The End Of Fish, In One Chart

When Warby Parker opened a flagship store in New York City, many people were shocked. No one expected the digital eyewear disruptor to expand their business to a bricks-and-mortar store.  Speaking at Internet Week this week, Neil Blumenthal, one of Warby Parker's founders, said the move was strategic.  "We believe the future of retail is at the intersection of e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar," he said. "People think it's crazy that we went and signed a 10-year lease in SoHo, next to Ralph Lauren, across the street from the Apple Store. But we have actually been dabbling in bricks-and-mortar for about three years, almost as long as we have had the website open." When it launched, the start-up offered customers the option to try a number of glasses at home, he explained.  "That in itself was a physical form of sales, but what happened was that within 48 hours of launch, we were overwhelmed by demand and had to suspend the home trial program. And people would call up and say, 'Hey, can we come to your office and try on glasses?' And we would say, 'Uh, we are working out of my apartment.'   "People would come in, and we would lay out the glasses on the dining room table. And we thought it was going to be a sub-optimal experience, but it ended up being a very special experience in that we could build relationships with our customers. They could try on all the glasses. We started to realize maybe there was a place for traditional bricks-and-mortar retail."  The idea for the Warby Parker showroom and pop-ups was born. When those raked in profits, the company decided to open a flagship to anchor the brand. Now, 50 percent of their foot traffic and sales are driven by word-of-mouth, which Blumenthal says was exactly the point. "Our philosophy from the get-go has always been: How can we grow this primarily through word-of-mouth? "It's about how can we create special moments. When you walk into the store, most people are really surprised, because it doesn't look like any place they have ever been that sells eye glasses." Please follow War Room on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »    

How can this be? Worlds are shaking as the father of the Graphics Interchange Format, ye trusty old bitmap image standby for animated images on Cheezburger and Reddit and everyone geeks wanna have fun, says it’s pronounced JIF, not GIF. “It’s pronounced JIF, not GIF.” ~ Steve Wilhite, the father of GIFs. Well that’s settled. #Webbys — Brian A. Hernandez (@BAHjournalist) May 22, 2013 Steve Wilhite invented the venerable image format in 1987 for CompuServe, the first commercial online service in the United States. It supports a not-very-staggering 8-bit color pallet, although it can go higher, and uses a lossless data compression algorithm to reduce file size without degrading quality. And, according to Wikipidia, the creator’s “intended pronunciation deliberately echoes the American peanut butter brand, Jif … although an “alternative pronunciation with a hard ‘G … is in widespread usage.” Wilhite disappointed those who believe GIF is pronounced the one true and right way, with a hard G, when he accepted a lifetime achievement award yesterday at the Webbies. Response has been varying, but true believers on the side of right and justice and the American way have bravely stepped up to the plate to correct this horrific wrong: @bahjournalist i don’t want to hear these communist lies — Trevor Harmon (@maelstrommusics) May 22, 2013 @bahjournalist totally still disagree…even if he did make it. Graphic. Not jraphic. If I made apple and called it ahpple…no dice. — Jarred Rowe (@JarredRowe) May 22, 2013 Unfortunately, the forces of evil are strong, and they have music on their side. Jonathan Mann, who has been making a “song of the day” for an astonishing 1,602 days, has made a song about the controversy which is mildly amusing, even if completely wrong-headed: Take it back, Wilhite … or give back the award! Image credits: Shocked Kramer/GifBin, Baby cringing/Reaction GIFs Filed under: Dev, OffBeat     

You saw the news yesterday. The Xbox One was everywhere, and everyone talked a lot about it. But when a new console hits, often we'll latch onto the biggest, shiniest new baubles. Now though, having slept on it, let's dig into the real nerd porn. It's worth a look.Read more    

