LONDON
Apple Inc., formerly Apple Computer, Inc., is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Cupertino, California that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software and personal computers. Its best-known hardware products are the Mac line of computers, the iPod music player, the iPhone smartphone, and the iPad tablet computer. Its consumer software includes the OS X and iOS operating systems, the iTunes media browser, the Safari web browser, and the iLife and iWork creativity and productivity suites. The company was founded on April 1, 1976, and incorporated as Apple Computer, Inc. on January 3, 1977. The word “Computer” was removed from its name on January 9, 2007, the same day Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, reflecting its shifted focus towards consumer electronics.
Apple is the world’s second-largest information technology company by revenue after Samsung Electronics, and the world’s third-largest mobile phone maker after Samsung and Nokia. Fortune magazine named Apple the most admired company in the United States in 2008, and in the world from 2008 to 2012. However, the company has received criticism for its contractors’ labor practices, and for Apple’s own environmental and business practices. As of May 2013, Apple maintains 408 retail stores in fourteen countries as well as the online Apple Store and iTunes Store, the latter of which is the world’s largest music retailer. Apple is the largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization, with an estimated value of US$415 billion as of March 2013. As of Sept 29 2012, the company had 72,800 permanent full-time employees and 3,300 temporary full-time employees worldwide. Its worldwide annual revenue in 2012 totalled
London is the capital city of England and the United Kingdom. With an estimated 8,308,369 residents in 2012, London is the most populous region, urban zone and metropolitan area in the United Kingdom and is the largest city in the European Union. [note Standing on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement
for two millennia, its history going back to its founding by the Romans, who named it Londinium.
term London has also referred to the metropolis developed around this core.
London’s ancient core, the City of London, largely retains its 1.12-squaremile mediaeval boundaries and in 2011 had a population of 7,375, making it the smallest city in England. Since at least the 19th century, the
The bulk of this conurbation forms the London region and the Greater London administrative area, note governed by the Mayor of London and the London Assembly.
The size of the world stock market was estimated at about $36.6 trillion at the beginning of October 2008. The total world derivatives market has been estimated at about $791 trillion face or nominal value, 11 times the size of the entire world economy. The value of the derivatives market, because it is stated in terms of notional values, cannot be directly compared to a stock or a fixed income security, which traditionally refers to an actual value. The stocks are listed and traded on stock exchanges which are entities of a corporation or mutual organization specialized in the business of bringing buyers and sellers of the organizations to a listing of stocks and securities together. Market participants include individual retail investors, institutional investors such as mutual funds, banks, insurance companies and hedge funds, and also publicly traded corporations trading in their own shares.
Selfridges, also known as Selfridge & Co., is a chain of high end department stores in the United Kingdom. It was founded by Harry Gordon Selfridge. The flagship store on London’s Oxford Street is the second largest shop in the UK after Harrods and opened 15 March 1909. More recently, three other Selfridges stores have been opened; in the Trafford Centre in 1998 and Exchange Square in 2002 in Manchester and in the Bullring, Birmingham 2003. In the 1940’s, smaller provincial Selfridge stores were sold to the Lewis Partnership, and
in 1951 the original Oxford Street store was acquired by the Liverpool-based Lewis’s chain of department stores.Selfridges was later then taken over in 1965 by the Sears Group owned by Charles Clore. Expanded under the Sears group to include branches in Manchester and Birmingham, in 2003 the chain was acquired by Canada’s Galen Weston for £598 million. H. Gordon Selfridge was born in 1856 in Ripon, Wisconsin, he married Rose Buckingham of the prominent Chicago Buck-
ingham family, and amassed the fortune with which he built his new London store.
Selfridges have coined the phrase “the customer is always right”.
The world’s most famous headphone has been completely redesigned and reimagined. The new Beats Studio® is lighter, sexier, stronger, and more comfortable, with precision sound, Adaptive Noise Canceling, a 20-hour rechargeable battery, and RemoteTal. It has all the energy and excitement you expect from Beats, plus a powerful, reengineered sound. Headphones are a pair of small loudspeakers that are designed to be held in place close to a user’s ears. They are also known as earspeakers, earphones or, colloquially, cans. The alternate inear versions are known as or earbuds but
a l s o can be referred to as earphones. In the context of telecommunication, a headset is a combination of headphone and microphone. Headphones either have wires for connection to a signal source such as an audio amplifier, radio, CD player, portable media player or mobile phone, or have a wireless receiver, which is used to pick up signal without using a cable. Headphones originated from the earpiece, and were the only way to listen to electrical audio signals before amplifiers were developed. The first truly successful set was developed in 1910 by Nathaniel Baldwin, who made them by hand in his kitchen and sold them to the United States Navy.[4][5] Some very sensitive headphones such as those manufactured by Brandes around 1919 were commonly used for early radio work. These early headphones used moving iron drivers, either single ended or balanced armature.
The r e quirement for high sensitivity meant no damping was used, thus the sound quality was crude. They also had very poor comfort compared to modern types, usually having no padding and too often having excessive clamping force to the head. Their impedance varied; headphones used in telegraph and telephone work had an impedance of 75 ohms. Those used with early wireless radio had to be more sensitive and were made with more turns of finer wire; impedance of 1000 to 2000 ohms was common, which suited both crystal sets and triode receivers.
A watch is a timepiece, typically worn either around the wrist or attached on a chain and carried in a pocket. Wristwatches are the most common type of watch used today. Watches evolved in the 17th century from spring powered clocks, which appeared in the 15th century. The first watches were strictly mechanical.
a skirt as wear a wristwatch�. This changed in World War I, when soldiers on the battlefield found pocket watches to be impractical and attached their watches to their wrist by a cupped leather strap. It is also believed that Girard-Perregaux equipped the German Imperial Navy with wristwatches in a similar fashion as early as the 1880s, to be used while synchronizing naval attacks and firing artillery.
As technology progressed, the mechanisms used to measure time have, in some cases, been replaced by use of quartz vibrations or electronic pulses. The first digital electronic watch was developed in 1970
Most inexpensive and medium-priced watches used mainly for timekeeping are electronic watches with quartz movements. Expensive collectible watches, valued more for their workmanship and aesthetic appeal than for simple timekeeping, often have purely mechanical movements and are powered by springs, even though mechanical movements are less accurate than more affordable quartz movements.
Before wristwatches became popular in the 1920s, most watches were pocket watches, which often had covers and were carried in a pocket and attached to a watch chain or watch fob. In the early 1900s, the wristwatch, originally called a Wristlet, was reserved for women and considered more of a passing fad than a serious timepiece. Men, who carried pocket watches, were quoted as saying they would “sooner wear
In addition to the time, modern watches often display the day, date, month and year, and electronic watches may have many other functions. Watches that provide additional time-related features such as timers, chronographs and alarm functions are not uncommon. Some modern designs even go as far as using GPS technology or heart-rate monitoring capabilities. The study of timekeeping is known as horology.