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Netherlands has Shortest Working Week

Published
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ron
on April 16, 2008
in International Business
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Work Home LifeAccording to research by OECD South Korean workers toil for over 45 hours every week on average, nearly seven hours longer than workers in any other OECD country.

The Netherlands has the shortest working week out of all OECD countries. However where more people work part-time the average working week is likely to be shorter. The Netherlands, where 45% of workers are part-timers, the highest proportion in any OECD country, has therefore the shortest working week.

Americans put in 15% more hours on average than workers in the western (richer) bit of the European Union. Owing to flexible arrangements for part-time workers, generous welfare systems and a limit on the working week all contribute to Western Europe’s seeming indolence.

Netherlands shortest working week of OECD countries

Source

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Politics 2.0

Published
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ron
on April 16, 2008
in Social Media
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Twitter NetworkWhen I first saw that Barack Obama “followed” more than 23.000 people’s Twitters and Hillary Clinton followed 0, I thought it was simply bad PR on Hillary’s part. Like Obama, she probably should pretend she’s listening to all those people, even though neither has the time for it.

Now I was left wondering if Obama’s thousands followers could be valuable data? Perhaps analytics companies could rake through those tweets and give the candidates charts about shifting attitudes and responses to speeches. Costly? Not much in comparison to TV ads at state television I assume. Is it worth it for candidates to mine Twitter?

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The Mood in The City

Published
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ron
on April 14, 2008
in International Business and International Finance
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The mood in London financial markets is not good. House prices are going down, and with them the British pound. Investment bankers within UBS are looking around for jobs, and the Royal Bank of Scotland is sweeping ABN Amro’s trading floor clean with incredible lack of style:

ABN’s structured credit traders were apparently told on Thursday that they should report to RBS’ London office in preparation for a move there on Monday. Terminals needed to be checked and such like. And when they got there… they were all fired (full story).

Luckily, the British have a great sense of humour, and I couldn’t stop laughing at this economic assessment of London 2010 from the price of everything blog:

London, April 2010 – Wall Street firms have just announced their latest results for FY 2009;

300 million staff have been “written down”, leaving just two (Sid and Doris Bonkers) to manage the investment banks’ remaining worldwide debt, equity, merger and advisory, securitisation, syndication and prime brokerage businesses.

Marti Peeps, sole analyst at the last remaining research house, Teletext, welcomed the results as “a bold step in the face of ongoing bad debt provisioning,” though conceded that the City’s newly “rightsized” payroll might struggle to take on board the burgeoning supply of new issuance, namely the packet of Walkers Crisps rumoured to be hitting the primary market in late summer 2012.Hopes for a recovery in Wall Street earnings have for several quarters hinged on the prospects for the successful completion of a 40p private placement of a bag of Salt and Vinegar flavour crisps on behalf of the Walkers Crisps Company. Lead underwriters JPCitigroupMerrill, a subsidiary of the US government, and Northern Rock SocGen KFW Nomura, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tesco plc (Neasden branch), are rumoured to have “solid” interest for the underwriting, most notably from Asia, itself a subsidiary of Texas Pacific Group, but declined to go into further detail. (click here for pdf version. Enjoy!)

Update @ April 15th: London’s financial services sector faces a loss of 20,000 jobs over the next two years. Cuts by Citigroup and RBS are the tip of the iceberg (BusinessWeek).

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Diversification @ Vodafone

Published
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ron
on April 12, 2008
in Global Strategy
. 0 Comments

Vodafone HQIn an interview with the BBC, the boss of the world’s largest mobile phone company (by revenue) Britain’s Vodafone Group plc was upbeat about his company’s prospects at weathering the credit crunch clouds hovering over businesses in Europe and the US.

Under oversight of Arun Sarin (CEO), Vodafone has successfully repositioned the company to counter global forces for the upcoming years. It can be characterised as a textbook example of a diversification strategy in terms of market segments (offered products and services) and geographical areas (geographic spread).

Yesterday it was a mobile telecom company and tomorrow it wil be a mobile telecom, internet, broadband, and financial service company. Furthermore, Vodafone used be very OECD developed market centric and now they have added an emerging markets portfolio with strong presence in the BRIC countries and further pushing into the Next Eleven (n-11) countries. The entire interview with Arun Sarin can be found here.

