Jackpot.com was the highest selling domain name in April 2012.The domain name was sold for $500,000 through Moniker.

1. Jackpot.com $500,000
2. Toys.xxx $125,000
3. Indi.com $115,000
4. Sommerhus.dk $114,625
5. Movies.xxx $90,000
6. Bohe.com $85,000
7. Hot.net $74,277
8. WirelessPhones.com $70,000
9. GeschenKideen.de $65,600
10. PrinterCartridges.com $60,000
11. Acronyms.com $60,000
12. LiveDoc.com $55,000
13. Mergers,com $50,000
14. GameGlobe.com $50,000
15. Seri.com $45,000

At No. 42, Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkin Caufield & Byer has been called an internet oracle. She (literally) wrote the book on the web in 1995 when she penned “The Internet Report” for Morgan Stanley and has since been involved in some of the biggest investments and acquisitions in recent years. . She sits on the board of mobile payments company Square and is also active with investments Groupon, Spotify, Legalzoom and One Kings Lane.
How Women Are Getting Left Out of the Venture Capital Game Leslie Bradshaw Leslie Bradshaw Contributor
Men Who Start Companies for Women: The Rise of Pink-Collar Businessmen Daily Muse Daily Muse Contributor
10 images Photos: Midas Top 10
An Angel Investor’s Good Advice for Women-Led Startups (And Everyone Else) O’Reilly Media O’Reilly Media Contributor

No. 76, Ruby Lu, is new on the 2012 list. The former Goldman Sachs banker is a partner at DCM where she led the firm’s investment in BitAuto, China’s answer to AutoTrader, which went public in 2010 (current market cap: $182 million), and Chinese ecommerce site Dangdang, which went public in 2010 (current market cap: $838 million), where she also sits on the board.

Accel’s Theresia Gouw Ranzetta sits at No. 92. Ranzetta has been an active investor in many a women-led startup so we consider her an especially bright star on the Midas list. She was an investor in LearnVest, ModCloth and video-based ecommerce site Joyus. She also led the investment in (non-female) lifestyle web publisher Glam Media, which is reportedly planning to file for an IPO this year.

Another newcomer, Jenny Lee of GGV Capital, is just behind Ranzetta at No. 94. She invests primarily in Chinese startups but also brokers deals with her U.S. colleagues at the firm. In 2004 she invested in software-development outsourcing service HiSoft, which went public in 2012 as well as data center services provider 21 Vianet in 2008, which went public in 2011.

The fifth and final woman in the list is Adele Oliva, a Philadelphia-based investor with Quaker Partners, which specializes in biotech and healthcare ventures. She is No. 97. Since joining the firm in 2007, Oliva has invested in Ascent Healthcare Solutions, which was acquired by Stryker Corp. for $525 million in 2009; Prometheus Laboratories, which was acquired by Nestle Health Science in May 2011 and Oceana Therapeutics, which was acquired by Salix Pharmaceuticals for $300 million in November 2011.

And that’s all for the ladies, which paints a pretty bleak portrait of the gender balance landscape in venture capital and, by association, gives perspective to how few female-led companies ultimately receive institutional funding. In January, Forbes contributor (and JESS3 founder) Leslie Bradshaw laid the problem bare: “A flurry of articles have been written on the “women and startups” problem,” she wrote. “The same issues are brought up again and again, but one issue that hasn’t been given much attention and scrutiny is the significance of the fact that there are practically no female VC’s.”

There are, of course, initiatives in place to change these ratios, but they themselves are startups. Here in New York, the Pipeline Fellowship, founded by Natalia Oberti Noguera, aims to educate female philanthropists to become investors in female-led ventures while the new Women Innovate Mobile accelerator is encouraging female founders with encouragement and cold, hard cash. And, of course, there are angel investors, most notably Gotham Gal Joanne Wilson who are making strides in the right direction. But five women on a list of 100 is a blunt reminder that there is much, much, more work to be done.

Above article is written by Meghan Casserly, Forbes

Every reporter, editor, anchor and producer hired at Bloomberg News gets a copy of The Bloomberg Way, a spiral-bound, 376-page tome that guides more than 2,700 news professionals to write about the world’s stocks, bonds, commodities, companies, currencies and economies. Written by editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler, the book is a style guide and manifesto, detailing how Bloomberg employees should write, report and behave.

Until November 2011, when Bloomberg made the book’s 12th edition public, The Bloomberg Way was available only to employees. Now readers can see for themselves how journalists in one of the world’s largest news organizations work.

“The Bloomberg Way is our guide to learning,” Winkler says in the introduction, noting that when the first edition was published in 1991, there was no manual for the emerging real-time business newsroom. The Bloomberg Way was meant to be that guide, helping reporters and editors translate business stories that other news outlets ignored. “If we could make Bloomberg’s printed and spoken word lucid enough, even to Aunt Agatha, Bloomberg would become a journalistic benchmark for instant perspective on money. And money increasingly was becoming the mother of all stories,” Winkler writes.

From the beginning, Bloomberg News was unusual. Created as part of Bloomberg L.P., the financial information company founded by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg in 1982, its readers were financial professionals, investors and traders who leased computer terminals to get second-by-second insights on world markets. The newsroom’s mandate was “to provide definitive coverage of economies, markets, companies and industries worldwide.” Bloomberg stories were not printed on paper; they were flashed across computers screens, and the point of every story was clear: Present the facts that mattered most, as quickly and clearly as possible.

The Bloomberg Way is filled with formulas to achieve that goal. Bloomberg stories should fulfill “The Five Fs” — that is, they must be First, Factual, Fastest, Final and take Future events into account. No story is complete if it doesn’t include “Five Easy Pieces” — information about the markets, the economy, government, politics and companies. The ideal lead is four paragraphs long and should always include a theme, a quotation, details and a nut paragraph that explains what is at stake. “Bloomberg News stories have a structure as immutable as the rules that govern sonnets and symphonies,” Winkler writes.

For aspiring business reporters or anyone who wants to better understand markets, economies and companies, The Bloomberg Way offers chapters on how journalists should cover them. From credit-default swaps to collateralized-debt obligations, technical analysis to Fibonacci charts, it defines financial terms without jargon.

