leaning against credit-fuelled financial bubbles was a core responsibility of central banks. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was skeptical about the Fed’s ability to identify bubbles or choose correct values for asset markets and emphasized a policy of cure, or mopping up bubbles with aggressive policy after they popped.

Mr. Bernanke is using the lectures as part of a broader effort by the Fed to explain its policies and role to the public as lawmakers and political candidates scrutinize its actions. The chairman has also started holding press conferences after meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee.

In other comments, Mr. Bernanke said the pace of recovery from the recession has been “extremely sluggish,” while action by the world’s central banks helped prevent another Great Depression. In the aftermath of the crisis, the U.S. has bolstered financial oversight, and the banking system is now “significantly stronger.”

The Fed has taken unprecedented steps to revive the world’s largest economy and prevent another economic contraction after the 18-month recession that ended in June 2009.

The central bank in December 2008 lowered its target overnight interest rate to a record range of zero to 0.25%, and it later purchased US$2.3-trillion of assets in two rounds of so-called quantitative easing.

At its September meeting, the FOMC announced a move, dubbed Operation Twist, to replace US$400-billion of short-term debt in its portfolio with longer-term Treasuries in an effort to reduce borrowing costs further and support the economic rebound.

Policy makers said at their last meeting on March 13 that they will continue the operation to lengthen the average maturity of holdings. The Fed also said it would maintain its policy of reinvesting maturing housing debt into agency mortgage-backed securities.

Mr. Bernanke used his March 27 lecture to focus on the Fed’s response to the financial crisis, asserting that policy makers helped prevent it from becoming a worldwide catastrophe. In previous lectures, Mr. Bernanke examined the roots of the crisis, including the boom and bust in home prices and the Fed’s failure to recognize vulnerabilities in the financial system.

Thursday’s lecture focused on the Fed’s response, the regulatory response, and the long-term implications of both. The students gave Mr. Bernanke a gift Thursday: a framed front page from The New York Times’ April 20, 1933 edition which featured a four-column headline announcing: “Gold Standard Dropped Temporarily To Aid Prices and Our World Position; Bill Ready for Controlled Inflation.” Mr. Bernanke is a Great Depression scholar.

Members of the International Energy Agency (IEA) are split about whether the conditions for a release have been met. U.S. policymakers have been canvassing the idea of a stock release for some weeks. Britain and France appear receptive to a request for a coordinated stock release. Germany and a number of other European countries remain opposed.

As a result, the agency has struggled to articulate a clear view about whether a release is warranted. Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven told journalists last month there were “no discussions” about a reserve release and she had not been in touch with the United States about it, though countries were free to employ their own reserves after consultation with the IEA.

The agency’s most recent market survey reiterated previous warnings about falling inventories and a tightening supply-demand balance. “(The) post-recession OECD industrial stock overhang has been gradually whittled away. Inventories…look very tight in absolute terms,” the agency wrote in its March “Oil Market Report”.

“There may be no actual physical supply disruption at present deriving from the Iranian ’issue’. But there are ongoing non-OPEC outages totalling around 750,000 barrels per day, as a slew of technical and political factors continue to hobble non-OPEC supply.”

Outside observers have detected a marked reluctance by the IEA and the European Commission to support a stock release. But the IEA’s opposition appears to be softening as a result of sustained pressure from Washington and some other capitals.

Following a regular meeting on March 28-29, Van der Hoeven acknowledged that “The oil market has been tightening in recent months; crude oil prices are very high again, and petrol prices have reached a record high level in some member countries. The International Energy Agency, like many others, is concerned by the impact of these high prices while the global economic recovery remains fragile.”.

It was not quite an admission that the legal conditions for a coordinated release had been met, but it came very close, noting tight supplies and the economic fallout.

Van der Hoeven promised “The IEA is closely monitoring market developments and will remain in close contact with member countries to exchange views about the oil-market situation. As we have mentioned many times, the IEA was created to respond to serious physical supply disruptions, and we remain ready to act if market conditions so warrant.”

Reading between the lines, Washington and its allies have made clear they reserve the right to go ahead with a release unilaterally, and the agency has been told to get out of the way.

The legal trigger for a stock release is ambiguous. The IEA’s information documents suggest the trigger is an “actual or potentially severe oil supply disruption” or a “major world oil supply disruption” (“IEA Response System for Oil Supply Emergencies,” 2011).

The original 1974 Agreement on an International Energy Program (IEP), which established the system of collective response, demand restraint, and emergency stocks, appears to refer to interruptions amounting to 7 percent or more of a participating country’s daily supplies (Articles 8, 13-15).

But this requirement has been waived in the three stock releases the IEA has approved so far (the Gulf War in 1991, Hurricane Katrina 2005 and the Libyan civil war in 2011).

Crucially, the agreement makes clear that collective action can be triggered not just by existing but by expected problems: “Whenever the group as a whole or any participating country sustains or can reasonably be expected to sustain a reduction in its oil supplies, the emergency measures…shall be activated.”

In the United States, the conditions for releasing crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) are broadly similar.

Stocks may be released only if “the president has found drawdown and sale are required by a severe energy supply interruption or by the obligations of the United States under the international energy program”

U.S. law defines a severe energy supply interruption as a shortage which “(A) is or is likely to be of significant scope and duration, and of an emergency nature; (B) may cause major adverse impact on national safety or the national economy; and (C) results or is likely to result from an interruption in the supply or imported petroleum products, an interruption in the supply of domestic petroleum products, or sabotage or an act of God” (42 USC 77 6202(8)).

The president must certify that “(A) an emergency situation exists and there is a significant reduction in supply which is of significant scope and duration; (B) a severe increase in the price of petroleum products has resulted from such emergency situation; and (C) such price increase is likely to cause a major adverse impact on the national economy” (42 USC 77 6241(d)(2)).

