Filed under: World wide web, Productivity, Web services, web 2.0

Vito Technology is probably ideal known for developing software for Windows Mobile and Symbian phones and PDAs. But the company has just made the jump into a new arena: web apps. First up is an on the internet task manager called Task2Gather.

The interface is clean and simple to use, if not entirely intuitive. It took me a few moments to figure out how to name new tasks or projects, for example (you type in the Name & description box, but it wasn’t immediately clear that the light blue area was a text box). You can either see a list of all your tasks from multiple projects at once, or you can browse tasks using a tree mode, which lets you pick a project and look at your finished and unfinished tasks and sub-tasks. You can also invite other users to share your task list.

Overall Task2Gather is useful if you want to keep your task list online and accessible from any computer, but there are other task managers out there that accomplish this as well or superior. Vito has an ace up its sleeve though: the company plans to release a Windows Mobile and iPhone version of Task2Gather soon. These mobile clients will likely not only let you create and manage tasks while you’re on the go, but also synchronize them with the internet client.

Task2Gather is free to use. Eventually Vito plans to offer a subscription-based premium version with access to additional features like RSS feeds for task updates and the capability to upload file attachments for tasks.

[via My Today Screen]

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Filed under: Earnings reports, Press releases, Products and services, Marketing and advertising, Garmin Ltd (GRMN)

Garmin Ltd. (NASDAQ: GRMN) shares are tanking today after the maker of personal navigation devices stated that its new nuvifone will be delayed by several months. I would avoid this fad stock for a while.

The device, which the company had originally hoped to be available for the fourth quarter holiday season, will not be launched until the first quarter, according to a statement from the Cayman Islands-based company. Of course, the company tried to put a positive spin one the announcement.

“While we’d hoped to have carrier launches in the fourth quarter, we have found that meeting some of the carrier specific stipulations will take longer than anticipated,” Garmin stated. “We remain pleased with carrier interest in the device and are working toward making necessary design changes to meet their stipulations. We expect launching the product during the first half of 2009.”

First half of 2009? Nothing like setting a vague target that can easily be changed. And the company’s problems don’t stop with new products. Fewer people are buying the old ones as well. Garmin anticipates 2008 revenue of $3.9 billion, down from a previous estimate of $4.5 billion. Earnings per share are seen at $4.13, below its previous forecast of $4.40.

While Garmin’s automotive/mobile, outdoor/fitness and aviation segments are expected to see double-digit revenue growth, the company’s marine segment will see flat sales growth this year. I wonder if this forecast, which has also been pared down, is too optimistic.

Although the company reported a 20% rise in second quarter profit, storm clouds continue to gather. The company’s SG&A expenses soared to $125 million in the second quarter from $95.3 million. Cost of goods sold hit $494.5 million from $367.8 million.

Investors are learning once again that fad stocks like Garmin eventually come crashing down to earth.

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Filed under: Business, Utilities, News, Productivity

We’re willing to bet radiologists in Shanghai like to listen to music — who doesn’t? — but that’s not how they’re using iTunes. At Renji Hospital and Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine, they’re using it to organize PDFs of important medical research and images that they say are more useful than many textbooks.

You can drop a PDF into iTunes and sort it just like you would with music. That means that the medical documents in Shanghai are searchable, ratable, and can be given multiple different tags. Before iTunes, they were keeping redundant copies of PDFs in directories by category. Now, they only need to keep one of each. So, if you’ve been looking for software that can organize your PDFs, consider an app you likely already have: iTunes!

[via Dr. Dobb’s]

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Filed under: Management, Amazon.com (AMZN), Marketing and advertising

When it comes to companies lacking in any kind of strategic direction, it’s hard to top Border Group (NYSE: BGP). In the midst of its efforts to sell itself, Borders recently launched its own e-commerce site to compete with better-financed, and just plain better, rivals like Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Barnes and Noble (NYSE: BKS).

Browsing NewYorkTimes.com this morning, I noticed a banner ad for “the new Borders.com: Free shipping on orders over $25.”

Man, that should do a lot to lure customers away from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Oh, wait. No it won’t, because both of those sites offer exactly the same deal. And, just to add insult to injury, so does Books-A-Million (NASDAQ: BAMM).

Basically, Borders has a weak balance sheet and, in the midst of its efforts to put its shareholders out of their misery with a sale, is blowing money on capital expenditures that’ll give the company the same service as competitors: meaning that most strategic buyers won’t pay any extra for the e-commerce site.

