Napoleon’s Fatal Mistake; Given an independent command, they acted well, especially if his orders were explicit and the task reasonably simple. But on their own, they tended to be nervous, looking over their shoulders, unresourceful in facing new problems he had not taught them how to solve

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

Napoleon’s Fatal Mistake

by SHANE PARRISH on OCTOBER 9, 2013

“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
— Victor Hugo

France of the 1790′s provided an ideal place for Napoleon Bonaparte’s unlikely rise to the top. Paul Johnson explains in Napoleon: A Life:

It demonstrated the classic parabola of revolution: a constitutional beginning; reformist moderation quickening into ever-increasing extremism; a descent into violence; a period of sheer terror, ended by a violent reaction; a time of confusion, cross-currents, and chaos, marked by growing exhaustion and disgust with change; and eventually an overwhelming demand for “a Man on horseback” to restore order, regularity, and prosperity.

Napoleon epitomized opportunism. Read more of this post

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Drinking With Your Eyes: How Wine Labels Trick Us Into Buying

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

Drinking With Your Eyes: How Wine Labels Trick Us Into Buying

by MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF

October 11, 201311:05 AM

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Shelf pop: Brilliant red ink and an arresting illustration make Scarlett stand out in a sea of Napa cabernet sauvignons. A splash of gold adds richness and elegance.

We’re all guilty of it. Even if we don’t want to admit it, we’ve all been suckered into grabbing a bottle of wine off the grocery store shelf just because of what’s on the label. Seriously, who can resist the “see no evil” monkeys on a bottle of Pinot Evil? But the tricks that get us to buy a $9 bottle of chardonnay — or splurge on a $40 pinot noir — are way more sophisticated than putting a clever monkey on the front. A carefully crafted label can make us think the bottle is way more expensive than it is, and it can boost our enjoyment of the wine itself, says David Schuemann of CF Napa Brand Design, who has been designing wine packaging for more than a decade. In his new book 99 Bottles of Wine, Schuemann spills the industry’s secrets about how wine labels tickle our subconscious and coerce us into grabbing a bottle off the shelf. The book is also a feast for the eyes, with about 100 photographs of the sleekest, most eye-catching winelabels in the business. Read more of this post

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The Soaring Cost of a Simple Breath; The high price of commonly used medications for conditions like asthma contributes heavily to health care costs in the United States

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

October 12, 2013

The Soaring Cost of a Simple Breath

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

OAKLAND, Calif. — The kitchen counter in the home of the Hayes family is scattered with the inhalers, sprays and bottles of pills that have allowed Hannah, 13, and her sister, Abby, 10, to excel at dance and gymnastics despite a horrific pollen season that has set off asthma attacks, leaving the girls struggling to breathe. Asthma — the most common chronic disease that affects Americans of all ages, about 40 million people — can usually be well controlled with drugs. But being able to afford prescription medications in the United States often requires top-notch insurance or plenty of disposable income, and time to hunt for deals and bargains. Read more of this post

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Where Jim Rogers Is Investing Now

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2013

Where Jim Rogers Is Investing Now

“I cannot invest the way I want the world to be; I have to invest the way the world is.” — Jim Rogers

By KOPIN TAN | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR

An interview with investor and author Jim Rogers in Singapore. Why he likes agriculture and Chinese airlines, is concerned about currency turmoil and thinks young Americans should learn a foreign language.

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Stepping off a 19-hour flight to visit Jim Rogers in Singapore is a daunting proposition. First, you must locate his home, nestled in a particularly private, verdant nook nuzzling the 183-acre Singapore Botanic Gardens. Next, his remarkably poised nine-year-old daughter—the blond-haired, blue-eyed Hilton Augusta Parker Rogers, or Happy Rogers to her friends—quizzes you in flawless Mandarin to see if your language skills are up to snuff. Then, Rogers invites you to exercise with him while chatting about the markets. Rogers, who will turn 71 this week, has always been a multitasker. The co-founder (with George Soros) of the Quantum Fund famously retired at 37 to travel the world, and is today a venerable investor, author of six books, and doting dad. Convinced of Asia’s ascendance but put off by China’s pollution, he moved his family from New York to Singapore seven years ago so his two young daughters can grow up speaking Mandarin. Today, Oriental antiques jostle Barbie dollhouses for pride of place in his spacious home. He takes his daughters to school on a bicycle, even though a gleaming Mercedes with an 8888 license plate—eight being the most auspicious number to the Chinese since it sounds like the word for “prosper”—sits in the driveway. What follows is our very sweaty conversation—me from the equatorial humidity, Rogers from pedaling a recumbent stationary bike on the patio, a laptop dripping stock quotes propped on his handlebars. A tantalizing pool beckons from 10 feet away, but he did not once slow down. Read more of this post