Notice both U.S. law and the IEP agreement contain forward-looking elements. Stocks may be released not just in response to a current shortfall but an expected one. Note also U.S. law envisages stock releases both in response to physical shortfalls and also the economic damage caused by a sudden rise in prices.

The question for the agency and its member governments is whether the current shortfalls (from South Sudan, Yemen, Syria and Iran) and expected future ones (if Iran’s exports fall further) are sufficient to warrant a release.

The problem for the agency, and governments which oppose a stock drawdown, is that last year’s release in response to the Libyan civil war has set an unwelcome precedent.

IEA Deputy Executive Director Richard Jones has said last year’s release should be considered a success. But officials have struggled to explain why it was appropriate to release stocks as a result of the Libyan export disruption in 2011 but would not be appropriate in response to a host of smaller disruptions in 2012, which amount to a similar loss of oil.

Most of the conditions (rising prices, falling inventories, tightening supply-demand balances and timespreads) seem very similar.

Meanwhile, even if sanctions have not yet interrupted Iran’s exports, which is open to debate, it is reasonably foreseeable they will cut export volumes by summer, which could supply the forward-looking justification for a stock release envisaged by the IEP and U.S. law.

Ultimately, stock releases are a political act. In this case, energy policy on stock releases will be subordinated to the wider diplomatic policy of containing Iran (and restraining Israel) through the use of oil sanctions.

Throughout this dispute, foreign policy has trumped energy policy. From an energy consumer’s perspective, it may not have been terribly sensible to impose an embargo on Iran’s crude exports, but foreign ministers overruled their energy counterparts. Having started down this route, foreign policy experts must see it through.

“The view is that higher oil prices are a price worth paying to prevent or push back a war against Iran and higher oil prices can be alleviated by using emergency stocks,” an industry source told Reuters this week.

Political leaders in the United States, the United Kingdom, and certain other countries will subordinate everything to that aim, which is what makes a stock release highly likely, unless prices start to come down of their own accord.

U.S. consumer spending increased by the most in seven months in February as households shook off a rise in gasoline prices, suggesting the economy may not have slowed as much this quarter as economists had thought.

The Commerce Department said on Friday consumer spending rose 0.8% as spending on long lasting goods, like automobiles, rose sharply. January’s spending was revised up to 0.4% from a previously reported 0.2% gain.

“So long as the consumer is spending, that’s the biggie everyone is watching as they drive the economy. The economy is on a decent trajectory, but maybe not as strong as some would like,” said Wayne Kaufman, chief market analyst at John Thomas Financial in New York.

U.S. stock index futures held onto earlier gains after the data, while U.S. Treasury debt prices turned higher. The dollar held earlier losses against the euro and yen.

Economists polled by Reuters had expected spending, which accounts for two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, to rise 0.6% last month.

When adjusted for inflation, spending rose 0.5%, the largest gain since September, after gaining 0.2% in January. That could cause analysts to raise their forecasts for 2% first-quarter growth.

The economy expanded at an annual rate of 3% in the final three months of 2011 as it got a boost from restocking by businesses, a stimulus that is expected to be lost this quarter.

Consumer spending rose at a 2.1% rate in the fourth quarter and last month’s increase suggested consumers were taking surging gasoline prices in stride, and saving less to supplement their low income.

Earlier this week, Wal-Mart Stores said U.S. sales in the last two months had withstood rising gas prices and a tough economy that worried many of its shoppers.

In the Commerce Department report, spending on goods meant to last more than three years rose 1.6% in February after advancing 1.4% the prior month. Spending on services rose 0.4%. Unseasonably warm weather had curbed spending on utilities in the prior months.

Last month income edged up 0.2% after rising by the same margin in January. The increase was below economists’ expectations for a 0.4% rise.

Taking inflation into account, the amount of income available to households after accounting for taxes and inflation, declined for a second month.

With spending outpacing income, the saving rate dropped to 3.7%, the lowest rate since August 2009. Savings slowed to an annual rate of $438.7 billion, the smallest level since October 2009, from $509.5 billion in January.

The report showed mild inflation pressures, which should help to support spending.

A price index for personal spending rose 0.3% in February after increasing 0.2% the prior month. In the 12 months through February, the PCE index was up 2.3%. It increased 2.4% in January.

A core inflation measure, which strips out food and energy costs, edged up 0.1% last month after rising 0.2% in January. In the 12 months through February, core PCE prices rose 1.9% after increasing by a similar margin in January.

The Federal Reserve would like this measure close to 2%.

The federal government has renewed its tax break for small businesses to help add staff, and is offering more incentives for job creation by other companies and organizations.

In its 2012 budget, the government extends its Hiring Credit for Small Business program, saying it will invest $205 million in the coming year to encourage hiring.

Under the program, introduced in last year’s budget, a small-business employer can receive a credit of up to $1,000 to offset the increase from the previous year in its employment insurance premiums.

“This credit provided needed relief to small businesses by helping them defray the costs of hiring new workers and allowing them to take advantage of emerging economic opportunities,” the government says in its budget document.

“The temporary credit is available to approximately 536,000 employers, whose total EI premiums were at or below $10,000 in 2011, reducing small business 2012 payroll cost by $205 million.”

The program would kick in regardless of the number of people employed by a small business. And while the credit is not dependent on an employer hiring additional staff, the government says its aim is to free up money to encourage hiring.

“It’s a nice win for small and medium enterprises . . . but a small one,” said Elio Luongo, managing partner at KPMG.

However, Luongo added that, at $1,000 per employer, the credit is unlikely to result in many new positions.

Thursday’s budget also includes:

• An additional $50 million over two years to the Youth Employment Strategy, which is aimed at helping young people gain work experience and learn skills;

• Investing $30 million over three years to improve job opportunities to Canadians with disabilities;

• Providing $275 million over three years to support First Nations education, as well as build and renovate schools on reserves;

• $50 million over two years to extend the so-called ThirdQuarter project, a federal-provincial-territorial program for older workers in communities with populations of less than 250,000.

