Today in Tech: IBM: revenues down, earnings up; Can a formula predict Olympics medal tally?

IBM: revenues down, earnings up

Revenues down: IBM’s revenues dropped by 3% in Q2, but it raised its full year earnings target - resulting in a generally positive response from analysts, media and market. The response highlights the different environment that MNCs operate in compared to Indian IT Services companies. The single most important factor in India seems to be growth.

Odd man out: IBM's positive outlook in earnings was in contrast to a generally bleak view of the market that its peers gave. IBM sees it as a vindication of its business model. But it's not clear how long can it  sustain this when there's a slowdown in tech spending globally. "IBM continues to show a phenomenal ability to deliver on the bottom line.. But it is going to be difficult to deliver going forward if revenues keep falling off a cliff," an analyst told WSJ

Hiring and firing: In a call with analysts, IBM's CFO said the company will hire 200-300 salespeople every month. To cut costs, it will lay off employees, but mostly outside US. It's tempting to read the influence of an election year into this. But, the prospects for IT sector seems to have become bright in US. More than half of IT employers surveyed by an online jobs site there said they plan to hire for positions throughout the remainder of the year.

Can a formula predict Olympics medal tally? Other than Dark Knight Rises, if there is one thing that seems to be on the top of mind of everyone I spoke to in the recent past, it's Olympics. We have a section devoted to Olympics on our site. Still, I thought I would write about a few things that will be of interest to the readers of this blog starting today. Here's the first.

Venturebeat directs us to Dan Johnson, Professor of Economics at Colorado College who has developed a model that predicts how many medals different countries can win at Olympics. It did well last time. For example, it predicted US will win 33 gold medals in Beijing. It won 36. It predicted 17 for Canada, and it won 18.

In fact, over the six games between 2000 and 2010 (including summer and winter games), the accuracy (measured by correlation between the prediction and actual wins) was 93% for the medals, and 85% for gold medals alone. More recently, he tweaked the model to improve it to 96% for all medals and 95% for gold.

Now, if you are asked to predict the number of medals yourself, you are likely to go by the past trends, and come up with a number. Or perhaps, you will make a guess depending on how big and how rich a country is. (The higher your country's population, the more the number of people on the right end of athletic bell curve, and the richer you are the better training you can afford - unless you have a dictator who can spend disproportionately more on sports to prove his regime's superiority).

Johnson considered factors such as these - income, population, host nation effect etc - to arrive at a formula and he ran the data through his model to come up with his predictions. You can read more about the medal here (pdf).

For India, the model's predictions were not that accurate last year: It predicted 7 medals, we won just three.

Could the fact that India's economic growth started only in 90s have anything to do with it? After all, today's wealth will show in the games only sometime in the future, and not right away. Let me know what you think.

For the complete predictions - click here.

Also of interest

• Escape Is Possible: Zoho Office Now Integrated Into Google Drive: Techcrunch
• Big Data on Campus: New York Times
• Windows 8 will be available on October 26th, 2012: Microsoft
• EBay Profit Soars 144% As E-Commerce Rebounds: New York Times
• EBay’s John Donahoe Seeing a “Staggering Surge” in Mobile Shopping: AllThingsD
• YouTube Offers a Way to Blur Faces, Protecting Identities in Videos: New York Times
• Facebook hit with tough questions on facial recognition in Senate hearing: Venturebeat
• Google Brings Emails to Feature Phones in Africa, No Internet Access Required: PC World

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.