After more than three years as vice president of Microsoft Corp.’s Enterprise and Partner Group in the western United States, Ralph Young is taking on new global responsibilities for Microsoft. He has assumed the role of vice president of its worldwide public sector business.
In this newly created position, Young will manage Microsoft’s efforts around government, education and healthcare industries as well as the teams responsible for public sector programs, partnerships, partners, services and marketing.
Young joined Microsoft in 1998 as the general manager of sales and marketing for TransPoint, a joint venture between Microsoft, First Data Corp. and Citibank that helped pioneer Internet billing and payment technology. Young also served as vice president of Microsoft’s Enterprise Sales Strategy Group, responsible for worldwide sales strategy and the development of the enterprise sales force, models, processes, tools and training.
Young holds an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in Chicago and a bachelor of arts degree in business management and psychology from Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio.
IBM today announced its researchers have developed technology to translate Arabic media broadcasts into English in near real-time and has licensed the technology to Critical Mention, Inc., the leading Web-based real-time television news search and broadcast monitoring service.
Codenamed "TALES" (for Translingual Automatic Language Exploitation System), the IBM technology processes the audio signal from Arabic television and radio stations and translates its spoken content into English text. Once this text is indexed by the CriticalTV platform, Critical Mention's clients will be able to conduct real-time searches of Arabic media, and receive alerts instantly when a search term is detected.
Cool design creates hot profits, and although really great design is an art rather than a craft, the EVaN project has developed some best-practice design tools to help companies maximise their potential. EVaN aims to usher in a new wave of design that allies form with function.
"Business is waking up to the enormous potential that compelling design offers," says Alessio Marchesi of Politecnico di Milano, EVaN's coordinator. Great design such as Apple's iconic iPod for example has enabled the company to draw profits from the two opposing revenue generators on the supply-demand curve: margin and volume. Great design can charge a premium and still shift millions of units, because it adds value to a product and protects it from commoditisation.
Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Intel Corporation have built the world’s first electrically powered Hybrid Silicon Laser using standard silicon manufacturing processes. This breakthrough addresses one of the last major barriers to producing low-cost, high-bandwidth silicon photonics devices for use inside and around future computers and data centers.