News from:http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international-business/forbes-media-to-explore-a-sale-of-the-company-says-ceo-mike-perlis/articleshow/25839706.cms, http://www.businessinsider.com/forbes-is-reportedly-exploring-sale-of-magazine-2013-11

Forbes Media CEO Mike Perlis said in a memo earlier this Friday, that “We’re organizing  a process to test the waters regarding a sale of Forbes Media. We have hired Deutsche Bank to represent us, and we expect interest from numerous suitors.” He also stated that Forbes Media hired the bank after receiving “serious” overtures to buy the company around $400 million to $500 million.

Forbes Media is well-knows for its annual rankings of the richest people in the world. according to data compiled by the Alliance of Audited Media(http://abcas3.auditedmedia.com/ecirc/magtitlesearch.asp), Forbes’ magazine had an average circulation of 932,884. It holds a special vision of the American economy and influences a large number of people. It also develops its own magazine style.

However, the appearance of Internet have changed people’s life greatly. Nowadays, people prefer using cell phones and computers to read news, e-books and e-magazine, so less and less people are willing to buy paper magazines. The status of all the paper industry including Forbes Media is threatened. As a result, every company has to find a way out, like selling the company and get more money to innovate.

News from：http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international-business/mcdonalds-to-spend-up-to-3-billion-on-new-restaurants-remodeling/articleshow/25778336.cms

The world largest hamburger chain, McDonald’s announced on Thursday that it is going to spend $3 billion next year to open 1,600 new restaurants and remodel about 1000 restaurants it has now. As it is stated in the news, “McDonald’s recently has struggled to meaningfully expand sales at established restaurants after years of outpacing its rivals, last month trimmed its 2013 capital spending outlook by $100 million to $3 billion and delayed some new restaurant openings until next year due to softness in China and some other emerging markets.”

We all know that such a big corporation like McDonald’s, the company grows much bigger, the more challenge it will face. At the moment McDonald’s is struggling from its sales revenue and it plans to open more restaurants to deal with it. In fact, from a customer side, I think there are other ways to handle it. The company can come up with more ideas about fast food, like burger sandwiches, New Orleans roasted chicken wings, etc. Sales not only come from how many stores the company owns, but also depends on how attractive the products and the service the company offers to its customers.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/12/news/companies/us-airways-american-airlines-antitrust/

According to CNN, American Airlines and US Airways merged together to be the largest airline. It is said that the Justice Department has reached a settlement with two airlines that they are required to sell facilities at seven airports to finish their merger. Meanwhile, under the agreement, the lower-cost airlines will increase their presence at many airport in United States.

The new airlines will give up several slots at different nation’s airports due to the antitrust law. Because of the appearance of the new slots, the competitions between airlines will be more intensive, breaking the present peace between each other. Other airlines will try their best to buy the slots and find more attractive destinations in order to gain more profit. Customers are expected to benefit from this merger. The involvement of different airways in the same air line means more choice for the customers. After the combination, they are easier to buy less expensive tickets and different selections for the airlines because of the rivalries, what’s more, the profit of the new airlines will not be affected.

The value of Bitcoin virtual currency triples yesterday. In the afternoon, it rose to $321 dollars per Bitcoin, which is a new record. The previous record was set on Wednesday, about $272 dollars per Bitcoin. Over the last week, the price of the Bitcoin grew by 44.6 percent due to the fact that recently the awareness of Bitcoin currency has greatly increased since more and more people know Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a type of peer-to-peer digital virtual currency introduced in 2008. It is not controlled by banks but relies on networks between computers. People also can exchange Bitcoin into real currency like US dollars and Euros.

In the past, investors like to store gold because they think gold never depreciate. After gold price dropped tremendously in April, 2013, they start to whether they should switch their attention on Bitcoin. It is safer and global. The owner has his/her own right to use it and can access it through any computer in the world. Because the number of Bitcoin is limited, we can predict that Bitcoin currency definitely will appreciate in the future. Its future is clear and bright.

Twitter resets its IPO price earlier today to the $23-$25 range. According to MicroVentures CEO Tim Sullivan, the demand for Twitter shares in the private market is very high. Using microeconomics concepts, the number of customers in the market increases, the demand will shift to the right which means the demand increases.As a result, the equilibrium price will increase. MicroVentures has been tracking the price of Twitter shares in the private market for a long time and they find that people bid the price from $15 per share last summer to $35 per share recently. Although the price in the private market is not used by banks to set the real share price, but it shows how people are crazy about Twitter shares and thus investors will hold an optimistic attitude about Twitter.

Twitter may meet the same situation as Facebook did last year since demand is so high and the price as well. It is true that they have different IPOs and Twitter’s seems much better than Facebook’s. Investors are expecting Twitter, but nobody can predict the future. See what happened to Facebook! Anyway, we still want to see the day that Twitter goes public.

