Kitchen Cleaning Business Threatened By 'Bullying'... | Stuff.co.nz

A small-business owner from Invercargill believes she is being bullied by a national franchise which she claims is trying to push her out of business by threatening legal action.

Sally and Ross Tily set up their professional kitchen cleaning business, VAT2013, last month, saying they saw a gap in the market for commercial kitchen services in Southland.

Their business started trading last week but they said they were under pressure to cease trading from the large kitchen cleaning franchise Cookright Kitchen Services.

The national franchise had sent her letters threatening legal action, she said.

A letter sent by Sally Tily, through her lawyer, to Cookright lawyers says it was a case of David and Goliath.

Tily believed she was being used as a scapegoat during a legal wrangle between Cookright and its former Southland Cookright franchisee, which closed after a dispute with Cookright.

In a solicitor's letter to Tily, Cookright claims she was working in association with the former franchisee and therefore breaking the terms of settlement between Cookright and the former franchisee.

The terms of settlement say the High Court has made an order restraining the former franchisee from operating within Southland, Invercargill or Central Otago, or 100 kilometres from those regions until December 31, 2015.

The letter says Tily was using the same premises, employees and vehicle as the former franchisee, with a similar name which had been used by the former franchisee for another business. The name was Vat Tech.

Tily said she had since changed the name of her business from Vat2013 to Professional Kitchen Services Southland.

She agreed she had employed a staff member who was made redundant from the former franchisee, but said none of the other allegations were true.

The staff member was not the franchise owner and she employed him because he was experienced and well liked in the community.

Tily said she was a family friend of the former franchisee owners and had helped them with their books, but did not seek their assistance in any way when setting up her business.

Various legal letters sent to Tily say that unless she ceases operating court proceedings will be issued.

"Cookright have pulled me into their legal battle with the former franchisees and are trying to put me out of business by saying they helped me set up my business, which is not true, I did this completely independently."

Tily's solicitor sent a reply to say she had nothing to do with any Deed of Settlement between the franchisee and Cookright and had never been part of a dispute or settlement.

The letter also alleges that potential clients who had indicated an interest in using the VAT2013 service had since said they were no longer interested because she would be in a fight in court and did not want the hassle.

Tily is a marriage and funeral celebrant and believes her reputation is in jeopardy.

"I feel that my reputation is at stake with the bullying tactics taking place. I am a nervous wreck; I am scared. I have done nothing wrong to be shut down," she said.

Cookright Kitchen Services managing director Steven McMullen said the company would not address the issue in public and would not comment without legal advice.

Two Cookright Kitchen Services staff members working in the region refused to comment.

- ? Fairfax NZ News

Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/small-business/8841078/Business-threatened-by-bullying-rival

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How to change the default volume for voice navigation in Maps for iPhone

If you use Apple Maps for iPhone, odds are you use the voice navigation feature as well. Depending on how you use it, the default volume may be too low to use without an external speaker or too loud if you're using your car speakers.

You have the option to adjust this default setting whenever you'd like. Here's how:

1. Launch the Settings app from the Home screen of your iPhone or iPad.
2. Scroll down a ways and tap on Maps.
3. Here you'll see an option for Navigation Voice Volume. Here you can adjust the loudness of the default volume Maps will use.

If at anytime you'd like to override the volume, you can of course use the volume controls to do so.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/ITOOryySEp8/story01.htm

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High court voids key part of Voting Rights Act

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act cannot be enforced unless Congress comes up with an up-to-date formula for deciding which states and localities still need federal monitoring.

The justices said in 5-4 vote that the law Congress most recently renewed in 2006 relies on 40-year-old data that does not reflect racial progress and changes in U.S. society.

The court did not strike down the advance approval requirement of the law that has been used, mainly in the South, to open up polling places to minority voters in the nearly half century since it was first enacted in 1965. But the justices did say lawmakers must update the formula for determining which parts of the country must seek Washington's approval, in advance, for election changes.

Chief Justice John Roberts said for the conservative majority that Congress "may draft another formula based on current conditions."

That task eluded Congress in 2006 when lawmakers overwhelmingly renewed the advance approval requirement with no changes in which states and local jurisdictions were covered, and Congress did nothing in response to a high court ruling in a similar challenge in 2009 in which the justices raised many of the same concerns.

"The coverage formula that Congress reauthorized in 2006 ignores these developments, keeping the focus on decades-old data relevant to decades-old problems, rather than current data reflecting current needs," Roberts said.

The decision means that a host of state and local laws that have not received Justice Department approval or have not yet been submitted will be able to take effect. Prominent among those are voter identification laws in Alabama and Mississippi.

Going forward, the outcome alters the calculus of passing election-related legislation in the affected states and local jurisdictions. The threat of an objection from Washington has hung over election-related proposals for nearly a half century. At least until Congress acts, that deterrent now is gone.

That prospect has worried civil rights groups which especially worry that changes on the local level might not get the same scrutiny as the actions of state legislatures.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by her three liberal colleagues, dissented from Tuesday's ruling.

Ginsburg said no one doubts that voting discrimination still exists. "But the court today terminates the remedy that proved to be best suited to block that discrimination," she said in a dissent that she read aloud in the packed courtroom.

Ginsburg said the law continues to be necessary to protect against what she called subtler, "second-generation" barriers to voting. She identified one such effort as the switch to at-large voting from a district-by-district approach in a city with a sizable black minority. The at-large system allows the majority to "control the election of each city council member, effectively eliminating the potency of the minority's votes," she said.

Justice Clarence Thomas was part of the majority, but wrote separately to say again that he would have struck down the advance approval requirement itself.

Civil rights lawyers condemned the ruling.

"The Supreme Court has effectively gutted one of the nation's most important and effective civil rights laws. Minority voters in places with a record of discrimination are now at greater risk of being disenfranchised than they have been in decades. Today's decision is a blow to democracy. Jurisdictions will be able to enact policies which prevent minorities from voting, and the only recourse these citizens will have will be expensive and time-consuming litigation," said Jon Greenbaum, chief counsel for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The group represented a black resident of the Alabama County that challenged the law.

Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said, "This is like letting you keep your car, but taking away the keys."

The decision comes five months after President Barack Obama, the country's first black chief executive, started his second term in the White House, re-elected by a diverse coalition of voters.

The high court is in the midst of a broad re-examination of the ongoing necessity of laws and programs aimed at giving racial minorities access to major areas of American life from which they once were systematically excluded. The justices issued a modest ruling Monday that preserved affirmative action in higher education and will take on cases dealing with anti-discrimination sections of a federal housing law and another affirmative action case from Michigan next term.

The court warned of problems with the voting rights law in a similar case heard in 2009. The justices averted a major constitutional ruling at that time, but Congress did nothing to address the issues the court raised. The law's opponents, sensing its vulnerability, filed several new lawsuits.

The latest decision came in a challenge to the advance approval, or preclearance, requirement, which was brought by Shelby County, Ala., a Birmingham suburb.

The lawsuit acknowledged that the measure's strong medicine was appropriate and necessary to counteract decades of state-sponsored discrimination in voting, despite the Fifteenth Amendment's guarantee of the vote for black Americans.

But it asked whether there was any end in sight for a provision that intrudes on states' rights to conduct elections, an issue the court's conservative justices also explored at the argument in February. It was considered an emergency response when first enacted in 1965.

The county noted that the 25-year extension approved in 2006 would keep some places under Washington's oversight until 2031 and seemed not to account for changes that include the elimination of racial disparity in voter registration and turnout or the existence of allegations of race-based discrimination in voting in areas of the country that are not subject to the provision.

The Obama administration and civil rights groups said there is a continuing need for it and pointed to the Justice Department's efforts to block voter ID laws in South Carolina and Texas last year, as well as a redistricting plan in Texas that a federal court found discriminated against the state's large and growing Hispanic population.

Advance approval was put into the law to give federal officials a potent tool to defeat persistent efforts to keep blacks from voting.

The provision was a huge success because it shifted the legal burden and required governments that were covered to demonstrate that their proposed changes would not discriminate. Congress periodically has renewed it over the years. The most recent extension was overwhelmingly approved by a Republican-led Congress and signed by President George W. Bush.

The requirement currently applies to the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. It also covers certain counties in California, Florida, New York, North Carolina and South Dakota, and some local jurisdictions in Michigan. Coverage has been triggered by past discrimination not only against blacks, but also against American Indians, Asian-Americans, Alaska Natives and Hispanics.

Towns in New Hampshire that had been covered by the law were freed from the advance approval requirement in March. Supporters of the provision pointed to the ability to bail out of the prior approval provision to argue that the law was flexible enough to accommodate change and that the court should leave the Voting Rights Act intact.

On Monday, the Justice Department announced an agreement that would allow Hanover County, Va., to bail out.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/high-court-voids-key-part-voting-rights-act-141637132.html

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Three planets in habitable zone of nearby star: Gliese 667c reexamined

June 25, 2013 ? A team of astronomers has combined new observations of Gliese 667C with existing data from HARPS at ESO's 3.6-metre telescope in Chile, to reveal a system with at least six planets. A record-breaking three of these planets are super-Earths lying in the zone around the star where liquid water could exist, making them possible candidates for the presence of life. This is the first system found with a fully packed habitable zone.

