Foxconn is allegedly planning to double its Chinese factory workers’ salaries by 2013, according to a Chinese newspaper, via M.I.C Gadget. Factory workers presently make roughly $346 a month at Foxconn, and the reported raise would bump up wages to $693 a month, a 100% increase. The aforementioned suicides at the Foxconn compounds prompted the company to raise wages in the past – nearly doubling salaries in 2010 to $315. Workers had been previously paid $141 a month.

The speculation regarding the raise is based on words apparently coming from Foxconn’s CEO during its Shanghai headquarters groundbreaking ceremony. The raise would be great for the migrant laborers at the Foxconn plants, and would affect competing businesses, likely prompting them to add more incentives to retain their own work force.

Other notable tech execs who receive a $1 salary include Apple’s late Steve Jobs, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, HP’s Meg Whitman, and Google leaders Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt. Executives do this sort of thing to fall into different tax brackets. Zuckerberg’s salary in 2012 is $600,000, up from $500,000 in 2011, which has a payroll tax of 35%. Though, with a $1 salary and stock options instead, he only pays a capital gains tax, which is 15% at present.

There’s a common belief that the wealthy sometimes live off interest, but in Zuckerberg’s case, it would be better to live off debt and municipal bonds. He could get a home equity line of credit, which isn’t taxable, and live off of that, while his stocks grow. And interest on said equity can offset any separate income.

There’s been a lot of speculation concerning why Facebook’s stock hasn’t skyrocketed since the Friday IPO. NASDAQ reporting errors, poor ad monetization, hoodies, weddings, etc., were all mentioned. When it comes down to it, it would appear that Facebook set the initial price of the stock too high. Realistically, a company with over 900 million “customers” isn’t exactly going anywhere anytime soon. It will be interesting to see how Facebook stock does after posting its earnings report in the coming months. For extensive coverage on Facebook’s IPO, go here.

Zuckerberg is certainly not the only exec to do this. In the wake of the Wall Street financial crisis, the salaries of CEOs have come under public scrutiny, particularly those whose customers lost lots of money. So, some companies have made hay out of the fact that their CEO takes a relatively modest salary.

But, a $1 CEO is a different breed. Why would Zuckerberg do it? No one lost any money due to Facebook’s market maneuvers or unregulated activities. Overall approval of Facebook in general is high. Public opinion of Zuckerberg is good, especially after the movie “The Social Network“. Zuckerberg is a capitalist hero, a geek wunderkind, the model of everything both the left and right love in America. Who would blame him for taking his company public, then raking in billions off something that not one user has to pay for?

What about other $1 execs? Others who have been listed as having single-digit salaries include Apple’s Steve Jobs, Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, HP’s Meg Whitman, and the Google triumvirate of Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt.

The public perception of these salaries is, and is intended to be, that these execs are sacrificing for the sake of the company or municipality they are overseeing. And, it is not to say that altruistic intentions are not involved, especially in the case of execs at the helm of a company they started.

In the case of elected officials like Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg, the low salary reflects a commitment to turn around a bad situation they were elected to fix. It endears them to voters and constituents. The rewards in terms of public goodwill are great.

The actions of these men hearken back to a time when America was clawing its way out of a bad spot. Around World War I, many business executives came to serve in branches of the U.S. government where they had business expertise. These execs took only a single dollar in salary and were called One-Dollar Men.

Lee Iacocca was brought in to turn around a failing Chrysler Corporation in 1978. Iacocca had been run out of Ford Motor Company after overseeing the public fiasco that was the Ford Pinto. His reputation was on the rocks due to his “safety doesn’t sell” statements about the fire-hazard pinto. But, Chrysler recognized that Iacocca was, under all the public hype, still an excellent top man.

Iacocca took a $1 annual salary from Chrysler, which drew attention to his efforts as a rescuer of the company, a core part of America’s auto industry. It also helped rehabilitate Iacocca’s public image.

