(Reuters) - Sweden's IKEA IKEA.UL, the world's largest furniture maker, is set to enter the consumer electronics market with products developed in co-operation with China-based TCL Multimedia (1070.HK), IKEA officials said.

IKEA, known the world over for low-price, self-assembly flat-packed furniture, plans to launch a line of furniture with integrated connected television and sound systems in five European cities in June, throughout seven European countries this autumn, and in its remaining markets in the summer of 2013.

The televisions, wireless sound systems and built-in CD/DVD/Blu-ray players with this line of furniture is designed specifically for IKEA.

"This is a large step for us. We will have an offer that is unique in the market," IKEA's living room chief Magnus Bondesson told Reuters.

"We are launching a new concept where you in one place can buy your furniture and your electronics -- designed for and matched with each other from start."

The furniture aims to solve the challenge of living room clutter of cords and remote controls, he said.

Tolga Oncu, sales chief at IKEA Sweden, said prices will start at around 6,500 Swedish crowns ($960) for the simplest combination bench unit, television and sound system.

"We've had very clear signals from customers that there is a need to be able to buy and integrate home electronics with the furniture in a simple way," Oncu said.

"With the way IKEA works, the way we can offer our products at the lowest prices on the market, we are convinced that this will be a really big success."

He declined to comment on costs or sales and profit outlook for the new range of furniture.

The co-operation with TCL isn't IKEA's first venture outside the furniture sector. For a decade it has sold appliances developed in co-operation with Whirpool (WHR.N), and for the last three years it has sold appliances developed in cooperation with Electrolux (ELUXb.ST).

The foundation-owned group, with 294 stores in 26 countries, grew net profit by 10 percent in its 2010/11 fiscal year to a record 2.97 billion euros ($3.88 billion).

TCL Multimedia sells televisions and other multimedia electronics under the brands TCL, ROWA, Thomson and RCA, according to its Website. It reported an operating profit of 883 million Hong Kong dollars ($113.81 million) in 2011, helped by a 46 percent rise in LCD televisions to 10.9 million sets.

($1 = 6.8022 Swedish crowns) ($1 = 0.7656 euros) ($1 = 7.7583 Hong Kong dollars)

(Reporting by Anna Ringstrom; Editing by Bernard Orr)

You’ve probably heard of Kik Messenger, a phone messaging app with the backing of Union Sqaure Ventures and RRE. It turns out Kik was just the beginning of the company’s plans — today it’s launching Clik, which is even more impressive.

Put simply, Clik can turn your phone into a remote control for any screen with a browser.

CEO Ted Livingston demonstrated the app for me earlier this week. Here’s how it works: You point your desktop browser at ClikThis.com, which generates a unique QR code. Then you open the Clik iPhone or Android app, aim the camera at the screen, and the app uses the code to figure out which device you’re trying to control. Once it’s synced up, you can select YouTube videos from your phone, and they’ll play on the screen.

The idea of turning a smartphone into a remote control isn’t new, but using Clik, the process of syncing up a phone to a screen is a ridiculously fast and easy, and it requires no extra hardware.

Once you wrap your head around the concept, what’s really impressive is the speed. When Livingston demonstrated the app, he could play videos, jump ahead, and adjust the volume instantaneously. I tried it out in the TechCrunch office, which has some of the worst AT&T reception known to man, and the lag was just 1 or 2 seconds. Apparently, Livingston and his team have had the idea for Clik for years, and they spent much of that time developing infrastructure capable of delivering that speed. In the meantime, they realized the technology could also be used to power a super-fast messaging app (namely, Kik), so the team “left Clik behind” for a little while, Livingston says.

And while the Clik app is limited to playing YouTube videos, that’s not the real vision. Instead, he says the app is more a proof-of-concept for potential partners, who may be in the video, music, photo, or games industries. Any online video service, for example, could use Clik to turn their smartphone app into a remote control for their desktop site. It’s particularly powerful because multiple phones can be synced up to a single screen — so you could challenge your friend to an online game, with both of you using your phones as controllers. Or if you’re throwing a party, you could have multiple DJs controlling the music from their phones. (On the second thought, that last scenario could turn into a disaster).

For now, you need an Internet browser for Clik to work, which rules out most TVs. Livingston said he’s currently targeting college students, who consume most of their media on computers anyway. In the long-term, however, it sounds like he has a plan for getting onto TVs too — in fact, he argues that this is a better approach to creating Internet-connected “smart” TVs. Rather than trying to build and push entirely new devices onto the market, Livingston says that with Clik, “Every screen just becomes a dumb output for your smart remote.”

