Airline business: Mere oxymoron or investor death wish? Cumulatively, America’s airlines have lost $34 billion since 1947. In the last decade, five legacy carriers landed in Chapter 11 bankruptcy—US Airways twice. “How do you become a millionaire?” mused Warren Buffett, who had an unhappy dalliance with US Airways. “Make a billion dollars and then buy an airline.”

The commercial jet came of age in Seattle, yet when Bill Ayer quotes another Buffettism at a business conference here—”If a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down”—the audience erupts in laughter. Mr. Ayer knows his gallows humor. He runs America’s seventh-largest carrier, Alaska Airlines.

Based along Angle Lake in southern Seattle, Alaska is an oddity—a smallish, specialized, regional airline in a world of global giants. It shuns cross-continental alliances and mega-mergers. It doesn’t make a priority of “market share” or “capacity discipline,” the industry buzz words. It’s also unusual, in an era of wrenching change at airlines, that Mr. Ayer has worked at the same company for 30 years.

Alaska is unique in other ways. “They seem to be running a business, rather than an airline,” says analyst George Hamlin. Take any industry metric—on-time arrival, customer satisfaction, full planes, consistent profitability, passenger growth—and you’ll find Alaska at or near the top.

Alaska shares rose 30% last year, making it the only major airline to show a full-year gain. The industry was down 25% on average. Alaska’s market capitalization of $2.78 billion compares with $1.56 billion for US Airways, the fifth-largest carrier, whose revenues are three times those of Alaska. Yet, as Mr. Ayer half-jokes at the luncheon talk, “airlines are not a great benchmark” against which to compare yourself.

Later in the day, at his office down I-5 from the huge Boeing plant, he says that airlines have gotten “really good at making excuses.” The excuse list is long: Few businesses are as vulnerable to fluctuating fuel costs and customer-demand shocks (think Great Recession, terrorism). Few are so dependent on union labor. Few are—since deregulation in 1978—as volatile and competitive.

Read Full Article in Wall Street Journal.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

Even the year’s grandest TV event isn’t enough to get smartphone addicts to look up.

In what is being marketed as the first “second screen” Super Bowl, the game’s promoters and advertisers are offering interactive experiences aimed at getting people to spend more money and time on mobile phones and devices.

Roughly 60% of Super Bowl viewers will use their phones during the game, says a survey by Velti, a mobile marketing firm. An E-Trade survey says 31% of viewers expect to use Facebook, and 6% will be on Twitter. “This is the first year where you’ll see fans using the cellphone more often than the remote,” says Krishna Subramanian of Velti. “Advertisers are trying to figure out how to leverage the second or third screen.”

• MORE: How to stream the Super Bowl live

Some examples:

•Game streaming.Verizon Wireless and the National Football League are partnering to live stream the game. It’s the first Super Bowl to be broadcast live on mobile phones, Verizon Wireless says.

Public Knowledge, a communications advocacy group, warns that live video streaming can be costly, as much as $20 for a three-hour game if you’re over your data limit.

Read Full Article in USA Today.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

Much like Twitter’s recent announcement concerning country-specific censorship, Google is getting on the fun by redirecting Blogger blogs to country-specific URLs. This means if you are in India and you’re trying to navigate to a Blogger.com blog, you will, in all likelihood, be redirected to the country-code top level domain, or [nameofblog].blogger.in domain, instead of its American counterpart.

Google has set up a page specifically addressing the redirects, and in their explanation, it also reveals their plans of country-specific censorship, something the redirection makes much easier:

Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD. [Emphasis added]

It’s odd to see “free expression” and “valid removal requests” in same sentence, but here we are. Google’s page goes on to promise “the majority of the content hosted on different domains will be unaffected by content removals,” but the fact remains, they are positioning themselves to remove content that much easier.

Another feature appears to be of the circumvention of the country code top-level domains, at least in relation to accessing the content:

Blog readers may request a specific country version of the blogspot content by entering a specially formatted “NCR” URL.

Full Article in WebProNews.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

The Securities and Exchange Commission investigates a Wall Street behemoth over claims that it assembled and sold a package of subprime mortgage-backed securities at the behest of hedge fund king John Paulson without telling other investors that Paulson planned to short it.

Sound familiar?

Almost two years ago, Goldman Sachs was in the SEC’s cross hairs over such an allegedly fraudulent scenario and ended up settling charges for $550 million, but not without becoming the poster boy for Wall Street shenanigans that helped crash the economy. Now, it’s Deutsche Bank that is being probed by the SEC, Der Spiegel reports, for allegedly letting Paulson help pick “junk” mortgage-backed securities that went into a collateralized debt obligation without telling other investors that the hedge funder was shorting the CDO, called START.

Deutsche Bank was the fourth-largest issuer of CDOs in the United States, but it has largely avoided the glare of a federal investigation while its competitors, including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JPMorgan, have all been probed by the SEC over how they marketed deals involving subprime mortgage-backed securities. The agency has come under criticism for that lapse, with particular focus on the fact that the SEC’s enforcement chief, Robert Khuzami, previously worked as the general counsel at Deutsche Bank when it was packaging such CDOs.

