Display-sourcing strategies are becoming clear, and not because screen resolution technology is any better. LG Display, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal, announced today its second-quarter net profit declined by 96 percent from a year ago. So recent moves by panel manufacturers Toshiba Corp. (Tokyo: 6502) and Sharp Electronics Corp. are making sense: The display market is bottoming out.

Last week, Toshiba sold one of its LCD manufacturing plants to Compal Electronics in an effort to revamp its LCD supply chain. Also last week, Sharp and Foxconn announced they were establishing a joint venture for the procurement of LCD TV panels and components. Although market research firm IHS iSuppli noted that LCD TV prices in the US increased in June, global prices are dropping and panel makers have had difficulty sustaining profit margins. The result, says IHS iSuppli analyst Juffrey Wu in a press release, will be the increased outsourcing of panel manufacturing:

The continued growth of the LCD TV industry during the last couple of years, in spite of the economic downturn, has further intensified the competition among television brands and contract manufacturers. However, even amid this growth, prices have fallen, causing profit margins to dwindle and prompting brands to increase outsourcing to achieve greater cost efficiency.

Although Toshiba maintains it is not exiting the LCD manufacturing market, the sale of its Mexico plant to Compal is an outsourcing agreement. Toshiba will continue to source from the plant and said the sale is aimed at increasing efficiencies in its local panel procurement. The Mexico facility supplies panels for end-products destined for the Americas region, Toshiba told EBN.

Source:http://www.ebnonline.com/author.asp?section_id=1071&doc_id=231593&itc=ebnonline_gnews

How America gets people and stuff into orbit is about to be outsourced in an out-of-this-world way.

With the space shuttle’s retirement Thursday, no longer will flying people and cargo up to the International Space Station be a government program where costs balloon. NASA is turning to private industry with fixed prices, contracts and profit margins. The space agency will be the customer, not the boss.

At least when it comes to the routine part of going to and from the space station, NASA hopes to rely on companies that will be the space version of FedEx and Yellow Cab.

The company that has been leading the commercial space race is hoping to launch its privately built rocket and capsule to the space station late this year. It won’t carry astronauts, but if all goes well the unmanned ship will dock with the station and deliver food, water and clothing. And its major private cargo competitor may only be a month or two on its heels.

Getting people to orbit on a new American ship is a different story. Some ambitious companies hope to launch astronauts that way in three years, maybe four. Until then, the Russians will fly astronauts on a pay-for-play basis. Some space veterans like John Glenn, the first American in orbit, think five to 10 years is more realistic.

But two of the major players have surprised people before — the tech tycoons who founded PayPal and Amazon.

NASA has hired two companies — Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of Hawthorne, Calif., and Orbital Sciences of Dulles, Va. — to deliver 40 tons of supplies to the space station in 20 flights. The cost is $3.5 billion, about the same price per pound as it was during the space shuttle’s 30-year history.

“It’s time. Once NASA blazes the trail, creates the technology and it’s available for private companies to take advantage of, this is the time” for the private firms to take over, said NASA commercial cargo chief Alan Lindenmoyer.

NASA met on Wednesday with companies wanting to taxi astronauts to the station. The agency hopes the money it saves by not flying the shuttle can be spent on new deep-space missions that will send astronauts to an asteroid and on to Mars.

Six private companies are working with NASA to send ships to the space station — either unmanned cargo ships or eventually astronauts in crew capsules.

For well more than a decade, boosters of commercial space have said they are ready to take over the job of going into low-Earth orbit on their own nongovernment ships, but hadn’t done it.

Now one has: Space Exploration Technologies, which often goes by the name SpaceX and is run by risk-embracing PayPal founder Elon Musk, launched his unmanned Dragon capsule into orbit last December. Now his company is lining up for the first private visit to the space station. The lower and upper stages of the rocket are at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The capsule is almost finished.

“What we want to do is get back into space as quickly as possible and as sustainably as possible,” said former astronaut Garrett Reisman, who now runs SpaceX’s “Dragon Rider” program.

And maybe a month or two later, Orbital hopes to have its first test flight to the station. First, it has to finish building its launch site at Wallops Island, Va., which should be done in just a few weeks. Then later this year it will have a test launch of its new rocket, the Taurus II, and finally it will use that new rocket to launch its capsule, Cygnus, to the space station, said company spokesman Barron Beneski.

“Just like a person hires FedEx to deliver a package across the country and you pay him 50 bucks, we’re delivering a 2,000-kilogram package to space, a few hundred miles above Earth, for a fixed price,” Beneski said.

Four companies are building spaceships to take astronauts to the space station on a pay-per-seat basis. They are all constructing ships that would be launched on top of private rockets.

Source:http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Future-of-spaceflight-NASA-is-outsourcing-the-job-1480903.php

Foreign companies have begun outsourcing new media work such as online reputation management, data mining, influencer identification and crisis management directly to small and mid-sized Indian social networking agencies. This is even as big agencies continue to sub-contract work to smaller agencies in India.

Mahesh Murthy, founder of Mumbai-based social media company Pinstorm, prefers not to call it outsourced. He would rather call it “in-sourced” work. His company has had offices abroad for over five years and done marketing work in India for foreign brands all this time. His company is now doing a lot of social media monitoring and responses for global brands, in addition to the search and display advertising that it has been doing so far.

His company is just a case in point. “Customers talk in real-time on the net and foreign companies realise the suite of online monitoring tools are not enough. You can have programs search for conversations. But you will still need people to manually look for context. Social media data are not structured. Automated programs are not intelligent enough to understand sarcasm on the net, for instance. We need human beings to extract juice out of a conversation,” notes Hareesh Tibrewala, social media strategist and Joint CEO at SocialWavelength.

Cost arbitrage is the primary reason that foreign companies, especially those from the US and UK, would want to outsource work to India. “By outsourcing social media activities (in part or full), a brand can cut its social media spend by 25 per cent and still achieve the same, if not better, results,” asserts Adhvith Dhuddu, chief executive officer of AliveNow, a social media agency based in Bangalore.

Other agency players like Tibrewala concur. For instance, an online monitoring project which could cost around $40,000 abroad would cost just around $15,000 if done in India. “These are ballpark figures,” says Tibrewala who has three US clients. “This will be a focus area for us next year. We hope to crack more deals.”

His optimism is shared by the likes of Rajiv Dingra, CEO & founder, WATConsult and Moksh Juneja, CEO of Avignyata. “We have seen interest from foreign companies since 2008 but now the momentum is picking up,” says Dingra. Juneja concurs he has been seeing interest even from companies in Malaysia.

However, unlike IT outsourcing, social media outsourcing poses many challenges in the form of price undercutting, cultural differences and skilled manpower, rather than just wage arbitrage.

Source:http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/new-media-outsourcing-to-india-picks-up/443415/

The city will entertain offers from other public agencies that want to partner with or absorb the Fire Department while City Hall continues to discuss contracting with the Orange County Fire Authority.

Suggesting that the OCFA’s proposal to serve Costa Mesa is less expensive than continuing an independent municipal agency, City Council members on Tuesday instructed city staff to seek proposals from other public agencies, including Newport Beach.

In other business, the council met public resistance when it came to extending consultants’ contracts.

The council approved keeping former Daily Pilot editor William Lobdell on staff as its spokesman for up to $70,000 through the end of the year, adding to the $30,000 he’s been paid since March.

Councilman Steve Mensinger said Lobdell should be hired permanently. Mayor Pro Tem Jim Righeimer suggested opening the position to other applicants before the position is made permanent.

The city also hired back two consultants from GrowthPort Partners for $50,000 through June. The pair has been working with city staff to recommend and implement layoffs as part of a broad austerity program.

Source:http://www.dailypilot.com/news/tn-dpt-0721-council-20110720,0,3386999.story