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The company has 3,100 part-time employees or contractors, but it’s not clear how many of those people work in the retail segment. A call to Apple seeking comment on its plans for its part-time employees was not immediately returned.

Nearly half of all Apple employees now work in the company’s retail segment, which is probably the area of its business most exposed to a volatile economy. Apple has 32,000 full-time employees, 15,900 of whom work in retail.

Apple may be cutting the hours of part-time workers in its retail stores, such as this one in downtown San Francisco.

Apple may be planning to shuffle its retail staffing plans in advance of what is expected to be a rough couple of months for the economy.

Apple’s retail operation uses a fair amount of part-time “Specialists” as greeters standing by the front door of its stores, directing customers to the appropriate parts of the store and answering basic questions. It seems that more and more of that role will be assigned to the fabled “Geniuses,” who will have to get out from behind the service desk and walk the store floor more often, according to the report.

AppleInsider reports that the company’s retail arm, which added 8,000 workers during the last year, is taking a few steps to reduce costs without laying off any employees.

According to the report, Apple is telling its part-time workers that they will be getting fewer hours for the foreseeable future, while full-time workers are going to be asked to do more.

(Credit:
Apple)

It’s buried in footnotes to earnings reports and sometimes almost seems intentionally obfuscated. The Securities and Exchange Commission thinks it has the answer: a type of language for business data that could be to finance what HTML was to the Internet.

EDGARfilings is a vendor that provides software for filing documents with the SEC, and the company has invested heavily in XBRL software, Yapundich said.

XBRL filings use XML data tags to describe business and financial information, making the documents much more searchable than the current official EDGAR filings, which are submitted in HTML or plain text format. Elements of a report, such as executive pay, are much more accessible, and the new format allows for more extensive cross analysis.

The SEC maintains an online database called EDGAR–the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system–so investors can review public companies’ financial reports.

Politicians, shareholders, and the public alike are clamoring for more transparency and accountability from Wall Street, the panelists at the conference said. Eisuke Nagatomo, president and CEO of Japanese company EN Associates, said that in the past year, the term “corporate governance” appeared 575 times in the Wall Street Journal–the same as the previous six years combined.

That was the plan, at least. There have been no fewer than 17 conferences so far to advance the Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, standard, and it still is not mandatory for U.S. companies. (The SEC started a voluntary XBRL filing program, and in May 2008 published a proposal that would require companies to submit their financial statements in XBRL format starting in the first quarter of 2009.)

By providing standardization from company to company and across markets and making elements like executive pay easy to find in a report, XBRL has the potential to eliminate the time crunch involved in that process, he said.

The conference appeared to be peopled not with representatives from public companies who will file in XBRL format–but instead government regulators and vendors like EDGARfilings, Fujitsu, and Rivet Software that are pitching their XBRL software.

At the 18th International XBRL Conference held here on Thursday, the SEC was expected to officially establish new XBRL filing rules. However, the rules were not set, and embattled SEC Chairman Chris Cox–Sen. John McCain has called for his resignation as a result of the recent financial crisis–did not appear at the conference as scheduled.

“We have hundreds of companies sitting on the fence,” said John Yapundich, executive vice president of EDGARfilings.

In general, regulators claim that adopting XBRL is essential to improving the efficiency and transparency of the public reporting process and has far-reaching implications for keeping track of the corporate world both domestically and internationally. But publicly traded companies don’t like the uncertainty created by the SEC’s delays.

With so many large companies collapsing under poor management, high executive pay has been a particularly hot issue. The House of Representatives in April 2007 passed a bill providing shareholders with an advisory vote on executive compensation, and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama sponsored matching “say on pay” legislation in the Senate. With McCain also expressing his support for shareholder advisory votes, the legislation will likely make it into law during the next administration.

WASHINGTON–Financial information about companies is sometimes difficult to uncover, and even more difficult to compare.

“That tightens the need for better and faster information,” said Patrick McGurn, special counsel for RiskMetrics Group. “Investors will be looking at hundreds of thousands of these ’say on pay’ profiles.”

Even so, “people are only slowly adopting the XBRL format because they’re waiting to see the rule sets from the SEC,” he said.

