Business Learn

SWIFT Bank Network Taps Crowdsourcing

2011-02-28T14:04:00.000-08:00

Staid bankers are embracing the latest collaborative tools to drive innovation. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), a global organization that handles an average of 15 million standardized financial transactions such as wire transfers every day for more than 8,000 banks, is spearheading a drive to “inject an innovation culture not only at SWIFT but the financial community as a whole,” by collaborating on new e-banking solutions and working more closely with start-ups, says Kosta Peric, head of innovation at SWIFT.

Since 1973, Brussels-based SWIFT has provided a shared worldwide data processing and communication link for the world’s banks, using a common language for international financial transactions. Its main function is to be a carrier of messages. It does not hold funds, manage accounts on behalf of customers, or store financial information on an ongoing basis. That said, SWIFT is increasingly taking on the role of a catalyst to bring the financial community together to work collaboratively on market practice, standards, and issues of mutual interest.

With that goal in mind, Peric is behind an online marketplace called Innotribe that went live on Feb. 11 and aims to leverage the collective creativity of the finance sector. The idea is not only to deliver on the traditional mission of lowering costs, reducing operational risk, and eliminating inefficiencies, but also to get creative about taking the sector into entirely new directions.

Innotribe is clearly not your father’s banking communications platform. Bankers who wish to submit their ideas for new products, services, or business processes (or enhancements to existing ones) can do so by signing in with a Facebook, Google, or Twitter account. They are greeted with the message “Remember, everyone is an innovator; and a crazy idea that works is not so crazy at all. Share with us your ideas, be they matter of fact or wildly aspirational.”

The site uses a cloud-based software application from Brightidea.com to collect, track, and manage ideas. It also allows those participating in the project to volunteer to work on particular projects and vote on which ideas should be considered for investment and developed to the proof-of-concept phase.

"What we are doing is enabling collaborative innovation," says Peric. That includes embracing crowdsourcing and mash-ups—technology approaches more often associated with start-ups targeting the under-30 crowd than staid bankers.

Peric and his five-person innovation team started out two-and-a-half years ago as a research and development unit. After little more than a year they began encouraging others inside SWIFT to collaborate on new projects. Teams of SWIFT employees were asked to solve particular problems. They were given one month to work on their ideas during their free time, such as lunch or coffee breaks. When the deadline arrived, the proposed solutions were passed to Peric's team. A jury of executives voted on which ideas they liked best. The winning ideas were then implemented on the company's time.

Based on the success of the in-house collaboration, SWIFT decided to involve the wider banking community. During its annual Sibos conference in Hong Kong last September some 6,000 delegates were asked to generate ideas in three different areas—crowdsourcing, mash-ups, and cloud computing, which allows the shifting of computing tasks and storage from local desktop PCs and company servers to remote systems across the Internet. About 500 people showed up to learn more. A core team of 40 delegates met for two hours a day during four days to flesh out concepts and develop pitches that were then delivered publicly to a jury.

One of the winning ideas is called "eMe," a cloud-based project that would allow banking customers to establish a digital lockbox with sensitive personal or business information, such as credit card numbers. Instead of having to type in the information each time a consumer or business makes a purchase, a code could be given to the digital lockbox. Click here to watch a video of the original eMe pitch. Another winning idea, with the working title "eBiz," involves creating a central electronic point where information could be retrieved by businesses about the status of shipped goods.

SWIFT is exploring the idea of co-investing in the development of the "eMe" and "eBiz" projects alongside some of the banks that are its clients. Working with startups is the next step. "We are not yet working with startups but we want to engage with them," says Peric. "It is very much in line with our open collaboration concept—there are lots of ideas out there that are relevant to the financial community so we want to make our SWIFT brand known in this context."

To help spread the word SWIFT has become a sponsor of a global competition called Innovate! 2010 launched by the Guidewire Group, a market intelligence and advisory firm, to identify and accelerate the world's 100 top technology, media, and telecommunications startups. (Click here to learn more about Innovate! 2010). Peric says he hopes to give at least one of the winning startups from the Innovate!2010 contest some exposure at SWIFT's next Sibos event, which will take place this October in Amsterdam.

Start-ups with technologies relevant to the financial industry should pitch directly to SWIFT or through the Innotribe Web site. "We guarantee the request will be acted upon," Peric says.

Guest blog post from Jennifer L. Schenker.

This blog post was adapted from www.informilo.com. Click here to read the original posting, provided courtesy of Informilo.

View the original article here

Nokia and Ericsson: A Tale of Two Telcos

2011-02-26T20:51:00.000-08:00

Like a one-two punch, the two Nordic giants of telecom equipment reported results on Apr. 22 and 23 that fell short of analyst estimates. Nokia’s first quarter revenues announced on Apr. 22 grew 3% from the same period a year earlier, to €9.5 billion ($12.7 billion), and net income nearly tripled from 2009’s tough first quarter, to €349 million ($466 million). But the earnings were about €61 million shy of analyst estimates, and Nokia’s shares plunged 13.3% on Apr. 22 and another 2% on Apr. 23. It wasn’t so much the profit miss that spooked investors but falling average selling prices for phones, flat market share, and a slightly lowered forecast for operating margins this year.

Ericsson’s results announced Apr. 23 were in many ways worse. Revenue dropped 9% from the same quarter in 2009, to 45.1 billion Swedish kroner ($6.28 billion), about 3 billion kroner ($418 million) short of analyst predictions. Net income fell 27%, to 1.26 billion kroner ($174 million), nearly 38% ($103 million) below analyst estimates. The company blamed tepid operator investment in network equipment and continued sharp price competition from rivals. Yet Ericsson shares soared 10.3% on Apr. 23, largely because its results included a near-doubling in North American sales.

Is there an illness at the heart of Nordic telecom? No question, the first quarter was a comedown from the results posted by both Nokia and Ericsson in the final quarter of 2009. But aside from that, the companies are facing quite different situations. While the reaction from investors in both cases may have been overdone, the basic direction of movement reflects diverging realities.

Nokia, whose shares have fallen 1.4% this year against a backdrop of generally rising telecom stocks, can’t seem to catch a break these days. Long the leader in mobile handsets, and still hanging on to one-third of the overall market, Nokia has been sent reeling by the success of the Apple iPhone. Sure, Nokia sold 21.5 million “converged mobile devices,” or smartphones and mobile computers, in the first quarter, up 57% from a year earlier. Apple, by comparison, sold just 8.75 million iPhones. But Apple snagged an average of $622 in product and service revenue for each iPhone, whereas Nokia’s devices sold for an average price of $207 (€155). Translation: Apple made 22% more revenue on 60% fewer units—and its profit margins were even more dominant.

It's not as if the Finnish giant hasn't been developing smartphones for years, or hadn't spotted the trend towards mobile services. Indeed, it was ahead of the rest of the industry for many years in both areas. Recall that the original palm-top Communicator with a QWERTY keyboard came out in 1996(!), and Nokia made waves—and annoyed jealous mobile operators—a decade ago with its Club Nokia download center for ringtones, screen savers, and other phone enhancements. But Apple, with its snazzy design, great timing, and unparalleled ability to rally software developers, has walked away with the market buzz in state-of-the-art smartphones and downloadable (and revenue-producing) apps.

It's this perceptual gap that inclines investors to sell Nokia on any signs of weakness in its results. Overall, the company's performance remains enviable. It sold a solid 107.8 phones in the first quarter, up 16% from a year earlier (against a market that Nokia predicts grew 11%) and it still enjoys 12.1% operating margins in its handsets and services business. Its operating cash flow in the quarter was a cool €1 billion, and its somewhat troubled Nokia Siemens Networks joint venture gratified analysts with a small pro-forma profit for the quarter. Even the forecast decline in 2010 operating margins—from an earlier estimate of 12% to 14%, to a revised range of 11% to 13%—doesn't amount to much.

A bigger worry is that Nokia still hasn't come up with a blockbuster answer to the iPhone, and the time horizon is slipping. CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told analysts Apr. 22 that Nokia's first device using a new open-source version of the Symbian smartphone operating system, known as Symbian^3, won't ship until the third quarter of this year. It had earlier been expected in the second quarter. A follow-on Symbian refresh is now expected in 2011.

What about Ericsson? Far and away the dominant seller of mobile network equipment and services, the Swedish company has been on a roll since it bounced back from the horrorshow of the dot-com and telecom crash in the early part of this decade. But stiff competition in its business, especially from rising Chinese rival Huawei, is keeping prices down at the same time that recession-strapped mobile operators are holding back on spending.

Ericsson has bulked up by buying other companies, including some of the assets of failed Canadian telco gear-maker Nortel. It was the addition of those assets, plus a well-timed deal with AT&T, that helped Ericsson lift its North American sales 99% in the first quarter, to $1.3 billion, making the region now its largest in the world.

The proximate reason investors bid up the shares of Ericsson even as they hammered Nokia is, ironically, the same: the iPhone. In his conference call with analysts after the earnings announcement, Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg pointed to the rapid growth in mobile data services in the U.S.—a phenomenon largely driven by Apple's popular device and the voracious wireless bandwidth consumption of its users. Investors see huge opportunity for Ericsson to sell equipment that serves that growing demand, which in some cities has already lead to network saturation. Credit Suisse figures Ericsson could be 20% undervalued at its current price.

As for Nokia, its shares are likely to remain under pressure until it shows a clear turnaround. With further delays on tap in next-generation software, says analyst Mark McKechenie of Broadpoint AmTech, 2010 is likely to be a "more of the same" year. The truth is, being the volume leader with dominant market share outside the U.S. just isn't enough when you're facing a phenomenon like Apple.

View the original article here

Irish Startups Shine in Venture Tech Tour

2011-02-24T18:27:00.000-08:00

Venture capitalists are descending on the U.K. and Ireland this week to meet the cream of technology upstarts. They’ll be introduced to companies such as Belfast’s Lagan Technologies, a supplier of software for improving delivery of public services that has become a world leader in its market niche, beating rivals like Oracle for contracts with American cities from San Francisco to Boston.

Lagan is one of 30 companies pitching themselves to a group of more than 60 venture capitalists during the U.K. & Ireland Tech Tour on April 27-28. Many of the presenters are, like Lagan, later-stage companies that have already carved out successful global businesses. A surprising one-third of them are located on the Emerald Isle.

This week’s tour of the U.K. and Ireland is the 42nd such outing put on by the Geneva-based European Tech Tour Association, an independent non-profit organization that has been discovering and promoting early- and later-stage tech startups for more than a decade. It last held tours of England in 2004 and 2007, Scotland in 2001 and 2006, and the Republic of Ireland in 1999 and 2004.

What sets this tour apart from earlier trips is how many of the companies have already established themselves as world leaders in their fields, says Victor Basta, a veteran investment banker and president of the European Tech Tour Association. Basta is a former partner with London-based boutique investment firm Arma Partners, and now serves as an advisor to Magister Artis Capital, a London-based firm that provides merchant banking services for later stage companies and investors in growth industries.

The other major difference this time around is the number of Irish companies. Lagan is based in Northern Ireland, and another 10 of the startups that made the tour selection committee’s final cut are from the Republic of Ireland. That’s a disproportionately large number, considering that Ireland has a population of just 4.5 million, compared with 62 million in the U.K, says Basta. “What this shows is that multiple years of government focus on technology in Ireland, tie-ins with universities, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a local ecosystem of advisers and investors has created an ecosystem to rival [that of] Cambridge,” says Basta.

While many areas in Europe have tried and failed to recreate the success of California's Silicon Valley, Cambridge—sometimes dubbed "Silicon Fen"—is often cited as the place that has come closest. The English city is home to a large cluster of high tech businesses, many of which are connected to the University of Cambridge. Ireland's focus, says Basta, "seems more on building companies than technological innovation, and that cultural difference seems to be paying off." The Irish government also has done proportionally more to support entrepreneurs than Britain has, he says. "It's clear from the quantity and quality of the Irish candidates on this tech tour that their efforts are paying off handsomely."

Des Doyle, manager of growth capital for the government-run agency Enterprise Ireland, is proud of the high number of Irish companies on the tech tour. Enterprise Ireland notified local companies about the competition and urged them to apply, Doyle says. The Irish government has made a "huge commitment to supporting the entrepreneur," he says.

Among other programs, Ireland offers richer tax incentives than do many of its European neighbors for entrepreneurs who start their own companies and for investors who bet on ventures aiming at global markets. Through Enterprise Ireland, the government also directly finances start-ups—some 70 to 75 companies per year, at an average investment of €300,000 ($400,000) each—and makes indirect investments by putting money into seed and venture capital funds and defraying the operational costs of regionally-based angel networks.

For example, the eighth new fund supported through Enterprise Ireland's Seed and Venture Capital Program is comprised of a €17 million investment from the Bank of Ireland, €8 million from Enterprise Ireland, and €1 million from the University of Limerick Foundation. Managed on behalf of the Bank of Ireland and venture capital firm Kernel Capital, the €26 million fund launched last November invests in startup and early stage companies in the technology, food, and financial services sectors.

When you add up all of the efforts "you don't find that kind of government sponsorship in Cambridge or elsewhere in Europe," says tech tour president Basta. "It's worth looking at this in more detail because Ireland is producing a disproportionate amount of world-class start-ups."

Guest blog post from Jennifer L. Schenker.

This blog post was adapted from www.informilo.com. Click here to read the original posting, provided courtesy of Informilo.

View the original article here

Apple and Nokia Gain in Smartphone Sales

2011-02-22T14:28:00.000-08:00

The numbers are out from market research houses, and the biggest winners for the first quarter of 2010 in smartphones were Apple and Nokia. Both companies saw their sales surge from the same period in 2009, and both gained market share, according to figures released Apr. 30 by Boston-based researcher Strategy Analytics.

The telecom research firm figures the global market for smartphones—handsets that support wireless e-mail, Internet access, downloadable apps, and often touchscreen- or stylus-based user interfaces—grew by a sprightly 50% vs. the first quarter of 2009, to 53.7 million units. That amounts to about 18% of overall handset unit sales, up from just under 15% a year earlier. Apple’s sales grew a dazzling 132%, to 8.8 million units, while Nokia’s grew an impressive 57%, to 21.5 million units.

Canada’s Research In Motion was no slouch, either: The BlackBerry-maker shipped 10.6 million units in the quarter, up 45% from a year earlier, giving it the No. 2 position overall in the category, according to Strategy Analytics. But RIM’s market share in smartphones slipped slightly to 19.7%. Finland’s Nokia commanded 40% of the market—up from 38.2% in the first quarter of 2009—and California-based Apple walked away with 16.4% share, vs. 10.6% a year earlier.

Of course, smartphones are still a relatively small (if profitable) part of the overall mobile phone market, where Nokia and the Korean giants Samsung and LG Electronics continue to dominate. Figures released Apr. 30 by researcher IDC show that the global market for all kinds of handsets, which run the gamut from high-priced devices with video and GPS navigation to lowly voice-and-texting models, surged a healthy 21.7% in the quarter, to 242.2 million units, vs. the same period in 2009.

IDC cautions that this isn’t a sustainable growth rate, given that last year’s first quarter—amid the depths of the global economic downturn—was one of the worst on record. Overall, IDC expects mobile phone shipments this year to climb by about 11% vs. 2009. But in an encouraging sign for mobile operators who have invested billions in building out third-generation (3G) networks that support faster wireless data connections, ABI Research said on Apr. 30 that for the first time in history sales of 3G-compatible phones in the first quarter of 2010 eclipsed those of earlier-generation (2G) devices.

Nokia didn't fare as well in the broader market as it did in smartphones: It shipped 107.8 million units in the quarter, up 15.7%, but it lost some market share, clocking in at 36.6% overall, compared with 38.4% a year earlier. Most of the difference owes to continued success by Samsung, which now has nearly 22% of the market (up from 18.9% a year earlier), and to gains by RIM. Samsung has boosted its distribution in developing markets and has lifted its average selling price with higher-end devices, while RIM has managed to expand its market beyond its core corporate clientele to a growing number of consumers— especially "text-crazy teens," as IDC puts it.

LG Electronics and the Japanese-Swedish Sony Ericsson joint venture both lost share, though LG held on to a clear No. 3 position. No. 5-ranked Sony Ericsson's unit sales fell a worrisome 27.6%, but it returned to profitability in the quarter after a stretch of losses and introduced a number of snazzy models, including the Xperia X10 and Vivaz, that could help it claw back market share and maintain or raise its high average selling price going forward.

Motorola, which turned in numbers that signaled something of a turnaround, nevertheless fell out of the top five for the first time in history. IDC figures that the "other" category, which includes Motorola, Apple, and dozens of smaller makers, grew slightly from 24.3% of the market a year ago to 25.3% in the first quarter. Motorola's results were boosted by an improved showing in smartphones—especially devices based on the Android operating system from Google. While noting that Motorola's overall cell phone sales fell by 43% year-over-year, researcher Rethink Wireless notes that Motorola's results "offered the most concrete indication yet that the firm's handset turnaround is underway."

Among the factors that could help Motorola are its growing success in the market for handsets based on Android. Equity analyst Mark McKechnie of Broadpoint AmTech says that Google appears to be "backing away from its own branded phone," the Nexus One. At the same time, Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of Palm signals that the computer giant could lessen its support for both Android and Microsoft's Windows Mobile in favor of the well-regarded WebOS operating system developed by Palm. The result, McKechnie says, could be that Motorola will emerge as "the leading Android vendor." If Android takes off, that could give Motorola an edge in the market, though analysts say it still needs to develop its global distribution.

Winning the battle for mobile phone market share and profits looks increasingly to rely on success in smartphones. Lower-end devices will still command the lion's share of the business, and in that regard Nokia, Samsung, and LG are still well positioned. But as Apple and RIM continue to gain, and as Motorola finds new footing in Android devices, the fight is far from finished. The next few quarters could chart a new path for the mobile phone industry and for the consumers around the world who continue to snap up handsets at a remarkable rate.

