Zuckerberg’s Step Into Politics Pushes Tech Friends Away

Zuckerberg’s Step Into Politics Pushes Tech Friends Away

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s bipartisan political organization is losing friends.

The group backed by technology millionaires and billionaires, called FWD.us, began advocating in April for changes to U.S. immigration law. Within weeks, FWD.us surprised some of its members by setting up partisan offshoots and airing ads promoting Democratic Senator Mark Begich’s support for oil drilling and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s backing of the Keystone XL pipeline.

It’s a strategy intended to give political cover to some senators who may support an immigration bill by reminding uneasy voters of the lawmakers’ other policy priorities. Yet the tactic angered some pro-environment donors and sparked a social-media campaign against Zuckerberg. Read more of this post

Halsey Minor, the CNET Networks founder who sold the company for $1.8 billion five years ago, filed for bankruptcy to liquidate his assets and pay his creditors

CNET Founder Minor Files for Bankruptcy After Selling Art

Halsey Minor, the CNET Networks Inc. (3549162Q) founder who sold the company for $1.8 billion five years ago, filed for bankruptcy to liquidate his assets and pay his creditors.

The Chapter 7 petition filed May 24 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Los Angeles listed assets of as much as $50 million and debt of as much as $100 million. In Chapter 7, a U.S. Trustee, or sometimes a judge, appoints an impartial trustee to administer the case and sell assets such as automobiles.

Minor, 47, sold CNET to CBS Corp. (CBS) in 2008. His Minor Ventures invested in early-stage technology startups including GrandCentral Communications Inc., which Google Inc. (GOOG) bought in 2007 for about $65 million and renamed Google Voice. Read more of this post

Export Champions: How I sell tea to China; Alex Probyn, founder of Kent-based business Blends for Friends, on the trials and triumphs of selling tea to China

Export Champions: How I sell tea to China

Alex Probyn, founder of Kent-based business Blends for Friends, on the trials and triumphs of selling tea to China.

Alex Probyn founded Blends for Friends, which exports tea around the globe. He expects the company to increase its exports from 10pc of turnover to 30pc within two years

By James Hurley

7:45PM BST 30 May 2013

How does a small company from Kent go about exporting tea to China? By selling the “quintessential English experience” first, says Alex Probyn, founder of Blends for Friends, a tea maker that is enjoying a brisk trade with the world’s second-largest economy.

Mr Probyn, a former master tea blender at Tetley, said his six-year-old business is benefiting from the growing Chinese middle class.

“It’s hilarious from our point of view because, although we’re exporting good quality tea, it’s stuff the average Chinese person on the street wouldn’t dream of drinking. But in cities they want afternoon tea with cakes and sandwiches – really, they’re buying that experience as much as the tea.” Read more of this post

A photo from the Mars Curiosity Rover reveals what appears to be a small animal or lizard on Mars

Curiosity photo shows lizard on Mars

2013-05-31 00:00:35 GMT2013-05-31 08:00:35(Beijing Time)  Xinhua English

A photo from the Mars Curiosity Rover reveals what appears to be a small animal or lizard on Mars. The photo was taken on February 20, 2013 by Curiosity’s MASTCAM and a high resolution copy is available on NASA’s JPL/Caltech website. The image was originally discovered by a Japanese researcher in March and uploaded to Youtube on May 14. (Source: xxcb.com.cn)

Meet the $200m bushy, Tom Brinkworth; You won’t find this controversial pastoralist in the social pages nor in the saddling enclosure on Melbourne Cup day. Rather, you will find him sleeping rough as he traverses his vast estate in South Australia

Meet the $200m bushy, Tom Brinkworth

PUBLISHED: 13 HOURS 46 MINUTES AGO | UPDATE: 2 HOURS 36 MINUTES AGO

Brinkworth in a trophy room bearing the results of the family’s passion for hunting. Photo by Nic Walker

TONY WALKER

Tom Brinkworth is presiding in what he calls his home office – a farmer’s kitchen – with its skillets and meat hooks, cleavers and boning knives, venison chunks and homilies about life and work, and shelves crowded with sauce bottles and condiments. On a refrigerator door, a fridge magnet bears the Churchillian words: Never, Never, Never Give Up. Whatever else friends and detractors – and there are plenty of the latter – might say about the enigmatic 76-year-old, no-one would ever accuse him of giving up, certainly when it comes to accumulating land.

Can acquisition of land become an obsession, I ask? “No, it’s a habit,” Brinkworth laughs. He recounts a friend’s observation that: “Brinkworth would buy out the whole of Australia if the price was right.” Queensland is his next frontier beyond holdings in South Australia and NSW, judging by coloured-in sections of a map of southern Queensland on a long refectory table in a crowded “trophy room” adjoining the kitchen. Brinkworth’s hunting exploits are captured in the mounted heads and antlers of seven species of deer, wild boar and various species of duck. The latter reflects his passion for game-shooting on his wetlands properties.

