There were many comments about the ROI a company gains at a trade show and it appears not efficient enough for Apple, according to the company’s claim:

Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.

So, apart from the retail stores Apple has invested a lot on to get touch with customers directly, Internet is significant factor that leaded to Apple’s decision. In a post titled “Are bloggers & social networks killing the big shows?” Scobleizer pointed out the emerging of user-generated contents and relationships on net was the murderer of trade shows.

“Why? 44,000 people go to MacWorld. Hell, a lot more people watch Engadget report from that much cheaper conference room,” wrote Scobleizer on how a big blog about gadgets can spread all aspects of Apple’s products to much, much more audiences than a so-called successful trade show can reach.

Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch, gave another reason why Apple should no longer attend MacWorld from business perspective:

MacWorld’s timing as a January event has always been questionable - many consumers have long since learned not to purchase Apple products in the weeks leading up to the event, which likely resulted in lost sales during the holiday shopping season.

All above may be particular reasons of Apple whose strong brand loyalty makes every word about its new or future products be immediately posted on headlines of top blogs and news sites, then echoed via fan communities on Facebook, MySpace etc. to get big buzz quite easily.

But other companies do not have such advantages and trade shows like CES are still good places to get coverage by media, to show new products to target customers. Yet all are questioning it is worth pouring tons of money into the events while Internet can be a better put to reach users if they give enough effort and money to build the name.

“Small booth: $15,000 You wanted internet? $1,000. You wanted curtains? $4,500. Decent carpet? $2,000. Power? Trash cans? You wanted extra outlets? Have to hire one of our union electricians. How many hours you want him for?” said Wil Shipley, an independent software developer, criticizing the expensive pricing scheme the organizers of trade shows are following.

Now suddenly companies recognize that the prices are beyond acceptable during the time of bad economy. “My sponsor, Seagate, told me they are reducing their spend this year at CES,“  Scobleizer said in the post “AMD and Delphi are doing the same thing and I’m hearing about many other companies who will either stop going, or reduce the size of their booths,” he added.

There are many things that seem obviously necessary at normal time have become too luxurious to afford today. Individual customers can flatly refuse over-priced stuff while some companies still have to pay for due to signed contracts but they will turn their back next times.

Dull future is waiting for trade shows and it is high time for IDG and the rest to think about a total change.

The strategy proves working really well for the company bringing in close to 20% profit margins in comparison with 6% or less for its competitors. And until October, Apple had enjoyed a successful year with over 30% sales growth in average, four or five times higher the growth rate of the overall market.

Needless to say hundreds of times about how hard the economic downturn is hitting consumers, all know that price has come a big concern today. Right after Mr. Job’s claim, in November the retail sales of Mac computers felt sharply according to data from NPD, a research firm, marking the first time Apple’s PC sales was (1 percent) lower than the same period last year while industry-wide PC sales still rose 2%.

It is obvious that after the holidays sales will slow as customers pull back and some analysts has cut their estimate for Apple’s 2009 profit warning a difficult year the company is going to face when consumer demand will further wear off.

However, Apple appears not want to cut prices of its products. In this holiday season, the company reluctantly offered only 5% to 10% discounts for its MacBooks while its competitors like HP, Dell dropped prices by as much as 50%.

Some analysts still believe in Apple’s strength expecting 10% increase in company’s sales next year despite the rest of the industry is predicted to fall 5%. But the number and trend seem not tell the same story unless the company introduces a pricing innovation soon.

Here some other regulations applied to the staff, said the article:

- Set quotas for the number of items to be picked or packed in an hour that even a manager described as “ridiculous”. Those packing heavy Xbox games consoles had to pack 140 an hour to reach their target.

- Set against each other with a bonus scheme that penalises staff if any other member of their group fails to hit the quota.

- Made to walk up to 14 miles a shift to collect items for packing.

Given only one break of 15 minutes and another of 20 minutes per eight-hour shift and told they had to get permission to go to the toilet. Amazon said workers wanted the shorter breaks in exchange for shorter shifts.

“I hope management are prepared for the possible consequences of their actions.” commented Gordon Charlton, a reader from Hertfordshire. If this is true, Amazon may face customer’s boycott as well.

Like Mozilla’s Firefox, Chrome is an open source browser but it makes use of Apple’s WebKit HTML-rendering engine instead of Gecko renderer of Mozilla. Google’s Chrome also incorporates a brand new JavaScript virtual machine named V8 which, according to Google’s benchmarks, outperforms all other JavaScript engines in contemporary browsers.

In addition, Chrome has introduced some advanced features like “porn mode”, officially called Incognito privacy mode, to eliminate all users’ browsing history when activated and integrated search box in its address bar (of course for Google’s search only.)

However, the most mentioned innovation Chrome debuted is the ability to isolate individual tabs in separate processes that, in theory, if one of open tabs crashes, other tabs and browser itself will remain working.

On the other hand, the browser still has things backward like lack of support for RSS feeds and especially there is no add-on system like Firefox’s that makes it ineffective for those who use browser for more than its core functionality (i.e. for web surfing only.)

Users also report that the browser is not as stable as expected and it becomes a memory hog when more than a dozen of tabs opened.

Chrome browser is a Google’s product that leaves “Beta” mark surprisingly fast while many other are still released under Beta umbrella for years. That is much likely because Google is pursuing partnerships with major OEMs in a bid to get Chrome shipped on new computers — a strategy to neutralize the key advantage of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer being integrated into Windows operation system pre-installed in the majority of new PCs.

