 Cover Story: May 28, 2007 Issue. By Roben Farzad | |
| Inversión de riesgo "extremo": Colombia (En Inglés) Un viraje extraño desde la nación numero uno en índices de criminalidad, a "punto caliente" para invertir. Puede durar esta Bonanza? | |
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"You going there to get some kilos?" asks the driver as he drops me off at Newark's international airport for my six-hour flight to Bogotá. He grins at me in the rear-view mirror as if he has cracked the most original one-liner in history. "Like Scarface," he continues, shifting to his Pakistani/Latino gangster accent: "Say hello to my little friend! Pow! Pow!" He hands me my bags and reminds me to call my mom and make peace with the Almighty before I embark for certain death. "You are crazy, my friend." Traveling to Colombia to chronicle the investment miracle unfolding there seemed perfectly reasonable a few weeks earlier. The stats all scream "Go! Go! Go!": Colombia's stock market has soared fourteenfold since October, 2001. Foreign direct investment and capital inflows have more than doubled, while real estate prices have tripled in many areas. Citigroup (C ) CEO Chuck Prince even kicked off his February "world tour" in Bogotá, where the bank is building branches and a Latin American call center. But when most Americans hear the name Colombia they think about the late Medellín drug lord, Pablo Escobar. And roving paramilitary death squads. And speedboat-loads of cocaine headed for Miami. I've been assured by bankers that things are getting much better in this nation of 42 million. But it isn't until I step onto the packed 737 to Bogotá that I get my first real sense of the intense interest in Colombian investments. I spy at least 20 business suits, including the laptop-toting Swede sitting next to me who's building a boutique hotel in the beautiful 16th century city of Cartagena on the north coast. Investors like these have visited many exotic ports in recent years. Colombia's surprising rise has been fueled by two larger trends: the enormous amount of money sluicing through global markets and investors' increasing risk tolerance. First, cash poured into the so-called BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Next it flooded riskier secondary destinations such as Turkey and Poland, and last year, with ferocity, Vietnam. Now money is gushing into third-tier hinterlands fraught with political and economic problems, where even the rule of law isn't a given. | |
 Fotos en serie. 1 | |
THE CONFIANZA INDEX Call them extreme emerging markets. The Standard & Poor's/IFCG Frontier Index of 22 such destinations, which includes investing curiosities like Lebanon, Côte d'Ivoire, and Bangladesh, has gained nearly 400% in the past five years. The question is whether these nascent markets have what it takes to parlay the fickle enthusiasm of hedge-fund traders and other investors into long-term economic development. Yet Colombia is so extreme that it hasn't even made the Frontier Index. Its stock market has an aggregate capitalization of just $59 billion. In this parallel investing universe, price-earnings ratios take a backseat to fuzzy measures such as confianza, which translates into confidence and trust but is more accurately described as the general sense that people can safely transact business and get through everyday life unharmed. The handful of Wall Street analysts who cover Colombia supply their clients with charts of murder rates and kidnappings. President Alvaro Uribe, who took office in 2002, nearly five decades into a civil war that has pitted Marxist guerrillas against right-wing death squads, has made confianza his overarching goal. Killings and abductions are down sharply in the big cities, and that has been a boon for all manner of investments, from stocks to real estate. "I guarantee that if you graph the decline in kidnappings to investment gains, the correlation would be one-to-one," says Ben M. Laidler, head of Andean research for UBS Pactual. On a continent whose economic history is the stuff of a blooper reel, Colombia's strong fundamentals stand out. Its $130 billion economy, a world leader in the production of coffee, petroleum, textiles, and flowers, is growing at 6.8% a year, two full points faster than the Latin American average. In the past 10 years, Colombia has slashed its inflation rate from 18% to 5%, and since Uribe was elected, unemployment has dipped from 16% to 13%. The nation has never defaulted on its debt or experienced hyperinflation. And entrepreneurial thinking is spreading. Run a Google (GOOG) geographical-hit query, and you'll see that, per capita, nowhere in the world are there more searches for the words "Peter Drucker," the late management guru, than in Bogotá. No. 2? Medellín. Yes, Medellín. Once the murder capital of the world, this city of 2.4 million is regaining its status as a commercial hub, hosting regional offices for a growing roster of multinationals including Philip Morris (MO), Toyota (TM ), and Renault, as well as globally minded Colombian companies that make up 70% of the country's stock market value. More