IPHONE 4S UNVEILED

The iPhone 4S is a touchscreen slate smartphone developed by Apple Inc.. It is the fifth generation of the iPhone, a device that combines a widescreen iPod with touchscreen, mobile phone, and internet communicator.It retains the exterior design of its predecessor, iPhone 4, but is host to a range of improved hardware specifications and software updates compared to the previous model. Integrated software and hardware changes support the introduction of new user interface and functions by Apple. Highlights include a voice recognizing and talking assistant called Siri, personal computer independence, cloud-sourced data (iCloud) and an improved camera system. A selection of the device's functions can be controlled by voice.

The iPhone 4S was unveiled at Apple's Let's Talk iPhone event on October 4, 2011 in Cupertino, California. Apple started taking pre-orders for the iPhone 4S on October 7, 2011 in seven initial countries (United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan) with a first delivery date set for October 14, 2011, and available on that same day for direct store sales in those countries. It will be released in 22 more European, American and Asian countries, including Ireland, Mexico and Singapore on October 28.

official site link:http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/

STEVE JOBS PASSED AWAY.ISAD

Steve Jobs-Apple - The death of Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs offers many lessons in succession planning. Organisations whose market value is tied to the perceived value of the founder need to ensure that they have a proper succession plan in place. Companies in fields like technology, where innovation and creativity are critical success factors, need to ensure that their market value is independent from the founder as his exit can affect market value significantly. Founders whose perceived value affects the market value of their organisations need to be aware of the need to separate their individual value from the company's to ensure organisational survival after their departure.

Official site:http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/

Steve Jobs took some time off the organisation due to ill health. This alone was of great concern to investors, perhaps because they could not trust anyone else to run the organisation.

Their concern was so much that they passed a resolution to force the board to disclose its succession plans.

This shows the dangers of placing too much emphasis on one individual... the CEO takes a deserved break and the investors start to get concerned.

Jobs is dead. However, he put in place a succession plan to ensure that the organisation survives his legacy. Founder members of organisations, who plan to exit at some point, must ensure that they prepare stakeholders well for their departure.

They should strive to separate their own identity from the organisation's to ensure that it survives their departure.

Founders can do this by identifying a successor early enough, say five years to their exit, and let the successor make some important decisions. He or she must also be allowed to interact with stakeholders and must also be introduced to them as the incoming CEO.

Simply put, the founder must be willing to share the spotlight with the successor.

This will give investors in the organisation some confidence that the organisation will still survive despite the founder's departure.People with technical know-how in an organisation should share the skills with others to ensure that they do not disappear after their exit.

According to strategists, Apple Inc will survive despite Jobs' death, "as Apple troops are trained to think like Jobs even when he is not there... many of the innovative ideas come from the ranks and not from Jobs."

This statement highlights the importance of having a training and mentorship programme in place. A founder with the technical know-how should ensure that successors are mentored and trained to think like him.

The legal risks of a potential successor leaving and using the skills acquired elsewhere can be hedged by using lock-in clauses in contracts.

Steve Jobs handpicked his successor, Tim Cooks.

This was part of the succession plan employed by the organisation. Bill Gates, on the other hand, groomed potential CEOs in the 90s and paved way for the successor of the organisation.

