These neighbourhoods are hives of building activity. The houses here have long passed the hutment stage and are now as pucca as your own homes, albeit in constrained conditions. Unlike most flat owners (this means you), these homes occupy a plot on the ground and rise to a height that will not get them in trouble with the BMC. They are built in RCC and brick masonry, finished with ceramic tiles, both inside and outside, are clean and largely maintenance-free. They have electricity and piped water running to their kitchens and toilets. This is clearly seen by the miles of running pipes over ground, on both sides of the streets. The roads outside their homes are paved with interlocking tiles, just like any other part of the city.

Despite this, the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) chooses to name these localities as ‘difficult’ areas, and damn them to the eternal hell of rehabilitation.



Managing cities is often more about understanding how people that live in them use the spaces where they work and live rather than imposing an outsider view of how cities should be.

Bad nepotism promotes people above their abilities by virtue of connections, and it erodes rather than enhances economic productivity.

But there is even a larger cost. If the rich leverage economic power to gain political power they can also skew broader public policy choices—from the tax system to the education system—to the benefit of their offspring. This will surely start eroding the belief that labour markets are fair, and that anyone can aspire to the top.



Sometimes I wonder where would I be if I had joined my dad's architectural consulting firm in Panvel. Would I be better off? Then I think to myself, probably we would've ended up killing each other first.

There's an ongoing business axiom that defines customer service: "the customer is always right."

Publicly, this may be the proper posture. People like Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos and the author of the best-selling business book, Delivering Happiness) built his first business on making customers happy (the company was LinkExchange - which he sold to Microsoft for $265 million) and pushed the concept even further with Zappos (the online shoe store), which was also sold (but this time to Amazon was over one billion dollars). That being said, there are instances when the customer is not always right. In fact, let's be honest: sometimes the expectations of consumers is so far beyond the pale that anything the company does to try to please them will be met with grumbles and complaints.

The majority of customers simply want value.

They want their products or services to do what it says it will do - reliably. In this day and age, the challenge is that brands are being held to task in the online channels. Any individuals can complain in text, images, audio and video, instantly and for free online for the world to see. If you're in line at your favorite retailer and you're wondering why they don't open up a second cash register, you're just a tweet away from holding that company responsible for their store policies. The other day, I was reviewing the Facebook page for a major airline and there was one complaint that stood out: "I'll never fly with you again! I was stuck at the security line for over two hours!" What does security have to do with the airline? (Answer: nothing). Have you ever been on TripAdvisor (the popular online destination that rates hotels)? You'll see a constant stream of one and two-star reviews where individuals complain about things like a lack of chocolate on their pillows or not enough channels available on their TV (while at the same time commending the hotel for having a nice staff, clean rooms and a cheap rate - the main reasons the majority of people would chose a hotel).

Are we quickly devolving to the sad state of: "you can only please a few of the people some of the time"?

The evolution of customer service and brand loyalty is a topic that has captured the imagination of Fred Reichheld for over twenty years. In 1996, the Bain Fellow published his first book, The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value. Recently, Reichheld (along with co-author, Rob Markey) published a newly updated version of his 2006 seminal book, The Ultimate Question (now titled, The Ultimate Question 2.0). So, just what is the ultimate question that every business should be asking...

"How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?"

If your company is doing well (and this doesn't mean you have to be perfect), your customers become your brand champions. They become the evangelists. They become the marketers. They are the ones who get your ideas to spread. "It turns out that people won't enthusiastically recommend your business to a loved one unless you have treated them in a very special way," says Reichheld via Skype. "It goes beyond the brand and loyalty. Social Media has made the model more apparent to businesses, but the roots of this concept go all the way back to the bible. It goes back to the idea that a name and a reputation are worth more than silver and gold. We created the Net Promoter Score system around the ultimate question to help businesses know - day by day - whether they are building their reputation or diminishing it."

Big or great?

While the simple and immediate feedback loop of deploying the Net Promoter Score (a system that allows customers to grade a brand on a scale from one to ten with a few, short questions) has been adopted by many businesses, the final results also empower a brand to think differently about the types of customers that they can be successful with. "There is no brand that is right for everyone," continues Reichheld. "A brand should be working very hard to make sure that the people who are buying their product or service are the people who it was intended to be sold to. They need to have a very clear focus. This means that when they get a Net Promoter Score of a nine or a ten from a customer, it's because they picked the right customer and they are appreciated for what they have to offer. Sadly, what we see historically is metrics around 'bigness,' meaning how many customers or how many units sold? What we should be looking at is a metric around greatness, not bigness."

So, is the customer always right?

"I don't think that the customer is always right any more than I think that the employees are always right or that a shareholder is always right," conceded Reichheld. "You do owe it to your business to understand the root cause of the feedback and what implications it has on your decision making, prioritization and your actions. But, there are criminals out there that are your customers. You want to keep those customers away. Not just from your cash registers but from your employees too, because they are abusive and they make life hell for everyone in your business. The Net Promoter Score is based on the golden rule that we should treat others the way we would want to be treated in their shoes, but it takes a lot of deep thinking to do this right. It's not superficial. Think about what actions a business takes when it gets a zero or a one score? The business should dig in to figure out what's wrong, try to fix it and understand how it feels to be in the customer's shoes, but it doesn't always mean that they are the right customers for your business."

The complete audio conversation between Reichheld and myself will be published this coming Sunday (October 30th, 2011) as episode #277 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast.

The above post is my twice-monthly column for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun newspapers called, New Business - Six Pixels of Separation. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original versions online here:

Montreal Gazette - Companies should focus on greatness, not 'bigness: ' author.

Vancouver Sun - The customer is (not) always right.




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Despite advice to the contrary, Meg Whitman announced today that Hewlett-Packard will not spin off, sell off, fold, spindle, or mutilate the company’s Personal Systems Group, the division responsible for manufacturing PCs. Instead, PSG will remain part of the company, at least until such time as HP management changes their minds again.

“HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG,” Whitman said in a statement. “It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees. HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger.”

After a couple months of waffling, the decision comes too late for the survivors of HP’s Palm acquisition. But despite the missteps of HP’s now-pilloried former chief executive Leo Apotheker, the Personal Systems Group has retained the lead in personal computer sales, with $40.7 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2010.





