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Posts Tagged 'foam mattress'
How to Choose: Sleeping Equipment for Camping | Sports Related
Posted by: Little White on: May 23, 2013
Once you've bought your tent, your next major consideration will be what equipment to buy to ensure you get the best night's sleep possible. Here's a guide to help you choose.
Sleeping on the Floor?
Whilst some people can adapt to the challenges of sleeping on the floor, sleeping in a regular sleeping bag with only the groundsheet between yourself and the floor does not often lead to a comfortable night's sleep. For some added comfort, you have two main options – a camping mattress or a Sleeping Bed. Both offer their own advantages and are discussed in more detail below. But whilst both provide added comfort, neither will raise your body particularly far off the ground. Therefore if you don't like the sensation of sleeping close to the ground, however comfortable, there is also the option of buying a camp bed. Whilst it will not be suitable for some smaller, lower tents, inside a larger family tent it offers you a solution to this problem.
Camping Mattress
There are several factors to consider in terms of deciding which sleeping mat or camping mattress to choose. The first is perhaps the simplest – do you need a single or a double mattress? A key factor in deciding this is to look at the floor space inside your tent, as this will determine how large a mattress you can actually fit inside. The second factor is whether to go for an inflatable mattress or a foam mattress that remains at a constant thickness. Inflatable mattresses can offer greater levels of comfort, but must be inflated and deflated before and after use. A third option is a self-inflatable mattress such as the Quechua A300 Mattress, which offer a compromise between the convenience of a foam mattress and the comfort of an inflatable mattress.
Another important consideration is the 'folded size' of the mattress. Whilst a mattress might fit inside your tent, but if it is too large for you to actually transport it then it will not be a worthwhile purchase. Studying the folded size (and weight) of the mattress is essential for any backpackers, but even if you will have access to a car during your camping holiday, it is still worth considering as a mattress with a smaller folded size will be easier to store at home following your holiday.
Sleeping Bed
The Sleeping Bed offers an alternative to the traditional pattern of buying a separate sleeping bag and mattress, and come in two main varieties. The first is a sleeping bag with an integrated self-inflatable mattress built-in, such as the 15° Sleeping Bed. This built-in mattress can be detached, meaning that both the mattress or the sleeping bag can be used on their own as well as together, offering a 3-in-1 sleeping solution. The other variety is mattresses with integrated duvets such as the Single Sleeping Bed Camp, providing a more portable option for people who prefer duvets to sleeping bags.
Sleeping Bags
Sleeping bags come in a range of varieties, but there are a number of features to consider when deciding which is the best for you. One of the most essential features is the temperature that your sleeping bag is designed to cope with. For example, the O° Quechua Light Hiking Sleeping Bag is designed to be comfortable at O°. Therefore if you are camping in that sort of temperature, it will be an ideal sleeping bag to ensure your temperature is comfortable throughout the night. Yet if you are camping in warm temperatures, other sleeping bags will be more suitable, such as the 20° Basic Camping Sleeping Bag, which is designed for use when the temperature is 20° and above. Therefore identifying the likely temperatures during your camping trip will help you to choose a sleeping bag that will provide the most comfortable night's sleep. If you will be camping in a wide range of temperatures and don't want to buy multiple sleeping bags, choose a bag that is suitable for the lowest temperature you expect to encounter as it is easier to find ways to lower the temperature in the tent at night than increase it.
Size is again another important consideration. The sleeping bag should be large enough for you to sleep inside of comfortably, so check both the size and the dimensions prior to buying to ensure that this will be the case. As with the camping mattress, the folded size is also important, particularly for backpackers. The smaller the folded size of your sleeping bag, the more space you'll have available for additional equipment and supplies. And finally, if you are going to be using the sleeping bag regularly, it is worth investigating whether it is machine washable or suitable for a tumble drier.
Bed sheets, duvets and blankets
Sleeping bags are not the only option. Your normal duvets or blankets will work too, and depending on the type of mattress you choose a bed sheet is an option too. The advantages of this set up is that it brings the comforts of home with you when you are camping. However, the major problem is that they are not designed specifically for the purpose of camping. Duvets in particular are notoriously difficult to transport, taking up a lot of space and being difficult to reduce down into a smaller size. This clearly rules them out for anyone backpacking, and even if you have access to a car, anything more than one duvet will be too large for most hatchbacks. However, if do have a car available offering the necessary space, it's an option that will give you added comfort.
Additional Equipment
If you have perhaps already got a sleeping bag that maybe isn't completely suitable for what you need to ensure a comfortable night's sleep, other sleeping equipment can help you get the comfort you need. Liners and pillows can help provide additional comfort, whilst if your sleeping bag is not designed for the cold temperatures you are encountering, then a Fleece Blanket is an option for providing additional warmth. More camping equipment, you can click Basic Tent Camping Equipment | Sports Related.
(This entry was posted by Colin)
More summer camping information, you can see:
10 best national park campsites across the USA | Sporting Life.
Selecting the Right Hiking Equipment Before Going on a Outdoor camping Trip | Sports and Exercise.


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As it turns out, the magic number was 5,048, which the Nasdaq hit on March 10, 2000. What's happened since has seemed more like black magic, vivid confirmation of the fact that the stock market plays rough. Technology's power to drive an economic boom has been proven, but so has its ability to provoke speculation, failure, and confusion.
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The Wired Index was founded three years ago to "mirror the arc of the new economy as it emerges from the heart of the late industrial age." Our goal was to reinvent the 105-year-old Dow Jones Industrial Average, using the share prices of public companies to monitor the rise of a technology-enabled, borderless economy. The Index's 40 companies have demonstrated a mastery of five essentials needed to prosper in this environment: innovation, intelligent use of new tools, strategic vision, global reach, and, above all, networked communication.
Amid the recent turbulence, the Wired Index got walloped right along with everyone else. It fell nearly 41 percent in the 12 months to April 2, 2001 – less than the Nasdaq's 58 percent drop, but more than the Standard & Poor 500's 24 percent decline or the Dow's 13 percent fall.
The final revenge of the old economy? Not quite. Over the long term, the Wired Index shows an unmistakable migration of value toward the new. From its launch in April 1998 to April 2, 2001, the Wired Index rose 69 percent. The S&P 500 rose by 3.4 percent during the same period. The Dow gained just over 10 percent, and the Nasdaq fell 3.5 percent.
Indeed, most members of the Wired Index are doing just fine in the real world of quarterly financials, generating numbers that would make any old-guard CEO the envy of his country club. In 2000, Wired Index companies topped 20 percent average revenue growth – four times the rate of the S&P 500, and four times that of the US economy as a whole. And despite the dramatically lowered expectations of 2001, many of these companies are on track to manage similar feats again this year.
Today, from the Fortune 500 to Main Street, information technology rules; the initial phase of the revolution is over, and everybody is better off because of it. The next round of growth will come from using technology to recast the entire range of business tasks and processes, from concept to execution, from accounting to marketing to inventory, at every link in the supply chain.
Making this leap will be essential for businesses to overcome what Harvard Business School's Michael Porter calls the paradox of Internet-enabled competition. The very qualities of the Net that lower barriers to entry – standardization, low cost, and worldwide scope – also make it difficult for businesses to survive in the long term. If everybody can use the Net – as, indeed, everyone can – then how can one company distinguish itself enough to gain an advantage over others?
The answer, Porter contends, lies in reinventing the value chain, defined as "the series of activities required to produce and deliver a product or service that enables a company to offer unique value." Competitive differentiation hinges less on what you do than how you do it. Only by enmeshing suppliers, subcontractors, partners, and customers in a web of real-time communication with internal operations can companies evolve quickly and sustainably.
Shifting ground inevitably throws some companies off balance. Following the Dow's tradition, we try to keep the Wired Index stable, but when one constituent undergoes a fundamental transformation – typically through merger, acquisition, bankruptcy, or insolvency – we take the opportunity to reexamine the list in light of emerging trends. (Note that only General Electric survives from the Dow's original dozen choices.) WorldCom sent us back to the drawing board when it split off its crown-jewel data services as a tracking stock. Lacking a market capitalization, a tracking stock can't figure into an index that weights elements by this metric. Thus, WorldCom had to go. We also decided to send Lucent and Globalstar back to the workaday world.
Lucent entered the Wired Index blessed with Bell Laboratories' unique technology legacy. Unhappily, the other half of its birthright – sclerotic AT&T-style top-down management – has doomed the company in the competitive scramble that Bell's own technology helped spark.
As for Globalstar, it built a best-of-breed global satellite telephone network – a brave new enterprise if there ever was one – but came up short in creating enough value for its customers, real or potential, to offset the massive cost of skyborne communications. As terrestrial wireless networks quickly encircled the globe, Globalstar's dream became so much pie in the sky.
In their place, we've chosen three companies – eBay, WPP Group, and Millennium Pharmaceuticals – that embody three forces we expect to gather momentum in the wake of the current downturn: the integration of value chains, the shaping of perceptions through new media, and the growing productivity of genomic sciences.
Two of Porter's favorite words are integration and uniqueness, both of which will be major themes in the new economy's next phase. Integration is key because an effective network of communication and feedback makes a formidable barrier to would-be competitors. Uniqueness, on the other hand, is the binding force in an environment where it costs nothing for customers to take their business elsewhere.
On both counts, eBay gets high marks. The online auctioneer now mediates transactions among 22 million members – and takes a cut each time – providing the liquidity and infrastructure the company needs to transform its platform into a sales channel for retail vendors of all kinds.
Among online business models, the most disappointing has been the advertising-supported system borrowed from magazines and broadcast. If advertisers haven't gotten their money's worth out of the Web, it's because they've failed to meet the medium on its own terms. Some observers argue that marketing doesn't matter when consumers have so much information at their fingertips. But, in fact, it matters more than ever. In a world awash in innovation, the hard part isn't creating something fresh; the challenge is getting potential customers to recognize its value.