Winkler expects reporters and editors to plan ahead, instructing them to write several story templates in advance of every event. They should maintain lists of the top 10 most important companies, executives, investors and experts on their beats, and know how to reach sources at any hour, if necessary. “Nothing makes people luckier than preparation,” writes Winkler in a chapter devoted to just that. “Winners are meticulous about preparing. They are obsessed with preparing. That is what builds confidence.”

Accuracy is key. “We want to impress with the quality of our information, not the intricacy of our prose,” Winkler writes. “Accuracy is the most important principle in journalism. There is no such thing as being first with news if we’re wrong.”

If growth is any indication, the formulas work. Little more than two decades after the first Bloomberg byline went out, the news service has expanded to 146 news bureaus in 72 countries producing 5,000 stories a day. Bloomberg Television reaches 310 million households globally. The company bought BusinessWeek — now Bloomberg Businessweek — from McGraw-Hill in 2009, created Bloomberg Government in 2010, and in September bought the Bureau of National Affairs, an Arlington, Va.-based legal news service, for just under $1 billion in cash.

One prize Bloomberg News hasn’t yet won is a Pulitzer. In journalism circles, some attribute that to the dictates of Bloomberg style. A former Wall Street Journal reporter known for wearing bowties and succumbing to an explosive temper — the website Gawker once called Winkler “one of the angriest men in media” — Winkler has been rumored to prohibit reporters from using adjectives, adverbs or even the word “but.”

A careful reading of The Bloomberg Way shows that Winkler’s rules are not as rigid as journo-legend says. Inspired by the classic writing guide The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, Winkler’s guidance echoes many tenets of good writing: “Prefer the short to the long. Prefer the familiar to the fancy. Prefer the specific word to the abstract.”

Winkler’s prescription for writing even includes what should be written first — namely, the headline. “Before reporters write a word of narrative — even the lead — they should write the headline,” Winkler declares. “Nothing focuses a story better than the discipline of first having to report its contents in 63 characters. Asking, ‘What’s the headline?’ helps to focus leads, which are often too long or have too many thoughts.”

Winkler argues that writing well means writing accurately. “The Bloomberg Way insists that reporters show, not tell, and not rely on modifiers, because adjectives and adverbs are imprecise,” Winkler writes. “Avoid adverbs that are loaded with assertions: lavishly compensated, hugely successful, flatly denied, greatly underestimated. The best reporters assemble the details, anecdotes and comments and then let the readers decide who’s right, wrong, guilty or innocent.”

Winkler expands the philosophy to characterizations and labels. “Labels mean different things to different people. In politics, who decides whether someone is moderate, conservative, liberal, left wing, right wing?” Winkler asks. Likewise, characterizations reveal judgments that reporters should avoid. Focus on facts, Winkler says, and report what people say and do. A lead asserting that a company “tried to calm fears of big cutbacks” is rewritten to explain the specific: The company’s chief executive “pledged in a letter” that he “wouldn’t close any breweries for half a century.”

As for the famous “but” ban, The Bloomberg Way does offer some wiggle room: The word can be used when “the intent is to signal an about-face.” Otherwise, clauses that start with “although,” “but,” “despite” or “however” will “confuse more than clarify” by connecting dissimilar ideas and taking readers in two different directions. Winkler advises writers to “focus on the part of the sentence to emphasize rather than put it in opposition to another point.”

For example, “Instead of saying ‘You disappoint me, but I’ll always love you,’ the Bloomberg Way says: ‘You disappoint me, and I’ll always love you,’” Winkler writes. “The difference in meaning is profound. Reporting should never be restrained by unnecessary qualification and qualification should never be ambiguous.”

Writing in the Bloomberg Way is hard. It doesn’t feel natural. After all, most people use the word “but.” But Winkler’s “but” rule is a profound lesson not just in writing but thinking.

Er, scratch that.

Avoiding the word “but” sharpens a writer’s focus. So does writing without modifiers, avoiding labels and characterizations, and coming up with a headline before starting to write. Imagine how The Bloomberg Way could be applied to situations beyond the newsroom. How would public discourse change if it were purged of labels and characterizations? How many thousands of conferences, emails, speeches and proposals would be improved — even eliminated, for that matter — if they were boiled down to a nine-word headline first? And how differently might we think and communicate — and maybe even feel — if we all could stop using the word “but”?

Published: January 2012 @ Wharton

But U.S. job seekers and the currently employed as well should exercise caution, according to Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Janice Bellace. She says in the U.S., anyone trying to challenge such a practice in court would have almost no legal ground to stand on. “People think they have more rights than they actually have; they seem to think they have rights that are just not there,” she says.

For example, she notes that employment law for decades has said that non-unionized workers could always be fired for taking actions that publicly disparage their employers. But 30 years ago, doing so was relatively complicated, and catching workers in the act was just as difficult. “When I was in law school, we used to read about cases where it did happen because it was so unusual,” Bellace recalls. “If you were talking to your friends about how much you hated your boss, you probably did it face-to-face. Although technically, under the law you might have gotten in trouble, nobody ever knew about it.”

But social media has been a game changer. “Technology has made it so much simpler for employees to get into trouble,” Bellace says. Years ago, an employee might have written a letter to a newspaper tearing apart an employer, “but it took time to sit down and type it out. Now you can Tweet it so simply. People say things before their mind stops them and says, ‘What am I doing?’”

The law is equally devoid of traction for potential employees who might be asked to provide access to their Facebook accounts, Bellace notes. “It has always been the case that employers could ask others about you for a reference and, if you refuse to give them names, they can refuse to hire you,” she says. “I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but it’s the state of the law.”

So why are the current incidents causing such an uproar? “Employees think that their private life is protected by some right of privacy and that either a current or potential employer shouldn’t be able to invade their private lives.” But, legally, in the U.S. there is little guarantee of that, Bellace says.

“Parts of the Bill of Rights refer to the right of the citizen or person against the state,” she notes. “No state can come into your house and ask to read your diary or computer files without a search warrant. It doesn’t say anything about an employer.” Last week, Maryland legislators passed what is believed to be a first of its kind bill that prohibits employers from requiring job applicants to hand over access to private social media accounts. States including California, Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois are considering similar legislation. Bellace says that she knows of no previous state law that explicitly offers this right of privacy, nor any case law that would support an argument in court, “although we may begin to see that.”