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The term “open source server” just
took on a whole new meaning. This morning at an event in New York,
Facebook director of hardware design and supply chain Frank
Frankovsky announced the creation of a foundation to guide the
Open Compute Project (OCP)—an
effort initiated by Facebook engineers to bring the benefits of
an open-source community to the problems faced in building
efficient “Web-scale” data centers. Facebook, Intel, AMD, and
Asus also have contributed intellectual property to the project,
including motherboard and blade server specifications.

The OCP was launched by engineers at
Facebook as a result of their experience in trying to build a
highly efficient data center in Prineville, Oregon. The
Prineville data center is the most efficient in the world in
terms of power consumption, using 38 percent less energy than
Facebook’s existing data centers and costing 24 percent
less. With a power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.07, only
seven percent of the power brought into the facility is used in
the data center’s overhead and cooling. But getting there
required Facebook’s engineers to custom-design servers, power
supplies, battery backup systems, and server racks to accommodate
a simplified power distribution system—using 480 volt
distribution to reduce loss, rather than stepping it down—and
minimize cooling requirements.






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This post originally appeared in Tim O'Reilly's Google+ feed.

This tweet by Steve Case (@stevecase) struck home for me, because in the aftermath of Steve Jobs' death I've been thinking a lot about O'Reilly, wanting to make sure that we streamline and focus on the stuff that matters most.

Here's the money quote from the article Case mentioned:

"My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products," Jobs told [biographer Walter] Isaacson. "[T]he products, not the profits, were the motivation. [John] Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything."

Jobs went on to describe the legacy he hoped he would leave behind, "a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now."

"That's what Walt Disney did," said Jobs, "and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That's what I want Apple to be."

All of our greatest work at O'Reilly has been driven by passion and idealism. That includes our early forays into publishing, when we were a documentation consulting company to pay the bills but wrote documentation on the side for programs we used that didn't have any good manuals. It was those manuals, on topics that no existing tech publisher thought were important, that turned us into a tech publisher "who came out of nowhere."

In the early days of the web, we were so excited about it that Dale Dougherty wanted to create an online magazine to celebrate the people behind it. That morphed into GNN, the Global Network Navigator, the web's first portal and first commercial ad-supported site.

In the mid-'90s, realizing that no one was talking about the programs that were behind all our most successful books, I brought together a collection of free software leaders (many of whom had never met each other) to brainstorm a common story. That story redefined free software as open source, and the world hasn't been the same since. It also led to a new business for O'Reilly, as we launched our conference business to help bring visibility to these projects, which had no company marketing behind them.

Thinking deeply about open source and the internet got me thinking big ideas about the Internet as operating system, and the shift of influence from software to network effects in data as the key to future applications. I was following people who at the time seemed "crazy" — but they were just living in a future that hadn't arrived for the rest of the world yet. It was around this time that I formulated our company mission of "changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators."

In 2003, in the dark days after the dotcom bust, our company goal for the year was to reignite enthusiasm in the computer business. Two outcomes of that effort did just that: Sara Winge's creation of Foo Camp spawned a worldwide, grassroots movement of self-organizing "unconferences," and our Web 2.0 Conference told a big story about where the Internet was going and what distinguished the companies that survived the dotcom bust from those that preceded it.

In 2005, seeing the passion that was driving garage inventors to a new kind of hardware innovation, Dale once again wanted to launch a magazine to celebrate the passionate people behind the movement. This time, it was "Make:", and a year later, we launched Maker Faire as a companion event. Around 150,000 people attended Maker Faires last year, and the next generation of startups is emerging from the ferment of the movement that Dale named.

Meanwhile, through those dark years after the dotcom bust, we also did a lot of publishing just to keep the company afloat. (With a small data science team at O'Reilly, we built a set of analytical tools that helped us understand the untapped opportunities in computer book publishing. We realized that we were playing in only about 2/5 of the market; moving into other areas that we had never been drawn to helped pay the bills, but never sparked the kind of creativity as the areas that we'd found by following our passion.)

It was at this time that I formulated an image that I've used many times since: profit in a business is like gas in a car. You don't want to run out of gas, but neither do you want to think that your road trip is a tour of gas stations.

When I think about the great persistence of Steve Jobs, there's a lesson for all of us in it.

What's so great about the Apple story is that Steve ended up making enormous amounts of money without making it a primary goal of the company. (Ditto Larry and Sergey at Google.) Contrast that with the folks who brought us the 2008 financial crisis, who were focused only on making money for themselves, while taking advantage of others in the process.

Making money through true value creation driven by the desire to make great things that last, and make the world a better place — that's the heart of what is best in capitalism. (See also the wonderful HBR blog post, "Steve Jobs and the Purpose of the Corporation." I also got a lot of perspective on this topic from Leander Kahney's book, "Inside Steve's Brain.")

See comments and join the conversation about this topic at Google+.

Related:

Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles
The State of the Internet Operating System
State of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars
What is Web 2.0?

From Reddit's Cylinsier, a response to Occupy Wall Street critics who argue that because they somehow managed to bootstrap themselves to wealth and privilege, the system is fair and its critics are just sore losers or lazy, greedy fools.

From Reddit's Cylinsier, a response to Occupy Wall Street critics who argue that because they somehow managed to bootstrap themselves to wealth and privilege, the system is fair and its critics are just sore losers or lazy, greedy fools.

Jonathan Rick is a social media strategist in Arlington, VA. You can follow him on Twitter @jrick and read his blog at JonathanRick.com.

The pace and power of web-fueled innovation is stunning. One day we’re swearing by Outlook, the next, we can’t live without Gmail. These changes exemplify the beauty of the Internet — the possibility that greener pastures are but a click away.

On the other hand, the list of tech innovations that could have been is quite long. Before we get into those, a few caveats:

Some of the companies below may not have missed the boat so much as skipped the ride. Oftentimes, these businesses simply chose to perfect their core businesses instead of tacking on new features.
None of these companies has been “MySpaced.” To the contrary, each remains well-regarded and innovative in its own right.

So, how did tech companies miss the boat?

1. Google Docs missed the SlideShare boat. Sure, Google Docs can display PDFs and PPTs, but documents are slow to load, maximized by default, and can’t easily be shared or embedded. By contrast, SlideShare is known as “YouTube for documents” because it’s fast, user-friendly and social.

