How trends connected to elderly people, single people, Asia, Internet of Things, internet search habits, mental health and global demand for water shape tomorrow's world? Take a look.
Source: http://www.visualistan.com/
Monday, 22 September 2014
Quote for the day
“Learn from your mistakes. Don't be misled by the day-to-day fluctuations in your equity. Focus on whether what you are doing is right, not on the random nature of any single trade's outcome.” - Richard Dennis
Sunday, 21 September 2014
Quote for the day
“Most men fail, not through lack of education or agreeable personal qualities, but from lack of dogged determination, from lack of dauntless will.” - Orison Swett Marden
11 Quotes That Illustrate The Strange, Relentless Genius Of Alibaba Founder Jack Ma
Alibaba, the enormous Chinese e-commerce company, is expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange this Friday.
At its helm is founder Jack Ma, a charismatic leader who started the company with 18 friends out of his small apartment in 1999. Although Ma is no longer CEO of Alibaba, he's still the face of the company.
Ma has succeeded because he is relentless, and some of his more memorable quotes — "Today is cruel, tomorrow is crueler" — illustrate how that relentlessness has formed his thinking.
On not giving up: "Today is cruel. Tomorrow is crueler. And the day after tomorrow is beautiful."
On past mistakes from "the dark days at Alibaba": "If you don't give up, you still have a chance. And, when you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength."
On teamwork: "If we are a good team and know what we want to do, one of us can defeat 10 of them."
On having a larger mission: "It doesn't matter if I failed. At least I passed the concept on to others. Even if I don't succeed, someone will succeed."
On perseverance: "We will make it because we are young and we will never, never give up."
On work: "If we go to work at 8 a.m. and go home at 5 p.m., this is not a high-tech company and Alibaba will never be successful. If we have that kind of 8-to-5 spirit, then we should just go and do something else."
On competition: "You should learn from your competitor but never copy. Copy, and you die."
On Alibaba.com's 2007 IPO: "Alibaba is not just a job. It's a dream. It's a cause. Let the Wall Street investors curse us if they want."
On starting a company: "If you want to grow, find a good opportunity. Today, if you want to be a great company, think about what social problem you could solve."
On the benefits of his technological ineptitude: "Intelligent people need a fool to lead them. When the team's all a bunch of scientists, it is best to have a peasant lead the way. His way of thinking is different. It's easier to win if you have people seeing things from different perspectives."
On growth: "In carrying out e-commerce, the most important thing is to keep doing what you are doing right now with passion, to keep it up."
Source: www.businessinsider.com
At its helm is founder Jack Ma, a charismatic leader who started the company with 18 friends out of his small apartment in 1999. Although Ma is no longer CEO of Alibaba, he's still the face of the company.
Ma has succeeded because he is relentless, and some of his more memorable quotes — "Today is cruel, tomorrow is crueler" — illustrate how that relentlessness has formed his thinking.
On not giving up: "Today is cruel. Tomorrow is crueler. And the day after tomorrow is beautiful."
On past mistakes from "the dark days at Alibaba": "If you don't give up, you still have a chance. And, when you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength."
On teamwork: "If we are a good team and know what we want to do, one of us can defeat 10 of them."
On having a larger mission: "It doesn't matter if I failed. At least I passed the concept on to others. Even if I don't succeed, someone will succeed."
On perseverance: "We will make it because we are young and we will never, never give up."
On work: "If we go to work at 8 a.m. and go home at 5 p.m., this is not a high-tech company and Alibaba will never be successful. If we have that kind of 8-to-5 spirit, then we should just go and do something else."
On competition: "You should learn from your competitor but never copy. Copy, and you die."
On Alibaba.com's 2007 IPO: "Alibaba is not just a job. It's a dream. It's a cause. Let the Wall Street investors curse us if they want."
On starting a company: "If you want to grow, find a good opportunity. Today, if you want to be a great company, think about what social problem you could solve."
On the benefits of his technological ineptitude: "Intelligent people need a fool to lead them. When the team's all a bunch of scientists, it is best to have a peasant lead the way. His way of thinking is different. It's easier to win if you have people seeing things from different perspectives."
On growth: "In carrying out e-commerce, the most important thing is to keep doing what you are doing right now with passion, to keep it up."
Source: www.businessinsider.com
Saturday, 20 September 2014
This Is The Man Making Bill Gates So Rich
His secret weapon is a man you have probably never heard of: Michael Larson.
Michael Larson
Gates hired Larson 20 years ago, when his net worth was a relatively paltry $5 billion, report Anupreeta Das and Craig Karmin at the Wall Street Journal, who just wrote a profile on the notoriously secretive Larson.
Larson runs Gates’ personal investment company Cascade Investment LLC, funded solely by Gates.
At one time, Gates wealth depended solely on Microsoft. But for years he’s been selling off his Microsoft stake. The common perception is that he’s been using the proceeds from those sales directly for charity. That’s not entirely how it works.
Although Gates makes his own investments in tech, it is Larson, through Cascade, who has taken Gate’s money and diversified it. Gates now has vast holdings in real estate and non-tech companies like the Canadian National Railway Co., AutoNation Inc., and Republic Services Inc. It is these vast holdings that help fund the Gates’ donations.