She points out that circumstances are very different in other countries where statutes exist that recognize an individual’s right to privacy. In Germany, for example, laws date back to the post World War II era when officials there sought to ensure that people could not be fired from their jobs for aspects of their personal lives, as they had been under the Nazi regime. A few years ago, Bellace attended a conference in Australia and recalls that the organization later couldn’t get a list of attendees from the Australian firm it hired to plan the convention because the law in that country prohibits the sharing of data without permission from the individual.

“Some of these countries developed laws before social media took off,” she notes. “That adds an interesting wrinkle in those countries because they are building on a foundation of law that says you own your information.”

Bellace says even people in the U.S. who try to sue an employer – one who has asked for access to social media accounts — on the grounds of discriminatory hiring practices (because the accounts may contain information such as an applicant’s age or race) may have trouble making a case. The employer could argue that it is asking all job candidates to provide the access and thus applying the policy broadly, Bellace points out, and if that is the case, the job seeker would have to prove that the company violated the law after checking out the entire applicant pool, which could be harder to prove.

“How do you know why others didn’t get hired? How do you know why you didn’t get hired?” Bellace asks. “That’s why employment lawsuits are so hard to bring.”

She predicts that there will eventually be further changes in the law “because younger people used to interacting with others online through social media will be more disturbed by what they view as an unreasonable intrusion into their private lives and therefore may propose legislation.” But Bellace adds that it will be some time “before people completely coalesce around this notion that you have a right to a private life and privacy in online communications.”

Written by Professor: Janice R. Bellace @ wharton

For instance, when Microsoft launched “decision-based” features for its Bing search engine, Google quickly implemented similar functions in order to maintain its dominance in search. When Google tried to outpace Facebook by creating a social network with features that the dominant site lacked, such as finer controls over how information is shared, Facebook simply added similar bells and whistles to its own service. And Facebook earlier this month bought social photo sharing app Instagram, paying $1 billion to ensure that it would not lose control of a potentially crucial market.

Incumbent companies say that such measures are necessary when users are just one click away from abandoning a service or program entirely. For example, when Google chairman Eric Schmidt spoke at a Senate antitrust subcommittee hearing last September, he noted that ensuring the company’s continued success “requires constant investment and innovation…. If Google fails at this effort, users can and will switch. The cost of going elsewhere is zero.”

In its filing for an initial public offering, Facebook made a similar claim — that despite the site’s more than 800 million active users, customers still aren’t locked in. “A number of other social networking companies that achieved early popularity have since seen their active user bases or levels of engagement decline, in some cases precipitously,” according to the filing. “There is no guarantee that we will not experience similar erosion.”

In reality, however, consumers often don’t switch, even if the costs are minimal, experts say, and successful first movers often gain a significant advantage over upstart competitors. But that is not to say that dominant firms shouldn’t watch their backs — there is always the chance that a nimble newcomer will enter a market and eat away at the established company’s user base.

“Companies often talk about how a competitor is just one click away [from overtaking them]…. It’s not that straightforward,” says Kartik Hosanagar, an operations and information management professor at Wharton. “People have inertia and also incur learning costs to switch to a new product or provider. So, to get consumers to switch, you cannot be as good or slightly better. You have to be much, much better along dimensions that matter to consumers.”

Businesses copying each other’s features to stay competitive is nothing new, notes Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach. The difference in the tech sector — and particularly on the Internet — is that it’s easier. Firms in that space are typically selling virtual goods, and incumbents can often replicate new features with the expertise and equipment they already have in house.

Ecosystem Lock-In

It has always been easy for businesses to go toe-to-toe on product features. “The significant thing on the Internet is ecosystem lock-in,” according to Wharton operations and information management professor Eric Clemons. “Everyone can have the same features. [But] the guy who wins first is difficult to depose.”

Clemons says ecosystem lock-in is not impossible to break, but it is highly difficult. For instance, Yahoo, which many consider to be past its prime, is still a dominant player on the web with 700 million active users a month. AOL, which is also considered to be antiquated by some critics, is a top-five web property in terms of traffic, according to comScore. “People get used to the experience” notes Wharton new media director Kendall Whitehouse. “You can never underestimate the power of inertia formed through habit.” Why don’t people easily switch services? Clemons argues that lock-in is all about the relationships consumers form with and on a particular service. For example, a Facebook user may not be entirely satisfied with the site, but “if your friends are on Facebook, you may stay on Facebook,” despite those misgivings. Whitehouse notes that the “network effect” of social media platforms like Facebook make switching — although easy to do — unlikely to occur.

Companies in many web-based businesses highlight a strong network effect, Werbach adds. A firm introduces a service, gains a significant lead and draws more customers as a result. More friends join, and the network effect reinforces itself. “The network effect is strong, and there are ways that sites [can try to retain] users, but it doesn’t always work,” notes Werbach, who cites MySpace as a first mover in social networking that unraveled.

James Whittaker, a former Google engineer now at Microsoft, said in a blog post that the network effects in Facebook’s favor are massive. “I worked on Google+ as a development director and shipped a bunch of code,” he wrote. “But the world never changed; sharing never changed. It’s arguable that we made Facebook better, but all I had to show for it was higher review scores.” He argued that the problem all along wasn’t that “sharing was broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy; Google just wasn’t part of it.”

Werbach says the jury is out on Google+. “Google+ offers the basic features of Facebook and in some ways is more compelling,” he notes. “[Google+] has a fighting chance to be a viable competitor to Facebook.”

But Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Andrea Matwyshyn notes that “competing with Facebook means competing with its platform as well as everything it knows about you. It’s a new type of barrier of entry. A new entrant to the market may not serve up the audience quickly and with the precision Facebook can.” Although social media is the most obvious relationship-based industry, Matwyshyn says web businesses overall have similar characteristics. “Web models are the vehicle for relationships,” she notes. “The companies that further the relationship with the human on the other side win.”

Facebook’s Defensive Play

The link between dominance and customer relationships partially explains Facebook’s recent $1 billion purchase of Instagram, an Apple iOS-based photo sharing application. The purchase was an effort to stop a potential rival that hit 40 million users since launching in October 2010. “Instagram could have assembled a standalone social network based on pictures,” Wharton management professor David Hsu says. “There is a probability that Instagram would have been a competitor to Facebook.”