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When the Rising Stock Price Hides Trouble

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

October 12, 2013

When the Stock Price Hides Trouble

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

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WHEN a company receives criticism about its executive pay practices, a typical defense is to cite a rising stock price as justification of its pay. If total shareholder return is up, the theory goes, stockholders have no right to complain about what might otherwise look like outsize pay at their companies. While this pay posture is understandable, it raises a question: Should a rising stock price inoculate top executives from criticism over their pay? To more and more experts in corporate finance and pay issues, the answer is no. Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, is among those who think that too many companies rely too heavily on the performance of their shares when computing executive compensation. “I’m a great believer in markets, but sometimes we need more attention paid to what did this management do to the value of the company and less to what did this management do to the price of the stock,” he said. “I would like to see compensation systems where managers are rewarded based on what kind of projects they are working on and how big their returns on invested capital are.” Read more of this post

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Is Music the Key to Success? What it is about serious music training that seems to correlate with outsize success in many diverse fields?

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

October 12, 2013

Is Music the Key to Success?

By JOANNE LIPMAN

CONDOLEEZZA RICE trained to be a concert pianist. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a professional clarinet and saxophone player. The hedge fund billionaire Bruce Kovner is a pianist who took classes at Juilliard. Multiple studies link music study to academic achievement. But what is it about serious music training that seems to correlate with outsize success in other fields? The connection isn’t a coincidence. I know because I asked. I put the question to top-flight professionals in industries from tech to finance to media, all of whom had serious (if often little-known) past lives as musicians. Almost all made a connection between their music training and their professional achievements. Read more of this post

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Slaying The Dragon And Other Ways To Create Killer Content Narratives

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

SLAYING THE DRAGON AND OTHER WAYS TO CREATE KILLER CONTENT NARRATIVES

THE “MERE EXPOSURE EFFECT” COMPELS PEOPLE TO LIKE SPECIFIC CONTENT SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY ARE FAMILIAR WITH IT. HERE’S HOW TO TELL A SUCCESSFUL STORY.

BY: DUKE GREENHILL

There is a system for successful storytelling. Actually, there are many systems. Sometimes we call them platforms. Sometimes we call them structures. Sometimes we call them strategies. But they’re all essentially the same. They’re the framework we deliberately select to support what we hope will be a successful story. Whether the metric of success is shares, comments, views, clicks, albums sold, box office receipts, or artistic immortality, the systems are there. While content marketing, social marketing, and native advertising are new media of sorts, in their most fundamental ways, they are no different than the stories we’ve been telling each other since the dawn of humankind. Read more of this post

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How To Become As Interesting As Malcolm Gladwell

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

HOW TO BECOME AS INTERESTING AS MALCOLM GLADWELL

KNOW WHAT YOUR PERSONAL BRAND COULD REALLY USE RIGHT ABOUT NOW? A BEST SELLER.

BY: DRAKE BAER

To be made into an adjective is probably the closest to immortality that any of us are going to get–and every time Malcolm Gladwell comes out with a new book, we’re reminded of the writer’s everlasting ability to remain interesting. But what is it to be “Gladwellian”? With the release of his new book, David and Goliath,we can see that the adjective summons constructive criticism, as in Slate, GQ, andTime. And when the New York Times asked him how he feels when a book is called “Gladwellian,” he said: I’m flattered, naturally. Although I should point out that it is sometimes said that I invented this genre. I did not. Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross did. Aside from setting us scrambling for the work of Nisbett and Ross–who authored The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology, a book exploring how our individual identities are so dang socially contextual–Gladwell’s answer on the question “Gladwellian” still feels incomplete. Read more of this post

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The German’s language’s ability to express the inexpressible explains why so many words have been embraced into English

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

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Can China produce a game studio like SuperCell?

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

Can China produce a game studio like SuperCell?

