Distance is not for the fearful, it is for the bold. It’s for those who are willing to spend a lot of time alone in exchange for a little time with the one they love. It’s for those knowing a good thing when they see it, even if they don’t see it nearly enough.

Pinterest is a vision board-styled social photo sharing website and app where users can create and manage theme-based image collections. The site’s mission statement is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting”. Pinterest is managed by a team based in Palo Alto, California.

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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