For Hsu, Facebook’s purchase of Instagram is not much different than Google’s $1.6 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2006. “Why was YouTube worth $1.6 billion?” asks Hsu. “Video was going to be big. Others couldn’t have come up with that platform.” Indeed, YouTube will have its “upfront,” a scheduled event to sell advertising in advance of the coming season, in May to sell advertising just like television networks. Nikesh Arora, Google’s chief business officer, said on April 12 that “YouTube has gone from an interesting ad buy to a key buy for brands.”

It’s unclear whether Instagram would have eventually toppled Facebook, but the acquisition could be viewed as a $1 billion insurance policy against future competition, according to Hsu. “Facebook and others have woken up to how, if a competitor gets enough lead time, they can get scale before an incumbent comes in,” he notes. “An 18-month lead is very credible.”

Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research, said in a research note that Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram was really a case of playing keep-away from Google. “The valuation is unquestionably high for the business on its own merits,” Wieser wrote. “However, given the importance of photo sharing to Facebook — recall the site’s foundation as one designed to essentially share photos — there is defensive value to preventing a competitor such as Google from acquiring the property if only for the possibility that Instagram continued growing at its recent pace.”

But Clemons is skeptical. In a recent KnowledgeToday blog post, Clemons argued that Google will match whatever features Instagram brings to Facebook for a lot less than $1 billion — about $999 million less.

The Competition Paradox

Whether Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram is ultimately viewed as defensive remains to be seen, but the deal is likely to encourage more competition, says Hsu. “What’s spurring entrepreneurial behavior is the smartphone,” Hsu notes. “Instagram’s acquisition will result in more start-ups. There will be a mobile app land grab.”

One or two of those start-ups may one day upend today’s web giants, but many will fail. “A successful first mover can take away a lion’s share of the market by the time a late entrant realizes, responds and launches,” Hosanagar states. “This implies that the first mover already has a high market share by the time the next guy enters. It’s not sufficient for the next guy to be slightly better.”

But Werbach points out that when sites like Amazon, Yahoo and eBay launched, they had to build their own infrastructure first. Today, that existing infrastructure allows start-ups to launch feature-rich sites quickly. The tech landscape in China is a key example, he adds: After Twitter took off in the U.S., a handful of Chinese start-ups launched with the same features.

Start-ups have other advantages, too. For instance, start-ups don’t have user bases and revenue streams to protect. Start-ups can also focus on a niche that hasn’t been seen or acknowledged by a large company. “The advantage to a start-up is being nimble,” Werbach notes. “Hundreds of start-ups will fail or be acquired, but some will have tremendous success.”

This competition on the web means that companies are scrambling for an edge. In fact, the only real way to protect features could be through patents, Hsu says. For instance, Yahoo sued Facebook claiming the social network is violating its social networking, advertising and privacy patents. Microsoft also recently spent $1 billion acquiring patents from AOL. Google acquired Motorola Mobility largely for its mobile communications patent portfolio. “Anytime a company can add more in the arsenal to serve as a barrier to entry it makes sense, and that often means patents,” Hsu notes.

Werbach agrees. “Patents are a legal monopoly and a potent weapon, especially if a start-up doesn’t have the resources to fight,” he says. “Overall, patent wars are a bad thing for innovation, but they are logical. I’m not thrilled with patent wars, but I understand why companies use them.”

Published: April 25, 2012 @ Wharton

The case has cast a bright spotlight on the agency model — otherwise known as the “platform model” — of e-commerce, in which an increasing range of manufacturers are selling their products directly to consumers over the web, while setting their own prices for those products. The agency model differs from the more traditional “wholesale model” of e-commerce in which “e-tailers,” such as Amazon.com, purchase goods from manufacturers and then resell those goods to consumers at prices that the e-tailers themselves set.

The legal controversy over Apple’s efforts to use the agency model when selling books directly to its consumers offers a good opportunity to examine the benefits and costs of adopting that approach, both for online retailers and their customers, notes Wharton marketing professor Z. John Zhang, who has done numerous studies in this area with co-authors Vibhanshu Abhishek, a current Wharton PhD student, and Kinshuk Jerath, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Does the agency model of selling online harm consumers — and society in general — by raising prices for numerous products, not just for e-books? Or might the agency model offer significant, if often overlooked, economic and social benefits over the wholesale model for manufacturers, retailers and the general public? The researchers’ most recent paper exploring these questions is titled, “To Platform-Sell or Resell? Channel Structures in Electronic Retailing.”

Selling More Kindles

The origins of the conflict date back to the early days of the e-book industry, when Amazon.com, one of its pioneers, used the wholesale model to sell all of its e-books at a price of $9.99, says Zhang. “Amazon was using e-books as a ‘loss leader,’ apparently because it calculated that if it made e-books cheap enough for consumers, more people would buy its Amazon Kindle,” the only hardware device on which Amazon’s e-books could be read. Amazon’s longer-term strategy seemed to be based on the idea that as Kindle’s share of the e-book reader market expanded, the company would eventually make more money from the device and control the gateway to the e-book market. However, book publishers grew fearful that if Amazon.com charged only $9.99 for all of its e-books, they would be unable to charge more than that for their own e-books. “Publishers worried that Amazon might also [force them] to lower their prices on e-books at some point, as the mammoth Walmart does to its suppliers,” Zhang adds.

That’s why the book publishers got together, as alleged by the Justice Department, with Apple to adopt the same agency model that Apple has traditionally used for selling its own software applications — rather than the wholesale model used by Amazon. Apple software application developers have long set their own online prices for their products, while giving Apple a 30% cut of the gross proceeds. Thanks to the agency model agreement between Apple and the publishers, the publishers were now able to set their own prices for their e-books on Apple devices, just as Apple has set its own prices for software.

Predictably, Apple e-books became more expensive than those sold by Amazon.com, and book publishers began urging Amazon to adopt the same agency model to sell their e-books on Amazon.com. In 2010, Amazon gave in to the pressure, and e-book prices on Amazon.com began to rise as a result. Many buyers of e-books on Amazon.com were irked by the price increases that ensued.