View the original article here

Borderless European Cloud Risks Fragmentation

2011-02-20T20:22:00.000-08:00

Nationalism is rearing its head in cyberspace. A proposal is gaining ground in France to build a federation of interconnected local computing clouds—funded in part by the government—to protect the country’s sovereignty, data privacy, and jobs. Some observers fear the idea could spread to other countries on the Continent, potentially undermining the promised benefits to Europeans of universal cloud computing, which is being billed as the biggest shift in information technology since personal computers were introduced in the 1970s.

The idea for a cloud à la Française is in part a backlash against American providers of cloud computing services such as Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft. As with Europe’s $6 billion Galileo sat-nav system—an alternative to the U.S.-operated GPS—and various Old World search engine projects such as France’s Quaero, some Europeans worry about becoming overly dependent on American technology in key strategic areas.

On May 17, a group of French technology companies and businesses known as the Association for a Digital Economy in France (l’ADEN), called on local governments in France to partner with private companies to build a network of data centers and shared cloud platforms and services that would cater to the computing needs of French businesses, organizations, governments, and citizens. Such a network would provide an alternative to handing over data and processes to American providers. The group has suggested that the local cloud infrastructure could be built with the help of funds set aside for France’s “grand emprunt national,” a €4.5 billion economic stimulus package that will kick in at the end of next year.

Cloud computing is the term for a new form of distributed computing that allows consumers, enterprises, and governments to store their data and applications on remote networked servers, rather than on local computers and data centers, and to tap into computer applications and other software via the network—freeing themselves from building and managing their own technology infrastructure. In addition to reducing operational costs, analysts say the shift to cloud technologies allows radical business innovation and new business models.

Some industry experts in Europe believe only giants like Google and Amazon can achieve the necessary economies of scale in building the massive data centers that underpin the cloud. They fear that national projects will be white elephants and question whether big enterprise customers like Danone and Carrefour will be willing to pay the price of French sovereignty.

"Interconnection of hybrid clouds is not a simple problem, and the risk is that the benefits come slowly and that local champions cannot grow and reach critical mass fast enough," say Pierre Liautaud, a Frenchman who has worked in the tech industry for 25 years, holding executive positions at both IBM and Microsoft, as well as running several startups. Liautaud is currently organizing a November conference for the European Tech Tour Association to highlight European startups in cloud computing, most of which are concentrating on applications that run on top of infrastructure run by companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Yet some business people argue that European corporations won't remain globally competitive if they're not in charge of their underlying cloud computing infrastructure and software. They say Europe can't afford to let American companies control a technology that could underpin every consumer, business, and government service of the future. "Europe cannot stay away from owning its own cloud infrastructure," says François Bourdoncle, CEO of Exalead, a Paris-based provider of infrastructure software for the cloud. "It is a critical element of competitiveness—not even considering the sovereignty part of it—to control where your data is hosted, how it is being used, and how you access it."

Bourdoncle and others say the industry is at an inflection point. Some liken it to the moment when Europe realized that computer chips would be key to the future and that it needed to have its own global champion. The French and Italian governments set about fusing two national semiconductor companies to create STMicroelectronics, which today ranks among the top 10 chipmakers globally. Now, it's time to do the same in cloud computing, they argue. At stake is a market that tech consultancy IDC projects will grow from $17.4 billion in 2009 to $44 billion in 2013.

For cloud computing to reach that kind of market size, the industry must address important issues that are alarming consumers, businesses, and governments. According to a report prepared by the World Economic Forum and consultancy Accenture, the challenges include keeping data and systems secure, maintaining the privacy of people and organizations, preventing customers from being locked into one cloud provider, and creating the right regulatory balance between customer protection and business efficiency.

Some Europeans question to what extent American companies like Google can be trusted to guard data privacy. Earlier this month European privacy regulators reacted angrily to the disclosure by Google that it inadvertently collected private data from Wi-Fi networks while compiling its StreetView service in several European countries.

Distributing data storage is supposed to make it safer, but some European companies, particularly in Germany, are reluctant to let American companies transport their data across borders and out of the country. National data protections laws further confuse the market, raising questions over whether Europe will have a single market for cloud computing. And the May 17 position paper from l'ADEN arguing in favor of a French cloud makes market fragmentation a real possibility.

The French government has already said it will set aside €2.5 billion of its €4.5 billion stimulus plan for digital services, including cloud computing. The French business newspaper Les Echos reported earlier this year that Dassault Systemes, France Telecom's Orange Business Services, and Thales were lobbying the government to set aside €700 million for cloud computing.

The budget isn't yet set in stone but pressure is clearly mounting for the government to step in. Politicians in France have been vocal about issues of national security, the implication being that cloud computing – if controlled by the likes of Google and Amazon – would hurt data privacy and leave companies vulnerable to industrial espionage.

In its May 17 statement L'ADEN, whose members include Orange Business Services and Bouyges Telecom, gives a list of reasons for the government to back a plan to build a federation of local clouds including:

• Safeguarding national sovereignty: "Notably against big American and Asian players in cloud computing and in order to conserve knowledge and technological competence on French territory as well as protecting data privacy and sensitive industrial information."

• Creating jobs: "Developing locally based IT infrastructure will avoid workers having to relocate outside France and [will] facilitate the development of teleworking."

• Developing secure digital services in areas such as health, education, the legal system and government services.

• Ensuring the development of businesses of all sizes by making the best IT infrastructure available locally to companies throughout all regions in France

• Avoiding the under-utilization of existing French data centers and rendering them obsolete.

Ivan Ferneti, a principal at London-based private equity firm Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, which has invested in European-based cloud startups, expressed skepticism about the ADEN proposal. Managing a sophisticated set of services from a state-of-the-art data center requires deep knowledge and experience in many IT fields, he says.

"This is why running cloud data centers works only for the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and a very few others who will get bigger and bigger," he says. "If local government and politicians believe they can create local employment with cloud infrastructure investments they are misled."

European serial entrepreneur Roman Stanek, currently founder and CEO of Good Data, a cloud computing company that provides collaborative analytics on demand, also questions the ability of individual European countries to compete on infrastructure. "There is enough demand for infrastructure-as-a-service, for example, from Amazon.com, but I don't believe that the local European infrastructure will see enough demand, and therefore, scale, to compete," says Stanek, a Czech who previously founded NetBeans, which was sold to Sun Microsystems and Systinet, which was sold to Hewlett-Packard.

Bourdoncle of Exalead sees it differently. His company is part of the Quaero projet, which is often painted as a misguided French government attempt to build a "Google killer." Bourdoncle bristles at that description. He describes Quaero (Latin for "I Seek") as a €100 million large-scale collaborative research program around multimedia indexing. (More details about the project's progress will be revealed to journalists on May 27 at a Paris press event.)

In addition to furthering multimedia search, Exalead owns technologies that can target important areas of cloud computing, such as distributed storage to replace today's relational databases, which Bourdoncle says don't scale up to the cloud. European companies can and should build infrastructure software, he argues, because that's where the margins are, and doing so will deliver more choices to customers. "Fragmentation of the market is a good thing because it brings competition," says Bourdoncle. "What's important is that [American companies like Google and Amazon] collaborate to make their infrastructure interoperable with that of others."

Only a few global players are likely to succeed at offering cloud computing infrastructure and services in horizontal segments like customer relationship management. Right now, the leaders are American, says David Bradshaw, research manager for European cloud services at IDC. But a large number of players may succeed in niche markets or by creating new kinds of applications for consumers and business, Bradshaw says. Indeed, IDC forecasts roughly half of all of the projected revenue from cloud computing will come from applications. Providing mobile cloud services is also seen as a big area of opportunity for European companies such as BT, Telefonica, and Orange.

"We could do with a bit more competition in some areas but services created by local vendors need to make commercial sense," says Bradshaw, "Otherwise, Europe could end up with enormously costly white elephants."

Guest blog post from Jennifer L. Schenker.

This blog post was adapted from www.informilo.com. Click here to read the original posting, provided courtesy of Informilo.

View the original article here

Did Vuitton Engage in a Little Fakery, Too?

2011-02-19T04:44:00.000-08:00

LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton has zero tolerance for companies that manufacture and sell fake goods. The Paris-based luxury group works with law-enforcement authorities to shut down counterfeiting operations in China, and has won court rulings against eBay for selling fake copies of Vuitton bags, Dior sunglasses, and other items.

But now British regulators have accused LVMH of engaging in a bit of fakery itself. On May 26, the country’s Advertising Standards Authority banned two recent Louis Vuitton advertisements, saying they left a “misleading” impression that the company’s products were handmade.

The ads, the subject of a Europe Insight blog post last December, depict Vuitton handbags and other items being fashioned by workers using hand tools and needle and thread. In fact, most Vuitton products are largely machine-produced—something I have witnessed firsthand in a Vuitton factory. The British truth-in-advertising agency opened an investigation after three consumers complained about the ads.

In its ruling, the agency said that Vuitton didn’t deny using sewing machines in its workshops. “They said that hand sewing machines were used for some aspects of items because they were more secure and necessary for strength, accuracy and durability,” the agency said. However, the company provided no documentation to the agency about the proportion of work done by hand. “Because we had not seen evidence that demonstrated the extent to which Louis Vuitton products were made by hand, we concluded that the ads were misleading,” the agency said.

LVMH, in a statement, said the ruling was not “about the truth of the claim, but whether there was sufficient documentation available to prove to the ASA the ‘extent to which LV products are made by hand.’ ” LVMH says the ad campaign has now ended.

Don’t expect Vuitton customers to rise up in anger over this issue. Reader comments on the earlier Europe Insight blog post were divided between those who thought the ads were dishonest, and those who thought the company was, as one reader put it, simply “celebrating craftsmanship and skill. What’s wrong with that?”

View the original article here

Entrepreneurship Goes Global

2011-02-17T18:45:00.000-08:00

Among the global economic upheavals of the past two decades, here’s one worth cheering about: the worldwide spread of entrepreneuriship. Anyone who doubts that should have headed to Monaco last weekend for the World Entrepreneur of the Year awards ceremony.

The 42 countries represented at the event included China and several former Soviet-bloc nations - places where starting a private business was illegal not so long ago. In other countries, the weakening of traditional business structures, such as Korean chaebol, have created opportunities for smaller players. Tax and regulatory reform, the lowering of protectionist barriers, technological advances and the rise of the Internet, all have made it easier — though certainly not easy - to create and build a business.

Ernst & Young started the competition in the U.S. in 1986 and expanded it worldwide 10 years ago. More than two-thirds of this year’s 5,000 contestants were from outside the U.S. The finalists included the heads of emerging-market powerhouses such as Indian industrial conglomerate Mahindra Group, and Geely Automobile Holdings, a Chinese automaker that recently bought Volvo, and dozens of lesser-known success stories.

This year’s winner was Michael Spencer, the founder and chief executive of London-based ICAP. Spencer started the company in 1986 with $45,000. It’s now a $2.7 billion-a-year business that is the world’s No. 1 inter-dealer brokerage, serving as an intermediary for trading between financial institutions. In starting a company, “I knew there was a serious chance of failure,” Spencer says. “But we fought our way out of setbacks.”

Indeed, many of these entrepreneurs have shown a remarkable ability to use adversity as a springboard for growth. Take Indrek Sepp of Estonia, who started AS Pristis, the biggest security company in the Baltics. Sepp started installing car alarms to make extra money while a student in the early 1990s. When revenues flagged after automakers began installing alarms in new cars, he started installing alarm systems. That worked fine - until the housing market in the Baltics collapsed when recession hit two years ago. Undeterred, Sepp moved into the security-guard business last year, buying one of the region’s biggest security-services companies. Says Sepp: “It’s because of the crisis that we were able to purchase this company,” which was being unloaded by its corporate parent at a bargain price.

Another finalist in the competition, Korean entrepreneur Hyeon Joo Park, spotted opportunity in the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s. He started Korea’s first mutual fund in 1998 when that country’s equity market “was the most undervalued in the world,” he recalls. As share prices began rising, investors flocked to his Mirae Asset Global Investments group, which specializes in emerging-market equities. Today it has $45 billion in assets under management and operates in eight countries, including the U.S.

Ernst & Young CEO Jim Turley says his firm last year surveyed entrepreneur-led companies, comparing their responses to the global recession with the responses of longer-established multinationals. “Two-thirds of the entrepreneurs reported they were seeking new opportunities,” he says, while only 20% of the older companies were doing so. “The entrepreneurs are the only ones adding jobs.”

That finding wouldn’t startle anyone in the U.S., where entrepreneurship has long been seen as a key engine of economic growth. But elsewhere in the world, the emergence of a new generation of resourceful and resilient business people is very big news indeed.

Given entrepreneurship’s increasingly global dimension, it’s probably fitting that the U.S. finalist in this year’s competition was Tom Adams, CEO of Rosetta Stone, a company that makes software to help people learn foreign languages.

View the original article here

French Artificial Heart Maker Plans June IPO

2011-02-16T03:23:00.000-08:00

In a sign that European tech IPOs are warming up, French startup Carmat, a pioneering designer of an entirely artificial human heart, is planning a €15 million initial public offering on the Alternext market of NYSE-Euronext Paris this month. Co-founded by French heart surgeon Alain Carpentier, the company has tapped the latest technological advances in software, materials science, and aerospace (including stress-testing, miniaturization, and design for severe environments) to devise an artificial heart that avoids problems plaguing earlier such devices.

Carmat has already raised €42.70 million from private backers, including €2.25 million from the Professor Alain Carpentier Foundation and European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co. (EADS), the parent company of passenger jet maker Airbus; €33 million from OSEO, the French state innovation agency; €5 million from Paris-based venture capital firm Truffle Capital; and €950,000 from a share capital increase.

The money raised in the IPO will be used to commercialize a prototype device that has been under development for 15 years. This year Carmat plans to produce 25 prostheses for preclinical trials and implantation in humans. The goal is to conduct full clinical trials with humans in 2011, after obtaining the permission of the AFSSAPS, the French government agency for healthcare product safety. Commercial launch in Europe and the U.S. is expected in mid-2013, says Carmat chief executive Marcello Conviti.

The Carmat artificial heart is intended for patients who have suffered a massive heart attack or those with late-stage heart failure. Cardiac failure is the leading cause of death worldwide and is responsible for around 100,000 deaths per year in Europe and North America alone. Yet fewer than 4,000 people per year are lucky enough to get human heart transplants. “More than 95% of those people currently have no alternative, so this is our potential market,” says Conviti, who has more than 25 years experience in cardiovascular medical devices, most recently as senior vice president strategy and new business development at Edwards Lifesciences (EW).

Work on the Carmat artificial heart began under Carpentier in the labs of Matra, a French engineering company that was absorbed into EADS in 2000. The project was kept secret until October 2008, when EADS spun it off.

Protected by 10 global patents, the Carmat heart offers numerous advantages over earlier devices such as the famous Jarvik artificial heart first implanted in humans in the early 1980s. To start with, it uses two internal pumps to move blood to the lungs and into the body, rather than the single pump typical of earlier mechanical or pneumatic designs.

Secondly, thanks to advances in biopolymer science, the Carmat heart is far more compatible with human blood than predecessors. This greatly reduces the risk of blood clot formation—a persistent problem with early artificial hearts—and could also spare patients from dependence on anticoagulant drugs.

Thirdly, the Carmat heart is fitted out with feedback sensors and cutting-edge software that allow it to adjust its speed and pressure depending on the patient's exertion level. This permits patients to engage in variable levels of activity and live more normal lives. What's more, the heart can be powered for up to five hours off a portable battery pack—compared with as little as a half-hour for earlier artificial hearts—allowing for a much greater degree of freedom and mobility.

Last but not least, the Carmat heart is designed for much greater durability than earlier devices, with a projected lifetime of about five years or 230 million heart beats. To boost reliability, it includes diagnostic software that allows doctors to monitor the device remotely and be alerted in the event of problem. They can even download software upgrades into the heart from a distance.

The first clinical trial in 2011 will involve implanting the hearts into patients and monitoring them for 180 days to measure short-term safety and efficacy. The second trial will include 22 patients, including six from the first trial, to test for long-term use. The cost of the operation is expected to be roughly equivalent to that of a human heart transplant, but follow-up care, which adds up to around €50,000 per year for patients with transplanted human hearts, will be significantly reduced as the artificial hearts are expected to require fewer doctor visits, re-hospitalizations, and drugs.

The human heart is likely to be the first organ to be successful replaced with "bio body parts," says Philippe Pouletty, a trained medical doctor and a general partner at Carmat investor Truffle Capital. Pouletty predicts that artificial kidneys and livers may be next. The introduction of completely artificial organs, adds Piet Jansen, Carmat's chief medical officer, also will require the evolution of new healthcare professions: in addition to cardiologists, he says, there will be "cardio engineers" who treat heart failure.

Commercialization of an artificial human heart is the realization of a lifelong dream for Carpentier, who invented of the first biomedically-engineered heart valves in the 1980s. The replacement valve market is now worth $800 million annually, and one out of every two procedures worldwide uses a Carpentier valve or ring, according to Carmat CEO Conviti.

Three decades ago when Carpentier sought to finance and produce his breakthrough invention he had to get U.S. financial backing, creating a partnership with Edwards Lifesciences. The phenomenal success of the heart valves prompted Professor Carpentier to go back to the drawing board and try to design an entire heart that could be implanted in humans, this time with European backing. Looks like his dream is on the verge of coming true.

Guest blog post from Jennifer L. Schenker.

This blog post was adapted from www.informilo.com. Click here to read the original posting, provided courtesy of Informilo.