2. Google Docs missed the Dropbox boat. The search giant passed on adding synchronization to Google Docs (or GDrive). Meanwhile, Dropbox pioneered this feature, for which it’s now the gold standard. And, in an ironic twist, during a five-day, company-wide hackathon, Dropbox developed the ability to sync its accounts with Google Docs. (Although Google may soon unleash a Dropbox killer.)

3. Microsoft Office missed the Google Docs boat. Only after companies, governments and non-profits had “gone Google” did Redmond release a cloud-based, collaborative version of its cash cow, Office (along with a few videos that contrast Office with Docs).

4. iTunes missed the Spotify boat. Apple cornered the digital music market years ago, but besides the all-important $0.99 per song price tag, Cupertino never really innovated with iTunes. Specifically, the software’s lack of social and streaming services created massive opportunities that Spotify — and Pandora, Amazon, Google, and Facebook — pounced on. Apple now is playing catch-up with Ping (pathetic) and iCloud (promising).

5. Mapquest missed the Google Maps boat. When I was in college, “Mapquest” was so popular that we used it as a verb. Today, it seems the only people who use this site are those who still have an AOL email address. The reason: thanks to relentless innovation (mash-ups, Street View, GPS-enabled mobile apps), Google Maps has presented itself everywhere you want to travel.

6. Google Latitude missed the Foursquare boat. Ironically, the founder of Foursquare was a former Googler who left because Mountain View wouldn’t allocate enough resources to his team, “leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.” Google still hasn’t made it with Latitude, whereas Foursquare’s points system, partnership with American Express, and merchant features have generated growth of a million users per month. (Perhaps this is why Google may want to buy Foursquare instead of compete with it.)

7. Facebook missed the LinkedIn boat. When I learned of LinkedIn, I thought, can’t you already do this with Facebook? Well, yes, but not without some hassle. Reed Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, recognized that, while we want to be hip in our personal lives, we strive to be practical and maybe even a little boring in our careers. This is why we use one email address for pleasure and one for business, and why we use Facebook to socialize with friends and LinkedIn to network with colleagues. Recognizing this, Facebook continues to hype its business pages, while such professional credibility comes naturally to LinkedIn.

8. Facebook missed the Twitter boat. When I learned of Twitter, I thought, can’t you already do this with Facebook? Indeed, at its core, Twitter is merely the Facebook status update. Yet Facebook lacked Twitter’s simplicity and pith, a void that ascetic Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, was keen to fill. Apparently, 100 million people agree.

9. Blogger and WordPress missed the Tumblr boat. Finally, when I learned of Tumblr, I thought, can’t you already do this with Blogger or WordPress? Just write shorter. Again, you could, but not with Tumblr’s base-bones simplicity, dynamic community and effective reblogging feature. Microblogging, it turns out, is different from blogging. (No doubt, this is why Blogger just announced Dynamic Views.)

10. Yelp missed the Foodspotting boat. Even though Yelp remains the top social network for restaurant reviews, it overlooked an essential facet of the dining experience: pictures. Foodspotting seized this opening, made it mobile, and now is expanding its focus beyond foodies.

So why do these examples matter?

The beauty of the web is that it dramatically lowers the traditional barriers to entry, so an entrepreneur can penetrate an already saturated market. For instance, despite heavy competition from the likes of LinkedIn, Yahoo, Facebook, Google-owned Aardvark, and Answers.com, Quora plunged into the Q&A fray. In short order, it carved out and capitalized on a niche.

Examine the above list and you arrive at an under-appreciated conclusion: Internet innovation is so fierce and constant that it undermines the notion of zero-sum market share. Instead of vying for a piece of the same fixed and static pie, webtrepreneurs bake whole new pies. Not for nothing does Jeff Bezos insist that the Kindle comprises a “different product category” than the iPad. Just because a company maintains a seeming monopoly on a market doesn’t mean the market is devoid of opportunities. When there’s an innovator, there’s a way. With the web, Goliath is always vulnerable.

Sure, tech giants are somewhat limited. Just reference the lawsuit from the Justice Department, the investigation from the Federal Trade Commission or the hearing from Congress.

Internet innovation comes in tidal waves, big and bold. By contrast, when’s the last time your microwave got a radical upgrade? Or your shower head? And how’s that electric car coming along?

In the end, the web’s rising tides lift the only ship that matters: the user’s.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, aluxum

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Google is targeting its App Engine platform-as-a-service cloud to business customers with a new $500-per-month plan that includes “premier support” and a 99.95 percent uptime service-level agreement. But customers may only contact Google after attempting to fix errors themselves, and “downtime” only counts against the SLA if there is more than a ten percent error rate and five consecutive minutes of degraded service.

“When choosing a platform for your most critical business applications or standardizing on one across your organization, we recognize that uptime guarantees, easy management and support are just as important as product features,” Group Product Manager Jessie Jiang announced in the Google Enterprise Blog. “So today, we are launching Google App Engine Premier Accounts. For $500 per month, you’ll receive premier support, a 99.95% uptime service level agreement and the ability to create unlimited number of apps on your premier account domain.”






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Ubuntu Linux will be the primary operating system powering HP’s upcoming cloud service, Ubuntu maker Canonical said last week. HP recently opened a private beta program for an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud that will offer both compute and storage capacity, using the OpenStack open source cloud platform.

OpenStack, which was recently spun off from Rackspace, is designed to work with multiple operating systems and virtualization platforms. Options include VMware, Hyper-V, Windows and Xen. HP is going with an all-open source lineup, with the Linux-based KVM as its hypervisor, and Ubuntu for the operating system.

“HP has chosen Ubuntu as the lead host and guest operating system powering their Public Cloud,” Canonical said in a blog post. “HP and Canonical are working closely together during the current private beta to make certain that we provide the most secure, scalable, business-class cloud to companies of all sizes.”

While Ubuntu serves as the “reference OS” for OpenStack, HP isn’t required to use it. “This is an important announcement on several fronts—that OpenStack is seen as the platform of choice for building out the largest Public Clouds, and that Ubuntu has what it takes to power OpenStack clouds as a scalable and hardened host OS and responsive and flexible guest OS,” Canonical said.