high-rises are under construction here than in Manhattan and Los Angeles combined. But all of it—the stock market gains, the development, the rising living standards—rests on confianza. Foreigners' view of Colombia as a lawless, violent, riven land won't change quickly. As Commerce Minister Luis Guillermo Plata acknowledges, "Why would I invest in a country if I can't go there?" As I get into the cramped cab that's taking me to my hotel, I can't help thinking about the fabled "millionaire's tour of Bogotá," a stretch of road where colluding cabbies and thieves once drove passengers from ATM to ATM to drain their bank accounts. And then there's the drugs. Colombia still produces the majority of the world's cocaine, an ongoing crisis that draws a steady supply of U.S. military and financial aid. Even corporate crime here takes on deadly overtones: Cincinnati-based banana giant Chiquita Brands International (CQB) was in the news recently for admitting to having paid $1.7 million in protection money to a Colombian paramilitary group on Washington's list of foreign terrorist organizations. I'm here to find out whether Colombia's fledgling stock market can keep surging, whether its financial and physical infrastructures can accommodate the flood of investment, and whether an equity culture can take hold. At the center of everything is President Uribe. "We need to rescue international confidence in our country," he tells me in his heavily guarded compound in Bogotá's historic center full of Spanish colonial architecture. Access to Uribe is preceded by an hour of security checks and chilling looks from guards holding bayonet-tipped machine guns. The 54-year-old Uribe is a rarity in increasingly leftist Latin America. A center-right ruler with an approval rating of more than 60%, he won a landslide second term in 2006 after having amended the constitution to allow him to run again. Uribe knows Colombia's history of violence firsthand: A decade ago he was governor of Medellín's province, and in 1983 his father was murdered by kidnappers. The sometimes dour leader has driven most of the drug traffickers and leftist guerrillas out of urban centers, though they still reign in remote regions. But allegations have surfaced in Colombia that the President himself has links to right-wing paramilitaries who murdered hundreds, including labor-union activists. On May 14, 20 Colombian lawmakers and businessmen were arrested on charges in connection with the scandal. Colombia's police chief and head of police intelligence, meanwhile, were ousted amid allegations of illegal wiretapping of opposition politicians and journalists. Uribe vehemently denies any personal connection to the affair. (See Alvaro Uribe: The Change Agent). Despite his obsession with law and order, the economy is never far from his mind. "The state is the most important private enterprise," he says, "and the public is like a universe of shareholders." Javier Vargas, a Colombian banker with Credit Suisse (CS), has heard Uribe sound that theme many times. "He talks like a person who is selling and marketing his country," he says. "Investor confidence is key for him." In May, Uribe visited Washington to meet with supporters in the Bush Administration and lobby congressional Democrats on a free-trade pact between the two countries. Democrats have been uneasy with Uribe since the recent allegations surfaced. But Colombia is a vital strategic ally in an increasingly hostile continent, bordered by Hugo Chávez' Venezuela and left-leaning Ecuador. Washington has sent Colombia $5 billion in aid since 2000, including $650 million last year; only Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Israel receive more. For Uribe, a deal is crucial both for the tangible economic benefits and the perceptual ones. He has invested much political capital already, visiting the U.S. at least 25 times since taking office. Winning full free-trade benefits with the U.S. would do much to bolster the fragile investor confidence he has been nurturing, while a loss would damage his prestige. Uribe's challenge is one that everyone, from business leaders to taxi drivers, acknowledges. "Investing here is rooted in improving physical safety and lowering the risk of doing business," says Alexander P. Kazan, a Latin American strategist at Bear Stearns & Co. (BSC ) "You really cannot overstate the importance." | |
 COVER STORY PODCAST | |