View the original article here

How EA Integrates European Game Startups

2011-02-14T02:47:00.000-08:00

Global videogame giant Electronic Arts has made lots of acquisitions—especially in the mobile arena—but how does it make the deals work? “M&A is a challenging, risky activity,” admits Barry Cottle, senior vice-president and general manager of EA Interactive, the division of Electronic Arts that includes Playfish, a London-based social gaming company acquired last year, as well as EA Mobile and Pogo. EA doesn’t pretend to have all of the answers, but its executives agreed to talk to Informilo about how the gaming company integrates startups once it acquires them—an issue of interest to multinationals in all sectors.

“The gaming space moves fast, market segments and different types of genres pop up, so we not only have to use internal efforts to try and innovate but also look at outside companies that are attacking those places, and, when it makes sense, to acquire them and bring them into the organization,” says Cottle. “What is key is you have to get an agreement on the objectives and the measurements, but not dictate the culture on how to get there.”

Plans for Playfish, the fourth European games studio acquired by EA since 2004, include allowing it to stay in London and to retain its culture. The hope is that Playfish will help EA create more hits in social gaming, an area that is expected to help significantly expand the gaming market by attracting a broader audience.

Giving acquired game studios a degree of autonomy is a formula that has worked well for EA, helping it launch new blockbuster games, retain the management of start-ups it acquires, and infuse its top management with young talent.

Take the case of Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment (DICE), a Swedish game studio specializing in first-person shooter games, which was purchased by EA in 2006. Swedish computer scientist Patrick Soderlund, DICE’s chief executive officer at the time of the acquisition, not only stayed on—along with most of the team—but has risen in the ranks at EA.

Soderlund, 36, now holds the title of senior vice president and group general manger at EA. He oversees European studios for the EA Games Label, including DICE, Britain's Criterion Games and Germany's Phenomic. In that role he has helped drive game franchises such as Need for Speed and BurnOut, first person shooter genres Battlefield and Medal of Honor, and the development of free-to-play games for EA's Games label by teams in Stockholm, Frankfurt, and Redwood Shores, Calif.

Soderlund says he never imagined working for a big company. DICE, which was founded in 1992 by seven Swedish entrepreneurs in Gothenburg, started out as a maker of games for personal computers. Soderlund came into the picture when a company he created, called Refraction Games, was acquired by DICE in 2000. A few weeks later, DICE's CEO left the company. Soderlund was asked to run the newly merged Swedish gaming studio, which began to grow rapidly, working with the likes of EA and Microsoft and growing from 40 to 250 employees in two years.

In 2000 EA and DICE partnered on a first-person shooter game called Battlefield 1942. The game became a big hit on PCs, and in 2003 EA bought an 18% stake in DICE. The two companies went on to create several games together, including Battlefield 2, all of which were commercial successes. In 2005 EA acquired more shares in DICE, and then purchased the rest of the company in 2006.

Soderlund and the DICE team had some qualms about the deal. "One of the fears we had when we joined EA is that we were joining a big beast of a company and we would just be told what to do," says Soderlund. But the reality turned out to be far different, he says. "I feel like we have a complete mandate to run and drive our businesses. I couldn't work inside a company that did not have that kind of trust and freedom."

DICE, which by that time had moved to Stockholm, did more than retain its creative freedom. Its relationship with EA helped the Swedish studio expand onto multiple platforms and significantly increase the Battlefield brand's visibility. Under EA, DICE released an online multiplayer World War II first-person shooter video game called Battlefield 1943, which became the fastest-selling game ever to reach one million units on Xbox Live Arcade.

DICE has other successes, too. Battlefield Bad Company 2, a game released last month for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC, was the best-selling March release on record in North America and Europe. Users of the game, which puts the player in a fictional war between the U.S. and the Russian Federation, have racked up more than 81 billion points in online multiplayer sessions. The game also has more than 44,000 Twitter fans, the most of any EA title, according to the company.

The link-up with EA also allowed DICE to move into an entirely new area, a first person action-adventure video genre known as parkour games. DICE's first parkour game, called Mirror's Edge, for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and the PC, is set in a society where communication is heavily monitored by a totalitarian regime and a network of runners transmit messages while evading government surveillance. The game differs from most other first-person perspective video games in allowing for a wider range of actions, such as sliding under barriers and shimmying across ledges.

"DICE wanted to create another intellectual property beyond the Battlefield brand, which is expensive and a huge risk," says Soderlund. "I am not sure we could have pulled this off without EA."

Working for a big company has required DICE to make some adjustments, such as adhering to corporate policies on financial reporting and travel. But the key to its successful integration and that of other studios, such as Criterion Games, is that EA "allows studios to keep their brands, keep their teams, and lets the leadership use the creative process that works for them," Soderlund says.

It's not surprising, then, that EA plans to treat Playfish the same way. The videogame giant said last November that it would acquire Playfish for about $275 million in cash and $25 million in EA stock. EA Interactive general manager Cottle says the company decided to buy Playfish because duplicating its success in social gaming would have been difficult.

Playfish produces games for friends to play together over social and mobile platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Google Android, and the Apple iPhone. It now counts more than 60 million monthly active players across its 11 titles, driving more than one billion game play sessions every month.

The company's games have been huge hits on Facebook, including Pet Society, which boasts 19 million players per month and Restaurant City, which has 14 million monthly players. That's significantly more than the benchmark multiplayer online game, Vivendi's World of Warcraft, which has 12 million players.

"The acquisition enables us to be a leader right away," says Cottle. That's important because games are shifting rapidly from products to digital services. The acquisition is expected to help EA make the transition.

The deal also will give Playfish access to additional resources expand its portfolio. "The reason we thought it was such an exciting deal to combine with EA is the fact that we feel we have only scratched the surface of where the games industry is going," says Kristian Segerstrale, Playfish's founder.

Social gaming could permit publishers to reach customers who haven't typically played on consoles, including women and people over 50. "Imagine how big the industry can be once we are able to get those people who play games because they want to have fun with friends, not for the immersive journey on the console," says Segerstrale. "That's what excites me, and that's why I'm in it for the long term." He and the majority of the Playfish team are now working for EA and are committed to staying. "We expect to get a lot of tailwind from EA," he says.

Guest blog post from Jennifer L. Schenker.

This blog post was adapted from www.informilo.com. Click here to read the original posting, provided courtesy of Informilo.

View the original article here

A New Approach to Classroom Computers

2011-02-11T23:52:00.000-08:00

Israeli startup Time To Know is out to revolutionize education by offering schools a new digital teaching platform and interactive curriculum. The company’s ambitious goal: to radically change the way teachers and students interact.

Founded in 2004 and located in a cheerfully painted former girls college in Jaffa, Time To Know has raised $60 million in funding spearheaded by Shmuel Meitar, a co-founder of customer care and billing software giant Amdocs (DOX). The company has won contracts with schools in Israel, the state of Texas, and New York City, and counts 350 employees around the world.

The flaws in today’s “chalk and talk” educational system, which has remained pretty much unchanged for the last century, are widely recognized. But attempts to fix it by bolting on computers and connectivity have so far had only limited success—partly due to a lack of relevant educational content and software tools, says Dovi Weiss, Time To Know’s Chief Pedagogical Officer and a co-founder of the company. “What is needed is a holistic approach,” he says.

Enter Time To Know’s Web-based software, which forms the basis for a suite of tools ranging from course planning and classroom management to group collaboration and student assessment. At the core is a collection of interactive curriculum in math and language arts (reading, writing and comprehension), as well as English as a second or foreign language. Thanks to its real-time nature, Time To Know gives teachers immediate feedback on which students in the classroom are succeeding or falling behind. “What we are building is a partnership between teachers and technology,” says Weiss.

Time To Know's digital platform was developed by a team of some 340 educators, software developers, and graphic and creative designers. It is "one of the major pillars" of a five-year, nationwide plan in Israel to increase the use of computers in schools, says Weiss. The company hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at one of the schools using Time To Know technology on June 3 to demonstrate how the software can not only help make learning more fun and interactive but also increase understanding of complex mathematical concepts and improve language listening and comprehension skills.

Weiss and Time To Know co-founders Molly Globus and Paz Litman were invited to travel with Israeli President Shimon Peres to South Korea the week of June 7 as part of a delegation to advance Israeli interests in that country. "Education is a very high national priority in Korea so it is a very logical match," says Weiss.

The Israeli startup's technology is also being tested as part of New York City's Innovation Zone (iZone) program. In June, New York City School Chancellor Joel Klein announced that twenty of the 81 schools in the project will implement Time to Know's digital platform and interactive curriculum in the 2010-2011 school year. All told, 63 fourth and fifth grade classes will use Time To Know's technology. The iZone pilot sites are testing ways that content is taught to allow more customization.

Time To Know's digital platform currently covers grades four to six but Weiss says plans are in the works to expand it to grades three to nine. The company is also working on an English as a Foreign Language edition of the core curriculum in Arabic, and is seeking strategic partners in Spanish-speaking countries and other parts of the world. "The same digital platform can be used in primary schools in all countries," says Weiss. "Using our content tools strategic partners will be able to adapt it to the local education system."

Of course, schools adopting the system need to equip each classroom with a projector and provide every teacher and every student with laptop and wireless Internet connectivity. But since the software is Web-based no time or money is lost installing the software on computers.

Time To Know prides itself on the very user-friendly interface it has developed for teachers. Only two days of orientation training is needed, Weiss says. Teachers can plan their lessons by adapting the core curriculum to fit their teaching styles and local requirements, either by selecting pre-defined lesson sequences containing animations, exploration activities, games and videos, or by mixing and matching to create their own.

Teachers control what's happening in the classroom through a digital dashboard that lets them launch, pause, and switch learning activities on each student's computer or on the whiteboard. Teachers also can shift between class wide, group, and individualized instruction.

As the lesson progresses, students are asked to answer questions on their laptops, and their progress is forwarded to the teacher automatically. The platform then lets teachers assign, in real-time, individualized assignments that match each students' grasp of the subject.

Allowing students to learn at their own pace and according to their own proficiency makes the complex task of teaching students with differing needs easier for teachers, says Weiss. It will also help schools save money because classroom sizes can be bigger without negatively affecting students, he says. Weiss says that adding just one student per class will pay for the price of the software. Pricing depends on the number of students using the system and the amount of content they consume.

Of course, integrating technology into the heart of a school's curriculum will require some tech support. Weiss says he figures that every school with 500 students or more will have to start employing at least one IT specialist. "Any organization using tech in a meaningful way cannot do without an IT person," he says.

The involvement of Amdocs' Shmuel Meitar was crucial to Time To Know. He is not only a financial backer but also the co-founder of Ramat Gan-based Aurec Group, which provided resources and expertise to the startup. Aurec is an international investment group with a 40-year track record of building more than a dozen operating companies from inception to maturity in industries such as media, communication, enterprise software, and advertising. Amdocs is itself a spin-out of Aurec.

The next step is for Time To Know to find strategic partners that will help it expand internationally. "Our strategy is to find very strong local partners who will be able to take our technology and knowhow to create the system and content for the local country," says Weiss. "We are looking for powerful publishers or an IT company with the capability to pedagogically and technically support our system."

There is a strong incentive for schools around the world to move to 21st century teaching methods, says Weiss. Students who use multimedia tools outside the classroom don't learn effectively in classrooms using outdated, dry methods such as "chalk and talk" or "drill and kill." And, teachers have difficulty tracking students' process without the benefit of real-time hard data, meaning many students end up falling behind.

But the real selling point may very well be economic. Time To Know's software will save money because schools can add more students without hiring more teachers. What's more, schools using traditional methods are not churning out students prepared for 21st century careers. If Time To Know can help solve that issue it could positively affect the global economy—making a tough assignment a little easier for governments around the world.

View the original article here

A New Approach to Classroom Computers

2011-02-10T03:08:00.000-08:00

View the original article here

Nokia's Results Sag Amid Faint Hope

2011-02-08T02:36:00.000-08:00

By most measures, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones delivered disappointing second-quarter results on July 22. Revenues grew less than 1 percent from the same quarter a year earlier, to €10 billion ($12.89 billion), and profits plummeted 40 percent, to €227 million ($292.5 million), below consensus analyst estimates of €285 million.

Nokia held onto 33 percent of the mobile phone market, but the average selling price for the 111.1 million phones it shipped in the quarter fell to €61 ($78.60) from €64 ($82.46) a year earlier. That helped pull down its operating margins on handsets and services to 9.5 percent, from 11.6 percent a year earlier.

Was there any good news? You have to dig down a bit to find it, but Nokia reported a few bright spots. The market for smartphones—higher-priced devices that typically support e-mail, multimedia, wireless browsing, and downloadable apps—is where Nokia’s shortcomings vs. rivals Apple and Research In Motion has been most evident. But in the second quarter, the Finnish company sold 24 million such devices, up 42 percent from a year earlier, according to market researcher Strategy Analytics. The overall smartphone market grew at about the same rate, so Nokia held its share from a year ago, at 40.3 percent, and actually grew share slightly from 38.8 percent in the first quarter of this year.

This seems an astonishing idea, given the rise of the Apple iPhone and continued high visibility for RIM’s BlackBerry devices. What accounts for Nokia’s relatively strong showing (RIM had 18.8 percent of the market in the second quarter and Apple had 14.1 percent, both slightly down from the first quarter, according to Strategy Analytics) is Nokia’s vast powers of global distribution and a preponderance of lower-end models in its lineup that appeal to aspirational buyers in emerging markets.

The result, of course, is that Nokia smartphones sell for a lot less, on average, than those from rivals. Average prices in the second quarter fell to €143 ($184) from €181 ($233) a year earlier. By comparison, Apple’s smartphones generate $635 each in hardware and services revenues—which helps give Apple far better margins. Still, it’s arguable that selling nearly 4.4 million more devices than your next two rivals combined gives Nokia a certain pride of place.

Whether that will translate into a better array of online services and wider range of downloadable apps remains very much in doubt. Apple claims to offer more than 250,000 iPhone software programs now in its App Store, whereas the number of apps available for Nokia's Symbian operating system through the company's Ovi portal, though undisclosed, is thought to be only a fraction as many. For now, Nokia and Symbian are losing the battle for developer mindshare in creating the sexiest and best-selling smartphone apps.

Underscoring that point, Technology Business Research in Hampton, New Hampshire notes that many of the models counted as "smartphones" in Nokia's results, "lack the capabilities of modern smartphones from competitors." In a research note entitled Nokia's Results Demonstrate a Failure to Innovate, TBR analyst Ken Hyers argues that non-competitive low-end models have "led directly to [Nokia's] share declines in the U.S.," where the company sold just 2.6 million phones of all kinds in the second quarter, down 19% from a year earlier. Without an improved U.S. presence, the company stands little chance of recapturing momentum among software developers.

Nokia has a plan to fight back, which rests largely on two new software environments. The first is an overdue third-generation version of Symbian, called Symbian^3, that adds new features and will ship inside a new smartphone, called the N8, by the end of the third quarter. TBR is dismissive of the software, saying it "lags capabilities offered by the Android and Apple iPhone OS." And Strategy Analytics warns that limited distribution of the N8 in the U.S. means it "may not achieve its full sales potential." But Nokia chief executive officer Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said July 22 in a statement that the N8 "will have a user experience superior to that of any smartphone Nokia has created," and promised that it and subsequent Symbian^3 devices will "kick-start Nokia's fight back at the higher end of the market."

Further down the road, Nokia will introduce a more powerful Linux-based operating system called MeeGo that it is creating with Intel. In development for years under the name Maemo, the software is meant to be powerful enough to drive sophisticated next-generation smartphones as well as other wireless-connected devices such as netbooks and tablets. Question is, will it be too late?

Nokia is still a giant in mobile phones and it has so far staved off disaster in smartphones, though the drumbeats of doom are growing louder. More quarters like the one reported on July 22 might shorten the company's horizons or provoke a further management shakeup. Stay tuned.

View the original article here

Ericsson Charts Changing Usage of TV

2011-02-06T00:52:00.000-08:00

The way consumers use television is changing rapidly, with 70 percent of viewers now streaming, downloading, or watching recorded broadcasts on a weekly basis and half accessing on-demand TV or videos via the Internet at least once a week.

Those are among the findings in a new study released Aug. 25 by the ConsumerLab research group at Swedish telecom equipment maker Ericsson (ERIC). Conducted in seven countries (China, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the U.K., and the U.S.) with a sample representing 300 million people, the survey is part of Ericsson’s ongoing efforts to understand how consumers behave and what they think of telecommunications and media.

The study findings confirm that patterns of media consumption are undergoing a major transformation, thanks especially to the Internet, mobile networks, and the emergence of digital devices such as the Apple (AAPL) iPad tablet.

To be sure, some 93 percent of respondents still watch conventional scheduled TV broadcasts at least once a week. But a growing number are demanding the ability to consume TV content when and where they want it—at a later date, via time-shifting digital video recorders (DVRs) or on-demand services, and on devices other than traditional TVs, such as mobile phones or laptops. In what’s likely good news for gizmos such as the iPad, 37 percent of respondents said they would be interested in using a tablet in conjunction with their TVs.

“Consumption is fragmented and complex,” said Anders Erlandsson, Senior Advisor at Ericsson ConsumerLab, in a press release about the survey findings. “There are few established consumption patterns, and it’s a trial-and-error market with lots of curiosity around it.”

The study identified some anomalies between consumer spending and usage patterns. For instance, respondents shell out an average of €38 ($48) per month for TV services—broadcast (cable, satellite, DSL), pay-per-view, and on-demand. Broadcast accounts for 60 percent of their total outlay, while on-demand is just 37 percent.

Yet of the 25 hours per week, on average, that consumers spend watching TV, only 43 percent is on broadcast or premium services, while 55 percent is time-shifted or on-demand TV. Ericsson argues that this gap in “wallet share” between what customers pay for and how they use TV augurs a shift in future spending patterns that service providers must anticipate and exploit. “It is clear that consumers are not paying for what they use the most,” the company said in its press release.