The public image advantages to taking a low salary are easy to see, whether in a failing-company scenario or in the case of a government leader working to turn around a state.

But, are there actually financial advantages to an exec who takes a very low salary to run a successful company? There certainly could be.

1) Lower Taxes. This one is simple. Payroll taxes are higher than taxes on capital gains in the United States. This fact has led to many political arguments in the past couple of years, and has become much more common knowledge as a result.

Mark Zuckerberg’s current outright salary is $600,000 per year. In terms of payroll tax, he is in a 35% tax bracket. If, however, he reduces his salary to $1 and takes stock options instead – a great deal for a company with an IPO like Facebook – he deals with capital gains tax, which is currently at 15%. Zuckerberg currently holds 28.2% of the company.

This makes sense, but let’s get a little crazy with the possibilities here.

2) No Taxes. Imagine this one, as proposed in a CNBC story. If Zuckerberg were to forego and future bonuses or additional stock rewards, and not cash out any stock (resulting in capital gains), he would effectively have an income of $1 a year, all while building a fortune as his stock rises, splits, etc. He has accrued enough money to live comfortably, though not extravagantly, for a while. To have no tax burden at all, continually plowing your resources back in on themselves, will build an even bigger legacy.

3) Living On Debt. Even once Zuckerberg’s savings runs out, he could live off a Home Equity Line of Credit. CNBC explains that scenario:

People sometimes talk about the rich “living off the interest” of their wealth. But that’s not really a tax efficient way to live if you are really, really wealthy. It’s better to live off of debt and muni bonds.

The best thing for Zuckerberg would be a home equity line of credit—perhaps multiple home equity lines. He would borrow against the value of real estate he owns. The money he receives from the HELOC is debt rather than income, which means it isn’t taxed. Even better, the interest he pays on the HELOC can be used to offset other income he may earn.

4) Taxpayer Money. This one is highly unlikely, but it is possible. If Mark Zuckerberg shows an income between $1 and $13,650 (2011 tables), he could qualify for Earned Income Tax Credit, even without children. Sounds silly, but there it is. with up to three children, he could collect up to $5,751 dollars in EIC per year, as well as Medicaid and Food Stamp benefits.

Now, this is not to say that Mark Zuckerberg intends to do any of these things, except maybe #1. But, once you have made your bones in business at the level of a Zuckerberg, the possibilities change. The planning can change. You don’t worry about things that many “normal” people worry about. You don’t care when W-2s arrive. You don’t concern yourself with bounced check fees. And, you don’t plan your tax strategy with “normal people” considerations like home mortgage interest, charitable contributions and job hunting expenses. These things are used, but they are not the core of your strategy.

Adding zeroes to the end of some of your numbers allows you to reduce the number most “normal people” worry about to a single dollar, and still build a kingdom.

And, you can give it away.

On December 9, 2010, Mark Zuckerberg, along with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett signed a “Giving Pledge” in which they promised to donate at least half their wealth over the course of time to charity. These men are all listed in the Top Twenty of Forbe’s World’s Most Powerful People (Gates is #5, Zuckerberg # 9, Buffett #20). They could do a lot in the world with the combination of wealth and influence they hold. Gates, for example, has long taken on the eradication of malaria from the Earth as his personal mission. And, in the past 10 years, incidence of malaria in the world has gone down 20%.

As big ticket financial advisers would say, “The more you keep, the more you can give away.”

Contained in said filings are some interesting bits of information about the company, not the least of which the salary information of Facebook’s top executives. And CEO Mark Zuckerbergs’s total compensation may surprise you. All in all, Zuckerberg raked in $1,487,362 – but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Facebook said that their compensation committee looked at the base salaries for their execs and adjusted them during Q1 of 2011. “The compensation committee decided to increase the base salaries of our executive officers in order to continue to bring their salaries closer to those paid by our Peer Group companies for similar positions,” said the filing.