“The benefit is better analysis, better understanding–it’s the transparency virtue we’re shooting for,” David Blaszkowsky, director of the SEC office of interactive disclosure, said Thursday at the conference.

“There’s a need for XBRL to serve as the horse in front of the cart on the disclosure issue,” McGurn said. “Once investors have information for one market, they’ll want it for every market.”

The browser is really what stops Student Pad from joining the workforce as a tolerable alternative browser. You can change your font, adjust the text and background colors, mark favorites, and view the source code. A helpful icon–the sheets of paper–copies and pastes the URL you’re looking at directly into the notepad.

However, the browser itself doesn’t work as smoothly as it should. It’s slow to load pages, sluggish when scrolling, and reluctantly lets you jump into other programs. A lack of tooltips makes getting acclimated a struggle. Modern browsing features such as tabs and a download manager are not supported, and advanced security enhancements are present only in a “web security indicator” that doesn’t seem to work.

It’s a good idea, with an execution that is clearly still in development and more novelty than anything else. There are some nifty student-based needs addressed here. There’s a built-in calculator with square-root functionality, calendar, bibliography template, e-mail client with Gmail and Hotmail hooks, MDI editor, and a basic spate of browsing features. The notepad lives on top of the browser, emphasizing both workflow and feature set.

There are some interesting tweaks here, including rolling most features under the Tools menu. Perhaps the program will become significantly better in the next major update, planned for April 10. For right now, Student Pad remains an interesting curiosity–but nothing more.

This alternative browser looks to be built on Internet Explorer, combining a robust notepad with diminished Web browsing. Freeware Student Pad splits the browser and notepad horizontally, so that the top half of window is for taking notes and the bottom half is for surfing the web. It sounds like an interesting project, but the execution of it as it is now shows that there’s room for improvement. There’s also no documentation on the browser’s source, although it uses Favorites so I’m assuming it’s based on IE.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET Networks)

He lacks the out-sized personality and charisma that is needed to inspire confidence in battles for the soul of a company. He said he would “go through walls” for Yahoo, but having personal passion and a vision isn’t enough to get others to walk through the walls.

He has to convince employees, shareholders, customers, and partners that no matter how difficult the situation, he can lead Yahoo to the promised land. Think reality-distortion field Steve Jobs, no-software Marc Benioff, dancing bear Steve Ballmer, the disarming Howard Stringer, the professorial Eric Schmidt, or the preacher John Chambers. Bill Gates doesn’t have the most charismatic or endearing personality, but he manages to control interviews, delivering the messages he wants.

Yang is ready and willing to fight, but the Chief Yahoo needs a new general to lead his troops.

The reviews of Jerry Yang’s performance at the Web 2.0 Summit have not been glowing. The Yahoo CEO’s interview with Web 2.0 Summit co-host John Battelle this week has been described as a train wreck, self-delusional, and as making a mockery of the vaunted company he helped create.

During the interview, Yang defined Yahoo’s vision as a “consumer brand that allows people to get what they want on the Internet.” Yahoo is a destination site with starting points, such as Yahoo Finance and the Yahoo home page, and is rewiring its platform to be more open and extensible. It serves billions of dollars in ads and is the No. 2 search engine. It’s a sound strategy. Yahoo is not Google or Microsoft and has to double-down on its core assets and 500 million to 600 million users.

Watch the full video, courtesy of TechWeb:

Jerry Yang and John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit

Yang’s job is to sell that vision inside and especially outside of Yahoo. The problem is Yang can’t sell.

TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington wrote that Yahoo needs its Barack Obama, “someone to make everyone believe that a true leader is at the helm, ready to fight. Someone with a believable plan. Someone who can inspire Yahoo–and Yahoo users–to believe that Yahoo can once again become a force on the Internet.”

But apparently fans’ thirst was greater than Dr Pepper predicted–or prepared for. The crush of visitors to the site crashed the site’s servers, leading to a lot of angry fans, some of whom mistakenly blamed the band for their lack of liquid refreshment. Now frontman Axl Rose and his bandmates are ready to pop.

Despite those measures, the band is still waiting for its apology.

Dr Pepper told CNN that it had “taken great steps” to keep its part of the deal and that it had extended the window for the giveaway from 24 to 42 hours. The drink maker also set up a toll-free line to handle consumer requests for the coupons. All of those measures have since expired.

