Apple shares may rise more than $700 as iPad sales Boom Boom : Study

Apple Inc. (AAPL), getting a boost from anticipation of the new iPad, rose to a record today and may climb 19 percent to $700, according to analysts who raised their price targets for the stock.

At least four analysts, including Katy Huberty at Morgan Stanley in New York, have increased price targets to $700 or higher in the past two weeks. Apple, based in Cupertino, California, rose 3.8 percent to $589.58 at the close in New York and has gained 46 percent this year.

More are likely to boost targets as they quantify the market share of the new iPad, said Michael Walkley, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity, who raised his target to $710 yesterday. The average price target of 43 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg is $605, which could mean updates are lagging behind, he said.

“As they do their checks in the quarter and stronger numbers come through, it leads to better earnings power than we were seeing even six weeks ago,” Walkley said in an interview. “Some analysts are behind the curve on estimates.”

Shares of some Apple competitors have languished as the company takes market share. Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ), which has tried competing with Apple through smartphones, tablets and personal computers, has tumbled 41 percent in the past 12 months. Nokia Oyj has fallen 40 percent. Research In Motion Ltd., the maker of BlackBerry smartphones, has dropped 79 percent.

As of today, Apple gave investors a 555 percent return in the past five years and has outperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index by 543 percent. Since 2007, investors paid an average 43 percent premium for Apple’s earnings compared with the S&P 500’s earnings.

IPad Upgrade
The new iPad, set to go on sale March 16, has been upgraded with a sharper screen and faster chip as Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook seeks to widen the company’s lead in tablets over Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. (GOOG) Slashing the price of the older iPad by $100 also helps cut into competition, said Huberty, who raised her price target to $720 yesterday.

Huberty also cited the company’s expansion in emerging markets such as China and Brazil and a new TV product as reasons to lift her price target.

“Apple’s earnings power is potentially far greater than investors believe and our prior bull case model suggested,” Huberty said in a note to investors.

Continue reading →

Personal cloud will replace PC at centre of users' digital lives by 2014: Gartner

The reign of the personal computer as the sole corporate access device is coming to a close, and by 2014, the personal cloud will replace the personal computer at the centre of users' digital lives, according to technology researcher Gartner, Inc.

Gartner analysts said the personal cloud will begin a new era that will provide users with a new level of flexibility with the devices they use for daily activities, while leveraging the strengths of each device, ultimately enabling new levels of user satisfaction and productivity.

However, it will require enterprises to fundamentally rethink how they deliver applications and services to users, a Gartner statement said.

"Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices," said Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner."Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life."

The past two years have been a whirlwind in the client computing space, leaving many enterprises asking what comes next and what the environment will look like in five years, it said.

"Many call this era the post-PC era, but it isn't really about being 'after' the PC, but rather about a new style of personal computing that frees individuals to use computing in fundamentally new ways to improve multiple aspects of their work and personal lives," Kleynhans said.

Several driving forces are combining to create this new era. These megatrends have roots that extend back through the past decade but are aligning in a new way, Gartner added.

Continue reading →

'Kony 2012' becomes the most viral video in History with more than 100 Million views [Study]

With more than 70 million views in five days, Kony 2012, a 30-minute documentary about Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony, has become the most viral video in history, according to one researcher.

In a blog post, Visible Measures found Kony outpaced other record-setting viral videos.

For instance, the video featuring Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent in 2009, hit 70 million views in six days. Old Spice’s “Responses” campaign didn’t hit 70 million until five months after it launched.

Visible Measures got its figures by tracking not just the original Vimeo version of Kony, but also responses to the video. By March 8, three days after Kony went live, there were 200 such responses, which ran six minutes on average. The video has also netted more than 500,000 comments.

Despite the rapid rise of Kony 2012, the video has brought a shower of criticism to Invisible Children, the organization behind it. Many of the negative critiques have been targeted at Invisible Children’s practices as an organization, not whether Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, is a war criminal.


In particular, a Tumblr blog called Visible Children, outlined how just 32% of Invisible Children’s money went to direct services, while the rest went to staff salaries and other overhead.

Invisible Children responded with a blog post outlining its expenses. The post didn’t dispute the 32% figure, but illustrated how another 26% went to “awareness programs.”

Continue reading →

Facebook Users Judge Friends by Photos, Not by Profile

It turns out a picture really is worth a thousand words, especially when it comes to your profile picture on Facebook. That is the finding of new research which looked at how people formed opinions of others on the popular social networking website. According to the research, most people formed impressions of others after seeing their profile picture, without ever reading any of the text contained in their profile.

"Photos seem to be the primary way we make impressions of people on social networking sites," said Brandon Van Der Heide, lead author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University. "If your profile photo fits what they expect, observers may be unlikely to look very closely at the rest of your profile – they have already decided how they feel about you."

To test this, Van Der Heide, along with Jonathan D’Angelo and Erin Schumaker, graduate students in communication at Ohio State, had students view Facebook profiles that included a photo and an "about me" section. The students looking at these profiles were then asked to rate how extroverted they thought a person was, on a scale of one to seven. The researchers found that people with photos showing them with friends were rated as being extroverted, even if accompanying text in the profile suggested otherwise.

A major exception, however, came when photos on profiles that showed something out of the ordinary.
It turns out a picture really is worth a thousand words, especially when it comes to your profile picture on Facebook. That is the finding of new research which looked at how people formed opinions of others on the popular social networking website. According to the research, most people formed impressions of others after seeing their profile picture, without ever reading any of the text contained in their profile.

"Photos seem to be the primary way we make impressions of people on social networking sites," said Brandon Van Der Heide, lead author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University. "If your profile photo fits what they expect, observers may be unlikely to look very closely at the rest of your profile – they have already decided how they feel about you."

To test this, Van Der Heide, along with Jonathan D’Angelo and Erin Schumaker, graduate students in communication at Ohio State, had students view Facebook profiles that included a photo and an "about me" section. The students looking at these profiles were then asked to rate how extroverted they thought a person was, on a scale of one to seven. The researchers found that people with photos showing them with friends were rated as being extroverted, even if accompanying text in the profile suggested otherwise.

A major exception, however, came when photos on profiles that showed something out of the ordinary.

"People will accept a positive photo of you as showing how you really are, but if the photo is odd or negative in any way, people want to find out more before forming an impression," said Van Der Heide. "If your photo is not quite normal – either positively or negatively – people are going to pay a lot more attention to what you wrote."

Van Der Heide attributed this to the fact that people are drawn to the unknown. Despite their unique nature, however, the photos still seemed to be a deciding factor for many people when forming impressions about others.

"People were still seen as introverted, because of their photo showing them alone on the park bench," said Van Der Heide. "But they got a little bump up in their extroversion rating because of their profile text suggesting they were extroverted."

While this news was based on Facebook, the results translate past Facebook. According to Van Der Heide, the results can be applied to all other social networking websites. However, an interesting development comes when looking at how job applicants can be judged by their profile picture. With that in mind, job seekers must know that profile pictures— particularly abnormal ones— will bring more attention to their profiles.

"If the photograph fits that image, people have little reason to question his or her judgments about this person’s characteristics," Van Der Heide said.

Continue reading →