With that in mind, they raised Zuckerberg’s salary by $100,000 and all other top execs by $25,000. They make a point to mention that these salaries are still under the 25th percentile of salaries of peer companies. Having said that, the Facebook group didn’t do too bad for themselves. In base salary alone, Facebook’s top five execs made between $275,000 and $500,000.

Zuckerberg

Facebook’s CEO made $1,487,362 in total compensation in 2011. This includes $483,333 in base salary, plus a $220,500 bonus. The rest of it comes in “other compensation” – to the tune of $783,529. What’s that mean? The filing says it’s “$692,679 for costs related to personal use of aircraft chartered in connection with his comprehensive security program and on which family and friends flew during 2011, and $90,850 for costs related to estate and financial planning during 2011.

That near $500,000 salary isn’t going to be there for long, however. Zuckerberg will begin taking a $1 salary effective 2013. This is not an unprecedented moved for top tech CEOs – Steve Jobs and Google’s Larry Page are notable chiefs who also take only a buck in salary each year.

Mr. Zuckerberg will be fine, we predict. He does, after all, have a 28% stake in a company worth upwards of $100 billion.

Here’s the rest of the financial info for the execs. From the top: CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg, CFO David Ebersman, VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer, and VP General Counsel and Secretary Theodore Ullyot.

First:

Your starting annual base salary will be at the rate of one million dollars ($1,000,000) per annum, less applicable taxes and withholdings…You will also be eligible to receive an annual target bonus of two hundred percent (200%) of your annual Base Salary…

My reaction? $1 million–maybe 2–to take over a company that is arguably in the sorriest state of its entire existence? I’d want at least $10 million on the table before I’d consider putting my good name alongside that mess.

Then I read:

Bartz, 60, could supplement her salary with a cash bonus up to $4 million, depending on Yahoo’s financial performance. She also is guaranteed a 2009 payment of $2.5 million in cash and $7.5 million in Yahoo stock…None of Bartz’s stock options will vest unless she can increase Yahoo’s stock price by at least 50 percent above the exercise price of her options.

All told, Bartz could earn a whopping $19 million, if she can come in and right the ship. This tells me two things.

1. The Yahoo board is smart enough to offer a package that only really rewards if Bartz excels as CEO.
2. Bartz is ultra confident that she can get Yahoo on track and its stock price back closer to $20.

Bartz may not be a big name–at least "not round these parts"–but clearly the signs are good that Yahoo’s not out for the count!

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So the difference between Yahoo’s chief financial officer and its president is $315,000, apparently, or 63 percent of that CFO’s salary.  What’s more, Elinor Mills reports that “Decker has been granted a stock option to purchase 300,000 shares at an exercise price of $26.20 each and 200,000 shares of restricted stock units.”

Finally, “Her annual target cash bonus will be 150 percent of her base salary, or $1.2 million, but her actual bonus for any year will be determined based on her job performance.”

Of course, considering how Yahoo’s done lately, that bonus is hardly a sure thing.  And there are bound to be examples of execs at other companies making far more money.  Still, the story is turning heads, and is at least interesting as a straightforward bit of news.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s stock is down $.19 (or just .71 percent) for the day.

But I do hope to explain one of the more important differences between web analytics and most of the traditional BI marketing analytics that has been done in the last twenty years. In addition, I’m going to make the case for why a new tool from WebTrends is a lot more important than you may be inclined to think. Along the way, you just might get a little richer – in understanding if not in take-home pay!

What actually got me to write about quantitative variables is a product from WebTrends that I first saw in late July and re-visited at the Engage Conference in Vegas. The product is called Score and it’s a product direction that I believe to be significant. One that echoes back to a great deal of work we did in the first six or seven years at Semphonic.

To explain why I think Score is significant, I’m going to have to have to delve into a bit of analytic theory. Don’t groan – I’ll do my best not to be too digressive!

For many years, multi-dimensional analysis has been the staple of business intelligence systems. Products from companies like Business Objects, Cognos and MicroStrategy have provided rich multi-dimensional reporting and analysis for probably a good decade. Web Analytics tools like Discover 2.0, Visual Site and WebTrends VI are just beginning to provide the similar levels of capability to web analytics.

