Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, the co-chief executives of Research In Motion Ltd., have stepped down as heads of the Waterloo, Ont.-based technology company.

According to a news release issued Sunday, RIM’s board of directors unanimously named former chief operating officer Thorsten Heins as president and CEO on the advice of Balsillie and Lazaridis.

“There comes a time in the growth of every successful company when the founders recognize the need to pass the baton to new leadership,” Lazaridis said. “Jim and I went to the board and told them that we thought that time was now.”

RIM has faced intense pressure from shareholders for months to change its management structure amid concerns the company is unable to compete with rivals Apple Inc. and Google Inc.

The company, maker of the BlackBerry series of smartphones and tablets, was the most valuable company in Canada as recently as 2008, but after a series of missteps the company has seen its share of the smartphone market dwindle.

According to the company, Lazaridis is now the vice-chair of the company’s board of directors as well as chair of its new innovation committee.

Balsillie will remain a member of RIM’s board of directors.

“I agree this is the right time to pass the baton to new leadership, and I have complete confidence in Thorsten, the management team and the company,” Balsillie said. “I remain a significant shareholder and a director and, of course, they will have my full support.”

Heins joined RIM four years ago from Siemens AG, becoming a senior vice-president. He was appointed chief operating officer for product and sales in August 2011.

Lazaridis said Heins has the right mix of leadership, industry experience and skills to take the company forward.

“We have been impressed with his operational skills at both RIM and Siemens,” he said. “I am so confident in RIM’s future that I intend to purchase an additional $50 million of the company’s shares, as permitted, in the open market.”

Among other changes at the top of RIM, current director and former Toronto Stock Exchange CEO Barbara Stymiest will become independent board chair and Fairfax Financial Holdings CEO Prem Watsa will join the board.

Big slide in 2011

Balsillie and Lazaridis, who shared the CEO and chair titles, have headed RIM together for the past two decades.

The company took a big slide in 2011, dropping behind its peers in the lightning-paced smartphone market, suffering through the worst service outage in its history and losing tens of billions of dollars in market value.

And the PlayBook tablet, RIM’s answer to the Apple iPad, failed to gain consumer support and the company was forced to give it deep discounts to help move the devices off store shelves.

The company announced that it will take a $485-million US charge before tax on the cost of discounting the price of its PlayBook tablet and $50 million in lost revenues from an October service outage that affected millions of BlackBerry email and text users. It was forced to cut 2,000 jobs to keep costs in line.

In December, RIM reported third-quarter net profits of $265 million US, well below the $911 million for the same period a year before. That came despite the sale of millions more BlackBerrys than in 2010 and a 35 per cent rise in global subscribers to 75 million.

Many investors held Balsillie and Lazaridis responsible for the company’s problems and previously called for them to be replaced and also for the company to be sold or broken up.

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McGraw-Hill Cos. normally sells high-school textbooks for $75 a pop. Now it says it will sell electronic versions of the same books, via Apple, for $15 each. How can the publisher make that work?

It’s the usual answer for this kind of digital question:

“Volume,” says McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw.

But there’s an important asterisk here, too. Normally, McGraw-Hill would sell its books directly to public schools, which would keep the texts for an average of five years.

Under Apple’s new textbooks plan, though, McGraw-Hill will try something different. It will sell its books directly to each student, who will use the book for a year, then move on. They’ll be able to keep the digital text, but won’t be able to resell it or pass it along to another student, and McGraw-Hill anticipates that another set of students will buy new books the following year.

So Mr. McGraw figures that over five years, he’ll generate the same total sales selling $15 ebooks as he would selling $75 books.

Of course, Apple will take an undisclosed cut of sales— McGraw-Hill execs wouldn’t go into details, so let’s assume for now that it’s Apple’s standard 30%—but presumably McGraw-Hill can make up some of that by forgoing the cost of print and distribution.

All of this assumes that the book pricing stays at $15. After Apple’s event, McGraw-Hill executives repeatedly used the phrase “pilot pricing” to describe their near-term plans. They said they have the ability to change the price when and if they want.

But Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue, Apple’s frontman on all media matters, said, “This isn’t pilot pricing…. All of our books will be $14.99.”

