Ten years ago, young people in Indonesia gathered at street-side food stalls called warung to hang out and gossip. But with rapid economic growth has come social change.
The franchise’s strategy has been to blend a small supermarket with inexpensive ready-made food and seating, which attracts customers in a city desperately lacking outdoor recreation space and snarled by traffic jams that often restrict mobility.

Weaving suggests a three-question checklist when considering an emerging market:

1. How much electricity does the local economy have?
2. What is being done to develop what they have?
3. What is the probability of success?

If the answer to question 1 is “not much”, the answer to question 2 is “quite a lot” and the answer to 3 is “quite high”, you may have the beginnings of an investment opportunity. Conversely, if the answer to 1 is “quite a lot”, to 2 is “not much” and to 3 is quite low, it may be wise to pack away the walking shoes and compass for another day.

Although traditional wrestling exists in various forms throughout West Africa, the version in Senegal, known as laamb, has reached unparalleled heights. Laamb ends when one of the wrestlers puts his opponent’s head, back or both hands and knees to the ground. Unlike other forms, laamb allows punches in certain matches. Those matches are the ones upon which wrestlers, spectators, sponsors, promoters, shamans, musicians and journalists descend every weekend.

Story of Francis Tiafoe, America's next big hope of a homegrown tennis star. Father was janitor of rich tennis club, they all lived in his 100 sq ft office. Literally grew up in a tennis club

Amazing story of Dallas Wiens and his face transplant. Also a history on transplants in general.

The new mall culture in Zambia's capital, which I've watched expand almost exponentially in visits over the last three years, is booming all over Africa, in places like Accra and Dakar, Windhoek and Gaborone, Nairobi and Maputo. Driving it are young people like Joshua and his friends, a generation that is growing up like none that preceded it: a bulging new cohort of young people with disposable income, however modest, a keen and up-to-the-minute sense of youth trends and of consumerism around the world, and, most importantly, the expectation that life that will continue to get better and richer and fuller of choices.

To win a following among Chinese buyers, brands have to follow three rules. First and most important, products that are consumed in public, directly or indirectly, command huge price premiums relative to goods used in private. The second rule is that the benefits of a product should be external, not internal. Even for luxury goods, celebrating individualism—with familiar Western notions like "what I want" and "how I feel"—doesn't work in China. The last rule for positioning a brand in China is that products must address the need to navigate the crosscurrents of ambition and regimentation, of standing out while fitting in.

Ray Dalio's views on the market. A lot of deleveraging to go, in year 4 of a 15 year cycle.

I paused for a moment to consider that he (who, according to Forbes magazine, made more than $8 million in 2010) and I (who, according to everyone, made significantly less) shared the same doctor. It occurred to me that in the United States, the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies probably don’t go to the neighbourhood clinic. Yet here I was in Toronto, with the CEO of Rogers, sitting in the same waiting room.

For the next 12 years, Mr. Han spent $1 million a year feeding and looking after a stock that grew to 50,000 sturgeons, all children of the original 200. But he got little in return until 2009, when the fish were old enough to yield caviar — one of the world’s most expensive delicacies, selling for as much as $400 per ounce, or $14 a gram.

Rise and fall of LTCM.

.. there are two kinds of investors: outsmarters and partakers. Although many outsmarters acknowledge the efficiency of the market, they think they can beat it.

Primer on setting up a hedge fund in HK

Q: How realistic are movies that show people breaking into vaults?
A: Not very! In the movies it takes five minutes of razzle-dazzle; in real life it’s usually at least a couple of hours of precision work for an easy, lost combination lockout.

Most vault lockouts are caused by malfunctions. A bank employee over-winds the time lock, a technician makes a mistake servicing the vault, or there was no maintenance because the bank has initiated yet another round of cost cutting.

Another 10-20% of my income comes from law enforcement searches and seizures or estate, aka “dead relative” openings. They hire me and I drill it open, but these are not situations where I like to hang around too long.

TPG’s visit comes as five or six western and Asia-based investment firms draw up plans to launch Myanmar-focused funds. They include Cambodia-based Leopard Capital, which specialises in emerging market funds; Hong Kong-based Bagan Capital, which is targeting a $50m fund; Yangon-based E&O Capital, which aims to raise a $30m fund; and Indochina Opportunities Fund – a joint venture between Asia-based Dragon Capital and Frontier that has allocated a portion of its new $250m fund to Myanmar.

