In response to Tina Tsai’s Snapchat Rejects $3 Billion In Cash Blog I would say Spiegel definitely  took a gamble by turning down Facebook’s offer. The IPO market is always unpredictable and could turn south before Snapchat goes public. Notoriously fickle teenagers may move on to the next “cool thing” before Snapchat can go public or gets another $3 billion offer.
As of right now Spiegel knows that he has a growing audience of teenagers that Facebook desperately, and increasingly, wants. He’s banking on that audience getting much bigger and more valuable.While $3 billion is a lot of money, Speigel may figure he can hold out and make a lot more just like Twitter’s recent IPO.

Source
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2013/11/14/maybe-snapchat-is-crazy-to-turn-down-3b-but-was-facebook-nuts-to-offer-it/

In my opinion college, regardless of the cost is very important. In Zilue (Sunny) Zheng’s Blog- College: Is It A Good Investment?, he does come to the conclusion that “a bachelor degree will strengthen job prospects” and i completely agree. If we are looking at college like an investment then I believe compared to other investments(stocks, bonds etc.)it  pays off the most in future returns, thanks to the earnings advantage you can see above.

Like any investment, the benefits from college are unknown and even risky. Some college students wind up at Goldman Sachs or Google and others wind up with $100,000 in debt and unemployed. Whether college is right (and what college is right) for every 18-year old like Sunny and I is not knowable. Whether college is failing as an institution is knowable — and it’s not

Source
http://www.hamiltonproject.org/images/uploads/thp_image_uploads/charts/EarningsEmployment.JPG

French professors Karan Girotra and Serguei Netessine have recently blogged about Amazon constantly editing their business model in the Harvard Business Review.
They basically explain how amazon went from a  “sell all, carry few” company to “sell all, carry a lot” one. They only had a handful of warehouses at the time but now due to growing demand they are about to spend 14 billion dollars to build about 50 warehousing facilities and take on the challenge of  “same day delivery” within the USA.

What I really liked about the blog is that how smart businesses like Amazon.com develop ways of constantly questioning what they do and they reconstruct their business model based on a regular basis as if it has an expiry date. Amazon teaches us that a company can’t afford to sentimentalize the icons of its past: it needs to be disciplined about challenging and breaking its existing business models.

Source

http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/11/amazon-constantly-audits-its-business-model/

Earlier this year British Airways signed a contract to replace their previously used Boeing 747 model with the A380 airbus jumbo-jets.

Airbus claims that the giant planes, with an upper deck six feet wider than the Boeing 747s they will replace, will each save the airline £100m in fuel costs over their lifetimes. The fuel bill for one long-haul flight runs into six figures and the A380 is said to be 16% more efficient. More significantly for those under the flightpath, the A380’s “noise footprint” on landing at Heathrow – the area greatly affected by noise disturbance – is claimed to be a quarter of that of a 747.

All BA’s A380s will be powered by Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines built at Derby which means up to 40 per cent of the value near £300million cost of each super jumbo – or around £120million –  is ‘British made’. Airbus said that over its lifetime of the A380 plane will contribute £15billion to the UK economy with the Rolls-Royce engines adding another £11billion.

Sources

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/jul/04/british-airways-airbus-a380-heathrow

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2355472/British-Airways-takes-delivery-new-270m-Airbus-A380.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9nq2QCU18E

Tesla Motor Inc.’s all-electric Model S became the top-selling car in Norway last month, with drivers in the country of 5 million people paying a premium to buy the award-winning luxury car second-hand to avoid having to wait five months for a new one, dealers said on Tuesday.The high performance Tesla S, which went on sale in Europe in August, had a market share in Norway of 5.1 per cent last month, pushing the conventionally-powered Volkswagen Golf into second place with 4.6 per cent, according to the latest official figures. Some drivers in Norway are now willing to pay as much as $20,000 extra to get the new Model S from existing owners.

Norway’s favouritism towards eco-friendly vehicles is evident in its exemption of electric cars from tolls and their access to bus lanes in the capital Oslo. In this way, the country, which ironically owes much of its tremendous wealth to oil exportation, has created incentives to increase the demand for eco-cars in ways that other countries cannot afford to.

Sources

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/new-cars/auto-news/teslas-110000-model-s-is-now-norways-best-selling-car/article14739655/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2012/07/11/why-tesla-is-beating-gm-ford-and-toyota-at-electric-cars/2/

Kenya’s economy has seen steady growth since 2002, averaging between 4 and 5 percent per year, according to the World Bank. Kenya’s economy briefly slowed down during the 2008 global economic downturn, but recovered quickly. The country’s economy was expected to grow nearly 6 percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund, and the Nairobi Stock Exchange is up 21 percent in the last 12 months. But in light of recent events it is about to drop substantially.

A significant percent of Kenya’s economy relies on tourists, who travel thousands of miles to go on safari through Kenya’s Great Rift Valley and other wildlife reserves. Approximately 1.8 million tourists visited Kenya in 2011, primarily from Europe and the United States, according to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. Tourism from China and India has also grown in recent years. It is not clear how the attack in Nairobi will impact the country’s economic prospects, at least in the near term but  Economist and local business owners fear that Kenya’s political instability will horrifically impact the economy and cause the number of tourists visiting to drop by 30% from its statistic of 1.8 million tourists in 2011. Not only will this adversely impact the country’s GDP and the success of businesses directed to tourism but the standard of living in Nairobi..

Sources
http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/04/westgate-mall-attacks-kenya-terror#part-two

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/attack-kenyas-economic-future-was-bright