This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Building up a business network isn’t easy, but it is essential if you intend to succeed anywhere in the world of business. This is especially true of small businesses without the track records of larger, more established organizations. Personal connections can mean all the difference between profitability and bankruptcy.

In a previous article, I wrote about ways to reignite your existing network online. In this post, I want to focus on how to use the web to make actual, lasting connections that will help you achieve your goals.

Many businesspeople don’t think of the web as a place to make connections, but rather to communicate with them. This isn’t true anymore, and in fact social media tools can be more effective than in-person meetings, especially when you’re trying to build an international network.

1. Consistently engage people you want to add to your network. If you want to get on somebody’s radar, start @replying to them on Twitter, comment on their Facebook posts, or create discussions around their work on your blog. If you’ve met them before, it’s fine to send a Facebook or LinkedIn request, although everyone has different rules for accepting or rejecting friend requests.

2. Don’t become a pest. There is a fine line between communication and harassment, and once you cross that line, there’s no going back. Don’t bombard your network with an overflow of social media messages. Use your best judgment.

3. Join online communities in your industry. There are a ton of mailing lists, message boards, and social networks dedicated to small business or your chosen field. You just have to find them. For example, many entrepreneurs regularly visit and contribute to Hacker News, a community for hackers, founders, and entrepreneurs. Find niche communities like it that focus on your field of business and get connected.

To get started, here are a few tips for connecting with other entrepreneurs via social media.

4. Don’t limit your online networking to one person or one network. There are a lot of great people to engage, but if you ignore them because you only want to use one network, then you miss out on a lot of potential engagement and potential contacts. Keep an open mind and try out new tools and new networks.

5. Bring it offline… eventually. Online communication is great, but when you have the opportunity, nothing really beats a one-on-one conversation over coffee. If you’ve been consistent in engaging your network online, then you won’t run out of things to talk about in person. Once again, don’t rush an in-person meeting. In most cases, you’ll know when the right time is to take it offline.

Consistent and meaningful contact is key to building a strong network. Be an active member in your network and keep them engaged. The network you build online will deliver huge returns throughout your career, so put in your full effort.

Summary: This post focuses on how to use the web to make actual, lasting connections that will help you achieve your goals.


Brightcove Inc., a Cambridge company known for its Internet video platform and online video tools, made an impressive debut on Wall Street yesterday as its stock rose 30 percent on the firm’s first day of trading, to close at $14.30, $3.30 above its offering price.

The company had priced its initial public offering of 5 million shares at $11 per share. By midday they were trading on the Nasdaq Global Market at $14.48, up nearly 32 percent, before floating down to $14.30 by closing time.

Founded in 2004 by Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove anticipated the growth of video on the Internet and has targeted its services - which include editing software and the hosting of online videos - to companies that are interested in adding video to their websites.

Because creating and hosting online videos demands technical expertise and the ability to store and serve large video files, many companies prefer to pay a specialist such as Brightcove rather than host video on their own servers.

Brightcove has a number of media customers, including The New York Times Co., The Boston Globe, The Weather Channel, and Conde Nast. The Times Co. - which owns the Globe and its websites Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com - also holds a small stake in Brightcove.

The company filed for the IPO in August. It reported revenue of $63.6 million last year, but was not profitable, showing a net loss of $17 million. In fact, since its inception, Brightcove has yet to finish a year with a profit.

In regulatory filings related to the IPO, Brightcove has said that it expects to keep losing money at least through the end of this year.

Brightcove has 312 employees, with more than 200 based in Cambridge. The company is planning to move to a new office on the Boston waterfront in April.

Summary: Brightcove Inc., a Cambridge company known for its Internet video platform and online video tools, made an impressive debut on Wall Street yesterday as its stock rose 30 percent on he firm’s first day of trading to close at $14.30, $3.30 above its offering price. The company had priced its initial public offering of 5 million shares at $11 per share. By mid-day they were trading on the Nasdaq Global Market at $14.48, up nearly 32 percent, before floating down to $14.30 by closing time.


SUNNYVALE, Calif. — LDK Solar lowered the top end of its previous fourth-quarter sales forecast, citing lower-than-expected shipments of solar wafers, cells and modules.For the quarter ended Dec. 31, the Chinese solar panel maker said Monday that it now expects revenue for the quarter to total between $440 million and $450 million, down from its previously projected range of $440 million to $520 million.Despite the cut, the range was still better than Wall Street expected. Analysts, on average, expect $434.6 million in sales for the quarter, according to a FactSet poll. Still, shares nearly percent.LDK said it now expects fourth-quarter wafer shipments to total between 215 megawatts and 220 megawatts, while shipments of cells and module shipments are expected to total between 250 megawatts and 260 megawatts.Meanwhile, in-house polysilicon production is expected to total between 2,100 metric tons and 2,300 metric tons and in-house cell production should come in at between 130 megawatts and 150 megawatts, the company said.LDK previously projected wafer shipments of between 200 megawatts and 270 megawatts, module shipments of between 180 megawatts and 270 megawatts, in-house polysilicon production of between 2,200 metric tons and 2,800 metric tons, and in-house cell production of between 220 megawatts and 250 megawatts.The company also said that as a result of the rapid drop in wafer and module prices during the quarter, it expects to incur a write-down of inventories and realize impairment charges, which will result in a negative gross margin for the period.For the full fiscal year 2012, LDK said it expects its revenue to total between $2 billion and $2.7 billion, while analysts polled by FactSet expect $1.84 billion.The company also projected fiscal year polysilicon production of between 12,000 metric tons and 15,000 metric tons, wafer production of between 2.7 gigawatts and 3.3 gigawatts, in-house cell production of between 1.2 gigawatts and 1.6 gigawatts, and module production of between 1.2 gigawatts and 1.6 gigawatts.In early trading, shares of LDK Solar Co. fell 8 cents to $4.82.

Summary: LDK lowers top end of 4Q revenue prediction


BURLINGAME, Calif., Dec. 5— A math error found in all of the Intel Corporation's top-of-the-line Pentium microprocessors is proving to be a continuing public relations nightmare for the world's largest chip maker.

At a computer industry conference that began here today, two of the largest computer makers tried to play down the growing public alarm about the error the chip makes in rare cases while doing high-precision division operations.

But at the same time, the Compaq Computer Corporation's chief executive, Eckhard Pfeiffer, said his company planned to make available a software fix that would turn off the faulty hardware component of the chip and give the user a slower -- but accurate -- solution until Intel begins supplying new chips without the error early next year.

"There's no panic," Mr. Pfeiffer said. "I don't think there is any reason for a general product recall, but if the customer is worried, this is something to fix immediately."

The I.B.M. executive in charge of personal computers, G. Richard Thoman, said that while for most people the potential error was not an issue, his company was still trying to determine the scope of the problem.

"I don't want to be alarmist, but for certain kinds of calculations we're not sure what the boundaries of the problem are," said Mr. Thoman, a senior vice president and group executive at I.B.M.

Last week the International Business Machines Corporation said that it would work with customers who wished replacement parts.

Both executives said their companies had not been receiving large volumes of calls. Separately, the chief executive of Gateway 2000, Ted Waitt, told an audience at an investment conference in San Francisco that his company's shipment rate had shown no signs of letting up in the face of growing concern about the flaw.

But a survey published today in Computer World, a weekly computer industry newspaper, gave a very different view of the concerns of corporate computer managers. A survey of 100 corporate managers found that 65 percent were either very or somewhat concerned and that 68 percent said they felt that Intel's case-by-case replacement policy was unfair. Moreover, almost half of those responding said they intended to delay purchases until the problem was resolved.

Intel officials discovered the problem in July but decided it was not significant enough to disclose publicly. The error became widely known last month after Thomas Nicely, a math professor at Lynchburg College in Lynchburg, Va., sent a private electronic mail message to several colleagues asking them to check their machines for the error.

Industry analysts said that all six million Pentium-based personal computers expected to be shipped this year will have the flaw.

Industry executives and technical experts said they were less concerned about the actual hardware error than by the way Intel was responding.

"Intel is to be faulted for their lack of disclosure rather than for the fault itself," said W. Jerry Saunders 3d, chairman of the Advanced Micro Devices Corporation, Intel's chief microprocessor rival.

Michael Slater, editor of Microprocessor Report, a computer industry newsletter, said: "They seem to be in denial mode, which is crazy. They took the gamble that they could wait until corrected silicon was available, but they lost."

Intel said it would worry about how it had handled the matter after it had finished dealing with the immediate consequences.

"A few weeks from now we'll reflect and see what we goofed up this time around," said Howard High, an Intel spokesman. "Now we're concentrating on mobilizing the company and making sure all the people that need to be responded to get handled quickly."

Another computer company that had a similar problem many years ago responded very differently, according to Richard Doherty, publisher of Envisioneering, a computer industry technical newsletter.

He said that when he was a college student in 1973, Hewlett-Packard had found a multiplication error in its HP-35 calculator that affected the accuracy of calculations beyond five significant digits. The company bent over backward to reach its users to tell them of the error and offer to replace the machine.

In trading today, Intel stock gained $1.25, to $64.125, on the New York Stock Exchange.


By Jill Heller International Business Times

Seven years ago, when she had just became engaged to cyclist Lance Armstrong, Sheryl Crow held an interview with USA Today in which she addressed the doping rumors surrounding her then fiancé.

Downplaying the potential implications of the charges, Crow said, "I don't think the French people are on a mission to strip him of his integrity." She was referring, of course, to the previous allegations from Armstrong's camp that the French had purposely tainted a urine sample produced by him with Erythropoietin, during the 1999 Tour de France.

"It's just a handful of people pursuing that theory," Crow continued, "and it's tiresome and a nuisance, and it will eventually end, I hope." Unfortunately for Armstrong, the debate has not ended, and now that the seven-time Tour de France winner has been stripped of all his titles and banned for life from competing in cycling, Crow is being labeled by some as a defining informant in the case against him.

According to new reports, Crow, who dated Armstrong during the last two years of his now-disqualified Tour de France victories, was interviewed by federal agents from United States Anti-Doping Agency in 2011, during an ongoing two-year investigation. On Sept. 1, TMZ reported that Crow could be the "smoking gun" in the doping case.

