2010年8月31日 星期二

Tech firms lobby Brussels for unified data standards

31.08. - Tech firms lobby Brussels for unified data standards

With no digital single market, the 27 member states all have their own
systems governing the collection, protection and retention of private
information. That means right now, services like Microsoft’s Hotmail or
Google’s Gmail, which store the service and the data outside personal
computers, must treat each piece of European data according to the laws of
its country of origin.

The DW-WORLD.DE Article
http://newsletter.dw-world.de/re?l=ew5wqqI44va89pI4#5960026

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31.08. - German government proposes amendement to Data Protection Act

In addition to protecting privacy at the workplace, the bill also would
prevent employers from searching private networks on Facebook while
checking out potential new hires.

The DW-WORLD.DE Article
http://newsletter.dw-world.de/re?l=ew5wqqI44va89pI5#5961284

2010年8月30日 星期一

glass NOW

Bloomberg News
The entrance to Apple’s store in Shanghai.

The tubular glass entranceway to Shanghai’s new Apple Inc. shop may be its most high-tech feature, considering the iPad hasn’t officially arrived in China.

Twelve rounded glass panels stand over 12.5 meters (41 feet) to form the cylindrical dome. Inside, the computer maker’s distinctive bitten-apple logo is suspended above a glass stairway that corkscrews into the underground retail space

The Toledo Museum of Art's $30 million Glass Pavilion is a symbol of America's "Glass City," and reflects the legacy of its local glassmakers.

China has become a powerhouse in the global glass industry. But massive production doesn't always mean high-quality output. WSJ's James T. Areddy reports from Shahe, known as China's Glass City.

A smudge on the image: The pavilion glass was imported from China, the new global powerhouse of the glass industry.

No one in the U.S. had the capability to satisfy cutting-edge architectural specifications for the curving pavilion, even though the 2006 job involved techniques advanced decades ago by Toledo inventors: bending and laminating glass. The pavilion features 360 thick glass panels, each up to 13.5 feet tall, eight feet wide and weighing over 1,300 pounds.

For years, the West focused on the threat from China's low-tech exporters like clothing and furniture makers. Glass represents how an even more potent challenge has arrived: sophisticated, capital-intensive businesses that boast high-tech expertise.

In industries where global demand has shifted to China, the pattern is repeated, from steel to locomotives and turbines to specialized glassworks. Chinese companies that have gorged on growth in the domestic market have managed in just a few years to close the gap on decades of technological innovation in the industrialized West.

China Closes the Gap

Getty Images

Bottles in their early form on a glass factory's production line

Made in China

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Shenzhen, China-based Avic Sanxin Co. got the Toledo Glass Pavilion job because of its willingness to invest in technology necessary for complex glass, including a $500,000 piece of equipment, says deputy general manager Bruce Tsin, who wears jeans and reads architectural magazines in English. U.S. companies, he says, are too cautious, preferring standardized processes and "easy money."

But China also has secured important technology from foreign glassmakers eager for a foothold in the world's biggest market. Foreign companies often play a balancing act in China, trying to protect selected manufacturing secrets and products.

Owens-Illinois Inc., an Ohio bottle-maker, intends to pump possibly hundreds of millions of dollars into Chinese acquisitions and joint ventures in the coming years. "It's the biggest glass market in the world and we feel underrepresented," says L. Richard Crawford, president of global glass operations. "What we bring the market is know-how."

Yet each deal will require approvals from Chinese authorities who have a reputation for pressuring foreign investors to introduce their latest proprietary technology, but a weak track record for protecting it.

Owens-Illinois says it will hold back key trade secrets locked in its suburban Toledo labs, like how to make jet black glass and 30% lighter wine bottles. Mr. Crawford says his company can succeed in China by introducing "the basic stuff."

Editors' Deep Dive: China's Tech Prowess Grows

Japan's Nippon Sheet Glass Co. this month said it would issue over $570 million in new shares in part to fund $53 million in planned spending on production lines that make energy-saving glass in the northern city Tianjin. Apple Inc.'s first Shanghai store opened in July featuring a tubular dome of glass panels 41 feet tall, all of it China made.

Northwest Ohio was aggressive about luring the glass industry in its early days, too. In the late 1880s, the area convinced East Coast glassmakers like Edward Drummond Libbey to relocate with cheap natural gas, cheap land and cheap labor—including workers as young as eight years old. Washington blocked European glass with tariffs. By 1900, the Toledo area had around 100 glassmakers. Mr. Libbey, who died in 1925, endowed the Toledo Museum of Art.