Lottery fever has swept the US hours before the draw for a $640m (£400m) Mega Millions prize, thought to be the biggest jackpot in world history.

Queues have been snaking out of shops from coast to coast with some punters snapping up tickets by the bushel.

The prize has been swelling since 24 January, with no winner matching all five numbers in the last 18 draws.

Forty-two states are in the big draw, which takes place in Atlanta, Georgia at 23:00 EDT (04:00 GMT).

The prize had stood at $540m before Friday’s announcement.

A jackpot winner could choose between receiving the full amount of $640m in 26 annual payments (more than $24m a year) or an instant cash option of more than $460m.

The largest jackpot to be paid out until now was a $390m Mega Millions prize that was split between two winners in 2007.

One hopeful ticket-buyer, Allsaints Macauley, a 64-year-old taxi driver in Washington DC, told the BBC that if he won he would drive his vehicle to one of the capital’s busiest intersections and leave it behind to be towed away.

“I’d skip town with my children to a place where the temperature will not go below 86 [F] and just hang out.

“The guys on Wall Street invest my trust, so my kids will never have to drive a cab or wash dishes like I did.”

Also in the queue was Mike Notarangelo, 52, unemployed, who said: “I’d set up my daughter, take care of my parents, and choose some charities to get some of the money.

“After that, I would travel the world. See all those places I’ve never been to.”

In California, some shops have been experiencing a ticket-buying frenzy, after lottery officials in the Golden State revealed which outlets have previously sold the most winning tickets.

Ryan King, a 33-year-old construction worker, told the Los Angeles Times: “I’ve already spent the money in my head, 300 times.”

The Las Vegas Sun reports that people have been driving to a shop on Nevada’s border with California to buy tickets.

Some $2,600 of tickets were sold to one buyer at a cafe in the state of Arizona, reports the Associated Press.

Even the relatively wealthy have apparently not been immune to the lottery bug.

NBA basketball player Chris Singleton, who earns a reported $1.5m playing for the Washington Wizards, said on Twitter that he planned to splurge $10,000 on tickets.

The Kansas City Star that the winnings could buy a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, a private island near Phuket, Thailand, or a fleet of 200 Bugatti sports cars.

But the odds are stacked overwhelmingly against any one person matching the six-ball jackpot.

Lottery officials say the chance of winning is just one-in-176 million. Tickets cost $1.

Mathematics professor Mike Catalano of Dakota Wesleyan University told the Associated Press news agency: “You are about 50 times as likely to get struck by lightning as to win the lottery, based on the 90 people a year getting struck by lightning.”

Based on other US averages, a person is 8,000 times more likely to be murdered, or 20,000 times more likely to die in a car accident than to win the lottery, he added.

The states of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Alaska, Hawaii, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada are not participating in the draw.

Some small businesses are already feeling the effect of disruption caused by the pressure of demand at the UK’s petrol pumps.

One business group leader said that a fuel strike was the “last thing” that businesses needed in the current economic climate.

Earlier in the day, an Easter strike by fuel tanker drivers was ruled out by the Unite union.

But some organisations have already seen customer cancellations.

‘Risk’

Paul Kielty is the manager of a small caravan park in Penrith, Cumbria. He said they had received a “flurry” of calls from holidaymakers wishing to cancel their bookings.

“Because of the fuel situation, they did not want to take the risk of not being able to get home,” he said.

He only started managing the park four weeks ago and was hoping for a smooth start.

The calls have eased off since the announcement that there would be no strike at Easter, when the park is fully booked.

However, with only 70 pitches, he said just a few cancellations could affect the business.

John Longworth, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), said that organisations such as this could not afford a fuel strike at any time.

“Employers are working flat out to keep their businesses afloat and deliver growth during challenging economic times. The last thing they need to contend with is a fuel strike, which could have a damaging effect on businesses across the UK,” he said.

“Not only will firms struggle to access the goods they need to run their business, staff will not be able to get to work, and smaller companies will be forced to shut down and lose takings.

“Public services could end up being affected, and parents who cannot get childcare will have to take time off and lose pay. Furthermore, too many UK jobs depend on sending goods to ports and markets overseas.

“People have already started panic buying, which will lead to further shortages and make the problem even worse.”

‘Right to strike’

However, the panic buying is by no means nationwide.

A number of businesses have said that they have been able to operate as normal.

Adrian Braithwaite, who chairs the Wakefield Driving Instructors Association, said instructors had sometimes needed to queue for five minutes to fill up, but this had not affected their work.

The Unite union said it retained the right to strike after Easter.

Unite’s drivers, who deliver fuel to Shell and Esso garages and supermarkets such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s, have called for minimum working conditions covering pay, hours, holiday and redundancy.

It hasn’t taken long for Tim Cook to capture the hearts and minds of the Apple faithful.
He’s garnered a 97 percent approval rating from Apple’s workforce, according to a survey conducted by job search site Glassdoor.com.
“While many speculated how Cook would be received by employees and how he would lead the tech giant, he seems to have settled in quite nicely,” Glassdoor notes in a company blog.
Jobs’ rating at the time he stepped down as CEO of Apple in August 2011 was 97 percent, Glassdoor noted, but his rating prior to that was 95 percent.Cook’s rating was part of a larger survey by Glassdoor to identify the top 25 CEOs most approved by their workers.

Other leaders of high-tech companies who finished in the rankings’ top 10 were Paul Jacobs, of Qualcomm (95 percent); Larry Page, of Google (94 percent); Paul Otellini, of Intel (90 percent); Pierre Nanteme, of Accenture (91 percent); and Paul Mantz, of VMware (90 percent).

Only one woman is in the top 25 list and she heads a high-tech company: Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard (80 percent).

