It has been confirmed that the Apollo 11 engines have been found. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recovered unidentified space engines from the bottom of the ocean earlier this year, and it has now been officially confirmed that they belonged to Apollo 11. …read more
Source: The Christian Post
Today’s tech titans are blessed with wondrous perks: company cars, private jets, even a free house for Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. But Russian oil titan Gazprom–one of the largest companies in the world–and its chief executive Alexey Miller, together have reached a new level: setting aside 119.7 million rubles ($3.69 million) for a new tablet.
Gazprom published its tender offer on its website, which was previously noted by Bloomberg. The tablet will be designed to allow Miller to constantly monitor Gazprom’s operations, while offering him all the power of his desktop computer. And the manufacturer, whoever it might be, needs to design the tablet to include 3G, GPRS, and Wi-Fi—and the Apple iOS operating system, to boot.
So did Gazprom just agree to pay $3.69 million for the best blinged-out iPad money can buy? Not necessarily. As the chief executive of a company that pulled in $153 billion in revenue in 2012, there are two concerns that Gazprom likely has in designing a tablet: security and bandwidth.
Gazprom resulted when the USSR’s oil and gas ministry went private, which transformed a government-backed agency into one nominally controlled by the private sector. As such, Russian interests are competing with multinational corporations, especially in offshore areas where Russia’s influence legally ends.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld
By now, we all know what it takes to become successful: as Malcolm Gladwell revealed in Outliers: The Story of Success, with a steady diet of 10,000 hours’ practice, we can become experts in our field. And yet, examples abound of novices who dive in and thrash the competition. What did Reed Hastings know about video rentals before starting Netflix? Very little, just as Jeff Bezos was inexperienced in book sales before he launched Amazon. How did they evade this iron-clad law? …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By Karl Smith, Contributor Kevin Drum asks what’s really going on with real interest rates. On one level its obvious, A Global Savings Glut Stupid. But, In theory, as [Ryan] Avent says, if the savings level is high, then interest rates will go down until it’s once again attractive to borrow all that money to invest in real-world production of goods and services. But that hasn’t happened, which means the real problem we’re facing is the mirror image of a global savings glut: namely, a global investment drought. For more than a decade now, no matter how low interest rates have gone, the appetite for real-world investment has remained anemic. This is a big question but I want to suggest that the answer might lie over here in this general direction somewhere: China has become the Jeff Bezos of Industrial Production China at some points has had investment rates of in excess of 40% of GDP. For super-geeks this exceeds the Ramsey Rule at a zero discount rate. For non-geeks it means that there is no investment strategy under which this is the profitable thing to do. Its always hard to tell but on balance I think the Chinese government is aware of this, yet is willing to lose money on its capital investments in order to provide jobs for people moving to the city. This is a smart move if you think cities produce agglomeration effects. With apologies to the less wonkish, China is using physical capital as a loss leader in order to grow cities that will produce network effects will in turn foster the human capital that really makes a country rich. In this way China has become like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, a Destroyer-of-Worlds.1 You can’t win a physical capital accumulation battle against someone whose plan is to overinvest and lose money on the physical capital. And just as you there is no point even trying to fight a determined central bank on interest rate policy; there is no point fighting a determined China on Industrial policy. That leaves a huge swath of investment unavailable. 1] Bezos is properly styled: His Entropic Incessancy, Destroyer-of-Worlds. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By Brendan Byrnes, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
In the video below, The Motley Fool speaks with Roger Martin, strategy expert and dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. We discuss executive compensation, specifically what he thinks of the current way executives are compensated. Martin believes that stock-based compensation for executives leads many of them to focus too much on the short term and can lead to management making decisions based on compensation schedules rather than the good of the business.
A transcript follows the video.
The full interview with Roger Martin can be seen here, in which we discuss a number of topics including Bill Ackman, innovation, corporate responsibility, executive compensation, and how to pick out great companies. Martin is the coauthor of “Playing to Win,” a new book on strategy written with former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley.
If you’re on the hunt for a great stock idea, The Motley Fool’s chief investment officer has selected his No. 1 stock for the next year. Find out which stock it is in the brand-new free report: “The Motley Fool’s Top Stock for 2013.” Just click here to access the report and find out the name of this under-the-radar company.
Brendan Byrnes: Executive compensation. You’ve said in the past that right now the executive compensation system is deeply flawed. What is wrong with it right now, and how has it evolved over time?