Although Ubuntu is getting favorable treatment, HP could still allow customers to host multiple operating systems, just as its competitors do. Rackspace Cloud Servers and Amazon EC2, which both use Xen virtualization, allow hosting of various operating systems including Windows and various flavors of Linux.

The HP cloud is targeted at developers, ISVs and business customers, with the ability to deploy virtual machines and object storage capacity on demand. HP has reached its initial limit for customers during the private beta, but people can still sign up to get access when the beta is expanded.




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My first Apple product was, like most PC owners, an iPod but the real Apple experience was when I got my first Mac. In 2009. Yup, I was very late to the party. The iPhone followed soon after and then the iPads, the Apple TV, and even the AirPort Extreme. People often mistake my love for simplicity in design, be it architecture (my major in a previous life) or technology, as fanboyism. I wear that badge with honor. But I never bought Apple products because I was in love with Steve Jobs. Actually, before buying a Mac, I had never heard a single Jobs famed keynotes. You could say I was living in the anti-reality distortion field.
I bought and loved Apple products because they just work and Steve Jobs philosophy, as I later discovered, emphasized just that. Breaking the shackles of complexity from computers and making users feel at ease was his underlying design principle, be in in hardware with a single scroll wheel or in software with the simple yet robust Mac OS X. Although the cult of Mac is derided and mocked relentless on any web forum, the sense of community is strong even if its growing by the millions every year (23% market share compared to less than 5% ten years ago). I remember my sense of puzzlement when I first got my Mac. As an avid Windows tinkerer, I had to unlearn all that. I still remember Supremus’ advice which he in turn had received from his Mac-using colleague:
When I got my first mac, my colleague had told me that I would go through 3 phases. 1st would be when I would get find myself comparing everything to windows and find things annoying with mac (ex: 2 button mouse, no way to expand apps to occupy full screen real estate etc). 2nd phase would be when I’d gloat over the fancy gui and tastefully done aesthetics and how everything fits together in OS X. The 3rd stage he told me was when I’d start looking *beyond* the beautiful UI and start knowing how the operating system has been designed, and that is when I’d appreciate OS X fully.
I went through the stages exactly as he described and if you are a recent convert or are planning on becoming one, I ask you to keep this in mind (although some things like “expand apps to occupy full screen” are now better than in Windows). As Supremus describes, it is hard to explain and has to be experienced firsthand with an open mind. If you think that the Mac is a toy then you haven’t yet delved into the wonder of AppleScript and Terminal which I’m no expert by any means. I have been proven wrong enough times by a work colleague who whips up a tweak that does things I have not thought possible on a Mac or any other platform.
As John Gruber put it succinctly, that Steve Jobs greatest legacy is not any particular Apple product but it was Apple itself. The company that he founded is instilled with this philosophy of providing the best user experience there is. Things may not be as ‘open’ or convenient or even have the latest top-of-the-line specs but the whole is always going to be greater than the sum of its parts. I hope this philosophy remains strong at Apple for as long as it can and although the domineering presence of Steve Jobs isn’t around anymore, we can only hope that his lessons have seeped in deep enough. Like all things, Apple may eventually fade away and be replaced by yet another innovative company but all I can hope is, that company would be guided by the same principles that Steve Jobs proved were so pivotal in creating a lasting and wondrous consumer experience.
(...)Read the rest of May the Crazy One Live On… (19 words)
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© patrix for Nerve Endings Firing Away, 2011. | Permalink | 6 comments Post tags: Apple, Business, Philosophy, Steve Jobs, Technology

Yahoo's shares soared by 10% on the rumour that the software giant said to be considering a fresh bid for the internet business
Microsoft is considering a fresh attempt to take control of Yahoo, sources close to the situation have told Reuters, more than three years after its first bid for the internet business failed,
The software giant launched a $44.6bn hostile bid for Yahoo in 2008 that was vigorously rebuffed by the company. Yahoo's share price has subsequently collapsed and the firm was valued at less than $18bn before Microsoft's renewed interest was reported.
Yahoo's shares soared by 10% on the rumour, which neither company would comment on, before falling back in after-hours trading. Peaking at $15.94, the shares were still barely half the value of Microsoft's $31-per-share offer in 2008.
Yahoo axed chief executive Carol Bartz last month and said the company was conducting a strategic review of its business, prompting speculation that it was a takeover target.
Goldman Sachs and media specialist Allen & Co are working with the firm and are believed to be sounding out potential buyers. Last month, several Yahoo employees in were told in a memo that the company's financial advisers were "fielding inquiries from multiple parties that have already expressed interest in a number of potential options."
Jack Ma, chief executive of Chinese internet company Alibaba, has already expressed an interest in buying Yahoo. The US firm owns 40% of Alibaba and Ma has previously sought to buy back the holding. The two firms have had a contentious relationship and Bartz was criticised for her handling of the Chinese firm, seen as one of Yahoo's best assets.
Other potential bidders include News Corp, buyout firms Providence Equity Partners, Hellman & Friedman and Silver Lake Partners and Russian technology investment firm Digital Sky Technology. Microsoft may seek a partner to go after Yahoo, according to Reuters' sources.
If Microsoft makes a bid it will be at a fraction of the price it was prepared to pay in 2008. That bid ended in failure after an intense four-month battle that eventually led to the resignation of Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who has opposed Microsoft's move.
According to Reuters there are "two camps" within Microsoft. One group of executives believe buying Yahoo would be a 'knock-out blow' to rival AOL, leaving MS-Yahoo as the undisputed leading web portal. Others, though, believe Microsoft should focus on buying companies with more potential for growth.
Yahoo is still one of the biggest draws on the internet but it has lost out to Google and Facebook in the battle to win over advertisers.
At the time of the original bid Microsoft's chief executive Steve Ballmer said buying Yahoo was the best way to achieve scale online, an area where the software giant has trailed arch-rival Google.
The two firms started talking again in 2009 and Microsoft signed a 10-year deal with Yahoo to run its internet search advertising business. That deal was attacked by Google as an "attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC."
Any new deal between the two firms is also likely to spark regulatory scrutiny and fierce lobbying from Google.
Tech analysts were sceptical about the chances of Microsoft bidding for Yahoo again, especially now it has secured the search advertising deal. They also argued that the sale process remains in its early stages.
Yahoo takeoverMergers, acquisitions and fundingMicrosoftComputingYahooInternetTechnology sectorMedia businessDigital mediaDominic Rusheguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Thank you for your excellent guide to independent bookshops included with this Saturday's Guardian. We were pleased to see that it included our own small shop along with so many others in all parts of the country, all much loved by their customers and hopefully most of them flourishing.
In the same paper (1 October) you report that Jamie Oliver is set to top the Christmas bestseller charts yet again – odds-on favourite according to William Hill. Readers may be delighted to learn that Amazon is offering this £30 book for a mere £10, a bargain indeed and a huge slap in the face to small bookshops like most of those in your guide, who will buy it from their wholesalers or direct from the publisher at considerably more. In our case we will pay £18 a copy (unless, of course, we order from Amazon) and feel impelled to discount to compete with the likes of WH Smith and the online giant.
Where is the sense in this, and how can small booksellers survive? The stark answer is that, like the Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth, which closed a few days ago, most will not. Most of us have loyal customers who will buy from us whatever the price, but with the economic squeeze this state of affairs can hardly continue. Perhaps a new project for the Guardian might be to talk to publishers and attempt to find out why they feel impelled to give suicidally large discounts on the very books that people most want to buy. I believe most European countries have some form of net book agreement that protects small shops like ours. I wonder how many of the bookshops in your guide will still be trading a year from now.Patricia AbrehartKingsbridge, Devon
BooksellersPublishingAmazon.comJamie Oliverguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Eight years ago on this day in 2003, I started Blogging.

