When Oakland-based coffee retailer Blue Bottle announced a $25.75 million investment round on Jan. 29 from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest investors, the jokes were easy:
Americans buying stuff. But you knew that!
US president Barack Obama asked corporations to “do what you can to raise your employees’ wages” in his annual agenda-setting State of the Union speech on Jan. 28. Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has spent the last year asking businesses there to pay workers more.
One unexpected idea on US President Barack Obama’s to-do list is a new public pension powered by behavioral economics.
Did Barack Obama have a bad year in 2013? You wouldn’t know it from his pugnacious State of the Union speech. The annual address on the state of the country and the president’s agenda began with a litany of statistics about US economic performance, including one guaranteed to catch some attention across the Pacific:
Tonight US president Barack Obama delivers his annual address on the state of the country and his agenda for the year ahead. As the interminable speech unspools, Obama will name assorted dignitaries seated in the audience—but one will really capture the story of his economic policies, and that’s General Motors’ new CEO, Mary Barra.
Charlie Shrem, the vice chair of the Bitcoin Foundation and CEO of BitInstant, once an exchange for the popular digital currency, was arrested at New York’s JFK Airport last night for violating money transmission rules.
The big markets news at the end of last week was the plunge of Argentina’s peso. The sell-off came as many other emerging-market currencies were already sliding:
This item has been updated.
San Francisco, thanks to outrage over swarming tech workers and rising rents, has become the symbol of gentrification’s ills. But San Francisco’s unique situation is giving gentrification a bad name; it doesn’t have to be that way, especially if the local government does its job correctly.
Mattresses in the United States are expensive, especially good ones. There’s an obvious reason why: The industry aims for huge profit margins for both the retailer and wholesaler that amount to 74% of the product’s price, and those wholesalers are dominated by the top four companies, which keep prices high by controlling some 59% of sales.
New data from the International Labor Organization’s 2014 World Employment Outlook doesn’t exactly paint a pretty picture of the global labor market.
For companies with data to protect, their primary problem is how cheap hacking can be.
It’s so hot in Melbourne this week—110°F (43.3°C)!—that tennis players in the Australian Open are hallucinating Snoopy just before they collapse from heat exhaustion. Now, imagine hundreds of soccer players, who run twice as far per game as their tennis cohorts, playing in similar heat. That’s what’s set to happen when the World Cup comes to Qatar in 2022, a decision that likely came about because of bribery and corruption at FIFA, the global governing body for the sport.
“We are now being displaced in the global economy,” US speaker of the House John Boehner warned this summer in a speech on US manufacturing that cited China’s economic dominance. Yet under Boehner’s watch, Congress itself is helping with that displacement.
What to watch for today
Today, Netflix shares are falling, and one reason for the sell-off is yesterday’s US court decision overthrowing “net neutrality” rules—but investors may be acting prematurely.
Netflix has updated its public data on how fast it streams movies to customers around the world. Viewers in the Netherlands see their movies with the best quality, at an average rate of 3.25 megabits per second, while Mexico comes in the slowest with an average of 1.76 Mbps.
Modern Farmer, an American publication that reads like the Esquire of agriculture, writes about the Bucher Delta R2 Vistalys optical grape sorting system, shown above, which can sort two tons of grapes in 12 minutes. It uses optical sensors snapping 10,000 frames a second to examine which grapes are suitable for wine production and which are suitable for the scrap heap.
Google is buying Nest, the maker of a smart thermostat for homes, for $3.2 billion in cash. With it comes a relatively untapped source for a company that aspires to organize all the world’s information: detailed data about power consumption. The search giant’s financial power and ambition could help accelerate development of a more efficient “smart grid” that’s responsive to actual demand for electricity.
Airbus reported 1,619 new plane orders in 2013, beating chief competitor Boeing’s 1,531. This is the second year in a row that the European aerospace giant has out-sold Boeing.
December was a disappointing month for US hiring, and like any good malingerer, Americans can blame the weather.
There’s a new occupation on the rise in America, and it’s phlebotomy—the art of drawing blood.
With the Volcker rule finalized, banks are again selling off investments in hedge and private equity funds that lawmakers say are too risky for banks insured with taxpayer money.