Now, in his new tell-all memoir, "The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France, Doping, Cover-ups and Winning at All Costs," Tyler Hamilton, a former teammate and later rival of Armstrong's, reveals several details, including that Crow was subpoenaed just weeks before the grand jury concluded its investigation of Armstrong. The memoir was released Wednesday.

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Hamilton also alleged that Crow stayed in an apartment in Girona, Spain, that was used by Armstrong to store and distribute performance-enhancing drugs to teammates before major races, reported the New York Daily News. Among some of the doping methods employed, Hamilton claims that teammates injected the illegal blood-booster EPO, and later took transfusions of their own blood, together, to enhance their endurance and recovery.

According to Hamilton, doping became a "fact of life" for Armstrong. "Lance worked the system ... Lance was the system," Hamilton writes in his memoir, adding that, "nobody sets out wanting to dope."

Jay Cooper, an attorney for Crow, who advised the now 50-year-old songwriter to cooperate with federal agents, declined to speak on the matter, citing attorney-client privilege. "I'm not going to comment one way or the other," Cooper told the New York Daily News.

According to the USADA, at least 10 cyclists in total have corroborated Hamilton's claims, and agreed to testify against Armstrong.

More From International Business Times: -- Red Sox Manager Bobby Valentine Still With The Team, But For How Long? -- London Paralympics: Husband-Wife Take Gold, South Africa's Pistorius Breaks Record (Slideshow) -- Do Athletes Make Better Doctors?

Summary:
By Jill Heller
International Business Times
Seven years ago, when she had just became engaged to cyclist Lance Armstrong, Sheryl Crow held an intervie...


Leave it to Thomas Schnetz to sneak humble dishes like fideo in among the Niman Ranch beef tacos and Mexican Caesar salad on the menu at Tacubaya, his taqueria in Berkeley's luxe Fourth Street shopping district.

Fideo ($6.95) is Mexican home cooking, as simple as it comes -- angel hair pasta drenched in a soupy tomato sauce, with a hint of chile heat and a sprinkle of queso cotijo -- and it springs from abuelita's kitchen, generations back.

You don't see this dish all that often on Mexican menus around here. But that's typical of Schnetz, both at his upscale Mexican restaurant Dona Tomas in Oakland's Temescal area, and at its 20-month-old offspring, Tacubaya, which he co-owns.

His thing is to offer some real Mexican cooking made with seasonal, local ingredients, and it's proved popular at both of his places.

Generally, that popularity is deserved. But while the quality of Tacubaya's food is never in question, sometimes the seasonings either over- or under-whelm.

Tacubaya opened as an all-day breakfast and lunch place for shoppers in need of a quick bite, and now stays open for dinner on weekends.

Its large, high-ceilinged space tucked back off Fourth Street is a fiesta of color: shiny walls of cerise, tomato, ruby red, tangerine. Along the left side, as you walk up to the counter to order, a mini-market sells the restaurant's guacamole, camote (a sweet potato sider), salsas and beans, containers of ingredients like lard, canela, piloncillo (sugar cane) and queso, and wooden and metal tortilla makers.

From here, you may spot someone busy hand-making corn tortillas behind the counter -- they're one of the high points of any meal. Order, grab one of the 46 seats either at the counter or wooden tables, and your food will arrive quickly.

The dish I'd hurry back for is the sopa de tortilla ($6.25). A deep red- brown, the thick soup is rich with chile and chicken flavor. Dip in for hunks of avocado, cubes of melting cheese and chewy fried tortilla strips. It's a meal by itself.

Lots of mushrooms and epazote add substance and flavor to the cheese stuffing inside the chile relleno ($5.95), a fat, 7-inch poblano chile. This is not your basic Mission relleno. Lightly battered and fried, it sits in a light tomato sauce, criss-crossed with crema. Though it's dense, it's not at all greasy and it's very good.

Tacos are classic style, done well. Double-layered handmade tortillas come with Niman Ranch beef, spit-roasted pork or beef tongue, or fish (all $3. 15 for one), and the usual garnishes.

The fish taco sported a big chunk of light, crispy batter-fried white fish, but it gained nothing from the arbol chile aioli, where too much sweetness concealed any chile taste.

Sweetness seemed to be a bit of a theme, and not always a welcome one.

The tamal ($3.75), stuffed with lots of browned pork in mole and served in a corn husk, played the browned meat against deep chile flavors very well, but it too could have been less sweet and a bit more hot.

Alongside, we got the camote ($2.95), a puree with loads of sweet potato flavor, but also a strong dose of the maple sugar-like Mexican piloncillo. A great offset to all the spice, but still too sweet.

One surprise was the unconventional take on ceviche de pescado ($7.75). It arrived on a large oval plate, slathered in a thick sauce of New Mexico and puya chiles and surrounded by tortilla chips. You fish for chunks of fresh tuna and avocado -- but their delicate flavors are overpowered by the strong, very hot sauce. Still, we eventually ate it all, and the sauce came in handy for perking up other dishes.

Breakfast, served until noon on weekdays and through the afternoon on weekends, is worth the stop, if for nothing but the Blue Bottle coffee ($2) --

each big, white cup made to order. Most of the dishes feature eggs -- with chorizo, or on a torta with ham, or scrambled with nopales and tomatoes.

The chilaquiles ($7.50) are like eggy nachos, and I could eat them all day. Housemade tortilla chips are sauteed in guajillo chile sauce, then topped with scrambled eggs, onions, cheese and crema. The heat picks up the eggs, the eggs temper the chile -- it works.

As soon as the huevos divorciados ($7.25) land on the table, you can see where they got their name. Precisely half the plate swims in a sweetish green tomatillo sauce and the other half in a clean-tasting red sauce. But the divorce doesn't last -- the sauces get pleasantly mixed up in the eating.

Menudo ($7.25), served on weekends, was a hearty bowl full of lots of tripe and hominy. But while the broth looked richly luscious, and tasted strongly of chile and beef, the seasoning was off and the problem wasn't just serious undersalting. The depth -- menudo's soul -- wasn't there.

Breakfast, lunch or dinner, don't overlook the churro ($3.50), made while you wait. Here's one place the sweetness really works.

Tacubaya is on the rise, with a liquor license in the works so you can have a beer with your tacos, along with the fruity aguas frescas ($2.50) and horchata ($2.50) now offered.

That will be a boon to the dinner service. If things continue to go well, Tacubaya hopes to take dinner to seven days a week.

Summary: Leave it to Thomas Schnetz to sneak humble dishes like fideo in among the Niman Ranch beef tacos and Mexican Caesar salad on the menu at Tacubaya, his taqueria in Berkeley's luxe Fourth Street shopping district.  Fideo ($6.95) is Mexican home cooking, as simple as it comes -- angel hair pasta drenched in a soupy tomato sauce, with a hint of chile heat and a sprinkle of queso cotijo -- and it springs from abuelita's kitchen, generations back.  [...] that's typical of Schnetz, both at his upscale Mexican restaurant Dona Tomas in Oakland's Temescal area, and at its 20-month-old offspring, Tacubaya, which he co-owns.  [...] while the quality of Tacubaya's food is never in question, sometimes the seasonings either over- or under-whelm.  Tacubaya opened as an all-day breakfast and lunch place for shoppers in need of a quick bite, and now stays open for dinner on weekends.  Along the left side, as you walk up to the counter to order, a mini-market sells the restaurant's guacamole, camote (a sweet potato sider), salsas and beans, containers of ingredients like lard, canela, piloncillo (sugar cane) and queso, and wooden and metal tortilla makers.  From here, you may spot someone busy hand-making corn tortillas behind the counter -- they're one of the high points of any meal.  Order, grab one of the 46 seats either at the counter or wooden tables, and your food will arrive quickly.  Dip in for hunks of avocado, cubes of melting cheese and chewy fried tortilla strips.  Lots of mushrooms and epazote add substance and flavor to the cheese stuffing inside the chile relleno ($5.95), a fat, 7-inch poblano chile.  Lightly battered and fried, it sits in a light tomato sauce, criss-crossed with crema.  Double-layered handmade tortillas come with Niman Ranch beef, spit-roasted pork or beef tongue, or fish all $3.  The fish taco sported a big chunk of light, crispy batter-fried white fish, but it gained nothing from the arbol chile aioli, where too much sweetness concealed any chile taste.  The tamal ($3.75), stuffed with lots of browned pork in mole and served in a corn husk, played the browned meat against deep chile flavors very well, but it too could have been less sweet and a bit more hot.  Alongside, we got the camote ($2.95), a puree with loads of sweet potato flavor, but also a strong dose of the maple sugar-like Mexican piloncillo.  [...] we eventually ate it all, and the sauce came in handy for perking up other dishes.  Breakfast, served until noon on weekdays and through the afternoon on weekends, is worth the stop, if for nothing but the Blue Bottle coffee ($2) --  Housemade tortilla chips are sauteed in guajillo chile sauce, then topped with scrambled eggs, onions, cheese and crema.  Menudo ($7.25), served on weekends, was a hearty bowl full of lots of tripe and hominy.  [...] while the broth looked richly luscious, and tasted strongly of chile and beef, the seasoning was off and the problem wasn't just serious undersalting.  Tacubaya is on the rise, with a liquor license in the works so you can have a beer with your tacos, along with the fruity aguas frescas ($2.50) and horchata ($2.50) now offered.


Northeast Utilities chief executive Tom May said the company’s NStar unit has been hampered by weather in trying to restore power to customer’s following this weekend’s snowstorm, but said the overall response has been a success story, thanks in part to last year’s merger between NStar and Northeast Utilities. Tat partnership, May said, has allowed NStar to call on other Northeast Utilities resources from Connecticut, as well as crews from the company’s other utilities, Western Massachusetts Electric Co. and Public Service of New Hampshire.

Summary: Frustrations started to show Monday as thousands of residents went another cold day without electricity and heat following this weekend’s snowstorm, while government officials criticized NStar for not being more responsive to customers’ need to know when power would be restored.