Thus, the field is wide open to companies that understand the Net's distinctive potential to communicate, differentiate, and build trust. New applications like P2P file-sharing setups, webloggers, and the coming avalanche of wireless services create a wealth of opportunities while adding urgency to the demands of cross-media marketing. Reinventing advertising for the Net is a task that intersects with lightning rod issues involving identity, privacy, and the role of commerce in civilized life. Which is why a diverse international operation like WPP Group can pull it off.
Yesterday's great technological revolution empowers eBay and WPP. Meanwhile, tomorrow's – biotech – has yet to hit its stride. The celebrated first draft of the human genome, published in June 2000, provides a broad, stable intellectual base on which to build broader, stabler biotech companies. During the past year, biotech has begun to evolve from an essentially handcrafted discipline into an industrial pursuit. Mass experimentation will lead, before long, to massive value creation.
Millennium Pharmaceuticals is a front-runner in this trend, the first to attempt to build a fast-track drug discovery and development platform based on bioinformatics. This burgeoning field is the leading edge of information technology's ability to turn a hidebound industry upside down. Increasing the Wired Index's biotech weighting is a prudent effort to keep up.
Change feeds on itself. As companies transform themselves in response to new competitive forces – faster decisionmaking, flatter business models, globalization – they in turn transform their environment.
Whatever else recent events have shown, they have demonstrated how entrepreneurs can alter the world with a good idea. Those who launch nascent ventures may not always succeed, and they may not always achieve the riches they dream of. But they do have a lasting impact. Stock market downturns suck productive energy back into the bottle, but they also redirect it to potentially greener fields. One novel idea at a time, the economy and the world around it change – now faster than ever.
Though the dotcom fever has broken, the innovations carry on. As James Morgan, CEO of Index stalwart Applied Materials, wrote in his 2000 report, "The great shakeout in the dotcom world will likely be remembered as the true start of the new economy." Here we go.
|Index Performance
|April 3, 2000 – April 2, 2001
|Index Performance
|April 1, 1998 – April 2, 2001
About The Wired Index
The Wired Index averages share price changes for 40 companies. Like the S&P 500 and most modern stock averages, but unlike the Dow, the Wired Index is weighted by market cap. That is, a change in the price of a large company moves the average proportionally more than an equal change in the value of a small one. To prevent the largest members from overdetermining the Index's value, weighting is governed by a $40 billion market cap ceiling.
The Index's value is calculated daily by HSBC's Quantitative Techniques Division. The Wired Index Fund (IWIRX), a mutual fund based on the Wired Index, is independently owned and operated by Investec, and maintains assets separately for US and non-US investors. On April 2, 2001, the Fund had a total asset value of $354 million.
With a rough draft of the human genome in hand, drug companies are getting down to the dirty work of sifting through some 140,000 genes to find those associated with disease. Affymetrix's DNA microarrays – glass chips that sprout tendrils of DNA like blades of grass – make the job go faster.By washing a gene chip in a nucleotide solution and seeing what sticks to what, scientists can find the sequences they're looking for.
But just as Affymetrix's sales are beginning to take off, outsiders are muscling in – and they're not a bunch of weakling startups. Agilent, 3M, Corning, and Motorola are gunning for Affy's 80 percent share of the $350 million gene-chip market, which is expected to reach $1 billion by 2005.
The discovery in March of errors in chips representing mouse tissues gave competitors an opportunity to crow, but it affected only 6 percent of Affymetrix's production run. Meanwhile, the company's next-generation arrays hold 50 percent more DNA than its current products, and 17 new chips are scheduled for release this year. Though Affymetrix has first-mover advantage and a 100-patent grip on the technology, competition will be fierce. Innovation is the only option.
Having grown in the past eight decades from a Shanghai storefront into a gargantuan combine of insurance agencies operating in 130 countries, AIG spent last year designing policies that mitigate new risks arising from the global network infrastructure. Emblematic venture: Avantrust, a partnership with Dun & Bradstreet aiming to make the Net safe for B2B transactions through an ecommerce platform that insures everything from customer credit to delivery of goods.
The Net also plays a pivotal role in AIG's efforts to reel in retail customers. After launching a suite of Web sites in early 2000, the company joined with Prudential and Kemper this year to found a Net-only insurance agency, Fusura. Meanwhile, links at E*Trade and Priceline are funneling investors and travelers directly to AIG.
E-insurance may well boost AIG's earnings growth beyond this year's 11.5 percent (which already gives the company a P/E nearly twice that of competitors like Chubb and St. Paul Companies). But AIG isn't neglecting its traditional role as the global village's insurance agency; it recently penetrated the life insurance markets in Vietnam and India, and it's also providing a hedge against political and investment risk in Latin America. In a world teetering between prosperity and disaster, AIG stands to profit either way.
AOL's all-stock purchase of Time Warner has got to be one of the best business decisions in recent history. Trading growth for cash flow may not have seemed to make sense 18 months ago, but in hindsight, who can argue?
Already, the combined entity is more than the sum of its parts. Promotions on AOL yielded 500,000 new subscriptions to Time Inc. magazines last year. And the number of advertisers that placed media in three of AOLTW's top venues (AOL, Time Inc., and Turner Broadcasting) doubled in the initial months of 2001. Q1 earnings beat expectations; to keep the ball rolling through the Q2 slowdown, the company slashed 2,400 jobs and made plans to cut 3,800 more.
Huge numbers give AOLTW the gravity to pull in partners throughout the technoverse: Gateway will help it produce Internet appliances, Toshiba is negotiating to distribute its content to mobile phones, and Nortel will develop and market its enterprise voice services. Given increasingly stiff competition in Europe and the paltry results of deals with Bertelsmann AG (AOL Germany) and Vivendi Universal (AOL Italy), the media giant is focusing on Asia. NTTDoCoMo will help build AOL Japan, and various Indian partners are lined up to receive a $100 million investment next year.
The über-merger may take years to sort itself out. But it's hard not to be optimistic when $11 billion in revenue is being funneled into a broadband pipeline that already reaches 13 million cable TV subscribers – not to mention 165 million chatterboxes using ICQ and instant messaging. AOL everywhere? Sooner or later.
The premier maker of the chip fab machines that keep Moore's law in force, Applied Materials has managed to navigate the swells and troughs of the silicon industry with a steady tack toward a future of ubiquitous computing. But the semiconductor downturn that began last winter was as unexpected as it was swift: RAM prices sank, PC sales slumped, and the wireless boom fizzled.
In the aftermath, computer vendors who can't sell faster boxes aren't likely to push chipmakers to upgrade from .18- to .13-micron line widths. And until service providers untangle the mobile Web, chip suppliers have little incentive to outfit their plants for more power-efficient copper lines. Applied Materials was able to almost double its revenue in 2000 because its customers budgeted their capital expenses before the Nasdaq crash, but it reduced earnings estimates twice during the first two months of 2001.
Applied Materials' latest mainsail: equipment that accommodates 300-mm wafers. The new larger size enables manufacturers to produce more chips per wafer, cutting fabrication costs by as much as 30 percent – an attractive prospect to customers like Intel, the only major chipmaker planning to increase capital expenditures in 2001. And then there's the ballast of Applied Materials' $4.2 billion war chest. "In a downturn," observes Lehman Brothers analyst Dan Niles, "the companies with the most cash win."
Although it throws a wrench into the Wired Index, Aventis' decision to sell its CropScience and Animal Nutrition divisions – the very parts of the company that prompted us to add Aventis last year – makes sense. Sloughing off these biotech units will let Aventis concentrate on its thriving business in prescription drugs and vaccines. More to the point, the move will shift whatever liability CropScience accrues as a result of last year's StarLink debacle – in which genetically modified feed corn found its way into the human food supply – off Aventis' books.
StarLink aside, Aventis had a fine 2000. CEO Jürgen Dormann managed to wring $355 million in cost savings from the 1999 merger between Hoechst and Rhône-Poulenc that created the company, while sales of allergy drug Allegra grew nearly 59 percent, contributing to 54 percent revenue growth. This year, Aventis expects merger-related synergies to save another $417 million. And it will introduce two promising drugs: Ketek, the first in a new class of antibiotic, and Lantus, a long-acting insulin.
Meanwhile, the nascent GM food industry seems to get thrown out of any house that invites it in. Monsanto, the frankenpharmer previously part of the Index, was acquired by Pharmacia, which spun it right back out again. Similarly, Novartis and AstraZeneca combined and then jettisoned their ag divisions to form Syngenta. Once Aventis is out of the game, we'll be looking for a pure play to take its place. Using genomics to feed the world may prove an idea too powerful to ignore.
The tough thing about being a pioneer is keeping up with the frontier. BroadVision was first with a set of back-end ecommerce tools intended to work right out of the box, helping fast-growing companies move even faster. But the company itself was slow to follow up with a Java implementation of its One-to-One Enterprise suite.
Last year, it paid the price. American Airlines, an account reportedly worth $1.5 million, abandoned One-to-One in favor of the Java-based Dynamo Commerce Suite from Art Technology Group. At the same time, costs spiraled as nonstop hiring and lavish marketing drove operating expenses up 42 percent in Q4. Worried investors responded by wiping out more than 80 percent of the company's market cap during fiscal 2000.
One-to-One 5.5, released in June 2000, was criticized as the same old code with a Java veneer, but BroadVision should recover. The fully Java-compliant version 6.0 came out in March, and the boxed-software approach is still attractive to ecommerce operations that don't have a team of programmers to spare. If CEO Pehong Chen can rein in spending and refocus the product development strategy, BroadVision can continue to define relationships between vendors and customers on the Web.
When the stock market plummets, trading volume shrinks and broker commissions evaporate like raindrops on hot pavement. Such fees account for nearly 40 percent of Charles Schwab's revenue. After trades dropped 13 percent between January and February – down 31 percent from the same period last year – Schwab shed roughly 3,000 jobs. Now the master of reinvention – having pioneered discount brokering and then retooled for the Web – is doing it again. The new position: money manager to the masses.
