Something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.
Take a look at this: Piano Staircase
The AAA-rating is given to the best bank, while D-rating is given to those on the verge of insolvency.
A rating: Asia Commercial Bank (ACB)
BBB rating: Sacombank, Techcombank, Vietcombank, Military Bank, Eximbank, Vietinbank, VP Bank, BIDV and Habubank
BB rating: South East Asia Bank, Saigon Bank, Agribank, Dong A Bank, VIB Bank, Maritime Bank, Lien Viet, Saigon-Hanoi, Ocean Bank
B rating: VID Public, HCM City Housing Development Bank, An Binh, Tien Phong, Vietnam-Thailand Joint Venture, PG Bank, Indovina, Saigon, Nam Viet, Mekong Housing Bank, Phuong Nam
CCC rating: Shinhanvina, Viet A, Vietnam-Russia, Vietnam Thuong Tin, Bac A, My Xuyen, Mien Tay, Phuong Dong, Dai A, De Nhat, South Asia, Dai Tin, Gia Dinh, Vietnam Tin Nghia and Kien Long
D rating: Viet Hoa Bank
Dubai là một trong 7 thành phố-bang của United Arab Emirates (Các Tiểu Vương Quốc Ả Rập Thống Nhất). Mỗi bang có ngân sách, quy tắc riêng, còn vấn đề đối ngoại, an ninh, dân cư thì chung.
Abu Dhabi, là thành phố lớn nhất, và là thủ đô của liên bang này. Abu Dhabi chiếm phần lớn dầu mỏ của UAE. Abu Dhabi có quỹ souvereign wealth fund lớn nhất thế giới.
Dubai thì phát triển kinh tế về cảng biển, giao thương, dịch vụ tài chính, và đặc biệt thập kỷ vừa qua bất động sản và du lịch tăng nhanh chóng.
Dubai World là công ty nhà nước, sở hữu DP World quản lý cảng biển, Nakheel quản lý đầu tư bất động sản, hàng hàng không Emirates Airlines, khách sạn Jumeirah Hotel.
Dubai World củng sở hữu Limitless và Economic Zones World, các công ty phát triển bất động sản. Trong mảng tài chính, Dubai World sở hữu Istithmar chuyên về mảng alternative investment. Dubai World cũng là chủ của Dubai Natural Resources World, chuyên đầu tư vào tài nguyên thiên nhiên như năng lượng, khai khoáng, kim loại, và sản phẩm nông nghiệp, gồm luôn cả liên doanh dầu khí ở Nga và Nigeria.
Dubai World cũng nắm nhiều cổ phần trong các công ty trên thế giới, gồm cả London Stock Exchange. Nhưng các ông ty này thiếu tính minh bạch vì sở hữu gia đình.
Khi thị trường bất động sản sập ở Mỹ thì Nakheel cũng mất 50% giá trị, tuy nhiên các nhà đầu tư không sợ default risk vì cho rằng đây là công ty nhà nước.
Các nhà phân tích cho rằng trong nỗ lực giải cứu kích thích kinh tế, Dubai nợ khoảng $80 billion (một số nói con số này có thể gấp đôi). Dubai World để hộ trợ kinh tế có một khoản liabilities là $60 billion. Vấn đề chính là ở Nakheel, chi nhánh bất động sản này có lượng trái phiếu khổng lồ sắp đáo hạn, gần nhất là Trái phiếu hồi giáo Islamic bond trị giá $3.5 billion vào tháng 12.
Người ta cho rằng các khoản giải cứu này được hỗ trợ bởi Abu Dhabi, nhưng ngày 25/11 Chính phủ Dubai xin giãn nợ 6 tháng.
Abu Dhabi thông qua ngân hàng trung ương liên bang đã mua $10 billion trái phiếu chính phủ Dubai và mới đây qua các ngân hàng riêng mua thêm $5 billion.
Theo Bank of International Settlements, các ngân hàng nước ngoài đã cho United Arab Emirates vay $123 billion (trong đó chia theo quốc gia, các ngân hàng Anh là $50.2 billion, Pháp $11.3 billion, Đức $10 billion).
Hiện diện của Dubai World ở Việt Nam là tổ hợp khách sạn Ha Long Star và khu đô thị hỗn hợp Đầm Nhà Mạc do công ty con Limitless đảm nhận.
source: taichinhdautu
Gotta love Japan
I don’t have any experiences whatsoever with Drupal, but this blog post is worth a bookmark. Anyone has a comment on this? (I’m looking at you, @ice).