You can download the iPhone and Android apps here. Clik is also starting to look at partnership requests, through the partner@clikthis.com email address.

By RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN

What do chief executives do all day?

It really is what it seems: They spend about a third of their work time in meetings.

That is one of the central findings of a team of scholars from London School of Economics and Harvard Business School, who have burrowed into the day-to-day schedules of more than 500 CEOs from around the world with hopes of determining exactly how they organize their time—and how that affects the performance and management of their firms.

Their study—known as the Executive Time Use Project—incorporates time logs kept by CEOs' personal assistants, who tracked activities lasting more than 15 minutes during a single week selected by the researchers. The project, which is ongoing, so far has collected data from three different studies of CEOs from around the world.

In one sample of 65 CEOs, executives spent roughly 18 hours of a 55-hour workweek in meetings, more than three hours on calls and five hours in business meals, on average. Some of the remaining time was spent traveling, in personal activity, such as exercise or lunches with spouses, or in short activities, such as quick calls, that weren't recorded by CEOs' assistants. Working alone averaged just six hours weekly.

The more direct reports a CEO had correlated with more, and longer, internal meetings, the researchers found. Rather than foisting off responsibilities to other managers, CEOs with more direct reports may be more hands-on and involved in internal operations, they said.

But not all direct reports are equal. In companies that incorporated a finance chief or operating chief into the corporate hierarchy, the CEOs' time in meetings was reduced by about five-and-a-half hours a week, on average, the researchers found.

Even if a CEO has a lot of direct reports, "the effect of the CFO or COO is stronger," and may help reduce a CEO's time spent in internal meetings, says Harvard Business School's Raffaella Sadun, a co-author of the project. The other researchers were Oriana Bandiera and Andrea Prat, of the London School of Economics and Julie Wulf of Harvard Business School. Their preliminary findings were just published in a Harvard Business School paper.

The researchers said they weren't surprised by the amount of time spent in meetings, since one of the roles of a CEO is to manage employees and meet with customers and consultants.

A busy meeting schedule—often conducted virtually in global companies—can indicate that executives are engaged with their companies and close to their managers and clients. Still, CEOs say they pine for more solo time to think and strategize.

Rory Cowan, CEO of Lionbridge Technologies Inc., a Waltham, Mass., technology-services firm with about 4,500 employees, says he is constantly communicating with staff and clients. "I don't know when I'm not in a meeting," he says.

Instead of spending a lot of time in long face-to-face meetings, however, Mr. Cowan spends more time "doing frequent iterative touches," either in person or via text messages, instant messaging and video chat—sometimes with "four or five windows open concurrently."

As a result, his meetings rarely last more than 15 minutes, he says.

Lars Dalgaard, CEO of SuccessFactors Inc., a human resources software firm, says he spends about a third of his work time, at most, in formal meetings.

"While you are sitting in a meeting, your competition is getting stuff done," he says. (Software firm SAP AG recently announced that it was acquiring SuccessFactors.)

NV "Tiger" Tyagarajan, president and CEO of Genpact Ltd., a technology-management firm, recently analyzed his time use to make sure he was spending enough time meeting with clients. He determined he was. But he does wish for more time to "sit back and think," he says, or simply to bounce around ideas "without a fixed meeting or a fixed agenda."

Mr. Dalgaard says he tries to dedicate as much as 25% of his week to thinking by making time on flights or blocking out time on his schedule—occasionally retreating to a quiet room or driving on the highway to let ideas crystallize.

Likewise, Mr. Cowan says that he tries to "build a big fence" around his first work hour in the morning at 7 a.m. to clear his thoughts, catch up on reading and manage email.

In contrast, Jon Oringer, CEO of New York based stock-photo provider Shutterstock Images LLC, doesn't seem to lack "alone time." He is rarely on the phone and averages about three meetings a day mostly lasting about 30 minutes, with some going up to 90 minutes.

The rest of the time he is usually scoping out his competition on blogs like TechCrunch, monitoring Web traffic and Twitter feeds and working on his own pet projects.

He is in the office from about 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., but says he works a lot from home, even during weekends.

"It doesn't feel like I work when I'm working," Mr. Oringer said. "It's my thing."

Executives' assessment of how they spent their time differed from the actual records, as noted by their calendars and personal assistants, researchers found.