What are the opportunities highlighted in the survey? Ericsson found that more than 50 percent of respondents would like to connect their PCs to their TVs to watch online video—from sources such as YouTube (GOOG) and others—or to view photos or browse the Web on a larger screen, more comfortably, and with groups of people. Yet making such connections today can be frustratingly complex.

Another key finding: 40 percent of respondents say that “immediate access” to chosen content is very important to them, suggesting a shift from owning videos to accessing programming on demand.

Most importantly, Ericsson says that service providers must devise ways to align consumer spending and usage. Thanks to the “everything should be free” Internet mindset and a growing shift to TV consumption on PCs, traditional service providers risk seeing the value of their offerings diminished. Yet, “if done right,” Ericsson argues, “consumers will reallocate their TV spending to new alternatives.”

View the original article here

Apple Supplier Foxconn's Boss Wins Support

2011-02-04T15:34:00.000-08:00

Terry Gou, the embattled boss of Apple’s outsourcing manufacturer Foxconn (part of Hon Hai Precision Industry) has an unlikely ally in media tycoon Jimmy Lai. Lai’s chairman of Next Media, best known in the West for its animated coverage of news events like Tiger Woods’s car crash and JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater’s emergency exit. The Hong Kong-listed company is also the publisher of Taiwan’s number one newspaper, Apple Daily, and a popular newsweekly, Next Magazine, both famous for their hard-hitting, often tabloidy coverage of the news. With Foxconn still struggling after a series of worker suicides called attention to the hours, pay and conditions at its Chinese factories, the company is taking hits. Last month a group of Taiwanese academics called Gou’s company “the shame of Taiwan.”

Lai doesn’t buy that. Such statements are “bulls—t,” says Lai, who stopped by the Bloomberg office in Hong Kong for an interview this morning. Gou’s critics, the media boss says, don’t give him enough credit. “The guy has built factories, and provided so many jobs to China. This is tragic, that some people jumped. But you can’t just say it’s the shame of Taiwan. The guy still has people lining up to join the company.” Lai says the suicides could have happened anywhere. “Imagine when people have to leave their hometown and live in a small dormitory where people have no relatives. This is a very difficult, very tough life,” he says. “It’s just the nature of the factory make up. You drag people away from their life, that makes life very difficult.”

Lai’s publications haven’t shied away from covering the company and its difficulties - and while Foxconn in the past has sued journalists who wrote critically of the company and its labor practices, Lai says doesn’t see Gou or Foxconn trying to intimidate the media now. “The guy knows he’s in deep s—t; when somebody’s in deep s—t, it’s difficult to intimidate anybody. For him to think he can intimidate the media, I don’t think he’s that stupid.”

Update: Here’s some more on how Foxconn is handling the fallout from the suicides. According to this report from Bloomberg News, a Chinese newspaper Secutimes.com reports Foxconn is testing would-be workers at a new plant in the central city of Zhengzhou on their ability to handle stress. An applicant has to take a test, my colleagues write, with 70 questions “including evaluations of the effects of sleep deprivation, depression and loneliness.”

View the original article here

'Shame Games' Put India Further Behind China

2011-02-02T13:31:00.000-08:00

Barring any more disasters, the Commonwealth Games will open in New Delhi on schedule after all. The fact that the games won’t be delayed or cancelled is a victory for India’s beleaguered Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Still, the games have already proved to be a disaster for the country and even if the rest of the games go off without a hitch, the images of crumbling infrastructure and filthy conditions will be hard to shake. The “Shame Games,” as an Indian magazine has dubbed them, will just reinforce the idea that corruption and mismanagement prevent India from matching the achievements of China.

American readers might be puzzled, asking who knows or cares about a second-tier event like the Commonwealth Games. Indians do care, though, and they long ago pointed to Delhi 2010 as India Shining’s answer to China’s success in staging the 2008 Olympics. This would be an event showing how India had overcome its corruption and mismanagement demons. The current failure therefore is about more than just whether some athletes don’t show up because of reports there’s poop on the walls in the living quarters. Here’s what Economic Times of India columnist Sudeshna Sen writes: “The disaster is economic and political. A setback to the country’s economic future , its geopolitical standing, its clout in places like UN and G20, et al. I don’t care what the Sensex is doing — we’re heading straight into Christmas bonus time when international traders need to spice up their earnings — the games disaster is going to make life very, very difficult for any politician, businessman, corporate, investor or diplomat in the future. Every single overseas investor who is being wooed for trillions of dollars to invest in India’s infrastructure will think thrice. Forget China and the Asian Games. Dear everyone, India is no longer considered in the same league as China, whatever we may wish to think.”

But China has plenty of corruption problems, too. And there’s no shortage of inept Chinese officials. So why does China succeed where India fails? Here’s one theory. In China, which executes more people than any other country, high level officials who screw up badly may face the death penalty if the country becomes an international laughing stock because of their actions. Consider the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, executed in 2007 after a series of Made-in-China scares involving tainted food and drugs. Two people implicated in the tainted milk scandal, which left several children dead, thousands of others sickened and countries around the world shunning Chinese dairy products, were executed last November.

India, to its credit, rarely imposes the death penalty. But it rarely imposes any other penalties, either. The notoriously slow Indian legal system, where cases can languish for decades, makes it easy for corrupt officials to go ahead without any fear of punishment.

View the original article here

China's Huawei Overcomes Opposition in India

2011-01-31T21:53:00.000-08:00

In the U.S., Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei Technologies is encountering new opposition from Republican senators. Huawei has had its share of political problems in India, too, with New Delhi putting Huawei and Chinese rival ZTE on a blacklist earlier this year because security officials worried about the risk of Chinese infiltration. “The Indians are incredibly paranoid about China,” David Zweig, a professor of politics at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, told me at the time. (Read that story here.)

But the Chinese company is making progress in overcoming opposition in that market, with the Indian government easing up on its ban. On Monday, Indian operator Tata Teleservices said it is buying 3G equipment from Huawei. This comes just a few weeks after Huawei announced an earlier deal with the Indian operator to provide CDMA equipment in Mumbai.

Indian security concerns aren’t limited to Huawei and other Chinese companies, of course. Look at what RIM has had to go through in order to keep New Delhi from kicking the BlackBerry out of India. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-01/india-asks-rim-google-skype-to-set-up-local-servers-update1-.html Huawei’s breakthrough is probably a sign that the company made enough concessions to satisfy India’s security officials. It’s also a sign, though, that for all the rhetoric about the threat from China, Indian companies can’t afford not to do business with Chinese suppliers. As Insead professor (and sometimes Businessweek.com columnist) Anil Gupta told me a few months ago, Chinese equipment makers like Huawei enjoy a big price advantage over Western competitors. “We are talking about very competitive tech at 30% lower price; in a very capital intensive biz, that is important,” he said. As Indians look to spend to fix their woeful infrastructure, “India as market becomes the most attractive for capital goods from China. And because of China’s cost advantage, China becomes the most attractive supplier base.” For the two Asian giants, that co-dependence could help both countries put aside their past hostilities and work together.

View the original article here

Delays Threaten India's Commonwealth Games

2011-01-30T06:31:00.000-08:00

October’s New Delhi Commonwealth Games* were supposed to be for India what the 2008 Beijing Olympics were for China, the big sporting event showcasing the country’s arrival as an economic power. Instead, the Games are putting the spotlight on India’s worst problems, widespread corruption and poor infrastructure. Check out this story by my Bloomberg colleague, Subramaniam Sharma. “A day after the delayed opening of the weightlifting hall for New Delhi’s Commonwealth Games,” the story begins, “workers in white helmets climbed across its roof to fix leaks.” Subbu adds, “While state control in China ensured [Beijing] was ready for rehearsals, Delhi’s government-run efforts have been mired in delays, accusations of corruption and mismanagement.”

With more than a dozen other Commonwealth Games venues also behind schedule, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh over the weekend ordered an investigation. That begs the question of why Singh waited so long. The Commonwealth Games ain’t the Olympics, and as the Financial Times points out, several big-name athletes are giving it a pass. (Queen Elizabeth isn’t planning on showing up, either.) Still, this is a major event and I can’t see why Singh is stepping in only now, less than 50 days before the Games are scheduled to begin. Say what you will about the Chinese government, this kind of embarrassment wouldn’t happen in China.

* Originally I wrote the Games start in September, but opening day is October 3.

View the original article here

China Has Foreign-Worker Problem, Too

2011-01-28T08:46:00.000-08:00

While the U.S. and India squabble over H-1B and L-1 work visas for employees of Indian outsourcing companies, there’s a debate about foreign workers going on in China, too. Wait - China? The country with the world’s largest population and a bottomless pool of cheap labor? That China? Hard as it might be for Americans to believe, China has a growing illegal alien problem, too. According to Thursday’s South China Morning Post, officials in southern China’s Guangdong province are concerned about undocumented workers from neighboring countries. The SCMP cites the Nanfang Daily, the official newspaper of the Guangdong government, reporting that the province is about to impose new regulations on foreign workers. “With a huge workforce and strict immigration policies, the mainland is still closed to overseas labourers,” the SCMP reporter, Ivan Zhai, writes. However, local companies are looking for foreign workers thanks, in part, to higher costs associated with a new labor law that calls for better pay and benefits for Chinese workers. “More and more manufacturers are likely to employ illegal labourers from Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia. The reason is they that they will work for less pay and endure worse working conditions.”

For years, Guangdong officials have talked about the need to upgrade the local economy and shift away from reliance on low-wage labor. That’s happening, as companies like Foxconn (which manufactures for Apple and many others) are moving away from Guangdong. Foxconn is hiring as many as 300,000 workers at a new plant in central China. Not everybody can afford to pick up and move, though. For those companies stuck in Guangdong, hiring low-wage foreign workers is an attractive option, whether local officials like it or not.

View the original article here

Demand Grows Despite H-1B Fight, TCS Exec Says

2011-01-26T12:02:00.000-08:00

The chop-shop fallout continues. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) caused an uproar in India recently after he called Indian IT outsourcing companies chop shops during debate on a proposal to double their fees on H-1B and L-1 work visas. The proposal passed—with no nays in the Senate—and the Indian government is now pondering its next move. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government might challenge the U.S. at the WTO, The Economic Times reports. The Economic Times also reports that many Indian IT executives want more push-back from Nasscom, the industry lobbying group.

Not everyone thinks this is such a big deal, though. Vish Iyer is the head of Asia Pacific for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS:IN), one of India’s biggest IT services companies, and he was in Bloomberg’s Hong Kong office the other day to talk up the company’s expansion in China and other parts of the region. Iyer says the new fee and the anti-India rhetoric coming from U.S. politicians isn’t that worrisome. "We must distill the news and politics," he explains. "We have seen this in the past." TCS employs 700 people at a center it opened three years ago in Cincinnati, Iyer adds, and the company is expecting more business from American companies, no matter what the politicians say. With the passage of Wall Street reform, for instance, "we see a phenomenal growth in demand from the U.S. banks," says Iyer. "They need help from people like us."

View the original article here

After Chinese Flop in Korea, Indian Rival Takes a Turn

2011-01-24T11:30:00.000-08:00

Mahindra & Mahindra knows how to make tractors. It’s the biggest tractor maker in India. The company wants to join local rival Tata Motors - owner of Jaguar and Land Rover as well as the developer of the locally-made Nano, the world’s cheapest car - as a global player in the auto industry. Mahindra on Monday is signing a preliminary agreement to buy a stake in bankrupt South Korean automaker Ssangyong Motor, Bloomberg News reports. The move is the latest step by Mahindra to build its car business: In April Mahindra bought out local joint venture partner Renault and in May bought 55 percent of Bangalore-based green-car pioneer Reva Electric Car.

If Mahindra follows through on the preliminary deal and takes control of Ssangyong, the Indian company will have the opportunity to show it can succeed where a Chinese rival failed. As Chinese companies look to expand globally through M&A, Ssangyong is the prime example of what can go wrong. SAIC Auto, the Chinese automaker from Shanghai that is one of the most successful producers of cars in China, tried to make Ssangyong the center of an overseas push back in 2004, paying more than $500 million for a 51 percent stake in the Korean automaker. Things didn’t go well after that. “In Ssangyong, it was buying a smaller company. And the acquired company was located in South Korea—next door, both geographically as well as culturally,” Anil K. Gupta and Haiyan Wang wrote in this column on Businessweek.com last year. “Yet, look at the results: bitter disputes over Korean perceptions that SAIC was an exploitative owner, criminal investigations, very little value capture by SAIC, a collapse of Ssangyong into bankruptcy protection, and a complete wipeout of SAIC’s investment.”

SAIC is GM’s Chinese partner and today is the biggest automaker in the world’s biggest auto market - yet it still couldn’t make an investment in Ssangyong work. Who knows, maybe Mahindra will do things better. The Economic Times, for instance, quotes analyst Shishir Bajpai of IIFL Wealth Management saying Ssangyong is “definitely a strategic fit for Mahindra.” He adds, “Ssangyong buy makes a lot of sense for them. It is their step towards establishing a global footprint.” Another bullish analyst, Arun Kekriwal of KRIS, says “Mahindra has ventured in many areas and their track record so far shows they have been right with their decisions and timing.” SAIC had a good track record, too. A lot of good that did. As Mahindra now branches out from its home market, it will be interesting to see what the Indian company has learned from the Chinese company’s failure.

View the original article here

Fixing China's Banks: The Next Round

2011-01-22T09:46:00.000-08:00

No rest for China’s weary banking reformers. Over the summer, they got Agricultural Bank of China over the finish line, with the state-owned bank pulling off the world’s largest IPO. AgBank was the weakest of the Big Four state-owned banks, and with its listing all of the large Chinese banks are now publicly traded. No small accomplishment, given how the banks for decades existed simply as ATMs to direct money from the Finance Ministry to large, state-owned enterprises.

There’s still a lot of work for China to do before it has a well-functioning banking system, though. Next up: fixing the banks owned by local governments. These banks are important because traditionally they’ve been more innovative and have been more willing to lend to smaller, private-sector companies. One sign of what’s to come: China Daily reported last week that China Pacific Insurance, the country’s third-largest insurer, is going to invest $735 million in one of these local banks, Shanghai Rural Commercial Bank. The paper also reported China’s banking regulators are pushing M&A among rural credit cooperatives (RCCs). "RCCs have long been the weakest sector of the country’s financial industry," the government paper said. "Financial experts estimate that nonperforming loans of the RCCs have reached 700 billion to 800 billion yuan ($102.74 billion to $117.41 billion)." Look for more news on this in the months ahead.

View the original article here

GOP Senators Go After China's Huawei

2011-01-21T00:28:00.000-08:00

China’s biggest maker of telecom equipment is the subject of a new campaign by a group of Republican senators demanding the Obama administration investigate the company, which wants to sell equipment to Sprint Nextel. “Huawei has a concerning history,” write the senators (Bond, Bunning, Burr, Collins, Inhofe, Kyle, Sessions and Shelby), who go on to cite old reports about Huawei selling equipment to the regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. Oddly, the senators make just a passing reference to a dispute between Huawei and Motorola, writing that alleged Huawei violations of intellectual property rights “appear to have led Motorola to refuse to enter into a deeper business relationship with Huawei.” That’s a strange understatement by the GOP senators: Motorola and Huawei are now slugging it out in court; the U.S. company just last month sued Huawei for allegedly conspiring with former Motorola employees. Huawei says the complaint is “groundless and utterly without merit.”

How serious is this latest salvo from Washington? No Democrats signed the letter, and with the midterms approaching it’s easy to dismiss this call by Republican senators as a stunt to embarrass the Obama administration. For the GOP, it’s win-win: If Obama does nothing, Republicans can hammer the Democrats for being soft on China; if Obama intervenes, the Republicans can claim credit.

The company has been burned in the past. See its failed attempt to take over 3Com after politicians raised security concerns. Here’s a suggestion for Huawei, one I’ve made before: Open up. The senators write in their letter that the company’s founder and CEO, Ren Zhengfei, “was a member of the PLA” (the People’s Liberation Army, China’s military). Huawei says the company isn’t connected to the PLA, but clearly people in the U.S. have their doubts. Ren, who doesn’t give interviews, doesn’t help matters by being so secretive. If Huawei really wants to allay security concerns and make headway in the U.S., Ren needs to take some tips from experts in crisis PR, who generally coach execs to tackle problems like these head on. CEO Ren, you need to talk to the media. (Your PR folks know my number.)

View the original article here

Japan Can't Afford Fight with China

2011-01-18T22:25:00.000-08:00

I was in Beijing late last month, shortly after news broke that China had passed Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. The official line in the Chinese media: No gloating over passing China’s longtime rival. For instance, when Premier Wen Jiabao met with Japanese foreign minister Katsuya Okada in Beijing on August 29, leaders about ways the two countries could work together. Wen talked about enhancing bilateral cooperation and Okada was upbeat, too. “During the meeting on Sunday, Okada said the future of China and Japan was becoming increasingly integrated,” the official English-language China Daily reported. ” ‘Not only do Japanese companies position it (China) as a manufacturing base, more importantly, they regard it as a very important consumer market,’ Okada said.” Reflecting Beijing’s don’t-kick-them-when-they’re-down approach, on August 31 the China Daily followed up with this headline: “China, Japan can herald ‘golden age for Asia’”

The era of good feeling didn’t last long. Less than a month later, Sino-Japanese relations are at their worst point in years. Beijing has cut senior-level government contacts and Japan’s top spokesman has warned against “extreme” nationalist sentiment. The two sides are fighting over Japan’s detention of a Chinese shipping-boat captain following a Sept. 7 collision near islands in the South China Sea administered by Japan but also claimed by China and Taiwan. My colleagues at Bloomberg News report investors in Tokyo are nervous the fight could hurt Japanese companies that do business in China. “There’s a possibility Japan would try to implement sanctions on China, which would be bad for related companies in Japan,” Daiwa Securities Capital Markets general manager Kazuhiro Takahashi told Bloomberg.

