The New Immagrenats
Well, it’s the same shit they thin the Koreans and Chinese are smart and shit are they in for a surprise.
Well, you have to realize that I have to make myself much better then everyone else. I realized that I read a lot and that is good because I am always growing. That has been my goal and I had great role models.. Yes, I realized that the more exposure I have the better I get..
I finished the Dali Lama book yesterday which was great. I realized that something’s we should let them be. Yes, because I read about knowing that someone has a certain cancer and should we let them know, what about the present life? Yes, this is true.. I also realized that the main goal is just life your life… this is the greatest mystery.. It also had some insights on how we thing of things and how things grow..
This is the true goal, always growing and learning… I also found a section which he talked about plasticity which are brains are like plastic which they expand and learn but not solid which some people think you can’t learn anymore.. Everyday your brain is able to learn and understand and it is always stretching and growing….Yes, I found it…
Taking peoples proprety with new law..
The issue is not whether governments can condemn private property to build a public amenity like a road, a school or a sewage treatment plant. That power is explicit in the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment, provided that “just compensation” is paid. The conflict arises over government actions to seize private homes or businesses as part of a redevelopment project that at least partly benefits a private party like a retail store, an apartment complex or football studio..
Fxm: Here you have an example of imminent domain which the government has given power to take this propertie if they decide it’s in the best interest of the public good. But, what happens when the public good is some big company with money?
The take over sometimes only benefits a private party like a retail store, an apartment complex or a football stadium..
The private party is who will benefit and uses the laws to win..
Private party are who we must look out for.
“Our opposition to eminent domain is not across the board,” he said. “it has an important but limited role in gorernment planning and the building of roads, parks and public buildings. What we oppose is eminent domain abuse for private development, and we are encouraging legislators to curtail it…”
But Salesforce.com, which supplies customer tracking and management software online, has shown how to create a thriving business by selling first to small business.
“our company was based on building momentum from the bottom up, and using the web as we do drastically reduces the cost of sales and service, “ said Phill Robinson, Senior vice president for marketing.
Today, the company has more than 18,000 customers and sales of moe than $300 million a year. It’s only problem seems to be growing pains, as they compnays network went down a coule of times in the last two months. Many start-ups are trying to follow in the footsteps of salesforce by offering software as an online service to reach smaller companies..
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Good article read it again..
Web Services Upend Old Ideas About the Little Guy's Role
By STEVE LOHR
Published: February 21, 2006
The old story of technology in business was a trickle-down affair. From telephones to computers, big companies came first. They could afford the latest innovations, and they reaped the benefits of greater efficiency, increased sales and expansion into distant markets. As a technology spread and costs fell, small businesses joined the parade, though from the rear.
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Search engines and other tools are helping small businesses thrive.
Running a Hatchery for Replicant Hackers
A boot camp is trying to systematize the archetypal two guys in a garage.
Mr. Cipriani Takes His Name to Wall Street Condominiums
The Cipriani brand trades on its legacy of hobnobbing and hospitality.
Rewarding Recyclers, and Finding Gold in the Garbage
One company works with municipalities to give households coupons for recycling.
Dan Krauss for The New York Times
Tom Kramer, a founder of Bella Pictures, said his business "wouldn't have been possible five years ago."
Now that pattern is being challenged by a bottom-up revolution, one fueled by a second wave of Internet technologies like the search services from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and software delivered as a utilitylike service over the Web.
The second-generation Internet technologies — combined with earlier tools like the Web itself and e-mail — are drastically reducing the cost of communicating, finding things and distributing and receiving services online. That means a cost leveling that puts small companies on equal footing with big ones, making it easier for upstarts to innovate, disrupt industries and even get big fast.
The phenomenon is a big step in the democratization of information technology. Its imprint is evident well beyond business, in the social and cultural impact of everything from blogs to online role-playing games. Still, it seems that small businesses, and the marketplace they represent, will be affected the most in the overall economy. Long-held assumptions are suddenly under assault.
Fortune Below 500
One truism has been that while small businesses represent a huge market — companies with fewer than 500 employees, the government reports, account for half the nation's economic output and 60 to 80 percent of all new jobs — it is highly fragmented and hard to reach.
So big companies typically shunned the small-business market, and Silicon Valley start-ups tended to sidestep it, instead devising business plans focused on either the consumer or the large-corporate market. But Salesforce.com, which supplies customer tracking and management software online, has shown how to create a thriving business by selling first to small businesses.
"Our company was based on building momentum from the bottom up, and using the Web as we do drastically reduces the cost of sales and service," said Phill Robinson, senior vice president for marketing.
Today, the company has more than 18,000 customers and sales of more than $300 million a year. Its only problem seems to be growing pains, as the company's network went down a couple of times in the last two months. Many start-ups are trying to follow in the footsteps of Salesforce by offering software as an online service to reach smaller companies.