If your team hates Drupal and loves OO then be very careful about selecting it for your project, conversely if you’re Drupal shop full of experienced Drupal developers you can probably get away with using Drupal when it’s outrageously unsuited to the task.
Some basic things:
- Drupal is a platform made for e-learning.
- Drupal is a perfect choice for content-centric sites, not relationship-centric.
- Drupal works well for a less than 10,000 users-community. But there will be some problems when you expand your site.
- Drupal site is somehow simple and easy to build. At first, you will need about 2 or 3 devs, one must be master of ajax and PHP to be a leader.
- Drupal works well, very well with hundreds of web apps. And you can modify them according to your project. It saves lots of time.
Things above are general experiences. If you want to digg-in, call me om IM.
Btw, that article is interesting.
http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/advertising/article.php/3699986 According to a recent report from market research
publisher Packaged Facts, approximately 25.6 million teens live in the
United States today, and in 2006 they spent nearly $80 billion dollars
on food, apparel, personal-care items, entertainment and other items.
Despite a slight decline in the teen population over the next few
years, “The Teens Market in the U.S.” report predicts that teen
spending will grow an estimated 3.5 percent annually, climbing to $91.1
billion in 2011. Where are teens spending their cash? More than a quarter of
them are spending it online, with that figure expected to rise,
according to the report. Similarly, the survey found that roughly a
third of teens now considered the Internet their primary source of
entertainment. Those statistics have a lot of online retailers and
entertainment providers seeing dollar signs. But if you want to cash-in
on the teen buying trend, you need to know how to market to this
notoriously fickle, attention-strapped audience. To help provide that
insight, Ecommerce-Guide.com spoke with two successful teen/young
adult-focused online businesses and a leading marketer for the
14-24-year-old demographic to uncover the basic rules of teen
marketing. Rule #1: Be Authentic
“The biggest piece of advice I
could give anyone marketing to teens is be who you are,” said Greg
Selkoe, the founder and CEO of Karmaloop,
an online retailer of urban clothing and streetwear. “We’ve been really
successful because we’re authentic. We’re all pretty young [Selkoe is
the oldest member of the Karmaloop team at 32] and consider ourselves
part of the culture we market to, which is streetwear culture. Our
director of grass roots marketing is 19 years old. So we’re very close
to our audience and understand our audience, and I think that makes a
huge difference,” Selkoe said. 
Karmaloop aims to sell urban street clothing to cutting-edge teens.
That word, “authentic,” may be the buzzword when it comes to marketing or selling to teens.
When asked for his opinion on how to market to teens, Craig Sherman, the CEO of Gaia Online, a fast-growing hangout for teens on the Web, with two million unique visitors a month, immediately used the “A” word. The founders of Gaia Online, who initially built the community for themselves and their friends, “built something that was truly authentic,” Sherman said. “They were trying to build an online hangout for teens, the equivalent of what the mall was 20 years ago,” he said. And they succeeded.
And what does Sherman, who described himself as “the old guy in the room,” mean by “authentic”? In addition to staffing your business with folks who “get it” and who aren’t much older than their users (Gaia’s main copywriter is in his early 20s and the average staffer is 26), it means being “open, honest and direct with users, about what [you’re] trying to achieve,” he said.
Gaia Online looks to appeal to teens by providing them a hangout on the Web.
Brandon Evans, the managing director of RepNation Media, who has worked with a lot of brands on how to generate buzz among teens and has created many successful campaigns targeted at young adults, agrees. “You have to be honest and upfront with what you’re doing,” he said. “And you shouldn’t sucker [teens], in any way, into deals where they’re providing credit cards and other information without knowing what they’re getting involved in.”
Rule #2: Create Some Buzz
As for how to reach teens
where they live or play, Karmaloop’s Selkoe is a big believer in grass
roots marketing. For Selkoe, his strategy was born out of necessity, as
he didn’t have the cash for a splashy marketing campaign. Instead he
simply went around to family and friends, talking up the business,
being honest (or “authentic”) about what he was trying to accomplish
with Karmaloop, and asking everyone he knew if they could tell, e-mail
or text their friends to check out the site and buy something.