"China is the America of the 1880s, 1890s," says Quentin R. Skrabec Jr., an industrial historian at Ohio's University of Findlay. "Pittsburgh was the steel; Akron was the rubber; Toledo was the glass city."

Ohio companies like Owens-Illinois, Libbey-Owens-Ford Co., Owens Corning and Libbey Inc. automated production of light bulbs, bottles and flat glass, supplied the Empire State Building with windows and commercialized fiberglass.

For decades, a major focus of Toledo was supplying glass to the rapidly expanding car industry of nearby Detroit. In the 1920s, the predecessor company to Libbey-Owens-Ford helped perfect the process of lamination to make windshields that didn't shatter into pieces. As the U.S. auto makers lost share in the 1980s to Japanese car makers, Toledo's glassmakers felt the pain.

Most of the world's flat glass comes from float lines, a tricky energy-intensive process in which molten glass flattens above a bed of hot tin and then is conveyed hundreds of feet in an unbroken ribbon while it cools. Float plants typically run 24 hours a day for years at a time.

There are 33 float lines in the U.S., according to Glass Magazine. Toledo has two of them, run by Nippon Sheet's Pilkington unit.

China has at least 150 float lines today. As recently as the early 1970s, the country was a tiny player in the glass industry. But the rapid growth in the Chinese construction and automotive industries since then has created surging demand for local glass.

The basic ingredients in glass, including silica sand and soda ash, are found almost everywhere. Because glass is heavy and difficult to transport, it is typically produced close to where it is used. China makes 45% of the world's glass, but it consumes virtually all of that amount. Every 15 minutes, its production is enough to clad a 100-story skyscraper.

Crowding a single Chinese city, Shahe, are 44 float lines. The Hebei Province city, 265 miles southwest of Beijing, makes around a fifth of the nation's flat glass.

In Shahe, Liu Jujun, owner of Hebei DaGuangMing Industry Group Co., recently inaugurated an 820-foot-long float glass line—adjacent to an identical one he opened last July.

"Whenever I go to other parts of the country, I see new buildings being built," says Mr. Liu, who is also a Shahe government adviser. "The more glass here, the more easily we can sell glass."

China's "Glass City" features a skyline of concrete cooling towers characteristic of nuclear power plants, not the expensive equipment Western glassmakers use to reduce pollutants like nitrogen oxide. Mr. Liu says 10% of his capital expenditure goes into pollution controls, that he meets all national standards and is switching to cleaner natural gas.

But Mr. Liu's plant features construction that looks slapdash by Western standards. It is run by engineers seated on wooden benches. A nearby silica sand producer spits mucky water onto the parched land. And trucks ply Shahe roads loaded with bags of synthetic soda ash, the product of a chemical process environmentalists forced out of the U.S. in 1985.

Most of China's glass output is such low quality, it has no market other than China. And much of the Chinese glass now hitting U.S. shores is chiseling into market extremities where profit margins are thinnest: the cheapest salt shakers, table tops and replacement windshields.

But China also is beginning to supply more sophisticated glass. Blast-resistant lower-floor windows for New York's One World Trade Center building under construction will come from northeast China's Shandong Jin Jing Technology Co. The U.S. company that is fabricating glass for the upper floors says it didn't have ability to make the large windows, which are nearly an inch thick and have V-shaped ridges in them.

"We try to hit the sweet spots in terms of volumes," explains Don McCann, architectural design manager at Viracon Inc. in Owatonna, Minn. "Our business model is geared toward the common sizes."

It was a similar story for the Toledo Museum of Art. Only a Chinese company and Spanish and Italian companies could produce the oversize curving panels needed for the futuristic design of its Glass Pavilion. Sanxin says it was paid under $1 million; people involved in the project said it would have cost up to 50% more in Europe.

"We did get some grief about the fabrication until we explained we didn't have a choice," says Carol Bintz, an officer of the Toledo Museum of Art who led the project. "We couldn't find anyone in the United States that could do both the size and make the curvature."

To win prestige work, Sanxin spends money. For the Toledo museum, it put $500,000 into the world's largest "autoclave," a giant blue cylinder that works like a pressure cooker to stick, or laminate, glass plates together.

"We were also quite proud to supply glass to a project like this," said Mr. Tsin, the general manager. "We believed after this project we had a chance to do similar things [elsewhere]."

Not everything went smoothly for Sanxin in Toledo. At least one piece of glass arrived broken, and replacement glass had to be air-freighted to Toledo at high cost.