FOUNDERS OF FAMOUS COMPANIES

1."Tata Group" was founded by Jamsedji Tata in 1868.
2."Reliance Industries" was founded by Dhirubhai Ambani in 1977.
3."Microsoft" was founded by Bill Gates, Paul Allen in 1975.
4."General Electric" was founded by Thomas Edison, Elihu Thomson and Edwin J. Houston in 1878.
5."American" International Group was founded by Cornelius Vander Starr in 1919.
6."HSBC" was founded by Thomas Sutherland in 1865.
7."ExxonMobil" was founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1870.
8."Royal Dutch/Shell Group" was founded by Marcus Samuel in 1907.
9."JPMorgan" Chase was founded by Henry S. Morgan, Harold Stanley, Bear Chuhta in 1799.
10."UBS AG" was founded by Richard M. Scrushy, Rainer-Marc Frey in 1854.
11."Toyota Motor" was founded by Kiichiro Toyoda in 1937.
12."AT&T" was founded by Alexander Graham Bell in 1983.
13."Wal-Mart Stores" was founded by Sam Walton in 1962.
14."Sony" was founded by Akio Morita, Masaru Ibuka in 1946.
15."Google" was founded by Sergey M. Brin, Lawrence E. Page in 1998.
16."Yahoo" was founded by Jerry Yang, David Filo in 1995.
17."ArcelorMittal" was founded by Lakshmi Mittal in 2006.
18."Ford Motor Company" was founded by Henry Ford in 1903.
19."Amazon" was founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos in 1994.
20."Genentech" was founded by Robert A. Swanson and Dr. Herbert Boyer in 1976.
21."Wegmans Food Markets" was founded by John and Walter Wegman in 1916.
22."Valero Energy" was founded by William R. Klesse (CEO) in 1980.
23."W.L. Gore & Associates" was founded by Wilbert (Bill) Lee Gore and Genevieve (Vieve) Walton Gore in 1958.
24."Container Store" was founded by Garrett, John Mullen in 1978.
25."J.M. Smucker" was founded by Jerome Monroe Smucker in 1897.
26."Recreational Equipment" was founded by Lloyd and Mary Anderson in 1938.
27."Boston Consulting Group" was founded by Bruce Henderson in 1963.
28."Quicken Loans" was founded by Dan Gilbert in 1985.
29."Whole Foods Market" was founded by John Mackey in 1980.
30."Republic Bancorp" was founded by Steven E. Trager (CEO), Bernard M. Trager in 1982.
31."Alston & Bird" was founded by Robert P. Jones in 1893.
32."QuikTrip" was founded by Chester Cadieux and Burt B. Holmes in 1958.
33."American Century Investments" was founded by James E. Stowers in 1958.
34."Qualcomm" was founded by Irwin Jacobs, Andrew Viterbi, Harvey White, Adelia Coffman, Andrew Cohen, Klein Gilhousen, and Franklin Antonio in 1985.
35."David Weekley Homes" was founded by David Weekley in 1976.
36."Cisco Systems" was founded by Len Bosack, Sandy Lerner, Richard Troiano in 1984.
37."Goldman Sachs" was founded by Marcus Goldman in 1869.
38."Network Appliance" was founded by David Hitz, James Lau in 1992.
39."Starbucks" was founded by Zev Siegl, Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker in 1971.
40."SAS Institute" was founded by Anthony Barr, James Goodnight, John Sall and Jane Helwig in 1976.
41."Nugget Markets" was founded by William and Mack Stille in 1926.
42."CDW" was founded by Michael Krasny in 1984.
43."American Fidelity Assurance" was founded by Cameron family in 1960.
44."American Express" was founded by Henry Wells, William Fargo and John Warren Butterfield in 1850.
45."Milliken & Company" was founded by Seth Milliken in 1865.
46."Amgen" was founded by George B. Rathmann in 1980.
47."JM Family Enterprises" was founded by James M. (Jim) Moran in 1968.
48."The Timberland Company" was founded by Nathan Swartz in 1952.
49."Intuit" was founded by Tom Proulx in 1983.
50."SRA International" was founded by Dr. Ernst Volgenau in 1978.
51."Nordstrom" was founded by John W. Nordstrom in 1901.
52."AFLAC" was founded by Bill Amos, John Amos and Paul Amos in 1955.
53."Infosys" was founded by N R Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, N. S. Raghavan, Kris Gopalakrishnan, S. D. Shibulal, K. Dinesh and Ashok Arora in 1981.
54."Mahindra Satyam" was founded by B Ramalinga Raju in 1987.
55."Essar Group" was founded by Shashi Ruia and Ravi Ruia in 1969.
56."Wipro Technologies" was founded by M. H. Premji in 1945.
57."Hewlett-Packard" was founded by Bill Hewlett nad David Packard in 1939.
58."Nokia" was founded by Fredrik Idestam in 1865.
59."Motorola, Inc." was founded by Paul Galvin and Joseph Galvin in 1928.
60."LG Group" was founded by Koo In-Hwoi in 1947.
61."Total S.A." was founded by Ernest Mercier in 1924.
62.”facebook” was founded by mark Elliot zuckerburg in febraury 2004

How do CAPTCHAs test our human identity by making our language unrecognizable?

Wherever we go on the internet, we encounter CAPTCHAs, those twisted words that block or enable entries on websites. Need to post an ad on Craigslist? There’s a CAPTCHA. Want to comment on an article or blog post? There’s a CAPTCHA. So why do we have them? They were invented to block spamming machines from posting wherever they want. In order to keep out spammers, a CAPTCHA has to effectively test if you are human or machine. Computer scientists figured out that one of the easiest ways to do that is to use images of language. In order to deceive spammers, the images of language take randomly generated text and manipulate the image, so that a human can barely read it, but a computer trying to take a picture of it cannot.



Even though we read words on the internet, the internet and computers are not made of words. In fact, computers often have a hard time understanding languages because they do not conform to the hard and fast rules that computer programs demand. That’s why coding languages have to be invented: human languages are too irregular. This is also one of the reasons it is so hard to create an intelligent robot. So, CAPTCHAs take advantage of the uniquely human ability to see letters that have been stretched or manipulated and still be able to decipher which letters they are.

The term CAPTCHA was first used by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in 2000. CAPTCHA is actually an acronym that stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. That’s a pretty straight-forward title, except for the Turing test part. What exactly is a Turing test? Alan Turing was a computer theorist who invented the Turing test which humans use to see if a machine can converse like a human being. A CAPTCHA is actually an inverted Turing test whereby a machine tests to see if you are human or not, but the core principle remains.

You may wonder why CAPTCHAs don’t use images of things other than letters, like a beach or a dog, but images are harder to have an exact answer for. A picture of a beach could generate a wide variety of responses–sea, sand, sunny, ocean, and so on–but a CAPTCHA that uses letters is paired to a particular answer. Letters, unlike images, are able to be deciphered by the human eye and programmed precisely by whoever creates the CAPTCHA.