Barclays bank has been on top of the mobile payments game, most recently with the launch of their secure mobile money transfer app, Pingit. Now they're taking contactless payment one step further into the wild world with a stick-on contactless credit card that could turn any phone into a tap-and-pay service, provided of course, that there's an appropriate point-of-sale device around. "PayTag" is available free for Barclays Visa credit card holders, as an extension of their existing accounts. Also in the works at Barclays is a partnership with cellular service provider Orange. Orange is due to announce a slew of Android phones with a Barclays payments app enabled, which can be swiped over contactless registers at various department stores, and coming soon to the London bus system and the Tube. Meanwhile, speaking at the Ad Age conference this week, MasterCard execs said that the company is investing generously in apps and mobile, following pilots like the six-month-long MasterCard PayPass test with New York's MTA.
One of the great pleasures in life for economists is watching bubbles burst. First the speculative air is pumped in just beyond the point of reason. There is always a trader willing to say that a tulip bulb will soon be worth a million guilders; an investment bank ready to predict $200 oil prices by the end of the year. There is always a looming war or a potential harvest failure to add spurious justification. But the end is inevitably the same. The bubble bursts.
That is what is happening now in the energy market. Sometimes the bubble deflates rapidly, as with the US natural gas price – now at a 10-year low of less than $2 per mmbtu. In other cases the air escapes slowly. That is what has been happening to the oil price since the announcement of a modest fall in Chinese imports.
Once the fall begins it tends to continue. European gas prices are also declining and utilities tied into long-term contracts are struggling to renegotiate terms. If the Japanese succeed in restoring some nuclear power capacity the Asia gas market will follow the downward trend. Simultaneously the important report from the UK's energy department has reopened the door to shale gas development in Britain and perhaps across Europe.
The oil market is also set for a serious adjustment. Iran has backed off from its threats to close the Strait of Hormuz, and another complex negotiating process has begun in Istanbul to find a way in which Israel and Iran can step back from a confrontation neither could win. The sanctions on Iranian oil exports are an important bargaining chip in these negotiations. If there is any progress, Iranian production will come back on to the market.
In any circumstances short of a long war, the decline in prices could be substantial and only the action of Opec swing producers, led by Saudi Arabia, could set a floor. The Saudis' position is that prices should average $100 a barrel, but with output from Iran and Libya restored, that would require a cut of up to 3m barrels a day in Saudi exports – with troubling results for the kingdom's budget.
Nor is the fall likely to be temporary. Years of high prices have encouraged investment and technical advances have started to transform the energy market. The focus of attention has been on shale gas, with US production up 14-fold since 2000 and now meeting almost a quarter of US demand. In China, shale gas exploration is just beginning and if successful could dramatically reduce import requirements over the next decade. In Europe, the environmental debate is unresolved but following the UK government's supportive report, a forthcoming paper from the Royal Society could help set new standards, opening the way for production across the continent.
Significant shale gas reserves exist in Poland and France. With new and clear guidelines, development could be rapid and sharply reduce Europe's import needs. At the same time, the US is beginning to plan for exports of gas. This is the context behind last week's remarkable comment by Vladimir Putin, who warned Gazprom it would have to rise to the challenge of a transformed market.
But shale gas is not the full story. US production of tight oil, which is produced from shale and other rocks, has tripled in the past three years to almost 900,000 b/d. Predictions that the US could become self-sufficient in hydrocarbons in the next two decades no longer look absurd.
For consumers the news is good. The jerry cans in the garage will decline in value but the price at the pumps should decline steadily. In the US, the low gas price is seen as rebasing industrial costs and opening the door to a renaissance of manufacturing. The losers will be those who have invested in the highest-cost oil and gas developments and those who have planned their corporate or national finances on the basis of a one-way bet on rising prices and revenues. One of the most telling features of the current market is that despite the high prices of recent months the shares of oil majors have suffered serious falls. Shell and BP are both down against the market by more than 10 per cent since the start of the year. A persistent fall in prices will reopen the question of industrial restructuring, which has been postponed by the largesse of the past few years. Several Opec states will also be in serious trouble, with any added production from Iraq putting yet more pressure on the quota system, which sustains the cartel.
Within the energy market, attention has shifted to electricity production. The attraction of gas as a feedstock for generating power is well known. If that is reinforced by plentiful supply and falling prices, the drift from nuclear will continue and more questions will be asked about the scale of subsidies needed to back renewables. With climate change off the political agenda the risk of slippage on pledges to reduce emissions is high.
Bubbles tend to distract attention from such long-term trends. As the bubble bursts, we will see more clearly how much the landscape of the energy market is changing.
The writer is visiting professor and chair of King's Policy Institute, King's College London
Is Human Genome Science ( NASDAQ: HGSI ) really worth more than $2.6 billion? It is a question to be asked when time comes, but it may help to gain a stock more than 100% than yesterday's close as company has rejected $2.6 billion takeover bid from Glaxo Smithkline Plc.
Read below the news transcript:
Human Genome Sciences Inc. (HGSI) rejected an unsolicited offer from GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK), its partner on the lupus treatment Benlysta, to buy the U.S. company for about $2.59 billion.
The $13-a-share cash offer, which represents an 81 percent premium to yesterday’s closing stock price of $7.17, doesn’t reflect the company’s value, Rockville, Maryland-based Human Genome said today in a statement. The board is exploring alternatives including a potential sale of the company, and Glaxo has been invited to participate in that process, Human Genome said.
Glaxo is seeking to take advantage of a 76 percent slide in Human Genome shares from their 2011 peak. Sales growth for Benlysta, Human Genome’s first drug on the market, has disappointed investors, and the company may not become profitable for years. Human Genome is also collaborating with Glaxo on two other experimental drugs, darapladib to treat hardening of the arteries, and Syncria for diabetes and heart failure.
