Big corporate losses have been the flavour of the week almost gone, with Polstar stealing the “crown”, if that’s the right expression, with a £38 million pre-tax loss for its 2009 accounts. This is a company where the “gross profit” sits at £29.1 million (down a third, according to PrintWeek), and it is suggested that the CEO is paid in excess of £900,000 for the year, including bonuses! This week’s information request involves you e-mailing PIND.editor@gmail.com with some good reasons as to why the CEO of any company should be paid bonuses for losing £38 million. Some of the comment attached to this story on printweek.com makes for interesting reading.
In silver medal position this week, but an excellent effort, goes to the Evening Standard, where the loss was only £28.3 million for its first year of trading under the Russian media mogul’s banner. This is less staggering I guess in so far as it does include restructuring costs, including redundancies and the move to a free-sheet model, and also the acquisition itself, costing a suggested £6.7 million.In what has to be seen as a positive move, BPIF members have voted to exclude pre-packs from membership of the federation. Companies have already been turned away as a result of this decision.
Going back to previous topics, we talked about browsers last week, and suggested that both Chrome and Opera were taking ground from the original breakthrough company Mozilla and its Firefox product. Well, Firefox is fighting back this week with a Beta release of its Firefox 4 browser. However, it might be argued that with tabs on the top row of the browser layout and the traditional menu bar disappearing behind one coloured button, that Opera 10.6 has been more than a slight influence on the new look product! Further tips on how to fiddle with the toolbar are offered from our friends at Lifehacker.One other Firefox mention: a new extension, Poyozo, offers one simple streamlined way to collecting together all of your various inbox’s in your virtual life. Might be worth a look. Although both Chrome and Safari have jumped onto the extensions train, neither has anything remotely close to the variety and sheer number of optional extra’s that Firefox can offer.
The week before we looked closely at the new Apple iPhone 4. Now as introductions go it’s had a bit of a rocky ride with the signal loss issue especially! Here at PIND we have gone for a Gear4 cover – a two piece full surround, which actually works out less expensive than the much promoted Apple Bumper, costing £25, which is now in short supply! The Gear 4 cover, as illustrated, makes it easier to get the phone in and out in order to mount it into a car cradle.
For those who have become seriously disenchanted with Mr Jobs and company it might be worth having a look at this “jumping ship” feature, detailing what a move from iPhone to Android would entail features-wise.PIND013
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