“When you go on the blogs and you read the responses from the fans, they associated Axl with this promotion…and blame him for the fact that they didn’t get their free soda,” Laurie Soriano, the band’s lawyer, told CNN. “We’ve gone public with the fact that we are not involved but are trying to clean up the mess.”

The soda pop maker launched a marketing campaign in March that promised a free soda to “everyone in America” if the rock band released its long-awaited Chinese Democracy album this year. After a 17-year wait, the band finally released the album–and Dr Pepper gave fans 24 hours to go to its Web site to print a coupon for their free soda.

“The door to a lawsuit being filed is always open until the fans are taken care of and Dr Pepper has done the right thing,” Soriano told CNN.

A Dr Pepper promotion revolving around Guns N’ Roses’ new album has gone flat–and the band is getting the misdirected static.

Google has entered the browser space. Chrome, its browser still in beta, is based on the open source Webkit project. Some will recognize Webkit as the foundation for another browser, Apple
Safari. But Chrome also borrows heavily from Mozilla
Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer, giving this new browser an old and familiar feel.

There is, however, innovation.

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Tabs are arrayed atop the browser instead of in the traditional toolbar. And users can drag and drop the tabs on the desktop outside the browser. There is also a way to make an icon for GMail and Google Calendar on your desktop.

In this podcast, Hoffman offers what he thinks Google did right with Chrome, and what could be trouble down the road.

Deep down, Google has also upgraded how the browser handles Javasript. Gone are the days when Java applets simply gave you dancing babies on a Web page. Today we’re running robust applications.

Joining CNET News’ Robert Vamosi this week is Billy Hoffman, manager of HP’s Web security group. Hoffman, along with Bryan Sullivan, also co-authored AJAX Security.

However, while offering Microsoft products with a reduced price tag to the public sector might be viewed by some as a move in the right direction, the firm didn’t reveal how Office 2007 might be made more interoperable with other doc formats.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” seems to be the strategy. Discounts are nice, but discounts only make it cheaper to fall into lock-in. The Open Source Consortium’s president, Mark Taylor, says it well: “Schools can now choose between long-term software freedom or a short-term discount on the next lock-in play.”

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Microsoft will no doubt eventually be forced into offering interoperability alongside its discounts. As noted on InfoWorld, Microsoft has even made some strides toward a more peaceful future with open source, the kissing cousin to open standards.

Now Microsoft has stepped in to appease some of the education tech body’s grumbles by announcing a new Open Licensing Programme (OLP) for government that will launch at the start of next month.

Fortunately, groups like Becta, which brought the original complaint against Microsoft to the European Commission, are unlikely to fall asleep at the wheel.

In an attempt to get its Office 2007 program on the desktops of U.K. youth, The Register reports that Microsoft is saying all the right things to the U.K. government in its attempt to placate the European Commission over interoperability with open file formats. Everything, that is, except how it intends to make its software more interoperable

The company said the OLP offered “a new way for public sector organisations to purchase software from Microsoft resellers” who will sell MS products at a discounted rate.

It’s just too bad that so much time must be wasted along the way.

A lot has happened in the intervening time–Live Nation emerged as a competitor to Ticketmaster, then agreed to merge with Ticketmaster, and The Wall Street Journal has published a couple
of articles exposing the fact that artists and managers often team up with ticket sellers (like Ticketmaster) and brokers (like Ticketmaster subsidiary TicketExchange) to sell their own allotments of tickets for several times their face value.

(Credit: Photo by Babak Gholizadeh, via Wikipedia)

In the end, NIN decided to charge only face value for its allotment of presale fan club seats and to put antiscalping provisions in place: buyers’ names will be printed on the ticket, and buyers will have to go through a special entrance where IDs will be checked. He believes that forgoing short-term gain in the interest of long-term fan relationships is the right thing to do.

Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor on Sunday posted a fascinating take on the whole practice of scalping. As he points out, Ticketmaster or Live Nation could have stopped the practice of scalping eons ago–all they’d had to do is print the purchaser’s name on the ticket and require a photo ID matching the ticket to get in, as they do with airline tickets. (And hey, some concerts–like the Police tour–have seats that cost more than the average airline ticket.) The reason they don’t is because Ticketmaster benefits from the scalper’s market through its TicketExchange subsidiary.