“It’s the potential of all three drugs” that’s appealing to Glaxo, said Tim Franklin, an analyst at MainFirst Bank AG in London. “I guess they’ve been watching and waiting. It’s going to be very difficult for Human Genome to argue for a higher price because obviously this is what the market thinks they’re worth.”
Human Genome more than doubled to $15 a share in trading before the Nasdaq Stock Market opened. Glaxo shares gained 1.3 percent to 1,460.50 pence at 11:43 a.m. in London. A spokeswoman for London-based Glaxo didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.
First Drug
Benlysta, approved by by regulators in the U.S. and Europe last year, is Human Genome’s first drug to reach the market. The company lost $381 million last year on sales of $130.9 million. Analysts predict revenue will jump 79 percent this year to $234.4 million, based on the average of 19 estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The company will report its first annual profit in 2015, according to analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
Glaxo’s offer values Human Genome at 11 times this year’s estimated sales.
SmithKline Beecham Plc, a predecessor company to Glaxo, entered into a collaboration agreement with Human Genome in May 1993, before the U.S. company’s initial public offering in December of that year.
Human Genome said it’s asked Glaxo for additional information on experimental treatments including darapladib, which is in the last of three stages of human studies usually needed for regulatory approval, and Syncria, also in late-stage testing. Syncria, also known as albiglutide, belongs to the same class of medicines as Novo Nordisk A/S (NOVOB)’s Victoza.
‘Very Promising’
The experimental diabetes therapy is a “very, very promising” new treatment, Glaxo Chief Executive Officer Andrew Witty said in February. “And we’ll see when the full data comes in before we can really articulate the full picture to you.”
“When you have so many projects together in late-stage development, it makes sense to want to integrate 100 percent of their value,” Eric Le Berrigaud, an analyst at Bryan, Garnier & Co. in Paris, said in a telephone interview. “It means Glaxo thinks these projects have a potential. Hard to say which project they are betting on the most.”
The U.S. biotechnology company has hired Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC as financial advisers and Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP and DLA Piper LLP as legal counsel.
No Assurance
“There can be no assurance that any transaction will occur,” Human Genome said. "HGS does not intend to discuss the status of its evaluation unless and until a specific transaction has been approved.’’
It’s unlikely any company other than Glaxo would want to bid, MainFirst’s Franklin said.
“There will be control provisions around Benlysta, darapladib and albiglutide that will protect GSK’s interests so it would not be worth anyone else bidding that price for the rest of the business,” he said.
French rival Sanofi and Switzerland’s Roche Holding AG also have made unsolicited offers for companies whose shares have fallen. Sanofi bought Genzyme Corp. for $20.1 billion last year after Genzyme’s stock declined following manufacturing woes. Roche yesterday abandoned its $6.7 billion offer for Illumina Inc. after the target company rejected the approach and refused to negotiate.
Read below the news transcript:
Human Genome Sciences Inc. (HGSI) rejected an unsolicited offer from GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK), its partner on the lupus treatment Benlysta, to buy the U.S. company for about $2.59 billion.
The $13-a-share cash offer, which represents an 81 percent premium to yesterday’s closing stock price of $7.17, doesn’t reflect the company’s value, Rockville, Maryland-based Human Genome said today in a statement. The board is exploring alternatives including a potential sale of the company, and Glaxo has been invited to participate in that process, Human Genome said.
Glaxo is seeking to take advantage of a 76 percent slide in Human Genome shares from their 2011 peak. Sales growth for Benlysta, Human Genome’s first drug on the market, has disappointed investors, and the company may not become profitable for years. Human Genome is also collaborating with Glaxo on two other experimental drugs, darapladib to treat hardening of the arteries, and Syncria for diabetes and heart failure.
“It’s the potential of all three drugs” that’s appealing to Glaxo, said Tim Franklin, an analyst at MainFirst Bank AG in London. “I guess they’ve been watching and waiting. It’s going to be very difficult for Human Genome to argue for a higher price because obviously this is what the market thinks they’re worth.”
Human Genome more than doubled to $15 a share in trading before the Nasdaq Stock Market opened. Glaxo shares gained 1.3 percent to 1,460.50 pence at 11:43 a.m. in London. A spokeswoman for London-based Glaxo didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.
First Drug
Benlysta, approved by by regulators in the U.S. and Europe last year, is Human Genome’s first drug to reach the market. The company lost $381 million last year on sales of $130.9 million. Analysts predict revenue will jump 79 percent this year to $234.4 million, based on the average of 19 estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The company will report its first annual profit in 2015, according to analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
Glaxo’s offer values Human Genome at 11 times this year’s estimated sales.
SmithKline Beecham Plc, a predecessor company to Glaxo, entered into a collaboration agreement with Human Genome in May 1993, before the U.S. company’s initial public offering in December of that year.
Human Genome said it’s asked Glaxo for additional information on experimental treatments including darapladib, which is in the last of three stages of human studies usually needed for regulatory approval, and Syncria, also in late-stage testing. Syncria, also known as albiglutide, belongs to the same class of medicines as Novo Nordisk A/S (NOVOB)’s Victoza.
‘Very Promising’
The experimental diabetes therapy is a “very, very promising” new treatment, Glaxo Chief Executive Officer Andrew Witty said in February. “And we’ll see when the full data comes in before we can really articulate the full picture to you.”
“When you have so many projects together in late-stage development, it makes sense to want to integrate 100 percent of their value,” Eric Le Berrigaud, an analyst at Bryan, Garnier & Co. in Paris, said in a telephone interview. “It means Glaxo thinks these projects have a potential. Hard to say which project they are betting on the most.”
The U.S. biotechnology company has hired Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC as financial advisers and Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP and DLA Piper LLP as legal counsel.
No Assurance
“There can be no assurance that any transaction will occur,” Human Genome said. "HGS does not intend to discuss the status of its evaluation unless and until a specific transaction has been approved.’’
