Recently, it was reported that Coca-Cola’s Dasani brand of bottled water is purified tap water in the UK (and most other countries). Now comes news of a recall of Dasani water in the UK
The Coca-Cola Co said on Friday it had recalled its entire Dasani range of bottled water from the British market after levels of bromate, a potentially harmful chemical, were found to exceed legal standards.
Oops. Many people buy bottled water with the thought that it is healthier than their tap water. This is not always the case…
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Former WorldCom (MCI) CFO Scott Sullivan has pleaded guilty to the criminal charges against him that were involved in the $11 billion accounting game they played. Additionally, Attorney General John Ashcroft is to Announce Charges Against Ex-WorldCom CEO, Bernie Ebbers. Ebbers has generally claimed innocence in all of this, so we’ll see in court how much knowledge he actually had of all of this. It’s hard to imagine a CEO not knowing about $11 billion in misdirected accounting. I worked for WorldCom for a couple of years, after WorldCom acquired ANS from AOL.
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The headline talks about Google pair make billionaire row, referring to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, each estimated at $1 billion. I found it more interesting to see that JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, has become a billionaire. That’s pretty dramatic for someone who writes books to have generated that kind of money in the 21st century.
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An excellent, and I think accurate, article from FastCompany: If He’s So Smart…Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation.
There’s one last essential element to successful innovation that has often been missing at Apple: follow-through.
This is why next year is going to be very interesting. Apple will either show some serious follow-through with their music strategy, or they will become an also-ran. There have been so many products competing with iTunes and iPod over the past few weeks that a wrong turn can seriously knock Apple down.
The rumored low-cost iPods may certainly help, and I think it also helps that Apple has the most consistent and usable music store as of today. They’ve got the lead, no question.
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The ever useful Motley Fool’s Rex Moore has a modified Foolish 8 screening criteria for stocks. The Fool is a great resource, and their stock picks are based upon really intelligent criteria (like: is the company producing actual usable cash, and do you know what their business is so that you can make intelligent decisions about the management?). In the article, Rex mentions a program that helped him do the stock screening. Another tool that I found is neat because it provides the software and historical data free, you just pay to stay up to date: StockWiz.com - Advanced Tools for Serious Investors. I haven’t yet checked to see if it has all of the criteria in the MF8, but since it’s free I can see how it does.
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Actually, I was already somewhat familiar with the Wal-Mart described in Fast Company | The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know. The article is a very interesting discussion of Wal-Mart’s tough tactics in dealing with suppliers and just what it means to be a $240 billion company. One interesting quote: “about 12% of the economy’s productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s could be traced to Wal-Mart alone.” That’s the kicker here. The article is reasonably balanced, but brings up the point that buying at Wal-Mart is moving a lot of jobs overseas.
Economic theory would tell us that in the long term, this is not a bad thing. In the short term, people are losing their jobs. But, the hope is that new industries will emerge in the US that will provide even better jobs. I read an article a few days back (I think it was in Wired) that described how our standard of living has improved quite a bit in the past few decades due to discount stores. Many things that “mere mortals” couldn’t afford have become far more accessible. Partly because those things have become cheaper, but also because we don’t have to spend as much money on necessities, thanks to stores like Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart is squeezing efficiency out of the market, which ultimately should put more money in our hands.
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The web site for Huh? Corp is a great piece of satire. There were so many companies with websites like this one a couple of years back. (I even worked for one!) It really shows how much it can pay to be known for something rather than everything.
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Time has a nice article about the changing consumerism in India. Huge change is afoot indeed.
The cutting edge of this consumer boom is on full display in Gurgaon, a satellite city south of New Delhi that is rapidly developing into mall-rat heaven. Since December, three mammoth, glitzy malls have opened their doors there, crammed with a collection of stores airlifted straight from America’s suburbs — Nike, Benetton, Pizza Hut, Subway sandwiches, even a showroom for Bose audio systems. Two multiplex theaters show such Hollywood hits as The Matrix Reloaded. Five more malls nearby are in the works.
The article also has some interesting bits about the steps McDonald’s has taken to cater to the crowd there:
The best seller is the McAloo Tikki burger, a vegetarian fried-potato patty with cheese. The newest entry is the McCurry Pan, a flat pastry filled with hot broccoli or chicken curry.
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Tim Bray investigates the monetary implications of his experiment with Google’s AdSense program:
Which is nothing that you’re going to retire on, but it would certainly cover the site’s costs and buy a couple of beers. And if you could drive the hits up, you could actually generate noticeable income.
Tim has a fairly busy site, but it looks like he could get several hundred a month from Google’s AdSense. At present, Google’s general policy is to not allow blogs, so I couldn’t sign up. I don’t do this blog for cash anyhow. But it’s interesting to think of what some sites that are trying to make a profit could do with this.
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Here is an excellent collection of farewell screenshots from failed dotcoms. I wonder what the total amount of funding raised for those 300+ companies was.
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