Still, the Toledo museum job helped win Sanxin recognition as one of the few companies anywhere able to take on certain highly specialized jobs involving curving or manipulating glass. It has worked on glass for a Paris airport, an Austrian subway, Tokyo storefronts and is supplying a museum in Anchorage, Alaska.

It has purchased equipment in hopes of fabricating glass for Apple's China expansion, but concedes it hasn't yet met the client's quality specifications.

Sanxin was founded as a private company in the 1990s and was listed on the Shenzen Stock Exchange. Its biggest shareholder is Aviation Industry Corp. of China, a government-owned company that is a leading plane maker and military contractor. Among its biggest contracts in recent years have been Beijing and Shanghai airports.

Mr. Tsin rejects the notion that Sanxin has an unfair advantage because of its government links. Instead, he says Sanxin has developed a niche business in architectural glass because the world's established glassmakers want stable, high-volume production, not the risks of one-off jobs like the Toledo Museum of Art.

Andrew Spear for The Wall Street Journal

The Toledo Museum of Art's $30 million Glass Pavilion was made with sophisticated, curving glass panels imported from China.

Toledo glass fabricators, machinists, artisans and retailers understand that China is reordering the glass industry. "It hasn't really been felt yet except in isolated instances," says Paul Pellioni, vice president of Toledo Mirror & Glass Co., a major installer who worked on the museum. "It would be naive to say it's not a factor. It's going to be a factor."

But Toledo's main problem remains the big drop in Big Three auto sales. Toledo's glass industry currently employs just 2,500 workers. That is down from nearly 10,000 workers in 1973, according to Moody's Economy.com.

No one at the Source, a crowded Toledo job bank and training center, sees the glass industry as an elixir for 11%-plus joblessness. "Manufacturing is fizzling out here," says Ken Nutter, a laid-off 54-year-old who worked as a glass cutter in the 1970s but not since.

When President Barack Obama last September bowed to union demands to levy tariffs on China-made tires, and later on steel pipe, he stirred hope in the U.S. glass industry, and its labor unions, that their sector might also get relief. It hasn't happened so far.

Last October, eight Democratic U.S. senators wrote to the Obama Administration asking it to challenge "Chinese subsidization" of its glass sector. Separately, lawyers say a movement is building for a World Trade Organization case that would challenge Beijing to prove that production surges in sectors including glassmaking are commercially oriented, not government policy.

China's Ministry of Commerce warns any action to restrict its glass industry would backfire. Any U.S. glass industry woes, the ministry said in a statement, reflect weak domestic economic conditions.

For U.S. glass companies willing to deploy technology, the ministry added, China is "a rare opportunity and wide market to explore."

Near the Pilkington plant on Dixie Highway outside Toledo, patrons at "Moe's Place" refer to "Glass City" in the past tense. "We used to be a glass capital," they say, pointing to boarded-up houses. The plant, which makes windshields for farm equipment and big-rig trucks, now employs 300.

Next door to the plant, bulldozers are readying Toledo's post-glass gambit: "Hollywood Casino." Designed with an Art Deco facade of concrete on a spot where glass was first made in 1898, it promises 3,200 construction and casino jobs, or 260 more than the glassmaking plant had in 1970.

—Bai Lin in Shanghai and Sue Feng in Beijing contributed to this article.

Write to James T. Areddy at james.areddy@wsj.com



Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703428604575418680197041878.html?mod=djemITPE_h#ixzz0y9wmFyPt
The atrium foyer is also a crystalline sign of the times: It was made entirely in China, establishing a fresh benchmark on workmanship for the world’s largest glass industry.

Glassmaking is a rare ancient craft with limited history in China. It got a boost in 1954 when Mao Zedong urged more production of building materials during a visit to a Hebei Province glass factory. In 1971, China’s building materials bureau proclaimed its development of a version of the established “float glass” manufacturing process.

By the early 1990s, China had overtaken the U.S. in flat glass production, and its 28.7 million-ton output last year was six times Ducker Worldwide managing partner Nick Limb’s estimate of 2009 U.S. shipments.

Now the Chinese industry is ascending the technology ladder.

Trends in glass underscore a broader shift for the world’s new No. 2 economy. Moving beyond cheap-for-export manufacturing and strengthened by domestic growth, Chinese companies increasingly compete in sophisticated, capital-intensive global businesses.

Foreign glassmakers are active in China, and on balance make superior products with moresophisticated technology. Yet increasingly, Chinese names in flat glass like CSG Holding Co.’s China Southern Glass, Fuyao Glass Industry Group Co. and Xinyi Glass Holdings Ltd. challenge global titans Nippon Sheet Glass Co.’s Pilkington, Asahi Glass Co., Compagnie de Saint-Gobain, Guardian Industries Corp. and PPG Industries Inc.