Gliese 667C is a very well-studied star. Just over one third of the mass of the Sun, it is part of a triple star system known as Gliese 667 (also referred to as GJ 667), 22 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion). This is quite close to us -- within the Sun's neighbourhood -- and much closer than the star systems investigated using telescopes such as the planet-hunting Kepler space telescope.

Previous studies of Gliese 667C had found that the star hosts three planets with one of them in the habitable zone. Now, a team of astronomers led by Guillem Anglada-Escud? of the University of G?ttingen, Germany and Mikko Tuomi of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, has reexamined the system. They have added new HARPS observations, along with data from ESO's Very Large Telescope, the W.M. Keck Observatory and the Magellan Telescopes, to the already existing picture [1]. The team has found evidence for up to seven planets around the star [2].

These planets orbit the third fainter star of a triple star system. Viewed from one of these newly found planets the two other suns would look like a pair of very bright stars visible in the daytime and at night they would provide as much illumination as the full Moon. The new planets completely fill up the habitable zone of Gliese 667C, as there are no more stable orbits in which a planet could exist at the right distance to it.

"We knew that the star had three planets from previous studies, so we wanted to see whether there were any more," says Tuomi. "By adding some new observations and revisiting existing data we were able to confirm these three and confidently reveal several more. Finding three low-mass planets in the star's habitable zone is very exciting!"

Three of these planets are confirmed to be super-Earths -- planets more massive than Earth, but less massive than planets like Uranus or Neptune -- that are within their star's habitable zone, a thin shell around a star in which water may be present in liquid form if conditions are right. This is the first time that three such planets have been spotted orbiting in this zone in the same system [3].

"The number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy is much greater if we can expect to find several of them around each low-mass star -- instead of looking at ten stars to look for a single potentially habitable planet, we now know we can look at just one star and find several of them," adds co-author Rory Barnes (University of Washington, USA).

Compact systems around Sun-like stars have been found to be abundant in the Milky Way. Around such stars, planets orbiting close to the parent star are very hot and are unlikely to be habitable. But this is not true for cooler and dimmer stars such as Gliese 667C. In this case the habitable zone lies entirely within an orbit the size of Mercury's, much closer in than for our Sun. The Gliese 667C system is the first example of a system where such a low-mass star is seen to host several potentially rocky planets in the habitable zone.

The ESO scientist responsible for HARPS, Gaspare Lo Curto, remarks: "This exciting result was largely made possible by the power of HARPS and its associated software and it also underlines the value of the ESO archive. It is very good to also see several independent research groups exploiting this unique instrument and achieving the ultimate precision."

And Anglada-Escud? concludes: "These new results highlight how valuable it can be to re-analyse data in this way and combine results from different teams on different telescopes."

Notes

[1] The team used data from the UVES spectrograph on ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile (to determine the properties of the star accurately), the Carnegie Planet Finder Spectrograph (PFS) at the 6.5-metre Magellan II Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, the HIRES spectrograph mounted on the Keck 10-metre telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii as well as extensive previous data from HARPS (the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) at ESO's 3.6-metre telescope in Chile (gathered through the M dwarf programme led by X. Bonfils and M. Mayor 2003-2010.

[2] The team looked at radial velocity data of Gliese 667C, a method often used to hunt for exoplanets. They performed a robust Bayesian statistical analysis to spot the signals of the planets. The first five signals are very confident, while the sixth is tentative, and seventh more tentative still. This system consists of three habitable-zone super-Earths, two hot planets further in, and two cooler planets further out. The planets in the habitable zone and those closer to the star are expected to always have the same side facing the star, so that their day and year will be the same lengths, with one side in perpetual sunshine and the other always night.

[3] In the Solar System Venus orbits close to the inner edge of the habitable zone and Mars close to the outer edge. The precise extent of the habitable zone depends on many factors.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/space_time/astronomy/~3/DpMy_6AWEjY/130625073544.htm

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From the ashes of Webvan, Amazon builds a grocery business

By Alistair Barr

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The online grocery start-up Webvan may have been the single most expensive flame-out of the dot-com era, blowing through more than $800 million in venture capital and IPO proceeds in just over three years before shutting its doors in 2001.

Twelve years later, though, Webvan is rising from the dead - in the form of an online grocery business called AmazonFresh.

Four key Amazon.com Inc executives - Doug Herrington, Peter Ham, Mick Mountz and Mark Mastandrea - are former Webvan officials who have spent years analyzing and fixing the problems that led to the start-up's demise.