What is multi-dimensional analysis? It’s simple stuff really and this is ground I’ve gone over before. In basic statistics, you typically start an analysis with a Frequency table. A Frequency table gives you the counts for all the values of a single variable. Here’s a example:

A frequency is a 1 dimensional analysis – it looks at a single variable. The next step up in complexity is called a cross-tabulation. And cross-tabulation typically begins with two variables. Here’s a classis 2-way cross-tabulation:

Cross-Tabulation is 2 dimensional analysis – and the basic method can be infinitely extend into three, four, five and potentially even more dimensions. In three way analysis, we might add a variable like income and be able to see the count of all High-Income, Age 16-25, Males versus the count for all Low Income, Gender Unknown, Age 65+.

What’s happening when you do multi-dimensional analysis is, implicitly, visitor segmentation. Each cell in the n-dimensional table can be reasonably considered a specific visitor segment. And by adding metrics around success or usage, you can map these descriptive variables to real-world differences in performance.

N-Dimensional analysis is powerful. But it also has some fundamental limitations that are poorly appreciated both in the BI world where it has been the dominant paradigm and in the web analytics world where it has looked like the holy grail.

When you use multi-dimensional analysis, you are segmenting visitors (or visits) into finer and finer units. Eventually, you might have a success count for an extremely small population defined by six or seven different factors. But as powerful as this is, there are some things it just can’t do.

First, multi-dimensional analysis is like a series of implicit AND filters. A visitor must be 18-35 AND male AND High-Income AND located in California. But suppose you want to add an OR filter. Suppose, for example, that you want 18-35 and MALE and (High-Income OR Medium Income) AND located in California. You can do this (in a way), by adding up cell counts. But the multi-dimensionality works against you now, because the OR may add 500 (50 states x 5 age categories x 2 gender categories) cells to keep track of. That isn’t very practical. So here’s a key capability to look at when you evaluate a multi-dimensional reporting system – can you collapse some values in a dimension easily. Some systems let you do this – – but many don’t. It’s a subtle point but it makes a big difference in the real world.

Even more significant, however, is the difficulty that ANY multi-dimensional analysis system has with quantitative (continuous) variables. Classic multi-dimensional analysis evolved in the CPG world where demographic variables were almost always the dimensions. Demographics aren’t usually quantitative. You are either Male or Female, 18-35 or 60+. It’s true that variables like age and income COULD be treated as quantitative values, but they are almost always used as Category variables. These variables aren’t treated as numeric variables where the value difference is signficant.  From a marketers perspective, 25-40 is just a category. and 26 is the same as 40 but different than 24.

This is a key fact about Multi-Dimensional analysis – it isn’t particularly useful for anything except the analysis of variables as CATEGORY variables. Multi-dimensional analysis doesn’t treat values as numerically significant.

In web analytics, however, the key dimensions are behavioral. And virtually every behavioral variable IS quantitative. We are commonly interested in HOW MUCH a visitor did: how many page views of Product Material, how many petitions they signed, how long they spent on site, how often they visited, how much product they purchased. In all of these cases, good analysis of the data requires numerical comparison of the variable values.

There are behavioral variables that aren’t quantitative (Is Customer, Is Registered) but they are much less common than quantitative variables. In web analytics, by far the most important behavior is page view. And page views are quantitative in every sense. They are numerically comparative and the number is ALWAYS significant.

Multi-dimensional analysis doesn’t handle these quantitative variables. You HAVE to bucket variables before you can analyze them – so you’re reducing quantitative data to category data at the very outset. And if the variable isn’t bucketed, it isn’t available as a dimension. So suppose you want to analyze the effect of viewing Product X feature pages or spending time in the Product X feature area. In multi-dimensional analysis, you can’t do it unless you can bucket Product X feature page views or Product X feature time.