The Pentagon’s internal auditing arm charged with ensuring that DOD spends its money properly has a $574 billion backlog – leaving potentially tens of billions of overpayments to contractors on the table.    The Defense Contract Auditing Agency, a little-known federal agency with a budget of $573 million, charged with independently auditing DOD contracts, is in disarray. As the name suggests, its function is simple: to audit contracts made between DOD and private businesses. But due to a series of costly personnel decisions, a dramatic rise in defense spending over the last decade, and a 24,000-audit backlog that seems nearly impossible to clear, the agency is under fire from lawmakers for failing to complete its mandate and failing to recover tens of billions in overpayments to contractors. Private contractors, meanwhile, complain that DCAA requirements slow the contracting process to a snail’s pace while burdensome and unnecessary requirements prevent companies from competing for federal dollars. “They are way behind, and they have a tremendous backlog. Part of the backlog is that they’re trying to expand their audit reach beyond areas they need to,” Stan Soloway, president and chief executive officer of the Professional Services Council, told The Fiscal Times. “That’s adding work. You’ve got a combination of not moving forward and expanding when they don’t have the resources they need.” DCAA did not respond to requests for comment. According to its 2011 report to Congress, the agency recouped 9 percent of the $128 billion in costs it reviewed that year. Applying this same rate to the $574 billion backlog would win the government back $54 billion – which is roughly half the money DOD lost due to sequestration.    BACKLOG BACKGROUND  To put the 24,000-case logjam in context, the agency conducted 7,390 audits in 2011 (the last year data is available). Using that rate, DCAA would not clear its current backlog until at least 2016. That’s not counting any new cases that the agency must audit. In its 2012 report to Congress, DCAA blamed its backlog on a lack of resources. “In prior years, DCAA did not have sufficient staffing to perform lower-risk incurred cost audits,” the agency wrote in the report. “As a result, the average length of time from the date an adequate contractor-incurred cost submission was received by DCAA to the issuance of an audit report was 965 days in FY 2011.”  DCAA said it planned to increase its staffing from 4,900 people in 2011 to 5,600 by 2016. The agency also fired its chief in 2009, bringing in Patrick Fitzgerald, a long-time Army auditor, to oversee an overhaul.  . FAULT LINES The overhaul appears desperately needed. Numerous government reports, as well as a report from the agency’s own inspector general, have identified multiple areas of concern about how the agency conducts audits. A 2009 Government Accountability Office report found fault with every one of the 69 audits it examined. GAO said the majority of problems were serious and said the agency was too concerned with facilitating contact awards, as opposed to questioning them. “A management environment and agency culture that focused on facilitating the award of contracts and an ineffective audit quality assurance structure are at the root of the agency-wide audit failures we identified,” GAO found. It said this culture fostered “policies, procedures, and training that emphasized performing a large quantity of audits to support contracting decisions and [that it] gave inadequate attention to performing quality audits.” In addition, a 2008 GAO report found “abusive environments” at two DCAA field offices, where employees were pressured to favorably change audit results. In 2009, the Pentagon inspector general told Congress that one DCAA manager who was based on the west coast allowed Boeing to recoup $271 million in improper payments. Even the agency’s own inspector general found numerous issues with the way the department has been run. A report on 50 contracts audited in 2010 – released in 2013, two years late – found that 74 percent of the reviews had serious faults and that “improvements in the area of competence” were needed at DCAA. CULTURE OF COMPLAINT    Professional Services Council’s Soloway said the turmoil at DCAA was making it more difficult for companies to work with the Pentagon. “We have companies who have been rendered ineligible to work for the Pentagon for the simple reason that that it’s taken so long for DCAA to confirm the company made the changes DCAA has requested,” he said. Lawmakers have been critical of the agency as well. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., has been the most vocal critic of DCAA for years. At a hearing last year, she said, “Anybody who believes we cannot find savings in the Department of Defense contracting does not know the issue.” But according to Steven Schooner, a professor of government procurement law at George Washington University, Congress is not giving DCAA the resources it needs to solve its problems. “Congress is always willing to hire more people to investigate, audit, find fault, and criticize, but rarely willing to invest in the kind of staffing and training that would avoid the entirely predictable problems in the first place,” he said. More from The Fiscal Times: The Real Cost of Living: $150,000 Minimum GOP Eyes Arcane Budget Rule to Help Crush Obamacare Greece Already Close to Breaking Point   Please follow Politics on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »