Michigan alumni also upset with football ticket prices, 'corporate culture' of athletics

ANN ARBOR -- Michigan's students aren't the only ones unhappy with the football program and the athletic department.

Former students are also less than thrilled.

A student protest and an online petition to remove Dave Brandon as the program's athletic director earlier this month ultimately led to a large price drop for student season football tickets beginning in 2015. The department cut prices by nearly 40 percent, as students will now pay $185 (including a service fee) for the home slate next year, down from $295 this past season.

However, Michigan alumni have also expressed their displeasure with high costs.Michigan's Alumni Association gathered reactions from anonymous alumsand posted them on the organization's website.

Those comments are as follows:

• "The athletic department procedures have emptied the cupboard of alumni support over the last several years and it will take a significant change within the department to bolster the level of support and fervor that existed then."

• "I am a 3rd generation Wolverine alumna living way out-of-state who waited 16 years to get season tickets and doesn't want to give them up, but the additional "charitable contribution" plus the huge price increase for tickets ($95 for the PSU game??) is a slap in my face and that of everyone who supports Michigan athletics."

• "I hope there will be a significant price decrease for regular/ alumni season tickets as well as that pricing has also gotten out of control, especially when you add in the mandatory donation."

With the announcement that prices would drop for students, Michigan also announced that it would keep general population football season tickets at the same price next season. The base price of a season ticket next season, without any preferred seat donation, will stay at $65 per game for the third straight year. For seven home games, that comes to $455.

Beyond that, the Alumni Association also gathered comments from alums addressing concerns over the "Corporatization of Football.

• "I come to Ann Arbor to remember the days that I lived there, that I went to games with friends, that I remembered cheering for MY team. If I wanted a corporate culture, I'd just go to an NFL game."

• "By treating us like mere customers to be plugged into a spreadsheet, they have effectively replaced the most loyal, natural fans of the team with the highest bidder."

• "I have watched with concern Michigan football turn into a marketing machine and the noise so loud in the stadium you can hardly have a conversation with the person sitting next to you."

• "If the students are not part of the Athletic tradition, then it becomes just a business and commercial venture."

At a Board of Regents meeting two weeks ago in Flint, Michigan president Mark Schlissel publicly expressed his displeasure with the athletic department's overall level of transparency during the Shane Morris injury situation, and outlined a number of other issues inside Brandon's department that are a concern.

He stated he would be deliberate and careful with his examination of the department, which includes Brandon, of course.

Asked Tuesday night by MLive at an event in Dexter if he's had any conversations with Schlissel about his job security, Brandon said: ""I meet with President Schlissel regularly. He's my boss."

At the same time, though, many around the department and the university have acknowledge that fan displeasure with the athletic department has seemed to bubble over this season.

Regent Mark Bernstein summed up the Morris situation, and the way it was handled, as a "spark in a very, very dry forest."

"I think the actions of the athletic department, I believe (some) generally agree, have drained whatever reservoir of goodwill there is with Michigan football in particular. So it makes navigating this issue far more difficult," Bernstein said two weeks ago. "Therefore, it makes this moment much more complex. Is that the fault of the athletic director? Partially. But at the same time, we all care deeply about this university. We care about the student-athletes who are working hard every day at the game they love.

"We care about our students, our fans, our alums. We want to get this right. And that's why it's essential that the board support the president's deliberative, methodical approach to this to figure out the best course of action."

மனிதர்களிடம் துரோகத்தை

நாய்களிடம் நன்றியை பார்க்கலாம்.

தேனீக்களிடம் உழைப்பை பார்க்கலாம்.

காகத்திடம் இருந்து ஒற்றுமையை பார்க்கலாம்.

மனிதர்களிடம் துரோகத்தை பார்க்கலாம்.

