“The unemployment rate jumped to 6.1 percent in August, its highest level in five years, as the erosion of the job market accelerated over the summer.” - New York Times ”

Andrew To, the sales and research director for Taifook Securities Company in Hong Kong, was more optimistic, pointing out that Hong Kong’s stock market has already lost two-fifths of its value since reaching a record of 31,958.41 on Oct. 30 last year. “Personally, I see this as a golden buying opportunity,” he said.” - New York Times

Technology Review (a magazine published by MIT) recently asked various thought leaders what the Web might be in ten years. Below is one of the most creative responses but all the interviews are quite intriguing.

Jonathan Abrams
Founder of Socializr and Friendster; San Francisco, CA

“In five to ten years, we will all have chips in our brains. When you look at someone’s face on the street, your Google Brain software will automatically call up every embarrassing photo of them from ancient websites such as Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace; list all mutual friends; and remind you of the person’s annotated bio. As a response to the perceived slowness and verbosity of antiquated services like Twitter, people will send everyone they know nanobursts of information about anything they might do or think before they actually do or think it. Every website, blog, and social-networking profile will include an aggregated feed from every other website, blog, and social-networking service, resulting in an exponential and infinite length of repeated content on every possible site, overloading our brain chips and causing frequent nosebleeds and occasional cerebral hemorrhage.”

Source: The Future of The Web, Technology Review 7/2008

Here is a quick email exchange that included some interesting statistics regarding the so-called “New Energy Crisis”. In short, the U.S. department of Labor estimates that as much as 50 percent of the nation’s utility workforce will retire in the next five to ten years. In 2006 there were 549,000 employees in the utilities industry (according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) which means over a quarter million people are estimated to exit this space as early as 2013. Major energy consulting agencies are already offering planning services and reselling Google’s Enterprise Solutions to enable one of the biggest “brain dumps” in history.

Question:

“Saw this article [below] on one of our industry daily newsletters. Are you
familiar with this Google Enterprise Professional program? Just curious. The company is called K-E-M-A, it’s an international consulting company. Suppose I could google “google enterprise” and get an answer too!”

“Faced with a graying workforce, [electric] utilities are seeking ways to
retain the knowledge and experience of their retiring professionals. K-E-M-A
has joined the Google Enterprise Professional program and is offering a new
line of services that helps utilities capture the knowledge of their aging
workforce by extending the power of Google across the enterprise.
BURLINGTON, MASS. - April 28, 2008 (News Release)”

Answer:

it’s this…

the certification costs $5k per year and has the following “Partner Requirements”:

Potential Google Enterprise Professional partners must meet the following requirements in order to initiate and retain membership in this program:

• Membership Fee
  • Search: $5,000 per year
  • Apps: $5,000 per year
• Partner Specialties - Choose from any combination of the following specialties:
  • Customization / Integration / Development
  • Installation
  • Training
  • Integration with your own Application
• Annual certification– Fulfilled via onsite training and certification, and then renewed annually
• Success Story– As a Google Enterprise Professional, you’ll be providing valuable assistance to Google Enterprise customers and we want to share your stories. Partners are required to publish a customer or solution success story.

Based on K-E-M-A’s press release it looks like they have already become a “partner”. This allows them to resell Google Enterprise Solutions with value-add consulting services to help utility companies establish an archive of their knowledge/data/processes and then hook up a google search appliance (below) to access it.

This is appears to be a smart move on their part based on these two articles:

“The U.S. department of Labor estimates that as much as 50 percent of the nation’s utility workforce will retire in the next five to ten years. From engineers to line-workers, the challenges associated with replacing the vast amount of technical and institutional knowledge of these professionals will be immense. Potential impact on day-to-day utility operations will be significant.” - KEMA

“Anyone and everyone with a power plant in the United States – municipalities, states, private-sector utilities, federal power agencies and manufacturers, as well as institutions from schools to hospitals – has a common challenge. The power industry workforce – the technicians, engineers, linemen and maintenance crews that fuel the industry – will be retiring in unprecedented numbers over the next ten years. The energy industry is one of the first to feel the effect of Baby Boomer retirements. This is partly due to massive hiring freezes and downsizing when the industry deregulated and focused on cost-cutting measures in the 1980s and 90s.” - http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.asp?id=4226

After reading this email announcement from Sam Adams today it seems like it might be a good idea for people to stay away from their bottled beer for a little while. Or… at least make sure the bottle doesn’t have “N35″ embossed on it.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Andrew & Bert
Date: Tue, Apr 8, 2008
Subject: Information from Sam Adams

Hello Dan Jackson,

As a loyal supporter and fan of our beer, we wanted to get in touch with you about an announcement that we made yesterday. We have announced a cautious, voluntary product recall of some bottles of Samuel Adams. While there is no problem with our beer, we believe a small proportion of bottles from our outside glass supplier could contain some small bits of glass.

