Not every business associated with the mess that is the mortgage meltdown is losing money. A small army of law firms and default servicing companies, who represent mortgage lenders, have been raking in mounting profits. These little-known firms assess legal fees and a host of other charges, calculate what the borrowers owe and draw up the documents required to remove them from their homes.
Default, or foreclosure, servicing operations have been compounding the woes of troubled borrowers. Court documents say that some of the largest firms in the industry have repeatedly submitted erroneous affidavits when moving to seize homes and levied improper fees that make it harder for homeowners to get back on track with payments. Consumer lawyers call these operations "foreclosure mills." Read more about it.
America's most admired companies
1 Apple
2 Berkshire Hathaway
3 General Electric
4 Google
5 Toyota Motor
6 Starbucks
7 FedEx
8 Procter & Gamble
9 Johnson & Johnson
10 Goldman Sachs Group
11 Target
12 Southwest Airlines
13 American Express
14* BMW
14* Costco Wholesale
16 Microsoft
17 United Parcel Service
18 Cisco Systems
19 3M
20 Nordstrom
Fortune, March 17, 2008
The light bulb has given us unprecedented control over our lives. We can work, eat and play at any hour of day or night. But all of this light may be having a detrimental effect on our lives. According to the article Turning Out The Lights from U.S. News and World Report, a study released last month found that breast cancer is about twice as common in brightly lit communities as in darker ones -- lending fuel to the argument that artificial light negatively impacts public health, wildlife and maybe even safety. Glare from lights inhibits night vision and endangers drivers, pedestrians and animals such as sea turtles, bats, and other nocturnal creatures. It can also disorient birds. Motivated by new evidence, more than two dozen cities worldwide will "go dim" on March 29th in an hour-long demonstration at 8pm.
GSB alum and instructor Ed Batista in his blog muses on journal writing. As part of his role as an instructor for 'Interpersonal Dynamics' at Stanford he requires students to keep a journal, and the time spent grading journals has convinced him of the value of the practice. To understand what makes this exercise meaningful, he has turned to neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux, and how journaling interacts with not only with emotional experiences but other experiences in life as well. Does journal writing have a transformative power to help us process and integrate memories ?
No, not for Vendetta but for Visa (NYSE: V). The largest IPO in US history and the gavel came down on a final price of $17.2 billion. The IPO price per share began at $44 and has risen in the week since trading. Money has already been set aside for legal fees (won’t lawyers be pleased) to cover potential lawsuits over fees credit card companies charge business. The Wall Street Journal in an article entitled Visa's IPO Is Worth a Close Reading talks more about what has made this IPO tick. Business Week gives some insight into how the largest IPO could happen while the investment banking industry is in such turmoil and what the future might look like for Visa in an article entitled Visa’s IPO Victory.
There is an article in the San Francisco Chronicle today about a company called LaserMonks.com. In 2002, Bernard McCoy founded an online ink and toner business that today has grown into a multi-million-dollar operation. Contrary to the way most businesses work, his own salary hasn't increased in proportion to the company's profits. The company is named LaserMonks.com because Bernard McCoy is a monk. McCoy is one of six Cistercian brothers who pray, work and live at Our Lady of Spring Bank Abbey in central/west Wisconsin. The monks "have no personal income or personal possessions," McCoy explains, but "monasteries, by the Rule of St. Benedict that we follow, are required to be self-supporting."
Read about how their business developed and evolved.
Library friend Michelle Gutman continues to keep us up to date with the latest corporate governance activities on campus. This time it is the 'Governance Lunch for Students' at the Stanford Law School, April 8; the lunch speaker will be Andrew Vollmer, Deputy General Counsel of the SEC. Followed by a reception and panel discussion on Stoneridge Security v Scientific-Atlanta, considered by many "the most important securities case in a generation". Both events are sponsored by the Rock Center for Corporate Governance.
