WEF
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit will cut about 4,500 jobs in coming quarters as he seeks to reduce costs amid slumping revenue and “unprecedented” market conditions. The 42nd World Economic Forum Annual Meeting closed today, with business leaders urging resolute action to promote growth and employment, particularly among young people. “Jobs should be our number one priority,” declared Annual Meeting Co-Chair Vikram Pandit, Chief Executive Officer of Citi, in a session on the global agenda for 2012.
Job creation in Davos | Felix Salmon
Here in snowy Davos, the topic of job creation has been about as popular as the passed canapés and free champagne. Not surprisingly, President Obama’s latest jobs proposals — a combination of taxing outsourcing corporations and reviving U.S. manufacturing — haven’t been as popular. It’s not hard to see why. Among other things, Obama’s State of the Union speech Tuesday drove home the idea that U.S. industries need more protection. “Over a thousand Americans are working today because we stopped a surge in Chinese tires,” he said in his speech .
Why Manufacturing Can't Solve The Jobs Problem
Leveraging Human-Machine Collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University | World Economic Forum-Leveraging Human-Machine Collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University
Computers are learning to read and understand the vast text-based resources available online, and to use their learning to infer and reason. Digital security must be managed. A virus, launched by a 12-year-old, can travel across the Internet at lightning speed. An effective digital security model has three aspects: The fort model – Using multiple embedded CPUs, different elements of the computer are isolated and secure, although able to work together: the keyboard, the operating system, the mouse, etc. A jigsaw puzzle method for data storage and protection – By breaking data into a thousand pieces and dispersing them across the Internet, any cyberattack will only access part of the data.
More and more people are accessing the internet via mobile devices The study, supported by web giant Google, assumes that in four years 3bn people will be using the internet, or nearly 50% of the world's population. The rapid fall in the cost of smartphones - with cheap versions now costing about $100 - means that by 2016 about 80% of all internet users will access the web using a mobile phone. In 2010, the internet economy in the G20 group of leading nations was worth $2.3tn - larger than the economies of Italy or Brazil, but a mere 4.1% of the total size of all G20 economies.
Web economy in G20 set to double by 2016, Google says
I’m among the disrupted of Davos. Outside, there’s an #OccupyDavos encampment in igloos (really). Down the road, someone will be giving out an award to the worst company of the world. But the disruption is no longer outside.
Davos, disrupted « BuzzMachine
In a world economy gripped by fear and smothered in uncertainty, I managed to meet someone here able to shine a bright light through the gloom – Steve Ellis, worldwide managing director of consulting firm Bain & Co. Sure, we might be facing the possibility of a collapse of the euro, an emerging markets slowdown, persistent unemployment in the West, a U.S. housing crisis, growth-killing fiscal austerity, and so on and so on. But Ellis is looking a bit further out into the future, and he likes what he sees. Yes, he says, we’re facing a pretty rough two or three years.
Guess What — I Met an Optimist at Davos! | Business | TIME.com
It’s highly unscientific and anecdotal, but the winner by far of the most-talked-about-person-in-Davos award, at least when it comes to people in my earshot, is George Soros. Soros is out of the investing game, living now as a full-time philanthropist and sage, while still keeping an eye on the fund company which bears his name and which provides him with a ten-digit income each year. Because he doesn’t have a financial book to talk, because he’s happy being brutally honest , and because he’s giving voice to the plutocrats’ darkest fears, Soros seems to encapsulate Davos 2012 like no one else. Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich.
Fear in Davos | Felix Salmon
Ivan Lee, 25, turned down a lucrative offer from Microsoft to start his own company, developing location-based games that he hopes will eventually dominate the industry. Bansi Shah, 23, picked up her undergraduate diploma, then took a job at Lattice Engines , a small San Mateo startup, where she makes “near the top” of the company’s $80,000 to $130,000 range for an entry level product manager, plus equity. These are the latest high-tech migrants to Silicon Valley, in their 20s and fresh out of college, drawn by a surge in start-ups and investment money that in the last year and a half has created more jobs than companies can fill, and eager to help shape the technology that infuses their lives. Their peers in other parts of the country — indeed, in many other parts of the state — may be struggling to find jobs, their independence stunted by financial hardship. But these recent college graduates are, at least for the moment, snugly protected from any hint of the recession.
Silicon Valley Newcomers Are Still Dreaming Big - NYTimes.com
Hot times in Silicon Valley
Jan 25th 2012, 17:26 by R.A. | LONDON THE San Francisco Bay area is undergoing one of its periodic tech booms on the back of the flourishing of social networking firms. That boom, the Wall Street Journal tells us , is very good for local tech workers:
OVER the past 15 years striking corporate headquarters have transformed the great cities of the emerging world. China Central Television’s building resembles a giant alien marching across Beijing’s skyline; the 88-storey Petronas Towers, home to Malaysia’s oil company, soar above Kuala Lumpur; the gleaming office of VTB, a banking powerhouse, sits at the heart of Moscow’s new financial district. These are all monuments to the rise of a new kind of hybrid corporation, backed by the state but behaving like a private-sector multinational. State-directed capitalism is not a new idea: witness the East India Company. But as our special report this week points out, it has undergone a dramatic revival. In the 1990s most state-owned companies were little more than government departments in emerging markets; the assumption was that, as the economy matured, the government would close or privatise them.
Emerging-market multinationals: The rise of state capitalism | The Economist
The Book of Jobs | Politics | Vanity Fair
What this transition meant, however, is that jobs and livelihoods on the farm were being destroyed. Because of accelerating productivity, output was increasing faster than demand, and prices fell sharply. It was this, more than anything else, that led to rapidly declining incomes. Farmers then (like workers now) borrowed heavily to sustain living standards and production. Because neither the farmers nor their bankers anticipated the steepness of the price declines, a credit crunch quickly ensued.Could the future of capitalism be decided in this Swiss mountain resort? But as more than 2,600 of the world's richest and most powerful people come to the Swiss mountain village of Davos to discuss the state of the world, is it a topic that they want to talk about? For some, these are clearly the right questions. "Is capitalism working? Will we grow again?