Silver Samsung Tocco Lite available on T-Mobile

 The Silver Samsung Tocco Lite is now available on T-Mobile, and is confirmed as being in stock.

The Samsung Tocco Lite, also available in Black, Gold, Pink and Red, still reigns as Samsung’s most popular handset, thanks to it’s host of features and affordable price tag. It’s a phone aimed at social networkers, as its 3 inch display offers instant  live updates from Facebook and Twitter. The TouchWiz interface also offers one touch access to your email accounts, the integrated web browser and the pre-loaded YouTube widget. That’s not all, as the Samsung Tocco Lite also sports a 3.15 megapixel camera, a built-in media player and up to 16GB of storage.

The Samsung Tocco Lite Silver is now available to order on pay monthly deals with T-Mobile. Prices start from just £3.19/month, once cashback from 21 months free line rental has been claimed from a 2 year £25.54/month contract. This deal includes a free handset, 600 minutes, 500 texts and 500MB data. The handset is also available to order on O2, Orange and Vodafone.

The Silver Samsung Tocco Lite is also available on Pay As You Go with O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Virgin and Vodafone, from just £34.90.

source. http://www.dialtosave.co.uk/mobile/news/2011/02/21/silver-samsung-tocco-lite-available-on-t-mobile/

Apple flunks a test

To require incumbent directors to attract more than 50 per cent shareholder support to secure re-election to the board scarcely sounds controversial. Yet Apple, the highest flying of high-tech companies, is battling to ward off a shareholder resolution at its annual meeting on Wednesday that calls for precisely that.

Behind the proposal is Calpers, the Californian pension fund, which has been talking to 50 of the largest companies in its portfolio to request voting reform. It objects to the US plurality voting system whereby votes against a nominee for the board have no effect and re-election can take place even on the basis of only one favourable vote. In place of this farcical non-franchise, Calpers proposes majority voting in the interests of heightened accountability.

More than 69 per cent of companies in the S&P 500 have already adopted majority voting. So why should Apple, whose board includes a notable supporter of responsible governance in former vice-president Al Gore, say no?

The company’s rejection rests largely on what it calls “the unusual mechanics of California law” relating to the number of shares required for a quorum. In effect, an Apple director would have to have just more than 25 per cent of the outstanding shares to be re-elected under majority voting. Apple claims to be worried that it could lose all its directors simply because too few shareholders cast their votes. It fears the threshold has become more challenging since stock exchanges scrapped rules permitting brokers to cast their clients’ votes where there were no client instructions.

This is a curious argument, since the legitimacy of re-election on a turnout of only 25 per cent would anyway be highly questionable. Moreover, the quorum rule is healthy because it prevents companies bouncing things through on a small turnout and gives an incentive to ensure votes are cast. And since attempts to change the law to allow shareholders to put forward other candidates came to nothing last year, ejected directors could be reappointed anyway. That highlights the fact that majority voting is only a halfway house to sensible voting reform.

What makes Apple’s resistance all the more strange is that other Californian companies such as Cisco Systems and PG&E Corporation have adopted majority voting without apparent qualms. Apple is not, in other respects, a governance dinosaur. But on this issue, Calpers undoubtedly has the better of the argument.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

source. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a0c30680-3df5-11e0-99ac-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1Efe0tJID

As the Web and web design progressed

 As the Web and web design progressed, the markup language changed to become more complex and flexible, giving the ability to add objects like images and tables to a page. Features like tables, which were originally intended to be used to display tabular information, were soon subverted for use as invisible layout devices. With the advent of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), table-based layout is commonly regarded as outdated. Database integration technologies such as server-side scripting and design standards like W3C further changed and enhanced the way the Web is made. As times change, websites are changing the code on the inside and visual design on the outside with ever-evolving programs and utilities.

With the progression of the Web, tens of thousands of web design companies have been established around the world to serve the growing demand for such work. As with much of the information technology industry, many web design companies have been established in technology parks in the developing world as well as many Western design companies setting up offices in countries such as India, Romania, and Russia to take advantage of the relatively lower labor rates found in such countries.

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logo design

Numerous inventions and techniques have contributed to the contemporary logo, including cylinder seals (c.2300 BCE), coins (c.600 BCE),[2][3] trans-cultural diffusion of logographic languages, coats of arms,[4] watermarks,[5] silver hallmarks and the development of printing technology.

As the industrial revolution converted western societies from agrarian to industrial in the 18th and 19th centuries, photography, and lithography contributed to the boom of an advertising industry that integrated typography and imagery together on the page.[6] Simultaneously, typography itself was undergoing a revolution of form and expression that expanded beyond the modest, serif typefaces used in books, to bold, ornamental typefaces used on broadsheet posters.[7]

The arts were expanding in purpose—from expression and decoration of an artistic, storytelling nature, to a differentiation of brands and products that the growing middle classes were consuming. Consultancies and trades-groups in the commercial arts were growing and organizing; by 1890 the US had 700 lithographic printing firms employing more than 8,000 people.[8] Artistic credit tended to be assigned to the lithographic company, as opposed to the individual artists.
A coin from early 6th century BC Lydia bearing the head of a roaring lion with sun rays

Innovators in the visual arts and lithographic process—such as French printing firm Rouchon in the 1840s, Joseph Morse of New York in the 1850s, Frederick Walker of England in the 1870s, and Jules Chéret of France in the 1870s—developed an illustrative style that went beyond tonal, representational art to figurative imagery with sections of bright, flat colors.[8] Playful children’s books, authoritative newspapers, and conversational periodicals developed their own visual and editorial styles for unique, expanding audiences. As printing costs decreased, literacy rates increased, and visual styles changed, the Victorian decorative arts lead to an expansion of typographic styles and methods of representing businesses.[9]

The Arts and Crafts Movement of late-19th century, partially in response to the excesses of Victorian typography, aimed to restore an honest sense of craftsmanship to the mass-produced goods of the era.[10] A renewal of interest in craftsmanship and quality also provided the artists and companies with a greater interest in credit, leading to the creation of unique logos and marks.

By the 1950s, Modernism had shed its roots as an avant-garde artistic movement in Europe to become an international, commercialized movement with adherents in the United States and elsewhere. The visual simplicity and conceptual clarity that were the hallmarks of Modernism as an artistic movement formed a powerful toolset for a new generation of graphic designers whose logos embodied Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s dictum, "Less is more." Modernist-inspired logos proved successful in the era of mass visual communication ushered in by television, improvements in printing technology, and digital innovations.