SLEEPY EXCHANGE On a cool April morning, I make my way to Bogotá's bustling financial district. Amid the roar of motorcycle engines and a haze of bus exhaust, the district brims with young professionals sipping tintos—tiny cups of dark coffee—while chatting on newfangled cell phones. At every crosswalk and on street medians, the less fortunate hawk snacks, cigarettes, and telephone calling cards from salvaged baby carriages, stark reminders of the gaping disparities in this poor nation. Halfway up a glassy office building is an ultramodern floor containing Colombia's stock exchange, the Bolsa de Valores. It's high-tech, but no one would confuse it with the NASDAQ. Just 12 people sit around a circular table staring at their flat-panel displays in a space no bigger than a conference room at a Best Western hotel. It's so quiet you might think you showed up to take the GMAT. I jokingly ask if we're at the right place. Our photographer wonders aloud if he should bother unpacking his equipment. "This is it," says Jaime Sarmiento, the exchange's 34-year-old communications director, sensing the anticlimax of the moment. He points up at the ticker, a circular LCD sign. "Does anyone know how to turn this thing on?" The specialists on the floor arrange a photo op, choosing a mustachioed elder to sit on the elevated chair in the center of the ring and motion as if he is directing order flow. Truth be told, everyone is just waiting for 1 p.m., when the market closes and the power lunch scene takes hold. When I ask if the early close is a vestige of the Spanish siesta, I'm curtly told that it's purely a result of how little business there is to transact. Sarmiento takes us downstairs to tour the café, a swank lounge that was conceived as a high-energy, high-buzz meeting place for stock junkies. On this day, two or three guys sit around reading the paper, blissfully unaware of the handful of digits flickering on the wall-mounted display above. Such sleepiness belies the market's breathtaking volatility. This is the central paradox of extreme emerging markets: With so few buyers and sellers, small upticks can quickly turn into major surges, while the faintest of downticks can lead to painful routs. After posting a 128% gain for 2005, second best in the world, the Bolsa nosedived 45% in two months during last year's late-spring emerging-markets swoon, the second-worst showing on the globe. It has since jumped 75%; on June 15, 2006, alone, the index gained 16%. It's down 5% in 2007. All the choppiness merely confirms the suspicions of most of the locals, who eschew stocks for government bonds, even though they yield just 6% now, a third of what they did eight years ago. "The general public just isn't all that accustomed to stocks," says Rodrigo Jaramillo, CEO of Interbolsa, the country's largest brokerage, and former chairman of the stock exchange. He notes that fewer than 70,000 Colombians bought local shares in 2006. Even people who invest for a living are reluctant to buy Colombian stocks with their own money. "I like to invest in young cows," admits a 26-year-old private investment adviser in a British-spread collar and Hermès tie between bites of an empanada in a breakfast joint near the exchange. His eyes light up as he explains that his uncle has given him dibs on investing in heifers, an inside opportunity that has lately scored him 20% to 30% annual returns. Why dabble in risky stocks, he asks, when he can collect steady returns on the family ranch? "I sponsor the cows until—how do you say?—graduation," he says, grinning diabolically, of the day when they're auctioned off and he reaps his windfall. But in fits and starts local investors are coming around. I'm struck by how many twenty- and thirtysomethings in Bogotá are at the leading edge of business and civic life: chief executives, money managers, restaurateurs, even cabinet ministers. Young and educated, Colombia's new elite could ply their trade anywhere in the hemisphere. A decade ago there would have been no question that they would end up abroad. Just four years ago, Bogotá's Club El Nogal, a hot night spot, was car-bombed by a leftist rebel group, resulting in 36 deaths. But El Nogal has come back stronger than ever. Even with all the bomb-sniffing dogs, the place is nearly impossible to get into on a weeknight. Bogotáns consider it a metaphor of their resilience. I meet some young professionals for dinner at Balzac, a restaurant modeled after Manhattan's trendy Balthazar. José María de Valenzuela, a recently minted MBA at INSEAD in France, lights a cigarette and reflects on his accomplishments. "There was just a small possibility I'd end up back here," he says. All of 32, Valenzuela, who did his undergraduate work at Brown University a decade ago, used to specialize in what you might call distressed investing. "People were afraid to leave the city," he recalls of the siege mentality of seven or eight years back, when terrified families sought escapism at his miniature golf course in Bogotá. "You could buy real estate just for the cost of the taxes." Which is what Valenzuela did, before selling into a property boom and plowing his winnings into what he and a former finance professor correctly thought would be the start of a roaring bull market for stocks. Last summer, Valenzuela rolled those profits into a partnership with HenCorp Futures, a U.S.-based trading firm, to offer currency strategies to foreign investors—a critical building block to outside participation in the Colombian market. The only way to buy Bolsa-listed stocks directly is in pesos, and there are no pure-play Colombian mutual funds available to foreigners. The next afternoon, on Valenzuela's recommendation, I head to Harry's Bar, in a tony Bogotá neighborhood that resembles San Francisco's Russian Hill. Amid the din of clinking wine glasses, blond-streaked women and sharply dressed men pick at plates of seared tuna and Argentinian steak. In the evenings the place is often overrun by actors, soccer stars, and diplomats. The owner, spotting my reporter's notebook, stops by. "Please tell America we're not a bunch of drug dealers shooting at each other from trees," he says. | |
