Inc.
Japan’s electronics majors are in crisis: Reports Bloomberg. Last year, Sharp, Sony and Panasonic faced a combined loss of more than $20 billion where as Apple and Samsung made a profit of $35 billion. Combined market capitalisation of the three Japanese electronics companies have gone down to about $29 billion while Apple’s valuation is $173 billion and Samsung is at $601 billion.
Sandberg joins Facebook share sale: Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, and two other members of the senior management team were among the first Facebook employees to sell their shares in the company this week after lock-up restrictions on employee sales in the public market were lifted. Ms Sandberg received $7.44m after selling about 353,000 Facebook shares, according to a filing made with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. Read more here.
New new world
Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites: Starting in February, Jeffrey G. Katz grew increasingly anxious as he watched the steady decline of online traffic to his company’s comparison-shopping Web site, Nextag, from Google’s search engine. Nextag’s response? It doubled its spending on Google paid search advertising in the last five months. ..What is it like to live this way, in a giant’s shadow? The experience of its inhabitants is nuanced and complex, a blend of admiration and fear. Read more here.
Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars: When a man tells you about the time he planned to put a vegetable garden on Mars, you worry about his mental state. But if that same man has since launched multiple rockets that are actually capable of reaching mars– sending them into orbit, Bond-style, from a tiny island in the Pacific– you need to find another diagnosis. Wired magazine looks at the plans of Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and co-founder of Tesla Motors. Read more here.
Entrepreneuring
One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education: In the upcoming issue of Forbes, Michael Noer writes on the world’s largest school which has 10 million students. Don’t believe? Read on. Salman Khan, the 36-year-old founder, runs the Khan academy with 37 employees, mostly software developers with stints at places like Google and Facebook.
Superman Leaves His Job At The Daily Planet To become an entrepreneur? Superman’s alter-ego Clark Kent has announced he, will be leaving his post as a journalist at the print publication, The Daily Planet, in hopes of creating a new media empire. Read more on his forthcoming entrepreneurial stint here.
Technicolor
How Science Can Build a Better You: In this article, David Ewing Duncan talks about the progress made by science in enhancing human capabilities. In a future presidential election, would you vote for a candidate who had neural implants that helped optimize his or her alertness and functionality during a crisis, or in a candidates’ debate? Would you vote for a commander in chief who wasn’t equipped with such a device? These are not tinfoil-on-the-head questions but such devices are already in use, he writes. Read more.
Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars: When a man tells you about the time he planned to put a vegetable garden on Mars, you worry about his mental state. But if that same man has since launched multiple rockets that are actually capable of reaching mars– sending them into orbit, Bond-style, from a tiny island in the Pacific– you need to find another diagnosis. Wired magazine looks at the plans of Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and co-founder of Tesla Motors. Read more here.
Gadgetvice
Linus Torvalds’s tirade on pathetic laptop resolutions: Please. Stop with the “retina” crap, just call it “reasonable resolution”. The fact that laptops stagnated ten years ago (and even regressed, in many cases) at around half that in both directions is just sad. Follow the thread here.
Now is not the time to buy Microsoft’s Surface: The Surface with Windows RT well designed, sturdily constructed, and has a lot going for it, including its ability to run Microsoft Office, connect to thousands of USB peripherals like printers and mice, interact with your Xbox 360 using the SmartGlass app, and work with Microsoft’s unique keyboard covers. However, it has almost as many failings, starting with the fact that very few apps are currently available for Windows RT. Read more here.
Big picture
What’s troubling India? Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University takes a look at what’s troubling India. The country’s fall from macroeconomic grace is a lamentable turn of events, he writes. Just a couple of years ago, India was developing a reputation as the cool place to invest. Heads of state tripped over one another to meet business leaders in Mumbai, hoping to pave the way for a significant expansion of trade and investment. Now their interest has faded, along with the macroeconomic numbers. Read more.
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The other financial crisis: Two variants of financial crisis continue to wreak havoc on Western economies, fueling joblessness and poverty: the one that we read about regularly in newspapers, involving governments around the world; and a less visible one at the level of small and medium-size businesses and households. Until both are addressed properly, the West will remain burdened by sluggish growth, persistently high unemployment, and excessive income and wealth inequality. Read more.
Lifehack
How Do You Raise a Prodigy?: Remember the Tiger mom stories? This is not that. But even better. Read Andrew Solomon, a lecturer in psychiatry at Cornell on how to raise children who are able to function at an advanced adult level in some domain before the age of 12. “Prodigy” derives from the Latin “prodigium,” a monster that violates the natural order. These children have differences so evident as to resemble a birth defect, and it was in that context that I came to investigate them. Read more here.
The DNA of Product Management: Hunter Walk, the director of product management at Google writes about a few things he tries to live by as a product manager. The truth is that you serve at the behest of your colleagues – you can’t win without your team, and you certainly won’t succeed without their backing. Read more here.
» TheSunnyMag: Superman to become an entrepreneur? And the DNA of product management @Pluggd.in.
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