business-news 10

The Economist on Business Continuity Planning. The effect on Ericsson, a Swedish mobile-phone company, of a fire in a New Mexico chipmaking plant belonging to the Dutch firm Philips, has become a legend. The fire, in March 2000, started by a bolt of lightning, lasted less than 10 minutes, but it caused havoc to the super-clean environment that chipmaking requires. Ericsson, unable to find an alternative source of supply, went on to report a loss of over $2 billion in its mobile-phone division that year, a loss that left it as an also-ran in an industry where it had once been a leader. ...

TechCrunch. A weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing every newly launched web 2.0 business, product and service

Robert Engle and Clive Granger won the Nobel Prize for their work on ARCH and something-or-the-other-I-ought-to-have-studied-at-B-school. I was outside Engle’s office last month (somewhere within 100m of the corridor in the photo), and that’s the closest I’ve been to an Nobel laureate. Of course, some people know him personally and discuss ‘stupid problems’ with him.

i2 may have to delist. And delisting may be good for them.

Salomon Smith Barney sold the CEO of WorldCom lots of IPO shares at a low price. The CEO made lots of money. Technically, that’s a bribe to your customer. But then, so is every free offer, or cross-sale. What makes the SSB-WorldCom deals illegal, this article argues, is that they’re so BIG, and they’re made of OTHER people’s money.

This purple and crimson diamond is supposed to be the most valuable object in the world. (Weight for weight.)

The Economist Technology Quarterly. Great tech news, a little infrequent though. (Thanks, Markose!)

I listen to radio on Real Jukebox’s Radio Tuner. They offer 2,500 channels, including business talk channels and western classical (my interests).

Here’s a new one. A study shows that unhappy workers are better than happy ones. Throw the Hawthorne effect out of the window.

moneycontrol.com is an Indian financial site. Yahoo gets most of its Indian news feed from here. Comments Jayesh 22 Nov 2000 12:00 pm: very good site