This is how, in the guise of red and yellow sandstone walls, a roofscape of pregnant Mughal domes and cool, dignified rooms of quiet solemnity, "a guru relates to a king". It is an apt and poetic metaphor used by the architect, Raj Rewal, to evoke the spirit of his new parliamentary library in New Delhi.

This thoughtful seat of learning, commissioned in 1991 and now complete, has been built in the regal shadow of Herbert Baker's circular parliament building, set in a campus of munificently planned and beautifully executed government buildings designed by Baker, Edwin Lutyens and their assistants in the old Public Works department between 1911 and 1931. That was when the Viceroy's House - today the Rashtrapati Bhavan, or presidential palace - opened in a triumph of imperial braggadocio. Lutyens's domed palace was the centrepiece of the Indian capital, and was moved by imperial decree from Calcutta to a bright and burning, tiger-prowled wilderness.

The government buildings of New Delhi, carefully maintained for the most part by the Indian authorities, remain one of the great set pieces of world architecture. It is as if the exquisite grouping of 17th- and 18th-century Baroque palaces at Greenwich by Jones, Webb, Wren, Hawksmoor and co had been transplanted from under the grey London cloudscape to the blazing skies of north-west India; the chirrup of sparrows replaced by the electric scream of peacocks and the shadow of circling black kites.

The Baker-Lutyens complex had no rival, perhaps, until the construction of Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa's Brasilia, 25 years after the official inauguration of New Delhi. The Delhi library, the first major addition to the old imperial capital since independence, is a big building. Parliament, however, insisted that it must relate harmoniously to the great colonnaded drum of Baker's building, so only its domed roofscape rises above the massive plinth behind it.

Rewal's trick has been to shape a building that is at once discreet and animated, the animation reserved for the roof and the generous interiors, the discretion expressed in the building's low profile. Its stone-clad walls are overshadowed by trees, and the domes of Baker's twin secretariat buildings overlooking parliament.

The building is much bigger than it appears to be: only two floors rise above ground, while a hidden pair - readily accessible book-stacks - sink below its superstructure. This leads to some magic moments inside the building, especially when the Scholars' Library reveals itself in all its four-storey splendour. But, then, with landscaping merging into the building, turfed roofs and a gentle symbolism that a Hindu or Jain would recognise, this building is subtle and special.

The plan appears to be adapted from a reading of the plan, section and symbolism of the classic Hindu temple. This takes the form, in Rewal's design, of a crossing of paths meeting under a central dome from under which the various libraries, auditorium, meeting rooms and cafeteria are gained. The Hindu temple, which traditionally stands on a "tirtha" (a crossing place favoured by the gods), is, in principle, a cosmic junction-box connecting humankind, God and the universe, a symbol of universal enlightenment - which, of course, a library is too. The temple is, in plan, a miniature representation of the universe and its cosmology; at its hub is a notional space for the holy mountain, Meru, the mythological centre of the cosmos, ringed around by rooms for individual gods. This explains why Hindu temples traditionally rise to fantastic central heights. They are hollowed out holy mountains, their dark cores ringed around with sacred caves, or shrines. This dark space also symbolises the womb, from which Hindus are symbolically reborn after devotion.

None of this rich symbolism, however, is obvious in the design of the new library. It is a nice conceit; where Lutyens's and Baker's secular temples to imperial rule represent the classical learning of western civilisation, Rewal's invokes the wisdom of Mughal India and the spiritual underpinning of Hinduism and Jainism. But, where the heart of a traditional Hindu temple is dark, although shot through with beams of sun and moonlight, Rewal's temple of secular enlightenment is awash with light.

This has been hard to achieve. New Delhi is an exceptionally bright city, but in the height of summer the temperature rises to 45C. The Central Public Works department was worried about Rewal's central glass dome. Together, though, architect and engineers came up with a double-skin of reflective glass that brings soft sunlight into the centre of the building while keeping the fierce heat at bay.

The library has four entrances, one on each side: one for ceremonial purposes, one for MPs, another for scholars and a fourth for the public. These lead either directly into the great light-filled dome at the centre of the building, or around a cloister-like corridor. This also acts as a further sun-screen, so that the interior, although light, is never bright.

Each of the principal rooms is capped with a dome. None is the same. Each is supported by a different play of steel, concrete and stone. Only one feels incongruous. This is the complex, lattice-like steel structure that supports the multi-domed roof of the four-storey scholars' library; it seems fussy and breaks the essential harmony of the building.

Otherwise, this is a noble building careful of its wooded site, its place in Indian history and of its readers. Shaded by trees, its interiors open up to internal courtyards, while its landscaped roof, punctuated by more domes than Rome can shake a crozier at, is a magical place to spy the surrounding architectural glory.

As a symbol of how India has come to terms with the architecture that rode on the back of so many invasions over the millennia, the library is a milestone. Educated in Delhi and London - at the Architectural Association and Brixton School of Building - and beginning his career in Paris, Rewal, who was born in nearby Jodphur in 1931, has always been well versed in the cultural crossovers of global architecture. As an escape from some of the meretricious pseudo-modern architecture that has threatened this extraordinary city, the new library is a landmark. A humble one though: Rewal's wise man - the library - might advise the king - parliament - yet he sits comfortably below him and in his stately shadow. Sensible fellow.

Summary: New Delhi's library takes inspiration from a Hindu temple to create a truly enlightening experience.


There are some six billion retail customers out there, shopping, hunting, scrounging daily for quite literally everything under the sun. What is the one thing they all want, regardless of time, place, ethnicity, demographics or economic status?

Based on Accenture research in 2013, polling 6,000 customers across eight countries, today’s customer is a non-stop shopper who wants and expects to move seamlessly across channels in pursuit of that perfect dress, that latest device, that ultimate experience. This customer expects to be recognised and respected no matter where, when or in which channel she or he surfaces. In today’s fast-moving markets, a seamless retail experience is becoming a prerequisite for any retailer that wants to remain relevant. In tomorrow’s markets, seamless retailing will be indispensable.

Understandably, many retailers feel overwhelmed. The advent, adoption and maturation of analytics as a business discipline promised the tools and solutions required to support that seamless experience. But where does the actual implementation of retail analytics stand? How are retailers using this potent new capability? And is the practice delivering on the promise?

As retail enterprises put analytics to work today, they are motivated by a number of imperatives:

1. The Insights Imperative: Retailers are striving to harness data for sharper customer insights. The need for master data management is understood, but at least half the retailing industry is still searching for a solution. Until retailers solve this puzzle, their ability to mine their data and to develop sharper insights into customer wants and needs will be impaired. When they do, they will discover that integrated data is the most direct path to creation of a seamless customer experience across all channels.

Example: One online retail group sells to consumers primarily through web sites and catalogues. The goal is to use data analytics to manage multiple accounts of a single customer as one holistic relationship, a prerequisite for developing a truly seamless retail experience. Using analytics online has greatly improved the company’s effectiveness in tracking customers’ pre-purchase activities, and optimising product positioning accordingly. As a result, the company now has more sales, bigger orders and better sales conversion.

2. The Actions Imperative: Retailers must find ways to turn insights into decisive actions at speed and at scale. The goal in collecting and analysing data is to harvest the rich insights that will help retailers shape a seamless and successful experience for the customer, guiding smarter decisions about which products to stock, what prices to charge and which offers to make to whichever customer you as a retailer interact with at this moment in time.

Example: As a niche player in the luxury market, fast, fact-based dynamic decision- making is critical to drive sales from current customers and to identify new growth opportunities for the enterprise.

Using advanced analytics capabilities, the retailer collects and filters massive amounts of online data from news, business and social networking sites, blogs and forums. With the results displayed in user-friendly dashboard reports, the company can leverage real-time business intelligence and trend analysis to make informed decisions that target consumer purchase preferences and product needs from a geographic perspective.

3. The Outcomes Imperative: Retailers must engineer the links across their enterprise that tie decisions and actions with the outcomes desired. Of the three imperatives, this is arguably the most critical of all, as well as the most difficult for retailers to achieve.

Example: Two major grocery retailers merged their operations, uniting a strong footprint in North American markets with a presence in other markets around the world. Both go to market via well-established discount brands, but their online operations were miniscule compared with their brick-and-mortar businesses. Analytics is being used to gain insight into the strongest elements of the established brand identities so that everything can be unified under a single powerful brand, and the customer experience will be consistent regardless of channel. Analytics are also being used to develop customer-level metrics and track profit per household, rather than profit per square foot of retail space. With the insights gained from this data, customer marketing initiatives are being adapted to achieve personalised interaction and a faster, more focused customer experience overall.

Behind all three imperatives is a single seismic shift: every customer is increasingly digital, and so every retailer must increasingly become a digital business.

Leading retailers have adapted to the new reality, customising their offerings, in context and across channels to forge relationships with shoppers as individuals. They are consolidating functions and developing the skills needed to ensure a seamless customer experience. They are building the IT platforms and integrated data services needed to support such seamless experience.

But others are still striving to take an integrated enterprise-wide approach to analytics. For this reason, it is perhaps unsurprising that a large percentage of retail analytics practitioners have not yet seen an adequate return on their analytics investment. Recognising and responding to the imperatives revealed will be critical for retailers who seek to turn analytics into a competitive advantage.

Many retailers stand at a vital juncture in the journey toward Return on Investment (ROI). Those in the competitive set of the future are already using analytics to take a holistic view of the customer and to make decisions based on the customer experience, rather than on price plays, inventory issues or product-based considerations. They are integrating data from across channels to shape a seamless customer experience as the core of their digital enterprise. Everyone else has a choice to make. They can either respond in kind, embracing analytics to focus relentlessly on the insights, actions and outcomes they need to meet the competitive challenge, or continue with business as usual.

The choice is clear, the digital marketplace is the future, and the decisive difference is analytics.

Chris Donnelly is managing director of Retail at Accenture.

Summary: Retailers have to increasingly shift to the digital world where, according to Accenture research, customers want to be recognised and respected regardless of where they are doing their shopping: in-person, online or on a portable device.


Spending on make-up, diet and exercise, fragrances, skin care, hair products and cosmetic surgery adds up to a staggering $160bn per year worldwide.

