The Week in Geek – March 17, 2007
BC Vaults to #14 on BusinessWeek’s B-School List
The callout on BusinessWeek’s rankings table shows why BC vaulted 9 places on the list of best undergraduate business schools: “Alumni and professors love helping students find jobs, making BC’s campus networking an invaluable resource”. BC’s program is the second best in the Northeast (after MIT) and the second best in the ACC (after UNC). Thanks to all who continue to give generously with their time & support of our program. You’re making a big difference!
Emerging Giants
An older cover story I just caught up on, but a MUST READ, also from BusinessWeek. Multinationals outside the US, Europe, and Japan are coming on way stronger than most realize. Consider:
- Chinese telecom firm Huawei won a huge contract with British Telecom and now has equipment sales of $8 billion outside China. In ’05 it spent $558 million in R&D with 7,000 engineers and captured 15% of the Asian and 7% of the Latin American market.
- Haier raked in 3/4ths of a billion selling appliances in the US last year & is #4 worldwide. Here’s a Chinese firm bringing jobs to the US via its plant in Camden, SC. Haier would have bought Maytag had Whirlpool not raised its offer to a shocking $2.8 billion.
- Egypt’s Orascom Telecom is making a killing selling wireless from Algeria to Pakistan and last year made a major foray into the developed world, buying Italy’s Wind Telecom for $16 billion.
- The firm that led BusinessWeek’s rankings of top IT companies in 2006 was Mexico’s America Movil, a carrier with more than 100 million Latin American subscribers.
- Brazil’s Embraer has created the only credible new aerospace firm outside of N. America & Europe. JetBlue is buying 101 of their jets for some $3 billion.
- In pharma, India’s Ranbaxy has 80% of revenue coming from overseas. The firm has 58 generics pending FDA approval and hopes to be top 5 in the US & #1 globally by 2012. Its pipeline is the second biggest in the generic industry. And it gains major global goodwill as one of the leading provider of at-cost $1/day AIDS generics in Africa.
- Drinking a Miller Lite? The parent company is SAB, based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
- Russia’s Lukoil has hundreds of gas stations in NJ & PA.
- India’s Mahindra dominates the Indian market for earth moving equipment & has been giving Deere a run for its money in providing equipment for rebuilding the Gulf after Katrina.
- And of course, don’t’ forget China’s Lenovo, which bought IBM’s PC business a few years back for $11 billion.
In the next decade the world bank estimates that developing nation share of world GDP will grow from 1/5 to 1/3. The BRIC countries alone will add 225 million consumers earning $15,000 a year or more. That’s more than the combined population of Germany & Japan.
Cisco New Headquarters: Bangalore
Still need to be convinced globalization is real? Cisco will be opening its ‘second headquarters’, Cisco East, in Bangalore next May. Headcount will be 10,000 in 3-5 years. It’s as much a talent play as it is one to understand the needs of emerging economies. And being in the midst of a hyper-growth market like India doesn’t hurt, either. Cisco’s focus on India doesn’t mean it’s leaving China to Huawei. The firm has plowed $650 million into local Chinese tech startups & has forged an alliance with Huawei competitor ZTE. In other Cisco news, the most successfully acquisitive firm in the US (119 acquisitions since 1993) announced that it’ll wolf down WebEx, the online conferencing firm, for a tasty $3.2 billion. WebEx has a 64% share of the online meeting market, and over 3.5 million monthly users. With a market cap of $156 billion, Cisco is the Valley’s most valuable firm. With nearly $21 billion in cash in the bank, expect more buyouts.
Execs Confirm Google Phone
Isabel Aguilera, Google’s Spain and Portugal chief, confirms the firm is working on a mobile phone. The phone initiatives are designed for developing countries. Not a bad target when one considers that of the 1.2 billion new cellphone subscribers worldwide by 2010, 86% will be in developing nations. Aguilera adds that the phone is only one of 18 products in Google’s labs right now. Allegedly there are 100 people at work on the Google phone.
Viacom Seeks $1 Billion from Google/YouTube
The parent of Paramount Pictures, MTV, and Nickelodeon is seeking $1 billion from Google, claiming YouTube willfully infringed on Viacom copyright by streaming more than 150,000 clips of movies and TV shows some 1.5 billion times. For the record, Viacom’s annual profits of $1.6 billion are just over half Google’s ’06 profits of $3 billion. Gettin’ a little envious of the world’s fastest growing company, are we Mr. Redstone? Perhaps it’s a ploy for a greater slice of inevitable ad revenue.
10 Emerging Technologies 2007
MIT’s Technology Review picks the geeky stuff to watch in the coming year. Solar Nanotech is being developed right her at the Heights! Other technologies to make the list include peer-to-peer video sharing (think BitTorrent & Joost from the Kazaa & Skype boys), neuron control, artificially structured metamaterials and personalized medical monitors.
Know When to Fold ’em
The Playstation3 has a 9 core chip, the most advanced consumer processor available. But if you own a PS3 now you can do more than kill aliens – you can participate in an effort to save lives. Stanford’s “Folding@Home” uses software programs to simulate the way proteins fold, or change shape. Understanding the mysteries of protein folding may yield clues to cure Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, among other dreadful diseases. Simulating folding requires so much computer time that some research can’t be finsihed within a graduate student’s years at the university. Stanford claims that if just 1% of the 1 million PS3 users participate in the project it will double the computing help from PC-based efforts (and these numbers already contribute resources in excess of all of the computing power available from the National Science Foundation). Got a PC, Mac, or PS3? You can help by visiting Folding@Home.
BlueDot Buzz Launches
BC Eagle Jigna Patel left Amazon.com to help found BlueDot, and it looks like she’s part of a hit. The firm, a hybrid combining the best of Digg & Delicious, got a killer endorsement from TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington who wrote “I like BlueDot a lot because its fast and the interface is awesome. It’s one of the “companies I can’t live without” and has replaced del.icio.us as the place I bookmark web pages.” Way to go, Jigna!
Inside eBay’s Innovation Machine
A huge eco-system of 40,000 developers writes code to plug into eBay’s network, pushing a staggering $50 billion of goods through the giant. By some estimates this places eBay as the world’s 7th largest retailer, responsible for roughly $1 in every $5 consumer online purchases in the US. Software created by the eBay developer network plays a role in about 25% of listings on the US eBay site. In 2005, eBay dropped fees for access to its APIs, saving some developers thousands of dollars a month. Shortly after the developer network doubled in size, while the number of sellers using third-party listing applications grew 50%. The case is one of CIO Insight’s 10 Cases where IT Raised the Bar.