Leadership Challenge

Initial anxiety over Apple’s future at the time of its co-founder’s death appears to have faded into oblivion, washed out by product successes like the iPhone 4S and third-generation iPad, and investor sops like dividends.

“In a very short time, concerns about Apple after Steve Jobs seem to have disappeared,” Nigam Arora, publisher of an investment newsletter, writes in Forbes. “There is hardly ever a mention of this subject in the media.”

“The Apple bulls almost universally accept that Steve Jobs built such a strong executive team and that Apple is on such a strong trajectory that Steve Jobs’ genius is no longer needed to propel Apple stock higher and higher,” he adds.

Cook at a recent product introduction

While Tim Cook’s popularity is rising high, much of what Apple is pumping out now was conceived during the Jobs era. It remains to be seen if Cook’s personable brand of leadership that’s winning the hearts of Apple’s rank and file will be able to maintain the company’s commitment to cutting edge industrial design.

It seems that Cook does quite well when playing “the good cop” but what lifted Apple above other technology companies in the past was its previous leader’s ability to play “the bad cop.”

That might be a role less palatable to Cook, as was suggested this week by one former Apple software engineer. The engineer, Michael Margolis, complained on Twitter about the user interface for the new Apple TV set-top box, which he asserted was rejected by Jobs five years ago. “Now there is nobody to say ‘no’ to bad design,” he laments.

Security vendor Trend Micro has been tracking a hacking campaign called Luckycat that has been linked to 90 attacks, including some aimed at Tibetan activists, and has tied it to a group based in China, the company said in a report published on Thursday.

The Luckycat campaign, which has been active since at least June 2011, has been connected with attacks against targets in Japan and India as well, according to Trend Micro. Industries targeted include military research, aerospace and energy, it said.

To avoid detection, the hackers used a diverse set of infrastructure and anonymity tools. Each attack used a unique campaign code to track which victims were compromised by which malware, illustrating that the attackers were both very aggressive and continually targeted intended victims with several waves of malware, according to Trend Micro’s report.

The security company was able to connect an email address used to register one of the group’s command-and-control servers to a hacker in the Chinese underground community.

The hacker has been using aliases “dang0102″ or “scuhkr” and has been linked to the Information Security Institute of the Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, where he was involved in a research project on network attack and defense.

The person behind the aliases and the email address is Gu Kaiyuan, who is now apparently an employee at Tencent, China’s leading Internet portal company, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

There are more signs pointing to China as the origin of the Luckycat campaign. The language settings of the attackers’ computers indicate that they are Chinese speakers, according to Trend Micro. The work done by the hacker group was first documented earlier this month by Symantec, which showed that the hackers used IP addresses allocated to China, Trend Micro said.

The targeted nature of the attacks is no isolated occurrence. The number of targeted attacks has dramatically increased, Trend Micro said.

To better protect themselves, enterprises need to use a mixture of technology and education, according to Trend Micro. Apart from patch management, endpoint and network security, enterprises should also focus on detecting and mitigating attacks, the company said.

But an enterprise’s defense is only as good as its employees. People trained to expect targeted attacks are better positioned to report potential threats and can become an important source of threat intelligence.

Intel this week said it was investing in the development of a “superchip” for high-performance computing systems that the company hopes will raise its supercomputing profile.

The superchip is aimed at providing high-bandwidth throughput with the use of InfiniBand interconnect technology, said Diane Bryant, vice president and general manager for the datacenter and connected systems group, this week.

InfiniBand is low-latency interconnect technology that links servers and storage units in data centers. The technology can provide low-latency communication between processors and servers in data centers while keeping CPU utilization rates low.

Bryant did not detail how InfiniBand technology will be used alongside the superchip. However, the product could fit right into Intel’s existing range of supercomputing offerings, which include Xeon server CPUs and the MIC (many-integrates cores) co-processor, which mixes standard x86 cores with specialized cores to boost HPC tasks.

Intel’s latest Xeon E5 and a 50-core MIC chip, codenamed Knights Corner, are being paired in a supercomputer called Stampede, which is scheduled for deployment next year at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas. The supercomputer will deliver peak performance of 10 petaflops (or 10,000 trillion operations per second).

High-bandwidth fabric will be very important in high-performance systems going into the future, Bryant said.

The superchip plan follow Intel’s announcement in January to buy parts of Qlogic’s InfiniBand business, which the chip maker said would help push internal bandwidth inside systems as processor performance increases and server performance scales up. The acquisition was also a step ahead in the effort to provide high-performance storage and server bandwidth in the race to exaflop computing.

The InfiniBand interconnect was originally envisioned to replace protocols like Fibre Channel and Ethernet, but has been slow in gaining momentum, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64.

“Integrating InifiniBand into a chip would make it easier to construct high-performance systems with low latency. You could see where there could be some advantages,” Brookwood said.

The integration of InfiniBand in future MIC chips could give Intel a way to create dense fabric for high-performance interconnects in supercomputers.

“But when you create this fabric, the issue is how is software going to work,” Brookwood said.

An Intel spokesman did not provide further information on the chips, saying the company has not yet made specific disclosures about future InifiniBand-related implementations.

Google has revamped its Search app for iPads with a bunch of new flashy features to make the app more interactive. The biggest improvement to the app comes from integration of Google Instant results, so you don’t even need to press the search button to get your results.

The redesigned Google Search app for iPad presents you with a simple home screen with a large search field for you to type your query. You can also search by using voice commands or Goggles, which allows you to search for items by taking photos of them with the iPad camera. You can also Google’s main services from the home screen, such as Gmail, Calendar, News or Maps.

Once you enter your search term, results will start to display instantly as you type, so there’s no need to press the search button altogether. Google has worked a lot on refining the results browsing experience. For regular search results, you can switch to instant preview mode, where you are presented with a series of sliding page snapshots from the top results of your query.