Here's some basic info about what has transpired in eight years here at the Six Pixels of Separation Blog: over 2700 Blog entries, over 20,000 comments and over 270 audio Podcasts. If you have read or listened to only one percent of all of that content, you'll know that both acknowledging this milestone or speaking about the numbers (how big/how many) is not my style. But, when I woke up this morning and saw the date notification in my Outlook, it gave me pause. It wasn't a sense of pride or accomplishment, either. The only question that continually popped into my brain was: was all of this Blogging worth it? And, the answer is obvious: yes.

Yes it is.

Starting this Blog was (and still is) without the question the single most important thing I have done in my professional life. It has changed me. It has changed the way I learn and grow and it has changed how I think about the world (and business and marketing and media and beyond). In spending some serious time soaking in this anniversary, I listed out why Blogging was (and still is) the smartest thing I have ever done.

8 Reasons Why Blogging Still Rules:

It's slow. I'm in no rush. Most brand are. They think that Social Media is cheap, fast and easy. Blogging has taught me that nothing could be further from the truth. In 2008, I wrote a Blog post called, In Praise Of Slow, that evolved into a much longer and important piece of my first business book, Six Pixels of Separation and the idea still rings true. Blogging has taught me the merits of building true relationships between an audience and content... and that takes time. Lots of time and effort. As fast and simple as it is to publish content with a Blog, success with a Blog as an engine of Marketing is a slow process. And, like a great cup of tea, the process is worth it if you have the intestinal fortitude to see it through.

Critical thinking. People like to think that Blogging is about the discourse (the comments, trackbacks, links, likes and tweets). While this makes up an important piece of the Blogging puzzle, the main reason I Blog is to publicly think about New Media and my media hacking ways. To be blunt: it's a selfish act. The only part that isn't selfish is that I publish it for the world to see, comment on and criticize. But (to be blunt again), that is selfish too, because everything that everyone tacks on to my Blog posts make me think more (and even rethink my initial positions). The simple act of Blogging forces me to think in a more critical way and to get that thinking down in writing. The writing part is (obviously) the hardest part of critical thinking. Putting your thoughts into words is not easy.

The people you meet. People often talk about stepping away from the computer to enjoy the conversation and meeting of people in the real world (more on that here: The Real World). My Blog has allowed me to not only meet, but become very close friends with people I would have never met otherwise. When I was a kid, I often wished that someone at my school liked comics or martial arts as much as I did. Now, we take for granted how easy it is to meet and connect with fellow, like-minded individuals. I don't take our connectivity for granted. Ever. Blogging has allowed me to meet and connect with people by removing the challenge of geography. While I don't often get to press the flesh with certain individuals often enough, I enjoy waking up and hanging out online with friends like Seth Godin, Amber Naslund, Julien Smith, Hugh McGuire, Liz Strauss, Christopher S. Penn, Mark W. Schaefer, Hugh McGuire, Tamar Weinberg, C.C. Chapman, Arjun Basu, Joseph Jaffe, Tom Peters, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and countless other (just look at my Blogroll on the left for more or who I follow on Twitter or Facebook:) I have coffee with all of these people each and every morning - whether they know it or not.

Writing (and reading) as art. This concept was really driven home to me after reading the book, Linchpin, by Seth Godin. Some people paint, some people scrapbook and others twiddle on a guitar in their basements. I write about business, marketing and media hacking. That is my art. For years, I thought it would sound either pretentious or ridiculous to say that writing about business is an art form. Well, this is my art. Take it or leave it.

Personal branding. Really, it's about reputation. It's easy to say something. It's easy to do something. It's hard to build a real reputation that is based on who you truly are for the world to see. This Blog is as real as it gets. It has been a tool, platform and space for me to demonstrate how I think. I believe the results are reflected in how Twist Image (my marketing agency that I own with my three other business partners) has grown over the years. I also believe that there is no better resume than this Blog to define me. I wish more people understood the power of having a living and breathing ongoing publishing platform that allows you to demonstrate how you think, that anyone can access from anywhere.

My place to go. I'm hooked on Arianna Huffington's line: "Self expression is the new entertainment." People often ask, "when do you find the time to Blog?" All I can think to myself is, "when do you find the time to watch half of the television shows and movies that you've watched?" By definition, I'm much more interested in active media than passive media. So, while you're relaxing and watching a sitcom, I'm relaxing and writing a Blog post. This is my place to go. My Blog is my treehouse. This is where I go for fun.

It keeps me regular. I made a commitment to publish six pieces of text-based content and one audio piece each and every week. You can use all the Metamucil you want, my Blog keeps me regular. Knowing that I am committed to creating and publishing this amount of content makes my ears perk up. It keeps me open to uncover new and interesting topics to discuss. The regularity and consistency of the Blog has forced me to keep that "nose for news" that I first developed when I started off in professional journalism during my late teens.