Tom Brinkworth of Watervalley station, 50 kilometres west as the crow flies from Kingston in South Australia, controls, at last count, 1 million hectares of agricultural land spread across 99 properties in his home state and NSW. By the time this article appears, he may well have brought up his century, such is his appetite for additional land, provided the price is right. Read more of this post

Canadian VCs urge young entrepreneurs to break ‘unrealistic’ expectations

Canadian VCs urge young entrepreneurs to break ‘unrealistic’ expectations

Matthew Braga | 13/05/30 | Last Updated: 13/05/30 2:37 PM ET
Young Canadian entrepreneurs tend to suffer from an “unrealistic expectation of values,” according to WIND Mobile CEO Anthony Lacavera, who spoke on a panel of Canadian venture capitalists Wednesday afternoon.

The group gathered to discuss the gap in understanding that exists between those with ideas and those with funding.

Mr. Lacavera stressed a need for better education of young entrepreneurs – but also a need to “break through that culture of risk aversion” that plagues Canadian VCs, who don’t act nearly as fast or aggressively as those in the U.S. Read more of this post

In Big Companies, Lean Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle; before you use lean to build the next product that could go on to change the world, make sure you’ve established a solid foundation for intrapreneurial success inside your own company

In Big Companies, Lean Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle

by Maxwell Wessel and James Allworth  |  11:00 AM May 30, 2013

In 2010, one of us was sitting in a room at the Harvard Business School with Eric Ries and a number of budding entrepreneurs. They were pitching their ideas and plans to Eric and their peers; once the pitch was complete, the group would then brainstorm. One of these young entrepreneurs in particular stood out. He was not your standard internet entrepreneur — the student presenting was pitching a project to increase sub-Saharan farm income, by helping farmers shift from traditional crops to rubber trees. He had developed an extensive plan, and had the promise of grant money behind him. The problem with the effort, of course, was that building both the necessary African infrastructure and the logistics network needed to transport the non-indigenous crops was going to be a very expensive proposition indeed.

Eric sat patiently and listened, jotting down a handful of notes. After some reflection, he jumped in with a set of questions. Each question focused on an underlying assumption of the business plan. Because the model relied on providing long-term loans, Eric asked questions about repayment and cultural bias. He asked how significant the education costs would be to sign up additional farmers. He asked exactly how big the income increases would be for the farmers who opted into the program. The student presenter acknowledged the risks and simply stated, “Well, we won’t know any of that for a long time… rubber trees take years to mature.” Read more of this post

The new number crunchers; One of the world’s first data scientists turned his geeky love of maths into a lucrative career

May 30, 2013 5:12 pm

The new number crunchers

By Emma Jacobs

When Jeff Hammerbacher lies in bed at night trying to sleep, he meditates on a maths problem. “I find it peaceful,” he says. Reflecting on “timeless entities in your brain allows you to get to the objective truth. It makes me calm inside my head”. Relaxation can be a problem for Mr Hammerbacher, who was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder. “I do have a lot of thoughts in my head, metaphysical dilemmas.”

Meditating on numbers is more than a cure for insomnia. It drives the 30 year old professionally. He is a “data scientist”, the hottest job title in Silicon Valley. Harvard Business Review ran an article co-authored by data scientist D.J. Patil, calling it “the sexiest job of the 21st century”. Mr Hammerbacher actually coined the term in 2008 with Mr Patil, who was the head of data and analytics at LinkedIn when he was leading Facebook’s team.

Mr Hammerbacher calls good data scientists “data rats”. Athletes are often considered “gym rats” if they spend a lot of time in the gym, so Mr Hammerbacher believes “data rats” need to spend a lot of time with data. So, when he has downtime he tries to get in some data science. Read more of this post

BCG Classics Revisited: The Experience Curve and its relevance to today’s business environment

BCG Classics Revisited: The Experience Curve

by Martin Reeves, George Stalk, and Filippo L. Scognamiglio Pasini

MAY 28, 2013

To mark The Boston Consulting Group’s fiftieth anniversary, BCG’s Strategy Institute is taking a fresh look at some of BCG’s classic thinking on strategy to explore its relevance to today’s business environment. This second in a planned series of articles examines the experience curve, an idea developed by BCG in the mid-1960s about the relationship between production experience and cost.

The experience curve is one of BCG’s signature concepts and arguably one of its best known. The theory, which had its genesis in a cost analysis that BCG performed for a major semiconductor manufacturer in 1966, held that a company’s unit production costs would fall by a predictable amount—typically 20 to 30 percent in real terms—for each doubling of “experience,” or accumulated production volume. The implications of this relationship for business, argued BCG’s founder, Bruce Henderson, were significant¹.  In particular, he said, it suggested that market share leadership could confer a decisive competitive edge, because a company with dominant share could more rapidly accumulate valuable experience and thus achieve a self-perpetuating cost advantage over its rivals.

The experience curve theory proved a valuable descriptor and predictor of competitive dynamics across much of the business landscape through the 1970s, providing a sound guide for investment and pricing decisions and an invaluable tool for strategists. Is the idea applicable to today’s environment? Yes, but in some industries it is no longer sufficient by itself as a blueprint for competitive advantage. In contrast to the 1960s and 1970s, when the general business environment was relatively stable and new-product introduction relatively infrequent, today’s business climate is characterized by higher volatility, less stable industry structures, and frequent product launches in response to rapidly changing technologies and tastes. Read more of this post