Saturday, May 26, 2012
Login

Posts Tagged ‘Second’

GM stock rises slightly on second day of trading; CNN in Lansing for GM segment

GM stock rises slightly on second day of trading; CNN in Lansing for GM segment
DETROIT General Motors’ stock fell the second day it traded, although it stayed above its initial price Thursday of $33. GM’s stock dipped as low as $33.11 early today, more than 3 percent below Thursday’s closing price, before climbing back to close at $34.26. Investors and the U.S. government are watching how the market views GM. The company’s stock went public Thursday amid an impressive …

Read more on Lansing State Journal


The Second Life of a Cisco Co-Founder

Each day, Inc.’s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs. Here’s what we found today:

One entrepreneur’s journey from Cisco to organic turkeys. With Thanksgiving just around the corner, the Washington Post has the interesting story of Sandy Lerner, one of the co-founders of Cisco, who now spends her time raising turkeys at her organic farm near Middleburg, Virginia. Lerner and her then-husband Len Bosack helped start the famous computer system company, which went public in 1990. Despite owning nearly a third of the company, Lerner was fired and left the company with roughly $200 million. Ever the entrepreneur, Lerner started the successful Urban Decay cosmetics company in 1995, eventually selling it in 2000 for a tidy profit. Her love of animals led her to start her organic, humane Ayrshire Farms in Virginia. If you want one of her turkeys on your Thanksgiving table, be ready to shell out some big bucks. One of Lerner’s certified organic, certified humane, heritage-breed turkeys will run you about $230 for a 22-pounder.

Family businesses on the rise. What happens when parents and children go into business together? Emotions fly high, toes are stepped on and successful companies are built, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal, which chronicles three startups run by parent-and-child teams. With parents getting laid off and kids unable to find jobs, many families are now giving it a shot. “It makes perfect sense,” says Wayne Rivers, co-founder of the Family Business Institute in Raleigh, North Carolina. Parents have the expertise and connections built up over a long career; kids are web-savvy in a way earlier generations can’t beat. And there’s nothing like a genetic bond to cement a business partnership. But he warns: “There’s always the parent-child dynamic, and when you add a business, with all its moving parts, it’s complicated.”

Private equity goes Hollywood. Equity investors in California are nothing new, but The New York Times reports that, lately, some of them are moving south from Silicon Valley to Hollywood. According to the Times, “falling salaries, rising subsidies and a thinning of competition [have] turned the financial equation in favor of the investor.” Some recent hits financed by new-to-Hollywood investors are “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” which were inexpensive to create and yielded a huge turnout at the box office. As one big oil investor explains, “We’ve always made our living by buying when things are down,” and as traditional studios have become more wary of investing the past few years, Hollywood seems to be the perfect environment for investors looking to get in when the going’s tough.

Cheap tweets. Why pay millions for a celebrity endorsement when you can have the editor of The Onion tweet for you for a fraction of the cost? The Wall Street Journal reports that some marketers are turning to cheaper, more powerful, alternatives: “Young social-media influencers who have strong online followings.” Lexus, the subject of the article, has hired a number of popular social media personalities to leverage their already established networks to promote the company’s message, which, the article notes, can “give a brand more credibility with younger shoppers than hiring high-priced celebrities.”

Snicker-worthy product names. When Sara Lee said Tuesday it would sell its North American bakery to a Mexican company, a lot of people got a chuckle. Not that anything about the $959 million sale was funny…except the Mexican company’s name: Grupo Bimbo. Sure, it’s supposed to be pronounced “beem-bo,” as some of the company’s marketing pleads for Americans to do. But today the Chicago Tribune’s Barbara Brotman writes an open letter to the company: “We’re still pronouncing it ‘bimbo,’” she says of herself and, well, the American public. Yes, it’s as childish as snickering at the name of the seventh planet from the sun, but Brotman laughs: “Would you like a piece of Bimbo?” “Can you butter my Bimbo?” Sure, the case of Bimbo illuminates the need for careful international branding, but also raises the question: is a bit of instant name recognition–even if it’s childish–ever a bad thing?

The perks of being the boss. Or at least one of the big guys like Gregory B. Maffei of Liberty Media Corp., that is. Maffei pulled in a total direct pre-tax compensation of $87.1 million in 2009, four times what he made in 2008 and enough to put him atop the Wall Street Journal’s latest CEO pay survey. Collected by the Philadelphia-based consulting firm Hay Group, the survey found that annual bonuses rose nearly 11 percent among companies with annual revenues of more than $4 billion during the last fiscal year. And though Ray Irani of Occidental Petroleum topped the best-paid list in April, he fell to No. 3 in the most recent survey and brought in a paltry $52.2 million for the year. Rounding out the rest of the top five were Larry Ellison of Oracle at $68.6 million, Carol Bartz of Yahoo at $44.6 million, and Leslie Moonves of CBS at $37.6 million, up 83 percent from 2008.

More from Inc. magazine:

Get this delivered to your inbox.

Follow us on Twitter.

Follow us on Tumblr.

Like us on Facebook.