It’s unlikely any company other than Glaxo would want to bid, MainFirst’s Franklin said.
“There will be control provisions around Benlysta, darapladib and albiglutide that will protect GSK’s interests so it would not be worth anyone else bidding that price for the rest of the business,” he said.
French rival Sanofi and Switzerland’s Roche Holding AG also have made unsolicited offers for companies whose shares have fallen. Sanofi bought Genzyme Corp. for $20.1 billion last year after Genzyme’s stock declined following manufacturing woes. Roche yesterday abandoned its $6.7 billion offer for Illumina Inc. after the target company rejected the approach and refused to negotiate.
A treasure trove of unearthed interviews, conducted by the writer who knew him best, reveals how Jobs's ultimate success at Apple can be traced directly to his so-called wilderness years.
If Steve Jobs's life were staged as an opera, it would be a tragedy in three acts. And the titles would go something like this: Act I--The Founding of Apple Computer and the Invention of the PC Industry; Act II--The Wilderness Years; and Act III--A Triumphant Return and Tragic Demise.
The first act would be a piquant comedy about the brashness of genius and the audacity of youth, abruptly turning ominous when our young hero is cast out of his own kingdom. The closing act would plumb the profound irony of a balding and domesticated high-tech rock star coming back to transform Apple far beyond even his own lofty expectations, only to fall mortally ill and then slowly, excruciatingly wither away, even as his original creation miraculously bulks up into the biggest digital dynamo of them all. Both acts are picaresque tales that end with a surge of deep pathos worthy of Shakespeare.
But that second act--The Wilderness Years--would be altogether different in tone and spirit. In fact, the soul of this act would undermine its title, a convenient phrase journalists and biographers use to describe his 1985 to 1996 hiatus from Apple, as if the only meaningful times in Jobs's life were those spent in Cupertino. In fact, this middle period was the most pivotal of his life. And perhaps the happiest. He finally settled down, married, and had a family. He learned the value of patience and the ability to feign it when he lost it. Most important, his work with the two companies he led during that time, NeXT and Pixar, turned him into the kind of man, and leader, who would spur Apple to unimaginable heights upon his return.
Indeed, what at first glance seems like more wandering for the barefoot hippie who dropped out of Reed College to hitchhike around India, is in truth the equivalent of Steve Jobs attending business school. In other words, he grew. By leaps and bounds. In every aspect of his being. With a little massaging, this middle act could even be the plotline for a Pixar movie. It certainly fits the simple mantra John Lasseter ascribes to all the studio's successes, from Toy Story to Up: "It's gotta be about how the main character changes for the better."
I had covered Jobs for Fortune and The Wall Street Journal since 1985, but I didn't come to fully appreciate the importance of these "lost" years until after his death last fall. Rummaging through the storage shed, I discovered some three dozen tapes holding recordings of extended interviews--some lasting as long as three hours--that I'd conducted with him periodically over the past 25 years. (Snippets are scattered throughout this story.) Many I had never replayed--a couple hadn't even been transcribed before now. Some were interrupted by his kids bolting into the kitchen as we talked. During others, he would hit the pause button himself before saying something he feared might come back to bite him. Listening to them again with the benefit of hindsight, the ones that took place during that interregnum jump out as especially enlightening.
The lessons are powerful: Jobs matured as a manager and a boss; learned how to make the most of partnerships; found a way to turn his native stubbornness into a productive perseverance. He became a corporate architect, coming to appreciate the scaffolding of a business just as much as the skeletons of real buildings, which always fascinated him. He mastered the art of negotiation by immersing himself in Hollywood, and learned how to successfully manage creative talent, namely the artists at Pixar. Perhaps most important, he developed an astonishing adaptability that was critical to the hit-after-hit-after-hit climb of Apple's last decade. All this, during a time many remember as his most disappointing.
Eleven years is a big chunk of a lifetime. Especially when one's time on earth is cut short. Moreover, many people--particularly creative types--are often their most prolific during their thirties and early forties. With all the heady success of Apple during Jobs's last 14 years, it's all too easy to dismiss these "lost" years. But in truth, they transformed everything. As I listened again to those hours and hours of tapes, I realized they were, in fact, his most productive.
Steve Jobs did not wander aimlessly into the wilderness after being ousted from Apple in 1985. No happy camper, he was loaded for bear; burning to wreak revenge upon those who had spuriously shoved him into exile, and obsessed with proving to the world that he was no one-trick pony. Within days, he abruptly sold off all but one share of his Apple stock and, flush with a small fortune of about $70 million, set about creating another computer company, this one called NeXT. The startup ostensibly was a vehicle for revolutionizing higher education with powerful, beautiful computers. In reality, it was a bet that one day he would get the better of Apple.
He was also going to do it with a revolutionary organization, something he dubbed the Open Corporation. "Think of it this way," he explained. "If you look at your own body, your cells are specialized, but every single one of them has the master plan for the whole body. We think our company will be the best possible company if every single person working here understands the whole master plan and can use that as a yardstick to make decisions against. We think a lot of little and medium and big decisions will be made better if all our people know that." It was a bold theory.
Over all the years Jobs was away from Apple, I can't recall him saying one good thing about the company's brass. Early on, he whined about how CEO John Sculley had "poisoned" the culture of the place. As the years went by, and Apple's fortunes dimmed, Jobs's attacks became more pointed: "Right now it's like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz: 'I'm melting. I'm melting,' " he told me in the mid-1990s. "The jig is up. They can't seem to come out with a great computer to save their lives. They need to spend big on industrial design, reintroduce the hipness factor. But no, they hire [Gil] Amelio [as CEO]. It's as if Nike hired the guy that ran Kinney shoes."