When you tap on a result, the snapshot fades in to the foreground and the page starts loading in a panel that slides from the right. The browsing panel allows you to share the current page via e-mail or open it in Safari, or +1 a result directly. To close the result panel, you just slide it to the right, where it stays pinned at the edge (so you can pull it back by dragging the edge of the panel to the left).

The image results browser has been redesigned, too. When you tap on the first image result, you are presented with a carousel (similar to iTunes CoverFlow) of images that you browse by swiping left or right. Tapping on an image then opens in a viewer panel the page containing the respective image.If you sign in with your Google ID into the Search app for iPad, you can also browse your search history visually. You can swipe right to view snapshots of pages you visited, which are stacked and organized by search term (and delete the queries you’d rather not have in there).

Businesses generate and consume massive amounts of email and instant messaging communications. For many businesses, all of that data has to be preserved, and produced on demand in the event of litigation. Google has introduced Google Apps Vault–a new service for Google Apps for Business customers that promises streamlined data retention and e-discovery.As a part of any litigation, the company can be compelled by the court to provide all relevant material to the opposing legal counsel. The process of discovery—or in this case e-discovery—requires that the business be able to preserve, search, find, and retrieve electronic communications such as email messages or instant messaging chats.

If a customer has a complaint, or a lawsuit is filed against the company for some reason, businesses need an efficient means of sifting through thousands upon thousands of emails and instant messaging chat threads to identify and retrieve communications that might be relevant to the matter. That can be a daunting, and resource-intensive task if you don’t have the right tools.

Google Apps Vault (simply “Vault” for short) makes the process easier for Google Apps for Business customers. Google claims that Vault can reduce the costs of litigation, regulatory investigation, or compliance actions by providing a way to manage and preserve important business data generated or transmitted within Google Apps.

A post from the Official Google Enterprise Blog explains, “Vault provides access to all of your Gmail and on-the-record chats and can provide significant savings to your business over the traditional costs of litigation and eDiscovery.”

Vault enables Google Apps for Business customers to search through archived communications based on dates, senders, recipients, or labels to quickly locate the desired information. Vault relies on the same Google infrastructure that Google Apps for Business customers already count on. Because it’s a Web-based solution, there are no hardware or infrastructure costs involved, and the service can be activated and deployed in minutes.

Google Apps Vault can be added to your Google Apps account for an additional $5 per user per month. For one user, that doesn’t sound too bad, but if you’re talking about 100 users, or 1,000 users, or more, that $5 per user can add up quickly.

If you’re a Google Apps for Business customer, check out Google Apps Vault and see what it has to offer. Before deciding, though, make sure you weight out the annual cost of the Google Apps Vault service compared with other data archiving and e-discovery solutions and make sure Vault is the best value for your needs.

By migrating to its own Linux distribution, LiMux, the German city of Munich reduced both IT costs and user complaints, according to figures provided by Mayor Christian Ude.

“The current impact on the budget for the LiMux project amounts to a total of €11.7 million,” (US$15.6 million) Ude wrote in a reply to questions asked by Marian Offman of the Christian Socialist Union on March 19. The questions were asked because the party was concerned about a failed migration from Windows to Linux in Vienna.

The city of Munich started the LiMux project in 2004 and began migrating from Windows NT to a fully open source desktop infrastructure in 2006.

The CSU does not have to be worried that the Vienna scenario is going to happen in Munich, Ude assured the city council. If the city had maintained the Windows infrastructure as it was in 2005, the associated costs would have amounted to €11.8 million. However, since then the number of computers increased significantly, and Munich would have spent an additional €1.65 million on new software alone, Ude said.

Even taking into account the €2.08 million for optimization and test management that ended up on the balance of the LiMux project, the LiMux system is cheaper than using a Windows installation, Ude noted. Upgrading the Windows systems to a level comparable to the LiMux infrastructure, including hardware needed to run the software, would have cost the city at least €15.52 million, he said.

The mayor also noted that if a Windows infrastructure had been chosen, the systems would have had to be upgraded every three or four years. “Just the license costs for 10,000 PCs with current Windows and Office licenses would be more than €2.8 million at the current time,” Ude explained, emphasizing that for the LiMux project, that amount only has to be paid once. “There are no license fees for Open Source products, all new product versions are free of charge.”

Ude said it was impossible to be exact about the amount of complaints the help desk gets about LiMux, noting that most problems are a combination of several causes. The software is not always the problem, since often there are problems reaching a server, or Internet connections might be malfunctioning.

However, there is a trend. “The amount of complaints with the service team has not risen with the increased number of LiMux workplaces, but even slightly decreased,” Ude wrote to the city council.

The maximum number of complaints was 70 per month before the beginning of the switch to LiMux. After the number of LiMux workplaces increased from 1,500 to 9,500, the maximum number of complaints per month dropped to 46. This leaves Ude to conclude that the decline in complaints was due to the migration to LiMux.

As of March 23, 10,000 systems were running LiMux, according to Kirsten Böge, change manager of the Limux project. The client is based on Ubuntu, and KDE is used for the graphical user interface. All PCs will be equipped with OpenOffice.org, Firefox, mail client Thunderbird and image editing software Gimp. As of January, 15,000 workplaces were using Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.

Munich uses the Open Document Format (ODF) as a standard, and OpenOffice is extended by an in-house developed system called WollMux. The extension includes numerous features including templates, forms and letterheads.

“By the end of 2012, 12,000 computers will have been switched,” Böge said in an email. “At this time, the LiMux project will be finished,” Böge said. “Our goal was to migrate 80 percent of all computers – this will be done with the 12,000.”

MasterCard says it is investigating a potential security breach of its cardholders’ account information.

The credit card company said Friday it has notified law enforcement agencies and issuers of the MasterCard accounts that are potentially at risk. The credit card company only processes transactions — the credit cards are issued to cardholders by banks and some retailers.

