Monthly Archive for October, 2011

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Seven billion and counting

Published on October 25, 2011 in International Business. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

On October 31, earth will gain its seven billionth inhabitant, according to official UN population projections.Of course, the data are not really accurate enough to predict the arrival of human number 7bn to the nearest day, or even year, but the symbolic moment has aroused an upsurge in the debate around “overpopulation” that has ebbed and flowed since Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 [Read more].

Economic and political changes, environmental and migratory pressures, debates about social redistribution and urban planning: many current balances will shift and pose important new challenges to policymakers, politicians and neighbour states. But these trends will vary greatly between different countries, ages, genders and social groups.

Looking at the fast-rising graph of the world’s inhabitants, it seems hard to believe the trend will even slow. Yet only two centuries ago – at about the time Thomas Malthus, the English scholar, was warning of pending famine, disease and war triggered by overpopulation – the earth’s inhabitants numbered fewer than 1bn people. Since then, the numbers have risen ever faster: doubling to the current 7bn in less than 50 years.

The onus is on the wealthier countries to take the lead in modifying lifestyles and developing new technologies to tackle global warming and the depletion of natural resources. The consequences of inaction will fall significantly on the poor, who may ultimately be forced to develop their own innovative solutions to problems for which industrialised countries still have no ready answers [Read more].

Beyond BRICS – FT’s emerging markets hub

Published on October 25, 2011 in Emerging Markets. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Should the Brics bail out the eurozone? Has Chinese growth stalled? Does it pay to play golf in Vietnam?

The FT beyondbrics hub is the place to find out. A news / blog hybrid, it brings together news and views from over 40 correspondents across the emerging markets world [Read more].

Meet the young innovators who are changing the world

Published on October 25, 2011 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Each year Technology Review honors 35 innovators under 35 who are tackling important problems in transformative ways. Candidates come from around the globe, some from regional TR35 competitions run by TR’s international editions. Find the ranking here.

Selecting Technology Review’s yearly list of 35 innovators under the age of 35 is a difficult but rewarding process. We search for candidates around the world who are opening up new possibilities in technology, and then we seek the advice of a panel of expert judges before finally selecting the winners. We look for people who are tackling important problems in transformative ways [Read more].

Sometimes that transformation comes from developing an entirely new technology, such as graphene transistors that could one day replace silicon devices in microprocessors. Sometimes it means using existing technologies in novel ways, such as creating an effective way for local businesses to advertise electronically or organizing social networks to build up a community of patients suffering from a disease.

The hottest new internet companies are growing up outside the USA

Published on October 25, 2011 in High Tech & Media and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: .

High-value financings for venture-backed private internet and digital media companies seem to be happening at a rapid pace. Dropbox, Tumblr, AirBnB, Foursquare, and Spotify have all raked in big fundings and attained record valuations in recent months. Meanwhile, public investors are decidedly less sanguine. The Nasdaq Composite index is flat for the year – and the average internet and digital media company is down 50% from 52-week highs.

As you can see from the chart, only six of the 116 publicly-traded internet companies are projected by analysts to achieve over 30% top-line growth in 2011 and 2012 and to achieve 2012 EBITDA margins of at least 30%. That means only 5% of the current crop of public internet companies are in the top echelon in terms of profitability and growth.

Let’s take a further look at these six companies: Baidu, Tencent, Yandex, Mail.ru, Qihoo 360 Technology, and MercadoLibre. What do these companies all have in common? Most obviously, they all operate outside the U.S. Second, they are being richly rewarded by public investors – all six are presently valued at at least 10x revenue – a very meaningful premium over the group of internet and digital media companies as a whole, where median revenue multiples fall in the 1-3x range, depending on subset [Read more].

Amazon, the Company That Ate the World

Published on October 25, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Jeff Bezos’ new tablet, the Kindle Fire, is cheap, pretty, and puts Amazon in perfect position to take a bite out of Apple—and every online transaction you make.