Roger Martin: What’s wrong with it now is it’s so much based on stock-based compensation, and that has evolved since about 1980. Prior to 1980, there was actually almost no consequential amount of stock-based compensation in the American economy.
In 1976, less than 1% of CEO compensation was stock-based. By 2000, it had become 50%.
The deep flaw, I think, is if you really think about what a stock price is, a stock price is simply everybody in the market‘s view of how well the company is going to do in the future. It’s not a real thing. It’s just about expectations of the future.
Brendan: Another Warren Buffett. In the short term, it’s a popularity contest.
Martin: That’s absolutely right. So, in essence, when you give somebody stock-based compensation … If you’re the CEO of a company, I’m on the board and I give you a stock option at the current market price, and say, “This is your incentive compensation, Brendan. You should make the most of this.” What they’re actually saying to you is not, “Make the company perform better.” They’re saying, “Raise expectations about future performance by those people out there called investors.”
I would argue there are a lot easier ways to do that, especially in the short term, than actually work really hard to build better products and be more efficient and effective and a better company.
Brendan: Let’s talk about those ways. How do you do it better? Do you look at a model like maybe Jeff Bezos at Amazon and say, “He’s focused on the long term, …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
By Brian Stoffel, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
Once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty easy to dissect balance sheets, income, and cash flow statements. This is the first step in getting your feet wet in the investment world.
But it doesn’t stop there. If we were to base investing decisions solely on what we read in these statements, that would be akin to picking a significant other based solely on their Facebook profile — to many, it just doesn’t make sense to avoid real-life interaction.
Investigating these “soft” aspects of a company is important for investors. And although we can’t capture all of the intangibles of a company in one article, Glassdoor.com — a website that collects employee sentiment for companies across the world — recently came out with a list that could help: The Top CEOs of 2013.
Below are the CEOs rated No. 15 through No. 11. Read below and I’ll give some more detail, and at the end, offer up a special premium report on one of these five.
No. 15: Ericsson
Swedish-based Ericsson provides network and Internet solutions for companies worldwide. CEO Hans Vestberg has been running the company since 2010, and has been a member of the Ericsson team since 1988. Vestberg has particular experience in emerging markets — having worked for Ericsson in China, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States.
Vestberg has also been a leader in focusing on humanitarian issues — believing that Ericsson can help tackle issues of poverty, health, education, and climate change. This might help explain why 93% of employees approve of the job Vestberg is doing.
No. 14: Apple
The post-Jobs era began as a surprise for Apple investors and employees alike. Though current CEO Tim Cook oversaw the company’s stock rising to a record $705 per share, he’s also been at the helm to see shares shrink 35% since then.
There’s really no telling what — if any — product will be the next Apple megaproduct: an iTV? An iWatch? It’s impossible to tell. But while investors may be panicking, employees are fully confident that Apple has a pipeline of products that will lead the company forward. A full 93% approve of the job Cook is doing, and they’ve also helped Apple rank as the 34th best place to work in America.
No. 13: Amazon
Next is Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos. While 93% of Amazon employees approve of the job Bezos is doing, I’ll spend a second outlining what makes Bezos’ reputation so important right now.
Most times, when a company spends outrageous amounts of money to build out infrastructure — sacrificing short-term profits for a number of years — Wall Street punishes that company by sending shares reeling.
Not so in the case of Bezos, who is busy building out an impenetrable moat that will be difficult for any company to match. You see, Bezos did this once before in the early days of Amazon, and he proved that the investment worked …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
The Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center will oversee the restoration of Jeff Bezos‘ vintage NASA Apollo rocket engines. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Space.com
By hnn
So few people do favors for NASA these days. So when Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com founder, announced last week that an expedition he financed had hoisted two F-1 rocket engines from an Apollo mission off the ocean floor, the agency was understandably grateful.
“We look forward to the restoration of these engines by the Bezos team and applaud Jeff’s desire to make these historic artifacts available for public display,” the NASA administrator, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., said in a statement.