South Koreans have more plastic surgery than people in any other nation per capita. One in 77 people went under the knife in 2011, according to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons.

But looking beautiful doesn’t require an operation, a syringe of Botox or a bank loan. By following these simple steps, you can get great deals on make-up, salon appointments and even special cosmetic tools — in 90 seconds.

Summary: If your wallet canât manage expensive creams or cosmetic surgery, consider these tips on saving money at the salon and make-up counter.


This is a Volkswagen Beetle that has been made angry. So angry in fact, it's sprouted some 544 horsepower. Welcome to the world of Global Rallycross.

Specifically, the Volkswagen Andretti Rallycross team, who will be entering this white hot Beetle later in the Red Bull GRC championship. As the name suggests, the team is run by Michael Andretti.

So, what are we looking at? Underneath sits a 1.6-litre very turbocharged and very intercooled four cylinder engine producing that headline grabbing 544hp. There's also a six-speed sequential gearbox thrown in for good measure, as well as a fixed ratio all-wheel-drive system featuring multi-plate limited slip diffs front and back.

There are ZF dampers, 14in diameter front and 11.8in rear vented brakes and four-pot aluminium calipers, 17in wheels and of course, a monster rear wing. Because racecar. It's also considerably fatter than the regular Beetle, too, and weighs in at a lithe 2,668lbs (about 300lbs less than a standard Beetle).

Which is all fine and dandy, but the other stat you really should consider is the 0-60mph time: 2.1 seconds. Whoa.

"I can't wait to race the No.34 Rockstar Energy Drink Beetle," said driver and TG USA host Tanner Foust. We'd like a go too, please. We suspect it might be a little quicker than the 500hp, 2-litre turbocharged one-off Beetle we drove last year in Los Angeles...

A version of this story appeared on TopGear.com.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Autos, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

Summary: The winged beast will run in the Red Bull Global Rallycross Championship.


These days it seems as though everybody wants a piece of the pop-culture commodity known as Whitey Bulger, the South Boston hood who murdered and made millions under the auspices of the FBI. He’s inspired a shelf-load of books, numerous articles, and much media coverage, and is the hero of an upcoming feature film based on the book “Black Mass,” now shooting in Boston with Johnny Depp starring as the notorious gangster.

But filmmaker Joe Berlinger isn’t so much inspired as disgusted by the notorious gangster in his newest documentary, “Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger,” and that goes double for all those in positions of public trust who abetted Bulger’s crimes. In every frame of the film, Berlinger’s heart goes out to the victims and their survivors. Though his documentary suffers from conventionality and slickness (as when he re-creates the Bulger trial proceedings), and his speculations about coverups tend to obfuscate rather than illuminate, he offers a forum for those who suffered to express their anger and pain, underscoring the evil of the man who victimized them.

People like Stephen Rakes. Whitey forced him to sell his South Boston liquor store at a cut-throat price. Rakes describes how Whitey put a gun on the table and picked up Rakes’s little boy as way of clinching the deal. “Ever since that day I’ll never be the same,” Rakes says. “I couldn’t protect my own children.”

Or Patricia Donahue, wife of Michael Donahue, an innocent bystander who gave a ride to a neighbor and ended up as collateral damage in one of Whitey’s many gangland executions. Or Steve Davis, brother of Debra Davis, an ex-girlfriend of Bulger hit man Stephen Flemmi. Bulger was accused of strangling her, then having her buried in a Dorchester marsh after ordering Flemmi to pull her teeth out with pliers to foil forensic identification. (A jury returned “no finding” on her murder.)

Local viewers might recognize these people from sound bites on the news during the media coverage of the Bulger trial last year. But here Berlinger gives them an opportunity to tell their stories in full. Many will also be familiar with the trial itself and its outcome, so “Whitey” doesn’t have the thrill of explosive revelations unfolding in real time, as did the Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky-directed “Paradise Lost” trilogy, a riveting account of a more obscure case (at least initially) of the justice system gone berserk. Berlinger’s wrap-up of Whitey’s career — from juvenile delinquent to murderous kingpin to seeming retiree with an arsenal and bundles of cash hidden in the walls of his Santa Monica, Calif., apartment — also covers familiar ground.

But his coverage of the trial goes well beyond the superficiality of a segment on the local news. He interviews the three prosecutors (who sit together and bear an unfortunate resemblance to the “see no evil” monkeys), the defense lawyer J. W. Carney Jr., and local media who have long covered the Bulger beat, including Globe reporter Shelley Murphy and columnist Kevin Cullen. He digs into the unholy alliance between Bulger and crooked FBI agent John Connolly, who granted Bulger criminal carte blanche in exchange for information about the local Mafia.

Weapons on display in a scene from “Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger.”

At this point Berlinger seems to lose his way and get caught up in a back and forth about Bulger’s claim that he was not an informant and would never murder women. It seems a moot point, and burrowing into it allows Bulger an opportunity to make the case that he could have made had he deigned to testify (and be cross-examined) at the trial.

Moreover, Berlinger turns the case into a fable about the elusiveness of truth and the distortion of conflicting points of view, a kind of South Boston “Rashômon.” Whether he succeeds at this or not might depend on one’s taste for conspiracy theories. Was the Bulger defense’s strategy of proving he had been given federal immunity squelched by the court because it was a red herring or because it was a coverup of more government perfidy? Who is the biggest liar — Whitey Bulger, the FBI, or hardened assassins like John Martorano, who testified against Bulger and in return was sentenced to only 12 years after pleading guilty to 20 murders?

Tough calls, and Berlinger has not added clarity or closure to the debate. But to his credit he consistently falls back on the point of view that too often gets lost in the sensationalism and subterfuge — that of the victimized.

“Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger” trailer:

- Bulger verdict puts end to historic saga

- Cullen: In the end, everything has passed Whitey by

- Special section: The trial of James ‘Whitey’ Bulger

Summary: “Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger” review: Filmmaker Joe Berlinger covers familiar ground in this account of the wicked ways of Whitey Bulger.


His story amounts to an American triumph. But there’s a curious wrinkle in the journey of Arturo Sandoval, the celebrated trumpeter and bandleader who has been a boisterous presence on the international music scene, particularly since defecting from Cuba and moving to the United States in 1990.

Sandoval’s application for citizenship was initially rejected because he’d been a member of the Communist Party back home, before renouncing his Cuban citizenship while on tour in Europe with Dizzy Gillespie.

But if he was the sort to keep score, Sandoval now has the ultimate answer to those Immigration and Naturalization Service employees who once denied him. Last year he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in a class that also included former president Bill Clinton. The music business has also lined up to decorate him with honors; he’s won 10 Grammy Awards, to date.

As the 25th anniversary of his dramatic life change approaches, Sandoval sounds like a man who is content to enjoy his success and take things a little slower.

Though he first achieved fame with the Cuban group Irakere in the 1970s, he’s said in the past that the Cuban government stifled his progress, both commercially and artistically. For a while after his defection, he worked at a pace that may have indicated a desire to make up for lost time.

“That happened for a while but not anymore,” he says, speaking on the phone while spending a few days off in Las Vegas, “Now I love to relax more, and I enjoy the moment and I play in the way I should, not even thinking about what many hundreds of opportunities I missed in the past. That’s history already. I can not think all the time about what could have happened. It’s better to live in the moment.”

Sandoval is most often associated with Afro-Cuban jazz, though he’s also written classical pieces and scored several films. He’s become a serious piano student since moving to the States — he says the Cuban government wouldn’t issue him a piano because, as a trumpet player, he “didn’t need it” — and onstage will often play piano, flugelhorn, and percussion in addition to the trumpet.

“A lot of times when he records stuff, he’ll play all the trumpet parts; he’ll play trombone, French horn, piano, percussion,” says longtime friend and current manager Frank Vardaros. An accomplished trumpeter himself, Vardaros was a student at Berklee College of Music when he first met Sandoval, who was in town for a gig. “It’s crazy,” he continues. “It’s like he’s a mad scientist in there.”

The crowd of musicians who protest the term “jazz,” or insist their music is without genre, could field an All-Star big band, many times over. But though Sandoval’s lively, percussion-heavy sound frequently is informed by the Latin elements most famously introduced to jazz by his mentor Gillespie, the trumpeter is keen to avoid labels.

“I really don’t like when the people try to put a sticker on my forehead that says ‘Latin jazz’ or something like that — I really hate that so much, that’s not fair,” he says, directing an expletive at those who would do so. “For me, it’s kind of an act of discrimination: There’s a Latino guy, OK, put a Latin jazz sign in front. Whatever sounds good, I love it. I enjoy playing or composing or orchestrating any kind of good music.”

Indeed, his 2003 album “Trumpet Evolution” sketches out a history of the instrument in jazz, from the music’s early days up through the work of Wynton Marsalis. The technically dexterous Sandoval has recorded album-length tributes to Gillespie and Clifford Brown, and has a collection of works by the Mexican songwriter Armando Manzanero ready to go later this year.

But whether playing with a big band or his sextet — he’ll be with the latter ensemble on Sunday, when he plays the second day of the Boston Globe/WGBH Summer Arts Weekend at Copley Square — Sandoval is probably best known in the live context, where his fluency with the higher ranges of his instrument has been known to elicit squeals in the cheap seats.

“That is the most important thing for me,” he says of a close connection with a lively audience. “If we establish that kind of communication, that’s my best gift from God. I feel like the happiest person. We are very lucky. I can’t lie to you and say that happens every night, but we experience that feeling very often.”

Sandoval’s summer itinerary also includes a six-day span of two shows a night at the Blue Note in New York, and one-off appearances in Singapore, Taipei, and Macau. (He returns to Boston to play Scullers Jazz Club in November.) But though he exerts a global influence, he runs at a less frenetic pace than he once did.

“I was trying to play millions of notes per minute, things I couldn’t play before,” he says of his first years in America. “I wanted to prove everything. I’m 65 years old now. I don’t think I have anything to prove.”

