Posted on August - 23 - 2010
Vital Wave Consulting is a strategy consulting firm that helps technology companies find business in emerging markets. It is based in Palo Alto, Calif., and its clients have included Microsoft, Intel and the World Bank. But when the recession hit, its revenue fell by more than 50 percent.
To survive, Brooke Partridge, who runs the five-year-old firm, rethought her entire operating model. She slashed expenses, got rid of office space, laid off staff — including several close friends — and started going after any business she could find. Having torn her team apart, she had to figure out how to hold together those who remained. Please watch the video below to see what she did. (Do
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Posted on August - 22 - 2010
The auto review issue of is always very popular, due in part to the fact that they can be more impartial by actually buying all the cars they test anonymously and not accepting any outside advertising. (This is not the case with any other car magazine.) Here’s a few charts and graphs from Consumer Reports summarizing their car reliability data by brand.
Long-Term Reliability
This chart below shows a graph of problems vs. age of vehicle for 8 major automakers. The data is from their 2008 Annual Auto Survey, which had more than 1.4 million responses. A typical eight-year-old Volkswagen has almost three times the number of problems as a typical eight-year-old Toyota. [
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Posted on August - 22 - 2010
NEW YORK—U.S. stocks declined Friday, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its second consecutive week of losses as concerns about economic growth weighed on investor sentiment.
The blue-chip index lost 57.59 points, or 0.56%, to finish at 10213.62, leaving it in negative territory for the week, month and year. The Dow remains down 2.1% for the year.
The Nasdaq Composite rose less than one point to 2179.76 while the Standard & Poor’s 500-share index slipped 3.94 points to 1071.69.
A weaker euro on Friday reminded investors of lingering sovereign-debt concerns and added to the week’s push-and-pull between encouraging corporate news and weaker-than-expected economic data. A
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Posted on August - 21 - 2010
You Could Become A Victim Of Online Credit Card Fraud Like I Did
Yep. It happened. I’ve been buying most of the stuff I own online for at least five years now. I am cautious about who I do business with and where I buy, but I buy something online every week and have never had any problems — until last week. It was an old, established account that got my money (so to speak) and it was my own fault that it happened.
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Posted on August - 20 - 2010
There has been some musing lately that much battered insurance company Manulife Financial may be becoming a value play. Manulife’s declining share price may partially have to do with self-created issues caused by the selling of variable annuities which were not hedged to drops in the stock market. However, one of its larger competitors, Sun Life Financial, is also experiencing 52 week lows along with most of the the life and health insurance sector. It appears then that Manulife’s woes are part of a larger downward trend for the entire industry.
Why are life and health insurance companies struggling in general?
Insurance have just as complicated balance sheets as banks and suffer from the same interest rate sensitivities. An
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