In class we mentioned how successful Dell is, Matthew’s blog also shows how Dell reach its success.However, what is happening to Dell now?

On the October 29, Dell CEO Michael Dell and the private equity house Silver Lake complete their buyout for Dell with $24.9 billion. As smartphones and tablet computers are more popular among customers, PC sales declined in the past years. Meanwhile, Dell CEO wants to transform the company into a provider of computing services to corporations to start a new chapter for the company.

It is really a sad story because Dell once was the largest PC company worldwide. Until now, the world is experiencing a new technical impact brought by smartphones and tablet computers. Customers are always tend to buy less expensive product with better service provided. Smartphones and tablet computers are much easier to carry with people and people can use the same applications that are used on computer or even more applications develped especially for smartphones and tablet computers. Dell PC is not capable of competing with smartphones and tablet computers since it is very heavy and large to carry and costs more. As a result, it is doomed to be obsoleted.

Recourse:https://blogs.ubc.ca/matthewanderson/2013/09/29/dell-icious/

The blog below indicates how he thinks Chinese people are crazy about buying gold on the Nation Day. That’s very interesting.

On the National Day, a huge number of people went to Hong Kong to spend their holiday. Meantime, because everything in Hong Kong is duty-free, people enjoyed shopping there. It is said that these days the most crowded place was not shopping mall but the gold stores. People rushed into the store and paid for the gold bars and gold coins without any thoughts and hesitations.

In fact, the price of gold still continues going down this month despite the United States government entered a shutdown on the October 1st. It was anticipated to go up because the United States government is now facing many big problems.

Using the microeconomics concepts, we know that price can affect quantity demanded. It turns out that the price of gold continues going down so that the quantity demanded by people greatly increased. Gold is a good example of price and demand.This is why people are crazy about “robbing ” gold.

Recourse：http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4df087300101bhex.html

Ali’s blog “Get ready for the iphone5s or iphone5c” indicates how she thinks about the products. I want to discuss it as well.

iPhone 5S/5C launched on the 20^th of September and all the apple fans were crazy about how to get a new iPhone at the first moment. But in fact, it was very hard to buy a shiny new iPhone 5S on the launch day because apple only offered a few iPhone 5S products. The most popular color for iPhone 5S is gold. It is said that these days the price of gold iPhones can reach to 10,000 dollars or even higher. No matter how high the price is, people still bid a even higher price to buy it. But at the same time, its sister phone iPhone 5C could be pre-ordered online on the 17^th of September and also could be bought on the launch day without any shortages.

Why this happened?

This is called “hunger marketing”. Apple reduces the production of iPhone 5S in order to create an illusion that there is a shortage of the apple iPhone 5S. From the microeconomics, shortage of the products will increase the price of the products and the corporations will gain high profit from while maintaining the high price. This strategy also adds brand value to the corporations. That’s one way that apple attracts more customers and make more profits.

Recource:https://blogs.ubc.ca/dengali/2013/09/27/get-ready-for-the-iphone5s-or-iphone5c/

The United States federal government entered a shutdown on the first of October because the government fail to enact a continuing resolution for the 2014 fiscal year. Over 800,000 people would be furloughed without pay. It is estimated that the shutdown will reduce 0.3% of the economic growth of the United States economy in the fourth quarter.

The shutdown causes serious problems. Many tourist attractions are forced to close, including Yellowstone National Park, Statue of Liberty. For example, October 1st is Chinese Nation Day and Chinese people all have a 7-day holiday. Many of them supposed to have a good time travelling to America. Now, they have to change their schedule because these tourist attractions are all closed. Meantime, the shutdown also leads to economic loss on the whole tourism industry. If this continues, some tourist cities may even break.

The shutdown also affect American’s life. IPhone 5S/5C have launched already and many apple fans are going to buy it. Since there are lots of people in the line, some federal employees who are not paid by the government earn their money by standing in the line and buying iPhones for those people do not have enough patient to wait.

While companies pay a lot of attention on how to gain more profit, they usually do not care about if they will produce a large amount of pollution to damage the environment.  As far as I’m concerned, this action is not business ethics because they sacrifice the environment in order to make a big profit. The specific example about this case is what is happening in my hometown. We have a lot of industrial factories there. They do develop the local economics, making big money, but at the same time, the pollution they produced cannot be ignored. The air is not fresh anymore and the water we drink is not pure anymore. There are some rules been set up to reduce the pollution but some unethical companies do not follow these rules due to the temptation of profit. It is very important for the companies to obey these regulations because they are associated with the companies’ credits. The companies have their responsibilities to make profits but they are also responsible for the whole society. Therefore, they should concern about how to find a balance between profit and pollution.