Smart Economy

What are the Best Countries for Business?

Forbes List of Best Countries for Business

The recession downturn has been ubiquitous across the globe, but Forbes recently published its fourth annual Best Countries for Business. The ranking, according to Forbes is a good indication of which nations will be in a better position than others to rebound from the current malaise.

 

Forbes  compiled operating conditions in 127 economies that suggest their ability to attract entrepreneurs, investors and workers. Factored in are a country's tax burden, red tape, investor protections, stock market performance, promotion of free trade and freedoms of expression and organization.

Denmark leads the pack for the second year in a row. The top three countries all advanced from last year’s rankings. Canada jumped 4 spots from 7^th to 3d  and Singapore from 8^th to 4^th. USAadvanced from 4^th to 2^nd spot. UK, Sweden,  Finland, Ireland and Switzerland  all retrenched from 2008 positions New to the top ten are Australia, Norway and New Zealand, which recently became the first developed country to sign a free-trade deal with China. Falling out of the top ten are Switzerland, Finland

and Ireland, which saw plans for a Guinness mega-brewery shelved as exports slowed.

Rank

'09     '08    Country

1       1      Denmark

2       4      United States

3       7      Canada

4       8      Singapore

5      12      New Zealand

6       5      United Kingdom

7       6      Sweden

8      13     Australia

9       9      Hong Kong/China

10    15     Norway

11    14     Netherlands

12    18     Belgium

13     3      Finland

14     2      Ireland

15    10     Switzerland

Source: Forbes; 4/27/2009, Vol. 183 Issue 8, p151

 

Walte Derzko

Smart Economy

Toronto

Author of the soon-to-be-released book: Hard Times Golden Opportunities.. about opportunity recognition in a recession/ depression featuring 45 opportunity scenarios.

 

The first 3D football match in European football history

• On 24 April 2009, Orange will air an experimental broadcast of the first ever football match in 3D when OL (Olympique Lyonnais) meets PSG (Paris Saint-Germain)

• This Ligue 1 (French Premiere League) championship game will be broadcast live on 3D screens in Parc des Princes and Gerland stadium for supporters and football fans invited by Orange and the two clubs

• This European First showcases the Group's ability to innovate, particularly in the presentation and broadcasting of premium content

On Friday 24 April at 8:30 p.m. Orange will offer a live broadcast in 3D of the Ligue 1 match between OL and PSG. Dedicated areas will be set aside at Parc de Princes and Gerland stadium to allow supporters and invited fans to live all the thrills of this match and this exceptional experience on a 3D screen, using glasses.

For the first time in Europe, Orangewill deploy special equipment to produce a football match live and in 3D, including six stereoscopic cameras, a standalone production bus, and specialised 3D teams. This operation will be run in conjunction with the professional football league LFP and HBS, executive producer of the French Ligue 1.

First trialled by Orange in 2008 at the Roland Garros International Tennis Open, 3D broadcasting provides gripping involvement and incomparable emotion compared to normal TV.

The OL-PSG match will also be broadcast in high definition for Orange sport channel subscribers both on Orange TV ( Orange sport: channel 20)  and on orange.fr.

 

Full press release here>>>

 

Walter Derzko

Smart Economy

Toronto

Author of the soon-to-be-released book: Hard Times Golden Opportunities.. about opportunity recognition in a recession/ depression featuring 45 opportunity scenarios.

Simulated Brain starting to think?

The BBC reports that a simulated brain experiment is getting closer to real thought. A detailed simulation of a small region of a brain built molecule by molecule has been constructed and has recreated experimental results from real brains.  The "Blue Brain" has been put in a virtual body, and observing it gives the first indications of the molecular and neural basis of thought and memory.  Scaling the simulation to the human brain is only a matter of money, says the project's head.  The work was presented this week at the European Future Technologies meeting in Prague

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 Full story here>>

 

Walter Derzko

Smart Economy

Toronto

Author of the soon-to-be-released book: Hard Times Golden Opportunities.. about opportunity recognition in a recession/ depression featuring 45 opportunity scenarios.