Schwab is betting that recurring fees charged for looking after private holdings will preserve its 10-year average of 24 percent annual revenue growth. It already offers advisory services to wealthy customers as well as online tools like Sell Analyzer, which figures out which securities to unload at tax time. With the acquisition of US Trust and its upscale retail banking clientele, revenue from asset management grew to 51 percent in 2000.
There's only one problem: having assets to manage. The Nasdaq's plunge melted Schwab's customer asset base from nearly $1 trillion last September to $845 billion in February 2001. In the current climate, though, diversification in any form is worthwhile. And in any climate, 7.6 million active investor accounts – Schwab's current roster – is something to bank on.
One strike and you're out. Cisco, The top dog in networking equipment, was blindsided by the precipitous tech-spending slowdown of late 2000 and missed its numbers for the first time in 11 years. Despite revenue growth of 55 percent in Q2 of fiscal 2001, earnings were 1 cent per share less than analysts had expected. Briefly the world's most valuable company, Cisco now also holds the distinction of having lost more market cap than any firm in UShistory – more than $450 billion between March 2000 and March 2001.
Among Wall Street's chief worries is the fact that no one has ever kept a $200 billion business growing at Cisco's target of 30 to 50 percent annually. As Merrill Lynch analyst Steven Milunovich notes, once a company hits about $30 billion in annual sales – a level Cisco will reach next year, slowdown notwithstanding – it tends to lose steam. Booming divisions get dragged down by sluggish ones; sprawling supplier networks become less and less efficient.
Bringing such massive, fragmented organizations to heel is among the fondest hopes of ebusiness. True, Cisco is already one of the most wired companies on earth, but the Net-driven push toward enterprise integration and supply-chain management is only just hitting full swing. If the power of the network can smash the $30 billion barrier, Cisco will be the first to know.
The company formerly known as DaimlerBenz was cruising in the fast lane when it acquired 34 percent of Mitsubishi in October 2000. Chair Jürgen Schrempp's strategy – to establish pit stops in Europe, the US, and Asia as a hedge against a downturn in any one region – looked like a direct route to global automotive paradise.
Not so fast. Chrysler's management had already walked out en masse when Schrempp refused to share the wheel. On its own – and suddenly squeezed by a global car glut, softened US demand, and engine trouble in Japan – the Stuttgart brassproved far less adept at cutting costs. Now, despite a banner year for the Benz division, the company finds itself weighed down by $4 billion in Chrysler plant closings and severance packages, not to mention Kirk Kirkorian's $9 billion shareholder lawsuit. What's more, the auto giant's market cap tumbled 38 percent between January 1, 2000, and March 20, 2001.
Dismal stuff. But Schrempp's technology strategy might pay off handsomely in the long run. By 2004, the company expects to begin boosting economies of scale by sharing parts across divisions – for example, putting Mercedes transmissions in Chryslers. At the same time, Covisint, the online components exchange partially owned by DaimlerChrysler's DCX Net, will have accrued a critical mass of suppliers. But before it can start saving money for DaimlerChrysler, Covisint will have to get around roadblocks like restrictive union contracts and vendors wary of sharing a network with competitors.
Perhaps there's a lesson in all this for Schrempp: You can load up on technology that helps people work together, but it helps if you're willing to cooperate yourself.
Imagine the ideal dotcom: Practically infinite scale. Self-perpetuating growth. Viral customer acquisition. No warehouses, no inventory, no limits. Put it all together and you get eBay, flea market to the world, which now boasts 22 million members trading $5 billion worth of goods annually.
While Amazon.com and Yahoo! are finding that it doesn't pay to arrive late at an auction, the first mover is expanding at a breathtaking pace. Based on gross sales, eBay is the top online marketplace in Australia, Canada, Germany, Korea, the UK, and the US. In February, it acquired iBazar, a French auction with 2.4 million European users.
By publishing its programming interface in February, eBay made it simpler for outfits like MotorcycleWorld.com and AuctionWorks to manage auctions on behalf of clients like Sun Microsystems and ritzcamera.com.The payoffs:deeper inventory, more transactions, higher price points, and powerful vendors with a stake in eBay's success.
Even so, CEO Meg Whitman's goals are ambitious. Her intention to pull in $3 billion annually by 2005 demands average revenue growth of 50 percent a year. Meanwhile, the company's share price hovered at 198 times earnings in April. That gives eBay a lot of cash to play with – and a long way to fall.
As high tech businesses wither all around him, EMC executive chair Mike Ruettgers still talks about growth. Last year, the leading vendor of data-storage systems focused on the burgeoning market for networked disk arrays, an essential purchase for companies that need to keep distributed operations in sync. And thanks to long-term customer relationships – plus a dash of prescience – EMC gets less than 12 percent of its revenue from dotcom clients.
Although tech-spooked investors bid down the stock a chilling 70 percent between September 2000 and March 2001, EMC's prospects look as bright as they did throughout the '90s, when it was the NYSE's best-performing ticker symbol. Nearly half its fiscal 2000 revenue came from new products, and the company plans to spend $1 billion on R&D in 2001, much of it directed toward software that makes its hardware work even better. An emphasis on software – with its tantalizing margins – has kept EMC one step ahead of competition from Sun, Compaq, IBM, and HP.
In a recent report partially funded by EMC, UC Berkeley economist Hal Varian calculated that the world would create more data in the next three years than it has in the past 300,000. Count on EMC to make sure there's a place to put it all.
Politicians may blame California's energy woes on the national spot market for electricity, but that hasn't stopped Enron – the company that practically created it – from replicating the model in other industries. Through EnronOnline, a Web-based exchange that racked up $336 billion in transactions last year, the ultimate commodities market maker has established beachheads in steel, paper, and data storage, while pumping up the volume in its natural gas, electricity, and bandwidth trade.
The latter three, especially, are seeing breakneck growth. Contracts for bandwidth on Enron's proprietary fiber network have multiplied from 1 in 1999 to 320 last year, and the fourth quarter saw more deals than the previous three. "I expect the bandwidth market to grow five- to sevenfold this year," says Salomon Smith Barney analyst Ray Niles. "But that's a drop in the bucket compared with what's ahead."
Still, with legislatures in the western US calling for price controls, and fears of an energy crunch growing back east, it's little wonder that Enron was trading at 52-week lows in April – despite 151 percent revenue growth last year. "If California retreats from market-based energy pricing, it will be a big problem for us," admits Enron president and CEO Jeff Skilling. But as long as the company can find the next high-growth commodities market, Enron will keep wheeling and dealing.
Fedex.com's menu of 26 languages is more than a multicultural nicety. When the site added Chinese in June 2000, package-tracking queries from Taipei rocketed 710 percent in six months. In 2000, FedEx supplanted DHL as the number one air freighter in seven Asian markets.
FedEx's IT investment is boosting margins, too. Each customer call to 1-800-GOFEDEX costs the company $1.52; tracking a shipment via fedex.com costs just 10 cents. At the same time, the newly formed eLogistics Group is working on Net-based ordering, procurement, and delivery systems to help startups enter the global arena.
The company's sweeping ambition hasn't gone unnoticed. Deutsche Post – the formerly government-run German postal service that went public in November, has revenue rivaling UPS's, and owns 50 percent of DHL – can and will block FedEx's access to European air routes. And if the US relaxes restrictions on foreign airline ownership, Deutsche Post could start swallowing US-based FedEx rivals like Airborne. Global opportunity, meet global competition.
According to Charlie Fote, First Data's boisterous president and COO, "Cash and checks are going down" – as in down for the count. Although 70 percent of all US payments are accomplished using cash or checks, Salomon Smith Barney expects this figure to sink to below 40 percent by 2010. Who picks up the slack? First Data. The company processed $425 billion in electronic payments last year (including $20.7 billion in Internet transactions), leading to a steadily rising share price.
First Data's main business is authorizing and posting retail credit card transactions. However, the company's check-verification subsidiary TeleCheck handled more than 3 billion payments last year. What's more, Western Union, acquired in 1996, handles cash payments in 185 countries and territories, potentially extending ecommerce to regions where Visa isn't a household name.
To leverage this multifaceted network into dominance in epayments, last fall First Data formed eOne Global, a joint R&D venture with Goldman Sachs, Boston Consulting Group, and the VCs at General Atlantic Partners. eOne's first project is CashTax, a tax-payment platform that already processes 40 million payments a year for corporate customers – an indication of the enormous businesses eOne intends to develop.
If anything stands between First Data and epayment hegemony, it may be off-the-grid systems like PayPal. First Data is responding with a right jab (MoneyZap, aimed squarely at PayPal's market but with international reach) and a left hook (strong relationships with major banks). Dominant in an area that's destined for steady growth, First Data has a friend in the trend.
Flextronics' ultra-horizontal strategy is a classic new economy play: Provide a razor-thin slice of the value chain on a global basis. Nominally based in Singapore – operational HQ is in Silicon Valley, where the customers are – the company serves as the assembly-line-for-hire to the top names in electronics. Sales nearly doubled in 2000, making Flextronics number two among competitors, just behind Solectron.
Last year got off to a strong start when the company won the contract to manufacture Microsoft's Xbox. Other lucrative deals followed, including a five-year, $30 billion alliance with Motorola and an agreement to manufacture Ericsson handsets, which could be worth $5 billion annually, according to ING Barings analyst Patrick Parr.
Of course, concentrated expertise also means concentrated risk, and depressed demand for consumer electronics could hit the company hard. In mid-March, Ericsson, citing a first-quarter loss, canceled a meeting with plant managers to discuss handing the reins to Flextronics.
Then again, a slowdown gives second-tier electronics companies an opportunity to grab market share. Playing both sides of the game – enabling market leaders to meet growing demand in good times, helping their competitors ramp up when the economy sours – puts Flextronics in a good position to roll with the punches.
Last year's merger of Glaxo Wellcome with SmithKline Beecham made GlaxoSmithKline the world's second-largest drugmaker, with a bottom-heavy balance sheet and projected growth of 13 percent this year. It also put some marketing-and-distribution punch behind SmithKline's R&D treasures.
But the company's new position brings challenges as well. As the top producer of AIDS medications, GlaxoSmithKline landed smack in the middle of a showdown with forces seeking to provide affordable AIDSdrugs to developing countries. Rival Bristol-Myers Squibb, spurred by an Indian drugmaker that threatened to copy brand-name preparations and sell them cheaply, decided to waive its patent rights. GlaxoSmithKline refused to follow suit, instead offering a 90 percent discount.
Meanwhile, the giant is struggling to get new drugs to market fast enough to stay ahead of big-pharma brethren and pesky biotechs. R&D director Tachi Yamada lit a fire under the company's 16,000 scientists with a $3.8 billion R&D budget for 2001 and a plan to restructure the organization to look like a cluster of startups. Employees will receive options and even royalties on sales of medicines they help invent.
Whatever it takes – org charts, stock options, acquisitions – GlaxoSmithKline's imperative is clear: to turn years of investment in cutting-edge biology into market-leading drugs.
Bad news for the economy is good news if your business is helping companies become more efficient. i2's TradeMatrix 5.0 is a network of vertically integrated business hubs that put back-end activities like inventory management together with online access to everything from raw materials to legal services, all running on top of a bulletproof transaction engine.
Building on its foothold in the high tech, automotive, and apparel industries, i2 took on telecom, energy, foods, textiles, and logistics with spectacular results last year. And having digested its $9.3 billion acquisition of Aspect Development last March, i2 returned to profitability in early 2001. Still, serving as a central nervous system for high-profile businesses can be risky, as the company learned in February when Nike made TradeMatrix a public scapegoat for the shoemaker's missed quarterly earnings target. Supplier and client buried the hatchet, but not before it had lopped off 22 percent of i2's share price. Six weeks later, i2 missed its own earnings estimate.
Still, i2 must be doing something right. In the past year, the company has lured Applied Materials and AT&T Wireless away from Oracle, and stolen UMC and Whirlpool from SAP. If it can make all its clients more profitable, it just might impact the GDP. Recession? What recession?
The human genome may be public domain now, but it's useless without information about the properties of the genes themselves. Incyte develops and licenses this perspective in the form of databases like LifeSeq Gold that help drugmakers get products to market faster.
Incyte moved onto the Web last year, making its databases more accessible, cost-effective, and up-to-date. That helped crack the previously untapped – and potentially huge – Japanese market; Sumitomo Pharmaceuticals was among the first to sign up via Incyte.com.
Meanwhile, the company is adding value any way it can. Its trade in ancillary tools such as cloned genes grew 50 percent last year. What's more, Incyte will collect royalties on any product developed using its data. The first Incyte-enabled drugs are scheduled for clinical later trials this year.
The upside is huge, but the R&D isn't cheap. So Incyte's most important move in 2000 was financial rather than scientific: It raised $620 million, partly by selling shares that Wall Street snapped up for more than $100 each. With money in the bank and an expanding client base, Incyte has a line on serious revenue growth. Profits? Patience.
Year after year, Intel faces the same question: How much longer can it rule the market for PC processors? With 80 percent market share and $33.7 billion in revenue in 2000, the chipmaker continues to beat rivals from AMD to Transmeta.
But competitive muscle doesn't address bigger issues about the PC's future. Slumping sales at Dell and Compaq, Intel's largest customers, suggest that people are shaking off the need for perpetual upgrades. Meanwhile, Intel's longstanding strategy of pumping money into anything that might boost demand for fast CPUs has led it into increasingly unfamiliar territory, like MP3 players and toys.
"When times grow tough, it's critically important to develop the next era's technologies," says Sean Maloney, Intel's executive VP of networking and communications. Accordingly, the company will pour $4.2 billion into R&D and fab equipment this year, betting that the demand for high-performance chips – not only the Pentium 4 but the StrongARM for handhelds and Itanium for workstations and servers – will boom when the new facilities are finally operational.
Intel is one of the few Net economy companies that must live by a five-year plan (the time it takes to build today's monster chip fabs). What it needs to do now is considerably harder: reinvent itself again.
The armsmaker metaphor often used to describe JDS Uniphase has never been more apt than it is now. While network dealers like Cisco, Juniper, Lucent, and Nortel battle to dominate a market that encompasses everything from telcos to mid-level corporations, JDS has assembled an unsurpassed catalog of key optical components that keep bandwidth rising.
JDS Uniphase may be "the Intel of the telecosm," as futurist George Gilder puts it, but the firm also shows a Cisco-like talent for stock-fueled acquisitions. In seven gulps last year – capped by the $41 billion purchase of arch rival SDL – JDS swallowed up nearly all its remaining competitors, fueling remarkable top-line growth. Net sales in the second half of 2000 outstripped those of the same period in 1999 by 468 percent.
The flip side: Comparing the final half of 2000 with the same period in 1999, JDS racked up a 263 percent loss. And, like other tech companies, it's predicting slower growth during 2001. Wall Street has pummeled the share price, knocking it from its high of $146 down to $21 in late March.
Make no mistake: Demand for network bandwidth is booming. If JDS Uniphase can use the breadth of its holdings to anticipate its customers' technology needs, it will profit from anyone's battle plan.
Don't be fooled by the brick-and-mortar trappings; Marriott International runs an information-age lodging operation. It doesn't own the hotels under its aegis. Rather, it rents franchises and sells management services, retaining full control over the bare essentials: branding and service.
This strategy has brought eight years of earnings growth. Profit rose by 19.8 percent last year as Marriott boosted its room tally to 390,000, with new locations in Africa, North and South America, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Middle East. The slowing US economy has forced competitors like Hilton and Starwood to scale back, but Marriott plans to add 175,000 more rooms by 2003.
Information technology should absorb some of the expense. Avendra, a new Web-based procurement center that pools Marriott's purchasing power with that of Bass, ClubCorp, Hyatt, and Fairmont, is expected to save millions of dollars within a few years. The Web is already shrinking costs in other ways. Bookings on Marriott.com, which grew 200 percent last year, cost the company half as much as reservations made by phone. It will take savings like that – and more – to offset what many observers expect to be a difficult year for the hospitality industry.
Battered by legal and market forces, Microsoft faces three big ifs. If the .Net software-as-service initiative pays off, Redmond will escape the desktop ball and chain. If the Xbox wins the hearts of gamers, the House of Gates will crack a lucrative new market. And if the US Court of Appeals sees things Microsoft's way, the company won't have to reformulate its strategy.
.Net is an XML-enabled architecture for apps that reside on central servers. The revenue model is still uncertain, and Sun is pursuing the same goal using Java. But without .Net, Microsoft remains dependent on Windows and Office, which account for 70 percent of sales, even as the PC market withers.
The Xbox, scheduled for release later this year, leverages game developers' familiarity with Microsoft's DirectX programming interface to attack the $7 billion-a-year trade in consoles and games. It's a big bet: Each unit will cost Microsoft $75 to $150, according to Salomon Smith Barney analyst Richard Gardner, which Microsoft hopes to offset with royalties on game sales.
Meanwhile, with Court of Appeals judges accusing their colleague Thomas Penfield Jackson of using "sleight of hand" to prosecute his case, the Big Split is looking less likely.
Tomorrow's precision-targeted drugs will make today's preparations look like sledgehammers. In the transition from brewing compounds aimed at symptoms to crafting molecules that pinpoint underlying causes, Millennium is a pioneer.
Millennium's R&D method automates the pharmaceutical industry's usual handcrafted approach. Where most pharmas tinker with one technology, such as genomics or proteomics, Millennium's pipeline connects virtually all current approaches to evaluating new drugs. This integrated process enables the company to discover promising medicines in 18 months, rather than the usual 24 to 36.
The prospect of saving big pharma big money has already yielded roughly $2 billion in agreements with a who's who of top drugmakers. Even more impressive is the cooperative nature of some of these deals. Bayer Pharma, for instance, pays Millennium $70 million a year to deliver promising leads, but lets Millennium market those it rejects. Millennium now has six of its own drugs in clinical trials, and the cancer drug Campath should reach the market by summer.
MLNM has been caught in the tech-stock downdraft since last November, which raises a potentially lucrative question: How much would you pay for a piece of Ford just as Henry is switching on the assembly line?
Media kingpin Rupert Murdoch dragged his feet getting into the Web game, but he would have been better off staying out altogether. Bad investments in companies like Juno, WebMD, and sixdegrees.com cost News Corp. $293 million in Q2 of fiscal 2001. Damage to the bottom line would have been greater if not for the Filmed Entertainment group, whose operating profit quadrupled thanks to sales of the X-Men video. Such are the advantages of a global empire with print, broadcast, cable, and film divisions.
Net bets aside, Murdoch's dream – satellite-based interactive digital television – may yet revolutionize the mediasphere. Cable is still the favorite; Forrester Research analysts predict that satellite penetration will top out at 20 percent in the US. But where cable infrastructure doesn't yet exist – most of the world – satellite is the only option. Market researcher Cahners In-Stat Group predicts that by 2005, digital-satellite subscribers will number 95 million worldwide, while digital-cable customers will come to 48 million.
Murdoch still has his eye on Hughes Electronics' 10 million-subscriber DirecTV, which would give him the broadest line of sight in the US and extend his analog-transmission reach to 95 million viewers worldwide. Considering AOL Time Warner's 13 million cable customers and feeble international presence, it looks like News Corp.'s dreamer is wide awake.
Nokia's sleek handsets helped transform mobile communications from luxury to necessity. But even 34 percent market share and 19 percent operating margin – more than twice that of any competitor – aren't enough to guarantee dominance as providers prepare to roll out high-speed third-generation wireless services.
Nokia Networks, Nokia's infrastructure division, has a huge investment in the GSM standard. But 3G is an extension of the competing CDMA spec. "With the world shifting to W-CDMA," says Brian Modoff of Deutsche Banc Alex Brown, "Nokia will have to do a lot better than the single CDMA phone it's selling at the moment."