Summary: Jeremy Goodwin interviews Cuban expat trumpeter, bandleader, and media personality Arturo Sandoval, who is one of the headliners for the Summer Arts Weekend festival, July 26-27


Corey Griffin (right) alongside siblings Michael and Casey

A 27-year-old man died in a Nantucket diving accident, hours after he raised $100,000 for a Lou Gehrig's disease charity in honor of his friend who inspired the ice-bucket challenge sensation.

that Corey Griffin dove into the water from the "Juice Guys" building at around 2 a.m. Saturday. An off-duty lifeguard was nearby and recovered Griffin, who was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Griffin's family says he was friends with former Boston College baseball player Pete Frates, whose family and friends launched the ice-bucket challenge to raise awareness and funds for charity. Twenty-nine-year-old Frates was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative disease, also known as ALS, in 2012. The movement has taken off

recently. Griffin, of Scituate, had been fundraising in Nantucket.

Syd Butler and Seth Meyers dump a bucket of ice on Mickey Rourke

Lloyd Bishop / NBC / NBCU Photo Bank / Getty

Summary: 27-year-old Corey Griffin raised $100,000 for a Lou Gehrig's disease charity


Listen to Britain, by Victor Burgin

Victor Burgin is the conceptual artist's conceptual artist. Though his name may not be immediately familiar, he still gets the theorists excited, having been at the forefront of every philosophical fad to have affected the arts in the past 30 years. Burgin claims: "You don't need a knowledge of psychoanalytic theory to deal with work like this - you simply need to know how to dream." Dreaming about Marxism, semiotics and structuralism will certainly give you a head start.

This is Burgin's first major show since his return from 20 years' teaching in the US. It surveys three decades of work cleaving to various critical agendas, and concludes with a newly commissioned video, Listen to Britain, that the artist claims to be a post-September 11 meditation on his homecoming.

The show demonstrates that Burgin appropriated the work of Alfred Hitchcock while Douglas Gordon was still in short trousers, and that he devised elliptical wall texts before Fiona Banner could do joined-up writing. But it also proves that the followers have implemented these ideas with far more wit and flair than the master.

Burgin may have written the book on the theoretical concepts that have informed every subsequent generation of artists, but who gets excited about a textbook? Burgin's work is determinedly drab, and the erudite obliquities of his "scripto-visual discourses" (that's photographs with words attached) seem almost to defy you to pay attention.

What really counts against the work is its lack of humour. Signs of wit only fitfully emerge. Listen to Britain, which shows a 1940s film clip of a girl standing on a hilltop looking pensive, is accompanied by excerpts from a contemporary opera, so we are actually listening to Britten. An inscription evoking mechanical sex "the way a man planes boards" is accompanied by a photo of an airport departure lounge, reminding us how we mechanically board planes. This seems neither particularly profound nor terribly funny. Dare one admit to being plain bored?

· Until February 23. Details: 0161-200 1500.

Summary: Cornerhouse, Manchester.


FORTUNE — Businesspeople love to read stories about how other businesspeople got going in their careers. It’s one of the reasons Fortune publishes its “How We Got Started” series that tells the delightful and substantive yarns of how businesses like the Papyrus card retailer and Banana Republic found their ways in the business world.

Such a wonderful tale appears in the Oct. 4th edition of the 2,000-circulation Bowdoin Orient, a student-run weekly, about one Reed Hastings, a mathematics major from the class of 1983. The end of the piece, by staffer Emma Peters, recounts how Hastings founded Netflix, the DVD-rental concern that has become a video streaming company worth $19 billion.

You can read about Netflix (NFLX) just about anywhere, of course. But this Bowdoin piece — brought to my attention by Andy Serwer, Bowdoin class of 1981, and Fortune’s managing editor — has terrific stuff about Hastings before he became the business mogul we know today. What’s remarkable about what the Orient unearthed is that Hastings hasn’t really changed all that much over the years.

MORE: Facebook without some annoyances

A man of eclectic tastes, Hastings studied math and later artificial intelligence, but he always had a head for business. He delayed attending Bowdoin to continue a summer job as a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman. Hastings told staff writer Emma Peters: “I loved it, strange as that might sound. You get to meet a lot of different people.” He also showed a precocious aptitude for business plans. After participating as a mentor in a self-paced calculus program at Bowdoin, Hastings penned a detailed analysis of how the school could make it better. “We ran the program for well over 10 years and no student had ever turned in anything like that,” said a professor. Later, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland, Hastings helped villagers build a better system for delivering water and worked with them to improve their honey-bee business. Both were side projects unrelated to his Peace Corps work.

For everyone who thinks that careers are linear or that successful people know exactly we’re they’re going, a quotation from the humble Hastings might be illuminating. “Mine was a path of serendipity, but it was a path of just being passionate about whatever I was doing at that time,” he told the student paper. “I’m as surprised as anyone about my business success.”

Summary: Bowdoin student newspaper illuminates early career of Reed Hastings, Class of '83.


To set the scene, the year is 1815.

James Madison is president. In Europe: the Congress of Vienna. Bismarck is a babe. Pushkin is just starting out. Napoleon will soon be trounced at Waterloo.

In music, Haydn has died six years earlier. Schubert is a teenager. Brahms is not yet born.

Meanwhile in Boston, a group of 16 men is laying the groundwork for, of all things, an oratorio society. “Too long,” they boldly declare, “have those to whom heaven has given a voice to perform and an ear to enjoy music neglected a science which has done much towards subduing the ferocious passions of men and giving innocent pleasure to society.”

They pledge themselves to improving the performance of sacred music, and “introducing into more general use the works of Handel and Haydn and other eminent composers.”

Selected from dozens of historical events, a list of 20 milestones in the Handel & Haydn Society’s 200-year evolution.

At their meetings, this group of almost exclusively amateur musicians “tunes” its voices with spirits. Then they lift them in song. By Christmas Day they are ready to perform at King’s Chapel. One thousand people turn out and hear arias from Haydn’s “Creation” and Handel’s “Messiah.” A local newspaper instantly declares it the best performance the city has ever heard.

And there we have it: The Handel and Haydn Society has arrived.

Incredibly enough, it has not fallen silent since that day. This fact makes H&H the longest-running performing arts organization in America. It also means that this month, the society finally arrives at the milestone of its 200th-anniversary season, beginning with a festive program on Friday, to be performed in what is by comparison an upstart venue: Symphony Hall.

Admittedly, one does not always stop to think of H&H in these long historic terms. On most days, the group dresses the part of other ensembles that count their history in mere single digits, or maybe decades. Like them, it has brightly lighted office space, rents concert halls, and uses e-mail marketing and brand consultants and hashtags. But it is not really like them. It has lived many lives.

The society has performed the American premiere of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” and it has jammed with Chick Corea. It has commissioned an oratorio from Beethoven. That Beethoven. And it has sung in some of the largest concerts that the world has ever seen, with a chorus of 20,000 singers, an orchestra of 2,000, and a group of Boston firemen who beat on anvils.

It has thrived and it has stagnated. It has nearly shuttered many times. It has shifted with changing fashions, and it has ignored fashions. It waited a shocking 142 years before granting women the right to membership. It performed for three US presidents in the 19th century. It has sung completely forgotten works such as Anton Rubinstein’s opera “The Tower of Babel.” And it has sung “Messiah” many, many, many times. It has needed, and sought, professional help. It has thrived again.

James T. Gearon, Thompson Stone, Courtenay Guild, and Paul F. Spain at the opening of a time capsule in 1940.

Over the next season, the society will be placing its vast, multitudes-containing history at center stage, with a richly narrated new coffee table book, a Boston Public Library exhibition opening in March, and a set of programs spotlighting works that the society has introduced in this country, among them the “St. Matthew Passion,” Haydn’s “Creation,” Mendelssohn’s “Elijah,” and — could it be otherwise? — Handel’s “Messiah.”

To flip through these pages of H&H’s past is at once to summon the history of classical music in Boston, and in America. The society’s founders, and its later stewards, grappled with all of the big questions: How to bring a European art to American soil, and then how to make it this country’s own. Who should perform it, and who should listen. How it should change over time. How it should not change.

An archival Handel and Haydn Society poster promoting a Christmas 1875 performance of Handel’s “Messiah.”

Within the narrower field of oratorio singing, always at the heart of H&H, the society reflected shifting tastes. In the later decades of the 19th century, its performing forces swelled to vast numbers, indulging the period’s love of grandness. In 1865, it performed with a chorus of 700. H&H preserved these aesthetic values, at times creakily, well into the 20th century, switching paths only after a sharp jolt attributed to a single lacerating review by the former Globe critic Michael Steinberg in 1965. New leadership soon arrived, and the society gradually embraced the new norms of the early-music movement, with its emphases of leaner forces, faster tempos, lighter articulations, and a rhythmic sensibility linked to older Baroque forms of dance.

Of course, one of the delectable ironies is that when H&H embraced so-called historically informed performance, it was reaching back to an era that included its own history. And judging from what we can piece together about H&H’s own earliest performances — said to have a chorus of 90 men and 10 women, with men singing alto parts in falsetto and sometimes doubling the sopranos, with German and Italian texts possibly delivered in English translation — it’s clear that these musicians of 1815 never got the memo on period performance practice.

The point is not that the past recovered by today’s early-music movement never existed, but that it was multiple, and that historically informed performance depends on whose history you are looking at. It also reflects contemporary tastes. Indeed, the most revealing exercise would be for H&H to attempt to reconstruct one of its own early performances. That would be something to hear.

In 1815, the H&H repertoire was not so distant from, well, the year 1815. Gottlieb Graupner, one of the two professional musicians in the society’s founding class, had played oboe in a London orchestra of Haydn. In 1823, the society did reach out to Beethoven himself for a work, and there were reports of an “oratorio for Boston” on his to-do list, but he never delivered. (Let’s imagine him muttering something about the late string quartets.)

In truth, far from a tale of a coolly visionary organization gliding augustly toward its own destiny, the early chapters of H&H were rough-and-tumble years, when crises came early and often. The society was saved from one near-extinction by an accidentally lucrative foray into publishing (specifically, Lowell Mason’s book of church music). The early years also featured splinter groups and turf wars, choruses like the Boston Oratorio Society, which had the temerity to go toe-to-toe with H&H, performing Sigismund Neukomm’s “Hymn of the Night” on the very same night. Talk about a provocation!