In many, many systems, you can not bucket these variables. That means you can’t do multi-dimensional analysis on them. And even when you can bucket them, you are limited to the ranges in the buckets. You aren’t ever analyzing them numerically. And here’s where our AND issue strikes again, because if I want to evaluate visitors with High Pages OR High Content Time, I’m back to adding up cells. And the methods of multi-dimensional analysis don’t give me anyway to take advantage of the fact that the actual value of a quantitative variable IS significant and can be usefully compared to other actual values.

Without the ability to flexibly bucket and collapse range variables, doing multi-dimensional analysis on quantitative variables is impossible. With them, it is extremely clumsy and not very useful. No matter how powerful the multi-dimensional model is, it’s really the wrong tool for the job.

So what’s the right tool? Well, that brings us back to my opening. Because the answer is something like Score.

Score lets you assign values to actions – and those values are additive. So I can produce a visitor score based on the number of product content views. Or the total time in a content area. Or on ANY combination of those two values that exceeds a threshold I set. What is virtually impossible to do with even the most flexible and powerful multi-dimensional analysis tool is trivial with a scoring system.

Before we began using off-the-shelf software, scoring was the primary analytic technique we used at Semphonic. We didn’t do it by hand (the way Score has you do it) – we used neural networks to score visitors across dozens of different dimensions. But Score’s user driven approach is still vastly more powerful for a host of important web analytics tasks than mulit-dimensional analysis.

What tasks are these? One of the obvious ones is measuring Engagement – which is why Score was discussed so prominently at Engage. You can’t measure Engagement with a single measure. And nearly every significant component of Engagement is quantitative – how much you do of something is CRITICAL. Which makes analysis of Engagement in multi-dimensional tools problematic.

But the utility of a product like Score is hardly limited to Engagement. For obvious reasons, scoring methodologies allow for significantly richer visitor segmentation than rules based around dimensional filtering.

CRM integration is a third – and particularly significant application for scoring methods. When I first saw Score, its potential uses for driving customer contact programs seemed obvious. Many of our clients do both regular and event-driven email messaging based on site behavior. Using multi-dimensional filtering, these cuts are quite limited. Scoring makes this process both much simpler and much more powerful.

A travel site, for instance, could easily establish threshold values for receiving an email alert on a particular destination. That threshold might include ANY combination of actual trips to the destination, planned trips to the destination and actual trips to similar destinations. Trying to accomplish a similar filter with multi-dimensional cells is either impossible or tortuous.

Here’s an even an even more difficult problem – suppose I send my customers a once-monthly newsletter and I want to target a dynamic offer to the destination they are MOST interested in. This is flatly impossible with multi-dimensional filtering. It is possible with scoring systems (though not – sadly – with Score which doesn’t currently support this).

Effectively, what scoring methods let the analyst accomplish is the analysis and combination of quantitative variables. In web analytics, this turns out to be an immensely useful capability because all of the core variables ARE quantitative.

Score is a ways from being perfect – it’s Version 1.0 after all. You can’t use all the variables you should be able to. You can’t compare scores. You can’t use negative scores. There are limitations on the number of scores you can build. The rule building process isn’t terribly flexible when it comes to integrating with large amounts of content. There is no data driven scoring.

But despite these V1.0 weaknesses, Score is a very, very significant upgrade in capability compared to multi-dimensional analysis within web analytics. It’s already a great tool for a number of key web analytics tasks. With continuous improvement, it has the potential to become one of the most important tools in web analytics. Once analysts start using tools like Score, they are going to realize something that should have been fairly obvious all along. Web Analytics is all about quantitative variables.

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Can’t Touch This: Yahoo, Comcast, And Video

It’s a bigger deal than the humble statement issued by Yahoo let on to readers. Yahoo gets an exclusive multi-year deal to deliver ads on Comcast.net, and Comcast gets the benefit of Yahoo’s branded advertising experience.

It’s almost enough to make YHOO shareholders forget about the $71.66 million pay package CEO Terry Semel will receive from the company, along with his $1 salary.