Cleaver-Brooks, Inc. to Host Investor Conference Call on Fiscal Year 2011 Second Quarter & Year to Date Financial …

Cleaver-Brooks, Inc. to Host Investor Conference Call on Fiscal Year 2011 Second Quarter & Year to Date Financial …
THOMASVILLE, Ga.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Cleaver-Brooks, Inc. to Host Investor Conference Call on Fiscal Year 2011 Second Quarter & Year to Date Financial Results

Read more on Business Wire


What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement, Second Edition: Planning a Prosperous, Healthy, and Happy Future

  • ISBN13: 9781580082051
  • Condition: New
  • Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Product Description
Plan Now for the Life You Want

Today’s economic realities have reset our expectations of what retirement is, yet there’s still the promise for what it can be: a life stage filled with more freedom and potential than ever before. Given the new normal, how do you plan for a future filled with prosperity, health, and happiness? As a companion to What Color Is Your Parachute?, the world’s best-selling career book, What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement offers both a holistic, big-picture look at these years as well as practical tools and exercises to help you build a life full of security, vitality, and community.

This second edition contains updates throughout, including a section on Social Security, an in-depth exercise on values and how they inform your retirement map, and the one-of-a-kind resource for organizing the sea of information on finances and mental and physical health: the Retirement Well-Being Profile. More than a guide on where to live, how to stay active, or which investments to choose, What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement helps you develop a detailed picture of your ideal retirement, so that—whether you’re planning retirement or are there already—you can take a comprehensive approach to make the most of these vital years.

What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement, Second Edition: Planning a Prosperous, Healthy, and Happy Future


AOL’s Second Chance

Each day, Inc.’s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs. Here’s what we found today:

The Reinvention of AOL. AOL, often thought of as a relic of Internet’s first days, is experiencing a rebirth, according to CNN. AOL’s plans to become a “content company” became mighty clear last week when it aggressively acquired not one, but three online companies, including TechCrunch, 5Min Media and Thing Labs, a social media company. The company’s president of Media and Studios, David Eun, tells CNN, “We want to be the pipe to distribute the best, most compelling content on the Web.” The story points out that AOL’s “widely recognized brand” is its strong suit, but because the company has lagged behind the competition for years, finding smaller content companies to sign on with them may be a struggle. “AOL has to buy companies in the primordial slime,” says Todd Dagres of Spark Capital. “People may not know much about Thing Labs, but AOL has to act almost as a venture capitalist and help guide these new companies.”

What country has the best brains? The BBC poses the question, and answers it unscientifically, by simply counting the number of Nobel Prize winners hailing from each nation. Since 1901, France has been awarded 57 Nobel prizes, Germany, 103, and the United Kingdom, 117. Who’s on top for best brainpower? Drumroll, please. With a whopping 323 Nobel prizes racked up, it’s … the United States!

Tune in, drop out, start-up. Never mind the perennial debate over whether or not an MBA is useful when starting a business. Perhaps a better question might be whether or not a college degree is even necessary. While Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are famous Harvard drop-outs, the American Express OPEN Forum has a list of other well-known entrepreneurs who have started wildly successful companies without the aid of a college degree. For example, Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, became one of the 11 wealthiest people in the world without a sheepskin. Likewise, John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods dropped out of college twice and never took a single business course.

Start-up lessons from The Social Network. There’s more than just a bunch of laugh-lines to take away from David Fincher’s Facebook film. If you’re an entrepreneur working on your latest ‘preneur, The Wall Street Journal suggests you take a nod from the fictionalized account of Mark Zuckerberg’s journey and do things like ask your friends and family for seed money, get on the same page as your coworkers, and dream big. Just can’t get enough? Read our review by Charles Taylor.

Redefining the music industry. Thus far, ad-supported music services offering free content have largely staggered. Yet Spotify, a Swedish company that’s become quite popular in Europe, aims to break this tradition by landing deals with major music labels this winter, CNET reports. Like its predecessors, Spotify faces a number of daunting obstacles to successfully penetrate the U.S. market, not the least of these is Apple. The only real way Spotify could get the labels on board, CNET says, would be to pay up and limit the risk the labels would have to take on. The site also faces an impending threat from Google, which plans to launch its own music service by early 2011.

More from Inc. magazine:

Get this delivered to your inbox.

Follow us on Twitter.

Follow us on Tumblr.

Like us on Facebook.


The Road To The Second Million

The Road To The Second Million Was Written From A Strong Urge To Share, Even For A Little Bit, The Personal Frustration That I Have Gone Through While Climbing To The top! The Business Bible.
The Road To The Second Million


How To Make A Fantastic Second Income From Your Photography

High quality ebook paying high commission of 60 percent per sale. Comprehensive affiliate support offered with all tools supplied for you to copy and paste and start selling fast. Niche untapped market , full of buyers and tons of traffic per week!
How To Make A Fantastic Second Income From Your Photography


Second Chance Romance – How To Win Your Ex Back

Now Paying 100% Commission. Check Out http://second-chance-romance.com/affiliates.html For Details. Top Affiliate Converts At Over 4% & Makes Over $15k A Month! This Is The Best Converting “Get Your Ex Back” Product And I Have The Proof To Back It Up!
Second Chance Romance – How To Win Your Ex Back


New: Seven Second Memory – Expert Affiliate Marketers – Split Testing

Earn 75% On Each Sale. $24.92 For You Per Sale. Experienced affiliate program managers. Great new memory product with constant Split Testing for best conversion rate. Free affiliate resources available now. Please register on our site’s affiliate page.
New: Seven Second Memory – Expert Affiliate Marketers – Split Testing


Second Opinion Arthritis Treatment Kit – $48.50/sale

Newly released product from nationally known arthritis specialist. Website ranked #1 in Google for “Arthritis Treatment” and “Arthritis Relief.” Conversion rate increasing every day!
Second Opinion Arthritis Treatment Kit – $48.50/sale