“In a lot of ways, that’s the best way to do your marketing,” Selkoe said. “Spend as little as humanly possible and rely on generating buzz. We’ve really just enlisted our consumers as our marketers.” And the strategy worked. In fact, everyone affiliated with Karmaloop is part of the company’s grass roots marketing campaign, going to parties, clubs and events frequented by the company’s core demographic, talking up Karmaloop and handing out free flyers, stickers and other fun freebies.
RepNation Media uses a similar approach in helping clients market to young adults. “A lot of what we do is what we call brand ambassador and influencer networks, where we’ll identify influencers in a particular demographic, recruit them, and then work closely with them to help them spread the message to their friends and their peers,” Evans said.
“Whether it’s getting a product into their hands, providing them with a special deal that they can distribute to friends, getting them to sample and provide feedback on a site, it’s about working closely with a tight knit group of people, and providing them tools, online or offline, so they can spread the message to their friends,” he said.
A big part of creating buzz and getting customer buy-in involves making them feel special — offering exclusive information and/or deals for those willing to opt-into e-mail lists.
Karmaloop, for example, features a box on every page of its Web site that offers visitors $10 if they sign up for the company’s free e-mail newsletter. And that’s just the beginning of the VIP treatment. “People who are on the e-mail list are treated specially,” Selkoe said. “In return for agreeing to join our e-mail list, we give them special deals and offers… like 15 percent off or free shipping.”
As a result, Karmaloop’s opt-in-only e-mail list contains 300,000 names and e-mail addresses, making it “a very powerful list,” Selkoe said. “If we send out an e-mail it’s going to generate $20,000 to $30,000 worth of sales automatically for us, like, that day.”
Another great way to get teens to visit and buy from your site is by running on-site contests and/or promotions. (Karmaloop has a “CONTESTS!” link on its left-hand navigation bar and often partners with other sites, which has brought in additional traffic.)
Rule #3: Keep Your Message Simple
“Teens have a very
short attention span,” said RepNation Media’s Evans. “They’re often
multitasking: watching TV, reading e-mail, on IM, doing lots of
different things. So you really need to catch their attention in a
short, concise way.” If you’re using e-mail marketing and you “provide
them with a lot of text, a lot of things to read, a lot of different
things they need to click on and do [like music and video clips], you
risk losing them before they see your main message,” he said.
To create an effective e-mail campaign, you really need to decide what your main message or offer is, and then “put it in the forefront, and make it as simple and straightforward as possible,” said Evans. Video and audio clips, even lots of graphics, while fun or attractive, can actually distract viewers, causing them to delete or close your e-mail before they’ve even clicked on the offer or visited your site.
Rule #4: Engage Your Visitors and Solicit Feedback
One
of the keys to both Karmaloop’s and Gaia Online’s success is that both
companies actively engage and solicit feedback from their teenage/young
adult customers. “Virtually every feature on Gaia has been built in
response to our users asking for that feature and then us going and
building it,” Sherman said. “And if we build something and the users
don’t like it, we change it.”
That’s why last December, when Gaia wanted to change the look and feel of its home page, it posted a version of the new page on one of its message boards and asked users for feedback. Within the first 24 hours, 19,000 users responded. “And they had really intelligent, articulate, insightful suggestions for improvements,” Sherman said. Gaia’s Web developers used the feedback in the redesign. As a result, the redesign took a bit longer, but “they [Gaia’s users] made it better. And more users came to the site as a result.”
Rule #5: Don’t Forget About the Parents
While
everyone we spoke with warned against marketing to parents when trying
to attract a teen audience, all agreed it was important to be sensitive
to parents, especially when it came to using their credit cards.
“We have a certain threshold for a charge,” Selkoe said. “If someone charges over $300, we’re going to call that customer and ask to speak to the cardholder,” he said. Most of the time, parents are OK with the charge, he said. But if they’re not, Karmaloop will refund them their money. “Our goal is to always make our customers happy.”
While not specifically aimed at parents, Karmaloop’s Wish List feature, for example, gives users the capability to “create a whole list of the stuff they want and then e-mail their parents the link,” said Selkoe. Parents know what to buy, how much each item costs and can buy it for their child.
It All Comes Down to Providing Good Value
For
Sherman, it all comes down to offering consumers (no matter how old
they are) something of value, which could be a great product or service
that they can’t get any place else, a way to save them time or money, a
unique form of entertainment or peace of mind.