நீங்கள் எங்களுடைய பணத்தை எங்களுக்கே

நீங்கள் எங்களுடைய பணத்தை எங்களுக்கே இலவச பொருளாக  தந்து எங்களை  பிச்சைக்காரர்களாக மாற்றி,(அதிலும் கொள்ளை) அதற்க்காக  விலைவாசியை ஏற்றி,எங்களை நீங்கள் சிரமபடுத்துவதைவிட,நீங்கள் உங்களுடைய  சேவையை (வியாபாரத்தை) செய்யாமல் இருங்கள்.நாங்கள் உங்களுக்கு பிச்சை போட்டதாக நினைத்து வாழ்ந்துவிடுவோம்.

7 Tips to Unlock the Potential of Google Inbox

Google is busy sending out invites for Google Inbox, so if you haven't yet been granted accessthen you should be let in soon. Inbox takes a whole new approach to email, so you might find yourself disoriented to begin with—here are seven key features that show off the potential of Google's new email messaging system.

1. Snooze emails

Previously seen in third-party clients (most notably Mailbox), Inbox lets you snooze emails to deal with later—it's the same as archiving emails, except these messages pop back into view after a predefined time. In the apps, swipe left on a thread; on the Web, click the clock icon. Available options include later today, tomorrow, next week or some day. The email remains snoozed until you manually move it back.

You can choose to set a specific date and time for the message to return (handy for those flight confirmations) and if you're using Inbox on a mobile you can also associate the unsnooze action with a specific location. Your snoozed messages can be viewed from the main Inbox menu in your browser or in the mobile apps.

2. Pin emails

Pinned emails are to Inbox what starred emails are to standard Gmail. You can quickly view pinned messages—"emails you need to get back to" in the words of Google—by toggling the master switch at the top of the Inbox interface on Web and mobile. Emails that you've snoozed are automatically pinned and show up in the same view as well as any reminders that you've created.

Don't pin emails then mark them as done with the green tick—this will archive the message and remove the pin at the same time. Pins are designed to be used the other way around, to bring emails back to the inbox from the archive or from bundles such as Social and Updates. Apply a pin when you've got a message that you don't want to lose in the deluge of other emails.

3. Use the Low Priority label

It's likely that a lot of the email traffic that arrives in your inbox is "low priority" and Google does make some attempt to sift out automatic emails, special offers, confirmation messages, social updates and the like. Inbox introduces a new Low Priority label that you can use instead of or alongside bundles like Social and Promotions. Find it on the app's main menu to activate it.

Low Priority works in the same way as marking a message as "not important" in the main Gmail interface. These unimportant messages can be bundled together in the main Inbox view, and you can also opt to have them skip the main view automatically in the Low Priority label settings. Messages can be moved between Low Priority and other bundled groups depending on how you want to use it, and Google Inbox will set up automatic filters if you want it to.

4. Create reminders

Reminders are a Google Now feature really, but they make it into Google Inbox as well. You can create simple reminders that hang around as sticky posts in the Inbox view and the Pinned view. Unfortunately, there's no ability to associate a reminder with a particular time, date or location (as you can in Google Now) so presumably Google will improve this feature over time.

The implementation is a little wonky right now. Simple reminders set up from Inbox will show up in the main Inbox view, but reminders created from Google Now won't; however, these Google Now reminders do appear when you pick the Reminders tab from the Inbox menu on the Web or on mobile. Jump to the reminders section of Google Now, however, and you won't see reminders created in Inbox at all. Hopefully they clear that up.

5. Marking as done

Inbox has been built to make it easier for you to power through your emails, and the Done button (an icon showing a tick) is a big part of that. It appears at the top of your inbox, at the top of each thread, alongside your bundled messages and on individual emails too. It's the equivalent of the archiving feature in Gmail, so messages marked as done are still accessible via search and the Done entry on the app's main menu.

On mobile you can swipe an email to the right to mark it as Done. As with the old archive method, this doesn't affect its read/unread state or the labels associated with it. Reminders can be marked as done in the same way. The only way to bring emails that you've previously dismissed back into the main Inbox view is to pin them (or open the standard Gmail interface and move the message back into the inbox from the All Mail view).