I.B.M. makes its living catering to the costly needs of its Fortune 500 clientele. But last year, it began offering small businesses Web-based software services like filtering for e-mail spam and viruses, starting at less than $2 per employee a month.
"I.B.M. could not afford to touch this market years ago," said James M. Corgel, general manager of services for small and medium-size businesses. "But as we automate more, we can afford to sell to the small-business market."
Creating More Gazelles
Students of small business have often noted that the most economically significant companies are the "gazelles," small businesses that become dynamic fast-growing companies. The new Web-based technologies could foster a proliferation of gazelles, stimulating job creation and wealth across the economy.
"In principle, this should lower barriers to the entry and growth of innovative small enterprises," said Frederic M. Scherer, an economist and professor emeritus at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
That principle is being widely practiced these days. Take the example of Bella Pictures, a three-year-old business in San Francisco. Its goal is to transform the enterprise of wedding pictures from a local craft of mixed quality into a national business of consistently high quality and personalized service. It has grown rapidly, and last wedding season, May through October, Bella shot photographs at 1,300 weddings.
Bella's 150 freelance photographers and 50 consultants in a dozen cities are linked in a virtual network. Every job, assignment, bride and mother-of-the-bride preference is entered into a Web-based customer relationship management program. Bella markets itself by buying keywords, like "wedding photography," on search engines like Google and Yahoo to bring customers to its Web site, bellapictures.com.
Bella solicits photographers on Craigslist, the online bulletin board, and photographers submit portfolios through the Web, too. All photographs are taken with digital cameras.
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Web Services Upend Old Ideas About the Little Guy's Role
Published: February 21, 2006
(Page 2 of 2)
The technology behind Bella, said Tom Kramer, the president and a founder, has become available and affordable only in the last few years. Sophisticated customer- and job-tracking software, he said, used to be available only as million-dollar software applications, with hefty annual maintenance fees. Today, its Web-based equivalent is a pay-for-use service from Salesforce, which costs Bella a couple of thousand dollars a month. Web searching, online listings and the spread of digital photography, he added, are all crucial tools for Bella.
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Eric Ottaway at the Brooklyn Brewery, which invested in a computer network linking its regional sales force.
Running a Hatchery for Replicant Hackers
A boot camp is trying to systematize the archetypal two guys in a garage.
Mr. Cipriani Takes His Name to Wall Street Condominiums
The Cipriani brand trades on its legacy of hobnobbing and hospitality.
Rewarding Recyclers, and Finding Gold in the Garbage
One company works with municipalities to give households coupons for recycling.
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Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times
Newark Nut Company became Nutsonline.com and sales tripled.
"Our business wouldn't have been possible five years ago," he said.
More Growth on Tap
The new technology is also giving small businesses the freedom to pursue new strategies. Brooklyn Brewery, founded in 1988, took a new path less than three years ago. The company wanted to build its beer into a larger regional brand. So it sold the trucks and storage facilities that it had used mainly in the New York area, and hired independent distributors to deliver its beer up and down the East Coast.
To become a regional business, the company wanted most of its employees to work outside Brooklyn, promoting its beer in new markets. It invested about $20,000 in a computer network so that its 15-person sales force, spread from Massachusetts to Georgia, could tap in from notebook computers for information on everything from sales leads to poster art for tavern promotions.
The strategy has paid off. Sales at the 27-person company have grown nearly 30 percent over the last couple of years to about $10 million in 2005, said Eric Ottaway, the general manager, who expects sales to rise about 15 percent this year. The growth has come without adding to his four-person administrative staff, Mr. Ottaway said.
Brooklyn Brewery farms out the maintenance of its computer network to a services company, Quality Technology Solutions of Morris Plains, N.J., which typically works for larger businesses. But it can make money on a smaller account like the beer maker because of the Internet and features that Microsoft has added to its Small Business Server software, which enables remote updating, troubleshooting and bug fixes, said Neil Rosenberg, president of Quality Technology Solutions. Mr. Rosenberg's experts can now monitor and tweak the brewery's computers from New Jersey.
"So I don't have to schlep a technician to Brooklyn for 80 to 90 percent of the problems," he said.
I.B.M., the giant of the technology services business, is not sending consultants to Cole Harford in Overland Park, Kan., either. Last year, Cole Harford, a distributor of restaurant supplies like napkins and plastic cups, started using a couple of I.B.M. Web-based software programs that monitor Cole Harford's e-mail for spam and viruses, blocking malicious code from reaching its 75 desktop and notebook personal computers. The service has been remarkably effective, said Laurel Johnson, the information technology director at Cole Harford, and it costs less than $5 a month per user.
Previously, Ms. Johnson said, she and an assistant used to spend two days a week wrestling with virus and spam troubles. Today, those problems take only four hours a month of her time, so she is planning to finally tackle a long-delayed project to automate the company's four warehouses.
