Obama Promises Internet Upgrade for U.S. Schools

Obama Promises Internet Upgrade for U.S. Schools

MOORESVILLE, N.C. â€" President Obama visited an innovative middle school in central North Carolina on Thursday to demonstrate the Internet-based education programs that he is proposing to make available nationwide.

Speaking to an audience of excited teenagers in a steamy gymnasium, Mr. Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to expand an existing program to provide discounted high-speed Internet service to schools and libraries, even if it meant increasing the fees that for years had been added to consumers’ phone bills. He said the initiative could lead to better technology at 99 percent of schools in five years.

“There’s no reason why we can’t replicate the success you’ve found here,” Mr. Obama said to the students’ cheers. “And for those of you who follow politics in Washington, here’s the best news â€" none of this requires an act of Congress.” To further applause, he added, “We can and we will get started right away.”

Mr. Obama was joined by his education secretary, Arne Duncan, whose department would work with the F.C.C. to revamp the initiative, known as the Schools and Libraries program or E-rate, to provide local schools with Internet speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, among the fastest commercially available. With the federal money that Mr. Obama proposes to redirect for this purpose, schools also could pay for wireless networks throughout their buildings and campuses.

The president singled out Mooresville for its program, which not only upgraded technology but also provided a computer to each student and extra training for teachers. School performance has improved in turn.

Mr. Duncan, speaking to reporters on Air Force One en route to North Carolina, said that he had learned of the innovations in Mooresville, a town near Charlotte, because the local school superintendent was a friend. Mr. Duncan said the school quit purchasing textbooks several years ago to pay for the technology. Mr. Obama, he added, wants to “shine a spotlight on best practices and try to take them to scale.”

To pay for a similar technology expansion throughout the United States, the administration wants to improve the efficiency of the current program, and for telephone customers to pay up to $ 5 a year extra, or about 40 cents monthly, on their bills.

The Schools and Libraries program is part of the Universal Service Fund, an $ 8.7 billion program that distributes money for several purposes. Nearly half the money goes to a program that has long subsidized telephone and Internet service to rural or remote areas. About $ 2.2 billion goes to Schools and Libraries, a similar amount supports phone service to low-income consumers, and $ 200 million pays for telephone and Internet service to health care professionals in rural areas.

As an independent agency, the F.C.C. does not answer directly to the president, but he nominates the agency’s chairman. Any changes to the program’s structure would have to go through a rule-making procedure and be approved by a majority of the commission’s members. Currently there are three members; two seats are vacant.

The program assesses the fees on phone companies, but they typically pass the cost to consumers. The tax is roughly 15 percent on the long-distance portion of phone bills, resulting in a monthly assessment of a few dollars on the average combined home and mobile phone plan.

Schools and libraries that qualify for E-rate support receive discounts of 20 to 90 percent on services and equipment, depending on the household income levels of students and whether the school is in an urban or rural area.

Administration officials say that while the E-rate program, established in 1996, provides low-cost Internet connections to community institutions, the speed of those services is rarely different from those that home subscribers can receive, about 20 megabits per second.

That is fast enough for the average home consumer to stream video, but if dozens of classrooms are trying to view video or listen to digital audio files at the same time, a school’s network will operate much more slowly.

Officials say they also expect private companies to expand their offerings of devices and products like electronic textbooks in response to the expanded program.

Jackie Calmes reported from Mooresville, N.C., and Edward Wyatt from Washington.

Corner Office: The C.E.O. of Houzz on Attracting Investors

Corner Office: The C.E.O. of Houzz on Attracting Investors

This interview with Adi Tatarko, chief executive of Houzz, an architecture and interior design Web site, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. Did you have the entrepreneurship bug early on?

A. Both my grandmother and my mother were entrepreneurs. They kept saying: “It’s all about you. If you want something, you can do it. Just be passionate about something and go all the way." So it was just something that I was part of early on. I saw both of them working very, very hard, but they thrived.

Q. Other influences from your family?

A. Even at school I was frustrated sometimes because it was just so traditional and people couldn’t think out of the box. I questioned things. Instead of my mother telling me, “No, you have to do it exactly the way they say it,” she actually encouraged me to think out of the box. It’s O.K. to question things. She was so supportive on that front.