We are pleased to announce that GSB Alum Alvaro Fernandez recently donated some copies of the new SharpBrains research report The State of the Brain Fitness Software Market 2008 to Jackson Library. Fernandez is co-founder of SharpBrains, a research and advisory firm devoted to helping individuals, companies, and others understand and participate in the emerging field of brain fitness. You can check out the press release for the report, and also read a review of this new field from Reuters.
It looks like even the historical Italian automaker Ferrari is jumping on the “green” bandwagon. At the North American Auto Show in Detroit in January Ferrari unveiled its new F430 Biofuel inspired by the Prius to use 15% less gasoline. Most people who drive Ferraris can certainly afford the high gas prices but now they have the benefit of saving gas as well as showing their friends they are environmentally savvy. The article entitled Ferrari’s Cleaner Machine can be read in the April issue of Bloomberg Markets.
Stanford MBA graduates Brian Spaly and Andy Dunn are in the rag business. They created Bonobos, an exclusively online trousers merchant specializing in lightweight corduroy, superfine twill and wool. Bonobos ( www.bonobospants.com.) offers a slightly flared leg and a little width in the thighs. Read more about their story.
An interesting article about Netflix is published in the March issue of Wired magazine. In October 2006 the company offered a $1 million prize for building a recommendation engine that would be 10% better than the Cinematch engine, the one Netflix is currently using. The 10% might not seem to make a big difference but in reality, before the contest started, Cinematch allowed the fluctuation in rating to be one point, which is a lot on a 1 to 5 scale. After a year, the AT&T team called BellKor was leading the pack with a proposed engine which was 8.43 percent better than Cinematch. Around the same time, a new mysterious competitor came up with the engine model which surpassed Cinematch by 8%. At first, he asked to be called “just a guy in a garage”. Well, he turned to be not just a guy, and not in a garage. The new mastermind behind the project is a retired management consultant and psychologist Gavin Potter. Gavin Potter is also a co-author of a book called Business in a Virtual World. And he works from one of the rooms on the second floor of his home in Central London. You can read the whole story online or in print copy of the magazine in library’s periodicals section.
In 2007, a growing number of local television stations, including WNCN in Raleigh, N.C., and WCMH in Columbus, Ohio, began producing noon programming exclusively for the Web. Among newspapers, The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Va., and The Ventura County Star in California started posting videos at lunchtime that have young journalists as hosts and are meant to appeal to 18- to 34-year-old audiences.
Yahoo’s daily best-of-the-Web segment, called The 9 and sponsored by Pepsi, is produced every morning in time for lunch. “Based on the traffic I’m seeing,” said Miguel Monteverde, executive director of AOL Video, “our nation’s productivity is in question.”
From an advertiser’s perspective, the Web is a more flexible medium than television, because technology makes it easy to monitor people’s behavior and adjust programming accordingly. Better still, marketers have found that consumers are up to 30 percent more likely to make a purchase after viewing an advertisement at lunchtime than at other times of the day.
“Not only is advertising volume and Internet use increasing during the 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. time period, but people are actually buying and purchasing and reacting to advertising,” said Young-Bean Song, vice president for analytics at Atlas Solutions, a unit of Microsoft that helps companies with digital marketing campaigns.
The New York Times
We're always keeping an eye out for bold new books, so it's apropos to note GSB Professor Bob Sutton's highly favorable blog review of Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational: Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. According to Sutton, the book presents study after study that shows why we waste money and underestimate risks, and reveals how to overcome or avoid these biases, concluding "This is one of those books that is on par with the Heath Brothers' Made to Stick, Robert Cialdini's Influence, and Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point. If you want to learn about behavioral economics, Predictably Irrational is the best place I know to start." With all this praise, the book seems 'predictably profitable'; and indeed, it's currently high in Amazon.com sales rankings.
On a whimsical note: Friday is Pi Day, a holiday held to celebrate the mathematical constant π (pi). Pi the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, 3.1415926535... (those dots are important). Pi Day is celebrated by math enthusiasts around the world on March 14th. The first Pi Day was celebrated at the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1988. Nerds (and they are proud of the term) celebrate by gathering together to eat pie and solve "interesting" math problems. March 14th is also Einstein’s birthday -- another great reason to celebrate. Want to learn more about Pi day? Check out the official website.
