Archive for the 'Global Strategy' Category

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Intel Capital invests $24 million in seven new companies

Published on September 8, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Intel Capital announced today it has invested $24 million in seven new startups. And so far this year, Intel said that it has seen two initial public offerings and 10 acquisitions from its portfolio of investments in startups.

The new investments include five new software start-ups and two follow-on investments. Since the company is a strategic corporate investor, it shoots for both a financial return and investments that help Intel’s strategic interests. The deals show Intel isn’t slowing down its investments despite a slow world economy [Read more].

Is journalism as we know it becoming obsolete?

Published on September 4, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: .

There have been plenty of obituaries written for the newspaper business, most of which have a kernel of truth to them — but is journalism as we know it at risk as well? Dave Winer, a programming guru and visiting scholar at the New York University school of journalism, says it is.

In a blog post on Friday, Winer argued that “journalism itself is becoming obsolete” because now anyone can do it. Is he right? In some ways, yes. One thing is for sure: Journalism is being transformed by the web and by real-time publishing networks and what Om calls the “democracy of distribution.” Whether that’s good or bad depends on your point of view [Read more].

It cost a lot of money to push bits around the net before there was a net. They had to have huge capital-intensive printing plants, fleets of trucks and delivery boys with paper routes. Now we can hear directly from the sources and build our own news networks. It’s still early days for this… but in a generation or two we won’t be employing people to gather news for us. It’ll work differently [Source].

Sony, Hitachi and Toshiba to Merge LCD Units

Published on August 31, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Sony, Toshiba and Hitachi announced on Wednesday that they would work with a government-backed fund to spin off and merge their liquid crystal display businesses, joining forces in the face of rising global competition.

The deal could create the world’s biggest maker of LCDs for mobile phones and cameras, with 22 percent of the market for small and
midsize screens, according to DisplaySearch.

The fund, the Innovation Network Corporation, will invest 200 billion yen ($2.6 billion) in the new company for a 70 percent stake, while the three manufacturers will equally split the other 30 percent, they said in a statement.

The Japanese government has long encouraged the nation’s manufacturers to consolidate as a way to increase their presence in global markets and better fight mounting competition from rivals like Samsung Electronics of South Korea, which is now far bigger and profitable than any single Japanese electronics maker [Source].

Google’s Strategic Mistakes Drove Motorola Buy

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

Google’s USD$12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility has set the technology and investing worlds aflutter, with much of the commentary positioning it as a play by Google for Motorola’s strong IP portfolio. But a single point of focus is incorrect and misses a bigger point: The MMI purchase is the result of Google’s miscalculations about the way value is captured in mobile computing. These strategic missteps placed Google in a position of weakness and forced it into a costly and desperate move.

When it took its approach to mobile software, Google made a big bet that smartphones and tablets were sufficiently mature and thus could be built in a way that didn’t require Google owning all points of the value chain. For the last year it seemed that Google bet right. Android was very quickly adopted by licensees to the point that it achieved nearly 50% share in smartphone shipments last quarter.

However, lately, cracks began to appear in the strategy. Issues with intellectual property in Android caused some licensees to have to pay royalties to patent holders, increasing the cost. Fragmentation took hold where some versions of the software were used by some licensees on some products without the option or incentive to upgrade. Finally, some vendors modified the software resulting in missing features or inconsistent user experiences — even to the extent that Google’s own services were omitted [Source].

Manchester United Picks Singapore IPO Over Hong Kong

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

Manchester United, is preparing to sell shares in an initial public offering on the Singapore exchange later this year, a person with direct knowledge of the plan said. Manchester United picked the Asian market for the share sale because many of its fans are now based in the region [Source].

The club, which is controlled by the Glazer family, owners of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the National Football League, might raise about $1 billion in the share sale, said the person, who declined to be identified before the details of the sale were made public.

Singapore beat Hong Kong to lure the initial stock sale of record 19-time English soccer champion Manchester United Ltd. in part by assuring a speedier approval process, bankers with knowledge of the matter said.

Singapore Exchanges Chief Executive Officer Magnus Bocker’s push to lure United is a sign of increased competition between the city-state and Hong Kong for IPOs by global brands. Hong Kong, whose market capitalization is more than four times that of Singapore, this year hosted offerings by Prada SpA, Glencore International Plc and Samsonite International SA, extending its lead as Asia’s premier venue for IPOs [Source].

Why Coca Cola Should Raise Prices

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

Despite its flat pricing in the U.S., Coke has kept profits growing by steadily increasing sales volume. Coke’s recent Q2 financial results reveal 7.5% volume growth in Continental Europe, and sales of my personal favorite—Coke Zero—rocketed by 15%. Coca Cola is the number one U.S. soft drink, with a 17% share.

Last year Beverage Digest reported that Diet Coke (9.9% share) surpassed Pepsi (9.5% share) to become the industry’s number two brand. Remember those famous “Pepsi Challenge” commercials where Pepsi confidently encouraged consumers to make their buying decisions after sampling both Pepsi and Coke? Well, the people have spoken: Coke is the clear winner [Read more].

Emergence Capital Partners raising $200M fund

Published on July 26, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Venture capital firm Emergence Capital Partners is in the process of raising its third fund, a $200 million fund labeled “Emergence Capital Partners III,” according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Emergence Capital Partners is known for investing in enterprise companies like cloud storage provider Box.net and online enterprise social network Yammer. It also invested in file transfer service YouSendIt [Source].

Google takes on Asia: New strategies in Asia’s diverse market

Published on June 14, 2011 in Emerging Markets, Global Strategy and International Business. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Daniel Alegre, Google’s President for Japan and Asia-Pacific, insists that his company is “locally relevant”, as it tries to appeal to the different tastes and internet capabilities of the hugely diverse Asian region.

It signals a shift in the centre of gravity of cyberspace, as Asia becomes the biggest and fastest growing region for the internet.

“Here in Asia… we have very strong competitors. And we thrive on that competition, because it forces us to be better and it forces them to be better and in the end, the internet benefits,” Daniel Alegre says.

The confidence is understandable. Given its global dominance and the new users that the Android operating system is drawing in, Google is still well positioned to challenge the Asian incumbents [Source].

Visa Is Making The E-Wallet Real

Published on May 12, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

We’ve heard a lot about the notion of a digital wallet, but the tech itself seems slow to arrive apart from one or two regional experiments, and the promise of more exciting tech in the future. Now Visa’s changing all that with a new plan to make the e-wallet, including wireless payments, a reality–and soon, too.

Visa, which calls itself a “global leader in electronic payments” has just announced what it’s calling the “next generation of payments solutions.” It means, quite specifically, the technology and financial data infrastructure that’ll supplant the little card payment machines we’re all used to swiping our card through to pay at a checkout or restaurant–a tech that’s being swiftly overtaken by digital commerce, mobile commerce, and “burgeoning social networking commerce environments.” Basically Visa’s seen the writing on the wall for the way its credit card systems currently work, and is planning to reinvent everything into a “secure cross-channel digital wallet” and a “range of customized mobile payments services” tailored to local markets around the world. This is a good thing for us consumers, and probably a shrewd business move by Visa itself.

The new digital wallet will arrive in the U.S. and Canada in the fall of 2011, and it’ll work by storing Visa and non-Visa payments data. It will support NFC payments through Visa’s payWave system and it’ll cover all sorts of payment situations, including e-commerce, mobile commerce, micropayments, social networks, and person-to-person payments. A long list of financial institutions are already on board, including U.S. Bank and the Royal Bank of Canada–indicating this really is a thing that’s happening, rather than a far-fetched patent [Source].

Wanted: Data Scientists to Turn Information Into Gold

Published on February 28, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Data scientists will increasingly become vital employees as companies create and use more and more data and try to tap the river of data they’re generating to improve their products or build new business opportunities [Source].

But what is a data scientist? Hilary Mason, a data scientist at Bit.ly, has a good definition. It’s someone who can obtain, scrub, explore, model and interpret data, blending hacking, statistics and machine learning. It’s a set of skills that go beyond many existing job titles and it’s increasingly in demand [Data Scientist].

The ability to take data – to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it [Source].