MasterCard wouldn’t say how many cardholders, banks or issuing companies are affected.

However, the security news blog Krebs on Security said the breach involved a major U.S.-based credit card processor, took place between Jan. 21 and Feb. 25, and that Visa was also affected.

MasterCard advised cardholders with concerns to contact the financial institution that issued their cards.

It added that its its own systems have not been compromised.

Sino-Forest Corp., the Chinese timber company fighting allegations of fraud, is filing for court protection from creditors under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act and putting itself up for sale.

The Mississauga-based company said in a release Friday that if it doesn’t get a good enough offer, it will hand over control to its bondholders.

Sino-Forest traded on the TSX and once had a market value of more than $6 billion.

But its shares were hammered last summer after short-seller Muddy Waters Research alleged that it had exaggerated sales and assets. The allegations have not been proven.

The firm faces investigations by securities regulators and the police and its stock has been halted for months on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Firm claims $4B in defamation damages

The firm also announced it is launching a defamation lawsuit against Muddy Waters and its head, Carson Block, claiming damages of $4 billion and the recovery of profits made by Muddy Waters.

“We believe the full value of our assets will only be achieved if we are able to continue operating the business, and repair and preserve relationships with our customers and suppliers,” the release said.

“We believe that the CCAA restructuring process is the best method to secure our future and will allow the time and stability required to normalize operations following the allegations made against the Company by Muddy Waters, LLC.”

Sino-Forest filed a report by its own independent committee earlier this year into the allegations by Muddy Waters, but fell short of bringing investors any closer to seeing a return on their investment in the company.

The report left several key questions unanswered including the value of its forestry assets and questions about certain relationships between the company and its suppliers.

Independent investigation met ‘numerous challenges’

The company said at the time, though some issues remain, the work of the committee was “at the point of diminishing returns.”

The independent committee’s report said its investigation encountered “numerous challenges in its attempts to implement a robust independent process which would yield reliable results.”

The committee pointed to several challenges including China’s legal regime for forestry, obtaining information from third parties, Sino-Forest’s small management team and cultural and geographic issues.

Though the report confirmed the company’s ownership and rights to its timberland holdings, just how much they are worth was another question.

Sino-Forest faces shareholder lawsuits in Canada and the U.S. alleging a fraud at the company. Sino-Forest has said it “intends to vigorously defend the action.”

“In spite of our efforts so far, Canada is not keeping up with other advanced economies on this crucial front,” Flaherty said.

In a budget that’s more about cuts, there’s almost $1.6 billion in spending on innovation, although there’s debate about how much of that is new money.

The past year has seen more wringing of Canadian hands about innovation than is usual. Foremost among a number of reports that were issued is the government-appointed Expert Panel Report. Tom Jenkins, the chairman and chief strategy officer at OpenText Corp., chaired that panel.

enkins likes what he sees on innovation in the budget, and not just the increased spending. The panel had recommended a substantial shift from indirect funding, usually as tax credits, to a more direct approach through grants to the Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP), easier access to venture capital and government procurement, and to do so in a targeted way.

“This government has done a great job responding to the panel’s recommendations,” Jenkins told CBC News in a post-budget interview.

Flaherty announced a doubling of IRAP’s support to companies and $400 million for venture capital funding. He singled out the Jenkins report for acknowledgement in his speech.

While the impression is out there that Canada is something of a laggard as an innovation nation, that does not capture the whole picture. Canada does not rate badly at innovating but it is not so good on the follow through.

In other words, when it comes to research and development, Canada’s good at research but not at development.

This is illustrated by Canada’s ranking in the Global Innovation Index. In 2011, Canada ranked eighth in innovation inputs and tenth in outputs but only number 54 in innovation efficiency, between Zimbabwe and Bulgaria.

The old acronym, R&D is giving way to a new one, RDC, for research, development and commercialization. Canada’s poor performance at commercialization has long been a concern for Dr. Mehran Anvari.

Anvari is one Canada’s innovation stars, both in research and commercialization of that research. His expertise is in minimal access surgery and telerobotic surgery. He heads the Centre for Surgical Invention and Innovation at McMaster University in Hamilton.

The centre is also into innovation at the grassroots level, sponsoring the Innovation Nation Robotics Competition for students.

Anvari likes what this budget does for innovation on a number of fronts, especially on commercialization assistance, which it does by “supporting research which is either in partnership with industry, led by industry or in collaboration and will have some commercial output.”

Anvari told CBC News that strengthening the industry-academic partnership “allows each to contribute to each other’s goals.” Industry will be able to utilize academic research, and that is innovation, he said.

Flaherty’s budget also sets aside $100 million a year for five years for the Canada Foundation for Innovation. CFI was created by the government in 1997 to invest in higher education research and innovation to support the private sector.

For Anvari, funding CFI is an important part of developing the necessary infrastructure for innovation.

Financing an idea becoming a commercial product

Just before the budget was introduced, Anvari was at meeting to discuss raising funds for a robotic system he and his team are developing in Hamilton. As invariably happens, the talk turned to seeking U.S. venture capital, he said.

Now, with the new budget’s proposed venture capital funding, there will be a Canadian option to finance the difficult step of going from an idea to a commercial product.

Anvari welcomes the government getting into the venture capital business because “with U.S. venture capitalists, eventually they draw the whole company south of the border and that’s the sad part of it, Canada loses control to the U.S.”

For economist David Macdonald, the money in the budget for innovation is not a substantial amount on an annual basis.

Macdonald is with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and has coordinated the Alternative Federal Budget project since 2008.

For Macdonald, the innovation spending in the budget, speaks to a recognition that business has been spending less on R&D, “despite the fact that federal tax rates have been cut in half” and the corporate sector sits on a big ‘cash stash.’