The closer you look, the more the society’s longevity seems due to a combination of foresight, the passionate devotion of its membership, and sheer good luck. Another crisis came in the mid-1840s, when the public’s tastes were shifting away from oratorios. The society was desperate for an infusion of new leadership. Suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, a young and idealistic band of crack German musicians, fleeing the failed European revolutions of 1848, washed up on Boston shores.

The Germania Musical Society, as it came to be known, was a sensation. Before long, its conductor was also leading H&H, bringing his two groups together for the local premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1853. That tenure was short, but another Germanian named Carl Zerrahn then took up the H&H tiller and held it for over four decades, a distinguished reign that transformed what was still basically a glorified church choir into a real performance group capable of holding its own on an increasingly crowded music scene. Zerrahn’s organist was B. J. Lang, a locally born musician who had traveled to Europe to study with Liszt, and then loomed large in musical Boston upon his return.

H&H leadership battles and internal politics spilled onto the pages of the city’s dailies and were the stuff of editorial cartoons — one of them depicting the mighty Lang shelved in a box, while Zerrahn conducts “Why do the Heathen Rage.” There were also triennial festivals that grew ever more ambitious in size.

In 1869, H&H and Zerrahn joined the efforts of an entrepreneurial bandmaster named Patrick Gilmore, who convened a National Peace Jubilee with a chorus of 10,000 and an orchestra of 500. A new building was erected for an audience of 30,000. Those Boston firemen were recruited for Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus.” Gilmore got even more audacious with his 1872 “World Peace Jubilee.” Chorus: over 17,000. This time Johann Strauss Jr. attended and led his waltzes, with the help of 100 assistant conductors. The “Anvil Chorus” was punctuated with cannon blasts. President Grant attended too. We are told he liked the cannons best. The new H&H book describes Strauss as being “mobbed much like Frank Sinatra, Elvis, or the Beatles, with hundreds of women clamoring for a lock of his hair.”

But could classical music have its own homegrown American stars? By the early 20th century, American musicians were more than ready to take the lead. Too often they were not given the chance. When Zerrahn finally stepped down in 1898, the society had an opportunity to choose a distinguished American-born leader: George Whitefield Chadwick. Instead it passed over Chadwick not once but twice, in favor of musicians with a European pedigree.

That this kind of prejudice was widely held and persisted well into the 20th century — witness how the BSO rebuffed Koussevitzky’s call for Leonard Bernstein as his successor — does not make it any less regrettable. “The H&H folks were vociferous in my praise, both as conductor and composer,” Chadwick bitterly recalled in his memoirs, “but they forgot it all a year or two later, when they needed a new conductor and sent to New York for a German singing teacher that nobody had ever heard of.”

The theme of history itself bobs and weaves through the pages of H&H’s history, its shifting awareness of its own increasingly venerable past. At the organization’s 50th season, it sealed with great fanfare an inscribed silver box, a time capsule, filled with several musical journals and newspapers of the day containing coverage of its concerts. There were strict instructions not to open the box until the organization’s 100th anniversary in 1915.

Harry Christophers conducts the orchestra, chorus, and soloists last year.

But when that centenary rolled round, no one even remembered the box, which was left languishing in a safe and discovered only in 1940. When it was then opened, one newspaper reported choristers in titters about the period ads proclaiming “The Great Invention of the Age — Hoop Skirts.” The 1940 clip appears in the newly published H&H book, allowing us to marvel at earlier generations marveling at earlier generations.

The longest directorship in the early 20th century belonged to Thompson Stone. An earnest paternalism comes through in one 1934 letter he sent to his enthusiastic charges: “The singer has a special task,” Stone instructs. “He must have a message to deliver, voice to convey the message, and a technique to express it. So-o-o-o, begin to vocalize. How’s the breadth? Does the voice sound well? Can you ‘make it behave’? Practice — every day.”

The year 1967 marked a major turning point, with the arrival of music director Thomas Dunn, who broadened the society’s repertoire beyond choral masterworks and, more seismically, began integrating principles from the burgeoning early-music movement. It was Dunn who set the society on its modern course. H&H reduced and fully professionalized its chorus around 1980, another major turning point. Five years later, Christopher Hogwood arrived, and switched the orchestra over to period instruments.

In more recent memory, Grant Llewellyn extended H&H’s range to orchestral works of the mid and even late 19th century. Roger Norrington, as artistic adviser, injected some refreshing irreverence. The society’s educational work has taken on a new prominence. And 2009 marked the arrival of Harry Christophers, a veteran of the vibrant British choral scene, who has brought new luster to the chorus.

And yet, among all these other things, the society’s history also reminds us that behind H&H’s present-day professional sheen lies uncountable hours of service from everyday Bostonians, the sedulous work and proud commitment of thousands of amateur singers faithfully invested in the rigors and joys of communal music-making. Movingly, in one H&H history compiled at the close of the 19th century, dozens upon dozens of members’ names are listed, some followed by an asterisk. A small, unobtrusive note explains this marking in deceptively clerical terms: The membership of each of these individuals was ended only by their own deaths. The list of names fills page after page. The asterisks speak for themselves.

The Handel and Haydn Society, as it now turns bracingly toward its own future, stands on the shoulders of its first two centuries. Its history is a landmark for all of Boston. Let the celebrations begin.

Summary: As Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society reaches its milestone 200th-anniversary season, Jeremy Eichler provides an overview of the institution’s venerability and values.


The Securities and Exchange Commission has ordered a Massachusetts man to pay $727,000 in a penny-stock fraud case.

The SEC had alleged that Geoffrey J. Eiten and his company, National Financial Communications Inc., promoted penny stocks in a publication called “OTC Special Situations Reports,’’ in an effort to increase the share prices of companies with stocks that traded for pennies.

The SEC said Eiten and his company made misrepresentations and omissions to investors on behalf of his clients — companies looking to boost their rock-bottom stock prices. According to the regulator’s complaint, Eiten issued statements about the companies’ finances without ensuring they were true.

The judgment, entered in federal court in Boston on Tuesday, permanently bars Eiten from participating in penny-stock offerings, including engaging in activities with a broker on such stocks. The judgment also ordered Eiten to pay disgorgement of $605,262, plus interest of $71,767 and a civil penalty of $50,000.

In a previous default judgment against NFC in 2013, the court ordered the company to pay more than $1.6 million.

Summary: The Securities and Exchange Commission has ordered a Massachusetts man to pay $727,000 in a penny stock fraud case.


Many will try, few will survive, says an Asian manufacturer working on several of them

Two new tablet computers based on Google’s GOOG Android operating system — one from Samsung, the other by Toshiba — were introduced at a trade show in Berlin this week, part of a wave of knockoff designs inspired by Apple’s AAPL iPad.

Many of them will disappear within a year, Compal Electronics president Ray Chen told investors on Wednesday, as the new arrivals quickly discover that competing with the iPad is not as easy as it looks.

Chen should know. The giant Taiwanese original equipment manufacturer is building tablets for three of the biggest players in the market: Acer, Lenovo and Dell DELL .

His remarks, picked up by DigiTimes, echo a report issued in late August by iSuppli‘s Rhonda Alexander.

The new tablets’ specs are likely look better on paper, Alexander noted. And indeed, both Samsung Galaxy Tab and Toshiba’s Folio 100 have built-in cameras and can run Adobe ADBE Flash, two things conspicuously missing from Apple’s iPad. But, she added:

“It’s still unlikely that any of the competitors will be able to equal the overall performance experience of the iPad. Apple’s complete integration of hardware, software, operating system and applications is a major piece of what makes the device a standout. And on that basis—an integrated hardware/software design—we don’t see anything in the marketplace at present that seems likely to rival what Apple is offering in tablets today.”

The proliferation of devices, each with different specs, actually works in Apple’s favor.

“Apple’s interface and many of its applications are geared to the pixels per inch (ppi) and screen configuration of the iPad,” she writes, “optimizing their appearance on that device. Developers designing applications to work across the broader base of new offerings from the various competitors are facing a mix of pixel densities, screen sizes, and touch technologies.”

According to Alexander, Apple will have captured by the end of 2010, more than 74% of the tablet sales. And she predicts that despite growing competition, it will dominate the market for at least the next two years, with 70.4% and 61.7% of tablet sales in 2011 and 2012, respectively. (See chart.)

Chen’s numbers aren’t that different. He predicts that between them, all the iPad knockoffs combined will sell no more than 10-12 million units worldwide next year. According to Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty, Apple is currently building 2 million iPads per month and has told its suppliers to ramp that up to 3 million per month, which implies a 2011 run-rate of 36 million.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Summary: Many will try, few will survive, says an Asian manufacturer working on several of them Two new tablet computers based on Google's Android operating system -- one from Samsung, the other by Toshiba -- were introduced at a trade show in Berlin this week, part of a wave of knockoff designs inspired by Apple's iPad.…


How executive shuffles, product changes, and a delayed IPO paid off for a couple of private equity firms.

FORTUNE — In September 2009, Silver Lake Partners and venture firm Andreessen-Horowitz bought Skype from eBay, where it had become the Kurt Cobain of technology companies (wildly popular, deeply troubled). The value of that deal: $2.75 billion.

In May 2011 the new owners announced that they were selling the company to Microsoft for $8.5 billion.

Voilà! Six billion bucks in less than two years.

For many, the Skype deal is seen — along with exuberance for the LinkedIn IPO and sky-high private valuations of companies such as Facebook — as a sign of a fast-inflating technology bubble: What else could explain such a lofty price tag for a company that lost $7 million in 2010 and $418 million the year before? What could have changed in just two years to make Skype nearly three times as valuable?

A lot, according to the executives behind the transaction, who spoke with Fortune exclusively about the strategic and tactical moves they made to transform the company from a quirky Internet phone service into a sophisticated and growing voice and video communications app. Indeed, Skype had long-standing plans to go public, and its backers felt sure it would have thrived on its own. “We have occasional fantasies of calling up [Microsoft] and torpedoing the deal,” quips Marc Andreessen, founder of Andreessen-Horowitz. “I’m thrilled with the deal but would be equally thrilled if it fell apart.”