Amid furious hardware development, the company is also working on middleware between OS and UI that will turn phones into full-fledged interactive appliances. This is a new business for the Finnish manufacturer, but Nokia is legendary for quicksilver development that gets new products to market while sales are still brisk and prices still high. If it can translate this skill from hardware to software, Nokia will continue to define the borders of the wireless world.
In a troubled industry like steel, leading-edge technology and progressive management can get you only so far. Last year, the keen efficiencies of Nucor's revolutionary minimills didn't make up for the falling price of flat-rolled steel, which sank an average of 12.5 percent. With competitors ramping up production in Brazil, East Asia, and Eastern Europe, capacity will outstrip demand for some time to come.
Still, president and CEO Dan DiMicco sees opportunity. Because the company melts down scrap for much of its raw material, its production costs shrink along with steel prices. And given that Nucor was one of only two US steel producers to turn a profit in Q4 2000, its shares remain at a relative premium. DiMicco intends to use that currency to buy smaller steel companies, then fire them up with Nucor's innovations.
After a costly failure to patent its thin-slab rolling process in 1999, Nucor is getting smarter about its intellectual property. Last year, the manufacturer formed a separate enterprise to market its strip-casting technology, which makes high-end sheet steel at prices that undercut lesser-quality stuff. Within a few years, the steelmaker expects high-margin licensing revenue to supplement its metal sales. Next up: HIsmelt, a low-cost, low-energy, low-emissions iron-making process that also produces electricity.
Global businesses make mountains of data. Just the names and numbers generated by sales, marketing, and procurement can become unwieldy. Even worse, the solutions designed to manage each department's information (Siebel in sales, Epiphany in marketing, Ariba in procurement, and so on) are notoriously incompatible. Now multiply the confusion by the number of offices in a distributed corporation. E-Business Suite, Oracle's new family of multilingual apps, brings order by uniting everything in one Oracle9i database. CEO Larry Ellison claims it saved his company a billion dollars last year.
This year is a different story so far, as Oracle's performance heads south along with the rest of the high tech sector. Database sales grew 6 percent in Q3 of fiscal 2001, compared with the usual 15 to 20 percent. The company responded in March by announcing that it would cut nearly 900 jobs in all departments – everywhere but R&D.
Oracle remains not only the number one database company, with 42 percent of the market (double that of its nearest competitor, IBM), but also the second-largest software vendor. And its products are complex enough that it actually makes most of its revenue selling services: $5.7 billion in fiscal 2000, compared with $4.4 billion in software sales. E-Business Suite currently makes up 22 percent of the latter figure, a number Ellison has vowed to raise to 50 percent.
By pitting the company against the likes of i2 and Siebel, Ellison risks neglecting his core business only to be trounced by hungrier competitors. Then again, his customers – which include 98 of the Fortune 100 – aren't likely to disappear into the Nasdaq black hole.
The Net's potential to enable collaboration reaches into every corner of industry. While Oracle and company build platforms that coordinate large-scale enterprises, PTC has focused on integrating the relatively confined, but no less exacting, area of product development. The Pro/Engineer application transformed industrial design, engineering, and manufacturing into a seamless, interactive whole, and last year's Windchill suite brought these capabilities to the Web. Phase three: Plug into online industrial exchanges.
The Exostar aerospace hub added Windchill in February, and Oracle is tying it into the Oracle Product Development Exchange. Partnerships with consulting firms like Accenture, Deloitte & Touche, and Ernst &Young promise to spread the word beyond PTC's strongholds in the automotive, electronics, plastics, and shipbuilding industries.
It will take time for this strategy to affect the bottom line, but PTC's conquest of the Web is already beginning to pay off. Although Pro/Engineer sales slumped in 2000, leading to a 12.2 percent drop in revenue and a $4 million loss, Windchill revenue more than doubled to $175 million on the strength of orders from Lockheed Martin, Ingersoll-Rand, and KLA-Tencor. With 30,000 Pro/E customers and rest of the business world starting to jack in, PTC has room to grow.
Apostles of pure fiber optics were taken aback last June when Qwest yoked its thoroughbred digital network to a plodding cash cow, US West, in a $58 billion acquisition. But it's hard to argue with success. The deal gave Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio the cash flow he needed to fund a $9.5 billion expansion of high-growth wireless, DSL, Web hosting, and IP transport services – and 29 million customers to sell them to. This guy isn't fooling around: He cut 15 percent of his Baby Bell's workforce – 11,000 jobs – even as revenue from data services grew 40 percent in fiscal 2000.
Nacchio plans to roll out video-over-broadband in 14 US West-serviced states over the next few years. Meanwhile, he's making an aggressive push in Europe. KPNQwest, jointly owned with Dutch telco KPN, is scheduled to complete a fiber network connecting 50 European cities by the end of this year.
Qwest's share value has been savaged with the rest of the telecom market, dropping roughly 50 percent between March and December. But owning US West appears to have kept the company out of the vortex that has enveloped cash-strapped new-breed carriers like Global Crossing and Level 3 – and out of the Jurassic swamp that has mired AT&T and WorldCom, with their aging gear and shriveling long distance revenue.
Reuters combines data with the ability to act on it. The company's financial news goes out to institutional investors over a private network, and to the public via the Web. When it prompts a trade, the Reuters-owned Instinet ECN can execute and clear the transaction.
Integrating these two sides of the business has been the job of Tom Glocer, a former M&Aattorney who will step into the CEO position in August. Amid an ongoing $750 million effort to upgrade the company's proprietary networks for the Internet era,Reuters launched Factiva (a Nexis-like news service) and Radianz (an online financial community), acquired French trading-software developer Diagram, and developed a high-security mobile communications platform.
Not all the year's ventures panned out. Last summer, as online trading ebbed, Reuters scuttled Instinet.com, a bid to extend the trading network to retail investors. It also pulled the IPO of Greenhouse, the company's R&D-cum-VC arm, as its investments dried up.
With fiscal 2000 revenue up 15 percent and net profit up 25 percent, the company plans to apply its expertise beyond finance, setting up information-and-trading platforms akin to Enron's commodities markets. But the big event of 2001 will be Instinet's $475 million IPO. The capital should give the trading network the financial independence it needs to partner with whomever it wants, while its parent (and majority owner) continues to spin data into gold.
The more people communicate electronically, the more they want to meet face-to-face. This puts the Sabre system, a networked database that handled $75 billion in airline, hotel, and auto rental bookings last year, at the center of a new economy sweet spot.
Sabre's retail venture, Travelocity.com, faces new competition from Orbitz, an alliance among American, Delta, Continental, Northwest, and United Airlines. But total online travel sales are expected to come to only $16.7 billion this year, and margins are getting tighter. In February, Northwest and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines stopped paying a 5 percent commission for online ticket sales – news that forced Travelocity's stock down 33 percent in one day. If other airlines follow suit, Travelocity's top line could shrink by 25 percent, says Forrester Research analyst Henry Harteveldt.
But Sabre was already shifting its online priority to helping its travel-agency clientele make the most of the Web. Launched in late 1999, Virtually There lets agencies offer their customers a personalized travel portal. And in September, Sabre bought GetThere, a corporate travel hub that generated $28 billion in sales last year. In late March, the company sold off its low-margin IT-solutions business. That leaves Sabre with an extra $670 million in the bank, a sharp focus on travel services that grew 26 percent in 2000, and nowhere to go but up.
A great enterprise needs great ideas, but brilliant execution is what makes it gush profits. For oil-exploration innovator Schlumberger, whose skill at extracting and analyzing geologic data helped to nearly double the world's oil reserves in the 1980s, acquiring tech developers as a hedge against the oil industry's downturns seemed sound. But so far the company has failed to weave its parts into a profitable strategy. In the divisions devoted to smartcards, semiconductor test gear, and utility metering, pretax earnings fell an average of more than 20 percent last year.
On the other hand, after a two-year industry slump, surging demand for oil has revitalized the business of helping petroleum suppliers find every last drop. Pretax profit in the oil-field services division swelled by 73 percent last year. Schlumberger seized the opportunity to launch IndigoPool.com, an oil industry hub, and WesternGeco, a reservoir-mapping joint venture with competitor Baker Hughes.
The windfall should also buy time to integrate the nonoil parts of the operation, but recent signs aren't encouraging. Schlumberger's latest purchase, systems consultant Sema, puzzled investors, who beat down the share price 13 percent in the eight trading days after the February 12 announcement. "To go from oil services and smartcards into customer care – sure, it's technology, but it's a big jump," says Yankee Group analyst Paul Hughs. Rex Ross, Schlumberger VP of communications, disagrees, insisting that "Sema's skills are critical to our business." We'll be looking for evidence on this year's bottom line.
The preholiday release of PlayStation 2 was supposed to mark the debut of the new Sony – an entertainment megaforce ready to parlay its considerable strength in computers, electronics, and content into a dominant position in the broadband future. Who would've thought a Sumo wrestler could trip over a silicon chip?
Rather than designing its next-gen game console around off-the-shelf silicon, Sony conceived the Emotion Engine, a devilishly complex chip that pushed production way behind schedule. Thus, even as postlaunch demand surged, PS2s were in painfully short supply. Shipments got up to speed by March, but by then gamers had set their sights on Microsoft's Xbox (built with chips from Intel and Nvidia, natch).
Sony missed its PS2 sales goals by more than a million units. The cost: alienated customers and developers, and a 23 percent drop in net earnings for Q4 2000 that forced the company to slash its 2001 earnings forecast by 50 percent.
Of course, there's more to Sony than the PS2, like blockbuster movies and the strongest brand in consumer electronics. And the PS2 may yet be vindicated. There's a reason Sony created the Emotion Engine: It can do things that don't come easily to a Pentium 4. Upcoming games that link the PS2 with NTT DoCoMo iMode phones hint that Sony has a few more tricks up its sleeve.
Playing guardian, bookkeeper, and back-office clerk to $6 trillion in institutional assets requires, above all, supreme dependability – which is why, as State Street vice chair Nick Lopardo likes to say, "The story doesn't change a lot from year to year." Nonetheless, the 208-year-old firm's fund-manager clients demand ever faster, more versatile access to their accounts, which State Street provides through services like Global Link, an IP-based network that combines investment research, risk management, and real-time trade execution. With clients in 92 markets, State Street is a force in foreign exchange as well.
International markets hold the key to long-term growth: As European pension funds go private, State Street stands to snag more contracts like the one it landed in October with Scottish Widows, a leading UK fund manager. Bigger deals are brewing in Asia, where State Street is one of the few Western firms to be allowed to run mutual funds in China.
A $282 million profit from State Street's 1999 sale of its commercial banking business skewed FY 2000 earnings growth, but the company claims a compound annual growth rate of 17 percent over the past 10 years. Although depressed stock prices might eat into its income in 2001, over time State Street's asset pool is bound to bulge with the investments of an aging world population.
The market for industrial-strength servers revolves around Sun. Despite the dotcom crash, the company's server sales jumped 45 percent last year, most of them at the expense of rival IBM.
But growth has slowed in 2001 as customers have slashed tech spending – which is why Wall Street stripped $97 billion from the company's market capitalization in Q4 2000. One response has been to expand into related areas, notably storage. Another is classic Sun: Spur demand for servers with innovative software like Brazil, a toolkit for building Net-based apps.
CEO Scott McNealy envisions a world of pervasive high-speed networking, where intelligent lawn sprinklers adjust their output to the latest weather report.The ubiquitous Jini-powered network is still around the corner (developers found the early code alarmingly memory-hungry), but there's time. As long as network traffic continues to grow, Sun will shine.
Vodafone CEO Christopher Gent spent the past year transforming Vodafone into the only mobile communications company with truly global reach. His stunning $181 billion hostile takeover of German telco Mannesmann was only the beginning. In the States, he bought Commnet for another $1.4 billion, then merged Vodafone's US wireless operations with those of Bell Atlantic and GTE to form Verizon, America's largest mobile operator. Then came a $23 billion sweep through Europe (resulting in the first pan-European rate plan), and on to Australia, China, Japan, and Mexico. Today, the company's network extends to 80 million customers in 29 countries.
Achieving that kind of coverage would bankrupt most companies. Gent managed to do it while limiting the company's debt load to only $15 billion, less than 10 percent of its valuation – leaving it fully ready for the next campaign, and with high-flying shares to burn.
Gent's power plays anticipate a worldwide appetite for broadband as voracious as today's demand for voice services. Vizzavi, a mobile portal co-owned by Vodafone and Vivendi, may well foster that demand. But the real action is in Japan, where 3G service is scheduled to roll out in May. There, Vodafone's J-Phone affiliate faces not only an entrenched local competitor, NTT DoCoMo, but also AT&T and British Telecom. The outcome of this battle will prove the mettle of Gent's imperial designs.
During the 2000 holiday season, Wal-Mart's Web site ranked seventh among etailers, with 370,000 unique visitors daily, according to Jupiter Media Metrix. Then the dotbomb hit, forcing Walmart.com to lay off 10 percent of its workers.
Hold the tears: Back in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Wal-Mart HQ commands an army of 1.24 million employees, 24 jobs lost in Silicon Valley didn't exactly spell doom. All along, Wal-Mart's inventory management and logistics system made sure the right amounts of the right products were in the right stores at the right time. The result: 16 percent sales growth overall, including a 41.2 percent increase overseas.
Given the retailer's legendary back-end expertise, its failure to dominate the World Wide Mall is surprising. A late-1999 deal with AOL to offer cobranded Net access has yet to bear fruit. And after accusing Amazon.com of poaching IT staff for trade secrets, Wal-Mart is reportedly sniffing out the bookseller as a possible partner.
Which might not be a bad idea. At this point, hanging back while other online retailers burned through billions – then hooking up with a master of online marketing – might be the smartest ecommerce strategy around.
Disney's newest theme park, California Adventure, opened in February at an opportune moment: It helped deflect attention from the company's misadventure on the Web.
With Go.com bleeding money and single-digit earnings growth projected for the entire Walt Disney Company in fiscal 2001, CEO Michael Eisner's decision to kill the Web portal – made in January and, no more encouraging, retracted in March – was hardly a surprise. In another act of retreat, the company decided to convert its Internet Group tracking shares back into Disney stock.
Disney's mastery of cross-media marketing is legendary, but it hasn't translated into profit online. While the Internet Group's revenue tallied $392 million in fiscal 2000, the Parks and Resorts group posted record sales for the sixth year running at $6.8 billion, and the Media Networks division posted $9.6 billion, up 21 percent.
Even that wasn't enough to forestall an extraordinary round of layoffs in March, when the company cut 4,000 jobs. The new austerity might be enough to finance experiments like the closely guarded plan to turn Movies.com into a virtual video store. If Disney can pull off video-on-demand – which has eluded all comers so far – the California adventure may get back on track.
What's all this about an advertising downturn? Advertisers still need to get their messages across. Audiences are more fragmented, diverse, and dispersed than ever, and media channels are proliferating faster than ways to say "Whassup?" An ideal opportunity for WPP Group.
From its humble roots as a maker of wire baskets, WPP has grown into the world's premier marketing powerhouse, a status sealed by the $4.8 billion purchase of Young & Rubicam last October. Operating in 102 countries, the Group comprises not only the biggest names in traditional advertising (Ogilvy & Mather, J. Walter Thompson), but also interactive advertising (wpp.com), media buying (MindShare), public relations (Hill and Knowlton), and market research (Kantar). Clients include 300 of the Fortune 500 and half of the Nasdaq 100, including high-profile brands like American Express, Ford, and IBM.
Revenue grew 39.8 percent and profit 41.6 percent in 2000 – results partly attributable to what CEO Martin Sorrell calls "punching and kissing," a combination of cooperation and competition among WPP subsidiaries. Come to think of it, integrating a zillion different marketing channels might be less challenging than pulling together all those querulous fiefdoms. It's a good thing Sorrell knows how to cut through the noise.
Yahoo!'s reliance on ad sales for most of its revenue in the past year – with dotcoms accounting for a third of the advertising total – have blown the portal pioneer straight into the economic riptide. In March, the simultaneous exodus of top executives, including former CEO Tim Koogle, made the mess look messier.
Though it's tempting to think the answer is a pay-for-play revenue model, conventional Net wisdom dictates that Yahoo!'s audience won't stand for it. Case in point: The company's auction site suffered an 80 percent drop in listings after it introduced a nominal charge last January.
The near-term situation may look dire, but in the long run Yahoo! has room to maneuver. With 185 million registered users, it has enough eyeballs – and data about the customers they belong to – to capitalize on emerging broadband approaches to interactive advertising. Moreover, Yahoo!'s enterprise-services unit is reaping dividends with Corporate Yahoo!, a customizable portal that has already attracted Bayer AG and McDonald's. Yahoo! still has $1.7 billion in cash, no debt, and Net smarts to burn. If nothing else, that ought to attract old media companies looking for a portal to the future.
Aventis, Cisco Systems, FedEx, First Data, Incyte Genomics, Nucor, Reuters, State Street: Steve Bodow (firstname.lastname@example.com)
eBay, EMC, Intel, News Corp., Oracle, Sabre, Sun Microsystems, Wal-Mart, Walt Disney: Andrew Madden (email@example.com)
Affymetrix, AOL Time Warner, BroadVision, Charles Schwab, Enron, Microsoft, Nokia, Qwest, GlaxoSmithKline, Yahoo!: Andrew Marks (firstname.lastname@example.com)
AIG, Applied Materials, i2 Technologies, JDS Uniphase, Marriott International, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Sony, Vodafone Group, WPP Group: Brian Taptich (email@example.com)
DaimlerChrysler, Flextronics, PTC, Schlumberger: Carole Winkler (firstname.lastname@example.com)
Financial data: Bloomberg, SEC (FY 00; Wal-Mart, FY 01)
1 Legal founding date may differ
2 Calculated 4/2/01
3 I/B/E/S estimate
4 FY 00 10-K filing
– Compiled by Stuart Luman, Wired researchGo Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

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"Two thumbs up for Harold and his crew! Great job. They kept to the schedule and really did a professional job in helping my house pass inspection. They were prompt, honest, and hard working. Don't go anywhere else!" John R.


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What could Metroid mainstays Mother Brain, Crocomire and Kraid have looked like in the beloved Metroid Prime video games? See for yourself in some recently excavated art work from the artists behind Nintendo's first-person Metroid adventures.
My personal favorite may be the Galactic Federation super suit seen above, a concept sketch from artist Sammy Hall dug up by NeoGAF user Mama Robotnik. More images from Metroid Prime could-have-beens and beautiful artwork that you might not have seen before, courtesy of the Metroid Wikia and further portfolio snooping can be seen in the gallery above.
After seeing these and playing Metroid: Other M, I might be ready for another Metroid Prime. Perhaps on the newly-launched Nintendo 3DS, perhaps?
A look at Metroid's mini-boss Kraid as he would have appeared in Metroid Prime.
Crocomire from Super Metroid in many conceptual forms.
Samus looks upon a Chozo statue.
The vistas of Skytown.
A trippy concept for Prime's version of Mother Brain, with mini-Samus to indicate scale.
Spider tracks and Chozo power-ups.


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Maine GOP senator proposes higher taxes on incomes over $250,000
AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) � A Republican senator faces likely opposition from his own party and Gov. Paul LePage in his proposal to increase Maine's tax on earned income of more than $250,000.
Sen. Tom Saviello of Wilton proposes raising the tax on that income from 7.95 percent to 8.5 percent. The higher rate was in effect until 2011, when the Legislature, controlled then by Republicans, scaled the rate back to its present level.
Saviello tells the Kennebec Journal (http://bit.ly/USIeKk ) that while he was campaigning, many voters asked why somebody with more than $250,000 in income couldn't be taxed more.
State revenue officials say the tax change could affect 4,100 Mainers and generate $5 million.