At NeXT, Jobs was damn well going to deliver a great computer. He was going to do it with massive resources, raising well over $100 million from the likes of H. Ross Perot, Japanese printer maker Canon, and Carnegie Mellon University. He was going to do it with an astonishing automated factory in Fremont, California, where every surface and piece of equipment would be painted in specific shades of gray, black, and white. He was going to do it in style, working with a full-time architect to give the corporate headquarters in Redwood City a distinctive, austere aesthetic; NeXT HQ looked much like the interior of one of today's Apple Stores. The centerpiece was a staircase that seemed to float in air.
If Jobs's time in exile can be seen as an extended trip through business school, the heady start of NeXT represents those early days when a student thinks he knows everything and is in a rush to show that to the world. In fact, Jobs had just about every detail wrong. The Open Corporation was a dismal failure in practice. Its hallmark was that employee salaries were not kept secret; there was even an attempt to impose uniform compensation. It didn't work, of course; all kinds of side deals were cut to satiate key employees.
More concretely, Jobs had the whole business plan wrong. It would be two years before NeXT delivered anything to customers. When the NeXTcube computer finally did arrive, it proved too expensive to ever command a serious market. Ultimately, Jobs was forced to admit that the undeniably beautiful machine he and his engineering team concocted was a flop. He laid off most of the staff and turned the company from hardware to software, first to rewrite NeXT's operating system, called NextSTEP, for Intel-based computers. The company also engineered an ingenious development environment called WebObjects, which eventually became its best-selling program.
Jobs didn't know that WebObjects would later prove instrumental in building the online store for Apple and for iTunes, or that NextSTEP would be his ticket back to Apple. The road for NeXT was always rocky, perhaps appropriate for something that was born out of a desire for revenge. It was a good thing he had something else going on the side.
Of the three companies Jobs helped create, Pixar was the purest corporate and organizational expression of his nature. If NeXT was a travail of spite and malice, Pixar was a labor of love.
The Pixar story began even before Jobs left Apple. In early 1985, Apple fellow Alan Kay called his attention to the computer Graphics Group (GG) skunk works in San Rafael, California, an ill-fitting piece of the filmmaking production puzzle George Lucas had assembled for his Skywalker Ranch studios. It was little more than a team of 25 engineers--including a young "user interface designer" named John Lasseter--who desperately wanted to continue to work together even though Lucas, then embroiled in the costly aftermath of a divorce, was looking to sell.
Jobs's trip to take a look-see left an indelible impression. GG's head geek, Ed Catmull, showed him some short demo films made by Lasseter, who was neither a programmer nor a user interface designer, but a talented animator who had left Disney and been given his faux title by Catmull as a way to convince Lucas to put him on the payroll. The films weren't much to look at, but they were three-dimensional, they were generated by computer rather than hand-drawn, and they displayed the whimsy of a master storyteller.
Fascinated, Jobs tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Apple's board to buy the group. "These guys were way ahead of us on graphics, way ahead," Jobs remembered. "They were way ahead of anybody. I just knew in my bones that this was going to be very important." After getting bounced from Apple, Jobs went back to Lucas and drove a hard bargain. He paid $5 million for the group's assets and provided another $5 million in working capital for the company, which was christened Pixar. In hindsight, the price was a pittance. But in 1985, nobody would have expected Pixar to one day outstrip NeXT. Certainly not Jobs: He didn't build any fancy digs for his motley crew of animators and engineers, who for years made do with used furniture and dowdy offices.
Once again, what Jobs knew in his bones didn't translate into getting the details right. As with NeXT, Jobs initially intended the company to be a purveyor of high-performance computer hardware, this time for two frightfully niche markets: the special-effects departments of Hollywood studios and medical-imaging specialists. By 1989, however, Pixar had sold only a few hundred of its Pixar Image Computers, faux-granite painted cubes originally stickered at $135,000, that had to be paired with expensive engineering workstations to do anything.
This time, the strategy pivot came from the talent. In 1990, Lasseter and Catmull told Jobs they could make a business of creating computer-animated TV commercials--perhaps one day they could even make, and sell, cartoons! Jobs was smitten with Catmull and Lasseter. They were always teaching him something new. Could they deliver on the ultimate promise of the place, to use computers to create an entirely new kind of animation for the cinema and thus upend the entire business model of animation? Jobs decided to focus on this one disruptive opportunity. It was an instinct he would return to, repeatedly, when he rejoined Apple.
In 1991, he fired much of the Pixar staff, announced the new direction to the survivors, and reorganized so that the studio could pursue one animated project at a time. "I got everybody together," Jobs said, "and I said, 'At our heart, we really are a content company. Let's transition out of everything else. Let's go for it. This is why I bought into Pixar. This is why most of you are here. Let's go for it. It's a higher-risk strategy, but the rewards are gonna be much higher, and it's where our hearts are.' " Then he and CFO Lawrence Levy went to work learning everything they could about the dynamics and economics of the animation business. If they were going to start making cartoons, they were going to do it right.
The shift at Pixar occurred at about the same time as the major turn in Jobs's personal life: the blossoming of his romance with Laurene Powell. In 1991, two years after she met him following an informal lecture at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, Laurene was his pregnant bride, married by a Buddhist monk at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park.
Jobs had never seemed like the marrying type and hadn't shown much of a sense of responsibility for Lisa, his first daughter, who was born out of wedlock in 1978. He denied paternity initially, even though he had named an Apple computer after her. Egotistical, narcissistic, and manipulative since childhood, Jobs often behaved like a spoiled brat who was accustomed to getting his way.
His personality didn't change overnight after meeting Laurene, but his selfish ways did begin to moderate, especially after his children, Reed, Erin, and Eve, came into the family in 1991, 1995, and 1998, respectively. As is often the case with new parents, Jobs behaved as if he were the first person in the world to discover and fully appreciate the joys of family life. He literally stayed closer to home, converting a clapboard storefront building catty-corner from the Palo Alto Whole Foods into a satellite office so his commute would be a short bike ride. (He didn't use the office all that much after returning to Apple.)