And although Gates has given an astounding $38 billion to his charitable foundation, thanks to Larson, he’s getting richer faster than he can give his money away.
His $81.6 billion is nearly $6 billion more than it was as of March 2014, when he was worth $76 billion, we reported at the time. And $76 billion was $9 billion more than he was worth in March, 2013.
In February, Gates celebrated 20 years of this partnership by throwing a gala to honour Larson at his Seattle mansion, reports the WSJ. It was a rare occasion where the two men socialized with each other. Apparently, they aren't buddies and don’t hang out much, sources told the Journal.
At the party, Gates told guests he has “complete trust and faith” in Larson, meaning that Larson invests Gates’ money, buying and selling, with completely autonomy.
And he does it all under a cover of such ferocious secrecy that he’s been nicknamed “the Gateskeeper.”
Although publicly traded companies do reveal when Cascade has invested heavily in them, Larson has all sorts of tricks for keeping Cascade’s and Bill Gate’s names out of other investments, sources told the Journal.
For instance, he makes employees sign confidentiality agreements which cover them even after they leave. He farms out more than $10 billion to up to 25 outside money managers. This helps him find new investment ideas, but it also helps cover the trail. When Cascade was part of an investment group that bought the Ritz-Carlton hotel in San Francisco, the publicist didn't even know Cascade, and Bill Gates, was among them.
He’s also been known to fire up a limited Limited Liability Corporation to make real estate purchases, to keep Cascade’s name off the deal and the deed.
He’s so good at hiding the trail that most people don’t know that Gates, through Cascade, owns a significant stake in the Four Seasons luxury-hotel chain.
And he’s frugal with the bosses’ money, too. Apparently Cascade employees, of whom there are about 100, are not allowed to stay at the Four Seasons when travelling on business, even if that business is on behalf of the Four Seasons. They must choose a lower-cost, less luxurious hotel.
“Melinda and I are free to pursue our vision of a healthier and better-educated world because of what Michael has done,” Gates told guests at the party.
And ultimately, the money will go to charity. Bill and Melinda Gates have vowed to donate 95% of their wealth to their foundation, as part of Gate’s Giving Pledge.
But until then, Larson is making it grow.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.my/
The Evolution of Chat: Stone Scribbles to Swipeable Screens
This year, the Oxford English Dictionary has added a slew of new words to the dictionary, from “amazeballs” to “YOLO.”
Cue the defenders of the English language, who take these “cray” new words to signal the dumbing-down and ultimate demise of the English language.
But self-proclaimed defenders of language have been bemoaning its decline for hundreds, even thousands of years: “Our Language is extremely imperfect,” complained Jonathan Swift in his 1712 essay, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. “Its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions.”
George Orwell agreed in 1946: “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way.”
But linguists agree there’s never been a “golden age” of language.
In fact, if anything, humanity’s ability to communicate with each other has improved over time. Linguists theorize that the first spoken language, the mother tongue of all languages today, had a simple vocabulary and grammar system, and was spoken at a slower speed, compared to languages today.
Yet from that one Stone Age dialect, humanity has evolved to speak thousands of distinct languages across the globe. Today we’re still discovering new languages all the time, showing humanity’s determination to communicate with each other.
Every language in the world is a living thing, ever changing and evolving.
That includes written language as well, first developed from images drawn on cave walls. Back when those detailed pictures started to develop into more of a symbolic shorthand, there were probably language purist cavemen who protested against the decline of pictorial communication.
As much as language has evolved and changed throughout the centuries, it’s not going anywhere: Humanity has been using some form of language or other to communicate with each other for thousands and thousands of years. Though the specific medium of communication might change, we’ll never stop chatting.
Cue the defenders of the English language, who take these “cray” new words to signal the dumbing-down and ultimate demise of the English language.
But self-proclaimed defenders of language have been bemoaning its decline for hundreds, even thousands of years: “Our Language is extremely imperfect,” complained Jonathan Swift in his 1712 essay, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. “Its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions.”
George Orwell agreed in 1946: “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way.”
But linguists agree there’s never been a “golden age” of language.
In fact, if anything, humanity’s ability to communicate with each other has improved over time. Linguists theorize that the first spoken language, the mother tongue of all languages today, had a simple vocabulary and grammar system, and was spoken at a slower speed, compared to languages today.
Yet from that one Stone Age dialect, humanity has evolved to speak thousands of distinct languages across the globe. Today we’re still discovering new languages all the time, showing humanity’s determination to communicate with each other.
Every language in the world is a living thing, ever changing and evolving.
That includes written language as well, first developed from images drawn on cave walls. Back when those detailed pictures started to develop into more of a symbolic shorthand, there were probably language purist cavemen who protested against the decline of pictorial communication.
As much as language has evolved and changed throughout the centuries, it’s not going anywhere: Humanity has been using some form of language or other to communicate with each other for thousands and thousands of years. Though the specific medium of communication might change, we’ll never stop chatting.
Source: http://www.whoishostingthis.com/
Quote for the day
“The real-time experiment turned out to be a very good idea because it stimulated my thinking. Having to explain my reasons for making decisions forced me to become more coherent; it imposed a certain discipline on me, which was very helpful.” - George Soros
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