1 'Silicon Valley needs missionaries nor mercenaries' (Vinod Khosla in The New York Times) Some people seem to think that getting acquired should be the highest aspiration for an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. I disagree vehemently. I think that mindset does a disservice to the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and around the world. This is exactly the wrong way to think about building a start-up not only because it develops the wrong company culture, but on a large scale it can poison the unique and innovative ecosystem that has developed in Silicon Valley over the past 40 years.
You want missionaries, not mercenaries – passionate, maniacally-focused founders who believe in a vision. There are of course mercenaries and people setting up for "acqui-hires" in the valley as well, but that is not what Silicon Valley’s special sauce is about. Having a vision does not prevent you from being acquired, but starting a company to "do a deal" is not what Silicon Valley culture is about even if most companies that have a successful exit are acquired.
2 The couch potato goes global (The New York Times) Last month, researchers affiliated with the World Health Organization and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine reported that, worldwide, people's waistlines are expanding, with the total combined weight of human beings on Earth now exceeding 287 million tons. About 3.5 million tons of that global human biomass is due to obesity, a third of which exists in North America, although we account for only 6% of the world’s population. The study, however, did not address possible underlying causes of the ever-growing weight of nations.
The latest figures suggest that the world’s population has become disturbingly inactive. According to the researchers’ calculations, 31.1% of the world’s adults, or about 1.5 billion people, are almost completely sedentary, meaning that they do not meet the minimum recommendation of 150 minutes of walking or other moderate activity per week, or about 20 minutes a day. Teenagers are faring even worse. More than 80% of young people ages 13 to 15 worldwide are not getting the hour a day of vigorous exercise recommended for their age group.
3 Super-rich 'hiding' $21tn (BBC) A global super-rich elite had at least $21 trillion hidden in secret tax havens by the end of 2010, according to a major study. The figure is equivalent to the size of the US and Japanese economies combined. The Price of Offshore Revisited was written by James Henry, a former chief economist at the consultancy McKinsey, for the Tax Justice Network. Tax expert and UK government adviser John Whiting said he was sceptical that the amount hidden was so large.
Mr Henry said his $21tn is actually a conservative figure and the true scale could be $32tn. A trillion is 1,000 billion. The report comes amid growing public and political concern about tax avoidance and evasion. Some authorities, including in Germany, have even paid for information on alleged tax evaders stolen from banks. Mr Henry said that the super-rich move money around the globe through an "industrious bevy of professional enablers in private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries".
4 When customers won't be cattle (The Wall Street Journal) Since the Industrial Revolution, the only way a company could scale up in productivity and profit was by treating customers as populations rather than as individuals — and by treating employees as positions on an organization chart rather than as unique sources of talent and ideas. The Internet has challenged that system by giving individuals the same power. Any of us can now communicate with anybody else, anywhere in the world, at costs close to zero.
But the Internet is young, and most development work has been done to improve the supply side of the marketplace. Individual customers have benefited, but improving their own native technical capacities has attracted relatively little interest from developers or investors. As a result, big business continues to believe that a free market is one in which customers get to choose their captors. Choosing among AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon for your new smartphone is like choosing where you'd like to live under house arrest. It's why marketers still talk about customers as "targets" they can "acquire," "control," "manage" and "lock in," as if they were cattle.
The only way to stop this insanity is for customers to start showing up as human beings and not just as cattle to be herded. In the not-too-distant future, you will be able, for example, to change your contact information with many vendors at once, rather than many times, over and over, at many different websites. You will no longer have to "accept" agreements that aren't worth reading because, as we all know, they cover the other party's butt but expose yours.
5 India's pampered pooches (Straits Times) Oreo marked her birthday this year with a pool party in a posh New Delhi neighbourhood. Nothing unusual - except that the two-year-old is a dog. The Dalmatian celebrated with a cake of flour, cheese and chicken tikkas, garnished with a rib-shaped biscuit on top and spent the day splashing in a swimming pool and chasing her 20 canine friends at a sprawling dog resort. 'It was like I was having my daughter's birthday party,'said Ms Priyamvada Sharma, Oreo's owner, who also has a 2-year-old female Labrador. 'We had every possible type of biscuit and bone any pet shop would have.'