My bureau was a block up the street, and occasionally I'd see him out for a stroll, usually with someone in tow. He always said he could think better when he walked. During these years, his fame had subsided somewhat, so it wasn't like encountering one of the Beatles at the supermarket. People pretty much left him alone.
I bumped into him on one of those walks when he was alone, and wound up joining him as he shopped for a new bicycle for Laurene's upcoming birthday. This was before you could do your homework on the Internet, but he had done his research, so there wasn't much shopping involved. We were in and out of Palo Alto Bicycles in 10 minutes. "I'd never have Andrea do something like this," he said, referring to his longtime administrative assistant. "I like buying presents for my family myself."
Even after he went back to Apple, there was nothing Jobs liked more than spending time at home. Not that he wasn't a workaholic. We were iChat buddies for several years, so his name would pop up whenever he was working at his computer at home. Almost invariably, he was in front of his Mac until after midnight. We'd occasionally have a video chat, and if it took place early in the evening, I'd often see one of his children in the background looking on.Shortly after his decision in 1990 to let Lasseter and Catmull start producing commercials and short films, Jobs pulled a rabbit out of his hat: He negotiated a $26 million marketing distribution deal with Disney that provided enough capital to make a full-length, computer-animated motion picture. Because Disney had been a Pixar customer, licensing its software for managing conventional animators, then-CEO Michael Eisner and his head of animation, Jeffrey Katzenberg, were fully aware that the company's technology was solid and unique, and that Lasseter showed flashes of genius as a new breed of animator.
In hindsight, Jobs's having a real family might have been the best thing to happen to Pixar. He was most effective as a marketer and a business leader when he could think of himself as the primary customer. What would he want from a computer-animated movie, both for himself and for his kids? That was the only market-research question he ever asked. He had always demanded great production values and design for his computer products. He was just as picky about what Pixar produced. Lasseter and Catmull couldn't have asked for a more empathetic benefactor.
Jobs was candid about the two Disney execs, telling me that both "make the mistake of not appreciating technology. They just assume that they can throw money at things and fix them. They don't have a clue." Once upon a time, he would have been enraged by the ignorance he perceived. When I asked him what had soured an earlier partnership between IBM and NeXT, he ranted: "The people at the top of IBM knew nothing about computers. Nothing. Nothing. The people at the top of Disney," on the other hand, "know a lot about what a really good film is and what is not."
Even though he believed that Katzenberg and Eisner "had no clue" about how far Pixar could take them--Jobs was convinced that Pixar's technology could revolutionize the business model for animation, which was then primarily a hand-drawn art--he recognized that the partnership had more or less saved the company: "It's the biggest thing I've done for Pixar," he said. So he found a common bond between the companies. "There was a certain amount of fear and trepidation, but what always happened was that making a great movie was the focal point of everybody's concerns. One way to drive fear out of a relationship is to realize that your partner's values are the same as yours, that what you care about is exactly what they care about. In my opinion, that drives fear out and makes for a great partnership, whether it's a corporate partnership or a marriage."
Then he set about designing an organization that could deliver a great movie--and many more. His foray into Hollywood had taught him a great deal. "I started to learn about how films are made. Basically, it's bands of gypsies getting together to make a film. After the film, they disband. The problem with that is we want to build a company, not just make a single movie."
This time, there was no flighty discussion of an "open" corporation. "Incentive structures work," he told me. "So you have to be very careful of what you incent people to do, because various incentive structures create all sorts of consequences that you can't anticipate. Everybody at Pixar is incented to build the company: whether they're working on the film; whether they're working on a potential direct-to-video product; whether they're working on a CD-ROM. Whatever their combination of creative and technical talent may be, we want them incented to make the whole company successful."
There was another compensation detail that reflected how completely Jobs was able to mesh the values of Silicon Valley with Hollywood. Pixar paid its animators just as well as its software geniuses (beginning an escalation in salaries that Katzenberg accelerated later that decade at DreamWorks). "We value them both equally," Jobs said of Pixar's two talent camps. "Some people say we should value one higher than the other, but we value them equally, we pay them equally, they have stock equally. We made that decision very early. Ed Catmull made that decision, actually. We will always do that; that's one of Pixar's core values."
These were the decisions that cemented the company's future success. When Disney surprised Jobs by scheduling Pixar's first movie as its 1995 holiday feature, his team was ready, with a little picture called Toy Story. And Jobs, armed with a renegotiated Disney deal for three pictures, was ready too; Pixar went public 10 days after Toy Story's stunning debut, raising nearly $100 million.
After that, it was as if the company hit the fast-forward button. And for the rest of his life, Jobs enjoyed Pixar as he enjoyed little else. Now was the time to throw away the used furniture and build a proper studio in Emeryville, California. He relished this so much more than the NeXT headquarters--after all, this time he and his team had earned it. The design blended aspects of a Hollywood lot and an old-fashioned brick factory building, perfect for his star animators and programmers, perfect for working with Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres, Owen Wilson, and all the other stars who enjoyed voicing Pixar characters. The custom-made bricks came in 12 shades, and if the colors weren't distributed evenly enough, Jobs would have the bricklayers pull them down and do it again. He would visit the construction site as often as he could as it came together, often clambering around the buildings at night, when no one but the security guards were around.For all the joy that Pixar brought Jobs, it was NeXT that got him back to Apple. After failing to develop new software architecture for the Mac and bungling a joint venture with IBM, Apple was on its deathbed in 1996. NeXT had a powerful, modern operating system and one very persuasive storyteller, who managed to convince CEO Amelio that his stepchild could be Apple's salvation. In late 1996, Jobs sold NeXT to Apple for $400 million, which he used to pay back Perot, Canon, and some other early investors. Within six months, Jobs had mounted a putsch and became Apple's "iCEO," with the i standing for what proved to be a deeply false "interim."