Avoiding a ‘Huge Markup’

On balance, though, has the agreement between Apple and these publishers really hurt consumers? Or does the agency model have hidden benefits that the Department of Justice has overlooked or disregarded? To address such issues, Zhang and his collaborators have done extensive economic analyses, some published and some not, on the impact of the agency model on competition. A starting point in their research, notes Zhang, was their realization that the wholesale price model used by traditional e-tailers “is not very efficient” to start with because both the wholesaler and the retailer want to maximize their own profits, leading to a big markup in the prices paid by customers. “Economists agree that the huge markup doesn’t help consumers or manufacturers or even retailers [including e-tailers],” he says. “Lots of economists identify this problem with the wholesale model as the ‘double marginalization problem.’” When this model is used, “end prices are too high to maximize channel profitability. The interests of the manufacturer and retailer are not aligned in a way that maximizes social welfare, either.”

For years, people have been trying to find a way to align those conflicting interests. One obvious solution is for a manufacturer to integrate forward — that is, opening its own stores and selling its own products directly to consumers. Apple does just that, thus eliminating retail price markups. However, few companies can do this in the world of brick-and-mortar stores, notes Zhang, because “most manufacturers lack the resources” to set up their own stores, and most manufacturers — unlike Apple — “don’t produce enough varieties of products to sell them in their own store.”

If, for example, you sell only toothpaste, you can’t open a store selling just toothpaste, even if you make it in several flavors. The best most manufacturers could do when selling through traditional channels is to use a so-called store-within-a-store format — essentially, an agency model for brick-and-mortar retailers. This format is widely adopted for virtually all product categories in department stores in Asian countries such as Japan, Singapore and China. According to Zhang, there are telltale signs that U.S. brick-and-mortar retailers are also moving in this direction.

Despite the negative image of the agency model generated by the headline-grabbing lawsuit, the Internet has been a boon for this approach, notes Zhang. Apple’s “platform” (or agency) model for apps allows software developers to run their own stores and sell their own products directly to consumers. “In theory, the agency model is a very good way to solve this double marginalization problem because there is only one layer,” he points out. When, for example, a book publisher pays a constant 30% fee to Apple, “this doesn’t distort the price at which the publisher sells to the end user.” That’s because when the publisher gets 70% of the pie, his interest — like that of his agent (in this case, Apple) — is to increase the size of the pie, not to increase his own share of it. When the channel members all try to get a bigger share of the pie, the pie shrinks and everyone suffers, including consumers.

On the Internet, it is much easier for all kinds of manufacturers to implement the agency model — not just giant manufacturers like Apple, which have the product variety and strong brand to sell directly in their own online stores. A growing number of smaller manufacturers have been selling more and more of their products at competitive prices directly to customers over e-commerce platforms managed by such sites as Alice.com, Etsy.com and even Amazon’s own Amazon Marketplace. Rather than emerge weakened as a result of the Apple e-book controversy, “over time, the agency model has a good chance to win the day. In fact, it should win the day for the good of the economy and for consumers,” adds Zhang.

Short End of the Stick?

Why then, in the case of e-books, does the Department of Justice want to stand in the way of the agency model? For many, the most objectionable outcome of the alleged collusion between Apple and the publishers is that prices for Amazon’s e-books — and, in fact, e-books in general — increased, thereby harming consumers. However, Zhang questions whether this argument examines all of the ways the agency model has had an economic impact on the market for e-books. For example, although prices of Amazon e-books have risen, prices of Kindle readers also went down over the same period. “You can’t say that the consumer only gets the short end of the stick as a result of the agency model. You have to balance all of the interests of consumers.”

Moreover, he suggests, the first wave of people who purchased Kindle readers were often more affluent consumers who were less sensitive to price and possibly more willing and able to pay somewhat higher prices for e-books. “For those people, there was very little impact when Amazon raised its e-book prices.” Society as a whole also gained when consumers who could finally afford a now-cheaper Kindle gained access to the thousands of e-books still available at little or no cost on Amazon’s website. Indeed, with the agency model taking hold in the publishing industry, “you will see that iPad, Kindle and Nook will all come down in price, competing even harder for new readers,” notes Zhang.

For their part, publishers also have a valid argument that if e-book publishers were restricted to using the wholesale model preferred by Amazon, consumers might eventually become unwilling to pay the higher prices Amazon might charge after it gained more and more share of the e-book market. “If Amazon became successful in building its market share, it could become so strong that it could go to the publishers and dictate the prices for e-books,” Zhang points out. If that happens, “who will have the incentive to produce e-books with the most advanced technologies,” such as videos, interactive elements and links to the Internet? “All of these things cost money, and publishers want room to make investments in the technology they need in order to be innovative. The pricing flexibility and discretion they gain through the agency model will give them the room they need.”

Initially, the agency model “may lead to higher prices for e-books, as we have observed,” Zhang concedes. This is because Amazon has been using loss-leader pricing to achieve its market share objectives. In addition, the agency model does have a tendency to reduce inter-store competition: If a publisher sells a book through both Apple and Amazon, “you can bet the publisher will not try to lower its price at Amazon to cut into its sales of the same book at Apple.” However, in that case, Zhang and his collaborators have shown that all bets are not off on price competition, as the agency model opens up inter-publisher price competition. “To sell a book, [one publisher] will have to compete much harder with other publishers with similar titles for readers.”

In their most recent paper, Zhang and his coauthors address a key question that e-tailers are now facing: When should they use a platform — or agency — model instead of the more conventional reselling format? In developing a theoretical model for their study, the researchers focused “on the effects of two main factors on the resulting selling format in electronic retailing: competition among e-tailers, and reaction by the manufacturer due to the impact of the electronic channel on sales in the traditional channel (brick-and-mortar retailing).” The results of their work suggest that “whenever sales in the electronic channel lead to a negative effect on demand in the traditional channel, e-tailers prefer to set up platforms, whereas when sales in the electronic channel lead to a substantial stimulation of demand in the traditional channel, e-tailers prefer reselling contracts with manufacturers.” Furthermore, “this preference is moderated by competition among e-tailers — as competition between them increases, e-tailers prefer to set up platforms.”

The researchers note that platforms have become widespread in industries as varied as consumer packaged goods (Alice.com), travel (Expedia, Travelocity) and vintage goods and arts (Etsy.com), as well as the “marketplaces” on Amazon Marketplace and Marketplace at Sears.com. They warn marketers, however, that “online retailing is still in flux,” and that although the agency model has “become a pervasive phenomenon, the understanding of this phenomenon is limited.” “This is one more reason why we should be extra careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water,” Zhang says.