 Fotos serie 2 | |
COFFEE BUZZ In walks my lunch guest, Felipe Gaviria, the boyish money manager whose name is on the lips of everyone in the smart-money set. In 1997, at 23, Gaviria was promoted to head of currency trading at a small bank in Cali. Two years later he left for business school in Barcelona. He returned to Colombia when Uribe was elected in 2002, sensing the moment was right to buy Colombian property and bet that the peso would strengthen against the dollar. Now he oversees $3 billion in pension assets for Spain's Grupo Santander. It's common knowledge that Gaviria is being wooed by bulge-bracket investment banks and hedge funds. "I receive everybody," he says coyly. With more money pouring in as the economy grows, Gaviria says he's impatient for more local investment options. Fortunately for him, some big ones are just around the corner. In an audacious move, Procafecol, of the fast-growing Juan Valdez coffee shop fame, is floating its shares on the Bolsa. The unlikely beneficiaries: thousands of rural caficultores, or coffee growers, who make up Colombia's national coffee alliance. They've recently been swarmed by an army of financial advisers dispatched to the countryside. "Your preferred shares give you dividend priority over ordinary investors," reads the glossy offering letter, as if to poke fun at the more cosmopolitan Class B shareholders. The real game changer could be the $4 billion initial public offering of state oil concern Ecopetrol, one of South America's four largest. In short order, it could become the most widely held stock on the exchange. And with U.S. bankers circling, a New York Stock Exchange (NYX ) listing could be in the offing. The only other Colombian stock listed in the U.S. is Medellín-based Bancolombia (CIB ), whose shares have jumped twentyfold in the past five years. Indeed, Wall Street is doing its best to ride the Colombia wave. In 2005, SABMiller (SAB.L ) PLC took over Colombia's biggest brewery, Bavaria, for a record $7.8 billion, with Merrill Lynch (MER), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Lehman Brothers (LEH ), Morgan Stanley (MS), and Citigroup (C ) advising on the acquisition. Last year ABN Amro advised on the sale of a controlling $657 million stake in a key oil refinery to Switzerland's Glencore International. "You're having more and more investment banks going into Colombia," says Eric Newman, a Bogotá native who was recently poached from Lehman Brothers by Morgan Stanley to cover the country for its Miami-based Latin American private banking arm. He shuttles to Colombia 20 times a year. Not only are Colombia's top companies doing better at home, they're also branching out to the rest of Latin America and beyond. A company called Chocolates, essentially Colombia's Kraft Foods (KFT ), now ships to Los Angeles and the Southwest, while Argos, the country's foremost cement producer, has been buying operations in Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. Bancolombia recently acquired El Salvador's largest bank. One sign of the rising fortunes in Colombia is the sudden misfortune of the self-proclaimed Bulletproof Tailor. Miguel Caballero makes suits and other apparel tough enough to withstand gunshots. His garment factory, located in a seedy neighborhood of Bogotá, features a picture gallery of famous customers, including action film star Steven Seagal and President Uribe, as well as glossies of Caballero discharging his handgun into the bulletproofed torsos of employees. Ten years ago, he says, his company sold 70% of its wares in Colombia. Now, thanks to the ebbing violence, that figure is just 20%. Caballero is dispatching salesmen to Russia, Venezuela, even Iraq. "The idea is to save the business," he says. "You can say we're globalizing." The growing confidence in Colombia brings a new set of challenges. The streets are safer, and citizens are road tripping again. Export-import activity is steadily growing. Tourism has nearly tripled in five years, and beach-lined, historic Cartagena is among South America's most expensive real estate markets. But with all of that happening, Colombia's highways, roads, ports, and other industrial backbones are becoming increasingly overburdened. "We're really behind on infrastructure," says Juliana Ocampo, a recent MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology who returned to Bogotá to work for Mexican cement giant Cemex. "If you ask everyone here, that's where the investment needs to flow next." Says Gaviria, the young money manager: "Our north port is terrible. If we had a world-class port project, I would invest right then and there." Bear Stearns warned in a recent report that growth could halt if tens of billions worth of infrastructure isn't soon built, noting that Colombian pension funds are clamoring to invest. If