Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Nov 4, 2013 (II)

choi

(8) Caroline Winter, Canada's Stanford.
www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... adian-feeder-school

Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: The University of Waterloo looks beyond BlackBerry.
(b) quotation underneath the title in print: It's "among the top few universities Google recruits from around the world"

(c) “Recent [University of Waterloo] engineering graduate Mike McCauley is living the dream. During his senior year, he and two classmates launched BufferBox, a delivery service that lets consumers send packages and online purchases to secure locations for pickup. After college, the startup was accepted into the Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, then Google acquired BufferBox for north of $25 million * * * BufferBox’s McCauley, now a Google product manager”
(i) BufferBox
www.bufferbox.com/

The graphic in the home page explains how it works.
(ii) BufferBox
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BufferBox
(Founded 2010; "The [Google] acquisition [of BufferBox] is seen as a step to compete with Amazon's Locker [which started in 4Q11] service. BufferBox's ten employees moved to Google's offices in Kitchener-Waterloo")

City of Kitchener is on the southern border of Waterloo. “Kitchener and Waterloo are often referred to jointly as "Kitchener-Waterloo" (K-W), although they have separate municipal governments. * * * In 1916 * * * the name of the city was changed to Kitchener; named after the late British Field Marshal [Herbert Kitchener,] the 1st Earl Kitchener.”
Kitchener.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchener,_Ontario
(iii) Waterloo, Ontario
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo,_Ontario
(In 1816, the new township was named after Waterloo, Belgium)
(iv) BlackBerry (company)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_(company)
(Headquarters Waterloo, ONtario; Research In Motion Limited [the original company name] was founded in 1984 by Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin. At the time, Lazaridis was an engineering student at the University of Waterloo while Fregin was a engineering student at the University of Windsor)

City of Waterloo is seventy miles to the west of Toronto, whereas the air distance  between Toronto and Detroit (located about 8 o’clock to Toronto) is 206 miles. City of Windsor, Ontario is the southernmost city in Canada and separated from Detroit by Detroit River.  Wikipedia
(v) University of Waterloo (public; Established 1957)  Wikipedia

(d) “In Canada, Waterloo University is still a source of national pride. It’s been voted the country’s most innovative school for the past 21 years by the Canadian magazine Maclean’s. The engineering program, where tuition runs $12,200 per year, has emerged as a farm system for Silicon Valley companies such as Tesla Motors, Twitter, and Facebook.”
(i) Maclean's
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maclean%27s
(a Canadian weekly news magazine; Founded in 1905 by Toronto journalist and entrepreneur Lt-Col John Bayne Maclean; section 3 University Ranking Guide)

is based in Toronto.
(ii) For “farm,” see Minor League Baseball
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_League_Baseball
(“These leagues also go by the nicknames the ‘farm system,’ ‘farm club,’ or ‘farm team(s)’ because of a joke passed around by major league players in the 1930s when St Louis Cardinals' general manager Branch Rickey formalized the system, and teams in small towns were ‘growing players down on the farm like corn’")

choi

(9) Peter Burrows, Get Ready for the Surge of Cheap Tablets.
www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... ge-for-the-holidays

Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: Low-cost parts open the way for alternatives to Apple and Samsung
(b) summary underneath the title in print: "The market is about to emerge from Apple's reality-distortion field"
(c) “The falling cost of components is making the tablet market easier to crack. Chinese semiconductor companies such as Rockchip now sell chip systems for $5, one-quarter of what U.S. companies charge. Displays that cost more than $100 two years ago are tens of dollars today. All told, a garden-variety tablet’s parts, from memory to shell, now cost $60, compared with $175 in 2011.”
(i) “Rockchip is a series of SoC (System on Chip) integrated circuits manufactured by Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics company 福州瑞芯微电子有限公司.”  Wikipedia
(ii) Formed in 2001, Rockchip is fabless and ARM-based, having switched a year ago from TSMC to Globalfoundries.

(d) “Tablets priced at $79 from Asian manufacturers such as Kobii, Ematic, and Le Pan have been on sale for more than a year, but sales have been slow.”
(i) I can not find information about Kobii.
(ii) Ematic
www.ematic.us/
is California-based, the website implies (“We proudly design our products in California”)  The website shows its tablets as toys. That is all I can find.
(iii) Le Pan
www.lepantab.com/

No other information is available.

(e) Press release: New iPad Air Costs Less to Make Than Third-Generation iPad Model, IHS Teardown Reveals. IHS, Nov 5, 2013
press.ihs.com/press-release/design-supply-chain-media/new-ipad-air-costs-less-make-third-generation-ipad-model-ihs
(“The iPad Air with 16 gigabytes (GB) of NAND flash memory and cellular connectivity [pricing $699] has a BOM [bill of materials] of $304 * * * This represents a 6 percent reduction from $325 for an equivalently equipped third-generation iPad [pricing $699 then], based on a final pricing estimate for the device at the time of the release in 2012. When the $6 manufacturing cost of the iPad Air is added in, the total cost to make the tablet increases to $310. For the lowest-end iPad Air model with 16GB of NAND and no cellular connection, the BOM and manufacturing cost is $274 [pricing $499], $42 less than the entry-level third-generation iPad [also pricing $499 then]”)

iPad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/iPad
(Release date: 3rd generation Mar 16, 2012; 4th generation Nov 2, 2012; Air Nov 1, 2013)


(10) Christopher Spillane, Saving Elephants With Google Earth.
http://www.businessweek.com/arti ... ephants-with-drones

Note: quotation underneath the title in print: "Drones are basically the future of conservation"