October 11, 2013

by Francisco Yu

When the DreamWorks animated movie Kung Fu Panda released worldwide, many in the Chinese movie and animation industry asked themselves why couldn’t a Chinese studio have created Kung Fu Pandafirst. After years of soul-searching and introspection, the Chinese animation industry has been trying (and failing) to meet that bar of creating an equal or greater animated film. The creative and decision making mechanisms of the industry just aren’t conducive to making a global animation hit yet. Read more of this post

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Building the Cloud: Who Wins, Who Loses; Traditional IT suppliers, including EMC, Cisco, and NetApp, are under siege from cloud operators like Amazon and Google. Pricey start-ups abound. A second chance for VMware

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2013

Building the Cloud: Who Wins, Who Loses

By TIERNAN RAY | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR

Traditional IT suppliers, including EMC, Cisco, and NetApp, are under siege from cloud operators like Amazon and Google. Pricey start-ups abound. A second chance for VMware.

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The cloud changes everything. The technology leaders of the past, including Hewlett-Packard , Cisco Systems , and EMC ,face unprecedented threats as computing moves out of corporate data centers and onto the cloud that companies like Google ,Amazon.com , and others have created. Over the past decade, these large Web companies have figured out how to build more-efficient computing facilities than the information-technology teams within large companies could ever imagine. Now these firms are renting their vast computing firepower to companies large and small. Amazon has multiple customers who run SAP(ticker: SAP) enterprise resource planning software, among the heaviest of traditional enterprise applications, for their critical planning. Social networking application SnapChat runs on Google’s App Engine. Read more of this post

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APAC has more mobile shoppers than any other region (INFOGRAPHIC)

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

APAC has more mobile shoppers than any other region (INFOGRAPHIC)

October 11, 2013

by Paul Bischoff

Asian consumers are leading demand for mobile commerce, according to a survey just released by SAP. The almost 3,300 interviewees were spread across China, India, Japan, and Australia. SAP’s findings suggests APAC is far ahead of other regions as far as m-commerce goes. 84 percent want more interactions, 67 percent want more payment methods (e.g. a mobile wallet), and 42 percent have actually purchased something through their mobile phones. Higher confidence in mobile security is driving the shift. Check out more of SAP’s stats in the infographic below.

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In a Mood? Call Center Agents Can Tell; New techniques in computational voice analysis are promising to help machines identify the emotions behind a person’s voice

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

October 12, 2013

In a Mood? Call Center Agents Can Tell

By NATASHA SINGER

IN a YouTube clip from one of Steve Jobs’s last interviews, he appears to be enjoying reminiscing about how he first hit upon the idea for the keyboardless tablet that eventually became the iPad. “I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard, type on a multitouch glass display and I asked our folks, could we come up with a multitouch display that I could type on, I could rest my hands on and actually type on,” Mr. Jobs says, smiling slightly as he recounts his enthusiasm at seeing the first prototype. “It was amazing.” Read more of this post

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The Grocery Store May Be on Its Death Bed; So-called ‘click and collect’ may be the future of shopping for groceries

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

The Grocery Store May Be on Its Death Bed

So-called ‘click and collect’ may be the future of shopping for groceries

By Brad Tuttle @bradrtuttleOct. 08, 20133 Comments

The need for the weekly 30-minute expedition browsing up and down the aisles of the supermarket is being eliminated. Instead, many shoppers are taking advantage of new services, in which they place an order online and hit a convenient pickup location to retrieve their groceries—often without ever having to leave the car. Despite the spread of options offering online groceries shipped to customers’ homes, consumers have largely been reluctant to jump on board. While the service sounds remarkably convenient, many are uncomfortable letting someone else pick out the meat and produce that’ll wind up on their table. Others worry about food freshness or tomatoes being bruised in such an arrangement, plus the need to block off time to wait for orders to arrive. Cost is a factor as well in grocery delivery (especially for same-day shipping), and since groceries are typically needed at least on a weekly basis, these are costs that can quickly add up. Read more of this post

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PayPal Has A New Retail Trick Up Its Sleeve; PayPal Beacon is a small proximity-based USB device that enables customers to buy things from retail locations hands-free