Providing a Second Wind
The new Web technologies have also given a second life to languishing small businesses. Until a few years ago, the Newark Nut Company, a retail and wholesale vendor of nuts, candy and other snacks, was struggling in a declining urban neighborhood. But in 2003, Jeffrey Braverman decided to leave behind his six-figure salary at a private investment company in Manhattan and help revive his family's business.
Mr. Braverman pushed the business online, studied Web marketing and bought keywords on search engines. Since then, the company's employment has tripled to 12 people, Mr. Braverman said, and sales have tripled into millions of dollars a year. The business, now called Nutsonline.com, recently relocated to Linden, N.J.
Search technology, he said, can really open the door to wider markets for small companies. Far-flung customers can find a company's products, while keyword advertising makes marketing more specific and affordable. "It's just been phenomenal what Google has done for our business," said Mr. Braverman, who is 25.
Smaller businesses have now taken the lead in spending on information technology. Small and medium-size businesses — those with fewer than 1,000 employees — account for half of all spending on hardware, software and services in the United States, and their spending grew 35 percent faster last year than the overall market, according to IDC, a research firm. That trend, said Ray Boggs, an IDC analyst, is expected to continue for the next few years as small businesses become more eager and adept at using new Web technology.
JotSpot is a Silicon Valley start-up betting on the small-business market. It offers collaborative work spaces online where people can share and edit Web-based documents and databases for project management, help desks, recruiting, product development and other tasks.
JotSpot calls them "do-it-yourself applications." Anyone can create up to 20 Web pages shared by five people, at no cost. For more pages and larger groups, the monthly fees start at $9.
"The sweet spot for us is small businesses up to 200 people," said Joe Kraus, a co-founder and the chief executive of JotSpot. "The rise of software as a Web service, combined with search marketing, has totally changed the economics of supplying and selling technology to small businesses."
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This article is for louise he is in the marketing business…
Throwing All Cultures Into the Marketing Pot
By HILLARY CHURA
Published: February 21, 2006
MARKETERS are embracing America's mishmash of cultures as the influence of immigrants is felt in areas like cuisine, music, holidays and clothing.
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Pepsi-Cola
Pepsi-Cola will bring a drink popular in Mexico to the United States.
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"You don't see it creeping up," said Luke Visconti, co-founder and partner in DiversityInc Media, which measures diversity management at large companies and publishes a magazine on the subject. "You don't see the changes unless you go back and think of it."
These days, contemporary men seek advice from old-world marriage brokers; home sellers consult feng shui practitioners before an open house; shops selling Asian-style bubble tea (made with tapioca) are opening in central business districts. And the results of earlier waves of cultural immigration, like Brazilian-inspired bathing suits and Caribbean cocktails, have given way to Cossack-inspired fur coats and sparkly Indian slippers. Many dishware manufacturers seem to offer square Asian-inspired dishes.
Some insurance covers acupuncture. Japanese anime comic books are becoming more popular. The Japanese pop music group Puffy AmiYumi performed during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and Broadway has had at least two Latino-influenced plays — "Forever Tango" and "Latinologues." Companies like Pepsi-Cola and Ford Motor are tapping into reggaetón, which mixes Spanish-language hip-hop with the rhythms of Caribbean music.
Marketers seeking innovations may need only to commandeer ideas from home, tweak a flavor, change packaging or borrow from an old-country holiday. "The Chinese New Year in a generation or two could be what St. Patrick's Day became a long time ago," said Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. "Hunan and Sichuan food is served in school cafeterias, and you've got sweet and sour sauce with your McNuggets."
Immigration may have had its greatest impact on the palate. Before the 1980's, a city's ethnic offerings may have started and stopped at chop suey and pizza; today, it could include Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Ethiopian or some fusion of two or more cuisines. Shoppers and diners have their choice of Greek yogurt, ready-to-drink mojito mixes, short-rib flautas, tortilla chips with tamari seasoning, sushi and Mediterranean olive bars. Asian ingredients like lemon grass and bok choy increasingly show up in recipes.
So, too, do peppers like chipotle and jalapeño and fruits like mangoes and guavas. "These weren't mainstream until the Hispanic population grew," said Marcia Mogelonsky, a senior research analyst for Mintel International.
According to the Census Bureau, by 2020 the Hispanic population will account for 18 percent of the total population, up from 6 percent in 1980. But the trend has moved well beyond Spanish-speaking Americans to include Indians, Chinese, Russians and other ethnicities. While immigrant influence remains greatest in major metropolitan areas, these enclaves have expanded to smaller cities.
Children's television reflects that diversity. Disney now shows "American Dragon: Jake Long," featuring a pint-size superhero who is half-Asian and half-Caucasian, hangs out with blacks and whites and consults a wizened Asian elder.
Other crossover shows include Nickelodeon's "Dora the Explorer," a 7-year-old Latina cartoon heroine who has several merchandise deals, including Campbell's soup. Last year, she spun off "Go, Diego, Go" that features her equally bilingual cousin.