the buildout stalls, it will undermine Uribe's reforms. STOCK OPTION I take up the issue with Vice-President Francisco Santos. Schooled in Texas and Kansas and formerly the editor of Colombia's largest daily newspaper, Santos was once kidnapped by Pablo Escobar's men and surely draws satisfaction from the fact that the cartel's late-'80s vehicles sit rusting in a pound adjacent to his office. "The roads are getting so clogged," he concedes. "But who will pay for all the infrastructure?" Financiers argue that the money is there for the taking, if only the government would change its thinking. Historically, Bogotá has issued bonds to fund such projects, but investors were hungrier for them when they yielded 20%. It also takes time to rouse all the layers of bureaucracy in the way. Bankers want the government to sell equity in the projects instead, following the privatization trend sweeping Europe and the U.S. "We can build roads without a penny of government money," insists Pedro Nel Ospina, the head of Corficolombiana, one of the country's top investment and merchant banks. "Let us do it already. Give us equity." The government isn't ready to make that leap just yet. But the fact that a vigorous debate about how best to become an ownership society is heating up—complete with business page editorials and regional free-trade zones—shows how far this rugged stretch of the Andes Mountains has come. Medellín, in particular, is undergoing one of the most extraordinary urban makeovers in modern times. "Our trucks, drivers, and distributors were attacked at least once a day," recalls Carlos Enrique Piedrahita, president of Chocolates, of the scene seven years ago. "Now it just doesn't happen." The 45-minute ride to town from Medellín's main airport winds through lush forests and fragrant flower farms. The city is shaped like a bowl, with commerce and wealth concentrated at the center as poverty stares down from the rim. It all descended into chaos with the decline of Medellín's textile industry in the 1970s and the simultaneous rise of the drug trade. In 1991, two years before Escobar met his end in a rooftop gunfight with police, he was recruiting cocaine-addicted teens in the hillside slums, paying them $750 for every police officer they murdered. Gang shootouts continued into emergency rooms. "One can have the impression that Medellín is about to drown in its own blood," The New Yorker magazine's Alma Guillermoprieto wrote in 1991, when the city's homicide rate was 381 per 100,000, the highest in the world. But exploding revenue from Medellín's resurgent corporate tax base is funding a rapid metamorphosis. Now those very same shanties are connected to the city center by a sky-lift gondola of the sort you might find at EPCOT Center. New libraries and schools court students from other parts of Colombia. "Imagination Park" stands where murdered bodies were once dumped. The business assistance office in the heart of the slum is helping tiny food stores and Internet cafés flourish where there used to be only crumbling cinder block and exposed sewer pipes. Today, Medellín's murder rate is 28 per 100,000, lower than those of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Statistics alone don't capture the sense of rebirth here. Atop the slum, in the shadow of ascending gondolas and a new computer lab, the city's poorest children think they're kings of the hill. They chase after me, tugging at my jacket, 30 or 40 at once. It's not my money that they want, it's pictures of themselves and their friends. As I sit down to catch my breath, a runty seven-year-old boy with a precocious understanding of digital photography suddenly climbs out from under the bench. "I don't have e-mail yet," he says. "So print it for me for when you come back, O.K.?" | |
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 Copyright 2007, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved. | |
sábado, mayo 19, 2007
Inversión de riesgo "extremo": Colombia
jueves, mayo 17, 2007
Encuentro de Internet con la pantalla "grande"
 Technology Basics |
| Internet Meets Large Screen By PETER WAYNER Published: May 17, 2007 |
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| ROBERT SOREL, a trombonist from Woonsocket, R.I., keeps his PC in his basement media room, where, hooked up to his other components, it acts as a jukebox for his music and video collection. In Woodbury, N.J., Dave Wasman, a computer consultant, keeps a Mac Mini connected to his high-definition television so he can browse the Web for news and short films. And Chris Lanier, a student at the University of Houston, uses his network-enabled Xbox to link his living room TV to his office computer, which he taps for Web offerings and for archived video. Each is exploring the couch-potato frontier, using a PC to bring the bounty of the Internet to the TV. They struggle with arcane formats, noisy fans and Web sites designed for the desktop to escape the old television broadcast networks and their collection of channels numbered in the mere hundreds. The long-predicted convergence of the Internet and the broadcast world is accelerating. Unlike