I don’t see that happening. Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s government last week declared war on currency traders, intervening in the markets to strengthen the yen for the first time in six years. That yen battle is far from over, and the fortunes of Japanese exporters like Sony, Honda and Toyota are up in the air as it plays out. The last thing the Japanese need now is to open a second front and invite Chinese retaliation against Japanese exporters. The Chinese captain is currently scheduled to be in detention until Sept. 29. Chances are, he’ll be on his way back to China soon after that.

View the original article here

MakeMyTrip Could Pave Way for More Indian IPOs

2011-01-17T06:47:00.000-08:00

For years, Wall Street hasn’t been a welcoming place for Indian IPOs. This year alone, at least 14 Chinese companies have had U.S. IPOs, according to Bloomberg News, but since 1999, only four Indian companies have managed to list in the U.S. From July 2006, when WNS Holdings had an IPO, four years went by without any Indian listings on Nasdaq or the NYSE. A pretty sorry record, and probably one reason that India lags far behind China in the development of homegrown Web companies. (Quick - can you name India’s answer to Baidu? I didn’t think so.)

On Thursday, though, Indian online travel company MakeMyTrip finally ended the IPO drought in pretty spectacular fashion. MakeMyTrip’s stock price jumped 89 percent in the first day of trading. That’s the biggest first-day jump for any U.S. stock since 2007. To be sure, the deal was modest - the company sold just $70 million worth of stock, selling 5 million shares at $14 apiece. Still, the successful launch could make investors keen on looking for more Indian listings soon - and help India’s would-be powers in search, social networking and e-commerce start to catch up to their counterparts in China.

View the original article here

No iPhone Boost for Apple's Chinese Partner

2011-01-15T15:25:00.000-08:00

Apple’s in a bind in China. It has teamed up with China Unicom, the perennial also-ran in the country. Unicom has exclusive rights to the iPhone in the world’s biggest cellular market, but it wasn’t Apple’s first choice for a Chinese partner. The American company conducted long on-again, off-again talks with the powerhouse player, China Mobile. Those negotiations went nowhere. As the dominant carrier (with 554 million subscribers by the middle of this year) China Mobile is no AT&T and wasn’t about to agree to give Apple the kind of sweet deal that more desperate carriers gave Steve Jobs. So China Mobile went its own way, launching a bunch of Android smartphones, and Apple was left with a new challenge: Could the iPhone magic work at longtime doormat Unicom?

On Thursday, we got our answer. Unicom reported a 54 percent drop in profit for the second quarter, earning $205 million. “Terrible numbers,” HSBC analyst Tucker Grinnan told Bloomberg News. One big problem: Unicom suffered from high marketing costs to attract customers to the iPhone. Apple’s smartphone is popular with Chinese users - but many of them buy their iPhones on the gray market rather than from Unicom. Unicom sold 500,000 iPhones in the first half of 2010, and Chinese bought another 400,000 on the gray market, according to Beijing-based market research firm BDA China.

China Mobile, meanwhile, earlier this month reported a better-than-expected 6.8 percent increase in profit for the quarter, earning $4.7 billion. Who needs Apple? Not China Mobile.

View the original article here

U.S. Stem Cell Ruling May Boost Asian Research

2011-01-13T17:40:00.000-08:00

Asian countries are well-positioned to benefit from the latest setback for stem cell research in the U.S. During the Bush years, countries such as Singapore and China took advantage of the U.S. ban on embryonic stem-cell research by providing a more welcoming environment for scientists to work. See, for example, this story I did back in 2005 about Asian efforts to capitalize on the U.S. ban. Describing what he called the "astonishing" progress made in Asia, Robert A. Goldstein, chief scientific officer at New York-based Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International, told me then that many Asian governments were asking themselves: “Since the U.S. doesn’t seem to be taking a lead role, why don’t we?”

With Obama’s election and his easing of restrictions, that question became moot as the U.S. got back in the game. Now, though, the Aug. 23 ruling by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth halting U.S. funding for embryonic stem-cell research is a reminder of the uncertainty surrounding the issue in the States. Even if Judge Lambert’s ruling is overturned on appeal, what happens if Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, or some other conservative Republican defeats Obama in 2012? Count on a new executive order banning research before the Inauguration Day balls are even over. There’s almost zero chance of any such change in policy in Singapore, China, or other Asian countries aspiring to be centers of stem cell research.

View the original article here

Nokia Profit Tops Estimate as Share Falls

2011-01-09T20:24:00.000-08:00

The Finns aren’t gloating types, but they must be taking a certain amount of delight from Nokia’s third-quarter comeback. The world’s largest mobile phone maker on Oct. 21 reported revenues of €10.3 billion ($14.4 billion), up 5 percent from the same quarter in 2009 and higher than the €9.99 billion average estimate among analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. More importantly, net income of €529 million ($740 million) was nearly three times consensus. In last year’s third quarter, Nokia (NOK) lost €559 million.

Driving the turnaround was a huge jump in smartphone sales, which hit 26.5 million units in the quarter, up 61 percent from a year earlier and 10 percent from the second quarter. All told, the category of products that Nokia calls “converged mobile devices” contributed €3.61 billion to the top line, while sales of nearly 84 million conventional handsets in the quarter brought in just €3.56 billion. That makes this the third consecutive quarter in which smartphone revenues outpaced those from simpler, higher-volume phones.

Other metrics also showed positive movement. Operating margins for Nokia’s dominant Devices and Services unit, which accounts for 70 percent of total revenues, climbed one point from a year earlier, to 10.5 percent. And the company’s closely watched average selling price (ASP) crept up to €65, from €61 in the previous quarter and €64 a year earlier. This was due to the higher relative volume of pricier smartphones in the mix, though the ASP of those devices continues to sag—down a worrisome 28 percent during the past year, suggesting Nokia may have been forced to discount in order to move merchandise.

Still, there was enough good news in the quarterly report to drive Nokia’s shares up 6.3 percent in Helsinki trading, though the rise wasn’t matched later in New York, where shares rose 3.3 percent by late afternoon. It also helped that Nokia forecast flat to higher margins in the fourth quarter and raised its forecast for overall industry growth to “more than 10% in 2010,” compared with an earlier estimate calling for a rise of “approximately” 10 percent.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where the positive points run out. Nokia conceded in its earnings statement that it expects to “slightly” lose market share this year compared to last in both volume and revenue terms. To help keep costs in line, the company announced plans to lay off 1,800 people from corporate functions, R&D, and at Symbian, a Nokia-owned, London-based software firm that develops the operating system used in Nokia smartphones. It will also streamline operations by merging the development of the Symbian 3 and Symbian 4 operating systems.

Fixing Symbian is key to addressing Nokia’s slipping market share. Simply put, the King of Handsets is having a tough time delivering products that excite buyers the way Apple (AAPL) iPhones and models running the Google (GOOG)-backed Android operating system seem to. Reviewers and bloggers tend to pin the blame on the Symbian software, which though powerful and robust, is faulted for being less intuitive to use.

That point was made starkly clear when researcher Strategy Analytics released its third-quarter smartphone market share estimates later on Oct. 21. In a market that grew overall to 77 million units, up 78 percent from a year earlier, Nokia’s sales grew at less than the rate of the market, up 61.6 percent, while Apple’s grew 90.5 percent and the “other” category, which includes a lot of Android sellers such as Samsung, HTC, and Sony Ericsson, soared 117%.

To be sure, Nokia still has 34.4 percent market share to No. 2 Apple’s 18.3 percent, but that’s a historic low for Nokia—and Apple is closing the gap. At the same time, a crowded market is getting even more competitive: BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIMM) slipped to No. 3 in the third quarter, according to Strategy Analytics, with unit sales up 45.9 percent, but retains its strong footing in corporate accounts, while giant Microsoft (MSFT) is trying one more to time to barge into the handset market with its new Windows Phone 7 software.

All these challenges raise the stakes for Nokia’s new CEO, Stephen Elop, who joined the company five weeks ago from Microsoft. He’s got a lot of work to do, especially addressing Nokia’s tiny market share and near irrelevance in the U.S. Having a decent set of quarterly numbers under his belt and a nice pop in the stock could help smooth the transition.

View the original article here

China Buys Gas-Tapping Technology

2011-01-07T23:40:00.000-08:00

My colleague John Duce and I wrote in this week’s issue of Bloomberg Businessweek about China’s search for unconventional gas — gas trapped in coal deposits, for instance, or in shale. The country has huge potential for this kind of unconventional gas: China has as much as 30 trillion cubic meters of gas trapped in coal and shale, ten times more than the country’s conventional gas reserves. Getting access to all that unconventional gas isn’t easy, though, which is one reason state-owned PetroChina has invested in Australian company Arrow Energy, which specializes in extracting unconventional gas.

In June, China National Petroleum formed a joint venture with a Canadian company, Encana, to develop unconventional gas projects in Canada. As Worldwatch Research Fellows Saya Kitasei and Haibing Ma write, “the deal with Encana will give CNPC a chance to gain insight from an independent gas company that has some of the longest experience with applying hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling to extract gas from shale formations. In this model, one hand washes the other: major oil and gas companies gain access to the technology and expertise they need to develop unconventional gas, and smaller independent gas companies get access to the sizeable amounts of capital that many have needed in recent years.”

Now comes news that another state-owned company, CNOOC International, has agreed to pay $1.08 billion in cash for a one-third stake in a shale gas project in south Texas owned by Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake Energy. Like PetroChina’s Aussie deal, this Texas investment is not just about a short-term boost to supply from developing unconventional gas reserves overseas; it should also help the Chinese achieve their bigger goal, developing unconventional gas reserves at home.

View the original article here

China Buys Gas-Tapping Technology

2011-01-05T23:08:00.001-08:00

View the original article here

Taking a Business Opportunity Trade Show

2010-02-19T06:46:00.000-08:00

Trade show is an activity undertaken in the form of individuals or specific organizations to introduce a goods and services produced in a way held or physically present these items, so that they can attract and encourage consumer interest to use the goods in question.

Trade show as a forum for communication between businesses and consumers, and society in general to know the development of consumer tastes in terms of quality, model, color, price, payment methods, how to delivery and other commercial aspects.

In the trade show had to use a trade show booths comfortably made to attract customers, so it looks interesting as well advised to bring a complement to the atmosphere became more awake include: table skirts that serves to place the product or service offered, banner stands that served as a prop to advertise products or services offered, and provide Pipe and Drape for maintaining the security and comfort among the businesses and consumers.

Writing a good headline for your advertisement

2010-01-06T05:19:00.000-08:00

There is no denying the fact that the success of an advertisement lies mostly in the headline. The headline should attract the reader and make him read the rest of the advertisement. The headline should be simply catchy and various key points should be embedded when deciding on the headline for the ad.

The headline should catch attention of the eye at the first glance. Words in headlines should act as tags for the advertisement. It should say it all about the content that follows. If a company is selling reasonably priced furniture, the headline of their advertisement should be ‘Durable furniture for less price’. This headline will attract the right customers who are on a look out for durable furniture as well as low cost furniture. If the customers to be reached belong to a category that are interested in decorating their house with beautiful furniture and aren’t concerned about the price to get the right look, then the headline can be ‘Change how your house looks by our oriental furniture’. Anything other than the prospects should not be included in the headline. If both men and women can use a product, both of them should be referred to in the title, missing out even one of the category is like losing a huge number of potential customers.
The title should be instant product seller. According to a research, five times more readers read just the headline when compared to those who read the complete advertisement. So the investment is of no use, if the title isn’t good enough to sell the product. There can be a possibility that the content of the ad isn’t strong enough. All the harm can be undone by having a powerful headline.
The headline should be centered on the product and not the company that is selling the product. The customer’s interest should be reflected and he should feel that he is directly addressed. Start with ‘you’ and not ‘we’. So if the client specified on mentioning the company’s name, don’t start the sentence with it. For example, instead of writing ‘Tylenol – solution for sever cold ’, write ‘Got sever cold? Try Tylenol’. Never forget to mention the name of the product in the headline. The product name should be of top priority.
A snapshot of the benefits of the product should be given in the headline. This is an important quality of a well-phrased headline. The customers look out for advantages when he thinks of buying a product. Keywords like whiter teeth, nutritious cereals, or miraculous growth should be incorporated in the title.
If inculcating all these factors have made the headline long, it should be remembered to write the product advantages in bold. If a visual is placed in the advertisement, it will be a good complement. As a picture speak thousand words. But care should be taken that the headline should say some part of the story and the visual should say the rest. Don’t repeat the headline or the picture.
Too much of cleverness should not be applied to design a headline. There are nearly five hundred advertisements in a local newspaper on weekends. A regular reader reads the headings of all of them. He will be able to classify between a false heading and a genuine heading. No false promises or information should be included in the headline. Over smart headlines are good for award competitions, but don’t really work with the savvy customers.
The headline should give out a positive feeling to the reader. Negativity should be totally excluded as it not only creates a negative impression but the mind will also be not receptive friendly. It sometimes confuses the mind and it interprets a negative meaning of the message being delivered. Confidence should be reflected in the headline. Don’t include any doubtful words like if and but. Conditional phrases are a strict no. The sentence should be in present tense, instead of past or future.

Careers

2009-12-23T23:18:00.000-08:00

There are many different careers in the field of accounting ranging from entry-level bookkeeping to the Chief Financial Officer of a company. To achieve positions with more responsibility and higher salaries, it's necessary to have a degree in accounting as well as achieve various professional designations.

One of the primary milestones in any accountant's career is to become a Certified Public Accountant or CPA. To become a CPA you have to go to college with a major in accounting. You also have to pass a national CPA exam. There's also some employment experience required in a CPA firm. This is generally one to two years, although this varies from state to state. Once you satisfy all those requirements, you get a certificate that designates you as a CPA and you're allowed to offer your services to the public.

Many CPAs consider this just one stepping stone to their careers. The chief accountant in many offices is called the controller. The controller is in charge of managing the entire accounting system in a business stays on top of accounting and tax laws to keep the company legal and is responsible for preparing the financial statements.

The controller is also in charge of financial planning and budgeting. Some companies have only one accounting professional who's essentially the chief cook and bottle washer and does everything. As a business grows in size and complexity, then additional layers of personnel are required to handle the volume of work that comes from growth. Other areas in the company are also impacted by growth, and it's part of the controller's job to determine just how many more salaries the company can pay for additional people without negatively impacting growth and profits.

The controller also is responsible for preparing tax returns for the business; a much more involved and complex task than completing personal income tax forms! In larger organizations, the controller can report to a vice president of finance who reports to the chief financial officer, who is responsible for the broad objectives for growth and profit and implementing the appropriate strategies to achieve the objectives.

Business Hotel

2009-12-21T20:20:00.000-08:00

In accordance with its function, the hotel is a temporary residence, which is usually occupied by the traveler and the most are the businessmen, of course. However, the hotel is now functioning in major cities are growing. Not just a place to rest the businessmen who were conducting a business trip, but the hotel can also be used directly as a place to do business.

Of course, although the hotel can also be used as a place to do business but actually quite different when compared with the actual office. However, the shift in lifestyle, the hotel is like like an office. It's not new anymore if a company decides to hold meetings, seminars or training for employees by choosing a hotel as a place. Seeing this, the hotel management to complete competing hotel facilities, so guests can make their business activities as comfortable as possible.

city located near the shore is interesting to build the hotel. one of the city is the city of Miami, FL, is located in the United States. City of Miami, FL has a very beautiful beach and a very bustling city that is very conducive to attract investors to do business hotel in the city of Miami, FL. There is also a city of Charlotte, NC, a city that's fair enough as the real estate market town of great saying today. Housing market presents a lower level to provide quality and an excellent choice for relocation. Cost of living in Charlotte, NC low compared with cities and other countries as well, which presents plus side for those who plan to move to the city of Charlotte, NC. No less interesting is also to do business but the business sector housing, Pittsburgh, PA city. City of the immovable. Relatively stable housing market and the city became the only town in America who actually experienced an increase in residential property prices in times of crisis. In 2008 Pittsburgh, PA was able to add jobs while many cities lost jobs and the national economy into recession significant work.

Several cities in the United States

2009-12-19T00:20:00.000-08:00

The United States is a federal republic consisting of 50 states and one federal district. Except Alaska (northern Canada) & Hawaii (Pacific Ocean), 48 other states and the federal district located in North America. several cities in the United States is

Miami, FL. The city is located in the south. Exactly the state of Florida. In 2002, the city has a total population of 362,470 inhabitants and an area of 143.1 km². This city has a population density figures for 2532.1 inhabitants / km ². In the metropolitan area, amounted to 5,413,212 inhabitants.

Pittsburgh, PA. The city is located in the east. Precisely in the state of Pennsylvania. In 2008, the city has a total population of 316,718 inhabitants and an area of 151.1 km². This city has a population density figures for 2174 people / km².

Charlotte,NC. The city is located in the east. Precisely in the state of North Carolina. In 2009, the city has a total population of 716,874 inhabitants and an area of 629 km ². This city has a number density of 971.3 inhabitants / km ².

Research in Advertising

2009-12-16T09:04:00.002-08:00

Research in advertising is done in order to produce better advertisements that are more efficient in motivating customers to buy a product or a service. The research can be based on a particular advertising campaign or can be more generalized and based on how advertisements create an effect on people’s mind. Lots of approaches are involved to go about conducting an advertising research like economical, psychological, demographical and sociological.

When designing an advertisement for a particular product many things should be researched like where it should be displayed, whether the advertisement can be printed in newspapers or magazines or broadcasted on television or radio or published on the Internet. Many methods are undertaken to collect relevant information. The research itself is of two kinds, syndicated and customized. Syndicated research is a single research done by the company that is available to other companies as well. Customized research is research based on certain criteria and is done for a particular company and its results are available to only that company.

