Spotlight Features

Welcome to the manufacturer to end-user business model! From ultra-complicated, highly polished and highly engineered modular devices to soft baby carriages, custom-labeled wines, engraved books, custom-designed furniture and tailored apparel. Is there anything left? Even steamy fertilizers and bulk...

Without access to e-mail, many of us would cease to function. If you use e-mail regularly, there is a 100 percent chance that some of the e-mails you send or receive will be blocked. If such e-mails are not important to you, then you might not notice. However, if those e-mails are important, then in...

To change or not to change, that's the big question. A very large number of corporations, big and small, are faced with the question of how and when they should bite the bullet and change their name or whether they should simply do nothing. Why? Sometimes -- and more often it is like an underground ...

It's no secret that consumers all over the world are far more politically savvy than they were a decade ago. They clearly support or oppose their own country's internal or external governmental policies. Most country's foreign policies, whether straight or sugarcoated, strategically branded or fals...

American relations with China may be seen from both a political perspective and in regard to how U.S. firms are seeking to enter the Chinese market. We begin here with the political perspective and then examine strategies for U.S. firms seeking to enter Chinese markets. It can be hard for many peopl...

Roy Disney said, "You need branding when your product has nothing to offer." Roy's uncle, Walt, invented Mickey Mouse and created the Disney empire. At the time, the word "branding" was reserved only for cowboys branding herds of cattle by the fiery iron. The word "branding" is dangerously overused....

For the last five years, it has become common for directors of Western companies to ask corporate managers, "What is our Bangalore strategy?" Now that labor markets in South Asia are maturing, a new question is becoming pertinent. For the next five years, a more relevant question will be, "What is o...

Too many executives either ignore or are unaware of corporate culture. Yet, it is absolutely critical to the success of their company. Whether you know it or not, corporate culture permeates your organization -- for good or for bad. There are actually many definitions of corporate culture, and you c...

A recent survey in the United States has highlighted the growing trend of employers to electronically monitor employees in the workplace. According to the 2005 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey conducted by the American Management Association (AMA) and The ePolicy Institute, employers ...

This fight over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is all about a golden key, as without it, the Internet is completely useless. That golden key is a name on the Net called a URL. It's all about the master design of a sophisticated key management system so that billions ...

This has been a bad couple weeks for your country, Pakistan. Every day brings more bad news. The worst indication is the drop in confidence among broad segments of the business community in Pakistan earlier this month, particularly the tech sector, which has been growing at over 50 percent per year ...

EBay is an icon for online merchandising for both private sellers and small companies. However, industry watchers warn that user dissatisfaction over increased rates and its rules could give alternative auction Web sites more market share. Rival auction sites are catering both to newcomers to online...

Should bloggers receive federal legal protection so they can shield sources from overzealous prosecutors? Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), believe so. But others in the Congressional leadership with more influence aren't so sure. Two pieces of legislation, S 340 and HR ...

MMO2, a very big telecom name in the UK, was created as a cute play on the then very popular millennium year 2000. It was fashionable to use the Roman numerals at the time, and so MMO2 came into being -- but it soon became outdated. Now they've just dropped the MM to be proudly rebranded again as O2...

In the late 1990s, Peter Relan was working as a software executive at Oracle when his neighbor, Louis Borders, the founder of Borders Books and Music, offered him a chance to join his new startup. Relan was intrigued enough to make the leap to the dot-com world, where he helped develop much of the t...