the established television networks, which serve up 30-minute meals of programming, video-sharing Web sites are nurturing a world of snacklike shorts. But finding the right hardware for this convergence still requires some thought. Some hook up an office PC to a large screen, a process that is straightforward for most modern screens and computers but is often complicated by tiny idiosyncrasies often caused by the very openness that attracts the users. Both Apple and Microsoft have been slowly moving toward the living room by enhancing desktops with software packages like Front Row or Media Center, which display videos and play music with a simplified interface. Another choice is a product designed for the living room, often by the same computer companies. The new Apple TV or the Xbox can bring videos, photos or music from the computer over to the TV, but they do not offer full Web browsers or all of the content that may be available online. Steve Perlman was a founder of WebTV, the start-up company that built a set-top box for browsing the Web in 1996 — a box that is now sold by Microsoft as MSN TV. He points out that PCs are poor guests in the living room because they can take a long time to start, spew white noise from a fan and are susceptible to viruses. The standard graphical desktop interface is hard for couch dwellers to use because of the small fonts and many tiny buttons. Web browsers and other tools ask for input from a keyboard that usually requires two hands, or from a mouse that needs a hard flat surface. |
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| The people on the couch will be leaning back, not sitting forward, and "they'll be holding a beverage in one hand and possibly their girlfriend or boyfriend in the other," Mr. Perlman said. "You really only have one hand available." One common solution is a wireless keyboard like the Adesso SlimTouch (about $85 from www.adesso.com) or the Logitech diNovo Edge (about $165 from www.logitech.com). Both come with trackpads for moving the cursor. A more sophisticated solution is a programmable remote control like the SnapStream Firefly (about $50 from www.snapstream.com). This will link the push of a single button on the remote to a long list of commands for the computer to execute. For instance, one button can call up a Web page with a weather report or the latest news. If the computer comes with a remote, as the iMac does, products like Remote Buddy (from iospirit.comfor about $13.50) or Mira (from twistedmelon.com for about $16) let the user push one button to activate programs. Many users take advantage of features that were originally included to help people with poor eyesight. The Firefox Web browser, for instance, can increase the size of the fonts in most Web pages, and a number of programs will zoom in on any part of the screen, making it easier to watch Web videos on the big screen. Juggling computer settings to make fonts readable is a constant challenge for most users. Many report, for instance, that they avoid the higher-resolution screen settings to make the fonts and the controls larger. Mr. Lanier in Houston, for instance, uses a 37-inch Panasonic TV that displays signals in the 720p format, which is short of the highest definition. A higher-resolution set is "not worth it for that screen size," he said. "As soon as you get up to the larger screen size, then it becomes a benefit depending on how close you are to the TV," he said. "Based on how far I sit from the TV, the benefits aren't going to be seen by my eyes." One big advantage of the open-ended PC platform is its adaptability to third-party products. Hauppauge, for example, makes a $99 HDTV tuner that converts broadcast HDTV signals into PC files that will play on Windows Media Center, where they can be watched later. While many welcome this flexibility, it can also complicate matters. Mr. Lanier, for instance, began with a full PC in his living room, but moved it back to his office and replaced it with the simplified interface provided by his Xbox. Some companies are introducing products to simplify the links between PC and TV. The MediaSmart flat-panel TVs from Hewlett-Packard include a small, limited processor that adds about $300 to the price. It uses the home network to download videos, photos and music from a PC with Media Center. "The neat thing about this, it does it without bringing the pain of the PC into the living room," said Alex Thatcher, senior product marketing manager at the digital TV solutions group of Hewlett-Packard. "By that, I mean the pain of doing a virus scan." Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president for worldwide product marketing, says that while he can understand why some might want to add a Mac Mini (about $600) to a living room TV, he thinks a better choice for many is the new Apple TV offering (about $300), which will display music, photo and videos from a Macintosh or a PC. "You need to focus on making things easier to use," he said. "You start with making the simplest things work well from the beginning." He said Apple was concentrating on adding simple features to the living room, not shoehorning a PC into the living room. Apple TV does not include a Web browser, but it will search the Web for some things. Movie trailers are downloaded directly from Apple's Web site; this may be how Apple will choose to open up its interface to YouTube videos in the future. Smoothing the connections is a big topic for the companies as they jockey to find the best way to satisfy both content creators and the couple on the couch. "Just as Web sites are adapted to detect whether it's a mobile device, I expect that you'll begin to see Web sites that are adapted for viewing on a television screen," said Mr. Perlman, the WebTV founder, who is now nurturing media tools and content through his business incubator, the Rearden Companies. "When that happens, you'll see an utter transformation of the business. "I think in the future, the broadcast stations will all turn off. There is a very limited amount of content on them." |
Home Theatremiércoles, mayo 16, 2007
Cómo empezar un pequeño negocio. NYT. Mayo, 17 2007
Small Business |
| Small Business 101: How to Get Started By BARBARA WHITAKER Published: May 2, 2007 |
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| Take a good look at that store on the corner. There is a 10 percent to 12 percent chance it will not be there next year, according to the Office of Advocacy for the Small Business Administration. "If you're new you have about a 50-50 chance of surviving five years," said Brian Headd, an economist with the Office of Advocacy, which tracks small businesses and examines the impact of proposed regulations on them. Still, such odds do not seem to damp the desire of entrepreneurs. An estimated 671,800 small businesses with employees opened their doors in 2005, the most recent year with statistics available, even as another 544,800 were expected to close theirs that year. "Starting a business is actually easy. You can get business cards and an address at Mailboxes, etc.," said Bill Morland, chairman of the Orange County chapter ofScore, a nonprofit association that works with the S.B.A. to educate and assist entrepreneurs. "But you're not really in business until you sell something, and that isn't easy." Success comes with education, careful planning and adequate cash flow, specialists say. And it has never been easier to lay the groundwork for starting a small business. Many tools are available on the Internet and at libraries to aid aspiring entrepreneurs. Whole magazines are devoted to the subject. But where to start? The Small Business Administration Web site is an excellent place to obtain information easily. It provides everything from details on characteristics important to run a business to information on writing a business plan to links to local centers offering assistance to start-ups. The site's "getting ready" section runs through a series of questions intended to help aspiring business owners gauge whether they have the qualities needed for the job: Are you a self-starter? Can you get along with different types of people? Are you risk-tolerant? Flexible and self-disciplined? Need someone to hold your hand? Score, short for Service Corps of Retired Executives, has a network of more than 10,000 volunteers, working and retired executives, offering free guidance on the Web, through their offices across the country and at workshops. Small Business Development Centers, a partner of the S.B.A., also provide guidance at centers across the country. Gillian Murphy, director of the San Joaquin Delta College Small Business Development Center, said she quizzed her clients about their reasons for going into business on their own. "I tell them 'I know you have something in your heart that's telling you you're going to be incredibly successful. My job is to get in your head and balance your head with your heart,' " Ms. Murphy said. To do that she has them create a basic business plan, including a financial statement. "Understanding the industry is key," she said. "If someone is going to start a floral shop and they do a projected profit-and-loss statement and I don't see spikes in February and May, they have no idea what they're doing." Eunice Green, who owns a health food store in Stockton, Calif., turned to the development center at San Joaquin Delta College when she thought about buying a second store. With the help of the center, she took information on the types of customers at her existing store and did what Ms. Murphy calls "economic gardening." After applying the demographics at various distances from the store, she decided against opening a second store. "It's kind of intuitive, but the S.B.D.C. gave me so many great concrete tools," said Ms. Green, owner of Green's Nutrition. A number of online resources have also grown up in recent years geared to providing small-business owners with a wide range of information. They include sites like Work.com, which has more than 1,700 how-to segments covering a multitude of issues confronting small businesses; E-venturing, run by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation; and About.com's small business and entrepreneur sites. (The New