Gagglescape's sister blog is http://www.corporateknightsforum.com. We have a series from the Davos World Economic Forum Conference that you may enjoy.

By Toby Heaps: Editor of Corporate Knights magazine which publishes the annual Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations list each year at the World Economic Forum.

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Environment themes and their relationship with the economy, particularly climate change, are hot this year in Davos.

Case in point. Last night I was waiting outside the Belvedere, the main Davos Hotel where the glitterati gather at night. As I was running a little late and it was quite a long line to get inside the hotel through the security check, I wondered if anyone would notice if I budded a little. But when I noticed that the Premier of Quebec was waiting behind me in the cold line, my better instincts suggested that was not a good idea, especially in Switzerland.

The Premier and I were both heading for similar events. He was off to speak on a panel with UK Conservative Leader David Cameron on climate change and energy security, and I had a dinner to co-host. I was looking forward to the dinner for two reasons: to hear what the world’s leading investment bankers had to say on taking the good fight (climate change, human rights) to the political stage, and I was curious how the red-blooded Wall Street crowd (Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Swiss Re) would appreciate the 100 per cent vegetarian-meal I had ordered for all of them.

It turned out that the hi-carb but low-carbon veggie-lasagna was a big hit, but my dinner conversation was interrupted when a senior Canadian aluminum company executive had to go outside to answer questions from a newspaper survey on whether his company supported the Kyoto Protocol and what they were doing about it. (...read more...)

In case you missed yesterday's Globe and Mail, Corporate Knights' Global 100 got some good coverage. In cooperation with Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, Corporate Knights publishes a list of the world's top 100 most sustainable companies. Here is that list:

For all you MBA grads out there who like me once dreamed of being great venture capitalists in an era where VCs are a vanishing breed, at least in Canada, then this story will give you reason to hope for the future of the industry. It turns out that the Wharton Business School has teamed up with the Utah based, student run, University Venture Fund. What is their objective? According to their press release:

Founded in 2001 at the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business, UVF is an independent, self-sustaining venture capital company committed to the entrepreneurial education of students at participating universities . . . "We're delighted that students from the Wharton School are now officially on board," said Jared Hutchings, founder and managing director of UVF. "The Wharton team of students offers exceptional expertise from previous work experiences and brings a rigorous analytical approach that reflects the strong Wharton MBA curriculum, so they will be a great asset for us. And UVF can help the Wharton students gain venture capital experience in a very hands-on way. There's no better training than investing real money in real entrepreneurs."

Ah, the idea of investing real money with real entrepreneurs is something so foreign to the Toronto market that I wonder if anyone in our local investment sector remembers the risk-reward charts they once so carefully studied. Remember? In the right sector with the right team early stage risk can result in later stage rewards. Well, at least in Utah.

Want o know more about the fund?

Founded in 2001 at the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business, University Venture Fund (UVF) is an independent venture capital firm committed to improving the quality of entrepreneurial education for a diverse group of students at its participating universities. The fund (...read more...)

Herman Miller's Aeron Chair - The former gold standard of Internet startups.

Last Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle explores the world of startups and venture capital. In turns out that the new generation -- Web 2.0 -- of geek entrepreneurs are better managers of venture capital than their Internet bubble predecessors. Understandable given the conspicuous-consumption spending of the late nineties.

Today's startups if they have Aeron chairs at all have either have their employees bring their own in or find them in sales:

Gone are the Herman Miller Aeron desk chairs and the other technocrat excesses of the late 1990s when dot-coms burned through money and hype, throwing lavish launch parties, staffing up quickly and spending millions on Super Bowl ads.

Emerging in their stead is a post-crash generation of stingy startups using ingenuity to minimize the cost of turning raw ideas into viable businesses.

They hire slowly and avoid using recruiters. They take advantage of plunging technology prices. They generate buzz by word of mouth. They establish overseas operations to lower labor costs. They scrounge computers and furniture from the free section of community Web site Craigslist. And, when they raise venture capital, they hoard it, fearful of blowing their shot at making it.

For Gagglescape.com readers who just can't get enough of Apple's new products, we have this fan video from New York. Apologies in advance to James Blunt fans:

Do you want to find out what Canada's leading eCommerce company, eBay, has in store for the future? Join MIT Forum organizer Mark Lawrence and guests for what promises to be a one of the winter's top sessions. The MIT Forum is for everyone -- no need to be an MIT Alumnus. Sign up for the evening here.