Because tax bills have to be introduced in the House, Saviello has to find a representative to introduce the measure.
Information from: Kennebec Journal, http://www.kjonline.com/


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NEA Leadership Diversity
RA Today Online – July 6, 2011
NEA Bylaw 3-1(g) is the Association's most effective policy for encouraging racial and ethnic diversity in leadership at all levels of the organization. At each Representative Assembly, a state delegation is accorded an ethnic-minority numerical goal for the combined number of ethnic-minority state and local delegates in attendance. This goal is based on the percentage of ethnic minorities within the state's population according to the most recent U.S. Decennial Census.
2011 marks the final year in which the proportion of identified ethnic-minority populations within each state is calculated based on the 2000 U.S. Decennial Census. NEA is reviewing the recently released 2010 Census data and will provide revised figures to state association presidents in fall 2011 for use beginning with the 2012 RA in Washington, D.C.
The degree to which a state delegation annually approaches, meets, or exceeds its ethnic-minority numerical goal provides a broad means of measuring the diversity present among our state and local organizations, and in the entire Representative Assembly.
Bylaw 3-1(g) has always been about more than a number. In the implementation of ethnic-minority involvement plans, affiliates realize that a variety of actions and approaches must be jointly taken to achieve and maintain success. These actions include educating and informing members about the Association's ethnic-minority involvement policies through delivering presentations, distributing brochures, and through other effective media; establishing ethnic-minority affairs or human and civil rights committees to coordinate plan actions and activities between state and local affiliates; identifying and encouraging ethnic-minority candidates to run for delegate and other governance positions, and submitting their names as candidates for appointment to state and national committees.
Each year the NEA Executive, Ethnic Minority Affairs, and Credentials Committees collaborate with state affiliate leaders to consider the challenges involved in policy planning, and develop effective approaches that will continually improve and reaffirm our efforts. The range and depth of our actions to support ethnic-minority involvement at all levels will enhance and sustain our efforts to reflect the diversity found among the students, schools, and communities we serve.
RA Media Headlines
View All RA Speeches


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Today I stopped by the Fashion Girls for Japan sample sale at The Bowery Hotel. 60+ designers donated pieces for Japan Society's Earthquake fund to aid in the reconstruction for the parts of Japan destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami last March.
There was a pretty good crowd when it started at noon. A large section for womenswear, with accessories and some shoes and a small section for menswear. As with all sample sales there's no fitting room so be sure to wear a tanktop and leggings if you're too shy to strip down in front of everyone. Every designer donated about 20+ pieces each, so the selection was pretty good. The prices however were still in the $150-$400 for some of my favorite Asian designers such as 3.1 Phillip Lim, Alexander Wang and Thakoon. Honestly, I've seen lower prices at their regular sample sales but since this was for charity I can understand only getting a 50% discount. And since my tax return wasn't that much, I only made one small purchase...
I picked up this pleated crochet skirt by Sea. Orig Price $125, Sample Sale Price $63
I've been looking for a white skirt for a while now and this one was really cute and flattering, I can't wait to wear it! First time I've ever bought anything from this company but I am officially obsessed after checking out their website.
Tomorrow's (Apr.1) the last day so be sure to check it out if you're in NY and show your support!
Be sure to follow me on twitter @fashionableazns if you would like a heads up on upcoming sample sales in NY!
Happy Shopping!


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This concert has already taken place!
Elbphilharmonie Hamburg Kleiner Saal
Lost Coltrane
€ 40.00 | 30.00
John Coltrane was one of the great legends of jazz history. Like Miles Davis, he transported hard bop into the modern era, and with the other members of his quartet – McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones – he wrote music history. Tonight Wolfgang Schmidtke and his ensemble present Coltrane's best-known pieces in »A Tribute to John Coltrane«. Heinz Sauer, who used to play sax in the Albert Mangelsdorff Quartet, and Uwe Oberg round off the programme with compositions of their own dedicated to the great master of modern jazz.
Uwe Oberg piano
Heinz Sauer saxophone
Wolfgang Schmidtke Quartett
Wolfgang Schmidtke saxophone
Kelvin Sholar piano
Johannes Fink double bass
Ernst Bier drums
»A Tribute to John Coltrane«
Estimated end time
Promoter: jazzwerkstatt gemeinnützige UG
During Your Visit
Enjoy the View
Between the old Kaispeicher and the new glass structure is the Plaza, a public viewing platform on the 8th floor of the Elbphilharmonie. Tickets for concerts in the Grand and Recital Halls include a visit to the Plaza two hours before the start of the concert or event; all other visitors require a Plaza ticket.More about the Plaza
A Diverse Cuisine
Food & Drink
A total of six bars in the Grand Hall and Recital Hall foyers offer concertgoers a varied cuisine before the start of events and in the intervals. Restaurants, cafés, delis and further bars await visitors in the »Störtebeker Elbphilharmonie« and in »The Westin Hamburg« Hotel.More about Food & Drink
Elbphilharmonie Hamburg
Kleiner Saal
The Recital Hall, designed in contrast to the Grand Hall in the classic »shoebox« style, offers seating for up to 550 people.
Finding Your Seat
All visitors enter the building via the main entrance. Admission takes place in the entrance foyer and is by concert ticket only. The »Tube«, an 82-metre-long, curved escalator, leads visitors up to the Plaza following admission
The Recital Hall is situated on the 10th floor and can be accessed via a stairway or lift. A cloakroom is located in the Recital Hall foyer.
Seat Preview
Are you curious to find out what kind of view of the stage different seats have? To help select your favourite seat, use your mouse to activate the representative seat views.
A cloakroom for guests of the Recital Halll can be located in the foyer of the Recital Hall on floor 10.
Baby carriages, wheeled walkers, walking-stick umbrellas, handbags larger than DIN A3 (42 cm x 30 cm) as well as sport bags, backpacks and suitcases must be checked in at the cloakroom. If required, wheeled walkers can be parked in the immediate vicinity of the hall entrances. Our front of house staff is happy to assist you in this regard.
Cloakroom fee: €1.50
Getting Here
Elbphilharmonie Hamburg
Platz der Deutschen Einheit
20457 Hamburg
The Elbphilharmonie can be easily reached by bus, underground, bicycle and ferry.
Underground line U3: Baumwall (approx. 450 m from the Elbphilharmonie)
Underground line U4: Überseequartier (approx. 950 m from the Elbphilharmonie)
Bus 111: Am Kaiserkai (Elbphilharmonie) (approx. 150 m from the Elbphilharmonie)
City bicycle (Stadtrad) stations: Am Baumwall and Am Kaiserkai / Großer Grasbrook
There are sufficient bicycle stands available in front of the Elbphilharmonie.
Ferry 72 (from Landungsbrücken pier): »Elbphilharmonie« pier
There is limited parking available in the Elbphilharmonie and the HafenCity.
Multistorey car park in the Elbphilharmonie (open 24/7, 435 parking spaces):
Please note that visitors to the Elbphilharmonie should use the entrance marked »Elbphilharmonie«. The entrance »Elbphilharmonie Hotel« is reserved for »The Westin Hamburg« hotel guests.
The car park operator APCOA offers a flat rate of €10.00 for four hours of parking. Every further hour or part thereof costs €5.00 as per the regular parking charge. The flat rate is only valid online and must be booked at least two hours in advance. Book the flat rate online at www.apcoa.de.
APCOA answers frequently asked questions about advance booking here.
Multistorey car park »Speicherstadt«: Am Sandtorkai 6, 20457 Hamburg (722 parking spaces, approx. 750 m from the Elbphilharmonie)
Überseequartier underground car park: Überseeallee 3, 20457 Hamburg (420 parking spaces, approx. 850 m from the Elbphilharmonie)
All halls and spaces are accessible for visitors with disabilities. More information at www.elbphilharmonie.de/en/accessibility.
Arrival Time
The Elbphilharmonie is a special building situated in a special place. Allow for plenty of time for getting to the Elbphilharmonie and the way to the concert area. We suggest first-time Elbphilharmonie visitors arrive at the main entrance 30 minutes before the start of the concert or event. Late seating is not guaranteed and latecomers may not be admitted to the concert hall.
Concert tickets for the Grand and Recital Halls authorise a visit to the Plaza from two hours before the start of the concert or event. Visitors to the Kaistudios require a separate Plaza ticket to visit the Plaza.
The foyers of the Grand and Recital Halls open their doors 90 minutes before the start of the concert or event. The bars in each foyer open simultaneously.
Admission into the halls begins 30 minutes before the start of the concert or event; for events offering pre-concert talks, admission into the halls begins 75 minutes before the start of the concert.
Smoking Ban
Smoking is prohibited throughout the entire premises of the Elbphilharmonie.
Photography and Video Recordings
Photography is permitted at the Elbphilharmonie for private purposes only. Please respect the privacy of other visitors and help ensure an undisturbed concert experience for all guests and artists. Employees and artists may not be photographed.
Photography, audio or video recordings of concerts and events are strictly prohibited.
Event-related video recordings or photographs for editorial or commercial purposes must be authorised by the Press Office of the Elbphilharmonie.


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So, a friend of mine posted this on their Facebook the other day:
"I think in many cases your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed." Sister Joan Chittister, Catholic Nun
Listen, Sister… you're little piece of rationalizing propaganda for the Pro-Abortionists out there is pretty weak, albeit exactly the kind of falsehoods and tripe that the Left, Liberals and Democrats drool over. Bonus: The image that contained this quote was taken from the Democratic Victory in 2012 Facebook page.
I've taken the liberty of rewriting your statement to reflect the reality and honesty yours lacked.
"I think in many cases your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child not born because what if you have to be responsible for a child fed, a child educated, and a child housed." LL1885, Bullshit Flag Waver
Blaming someone else for what you did consensually with your body is the height of hypocrisy. That hypocrisy is only eclipsed by wanting someone else to then to pay for the consequences of what you did with your own body, whether that be murdering the baby by aborting it or rationalizing said murder by claiming other people wouldn't pay for all the things that come after birth. Paging Sandra Fluke…you're being given the cold shoulder again.