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JPMorgan Chase

Published
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ron
on April 11, 2008
in International Finance
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JPMorgan Chase M&A Bear Stearns

Is Google losing momentum?

Published
by
ron
on April 11, 2008
in High Tech & Media and International Business
. 0 Comments

Did Google peak last November 6th, when its share price hit an all-time high of $742? Some people on Wall Street seem to think so. They now value the firm at around 40% less. Part of the blame belongs to the general turmoil in the stockmarket. But the bigger part, investors fear, is that Google, at the ripe old age of nine, might already be over the hill.

First, the company missed Wall Street revenue forecasts in the fourth quarter for the first time. Then a pair of reports from market researcher comScore (SCOR), the latest on Mar. 26, said U.S. growth in the number of clicks on the paid ads appearing next to Google’s search results essentially flatlined for two months running compared with a year ago. Six months ago, paid clicks were growing up to 40% annually.

However over the last couple of months Google is improving their add system in two ways. First, it offers fewer ads on each results page, and often none at all. This reduces visual clutter and pleases both users and any remaining advertisers. Second, Google seems to be trying harder to weed out those advertisers who bid low in the auctions it conducts for advertising slots linked to particular keywords. in short, with less space devoted to ads, and only higher-bidding advertisers getting through, there are fewer ads to click on.

If Google is really over the hill we will find out in the upcoming months. For now stay tuned.

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Van Basten offers Bergkamp trainee post

Published
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ron
on April 10, 2008
in Ranting and Raving
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Dennis Bergkamp and Marco van Basten

Dennis Bergkamp will return to Ajax. The former pro has been asked by Marco van Basten to do a traineeship with the club. “I think that Dennis can make players better”, Van Basten said. Read more.

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Another way with web video

Published
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ron
on April 3, 2008
in Social Media
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Blinkx Broadband TVWeb video. Some believe it’s all about low quality, edgy clips which you can graze on at your laptop - others see the internet as simply a way of delivering quality content in high definition to your plasma screen. Or perhaps you want to be able to click onscreen and get a wealth of information from the web about what you’re watching? That’s what Blinkx, a company launching a new online video service, is betting can make it stand out from an increasingly desperate crowd.

Its BBTV application promises to take a ragbag of content, from news clips to documentaries to independent films, and present it to you online with Blinkx’s added ingredient - clickability. The idea is that you are watching a news item about monks in Tibet, you click and get the entire commentary on screen, use that to navigate to the section which interests you, and then click again to draw down all that rich information that the web can provide.

While watching blinkx BBTV, viewers can access transcripts of a program’s audio track and background information on everything from actors and personalities to reviews and locations shown within the video (MediaPost, 2008)

But isn’t it too late for another video wannabe to enter this market? As far as I can see, the audience has decided that it wants either YouTube or mainstream television - and the likes of Blinkx may fall through the gap in the middle.

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Priciest cities

Published
by
ron
on April 2, 2008
in Ranting and Raving
. 0 Comments

Harbour @ Oslo, NorwayOslo (Norway) is the priciest city in the world to live in according to the Economist Intelligence Unit. In its latest twice-yearly index of over 130 cities, in which 160 items are assessed, Norway’s capital has been the costliest since 2005, when it toppled Tokyo from the top spot.

European cities dominate the list, reflecting the weakness of the dollar. New York is still the most expensive city outside of Europe or Asia, but it has slipped from 28th to 39th in a year. Relocating to Latin America or India would get you a lot more for your Euro.

The highlights of the ranking can be found here. More on the methodological approach of the conducted survey can be found here.

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Social Media Rush….

Published
by
ron
on April 1, 2008
in Social Media
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Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later (Social Media Will Change Your Business, BusinessWeek Online)

“Blogs werethe heart of the story in 2005. But they’re just one of the tools millions can use today to lift their voices in electronic communities and create their own media. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, video sites like YouTube, mini blog engines like Twitter—they’ve all emerged in the last three years, and all are nourished by users. “

A good primer for business executives that are just starting out in social media initiatives. We’re just standing at the beginning of the social media revolution. In the next three to five years the entire media world will be turned upside down and advertising, communications/PR, market research, etc will be performed in ways never seen before.

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