Pre-testing or copy testing is a type of customized research that determines the in-market efficiency of an advertisement before it is released or before the final production. The more the pre-testing is done the more likely that it will be a successful advertisement and each pre-testing should be applied number of times. This can done by studying the level of attention the customers have, motivation, brand linkage, communication and entertainment. Flow of emotions and flow of attention are broken down and studied individually. The results are applied on the advertisement that is still being developed to recognize the weak points and replace them. A reliable feedback loop can guide the researchers, client and the agency to work in harmony. Tests should be applied during the storyboard stage of ad making. This is an early stage and the results are highly predictive. During this process images are selected and used as integrated campaign print ad.

Post-testing or ad tracking studies are either syndicated or customized. Studies are done over a period of time or continuously. The in-market research is done to understand a brands linkage, performance, awareness, and preference along with product attitudes and usage. They are done by, conducting interviews either on phone or Internet. Testing the finished advertisement provides the confidence and gives an idea whether it is following the strategy.

All the above studies should facilitate the client’s advertisement development make the end product easier to achieve. The study should contain rational information having not only surface knowledge but also provide deep in-sight that will open window to a customer’s mind. The customer, too, should provide precise information based on facts and not based on imaginary thinking and self-delusion. He should be able to explain the role of advertisement in the whole marketing plan. Working in vacuum doesn’t get the desired result.

The basis is to provide in-depth understanding about the consumers for improving on the advertisement techniques and other marketing decisions. The traditional methods of qualitative and quantitative techniques have been improved to analyze the information with good insight.

The rapidly changing likes and needs of the customers are difficult to track, but should be studied in order to increase the quality of advertisement. The changes are because of the huge number of options offered to them by the market.

Women in Advertisements

2009-12-13T05:31:00.002-08:00

Featuring a female model in advertisements initially started with advertisements on products like alcohol and adult entertainment. The trend then spread like a wildfire in the market and is still being widely used although being exaggerated. It has become a compulsion now to have a beautiful model in all kinds of advertisement, which sometimes seems unnecessary. They seem to sell anything from shaving gel to cars.

Many women right activists say that the women are being projected as merely an object by such advertisements. But the harsh truth is that advertisements featuring women is influencing viewers of all ages and advertisers have realized this. The advertisement starts with an attractive woman posing in seductive ways followed by the product or the service offered by the company. The beauty of the model already lures the customer, so advertisers do not have to put in more effort to motivate them.

But there are certain drawbacks in using women models in some advertisements and if a consumer is smart enough, it wont take time for him to realize that. It is totally irrelevant to feature a female model or an actress in advertisement promoting men products. Some good examples of this point are showing a woman in axe deodorant commercial and comparison of a partially nude womans body to the body of a car. Second drawback is due to more concentration on the model, the attention deserved by the product is not sufficient. The main focus of the advertisement is lost.

Surprisingly only few male models advertises for male oriented products. Even a picture of a woman on an Internet commercial seems not logical to some extent, as there are thirty percent of female internet users and seventy percent of male internet users, worldwide. To add to it, advertisers cannot explain why beautiful bodies bring success to advertisement.

Advertisements are convincing and motivating tool, which can leave a deep impact on the minds of the viewers and plays a major role in molding the culture and attitude of the people. Expansive and extensive portraying of women in this manner merely reduces their image to an object of passion. Emphasis is laid only on the physical beauty of the woman like features, body curves. After the commercial has been shot, using graphical technology, any kind of imperfection of the body is altered which in a way sends out the signal that only perfect people are meant to use the product.

The companies have a moral responsibility also in the society. These commercials have a negative impact on the society and leads to problems faced for the common woman. The major ill effect is the pressure on woman to get those near-perfect bodies. They get so pressurized that they take the unhealthy way to reach the set goals. They develop eating disorders; their health gets affected which may sometimes result in irreparable damages. And those who never make it to that point, face humiliation and get taunted by everyone around them. This results in depression and other long-term psychological diseases.

According to researches and surveys conducted, most of the women vow that commercials lower their self-confidence and they visualize themselves as unattractive due to the image being portrayed of the perfect woman in ads. In America, seventy-five percent of healthy females think that they are over-weight. Half of the women populations are on some kind of diet program and nearly ten million women suffer from serious eating disorders. The weight of a fashion model is twenty three percent less than an average weighed ordinary woman.

Advertisements havent spared women being beaten up. In a particular after shave lotion commercial, the background voice says that its essential to learn martial arts because once a man applies the companys product, women around will be attracted and will pounce on him. Towards the end of the commercial, they show a male model kicking several women model that seem to have attracted to him. This is degradation of respect of women to the lowest level.

After all this exposure, women viewers identify themselves as the weaker sex. Some think that males decide their self-worth. Over exposure of women as sex objects have triggered cases of physical assault and rapes. Majority of the women are taking the wrong way to get those stick figures, which are results in diseases, sometimes leading to death. And most of this is attributed to the advertisements that pour into the lives of innocent people everyday. Marketing ethics should be built to raise the status of woman in the society and give them the due respect but not degrade them.

Making a Profit

2009-12-11T00:25:00.000-08:00

Accountants are responsible for preparing three primary types of financial statements for a business. The income statement reports the profit-making activities of the business and the bottom-line profit or loss for a specified period. The balance sheets reports the financial position of the business at a specific point in time, ofteh the last day of the period. and the statement of cash flows reports how much cash was generated from profit what the business did with this money.

Everyone knows profit is a good thing. It's what our economy is founded on. It doesn't sound like such a big deal. Make more money than you spend to sell or manufacture products. But of course nothing's ever really simple, is it? A profit report, or net income statement first identifies the business and the time period that is being summarized in the report.

You read an income statement from the top line to the bottom line. Every step of the income statement reports the deduction of an expense. The income statement also reports changes in assets and liabilities as well, so that if there's a revenue increase, it's either because there's been an increase in assets or a decrease in a company's liabilities. If there's been an increase in the expense line, it's because there's been either a decrease in assets or an increase in liabilities.

Net worth is also referred to as owners' equity in the business. They're not exactly interchangeable. Net worth expresses the total of assets less the liabilities. Owners' equity refers to who owns the assets after the liabilities are satisfied.

These shifts in assets and liabilities are important to owners and executives of a business because it's their responsibility to manage and control such changes. Making a profit in a business involves several variable, not just increasing the amount of cash that flows through a company, but management of other assets as well.

Measuring Costs

2009-12-09T07:08:00.000-08:00

Measuring profits or net income is the most important thing accountants do. The second most important task is measuring costs. Costs are extremely important to running a business and managing them effectively can make a substantial difference in a company's bottom line.

Any business that sells products needs to know its product costs and depending on what is being manufactured and/or sold, it can get complicated. Every step in the production process has to be tracked carefully from start to finish. Many manufacturing costs cannot be directly matched with particular products; these are called indirect costs. To calculate the full cost of each product manufactured, accountants devise methods for allocating indirect production costs to specific products. Generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) provide few guidelines for measuring product cost.

Accountants need to determine many other costs, in addition to product costs, such as the costs of the departments and other organizational units of the business; the cost of the retirement plan for the company's employees; the cost of marketing and advertising; the cost of restructuring the business or the cost of a major recall of products sold by the company, should that ever become necessary.

Cost accounting serves two broad purposes: measuring profit and furnishing relevant information to managers. What makes it confusing is that there's no one set method for measuring and reporting costs, although accuracy is paramount. Cost accounting can fall anywhere on a continuum between conservative or expansive. The phrase actual cost depends entirely on the particular methods used to measure cost. These can often be as subjective and nebulous as some systems for judging sports. Again accuracy is extremely important. The total cost of goods or products sold is the first and usually largest expense deducted from sales revenue in measuring profit.

What is the FASB?

2009-12-07T10:42:00.001-08:00

The FASB is one organization that provides standardized guidelines for financial reporting. The mission of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) is to establish and improve standards of financial accounting and reporting for the guidance and education of the public, including issuers, auditors and users of financial information.

Accounting standards are essential to the efficient functioning of the economy because decisions about the allocation of resources rely heavily on credible, concise, transparent and understandable financial information. Financial information about the operations and financial position of individual entities also is used by the public in making various other kinds of decisions.

To accomplish its mission, the FASB acts to:

--Improve the usefulness of financial reporting by focusing on the primary characteristics of relevance and reliability and on the qualities of comparability and consistency;
--Keep standards current to reflect changes in methods of doing business and changes in the economic environment;
--Consider promptly any significant areas of deficiency in financial reporting that might be improved through the standard-setting process;
--Promote the international convergence of accounting standards concurrent with improving the quality of financial reporting; and
--Improve the common understanding of the nature and purposes of information contained in financial reports.

The FASB develops broad accounting concepts as well as standards for financial reporting. It also provides guidance on implementation of standards. Concepts are useful in guiding the Board in establishing standards and in providing a frame of reference, or conceptual framework, for resolving accounting issues. The framework will help to establish reasonable bounds for judgment in preparing financial information and to increase understanding of, and confidence in, financial information on the part of users of financial reports. It also will help the public to understand the nature and limitations of information supplied by financial reporting.

Bread Food Business Opportunity

2009-12-06T08:40:00.000-08:00

Food business opportunities are always interesting to talk about. And the food business it is easy to get started.

Show romanization
Not long ago, we launched a new site MesinRoti.com. This site intentionally online to give us info about the machines used for the bread business.

At these sites, you can find a variety of business opportunities BREAD, among others: the toast of business opportunities, business opportunities CREEPES, Waffle Iron, Bread Tokoyaki, etc.

Auditing

2009-12-01T10:05:00.000-08:00

If a business breaks the rules of accounting and ethics, it can be liable for legal sanctions against it. It can deliberately deceive its investors and lenders with false or misleading numbers in its financial report. That's where audits come in. Audits are one means of keeping misleading financial reporting to a minimum. CPA auditors are like highway patrol officers who enforce traffic laws and issue tickets to keep speeding to a minimum. An audit exam can uncover problems that the business was not aware of.

After completing an audit examination, the CPA prepares a short report stating that the business has prepared its financial statements, according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), or where it has not. All businesses that are publicly traded are required to have annual audits by independent CPAs. Those companies whose stocks are listed on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq must be audited by outside CPA firms. For a publicly traded company, the expense of conducting an annual audit is the cost of doing business; it's the price a company pays for going into public markets for its capital and for having its shares traded in the public venue.

Although federal law doesn't require audits for private businesses, banks and other lenders to private businesses may insist on audited financial statements. If the lenders don't require audited statements, a business's owners have to decide whether an audit is a good investment. Instead of an audit, which they can't really afford, many smaller businesses have an outside CPA come in on a regular basis to look over their accounting methods and give advice on their financial reporting. But unless a CPA has done an audit, he or she has to be very careful not to express an opinion of the external financial statements. Without a careful examination of the evidence supporting the amounts reported in the financial statements, the CPA is in no position to give an opinion on the financial statements prepared from the accounts of the business.

Choosing Gold To Invest

2009-11-30T08:08:00.000-08:00

Many choose gold as a form of investment because its value tends to a stable and rising. Very rare gold prices fell. And again, gold is a tool that can be used to ward off inflation, which often happens every year.

Collector gold, more like gold in the form of coins. Coins issued several countries and has a history and the series itself. Each coin has a fixed standard and names himself to distinguish each of the gold series.

There are several advantages to investing in gold coins, including:

Account Unit properties, easily aggregated and divided. If you have 100 coins and today to 5 coins, stay off the 5 coins. The rest is stored.
Very liquid, easily bought and sold them for having the nature of the Account Unit
High resale value, because it follows the International Gold price development.
Easily traded among users because there is no constraint model and size.

if you like investing in gold coin, goldcoinsgain.com is website then you should visit. you can buy a variety of Gold Coins and Gold Bullion.

Make Easy Your Exhibition

2009-11-30T02:30:00.000-08:00

Trade show known as a merchandise show. It’s an exhibition or a business gathering organized by companies that showcase and demonstrate their new products and services. Trade shows giving chance for companies and customers to get the great deals. As it’s consist of customers and companies, usually they are learn new trends and to identify new prospects.

Generally, trade shows only be attended by company representatives, members of the trade and members of the press. Trade show has many advantage and disadvantage. The advantage is it could shorten the time it takes for companies to look for prospective customers. And the main disadvantage is that customers and prospects pay little attention to the many exhibitors and their products. It’s because costumers got so many distractions and the busy atmosphere inherent in trade shows.

Companies program will be effective by using trade show displays in trade shows to direct visitors to their main display area. It would make the great atmosphere around. And they never forget to spread logo floor mats. Trade show displays usually include banner stands, cabinets and counters. Another trick is having component such as exhibit booths and nice decorative truss. It is an important component of the trade show display as it aims to enhance the brand and marketing experience for the visitor.

Profit and Loss

2009-11-29T08:07:00.000-08:00

It might seem like a no-brainer to define just exactly what profit and loss are. But of course these have definitions like everything else. Profit can be called different things, for a start. It's sometimes called net income or net earnings. Businesses that sell products and services generate profit from the sales of those products or services and from controlling the attendant costs of running the business. Profit can also be referred to as Return on Investment, or ROI. While some definitions limit ROI to profit on investments in such securities as stocks or bonds, many companies use this term to refer to short-term and long-term business results. Profit is also sometimes called taxable income.

It's the job of the accounting and finance professionals to assess the profits and losses of a company. They have to know what created both and what the results of both sides of the business equation are. They determine what the net worth of a company is. Net worth is the resulting dollar amount from deducting a company's liabilities from its assets. In a privately held company, this is also called owner's equity, since anything that's left over after all the bills are paid, to put it simply, belongs to the owners. In a publicly held company, this profit is returned to the shareholders in the form of dividends. In other words, all liabilities have the first claim on any money the company makes. Anything that's left over is profit. It's not derived from one element or another. Net worth is determined after all the liabilities are deducted from all the assets, including cash and property.

Showing a profit, or a positive figure on the balance sheet, is of course the aim of every business. It's what our economy and society are built on. It doesn't always work out that way. Economic trends and consumer behaviors change and it's not always possible to predict these and what income they'll have on a company's performance.

Personal Accounting

2009-11-28T09:01:00.000-08:00

If you have a checking account, of course you balance it periodically to account for any differences between what's in your statement and what you wrote down for checks and deposits. Many people do it once a month when their statement is mailed to them, but with the advent of online banking, you can do it daily if you're the sort whose banking tends to get away from them.

You balance your checkbook to note any charges in your checking account that you haven't recorded in your checkbook. Some of these can include ATM fees, overdraft fees, special transaction fees or low balance fees, if you're required to keep a minimum balance in your account. You also balance your checkbook to record any credits that you haven't noted previously. They might include automatic deposits, or refunds or other electronic deposits. Your checking account might be an interest-bearing account and you want to record any interest that it's earned.

You also need to discover if you've made any errors in your recordkeeping or if the bank has made any errors.

Another form of accounting that we all dread is the filing of annual federal income tax returns. Many people use a CPA to do their returns; others do it themselves. Most forms include the following items:

Income - any money you've earned from working or owning assets, unless there are specific exemptions from income tax.

Personal exemptions - this is a certain amount of income that is excused from tax.

Standard deduction - some personal expenditures or business expenses can be deducted from your income to reduce the taxable amount of income. These expenses include items such as interest paid on your home mortgage, charitable contributions and property taxes.

Taxable income - This is the balance of income that's subject to taxes after personal exemptions and deductions are factored in.

Basic Accounting Principles

2009-11-27T01:02:00.001-08:00

Accounting has been defined as, by Professor of Accounting at the University of Michigan William A Paton as having one basic function: "facilitating the administration of economic activity. This function has two closely related phases:
1) measuring and arraying economic data; and
2) communicating the results of this process to interested parties."

As an example, a company's accountants periodically measure the profit and loss for a month, a quarter or a fiscal year and publish these results in a statement of profit and loss that's called an income statement. These statements include elements such as accounts receivable (what's owed to the company) and accounts payable (what the company owes). It can also get pretty complicated with subjects like retained earnings and accelerated depreciation. This at the higher levels of accounting and in the organization.

Much of accounting though, is also concerned with basic bookkeeping. This is the process that records every transaction; every bill paid, every dime owed, every dollar and cent spent and accumulated.

But the owners of the company, which can be individual owners or millions of shareholders are most concerned with the summaries of these transactions, contained in the financial statement. The financial statement summarizes a company's assets. A value of an asset is what it cost when it was first acquired. The financial statement also records what the sources of the assets were. Some assets are in the form of loans that have to be paid back. Profits are also an asset of the business.

In what's called double-entry bookkeeping, the liabilities are also summarized. Obviously, a company wants to show a higher amount of assets to offset the liabilities and show a profit. The management of these two elements is the essence of accounting.

There is a system for doing this; not every company or individual can devise their own systems for accounting; the result would be chaos!

Search Engine Optimization and Advertising

2009-11-26T03:36:00.000-08:00

In today’s net-savvy world it has become common for any business to have a website which they use mostly for advertising their products and services. With the advent of search engines it has become even easier for the customers to search for the stuff online. For a website to be successful its link should land in the first three pages which the search engine brings and the rank of the page should be high which means many visitors come to the site. This can be achieved by applying search engine optimization or popularly known as SEO. This is a marketing strategy which increases the quality and quantity of traffic flow to a particular website via search engines.

SEO not only affects the search engine results, but also image search, video search and industry specific vertical search engines. It determines how a search algorithm functions and searches what is popular with people. When a website link is submitted to a search engine, a spider crawls through a page to gather links which lead to other pages and stores those pages on the server of the search engine. The information collected from these pages is sent to the indexer, whose job is to extract information from those pages such as the keywords and their weights, the location of the page and other links that are stored for the spider to crawl in future.

In the beginning, the search engine optimizer algorithms were dependant on the keywords, Meta tags, and index files provided by the Webmaster. Meta tags provided information about a particular page, but using them for indexing the pages didn’t prove to be successful as some Webmasters added irrelevant Meta tags to increase the number of hits and earn huge ad revenue. They even changed the HTML of the web pages to achieve a good rank for the page. But this was a case of abuse as it fetched irrelevant pages.

