1 Engineers, not MBAs, are startup stars (San Francisco Chronicle) It's been hinted at time and again that MBAs don't quite measure up to engineering degrees in the startup world. Now there's data to back up that claim. In a report out by Identified, a startup that pulls Facebook data to track employment trends, the difference isn't seen in the undergrad degrees. The spit happens in graduate school. "The company found 3,337 founder/CEOs have an advanced engineering background compared with 1,016 MBAs," according to the report, which looked at 36 million profiles in the company's database.
2 P&G to lay off 1,600 since Facebook can do the job (San Francisco Chronicle) Reality appears to have finally arrived at Procter & Gamble, the world's largest marketer, whose $10 billion annual ad budget has hurt the company's margins. P&G said it would lay off 1,600 staffers, including marketers, as part of a cost-cutting exercise. More interestingly, CEO Robert McDonald finally seems to have woken up to the fact that he cannot keep increasing P&G's ad budget forever, regardless of what happens to its sales. He said he would have to "moderate" his ad budget because Facebook and Google can be "more efficient" than the traditional media that usually eats the lion's share of P&G's ad budget. In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that the return on investment of the advertising, when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient.
3 More QE in the offing (The Guardian) The prospects of fresh action by the Bank of England to boost growth increased on Tuesday after Threadneedle Street released figures showing a contraction in the money supply and weak borrowing by both companies and households. News of a drying up of credit left City analysts confident that a fresh round of quantitative easing would be announced by the Bank's nine-strong monetary policy committee when it meets next week.
Data from the Bank showed that consumers repaid credit card debts in December, while borrowing by the corporate sector fell at its fastest rate since the summer of 2009. The broad measure of the money supply – which includes notes and coins in circulation and bank balances – dropped by 1.4% in December, the biggest one-month decline on record. Howard Archer, UK analyst at IHS Global Insight, said: "The sharp drop in underlying money supply growth in December makes at least another £50bn of quantitative easing by the Bank of England look even more of a racing certainty at their February policy meeting next week." Threadneedle Street announced the first wave of QE in early 2009, buying £200bn of government gilts over the next 12 months.
4 Sizing up Facebook and Google (The Guardian) Bankers, bloggers, stock market traders and internet entrepreneurs are holding their collective breath. Facebook's record-breaking stock market listing, the largest ever for a technology company, is imminent. The world's leading social site, with 800 million members worldwide, is expected to sell off a 10% stake for between $7.5bn and $10bn, implying an overall value of $75bn to $100bn.
The multiples are on a par with those achieved by Google when it joined the Nasdaq in 2004. By then, Google's superior engineering had allowed it to secure an unassailable position in search, a utility without which the web would be impossible to navigate. Seven years on, and Google is making more than $10bn a quarter with a market capitalisation of $188bn. Does Facebook have the same potential? The bulk of Facebook's income will be from advertisers. WPP, the world's biggest marketing services group, already spends $200m a year with Facebook, an eighth of the $1.6bn it pays to Google.
The experience of Myspace, Britain's Bebo and Friends Reunited would suggest these forums can be passing fads, whose users are quickly drawn to other novelties. The social network founded eight years ago in Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room has soared in membership while rivals melted away, but Google is biting at its heels. The search giant recently pegged staff bonuses to the success of its own social offering, Google+, and the effect has been dramatic. Its membership ramped up to 90m users in January, having doubled in three months.
5 India’s battered toddler (BBC) For close to two weeks, the distressing story of a two-year-old toddler has grabbed India's attention. A teenage girl brought the battered toddler to a hospital in Delhi and left her there. Doctors found she had serious injuries - human bite marks all over her body, broken arms and a partially smashed head. They said they had not seen abuse of this level on such a small child.
We still do not know who the toddler's parents are, why she was abandoned and why she suffered such brutality. The story is, sadly, not unusual and mirrors the neglect, abuse and social bias that girl children suffer in largely patriarchal India. India has one of the highest female infant mortality rates in the world. Unchecked illegal sex selection abortions have led to a skewed sex ratio - 112 boys are born for every 100 girls in India, against the natural sex ratio at birth of 105 boys for every 100 girls.
