From BizDom Blog
POWER HORSE joins in the World Team Cup
The continuance of the World Team Cup is assured. The Austrian energy drink POWER HORSE is joining the 34th tournament as its namesake main sponsor. The event will run from 15 - 21 May 2011 traditionally taking place in the Rochus Club in Duesseldorf. From now on the tournament will be named the POWER HORSE World Team Cup. POWER HORSE has been active in the sports section in recent years. Last year the company acted as a sponsor to the Polo European Championships and also sponsored the Austrian Football Club Linzer ASK. On the occasion of the Football World Championship in South Africa, the Manchester City player, Emmanuel Adebayor, who was nominated African player of the year in 2008, was signed up as a brand ambassador. Apart from activities in the field of sports sponsorship, POWER HORSE also promotes product placements in addition to classical media and promotions at the POS. The brand's appearance in the Angelina Jolie-Film WANTED and co-operation with 20th Century Fox with regard to the action-movie A-TEAM will remain unforgettable.
Indian businessman buys Spanish Football Club Racing Santander
Indian tycoon Ahsan Ali Syed confirmed Thursday he plans to buy indebted Primera Liga side Racing Santander, reportedly for 30-40 million euros (40-54 million dollars).
Syed made a bid in August last year for English Premier League club Blackburn Rovers but failed to reach agreement in negotiations for a reported 300-million-pound ($480 million) takeover.
Former WikiLeaks Staffers Launch 'OpenLeaks' Competitor Site
All across Europe, from Brussels to the Balkans, a new generation of WikiLeaks-style websites is sprouting.
Like their forerunner, the fledgling whistle-blowing sites are a chaotic mixture of complex systems engineering, earnest campaigning, muckraking and self-promotion.
And though their goals are varied, the activists behind the sites told Reuters that they share one major concern: they all vow not to repeat mistakes they believe were made by Julian Assange, the controversial WikiLeaks creator.
The proliferation of websites to encourage, facilitate and shelter leakers is so anarchic that two aspiring anti-corporate leak sites are both claiming rights to the rubric “GreenLeaks” and muttering about legal consequences if the other side doesn’t back down.
The most ambitious and potentially far-reaching WikiLeaks spinoff to surface this week is Domscheit-Berg’s OpenLeaks, which its founder describes as a mechanism both for putting together leakers with knowledgeable recipients and for linking leak-consuming organizations to each other.
The burgeoning Wikiworld has been eagerly anticipating Domscheit-Berg’s next project since his falling out with Assange last year. The two became estranged following an e-mail exchange in which Assange summarily suspended Domscheit-Berg as WikiLeaks co-spokesman for allegedly leaking information to the media about growing concern among other WikiLeaks activists about Assange’s private life.
Domscheit-Berg subsequently quit WikiLeaks, denouncing Assange for “acting like an emperor or slave trader.” He took with him other more shadowy figures who had been important collaborators with Assange in creating key elements of WikiLeaks’ leak-handling systems architecture.
One of the defectors was a programer known to most insiders simply as “The Architect.” Described by colleagues as at least as brilliant at programing as Assange, The Architect was the principal designer of the systems WikiLeaks used to produce Assange’s greatest public triumphs last year, the distribution of hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government reports.
In a conversation with Reuters on Thursday from Davos, Switzerland, where he appeared on a World Economic Forum panel devoted to “Confidentiality and Transparency,” Domscheit-Berg said his WikiLeaks experience had convinced him of the wrongness of Assange’s view that the website should publish raw information and let others sort through it. (Assange’s approach subsequently appears to have matured, as demonstrated by WikiLeaks current snail-like release of its cache of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables.)
Domscheit-Berg said WikiLeaks taught him that huge efforts have to be made to authenticate, analyze, filter and if necessary redact leaked secret documents before making them public. He said that WikiLeaks also demonstrated that a top-down group like WikiLeaks, which Assange by his own account rules like something of an absolute monarch, might not be the best model to undertake painstaking pre-publication reviews of complex, and potentially damaging, data.
He said his concept is to create a new network through which leakers of any kind — government, corporate, environmental, whatever — could make confidential submissions to groups that could make use of them. OpenLeaks itself would not evaluate, let alone publicly release, the information. Instead it would convey it from leaker to leakee.
Like their forerunner, the fledgling whistle-blowing sites are a chaotic mixture of complex systems engineering, earnest campaigning, muckraking and self-promotion.