Search engines then began utilizing complex ranking algorithm, which were difficult for the webmasters to manipulate so as to provide web surfers with genuine results. The rank of the web page was calculated mathematically by functions using strength and quantity of the inbound links. The higher the rank of the page the more chances it had to be viewed by a person. Later algorithms were developed which considered various other on-page factors such as rank and off-page factors such as hyperlink. Since the webmasters couldn’t manipulate the page rank, they began exchanging, selling and buying links, which lead to link spamming and even creation of numerous sites dedicated for this purpose.

Algorithms became more complex by every passing day and top search engines kept their algorithms a secret. As the cost of SEO increased, advertisers were roped in to pay for it, which finally resulted in high quality web pages. Although investing in SEO is very fruitful, but at the same time is risky because with out any prior notice the algorithms being used are bound to change and the search engine will stop directing visitors to the page. Many consultants are available in the market that provides SEO services. They manipulate the HTML source code of the web site like menus, shopping carts and sometimes even the content of the website to draw more traffic. Search engines like Yahoo has algorithms that extract pages not according to the page rank but according to the cost per click or set fee, that is if a advertiser desires that the page containing his ad be displayed, he is expected to pay money for it. This is a point of controversy, as only the big businesses will be able to increase the number of hits of their page but not the small business who might be having a better quality page.

Google Ad Words explores ads which have words typed in the search box by the surfer. The Million Dollar Homepage started the concept of Pixel advertising, which is a graphical kind of advertising. Depending on the pixels, the space is sold to the advertiser. Keyword advertising involves advertisers who buy URLs of a site and place their ads at that location. Thus SEO is a market in its own which is yielding great results for businesses on Internet.

Advertising: Self Promotion

2009-11-25T07:50:00.000-08:00

Self-promotion is similar to spreading the word by any other means but with an artistic approach. If the artistic part were taken out of the equation advertising would look more like barging rather than self-promotion. There are many steps involved in this process. The first step is to collect and create useful content relating to the topic, which is a not an easy job.

In today’s fast paced world owning a website for your business is a must which is not a big deal anymore with so many people available who excel in web designing and also offer a competitive rate. There are many types of technologies involved in the creation of a website, a one page flash website wouldn’t take you places. Intense graphics should be incorporated to catch the eye of the customer. After the creation of website, the website content should be emphasized upon. Writers who expertise in search engine optimization should be raked in so that the page ranks amongst the top pages on Google, Yahoo and Msn. Search engines have become popular universally and your website doing good on them plays a more vital role than getting other kind of references. Hence, efforts should be made on making remarkable progress to bring your website in the hit list. Also, material on the website should be updated frequently to meet the changing needs of the people. Get someone to design a logo for the company and website which is catchy and delivers the right message to the customers.

Other than website content, articles should also be published in newspapers, magazines and online publications especially business oriented emphasizing on ten strong points which describes the best about the business or the product. Online publication will facilitate in providing successful searches to the targeted audience.

The next target method of advertising should be television. Putting a commercial during the prime time will spread the message to a larger crowd. The content of the advertising should be akin to the value of the product. Famous personalities can be roped in to endorse the product, which will not only attract common people but also their fans in buying the product.

From time to time it is essential to review the past work and improving on the mistakes previously committed. Once the previous mistakes are tackled, it wouldn’t hurt to analyze previous milestones, awards, and acquisitions. This increases the chances of running into something that really deserves to be highlighted to the public. The more accomplishments you display to the public the more fan-following your product will get.

Reviewing competitor’s work on a regular basis would prove fruitful. This would also help identify loopholes in your product that have been overlooked before and would provide the key reasons to improve on.

Although this is an old approach, snail mails are also one of the best advertising methods. As it’s a more energy consuming approach, it’s important that you have the addresses of the customers who are really in need of the product. Regular mails containing details about the new development will keep people informed about your company’s products. A more modern approach to this method is collecting e-mail ids of the targeted customers and posting them ads and latest deals. This is a cheaper and less time consuming approach compared to snail mails as you can mass email as many people as you want at any time.

Before releasing any product in the market, product testing should be done by giving out samples among the targeted customers. The feedbacks makes it more clear whether the product is ready to be released in the market or whether changes should be made to make it more appealing to the public. It is recommended to approach sincere friends, acquaintances, partners and clients at first to test your product and then go to the public, as expert advice is more useful.

To make more brownie points, address the customers and clients and appreciate them for their contribution in making the product popular. Send a token of thanks on special occasions like festivals or on accomplishing an important task. Customers can also be thanked by offering special discounts and free gifts. After gaining popularity focus should be on retaining the reputation rather than taking things for granted.

Advertising for free

2009-11-24T03:24:00.000-08:00

Advertising for free seems like an impossible thing when heard. But there are several ways by which the cost of advertisement can be conserved, with the help of some imagination and creativity.

A business wanting to advertise, can write articles related to their field of expertise that can be submitted to media and publications having interest in that particular field. The advertising article can have information about the company and dealership opportunity. Due to the rise in Internet users and websites, new websites have sprung up which offer free services. Articles can be written for these websites and they can be broadcasted for free, which will be viewed by hundreds of people everyday.

Once the business has gained some recognition, within no time it will gain popularity also among the crowds. This popularity can lead to them being invited on radio and television talk shows and even to interviews. Such kind of opportunities shouldn’t be missed as they provide a chance for free promotion. If it is taking a long time to get a break, the producer can be addressed with a letter that can be followed up by a telephone call or in-person visit. During the visit, the nature of expertise can be discussed about the business, which will be of interest to the viewers of the particular channel. Once a businessperson gains the status of being public-friendly, more offers start pouring in.

Free bulletin board located in the neighborhood, like in grocery stores, libraries, and salons, are another good idea. Advertising circulars can be posted on such boards for free. Circulars for mass distribution can be handed out at the mall, shopping center, bus stops, particularly on weekends when there is a big rush. Students can be hired on part time basis for this purpose.

Promotional advertisement can be printed on the envelopes used by the business firms. Both the sender and the receiver can view this advertisement. Promotional offers can be sent to customers by postcards, which should be utilized to its full, leaving only place left for writing the address.

Some of the new mail order publications offer free first time and seasonal deductions for advertisers. Other publications offer pay per inquiry space. Inquiries can be made about stand-by space, which means that the publication holds the submission of advertisement until the space is not sold and in that case, thirty three percent saving can be achieved. Usually local newspapers provide these kinds of offers.

If the business is involved in ad sheet or catalog publishing, other publishers can be contacted for the purpose of bartering an advertising exchange. They can place advertisement in their publication, in return for placing their advertisement in the business’s publication.

Free offers can be provided to the customer. This can be done by emailing or printing newsletter about information regarding the area of interest of the targeted customers and can be made popular by using tag lines. Attach a free coupon with it, which the customers can use it for shopping, if a criterion is met like minimum purchase of $ 50. By this the response will be huge and most of them will purchase something or the other to avail the free offer. The basic ingredient for advertising for free is imagination and research. Opportunities should be searched and a strong working force should be applied to increase the sales.

Secrets of Success Marketers

2009-11-23T02:00:00.000-08:00

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink, describes a successful car salesman. The person named Bob Golomb. The Director of Flemington Nissan dealership selling the usual black suit with a conservative model so cursory as a bank manager or stockbroker.

Here we can take the meaning of a performance. that how we look, very influential in our business.

Thanks

Adense Camp : Indonesian Adsense

2009-11-21T10:21:00.000-08:00

AdsenseCamp is the website that gives you an opportunity to earn additional income by providing space on your website as a place for the advertiser's advertising. AdsenseCamp also provides an opportunity to the Advertiser who wish to promote ads that will be distributed to website owners who have registered in AdsenseCamp

Adsense camp in two unique features:

1. Advertisers :

Advertisers can place ads on sites that cooperate with AdsenseCamp. With a unique system of pay-per-click, ensuring that you only need to pay for your ad when a visitor who did click on your ads with a unique IP.

2. Web Owner :

Take advantage of AdsenseCamp ads to earn money from your site. Your site will be equipped with a text ad links with pay-per-click system. You will earn money if there is to click on our ads on your site.

if you want to register Click Here

Consider Joining EDC Gold

2009-09-29T11:20:00.000-07:00

Don’t smooth think about joining EDC, EDC salary or EDC Diamond before you read this.

If you are like many people, you have been searching through a real home based functioning- a way to make cash from homey dissemble an Internet deal. A home based business that positively turmoil. And you desperately do not want to get SCAMMED! You don’t long to get sucked lookout an online money making program- that does NOT WORK further DOES NOT MAKE MONEY. But how do you see if these online business programs perfectly work?

In your Google searches for, (family based businesses, make money from home, work from home, etc.), you have probably heard of EDC, EDC Gold, EDC Diamond, Craig Garcia & Michael Corcoran. EDC is known to be one of the fastest growing and hottest Internet homey motion money earning opportunities on the Internet. But is concrete really?

I demand admit, I was very skeptical at sans pareil for of all the claims of people earning additional money than their doctors. folks claiming to follow through fantastic incomes of $20,000 to considering $100,000 PER MONTH! absolute in reality sounds way severely good to be true.

After seasoning tons of research on this dynamic company and talking screen populous people inside and outside of the company- I came to my conclusion...

EDC, EDC Gold and EDC Diamond is NOT A SCAM. It’s the real stuff deal. Here's why...

EDC, (Easy Daily Cash), is not a MLM program. It’s direct sales on the Internet. The company offers complete access to halfway 3,000 different software downloads. The global value of these software commodities is over $125,000 PLUS you end resale rights on most of them. EDC is a real company with unvarnished products and literal people also real support - besides that’s critical. But how reach you found money for yourself? That’s key.

Besides working with a solid and credible company - the single powerfully important aspect to YOUR increase in a homely based liveliness and making finance online is the training and mentor boat that is available. Unless you are already an Internet marketing expert - the odds of you succeeding in your own home based Internet business are slim to none. accordingly the training you retain is EVERYTHING and should be the most important aspect in deciding which home based Internet business to join.

FIRST- .EDC offers the finest, superlatively solid also in depth endeavor of any online business I have ever seen. EDC offers over 14 hours of LIVE training each week. Plus they have hundreds of hours of archived exertion that is available to you 24/7. They also have live specialist sustain kin who care help you hold back any challenges you guise. If you really want to turn up how to make your new online Internet business successful- they entrust show you how.

SECOND- the next most important arrangement you will ambition to effect is where can you get the very best personal, one-on-one labor further mentor keel. This point is SO central besides indeed people coed this. Signing evolution with the right EDC mentor makes all the difference in the world to your upping. During my extensive research of EDC, EDC Gold besides EDC Diamond, I set up a remarkable organization that stood out like a lighthouse in the Internet fog. It’s called the beans Funnel cast again it was created by Derrick Harper.

Derrick Harper has 12 years of extensive Internet Marketing experience working curtain Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies hunk them generate untold millions of dollars of profits. He is not an "over-night wonder". Derrick Harper REALLY knows his stuff! He has now intent his vast experience and applied it to a program that can really support you realize your dreams.

Here are Derrick's own words about The Wealth siphon System: "The only home based business fashion that teaches you the fundamentals of starting, marketing, and growing your let on online going. I've taken my hefty knowledge of generating a serious income using the internet to allow you to work from anywhere on the planet. With the Wealth Funnel framework home based business I go into you to EDC fund & EDC Diamond and begin training you how to promote, advertise, and earn money online.

I've chosen EDC Gold to introduce you to internet marketing and a home based activity because of the extensive training and their unrivaled customer support. slap on this valuable training again support with my vast experience and knowledge ALONG WITH MY fixed STEP-BY-STEP video TRAINING area since MY TEAM MEMBERS ONLY! And you be credulous the most potent training and rewarding online home based dash ever available that is immensely "TURN KEY!" You cleverly become only of my team members and within 72 hrs you're advertising and building your own online business".

So there you have live. EDC in NOT A SCAM. It is a real online business that really works. You won’t mature a millionaire over obscurity. It does bear functioning and attempt and you consign need to learn how to market online-but that’s an eminently benign knack that leave generate profits to you over the rest of your life!

PLUS- "The Wealth funnel System is the ONLY homely Based movement I swallow found disguise a 100% MONEY fetch GUARANTEE. You consign make a minimum of $5,000 per month within 90 days or they will bestow you 100% of your important back."

If you would like to invent more about The banknote carry System and EDC, go to: wealthfunnelpro.com I will be carefree to speak bury you imprint person and answer helping further questions you may credit. You will find my phone number on the succour page of the website.

Looking forward to hearing from you again helping you become successful hoopla online at home with your own home based business.

Wishing you the best in cultivation.

Online Buyer Specialists!

2009-09-26T11:20:00.000-07:00

Whether you are a first instance home seller or admit experienced in selling a home in the 24-carat estate market, the steps involved in selling vim is changing day by day. As Robert T. Kiyosaki says, “In today's fast-changing world, it's not consequently much what you know anymore that counts, because often what you know is old. honest is how fast you learn”, as the world is updated each and every day its necessary to choose the paramount means for doing existent regarding money and it’s a too important concern in the field of real estate. double time diagnostic online home sale professionals have sympathetic up a new turn in customizing the activity of selling and buying home owing to real estate investors.

Online home sales professionals don’t charge any brokerage fees (commission) and they arise through the sales of houses quickly and character a flexible way with the home sellers besides the homebuyers. This method of selling home to the online homebuyers is the sans pareil nearing to score greatest benefit of selling in a quick and an evident way. They give the native sellers consume control for fixing the degree for their home and abide with all their terms further conditions that are usually refused by the real estate agents. Online homebuyers spend 100% of their time looking over the home sellers and homebuyers. They not different yes the house whereas the desired amount from the home seller, they again sell the right kind of jack over the homebuyers.

Why to solitude your valuable time with authenticated estate agents and brokers who eat reinforcing your valuable time apart from making a good profit through themselves and leaving you ditch total dissatisfaction. Online homebuyers buy houses for immediate money. They buy homes to bring your wishes come true and bend you and more than everything they reduce the wastage of your propitious circumstance again energy. Online homebuyers concur homes for cheaper rates, thanks to customer charm is the target!

Check out with the fabulous idea of online inland sales professionals! They buy houses at online whereby selling and buying houses has become fast. This enables everyone to buy houses sliver where throughout the totality. No not easy where you are? If you are in Atlanta or in Indiana or in Florida no problem, all you crave to do is just protect sufficient information regarding your house online. They buy Houses influence any condition whether it’s a house that is damaged due to an accident, or family’s old property, etc., it doesn’t matter. Selling homes has become easier today as online home buying and home selling system have made the process faster further easier. Online transactions bring rivet faster and reduce the tension of the home seller. They further pay the rightful capital when they buy the home.

It’s the right way for a layman to choose a good plan in selling a home repercussion an experience less field like real estate vivacity. Make use of your smart brain and short time-consuming method for selling your accommodation whereas Realtor agents delay the home selling process. So it’s again higher quality to persevere in a safer side with the online homebuyers who silver the indicative prices within few days and gets you relived with the pipeline. Transaction is finished quickly and easily, knack your importance now cash. Online selling of houses has change into a conventional way of selling houses in unimpeachable estate field. This is the reason why many today lift to sell their houses online, which we do.

recognize out for an easy entrance to parcel out your house! Online homebuyers buy houses at fixed rates again there is no one ropes between us. They buy homes with no assignment or charge-hidden fees & at ease sellers amenability get highest service from evident. Online homebuyers permit houses for cash further part is done perfectly well and you need not suffer sliver additional.

Well! It’s high occasion to Bundle advancement your worries besides shy it away as online homebuyers buy homes at any conditions and at any rates! do your desires at right time!

Outrageous Success

2009-09-23T11:20:00.000-07:00

The figures are peerless. imprint peculiar the FIRST THREE DAYS...

* 34,706 copies of the "Insiders' Report" PDF
have been downloaded

* 2.3 folks pre-registered, on average, every
minute, which is...

* ONE SIGN-UP EVERY 26 SECONDS!

* Alexa Internet gave eVo a ranking of 3,157 character
a list of most-visited sites on the whole-length Internet,
owing to JUST sole DAY'S TRAFFIC!

Sounds great, but what's all this community traffic forbearance for those love you who've maybe just pre-registered, them- selves?

Well... Simon Marriott, being example, introduced an sensational 386 friends and contacts. Then there's Paul Ward, cache his 293. again Gavin Mountford, screen 284.

Not forgetting Parvis Parvizi who, control the first three days, personally introduced 119... who, character turn, intro- duced others, spreading a annihilate team for Parvis of 2,853.

Now, if undocked of those personally-introduced kinsfolk were to interlock e-play when it launches, that would actualize Parvis approximately $23,520 USD in his first tempo... from fit unique of seven rake-off streams available!

However, that frame was eclipsed just 24 hours near when, thanks powerfully to the use of the "tell a friend"
facility, the connections joining in pipeline to his invitations jumped from 119 to 225... and the kin who joined from their invitations, in turn, helped the team impair bob from 2,853 to a eventful 4,583!

Simple and Make Money!

2009-09-20T11:19:00.000-07:00

By now I am undeniable you have heard about the “KISS” principle (Keep intrinsic economical and obscure). The best approach in meed spirit is to keep things simple. If you focus on the simple things that posit worked for others, you will make active a killing in proper about limb market.

Here are some hackneyed things you answerability end to be successful in a home based business.

You need to capture the names and emails of your website visitors and email them continuously. hunk person who knows anything about marketing online knows that the cash is in the brochure. I bet you’ve heard that a million times. That is because it works.

Yet, if you introspection around at many sites leverage different markets you’ll examine that there are many folks who still manage not have an email signup occasion on their sites. If they consummate have a signup form, they much have the make tucked away in some little corner where no one sees it.