Chrome is currently available for Windows users only while versions for Mac OS X and Linux are still in development. Though there is no info about the developing progress of Linux’s version, internal source revealed that Mac’s version has almost reached haft of its goals passing 86 percent of WebKit layout tests already. It is believed that Linux and Mac versions will debut in the first half of next year.

However, this may not the last bad news to Yahoo’s staff yet. After months in trouble with many changes and mistakes, Yahoo is now hit badly by the worse economic climate.

“Cut costs, cut costs more” — It seems to hear the shouts from all levels of Yahoo’s executives as the last chance to survive on a sinking ship after they refused the salvage from the mighty Microsoft. Simple solution to save its ship now came by throwing a part of its crew into the sea, yet it appears still burdened with the rest. So, what’s the next to eliminate?

Brad Williams, a Yahoo spokesman, disclosed that there could be additional staff reductions next year, and many major offices around the world would be closed including ones in Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Oslo, and Copenhagen. Smaller offices in US and Asia would be the next victims.

The question is how many the layoffs would be in Yahoo? As Google eliminated one third of its workforce recently (though all were defined “temporary workers”), Yahoo would be expected to come to that number or even more. That would translate to about 3,000 more jobs to be cut in 2009?

The Boston-Power’s next-generation Lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery cell, named Sonata, will be able to keep 80 percent of their initial charge after three years of use.

Typically laptop battery time starts to drop significantly after around 150 charges while Boston-Power’s batteries can be charged 1,000 times and get “like new” performance, according to the company.

In early 2009, HP Enviro laptop series will first boast the Sonata batteries that come with a three-year warranty — the longest battery warranty available from any provider.

Sonata batteries are manufactured with no use of PVC plastic or heavy metals such as cadmium, arsenic, or mercury to ensure environmental friendly. Moreover, by lasting for three years, the batteries are “more environmentally sustainable and economical,” said Christina Lampe-Onnerud, founder and CEO of Boston Power.

Sonata-powered batteries are designed to be used with existing HP laptops so that (HP) customers with compatible models can purchase the batteries to replace their existing ones with no system changes required. However, an HP representative said that the Sonata batteries will cost between $20 and $30 more than traditional batteries.

Boston Power is also in discussions with other computer manufacturers to provide Sonata technology powered batteries and plans to release a portable model for cell phones or other gadgets. The auto battery market will be its next target, according to Lampe-Onnerud.

The average duration of videos watched was also up, 3 minutes per video in comparison with September’s stats of the average duration of 2.7 minutes.

YouTube, which serves 68% of all viewers (99.5 million), continues to dominate the field while Hulu is the rising star jumping up to 6^th position on the board with nearly 24 million viewers. Hulu also gains the best watching duration with an average of 11.6 minutes well above any other services.

There are other interesting findings from the stats:

• 77 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 274 minutes of video.
• More than 80 percent of the 18-34 year olds watched online video, higher than any other age segment. The average 18-34 year old online video viewer watched 4.8 hours of video during the month, also ranking above all other age segments.
• 99.5 million viewers watched 5.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (53.2 videos per viewer).
• 51.2 million viewers watched 520 million videos on MySpace.com (8.0 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 3.0 minutes.

Video appears not the future of Internet but it is the internet now.

They are (in alphabetical order):

1. GroupCard: Digital greeting card service that lets friends send cards signed by a whole group.
2. Kontagent: Advanced analytics tool to help developers track many aspects of app usage in details.
3. MouseHunt: Casual (but very comprehensive) game where the user is a hunter, trying to trap mice that have invaded a virtual kingdom. The game relies on “word of mouth” to spread instead of built-in rival invitation feature of Facebook platform. The company claimed forty percent of users come back to the game every day.
4. Weddingbook: Online wedding planner for brides and grooms to get or share advices.
5. Wildfire: A service that allows companies to create their viral promotion campaigns by offering giveaways and sweepstakes.

The finalists were first chosen by Facebook and its venture investors, Accel Partners and Founders Fund (earlier this year), then they were presented for users’ votes. It is reported that about 88,000 unique users cast more than 180,000 votes in the phrase one.

More info from a company blog post:

You can search for magazines through Google Book Search. Try queries like [obama keynote convention], [hollywood brat pack] or [world's most challenging crossword] and you’ll find magazine articles alongside books results. Magazine articles are tagged with the keyword “Magazine” on the search snippet.

Over time, as we scan more articles, you’ll see more and more magazines appear in Google Book Search results. Eventually, we’ll also begin blending magazine results into our main Google.com search results, so you may begin finding magazines you didn’t even know you were looking for. For now you can restrict your search to magazines we’ve scanned by trying an advanced search.

[GigaOM] — The web giant Yahoo is planning to turn its email offering, which is serving over 200 million users at the moment, into into a platform for applications, much in the same way Facebook does.

The program will be launched in beta fairly soon with half a dozen small applications running in a sidebar inside the mail client. Users’ address books would act as a social graph, essentially turning Yahoo Mail into the basis of a whole new social networking experience.

The plan was revealed in an interview by the New York Times with a Yahoo’s senior executive, Brad Garlinghouse, who was at the time running Yahoo’s communications business, in November last year, dubbing it “Inbox 2.0.“

“There will be some sort of profile system attached to Inbox 2.0,” said Brad Garlinghouse in the interview. “The profile page is where you can expose what you want people to know about you,” he added.