Should Your Company Require College Degrees When Hiring? | All Business

October 13, 2015October 12, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

There has been talk about how the global economy has become too obsessed with college for years now. Students enter college, spend four years learning about something with little workplace value, and graduate with mountains of debt and a degree not worth the paper it is printed on.

And now one major British company has decided to really make that degree even less valuable. As the Huffington Post has reported, British accounting firm Ernst & Young has announced it will be removing the degree classification from its entry criteria. The company declared that there is “no evidence” success at university correlates with achievement in later life.

Should other companies follow the example of Ernst & Young, and has the college degree truly become something useless? The answer, like so many things, is “it depends.”

How This Founder Acquired Her Much-Bigger Competitor | Inc.com

October 13, 2015October 12, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes an app is just an app. But sometimes it’s a potentially huge business. That distinction isn’t always easy to spot; consider it a variation on “…another man’s treasure” for the phubbing age.

Kathryn Loewen, a former developer and software product manager, had racked up years of experience in financial services by the time she started business school at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia. When she graduated in 2013, she also had a head full of ideas, and methods for plugging them into business plans, and headed to her hometown of Vancouver.

Back home, she found herself in a good place. She had fellow developers to collaborate with in her home of Vancouver, and together they could build something, test it, and drop it if the app or software didn’t stick. But within months, one did. She’d been tinkering with Stripe, the Paypal-competing payment processor popular among startups. It appealed to her financial-service savvy. Along with another developer, she built an app onto its API that would allow business owners to monitor and manage their Stripe accounts on their Android devices. She called it Control.

Dell Buys EMC For $67B In Largest Deal In Tech History | TechCrunch

October 12, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

In the largest tech deal in history by far, Dell and partners MSD Partners and Silver Lake agreed to buy EMC today for $67 billion or $33.15 a share.

This is way over the $27 price being rumored last week, and makes the deal far larger than the $37 billion that Avago paid for Broadcom just last May. What makes this deal even more interesting is that Dell with a valuation of around $25 billion was by far the smaller fish at approximately half the size of EMC.

The biggest part of EMC by far is VMware, which was included in the deal and will continue to be a separately publicly traded company, but EMC will go private and become part of Dell ending the company’s long history as a publicly traded company.

The two combined companies will make the Dell and EMC the world’s largest privately controlled, integrated technology company, according to a statement released by EMC.

LinkedIn switching to ‘discretionary’ vacation policy | Cnn Money

October 12, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

LinkedIn is the latest company to offer an open-ended time off policy to its employees.

The networking site is implementing a “discretionary time off,” or DTO policy, for its U.S.-based employees, LinkedIn (LNKD, Tech30) vice president Pat Wadors said in a blog post.

Starting November 1, the company will no longer offer a set number of days off each year. Instead, managers will work with employees to plan vacation time.

Under the new policy, LinkedIn employees will face “no set minimum or maximum amount of vacation time,” Wadors wrote.

“We are not alone in making this shift to DTO. It’s part of a growing movement to place more focus on results and empowerment, not hours worked,” Wadors wrote. “And it’s an important step to help employees recharge and keep engaged.”

The unlimited vacation model got its start at small tech firms, and a couple of major employers including Virgin (VA) and General Electric (GE) have adopted it over the past year.

The shift has caused bumps in some workplaces.

Texas university students to protest gun law with dildos | BBC News

October 12, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Texas students are planning to hang sex toys from their bags in protest at a law allowing people to carry concealed weapons on university campuses.

“You’re carrying a gun to class? Yeah well I’m carrying a HUGE DILDO,” Jessica Jin, organizer of Campus (DILDO) Carry, wrote on Facebook.

About 3,000 people have signed up for the protest, which is planned for next year when the law takes effect.

Gun rights supporters have criticized the rally on the group’s Facebook page.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott enacted the campus carry law in June. Under the law, university presidents are permitted to create so-called “gun-free zones”.

“The State of Texas has decided that it is not at all obnoxious to allow deadly concealed weapons in classrooms, however it DOES have strict rules about free sexual expression, to protect your innocence,” wrote Ms Jin, a student at the University of Texas at Austin.

Solar & Wind Reach a Big Renewables Turning Point : BNEF | Bloomberg Business

October 9, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Wind power is now the cheapest electricity to produce in both Germany and the U.K., even without government subsidies, according to a new analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). It’s the first time that threshold has been crossed by a G7 economy.

But that’s less interesting than what just happened in the U.S.

To appreciate what’s going on there, you need to understand the capacity factor. That’s the percentage of a power plant’s maximum potential that’s actually achieved over time.

Consider a solar project. The sun doesn’t shine at night and, even during the day, varies in brightness with the weather and the seasons. So a project that can crank out 100 megawatt hours of electricity during the sunniest part of the day might produce just 20 percent of that when averaged out over a year. That gives it a 20 percent capacity factor.

12 Sure Signs You Shouldn’t Trust a Business Partner, Vendor | Small Biz Trends

October 9, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

When working with an outside company, there are only so many factors you can control. But based on their behavior, you should know when it’s time to back out.

That’s why we asked 12 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question:

“What is one warning sign that a deal with a partner or vendor is not going to pan out?”

Here’s what YEC community members had to say:

1. There Are Long Wait Times Between Communications

“I find that when a partner or vendor takes a long time to respond to our calls or emails, it’s not going to work out.

Urban Outfitters wants full-time employees to work for free | Business Insider

October 8, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

As the holiday season approaches, Urban Outfitters is hoping that its employees are in the giving spirit.

Gawker published an email asking the full-time employees at URBN, Urban Outfitters’ parent company based in Philadelphia, to work without pay during five weekend days in October.

The email explains that October is the busiest month of the year for URBN (which houses Urban Outfitters, Free People, and Anthropologie), and therefore, URBN needs its employees’ help.

What’s Your Most Productive Work Time? | Business News Daily

October 8, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

If you’re like many of today’s office workers, you begin your day between 8 and 9 a.m., end between 5 and 6 p.m., and spend the eight or nine hours in between juggling meetings, conference calls, emails and project deadlines — along with a few trips to the coffee maker to keep you alert and productive.

Sound familiar? If it does, then you probably also know that, despite your best efforts (and caffeine intake), you’re not always at your peak when you’re trudging through the daily stream of work. All 9-to-5ers go through productivity slumps during the workday, and yet they still try to power through and keep working, even if it means substandard output. But why do they do it?