This month, a crowded half-day Shanghai seminar (in Chinese) drew speakers from as far as Delaware to expound on China’s new glass milestone: the Apple store.

When it started planning for the Shanghai store 18 months ago, Apple’s London-based design firm Eckersley O’Callaghan was unsure fabricators in China could fulfill Steve Jobs’s signature standards, said co-founder James O’Callaghan. The Apple chief executive took a personal interest in the Shanghai project — his name appears on patents for glass stairways used in some shops.

As Apple embarks on a major China retail expansion, not least of the reasons for it to source locally is the nation’s tax of up to 30% on certain glass imports. And of course, China already has a role making its iPhone and iPad.

Fabricator Beijing North Glass Safety Glass Co. got the nod for Shanghai after cutting its teeth on less complex Apple store projects in New York and Beijing.

Even so, North Glass’s general manager Paul Gao told the seminar, “they doubted our ability.”

While North Glass’s mandate for Shanghai was only 62 pieces, it took a year to complete, including months spent testing new machinery.

The complexity: ultra-clear, tempered, scratch-, stain- and bubble-free glass panels, six layers thick, 12.563 meters tall and 2.578 meters wide.

“Actually North Glass has run risks to be the global partner of Apple,” Gao said, noting it once took 28 days of retries to get a panel approved by O’Callaghan’s two-hour inspection. “A lot of glass was rejected.”

“Pure determination,” said O’Callaghan. “The accuracy was excellent and beyond my imagination.”

A DuPont Co. division supplied glass-strengthening materials to the Apple project. Some shop glass came from Shandong Jin Jing Technology Co., which has worked with PPG and is also producing blast-resistant windows for One World Trade Center, New York’s newest and tallest skyscraper.

Special cranes lifted the glass panels in place, and Apple’s store opened to overflow crowds on July 7.

At the end of Gao’s Aug. 13 presentation, his audience burst into applause — then accompanied him across the street to marvel at the Apple dome under a clear dusk sky. “Apple was inspecting art, not a manufactured product,” Gao said.


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Kindle 3

STATE OF THE ART

New Kindle Leaves Rivals Farther Back


Too bad there’s not a reality TV show called “America’s Most Freaked-Out Tech-Company Meetings,” where you watch classic panicked board meetings. For example, when the Apple employee left aniPhone 4 prototype in a bar. Or when Intel learned that its Pentium chip contained a math error. Or when Microsoft was caught bribing bloggers with $2,500 laptops to promote Windows Vista.

Stuart Goldenberg

Pogue's Posts

The latest in technology from the Times’s David Pogue, with a new look.

Amazon

The new Kindle e-book reader is 21 percent smaller than the previous edition and wieghs 8.5 ounces, and Amazon has improved the E Ink display.

The Nook reader from Barnes & Noble includes Wi-Fi.

Readers' Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

One of the most exciting episodes, though, could have been shot atAmazon the day Apple announced theiPad.

Amazon makes the popular Kindle e-book reader. For a while, it was pretty much the only game in e-book town. But the iPad has a touch screen, color, prettier software, audio and video playback, 100,000 apps — and at the time, it didn’t cost much more than the Kindle. For the Kindle, with its six-inch monochrome nontouch screen, the iPad was your basic (full-color) nightmare.

This week, Amazon unveiled what everyone (except Amazon) is calling the Kindle 3. You might call it Amazon’s iPad response. The Kindle 3 is ingeniously designed to be everything the iPad will never be: small, light and inexpensive.

The smallness comes in the form of a 21 percent reduction in the dimensions from the previous Kindle. The new one measures 7.5 by 4.8 by 0.3 inches, yet the screen has the same six-inch diagonal measurements as always. Amazon’s designers did what they should have done a long time ago: they shaved away a lot of that empty beige (or now dark gray) plastic margin.

Now, the Kindle is almost ridiculously lightweight; at 8.5 ounces, it’s a third the weight of the iPad. That’s a big deal for a machine that you want to hold in your hands for hours.

Then there is the $140 price. That’s for the model with Wi-Fi — a feature new to the Kindle that plays catch-up to theBarnes & Noble Nook. A Kindle model that can also get online using the cellular network, as earlier models do, costs $50 more. But the main thing you do with the wireless feature is download new books, so Wi-Fi is probably plenty for most people.

That $140 is quite a tumble from the Kindle’s original $400 price, and a tiny sliver of what you would pay for an iPad ($500 and way, way up).