It connects me to you. Think about life before Blogging. You would be waiting for a new book to come out or for a published piece in a newspaper of magazine. No more. Blogging connects me to you. You don't need to read it every day and you don't even need to leave a comment, and yet it still connects us (some more than others). I Blog in the hopes my thoughts resonate. I Blog in the hopes that it creates a level of discourse. I Blog because I'm tired of "top 10 reasons"-types of Blog posts. I Blog in an attempt to raise the bar. I Blog because it connects me to people like you... the exact kind of people I have been waiting my whole life to meet.

Why do you Blog? Better yet, why don't you Blog?




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Nokia is significantly cutting its workforce, by closing and downsizing some of its manufacturing facilities in Europe and the U.S.

After huge losses in the second quarter, mostly due to the collapse of Nokia’s smartphone strategy, the Finnish mobile giant will close its manufacturing facility in Cluj, Romania — which employs some 2,200 people — by the end of 2011 and focus on its factories in Asia.

The company will also close its Location and Commerce operations in Bonn, Germany, and Malvern, Penn., in the U.S. It will “review the long-term role” of its manufacturing operations in Salo, Finland, Komarom, Hungary, and Reynosa, Mexico, which will affect personnel in 2012.

The final tally is brutal: 3,500 will lose their job by the end of 2012, in addition to the 7,000 job cuts (3,000 of which are outsourced) announced in April. Additionally, Nokia will announce the possible effect of the consolidation of its L&C operations on personnel in the first quarter of 2012.

The Cluj factory was mainly used for feature phone production, so this latest wave of layoffs won’t impact Nokia’s smartphone production and its deal with Microsoft.

Nokia employed 132,427 workers worldwide at the end of 2010.

More About: Business, job cuts, layoffs, Nokia
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Researchers at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have demonstrated an electronic "man in the middle" attack that allows remote tampering with the Diebold AccuVote voting system. Argonne's Vulnerability Assessment Team has previously exposed the same sort of vulnerability in Sequoia AVC machines in 2009, and believe the attack could be used against a wide range of voting machines.

The attack requires tampering with voting machine hardware, and allows for votes to be changed as the voter prepares to commit them. But the devices require no actual changes to the hardware—the hardware required to make the attacks can be attached and removed without leaving any evidence that it had ever been there. The electronics in the demonstrated attack are simply jacked in between two components on the Diebold's printed circuit board using existing connectors.

VAT team leader Roger Johnston said in a video posted by Brad Friedman of the voting watchdog site The Brad Blog that the physical security measures taken to protect voting machines in many states are inadequate to protect them from pre-Election Day tampering. "They're often kept a week or two before elections in a school or church basement,"Johnston said. And the modifications can be made without picking locks or breaking seals on the devices.

Diebold has a shaky security history. In 2004, Johns Hopkins University computer science professor Avi Rubin and a team of researchers revealed a broad set of cyber vulnerabilities in the AccuVote system. In the past, there have been suggestions that Diebold itself tampered with elections in Georgia in 2002.

But while cyber attacks would require a high level of sophistication, the electronic man-in-the-middle attack demonstrated by Argonne's VAT team requires only basic electronics skills, and about $10.50 worth of hardware. "Anybody with an electronics workbench could put this together," Argonne VAT team member John Warner said in the video.




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As if the MySQL community doesn't have enough to worry about, a security firm is reporting that the MySQL.com website has been commandeered by hackers. And recent visitors to the MySQL.com website may have downloaded something other than the database software to their systems.

Web security firm Armorize reported in its blog today that the MySQL.com website has been turned into a launchpad for serving up malware attacks. Visitors to the home page of the site are hit with a JavaScript injection attack that has been planted on the site. The script opens an IFRAME to a malicious site, which in turn launches a BlackHole exploit "pack" that probes for known browser and plugin weaknesses and then stealthily installs malware on the visitor's PC. There's no warning button or action required by the user other than visiting the site to trigger the download.

Security blogger Brian Krebs reports that he had seen a post last week on a Russian hacker forum by a member offering to sell root access MySQL.com for $3,000. The site is owned by Oracle.





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Rebecca Frankel shared on her Google Reader Feed this image:

I think it's a great example of execution strategy. A frequently used execution strategy is to standardize on one platform and optimize on delivery that way. The nice thing about this strategy is that if you're the startup and the incumbent has built in legacy systems and costs that keep them from executing on the same strategy, you'll have a built-in advantage that will continue for a good long time. For instance, it's hard for an airline to switch the hubs it's using after it's been locked into a long term contract. And obviously, it's hard for incumbent airlines to sell all their fleets and standardize on the 737. The strategy that RyanAir uses, by the way, was first pioneered by SouthWest Airlines. A good execution strategy like this can be easily explained to all your employees to the point where everyone knows what the strategy is, leading to broader alignment.

At Google circa 2003, the execution strategy was straight-forward: build clusters of commodity machines driven by a common software infrastructure so scaling was straightforward. Once MapReduce was adopted, for instance, your mapreduce jobs were datacenter independent and could be run on any number of datacenters. Similarly, all projects could share a single set of site reliability engineers, release engineers, etc., and your resource constraints could be relieved by effectively hiring in all these areas.

The problem comes when you have a new product that doesn't fit your existing execution strategy. Orkut, for instance, was initially written using Microsoft's .NET framework. That didn't fit in with what the rest of Google was doing. It rapidly became a popular product, and the system started falling over from the huge number of requests. The team was staff-constrained, and few engineers inside Google wanted to work on a product that was clearly way out on the left field with respect to Google's execution strategy. To be honest, nobody knew how big social networks were going to be. The result was that it took a while to rewrite Orkut to conform with Google's execution strategy, and by the time it was done enough time had passed and enough users had migrated to another social network that the rest was history. In retrospect, the right thing to do should have been to spin Orkut off, have it raise its own funding round (with Google kicking money), and race quickly to deal with its scaling problems independent of the rest of Google's infrastructure. Facebook might still have won, but at least Orkut wouldn't have been paying Google's strategy tax. Microsoft has its own strategy tax here in that everything has to be tied to windows, but I think even Microsoft's starting to move away from that with its phone and tablet entries.