The bottles we’ve identified as being possibly affected are from one glass plant of the five that we get our bottles from. The issue affects less than 25% of our bottled beer and of that amount, we believe far less than 1% of the bottles we’re recalling are actually affected. We have no reports of any injury from our drinkers related to this issue. But because the safety of our drinkers is of paramount concern to us, we are being cautious and issuing the recall for all bottles from this glass plant.

But not to worry, this doesn’t mean that you have to stop drinking Samuel Adams! All draft beer is perfectly fine and most of our bottled beer is not in these possibly affected bottles. It’s easy to spot the bottles we’re recalling: they are all embossed to say “N35″ at the base of the bottle below the label (see photo on web site). We are working with our wholesalers and retailers to ensure that the affected bottles are removed from stores quickly.

We wanted to be sure that our loyal Sam fans are aware of the problem and know that we are doing everything we can to address this situation quickly. We are disappointed that because of these bottles supplied to us, we didn’t live up to your expectations as a loyal Sam Adams drinker. We believe that we are taking all the right steps to ensure that the bottled Samuel Adams beer out there meets our quality standards and your expectations. If you have any questions about the recall, we created a special web site and a toll-free number 1-888-674-5159 to answer your questions.

As always, we appreciate your support.

Cheers,
Andrew & Bert
2008 The Boston Beer Company, Boston, MA

Jack Welch on Work/Life:

“Your boss’s top priority is competitiveness. Of course he wants you to be happy, but only inasmuch as it helps the company win. In fact, if he is doing his job right, he is making your job so exciting that your personal life becomes a less compelling draw.”

The quote above was pulled from:
Jack Welch’s best seller “Winning” (2005)
I read this book a while back and highly recommend it. Recently, I’ve started to publish an excerpt from the book to kick off each week.

Jack Welch on China:

“Yes, you hear about China’s problems - its scarcity of middle managers, for instance, and the massive number of poor farming families moving into unprepared cities with not enough jobs to support them. Lumbering, bureaucratic state-owned enterprises still make up most of its economy. And the country’s banks are saddled with bad loans. But for China, these aren’t mountains to be scaled, they’re blips to be flattened by the giant, high-speed bulldozer that is its economy. Increasing prosperity from spectacular economic growth over the past twenty years has given the Chinese enormous self-confidence. But China has so much more: a massive pool of low-cost, hardworking laborers and a rapidly expanding number of well-educated engineers.”

“And then there’s its work ethic, which may be its single biggest strength. Entrepreneurship and competition are baked into the Chinese culture. Consider the executive who hosted me during a week long visit to Shanghai and Beijing last year. She said she’s at the office from 7am until 6pm, goes home for dinner to join her husband and son until 8pm, and then returns to work until midnight. “This is very typical here,” she said, “six days a week.” And she works for a U.S. multinational!”

“You can look at China and feel victimized. Or you can look at it and be excited about conquering the challenges and opportunities it presents.”

The quotes above were pulled from:
Jack Welch’s best seller “Winning” (2005)
I read this book a while back and highly recommend it. Recently, I’ve started to publish an excerpt from the book to kick off each week.

“I think winning is great. Not good - great. Because when companies win, people thrive and grow. There are more jobs and more opportunities.”

“A good mission statement and a good set of values are so real they smack you in the face with their concreteness. The mission announces exactly where you are going, and the values describe the behaviors that will get you there… an effective mission statement basically answers one questions: How do we intend to win in this business? In the most common scenario, a company’s mission and its values rupture due to the little crises of daily life in business.”

Jack Welch on Values:

• Never let profit center conflicts get in the way of doing what is right for the customer.
• Give customers a good, fair deal. Great customer relationships take time. Do not try to maximize short-term profits at the expense of building those enduring relationships.
• Always look for ways to make it easier to do business with us
• Communicate daily with your customer. If they are talking to you, they can’t be talking to a competitor.

The quotes above were pulled from:
Jack Welch’s best seller “Winning” (2005)
I read this book a while back and highly recommend it. Recently, I’ve started to publish an excerpt from the book to kick off each week.