Some marketers are inching forward. Bank of America sponsored a Manhattan family music festival — promoted in English and Spanish — with a Chinese music ensemble and a gospel choir from Soweto. McDonald's spun off the Chipotle Mexican Grill chain this year and still owns a big stake.
Last year, Schieffelin & Company rolled out Navan, a vanilla cognac intended to play off the spice's appeal to Hispanics but also to blacks and Asians. Diageo last year introduced the high-end Brazilian rum Orinoco.
Procter & Gamble is trying to expand sales for its Ariel laundry detergent, which is popular in Mexico, into Wal-Mart in the United States, said one Procter & Gamble marketer who asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media.
He said a mainstream marketing campaign for Pantene shampoo, likely to begin before July, will be based in part on market research that showed Latina women prefer long, straight hair.
At the same time that Asian chains like 99 Ranch Market have grown more popular with non-Asian customers, Wal-Mart and other supermarkets have expanded their ethnic food aisles, said Saul S. Gitlin, executive vice president for strategic services at Kang & Lee, part of WPP Group's Young & Rubicam Brands.
In introducing the Ford Fusion four-door midsize sedan in 2005, Ford's general market advertising campaign borrowed from its Asian campaign's soap operas, said David Rodriguez, multicultural marketing manager for Ford, Lincoln and Mercury brands.
He said the Ford Fusion Mixer, a Web-based music mix that includes genres like R&B, salsa, reggaetón, Asian, hip-hop, rock and alternative music, was developed for Fordenespanol.com but now runs on all company sites.
"In many cases, we will very much acknowledge that what is multicultural today very much will be general market tomorrow," Mr. Rodriguez said.
Pepsi-Cola North America is bringing Manzanita Sol, a popular apple-flavored soft drink in Mexico, to Southern California, Texas, Arizona, New York City and Miami. It is aimed primarily at Latinos but is also tied to the American affinity for apple juice.
Lara Montilla, senior marketing manager for multicultural marketing at Pepsi, says the drink is selling well, in part because of nonethnic consumers.
"The U.S. consumer is exploring different flavors more now than before," Ms. Montilla said. "We definitely will see a lot of crossing paths when it comes to innovation — innovation that is targeted to ethnic consumers but crosses over to the general market."
She said only a handful of companies had figured out how to achieve that crossover and that Pepsi-Cola North America had learned from its sibling, Frito-Lay. The snack company introduced Doritos Guacamole for Latinos but expanded it to the general market. She said aguas frescas, a drink with fruit pulp, sugar and water that is popular in Latin countries, was an area of interest and that Pepsi was considering how to make the category more prevalent here.
Expanding a product from a specific ethnic group to the general market makes good business sense.
"A lot of major companies have tried developing merchandise just for specific ethnic groups and may not have gotten the volume," said Peter Krivkovich, president and chief executive of the Chicago-based advertising agency Cramer-Krasselt, whose clients include Barton Beer, which imports Corona, and H. J. Heinz. "For large companies, small brands are just not worth it."
The tactic, however, could also alienate a brand's core clientele, said Tom Pirko, president of the beverage consultancy Bevmark. "A lot of people, if you give them something other than what they want or expect, will reject your product, boycott it," Mr. Pirko said.
Mr. Rodriguez of Ford said the automaker would accelerate ethnic efforts this year, taking into account how many immigrants were big adopters of technology and were more accepting of the Internet, broadband, text messaging and mobile marketing.
"As fluency levels increase," Mr. Rodriguez said, "you are going to see more opportunity via different media mixes to reach out and connect with these people in more creative and innovative ways."
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Enron trial update.. Accounting firm takes it big..
Enron Trial Stirs Memory of Andersen
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
Published: February 21, 2006
In the 1990's, Robert N. Lowe Jr. helped oversee a team of accountants providing tax advice to companies like Microsoft, Goodrich and Banco Santander, all clients of Arthur Andersen, the firm where he worked.
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Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Robert Lowe Jr., left, runs the tax advice group at Alvarez & Marsal.
The Rise and Fall of Enron
Find out more about the collapse of Enron with this interactive timeline.
The Enron Trial
Larry Ingrassia, business editor, Joseph Nocera, business columnist, and Kurt Eichenwald, investigative reporter, discuss the Enron trial.
Now, years after Andersen has vanished from the world of public accounting, those companies are again clients of Mr. Lowe, who now runs the tax advisory group at Alvarez & Marsal, a corporate consulting firm that specializes in corporate turnaround work.
"I have the same relationships I've had for 20-plus years," said Mr. Lowe, who spent 21 years at Andersen.
The moves made by Mr. Lowe and his clients are not unusual, though the circumstances that forced both from Andersen certainly were.