You want missionaries, not mercenaries – passionate, maniacally-focused founders who believe in a vision. There are of course mercenaries and people setting up for "acqui-hires" in the valley as well, but that is not what Silicon Valley’s special sauce is about. Having a vision does not prevent you from being acquired, but starting a company to "do a deal" is not what Silicon Valley culture is about even if most companies that have a successful exit are acquired.
2 The couch potato goes global (The New York Times) Last month, researchers affiliated with the World Health Organization and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine reported that, worldwide, people's waistlines are expanding, with the total combined weight of human beings on Earth now exceeding 287 million tons. About 3.5 million tons of that global human biomass is due to obesity, a third of which exists in North America, although we account for only 6% of the world’s population. The study, however, did not address possible underlying causes of the ever-growing weight of nations.
The latest figures suggest that the world’s population has become disturbingly inactive. According to the researchers’ calculations, 31.1% of the world’s adults, or about 1.5 billion people, are almost completely sedentary, meaning that they do not meet the minimum recommendation of 150 minutes of walking or other moderate activity per week, or about 20 minutes a day. Teenagers are faring even worse. More than 80% of young people ages 13 to 15 worldwide are not getting the hour a day of vigorous exercise recommended for their age group.
3 Super-rich 'hiding' $21tn (BBC) A global super-rich elite had at least $21 trillion hidden in secret tax havens by the end of 2010, according to a major study. The figure is equivalent to the size of the US and Japanese economies combined. The Price of Offshore Revisited was written by James Henry, a former chief economist at the consultancy McKinsey, for the Tax Justice Network. Tax expert and UK government adviser John Whiting said he was sceptical that the amount hidden was so large.
Mr Henry said his $21tn is actually a conservative figure and the true scale could be $32tn. A trillion is 1,000 billion. The report comes amid growing public and political concern about tax avoidance and evasion. Some authorities, including in Germany, have even paid for information on alleged tax evaders stolen from banks. Mr Henry said that the super-rich move money around the globe through an "industrious bevy of professional enablers in private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries".
4 When customers won't be cattle (The Wall Street Journal) Since the Industrial Revolution, the only way a company could scale up in productivity and profit was by treating customers as populations rather than as individuals — and by treating employees as positions on an organization chart rather than as unique sources of talent and ideas. The Internet has challenged that system by giving individuals the same power. Any of us can now communicate with anybody else, anywhere in the world, at costs close to zero.
But the Internet is young, and most development work has been done to improve the supply side of the marketplace. Individual customers have benefited, but improving their own native technical capacities has attracted relatively little interest from developers or investors. As a result, big business continues to believe that a free market is one in which customers get to choose their captors. Choosing among AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon for your new smartphone is like choosing where you'd like to live under house arrest. It's why marketers still talk about customers as "targets" they can "acquire," "control," "manage" and "lock in," as if they were cattle.
The only way to stop this insanity is for customers to start showing up as human beings and not just as cattle to be herded. In the not-too-distant future, you will be able, for example, to change your contact information with many vendors at once, rather than many times, over and over, at many different websites. You will no longer have to "accept" agreements that aren't worth reading because, as we all know, they cover the other party's butt but expose yours.
5 India's pampered pooches (Straits Times) Oreo marked her birthday this year with a pool party in a posh New Delhi neighbourhood. Nothing unusual - except that the two-year-old is a dog. The Dalmatian celebrated with a cake of flour, cheese and chicken tikkas, garnished with a rib-shaped biscuit on top and spent the day splashing in a swimming pool and chasing her 20 canine friends at a sprawling dog resort. 'It was like I was having my daughter's birthday party,'said Ms Priyamvada Sharma, Oreo's owner, who also has a 2-year-old female Labrador. 'We had every possible type of biscuit and bone any pet shop would have.'
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