Kiva Systems, the robotics company that Amazon bought last year for $775 million in one of its largest-ever acquisitions, was built on ideas and technologies originally developed at Webvan and is a key part of the AmazonFresh strategy.

Even Webvan's old Web address, webvan.com, is now part of the Amazon empire.

"We had a lot of Webvan DNA in the room and we drew on that experience a lot," said Tom Furphy, who helped start AmazonFresh with Herrington and Ham before leaving to become a venture capitalist. "That was a good formula for building the business responsibly."

Amazon declined to comment for this story, or make any AmazonFresh executives available for interviews.

Former Amazon and Webvan officials say Amazon drew three big lessons from the Webvan debacle: expand slowly, limit delivery to areas with a high concentration of potential customers, and focus relentlessly on warehouse efficiency.

The opportunity for Amazon is huge. The grocery business in the United States generated $568 billion in retail sales last year, with online accounting for less than 1 percent, and it's among the last major retail sectors that the online giant has yet to tackle.

But the risks are large as well. Groceries are a notoriously low-margin business, and the aggressive expansion of discounters like Walmart has made the business even more cutthroat than it was in Webvan's day.

And competition in the online grocery business is heating up. FreshDirect and Peapod have been plugging away for years, while traditional grocery chains like Safeway also do online ordering and delivery. Walmart is testing its own fast delivery service in some markets in the United States now.

SLOW EXPANSION

AmazonFresh now serves Seattle and Los Angeles, and it plans to launch in the San Francisco Bay Area later this year. If these cities go well, Amazon is eyeing 20 new markets for 2014.

But the big plans belie what has been one of Amazon's most cautious entries into a new business since founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos started selling books online in the 1990s.

The grocery service started in just two Seattle neighborhoods, Medina and Mercer Island, in 2007, and then slowly spread to other Seattle communities over the next five years. It didn't expand beyond Seattle until June 10 of this year, when it launched in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles roll-out is similarly modest, covering only a few zip codes initially. "We know customers value this service but the economics remain challenging," an Amazon spokeswoman said when describing the L.A. launch.

Webvan - which ironically was also the brainchild of a book-seller, Louis Borders - expanded to nine major metro areas just 18 months after it began serving the San Francisco Bay Area, former executives recall. (Borders, co-founder of the now-defunct Borders Books & Music, declined to comment for this story.)

Webvan began its big expansion in Atlanta while the San Francisco service was still "wobbly," recalls Krishna Hegde, Webvan's vice president of deployment and systems engineering.

After the Atlanta launch in April 2000, Hegde said he recommended that the company slow down. But Mark Zaleski, president of operations, argued the company should press on because of promises made to Wall Street investors, Hegde said. Zaleski could be not be reached for comment.

Webvan "committed the cardinal sin of retail, which is to expand into a new territory - in our case several territories - before we had demonstrated success in the first market," said Mike Moritz, a Webvan board member and partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the company's venture capital backers. "In fact, we were busy demonstrating failure in the Bay Area market while we expanded into other regions."

DELIVERY DENSITY

Webvan not only launched in many cities, it also offered service across entire metro areas. That resulted in the company's delivery trucks making many trips where they only dropped off a few orders.

"The biggest failure of Webvan was delivery density," said Gary Dahl, vice president of distribution at Webvan from 1997 to 2001. In the Bay Area, he said, Webvan made money delivering in San Francisco and Oakland, but lost a lot of money delivering in suburbs such as Orinda and Moraga.

"Mean travel time between delivery stops is the key to success in the home delivery business," Dahl explained. "Travel one block in San Francisco and you have passed 200 people, travel one block in Moraga and you have passed about six people."

AmazonFresh has tackled this problem by only delivering to densely populated areas of Seattle, and it's taking the same approach in LA, according to Keith Anderson, an executive at consulting firm RetailNet Group.

"If you drive into certain neighborhoods in Seattle you will see a lot of front doors with AmazonFresh totes," he said. "That's because Amazon expanded gradually into specific neighborhoods and tried to deliver to lots of homes in those specific areas."

FreshDirect covers more than 80 percent of the New York metro area, but it took the company about a decade to expand its delivery network this wide. Last year, FreshDirect launched in Philadelphia.

KIVA ROBOTS PROVE KEY

Webvan also suffered severely from weaknesses in the design and technology of its giant warehouses. At its first facility, there was a single conveyor belt that snaked about five miles through the building bringing items to workers, who would then pick and pack the products into totes, Webvan Chief Technology Officer Peter Relan said.

When the conveyor belt broke, the operation would grind to a halt, he recalled.

