Find Gadgets, Travel Destinations, Yoga Poses Visually with Bing

On September 21, 2009

Find Gadgets, Travel Destinations, Yoga Poses Visually with Bing

We've given Bing a fair share of ink here at Business Hacks. Microsoft's underdog search engine is doing some innovative things, and in our totally unscientific reader poll, we found Bing earned a respectable 30 percent share compared to Google's 48 percent. Well, we have an update: Last week, Bing rolled out Visual Search, an interesting update that makes certain kinds of searches easier, more intuitive, and fun. If you choose a topic for which there is a visual search, you get a slew of thumbnails that represent the whole landscape of potential search results. You can browse the whole field, or filter the results. For example, if you choose digital cameras, you can narrow your options by megapixel,...


On September 21, 2009

Microsoft Say-On-Pay Is Pressure-On-Tech-Firms

On Friday, Microsoft announced that its board approved a say-on-pay plan, in which shareholders will participate in an advisory vote on executive compensation. But this is more than a dry scrap thrown to investors. Even a non-binding vote creates real pressure on top management and, even more so, on other companies.


On September 21, 2009

Apple or Google: Who Will Walk the Plank?

After you've spoken with a number of DOJ prosecutors and SEC enforcement attorneys, one thing becomes clear: They hate being lied to. We're not talking petty annoyance. No, these are people who have been known to go after mendacity with a vengeance suitable to Greek mythology. Businesspeople who technically went afoul of the law and might have pulled through have been brought to the ground because they tried to cover up problems by omitting or misstating what they knew. And that brings us to Apple and Google.


On September 21, 2009

Reducing Size and Color Uncertainty in Product Photos

Shopping online is risky. Customers rely on relatively small, 2-D product images or sometimes video to get an idea of the actual 3D product they are potentially buying. One of the most common reasons for online returns is the item appeared different on the site, and the customer expected a different color, higher [...]


On September 21, 2009

ERP: The Slumbering Enterprise Giant Is Awakening

A mature market that has served as the backbone for enterprise computing for many decades, the ERP industry is not characterized by rapid change. So, when a "game changer" appears -- that's how Frost & Sullivan analyst David Boulanger characterized SAP's ongoing Business ByDesign rollout -- it pays to sit up and take notice.


On September 21, 2009

Twitter’s Legal Challenges: Lessons for Startups

On March 21, 2006, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey sent out the first tweet: "Just setting up my twittr." A mere three years later, in February 2009, Twitter had approximately 4 million visitors. At that point, Twitter set an audacious goal of one day reaching 1 billion users and becoming "the pulse of the planet."


On September 21, 2009

How to Manage Employees Twice Your Age

With creativity, innovative ideas and a can-do attitude valued more than ever in the modern workplace, the young but ambitious can find themselves managing those nearly twice their age. Now that could be awkward, but there are ways to smooth over this potentially fraught situation and make it productive for everyone. Morey Stettner, writing on Investors.com from Investor's Business Daily, takes on this topic and offers a couple of tips to make sure egos don't get the best of everyone and keep politics from undermining your team: Talk Less, Listen More: Managers of all ages risk alienating their staff if they adopt a my-way-or-the-highway bossiness. But younger supervisors who come on too strong can stoke outright hostility among more experienced...


On September 21, 2009

Seven Lessons for Entering Emerging Markets

For any business suffering from the downturn in the developed countries of Europe and North America, the prospect of branching out into the relatively uncharted, but comparably prosperous territories of emerging markets may seem tempting. Delegates at the recent Emerging Markets summit in London, held by the Economist and the Department for UK Trade & Investment, were told a potential untapped market of a billion consumers was out there to be sold to. In his keynote speech, business secretary Lord Mandelson stated the economies of the emerging markets and the developed world were inextricably linked and the concept of decoupling -- where developing economies would operate distinctly from the west as they matured -- was nonsense. Not all of the emerging...


On September 21, 2009

Sam’s All Business for Hispanic Heritage Month, as Walmart Boosts Latino Initiatives

Sam’s Club is taking its own unique approach to celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, one that combines its desire to attract an increasingly important consumer group and to reinforce its position as the club for small business. Sam's Club is working with the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce to launch a nationwide contest, Como Si: Doing Business Today for Tomorrow! The contest will be a promotional vehicle for the chamber as well as the retailer. To enter the contest, participants upload a video running between one and two minutes to www.comosidoingbusinesstoday.com describing what they have done to – as a company statement put it -- "keep up and keep going" in today's tough economic environment. Representatives from the chamber will...
On September 20, 2009

What Fool Will Buy the Talecris IPO? Oh Wait, That’ll Be Me.

It’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to buy a piece of Talecris Biotherapeutics’ proposed $850 million initial public offering. VentureBeat said it best when Talecris tried to go public two years ago: So what we have is a profitable but relatively slow-growing biotech with huge debts, run by executives who are themselves bleeding substantial amounts of cash out of the business, which is likely to remain heavily indebted after its owners siphon off most of the proceeds from an offering roughly four times the size of any other biotech IPO in almost a decade. Let’s take each of these claims in turn, shall we? Talecris is profitable…but not that much: Unlike most biotechs, Talecris actually has revenues. The...
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