Andersen was charged in March 2002 with obstruction of justice after the disclosure of the destruction of documents related to its work as auditor of Enron. Andersen was convicted three months later, effectively shutting it down. Even though the Supreme Court overturned the verdict in May 2005, the decision came too late for Arthur Andersen to revive itself. Most of its 25,000 employees had long since left the firm.
Andersen still exists, but it does not audit public companies and is a shadow of the firm it used to be. It has fewer than 200 employees. Most work on litigation from past audits or on pension issues.
And while many Andersen alumni would like to forget the taint that Enron's spectacular collapse left on them, memories of Andersen have been stirred again by the trial in Houston of Enron's former chief executives, Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling.
Some former Andersen employees said they were watching the trial closely because they blamed Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling for the firm's fate.
"We look to them and for the most part attribute everything that happened to those people," said Jonathan Goldsmith, a former Andersen employee who is now in the M.B.A. program at the University of Chicago.
Mr. Goldsmith said he had a good sense of what other former employees were thinking about from their postings on a Web site he maintains, www.andersenalumni.net. Many Andersen alumni, he said, view the former Enron executives as "the ones who really should pay the price for what happened to us."
But others said that while they would monitor the criminal case in the coming months, vindication of their anger over the firm's fate came with the Supreme Court's reversal of Andersen's conviction last summer.
"People have moved on," said Lisa Fair, a former Andersen partner who is a tax partner in Atlanta for a unit of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. Referring to the trial of Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling, she said: "Whether they're found guilty or not really doesn't change what happened, nor does it fix anything that you may believe was an injustice or unfair. Most people have closed the chapter on that."
Since Andersen's downfall, Congress has passed a broad new law on corporate governance and a new regulatory agency has been created to monitor certified public accountants. The result has been a boon for accounting firms.
As the number of big accounting firms fell to four, the number of smaller firms in various market niches increased sharply, exploiting clients' new interest in avoiding the potential conflicts that result from using an auditor for multiple tasks. So there is more competition in some areas, less in others.
"More and more specialties have cropped up," said Dennis R. Beresford, a former chairman of the Financial Accounting Standards Board who is a professor at the University of Georgia in Athens. "It's a good thing."
Employees of Andersen have gone to work for some of these new companies; in some cases, Andersen alums founded them.
Too much time has passed for some former Andersen employees to be overly concerned with the latest prosecution, said David C. Meyer, a former Andersen partner who now heads the tax practice at Grant Thornton's office in Houston.
"I'd be lying to you if I said I wasn't paying attention, but I don't think it really matters," Mr. Meyer said. He added, "When the Supreme Court came out and unanimously overturned the conviction, I was glad it happened, but it didn't really mean anything on a day-to-day basis."
The Andersen partner whose name is most closely linked to the firm's demise, David Duncan, has withdrawn the guilty plea he made before Andersen's trial, in which he was a crucial witness. His lawyer, Barry G. Flynn, says Mr. Duncan, who was the lead partner serving Enron, now is engaged in a business venture on his own.
The other major figure in the last days of the firm was Nancy A. Temple, an internal lawyer at Arthur Andersen, whose e-mail message about the firm's "document retention" policy was cited by prosecutors as a signal to destroy Enron-related files. Ms. Temple is now a lawyer at Freeman, Freeman & Salzman in Chicago, although her biography on the firm's Web site makes no mention of her time at Andersen.
Enron Trial Stirs Memory of Andersen
Published: February 21, 2006
(Page 2 of 2)
Ms. Temple acknowledged her past in a speech before a group of accountants in Manhattan several weeks ago, noting that "the last time I spoke in public was when Congress invited me to talk about Andersen." Far more significant were other developments over the last four years since Enron's fateful bankruptcy court filing in December 2001. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 prohibits accounting firms from providing numerous types of consulting services to their audit clients and requires auditors to certify a company's internal controls — the practices or systems for keeping records and preventing abuse or fraud.
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The Rise and Fall of Enron
Find out more about the collapse of Enron with this interactive timeline.
The Enron Trial
Larry Ingrassia, business editor, Joseph Nocera, business columnist, and Kurt Eichenwald, investigative reporter, discuss the Enron trial.
"Things have gotten more conservative in the accounting profession and I think in the business world," said Daniel A. Powers, a former Andersen partner who works in the Kansas City, Mo., office of Grant Thornton. "People are much more sensitive."
The new rules and attitudes have meant that, for example, the bundle of services that public companies used to buy from accounting firms — audit work, consulting work, tax advice and information technology, among others — has been broken up. Other companies, some founded by Andersen alumni, now can compete for different pieces of the business.
That is the business development that Mr. Lowe of Alvarez & Marsal is working to exploit. "From the client's perspective, the issue's not just a current conflict, but whether there will ever be a conflict with using a Big Four firm as a tax provider," said Mr. Lowe, who is building the firm's practice.
The Huron Consulting Group, founded by former Andersen partners, advises companies on financial and accounting matters and on how to improve their operations, and assists in the conduct of investigations. Another group of Andersen professionals moved to Robert Half International. The subsidiary they formed, Protiviti, provides services that include helping companies improve their internal controls, conducting financial investigations and preparing for possible business interruptions.