Mark Cuban called it the deal of the year, heady praise for an online deal in the wake of Google’s $3.2 billion DoubleClick purchase.

"The one thing that Google doesn’t have is a contained network. Comcast does," Cuban wrote. "The implications are significant."

In Cuban’s opinion, it isn’t an Internet deal, but a non-Internet deal, since Comcast delivers its content via cable to its private network of customers. Comcast customers also have set-top boxes, from which the company can pull in plenty of customer data.

"The two companies can work together to leverage customer data (within privacy limits) to deliver ads that are not only personalized, but also can evolve to be "over the top" of the set top box," said Cuban.

High-quality video means high-quality video ads. No weird pixellations a la YouTube or other online video providers. If it plays out as Cuban predicted, he thinks Google and Microsoft will have to follow the path set by Yahoo and Comcast.

To do that, it seems those companies would need private networks where, like Comcast, they can control and monitor the quality of service. Google could partner with Time Warner Cable, or even fulfill the dream of many a tech pundit by launching a fully-owned private network.

How about Google Network over power lines? The company has invested in broadband over power line technology. In that case, one could forget about cable networks. Google would be in the infrastructure of any building that can power a nightlight, should BPL truly develop.

But for now, Yahoo’s deal on Comcast’s private network is one Microsoft and Google can’t touch.

The site will feature video clips of 12 finalists and will allow users to cast votes for those select four they believe should receive an extra 15,000 for their cause. The awards cover four categories that include public health, community building, education & environment, and global impact. The site will also feature questions from celebrities on Yahoo Answers.

"The BRICK awards are all about acknowledging acts of community service by remarkably selfless young people," say Meg Garlinghouse, director of Yahoo! for Good, the company’s community relations initiative. "We’re using our network to spotlight these extraordinary individuals while also using our vast reach to inspire more youth to make a positive impact on their communities."

Web site HowStuffWorks will have background information and interviews with the 12 2007 Brick Award Winners. It will also include information on the voting process, previous winners and what people can do in their own communities.

"Other award shows recognize celebrities who can ice skate and people who can sing. It’s about time we honor people who actually do really important good work. I’m looking forward to making these kids more famous than Paris Hilton," said Nancy Lublin, CEO the BRICK Awards.

All of the 12 winners will receive a $10,000 community grant to continue their work.

In Silicon Valley, no one beats Yahoo’s CEO when it comes to matching paychecks. ZDNet noted how Semel’s $56.8 million in compensation last year easily bested that of executives with similar titles, as a survey cited in the San Francisco Chronicle noted.

Although four of the top seven executives in that survey all have Yahoo on their business cards, presumably printed in money-green ink, Semel will experience a salary cut for 2008. The company’s board of directors have decided to nudge their CEO’s salary down to a symbolic $1, and will make up the difference with stock and options.

A slew of Form 4 and 8-K filings on June 2nd with the SEC discussed how Yahoo would compensate its top officers. Semel stands to gain a discretionary annual bonus of a fully vested stock option of up to 1 million shares each year from 2006 to 2008.

The top man also has a retention bonus in play of 6 million option shares with a strike price of $31.59. Those options vest over a three year period, with 25%, 35%, and 40% vesting on each anniversary date that Semel remains ensconced in Yahoo’s helm.

Other Yahoo officers, like CFO Susan Decker and COO Dan Rosenweig, will maintain salaries of $500,000 annually, with $1 million cash bonuses possible each year from 2006 through 2009. The board also provided stock options of 2.1 million shares for each of the two officers, with a number of the shares vesting each year over a four year period.

Yahoo’s stock has gyrated from 28.60 to 43.66 over the past 52 weeks, as denoted by MarketWatch. The stock last traded at 31.52.

The $1 salary has come back into vogue. Lee Iacocca famously accepted a $1 salary when he was working toward Chrysler’s recovery many years ago. Now, such iconic names as Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have switched to the $1 salary.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.