When will the recession / depression end ? part 26 If you can’t trust mainstream economists, who can you trust?

I’ve mentioned before that mainstream economists have a absolutely dismal record of predicting future recessions, according to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) study that compared the track records of mainstream economists in over 60 countries. They found that mainstream economists got it right ( predicted a recession a year before it happened) in only 2 out of 60 recessions that they studied amongst different countries. There were several "outlier" or rebel economist that we have been tracking on the Smart Economy blog since 2005-2006 who were signaling a market top, but most business people were in denial at the time, even as late as May 2008.

If mainstream economists  have such a dismal record of failure predicting recessions, what makes you think that they are any better at timing the turnaround? They are likley to be biased on the upside and discounting any continued risks.

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Last week one single US bank announced record profits and that was supposedly a signal for everyone to jump back into the American stock market and for the consensus of mainstream economists to confidently predict that the recession will be over by the fall of 2009. Last Friday, a report from the Blue Chip Economic Indicators survey of private economists indicated that 86 percent of  them think that the recession will end in the second half of this year. President Obama called it a “glimmer of hope” in a speech on the weekend. N.B. --The working assumption here is that until the USA begins a turnaround, the global economy won’t start recovering from a recession / depression either.

In my opinion, I find it difficult to see any “glimmer of hope” when,

-Home and commercial foreclosures continue on the rise in the USA
-Unemployment continuing to rise in both  Canada, EU and the USA (this will likely go beyond the 10% forecast)
-23 banks have been shut down so far by FDIC this year (projections are for over 100 to close their doors)
-GM will likely be filing bankruptcy ( and all the secondary consequences in the auto-parts industry, and in single industry towns)
-The US budget deficit is almost a trillion dollars ( and the possibility of hyperinflation and a devalued US dollar down the road if we see a L-shaped recovery)
-Workers in the USA are becoming the working poor with companies cutting/freezing salaries, cutting 401k matching contributions and medical benefits

-The baby boom cohort in the USA is about to start retiring, cash in their dwindling 401K’s and decimated mutual funds and bankrupting an already dysfunctional pension plan program (too many new old aged recipients and not enough new younger workers paying into the program) consequently many seniors may delay / postpone their  retirement plans—Freedom 55 pushed back to Freedom 65, 75  or 85

When will we see a bottom or a turn-around? Listen to the political cartoonists and the satirists. They appear to have a better track record then the economists....This week's consenus from the humor pages...generally in the short term, no hope in sight...but there are opportunites for the few that are savvy enough to anticipate and spot them in advance.

 

 

 

 

What's the opportunity space or opportuntiy window here?

 

Walter Derzko

Author of the soon-to-be-released book: Hard Times Golden Opportunities.. about opportunity recognition in a recession/ depression featuring 45 opportunity scenarios.

The Opportunity Clinic-28 tactics for managing your business in a recession-Part 17 Leapfrog your competition

In a professional bike race, the race is unusually won on the harder, uphill climbs, where also-rans can leapfrog the leaders, who might fall behind on the steeper inclines. The same is true at the national level in a recession, where countries can leapfrog their direct competitors by introducing and commercializing novel and disruptive innovations to give their industries a competitive advantage, when heading out of a recession. Many countries may be ignoring this once-in-a-hundred-year opportunity space.

Professor Sorin M.S. Krammer, from the   Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Economics Department,  Troy, NY, USA, writes in a paper entitled: " Drivers of national innovation in transition: Evidence from a panel of Eastern European countries ."

 Abstract

Innovation plays a crucial role in determining today’s economic growth patterns. But what enables some countries to innovate more than others?