Each year the MIT Technology Review provides a list of 10 Emerging Technologies to watch for. This year biofuels lead the list with signing of the Energy Independence and Security act signed into law which will provide funding and support to develop alternative fuels. Many of the other technologies surround computing and health. For instance better ways to diagnose illnesses and improving the way computers work and wireless power is delivered. Read all about these technologies and how they might impact our futures in the April edition of the MIT Technology Review.
As is my custom, I am highlighting the latest issue of New Perspectives Quarterly, a magazine specializing in big-ticket ideas and issues contributed by thought leaders and diplomats from around the world. The Winter 2008 issue lists the introductory Commentaries for issues of NPQ from 2001 - 2007. Topics covered are 'Civilizations Out of Sync', 'The Future of Anti-Americanism', 'No Shortcuts to the "End of History" ', "From the Faith Gap to Post-Liberalism', 'Globalization's New Left', 'DeGlobalize the Jihad', and 'China: From Democracy Wall to the Shopping Mall and Back', among others. Actual articles included are 'Modernization Will Arrive in Arabia From Asia', 'India: Sacred Cows and Software', and 'Hollywood in the World', for example. And the authors or people interviewed in these issues over the years? Samuel P. Huntington, Rem Koolhaas, Jorge Casteneda, Kofi Annan, General Wesley Clark, Lester Thurow, Amartya Sen, Robert McNamara, Coretta Scott King, Francis Fukuyama, Vladmir Putin, Mohamad Mahathir, Hillary Clinton, Edward Said, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Wolfowitz, Mohammed Yunus, Henry Kissinger, Carlos Fuentes, Al Gore, Gore Vidal ... and the list goes on. Read all this and more in the latest issue on the Jackson periodical racks.
I came across an article in the New York Times talking about how Seattle has become a book selling mecca. One influential factor is Nancy Pearl who ten years ago, started a program for public libraries there that she hoped would get adults excited about literature.It was called, “If All of Seattle Read the Same Book.” Free copies of “The Sweet Hereafter,” were distributed to individuals and book clubs. The novel became the top-selling book in the area.
Ms. Pearl’s rise in the book world parallels Seattle’s rise in the publishing world. Though the big publishing houses are still ensconced in New York, the Seattle area is the home of Amazon, Starbucks and Costco, three companies that increasingly influence what America reads. Read more about it.
Silverlink Communications® Inc., the leader in healthcare communications, introduced at the Health 2.0 Conference, a fundamentally new capability to healthcare communications – called Adaptive HealthComm Science(TM) – a discipline that combines decision science methodologies and analytics with personalization technology. This proven approach merges world-class communications techniques from consumer industries with the unique characteristics of healthcare, to drive healthcare behaviors in scale. By leveraging Adaptive HealthComm Science, healthcare enterprises can dramatically improve the effectiveness of their communications programs, improving the member experience and driving down healthcare costs.
BusinessWire, March 04, 2008
No, we're not talking about sasquatch. The New Yorker February 25 article of the same name by Michael Specter highlights carbon emissions, and society's growing sensitivity toward one's 'carbon footprint'. No longer an obscure concept, an excessive carbon footprint may soon become, the author suggests, the corporate equivalent of wearing a scarlet letter. While awareness is still gathering steam, consumers someday may monitor a product's carbon footprint with the same zeal with which they watch trans-fats and carbohydrates today. Included in the piece is a spotlight on the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), where members ignore pork bellies and gold -- and instead buy and sell the 'right to pollute'.
New databases, new books, new journals, and a big birthday – this month’s JacksonLine has it all! Check it out.
Last week in San Francisco Cleantech Forum XVI was held, bringing together green companies and investors working with clean technology. "Clean tech is a global phenomenon, both in terms of need and opportunity," said Nicholas Parker, co-founder of the Cleantech Group, which organized the forum. It tracks trends in the industry and serves as a matchmaker for investors and entrepreneurs. Check out the Cleantech Group site for news and information on future forums and other cleantech industry related subjects.
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