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

PayPal Has A New Retail Trick Up Its Sleeve

DYLAN LOVE OCT. 12, 2013, 9:23 AM 3,789 6

paypal-beacon

PayPal is one of the dominant names when you’re talking about mobile payments. They recently introduced a brand-new system that’s going to change how you interact with the retail environment. It’s a small USB device (pictured right) called Beacon, and it enables customers to buy things from retail locations hands-free. If you’re one such customer, you don’t have to touch a wallet, a credit card, or any physical money at all to pay for your items. By checking in to a store à la Foursquare (you can even configure the app check you into places automatically), that retailer has access to the funds in your PayPal account and you can pay for your items directly with that money. It’s proximity-based, so you do have to be physically present at the store. The security check happens when the retailer is shown a picture of your face to make sure that you’re who you say you are. With that confirmed, your total purchase is deducted from your PayPal account. Read more of this post

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French farmers are committing suicide at alarming rates; Livestock farmers face particularly slim profit margins and have been unable to pass along higher costs to food manufacturers and retailers

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

French farmers are committing suicide at alarming rates

By Roberto A. Ferdman @robferdman October 11, 2013

France’s agriculture sector has suffered its fair share of setbacks lately. But here’s a particularly gruesome one: Farmer suicides are adding to the industry’s struggles. A new report (link in French) released yesterday (Oct. 10) by French health institute INVS reveals that nearly 500 farmers in the country took their own lives between 2007 and 2009. That’s roughly a suicide every other day, French news outlet The Local points out. The suicide rate among French farmers is more than 20% higher than that of the general populous, which is an even greater concern when one considers that France already has an alarmingly high suicide rate compared to its European neighbors; suicide rates in France, for example, are twice those of Spain and the UK. Only cancer and cardio-vascular disease are greater causes of death amongst French farmers. France’s mounting suicide problem reflects its suffering agriculture sector, which has buckled amid rising prices for inputs like fertilizers and feed. The economic squeeze has been especially hard on the country’s livestock sector, which registered the highest farmer suicide rates. Livestock farmers face particularly slim profit margins and have been unable to pass along higher costs to food manufacturers and retailers. In January, French farmers took to the streets to protest new environmental regulations that have hiked up costs further. To placate restless farmers, French president François Hollande redirected nearly a €1 billion in subsidies from the European Union last week to help those most affected by the sour economy. (France is the EU’s top agricultural producer as well as the biggest beneficiary of EU aid.) INVS plans to carry out another study to determine whether the suicide problem among France’s farmers extends into 2010 and 2011.

Filed under Macro Trends

Indonesian Miners Risk Lives in Modern-Day Gold Rush

October 13, 2013 Leave a comment

Indonesian Miners Risk Lives in Modern-Day Gold Rush

By Anne Usher on 12:41 pm October 11, 2013.
Kereng Pangi. In a desolate area of central Indonesia where lush rainforest once stood, illegal miners on the frontline of a modern-day gold rush tear up the earth in the hunt for the precious metal. Thousands of men use high-pressure hoses to blast tons of sand out of the ground daily in open pits around Kereng Pangi on Borneo island, before running it through filters to find specks of gold. Read more of this post

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The 41 Most Unusual Economic Indicators

October 12, 2013 Leave a comment

The 41 Most Unusual Economic Indicators

MATTHEW BOESLER AND STEVEN PERLBERG OCT. 11, 2013, 2:51 PM 163,114 7

With the government shutdown showing no sign of abating, it looks like we could be left without some of our favorite economic indicators for some time. For example, economists and market watchers won’t get their hands on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ jobs report — the oft-hyped monthly indicator — until Congress can produce a budget. The good news is there are other economic indicators to supplement our view of the economy. Though some, like Tylenol usage and the Mosquito Bite Indicator, are stranger than others. Read more of this post

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Malaysian play in Singapore gone awry

October 12, 2013 Leave a comment

Updated: Saturday October 12, 2013 MYT 7:15:31 AM

Malaysian play in Singapore gone awry

BY RISEN JAYASEELAN AND TEE LIN SAY

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WHAT a mess. The fallout stemming from the massive sell-off of Blumont Group Ltd,Asiasons Capital Ltd and LionGold Corp Ltd is rocking the foundation of these companies and raising questions. With such battered share prices and with the billions having been wiped out from their market capitalisation, the model of using their highly liquid SGX-quoted shares, as currency for takeovers, is in jeopardy. Then there’s the stigma to deal with: will bankers, business partners and vendors of assets be as open to deal with them as before? Read more of this post

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Taiwan talk show host ‘Little S’ Dee Hsu questioned over Top Pot scandal

