At Huawei, Matt Bross Tries to Ease U.S. Security Fears

For all its recent success, Huawei’s accession to the global scene has been awkward. Its corporate culture tends to come off somewhere between xenophobic and absurd to local critics. Sample headline published last year in the Times of India: “Huawei Technologies Bans Indians in India.” (Huawei says there’s no discrimination at its Indian facilities.) More pressing, though, is the reputational baggage tied to the company’s founder. Pundits wonder whether China’s premier technology company, a privately held organization run by an ex-deputy director of the army’s engineering corps and former delegate to the Communist Party’s national congress, can overcome suspicions among politicians, security officials, and would-be customers outside China. “Huawei is a large company with state-owned interests involved, and also Chinese military linkages,” says Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor at the Center for East Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “So one of the concerns is what these guys are up to.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Sep 17, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,324 words)

The God Clause and the Reinsurance Industry

In the fall of 1998 I started a job in New York with one of the world’s largest reinsurers. Soon after, at a meeting in a conference room above Park Avenue, someone complained that the market for reinsurance had gone soft. “What we need,” he said, “is a good catastrophe.” It was a joke, but true, too. I offered that a cyclone had hit Bangladesh and it had been an active year for cyclonic storms. No, he explained, little of that value was insured. “Honestly,” said someone else, “I’ve never understood why those people don’t just leave. It’s a dangerous place.” By definition, reinsurers work at the edge of suffering, and so have developed euphemisms to help them stand at a distance. A catastrophe is called a “loss event.” A catastrophe big enough to affect several reinsurers is called an “industry loss event.” #Sept11

Source: Businessweek
Published: Sep 1, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,495 words)

The Saving of Ground Zero

To the degree that it’s possible for a 102-story building to take a city by surprise, One World Trade Center snuck up on the New York skyline. For years the project, conceived in the throes of tragedy, has been debated, negotiated, renamed, redrawn, hailed as a beacon, and maligned as a boondoggle. It wasn’t until recently, though, that it presented itself as an immutable fact, beginning to replace the void above Ground Zero with steel and reflective glass. Designed to commemorate lost life and recapture lost revenue, the half-completed skyscraper is both a nationalistic statement—it was formerly known as the “Freedom Tower”—and the centerpiece of a speculative real estate project. #Sept11

Source: Businessweek
Published: Aug 3, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,974 words)

What’s Killing Carbon Capture?

Yet only two years in, the future of carbon capture and storage (CCS) is in jeopardy. On July 14, American Electric Power pulled the plug on its CCS efforts, citing a weak economy and the “uncertain status of U.S. climate policy.” CEO Morris said AEP and its partners “have advanced CCS technology more than any other power generator with our successful two-year project to validate the technology. But at this time it doesn’t make economic sense to continue.” The dimming of CCS’s promise reflects a broader national retreat from the goal of reversing climate change. In private and, to some degree, in public, the company and its executives express frustration that they tried to do the right thing—only to end up burned.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Jul 22, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,356 words)

Daniel Ek’s Spotify: Music’s Last Best Hope

Without Spotify, labels know only when an album is sold. If a CD is ripped for a friend or borrowed for a party, they know nothing. Spotify gives them a record, by location, age, and gender, of every single time a track is played. Jay-Z used to think he was big in London, based on U.K. album sales; it turns out he’s big in Manchester. Spotify has discovered that radio plays—on real, terrestrial, electromagnetic spectrum—still drive interest in artists, as do Sweden’s summer talk shows. Sundin has a Spotify chart tracking Rihanna and Lady Gaga over seven weeks. Both show a bump on Friday and a spike on Saturday. They are weekend artists. Spotify knows when your party plays Gaga.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Jul 13, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,977 words)

Elizabeth Warren Has Already Won

Elizabeth Warren’s admirers often refer to her as a grandmother from Oklahoma. This is technically true. It’s also what you might call posturing. Warren, 62, is a Harvard professor and perhaps the country’s top expert on bankruptcy law. Over the past four years she has managed to stoke a fervent debate over the government’s role in protecting American consumers from what she sees as the predatory practices of financial institutions, and she has positioned herself as the person to oversee a new federal agency to rewrite the rules of lending. Warren is a grandma from Oklahoma in roughly the same way Ralph Nader is a pensioner with a thing about cars.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Jul 7, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,257 words)

Fall of the House of Busch

The death of Adrienne Martin is the latest twist in a saga that has transfixed St. Louis. The Busches and their beer company had survived Prohibition, labor strikes, and price wars, growing to operate 12 breweries around the country, producing 128 million barrels of beer in 2007 and taking in nearly $17 billion in revenue. The red, white, and blue Budweiser can is practically synonymous with America itself. But at a crucial time, the company failed to adapt to a changing market, leaving it weakened and vulnerable to a foreign takeover. And it was August Busch IV, the last member of the family to lead the brewery, who was there when it all came apart. Martin’s overdose represented not just the darkest moment in Busch’s turbulent life. It also signaled the unraveling of one of America’s most storied families, their business empire, and the city their money had helped build.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Jun 30, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,455 words)

Transocean: No Apologies

Fourteen months after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded 50 miles southeast of Venice, La., killing 11 men and setting off the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, Transocean, the company that owned and ran the ill-fated 32,600-ton vessel, finally issued its official account of what happened and why. It produced a report on June 22 of no fewer than 854 pages, divided into two volumes, and spared no detail. The bottom line, though, isn’t complicated:It was BP’s fault.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Jun 30, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,448 words)

The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace

In February 2009, with the threat of Facebook’s growing popularity looming over their company, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, the co-founders of Myspace, appeared on The Charlie Rose Show. DeWolfe explained that Myspace was more than a social network; it was a portal where people discovered new friends and music and movies—it was practically where young people lived. “We have the largest music catalog in the world,” DeWolfe said. Anderson predicted that by 2015, Myspace would have up to 400 million users. DeWolfe said the site’s worth was “in the billions.” Rose mentioned how Murdoch had bought Myspace’s parent company, Intermix, for $580 million. “Are you happy you made the deal?” asked Rose. “Um …,” said DeWolfe.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Jun 22, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,119 words)

FireEye: Botnet Busters

Now, Lanstein and FireEye were chasing their mightiest target to date, the Web’s most sprawling and advanced spam machine, called Rustock—pusher of fake pills, online pharmacies, and Russian stocks, the inspiration for its name. Over the past five years, Rustock had quietly—and illicitly—taken control of over a million computers around the world, directing them to do its bidding. On some days, Rustock generated as many as 44 billion digital come-ons, about 47.5 percent of all the junk e-mails sent, according to Symantec, the computer security giant based in Mountain View, Calif. Although those behind Rustock had yet to be identified, profits from it were thought to be in the millions. “The bad guys,” is what Lanstein had taken to calling them.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Jun 16, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,415 words)