Published: April 25, 2012 @ Wharton

The inaugural group include s 33 of the net’s most influential engineers, evangelists and entrepreneurs including Internet fathers Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf; Internet standards guru Jon Postel; web inventor Tim Berners-Lee; encryption pioneer Phil Zimmerman; and Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker.

And, yes, snarky late night comedy aside — former vice president Al Gore is being inducted as well.

The inductees were announced Monday in Geneva, Switzerland at Internet Society’s annual conference, where the group is celebrating its 20th year. ISOC is home to the Internet Engineering Task Force, the net’s technical standards setting body, and is funded largely by the .org top level domain.

While the Internet’s origins are firmly based in American university computer labs and DARPA, the U.S. military’s long-term research arm, Geneva is a natural home for the awards.

The World Wide Web was born here at Cern, just a few kilometers from the conference c enter, and Switzerland has a long history as an international center for diplomacy — symbolically important for an organization dedicated to including civil society, engineers, corporations and governments in decisions affecting the net.

But as the revolutionaries celebrate having created the world’s most important communications medium, they also murmur about looming threats to their creation.

This year saw the U.S. government push to modify the net’s infrastructure to protect the business model of the music and motion picture industry in the U.S., setting off a dramatic protest in the U.S.

Around the globe, repressive and authoritarian regimes have reacted to political dissent by installing filters, firewalls and first-world surveillance technologies.

Geneva is also home to the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. arm that sets rules, standards and rates for international telecommunications, and parts of whose membership has been making noise about exerting more state control over Internet governance.

That move — seen to be driven by non-democratic countries including Russia, China and states in the Middle East — is seen as by many at ISOC as a threat to the the core principles of the Internet.

But de spite those looming clouds, the Internet’s founders and visionaries have much to celebrate. Some two billion people around the world are connected to the Internet, where they can communicate locally and globally for virtually no-cost and have access to knowledge, news and gossip at a speed and depth imaginable 30 years ago only by a small handful of people — many of whom are being inducted into the hall of fame for envisioning and building that network of networks.

Over t he next year, Wired will be publishing Q&As with the living inductees and profiles of the three who were posthumously inducted.

The inductees fall into three categories: Pioneers who were key to the early design of the Internet; Innovators who built on the net’s foundations with technical innovations and policy work; and Global Connectors who have helped expand the net’s growth and use around the world.

Pioneers

Vinton Cerf: Consid ered one of the fathers of the Internet, Cerf co-wrote the TCP/IP protocol that unites the world’s computer networks into the Internet. He also co-founded ISOC, served as chairman of the board of ICANN, and is now a vice president at Google.

Danny Cohen: Cohen created the world’s first real-time vi sual flight simulator and in 1981, ported it over to run over Arpanet, creating the net’s first real-time application. Cohen was also a pioneer, starting work in the 1970s on Voice over IP and online video.

Steve Crocker: An early co-conspirator at UCLA with Jon Postel and Vint Cerf, Crocker is kno wn as the father of the Request For Comment (RFC), setting the tone and format for the net’s gracious way of recommending and eventually cementing standards.

Donald W. Davies: A Welsh computer scientist who worked withAlan Turing, Davies was one of the inventors of the idea of packet-switched networks in the 1960s, and gave it the name. His invention was used to create the first two packet-switched networks and laid the groundwork for the Internet.

Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler: For 17 years, she headed the Network Information Systems Center that was the net’s original nerve center for RFCs and Internet addresses, composed the net’s original technical documentation. Her group operated the first WHOIS server and developed the top-level domain system comprising .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .org, and .net.

Charles Herzfeld: The director of DARPA from 1965 to 1967, Herzfeld was convinced of the need for interconnected computer and authorized the creation of Arpanet, the net’s direct predecessor.

Robert E. Kahn: One of the fathers of the Internet, Kahn built on his work at Arpanet to make diverse networks speak to one another in a common language. With Vinton Cerf, Kahn co-wrote the TCP/IP protocol and later co-founded the Internet Society.

Peter Kirstein: Working together with Vinton Cerf in the late 1970s, Kirstein co-authored one of the net’s most important papers on interconnection and played a key role in early tests of the Internet.

Leonard Kleinrock: Starting with his doctoral thesis in 1962, Kleinrock developed key mathematical models for packet switched networks and continued that work as a professor at UCLA. Considered to be among the fathers of the Internet, Kleinrock supervised the first message ever sent over Arpanet and contributed key theoretical work for hierarchical network routing.

John Klensin: Beginning his work on net standards in 1969, with contributions to FTP, Klensin has contributed to key protocols including DNS and SMTP, as well as serving long terms on the Internet Architecture Board, including chairing the board.

Jon Postel: Most famous for singlehandely running the net’s n aming system until his death in 1998, Postel was the RFC editor starting in 1969, served on the IAB, and wrote some of the net’s most fundamental protocols. Postel also wrote the “Robustness Principle” RFC, instructing the net to be “be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept.”

Louis Pouzin: The inventor of datagrams (packets without loss notifications), Pouzin designed an early packet switching network that was highly influential in the eventual design of the TCP/IP protocol that defines the Internet.

Lawrence Roberts: Roberts was one of the developers of the ide a of using data packets to create a distributed computing network, and in 1966, became the program manager of Arpanet and was responsible for the system’s design.

Innovators

Mitchell Baker: Starting as the lawyer who wrote the open source license for Mozilla, Baker led Mozilla into developing Firefox, which upended the stagnant web browser market just as the net entered the world of Web 2.0 interactivity. Baker has turned Mozilla into a force for the open web that also delivers free, open-source applications into the hands of millions of net users.

Tim Berners-Lee: Marrying hypertext to the TCP/IP protocol, Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 as an open standard. In addition to designing HTTP and HTML, Berners-Lee also invented the first browser and web server.

Robert Caillau: The co-founder of the World Wide Web, he co-authored the funding proposal for the project to CERN with Berners-Lee. He also wrote the first web browser for the Mac.

Van Jacobson: When the Internet began to grow in the late 80s, Jacobsen devised a flow control algorithm for TCP that allowed the network to scale and avoid congestion, which is still used today. A leader in network diagnostics and performance, he won a ACM SIGCOMM lifetime achievement award in 2001.