The stock’s low price has attracted brilliant investors like William Ackman, but given that the company is continuing to make value-destroying decisions, I don’t think it’s a stock investors should go near.

More Borders coverage:
Does Borders have any idea what it’s doing?
Borders goes digital
Borders is for sale
Why would Barnes & Noble buy Borders?

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Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Productivity, Web services, Google, Freeware

Since the dawn of time Google Calendar, we’ve been waiting for a free, easy way to fully synchronize our Google Calendar to desktop calendar clients like iCal. We’d love to be able to access the same calendar data across multiple personal, but it’s always been a messy affair, not free, an incomplete solution, or Personal computer only.

Well, Calgoo has been one of those paid options up until now, but the minds behind the program just announced that it is free from here on out. That’s right, Calgoo is now the free option in Google Calendar and desktop caledar synchronization. Calgoo officially supports 30 Boxes, Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook, and — of course — Google Calendar.

Calgoo’s “Chief Owl” will not employ ads in the app in order to pay for the costs of developing the program, but the team will start to run ads on Calgoo Hub and possibly other future products. As for the software itself, it’s pretty easy to use, and it provides for two-way synchonization, which means that any changes on one calendar will apply to the other.

[via WebWorkerDaily]

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Filed under: Consumer experience, Starbucks (SBUX), Marketing and advertising

With its stock teetering near 5-year lows on concerns about its growth prospects and style drift from its roots as a coffee shop, returning Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX) CEO, Howard Schultz, stated earlier this year that the company would stop selling sandwiches.

Let the backtracking start. The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) that Starbucks won’t be discontinuing sandwiches after all. Rather, the sandwiches will “evolve,” according to a Starbucks spokesperson. The company will use a different kind of cheese and less butter in an effort to prevent the scent of sandwiches from overpowering the aroma of coffee.

This looks to me like a move motivated by Wall Street rather than a broad corporate vision. Mr. Schultz made it clear that he wanted to get rid of sandwiches back in January, telling investors that “In short, the scent of the warm sandwiches interferes with the coffee aroma in our stores, which is the key to the coffee experience that forges our connection with customers.”

Did it all of a sudden occur to Schultz that it might be possible to make the sandwiches less pungent? I somehow doubt it. Rather Starbucks looked at the fact that sandwiches make up 3% of the company’s sales — plus whatever additional coffee sales they generate — and that, with the stock about 50% of its 52-week high, this just wasn’t the time to take a same-store sales hit in the name of long-term vision. If this were a private company, I seriously doubt that they’d have reconsidered the plan to cease selling sandwiches. The power of the institutional imperative appears to have trumped Schultz’s ideas for returning the company to its roots.

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Filed under: Marketing and advertising, NIKE, Inc’B’ (NKE)

Whatever other problems it has, Nike Inc. (NYSE: NKE) has, historically been on the side of the gay community. From sponsoring athletes at the Gay Games to offering domestic partnership benefits to its gay and lesbian employees, there’s tiny fault for a gay rights activist to find with Nike.

But that didn’t stop some people from making up fake controversies. The companies ads for its Hyperdunk basketball shoes feature competing basketball players in pics with heads in each other’s crotches, hands on butts, etc. — stuff that happens all the time during basketball games.

Now, in response to the criticism, the company is pulling the ads, citing its desire “to underline our ongoing commitment to supporting diversity in sport and the workplace.”

The ads are funny and they’re not homophobic — Nike’s track record on these issues demonstrates that. LGBT activists who make an issue out of stuff like this marginalize the real issues, by making it look like there aren’t more massive battles to fight. With one presidential candidate who just learned what “LGBT” means, there clearly are. But silly stuff like this will turn people off and prevent those issues from being taken seriously.

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Filed under: Major movement, Bad news, Marketing and advertising, S and P 500

In this series, we take a look at the 25 stocks on the S&P 500 Index (SPX) that have turned in the worst performance during the past decade — what went wrong, and what happens next.

New York-based Interpublic Group of Companies (NYSE: IPG) is a marketing services firm, but they’re not your average PR hucksters. Flip through IPG’s resume, and you’ll find that they were once tapped as the “brand steward” for Coca-Cola Classic. Is there a more solemn task in the world of marketing? Perhaps — Coke also handed IPG the reins on Cherry Coke, but jealously guarded its Sprite brand from the mega-marketer’s grasp.

