Ever wondered what happens when we type a website name ending in .cm instead of .com. Well this is what happens. The .cm country code is owned by Cameroon. Not many websites are registered in the country. But the similarilty of .cm with .com makes it a big business opportunity. Kevin Ham, the domain king who has built a $300 million empire on domain names, sent some of his people to Cameroon to discuss the possibility of moving the .cm traffic to his website. This is what happens. When an internet user types a website with .cm extension, it gets transferred to a server in Cameroon. If the website is not registered with them it gets transferred to the website “agoga.com”. Agoga’s servers query Yahoo to find ads related to the typed name, which are then displayed on a parked page. Whenever a user clicks on an ad, Yahoo pays Ham, who shares an undisclosed slice of the revenue with Cameroon.
July 9th, 2007
He is the richest man in India, with a net worth of $20 Billion. He is the chairman, managing director and the largest shareholder of Reliance Industries, India’s largest private sector company. He is Mukesh Ambani. Since splitting with younger brother Anil in 2005 and taking control of $20 billion (revenues) Reliance Industries, founded by his late father Dhirubhai Ambani, his fortune has soared by $11 billion. Reliance Petroleum, the oil refining subsidiary of Reliance, in which Chevron has 5% stake, listed on May 2006. Betting $5.5 billion on retail ventures including Reliance Fresh, a chain of food stores; 60 are now open. Megaplans include $10 billion investment to develop special economic zones. Recently got board approval to hike personal stake in Reliance Industries from 44% to 48%.
June 17th, 2007
He is the fifth richest man in the world with a net worth of $32 billion. His company accounts for 10% of world’s production of steel. He is Lakshmi Mittal, the steel titan, who began his career working in his father’s steel making business in India and today is the chief executive of Arcelor-Mittal, a UK based company with $80 billion in sales. Not content to dominate the steel industry, Mittal is branching out. Among his latest deals: spent $980 million for a 50% stake in Kazakh oil firm Caspian Investment Resources, a subsidiary of Russia’s Lukoil. And last but not the least he is the richest man in the UK!
June 17th, 2007
Over the past few months, a lot has been said about the future of Social Security. And most of it is not very pleasant. Most of us are wondering whether we will be able to reap the benefits of our Social Security in our old age.
Reading an article recently I found some interesting information about Social Security, the present state and the future. Presently Social Security is taking in more money that it needs to pay the beneficiaries. This surplus is being delivered to the U.S. Department of Treasury, which in exchange gives the Social Security Administration an IOU in the form of special non negotiable bonds (at present there are $1.9 trillion worth of these bonds with the Dept of Treasury). So when the tax revenues going into the Social Security system start to fall short, the SS Administration will start cashing in the IOUs. The Treasury has already spent that money, so when the SS starts cashing in the IOUs, the Treasury will have to look for ways to raise the money- hike taxes, reduce spending on things like education, infrastructure.
Even though we will be able to reap the benefits of Social Security, we will be paying more taxes and getting worse services (education and infrastructure being a few).
But the Social Security system will be in trouble once the IOUs are redeemed. The system will then have a deficit and will have to reduce the benefits or increase the payroll taxes.
One solution to the problem as suggested in the article was to change the way the benefits are calculated. Instead of raising the benefits at the rate at which the wages are increasing, i.e 1-1.5% higher than the cost of living indexes, they should be raised by the increase in cost of living. This would always give you the same purchasing power. It will reduce the burden on the system and help get the system back on its feet.
Till a solution is put into place we can all hope that some day we will be able to reap the benefits of the Social Security tax we pay today.
June 9th, 2007
The inflation rate for women is higher than that for men. The Consumer Price Index for products catering to women (jewellery, clothing, shoes, cosmetics, household appliances) is higher than for products targeting men. Year over year inflation rate in the US, for products catering to women is 18 times higher than the 0.8% for products for men.
The reason for the disparity is the higher demand for women’s products, which in turn is pushing the prices. Women have a higher rate of employment growth than men, more are living single- single women spend more on themselves than men, so there is more being spent on women’s jewellery and clothing thereby pushing the prices and finally leading to a higher inflation rate for women.
March 12th, 2007
In the year 2005, Exxon Mobile reported annual income of $36B, becoming the top earner in the history of the American corporate world. Well they did it again, the annual income of Exxon Mobil for 2006 was $36.5B. The 4th quarter results were lower than expected by 4%, but the record annual profit made up for the lower than expected last quarter.
With this the company has widened its lead over Walmart as the company with the largest revenues in the USA. Oil is definitely the gold of this century, and perhaps the next too.
February 1st, 2007
XBRL Taxonomies,are the dictionaries which the language uses. Each item of data are identified by a specific tag, taxonomies are the categorization schemes that define these tags.
Based on the accounting regulations these taxonomies might change. So different countries have their own taxonomies, within the US different national jurisdictions may have different taxonomies, different industries will have different taxonomies. There are also taxonomies for internal reporting purposes called the GL taxonomy.
January 31st, 2007
Under XBRL every financial data has its identifying tag, which is computer readable. SO instead of having data as text, it is stored as a tag. Computer can read it, store it, analyze it, and present it in different forms. It will make not just intra company analysis easy, but facilitate inter company analysis. This is how: if the tag for Net Income is same for all companies, as is the case in XBRL, then the computer can generate a report analyzing the Net Income tag for one company against its competitors, other companies in different industries, suppliers, buyers, etc…It can compare data of not just national players but also international players.
The tags provide a range of information about the item, such as whether it is a monetary item, percentage or fraction. XBRL allows labels in any language to be applied to items, as well as accounting references or other subsidiary information.
XBRL can show how items are related to one another. It can thus represent how they are calculated. It can also identify whether they fall into particular groupings for organizational or presentational purposes. XBRL is easily extensible, so companies and other organizations can adapt it to meet a variety of special requirements.
January 28th, 2007
An international non-profit consortium of approximately 450 major companies, organizations, and government agencies is working on XBRL. It is an open standard, free of license fees.
January 28th, 2007
eXtensible Business Reporting Language, is a language to communicate the financial data of an organization. It is a process of creating a standard platform/format for reporting. XBRL is a member of the family of languages based on XML, or Extensible Markup Language, which is a standard for the electronic exchange of data between businesses and on the internet.
January 28th, 2007
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