Posted on
Oct 19 2007 5:35 AM
by
Asif
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I have a personal vendetta against cognitive biases. I think one of the best ways to be successful in life is not to make any major mistakes - the kind that send you into bankruptcy, surgery, divorce, or any other traumatic life altering situation. Of course, the flip side of that coin is that not taking any risks is a sure way to a life of mediocrity.
I balance these two things by trying to take risks smartly. And that means avoiding lousy decisions because of cognitive biases. The problem is that cognitive biases are so dangerous because we don't know we have them and don't recognize when we fall prey to them. I am always on guard for this very reason. I spend a lot of time, when I make decisions, examining my thought processes............
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Not so long ago, the field of cable TV was a small-time business. Dozens of local networks, often run by families—think John Rigas' Adelphia Communications, for example—operated within tiny jurisdictions that regulators carved out as franchises. Now, with the cable industry scaling up to take on telecom in traditional telephony areas, those local barriers and small family players are giving way to giants—many of which may soon go global with private equity buyouts. .....
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It's Memorial Day weekend and Venice Beach will be packed with hundreds of thousands of beach goer's spending time at Southern California's #1 tourist attraction bringing in the start of summer. Unfortunately they will all miss Paul and Jule Embry of Paihia Mosaics who have decided to participate in the Fiesta Hermosa (Beach) Art Show about ten miles south along the coast instead of manning their spot on the Boardwalk.....
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Made To Stick may be the best business book of 2007. Written by brothers who are also business professors, it is rare in that it is well researched and theoretical, yet practical at the same time. It doesn't contain magic bullets and the authors are honest enough to note that some ideas just can't be made that "sticky."
The book is about "stickiness," and looks at ideas that people tend to remember and pass on. It's a combination of marketing, memetics, psychology, and business strategy all rolled into one. The stories are concrete, and very useful. The book is worth the price just for the....
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Seeking to climb past Chinese rival Lenovo to become the world's No. 3 PC maker, Acer has tied up with the iconic Italian automaker to convey to consumers that its computers have a special sleekness to them — a distinction, it hopes, that separates its machines from the plain boxes of other manufacturers.
The colorful marketing campaign, complete with claims of "easy to spot dashboard controls" and "a vision of perfection," is a key part of Acer's retail push in the United States, which it withdrew from in the 1990s after a disastrous first foray, and in China, Lenovo's home turf.
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Nokia Siemens Networks BV claims to be among the top three in the field with combined revenues of more than euro17 billion (US$22 billion) in 2006, and aims to be the market leader.
"Already starting as one of the leaders of the industry, we have a clear objective: to become number one," said Simon Beresford-Wylie, chief executive officer of Nokia Siemens Networks. "We want to be the number one communications enabler for our customers. We also want to be known for operating with the highest standards of ethics and integrity."
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The claim underpins Tesco's response to the Competition Commission's (CC) 'emerging thinking' report which highlights the sales growth and land ownership of the major supermarkets as areas of concern.
Instead Tesco's submission insists that it makes economic sense for the grocery market to adopt cost-efficient national strategies.
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MUMBAI (Reuters) - Half a century ago, Renault (RENA.PA: Quote) and Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. (MAHM.BO: Quote) failed to get off the ground a venture to make a cheap car for the local Indian market priced at a princely $158. Nowadays, that might buy you a set of new tires, but the two are back in partnership vying with global automakers to grab a slice of an Indian car market that is forecast to nearly double to 2 million units by 2010, if not sooner. Read the rest of this entry »
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Mercedes-Benz is starting a comprehensive integrated marketing campaign for the new Mercedes-Benz C-Class, which will be introduced to the market on March 31, 2007. Using the slogan “C-for Yourself,” the brand with the star is conducting a variety of communication activities via several channels to support the sales launch of its highest-volume model series. The primary goal of the campaign is to convince customers around the world of the advantages of the versatile product concept behind the new Mercedes-Benz C-Class sedan, including two distinct front-end designs and outstanding comfort, agility and safety. Read the rest of this entry »
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iCrossing (http://www.icrossing.com/), a digital marketing agency committed to people's desire to find, announced today that it will acquire Sharp Analytics, a leader in next generation business intelligence solutions. This move combines iCrossing's industry-leading digital marketing services with Sharp Analytics's proprietary marketing dashboard technology, SharpView(TM), to provide Fortune 500 marketers - and their agencies - the most comprehensive offline to online campaign insight available in the industry. Read the rest of this entry »
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Looking to build on its channel momentum, Intel this week plans to unveil to partners its next-generation Centrino Duo and vPro platforms as well as its Intel Inside 2007 program. At the Intel Solutions Summit 2007 in San Diego, executives will highlight emerging mobile, desktop and server opportunities for system builders and Premier partners based on the upcoming "Santa Rosa" Centrino Duo processor, which is expected to launch in May, sources close to the company said. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted on
Mar 15 2007 2:39 PM
by
Xtrmius
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Britain's Cadbury Schweppes Plc on Thursday said it was planning to split its global confectionery division and its American soft drinks into two separate businesses to help unlock value for shareholders.