“With teens it’s harder than ever to sell them something [if they don’t consider it] really valuable,” Sherman said. “The age of pure mass market, one-size-fits-all, has gone away. Teens have [and want] more options than they ever had before. Therefore you have to offer a product or service that helps them to express themselves in a way that is unique and customized — that speaks — to that individual.”
For Karmaloop, which has been around since 1999, the goal has always been to carry the clothing brands that teens want — cutting edge, urban streetwear — and to give its customers reasons to frequent the site and tell their friends about it.
“Every day we have new items, and we probably change the home page once or twice a week,” said Karmaloop CEO Selkoe. Freshness and maintaining an edge is important to young adults, especially in the online apparel business. “With fashion that’s considered edgy or unique [as well as with teens], things get old quick.”
By Martin Wolf
Published: November 10 2009 21:03 | Last updated: November 10 2009 21:03
“A crisis is a strange way to celebrate an anniversary.” This is the wry judgment of Erik Berglöf, chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.* Yet a crisis is what we see in countries that began the march from communism two decades ago. So, has capitalism failed, as communism did? In a word, “no”. Some transition countries are in crisis; transition is not. The same judgment applies elsewhere: capitalist countries are in crisis; capitalism itself is not. But reform is necessary. The great virtue of liberal democracies and market economies is their ability to reform and adapt. They have shown these qualities before. They must do so once again.
For those born, like me, shortly after the second world war, the cold war was the defining intellectual and political struggle of our lifetimes. With the collapse of communism ended a catastrophic epoch of millenarian politics and the delusion of a rationally planned economy. The freedom offered by democracy and the prosperity supplied by markets won. The fact that communism expired not with a bang, but with a whimper, we owe largely to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Yet 2009 is a sobering year from which to look back. A year ago, capitalism careered over a cliff. With vast effort, states have put it back on the road. According to Piergiorgio Alessandri and Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England, in a superb new paper**, the total gross value of interventions on behalf of banks has been $14,000bn (€9,400bn, £8,400bn). This is state capitalism.
What then does the crisis mean for the countries that exited from socialism two decades ago? What, too, does it mean for the world?
For the former, it has meant big falls in output. According to the EBRD, the fall in the gross domestic product of transition countries will average 6.2 per cent in 2009. Declines vary widely: from 18.4 per cent in Lithuania, 16.0 per cent in Latvia, 14.0 per cent in Ukraine and 13.2 per cent in Estonia – depression numbers – to 7.8 per cent in Slovenia, 6.5 per cent in Hungary, 6.0 per cent in Slovakia and 4.3 per cent in the Czech Republic. Poland’s economy is forecast to grow this year, by 1.3 per cent. In general, notes the EBRD, “the size of the output declines correlates with pre-crisis credit booms and external indebtedness”. The bursting of bubbles hurts.
These collapses are real and worrying. But they need to be put in context. First, many countries in transition experienced big increases in output after the initial and largely inevitable post-Soviet collapse (see charts). Poland was the star. In general, the successful countries were those that reformed most seriously. Second, surprisingly perhaps, transition countries have made few reversals of reforms. As the EBRD report notes, “government changes since early 2008 have either led to no change with respect to the reform stance, or indeed favoured pro-reform parties”. This is quite consistent with what is happening in the emerging world, more broadly. The absence of a credible alternative economic model is evident. Populist adventurism also seems unattractive.
As recovery begins to gather force across the world economy, the great legacies of the collapse of the Soviet empire – the integration of much of Europe and the concomitant spread of freedom to Russia’s borders, if not beyond – remain intact.
Yet the crisis brings important lessons. The philosopher Karl Popper laid down the right approach. He distinguished the “piecemeal social engineering” intended to ameliorate specific ills from the “utopian social engineering” intended to transform society in its entirety – an aim that, in practice, “has led only to the use of violence in place of reason”.
The reformer must identify the cause of the malady before attempting treatment. In the case of this crisis, the failure lies not so much with the market system as a whole, but with defects in the world’s financial and monetary systems. Some of these failings are inescapable. The future is inherently uncertain. Big mistakes will be made. Where prevailing paradigms lead to risk-taking on an excessive scale, corrections are likely to be brutal. Where risk-taking involves large-scale leveraging of the balance sheets of the financial sector, corrections are likely to mean a collapse in both intermediation and the economy. Should collapse not be prevented, the consequences may, history tells us, be dramatic.