6. Building bundles

Bundles are another of the headline features of Inbox but you might find yourself a little wary of the way they automatically hoover up many of your incoming messages. They're like the preset tabs in the Gmail Priority Inbox, but they stay in line with your other messages. You can move individual emails to and from these bundles, and (as with Priority Inbox) each time you do this the app will ask if you want to sort these kinds of emails automatically in the future.

Bundles can be accessed from the main Inbox menu on the Web and in the mobile apps, and marked as done in batches. Open up the setting page for a bundle (via the cog icon at the top) and you can opt to switch on a digest view that only shows these messages once a day or once a week. You can build your own bundles too: Select an existing Gmail label (or create a new one) from the Inbox menu, click or tap the cog icon, then opt to bundle these types of messages automatically.

7. Search smarter

Google has upgraded email search with Inbox as well. Try running a query for "my next flight" or "hotel booking" or "Rob phone" to see the relevant information pop up straight away, dug out of your inbox and presented in a simple card-style format. As with the main Google portal, the idea is that you don't even need to finish your search to see the information you need.

Facebook Pre-Earnings: Expect Growth Momentum To Continue

With Facebook’s stock rising by 30% over the last six months due to impressive results, many investors will be on their heels on October 28, to see if the companycan keep its growth momentum intact with Q3 2014 earnings. The company posted 61% revenue growth in the second quarter, along with a 17 percentage point improvement in the GAAP operating margin. We expect the company to show solid results in the third quarter as well, fueled by its strategy to focus on mobile devices, improve ad products and grow the number of marketers on the platform. However, the growth rate could slow somewhat in sequential terms in the third quarter due to tougher comps.

While we expect profitability to improve in the third quarter as well, we’d like to remind investors that various factors such as incremental operating costs due to closing of WhatsApp and Oculus acquisitions, along with rise in core operating expenses will weigh on the company’s profitability post Q3. In terms of revenue growth, we believe there is huge long-term potential for the company to expand its advertising revenue from the U.S. and abroad. Building out the eco-system (which comprises of several entities such as WhatsApp and Instagram) and enhancing online video advertising will further propel top-line growth for the company in the long term.

Our price estimate for Facebook stands at $65.50, implying a discount of about 20% to the market. We forecast Facebook’s revenue and EBITDA to grow meaningfully from $7.9 billion and $4.9 billion in 2013 to over $42 billion and $30 billion by the end of our forecast horizon (i.e 2021) in our model.

Facebook Offers Life Raft, but Publishers Are Wary

For publishers, Facebook is a bit like that big dog galloping toward you in the park. More often than not, it’s hard to tell whether he wants to play with you or eat you.

The social network now has over 1.3 billion users — a fifth of the planet’s population and has become a force in publishing because of its News Feed, which has been increasingly fine-tuned to feature high-quality content, the kind media companies produce.

To its credit and economic benefit, Facebook has done a better job of cleaning some junk from its feed, featuring news that leads to stronger levels of engagement, which is a win for the platform, the publisher and the readers.

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That role has become increasingly important when you factor in the big tilt to mobile, as my colleague Ravi Somaiya points out. For traditional publishers, the home page may soon become akin to the print edition — nice to have, but not the primary attraction. In the last few months, more than half the visitors to The New York Times have come via mobile — the figure increases with each passing month — and that percentage is higher for many other publishers.

Enter Facebook’s popular mobile app, which has captured greater amounts of time and, more remarkably, managed to fit a business model onto the small screen by providing extremely relevant advertising. By contrast, publishers like newspapers and magazines and even some digital sites have tried to shoehorn old business models and web templates onto tiny screens. That hasn’t worked so well.

Loading publishers’ web pages on a mobile device can be maddening, slowed by advertising that goes out for auction when readers click. So while Facebook loves the content, it hates the clunky technology many publishers use for mobile. When it comes to the impatient hordes on phones, speed matters above all else.

I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago and bumped into an executive who works in mobile at Facebook. He wasn’t speaking for attribution, but he derided the approach that traditional publishers take to mobile devices, saying it made for an unpleasant user experience, hurt user engagement and crippled their efforts to make money in a smartphone world.