…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at History News Network – George Mason University
At Forbes, we talk to a lot of billionaires about how they make, spend and give away their money. There’s a particular species of billionaire who uses a chunk of their fortune seeking adventure and exploration. Think of Richard Branson and his record-setting Morocco-to-Hawaii hot-air balloon ride, or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos‘ deep-sea expedition to recover the engines from the 1969 Apollo 11 mission. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen lent his 414-foot yacht the Octopus in a failed mission last summer to raise the bell from HMS Hood, sunk by the Germans in World War II. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By Austin Smith and Jeremy Phillips, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos need no introduction, but investors may be surprised to see how much these two have in common. While Bezos has long been criticized for keeping a tight leash on Amazon.com‘s earnings, opting instead to pour the company’s cash flow back into future growth, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have long supported companies with strong capital return to shareholders, whether in the form of dividend payments or share repurchases.
However, in a recent interview with the Harvard Business Review, Bezos put his investing chops on display, even quoting Buffett directly. He revealed that while Amazon’s stock price may seem expensive, there is a method at work, as he’s directing his company to build wealth for shareholders exactly as investors should hope.
The Fool’s Austin Smith has more in the following video.
If you’re still scared by Amazon’s nosebleed multiple, have no fear. The Motley Fool’s chief investment officer has selected his No. 1 stock for the next year, and it’s far cheaper than Amazon today. Find out which stock it is in the brand-new free report: “The Motley Fool’s Top Stock for 2013.” Just click here to access the report and find out the name of this under-the-radar company.
The article Is Jeff Bezos the Next Warren Buffett? originally appeared on Fool.com.
Austin Smith has no position in any stocks mentioned. Jeremy Phillips owns shares of Amazon.com. The Motley Fool recommends and owns shares of Amazon.com and Berkshire Hathaway. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools don’t all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Copyright © 1995 – 2013 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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The giant rocket engines that propelled mankind to the moon have been retrieved from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, is responsible for this voyage to the bottom of the sea, which recovered two huge F-1 engines. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By Mark Russell 
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Great Finds
By Tim Beyers, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
If happy employees perform better, Facebook should be crushing the market right now.
More than 99% approve of CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the latest Glassdoor survey, yet the stock has lagged since the IPO and remains down nearly 3% year to date despite a 9% rally in the S&P 500. Glassdoor also rates the social network as the best place to work, a ranking current and former employees corroborated in comments left at the site.
“It is good to work here with the smartest people in San Francisco Bay Area. The company is always moving fast,” wrote one software engineer.
Another current employee said Facebook is an “amazing” place to work and cited autonomy and discretion to achieve results as reasons why. Precisely the sorts of comments you want to see when success depends on winning the war for technical talent.
Zuck beat out several notable names in taking the top spot among CEOs:
Google‘s Larry Page ranked 11th.
Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos ranked 16th.
Apple‘s Tim Cook came in at 18th.
To be fair, all four CEOs netted better than 90% approval from their respective workforces. But only Zuck achieved the elusive 99% percentile. Well done, sir.
How loudly should investors cheer? That’s less certain. Judging from history, direction matters more than score. Consider Cook‘s performance. He’s down 4 percentage points — from 97% to 93% — in a terrible year for Apple shareholders.
By contrast, the late Steve Jobs left the top post with a 95% approval rating among workers. Investors had to be equally pleased, given the multibagger returns he and his team produced over an epic 14-year comeback.
Which path will Zuckerberg take? I think it’s too early to tell, but I also believe talent — especially engaged, excited, happy talent — is always more likely to produce for investors. Right now, Facebook has that in spades.
For further analysis of Facebook, I invite you try our newest premium research report in which we pick apart Zuck’s strategy and assess the risks and opportunities for your portfolio. Access your report now by clicking here.
var FoolAnalyticsData = FoolAnalyticsData || []; FoolAnalyticsData.push({ eventType: “TickerReportPitch”, …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos claimed success Wednesday in his mission to recover Apollo 11 moon mission engines that plunged into the ocean decades ago. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
Bezos Expeditions, led by Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, located and recovered remains and debris from two F-1 engines that powered Project Apollo’s Saturn V rockets. They located and photographed others artifacts as well. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Space.com
By Alyce Lomax, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
Many traders might scoff at pondering measures of happiness as well as cold, hard numbers in investing. However, we’re not all traders; some of us are long-term investors. Increasing numbers of us know about a secret weapon to success: trying to find windows to envision what really makes companies tick (or deteriorate).
For example, whether the real, flesh-and-blood human beings who work at the companies you invest in are happy and well treated should be weighed in investment decisions. If they’re not happy, you shouldn’t be, either. In fact, you should question whether these stocks belong in your portfolio at all. Companies that fail on this measure ultimately don’t have bright futures.