Q. How did that manifest itself as you started building your company?

A. We wanted to find the right investors who supported our vision, and I didn’t want to go to V.C.'s on Sand Hill Road and start pitching people. I just didn’t want to do it. It’s not me. I love what I’m doing, and if somebody wants to join us as investors, they need to understand it without me making a standard pitch. So we would just have coffee with people in an informal environment and talk about what we are doing. We figured they’ll get it, and if they don’t, then they shouldn’t be our investors. This was the way we did it. It was very informal.

Q. But even if it’s over coffee, you’re still pitching.

A. That’s true, but it wasn’t in the forum that people are used to. It was important for me to say: “Look, I’m not going to try to package it in the way that you are used to. I’m not going to make up numbers for a PowerPoint and show you that the company is going to be worth X and make Y. I don’t have a crystal ball.” Even today, I keep saying to investors that I don’t have a crystal ball and I have no idea what’s going to happen in five years. I know who I am, I know what the company is, I know where we’re going. I have the power to control the day-to-day and what we are doing, but I don’t know what’s going to happen. It goes back to what my mother said when I was in school: “If you have another way to say it, just tell them you have an innovative way to demonstrate it.”

And the investors have been fine with it. I told investors when I met them in the restaurant: “If you think that you’re going to be feeling that this is not right, and we’re not doing it the way you are used to, then just don’t join. It’s going to be very, very different.” And they actually liked it. It is different.

Q. You have 110 employees now. How did you build the culture?

A. My husband, Alon, and I are running this company together, and we said early on that we wanted to be a pretty flat organization. It started from the idea that people can be way more creative when they don’t have middle management.

How many times do engineers feel frustrated because they are very talented and they have to report to a middle manager who isn’t necessarily talented? At some point, the engineer just says, “I don’t want to do it.” Or they feel that if they don’t get promoted to be that manager, then they’re not good enough. And it’s not true. You can be an amazing individual contributor, but not necessarily even like being a manager.

So many times those middle-management positions can just block people from growing individually. So we actually built the company in a way that we don’t have middle managers at all. This also requires hiring people who are very mature and experienced, and who can take everything from coming up with a concept all the way to executing it by themselves, and be very creative, innovative and entrepreneurial.

Q. But people need priorities, too.

A. We set the goals for the entire company. It’s very important that everybody in the company understand where we are going, why we are doing what we are doing, and what other people in the company are doing. We all sit in one big open space together. We have company meetings every few weeks just to make sure everybody’s on the same page. So we talk about these goals, and they own their goals.

It’s all about numbers and how do we get there and how do we achieve everything. They own this, and it works. It’s just amazing. You let people own something, and be entrepreneurs, and they thrive. You see people are moving between tables consulting with each other. And they are getting an immediate response from their work because things move really fast in a small company.

Q. How do you hire? If you were interviewing me, how would that conversation go?

A. I will first walk through your résumé and try to understand why you’ve made certain choices. I’m trying to understand what type of person you are, and the choices you made and the way you made them will tell me a lot about you. So it’s less about the type of jobs you did; it’s more about why. Why this company and not the other company? Why did you move from this one to the other one? So I’ll try to learn about you and who you are. I just in general want to understand what is it that will make you happy. So I will ask you, “What will make you thrive?” But I will also ask, “What will make you unhappy?”

Q. In terms of the culture?

A. Yes. And this is always very interesting, and you learn a lot about people. Sometimes they’re very surprised, because they don’t expect a negative question like, “What makes you unhappy at work?” But you hear great answers.

Q. What’s a great answer for you?

A. I like hearing that people don’t like to be micromanaged. They like to be responsible for something. People don’t like repetition. They don’t like boring things. When someone says, “I want to own something. I want you to trust me,” I love that.

Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Blog More Efficiently on Tumblr

Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Blog More Efficiently on Tumblr

Tumblr, the blogging platform that was recently purchased by Yahoo, has been around since 2007 and hosts more than 111 million blogs. Over the years, the site has made sharing photos and other content from the Web even easier.

For example, you can post a photo, video or a piece of text to your Tumblr blog with an e-mail message by sending the material to a special address. Tumblr has instructions for publishing by e-mail here.

