Big investors rethink social media; Nomura to cut jobs; The novel is in danger; For power-starved India, temporary generators

1 Big investors rethink social media (San Francisco Chronicle) The market pummeling of Facebook, Zynga and Groupon has forced some soul searching in Silicon Valley. Venture capitalists and angel investors so hot on social media just months ago have largely turned their backs on the space, investors say. Even for the most promising social startups, they won't pay nearly as high a price to get into deals as they would have a year ago.

The renewed discipline includes avoiding riskier deals, paying less for the promising ones (particularly in the late stages) and holding off on IPOs until growth prospects are clear. After all, if the public markets have said one thing clearly, it's that they want to see a graph line that points up and to the right for the foreseeable future. Wall Street clobbered Facebook, Zynga and Groupon after it became clear that growth was already slowing, dramatically so in the latter two cases.

For the second quarter, Zynga posted a $22 million loss, a stunning turnaround from its $1.4 million profit a year earlier. Worse yet, it cut the financial forecast for the second half of the year roughly in half. The stock has plummeted nearly 70% from the IPO price. Earlier this month, Groupon dropped its third-quarter revenue expectations below those of analysts, sparking its own stock sell-off. Shares are off closer to 80% from the offering price.

2 Nomura to cut jobs (The Guardian) Nomura Holdings is finalising plans to cut hundreds of jobs, mainly in equities and investment banking, in an overhaul aimed at restoring its overseas operations to profitability, people with knowledge of the planning within Japan's largest brokerage said.

While the size and scope of the streamlining are still being debated, one analyst estimated Nomura could target $750m in annual cost savings, on top of a nearly completed $1.bn cost-cutting drive. The plan will be made public early next month, according to people with knowledge of the matter who declined to be identified ahead of an official announcement.

Nomura's European operation, which employs about 4,000 people and generated 76bn yen, or $970m, in losses over the past year as the region slipped into its ongoing debt crisis, will account for the largest portion of the cuts. But Asia outside Japan and the Americas will be impacted as well.

3 The novel is in danger (The Guardian) The novel is in danger, according to Howard Jacobson, the Man Booker prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. The fault, he said, lies not with novelists but with the lack of good readers. Jacobson said he felt a sense of heartbreak when he heard readers say: “I don’t like this book because I don’t sympathise with the main character.”

He added: “The language of sympathy and identity and what we call political correctness is killing the way we read. That’s like the end of civilisation. That is the end. In that little sentence is a misunderstanding so profound about the nature of art, education and why we are reading, that it makes you despair. Who ever told anyone that they read a book in order to find themselves?”

Speaking at the Edinburgh international book festival, Jacobson said the reader needed a strong stomach and ought to be able to withstand the “expression of an ugly point of view” in a book. There was great danger in the politically correct pressure that urged: “You can’t write about women like that, you’ve got to be careful what you say about gays, what you say about Jews … You have to be able to say of the novel that it has free rein — it can go anywhere.”

4 For power-starved India, temporary generators (BBC) Scottish firm Aggreko is holding talks with Indian officials over the possible supply of temporary power in Delhi. The discussions follow a recent massive power failure which left much of the nation without electricity. Aggreko declined to comment on the discussions in India.

However, a source familiar with the situation said Indian officials were talking to several temporary power specialists in a bid to prevent further blackouts. "The power problems in India are monumental and Aggreko alone cannot resolve them," he said. Last month almost half of India was left without power for two days in what was described as one of the world's worst blackouts. More than 600 million people were affected by the power cut after three electricity grids collapsed, one for a second consecutive day.