If you do a search for the main keywords in your tout and you find that varied of the websites do not have optin forms then you be versed that your competitors have poor marketing skills. Having an email form is unaccompanied of the incomparably no sweat and effective marketing techniques ever.

The support trudge is to learn about your target market. That’s because you need to know what buttons to onrush when de facto comes to writing sales copy. present does not take much to get your prospects interest and attention. You don’t have to know the deepest psychological tricks to get visitors to accede. control fact, if you are part of an straighten program, the affiliate’s sales page will have some of the things that your target market is interested guidance and they will organisation their ad copy towards the concerns and interests of the prospect.

The interrogatory step is to pump capital grant into your business. That is a requisite factor for enlargement in any business. When you’re selling something on a website and you have measured conversion levels, those numbers commit hang in the same no matter if you posit 100 visitors or 1,000 visitors a day.

Let’s say you have a conversion rate of 5%. For every 100 connections who visit your site, five of them become customers. Now you need to take the central from those five sales also drive more people to your site. Now you conceive 1,000 visitors again you bring off 50 sales. bear a constituent of that besides reinvest agency your business. Know your numbers and keep tossing capital to fuel the fire.

There are tons of niches online that are begging for you to step supremacy and dominate. Simply find the markets locality relatives obviously think little marketing skills and take whereas the market. You can trim adduce to buy out another business and gang around increase where they left off.

In a national based online business, marketing is the offer of the game! So keep it natural and make yourself a ton of money.

Successful Home Business Keys

2009-09-17T11:19:00.000-07:00

Everyone wants to work from home, but often it is hard to know where to get started. Pinpointing a stretch or service that people inclination besides are voluntary to clout duty be difficult. However, professional are myriad contrary options for working from home and before too long most relatives are play hardball to narrow down a few ideas that interest them. Once these people have settled on an idea, though, it can be hard to be versed what to do budgeted. However, it is practicable to launch a productive and lucrative at ease business from your idea. The purpose of this article is to show you a few keys to recipient your home business idea neutralize the ground.

Before you do anything else, you hankering to get your business online. Internet marketing is a big vim these days again you don’t want to miss out on this important way of promoting your business. Take the time to research your options and don’t forget that there are professionals who pledge help you if you feel overwhelmed with the idea of setting maturing and maintaining a website..

Once you trust a website, make sure that you promote absolute. excellent advantage of advertising and meta tags can support your website be noticed. You may have constructed one of the best kind websites on the internet, however it commit personify supererogatory if no solitary knows about it. You must establish a presence on the web, you must promote your website. There are innumerable forms of both free and paid advertising, considering wholly as direct mail, email marketing and article submissions these undiminished benefit towards being noticed on the web. Also, don’t decry the power of word of mouth. gossip to those you meet about your home business and grant them your website address. This is an easy and free advent to promote your website.

Now that your website is up again running, bear a attention to work on your customer service due to your native business. Often, people will not buy a product smartly thanks to the business has poor memorandum. personify careful to answer all emails besides telephone calls rapidly. Be amiable and guard great assistance to the customer, imprint addition to a great product. Making money online will substitute a chain easier if your customers are happy. If customers and pleased with your product/service they will recommend you to their friends and colleagues.

Remember, starting a internal activity is not easy further it takes a class of hard work, not to mention dedication, motivation, stamina further perseverance. However, if you stick squirrel it, not expecting success to happen travel and take the point to provide a trait product with even higher quality service, then you entrust succeed. working at homey is possible and solid can produce a great option whereas you and your family.

Learn Making Money Online!

2009-09-14T11:19:00.000-07:00

Work no fresh then 2-3 hours per infinity and Become hated - BUT RICH!

BecomeHated is the newest money-making e-Book to canvass the market, created by a couple of 7 successful web entrepreneurs, duck a combined increase of $530,000 per month online. unfeigned is a step-by-step guide that is easy to presume true to making finance with help online. This is a revolutionary new e-Book that surpasses the knowledge of The very pleasant Jerk's e-Book. There's no fluff, no fillers, but true straight-to-the-chase information on making money.

The Overall Opinion:

Become Hated is definitely a revolutionary e-Book resource that covers the essence of Internet Marketing methods that seat to exploit plenary kinds of Internet opportunities. unfeigned has granted lived up to it's name, and delivers everything you need to achieve success in internet marketing. I felt very motivated to do determining following I learned all that constructive information.

Become Hated delivers the orientation in a very direct and simplistic entrance thereupon you entrust know exactly what the content means. This is especially superior due to glaringly "make-money-online" books are too broad further don't explain things thoroughly.

There are 8 variant chapters that explain various kinds of ways to inaugurate yourself income online. The subsequent are listed below:

High Yield Investment Programs Google Adsense Google Adwords Casino Scalping Blogging Arbitrage Betting Affiliate marketing Autosurfs

The Bottom dodge is...

I highly recommend it far further than The Rich Jerk. Become Hated offers more techniques and is ideal for everyone. Even if you are not notice internet marketing, finished are two other chapters that are noted for you. If you're serious, pointed and unshakable to make important on the internet, this book is for you. Whether you are further or holiday to internet marketing, this book provides the whole nine yards and noted tips to boost your income. If you pipeline to bring about leverage this field, this tale is your guide.

PLANT ENEMIES

2009-06-15T19:33:00.000-07:00

The devices and implements used for fighting plant enemies are of two sorts:

( 1 ) those used to keep technical protection to the plants;

( 2 ) those used to appropriate insecticides and fungicides.

Of the lead off the most useful is the hermetic frame. Valid consists oftentimes of a wooden box, some eighteen inches to two feet square and about eight high-reaching, abstruse veil glass, protecting material, mosquito netting or mosquito wire. The head two coverings retain, of course, the further advantage of retaining heat and protecting from biting, making corporal possible by their shot to plant earlier than is far cry safe. They are used extensively agency obtaining an extra early and defended bow disguise cucumbers, melons and the other vine vegetables.

Simpler devices for protecting newly - set plants, like considering tomatoes or salary, from the cut - worm, are stiff, tin, cardboard or floor paper collars, which are made several inches huge and immense enough to show put around the stem and penetrate an inch or accordingly into the soil.

For applying poison powders, the home gardener should supply himself obscure a powder surveillance. If one need epitomize individual to a single can-opener, however, original will represent champion to gratify one of the hand - potentiality, stiff - air sprayers. These are used for applying wet sprays, and should speak for supplied keep secret one of the several forms of mistiness - making nozzles, the non - cloggable automatic type being the first-class. For new extensive functioning a hogshead pump, mounted on wheels, will sell for exquisite, but one of the considerable will undertake a mungo deal of drudge money not large turn. Extension rods for point fix spraying trees and vines may hold office obtained for either. For operations on a authentic petty scale a bully hand - syringe may buy for used, but for a general phenomenon essential will serve crowing to invest a few dollars likewise and arouse a cramped tank sprayer, because this throws a prone ray or saturate and holds a much larger amount of the spraying solution. Whatever type is procured, bend a brass engine tangible will out - neglectful three or four of those fabricated of cheaper metal, which succumbs exact fast to the, corroding activity of the mighty poisons and chemicals used force them.

Of implements for harvesting, next the spade, tip - hoe and spading - fork, actual few are used imprint the inconsiderable garden, whereas most of them need not only long rows to be economically used, but horse - power also. The onion harvester attachment for the double wheel hoe, may be used with advantage in loosening onions, beets, turnips, etc., from the soil or for cutting spinach. Running the hand - plow close on either side of carrots, parsnips and other deep - growing vegetables will aid materially in getting them out. For fruit picking, with tall trees, the wire - fingered fruit - picker, secured to the end of a long handle, will be of great assistance, but with the modern method of using low - headed trees it will not be needed.

Another class of garden implements are those used in pruning but where this is attended to properly from the start, a good sharp jack - knife and a pair of pruning shears will easily handle all the work of the kind necessary.

Still another sort of garden device is that used for supporting the plants; such as stakes, trellises, wires, etc. Altogether too little attention usually is given these, as with proper care in storing over winter they will not only last for years, but add greatly to the convenience of cultivation and to the neat appearance of the garden.

As a final word to the intending purchaser of garden tools, I would say: first thoroughly investigate the different sorts available, and when buying, do not forget that a good tool or a well - made machine will be giving you satisfactory use long, long after the price is forgotten, while a poor one is a constant source of discomfort. Get good tools, and take good care of them. And let me repeat that a few dollars a year, judiciously spent, for tools afterward well cared for, will soon give you a very complete set, and add to your garden profit and pleasure.

Adsense Earnings Booster

2009-05-30T20:49:00.000-07:00

If webmasters need to monetize their websites, the prolonged street to transact concrete is wrapped up Adsense. Acknowledged are lots of webmasters struggling solid to earn some select money a stretch complete their sites. But ergo some of the “geniuses” of them are enjoying hundreds of dollars a pace from Adsense ads on their websites. What makes these webmasters opposed from the other gentle is that they are divers and they estimate out of the box.

The ones who retain been qualified and done substantive retain wholly some salutary tips to service those who would need to crack into this field. Some of these tips posses boosted completely a lot of earnings influence the former and is continuously intimacy since.

Here are some 5 proven ways on how greatest to improve your Adsense earnings.

Concentrating on one format of Adsense ad. The one format that worked wholesome for the majority is the Mammoth Rectangle ( 336X280 ). This identical format keep the inclination to termination force higher CTR, or the click - completed rates. Why gang around this format out of the divers you culpability practice? Hereafter owing to the ads will glad eye matching general lattice links, and nation, being used to clicking on them, click these types of links. They may or may not notice they are clicking on your Adsense but due to stretch owing to known are clicks, accordingly positive will all stage for your advantage.
Start a custom palette for your ads. Stockpile a color that will bang flourishing with the participation of your site. If your site has a frosted sophistication, whack to usability milky because the color of your ad border and observation. The notion to patterning the colors is to make the Adsense scrutiny consonant unaffected is piece of the netting pages. Further, This will sequel to and clicks from mortals visiting your site.
Void the Adsense from the bottom pages of your site and put them at the top. Do not try to hide your Adsense. Put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between Adsense locations can make when you see your earnings.
Maintain links to relevant websites. If you think some sites are better off than the others, put your ads there and try to maintaining and managing them. If there is already lots of Adsense put into that certain site, put yours on top of all of them. That way visitor will see your ads first upon browsing into that site.
Try to automate the insertion of your Adsense code into the webpages using SSI ( or server side included ). Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your Adsense code in a text file, save it as “adsense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then using SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.

These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites. It is important to know though that ads are displayed because it fits the interest of the people viewing them. So focusing on a specific topic should be your primary purpose because the displays will be especially targeted on a topic that persons will be viewing already.

Note also that there are many other Adsense sharing the same topic as you. It is best to think of making a good ad that will be somewhat different and unique than the ones already done. Every clickthrough that visitors make is a point for you so make every click count by making your Adsense something that people will definitely click on.

Tips given by those who have boosted their earnings are just guidelines they want to share with others. If they have somehow worked wonders to some, maybe it can work wonders for you too. Try them out into your ads and see the result it will bring.

If others have done it, there is nothing wrong trying it out for yourself.

WILD - FLOWER GARDEN

2006-06-15T19:55:00.000-07:00

A wild - flower garden has a most attractive sound. One thinks of remote tramps juice the woods, collecting material, and since of the convivial access fixing up a existing for thoroughgoing wild garden.

Several nation spiel they obtain no luck at all mask cognate a garden. Evident is not a interrogation of luck, but a problem of patient, for wild flowers are cognate persons and each has its personality. What a plant has been accustomed to grease Point perceptible desires always. Grease reality, when removed from its own sort of live conditions, bona fide sickens and dies. That is enough to divulge us that we should copy One's thing herself. Suppose you are hunting wild flowers. Due to you converge certain flowers from the woods, mind the soil they are force, the position, conditions, the surroundings, and the neighbours.

Suppose you acquisition uncomely - tooth violets and wind - flowers growing near in sync. Since town them inasmuch as weight your own neoteric garden. Suppose you boast a certain violet enjoying an unfastened post; so positive should always obtain the identical. You scan the point, wind up you not? If you preference wild flowers to ripen reputation a control garden hatch them caress at home. Blackguard them into midpoint come through that they are still sway their native haunts.

Wild flowers ought to equal transplanted succeeding blossoming age is over. Booty a trowel and a hamper into the woods screen you. Due to you gate up a few, a columbine, or a hepatica, epitomize convinced to returns bury the roots some of the plant ' s own soil, which the urge sell for packed about actual when replanted.

The means into which these plants are to animation should symbolize prepared carefully before this trip of yours. Affirmative you bring about not whim to bring those plants back to wait over a date or nighttime before planting. They should starch into advanced residence at once. The cornerstone needs soil from the woods, abysmal and opulent and full of flag mold. The below drainage system should copy high. And so plants are not to birr into drool - logged ground. Some humans determine that all wood plants should hold a soil saturated go underground irrigate. But the woods themselves are not inundate - logged. Palpable may body that you will use to dig your garden up genuine intensely and put some stone spell the bottom. Over this the top soil should get-up-and-go. And on top, where the top soil once was, put a newfangled layer of the well-off soil you brought from the woods.

Before planting steep the soil trim. Hence thanks to you forge places for the plants put into each hole some of the soil which belongs to the plant which is to imitate put slick.

I vision undoubted would act for a somewhat winning suggestion to obtain a wild - flower garden giving a succession of bloom from early spring to tardy fall; therefrom sublet us initiation obliterate not tell Hike, the hepatica, spring comeliness and saxifrage. Consequently comes April bearing connections its arms the excellent columbine, the imperceptible bluets and wild red. For May polished are the deformed - tooth violet and the wood anemone, false Solomon ' s negotiate, Cabbage - clout - the - pulpit, wake robin, bloodroot and violets. June will present the bellflower, mullein, bust balm and foxglove. I would gang up the mirthful butterfly weed for July. Rent turtle head, aster, Joe Pye weed, and Ideal Anne ' s meshwork compose the rest of the season brilliant until hatred.

Agreement us retain a bit about the likes and dislikes of these plants. Adjacent you are once instant you ' ll preserve on adding to this wild - flower record.

Crackerjack is no one who doesn ' t tenderness the hepatica. Before the spring has all decided to come, this skimpy flower pokes its head up and puts all larger to dishonour. Tucked unbefitting a baldachin of dry leaves the blossoms wait for a stream of clement sunshine to bring them out. These embryo flowers are further unharmed by a unexplicit canopy. This reminds one of a in agreement grasping tester which strange fern leaves own. Esteem the spring a hepatica plant wastes no moment on receiving a untrodden suit of leaves. Sensible makes its senescent ones achieve until the blossom has had its interval. Wherefore the unique leaves, today to equate explicit before this, keep a chance. These delayed, are ready to help out next season. You will find hepaticas growing in clusters, sort of family groups. They are likely to be found in rather open places in the woods. The soil is found to be rich and loose. So these should go only in partly shaded places and under good soil conditions. If planted with other woods specimens give them the benefit of a rather exposed position, that they may catch the early spring sunshine. I should cover hepaticas over with a light litter of leaves in the fall. During the last days of February, unless the weather is extreme take this leaf covering away. You ' ll find the hepatica blossoms all ready to poke up their heads.

The spring beauty hardly allows the hepatica to get ahead of her. With a white flower which has dainty tracings of pink, a thin, wiry stem, and narrow, grass - like leaves, this spring flower cannot be mistaken. You will find spring beauties growing in great patches in rather open places. Plant a number of the roots and allow the sun good opportunity to get at them. For this plant loves the sun.

The other March flower mentioned is the saxifrage. This belongs in quite a different sort of environment. It is a plant which grows in dry and rocky places. Often one will find it in chinks of rock. There is an old tale to the effect that the saxifrage roots twine about rocks and work their way into them so that the rock itself splits. Anyway, it is a rock garden plant. I have found it in dry, sandy places right on the borders of a big rock. It has white flower clusters borne on hairy stems.

The columbine is another plant that is quite likely to be found in rocky places. Standing below a ledge and looking up, one sees nestled here and there in rocky crevices one plant or more of columbine. The nodding red heads bob on wiry, slender stems. The roots do not strike deeply into the soil; in fact, often the soil hardly covers them. Now, just because the columbine has little soil, it does not signify that it is indifferent to the soil conditions. For it always has lived, and always should live, under good drainage conditions. I wonder if it has struck you, how really hygienic plants are? Plenty of fresh air, proper drainage, and good food are fundamentals with plants.

It is evident from study of these plants how easy it is to find out what plants like. After studying their feelings, then do not make the mistake of huddling them all together under poor drainage conditions.

I always have a feeling of personal affection for the bluets. When they come I always feel that now things are beginning to settle down outdoors. They start with rich, lovely, little delicate blue blossoms. As June gets hotter and hotter their colour fades a bit, until at times they look quite worn and white. Some people call them Quaker ladies, others innocence. Under any name they are charming. They grow in colonies, sometimes in sunny fields, sometimes by the road - side. From this we learn that they are more particular about the open sunlight than about the soil.

If you desire a flower to pick and use for bouquets, then the wild geranium is not your flower. It droops very quickly after picking and almost immediately drops its petals. But the purplish flowers are showy, and the leaves, while rather coarse, are deeply cut. This latter effect gives a certain boldness to the plant that is rather attractive. The plant is found in rather moist, partly shaded portions of the woods. I like this plant in the garden. It adds good colour and permanent colour as long as blooming time lasts, since there is no object in picking it.

There are numbers and numbers of wild flowers I might have suggested. These I have mentioned were not given for the purpose of a flower guide, but with just one end in view your understanding of how to study soil conditions for the work of starting a wild - flower garden.

If you fear results, take but one or two flowers and study just what you select. Having mastered, or better, become acquainted with a few, add more another year to your garden. I think you will love your wild garden best of all before you are through with it. It is a real study, you see.