What went wrong? At number 22 on our list of SPX underperformers, IPG lost 72% of its value from June 30, 1998 through June 30, 2008. The worst of the stock’s woes occurred during the first several years after the turn of the millennium. A broad economic slowdown led many clients to trim their spending on advertising, and — as one of four “megacompanies” that essentially ruled Madison Avenue — IPG couldn’t help but feel the pinch.

Even as the marketing behemoth faced down this fundamental challenge, an accounting fiasco caused the company to restate six years’ worth of financial results. Interpublic soon found itself facing a formal investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, along with an IRS audit over the small matter of $41.5 million in unpaid taxes.

By Might 2003, the company was so shamed by its financial failings that a slew of top executives concurred to forfeit their stock options to appease shareholders and lower-level employees. Oddly enough, investors later learned that IPG managed to pay out more than $41.4 million in bonuses to its top executives in 2003 (incidentally, that was a year in which the firm lost $451.7 million).

And what about Coke? The world’s best-known brand, realizing its instinct about Sprite was correct, snatched the plum Coca-Cola Classic assignment away from IPG unit McCann-Erickson in 2003.

What next? Interpublic might have lost “the real thing,” but it’s now in league with another American icon — Jay-Z. The self-proclaimed “best rapper alive” teamed up with fellow entrepreneur Steve Stoute in early 2008 to form Translation Advertising, a unit of IPG’s Translation Consultation. However, Interpublic can probably relate on a deeper level to its new mascot for client MasterCard: the infamous Saturday Night Live character Mr. Bill, who’s certainly no stranger to crushing blows and lingering pain. In the meantime, stay tuned for the company’s next turn in the earnings spotlight, which is scheduled for July 30.

Elizabeth Harrow is an analyst and financial writer in the research department at Schaeffer’s Investment Research. She is featured in the weekly video series Option Basics on SchaeffersResearch.com.

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Filed under: Kids, Productivity

If you’ve a lot of studying to do, StudyProf FlashCards might be the buddy you’ve been looking for. The program, which has a free trial version available, grants you to create flashcards in a relatively easy environment. Give your card a title and an image or audio then virtually flip the card and place the information you’re trying to learn on the back.

After making a set of cards you can file them in your card box and retrieve them and replay them, slideshow style with simple mouse clicks.

If you’re studying something specific, StudyProf creators, Felling Software Development, has also created the Flashcard Archive to make it easier to download precreated sets of flashcards (though only the English to German flashcards are currently available).

Studying is never a lot of fun, but at least if your typing is better than your handwriting StudyProf gives you an substitute method to get the job done.

[Via download.com]

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Filed under: Marketing and advertising, Business of sports

This post is part of a series on celebrity spokespeople who ended up doing serious harm to the brands they were hired to promote, or vice versa. See how we rank the 20 top spokesperson fiascos.

When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I remember watching O.J. Simpson in Hertz (NYSE:HTZ) ads dash through the airport on my television screen as a spunky old woman yelled “go, O.J., go.” It seems like these spots were always featured during breaks of favorite ABC Television shows “Charlie’s Angels”, “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island.” I even imitated O.J. when I went to the airport, much to the horror of my parents. I thought that, next to Television private eye Jim Rockford, Simpson was the coolest guy in the world.

Of course, no one realized at the time that Simpson’s nice-guy image was an act. When he led police on his infamous low-speed chase through the freeways of Southern California, people saw O.J. running again — this time from the law, under suspicion for the murder of his wife and waiter Ron Goldman. Again, people thought about Hertz. When he was acquitted, people thought about Hertz. For people my age (40), O.J. and Hertz will be forever linked. That’s the power of branding.

About the only thing O.J, is endorsing these days is plastic football helmets and old photos of himself, which is the root of his current legal troubles in Las Vegas. People are less interested in him in that world. At least one sports memorabilia dealer has his O.J. Simpson-autographed merchandise on sale.

To be fair, Hertz severed its ties to Simpson when allegations of domestic abuse first surfaced in 1992. Since then, advertisers do a much more thorough background check on their celebrities before hiring them to tell us how we should spend our discretionary income. We’re a nation of sheep. The problem is that we as Americans continue to look to our celebrities before making important decisions, which is a pity.

Read the entire series

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