When top executives compare their top priorities to their time use, "they are usually surprised about the mismatch," says Robert Steven Kaplan, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.

He recommends executives substitute the word 'money' for 'time' when deciding how to schedule their week. "With money... you'd be more careful and judicious about it. If someone asked you for some, you'd be more likely to say no," says Mr. Kaplan.

The researchers' global study involved both private and public companies from many countries; they didn't determine whether executive time use correlated with a firm's performance.

In another sample of 94 Italian CEOs, the researchers found that the way an executive budgets his or her time strongly correlated with a firm's profitability and productivity, measured as revenue per employee.

In the Italian sample, the key to a company's performance was with whom CEOs met. Meeting with external figures didn't help a firm's productivity, they found. Better performance came from more internal meetings, they found.

—Willa Plank contributed to this article.

Write to Rachel Emma Silverman at rachel.silverman@wsj.com

The Mooresville, North Carolina district is one of a handful in the country to issue laptops, the MacBook Air in this case, to each student. Mooresville is attempting to turn the public school education on its head, using technology to change the culture of instruction. The district was profiled in the New York Times on Monday.

The Times says the district has "quietly emerged as the de facto national model of the digital school."

[Superintendent of schools Mark] Edwards spoke on a White House panel in September, and federal Department of Education officials often cite Mooresville as a symbolic success. Overwhelmed by requests to view the programs in action, the district now herds visitors into groups of 60 for monthly demonstrations; the waiting list stretches to April. What they are looking for is an explanation for the steady gains Mooresville has made since issuing laptops three years ago to the 4,400 4th through 12th graders in five schools (three K-3 schools are not part of the program).

The district’s graduation rate was 91 percent in 2011, up from 80 percent in 2008. On state tests in reading, math and science, an average of 88 percent of students across grades and subjects met proficiency standards, compared with 73 percent three years ago. Attendance is up, dropouts are down. Mooresville ranks 100th out of 115 districts in North Carolina in terms of dollars spent per student — $7,415.89 a year — but it is now third in test scores and second in graduation rates.

Each MacBook Air notebooks is leased from Apple for $215 per year, including warranty. The total cost for the computers is around $1 million per year, plus an additional $100K for software. Families pay a $50 fee

The Mooresville Graded School District paid for the initiative by eliminating 65 jobs, including 37 teaching positions, and accepting larger class sizes. At the same time, schools could get rid of computer labs and antiquated teaching materials like hanging wall maps.

Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson wrote about Jobs' feelings towards American public education. Jobs felt the system was "hopelessly antiquated and crippled by union work rules." Particularly galling to Jobs was that classrooms were led by teachers standing at a blackboard, using textbooks. He felt that "all books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive." Feedback should be tailored to each student and provided in real time.

Instead of simply throwing technology dollars at the problem, hoping it can fix itself, Mooresville is using technology as a tool to help students learn.

Mooresville frequently tests students in various subjects to inform teachers where each needs help. Every quarter, department heads and principals present summary data to Mr. Edwards, who uses it to assess where teachers need improvement. Special emphasis goes to identifying students who are only a few correct answers away from passing state proficiency standards. They are then told how close they are and, Mr. Edwards said, “You can, you can, you can.”

Apple made its biggest stride yet into the digital classroom at an education-focused event last month. At that event, Apple launched a new digital textbook initiative for the iPad, plus easy-to-use authoring tools to help educators collaborate and share knowledge across school districts and disciplines.

Jobs' vision for the digital school may be turning to reality in Mooresville, North Carolina.

(Image via Jeremy M. Lange/New York Times)

RIM: It's okay, we have superheroes

It's a common human trait that, when faced with a series of calamities, the brain will retreat into a fantasy world in which everything is the exact opposite of reality. Could this be the inspiration for RIM's four new cartoon characters, which the company hopes will spread its "Be Bold" marketing message? The pattern certainly seems to fit. From left to right: there's GoGo Girl, who "saves the day with a brilliant strategy" (translation: we don't have a strategy). Then comes Justin Steele, who's "always ready to stick up for his friends" (translation: we don't have friends). Trudy Foreal "isn't afraid to call it as she sees it" (translation: our shareholders are complaining). Finally, the adventurous Max Stone is "able to jump out of a plane" (translation: we're going to crash).

Update: RIM has provided a little update stating that this is "not a new ad campaign." Still, it's fun to imagine what might have been.