Facebook hopes it has a fix for all that. The company has been on something of a listening tour with publishers, discussing better ways to collaborate. The social network has been eager to help publishers do a better job of servicing readers in the News Feed, including improving their approach to mobile in a variety of ways. One possibility it mentioned was for publishers to simply send pages to Facebook that would live inside the social network’s mobile app and be hosted by its servers; that way, they would load quickly with ads that Facebook sells. The revenue would be shared.

That kind of wholesale transfer of content sends a cold, dark chill down the collective spine of publishers, both traditional and digital insurgents alike. If Facebook’s mobile app hosted publishers’ pages, the relationship with customers, most of the data about what they did and the reading experience would all belong to the platform. Media companies would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns.

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It is a measure of Facebook’s growing power in digital realms that when I called around about those rumors, no one wanted to talk. Well, let me revise that: Many wanted to talk, almost endlessly, about how terrible some of the possible changes would be for producers of original content, but not if I was going to indicate their place of employment. (Many had signed confidentiality agreements, so there’s that as well.)

It’s not that Facebook has a reputation for extracting vengeance, so far as I know; it’s just that the company has become the No. 1 source of traffic for many digital publishers. Yes, search from Google still creates inbound interest, and Twitter can spark attention, especially among media types, but when it comes to sheer tonnage of eyeballs, nothing rivals Facebook.

“The traffic they send is astounding and it’s been great that they have made an effort to reach out and boost quality content,” said one digital publishing executive, who declined to be identified so as not to ruffle the feathers of the golden goose. “But all any of us are talking about is when the other shoe might drop.”

Chris Cox, chief product officer for Facebook, knows that the frightened chatter is out there, but says those worries are unfounded because the interests of Facebook and digital publishers are pretty much aligned.

“We are at the very beginning of a conversation and it’s very important that we get this right,” he said in a video call. “Because we play an increasingly important role in how people discover the news that they read every day, we feel a responsibility to work with publishers to come up with as good an experience as we can for consumers. And we want and need that to be a good experience for publishers as well.”

Facebook’s concerns seem sincere, but the relationship can be fraught. Several years ago, The Guardian and The Washington Post achieved eye-popping traffic from a Facebook news app called Social Reader. But eventually consumers rebelled against excessive notices about what their friends were reading, Facebook tweaked the algorithm, traffic fell and the plug was pulled in 2012.

Given the amount of leverage Facebook has, many publishers are worried that what has been a listening tour could become a telling tour, in which Facebook dictates terms because it drives so much traffic. (Amazon’s dominance in the book business comes to mind.)

“We’ve talked about the importance of a united front so that Facebook gets the message that this isn’t going to work, but that could change if somebody cuts a big revenue-sharing deal,” another publishing executive said.

It reminds me very much of those times when other digital behemoths tried to persuade content providers into letting them host the publishers’ content. In the early days, when AOL was dominant, the service preyed on the publishers’ fear that if they didn’t put their content inside the walled garden of AOL, their content would be invisible. That strategy benefited AOL in the short run, but no one prospered in the long run.

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story

Continue reading the main story

And I remember a visit to Google when Sergey Brin, a founder of the company, and some of his colleagues talked about how clunky most news web pages were — sound familiar? — and offered to host content with quicker load times and a revenue share. That went nowhere fast.

Once companies reach a certain scale online, they have a tendency to decide that while they love the Internet, they would like a better version. And, oh, by the way, they should run it. (All considered, Apple has already pulled off that trick, creating a private enclave of apps that it controls.)

David Bradley, who owns and leads the Atlantic Media Company, says it has an excellent relationship with Facebook and profits nicely from the traffic the site generates. But he says the next battle for control over content is a significant one, not so much mandated by Facebook as by consumer preference.

“Increasingly, people would rather have their news curated by friends rather than editors,” he said. “Facebook technology may create a better reader experience than publishers can match — pages that load better and better page design.”

He has been thinking a lot about what that means.

“My job is to navigate The Atlantic to continuing good relations with the platforms,” he said. “In my last trip to the Valley, the best minds were talking about the same issue: Is the coming contest between platforms and publishing companies an existential threat to journalism? At least in the Valley, largely the answer I heard was ‘Yes.’ ”

His candor is admirable, but his conclusion is scary. The Facebook dog is loose, and he’s acting more friendly than hungry. But everyone knows that if the dog is big enough, he can lick you to death as well.

FOCUS – SNB could need to buy $60 bln of gold, first poll shows ‘yes’ vote

The Swiss National Bank could be forced to buy nearly $60 billion of gold at current spot prices after the first poll on the impending Swiss referendum shows a ‘yes’ vote could be on the cards.

On November 30, voters in Switzerland will decide whether or not to outlaw further gold sales from the Swiss National Bank, to make physical bullion at least 20 percent of the bank’s assets and whether to repatriate Swiss-owned gold.

A recent poll by popular online news site 20 Minuten shows the initiative’s supporters ahead 45 percent to 39 percent.

Should the country vote in favour of these proposals, the SNB will be forced to enter the physical bullion market to raise its gold holdings from around 7-8 percent at present, according to World Gold Council statistics.

The country has 1,040 tonnes of gold in its reserves, according to WGC figures, and would therefore need around to buy another 1,500 tonnes of metal to bring gold holdings to 20 percent of its assets.

At current spot gold prices of 1,239.70/1,240.40 per ounce, this equates to more than $60 billion.

“If the Swiss vote to boost gold reserves, as well as providing extra physical gold buying, it will also be a strong signal supporting the monetisation of gold – a move away from fiat money,” FastMarkets analyst William Adams said. “This may well encourage other countries to follow suit.”

“Let’s not forget that although confidence in the financial system may have been restored over the last year or so there is still a huge amount of sovereign debt and it remains far from clear how governments with deal with it. How they do may well become gold’s business,” he added.

Still, the ‘Save Our Swiss gold’ campaign may well flounder – the 26 Swiss Cantons or member states could theoretically dismiss the results of the referendum.

“Given that the SNB and the Federal government are actively opposed to the constitutional amendment, this may be an insurmountable barrier,” Barclays noted in a report.

There could be wider issues that impose a significant constraint on the SNB’s conduct of monetary policy, it added.

“The passage of the referendum would not remove SNB independence, but would alter its incentives to pursue balance-sheet related unconventional policy measures, hence undermining its credibility to purchase unlimited amounts of FX in defending its current primary policy tool, the EURCHF floor,” the bank said.

“It may increase the likelihood of the SNB following the ECB in introducing negative deposit rates. While gold markets have been most focused on the issue, the five-year phase-in would limit volatility, though passage of the initiative likely would raise the long-term equilibrium price for gold,” it added.

The Swiss People’s Party (SVP) launched the Swiss gold initiative in September 2011, with the target of achieving the 100,000 signatures in 18 months needed to advance the initiative to a federal referendum.

It gave several reasons for the programme: first, that following efforts from the ECB and the US Federal Reserve to devalue their respective currencies, the strength of the Swiss Franc had been weakened, forcing the Swiss to consider doing something similar.

The SVP also claims that Swiss gold is the property of the people, citing the SNB sell-off of 1,550 tonnes of the country’s original 2,590 tonnes of reserves in 2000 as a breach of that right.

Lastly, the SVP says that the SNB should reveal the locations of any Swiss gold reserves and repatriate any of the offshore metal, details of which have long been kept from public knowledge.

Swiss gross exports of gold surged to 172.6 tonnes in September, which is the highest monthly outflow since February. Of that total, exports to India were 58.8 tonnes, about twice the average monthly volume.

But gold imports into Switzerland were also higher at 194.6 tonnes, with inflow from the UK rising to 63.3 tonnes from 8.6 tonnes in August.

- See more at: http://www.bulliondesk.com/gold-news/focus-snb-could-need-to-buy-60-bln-gold-first-poll-shows-yes-vote-83907/#sthash.tlh9hszQ.dpuf