The bank gained a certain infamy for its role in packaging START, as well as other CDOs, during hearings led by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) last year. It was revealed then that Deutsche banker Greg Lippman once advised a colleague to buy protection for the bank against START, emailing him: “Start is crap you should short because I bet we’ll have to … buyback cash ones next year.”

Read Full Article in Huffington Post.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

I first spoke with Dave Goldberg in October, when I was working on a piece about successful startups that aren’t yet household names. Goldberg runs SurveyMonkey, a Palo Alto, CA firm that lets users create online surveys for free and, for more elaborate surveys, pay up to $65 a month. Founder Ryan Finley started SurveyMonkey in 1999. With his brother Chris, Finley grew the company to a rumored $30 million in sales– without raising any outside funding. In 2009, Spectrum Equity and Bain Capital bought out the Finleys, installing Goldberg, a former Yahoo exec, as the chief executive.

Since then, SurveyMonkey has been buying on a bit of a buying spree. In June 2010 it acquired phone polling startup Precision Polling. After closing a $100 million round of senior debt financing that November, it bought WuFoo, which makes online forms. Last year SurveyMonkey bought a stake in survey provider Clicktools.

In December SurveyMonkey teamed up with TPG Capital to buy part of MarketTools, a rival firm. At the time, TPG’s single-digit stake in SurveyMonkey valued the firm at $1 billion, according to the New York Times.

I met with Goldberg while he was visiting New York last week. If he was excited about an upcoming Facebook IPO– where wife Sheryl Sandberg is COO– he didn’t let on. Below is a condensed, edited version of our conversation.

What’s your growth strategy?

Read Full Article on Forbes.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

Facebook may finally be ready to go public. The social-networking behemoth is planning as early as next week to file for an initial public offering worth up to $100 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources.

Morgan Stanley is expected to be lead underwriter with Goldman Sachs also likely to play a major role, the sources said. USA TODAY could not independently corroborate the story. The timing of such a filing could put Facebook on track to start trading stock as early as this spring.

The six-year-old Facebook is expected to raise $10 billion, with a valuation of between $75 billion and $100 billion, although such information would not be in the initial registration document. By either measure, it would make Facebook among the largest IPOs ever. (Visa set a record in 2008, when it raised $17.9 billion.)

“It makes Facebook the largest Internet IPO ever,” says Kathleen Smith, a principal at IPO investment advisory firm Renaissance Capital.

Read Full Article in USA Today.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

BROADWAY leaders from all corners of the arts assembled on January 23rd as part of TEDxBroadway, a day-long conference examining the future of New York’s Great White Way. The event considered the problems now plaguing the industry, and offered some ideas for handling the coming challenges—though there were few hard-and-fast solutions.The motley assortment of speakers included Neil Patrick Harris, an actor; Frank Eliason, Citibank’s social-media strategist; Kara Larson, an arts marketing consultant; Juan Enriquez, a scientist (and TED favourite); and Jordan Roth, president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns five theatres on Broadway. Addressing the conference’s 200-plus attendees, these speakers were candid about Broadway’s shortcomings. The most consistent targets of scorn were Broadway’s archaic and off-putting ticketing system; the stalls in creative development that have led to a slew of unimaginative jukebox musicals; and the dated and overall poor experience most theatres provide for ticket-buyers.

Broadway is failing to connect with audiences, observed Mr Eliason. It feels like theatres “are rushing you in and rushing you out,” he said. With Google, Twitter, Facebook and additional social media providing people with 24-hour access to whatever they want, Broadway needs to figure out how to personalise the theatre experience for ticket-holders, and use these new platforms to communicate in a new way. “Human connection is extraordinarily important.”

Gregory Mosher, a Tony Award-winning director and former artist director of the Lincoln Centre Theatre, stressed that a big part of the problem lately comes from foolish efforts to predict box-office success. “You produce one show with movie stars and it does well, then another and that does well, then another and that does well. So you decide all shows with movie stars do well, but it’s just not true,” he said. Indeed the “fallacy of prediction”, as he described it, was blamed several times over the course of the day for Broadway’s spate of formulaic shows in recent years. If there was consensus on Monday, it was that shows have been consistently uniform and boring, both behind the scenes and on stage. Many speakers underscored the need for diversification on Broadway. “We’re not inspiring a young audience to plunk down their money and say, ‘We want to see a Broadway show,’” said Joseph Craig, an entertainment marketing guru.

Read Full Article in The Economist.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

I’ve been Starting My Start for some time now with Upstart, Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals , and I found out what not to do more than what is effective, which was humbling, but educational. There are some elements worth discussing, which should help any person considering building a business on their own.

Here’s what I learned:

Who are You – Are you up for this? The work, the hours, the failure, the rejection – because to Start Your Start, you will get overwhelmed and depressed with how much there is to do, with how much has not been done yet – with how far you are away from your ultimate goal, yet you will need to fight through to the next moment and the next, until you “breakthrough.” Are you willing to do this for your dream?