Third-party browser add-ons, like Post To Tumblr for Google Chrome and Tumblr Post for Mozilla Firefox can make it easier to share items found on the Web.

Tumblr has its own bookmarklet for quickly sharing Web content, as well as a collection of other timesaving tips on its site. You can find instructions for tasks like posting audio clips by phone, mass-editing posts and tags, and using keyboard shortcuts for navigation.

Publishers Tell of Disputes With Apple on E-Book Prices

Publishers Tell of Disputes With Apple on E-Book Prices

In an e-mail to her boss, Leslie Moonves, Carolyn K. Reidy, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, dismissed an Apple executive as a “minion.”

David Shanks, the chief executive of Penguin Group USA, fought with Apple over the e-book pricing it initially proposed.

And Ms. Reidy called an executive at Paramount Pictures to verify Apple’s claim that a 30 percent commission on sales in their iTunes store â€" which she considered too high â€" was standard.

These actions were described in testimony this week as evidence that, rather than illegally conspiring to fix e-book prices, Apple and the publishers were locked in intense negotiations during December 2009 and January 2010. Again and again, Apple lawyers sought to portray the actions as normal business proceedings.

Mr. Shanks and Ms. Reidy echoed that theme, saying the negotiations with Apple were much like those with other retailers, a push-and-pull series of talks that forced them to demand concessions and make some of their own.

Mr. Shanks and Ms. Reidy were the first publishers to take the stand in Federal District Court in Manhattan in the civil antitrust trial stemming from the lawsuit filed last year by the Justice Department.

The publishers, which have all settled with the government, are not on trial. But the proceedings have provided a glimpse into the state of the book business during the period several years ago when Apple decided to enter the e-book market to coincide with the introduction of the iPad.

Lawyers for the Justice Department have argued that the publishers not only used Apple as a conduit to communicate with each other, but also had conversations in which they shared information about Apple and its competitor, Amazon, the dominant force in e-books.

They have repeatedly pressed publishing executives this week on the phone calls and e-mails they exchanged, the private dinners they attended and their conversations at industry events, interactions that, according to the government, are evidence that the publishers were engaged in a conspiracy to raise prices on e-books.

When Apple entered the e-book market, it did so under the so-called agency model, in which publishers set prices for e-books and the retailer takes a 30 percent commission. At the time, publishers sold e-books to other retailers under a wholesale model, where publishers charged retailers close to half the cover price for a book, and the retailers set their own prices.

Amazon, which controlled 90 percent of the e-book market, had set the default price of most new and best-selling books at $ 9.99, a price that publishers felt undervalued their books and cannibalized hardcover sales. Eager for another big competitor in the e-book market, all six publishers engaged in talks with Apple.

It was during that time, the government said, that the publishers and Apple illegally colluded, eventually forcing Amazon to adopt the agency model as well.

Lawrence Buterman, a lawyer for the Justice Department, questioned Ms. Reidy on Wednesday about her conversation with Brian Murray, the chief executive of HarperCollins, while Mr. Murray was trying to move Amazon to the agency pricing model.

Mr. Buterman also asked her about a conversation with John Sargent, the chief executive of Macmillan, a fellow publisher, during which the two talked about Amazon.

Ms. Reidy shrugged it off. “I made some crack about the personalities at Amazon,” she said.

Mr. Buterman pointed to phone logs that showed several phone calls between Ms. Reidy and David Young, then the chief executive of Hachette. Ms. Reidy said she did not remember all of the calls.

Ms. Reidy, displaying occasional flashes of impatience and sarcasm during several hours of testimony, repeatedly deflected the government’s suggestion that the most-favored-nation clause imposed the agency model on other retailers. The most-favored clause is a provision in the publishers’ contracts with Apple requiring that no other retailer sell e-books for a lower price.

“As a practical matter, the M.F.N. made Simon & Schuster want to move other retailers to an agency model,” Ms. Reidy said, emphasizing the word “want.” “It didn’t force us.”

Later, under questioning by Daniel Floyd, a lawyer for Apple, Ms. Reidy said she initially resisted the most-favored nation clause, but eventually agreed to include it.

Mr. Shanks, testifying on Tuesday, said he was not able to convince Apple to eliminate price caps of $ 12.99 and $ 14.99 on its e-books.