Business strategy is a whole different animal. In some ways, it's like playing a strategic board game with your business. I'll give you an example. Microsoft invested $240M in Facebook in 2007 at the then stunning valuation of $15B. At that time, Facebook was not profitable (and would become profitable based on Microsoft's guaranteed revenue), and it looked like Microsoft was desperate, throwing money at Facebook. Well, 4 years later, it looks like a brilliant move. Not only does it look like Microsoft's investment will pay off (at least 4X, maybe more), Facebook's been a tremendous thorn on Google's side, probably accounting for no small amount of management distraction, time spent launching (and re-launching) competitive products, and I'm sure no small drain on Google's engineering team. Time will tell as to whether Microsoft's acquisition of Nortel's patent portfolio, essentially forcing Google to buy Motorola will be similarly smart, but spending $4.5B (and that's split between Apple/RIM/Sony/EMC, etc) so that your competition has to spend $12.5B (and ends up having to run a hardware business that's not particularly profitable --- Motorola's the weakest of the Android manufacturers) looks pretty smart right now.

Another company which is good at this is Amazon. The Kindle, for instance, unusually attacked the market from a completely different angle. It's early adopters were not the usual hip 20-somethings, but were the older generation: people who still read and whose deteriorating eye-sight and arthritis made the Kindle an almost must-have. This was so much ignored by other vendors (Apple included) that by the time other ebook stores launched, nobody else has made a dent in electronic book distribution. By ensuring that the Kindle App is available for nearly every platform, Amazon has gotten a choke-hold on electronic book distribution that's only starting to be realized at this point.

Someone told me a little bit back that Amazon's S3 services were priced at below cost at launch. Basically, they bet that they could drive costs down a bit, and that customers would see the move to their cloud services as a no-brainer at those prices and thereby gain them further economies of scale. At this point, I've run into lots of companies that have based their businesses on S3, but comparatively few who've done so on Google's AppEngine infrastructure AppEngine is a bit of a red-headed stepchild at Google because it can't be priced to produce high margins, while Amazon's very much used to low margins.

Obviously, business strategy is of no use if you screw up your execution strategy (or if your product sucks --- nothing ever saves you then), but ideally you want everything in place. Amazon's been the stealth surprise in the past few years in places that looked completely unrelated to e-commerce because of this. At the same time, Microsoft's not being doing so well at execution but its business strategy successes are being ignored by the press, and I think that counting them out would be a mistake.

Hewlett-Packard's new boss is one of Silicon Valley's most successful women. She's also a free-spending political failure sometimes known as 'Evil Meg'
Meg Whitman faces a daunting task as she takes the job at one of world's biggest technology companies.
The firm's last three bosses have all left under a cloud. Carly Fiorina clashed with the company's beloved founding family and was dubbed the "anti-Steve Jobs" for all she did for HP. Her successor, Mark Hurd, was axed amid scandal involving a former porn star and accusations of fiddling his expenses. Léo Apotheker lasted 11 months and presided over a halving in the firm's value. The company's board is reportedly so dysfunctional most of them didn't even interview Apotheker, they were too busy arguing.
Whitman, former boss of eBay, is set to take over from Apotheker immediately, the company announced today. She has the advantage of being available as she is both a non-executive director of HP and failed to secure the last job she really wanted, the governorship of California, after spending a record $144m on her campaign.
"Meg is a technology visionary with a proven track record of execution. She is a strong communicator who is customer focused with deep leadership capabilities," HP chairman Ray Lane said in a statement. She is also a woman who, according to court documents, is referred to as "Good Meg" or "Evil Meg" by colleagues and who once ended up with a $200,000 legal bill after pushing over an underling in a meeting.
Margaret Cushing "Meg" Whitman, 55, is a Harvard grad who cut her teeth in toyland. She was in charge of Mr Potato Head among others at Hasbro and went on to work for Walt Disney before becoming one of Silicon Valley's most successful executives. She joined eBay, the online auction firm, in 1998 when it had just 30 employees and was instrumental in turning the firm into a global giant. In the process she built a $1.3bn fortune and became one of the hottest tech executives in the valley.
She is also one of the more notorious. Her career post-eBay has been patchy. The auction giant has been at war with Craigslist, the free listing site, for a number of years. In court documents it was revealed staff had dual nicknames for Whitman and that in her frustration with Craigslist brought out the "monster".
It wasn't the only time her aggressive side had been displayed. Whitman once shoved a communications officer, a move that ended in a law suit and a reported $200,000 settlement.
And the California voters proved immune to her tactics. With a total spend of $144m, mostly of her own money, Whitman spent $43 for each of the 4,127,391 votes she received in the 2010 election, losing to Jerry Brown, who spent $36m. During the campaign it was revealed that Whitman herself had not voted for 28 years, a record she described as "atrocious" and had ruthlessly dumped her longtime housekeeper when it emerged she was an illegal alien - and consequently a political liability.
HP will be hoping they have hired eBay Meg not California Meg. The knives are already out. "Worst politician ever to run worst tech company ever," said Gawker when she was appointed.
But for a woman who clearly relishes a challenge, perhaps HP is the next best thing to running California. They're both massive and maladjusted. And if it all goes wrong she, can always put her stuff on eBay.
Hewlett-PackardeBayCaliforniaTechnology sectorDominic Rusheguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

After growing at an insane pace for nearly five years, in 1983 Autodesk as a company had disintegrated to the point that it was nearly dead. The company was confused and without vision, and its customers were starting to lose faith. A software engineer named John Walker wrote the letter below, called The Crisis Letter, and it provided the necessary shock to get the company back on its feet.

Something that we all architects and planners use almost didn't exist. Inspiring stuff.

IT was an unusual commission, unlike anything that Stuart Silk, a Seattle architect, had been offered in his quarter-century of practice: design three high-end custom homes for clients he would never meet. Although there were some specifications for functions and dimensions — total square feet, for example, and the number of bedrooms and baths — there wasn’t a clue as to style or a construction budget.

We used to dream of such clients way back in architecture school. We designed fancy expensive five-star hotels in school and then were asked to design toilet details after graduating. We accepted that as the bitter truth of architectural practice in realtiy. Alas, ten years too late. Damn you, China.

"You can try to win a features arms race by offering everything under the sun. Or you can just focus on a couple of things and do ‘em really well and get people who really love those things to love your product. For little guys, that’s a smarter route.