It’s important to note that this is about the high-school textbook market, for now. While McGraw-Hill and other publishers sell college texts though other digital platforms, they still haven’t announced plans to do so with Apple.

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Sweden dealt a symbolic blow to the global fight against digital music and film piracy by recognizing a group that promotes file-sharing across the Internet as a religion.

One of the most wired nations in the world, Sweden has long been a battleground between those who support file-sharing and the music and film industry. The Nordic state gave birth to the world’s largest filesharing website, Pirate Bay.

Registering the Church of Kopimism is a way to avoid “persecution,” said the website of the group, which was given official recognition by the Swedish state last month.

Kopimism’s name is derived from the words “copy me” and as its website makes clear it supports all forms of downloading and uploading files and sees copyright laws as violating freedom of information.

“We believe that information is holy,” said Isak Gerson, who calls himself the “spiritual leader” of a church whose key symbols are “Ctrl C” and “Ctrl V,” the keyboard short cuts for copy and paste.

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The youngest Microsoft professional, Arfa Karim passes away at the age of 16 in a Lahore hospital on Saturday, DawnNews reported.

Arfa fell desperately ill last month and doctors say she has suffered brain damage, leaving her in a coma at the Combined Military Hospital (CMH) in Lahore.

She was suffering from idiopathic epilepsy seizures which led to brain damage.

The medical experts say the epilepsy can be caused by various infectious and non-infectious diseases but in idiopathic epilepsy no underlying disease of the brain or body can be identified in the early or short investigations.

Arfa became the youngest Microsoft professional after completing her MCP in 2004 at the age of only 9.

Upon completing her course, Microsoft owner Bill Gates invited her to visit the company’s headquarters in the US. Software Development Division Vice President Somasegar also acknowledged her achievement in his blog.

Arfa was studying at the Lahore Grammar School`s Paragon Campus for her A Levels. She also received numerous awards and gold medals from private and government institutions for her achievement.

She received the Fatima Jinnah Gold Medal in the field of science and technology in 2005, besides the Salaam Pakistan Youth Award.

She has also received President’s Award for Pride of Performance. She was invited to Microsoft Headquarters again in November 2006 as a part of the keynote session in the Tech-Ed Developers conference held in Barcelona.

Her funeral will be held at Cavalry Ground Lahore on Sunday, said Arfa’s father.

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In 2001, weighty economic issues were dealt with by the G7: Canada, the UK, the USA, Italy, France, Japan and Germany (Belgium’s finance minister was also invited).

That year, economist Jim O’Neill came up with the term Brics, standing for Brazil, Russia, India and China and said they should have a bigger say.

He said that the Bric economies were growing much faster than those of the G7, so the Bric countries should get a seat at the economic top table.

Ten years on, the Bric countries are well established among the biggest economies. China, in particular, has stormed up the rankings and may soon challenge for top spot.

The Brics are still well behind in some areas though. Accounting for over 40% of world population, they are way behind in economic output per person.

The Bric countries also have great economic inequality. Average life expectancy is significantly lower than in the G7.

Today, weighty economic issues are discussed by the G20 instead of the G7. The old G7 countries are hoping that the rich Brics are going to fund their recoveries by buying their products and their debt.

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A cycle of severe droughts has led to a humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa (which includes Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Uganda). It is estimated that over 13 million people have been affected, many fleeing their homes and are now left with limited access to food, clean water and shelter.

Humanitarian assistance is urgently needed as alarming levels of acute malnutrition and death continue to rise among vulnerable groups including children under five and pregnant mothers.

The Red Cross Red Crescent Movement has a strong presence in the Horn of Africa and is actively scaling up operations to meet the urgent needs of affected communities. It is an extreme situation and more funds are urgently needed to address this growing crisis.

Money raised will go to support the work of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement in the region, both providing emergency relief and helping people recover their livelihoods. The Horn of Africa Drought Appeal will cover numerous countries in Africa including those currently affected and potentially affected in the future.

Israel says it will speed up Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem – and freeze the transfer of funds to the Palestinian Authority.

The announcement comes a day after the Palestinians won full membership of the UN cultural organisation, Unesco.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says the move will speed up the destruction of the peace process.

The Israeli government has described the Unesco vote as a “tragedy”.

A spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, Yigal Palmor, told the BBC the measures were designed to increase pressure on the Palestinians.

Mr Palmor said they were “a response to unilateral measures aimed at confronting Israel at the UN and elsewhere on the international scene”.

“They [the Palestinians] shouldn’t be wasting time by all these manoeuvres. They should continue to negotiate,” he said.

The Israeli government said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had called for the accelerated construction of some 2,000 housing units.

It said the construction will be in “areas that in any future arrangement will remain in Israel’s hands”, according to a statement quoted by Reuters news agency.

The BBC’s Kevin Connolly says the announcement will be seen as a punishment for the Palestinians and a warning to countries that backed their Unesco bid that Israel will react more strongly still if a similar application for Palestinian membership of the UN itself should prove successful.

Peace talks between the Palestinians and Israel broke down more than a year ago. The Palestinians are demanding an end to settlement building.

Almost 500,000 Jews live in settlements on occupied territory. The settlements are illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

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Computerworld polled 353 IT executives about their hiring plans for 2012 in its annual IT Forecast survey. The results indicate that U.S. companies will be investing in their IT workforces to bolster business in the year ahead; Nearly 29% of respondents plan to take on new IT staffers through Summer 2012 – a 45% increase in IT hiring expectations over last year’s results. The survey also reveals that companies will be thinking about innovation, not just “keeping the lights on,” as they plan next year’s IT hiring.

Here are the top nine skill sets the IT executives will be hiring for in 2012:

Programming and Application Development
61% of the executives plan to hire web and application developers over the next 12 months. Driven by continued explosive growth in the mobile market, this represents the largest year-over-year growth rate in a single skill set. Companies will hire record numbers of mobile application developers in 2012 to develop new apps and technologies to increase their reach and meet the needs of mobile users.

Project Management
Large-scale IT projects in 2012 will demand skilled and talented project managers to make sure goals are met on time, under budget, and to specifications. The demand is greatest for PMs who can also play the increasingly popular role of “IT business analyst,” meaning the executives want to hire project managers who will not only oversee and monitor, but help plan and deliver projects as well.

Help Desk & Technical Support
Until the day when technology is no longer used in the workplace there will be a need for help desk technicians. The twist in 2012 is that mobile devices have added a new dimension to the IT help desk. Certifications that validate mobile computing skills in a popular operating system, like the MCTS: Windows 7 – Configuration, can help you leverage this demand to get hired.

Networking
2012’s increased demand for IT networking professionals is fueled in part by an uptick in virtualization and cloud computing projects. As for specific qualifications in these areas, the tech executives will be looking to hire IT professionals with skills, certifications, and experience in VMware and Citrix.

Business Intelligence
Increased demand for IT professionals with BI skills is a promising trend for the IT job market, as it indicates a shift away from cost savings to investing in technology that provides access to real-time data for better business decisions. Noteworthy beneficiaries of the BI hiring increase include Microsoft SharePoint developers and SQL Server BI Specialists.

Data Center
More demand for data center professionals is another impact of organizations’ increased focus on cloud and virtualization strategies in 2012. Particularly, “hiring managers will be looking for IT pros with [training and experience] in data center operations and systems integration,” says John Reed, Executive Staffing Director of IT staffing firm, Robert Half Technology.

Web 2.0
IT skills centered around social media will increase in demand as more businesses look to engage consumers and gain a competitive advantage through online platforms and social networking campaigns. In demand skills in Web 2.0 include HTML, XML, CSS, Flash & JavaScript on the front-end, and AJAX, PHP & .Net for back-end programming. Web developers will capitalize on the Web 2.0 hiring push.

Security
Security remains a top concern for IT hiring managers through 2012 as the frequency, scope, and sophistication of cyber attacks continues to rise. Some of the IT execs report actively seeking professionals with security and auditing skills, but finding it difficult to locate good talent. This indicates an excellent opportunity for IT pros to advance their information security skills and credentials. The survey indicates that companies moving into cloud computing have higher than average demand for information security pros.

Telecommunications
IT professionals with telecommunications expertise will see increased demand as organizations continue to upgrade call centers and communication systems with the latest digital hardware and technology. Sought after telecommunications skills include IP telephony, VOIP, and Cisco IP Call Center.

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