October 12, 2013 Leave a comment

‘Little S’ questioned over Top Pot scandal

The China Post news staff
October 12, 2013, 12:02 am TWN

Talk show host Dee Hsu (徐熙娣, stage name Little S) yesterday returned home without facing charges, at least temporarily, after telling prosecutors whether or not she had “anything to hide.” According to media reports, prosecutors want to find out whether she has knowingly lied to consumers and committed fraud. Hsu was summoned to the Taipei District Public Prosecutors’ Office (TDPPO) to testify as a witness in an insider-trading case involving her husband Mike Hsu (許雅鈞) and father-in-law Hsu Ching-hsiang (許慶祥), as well as in a false advertisement case. Read more of this post

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The long war: A new vaccine will help, but will not defeat malaria

October 12, 2013 Leave a comment

The long war: A new vaccine will help, but will not defeat malaria

Oct 12th 2013 |From the print edition

ON OCTOBER 8th researchers announced progress in developing a vaccine against malaria. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a British pharmaceutical firm, said it would seek regulatory approval next year for this vaccine, called RTS,S. GSK and its charitable partner, the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, also revealed new data showing the vaccine’s effect in children. This is good news, but RTS,S will not vanquish malaria by itself. Read more of this post

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Science: Beyond the God particle; The Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics show how computing is changing every field of research

October 12, 2013 Leave a comment

October 11, 2013 7:31 pm

Science: Beyond the God particle

By Clive Cookson

The Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics show how computing is changing every field of research

Computers, born out of science, are transforming every aspect of the scientific process, as this year’s Nobel physics and chemistry prizes show. Fifty years ago the physics laureates Peter Higgs and François Englert applied their brains through pencil and paper, blackboard and chalk, to come up with proposals for a new fundamental energy field and subatomic particle, which would explain why matter has mass. Last year one of the most computer-intensive scientific experiments ever undertaken confirmed their theory by making the Higgs boson – the so-called “God particle” – in an $8bn atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider at Cern outside Geneva. Read more of this post

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Korea needs National Entrepreneurs Day; The number of business tycoons who are in jail is unprecedented in Korea’s history. These tycoons did not understand how our society has changed. The public has shown little sympathy for their crimes

October 12, 2013 Leave a comment

2013-10-10 16:47

Korea needs National Entrepreneurs Day

By Lee Chang-sup
With business leaders facing jail time and the nation’s economy struggling, Korea needs a way to spark entrepreneurial spirit once again. A National Entrepreneurs Day could be exactly what the nation needs to encourage entrepreneurs to bring new moneymaking ideas to the market. The current business climate is not welcoming to new entrepreneurs.  A record number of high-profile bankruptcies haven taken place since the financial crisis in 1997. Big names like Woongjin, STX and Tongyang face either a bank-led workout or a court receivership. Almost all construction and shipping companies are in trouble. Bankruptcy is so common among small businesses that it rarely makes the news anymore. The Bank of Korea says the rate of dishonored bill — a check or similar financial instruments whose payment has been refused — rose from 0.08 percent in July to 0.14 percent in August. Read more of this post

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Troubled Korean companies misuse CPs (commercial paper); Companies facing cash shortage problems issue bills until the moment they go bankrupt or seek court receivership. This damage is then passed on to investors

October 12, 2013 Leave a comment

2013-10-11 16:27

Troubled companies misuse CPs

Experts call for more release of firms’ financial information
By Kim Rahn

When several large companies collapsed from liquidity shortage in recent years, it also caused a collapse of retail investors who purchased their corporate bills. While the recent court receivership of Tongyang Group is likely to inflict losses on more than 12,000 such bill buyers, analysts say that the corporate bill system is misused by cash-strapped companies amid loopholes in the regulations. Read more of this post

Filed under Investing Process, Macro Trends

Korean prosecutors raided the homes and offices of top executives of Hyosung Group in an investigation into allegations that the country’s 26th largest conglomerate has engaged in tax evasion and breach of trust for about a decade

October 12, 2013 Leave a comment

Raids hit Hyosung homes, offices

Tipped off by tax men, prosecutors seek clues in ‘massive fraud’

Oct 12,2013

The prosecution yesterday raided the homes and offices of top executives of Hyosung Group in an investigation into allegations that the country’s 26th largest conglomerate has engaged in tax evasion and breach of trust for about a decade. Around 60 prosecutors and investigators from the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office were sent to 10 locations yesterday morning for the raids. The headquarters of Hyosung Group and its financial arm, Hyosung Capital, as well as the homes of Hyosung Chairman Cho Suck-rai and other senior executives, were raided starting at about 7:30 a.m. Read more of this post