He also created something called Pixar University for the staff, where his brilliant engineers and clever artists and smart financial people could take classes in all kinds of subjects, to better appreciate what their coworkers did. There were classes in the visual arts, dance, computer programming, foreign languages, drama, mathematics, creative writing, and even accounting. "It is," he once told me, "the coolest place to work in the world."
The ensuing tale, the saga of the modern Apple, is simply the story of the man who emerged from that 11-year business school and implemented the lessons he had learned along the way. As was true when he started at Pixar and NeXT, Jobs had many of the details wrong when he first returned to the Apple helm. He imagined that the company's business would always be selling computers. He thought that what was then called the "information highway" would be primarily of interest to businesses. He dismissed the idea that computer networks would carry lots of video.
But some of the tougher years at NeXT and Pixar had taught him how to stretch a company's finances, which helped him ride out his first couple of years back, when Apple was still reliant on a weak jumble of offerings. With newfound discipline, he quickly streamlined the company's product lines. And just as he had at Pixar, he aligned the company behind those projects. In a way that had never been done before at a technology company--but that looked a lot like an animation studio bent on delivering one great movie a year--Jobs created the organizational strength to deliver one hit after another, each an extension of Apple's position as the consumer's digital hub, each as strong as its predecessor. If there's anything that parallels Apple's decade-long string of hits--iMac, PowerBook, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, to list just the blockbusters--it's Pixar's string of winners, including Toy Story, Monsters, Inc.,Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, WALL-E, and Up. These insanely great products could have come only from insanely great companies, and that's what Jobs had learned to build.
Jobs had learned how to treat talent at Pixar; he spoke to me about his colleagues there differently from the way he discussed his NeXT coworkers. When he returned to Apple, he often described his very top management team in the same warm terms, with the occasional notable exception. As he had with animators and programmers at Pixar, he integrated designers and technologists at Apple. He cultivated a team he could count on, including the great designer Jonathan Ive, who is to Apple what Lasseter is to Pixar. "We've done so many hardware products where Jony and I have looked at each other and said, 'We don't know how to make it any better than this, we just don't know how to make it,' " Jobs told me. "But we always do; we realize another way. And then it's not long after the new thing comes out that we look at the older thing and go, 'How can we ever have done that?' "There was one other big lesson he learned from his Hollywood adventure: People remember stories more than products. "The technology we've been laboring on over the past 20 years becomes part of the sedimentary layer," he told me once. "But when Snow White was re-released [on DVD, in 2001], we were one of the 28 million families that went out and bought a copy of it. This was a film that is 60 years old, and my son was watching it and loving it. I don't think anybody's going to be beating on a Macintosh 60 years from now."
When I listened to this quote again last month, I was struck by something else in it: the combination of adaptability and intuition that proved so critical to Apple's rise. Jobs may have been impulsive at times, but he was always methodical. This kind of nature suited an autodidact with eclectic tastes, empowering him either to obsess impatiently about a pressing problem that had to be dealt with immediately--much like an engineer--or else to let an idea steep and incubate until he got it right. This is why Jobs was so often right on the big picture, even when he got the details wrong. Open salaries was a dumb detail of the Open Corporation, but its core idea, of a workplace where every single person understands the company's goals, is something that most organizations get wrong and that Apple has gotten so right for well over a decade. If Jobs was initially wrong about Apple getting into phones and handheld devices, he was right on about the big idea of the computer at the center of a whirling digital universe. Hence Apple's ability to deliver a great iTunes store after the iPod, even though it was never planned. Hence the great iPhone, despite Jobs's dismissal of "Swiss Army knife" digital devices.
Once he realized he really was going to die, Jobs quietly began to think more seriously about the story of his own life and creations. At his memorial service, Laurene remarked that what struck her most upon really getting to know him was his "fully formed aesthetic sense." He knew exactly what he liked, and he analyzed it until he could tell you precisely why. Jobs always felt that architecture could be a truly lasting expression of one's aesthetic, reaching beyond the limits of one's lifetime. It wasn't incidental, then, that his last public appearance was at a Cupertino City Council meeting to unveil the breathtaking four-story, doughnut-shaped "mother ship" that's nearly a half-mile in diameter and that will one day become Apple's headquarters.
Of course, Jobs wanted his own official story to measure up. So he enlisted Walter Isaacson--creator of a virtual Mount Rushmore of best-selling biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Henry Kissinger--to tell his tale. Like those giants, Jobs is a man whose history will be told many a time, with fresh insights and new reporting. In the retelling, it may well be that the lessons from his "lost" years in the "wilderness" are the ones that will prove most inspiring.
Want to make your own pants? The site will have instructions for that. And also how to make your own sewing machine. It aims to be a repository of instructions on how to make everything, and change how we think about where our stuff comes from.
When industrial designers think about ways to make products more sustainable, they often focus on small tweaks: removing BPA from plastic, or making a product that’s slightly less toxic than previous iterations. But these are bandaids on the larger problem: materials that aren’t biodegradable and that are mass-produced in central locations (so supply chains can be easily disrupted).
When Dominic Muren, a former toy designer, started the Humblefactory design laboratory, he decided to address systemic supply chain issues. "What if instead we thought about the way slow food thinks about food? Slow food isn’t trying to be a healthy alternative to a TV dinner," he explains. "It’s asking people to completely reexamine the way food gets delivered to them in a local context."We don’t have a good place to have conversations on what’s possible to make on a small scale in your local community and how you do that making.
Humblefactory has worked on a variety of projects, including a skin-based method to hold assemblies of objects together and a way to use waste paper to make durable 3-D objects (the vacuum-powered molding process can be seen in the slide show above). But Muren’s latest is his most ambitious. Alchematter, a site that will launch in closed alpha this summer, will be a crowdsourced guide to making things from scratch--or, if you like, a Wikipedia for makers.