During a recent stop at a local coffee shop the Barista explains “I woke up and had to be in here at 6:30am this morning and am incredibly tired… I like to stay up really late so I am NOT really much of a morning person you know”

Oh the irony, either it’s time to revise the old career path or the coffee shop management needs to mandate free quadruple espresso shots for any employee that’s tired/late/etc! Wake up!

- from Paul Graham’s “The Future of Web Startups”

• He is a regular visitor to the Caribbean island of Saint Barts and other islands where he gets inspiration for many of his songs and some of the characters in his books.
• Buffett has been instrumental in the work of the Save the Manatee Club.[1]
• He is friends with legendary investor Warren Buffett and they suspect that they are distant cousins, but they have not been able to document this. (Wall Street Journal, 5/2/2005)
• Buffett appears on a Phish tribute album called Sharin in the Groove, where he performed the band’s “Gumbo” (which references a gun-slinging parrot) with Lamont Berry of Chicago, Illinois. He also performed Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl in concert with Phish in 1995.
• Buffett wrote the music for and appears in the 1975 movie Rancho Deluxe. The movie was written by his brother-in-law, author Tom McGuane.
• Buffett has had cameos in several movies, including Repo Man as “Additional Blond Agent”, Congo as a pilot, a pirate in Hook and in a cameo in Cobb. Additionally, he and his music appear in the 2006 release Hoot.
• Buffett appeared in the May 13, 1978, episode of Saturday Night Live. He also wrote and performed the theme song to the short-lived 1993 CBS television series Johnny Bago.
• An avid pilot, he owns several planes including a Grumman HU-16 “Albatross”. The plane, named “Hemisphere Dancer”, is currently parked next to his Margaritaville restaurant in Orlando, Florida. Previously it could sometimes be seen on the ramp at Princess Juliana International Airport (IATA identifier SXM, ICAO identifier TNCM) in nearby Saint Maarten while he was in the area. This is the plane Buffett was flying during the incident recounted in the song “Jamaica Mistaica” on the album Banana Wind. While in Jamaica on January 16, 1996, Buffett’s plane was shot at by Jamaican police. The “Hemisphere Dancer” had been carrying Buffett, U2’s Bono, and Island Records producer Chris Blackwell, but they were not onboard at the time. Police suspected it was smuggling drugs. No one was hurt, although there were a few bullet holes in the plane. Buffett’s company has since licensed use of the name Margaritaville to several restaurants in Jamaica, in Montego Bay, Ocho Rios and Negril, where the “Jamaica Mistaica” incident took place.
• On November 23, 2004, Buffett raised USD$3.4 million at his “Surviving the Storm” Hurricane Relief Concert in Orlando, Florida to provide relief for hurricane victims in Florida, Alabama and the Caribbean affected by the four major hurricanes that year. He has donated $500,000 to Hurricane Katrina relief so far.
• Buffett wrote the sound-track for, co-produced and acted in the film version of Hoot which focuses on issues important to him, such as conservation.
• Buffett sang for President Bill Clinton on the White House south lawn for his birthday in the year 2000. [2]
• Former members of Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band include saxophonist Amy Lee.
• In September of 2005, Buffett became the first musician to stage a concert at Wrigley Field in Chicago.
• Tom Corcoran shot photographs for seven of Buffett’s album covers, as well as cowrote the hits “Fins” and “Cuban Crime of Passion”.
• In 1978, the University of Southern Mississippi renovated its Student Union Building. A time capsule, found over a telephone booth, contained a picture of Buffett and several of his fraternity brothers wearing dresses. (The Student Printz, Oct., 1978)^{[citation needed]}
• Some of Buffett’s 1976 Havana Daydreamin’ albums are misprinted with two versions of “Woman Going Crazy on Caroline Street”, a song that may be titled “Please Take Your Drunken Fifteen Year Old Girlfriend Home”, and are missing the song listed on the cover and on the album label as “Defying Gravity”
• On a “60 Minutes” interview, Buffett stated that he gets letters from emergency room doctorswho operate to his music and stated that “people in high stress situations listen to it as a release” and that “If you came to one of my concerts, it would look like Sodom and Gomorrah had just landed. But I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of people are back at work on Monday.”

Click here for more…

SORRY, CAN’T RESIST

“A Polish immigrant went for an eye exam to get his driver’s license. The examiner showed him a card with the letters:

C Z W I X N O S T A C Z

“Can you read this?” asked the examiner.

“Read it?” replied the applicant – “I know the guy.””

“There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible.”

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”