Lawrence H. Landweber: Working on behalf on a consortium of universities, Landweber proposed the creation of a federally funded network, called CSNET, that would link up university computer science programs that couldn’t get on Arpanet. CSNET, funded in 1981, linked up more than 180 universities internationally, spread the gospel of the Internet and served as the predecessor to NSFnet that became one of the Internet’s backbone networks.

Paul Mockapetris: Recognizing in the early ’80s that a single, centralized table linking domain names to IP addresses wasn’t going to scale, Mockapetris proposed distributed system instead, inventing, along with Postel, the net’s distributed and dynamic Domain Name System.

Craig Newmark: Seeking to connect a group of friends, Newmark founded Craigslist in 1995, making it possible for net users around the globe to find apartments, jobs and used couches for free. Newmark has also been vocal in supporting an open web.

Ray Tomlinson: In 1971, Tomlinson created the first email system that could send messages between different systems on Arpanet, and is the person responsible for using the @ sign to differentiate between hosts.

Linus Torvalds: In 1991, in conjunction with his Masters thesis, Torvalds began work on the free and open-source Linux kernel, leading to a wide range of Linux operating systems that power many of the world’s servers, routers, supercomputers and smartphones.

Phil Zimmermann: Zimmermann, a tireless advocate for privacy and security, is best known as the creator of Pretty Good Privacy, the net’s leading e-mail encryption system, which earned him an investigation by the U.S. government.

Global Connectors

Randy Bush: Bush founded the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC), which with the help of the National Science Foundation, helped spread networking technology to the developing world in order to help local scientists, engineers and educators collaborate with international colleagues by providing assistance to local network engineers.

Kilnam Chon: Chon won the prestigious Jon Postel Service Award in 2011 for his work in spreading the Internet in Asia.

Al Gore: As a U.S. senator in the 1980s, Gore was the first politician to grasp the potentia l of the Internet. Gore wrote the High Performance Computing and Communications Act that passed in 1991 which helped spread the net beyond computer science professionals by providing key funding to Internet projects, including the groundbreaking Mosaic browser which led to the dot-com boom.

Nancy Hafkin: Working for the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Hafkin was instrumental in the spread of networking and electronic communication in Africa. In the early 1990s, she played a key role in efforts to spread e-mail to countries in Africa.

Geoff Huston: From 1995 to 2005, Geoff help ed construct and develop Telestra’s Internet architecture in Australia building on his work in the 1980s, when he led the initial construction of the Australia’s Internet. He was also the executive director of the Internet architecture board from 2001 to 2005.

Brewster Kahle: After a successful ent repreneurial career in the first dot-com gold rush, Kahle set out to become the web’s archivist and librarian, creating the Internet Archive that caches copies of the Web for posterity. His newest project aims to collect one copy of every paper book ever printed.

Daniel Karrenberg: Karrneberg was t he founding CEO of the RIPE Network Coordination Center, which was the world’s first Regional Internet Registry, covering Europe, the Middle East and parts of Africa and Central Asia. Now RIPE NCC’s chief scientist, he has also served three years as the chairman of the board of ISOC.

Toru Takahashi : Sometimes known as the “Mother of the Internet” in Japan, Takahashi was instrumental in bringing the Internet to Japan and promoting it throughout Asia in the 1990s. A journalist who turned to entrepreneurship and Internet evangelism, Takahashi was key to the early commercial development of the Internet.

Tan Tin Wee: Dr. Tan Tin Wee founded the multilingual Internet domain name system and has an Internet pioneer in Singapore, central to the net’s adoption among both Chinese and Tamil communities throughout Asia.

Above article written by Wired

saudi arabia solar thermal plant

Saudi Arabia is known for its opulent, luxurious and excessive architectural aesthetic.

The country wowed the international design world with its rule-breaking design excess up until the industry freeze which began around the time of the 2009 global financial crisis (GFC). The GFC hit the entire area hard, with some of the most extensive and world-first developments, especially those in the United Arab Emirates, stalled until money to continue could be garnered. Others still were completely abandoned.

However, unwilling to suffer further industry challenges like its UAE counterparts, the Saudi industry has gone in a direction that has been slow to catch on in the middle east – toward green building.

In fact, as the proverbial dark horse, the Saudi industry has proven it is now designing for resource and cost efficiency with the announcement that they have completed the world’s largest solar thermal plant, located in the country’s capital of Riyadh.

The $14 million renewable energy development includes a 36,000 square metre rooftop solar energy system that will cater to the hot water needs of the 40,000 students at the city’s Princess Noura Bint Abdulrahman University for Women. The 10 square metre solar panels have been provided by Austrian firm GREENTecOne.

saudi arabia solar thermal plant

“This plant has gigantic proportions – the 36,000 square metres of surface is equivalent to about the size of 5 football pitches full of collectors,” says Robert Kanduth, founder and managing director of GREENoneTEC.

Functionally, the solar panels are placed in prime locations to receive the full intensity of the roasting desert sun. This effect is enhanced through the implementation of increased solar performance-inducing glass. A modified mounting system has also been put into place in order to stand against the high winds that are a reality during sand storms in the area.

The environmental benefits of such a venture are self-evident. In terms of its investment potential, the solar thermal plant is also expected to be incredibly economically lucrative for the city. Not only will the reliance taken off the country’s rich oil supply mean electricity cost cutting, but it also offers to maximise oil export ventures from the area. In the long term, the city is also making strong steps towards safeguarding itself against oil depletion and leading the way for green innovation in the area.

By Tim Moore

Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, is an investor in Andreessen Horowitz.

Written by Ari Levy @ bloomberg

Yet at a recent panel at the first Wharton Middle East and North Africa Business Conference, experts who have spent years looking at the oil industry, often first hand from those oil countries themselves, painted a different picture. It is one of worry about the future of oil, and a move in many places toward not only different industries, but completely different kinds of energy production.

“The challenges in the Middle East transcend oil,” said Morten Klumb, a partner at McKinsey & Company, who has spent the last six years for the firm in the Middle East, often focusing on infrastructure and real estate, not solely the oil business. The World Bank, said Klumb, estimates that the region has to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure just to get up to speed.