Join Jordan as he describes the path that eBay has taken to its position of e-commerce leader in Canada, and how buyers and sellers alike are creating and building businesses through the eBay platform.  The event is interactive with participation and questions from the audience most welcome.  Jordan will also touch on the experience of introducing eBay to our unique market, as witnessed by the recent launch of eBay Canada’s French-language site; future trends in the modern dot com era; technology and convergence; and how eBay is adopting to rapid technological changes through the recent acquisitions and creation of technically innovative properties such as PayPal, Kijiji and Skype.

The Toronto Stock Exchange announced this week that it will soon roll out its "Leapfrog" trading system. According to the TSX, the system is tailored to algorithm-based trading where near instantaneous data exchange is required. The system will outpace those offered by the NASDAQ and other major exchanges. Will this system result in more trading volume for the TSX? The Canadian Press reports:

An emerging Canadian competitor to the TSX responded that shaving transaction times is a basic function in an era when trading firms jostle for space in the buildings that house exchange computers in order to take advantage of shorter signal transits at the speed of light.

"Without wanting to get into the competitive aspect, low latency is just part of what you have to provide," said Richard Carleton, vice-president of corporate development at the Canadian Trading and Quotation System, or CNQ, established last year and promising a faster and cheaper alternative to the established markets.

Think of the importance of speed to profitability if firms fight to be in the same building as exchange computers. Millionths of a second count in arbitrage.

Why is algorithm trading so important? Here is an excerpt from a Newsweek story on the subject:

Trading algorithms automatically break up large orders into bite sizes and feed them directly into the market. But they can be tuned to execute almost any strategy. Some aim simply to capture the average price over a day, others to gain an edge by, say, trading more heavily at the opening and close, when volume is high, and less when it slows down around lunchtime. And they can be customized, for example, to sell stock stealthily over several weeks if a manager holds a 3% position in a particular stock and wants to cut it to 1%. Not only (...read more...)

Arstechnica.com has an interesting story about NBC's VP of Digital Innovation, Sab Kanaujia, and his on-again, off-again post on what NBC Universal is going to do to compete with upstart media companies YouTube and MySpace. It turns out that Kanaujia did not want to spill the beans so the post got pulled - except, it didn't. Thanks to Google cache:

It won't surprise anyone that my team at NBC Universal Digital Media is currently leading a major social networking initiative. I guess every online media firm is doing something in this area. We know we're already late. But unlike Fox, our approach has been different.

Instead of buying an existing social networking destination (Digital Media evaluated some candidates back in the summer before I joined the team), the decision was made to internally build the platform grounds up - we do have a few 3rd party partners to give us a jump start. The decision not to buy was mainly due to integration challenges and the inability of most of 3rd party social networking destinations to scale, a key aspect for a large media firm like ours.

Okay, we've all done this - hit the submit button only to realize we forgot to spell check or fact check or . . . In this case, we can guess that people at NBC did not want their tactics to reach the competition. That's the problem when blogs become the stream-of-consciousness tools they were meant to be, people say things that would never see the light of day in the print world. But that's fine. The transparency of ideas is building a momentum of entrepreneurship that will launch the next economic golden age; or, maybe it will destroy us. I wonder what Kanaujia thinks.

Many in the business community believe in Malcolm Gladwell's maxim, "Don't think--blink!" When a CEO of a company is well-versed in the issues and functions of their company, often decisions have to be made on a moments notice. Having insight in how to make better snap decisions can make the difference between success or failure.

Gladwell's book, Blink, was partially based on science and partially on anecdotal evidence. Yesterday, the BBC ran a science story that adds legitimacy to his argument. Researchers have determined that in some situations people make better decisions in a fraction of a second than they do when given time to study a problem:

Ten volunteers were shown a computer screen covered in over 650 identical symbols, including one rotated version of the symbol.

They were asked to decide which side of the screen the rotated image was on.

Given a fraction of a second to look at the screen, the subjects were 95% accurate.

But when they were allowed to scrutinize the image for over a second, they were only 70% accurate.

Dr Li Zhaoping, of UCL's Department of Psychology said: "This finding seems counter-intuitive.

All of this goes a long way in supporting those successful people who credit their success to so-called intuition. That is a very human trait: when we don't know the reason for something we assign it to a category that embraces the undefined.

The truth is we can prepare ourselves to make good, fast decisions. It is called hard work and preparation. Welcome to the future -- and the past.