When you choose that path, you get clarity. Everything is simpler. It’s simpler to explain your product. It’s simpler for people to understand. It’s simpler to change it. It’s simpler to maintain it. It’s simpler to start using it. The ingredients are simpler. The packaging is simpler. Supporting it is simpler. The manual is simpler. Figuring out your message is simpler. And most importantly, succeeding is simpler."

Chipotle, Pinkberry, and Nintendo are cited as examples. I can think of one more but it is no longer one of the little guys.

"Jobs shared some interesting observations and anecdotes about Apple, his relationship with customers and of course the iPhone 4 debacle. When looking over my notes I saw some nuggets of wisdom which I feel are universal, regardless of how you may feel about Apple, Jobs and the company’s response to the iPhone 4 debacle."

"The Android ecosystem doesn’t seem capable of producing devices that are great on day one. Yet Apple consistently pulls it off." The promise of "It'll only get better" leaves us with an unfulfilled promise of today.

"Small Retailer Bet Well on Vuvuzelas, but Key-Word Ads Don't Work for Some"

"PVM Oil Futures trader Steve Perkins bought 7m barrels of crude in late-night trading binge on his laptop, driving the oil price to an eight-month high."

"Tim O'Reilly is Silicon Valley's leading intellectual and the founder of O'Reilly Media, a steadily growing $100 million company. His life is a vivid demonstration that interesting things can happen when you are working for more than money."

Mr. Jobs is indeed starting to behave like that other convicted monopolist we know and love.  Yet unlike the latter, Jobs did not engage in underhanded business practices to create his monopolies. They were handed to him on a silver platter by the rest of the market, which insists on peddling either outright crap [2] or cheap imitations [3] of Apple’s aesthetic.  In order to resist the temptation this worldwide herd of mindless junk-peddlers a

"Apple did not provide details of opening day sales. But Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who had predicted as many as 300,000 iPads would be sold this weekend, dramatically revised his numbers upward Saturday to between 600,000 and 700,000 units purchased just on the first day. That contrasts with 270,000 iPhones sold during its initial launch."

Foursquare offers new opportunities to promote your business and build stronger relationships with your customers.

A basic piracy operation requires a minimum eight to twelve militia prepared to stay at sea for extended periods of time, in the hopes of hijacking a passing vessel. Each team requires a minimum of two attack skiffs, weapons, equipment, provisions, fuel and preferably a supply boat. The costs of the operation are usually borne by investors, some of whom may also be pirates.

"Then, figuring I would take his new degree for a test drive, I asked him how he thought I did that. “I’m sure you treat them well,” he replied.

“That’s half of it,” I said. “Do you know what the other half is?”"

When signing on for films that are possible Oscar contenders, actors often have award-triggered bonuses built into their contracts that vary depending on the size of the film.

What's dangerous about the iPad is that it's much closer to a "real" computer than the iPhone is. If you dock it with the keyboard accessory, it really is just a sort of low-powered franken-laptop. And yet this is a computer over which you have absolutely no control. And the question is: If we all continue to buy Apple's locked-down products hand-over-fist (Jobs went so far as to talk about Apple as a mobile device company yesterday), what reason does Apple have not to keep moving forward with that model—a model that, to many, is defective by design.

Every project gets greenlit in Bollywood in the following order of priority. Star cast. Banner. Director. And finally, Story. If you have the stars, everyone’ll want to produce your film, eg Blue.

“You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.” - Steve Jobs

According to an inside source close to the going-ons involved in all of this, a new tablet of some sort may not be the only thing on deck for next Wednesday though. We have been led to believe by an inside source that AT&T will lose their iPhone exclusivity on the same day

"So... like Don Draper, they can go to Cali on biz trip and make it an extended stay?"

The fact that Apple does not reveal prototypes but shipping products is the fundamental difference between their entire business strategy and that of the rest of the industry.

Meet the 17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb global warming

Interesting how a man can retain his top position in the wildly fluid business world.

Monday's article at the Wall Street Journal, which provided confirmation of an Apple tablet device, had all the earmarks of a controlled leak. Here's how Apple does it.

"The type of people we all don't want in Northgate are going to be loitering in that plaza. I don't understand how you guys don't perceive the huge liability with fights out of the bars. Well you just created a boxing ring,"

Cool email exchange

One of the best ways to prepare yourself to pitch your company is to watch other people pitch theirs. Here are a dozen of the best “start-up” pitches I could find

At least software dev. clients don't think they can do it themselves and not pay you in the end.

the company boasts of illuminating its stores with low-wattage lightbulbs but positions outlets far from city centers, where taxes are low and commuting costs high—the average IKEA customer drives 50 miles round-trip.

What a Texas town can teach us about health care.

Dell says it has made $3 million using Twitter.

Matt Mullenweg, founder of Word Press and Automattic, manages a successful Internet business where everyone is working from home.

Launching in London today, the Espresso Book Machine can print any of 500,000 titles while you wait

Hulu, the online TV service launched two years ago by Fox and NBC, has enjoyed incredible success with viewers — too much, it may turn out.

Behind the Bill Gates success story is the other William Gates. The senior Mr. Gates balanced a family thrown off kilter by a boy who appeared to gain the intellect of an adult almost overnight. He served as a quiet counsel as his son jumped into and thrived in the cutthroat business world.

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging

This is Business Today’s Third Annual Listing of hottest start-ups

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the San Francisco start-up is watching the outside initiatives closely as it prepares to launch its own fee-based services this year

In the mid-'80s, Wall Street turned to the quants—brainy financial engineers—to invent new ways to boost profits. Their methods for minting money worked brilliantly... until one of them devastated the global economy.

Amendment is added to massive federal stimulus bill that gives U.S. workers job priority

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP’s Indian affiliate, the auditor of Satyam Computer Services Ltd., said two partners were arrested by police as authorities extended the nation’s largest fraud inquiry.

Indicating that it was taking charge of the company for now, the government said it would restrain current directors of Satyam from acting, and appoint 10 of its nominees to Satyam's board.

The chairman of India’s Satyam Computer Services on Wednesday confessed to fixing the IT outsourcing company’s books for the past “several” years, the country’s first major fraud case to emerge following the global financial crisis.

The New York Times (NYT) became the second to last major newspaper to run a front page display ad today. But nothing like our Times of India who had a full-front-page ad for Indya.com