Chart of the Day: Enterprising Aussies; Of those who say they are interested in becoming entrepreneurs, % who actually try to start a new business

April 27, 2013 Leave a comment

Enterprising Aussies

Apr 26th 2013, 13:46 by Economist.com

Starting up a business down under

A NEW report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), a professional-services firm, suggests that Australia could start a lot more businesses. It predicts that online and high-tech start-ups could account for 4% of GDP and 540,000 jobs by 2033, up from 0.1% of GDP and 9,500 jobs today. The report offers signposts as to how the country might shift from mining coal to mining data. Australia has about 1,500 tech start-ups, mostly in Sydney and Melbourne. Vast untapped opportunities await in health care, an industry that will surge as the nation ages. Australia’s regulatory environment for entrepreneurs is friendly, and the country is admirably open to skilled immigration. In an annual survey of global entrepreneurship, 54% of adult Australians said they were interested in starting their own business, compared with nearly 70% of Italians. But 19% of Australians actually began the process, the highest proportion of the 21 countries in the report, whereas only 3% of Italians did so. Nonetheless, PwC frets that “fear of failure” is more common in Australia than in America or Canada, and this could be holding it back.

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Filed under Life, Macro Trends

The cold wind of competition sweeps the legal-services market

April 27, 2013 Leave a comment

The cold wind of competition sweeps the legal-services market

Apr 27th 2013 |From the print edition

“THE one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself,” noted Charles Dickens. These days many lawyers are struggling to do so. Few people are buying or selling houses. Divorces have been declining steadily for the past ten years. There is less crime. Legal aid is being trimmed. As a result, the proliferation of lawyers has slowed. This month the Law Society, which represents solicitors in England and Wales, announced that the number of firms and private practitioners had dropped for the first time. To make matters worse, competition is increasing.

Britain’s legal industry was once tightly regulated. Only qualified lawyers, typically operating in partnerships, were permitted to offer legal services. That changed in 2007, when the Legal Services Act allowed non-lawyers to own, run or invest in legal businesses. The first licence for an “alternative business structure”, as the new, looser arrangement is awkwardly known, was issued in March 2012. A year on, Britain’s legal market is beginning to churn. Read more of this post

Filed under Macro Trends

WisdomTree Powers Ahead, Shares up 85% This Year; why the ETF company is one of the brightest spots in the asset management industry

April 27, 2013 Leave a comment

April 26, 2013, 10:25 A.M. ET

WisdomTree Powers Ahead, Shares up 85% This Year

By Brendan Conway

The ascent of WisdomTree Investments (WETF) continues. This morning’s earnings report gives a few more signs why the company is one of the brightest spots in the entire asset management industry. The only publicly traded firm selling ETFs and ETFs alone reported a 53% jump in total revenue last quarter and a six-fold rise in net income. The period’s 60% growth in assets under management from a year earlier is more than twice the pace of the ETF industry’s 27% growth during 2012.

It’s not as if the company is sacrificing profitability to build up assets. WisdomTree’s average ETF advisory fee held steady at 0.54%. Costs rose, but gross margins still expanded to 72% from 63% a year earlier. Investors have responded. Shares are up nearly 85% year-to-date, including a 5% jump this morning, to $11.43.  Read more of this post

Filed under Macro Trends

Cities are finding useful ways of handling a torrent of data

April 27, 2013 Leave a comment

Cities are finding useful ways of handling a torrent of data

Apr 27th 2013 | CHICAGO |From the print edition

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THANKS to Brett Goldstein, Chicago’s chief information officer, it is easy to discover a great deal about his city. In the past three months 5,973 vehicles were moved; since the start of 2011, 72,687 complaints about faulty lights in alleyways have been reported; and in the first half of 2012 the tourist-information website was apparently unavailable for 5,870 minutes. (The city says this was caused by a fault in the monitoring software.)

Needless to say, Mr Goldstein will want to get this fixed if he is to retain his annual salary of $154,992. Yet the nugget of data is a tiny detail in a vastly larger enterprise: to make Chicago’s data openly accessible and useful to the millions of people who live and work there.

Many cities around the country find themselves in a similar position: they are accumulating data faster than they know what to do with. One approach is to give them to the public. For example, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago are or soon will be sharing the grades that health inspectors give to restaurants with an online restaurant directory. Read more of this post

Filed under TMT Trends

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