The European Union voted in October 2008 to ban outright incandescent light bulbs which transform a miserable 5% of the electricity into light. On Monday this week, they published the timing for the suppression of these inefficient incandescent bulbs over the next four years. Starting September 1st 2009, the sale of 100+ watt bulbs will [...]
15 YEARS LATER : MY 15-YEAR REUNION AT INSEAD I have just completed my 15-year reunion at INSEAD in Fontainebleau. There were some 59 fellow classmates (out of about 205) who came in from 16 countries (3 came from Australia). It was a lovely way to reconnect – among other things to remind us of [...]
L’OREAL PROFESSIONNEL BUSINESS FORUM 2008 Coming back from the 7th edition of the L’Oréal Business Forum, held September 29 through October 1, 2008, in Villasimius, Sardinia (Italy), I wanted to share with you the day-by-day videocast which was put up on line as soon as each segment was ended. There were 2,000 L’Oréal Professionnel hairdresser [...]
The US has announced recently that citizens of the 27 visa waiver programme countries (most of Western Europe, Australia, Brunei, Japan, Singapore and New Zealand) will need to register (online) 72 hours in advance of their visit to the US. See here on the official VWP site. The new plan goes fully into effect at [...]
WWF (World Wildlife Foundation) began the Earth Hour — lights out for an hour — in 2007 in Sydney Australia. The notion is that between 8-9pm in your time zone wherever you are in the world, everyone is to turn off their lights (or at least make some environmentally friendly gesture). I am writing this [...]
China bans free bags! In a second post (“Getting rid of Plastic Bags” May 2007) on the topic, I read in the Herald Tribune with a mixture of satisfaction and curiosity about China’s intended policy to ban the giving out of free plastic bags in shops (effective June 1 2008). What caught my eye in [...]
Facebook is growing at a rate of knots, it’s hard to imagine where it will stop. This pick up from Mashable is interesting as it speaks to the aforementioned (prior post “Googlotics”) role of the online presence in political races. Put your two cents into this Daily Poll about whether online presence will have an [...]
Are you left, right or whole brained? One of my favourite ‘business’ books in the past couple of years was “The Whole New Mind” by Daniel Pink. (@Amazon, 2005). What I enjoyed about this book was a revaluing of the right side of the brain in business and management in particular. We have for so [...]
I mentioned in a prior post that on-line activity in elections was heating up (Turkey, for example). The elections of the future can and will be decided by the on-line campaigning. In the pursuit of open debate, we can hope to see lots of on-line chatting, blogging, etc., on the candidates in the run up [...]
In preparations for the CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés) meeting 24 September, in Montréal, Google’s Keeper of the Data, Peter Fleischer, has been on the bandwagon for a worldwide protocol for the protection of private data on the net. Fleischer spoke, on 14 September, at a conference in Strasbourg, organised by UNESCO, [...]