Employees “Like” Facebook
Fortunately for investors, the last decade has made it a lot easier to find out how real people feel about their daily experiences with well-known publicly traded companies.
The Internet has opened up more avenues through which consumers can sound off about their customer service or opinions about specific companies. Similarly, it’s an excellent vehicle to spread the straight dope from corporations’ employees, too.
Glassdoor is one of the Web-based services seeking to enlighten the world about what people really think about the companies they work for. Today, Glassdoor released its list of the 50 highest-rated CEOs of 2013, based on the employee data it culls.
Over the course of its history, Facebook has been a magnet of controversy. Not only do Facebook users tend to get bent out of shape about technological changes and privacy issues, but Facebook’s hyped IPO left a lot to be desired in many ways.
Regardless, Facebook employees have clicked a collective thumbs-up “Like” for founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He topped Glassdoor’s list, with a whopping 99% approval rating. His rating increased 14% from this time last year.
In a fascinating twist, Zuckerberg knocked Apple‘s Tim Cook out of the No. 1 slot since last year’s report. Cook’s approval rating has fallen to 93% from 97%, dropping him into the 18th spot on the list.
Speaking of Apple, last month Amazon.com vaulted over Apple and took the top spot as the company American consumers trust the most, according to the 2013 Harris Poll Reputation Quotient. When it comes to Glassdoor’s data, Amazon’s leader Jeff Bezos enjoyed a huge rating increase over the last year, jumping 13% to a 93% approval rating. Look out, Cook.
In my last column, I addressed the lack of female leadership in corporate America, and sadly enough, the only female executive who made Glassdoor’s list this year was Sharon Turney, who runs Limited Brands‘ Victoria’s Secret unit. She had an 82% approval rating, placing her at No. 42 on the list.
Last year, Hewlett-Packard‘s Meg Whitman was the sole female chief executive on the list; this year, she’s disappeared from the list altogether.
Morale: an intangible but invaluable asset
If you’re an investor who has followed investment philosophies such as stakeholder value capitalism or “conscious capitalism,” which …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
Ah, Amazon — did Jeff Bezos choose that name to symbolize the largest bookstore in the world or did he realize that he would one day create an enterprise cloud service that was as large and complex as the river basin? After spending some time with his enterprise infrastructure service, I think he saw this coming. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Computerworld Latest
Following my suggestion that a key to answering the question, How To Be Happy At Work, is to be involved in “delighting customers”, one colleague told me that he choked on the word, “customer”. I get the part about ‘delighting’. The focus is on value-in-use from collaboration around an activity. So ‘delighting’ is fine. But ‘customer’ is a problem: this isn’t about a one-way transaction with a producer delivering something to a ‘customers. Instead, every party should be getting something out of it, in intangible ways as much as the tangible. This is about creating delight for everyone involved in the interaction. This recalls Chris Brogan’s rant in reaction to a newsletter from Jeff Bezos at Amazon [AMZN], “A Customer Is A Dirty Word.” I am not a customer. I am not a user. I might be a client. I might be a member. I may even be a loyalist. But don’t call me a customer. “Customer” is a dirty word. Words Matter… I’m not even fond of “users.” At Kitchen Table Companies, we have members. We have advisors… I want Jeff Bezos to call me his very cherished and appreciated community member. I want him to think of me as a supporter. Something. Anything. I agree that the commercial overtones of the term “customer” to describe “the people for whom and with whom the work is being done” are problematic. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By Karl Smith, Contributor The Verge speculates on why Amazon wants to start issuing its own currency: Three things: loyalty, an easy way to reward customers without simply giving away free money, and flexibility on their balance sheets. So in the future, will every company have its own branded currency? Varoufakis said that’s doubtful, because creating a currency is hard, contains hidden costs, and is rarely worth it for a company to bother with the intricacies of designing their own. Here is another. Let’s say you buy my argument that Jeff Bezos using expert cash-flow management to allow him to generate shareholder value without consistently generating profit. Then its not far fetched that he is taking that knowledge of monetary economics to the app realm. There is reason to believe that like urbanization, virtualization creates generalized returns to scale. Nations have been tempted to take advantage of this through industrial policy that seeks to funnel a lot of money into the hands of an emerging industry. However, as China has shown, a much more effective method is currency policy. Instead of being caught up in the drama of picking winners and losers simply stack the deck in favor of the emerging sector by pushing manipulating the exchange rate. This allows you to