Says Muren: "We don’t have a good place to have conversations on what’s possible to make on a small scale in your local community and how you do that making. There’s Instructables and Make:Projects and a couple of websites that allow you to share instructions, but nothing that allows you to share the whole chain from the ground up."
A sample project on Alchematter might contain instructions for making a sweater. But it won’t stop there: There could be variations on a single procedural step that change the pattern, or even instructions on how to make a knitting machine that creates the sweater for you. The sweater instructions could also be embedded into a larger project, like a knit cushion that goes on a couch.
Muren is also excited about the prospect of DIY bioengineering projects being included on the site (see this video on how to make DIY antidepressant yogurt to see what he means). "There’s little small-scale support infrastructure," he says.It’s not just you either live in New York and you’re a hobbyist or you live in rural Ghana and you’re a farmer with nothing.
Each project can be adapted to a local context by contributors. In New York, makers might have the cash to buy tools from McMaster Carr, a massive industrial supply company. In Detroit, makers might not have the funds for that--but they may have access to scrap, because they live in a place where industry is in decline. A savvy contributor could make a note on a project for locals living in places that have an excess of trashed microwaves: Go find a dead microwave and take a particular chunk out of it to use in XYZ project.
"The reality of small-scale making is that there are a lot of different situations," says Muren. "It’s not just you either live in New York and you’re a hobbyist or you live in rural Ghana and you’re a farmer with nothing."
By the time the public gets to play with Alchematter, there will probably be plenty of projects to look through. Humblefactory is teaming up with Open Source Ecology, an organization working on a toolkit containing 50 components that can build a civilization from scratch (we’ll believe it when we see it) for the closed alpha. "They’re missing a good way of sharing these designs," says Muren.
When industrial designers think about ways to make products more sustainable, they often focus on small tweaks: removing BPA from plastic, or making a product that’s slightly less toxic than previous iterations. But these are bandaids on the larger problem: materials that aren’t biodegradable and that are mass-produced in central locations (so supply chains can be easily disrupted).
When Dominic Muren, a former toy designer, started the Humblefactory design laboratory, he decided to address systemic supply chain issues. "What if instead we thought about the way slow food thinks about food? Slow food isn’t trying to be a healthy alternative to a TV dinner," he explains. "It’s asking people to completely reexamine the way food gets delivered to them in a local context."We don’t have a good place to have conversations on what’s possible to make on a small scale in your local community and how you do that making.
Humblefactory has worked on a variety of projects, including a skin-based method to hold assemblies of objects together and a way to use waste paper to make durable 3-D objects (the vacuum-powered molding process can be seen in the slide show above). But Muren’s latest is his most ambitious. Alchematter, a site that will launch in closed alpha this summer, will be a crowdsourced guide to making things from scratch--or, if you like, a Wikipedia for makers.
Says Muren: "We don’t have a good place to have conversations on what’s possible to make on a small scale in your local community and how you do that making. There’s Instructables and Make:Projects and a couple of websites that allow you to share instructions, but nothing that allows you to share the whole chain from the ground up."
A sample project on Alchematter might contain instructions for making a sweater. But it won’t stop there: There could be variations on a single procedural step that change the pattern, or even instructions on how to make a knitting machine that creates the sweater for you. The sweater instructions could also be embedded into a larger project, like a knit cushion that goes on a couch.
Muren is also excited about the prospect of DIY bioengineering projects being included on the site (see this video on how to make DIY antidepressant yogurt to see what he means). "There’s little small-scale support infrastructure," he says.It’s not just you either live in New York and you’re a hobbyist or you live in rural Ghana and you’re a farmer with nothing.
Each project can be adapted to a local context by contributors. In New York, makers might have the cash to buy tools from McMaster Carr, a massive industrial supply company. In Detroit, makers might not have the funds for that--but they may have access to scrap, because they live in a place where industry is in decline. A savvy contributor could make a note on a project for locals living in places that have an excess of trashed microwaves: Go find a dead microwave and take a particular chunk out of it to use in XYZ project.
"The reality of small-scale making is that there are a lot of different situations," says Muren. "It’s not just you either live in New York and you’re a hobbyist or you live in rural Ghana and you’re a farmer with nothing."
By the time the public gets to play with Alchematter, there will probably be plenty of projects to look through. Humblefactory is teaming up with Open Source Ecology, an organization working on a toolkit containing 50 components that can build a civilization from scratch (we’ll believe it when we see it) for the closed alpha. "They’re missing a good way of sharing these designs," says Muren.
Yesterday's gap up opening couldn't translated in to short covering and buying at 5340 levels and Nifty clawed back to 5300 level. Today's market is muted with no direction as global cues is negative and ahead of Spain's 10 year bond sale which will take place later on thursday.
Trader's are watching closely that will the spain able to refinance its 10 year note with yield around 6% and whether it will continue to climb. Nifty will see 5280 levels in near later half when European markets will open as there will be no hope for positive news from Spain's debt auction and markets will disappoint after that.
For the first time in the history of the Indian commodity markets, National Spot Exchange (NSEL) will launch "e-Platinum", an investment product in platinum in demat form under NSEL's e-series banner, on Tuesday, April 17, 2012.
Indian investors will now have an opportunity to buy, sell, hold and liquidate their e-Platinum units electronically. They will also have the option to invest their small savings in this rarest of all precious metals through SIPs (systematic investment plan).
Benefits
**Trading units available in 1 gram
**Extended trading hours from 10 am to 11:30 pm
Indian investors will now have an opportunity to buy, sell, hold and liquidate their e-Platinum units electronically. They will also have the option to invest their small savings in this rarest of all precious metals through SIPs (systematic investment plan).
Benefits
**Trading units available in 1 gram
**Extended trading hours from 10 am to 11:30 pm
Why would anyone in his right mind pay Rs 1 crore – yes, one crore – for a post-graduate seat in a medical college?
If you had that kind of money after school, would you even have to work to earn a living?
