Mozilla Names New CEO - PC Magazine

Gary Kovacs is taking the reigns of The Mozilla Corporation as the new chief executive, the company announced Thursday.

"He melds the fundamentals of a good executive with a powerful understanding that Mozilla's non-profit, public benefit mission drives everything we do, including those activities which might look like 'business as usual' to a casual observer," Mozilla Foundation chair Mitchell Baker wrote on her blog. "Gary brings a deep understanding of the mobile space and rich media from his time at Macromedia/Adobe and Sybase."

Kovacs brings a wealth of experience with him to Mozilla; he's the former senior vice president of markets, solutions, and products at Sybase, and he used to be the general manager and vice president of mobile and devices at Adobe. Kovacs also served as vice president of product marketing at Micromedia, and he spent a decade working for IBM.

According to outgoing CEO John Lilly, the search has been a six-month process. Lilly announced in May that he would be resigning to join venture firm Greylock Partners. Lilly remained at Mozilla during the search process, easing the transition before Kovacs takes over on Nov. 8.

Kovacs is the right person for the job, Lilly wrote, because "he's got deep background in the battlefields that will define the future of open Web: mobile and rich media, and he's been involved in building great organizations several times over."

Mozilla's products already reach 400 million people around the world. Baker said that they hope to increase that number to half a billion.

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ADB, World Bank assess Pak flood damage at $9.7 billion - The Hindu

AP Pakistani flood affected people wait to get national identity cards near Peshawar in Pakistan on Tuesday. The floods, that swept across Pakistan since July, has caused an estimated $9.7 billion damage to infrastructure, farms, homes, as well as other direct and indirect losses, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank (WB) have said.

The estimate was presented in the Damage and Needs Assessment (DNA), a survey conducted nationwide by ADB and the World Bank to assess the extent of the flood damage.

The survey was submitted to Pakistan Government and today was made public at Friends of Democratic Pakistan (FoDP) meeting in Brussels.

“$ 9.7 billion is almost double the amount of damage caused by the 2005 Pakistan earthquake,” said Rune Stroem, ADB Country Director for Pakistan.

Rachid Benmessaoud, World Bank Country Director for Pakistan said that now the DNA has been completed “our job as friends of Pakistan is to help the country respond to this enormous reconstruction challenge.”

In carrying out the assessment, ADB and World Bank teams examined the extent of the damage in 15 key sectors across Pakistan, also the direct damage, indirect losses and reconstruction costs.

The DNA found that the agriculture and livestock sectors have been the worst hit, followed by complete or partial damage to a large number of houses.

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Microsoft Is Pinning Its Hopes on Windows Phone 7 - BusinessWeek

By Peter Burrows and Dina Bass

In an interview shortly after he unveiled Microsoft's (MSFT) new Windows Phone 7 mobile software on Oct. 11, Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer declared a new era for Microsoft. "This is a big launch for us—a big, big launch," he boomed.

Ballmer, never known for understatement, may be lowballing this one. Gartner (IT) expects smartphone sales to surpass PCs in 2012. Microsoft remains immensely profitable thanks to its aging PC monopoly, and it will remain so even if it never figures out the smartphone market. Yet the stakes go beyond numbers—it's about staying at the center of computing while the world's information moves away from PCs and into the cloud.

People get e-mail, music, and Season Two of Mad Men on smartphones and other mobile devices—essentially pocket computers—and that information is warehoused at and delivered from far-off data centers, not PC hard drives. "If Microsoft gets this right, the stock is really, really cheap," says Michael F. Holland, founder of investment firm Holland & Co. "It would be an indication they've been able to evolve into a 21st century company."

By almost any measure, Microsoft is nearly out of the mobile game. Its market share fell to 5 percent from 22 percent in 2004, says Gartner. Customer satisfaction of Windows smartphones is 24 percent, according to ChangeWave Research; it's 74 percent for iPhones and 65 percent for handsets powered by Google's (GOOG) Android. There are a few hundred apps for Windows mobile, vs. 250,000 for Apple (AAPL) and 70,000 for Android. Asked about Windows Phone 7's chances, Google Android chief Andy Rubin has said: "The world doesn't need another platform."

Unless, of course, Windows Phone 7 handsets, on sale Oct. 21 in Europe and Nov. 8 in the U.S., blow away consumers as the iPhone did back in 2007. Today, consumers load their smartphones with apps. Rather than tap between separate programs, Windows Phone 7 users will choose from a few larger icons—Microsoft calls them tiles—that aggregate information from related apps. For example, a "People" tile lets users contact friends via phone, text, or Facebook without having to click on any of those apps. An "Office" tile opens a screen to edit and send a PowerPoint deck or Word file, no attachments necessary. This is the biggest step forward since Android, says Jonathan Sasse, senior marketing vice-president of Internet music company Slacker.

Microsoft mobile chief Andy Lees says Windows Phone 7 reflects his group's new approach to design. In the past, the company wrote the software and left it to licensees to ensure great products. This time, Microsoft set strict rules. All Windows Phone 7 handsets must come with three buttons (home, search, and back) and a camera with at least five megapixels of resolution. "In some cases that meant saying no to some of our largest partners, says Lees. He adds that Microsoft doesn't need to have as many apps as Apple or Android, just the most popular ones. That way Microsoft can assure the quality of Windows handsets. Ours is a structured ecosystem," says Lees.

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