Ms. Reidy said she also opposed the price caps, but relented and allowed them to be written into the contract.

The antitrust trial, which is expected to take about three weeks, is presided over by Judge Denise L. Cote.

After the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Apple and five publishers last year, the Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins settled immediately; Macmillan and Penguin agreed months later to settle. Penguin and Random House, two of the biggest publishers in the business, are expected to complete a merger in July.

Ms. Reidy provided the most embarrassing moment of the day when an e-mail from her to Mr. Moonves was projected onto a large screen. In the e-mail, Ms. Reidy updated Mr. Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, which owns Simon & Schuster, on her talks with Apple. She referred to an Apple executive as a “minion.”

The executive, Keith Moerer, was seated in the courtroom.

“Sorry, Mr. Moerer,” Judge Cote said, as the onlookers laughed.

“That’s just what I was thinking,” Ms. Reidy said.

Gadgetwise Blog: Monoprice Introduces an LED Monitor

Gadgetwise Blog: Monoprice Introduces an LED Monitor

Monoprice, the Web retailer best known for its low-priced cables, continues to expand its product line with a 27-inch high-resolution LED computer monitor it showed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last January. The price? $ 475, nearly a third less than many models with similar specifications.

Just to give you an example of Monoprice’s value, let’s look at the kind of cable you use to connect your TV to your DVD player. A 6-foot 24AWG High Speed HDMI cable from Monoprice is $ 6. The lowest price I could find on a similar name-brand cable was $ 50.

One caveat is that Monoprice’s quality can be uneven, although the company has a reputation for happily replacing faulty products without a quibble.

Going by the numbers, the monitor looks very good indeed. It claims 2560 x 1440 resolution and .233 by .233 mm dot pitch, which means it has lots of pixels close together for high resolution.

I have to admit I am not well-equipped for evaluating monitors. I would prefer to have seen it side-by-side with a competing model. Instead I connected to a TV source and watched some high-definition shows. The blacks were certainly excellent, detail was very good, and there was little problem with motion â€" although some parallel horizontal lines could get a bit jagged.

Other users have reported “light bleed,” meaning that the lights behind the screen can illuminate unevenly, causing shadows and ill-defined areas. I didn’t see any light bleed, but my room may not be dark enough for it to be apparent.

Of course, you can’t deliver a product at a fraction of a competitor’s price without cutting a few corners. Those most noticeable to me were the inelegant plastic bezel around the screen and the functional but cheesy stand. At the savings offered, I could live with it.

App Smart: Apps Offer Lessons in Simple Drawing

App Smart: Apps Offer Lessons in Simple Drawing

The smartphone revolution, among other things, has put a camera in everyone’s pocket. This has led to an explosion in the art of photography â€" if you can call an Instagram self-portrait art. But smartphones and tablets have another ability that is genuinely arty: they can help teach basic drawing and sketching.

How to Draw is a good app for learning basic skills, and is free for iOS and Android.

Its Step by Step section features the main drawing lessons, each of which is based on copying simple lines that make up a cartoonish drawing of an object like a turtle or a coffee mug. The app shows each line in turn, then you draw on the screen with a finger to copy it. More guide lines appear, until the image is complete.

The app has tools to add color to the image, or it can stay as a pencil-like sketch.

The app is aimed more at children, given the sample images and its Coloring section, which looks a lot like a digital coloring book. It starts with a limited number of sample images; more images require an in-app payment. Access to all of them costs $ 5.99 for the iOS edition.

Complete novices will definitely pick up basic drawing tips. How to Draw, however, is unlikely to turn you into Leonardo.

For more advanced drawing lessons, Learn to Draw Digital Sketchbook, free for iPad, is a great choice. This app is more like being taught to draw by a human teacher. It has a number of sample lessons, including how to draw a hibiscus flower or a dragon, and it talks users through the drawing of a detailed illustration.

Each step takes place on a faux sketchbook with tools like a pencil and eraser shown at the bottom on an icon bar. The app has rough blue guide lines for every step of the lessons. A spoken guide and a text panel offer detailed guidance: for example, “start by using the sketch pencil to block in the blossom with six straight lines.” The text box can be made to disappear, and users can control the opacity of the guide lines.