Fifty percent of the populace, he said, does not have adequate access to clean water, or in some cases flowing water at all. Instead of oil, he said, these countries would be better off focusing on developing infrastructure. “People ask why I am focused on infrastructure, the most boring of industries,” Klumb said. “I bring in a few facts, and they see where the opportunities lie.”

End To Oil Exports?

If the Middle East, which is one of the largest dry areas in the world, were to find ways to improve its renewable water resources and to develop innovative water management systems, then the oil industry would pale in comparison, especially in countries like Bahrain, which basically have no oil.

That is where an increased role from the private sector — particularly after the Arab Spring movements — will come into play. “The private sector is far better than government investment for allocation of risk,” Klumb said. “The developer is good at being a developer. The contractor is better at construction, and so forth. It is not the government trying to do everything.”

Thus, whether it is better water supplies or whatever the populace now needs, it will be, hopefully in Klumb’s eyes, more private capital going toward the whole infrastructure of the region, not just that of the oil producing industry.

Though it may sound strange to many Western observers, some parts of the Middle East may well stop exporting any oil at all. According to Hesham Tashkandi, the senior operations leader at GE Energy, based in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates will be using all of its own oil by 2017.

“The UAE does not have as much oil as other countries, so it may find that it would be better to burn the gas and oil itself, rather than continue to trade on the global market,” Tashkandi said, adding that keeping oil at a high price does not always mean prosperity for many of the people in the Middle East.

“Only a few countries care about oil in the region — those that make more selling it than burning it themselves,” he said. As countries see a broader base of their population being more affluent, even those that produce the most oil, they themselves are using more oil. Countries and provinces like the glitzy sheikhdom of Dubai, which has scant oil, yet is growing and seeking green energy alternatives.

“Nuclear power has been considered in the Middle East for quite a while and Dubai will be the first in using it,” Tashkandi said. “Unfortunately, that has to balance the risk and the reward. The reward is to be efficient and the risk is to the environment. But in the long term, things will be more nuclear.”

He also sees the region moving toward solar power and other alternatives — and he said it would be surprising to Westerners to know who the leaders were.

“Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are building the most solar plants,” he said, noting that those countries have a goal of having seven percent of their power coming from solar energy by 2020. “Especially in the Middle East, where you have the sun all the time, this is the way to go.” The goal in Kuwait, he said, is to save 7000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions a day, which, with solar energy, will save a gigawatt of electricity each of those days.

There is also a big move in waste-to-energy solutions in the Middle East, Tashkandi added. “They have plenty of sewage water, and will have more as the population grows,” he said. “It is not as efficient and it will take a lot of infrastructure.” But it is coming, Tashkandi said.

The biggest problem is not the technology to produce energy, he said, but to distribute it. The power grid is growing along the Arabian Peninsula, particularly connecting Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, but it is only in a nascent stage. The ultimate goal is to connect that grid to Europe, particularly the southern countries like Italy and Spain, which will increase energy exports to Western nations.

The country most concerned about its energy production and export capacity is, to be sure, Iran. Sara Vakhshouri is an independent energy consultant who formerly was an advisor to the director of the National Iranian Oil Company International. Her perspective is that while Iran is one of the world’s great exporters of oil, it is also, ironically, the second largest consumer of oil in the Middle East, so is a major importer of refined gasoline.

The population of Iran is between 60 and 70 million, she said, and in the past, Iranians consumed an average of a liter of oil products a day, though that has declined in recent years. Its total refinery capacity is only 1.5 million barrels a day, so that is only about 36% of the production needed to sustain its own population. “The oil business is more complex than it seems on the surface,” she said.

This is especially so in light of the potential boycotts of Iranian oil because of nuclear weapons concerns. On Iran’s side, Vakhshouri said, it is unlikely it would close the Strait of Hormuz for any length of time, despite its threats to do so. The Strait of Hormuz is only 22 miles wide at its narrowest point, but it is the place where much of the oil from the region has to go through.

Iran’s biggest customer may be China, but it only accounts for 11% of China’s oil imports. Countries more vulnerable are Sri Lanka, which imports 93% of its oil from Iran and the more tottering European economies of Greece, Italy and Spain, which respectively import 34%, 13% and 10% of their oil from Iran.

Vakhshouri said that those countries could not readily join a boycott, even if they wanted to politically.”Their refineries are set to the Iranian product,” she said. “If they have to import from other places, they would have to change what their refineries do.” Even if they wanted to, said Vakhshouri, it would take months at least to convert them. “They say Libya will open up and replace the Iranian oil, but that oil is of a different type. It is why the Europeans, in a boycott, would have to give it six months to take effect.”

Japan, too, is in a difficult position when it comes to boycotting Iranian oil. Before the recent nuclear disaster, it had already imported 10% of its oil from Iran, but now with the nuclear reactors down, it faces the prospects of having to increase that. Despite pleas from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Japan is not willing to follow the sanctions on Iran, said Vakhshouri.

“So even if the coalition doesn’t break, Iran is likely to find customers for its oil,” she said. Vakhshouri said that the effects of the sanctions, however, are being felt in Iran, as the national currency has dropped precipitously. “The big question is whether the oil sanctions will be a tool to change the country’s behavior,” she said. “It is not clear yet whether that will happen.”

More Sharia Finance

Islamic finance will continue to grow in the region, said panelist Michael J.T. McMillen, managing director at River Stone Capital, and a lecturer in law at University of Pennsylvania Law School. Financial transactions, even those in international business, will be conducted at least in part in Sharia-compliant finance, said McMillen, who has an expertise in Middle Eastern banking.

Those transactions must follow Sharia law, he said, which prohibits fixed or even floating fees on loans, which is counter to Islamic prohibitions against usury. Thus, in order to do business, there are complex buying and selling practices.

“Sometimes you will see a transaction based around some metal, where there is a mark-up and then it is sold back to the original owner,” said McMillen. “No one has any interest in that metal, but it is a way to do a different transaction under Sharia law.”

Though Islamic banking began in earnest in the 1970s, it was not until a decade ago that Islamic financial transactions became prominent, and since 2007, it has increased dramatically, McMillen said.

“There is lots of pressure to do more Islamic financing, for infrastructure and for everything else,” he said. “There are issues arising from this, but what is important is that everyone will have to know how it is used in order to do business in that area of the world.”

Published April 02, 2012 @ Wharton