We try not to be mindless promoters of the next cool gadget. Really. That said, there are some technologies that represent a sea-change in the evolution of information management. They can't be ignored.

The mobile communications appliance we have all waited for debuted yesterday at MacWorld. As a result, Research In Motion's stock dropped about the same amount as Apple's climbed. If you have not seen the new iPhone yet it is worth taking a moment to visit the Apple website for a tour of its features.



The iPhone first is a beautifully designed piece of consumer electronics. It represents an evolution of the ideal that drives this remarkable company: think different and think simple (funny how billions of R&D investment can result in such a simple, easy to use device). In cultural theory terms, its lineage owes much to the boomer generation's embrace of a technological future as represented by Stanley Kubrick's seminal film, 2001. The black obelisk in that film - a perfect, black rectangle - represented in iconic form the combined intelligence of a superior race that through its technology begins the evolution of human intelligence (for you creationists in the audience the obelisk can represent god - your choice).


Image from, appropriately enough, Hackers At Large

Kubrick understood the maxim that sufficiently advanced technologies resemble magic. The iPhone is that technology. Its easy-to-use interface and high-res screen combine cellphone and a usable Internet browser in one small, elegant package.

Of course, since Canadians live in a no connectivity competition zone, very few of us can afford the ridiculous charges this phone will generate for Internet access. It is time for an upstart competitor - Virgin, are you listening - to throw open the doors to affordable mobile Internet access in this country. Maybe the iPhone will drive (...read more...)

Over the last week or so some of you may have seem my name in the media relating to a blogger challenge to TTC Chair, Adam Giambrone. The issue: improving the TTC's information website and increasing ridership. So far the Star, the Post, the Globe and Mail, the CBC and numerous blog sites have picked up on the story.

On New Year's eve I did something many would consider a simple task. I went to the TTC web site looking for a way to get from my house to the location of a New Year's eve party. Half an hour later I was no further ahead. It took a combination of searching the web and calling a help line to find out the subway and bus we needed to take. The next day on my other blog, Readingtoronto.com, I posted a challenge to Adam Giambrone. Would he listen to Toronto bloggers if they offered suggestions on how to improve the site?

To his credit he said yes. This is where the social-networking comes in. I asked my fellow Toronto bloggers to join in the challenge and we all asked our readers how they would improve the TTC way-finding system. The response was nothing less than remarkable. The comments poured in. Many are near-brilliant. This is what the "Wisdom of Crowds" is all about.

Our next step is to bring these suggestions - in a usable form - to city hall. Open source democracy? Maybe. Let's face it. Social-networking isn't only about connecting with your friends on MySpace, it is about coming together in communities of interest to make the world a little better. That is what Toronto bloggers have done. How many other seemingly intractable problems are waiting to yield to the onslaught of this technology? I think we'll all find (...read more...)

I received an email from the Wall Street Journal today informing me about their new, free service, the Market Data Centre. It is a worthwhile new service to be sure as it is full of useful market information. While I was on that site I followed a link to another service, http://www.stockpickr.com.

Stockpickr boasts that it uses social networking strategies to help users build effective investment portfolios. Here is what the company says it does:

What is StockPickr?
StockPickr is a free stock recommendation site that allows you to receive automated stock recommendations from thousands of portfolios, both professional and amateur, with a similar make-up to yours. Just enter your favorite stocks and within seconds you will receive new recommendations based on our internal algorithm matching your portfolio with the thousands of hedge funds, mutual funds and other peer portfolios (DIY portfolios) that have a similar composition. It also allows you to network, research and discover new great ideas in the financial market arena.

A quick visit to the site reveals a somewhat poorly designed interface with way too much going on. Still, the premise is an interesting one: Does a socially networked investment site give us an opportunity to improve our stock-picking?

Not everyone thinks so. Roger Ehrenberg of Information Arbitrage thinks the trend could be a disaster for investors:

It is particularly interesting to read some of the comments to the TechCrunch article. The diversity of comments pretty much represents that of the investing public - most comments have no appreciation for history or empirical research, a few are so far off the reservation (citing "wisdom of crowds" as the reason why such sites make sense) as to hardly warrant comment while a few actually raise the fundamental issues of indexing, risk management and diversification. The feel one gets (...read more...)

Plastic Logic is the Boston company that is getting closer than anyone to the holy grail of a paper-like digital display. You know the one: It makes printed newspapers and magazines obsolete. They announced a 100 million dollar investment yesterday that will let them build a new manufacturing plant.