For auditors reviewing the finances of the largest public companies, the task has become more demanding, as accountants seek to comply with the new reporting requirements. That has made it less cost-effective for the biggest accounting firms to audit any but the biggest companies and has increased the cost of audits, even as it has made accounting a more attractive field to students.
As the four biggest accounting firms (KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu) have shed their smaller clients, slightly smaller accounting firms have benefited. These are not small companies, however; BDO Seidman, for example, last year reported revenue of $440 million.
The greater complexity of audit work has also increased the demand for accountants. Mr. Beresford, the accounting professor, said that demand for graduates of the University of Georgia's accounting program had soared.
"It's terrific," he said. "We are limited in our school only by our capacity. We bring 175 new students into the accounting major every year, and I think the demand from the employers would be twice that much or maybe three times that much."
But even as the loss of Andersen has, directly and indirectly, helped give rise to new firms involved in different businesses that accounting firms used to perform, it has also tightened the supply of traditional accounting and especially audit services for the world's biggest companies. A big company that retains one Big Four firm as its auditor, another for tax advice and a third to review internal controls will have a hard time switching auditors, especially if a competitor in the same industry is audited by the fourth firm.
"I don't think it's a big problem," said Mr. Beresford. "It just kind of removes some of the flexibility that we had in the system previously."
Perhaps most important, these changes do not mean that there will not be fraud in the future, accountants and executives agree.
"Will there ever be another WorldCom or Enron or HealthSouth or whatever?" Mr. Beresford asked. The answer may well be yes, he said, adding that the changes over the last four years "won't prevent things."
"But," he said, "they'll help."
Good article on the new technology, please read, I had no time this morning..
Running a Hatchery for Replicant Hackers
Randi Lynn Beach for The New York Times
Evan Williams, an entrepreneur, imparts start-up tips at a boot camp for hackers.
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
Published: February 21, 2006
At 26, Phil Yuen's identity lay somewhere between Dilbert and a Microserf. His office, on the first floor of Building 16 on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., did not have a window. Not to worry. "I could see the window from my manager's office," he said.
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Web Services Upend Old Ideas About the Little Guy's Role
A new generation of software is putting small companies on a more equal footing.
Mr. Cipriani Takes His Name to Wall Street Condominiums
The Cipriani brand trades on its legacy of hobnobbing and hospitality.
Rewarding Recyclers, and Finding Gold in the Garbage
One company works with municipalities to give households coupons for recycling.
Enlarge This Image
Randi Lynn Beach for The New York Times
Adam Siegel, far left, and Cole Poelker at boot camp.
Mr. Yuen was a midlevel manager who wrote specifications for enterprise project management software — giant computerized flow charts. "I drew boxes and lines to help other people draw boxes and lines," he said.
Then one night last spring, he was sitting in his apartment, surfing the Web. He went to Slashdot.org ("news for nerds") and saw an article that Paul Graham, the essayist and guiding light of computer programmers, was establishing a start-up company, later called Y Combinator, which would be giving seed money to hackers to start businesses. The word "hacker" is not derogatory in the computer world, but it is someone who is creative and resourceful with code.
"It's like Rob De Niro wants to start an acting school," Mr. Yuen said. "Do you want to join it? You get to work with him every week, you might even get a small little movie deal out of it at the end."
Mr. Graham, a 41-year-old dimple-cheeked entrepreneur who sold his company, Viaweb, to Yahoo in 1998, had developed a large following for his lucid and contrary essays in a geek community more comfortable expressing itself through programming code than coherent paragraphs. Among his essays, "How to Start a Startup" is a siren call, resonating with Gen Y programmers pondering quarter-life crises and with college students too inexperienced to be jaded.
After the establishment of Y Combinator, more than 200 teams, with two to four people a team, applied in just a few days for eight slots announced by the new company, which operates in Mountain View, Calif., and Cambridge, Mass.
After being accepted, Mr. Yuen and his team established two start-ups in the last seven months: one he gave up on; the other, called TextPayMe, is a service that sends cash payments to an online account through text messaging — akin to PayPal but using a cellphone.
Last month, Mr. Yuen was in Mountain View, in the heart of Silicon Valley, demonstrating his product to venture capitalists and other tech entrepreneurs. At a Y Combinator dinner, he asked Evan Williams, a co-founder of Blogger, who was a guest speaker at the event, for his cellphone number and then sent him $2 using TextPayMe. (Mr. Yuen, incidentally, has now accumulated a trove of cellphone numbers of Silicon Valley heavyweights and offers from three venture capital firms.) Mr. Williams, intrigued, mentioned he had the same idea earlier that day while brainstorming with friends. "It's something in the air," he said.
