Food as Fuel

Noticed a trend of using crops to produce fuel for vehicles.

As energy demands devour crops once meant for sustenance, the economics of agriculture are being rewritten

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. "Farmers will be better off, the world will be less dangerously dependent on the Mideast, and we will take a giant step in greenhouse gas reductions," he argues. "There is little downside."

Complete Businessweek story.

Are profits linked to you people?

It requires managers to abandon the command-and-control model that has dominated American business for the better part of a century, trust their people, and do a much better job of sharing corporate wealth.

Read complete article at Businessweek

Where is the money?

Going Private
Hotshot managers are fleeing public companies for the money, freedom, and glamour of private equity

Business school students, meanwhile, are angling to get on the partner track. At the University of Chicago, says Julie Morton, associate dean of MBA career services, résumé writing courses for private-equity candidates are oversubscribed. Stanford University is seeing more interest. More 2005 Stanford MBA grads went into private equity than any other area except consulting and consumer products and services.

These students, not yet wary of the public life, are chasing the huge dollars in private equity. The median annual compensation for a 2005 Harvard Business School grad who went to work for a private-equity firm was $174,500, compared with $135,000 for the rest of the class. Last year's Stanford grads did better, with median total compensation of $232,000, compared with $140,000 for the class. Some private-equity funds pay as much as $300,000 to fresh MBAs.


http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_09/b3973001.htm

How do Doctors practice?

Doctors have traditionally plied their trade.

The research is out there—thousands of studies are conducted on medical practices and products every year. Unfortunately, physicians don’t use much of it. Recent studies show that only about 15% of their decisions are evidence based. For the most part, here’s what doctors rely on instead: obsolete knowledge gained in school, long-standing but never proven traditions, patterns gleaned from experience, the methods they believe in and are most skilled in applying, and information from hordes of vendors with products and services to sell.

ACM Queue - Stop Whining About Outsourcing! - The facts about IT job growth show no reason to complain.

ACM Queue - Stop Whining About Outsourcing! - The facts about IT job growth show no reason to complain.:

"It concluded that most credible studies suggest that over the next decade, for example, about 2 to 3 percent of U.S. IT jobs will migrate each year. That is a reduction of about 20 percent over a decade—still leaving many IT jobs, but perhaps not a rosy picture."

Experience Economy

Companies used to focus on making new, better, or cheaper products and services--and then selling them in the marketplace. Now, the game is to create wonderful and emotional experiences for consumers around whatever is being sold. It’s the experience that counts, not the product. While that business model has long been the preserve of cult-like brands such as Starbucks and Apple, it’s fast becoming the norm in all industries. The goal: to build communities of passionate and loyal consumers.


What management thinkers B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore first identified as The Experience Economy several years ago has finally come to pass.

Businessweek Dec 7 2005

Content creator pays for end user's access to technlogy.

A collect call is a well established idea in telecom. This idea might just work in software. I am not sure if such an attempt has been made in technolgy sector.

The conventional model is that you buy Application software to create, edit business documents. Next you send an attachment of you document to the recipient.


Now I am beginning to wonder if the "Collect call" Idea can be applied to software?

Imagine that you are a big corporation and you can afford expensive software, so you buy the authoring software. In the conventional situation the reciever of the document should have the same application software to read your document.

Suppose you have embeded the permissions into the document such that the reader can just plug in a password and start editing the document without haveing to purchase the application software.

The user basically has a free verison of your application software which does not allow authoring but only reading, now with permissions set he can have access to funtionality , the usage of which has been payied for by the sender.

Ownership of Digital Content.

Banks are allowed to keep lockers and customers have to right to store anything in them. i.e the source of your assest are not questioned at the Banks.

Now if have a few Gigs of content , then the service provider should not question me as to how I have come into the possesion. So as to host the content.

This should be the case, but Digital rights managements look to certify the owner ship of Digital data. what happens when I buy a softcopy of a music piece and then decide to Gift the piece to a friend.