York Times Company owns About.com.) StartupNation, a Web site founded by Rich and Jeff Sloan, offers advice through video segments augmented by written information and provides forums and groups where entrepreneurs can share information. Other sites, like Bplans, owned and operated by Palo Alto Software, publisher of Business Plan Pro, have taken a more focused approach. Bplans offers more than 100 free sample business plans (more can be purchased) and they offer advice and other planning tools. When it comes to sorting through financial information, CCH Business Owner's Toolkit has templates to help examine financial issues as well as other model business documents, checklists and government forms. Still, any business or financial plan is only as good as the information it is built on. Finding that information may seem like a daunting task, but there are many free resources to turn to. A good first stop is the Census Bureau, which has detailed information in many areas including population, income and economic indicators for business. If the breadth of the Census Bureau's information seems overwhelming, check out CensusScope, an Internet site that breaks demographic information down into manageable segments. Another source of free statistical information online is FedStats, a site that provides a range of information produced by the federal government. And don't forget you can still do your research the old-fashioned way by visiting a public library where a librarian will be able to provide a range of information, including industry publications. The Library of Congress has compiled The Entrepreneur's Guide to Small Business Information, a listing of books and directories helpful in establishing and running a business. Ms. Murphy, who has been counseling small-business aspirants since 1989, says careful planning is essential to creating a successful business. Knowing the product, the market and the costs while having enough capital will go a long way toward getting through lean times. "People who fail to plan have really not given themselves an opportunity to succeed," she said. |
Lo que se veía venir.......
Technology | |||
| Amazon to Sell Music Without Copy Protection By BRAD STONE Published: May 17, 2007 | |||
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| After years of industry speculation, Amazon.com is getting into the digital music business. | |||
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| Amazon, the Internet's most successful seller of physical CDs, today announced plans to introduce a music download store later this year, selling songs and albums in the MP3 format without the anti-copying protection used by most online music retailers. Selling songs as MP3 files means that customers can transfer their music without limits to any computer, cellphone or music playing device, including Apple's iPod and Microsoft's Zune. The music will be from a major label, EMI, and 12,000 independent music companies that have chosen not to use the copy-restricting software known as digital rights management, or D.R.M."We are offering a great selection of music that our customers love in a way they clearly desire, which is D.R.M.-free, so they can play it on any device they own today or in the future," said Bill Carr, Amazon's vice president for digital media. David Card, an analyst at JupiterResearch, said Amazon's store would immediately position Amazon as a serious rival to Apple and its popular iTunes service. "We've been waiting for Amazon to be a serious player in digital music for some time," he said. "They know how to sell music and this is a powerful endorsement of the MP3 strategy." The move comes more than a month after Apple announced a similar initiative with EMI to sell music in the unprotected format on iTunes. Apple plans to start selling EMI's songs as MP3 format later this month. The other major music labels, like Universal Music Group, SonyBMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, appear reluctant to forgo copy protection. Universal Music, the world's largest music label, recently conducted limited experiments with D.R.M.-free music sales in France, but also has not committed to selling unprotected music. That will limit Amazon's music selection in the short term, although Mr. Carr of Amazon.com said he hoped that today's announcement would persuade other music labels to take part. Amazon did not announce many details of the new service. It would not comment on the planned pricing for songs and albums. As for whether EMI would make the Beatles catalog available for digital downloads on Amazon.com, the music label said it had not yet reached a deal with Apple Corps, the Beatles' music company, to sell the band's songs digitally. But Paul McCartney's solo work, including a coming album, will be available as MP3s for download on the new Amazon service and on Apple's iTunes Store. | |||
lunes, mayo 14, 2007
Todo está interconectado. Opinión. El Tiempo. Mayo 12, 2007.
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Cuando todo se conecte. La revolución inalámbrica.
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