Since it launched its ‘App Store’ in July 2008, Apple has revolutionized the mobile applications (mobile apps, for short) space and started a phenomenon. Although mobile apps have existed for years through companies such as Handango and Handmark — which were online stores, selling mobile content such as news and infotainment for Windows and Palm phones — Apple changed the game by leveraging its App Store through the iPhone.

The volcanic eruption in Iceland has led to a crisis not only for the European air transportation industry, in particular, - disrupting air travel and air cargo operations across northern Europe – but also global commerce overall. The eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in southern Iceland has resulted in a major economic crisis. The volcano had been dormant for almost 200 years – the last time it erupted was back in 1821 (and that eruption lasted for two years).

With most companies either in or rapidly approaching their business planning cycles, executives and analysts alike are hard at work trying to predict how the next fiscal year will unfold, making a range of decisions from where best to focus their efforts to how much to spend on each viable opportunity. The foundation for these decisions is an understanding of how much their specific business will grow (or not), and core to these calculations is their forecast for how their general industry, related sectors and/or the general economy will trend.

The subject of brand extensions has been around for decades - and marketing executives have engaged in heated debates about pros and cons of such tactics, and how far such extensions can be taken. Nowhere has this debate been more heated than in the luxury goods sector, where the hope has always been that the high margins in core goods can ultimately translate to profits in other unrelated categories. While the debates are nowhere near being silenced, there is some emerging research that luxury brand extensions can benefit from more improved brand associations than, say, a value brand.

Aswath Damodaran, the famed NYU finance professor and High Priest of quantitative valuation, shares a lot with Edward Altman, his equally famous colleague at NYU.  (Damodaran penned "Investment Valuation: Tools and Techniques for Determining the Value of Any Asset", a classic investment management text that has stood the test of time and remains a best seller for any MBA student or erudite portfolio manager alike.  Altman is the man behind the Altman Z-Score and has devoted his career to analyzing the causes of corporate distress and bankruptcy.)  During the credit

There’s a classic scene in the 1976 hit movie, The Marathon Man, in which Laurence Olivier, playing a skilled dentist who is also a Nazi war criminal, is torturing a young Dustin Hoffman.  Using his medical know-how and some frightening looking dental tools, Olivier is attempting to extract from Hoffman the answer to a simple question: “Is it Safe?”  Hoffman’s response is to scream repeatedly and then collapse from exhaustion.

This weeks announcement between Dr Pepper Snapple and HCL Technologies has us thinking about how the practice of  Outsourcing has been changing in recent years.  Traditionally viewed as simply a means of cost arbitrage (effectively, moving work from one high cost location to an alternate lower paying one while maintaining or increasing the level of service delivered), a mix of economic and political realities have been forcing a shift in thinking and the DPS-HCL deal seems to be an example of this changing trend.

The core elements of the deal are your standard outsourcing fare - HCL will provide IT application and infrastructure operations and management services to DPS, which essentially means it will manage DPS' computer networks.  However, one aspect of the relationship specifically caught our eye:

HCL said that Dr Pepper Snapple would be its “anchor service desk customer” in an operation in Raleigh, N.C., that would eventually employ 500. With the new deal, HCL is continuing to “bring on new staff at our new facility in North Carolina,” Shami Khorana, president of HCL America, said in a statement.

In other words, not only is HCL outsourcing (and offshoring) DPS' IT work to its own offshore locations (cost arbitrage was no doubt a key factor in the deal) but it will be 'onshoring' jobs as well as part of the deal.  Indeed, as the NY Times put it:

At a recent address to the NYU Money Marketeers, a New York-based association of financial market participants, Kenneth Volpert, head of the Fixed Income Group at Vanguard, reviewed just how far and how fast the credit markets had improved since late 2008. At the start of this year, municipal, corporate and high yield spreads had spiked to near all time record wides with liquidity sketchy at best. Six months in, while credit markets will still far from 'business as usual', they had markedly improved. One of the more influential bond fund managers in the industry, Volpert was generally optimistic about a continued recovery in the markets, but still expressed some caution - a definite sentiment of “let’s wait and see before we all plunge back into the pool”.

In light of this improving financial climate, attention is slowly turning back from stabilization to identifying the next economic opportunity, and few are seeing as much attention as one of President Obama’s most ambitious (and popular) economic agendas: the promotion of Alternative Energy. Indeed, as we write in a recent article on the subject in the financial publication Global Trade Review:

Green energy had been a buzz phrase throughout the final weeks of the US presidential campaign. Both Senator Obama and his Republican rival Senator McCain eagerly promoted their determination to lead the US economy towards energy independence. This was largely due to a massive government campaign of tax incentives and government investment to fund development of alternative energy generation.

The Financial Times recently reported on a recent survey by the British Chartered Financial Analyst Institute of its members, which found that an increasing proportion believed that markets did not behave rationally:

The British CFA recently asked members for the first time whether they trusted in "market efficiency" - and discovered more than two-thirds of respondents no longer believed market prices reflect all available information. More startling, 77 per cent of the group "strongly" or "very strongly" disagreed that investors behaved "rationally" - in apparent defiance of the "wisdom of crowds" idea that has driven investment theory. The shift is significant as the assumption of efficient markets is a cornerstone of calculating the value of everything from stocks to pension fund liabilities to executive compensation.

It's an interesting result, especially given the fact that CFAs are schooled in the tenets of rational and efficient markets from the outset.

It's also, in my opinion, in line with the reality of the markets.  The evidence has been there for all to see in recent years (and, in truth, much before that as well) - markets have quite frequently behaved irrationally and, many would argue, are not behaving entirely rationally at the moment.   Some even go further, such as Jeremy Grantham, the famed market strategist with GMO, who wrote in a recent quarterly letter to his clients (see a recent NYT article):

Periods of economic upheaval tend to see organizations rethinking their relationship with their employees. Some of this is driven by the employer (see the 'rightsizing' that has taken place over the last year), but others are driven by the changing demands (and expectations) of the employee.  A clear example of the latter is the steady but growing rejection of the traditional 'corporate ladder' - where an individual works along a defined path for a defined period of time  to achieve defined promotion rungs.  Stay on that path and everything's fine.  Deviate here or there, and all bets are off.

Given the death of the "Company Man" and the general acceptance that the employee can have diverse needs, organizations have begun to rethink their definition of 'career path'.  In fact, according to an article in Ignites.com (Corporate Ladder Gets Makeover Amid Downturn), organizations could actually be facing a unique opportunity to rethink the traditional corporate ladder:

...the up-or-out ladder model is no longer a tidy fit in corporate America, as the workforce has evolved from a male-dominated cadre to a more diverse group. With that comes a mix of lifestyles and demands, as employees struggle to strike a balance between work and life.

This is especially true in the professional services world.