Unilever's AdeS, a combination of soymilk and fruit juice, has become a big success in Latin America. In Brazil it's now so popular that it now has about ten direct competitors, among them a product made by Nestlé. All of which raises a question: Why did it take so long?

AdeS was developed not by Unilever but by an Argentinean lawyer. And while he enlisted Unilever and other multinationals to distribute the product from its beginnings in the 1980s, it took them decades to appreciate its potential.

Instead of horses, of which there are few in Rwanda, players drive and ride motorcycles, of which there are many.

The game has few rules. There are five players a team, opposing goals and 15-minute quarters with a “beer’s worth” break in between. The game is played at a frenzy — drivers goose the bikes to 45 miles per hour — as players jab and motorcycles fall. Spectators crowd as arguments ensue.

First, the scientists noticed that the yogurt-eating mice were incredibly shiny. Using both traditional histology techniques and cosmetic rating scales, the researchers showed that these animals had 10 times the active follicle density of other mice, resulting in luxuriantly silky fur.

On measuring the males, they found that the testicles of the yogurt consumers were about 5 percent heavier than those of mice fed typical diets alone and around 15 percent heavier than those of junk-eating males.

Over the past 20 years, net of fees, Kauffman has been paid out 1.31 times, on average, the amount that it invested in any given fund — well below the standard “venture rate of return” of twice committed capital.

In theory, if you believe the VC industry’s hype, the returns should look a bit like the green line: negative in early years, as you make investments which won’t pay off for a long time, and then positive by year 10.

In reality, reported returns peak very early on, in month 16 — which just happens to coincide with the point at which the GPs tend to start going out on sales calls, trying to raise their next fund. (The blue line shows total fund returns, while the red line shows returns net of fees — the money which actually goes to LPs.) Of course, at month 16, none of the returns are realized: they’re driven instead by increases in portfolio-company valuations, and those valuations are set by the GPs themselves.

McDonald's spends more on marketing than anyone else in the industry. Revamps image using social media, revamping restaurants to be more modern, and reaching out to Mommy blogs to hit new customers

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30 April 2012 Last updated at 23:02 GMT Share this pageEmail Print Share this page

1.8KShareFacebookTwitterAngola's businesses beat most of Europe to 4G mobile servicesBy Egon Cossou

Editor, Africa Business Report, BBC World News
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Growth spurt: Luanda has changed

It is 10 years since the end of Angola's civil war.

Continue reading the main story

Special Report: The Technology of Business
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21st Century eureka moment
Keep the social media cowboys at bay
The ubiquitous hard drive
The country has made enormous strides in rebuilding its economy, which is expected to grow by around 8% this year.

Much of that is due to the country's enormous oil reserves - it's now the second biggest producer in Africa.

The rapid growth in the economy has led to a boom in infrastructure development.

That's evident in the capital Luanda, where you'll see the skyline being transformed by newly-built towers of glass and steel.

Look out to the coast from downtown and you'll be greeted by the spectacle of a vast sweep of land being reclaimed from the sea, to build a dramatic new peninsula.

Expect a new marina, yet more skyscrapers and fancy restaurants to populate the area, in the years to come.

Going mobile

But infrastructure growth doesn't just mean more office blocks and motorways.

It also means a big upgrade in the mobile phone network available to Angolans. They're in the process of getting high-speed 4G services - ahead of most of Europe and many parts of the US - thanks to a $100m project underway there.

It means customers in Luanda will enjoy faster mobile download speeds than their counterparts in London.

The phone operator is Movicel - the one of Africa's biggest GSM providers.

As the economy expands in Angola, so does the construction industry
Antonio Francisco is chief operations officer and insists that his country must have the best technology available in order to boost economic development.

"The telecoms sector is a strategic sector," he tells me in the company's swish new offices away from the bustle of downtown Luanda.

"We can't think about the growth of the economy unless we have telecoms infrastructure well done. What we're doing is bringing the newest technology that can provide better mobile broadband."

Chinese connection

Movicel has partnered with Chinese phone giant ZTE to bring in 4G.

The firm is providing all the equipment - including handsets. It will also play a crucial role in the $1bn upgrade of Movicel's entire system.

“This is the first indoor vertical food-truck court in the city, and as far as I know, the country,” said David Weber, president of the New York City Food Truck Association, which was asked three months ago by the building’s owner, RXR Realty, to bring in a rotating roster of a dozen food trucks, including Mexicue, Red Hook Lobster Pound Truck and the Gorilla Cheese Truck.

“Iten is a very nice place to train; the altitude is high,” Kipsang said upon arrival home last week at Eldoret airport, 20 miles from Iten. The town sits 8,000 feet above sea level. “There are so many high-class athletes that train there and perform very well.”

Profile on Samuel L Jackson, the consumate professional and highest grossing actor of all time with his movies making $7.4 billion.

Profile of Naomichi Suzuki, a 31 year old government worker from Tokyo who did a stint in the former coal mining town of Yubari, only to be urged by its aging population to be its mayor. Faces a steep uphill climb.

Profile on Narrative Science, a company that began automated story writing in sports. Technology can be modified to set the tone of articles, and has expanded into breaking down large amounts of data summarized into simple paragraphs.

Amazingly detailed answers about the implications of the Bo Xilai scandal, including all the political intricacies involved.

In Myanmar's Mergui Archipelago (Khayin Khwa), the beaches are as pristine as they are empty of tourists. But as the country opens up after decades of military rule and self-imposed isolation that could all change.

“Change is a big problem in Zimbabwe.”

Most countries that use the USD will mint their own coins, but in Zimbabwe no one trusts the government enough to use them.

Mila is the Andean stock exchange tie-up that harmonises electronic trading between the Chilean, Colombian and Peruvian bourses.

The project, which creates Latin America’s second biggest market after Brazil by market capitalisation, has delivered lacklustre volumes after debuting amid global economic gloom and lingering regulatory and tax complications. South_America

Profile on Sierra Leone's stock exchange

Interview with a small time weed dealer. All about economies of scale.

Academic journals are almost extortionist in nature:
The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier's operating profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2bn). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles.

Profile on how Facebook approaches development and updates. Journalist spends a day with the release engineering team.

Tyler Cowen the economist shares advice on picking the right restaurant:
1. In the Fanciest Restaurants, Order What Sounds Least Appetizing
2. Beware the Beautiful, Laughing Women
3. Get Out of the City and Into the Strip Mall
3b. Corollary: The food truck is your friend.
3c. When in Manhattan, choose restaurants on the streets over those on the avenues.
4. Admit what you don't know
5. Exploit Restaurant Workers
6. Prefer Vietnamese to Thai
6b. Exception: Eat at Thai restaurants attached to motels.
6c. Corollary: Prefer Pakistani to Indian.

Under president Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao, there has been almost zero political reform. But there have been a number of very significant steps forward in terms of environmental policy: anti-desertification campaigns; tree planting; environmental transparency law; adoption of carbon targets; eco-services compensation; eco accounting; caps on water; lower economic growth targets; the 12th Five-Year Plan; debate and increased monitoring of PM 2.5 [fine particulate matter]; investments in renewables and clean tech...

Profile on Anders Borg, Sweden's finance minister, a libertarian who sought to use tax cuts rather than debt to push through stimulus, and was successful at it.

About the growing trend of amateur chemists perfecting their own drugs (both recreation and fitness) thanks to the proliferation of information on the internet.

Profile of Estonia, home to Skype and Kazaa. A place where free-wifi is everywhere and all services are online even though 20 years ago no one had a phone. Fears the launch of the EU's ACTA against internet rights.

Notes from a class that Peter Thiel taught. Touches on competition and its paradoxes, and life in general

Essay on Canada's relationship and influence in Cuba, particularly in tourism.

In India, P&G innovates by building a cheap single-bladed razor that is "good-enough" to take market share rather than selling cheap versions of its premium razors.

Drones are becoming more prevalent, but worry is not when used in war but when used by the CIA in countries that are not officially at war.

Story of the God of Gamblers Siu Yun Ping, Macau casinos and how corrupt they are, and the extent of money laundering/triad involvement in running junkets that recruit rich mainlanders to gamble. A dirty business all around.

"In a post-Moneyball world," says Conte, "injury risk assessment is the final frontier."

Profile on Vupen, which finds high-level zero-day exploits itself and sells them to government agencies for 6-7 figures. Also charges $100k a year subscription just for the right to buy them.

Profile of Zhou Youguang, inventor of Pinyin. Now 106 years old, critical of the Communist Party, and an unknown in China.

Article by Bill James tracking the changes in crowd control in ballparks and in prisons. Stage 1 was players being able to respond directly to fan heckling. Stage 2 players were prevented from doing so, giving fans free reign to heckle. Stage 3 was the clampdown on fan behaviour which had gotten out of hand because players could not respond. Similar to how prisons have become incredibly strict.

Thirty years ago people expected to go to a baseball game, get drunk, and act stupid; now, no one expects to be able to do that, so the issue doesn't really come up. Crowd control — like prison control and standing up a democracy — is mostly a matter of managing expectations.

Story of Instagram and how founders Kevin Systrom (who interned at Odeo which became Twitter) and Mike Krieger have focused on uptime and making something work well rather than rapidly expanding across platforms. Have also managed to do it all with just 10 employees so far.

Great article on brainstorming and a substory about Building 20 at MIT. Brainstorming is most effective when done alone and then later on with debate. Collaboration is essential, but brainstorming itself is actually detrimental.

Building 20 was a haphazard structure built temporarily for lab experiments during WWII and gave birth to radar. The lack of finish actually lent itself to being the "magic incubator" of ideas as people were forced to collaborate and felt inhibited, often modifying their surroundings to their own specifications.

Retailers that spend more on employees are seeing higher sales as a result, meaning cutting labour costs to the bone are counterproductive. Marshall Fisher, Jayanth Krishnan, and Serguei Netessine looked at detailed sales data from a retailer with more than five hundred stores, and found that every dollar in additional payroll led to somewhere between four and twenty-eight dollars in new sales.

Touches on the outsourcing of work to the customer.

Details the experiments and findings of split-brain patients, people who had surgery to fix seizures by slicing through her corpus callosum, the bundle of neuronal fibres connecting the two sides of her brain.

On Paul Beeston, Pat Gillick, and how they built the Blue Jays from expansion team to World Series Champion. Also on brilliant team culture.

EurimPharm, started by Andreas Mohringer in his late 20s, buys medicines/drugs from cheap countries like Greece and resells them to the UK or Germany after relabelling. All legal under EU law, athough drug comanies try to clamp down on it.

Don Johnson won $15mio in winnings from three different casinos, preying on special discounts only available to high rollers to shave the house advantage to 25 bp.

Absent a President’s involvement, these votes fell along party lines just a third of the time, but when a President took a stand that number rose to more than half. The same thing happened with votes on more partisan issues, such as bills that raised taxes; they typically split along party lines, but when a President intervened the divide was even sharper.

Edwards’s work suggests that Presidential persuasion isn’t effective with the public. Lee’s work suggests that Presidential persuasion might actually have an anti-persuasive effect on the opposing party in Congress. And, because our system of government usually requires at least some members of the opposition to work with the President if anything is to get done, that suggests that the President’s attempts at persuasion might have the perverse effect of making it harder for him to govern.

Presidents win victories because ordinary Americans feel that their lives are going well, and we call those Presidents great communicators, because their public persona is the part of them we know.

Jim Cooper says, “We’ve effectively lost our Congress and gained a parliament.” He adds, “At least a Prime Minister is empowered to get things done,” but “we have the extreme polarization of a parliament, with party-line voting, without the empowered Prime Minister.” And you can’t solve that with a speech.

Planting bamboo in order to stem deforestation in Africa:
How does bamboo improve on hardwood? Cut down a hardwood tree and it’s gone. It will take several decades for another to grow in its place; it can take a century for a forest to grow back after cutting. But bamboo is a grass, not a tree. Under the right conditions, it can grow a full meter a day — you can literally watch it grow. It is also fast maturing. A new bamboo plant is mature enough to harvest after three to six years, depending on the species. Most important, bamboo is renewable.

Bamboo has other advantages. Its roots grab onto soil and hold it fast. Plant bamboo on a steep slope or riverbank and it prevents mudslides and erosion. And bamboo is parsimonious with Africa’s most precious resource: water.

“You want firewood, you want to reduce erosion, to maintain the water supply, generate cash and employment. Bamboo comes the closest — it gives you the most things.”

The five factors that best predicted price growth between 2001 and 2011 were the share of adults with college degrees (positive correlation), housing permits per capita (strong negative correlation), median family income (strong negative correlation since poorer places experience faster economic growth), median housing value and the closest distance to the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.

Signature Chinese dishes from the 31 different provinces/municipalities

Tide has become a form of currency on the streets. The retail price is steadily high — roughly $10 to $20 a bottle — and it’s a staple in households across socioeconomic classes.

Profile of the most prolific arms dealer in the world.

Can you imagine crimes in which the victims willingly, and without any kind of coercion, give their money and possessions to robbers? It happens in Colombia, if you're unfortunate enough to be drugged with burundanga.

Using heart rate variability (HRV) to measure stress:
"Stress and worry aren't what necessarily cause the problem," says Sian Beilock, a University of Chicago psychologist and author of the book Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To. "But if they lead to trying to control performance" -- that is, trigger the prefrontal cortex -- "it's more likely to end in a choke."

Solazyme was a company focused on finding renewable applications for algae, mostly to make oil. By feeding sugars to algae, oil is created and has been utilized in multiple applications including cosmetics. Food made with the algae flour is also much healthier and apparently tastes the same.

Kirk Goldsberry uses traffic mapping to the NBA court to display areas on the floor that yielded the most points per shot. Can break it down by player as well.

Profile of Manoj Bhargava, founder of the 5-Hour Energy drink. Spent his 20s as a monk on a commune, found the mixture at a trade show and perfected it by selling it in a smaller bottle.

Arguments that while Iran having nuclear weapons is not ideal, that starting war because of it is even worse. Arguments are that Iran is more rational than portrayed, has an incentive to stay alive as a nation to the point where they would not commit suicide by bombing Israel, historical "crazy" nations like Soviet Russia and Communist China have passed without incident, and that war would be both messy and ineffective in the long run

192kHz audio extends to 400% of the audible limit.192kHz digital music files offer no benefits. They're not quite neutral either; practical fidelity is slightly worse. The ultrasonics are a liability during playback.

All signal content under the Nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate) is captured perfectly and completely by sampling; infinity is not required. The sampled signal contains all of the information in the original analog signal, and the analog signal can be reconstructed losslessly. Sampling does not affect frequency response. Sampling is also completely phase neutral.

None of that is relevant to playback; here 24 bit audio is as useless as 192kHz sampling. The good news is that at least 24 bit depth doesn't harm fidelity. It just doesn't help, and also wastes space.

Empirical evidence from listening tests backs up the assertion that 44.1kHz/16 bit provides highest-possible fidelity playback

The easiest fix isn't digital. The most dramatic possible fidelty improvement comes from a good pair of headphones

Story of Southwest Airlines' success through extremely tough conditions for the aviation industry. Its key is their unique culture which has led to high productivity levels and kept overall labour costs low despite some of the highest salaries in the industry.

I came up with 3 primary actions that can be taken in order for these 57 year olds to retire comfortably, if taken together. All of them will have a potentially negative impact on the economy.

1. Postpone retirement to age 70 or older
2. Cut the household budget and save the difference
3. Liquidate debt by downsizing

They realized intersections will change not just because they’ll need to accommodate driverless cars, but because driverless cars will make intersections much more efficient .. we won't need traffic lights at all.

A study on Denver reveals:
The impact of light rail, though not visible on the interstate highways, cannot be considered inconsequential. Light rail kept the rate of increase of traffic lower within the influence zone despite the large amount of residential, office, and commercial developments taking place around the light rail stations.

Article on why legalizing drugs in Central America would not be too effective:
Tax collection authorities and institutions are so weak that states already take in far less than they're owed.
Also, cartels make a lot of their money outside of drugs, through extortion, human trafficking, kidnapping, prostitution, and other criminal activities, many of which are violent.
In any case, the correlation between drug trafficking and violence is not as straightforward as most people think.

First time Davos participant describes the Davos experiece.

New paper compares saving rates and other success factors against how strongly their language incorporates future-time-reference(FTR). But because strong-FTR languages like English or Spanish make a greater distinction between the present and the future, we may be more likely to ignore long-term consequences and trends. But for a weak-FTR language, like German or Finnish, may make speakers feel like the future is more immediate.

Story of Mike Powell, US high school wrestling coach. Immensely strong and a father figure to marginalized kids and forced to reevaluate what manliness was after he got a muscle-wasting disease called polymyositis at the age of 33. Inspiring.

My own preference - and you knew this was coming -- is our third category: investment in productive assets, whether businesses, farms, or real estate. Ideally, these assets should have the ability in inflationary times to deliver output that will retain its purchasing-power value while requiring a minimum of new capital investment.

The Azerbaijan Tower will be the crowning centerpiece of the Khazar Islands, a $100 billion city of 41 artificial islands that will spread 2,000 hectares over the Caspian.

Tsawwassen First Nations outside of Vancouver are building retail space/shopping malls on their (prime farm) land. Residents are not pleased due to sprawl and oversupply of retil space, but the natives are looking at economic opportunity

Jeremy Lin's rise to stardom with the Knicks

Harvard economist empirically studying children and education.
- paying kids to get good grades has no effect on grades
- Five common elements to higher test scores: increased instructional time, data-driven instruction, feedback for teachers, tutoring (especially so), culture of high expectations
- emphasizes quick testing to keep results relevant