6 Hong Kong sees difficult year (BBC) Hong Kong has unveiled measures worth $10bn to help local residents and businesses prepare for a "difficult year." The measures, announced in the annual budget, include tax rebates, loan guarantees, and subsidies. Hong Kong's financial secretary said the package would boost the economy by 1.5 percentage points in 2012. John Tsang warned that "bleak" economic prospects for the US and Europe would lead to slower growth in Hong Kong. "I am not optimistic about Hong Kong's export performance in the first half of the year," he said.
7 Eurozone unemployment at 10.4% (BBC) Unemployment in the eurozone hit a record high at the end of last year, the Eurostat agency has said. The jobless rate in the 17 countries that use the single currency was 10.4% in December, unchanged from November's figure which was revised up from 10.3%. Some 16.5 million people were out of work in the eurozone in December, up 751,000 on the year before. The highest unemployment rate remains in Spain (22.9%), while the lowest is in Austria (4.1%).
8 Spanair’s abrupt collapse (BBC) Spain's fourth-largest airline Spanair has collapsed, leaving more than 20,000 passengers stranded across Europe and Africa. The Barcelona-based firm stopped operating on Friday and more than 200 flights were abruptly cancelled. In 2010, Spanair reported an operating loss of 115m euros. The collapse comes after Qatar Airways stopped takeover talks, ending the prospect of further financing, and also reflects weak demand for air travel in Spain. The airline was seen as a flagship of the regional government of Catalonia, which had helped it stay afloat with more than 150m euros of subsidies.
9 $3.8bn net loss for Sharp (Straits Times) Japanese electronics maker Sharp said on Wednesday that it expected a full-year net loss of $3.8 billion, blaming falling prices, a high yen and the global economic slowdown. The firm expects a net loss of $4.8 billion for the year to March.
10 Battle of newspaper brands in India (Wall Street Journal) A battle of brands between two of India’s leading English dailies is brewing, with The Hindu newspaper launching an advertisement campaign suggesting that The Times of India contains trivial news that leaves its readers unenlightened on issues that matter. A senior official at The Times of India declined to comment, while the company’s chief marketing officer didn’t respond to requests for comment about the campaigns. Advertising expert Prahlad Kakkar noted that The Hindu’s “necessary” counter campaign has positioned the newspaper as “aggressive, competitive and informative.” The Times of India is the most widely read English-language newspaper, with a daily readership of 7.4 million, while The Hindu ranks third.
11 Biennale in Kochi (Wall Street Journal) If town twinning is still a done thing, a few months down the line someone may want to place a request to twin Venice and Kochi. Consider the following: both are port towns that made their fortunes in the spice trade and both, to different extents, sit on networks of canals. And soonish, if all goes to plan, Kochi will have its own art biennale, too. The start date has been set: a prophetic 12/12/12. That’s when the city in India’s southern state of Kerala is set to host a three-month long exhibition of Indian and international contemporary art. Modeled on Venice’s Biennale, a century-old art show that takes over Italy’s lagoon city for several months every two years, the idea behind Kochi’s biennale is to provide a platform for contemporary art in India that is neither a gallery nor a trade fair.
The biennale would take place across venues in Kochi. Among them is the newly-restored Durbar Hall, a 19th century court that originally belonged to the Maharaja of Kochi. Potential venues also include dockyards, heritage buildings and warehouses, which are somehow reminiscent of Venice’s Arsenale, a historical shipyard that functions as a vast exhibition space. Kochi would not be the first city to have a biennale inspired by Venice: Berlin, Liverpool and Dakar, among many others, already boast one each. For India, which first participated at the Venice Biennale only last year – the art show’s 54th edition — an event of that scale would be a major leap.
12 India’s trade deficit widens (Wall Street Journal) India's trade deficit in December widened to $12.7 billion from $8.0 billion a year earlier as export growth slowed due to falling global demand. But imports, specially in the non-oil segments, continued to grow. For the April-December period, the trade gap was $133.2 billion, compared with $96.2 billion a year earlier. India's merchandise exports in December grew 6.7% from a year earlier to $25.0 billion while imports rose 19.8% to $37.7 billion.
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