Mick Mountz, an MIT-trained Webvan executive, oversaw the picking and packing process, along with Mark Mastandrea, and together they tried out lots of technology to make the warehouse run more efficiently, according to Relan.

For each $100 bag of groceries, it cost Webvan about $30 to pick and pack; the company had to get that down to $10 to make the process economically viable.

Mountz came up with a solution based on multiple robots that would bring products from different parts of the warehouse to human workers for picking and packing. Unlike a conveyor belt, if a robot broke down it could be fixed while the other robots continued their work.

However, Webvan had spent so much on its original warehouse - about $100 million, according to Relan - that the company was loath to completely change the process in favor of robots.

After Webvan went bust in 2001, Mountz founded Kiva Systems, which designed and built robots that now zip around the warehouses of retailers including Staples Inc, Walgreen Co and Gap Inc.

Amazon bought Kiva in 2012 for $775 million. Mountz is still running Kiva, while Mastandrea became director of delivery experience at AmazonFresh in March.

"When there are a large number of products and the shapes and sizes vary, as they do in grocery, you still need a human at the end to do the picking and packing," said Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures, which was an early investor in Kiva. "The Kiva System is the best solution out there for that combination of warehouse technology and human workers."

Amazon has one other thing Webvan never had: a huge, existing customer base. While Webvan had planned to expand into delivery of other goods once it had developed a base of grocery customers, Amazon is going the other way, and can help defray the cost of delivering groceries by delivering books or electronics at the same time.

There are other advantages that have accrued over time. The spread of cloud computing services - pioneered by Amazon's Web Services business - makes it cheaper to run online businesses, while consumers are more comfortable buying online through faster Internet connections.

Online shoppers who type "webvan.com" into an Internet browser today will find a website selling more than 45,000 non-perishable grocery items. In the top right-hand corner, it says Webvan is "part of the amazon.com family" and consumers can use their existing Amazon accounts to buy.

"Amazon purchased the name a couple of years ago," Dahl said. "Maybe they will revive it if sales are slow in the Bay Area."

(Reporting by Alistair Barr; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Claudia Parsons)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ashes-webvan-amazon-builds-grocery-business-120312054.html

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Your Android device is not the place to store your photos

When (not if) you lose everything on your phone or tablet, you'll be thankful you backed up the important things

We just got another heart-breaking email from a reader who has lost all their pictures and video because the SD card in their Android device went belly-up. We get at least a few of these every week, and it's horrible having to tell folks that there is a very good chance they'll need to use complicated forensic data retrieval tools to have any hope of getting those memories back if they can even get the media to be recognized in a computer again. Not having a good answer is the worst part of our jobs.

Now, this is not the SD card vs. no SD card debate. The same thing can happen with the internal storage on your phone, and while corruption isn't as common, accidentally erasing everything is more frequent -- especially when folks are tinkering with things and wiping and flashing "stuff". Don't go thinking this doesn't apply to you, because it does.

read more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/hmymAzMUPeQ/story01.htm

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Netflix to run original TV series from Dreamworks

NEW YORK (AP) ? Netflix is going to start running original television series from Dreamworks Animation.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Netflix Inc. says the multi-year agreement is its biggest deal ever for original first-run content and includes more than 300 hours of new programming. It expands on an existing relationship between the companies.

For Dreamworks, the transaction announced Monday is part of a major initiative to expand its television production and distribution worldwide.

Netflix has been adding original programming to its roster of movies, and debuted the original series "House of Cards" on Feb. 1. It has also increased its focus on children's programming in a move seen as taking a different tack than traditional premium pay TV channels such as HBO, Starz and Showtime, whose original shows are tailored more to adults.

In December Netflix announced it will offer Disney movies, starting with films released in 2016. It declined to make a similar deal for the rights to Sony movies starting in 2016, which was kept by Starz.

The new Dreamworks shows will be inspired by characters from its hit franchises like "Shrek" and "Kung Fu Panda" and upcoming feature films as well as the Classic Media library that Dreamworks Animation SKG Inc. bought last year. The television shows will be commercial free.

The first series is expected to begin airing in 2014 and will be shown in the 40 countries in which Netflix operates.

In February the companies announced their first ever Netflix original series for kids based on the film "Turbo" that is coming out in movie theaters next month. The original series, called "Turbo F.A.S.T.," will be shown starting in December.

Next year Netflix customers in the U.S. and Latin America will also have access to some of Dreamworks' newest films, including "The Croods" and "Turbo."

Netflix shares rose $12.29, or 5.7 percent, to $226.28 in morning trading. Dreamworks shares rose $1.69, or 7.4 percent, to $24.50.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/netflix-run-original-tv-series-dreamworks-103032177.html

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