subsidize the winners – whomever they might be . The dynamics are a bit involved but in short export industries will tend to be folks who gain from increasing returns to scale. Otherwise, its not clear why there is bilateral trade in such industries. A depressed currency benefits exporters at the expense of everyone else. A so voila, a depressed currency promotes the very sectors where there are increasing returns. Amazon’s likely method is a little different but creates a similar effect. Amazon simply gives regular shoppers “reward” Amazon Coin whenever make a purchase. Yet, then its allows developers to redeem Amazon Coin for one coin to the cent. For customers this means products priced in Amazon Coin are unusually cheap. In general a customer won’t have to give up 100 cents to get 100 Amazon Coin, since she’ll collect “reward” coin from the purchase of ordinary Amazon products. This in turn implies that exporters in the Amazon Coin world – which is now app development – experience a currency subsidy. Their customers find their products cheaper than a pure resource exchange would imply. As a result we would imagine investment in app development in Amazon Coin world to accelerate. And, if there are increasing returns then the agglomeration of lots of developers into this world will mean lower costs products and an even stronger advantage to enter app development. If it works then you could have a take-off economy similar to China’s. The wrinkle of course is who bears the short term cost of the subsidy. However, Bezos may already have this worked out – Wall Street bares it. It bares it because Bezos’s cash-management policy gives the Street an incentive to shovel him cash at well below market rates. If all of this works then what we are talking about is Amazon as a private company effectively taking on the traditional roles of a nation state: managing liquidity demand and internalizing externalities.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By Ewan Spence, Contributor One area that immediately springs to mind is how Coins will interact with Kindle FreeTime. This is the service that provides a walled garden inside the Kindle Fire Android tablets and allows children to play and explore, with their parents reassured that they can’t run up bills or order anything from the Amazon store. I can easily see FreeTime having its own ‘balance’ driven by Amazon Coins purchased by the parents so children can have some digital pocket money to spend as they see fit, but only the fixed amount transferred into the FreeTime account by their parents. 200 coins a month, does that feel about right? It’s the options available to Amazon if they move Coins away from an alternative way to buy apps but start to provide developers tools to use Coins as an in-app currency that really interest me. I hope Amazon will make this as simple as possible for developers to use, and provide an SDK that will work over all Android devices (not just the Kindle Fire). If so they can provide developers an alternative to Google Play for in-app purchasing. While the exchange rate at the moment is set to 1 coin per US cent, I’m sure that there will be special offers and exchange rates to kick start the program. Amazon has shown before they’re happy to buy the hearts and minds of Android developers to get them coming through their stores. Competition is going to be good for the Android ecosystem, and Google Play against Amazon Coins for in-app purchasing is going to be an interesting struggle to watch. Amazon of course want to bring more developers to their attention, and be able to ensure the best apps are available in the Amazon App Store. The Amazon Coin SDK will give them another engagement opportunity, and data points for applications and techniques that are earning money. This increase of income streams might seem, in the short term, to be a problem for the users. After all, aren’t they going to be expected to pay more so developers see more money? That is true, but margins and profits in the mobile app space (especially on Android) are not stunning. Without revenue flowing to the developers, there will be no high quality app economy. In the long term, if Amazon Coins can reward developers while feeling fair to users encountering the service in their apps, then this is for the benefit of the whole app ecosystem on mobile devices. And another thought. Amazon Coins can potentially add more to Amazon’s bottom line than the conversion fee to move between the virtual currency and hard cash. People buying coins are unlikely to spend all the coins in one transaction. Which leaves Amazon with a nice cash pile of purchased but unspent coins. It might not start out large, but if Coins becomes established, with millions of users, expect Amazon to work this reserve for their benefit. As announced today, Amazon Coins is a one way street, to ‘load up’ an account that can be used to buy applications in the Amazon App Store. But let’s not skate to where the puck is, let’s skate to where Jeff Bezos‘ puck is going to be. Which is a time when Amazon will have a micro-currency established across the Android ecosystem, when developers have an attractive alternative that provides them a solid income stream, when users are encouraged to spend their money and reward the developers. That’s something I can see fitting in perfectly to Amazon’s ethos and strategy.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Gazprom