That night, at the dinner, Mr. Williams addressed a room full of refugees from Oracle, AOL, Microsoft and Accenture. "I think this is so cool what you guys are doing," said Mr. Williams, who sold his company to Google in 2003. "I would love to be part of something like this. I'm so jealous."
If it is possible to systematize the archetypal two guys in a garage (and they are generally guys), the year-old Y Combinator wants to do it. The company's formula is to throw smart people together and provide them $6,000 in seed money per person to cover the initial costs of the company, cookie-cutter legal paperwork and an extensive network of business contacts.
In return, Mr. Graham and his partners — Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris — collectively own 1.2 to 12 percent of the company, with an average of 6 percent a person. The company holds two boot camps a year for about eight groups each session, a summer one in Cambridge and a winter one in Mountain View. Y Combinator is not so much an incubator as a hatchery for baby companies, and as with all things spawned in bulk, some will die, some will flourish and some will eke by.
"Y Combinator comes down to two kids in a room with two computers and ramen noodles for a summer," said Chris Sacca, a principal of new business development at Google and a speaker at Y Combinator's one-day start-up school conference in October at Harvard. "It takes ambitious geeks and puts them in a situation with no distraction and expects audacious outcomes from them. The reason we like it is that that is what Google is." Indeed, Google has made acquisition overtures to one of the companies that was formed during the summer session, which the founders turned down.
Mr. Graham got the idea for starting Y Combinator after giving a talk to student entrepreneurs at Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in computer science. He told them to look for seed money from rich people they knew, preferably ones who had made their wealth from technology. "Then I said, 'Not me,' and they all looked kind of downcast and then I felt like a jerk," he said. Then, on reflection, Mr. Graham thought, why shouldn't he try to support young hackers?
The goal for Y Combinator's young entrepreneurs is twofold: to make something people want (which is the company's motto); and to stretch their financing long enough for additional investment or to get acquired. For instance, Mr. Graham's former company, Viaweb, which made software to build commercial Web sites, was bought by Yahoo and reborn as store.yahoo .com. One Y Combinator business created last summer, a company that uses cellphones for social networking, got financing from a venture capital firm. Two other Y Combinator companies, a calendar Web site called Kiko.com and a news site, Reddit.com, received additional angel financing.
Y Combinator relies on certain premises: that open-source software and falling hardware prices means that tech start-ups are cheap to finance; that large companies are no longer at the forefront of innovation; and that mature technology companies find it cheaper to buy than to build.
The company takes its name from an obscure mathematical term, describing a function that generates other functions. Y Combinator is a company that creates other companies — a sly reference that would elicit a smile from a very narrow set of people, but luckily the same set that the company is trying to appeal to. It is the philosophical triumph of the passionate computer hacker over the uptight M.B.A.
Running a Hatchery for Replicant Hackers
Published: February 21, 2006
(Page 2 of 2)
"Paul is telling us, 'If you are having a good time, and you are building something that other people want, then the money is not going to be a problem,' " said Beau Hartshorne, 24, whose vision for a company he is calling Pixoh will allow people to resize and crop their photos within a Web browser.
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Mr. Graham is more focused on creating cool products — that is, coding as art — than developing revenue models and protecting intellectual property. Thus, Y Combinator may not be as good at teaching participants how to build self-sustaining companies than it is preparing them to sell, or flip, their businesses. For Silicon Valley corporate war chests, acquisitions are often made for technical talent as well as product, which generally has to be rebuilt if it is kept at all. The whispered acquisition rate for companies is about $1 million to $2 million per technical employee.
"It's a way for recruiting for Yahoo where you don't have the risk and uncertainty of knowing if they can actually do something," said Joel Spolsky, a technology entrepreneur in New York City who also has a wide readership on the Internet.
"The danger is that you will run out of money before a buyer shows up," said Peter Rip, a managing director of Leapfrog Ventures, a venture capital fund in Menlo Park, Calif. "We are seeing a lot of guys being attracted to the ease with which they can start a company, but starting is really only the first step."
From a financial standpoint, the Y Combinator investments are small in a world where valuations are measured in millions of dollars, if not billions. "In the traditional venture capital model, $6,000 isn't enough to pay your corporate lawyer fees for your first financing," said Mr. Sacca of Google.
"It's not just about the money," said Jeff Mellen, 24, who quit Oracle with three of his friends to build an operating system that works within a Web browser.
Y Combinator provides the validation that young techies should keep pursuing their dreams. "I could get the same amount of money from my parents, but that wouldn't tell me if my business plan or idea was a good one," Mr. Mellen said. "That tells me my parents love me."
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Science Comes to the Masses (You Want Fries With That?)
By MINDY SINK
Published: February 21, 2006
DENVER, Feb. 20 — A scientist walks into a bar. More than 100 people are there, eager to hear all that she has to say and ask a lot of questions. No joke.
That's what happens at the Wynkoop Brewing Company here every month when Café Scientifique is held.