Eventually, concert tickets will be sold through a dynamic pricing model, just like items in a bazaar.

More fascinating, however, is Trent’s account of how he wrestled with the temptation to sell the band’s allotment of tickets–10 percent, in NIN’s case–for more than face value. As he rightly points out, as long as there are people willing to pay $1,000 for front-row seats, either the band has to charge that amount and be criticized for looking greedy, or a second market is going to thrive.

If you’re sick of paying exorbitant prices for big-concert arena tickets, I promise you that there are plenty of small bands playing in your town tonight that you’d enjoy, that would love to have you there, and that won’t charge you more than $30 for the privilege. You might not get to hear your favorite song, but you’ll actually see and hear the band up close, and you won’t have to deal with that “down in front” guy who always seems to sit behind you.

A year and a half after I first blogged about ticket brokers and the free market, the rest of the world is finally catching on to the fact that scalping isn’t going away.

I agree with his prediction of the future: eventually, the Ticketmaster-Live Nation merged company will move to dynamic pricing for all tickets, similar to how airlines price tickets today. If it’s a hot ticket, prices could skyrocket even higher than scalpers’ prices today. Then again, if tickets aren’t selling, there might be a last-minute fire sale–good for fans.

The first is a stored wish list, which the company says users could treat like Neflix’s DVD queue. In other words, if the service gave you multiple trips that you’d like to go on, you can save the ones you don’t choose for the future.

First, the group defines where they’re beginning their trip and then specifies the number of people on the trip, how many hours they are willing to travel and how long they have for the trip. Then, they can choose tags from a long list of activities that each person wants to do.

The idea of the so-called Social Trip Planner is that a group of people expecting to travel together can use a rich Web site to plan and organize their vacation and share information about what they’re doing amongst each other easily and automatically.

SAN DIEGO–One of the nice things about Web 2.0 is that the interactivity it promises can be applied to almost any kind of application.

The service starts with what the company calls its “inspiration planner,” which is designed to help a group traveling together–be it a family or several friends–figure out a destination that meets everyone’s needs.

TravelMuse brings Web 2.0 functionality to the task of group travel planning.

The social trip planner also allows users to find searched-for trips other people have created to see what else might be fun.

At this point, the service produces a list of potential destinations that meet the criteria defined by the group.

That’s the basis of TravelMuse’s new social trip planning service, which it unveiled at DemoFall Tuesday.

This in and of itself is impressive, as anyone who has ever tried to put together a trip with a group would know.

This seems like a valuable service, especially for families with kids who want to figure out a vacation alternative to Disneyland, but who don’t really have any idea where they want to do. Because it offers vacationers the ability to pick and choose the activities they want from a large this, the service seems likely to be able to help people like this meet their needs.

Then, based on the criteria a group has defined, the service offers up suggestions for hotels and other services at the destination, and as the group is putting its trip together, they can drag and drop those suggestions into the planner.

But the service has many other features as well.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

If things need to change after the planning has begun, you can swap out an entire day’s activities for another by simply dragging and dropping, and everyone involved is automatically notified of the changes.

The application was created by Moderati, the same company that created the Virtual Zippo Lighter. There’s a YouTube video, posted below, that shows the Virtual Yule Log in action.

Now, if only I could watch a dreidel being made out of clay while Rock of Ages plays in the background, my holidays would be complete.

But what if the holiday season takes you even further afield, so that you don’t even have a plasma TV to keep you warm. Well, record label EMI has come up with an option–play the Yule Log on your
iPhone or
iPod Touch.

For $1.99, it is offering the Virtual Yule Log application at the iTunes store, featuring holiday tunes from its catalog, which includes holiday songs from Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Nat King Cole.

For those without a fireplace and/or an ability to carry a tune, TV stations have for decades offered the Yule Log, an on-screen fireplace crackling as Christmas Carols play in the background.

According to “The Holiday Yule Log” book, the first televised fireplace was in 1966 on New York’s WPIX-TV. With carols on in the background and no commercials, it was an instant hit and was adopted by other stations around the country.