Flaherty and Macdonald may agree that the government’s innovation policy hasn’t been working but Macdonald told CBC News that what they are doing now is “trying a smattering of smaller programs… that put more money in the hands of corporations.” He doesn’t “have a lot of faith that that’s going to change the overall situation, when $10-12 billion a year couldn’t,” referring to the cuts in corporate taxes over the last few years.

Macdonald argues that there is a need for capital investment by businesses but when it comes to innovation, he notes that governments can increase spending without relying on the whims of business.

Anvari supports government targeting certain sectors for innovation funding but had expected there would be something on the environment and clean energy.

In the future, Jenkins would like to see the government doing more on the innovation front through procurement, so we can see government more as a customer “rather than as a hand-outer or subsidizer.”

Business activity in the U.S. held near a 10-month high in March, showing the economy is weathering rising fuel costs.

The Institute for Supply Management-Chicago Inc. said today its barometer fell to 62.2 from 64 in February. Readings greater than 50 signal growth. Economists forecast the gauge would fall to 63, according to the median of 58 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey.

The strongest auto sales since 2008 combined with growing business investment in new equipment may keep propelling demand throughout all manufacturing industries, which account for about 12 percent of the economy. Increasing sales will probably also continue to underpin hiring, extending the biggest payroll gains since 2006.

“Output and hiring should remain robust,” Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors Inc. in Holland, Pennsylvania, said before the report. “Manufacturing has been strong, with order books continuing to fill.”

Economists’ projections in the Bloomberg survey ranged from 59.7 to 67.

Consumer spending in the U.S. rose in February by the most in seven months, a Commerce Department report showed today, signaling the biggest part of the economy is strengthening.

Purchases climbed 0.8 percent, the largest gain since July. The median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News called for a 0.6 percent increase. Incomes advanced less than projected, sending the saving rate to a more than two-year low.

Stocks Advance

Stocks rose, extending the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index’s biggest first-quarter advance since 1998.

The S&P 500 increased 0.3 percent to 1,406.72 at 10:11 a.m. New York time. The benchmark gauge has rallied 12 percent since the beginning of 2012, gaining for a second straight quarter.

The Chicago group’s employment measure slid to 56.3 from 64.2 the prior month. The production gauge increased to 68.6, the highest since last April, from 67.8, and the index of new orders decreased to 63.3 from 69.2.

The measure of prices paid climbed to 70.1 from 65.6, and a gauge of inventories rose to 57.4 from 49.6.

Economists watch the Chicago index and other regional manufacturing reports for an early reading on the national outlook. The Chicago group says its membership includes both manufacturers and service providers with operations in the U.S. and abroad, making the gauge a measure of overall growth.

The ISM’s national factory index probably rose to 53.1 in March from 52.4 the prior month, according to the median projection in a Bloomberg survey ahead of the group’s report April 2. As in the Chicago survey, a reading greater than 50 signals expansion.

Other regional measures have been mixed this month. Data from the Federal Reserve Banks of Philadelphia and New York showed manufacturing expanded at a faster pace in March. Similar gauges from Dallas and Richmond pointed to a slowdown.

Nike Inc. (NKE) (NKE), the world’s largest sporting-goods company, is among companies seeing improving demand.

The Beaverton, Oregon-based company this month reported third-quarter profit that topped analysts’ estimates as sales gained in North America. The maker of Air Jordan basketball shoes has been using new products to lure consumers who are spending more on athletic gear across the industry. The strategy helped boost Nike’s third-quarter sales 17 percent to $2.15 billion in North America, the company’s largest market.

Consumer Confidence

“There is some stability easing back into the broader marketplace as consumer confidence moves higher in some parts of the world,” Nike Chief Executive Officer Mark G. Parker said in a March 22 conference call.

That may explain why factories are hiring. Manufacturing payrolls climbed by 83,000 workers in the first two months of 2012, the best performance over a similar period in a year, according to data from the Labor Department.

Vehicle demand should also drive production at the nation’s auto plants. Cars and light trucks sold at a 15 million annual rate last month, the most since 2008, according to Ward’s Automotive Group.

Growing demand shows that higher fuel costs have yet to damage consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the economy. The price of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline climbed to a 10-month high of $3.93 on March 29, according to AAA, the nation’s largest automobile association.

The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index last week held close to a four-year high, a report yesterday showed.

So Google may enter the tablet fray directly by marketing its own Android challenger to the iPad while also licensing the OS to hardware partners. What makes it likely to succeed, after its Nexus phones online experiment failed?

Reports say Google plans to launch its own 7-inch $200 tablet and sell it to consumers through an online store, alongside other co-branded tablets from Samsung and Asus. It’s a plausible plan. Google’s acquisition of Motorola allows it to not only design but also manufacture its own phones and tablets. But since the Motorola deal isn’t final, Google went elsewhere to build a competitive tablet that could rival not only iPad but also Amazon’s Kindle Fire, according to a report this week from DigiTimes.

In a short few months, Amazon has sold more than 3 million Kindle Fires, placing it as the number two tablet. The 7-inch Fire’s main advantage is pricing: for the price of an iPad, you can buy a couple of Kindles and still have $100 left – though the performance and features of the smaller tablet are no match to the iPad 2, let alone the new iPad — it has no cameras, microphone, only 8GB of built-in storage and an aging dual-core processor.

Google is reportedly also aiming for the $200 sweet spot by building a 7-inch tablet with Asus, set to launch some time in the third quarter. But making the tablet is only half of the job, so Google needs a strategy to get it into as many people’s hands as possible. This, according to a follow-up Wall Street Journal report, will be done via a dedicated online store for tablets from Google.

The Google tablet store will sell not only its own 7-inch $200 tablet, but also other Android slates from partners such as Samsung and Asus. One could speculate the online store will open with the launch of Google’s tablet, which logically would run the next version of Android, Jelly Bean, expected in late summer.