In relatively few steps this app can teach a person how to create detailed drawings; the work can be saved to the iPad’s photo gallery.

One problem is that its free content is limited. For more complex lessons and to learn advanced techniques, like those needed to draw people, you will have to make multiple in-app purchases. Each new lesson can cost from a dollar or so up to $ 6.99.

If you would like to draw people, you may prefer How To Draw: With Artist Matt Busch. This $ 1.99 iOS app has four portrait tutorials, but unlike the other apps mentioned here, you do not draw on the screen. Instead, this app shows an image that the artist has created for you to follow in a sequence of steps, and you are supposed to draw on paper.

The app displays real drawings, and this realism made the lesson more interesting. Points of interest are highlighted in each sketch with blue pencil icons; tapping on these brings up a text box that contains guidance like, “Note when drawing noses, the less you draw the more aesthetically pleasing it will be.”

I’ve always found it hard to draw people, and yet I am able to produce passably good results thanks to the tips here. It is quite basic, however, and though you’ll learn some good drawing techniques, they are limited to people’s faces.

A great free app for Android devices is How to Draw â€" Art Lessons. With this app, too, you are expected to draw in pencil on paper, guided by a sequence of sample sketches, but its images are simpler. Available topics include Japanese manga characters, sea animals and even band logos. The app goes step by step on guiding the drawings. Each step is shown in color to stand out from the previous stages of the illustration.

This app is free, but the images are fairly simple and the popover advertisements can be annoying.

Quick Calls

Qualcomm, which makes the Snapdragon chips in many Android devices, now has an app to help save battery life on phones and tablets. The app, Snapdragon BatteryGuru, is free and is intelligent, because it learns user habits, and turns off services like Wi-Fi when not in use. ... The music identification app Shazam is now available for Windows Phone 8 devices and integrates with Xbox Music or Nokia Music. It’s free.

DealBook: Dell’s Mathematical Argument Against the Southeastern- Icahn Plan

DealBook: Dell’s Mathematical Argument Against the Southeastern- Icahn Plan

As Dell prepares to defend its $ 24.4 billion sale to its founder, the computer company took a big swipe at two of its biggest investors, who oppose the leveraged buyout.

In a presentation filed with regulators on Wednesday, Dell argued that an alternative plan by Southeastern Asset Management and the billionaire Carl C. Icahn would leave shareholders stuck with the worst of two worlds: trapped in a still-public Dell whose coffers and performance continue to decline.

Southeastern and Mr. Icahn, who together own over 12 percent of Dell, have called for a dividend payout of $ 12 a share, either in cash or in additional stock. That would leave the computer maker publicly traded, but with dramatically fewer shares outstanding, in what financiers commonly call a stub.

In presenting their proposal last month, Southeastern and Mr. Icahn derisively called the $ 13.65-a-share offer from Michael S. Dell and the investment firm Silver Lake “the great giveaway.”

But Dell reiterated in its presentation that a special committee of its board had considered and discarded alternative ideas, including a special dividend. And it contended that the Southeastern-Icahn plan would load too much debt onto Dell while sapping its cash flow and making its stock more thinly traded.

In one page in particular, Dell calculated that the debt required to carry out the alternative plan did not accurately account for debt payments the company must make, as well as cash needed for operations and other requirements. Instead of $ 17.3 billion in cash available to Southeastern and Icahn, the company contended, only $ 13.4 billion would be usable.

That would leave Dell with a potential $ 3.9 billion hole in its balance sheet if the special dividend plan were enacted.

Dell also pointed to the example of Clear Channel, where two private equity firms agreed to leave a stub as part of their leveraged buyout. That stock, which has been harder to trade because of fewer outstanding shares, has fallen 69 percent since August 2008.

In its presentation, Dell argued that the alternative plan presented a “dramatically elevated risk profile and uncertainty for existing Dell shareholders.”

Still, Southeastern and Mr. Icahn are betting that enough shareholders will agree that the take-private bid by Mr. Dell and Silver Lake is too low.

One factor they are counting on is the high support required for the leveraged buyout to pass. Mr. Dell cannot vote his stake of roughly 16 percent in favor of the deal, meaning that a “majority of the minority” of shares outstanding must vote affirmatively for the deal to succeed.