Yes, of course, it’s a little silly to compare the Kindle with the iPad, a full-blown computer with infinitely greater powers. Although it’s worth pointing out, just in case you were indeed considering the iPad primarily for its e-book features, that the Kindle’s catalog of 630,000 current books is 10 times the size of Apple’s.

No, the Kindle’s real competition is the gaggle of extremely similar, rival e-book readers, all of which use the same E Ink screen technology.

E Ink is satisfying to read but deeply flawed technology for e-book screens. It works by applying an electrical charge to millions of tiny black particles, causing them to freeze in a pattern of letters or grayscale images. The result really looks like ink on paper, because the black stuff is so close to the surface.

E Ink is great for battery life, too, since only turning pages uses power; otherwise, the image could sit on the screen forever without requiring any additional juice. (Amazon says that on the new Kindle, if you turn off the wireless features, you can read for a month on a single charge.)

But E Ink has plenty of drawbacks, too. It’s slow to change the page image, for example. The new Kindle reduces the page-turn wait to well under a second. It’s the fastest page-turner among e-readers, leaving its rivals in the dust (especially the Nook, which, despite five software upgrades since its debut, still lags). But the page turn moment still features a bizarre, black-white-black flashing sequence — a nonnegotiable characteristic of E Ink.

E Ink’s speed problems mean that it can never display video, either. And, of course, it can’t display color. Last month, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, responded to this point this way: “You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets.” Yes, but color and video may well improve a new era of livelier e-books.

Still, Amazon has clearly put a lot of time into refining the new Kindle’s E Ink screen. The background gray is a few shades lighter than on any other reader, producing much better contrast behind the black text.

In the world of copy-protected e-books, choosing a reader is a particularly momentous decision. You’re not just buying a portable reader. You’re also committing to a particular online e-book store, since in general, each company’s e-books don’t work on other companies’ readers. (The one exception: Sony and the Nook use the same copy-protection scheme.) Even on the new Kindle, you can’t read nonprotected books in the popular ePub format, as you can on its rivals.

(However, Amazon and Barnes & Noble each offer excellent reader programs for Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android; in other words, you don’t actually have to buy a Kindle or a Nook to read those companies’ e-books. Buy a book once, read it on all your gadgets. Kindle books even wirelessly sync up, so each gadget remembers where you stopped — a feature that’s still on the Nook’s to-do list.)

Fortunately, the online stores are all pretty good (except Apple’s, whose book selection is still puny). The pricing seems to have evened out, too; in general, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony have exactly the same prices for New York Times best sellers. Sadly, lots of them are now $13, up from the flat $10 that Amazon used to charge for all best sellers.

Those prices seem high. The fact that e-books involve no printing, binding, shipping, distributing or taking back and shredding unsold copies ought to save you something. And it’s outrageous that you can’t sell or even give away an e-book when you’re finished with it. You paid for it; why shouldn’t you be allowed to pass it on? (End of rant.)

The new Kindle’s nonremovable storage now holds twice as many books: 3,500 of them, which should just about cover your next flight delay. The tiny joystick has been replaced by cellphone-like four-way control buttons, and the page-turn Forward and Back buttons, which flank both edges, are silent now, for the benefit of sleeping spouses. And the new Kindle handles PDF documents much better now; you can even add notes to them and magnify them.

Of course, the Kindle’s rivals have their own attractive features. The Nook, for example, has a balky color touch screen beneath the E Ink screen, which you use for navigation. You can read any Nook book at no charge, one hour a day, when you’re in a Barnes & Noble store. You can even “lend” a book to a friend — although held to a two-week maximum, one time a title and only on books whose publishers have permitted this feature.

Sony Readers have touch screens; some models even have built-in illumination screens. (If you believe the rumors, new Reader models are on the way.)

Really, though, what makes the Kindle so successful isn’t what Amazon added to it; it’s what Amazon subtracted: size, weight and price. Nook’s two-screen setup makes it fussy and complicated. Sony’s additional screen layers make the E Ink less sharp.

In the meantime, certain facts are unassailable: that the new Kindle offers the best E Ink screen, the fastest page turns, the smallest, lightest, thinnest body and the lowest price tag of any e-reader. It’s also the most refined and comfortable.

No doubt about it — the next episodes of “America’s Most Freaked-Out Tech-Company Board Meetings” won’t be filmed at Amazon. They’ll be set at Amazon’s rivals.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 28, 2010

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about Amazon’s latest Kindle e-reader, misstated, in some editions, the name of the Intel chip that was found in 1994 to contain a math error. It is the Pentium, not the Pentium 5. (Intel does not make a chip called the Pentium 5.)