Does this strategy sound familiar? Yes, it’s the Nexus One strategy revisited.In 2010 the Google-branded Nexus One was manufactured by HTC and then scrapped after a few months because the model of selling unsubsidized phones at full price online without being able to test them wasn’t a draw to the Americans accustomed to getting cheap or free phones with a two-year contract.

Apple’s strength in moving tens of millions of iPads is its chain of 360 retail stores, where people can play with the tablet, purchase it outright, and get it serviced. The Android ecosystem lacks such an infrastructure and Henry Blodget opines that if Google is serious about selling Android tablets, it should consider a similar strategy. Also, buying an iPad doesn’t require a two-year data contract, unlike some Android tablets that are tied to such deals in order to push their pricing close to Apple’s tablet.Amazon, however, proves it can sell millions of Kindles with an online store only and a $200 tablet based on Android – although it’s locked out of Google services and app store and substitutes Amazon’s own services. If Google is indeed chasing this strategy, then a $200 7-inch Google-branded Android tablet stands a good chance, but Google may have to cut too many corners in order to be able to price its tablet so low. After all, Amazon is selling the Kindle Fire at a loss, hoping to profit from subsequent digital sales and subscriptions made via the tablet.

Revenue continues to shrink at Research In Motion, and the company reported a loss for the fourth quarter as it struggles to stay relevant before launching a new smartphone platform.

On Thursday, the company reported results for its fiscal fourth quarter ended March 3. It also announced additional personnel changes, including that Jim Balsillie, former co-CEO of the company, has given up his board seat. Balsillie and company founder Jim Lazaridis recently handed over their positions as co-CEOs to Thorsten Heins, who had been chief operating officer.

For RIM’s fourth quarter, revenue dropped 25 percent from the previous year to US$4.2 billion. The company recorded a net loss of $125 million, or $0.24 per diluted share.

Analysts were expecting just slightly better revenue. Those polled by Thomson Financial thought revenue would reach $4.54 billion.

RIM shipped 11.1 million phones in the fourth quarter, 21 percent fewer than in the third quarter. It also shipped 500,000 PlayBook tablets. That’s up from just 150,000 in the third quarter. The company has sold a total of 1.3 million tablets, it said.

In his first earnings call since he took over as CEO, Heins said he has a different view of the company now that he’s spent ten weeks studying it. “The impression I had at day two of being CEO is now pretty different from the facts I know after being CEO for ten weeks,” he said on the call. After he first took over, his comments were largely supportive of the company’s existing strategies, but he has now announced plans to make a number of changes.

One decision he’s made over those ten weeks of studying the company is that he will focus on enterprise customers, he said. “We plan to refocus on the enterprise business and capitalize on our leading position in this segment. RIM was late to the BYOD movement and we saw a significant slowing down in our enterprise subscriber growth rate as a result,” he said. BYOD refers to the “bring your own device” trend, where workers are allowed to choose their own phones to connect to business applications.

At the same time, RIM wants to position its forthcoming BlackBerry 10 platform to appeal to all segments, including consumers. “That doesn’t mean we have to do it alone,” he said. “Whether it means we’ll build hardware or whether we engage in other partnerships is exactly part of the strategic review,” he said. That means the company is considering licensing its software to other hardware makers, if that option makes sense as part of a strategic evaluation of the company that Heins is undertaking.

RIM will keep making high-end devices itself, he said. “I want the RIM device to be a high-end object of desire,” he said.

Heins also expects to pare down some of the company’s services offerings aimed at consumers, although he didn’t specify which. “We’re looking at ways to scale back these activities and refocus on our integrated services offering” that leverages RIM strengths such as the BBM service, its security offerings and management products, he said. BBM is RIM’s popular instant messaging service.

At least until BlackBerry 10 comes out, RIM will continue to focus on entry-level products, particularly outside of North America, where it has already sold more than 40 million of its entry-level Curve phones. It reported that 68 percent of total revenue came from outside of the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

RIM will also introduce some new BlackBerry 7 phones, including entry-level models, and initiate programs to try to boost sales. Those efforts are aimed at trying to sustain sales before the launch of the first BlackBerry 10 phone later this year.

The company continues to only vaguely say that it will deliver the phones based on the new platform in the “latter part of this year.” It has blamed the delay on a decision to use a more advanced chipset that won’t be available until the middle of the year. RIM will offer prototype devices to developers during its annual BlackBerry World event in May to help them build apps that will be available at the launch of the phone. Heins said the company plans to have phones for carriers to review early in the summer, with shipments coming later in the year.

The company has decided to stop offering guidance on future unit shipments, revenue and earnings. It generally warned, however, that it expects continued downward pressure on earnings throughout the year.

RIM also announced additional leadership changes. David Yach, who has been CTO of software for the company for 13 years, is retiring. Jim Rowan, chief operating officer of global operations, who has been with the company for four years, is leaving to pursue other interests. RIM said it is searching for a new COO to run the entire company’s operations.

You want to reduce your carbon footprint and your energy bills, become more self-sufficient in energy, and earn some extra income. The Feed-In Tariffs are a new Government-backed measure to make it worth your while to produce renewable electricity. There are three separate ways that the Tariffs help you make money from generating your own energy:

The Generation Tariff:

You earn a fixed income for every kilowatt hour of electricity you generate and use in your property.

The Export Tariff:

You earn an additional fixed income for every kilowatt hour of electricity you generate and sell back to the grid.

The bit you still buy from your electricity supplier:

When you can’t generate enough electricity for your needs (if the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine) you still buy electricity from your utility company at the normal rates but it’ll be much less electricity than you currently buy.

Renewable heat has its own similar tariff mechanism. You can find more information on our sister site wmzchange.com This scheme is called the Renewable Heat Incentive and covers, among others, solar heating systems. The only solar system covered within the Feed-In Tariffs is solar photovoltaics for the generation of renewable power.

If you want to know more about the Feed-In Tariffs see our Quick Guide or look at the detailed pages listed below.