Jeff Bezos is channeling Apple. It’s mid-September and the wiry billionaire founder of Amazon.com (AMZN) is at his brand-new corporate headquarters in Seattle, in a building named Day One South after his conviction that 17-year-old Amazon is still in its infancy. Almost giddy with excitement, Bezos retrieves one by one the new crop of dirt-cheap Kindle e-readers—they start at $79—from a hidden perch on a chair tucked into a conference room table. When he’s done showing them off, he stands up, and, for an audience of a single journalist, announces, “Now, I’ve got one more thing to show you.” He waits a half-beat to make sure the reference to Jobs’s famous line from Apple (AAPL) presentations hasn’t been missed, then gives his notorious barking laugh. With that, Bezos pulls out the Kindle Fire, Amazon’s long-anticipated tablet computer—and the first credible response to the Apple iPad [Read more].

Building a Company Without Borders

Published on October 21, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: .

They say you can’t go home again. If you work for Reckitt Benckiser, you can go home—but you may not want to, and you certainly won’t have to.

Most of our top managers haven’t held jobs in their countries of origin for years and view themselves as global citizens rather than as citizens of any given nation. We have operations in more than 60 countries. Our top 400 managers represent 53 different nationalities. We’ve spent the past 10 years building this culture of global mobility because we think it’s one of the best ways to generate new ideas and create global entrepreneurs [Read more].

Reckitt Benckiser resulted from a merger in 1999 of Reckitt & Colman—a British purveyor of household cleaning products with a great stable of brands—and the Dutch-listed Benckiser, a much smaller but better-performing consumer goods company. But we don’t want to be known as an Anglo-Dutch enterprise, or by any other label based on our operations or history. We’re not any country’s company—we’re a truly multicountry company.

Ubiquitous computing: Technology will become even more personal

Published on October 16, 2011 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Researchers such as Ms Bell conclude that ubiquitous computing, or “ubicomp” to its fans, is no longer the realm of science fiction. In a series of articles in the 1990s Mark Weiser, the chief technologist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), laid out a vision of a world in which computers would be everywhere yet all but invisible. Instead of the conventional desktop or laptop, Mr Weiser (who died in 1999) and one of his colleagues, John Seely Brown, predicted that in this new era of “calm technology” gadgets would adapt to people rather than vice versa.

If there is one part of the world where personal technology is on its way towards becoming ubiquitous it is Asia, where several richer countries have created impressive infrastructures on which all sorts of personal technologies can work. South Korea, for instance, plans that every home in the country should have an internet connection with a speed of up to one gigabit per second (fast enough to download a full-length feature film in a matter of seconds). And it also intends greatly to increase the capacity of the country’s wireless-broadband networks [Read more].

The future in 140 characters

Published on October 16, 2011 in Ranting and Raving and Social Media. 0 Comments

The World in 2012: What will next year bring?

This year The World in 2012 has also invited a number of contributors to make their predictions in the space of 140 characters.

If you are not a Twitter user you can still take part by leaving your prediction (in no more than 140 characters) in the comments below. Winners will be announced near the date of publication, in mid-November. Good luck [Read more]!

Paul Allen: The Singularity Isn’t Near

Published on October 14, 2011 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: , .

The Singularity Summit approaches this weekend in New York. But the Microsoft cofounder and a colleague say the singularity itself is a long way off.

Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities. They call this tipping point the singularity, because they believe it is impossible to predict how the human future might unfold after this point [Read more].

Google close to launching music service

Published on October 14, 2011 in Global Strategy and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Google is reportedly preparing to launch its own Mp3 store, according to the New York Times. Citing unnamed “music executives,” the report said Thursday that the company will open the store in the next several weeks [Read more].

Music is becoming a key part of Google’s drive for dominance online. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple are all locked in a race to become the one-stop shop for social, shopping, media and communication. Amazon has a cloud music player that’s hooked into its huge library of tracks. Facebook recently announced integration with Spotify, which will let users listen to music together with their friends [Read more].