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Traders tap Twitter for top stock tips

October 12, 2013 Leave a comment

Last updated: October 11, 2013 11:31 pm

Traders tap Twitter for top stock tips

By James Mackintosh, Investment Editor

As Twitter’s flotation approaches, Wall Street analysts are building models to calculate what it might be worth – with a figure of up to $15bn doing the rounds. But while the IPO is sure to be one of the biggest financial media events of the year, traders are starting to look at Twitter not as a buy or sell in itself but as a way to generate hot tips on other stocks. The idea is a simple one: the 500m daily messages on Twitter put online the sort of gossip usually only available in snippets by eavesdropping in bars or the office lift. Apply some moderately sophisticated computer filtering, and out should pop market-moving news and views investors can use. Read more of this post

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The Worst Acquisitions Apple Ever Made

October 12, 2013 Leave a comment

The Worst Acquisitions Apple Ever Made

KYLE RUSSELL OCT. 11, 2013, 9:34 PM 12,091

Under Steve Jobs, Apple bought the company that was undercutting them with Mac clones. Over the years, some of Apple’s biggest successes have been the end result of the company acquiring another with promise and integrating their technologies with its own in a way that provides real value to users. Mac OS X and iOS are the result of the purchase of NeXT in 1997. iTunes, which truly set the iPod apart from its competitors, came from the purchase of SoundJam MP in 2000. Of course, not all of Apple’s purchases have worked out so well. Some of the technologies Apple has bought never made it to market and others just didn’t seem to fit in with Apple’s other products. Read more of this post

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Mobile Karaoke App Changba Announced 100 million Users,Will Launch A Version for TV

October 12, 2013 Leave a comment

Mobile Karaoke App Changba Announced 100 million Users,Will Launch A Version for TV

By Tracey Xiang on October 11, 2013

Mobile Karaoke App Changba has had 100 million registered users and 30 million monthly active accounts, Chen Hua, founder and CEO of it, disclosed at the company’s annual event today. It’s been no more than one and a half years since its launch. As I called it the startup star of 2012 in China, the mobile Karaoke gained traction immediately after being released in May last year. The second climax occurred after the app was featured by one of the most popular TV shows in China. That helped Changba expand to second-tier cities, according to Mr. Chen. Read more of this post

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Voice Recognition Service Yunzhisheng Reportedly Received Tens of Millions Dollars In Series A Financing, Released Z Watch

October 12, 2013 Leave a comment

Voice Recognition Service Yunzhisheng Reportedly Received Tens of Millions Dollars In Series A Financing, Released Z Watch

By Emma Lee on October 12, 2013

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Yunzhisheng, a Chinese voice recognition startup, secured tens of millions of dollars from a domestic venture capital, citing people familiar with the matter (report in Chinese). The company kicked off voice recognition public cloud last September, becoming the second domestic company to open up this technology to the public after USTC iFlytek. Baidu followed the suit this August. Yunzhisheng now cooperates with Leshi Super TV, smartwatch inWatch, Smartisan ROM, Sougou Voice Aid and NetEase’s EasyChat. It also developed voice plug-ins for WeChat. Additionally, Yunzhisheng have already rolled out three independent apps, namely Voice Aid, Yunzhisheng Voice and Yunzhisheng Input method. Read more of this post

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What Twitter knows that Blackberry didn’t: Successful firms connect with customers via social platforms

October 12, 2013 Leave a comment

Oct. 10, 2013, 6:01 a.m. EDT

What Twitter knows that Blackberry didn’t

Commentary: Successful firms connect with customers via social platforms

By Sangeet Paul Choudary , Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne

Google’s Android grows stronger and is moving beyond smartphones to power cars, home electronics and wearable accessories. A thriving Amazon.com and Kindle are transforming publishing. In the hotel industry, AirBnB is disrupting the market.

Now Twitter (PRE-IPO:TWTR)  , with an ecosystem of more than one million apps, has filed its IPO to raise $1 billion. We used to live in a world where commerce flowed linearly. Firms added value to products, shipped them out and sold them to consumers. Producers and consumers held distinct roles. Value was created upstream and flowed downstream. Read more of this post

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