And though their goals are varied, the activists behind the sites told Reuters that they share one major concern: they all vow not to repeat mistakes they believe were made by Julian Assange, the controversial WikiLeaks creator.
The proliferation of websites to encourage, facilitate and shelter leakers is so anarchic that two aspiring anti-corporate leak sites are both claiming rights to the rubric “GreenLeaks” and muttering about legal consequences if the other side doesn’t back down.
The most ambitious and potentially far-reaching WikiLeaks spinoff to surface this week is Domscheit-Berg’s OpenLeaks, which its founder describes as a mechanism both for putting together leakers with knowledgeable recipients and for linking leak-consuming organizations to each other.
The burgeoning Wikiworld has been eagerly anticipating Domscheit-Berg’s next project since his falling out with Assange last year. The two became estranged following an e-mail exchange in which Assange summarily suspended Domscheit-Berg as WikiLeaks co-spokesman for allegedly leaking information to the media about growing concern among other WikiLeaks activists about Assange’s private life.
Domscheit-Berg subsequently quit WikiLeaks, denouncing Assange for “acting like an emperor or slave trader.” He took with him other more shadowy figures who had been important collaborators with Assange in creating key elements of WikiLeaks’ leak-handling systems architecture.
One of the defectors was a programer known to most insiders simply as “The Architect.” Described by colleagues as at least as brilliant at programing as Assange, The Architect was the principal designer of the systems WikiLeaks used to produce Assange’s greatest public triumphs last year, the distribution of hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government reports.
In a conversation with Reuters on Thursday from Davos, Switzerland, where he appeared on a World Economic Forum panel devoted to “Confidentiality and Transparency,” Domscheit-Berg said his WikiLeaks experience had convinced him of the wrongness of Assange’s view that the website should publish raw information and let others sort through it. (Assange’s approach subsequently appears to have matured, as demonstrated by WikiLeaks current snail-like release of its cache of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables.)
Domscheit-Berg said WikiLeaks taught him that huge efforts have to be made to authenticate, analyze, filter and if necessary redact leaked secret documents before making them public. He said that WikiLeaks also demonstrated that a top-down group like WikiLeaks, which Assange by his own account rules like something of an absolute monarch, might not be the best model to undertake painstaking pre-publication reviews of complex, and potentially damaging, data.
He said his concept is to create a new network through which leakers of any kind — government, corporate, environmental, whatever — could make confidential submissions to groups that could make use of them. OpenLeaks itself would not evaluate, let alone publicly release, the information. Instead it would convey it from leaker to leakee.
Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World’s Greatest Chocolate Makers
Chocolate Wars raises the question of the piety of the Quaker families — the Cadbury and Rowntree and Fry clans that dominated the British cocoa business. They concocted chocolate drinks as alternatives to gin and rum. These good Quaker folk wanted to change the world. For the most part, they failed, though they grew rich trying. The world turned Ms. Cad bury’s relatives and their business into just one more mass-market consumer-products company that was forced to put profit ahead of principle. Ultimately, Cadbury was eaten by the biggest processed-food company in the United States, Kraft Foods Inc. The story begins in the mid-19th century when Richard Cadbury, a devout Quaker opposed to war, oppression, alcoholism and what he considered useless entertainments such as art and music, sent his youngest son, John, to London to study a new tropical product, cocoa, that would be a way to make money. The Quakers had nothing against piling up fortunes and, indeed, poured many of their own into model towns and societies devoted to rescuing the fallen and the drunk.
The Quakers succeeded admirably. As Ms. Cadbury notes, in the early 19th century, 4,000 Quaker families ran 74 Quaker British banks and more than 200 companies. “As they came to grips with making money, these austere men of God helped to shape the course of the Industrial Revolution and the commercial world today,” the author says.
Well, yes, but the conventional history of the chocolate biz and of the industrial revolution is not the whole story. Falling prices in the 19th century, cheap labour driven to cities by recurrent crop failures and various blights, not a little exploitation of labour in prison workshops and availability of cheap inputs from colonies had a lot to do with the success of Europe in dominating the world for the 19th century and half of the 20th.
The problem was that cocoa grows mostly in west Africa, which is a very hot place. Tending the trees and harvesting the cocoa pods was given to African slaves sold by Portuguese merchants operating from the port of Sao Tome. The Portuguese traders and plantation owners were at the time essential to the business. Ms. Cadbury describes the moral issue, which became a very practical dilemma when the British press raised the question of Quaker hypocrisy:
A delicious chocolate bar rested on the unspeakable misery of African slaves and the head of the company, said critics. George Cadbury, a utopian idealist in Britain who built communities for his workers, was just a ‘malevolent cocoa magnate,’ they charged.