Happily, governments and central banks have learnt the lessons of the 1930s and decided, rightly, to prevent collapses of either the financial system or the economy. That is precisely the right kind of “piecemeal social engineering”. Similarly, big efforts have been made to rescue the crisis-hit countries of central and eastern Europe. Thus, support from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union has been between 4 and 6 per cent of GDP (or more) for the four eastern European countries that have accepted IMF programmes.
A similar pragmatism must now be shown in completing the escape from the crisis. That will require substantial rebalancing of global demand. It will also require further reforms. For transition countries, a reversal of financial integration is likely to be costly and unnecessary. The principal goals of reform must, instead, be to make the economy less vulnerable to shocks and to curb excessive credit growth in future.
Similarly, at a global level, radical reforms must be made in the financial and monetary systems. To put it bluntly, the banking system has been gaming the taxpayer on an intolerable scale. This must end, in one of two ways: the sector must be made subject to the market or become a heavily regulated ward of the state. Again, the curbing of huge credit bubbles must be an integral element in the formation of regulatory and monetary policies. Finally, the dependence of the global monetary system on the currency of an over-indebted superpower is neither desirable nor sustainable.
Anniversaries are a good time for taking stock. The collapse of Soviet communism was a glorious moment. It remains so, despite mistakes and disappointments along the way. But today’s crisis tells us of the failings of a euphoric capitalism. Capitalism will not now perish, as communism did. But the signal ability of liberal democracy is to learn and adapt. We learnt from the 1930s. We must now learn the lessons of the 2000s.
Cigarette pack from Vietnam, date unknown (probably 1980s). The kitsch level approaches heights rarely seen outside Japan.
Vietnam aims to sell $1 bln bond by early 2010-source
HANOI, Nov 3 (Reuters) - Vietnam hopes to raise $1 billion by early next year in its long-awaited second international bond issue that will cap the coupon at 7 percent, a finance ministry official said on Tuesday.
The ministry wanted to sell 10-year dollar bonds before the end of the year but there might not be enough time to do so.
“Most of the money, about $700 million, would supplement the government’s budget and the rest would be loaned to state-owned companies,” said the official, who declined to be identified because he was not authorised to talk to the media.
The government had already approved the bond sale and has chosen Barclays Capital, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank to advise on the issue.
Vietnam’s only foray into the international capital market was in 2005 when it sold $750 million worth of sovereign bonds maturing in 2016.
Those bonds were trading with yields of 6.3-6.4 percent, compared with the original coupon of 6.75 percent, a bond trader said.
Two years ago the government approved another issue worth $1 billion but the sale had been delayed several times.
Asia has seen a handful of high-yield sovereign issuances in recent months as countries try to raise money before interest rates start to rise.
Last month, the Philippines attracted solid demand with the sale of $1 billion of 25-year global bonds, its third sale of the year. In February, Indonesia raised $3 billion via a heavily oversubscribed sale of 5-year and 10-year bonds in the biggest deal out of Asia ex-Japan since 2003.
Yang-Myung Hong, a credit analyst for Nomura International, the backdrop was generally encouraging for Vietnam.
“However, the credit market has been under pressure over the past weeks together with the overall selloff in risky assets, and this provides for a more challenging environment compared to the situation until more recently,” he said.
The 7 percent ceiling would probably not cause problems, given the level of other Asian sovereigns, although he said “the uncertainty of future market movements makes it difficult to predict whether it will still be the case in early 2010”.
With the economy under pressure from the global slump, and the government extending parts of an economic stimulus package, many economists forecast the fiscal budget deficit will rise to 10 percent of GDP or larger, more than double last year’s.
Questions have persisted for months about how the government would fund the deficit. Domestic dong-denominated government bond auctions have struggled this year, with the finance ministry’s yield ceiling too low for the market.
Vietnam is also trying hard to boost its foreign exchange reserves and said last month it would borrow $1 billion from the World Bank this year and next, and also $1 billion annually from Japan from 2010 to 2012. (Reporting by Nguyen Nhat Lam, Ho Binh Minh and John Ruwitch in Hanoi and Umesh Desai in Hong Kong)
http://www.reuters.com/article/financialsSector/idUSHAN51686420091103