Plastic Logic announced today that it will build the first factory to manufacture plastic electronics on a commercial scale. The facility will produce flexible active-matrix display modules for 'take anywhere, read anywhere' electronic reader products. It will utilize Plastic Logic's unique process to fabricate active-matrix displays that are thin, light and robust; enabling a reading experience closer to paper than any other technology.

To fund this comprehensive commercialization program, Plastic Logic has completed a first closing of $100 million of equity finance led by Oak Investment Partners and Tudor Investment Corporation. Existing investors Amadeus, which led the seed financing of Plastic Logic, Intel Capital, Bank of America, BASF Venture Capital, Quest for Growth and Merifin Capital also participated. The financing is one of the largest in the history of European venture capital.

If they are successful in commercializing the product the market size will massive. It may even make Google seem like a small player. Imagine the ecological benefits of removing the need for millions of tons of newsprint. Keep this company on your watch list.

Here is part of what the Financial Times says about the technology:

However, news that a plant is to be built will create a stir far beyond Cambridge. Morry Marshall, vice-president for strategic technologies at Semico, a Phoenix-based semiconductor research group, says plastic semiconductors have "tremendous potential" and add up to a "breakthrough that is waiting to happen".

The initial products from the factory will be pieces of plastic about A4 size. The basic plastic substrate (...read more...)

It is that time of the year again: time to look back over the last 365 days, admire your accomplishments, cringe at your failures and plan for the new year.

Did you learn anything in 2006? Do you have what it takes to succeed in '07 or are you and your team ready for a hard landing? Business 2.0 is offering advice from 50 well-known, successful people. Gagglescape.com brings you eleven of the best. These are people who recognize that successful businesses need people power and innovative ideas in order to rise to the top. How do you get innovative? Take a look at my story on the key lessons of innovation. After you've done that read through what these eleven success stories have to offer:

Sergey Brin
Co-founder, Google
SUCCEED WITH SIMPLICITY

Chris DeWolfe
Co-founder, Myspace
KEEP SOCIAL NETWORKS SOCIAL

Chad Hurley
Co-founder, YouTube
GIVE YOUR STARTUP A FIGHTING CHANCE

1. Test first. Launch your product or service before you have funding. See how people respond to it before you have a PowerPoint and business plan - have something people can use, and go from there.

2. Seek outside feedback. As you start building the product, don't assume that you know all the answers. Listen to the community and adapt. We had a lot of our own ideas about how the service would evolve. Coming from PayPal and eBay, we saw YouTube as a powerful way to add video to auctions, but we didn't see anyone using our product that way, so we didn't add features to support it.

3. Give partners what they want. Approach your business partners with concepts that they can get their heads around, and try to respond to their needs. An interesting example is what we've done with the music labels. With Warner and others, (...read more...)

A handful of IPOs exploded in Friday's market much like an eruption from a smoldering volcano. They scored an average opening-day gain of nearly 40 percent. But the event that led up to Friday's fireworks didn't just happen overnight.

 

This year's IPO traffic is breaking down into two different markets: Pre-Labor Day and Post-Labor Day.

 

Investors who bought shares of companies that have gone public since Labor Day wound up on the lucky side of the ledger. The numbers tell the story.

 

The average opening-day gain of the IPOs priced since Labor Day is 18.1 percent. That's roughly twice the average opening-day gain of 8.9 percent for the IPOs priced during the first eight months of the year.

 

Here's how the two different IPO markets of 2006 have taken shape so far.

 

Pre-Labor Day:

On Sept. 1, 2006, which was the Friday before Labor Day, the Nasdaq Composite Index, the barometer of the IPO market, ended at 2,193.16, DOWN 0.55 percent from its close at 2,205.32 on Dec. 30, 2005.

 

During those eight months, the new-issues calendar produced 136 IPOs, according to available records. That was an average of about 17 IPOs per month. They had an average opening-day gain of 8.9 percent.

 

On Sept. 1, 2006, the pre-Labor Day Scorecard (excluding unit offerings) looked like this:

• IPOs priced: 105
• Up: 50
• Down: 53
• Unchanged: 2
• Average gain: 4.32 percent
• Nasdaq Composite Index: Down 0.55 percent

Post-Labor Day:

On Dec. 9, 2006, the Nasdaq Composite Index closed at 2,437.36, UP 11.1 percent from Sept. 1, 2006.

 

During those three months and a week, the new-issues calendar produced 76 IPOs. That was an average of about (...read more...)