The key to fixing Skype, which eBay EBAY struggled to integrate into its auction site, was to win over the company’s mercurial founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who actually owned the rights to the software underlying the service — without that intellectual property, it would be impossible to unleash Skype’s potential. The problem: The two had been pushed aside after the eBay acquisition and had no intention of throwing a bone to the next guys who wanted to buy their invention. In fact, the moment Silver Lake floated a buyout offer, Zennström, a Swede, and Friis, a Dane, sued all the parties involved.

Egon Durban, the Silver Lake partner who was leading the transaction, realized he needed help with the founders. Enter Andreessen, himself a founder (Netscape, Opsware), an eBay and Facebook board member, and a guru to a new generation of tech entrepreneurs. To Andreessen, Skype was a potential gem — one of the few great network-effect tech companies ever created.

Andreessen agreed to invest $50 million of his venture firm’s money in the deal on the bold assumption that he and Durban ultimately would win the founders’ trust. He assumed correctly: Zennström and Friis accepted a 14% stake in the new ownership structure in exchange for giving all the IP back to Skype. With Skype’s software rights secured, the investors went into turnaround mode. Durban, who says he spent about half his time over two years on Skype matters, focused on bringing in new management. He and Andreessen quietly changed out 29 of Skype’s 30 top managers. (In contrast, the recent firing of eight executives before the closing of the Microsoft MSFT deal — they’ll lose their chance at million-dollar payouts — caused quite a stir.) Thanks to its status as a venture-backed company with options to grant, Skype was able to double its engineering ranks and open a Skype facility in Silicon Valley.

The new team furiously started spitting out added features and new versions of Skype every four to six weeks, and dove into significant new businesses, including smartphone apps, deals to embed Skype in consumer products like TVs and game consoles, and partnerships with Facebook and Verizon Wireless VZ . “The Facebook partnership was critical,” Durban says. “And the partnerships with carriers — they had thought of us as an enemy. Getting Verizon signed up signaled that one of the world’s largest carriers was not at war with us but was supportive.”

In fact, Skype was suddenly surfing tectonic shifts in communications. The wave of iPhones and iPads and Androids in 2009 and 2010 pushed wireless carriers to the realization that their most profitable business would be providing data services, not voice calls, and they came to see apps such as Skype as assets that would help drive sales of smartphones and pricey data plans.

By the fall of 2010, just a year after the buyout, Skype was surging: Users had climbed to 600 million from about 400 million a year earlier — and it saw rising usage of its video calling services. But it needed a CEO who could take the company public. (Josh Silverman, who was the CEO of Skype when it was a unit of eBay, had stayed on.) Durban contacted Tony Bates, a senior executive at Cisco CSCO . They talked for nearly three hours — on Skype, naturally.

The clincher was Bates’s meeting with Andreessen. “I’d always been a big admirer but had never met him,” Bates says. “Going into the Andreessen-Horowitz office was an experience. They have this wonderful library in the lobby, and I looked for a couple of books that were special to me. One was Neuromancer, by William Gibson. I couldn’t find it, so that became a good opening to the conversation.”

Bates, a Brit with a deep technical background and big-company chops, was perhaps one of the few executives — “a needle in a haystack,” Durban calls him — who could wrangle strong-willed engineers spread across half the globe. He joined in October 2010, and Skype postponed its IPO, which gave Bates time to get the company into better shape.

Little did the executives know the delay would work in their favor: By early 2011, Skype was developing new ways to make money, including selling advertisers airtime during Skype video calls. Executives started talking up the video business — and a forthcoming IPO. Peter Klein, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, had been hearing the chatter and reached out to Durban in April. Microsoft, which had been looking for ways to bolster its fledgling efforts in mobile-phone software, saw Skype as a potential partner for voice and video calls; it also saw the software as an interesting way to enhance its broadband-connected Xbox gaming platform.

Durban, who jokingly likens the deal to marrying off one of his daughters, and Andreessen are uncharacteristically mum when it comes to the juicy details of the negotiations, and Microsoft declined to make Klein available for the story, but clearly Microsoft was bidding not against another buyer but against the valuation Skype expected to secure from its public offering. For Durban, Andreessen, and Bates, $8.5 billion in cash was an offer too good to refuse. So far U.S. antitrust officials have signed off on the deal, and European Union approval is pending.

So did Microsoft overpay for Skype, contributing to a new tech bubble? Spokesman Frank Shaw likens the deal to Microsoft’s $240 million investment for a 1.6% stake in Facebook in 2007 — now worth roughly $1.3 billion based on reports that put Facebook’s value at about $80 billion. “History doesn’t always repeat,” he says, “but there are similarities in terms of what people are saying about the Skype deal.”

Certainly Microsoft will be buying a fast-growing, well-positioned global asset with an unbeatable brand. But that’s what eBay thought when it bought Skype in 2005 for $2.6 billion. The devil is in how that asset is managed, and whether it can integrate with existing products and services. eBay blew it on both counts. If Microsoft does the same, we could wind up writing this story again with different names — or maybe some of the same ones — a few years from now.

–Kevin Maney is co-author of the upcoming book The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future … Just Enough.

–This article is from the July 25, 2011 issue of Fortune.

Summary: How executive shuffles, product changes, and a delayed IPO paid off for a couple of private equity firms. By Kevin Maney, contributor FORTUNE -- In September 2009, Silver Lake Partners and venture firm Andreessen-Horowitz bought Skype from eBay, where it had become the Kurt Cobain of technology companies (wildly popular, deeply troubled). The value of…


While much of the frenzy around the holidays invokes images of Wal-Mart WMT door busters and Amazon AMZN warehouses, Starbucks is proving itself to be one of the kings of the season.

The coffee giant has announced that one out of every seven Americans received one of its gift cards this holiday season. That’s up from one in eight Americans in 2013. Doing a little math (based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s population clock of about 320 million Americans), that implies that nearly 46 million received Starbucks gift cards in 2014 versus about 40 million in the year-earlier period.

It isn’t exactly a surprise that Starbucks SBUX would do so well when it comes to generating gift card sales during the key retail shopping season. A National Retail Federation survey recently reported that one in five had planned to pick up coffee shop gift cards this holiday season, one of the most popular choices for gift cards.

A Starbucks spokeswoman told Fortune that nearly 2.5 million Starbucks cards were activated on Christmas Eve alone, implying the coffee company benefits greatly from those looking to scoop up a last-minute gift. And more than $1.1 billion were loaded on the company’s cards in the U.S. and Canada throughout the most recent holiday season. To add some perspective, Starbucks generated $16.4 billion in revenue globally in the most recent fiscal year.

Gift cards are a popular strategy employed by retailers to generate more traffic to their stores, and Starbucks is particularly good at incorporating those dollars into its loyalty program. The value of a gift card can be uploaded and combined with a java lover’s Starbucks card, which offers broader rewards and discounts, as well as promotions (including the recently announced “Starbucks for Life” promotion).

Summary: Coffee giant says 1 in 7 Americans received one of its cards.


Wall Street, caught flat footed by Apple’s latest earnings, issues a slew of new price targets

Having scrambled to catch up to Apple’s AAPL rising share price in advance of the company’s quarterly earnings report, analysts fell over themselves the next day issuing price targets to reflect the buying orgy that took the stock over $202 a share in after-hours trading Monday.

According to the running list maintained at AAPLinvestors.net, 23 analysts raised their targets on Tuesday, to prices that ranged from $210 (Goldman Sach’s David Bailey) to $280 (UBS’ Maynard Ums).

The AAPLinvestor list, maintained as a labor of love by a former adman (and Apple shareholder) named Terry Gregory, is copied below the fold. [Note Gregory does not include Jim Cramer’s price target; you can draw your own conclusions.]

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Summary: Wall Street, caught flat footed by Apple's latest earnings, issues a slew of new price targets Having scrambled to catch up to Apple's rising share price in advance of the company's quarterly earnings report, analysts fell over themselves the next day issuing price targets to reflect the buying orgy that took the stock over $202…


updated 03/24/2015 AT 08:20 PM EDT

•originally published 03/24/2015 AT 07:30 PM EDT

Another cable network is looking to capitalize on the public's interest in the transgender community by airing a real-life version of the

This summer, ABC Family will premiere

, an unscripted show that chronicles the life of 17-year-old Ben Lehwald of Evanstan, Illinois, as his father Charlie transitions to become Carly.

The docu-series from Ryan Seacrest Productions will take Ben's perspective as he watches his dad divorce his mom, Suzy, before undergoing gender reassignment surgery.

The series will also focus on Ben's girlfriend Danielle, whose dad is also transitioning into a woman.

"I want to be able to provide guidance for kids who are going through it," Ben tells PEOPLE. "Maybe this will help them being able to deal with it."

"This story in particular is really specific and beautiful and we loved that it's from the point of view of this teen boy just trying to figure it out," adds Karey Burke, the network's exec VP of programming and development. "The journey of acceptance is utterly authentic. Our network has a history and certain currency not being afraid of shows that tackle social issues, that shed light on current affairs. So its really in our DNA to be exploring these kind of stories."

debuts, Discovery Life will introduce

. The unscripted series will follow eight people, six of whom are transgender women. Also this summer, TLC will unveil

, a show focusing on

Meanwhile, it's not clear whether E! will air a new reality series that chronicles

that production was halted because Jenner isn't certain the production company, Bunim/Murray, is the right fit.

"Bruce's primary goal is to bring awareness to this issue in order to help others (in the transgender community)," says the source that has knowledge of the situation, which TMZ was first to report. "He is not sure that E! and a reality show is the best format to do that."

Summary: The network air a real-life version of the Amazon drama Transparent


Amazon is testing its drone delivery system at a secret location in Canada, according to The Guardian. The report follows the company’s complaints over U.S. aviation regulators’ speed.