There are many options out there that don't include ending a life. Plenty of families want to adopt. Ever heard of safe surrender? How about Foster care? Pretty sure your parents would be of some form of help, maybe even a close friend?
Wait, I have a novel idea — use protection or don't have sex. Oh noes.. how awful of me for telling people a very basic point of self responsibility. I must be setting women back 50 years! They should be able to screw with wild abandon — on my dime no less! Really ladies, you're going to sit there and chant that you want control over what you do with your body but just not what happens if you decide not to invoke that same self control. You can't have it both ways and the rest of us are tired of being your blame pinatas.
Why is it I have yet to find a Left leaning or Democrat linked group that deals in adoption? I don't see any tied to orphanages either. If you've got one, send it to me. I googled for a long time and came up with zilch. I'll gladly update with any that are sent to me.
I did find plenty of stories on Left leaning groups trying to defund Christian based adoption groups. Gee, that's helpful. Also, why is it Democrats push to fund abortions with tax money but not adoptions in their party platform?
I'm sure Sister Chittister is on top of all of these questions.


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I love the book, love the video even more and that song is SO catchy! If you have never seen it you need to check it out:
Anyway, we made chicka chicka boom boom trees by tearing with our fingers and they had to glue letters of their name on the tree. I got the letters from oriental trading ($8 for over 1000 pieces!) and love how they turned out. The trees are on half sheets of construction paper so the letters don't seem too small on the tree.
|letters from Oriental Trading
Thank you, little giraffes, for the awesome idea! :)


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I grew up on Sailor Moon and definitely feel it was a pinnacle in my childhood. I have two Sailor Moon tattoos and still watch episodes on YouTube whenever I am feeling down. It hasn't lost any of its humor or magic to me. Sailor Moon and the Sailor Scouts taught me to be brave, to by myself and that feminism is awesome. They fought for love, justice, equality, and the well-being of the world; physically and morally. As a kid I looked up to the girls in a fantastical sense. I know it's just a "cartoon" but the messages every episode sent still ring with truth and relevancy to this day. Every Sailor Scout had a very defined personality and character traits, and it was so easy to align with one as your favorite. I decided to make some fashion sets for each [inner] Sailor Scout based off their personality. I tried to add as much nuance and detail as I could. I had way too much fun making these – and probably spent way too much time on them. This is how I envision the scouts if they were personified modern-day teenage girls. For those that were big fans of the show, I know you'll notice lots of quirky details in these sets, and I hope you love and appreciate them! If they are well received, maybe I will do the Outer Scouts and some of the more iconic villains. If any of you are curious, my favorite scouts are Venus and Jupiter. Who is your favorite?
Posts Tagged 'sailor mercury'
Sailor Moon 2012November 7, 2012
Sailor Venus by krystipryde featuring philosophy lip gloss


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Bancha integrates ExtJS 4 and Sencha Touch with the light-weight PHP-MVC-ŁFramework CakePHP 2.
Basically it:
- handles all communication between server and client
- shares all Schema and validation rules in CakePHP with ExtJS/Sencha Touch
- enables asynchronous and batched request to the server
- automatically implements CRUD for all remotable cake models
- is well-tested with PHPUnit and Jasmine
For ExtJS & Touch Developers
Bancha provides a simple interface to create models. These models get all fields, validations and associations and a fully configured proxy from the server.
Just use Bancha.onModelReady('User', callback); and Bancha does the rest.
We would appreciate any comments and ideas.
For more Information:
- follow us on twitter @banchaproject
- see the examples
- read our dokumentation
- read the JS API Docs
- get the code


text: GIRLS GONE WILD ... FOR MONKEYS Girls Gone Wild ... for Monkeys http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2005/10/girls_gone_wildfor_monkeys.php Pornography studios might do well to take a tip from the Discovery Channel. According to a recent study, women are aroused by watching monkey sex. Sure, they're more aroused by watching human sex, but the loving habits of the bonobo are enough to bring out the primate in any civilized lady. The study, conducted by Meredith Chivers of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health and J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University, was published in the October issue of Biological Psychology. The researchers found that while straight men are only aroused by females of the human variety, straight women are equally aroused by all human sexual activity, including lesbian, heterosexual and homosexual male sex, and at least somewhat aroused by nonhuman sex. Each subject involved in the report watched seven two-minute clips of sex: six scenes involving humans and one of bonobos. The subject constantly monitored and noted his or her subjective arousal. The subject was also affixed with a device that measured genital arousal-penis circumference for the men and vaginal pulse amplitude for the women. All eighteen men were heterosexual and all reported subjective arousal only during the scenes with women. The objective data matched their reports: Images of our evolutionary ancestors do not make a man retrogress to Homo erectus. The eighteen heterosexual women reported greatest subjective arousal during the heterosexual scene, but their bodies reported they were less naturally selective. Chivers said in a previous study she had shown a very low correlation between women's stated sexual interests and their sexual arousal patterns in the lab. The correlation was much higher for men, she said. "There's the possibility that genital response for women is not necessarily imbued with meaning about her sexual interests," says Chivers. She also emphasized that her findings do not imply women harbor a latent desire for lesbian sex or bestiality. While the women did not report their arousal in the subjective part of the study, Chivers said women are generally receptive to her findings about their objective responses. "When I speak to women, there's sort of an intuitive 'Oh, yeah,'" she says. Barbara Bartlik, a psychiatry professor at Cornell, said she was not alarmed by the women's response to the nonhuman stimuli. "I don't know why this has surprised everybody that women get aroused watching humans and animals," she says. "Animals, because of the way they function in an uninhibited manner...can be very arousing to look at when they copulate." However, Bartlik was surprised that the men did not have the same response as the women. "I would wonder if the men weren't concerned about being labeled as homosexual or perverse by being interested in these things, and therefore their erections were inhibited," she said. Chivers hopes to discover what specific aspect of a visual stimulus causes women to become aroused. Some experts believe mentally labeling an act as sexual arouses women. Others, including Chivers, believe innately recognized sexual features such as an erect penis, even out of their usual human context, stimulate women. She said she did not yet know how similar to humans an animal would need to be in order to elicit a sexual response from women.


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Numbers don't lie: There's no denying that the Ford Explorer, introduced in 1990, was an enormous success, quickly becoming — year after year — the top-selling SUV. The four-door, V-6-powered sport utility vehicle filled an enormous hole in Ford's lineup, as the models that preceded it, the Bronco and smaller Bronco II, were never offered with rear doors.
Even from that very first model, though, I was never a big Explorer fan. I always thought there were better alternatives available, sold by General Motors, Chrysler, Jeep, Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi and even Isuzu.
Now, things have changed. If you assume a few constants over the long, long life of the Explorer, such as the 4-liter, German-built V-6 engine, then this 2011 model represents the first genuinely new Explorer. The biggest change: The Explorer has always been a traditional, truck-based SUV, with a body attached to a separate frame. For 2011, the Explorer officially becomes a "crossover," now based on a car platform — the Ford Taurus — rather than a truck platform. And, like the Taurus, the Explorer now comes standard as front-wheel-drive, with optional all-wheel-drive.
As with most crossover SUVs, there's more sport, less utility. The 2011 Explorer can tow a maximum of 5,000 pounds, while the 2010 model could tow up to 7,115 pounds. The four-wheel-drive 2010 Explorer was heavier, more rugged and more capable off-road than the newer model.
But the trade-off for slightly less utility is minor compared to what the 2011 Explorer offers — a far better ride, excellent handling and much better fuel mileage. The test Explorer, an all-wheel-drive mid-level XLT model, is EPA-rated at 17 mpg city, 23 mpg on the highway. A similarly-equipped 2010 Explorer was rated at 14 mpg city, 19 highway. That was with the optional 292-horsepower, 4.6-liter V-8 engine. Now, the standard engine is a 3.5-liter V-6, but it has only two fewer horsepower than the old V-8. The new Explorer will soon be offered with a 2-liter, turbocharged 4-cylinder than gets even better mileage, and has a still-impressive 237 horsepower.
The seven-passenger 2011 Explorer has an all-new look, inside and out. Exterior styling is handsome and functional, with a high-enough roof to make for decent headroom even in the two third-row seats — though getting back to those two seats is a hassle, and once there, legroom is marginal. Those seats fold down easily, more than doubling the 21 cubic feet of luggage space you have when all the seats are in place.
Inside, the test Explorer XLT — one step up from the base model, and one down from the deluxe Limited — had plenty of standard equipment. Front and second-row seats were fine, instruments and controls properly placed. I'm not yet impressed with the touch-sensitive controls, most of them located in the TV screen in the center console, and some right below the screen. They require a very light touch to operate, but the system is unnecessarily complex and anti-intuitive. It's certainly capable once you master it, but I just don't much like any system that can be torpedoed to this extent by the failure of a video screen. Oh, well — there's also voice-operated controls.
That's pretty much where the criticism ends. The electric-boosted power steering is superb — properly weighted and with just the right feel. The engine and 6-speed automatic transmission work in harmony, and you won't miss the V-8 unless you need to tow a lot.
Price is comparable to the outgoing model, starting at $28,190 for the front-drive base model. The all-wheel-drive Limited starts at $39,190, and can easily top $45,000. The test XLT listed for $38,355, with about $4,400 in options. Even at that, it lacked a power lift gate, a sunroof, power third-row seats and a rear-seat entertainment system.
When word came that the Explorer would be built on the Taurus chassis — and would, in fact, be assembled in the same Chicago plant — many of us wondered what kind of SUV that Taurus platform would make. The answer: An excellent one, at least on par with anything the competition offers. Well done.
Numbers don't lie: There's no denying that the Ford Explorer, introduced in 1990, was an enormous success, quickly becoming — year after year — the top-selling SUV. The four-door, V-6-powered sport utility vehicle filled an enormous hole in Ford's lineup, as the models that preceded it, the Bronco and smaller Bronco II, were never offered with rear doors.