This study attempts to answer this question by analyzing in premiere a panel of six Eastern European transition countries. It provides a detailed description of innovation identifying regional differences in terms of historical heritage, technological specialization, commitments and main actors involved in this process, before and after the fall of communism. Secondly, it explores empirically the main drivers of their innovative output, proxied by patents, using a variety of econometric techniques and control variables. The results confirm the crucial role of universities and existing national knowledge base complemented by R&D commitments from both public and private sources. Policy measures, such as intellectual property rights protection or a favorable business climate, increase significantly the propensity to patent, while measures of transitional downturn and industrial restructuring diminish it. Finally, globalization contributes to developing new innovations in these countries through inflows of foreign investment and trade.

Source: Opportunity Clinic and Research Policy Volume 38, Issue 5, June 2009, Pages 845-860

 Walter Derzko, Smart Economy, Toronto

Author of the soon-to-be-released book: Hard Times Golden Opportunities.. about opportunity recognition in a recession/ depression featuring 45 opportunity scenarios.

The Opportunity Clinic-28 Tactics for managing your business in a recession. Part 16 of 28 Shortage Opportunities

In writing my new soon-to-be-released book Hard Times Golden Opportunities, I discovered that  one of the most underated and overlooked opportunty spaces are "shortage opportunties." They can occur in both boom times and in market reversals, busts and recessions.

A good example is AirBnB.com which is profiled this week in Time Magazine. Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky were classmates at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). A few years ago, they moved to San Francisco with the vague intention of starting a business.

Time writes:

 

“Their eureka moment occurred in October 2007 when a huge design conference decimated the supply of hotel rooms in the city. They decided to try their idea without mapping it out [i.e. without any prior business model or business plan].

"We thought, Why not host people in our own apartment?" Gebbia said. "It was a way to make a few extra bucks to offset our already expensive rent." The guys had an extra bed, a sofa and an air mattress and decided to offer, via the conference's website, ad hoc bed-and-breakfast accommodations. Thus was born AirBnB.com. They made $1,000 that week and were shocked to find that their customers weren't teenage slackers but were instead older folks, including a 45-year-old father of three. Said Gebbia: "It completely blew away our assumptions."

Since they had no money, they quickly enlisted as their partner a former roommate, Nathan Blecharczyk, who had some technical skills. He built the website--which was initially aimed at cities with big conference calendars--and made it easy for hosts to offer low-rent lodging to visitors. AirBnB.com handled the financial transaction between guests and hosts and took 10% from the guests and 3% from the hosts.

 

Traffic grew. Along the way, the guys listened to their customers, tweaked the site and got free press by arriving at high-profile events, like the 2008 Democratic Convention, that were suddenly short of hotel space. Tapping their RISD backgrounds, they designed fanciful Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's cereal boxes and sold $30,000 worth as collector's items, which kept them going. With their guerrilla lodging site and their cereal boxes, they got on CNN, on many local newscasts and in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And their site grew--enough to garner $20,000 from Y Combinator, the venture firm.

Today AirBnB.com has nearly 12,000 registered users, with more than 3,000 properties nationwide, Gebbia said. "As the economy gets worse, our business gets better." Again, this is a get-rich-slowly scheme: the business generates enough money to house and feed its three founders, who live together in an apartment that doubles as their workplace."

 

Source: The Opportunity Clinic (c) 2009 and Get Rich Slow Josh Quittner. Time. New York: Apr 20, 2009. Vol. 173, Iss. 15; pg. 42

Walter Derzko, Smart Economy, Toronto

Author of the soon-to-be-released book: Hard Times Golden Opportunities.. about opportunity recognition in a recession/ depression; 45 recession-based opportunity scenarios.

New Higher Education Business Model? YouTube EDU

In a story called "On the Net: College too expensive? Try YouTube" , AP reports today (April 9, 2009) that:

"More than 100 schools have partnered with YouTube to create the YouTube EDU channel, including MIT, Harvard, Yale, Stanford  and UC Berkley... The Google Inc.-owned YouTube has for the last few years been forging partnerships with universities and colleges. The site recently gathered these video channels under the banner YouTube EDU."