Science is not cold and remote in this setting. It's live, interactive, free and informal, with a drink or two. And other Café Scientifique meetings are popping up throughout the country and around the globe on campuses, in coffee shops, bars and even a church. The purpose is to make science accessible and even fun to anyone with the time to stop by.
"A lot of people come to see real live scientists — some of whom are extremely famous and prominent — and see how their brains work," said Dr. John Cohen, a professor of immunology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and the founder of the Denver Café Scientifique. "People don't often get a chance to do that. Some come to ask questions, others are content to listen."
The Denver Café Scientifique was established in 2003 and is the largest in the country to date, drawing about 150 people (cafescicolorado.org). The topics vary from sleep to interstellar communication to Higgs bosons to nanotechnology, and they attract people of all ages and all occupations.
"Who would have thought you'd have standing room only at a geek event?" Dr. Cohen asked. He said he first read about science cafes in 1999 when they were catching on in England. "It just sounded like so much fun," he said. "I saw it as a reminder of the peripatetic philosophers who wandered the Agora in Athens." He imagined them, he continued, "stopping every so often to refresh themselves with a mug of wine from the local sellers."
It was an article in Nature by Duncan Dallas that inspired Dr. Cohen and others. Mr. Dallas, now a retired television producer, started Café Scientifique in 1998 with a note posted in a bar in Leeds, England: "Where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, anyone can come to discuss the scientific ideas and developments which are changing our lives."
He said he was inspired by French philosophy clubs; coincidentally, science cafes were starting up in France in the late 1990's. In an e-mail message, Mr. Dallas said that taking science out of the classrooms changes the expectations of the audience and the speaker — from lecturing to discussing.
"I believe that science is the most important force in our culture," Mr. Dallas wrote, "and is increasingly impinging on our public and personal lives, through subjects like genetics, neurology, pharmacology and evolutionary psychology. So public engagement with science is bound to increase in many forms over the next decade."
Café Scientifiques in Britain (www.cafescientifique.org) received public financing to get started, and dozens are now held around the country. In the United States some such cafes have no budgets and are independent — like the one in Denver — while others receive school and corporate help.
Two science cafes in New York — one in Syracuse and the other in the city — break from the tradition of free science to all and charge $5 to $10. Roald Hoffmann, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, is to be the host of an Entertaining Science cabaret at the Cornelia Street Cafe at 6 p.m. March 5 in Manhattan.
Sigma Xi, a scientific research society, was host to the first national gathering of Café Scientifique leaders this month in North Carolina to network and organize the movement.
Juliana Gallin, a 38-year-old graphic designer in San Francisco, started "Ask a Scientist" at the Bazaar Café two and a half years ago (askascientistsf.com). "I was trying to think of something interesting to do outside of my day job that would be more personally fulfilling than the typical volunteer opportunities I was encountering," Ms. Gallin said, noting that it was only later that she learned of the Café Scientifique movement.
In Seattle, Gretchen Meller, a research scientist, and a few of her friends had their first event last September in a local bookstore (scienceontap.org). "If the general population is to vote on these issues eventually," she said, "they need the opportunity to ask questions."
Indeed the topics are sometimes taken from headlines. Café Scientifique Pittsburgh will be host to the author Pamela Winnick, who will discuss her book "A Jealous God: Science's Crusade Against Religion." The Pittsburgh science cafe was started by two science writers in 2004 and is held at the Penn Brewery every month. Tim Palucka, a 46-year-old freelance science writer, shows off the humorous side of Café Scientifique when he jokes that their motto should have been "Talk to a drunk scientist" instead of "Eat. Drink. Talk Science."
The topics are not always so funny. Tony Cox spoke here recently on "Risk Analysis and Public Health." Sipping on their microbrews, people listened and then rushed up to Dr. Cox to ask questions during a break before the official questions and answers began.
"It's almost like continuing education," said Lyda Ludeman, a 64-year- old retired I.B.M. systems controller. "And the great part is, they don't test you." Ms. Ludeman comes to Café Scientifique every month with a group of regulars, some wearing denim shirts with Café Scientifique logos sewn on the chest.
John Farmer, a 49-year-old advertising executive who attended with his girlfriend last month, said he liked to come to Café Scientifique occasionally to learn about different topics. "A lot people are intimidated by science," he said. "It's great to drink a beer and to brush elbows with these geeks who have very disciplined minds. Everybody can use a little more science in their lives."
I found some good articles today, but we are moving more towards the content. Yes, I have realized it’s all about the content because this is what we have and this it the main issue.. I am seeing more companies are being on the net.. This is really great… I am learning more and more.. This the goal to all this..
The new chairman
“He not only was articulate in his views, but justifided his views without making finanicial markets balk,” said Anothny chan, chief economist at JP Morgan private client serives. “ he was impressive, maybe not as imperesseive as greenspan, but greannspan had 18 year to practice.”
Learned a lot this moriing..