Don’t sit there thinking you’re the only person doing what you’re doing or thinking about doing it; there are many people thinking the same thing, at exactly the same time – it’s only the person, who dares to stop dreaming and start doing – he/she is the person that has enough naiveté, enough folly – enough disruption to what makes them comfortable – enough belief to “Make it Happen.” Is that you?

Vision – See where you are going and clarify your motivation for wanting to get there. It’s rare when one entrepreneur can do all things alone, so it will be necessary to connect your vision to those you want to employ, those with financial resources and your potential partners. The vision should be incredibly ambitious, yet still have pragmatic means for achieving.

Believe – It’s your dream, don’t expect others to see your dream as you do. If you can’t create excitement within yourself – you won’t be able to persuade others to support your initiatives.

Talent – Find talent that feels what you feel about your proposition; don’t just get famous or cheap partners or employees — seek value – find the people, who want the business to happen almost as much as you do. Find those people, who are relentless in their pursuit of milestones and overall goals. Also, look for diversity in talent – if all your talent is creative-leaning, you will have a blind spot within operations. Also, diversity in thought and talent will look at ideation and process development through eclectic frames, which should help your enterprise find the best path forward.

Operations – Strategize; create a roadmap of how to achieve your goals. Execute; find the tactics to complement and complete the roadmap. Identify core and peripheral audiences, the risks and the costs. Create a real-time SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) and metric platform. Connect your employees to the goals, the mission and the vision – personalize performance.

Performance – Identify the milestones you want to reach, when you want to reach them – the resources necessary, and how you measure up to your own objectives and to your competitors – where are you making inroads, where do you need to adjust – what does your performance tell you about the next 15-30 days – what does it tell you about the year ahead?

Differentiate – Create a Unique Selling Proposition; what will be different about your offering from the rest of those already within market – how will your communications and customer service be different – what will be customers/users testimony, which separates your products or services  — how will you deliver this differentiation consistently?

Know the Numbers – If you are like me, creative and somewhat capricious – then you hate financials, but there is no business without the business side of the business. If you are not clear and present about your financials, you have no business – whoever knows the numbers and how it relates to costs, revenues, margins, taxes and net issues – that’s the person who owns the business. Don’t “create” yourself out of owning your own business! (Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs, by Karen Berman and Joe Knight) good numbers book to start out.

Repurpose – If you think it, it’s already been done. Stop wasting time creating something that already exists – your job is to personalize that thing you are offering to fit your audience. Yes, we have already been to the moon – your job is to get a social media site for regular people who want to go to the moon. Don’t invent – repurpose and make something already invented – original again.

Look Around the Corner – See the future before it arrives; the first to the opportunity, to the IPO, to the information is always the winner – the one slow to evolve is always dead on arrival. Engage in futurity (sound principles, ethics and performance), not in foolishness (pets.com) – enough said.

Still Believe – As the business moves forward, you will get your ass kicked up and down and all around, even as things start to get better; you will lose money, lose great people and deals will fall through, hang in there, dust yourself off, refocus and keep fighting. Stay focused – there will be people and circumstances that you think should support you, who will not offer that very support, and others not aligned with your vision, who will surprisingly become accoutrements to your success. Calm is your armor – stay focused, resolute and WIN.

Evaluation – What have you learned and why did that happen. How did this information help your company and what adjustments do you need to make to do whatever you’re doing more effectively, with less cost? Should you measure every day, once a week, once a month etc ; whatever you do, your performance, the financials and the evaluation should tell an immediate and comprehensive story – if not – change your evaluation formula.

Fun – You’re on your way. It’s great to be your own man (or woman), and to be autonomous. Remember that if you make it, it will be yours. Lofts and Maserati’s are not had by 9-to-5ers. Remember to have parties and events, recognize employees and get out in the community you serve – you are the most direct reflection of your firm  — if you look like you’re having fun – you become attractive to potential customers, financiers and partners.

Repeat – When you complete my list, repeat them again, and this time “Breakthrough.”

See you soon –best to you and your endeavor.

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

Zynga Inc. Chief Executive Mark Pincus ended 2011 as the face of an overhyped Web initial public offering. Now he wants to show the hype was justified.

Early last year, his San Francisco company, which makes social games such as “FarmVille” that are played on Facebook, was on track for one of the hottest initial public offerings of 2011. But when Zynga finally went public last month, its stock price dropped 5% on the first day of trading and has since consistently traded below its $10 offering price.

Mr. Pincus, 45 years old, also came under scrutiny for his role in asking some early employees to renegotiate their stock compensation packages. Some saw the move as undermining Silicon Valley’s long-held tradition of young entrepreneurs signing up at start-ups for low salaries but with the hope of an eventual payoff from big equity packages.

Now Zynga faces questions of whether it can keep producing new gaming hits, even as it works to move away from its dependence on Facebook.

With the quiet period surrounding Zynga’s IPO now over, Mr. Pincus sat down to discuss Zynga’s culture, its stock price, and the potential for future revenue growth and online gambling.

Read Full Article in Wall Street Journal.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

Take a look at how vastly Mozilla’s “Thunderbird” email program has changed and improved. It has restated its purpose and now has once again become a player in the web email market.

Read Full Article in USA Today.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation