May 2012, Facebook’s IPO turned into a huge Wall Street debacle and plumped to $17.73 that summer. Today, the tech giant’s stock price has remained around $76 since this July, doubling the company’s IPO price of $38.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg belled ringer by his mobile strategy. When the social network went public, almost all its revenue came from desktop-based ads. But with more than 500 million people consuming Facebook portably, Zuckerberg needed to transition his business.

And that transition to mobile business turned out to be smooth and successful. What has been doubled is not only its stock price, also its mobile active users — around one billion people are actively using Facebook mobile app. What’s more, the social network’s mobile ad revenue takes up more than two-thirds of its total ad revenue. Facebook’s share of total mobile advertising market is predicted to pass 12 percent in 2014, quadrupling that in 2012. That makes Facebook the biggest beneficiary of the mobile age.

Google is another big player of mobile advertising. But its mobile ad revenue accounts for only one-third of its total ad revenue and the price tag on Google’s mobile ads are much less than that of its desktop ads, according to The New York Times. From Facebook’s perspective, things look completely different: one year after its IPO, Facebook’s VP of global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson claimed that Facebook’s mobile ads cost more than desktop ads.

The new auto-playing video product is helping Facebook’s mobile monetization as well. The company wrote in a blog post that its 15-second Premium Video Ads will start playing without sound in the News Feed, and the sound will start only when users tap the video.

The company started testing premium video ads last December and introduced these ads on Facebook with a select group of advertisers this May. Facebook will sell and measure the ads “in a way that’s similar to how advertisers already buy and measure ads on TV.” This new function targets “advertisers who want to reach a large audience with high-quality sight, sound and motion.”

Facebook-owned Instagram’s performance will also charge the giant’s mobile business ahead. The photo-sharing app, with 150 million active users, only started to play ads last November. Michael Kors and Ben & Jerry’s are Instagram’s early-stage clients. Spending $1 billion on Instagram two years ago, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has every reason to expect the photo-sharing app bringing in real dollars.

This March, Instagram made a 40 million digital ad deal with Omnicom, a major holding company having a great many big-brand clients, including Nissan, AT&T and Pepsi, and looking to establish a strong relationship with the growing mobile platform. Instagram will be displaying video ads some time as well, just as its parent does.

For today’s Facebook, “Every moment is mobile.”

The day after Thanksgiving, otherwise known as “Black Friday,” was anticipated to reach record sales. The economy is improving, gas prices are low, and the savings were enticing; however, in the end, consumer spending disappointingly did not satisfy the hype for retail profits. Although there are multiple ways to analyze consumer habits during the holidays, Cyber Monday came out on top as the big money maker during the weekend shopping frenzy.

The one-day shopping event of the year has morphed into a week of savings. Thanksgiving has become “Gray Thursday,” then there is the penultimate “Black Friday,” followed by “Small Business Saturday,” and “Cyber Monday.” Although the intention is to initiate the spending spree early, the result may be less spending overall because the consumer expects better savings for a later day.

The Black Friday crowds at Macy’s (photo credit: Marketplace)

According to the National Retail Federation, spending on Black Friday was approximately 11% less than a year earlier. Consumer spending was $50.9 billion over the Thanksgiving weekend, compared to $57.4 billion in 2013.

The competition for retail stores to get consumers in their doors is increasingly difficult as shopping online is both easier to scope out deals, and can be done in one’s pajamas on the couch. With the lower price of gas, expectations were higher for in-store traffic, but this was not the case. According to IBM Digital Analytics, sales grew 8.5% on Cyber Monday, making it the largest online shopping day of the year. Holiday shopping online rose 17% to a record $2.04 billion – shedding light on consumer habits.

Although sales faltered on Black Friday, the amount consumers plan to spend on gifts has slowly increased the last couple years, showing the “gift-giving” is still alive in the American economy. The American Research group quantified a series of consumer habits for the holidays, including the trend for spending more money on gifts for 2014.

As consumers are shifting from in-store spending habits to online, it is evident that shopping overall is down from previous years. This, in part, could be due to shifting consumer priorities for their dispensable income. In an interview with Macy’s CFO, Karen Hoguet, she stated, “Shoppers are spending more of their disposable dollars on categories we don’t sell, like cars, healthcare, electronics and home improvement.” This seems to show that even though the economy is improving, it doesn’t mean consumers aren’t entirely comfortable with spending their income on nonessential goods.

There are many other trends to size up the economy during the holidays, including the amount of money consumers are willing to spend on Christmas trees. The desire to bring some holiday cheer to one’s home can be used as an economic indicator. For example, spending money on a fake tree tends to be more economical when you can put up the same tree (with the same pre-hung lights) for many years to come. Although the sales of real trees still dominate this market, the trend to buy a fake tree has increased while the sales for real trees is on the decline.

A final last thought to wrap up the economics of the holidays– need help picking out a Christmas gift for a loved one? According to Joel Waldfogel, author of the books, “Scroogenomics,” people value gifts about 20% less than the price tag number. In his own words, Waldfogel believes, “The choice to buy presents turns out to destroy a lot of value.” It does sound a bit scrooge-like, but maybe giving a gift card isn’t impersonal after all – it’s just economical.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Affordable Care Act (ACA) or “Obamacare,” is a revolutionary regulation aimed to change the landscape of American healthcare system.

The two major changes under ACA include expanding the number of subsidies available to people with lower income, and also providing insurance to people regardless of their pre-existing conditions. The Obama government wishes to enroll more people into the healthcare system through the establishment of ACA, and thus cover the deficit the government has been spending on healthcare industry. However, is it really going to work? Probably not.

If we take a closer look at how ACA works, we will be able to see the problem. The fundamental principal of Affordable Care Act is to use the money from young and healthy people to pay for the bill of unhealthy or elder people who have higher medical costs. Hence, the health insurance company should enroll younger demographics to balance the risk pool. According to a research conducted by California Association of Health Plans, people in their 20s will experience an increase in premiums by 33% under Affordable Care Act, whereas elder people will see an decrease in their cost of premiums. Now, here comes the question, will young and healthy people who only spend a small amount of money every year on visiting hospitals or doctors be willing to pay more for health insurance? Moreover, will they be able to pay that amount of money since they just start to live on their own? I guess most young people will find that hard.

In fact, although the health plan premiums for young people grow by over 30%, the benefits under ACA also increase by 42%, which means the health company is able to provide members with better services and networks. However, it seems that young people don’t care much about the benefits. According to a survey conducted by USC Annenberg students, the issue that concerns young people the most is the cost of health insurance. They use the word “expansive” frequently to describe the healthcare system. And most people admit that it’s the high cost of insurance that prevent them from enrolling in it.

Some people may argue that there are subsidies available for young people with limited income. Yes, there are. But the truth is, for those who earn a little more than the poverty line, it’s hard for them to choose whether to earn more with no subsidy or to earn less with a small amount of subsidy. More importantly, for those healthy people who usually don’t have health problem, they would rather end up with paying penalties instead of purchasing health insurance, which is far more expansive than the penalty.

All in all, the Affordable Care Act alone couldn’t make the healthcare system operate better. If the government tries to enroll more young people, they should definitely invest more on educating younger demographics the importance of purchasing health insurance. As long as people feel the necessity of doing so, they will be willing to purchase the health insurance initiatively.

Technology has an ageist connotation – it signals new changes in society and has become an obsession to newer generations. It is not common to link the older population to the technological craze; however, as of recently, this association has been challenged.

The United States population aged 65+ will increase from 40 million to 80 million in the next thirty years. The desire to market products for this age group has become increasingly popular, and investors are starting to eye the types of services they can tap in to. One such market of interest is new technology to cater to the aging population, which has proven to be no easy feat.

Take GeriJoy for example, a tablet-based “pet” avatar that can have human interactions– intentionally designed for a patient with dementia or other cognitive disease. Victor Wang previously worked in research for the human machine program with NASA’s telerobotics platform, but changed career paths when this concept of his took off. On a seven-inch tablet, an animal can watch over an older individual, and have 24/7 conversations with them as if it were a real human. The product is marketed as “the benefit of pet therapy without any smells, allergies, cleaning up, bites, or food and veterinary bills.” The pseudo-pet can also remind your older loved-one to take their medication or call an emergency contact if they fall. The idea has caught the interest of many, however, the resistance of a senior to feel comfortable with new technology still serves as a barrier.

Examples of the avatars for GeriJoy

The numbers game is a bit up in the air to label the market of technology for an aging population. According to BCC Research, elder-care technology products were valued at $2.7 billion in 2012. With a compound growth rate of 17.7% a year, this market is projected to reach $7.2 billion by 2018. With growing awareness of the aging Baby Boomers, the efforts to allow these individuals to “age-in-place,” rather than moving into a nursing home, has given life to this sector of the market.  It’s a well-publicized issue that our society does not have enough caregivers to provide services for the 68% of Baby Boomers who are confident they will not leave their house, so companies are viewing this as an opportunity to come up with some type of answer. Other projections are claiming there is a $30 billion technology opportunity to allow seniors to age-in-place, but this can only be reached if the stigma of “confusing technology” for elders can change.

Here enters Google and the Aging2.0 Academy, a partnership that is bringing new innovation to the field of technology and the aging population. Google for Entrepreneurs will support the efforts of the Academy both financially and through mentoring. The Aging2.0 Academy is a yearlong program that guides startups in the field of long term care. In the upcoming “class,” GeriJoy is one of the companies to embark on this experience. Based in San Francisco, the startups will have opportunities to network with key players in the gerontology and technology fields, hopefully establishing new relationships that will produce game-changing products.

The start ups for the most recent class

The Aging2.0 Academy was founded by a trio of entrepreneurs and investors, all with the same goal to introduce technology to the aging-in-place industry. Although their background in gerontology is not robust, their determination to ignite new technological innovation to this market consequently brought awareness to the business of caring for seniors. Although it will take time to introduce the older generation to different forms of technology, with the new innovations, this industry could live up to its hypothetical potential. With a lot of risk on the line for the start-ups, there could be many rewards for the investors.

Thanksgiving like Christmas is usually the commerce-free holiday in the US, when big stores are mostly closed. But these years, there’s growing number of retailers expanding their selling hours during commerce-free holiday to boost their sales. Radio Shacks probably the most expected one.

Founded 1921 and went public in 1982, RadioShack Corporation is an American franchise of electronics retail stores in the U.S. The company has more than 4,400 company-operated stores in the U.S. and Mexico ,and more than 900 dealer stores in 25 countries.

It’s not surprising that the company is desperate to gain some sales during the holiday season, because there’s speculation that the company will die very soon. With several consecutive quarterly loss, in this June, following the horrible results posted from RadioShack’s 2014 Q1 earnings report on June 11, analyst company B. Riley & Co. lowered its price target on the company from $1 a share to zero, signaling another prediction for the company’s march to grave.

Compare its Q1 2014 and 2013 Q1 which is one year ago, Its revenue dropped $736.7 million from $849 million in the year ago period, which is about 11 percent drop. And Sales fell 14 percent for stores.

The company’s total liquidity decreased year to year, but its Chief Financial Officer John Feray assured investors that the liquidity they hold was enough to fund its turnaround for the next 12 months. (Ironically he already resigned)

First, to decrease expenses, RadioShack plans to reduce rent costs, cut customer compensation expenses, consolidate to fewer freight carriers to reduce rates, buy more store fixtures from Asia, and examine utility bills and rate plans. Like Office Depot, RadioShack plans to do more with less and shutter 200 stores per year over a three-year period.

However, take a look at the expense chart of RadioShack’s: Operating expenses, which were around 40% of revenue at the beginning of 2012, surpassed 50% during the most recent quarter. By comparison, Best Buy only spent 20.4% of its revenue on operating expenses during its second quarter.

Second, the company launched RadioShack Labs with PCH on June 5 to support startups and inventors to boost new product innovation. RadioShack plans to use a “direct-to-store” model for select products by reducing inventory requirements and increasing inventory turn in stores. The “RadioShack labs” is built to mainly stimulate innovation and raise consumer awareness to save its mounting losses in dropped sales. This could be an opportunity to fight against the industry-wide decline in electronics sales and low mobile phone demand due to few new models.

Other moves, such as adding services including in-store mobile device repair service to increase customer volume, are in the planning stages. The company’s Chief Executive Joseph Magnacca has acknowledged the implementation has taxed the company, saying “We were trying to do too much too quickly.” Magnacca, though, is confident that, once implemented, the moves will be a success. He added that the recent quarter report did not showcase their turnaround plan, and he was confident about that the company was able to overcome its challenges.

Till today, looking at RadioShack’s market performance it’s quite not pleasant. No one comes to RadioShack’s for purchasing electronics. One factor is that While consumers are increasingly shopping online, RadioShack has a negligible e-commerce business. Its rival Best Buy, in contrast, has invested in its e-commerce business over the past couple of years. RadioShack can’t compete with Best Buy, and it certainly can’t compete with online-only retailers such as Amazon.com. People aren’t going to RadioShack stores because there’s simply no reason for them to do so. And that’s not a problem that can easily be fixed.

To touraround they need to keep up bring more products, more innovation and establish a strong selling point. But these things need cash. Unfortunately the company don’t have liquidity, as mentioned before. Sales are declining far faster than costs, resulting in quarterly losses growing. The operating loss during the most recent quarter more than doubled of year ago period

The company shows no sign of increasing liquidity. So right now it is desperate for cash.

Recently RadioShack received a lifeline of a $120 million investment from shareholders hedge fund Standard General LP, which also finance American apparel to save the company earlier this year, and Litespeed Management LLC that will allow it to get through the holiday season and restructure its debt.

CNN Money first published the coming financial rounding from hedge fund August, RadioShack shares are up 115% for the week.

On October, it announced that it is planning a rights offering that is expected to complete by March 15, to offer existing shareholders the right to purchase equity at 40 cents per share of common stock.

One of the world’s favourite treat- chocolate, could face a critical shortage in the next 20 years; two leading chocolate makers Mars, Inc. and Barry Callebaut say.

Switzerland-based Barry Callebaut, which describes itself as the world’s leading manufacturer of high-quality chocolate and cocoa products, said it had concerns about future cocoa supply in its annual report published earlier this month. Barry Callebaut was repeating the concerns of Mars in the US, which has been warning for some years that cocoa production could be 1 million tonnes short of demand by 2020.

Simply put from the manufacture perspective, it seems like people are eating too much chocolate therefore leads to this not-so-sweet deficit in the future.

Image Source: thestar.com

Nevertheless, people’s exceeding consumption power is not the only reason for the deficit.

On the other side of the supply-demand chain, the market supply of chocolate has already been affected by the lower cocoa productivity worldwide in recent years.

Cocoa is the main ingredient in chocolate, without it there is no tasty chocolate. Last year, the world ate roughly 70,000 metric tons more cocoa than it produced. Bloomberg reports that from 1993 to 2007, the price of cocoa averaged about $1,400 a ton; the past six years had an average of little more than $2,700 – an 87 percent increase. According to Bloomberg, the lack of supply is reportedly due to drought, disease, higher demand of more-productive crops like corn, and last but not least, the rising popularity of dark chocolate – which calls for more cocoa.

Source: Groupe Sucres et Denrées (SUCDEN)

On Sep 21^st, 2014, Joon Young, a member from the K-pop boy band, ZE:A, tweeted that his entertainment company had been squeezing cash out of the team without giving team members a fair salary. He then posted his paycheck on Twitter, which showed that his monthly income was only $300.

Since the year 2012 when Psy’s “Gangnam Style” went viral on YouTube, K-pop has experienced a huge increase in its market share all over the world. However, behind the glamorousness of the K-pop industry, K-pop stars are actually experiencing unfair treatment and limited freedom.

The key players in the industry, big entertainment companies in Korea, take full control over the business from casting to production, and from marketing to distribution. They casted and trained talents, and when the artists finally get debuted, they will be forced to sign a long-term contract with the company. Some of the contract even last for 17 years, which is impossible to imagine here in America.

The contract is extremely harsh to artists and beneficial to the company. Artists have to work 7 days a week with only one-week holiday at the end of the year. Three former members from TVXQ complained that they could only sleep 3 hours a day and were not allowed start their own business unless getting permission from the company. Moreover, although TVXQ brought millions of dollars to the company each year, the members only received 1% of what they’ve earned. As a result of that, the three members ended up filing a lawsuit against the company and formed another band themselves.

This lawsuit, which lasted for 4 years, aroused widely concern over the so-called “slave contract” inside the industry. In 2010, the Fair Trade Commission in Korea finally realized the seriousness of the problem, and asked SM Entertainment, the entertainment company of TVXQ, to revise its unfair contract with the artists. SM Entertainment did that, and held a press conference to address people’s concern. Now, everyone seemed relieved, however, this was not the end of the story.

On May 15th, 2014, Kris, a member from the boy band EXO, filed another lawsuit against his entertainment company, and claimed that the intense working condition caused him adverse health problems. Five month later, another member from EXO, Luhan, followed Kris and asked to end the contract with the company. Several days later, Jessica, a member from one of the most well-known K-pop girl band, Girl’s Generation, claimed through weibo platform that she was kicked out of the team because the company didn’t allow her to start her own fashion business.

All of what happened above remind us that the “slave contract” is still there, and it not only hurt the interest of the artists, but also hurt the feeling of K-pop fans all over the world. In fact, this kind of situation is hard to be changed in a short period of time. As the K-pop industry growing bigger and bigger, the competition among entertainment companies and K-pop artists will only be more, not less. This made people worry if the growing speed of the industry surpasses the capacity it can actually handle, which made the industry vulnerable in its expanding process. However, there were also people arguing that this process is what every industry would experience during its expansion. No matter what the answer is, one thing is for sure: if the K-pop industry didn’t make any changes in the way they manage their artists, it will absolutely affect the future development of the industry.