The company is using the undisclosed location to perfect a system CEO Jeff Bezos first revealed at the end of 2013 called Amazon Prime Air. The company’s goal is to use small autonomous drones to deliver customers’ packages with speeds unmatched by ground vehicles. However, it isn’t clear if Amazon’s drone plans would mesh with proposed Federal Aviation Administration regulations governing commercial drone flights.

The largest internet retailer in the world is keeping the location of its new test site closely guarded. What can be revealed is that the company’s formidable team of roboticists, software engineers, aeronautics experts and pioneers in remote sensing – including a former NASA astronaut and the designer of the wingtip of the Boeing 787 – are now operating in British Columbia.

The end goal is to utilize what Amazon sees as a slice of virgin airspace – above 200ft, where most buildings end, and below 500ft, where general aviation begins. Into that aerial slice the company plans to pour highly autonomous drones of less than 55lbs, flying through corridors 10 miles or longer at 50mph and carrying payloads of up to 5lbs that account for 86% of all the company’s packages.

Amazon recently received FAA clearance to test some of its delivery drones in the United States. However, Amazon said last week that FAA approval only applied to an aircraft model that was already obsolete.

The FAA is expected to vote on long-delayed commercial drone rules by the end of the year, potentially putting an end to years of uncertainty regarding the practice.

Summary: It's a secret location in the Great White North


People already use mobile phones to handle their banking and investments. So why wouldn’t they want to use their phones to connect with doctors, to save time and money?

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins is betting that doctors will increasingly depend on telemedicine to diagnose and treat patients who check in with them remotely through mobile devices.

As Kleiner Perkins investment partner Mike Abbott explains, health care is one of the largest segments of the U.S. economy at $2.7 trillion dollars. But it is also the most inefficient because of the big price tag for patient care. Mobile, in particular, can lower costs and still help people manage their health care needs effectively, he said.

Today, Kleiner said that it has invested in Spruce, a startup that lets patients connect with dermatologists about conditions like Acne, aging skin, and psoriasis – and get prescriptions and personalized treatment, all through their mobile phones. This funding adds to Kleiner’s bet on telemedicine after previously investing in Teladoc, a company that coordinates virtual appointments with doctors.

The investment in Spruce is Kleiner’s first since it was cleared last week of gender discrimination allegations in a high-profile trial in San Francisco. A former female partner who had sued the firm lost the case after the jury ruled in Kleiner’s favor. The case cast an unflattering light on the firm by exposing emails showing bickering among colleagues, big egos and disorganization. But with this latest investment, Kleiner can show that it is returning to some semblance of business as usual after the court room drama of the past month.

Spruce, which has raised $15 million in new funding in this round from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Baseline Ventures and Cowboy Ventures, was founded by former Kleiner Perkins investment partner Ray Bradford.

Bradford says that dermatology, in particular, works well with remote treatment. Skin problems are usually visible and therefore relatively easy to diagnose through photos and video. Skin treatment is also one of the most common reasons patients see doctors. But because it often takes a month for an appointment, many people have to resort to buying over the counter medicine.

For $40, Spruce offers people a way to connect with a local dermatologist by letting them send photos of their condition, message their doctor for up to 30 days, get personalized treatment plan within 24 hours and receive prescriptions for medicine. This compares to an average of $100 for an in-person visit at a traditional dermatologist practice, Bradford says.

“With the recent changes in health care, consumers are bearing more costs than before, so they are going to vote with their dollars on health products that work for them,” says Abbott, the venture capitalist.

For now, however, Spruce lacks an important element that is necessary for it to become widely used: buy-in by insurance companies. As it is, people must pay out of their own pockets for an appointment. The goal, according to Abbott, is for patients to pressure employers and insurers to add mobile medical services to their coverage. Eventually, in theory, insurers will have to give in.

According to a survey conducted by human resources company Towers Watson, telemedicine has already been adopted by nearly a third of large employers in 2014. Another 30% said they planned to add it to their offerings in 2015.

A recent Healthcare Informatics report by electronic medical record company Software Advice shows that there is a large demand for telemedicine. Three-quarters of patients who have never had visited a doctor remotely said they were interested in doing so.

Spruce makes money by taking a cut of what patients pay for their doctor appointments. A company representative declined to provide any details about the amount other than to say the vast majority is paid to the doctors.

Virtual healthcare is a niche that is filled with new competitors looking to capitalize on the expected growth of telemedicine. They include Better, a company that launched in partnership with the Mayo Clinic, and Doctor on Demand, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Venrock, and Sir Richard Branson.

Besides the competitive environment, regulatory and security hurdles are potential roadblocks to telemedicine gaining traction. For example, Spruce is only available in a small number of states including New York and California. One wrinkle is that doctors can only practice medicine in states where they are licensed. Because of the legal implications, regulators recommend that telemedicine companies only connect patients with doctors in the same state as they are.

Liability is another concern. In general, mobile app services, such as Spruce, cover the cost of telemedicine insurance for doctors.

Regardless of the potential challenges, Bradford and Kleiner Perkins believe that telemedicine is not just a fad, but that it is the future. For now, Spruce is focused on dermatology, but will be evaluating other medical specialties in the future.

Summary: The venture capital firm has invested in Spruce, a mobile app that lets people remotely connect with their doctors.


In terms of e-mail snafus, J.C. Penney JCP could do worse.

After a senior executive this week inadvertently sent an e-mail to a securities analyst that contained non-public information regarding the company’s sales results, the department store chain on Tuesday had to put out a regulatory filing saying comparable sales were up 6% so far this quarter, which started in early February, suggesting the retailer did great business over Easter and has seen a strong start to the spring season.

For the whole quarter, Penney said it expects comparable sales, which include sales at stores open for at least a year, and e-commerce, to be up 3.5% to 4.5%, a lower number because Penney’s has already seen the Easter sales bump. (It was also in line with its initial forecast for growth of 3-5%.)

“On April 13, 2015, J. C. Penney Company, Inc. (the “Company”) became aware that a senior official of the Company inadvertently sent an e-mail communication to a securities analyst that contained non-public information regarding the Company’s comparable store sales results for the fiscal first quarter of 2015 to date,” Penney said in the filing.

Even though this was probably a pain in the neck to do for Penney’s investor relations team, at least it was good news. Penney has been on the comeback trail in the two years since previous CEO Ron Johnson was fired after his attempts to re-invent Penney failed spectacularly. Sales rebounded last year, but Penney investors punished the stock in February after its forecast suggested its profit margin was recovery a bit too slowly.

Summary: The retailer accidentally told Wall Street its sales this quarter have been soaring.


Sports fans will soon be able to watch NBA, NHL, and NASCAR sports events and live concerts without leaving the house, in 360-degree virtual reality.

NextVR, a virtual reality company founded in 2009, captures live-action content (e.g. live sports, news, music, awards shows, nature, etc.) and transmits it directly to consumers’ VR devices. NextVR is set up to work across any existing VR platform, including Samsung Gear VR, HTC Vive, Sony Morpheus, and Oculus Rift.

NextVR began by jointly testing its technology with organizations like the NBA, NHL, and with broadcasters such as ESPN, Turner Sports, and Fox Sports. In many cases, the company is now moving beyond testing to first VR market executions in sports.

According to Gene Munster, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, the opportunity for sports leagues and concert promoters is open-ended as VR grows over time. He estimates that just for the NBA, VR revenue will grow from $4.1 million in 2017 to $500 million by 2025. The NFL, which Munster says is interested in VR, could see an additional $1.2 billion in revenue by 2025, essentially selling seats to stadiums to fans who don’t want to leave home.

When you combine the major sports leagues together, there’s a $4 billion business opportunity by 2025, but that could grow exponentially as more companies flood the market with quality, affordable VR headsets. These forecasts are based on extremely low adoption rates for VR technology, so there’s potential for even greater revenues if VR does take off more quickly.

“The leagues initially will go with a single company to work through the technology, and over time different leagues could partner exclusively with a VR company,” says Travis Jakel, research analyst at Piper Jaffray. “The potential risk is that traditional broadcast companies could enter the VR space, but even that opens up the opportunity for a NextVR to be acquired by one of them.” Jakel adds that live concerts in VR will follow a similar path as the NBA with approximately $4 million in revenue in 2017 and over $500 million by 2025.

Munster says NextVR is ahead of the game in sports, although there are two other companies focusing on live VR events—JauntVR and Otoy. He adds Otoy has the most overlap with sports, while JauntVR operates more like a traditional Hollywood production company.

Dave Cole, co-founder of NextVR, says the company differentiates itself with its broadcast platform that allows them to transmit live stereoscopic VR content over low-bandwidth (even mobile) Internet connections.

“With our technology, you actually feel like you are experiencing events as they are happening,” Cole says. “In some ways, it’s almost better than being there because you can achieve vantage points that you would never be able to get in real life.”

Cole sees VR technology opening up additional revenue models for sports and entertainment companies through sponsorship sales, subscriptions, and pay-for-view. Additionally, because the fan experience can be so dramatically enhanced, adjunct content can be created and monetized.

“Imagine joining your favorite NFL team during training camp, or being in the dugout during a MLB All-Stars game,” Cole says. “This isn’t just about taking fans to the best seat in the arena, this is about taking them places they could never go before.”

Summary: NextVR's technology is being used to stream professional sports events and concerts to consumer VR headsets. This market has the potential to grow to $4 billion in the next ten years, according to analysts.


05/03/2015 AT 01:00 PM EDT

last September but still they aren't revealing their wedding date.

Why? Well, it could be today or tomorrow or next year.

"We might just do it after the fight," Bow Wow, 28, told PEOPLE while attending

in Las Vegas on Saturday. "We're really spontaneous. That's what's great about us. We break rules. We have our own rules."

The couple's relationship was anything but conventional, but it works for them. They got engaged after just six months of dating; and although they knew each other for years, an on-camera kiss set the romance in motion.

The young couple seemed to be on cloud nine as they held hands on the pre-fight red carpet. And to hear the rapper and

star talk about it, they are.

"I feel like relationships are healthy with communication," he said. "If things are understood then it's understood. We have our little thing. We can leave right now and go get married. Our thing works."

Summary: The rapper even joked that he and Mena could get married after the Floyd Mayweather fight