The move comes after Cadbury, the world's largest confectionery group, revealed on Tuesday that U.S. activist investor Nelson Peltz had taken a 2.98 percent stake and analysts said Peltz would pressure Cadbury to split into two.
Cadbury shares ended on Wednesday at 602 pence valuing the group at 12.6 billion pounds ($24.2 billion), but analysts said if the group was split into two focused groups its combined value would increase significantly.
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Philips has recently confirmed that they’ll be phasing out the production of plasma TVs.
CEO of Philips Consumer Electronics, Rudy Provoost, said at a recent press event in Hong Kong that, from later this year, new plasma TVs would only be sold in North America and Australia.
Market analysts have said that Philips’ decision could be related to the strong growth of the LCD TV market, and also that, whilst it has a 32.9% stake in LG.Philips LCD, it doesn’t have any plasma plants to support its own-brand plasma TV business.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) surpassed HP in worldwide external disk storage systems revenue, with a share of 18.6 percent to HP’s 13.7 percent, for the fourth quarter of 2006. IBM also achieved a revenue share of 15.1 percent share to HP’s 14.3 percent for the full year 2006, according to data released by IDC [1]. Growing 15.5 percent year over year, IBM also posted the fastest growth of the top five vendors in the fourth quarter, outpacing Dell, EMC, Hewlett-Packard and Hitachi. Additionally, IBM posted the fastest storage software growth among the top storage vendors. Read the rest of this entry »
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New Century Financial has edged closer to collapse after its creditors, including Barclays Bank, threatened to stop funding the company, the second largest sub-prime lender in the US. Shares in New Century were suspended pending an announcement. The stock has already lost 89 per cent of its value this month and plunged a further 48 per cent in early trading. Read the rest of this entry »
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A couple of months ago I found myself near Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, standing in front of a high-end cheese shop and Range Rover Sports, and an additional 30 or so LR3s. The irony is that these bucks-up mega-consumers -- who would happily nuke a Starbucks if their doppio macchiato isn't steamed just so -- willingly put up with the aggravation of owning a Land Rover product. How dysfunctional is this relationship? In the 2006 J.D. Power Initial Quality Study (problems per 100 vehicles within 90 days of purchase), Land Rover registered a basement-dwelling 204. Porsche leads the industry with 91. The industry average is 124. Read the rest of this entry »
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In 1992, Aston Martin, the British sports car brand made famous by James Bond, sold only 46 cars. Last year, sales rose to a record 7,000, more than 152 times the 1992 figure. By nearly all accounts, Aston Martin is a Ford Motor Co. success story, a shining star for the struggling auto giant that acquired a controlling stake in the British company two decades ago and full ownership in 1994. Read the rest of this entry »
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While everyone knows that Linux is now pervasive in IT organizations, the slippery nature of open source software makes it difficult to gauge how deeply it has penetrated into the data centers of the world. And it is even harder to reckon how much money those Linux investments represent, since in many cases the costs associated with Linux are soft ones--paying system administrators to patch machines--rather than hard ones--buying a license and support contract from a third-party vendor. And if Linux is hard to quantify, other open source software presents even more of a challenge. Read the rest of this entry »
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One of the reasons why Hewlett-Packard bought Compaq more than six years ago was to get its hands on its lucrative and large server business; the other was to get its hands on Compaq's disk array business, which had an even more dominant piece of that pie. For years, HP has outsold IBM in the disk array business, but in 2006, according to research by Gartner, Big Blue finally surpassed HP to take the number two spot in the external RAID disk array market. Read the rest of this entry »
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) surpassed HP in worldwide external disk storage systems revenue, with a share of 18.6 percent to HP's 13.7 percent, for the fourth quarter of 2006. IBM also achieved a revenue share of 15.1 percent share to HP's 14.3 percent for the full year 2006, according to data released by IDC [1]. Growing 15.5 percent year over year, IBM also posted the fastest growth of the top five vendors in the fourth quarter, outpacing Dell, EMC, Hewlett-Packard and Hitachi. Additionally, IBM posted the fastest storage software growth among the top storage vendors. Read the rest of this entry »
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