According to a story in DNA newspaper, the leader of the opposition in the Maharashtra assembly, Eknath Khadse, unveiled the details of a “sting operation” on the sale of engineering and medical seats in the state, where seats were apparently sold to bidders for considerations ranging from Rs 7 lakh to Rs 1 crore.
The report, quoting Khadse, says that “private colleges and universities demanded Rs 7 lakh to Rs 10 lakh for bachelor of dental surgery (BDS) seats while the rate for a post-graduation courses goes up to Rs 1 crore.”
Extracting a crore from medical college aspirants is apparently easier than extracting teeth out of dental patients.
But the idea flies in the face of economic logic – since the whole purpose of an education is to find a vocation that earns you a decent income.
Why would anyone in his right mind pay Rs 1 crore – yes, one crore – for a post-graduate seat in a medical college?AFP
While smaller sums such as a few thousand rupees or even a few lakhs may make some sense since the student will presumably earn much more on graduation, the crorepatistudent clearly needs some coaching in economics.
Let’s look at the math.
If I invest Rs 1 crore in a seat, and, let’s say, I expect to spend another Rs 10 lakh while I am doing the medical course (MBBS, etc) over the next five-and-a-half years or six, that’s an investment which will yield nearly Rs 1.9 crore at the end of six years. (Assumption: a 10 percent annual compound interest, which is easily possible in a mix of equity and debt schemes).
Put another way, the opportunity cost of doing a medical course for six years after paying Rs 1 crore as capitation fee or bribe is a loss of Rs 1.9 crore at the end of the course. And let’s not forget that while the seat-bagger will be slogging his butt off in the medical course, the person who opts to invest the Rs 1 crore in a mutual fund or bank fixed deposit will be having a ball.
No work, all play.
On the debit side, at the end of six years, the person who did the medical course would have a skill that can earn him an income while our all-play-no-work idler would have few skills but Rs 1.9 crore in the kitty.
However, one can acquire skills for far less money – even if it is not to become a doctor. In fact, one could do odd jobs and small courses and earn some money. So there would be some skills learned while our future medic is beavering away with hefty books and inspecting skeletons in the lab.
Now, if one were to invest Rs 1.9 crore in a tax-free bond at 8 percent (which is the going rate in recent tax-free bond issues), it would give you a monthly tax-free income of Rs 1.26 lakh.
No MBBS doctor or even specialist will start out his career with that kind of income.
Paying Rs 1 crore for a medical seat is only for the economically-challenged.
See more similar story about Para Medical studies as well e.g. Pharmacy
If you had that kind of money after school, would you even have to work to earn a living?
According to a story in DNA newspaper, the leader of the opposition in the Maharashtra assembly, Eknath Khadse, unveiled the details of a “sting operation” on the sale of engineering and medical seats in the state, where seats were apparently sold to bidders for considerations ranging from Rs 7 lakh to Rs 1 crore.
The report, quoting Khadse, says that “private colleges and universities demanded Rs 7 lakh to Rs 10 lakh for bachelor of dental surgery (BDS) seats while the rate for a post-graduation courses goes up to Rs 1 crore.”
Extracting a crore from medical college aspirants is apparently easier than extracting teeth out of dental patients.
But the idea flies in the face of economic logic – since the whole purpose of an education is to find a vocation that earns you a decent income.
Why would anyone in his right mind pay Rs 1 crore – yes, one crore – for a post-graduate seat in a medical college?AFP
While smaller sums such as a few thousand rupees or even a few lakhs may make some sense since the student will presumably earn much more on graduation, the crorepatistudent clearly needs some coaching in economics.
Let’s look at the math.
If I invest Rs 1 crore in a seat, and, let’s say, I expect to spend another Rs 10 lakh while I am doing the medical course (MBBS, etc) over the next five-and-a-half years or six, that’s an investment which will yield nearly Rs 1.9 crore at the end of six years. (Assumption: a 10 percent annual compound interest, which is easily possible in a mix of equity and debt schemes).
Put another way, the opportunity cost of doing a medical course for six years after paying Rs 1 crore as capitation fee or bribe is a loss of Rs 1.9 crore at the end of the course. And let’s not forget that while the seat-bagger will be slogging his butt off in the medical course, the person who opts to invest the Rs 1 crore in a mutual fund or bank fixed deposit will be having a ball.
No work, all play.
On the debit side, at the end of six years, the person who did the medical course would have a skill that can earn him an income while our all-play-no-work idler would have few skills but Rs 1.9 crore in the kitty.
However, one can acquire skills for far less money – even if it is not to become a doctor. In fact, one could do odd jobs and small courses and earn some money. So there would be some skills learned while our future medic is beavering away with hefty books and inspecting skeletons in the lab.
Now, if one were to invest Rs 1.9 crore in a tax-free bond at 8 percent (which is the going rate in recent tax-free bond issues), it would give you a monthly tax-free income of Rs 1.26 lakh.
No MBBS doctor or even specialist will start out his career with that kind of income.
Paying Rs 1 crore for a medical seat is only for the economically-challenged.
See more similar story about Para Medical studies as well e.g. Pharmacy
The Wall Street Journal has learned a few incredible facts about the recent deal to buy Instagram. Firstly the deal was led almost exclusively by CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself in a brief and intense three day window, without much of the legal or banking paraphernalia that usually goes with such negotiations. And then, at the key moment of discussing price it was guessed that if Facebook was one day to be worth $200 billion, then Instagram's value should be 1% ... Or $2 billion. That's twice what it ultimately went for. The WSJ also suggests that Zuck made the moves because he was worried that Instagram was growing so very swiftly, effectively bypassing Facebook's photo-sharing dominance--this information chimes with rumors he "panicked" at this news. And Facebook's board was "told" not asked about the deal. This paints a complex picture of its CEO as at once confident and bold, and also nervous and panicky--details that will be scrutinized come Facebook's imminent IPO.