 

What new distribution channels could be incorporated into your evolving business model?

 

Source: The Opportunity Clinic (c) 2009

See http://www.youtube.com/edu

 

Walter Derzko

Smart Economy

Toronto

Author of the soon-to-be-released book: Hard Times Golden Opportunities.. about opportunity recognition in a recession/ depression.

US Electricity Grid Penetrated By Russian and Chinese CyberSpies according to Wall Street Journal April 8, 2009

"Cyberspies from China, Russia and other countries have penetrated the U.S.electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials. Officials said water, sewage and other infrastructure systems also were at risk." claims the Wall Street Journal this morning. 

 

Although the respective governments are denying any affiliation now, stories in the local Russian and Chinese media about these governments actively recruiting and hiring hackers and cyberspies have appeared regularly since 2004. (see our Smart Economy  theft engine software post and ransomware software in 2006)

Full story here > http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123914805204099085.html

 

Walter Derzko

The human brain functions on the edge of chaos, at a transition point between randomness and order

According to Cambridge-based researchers, there is fresh  new evidence that suggests that the human brain lives "on the edge of chaos", at a critical transition point between randomness and order. The study, which was published last month in the March 20 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology, provides experimental data on an idea of self-organized criticality (SOC) - that was previously fraught with theoretical speculation.

Self-organized criticality (where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at a critical point between order and randomness), can emerge from complex interactions in many different physical systems, including avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, and heartbeat rhythms. According to this study, conducted by a team from the University of Cambridge, the Medical Research Council Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, and the GlaxoSmithKline Clinical Unit Cambridge, the dynamics of human brain networks have something important in common with some superficially very different systems in nature.

 

Computational networks showing these characteristics have also been shown to have optimal memory (data storage) and information-processing capacity. In particular, critical systems are able to respond very rapidly and extensively to minor changes in their inputs.

"Due to these characteristics, self-organized criticality is intuitively attractive as a model for brain functions such as perception, [opportunity recognition] and action, because it would allow us to switch quickly between mental states in order to respond to changing environmental conditions," says co-author Manfred Kitzbichler.

 

The researchers used state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques to measure dynamic changes in the synchronization of activity between different regions of the functional network in the human brain. Their results suggest that the brain operates in a self-organized critical state. To support this conclusion, they also investigated the synchronization of activity in computational models, and demonstrated that the dynamic profile they had found in the brain was exactly reflected in the models. Collectively, these results amount to strong evidence in favour of the idea that human brain dynamics exist at a critical point on the edge of chaos.

According to Kitzbichler, this new evidence is only a starting point. "A natural next question we plan to address in future research will be: How do measures of critical dynamics relate to cognitive performance or neuropsychiatric disorders and their treatments?"

 

Walter Derzko, Smart Economy, Toronto

Author of the soon-to-be-released book: Hard Times Golden Opportunities..about opportunity recognition in a recession.

A new business model for the Digital Book?

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bradley Inman is starting Vook, a new platform for e-books that will combine text, video and social networking, in an attempt to provide a more satisfying experience than Kindle and other e-book formats have been providing so far.

 

The NYT says: "

" Inman wants to create great fiction, dramatic online video and compelling Twitter stream — and then roll them all into a multimedia hybrid that is tailored to the rapidly growing number of digital reading devices.

Mr. Inman, a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, calls this digital amalgam a “Vook,” (vook.tv) and the fledgling company he has created with that name just might represent a possible future for the beleaguered book industry.

Publishing, of course, is feeling the same chronic pain as other media businesses, with layoffs, corporate restructurings and a general sense of gloom, doom and kaboom settling over name-brand giants like Random House and Simon & Schuster."

 

See full story here>  New York Times, April 4, 2009

Walter Derzko

Author of the soon-to-be-released book: Hard Times Golden Opportunities.. about opportunity recognition in a recession/ depression.