It all came to a head in a case for libel brought by Cadbury against a major newspaper, The Standard, which ended in a verdict for Cadbury, which was then awarded the nominal sum of one farthing as compensation for losses.
Read more: http://arts.nationalpost.com/2010/11/26/book-review-chocolate-wars-by-deborah-cadbury/#ixzz1CPLmLdx1
Facebook's 'sponsored stories' turns your posts into ads
Facebook Inc. has introduced a new advertising program that will take users "likes," check-ins and other actions and make them into revenue-producing advertisements.
The program would put Facebook users' posts on the right column of Facebook screens, which is set aside for targeted ads, and the posts would get a "Sponsored Story" label.
The tool would, for instance, give regular check-ins greater visibility and ensure they don't disappear as fast as the regular feed.
There are now four types of sponsored stories:
Likes: When people like something on your page, which can be used in an advertisement.
Wall Posts: Same goes for wall posts. Anything posted on a wall is open to be sponsored.
Check-ins: When people use Facebook Places to check in to a location, that information can be displayed in an advertisement. As Advertising Age noted, "If Starbucks buys a 'sponsored story' ad, the status of a user's friends who check into or like Starbucks will run twice: once in the user's news feed, and again as a paid ad for Starbucks."
Custom apps: Interactions taken on custom applications -- for example, taking a quiz or poll can be sponsored.
Sweet Short & Simple (3S) Quiz No. 2: Republic Day Special
1. Lok Sabha, or the House of the People, has currently 545 members. It includes 529 representatives of the states, representatives of union territories and representative of Anglo Indian community. How many members are nominated by the President of India to represent Anglo Indian community?
2. The prolific writer, philosopher and social worker, he was born on May 28, 1883 in the village of Bhagpur near Nasik. This freedom fighter established an organization by the name of Mitra Mela.
3. This state of India derives its name from a Sanskrit word meaning ‘peerless’. Occupying an area of about 78,438 sq km, it was earlier known by the names such as Pragjyotisha and Kamrupa.
4. Formed in 1942 by the Indian nationalists in Southeast Asia, the aim of this organization was to overthrow the British rule in India. It mainly consisted of Indian prisoners of war, which were captured by Japan.
5. Born in September, 1825, this great leader was the alumnus of the Elphinstone College. Regarded as ‘The Promise of India’ by professor Orlebar, he was one of the founder members of the Indian National Congress.
2. The prolific writer, philosopher and social worker, he was born on May 28, 1883 in the village of Bhagpur near Nasik. This freedom fighter established an organization by the name of Mitra Mela.
3. This state of India derives its name from a Sanskrit word meaning ‘peerless’. Occupying an area of about 78,438 sq km, it was earlier known by the names such as Pragjyotisha and Kamrupa.
4. Formed in 1942 by the Indian nationalists in Southeast Asia, the aim of this organization was to overthrow the British rule in India. It mainly consisted of Indian prisoners of war, which were captured by Japan.
5. Born in September, 1825, this great leader was the alumnus of the Elphinstone College. Regarded as ‘The Promise of India’ by professor Orlebar, he was one of the founder members of the Indian National Congress.
Need a mentor? Want to be a mentor? Meet your mentor
MicroMentor.org is a free online service that connects small-business owners with volunteer business mentors run by Mercy Corps, a nonprofit humanitarian agency.
To find a mentor, go to the website, create a brief profile and a specific mentoring request. The request is then listed in the mentoring opportunity database, where volunteer mentors can offer to help (you can also request help from specific mentors). The site has more than 3,500 entrepreneurs and 2,600 business mentors enrolled, and it has made more than 2,250 matches. It also offers advice and information on mentoring relationships and how to make them most effective, as well as a number of success stories.
Volunteer mentors can also sign up on the website—and there are dividends. MicroMentor reports that participating businesses had a 75 percent increase in median annual business sales and an 87 percent survival rate year over year.
“This is a way for small-business owners to get meaningful advice,” says Andrea Long, spokeswoman for MicroMentor.org. “And because you can have more than one mentor, you can create a virtual advisory board. That gives smallbusiness owners the tools they need for success.”
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