In order for companies to survive nowadays, it is important for them to think of ways to improve and innovate their business to the next level. For example, Amazon has now improved its delivery days from 6 days a week to 7 days a week. Amazon has teamed up with the United States Postal Service to deliver on Sunday too. It is essential that amazon offers a service like that for the purpose of competing with others major online shopping websites such as eBay, Walmart, Safeway and Target etc. Many competitors of Amazon has offered delivery times which is very efficient.

Amazon believes that by working with the USPS, its revenue and amount of sales will increase as the delivery time will be faster and thats what every online shopping customer wants. In my opinion, I think the decision made by Amazon is right as Amazon itself has successfully found a way to improve and innovate its company to compete with its competitors. Therefore, it is safe to say that the revenue and the amount of sales of Amazon will soon increase more than before.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-11/amazon-postal-service-to-start-sunday-package-deliveries.html?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

Did anyone ever wonder what kind of company Google actually is? At first I thought that Google was a search engine company, and soon after that I thought it was an advertising company and then again I thought it was a mobile company because of Android. Then after doing research, I realize that Google is currently an advertising company and would likely become a hardware company too in the near future. But, an interesting fact is that Google is having a competition relationship with Apple despite both companies differences. Google focus on earning revenue on advertising and Apple focuses more on hardware. So what makes both companies compete?

It appears that both companies are competing to be the perfect company in both advertising and hardware. Google is competing it’s hardware with Apple and Apple is competing its advertising capabilities with Google. Both companies are competing in improving each of their own weaknesses which is really interesting. It explains that both companies are aiming to monetize customers with hardware and leveraging software to reach customers through advertising in order to achieve the best of both worlds.

http://blog.inner-active.com/2012/06/the-paradox-of-the-apple-google-war-brought-to-a-whole-new-level/

Now everyone has definitely dream of working in Google before, why? That’s because of it’s reputation for being the biggest and most ambitious tech company on the planet. Not only that, it is also famous regarding the culture of the company for being fun and innovative. Employees who works in Google has one of the best employees’ benefits too. Therefore, it is not far-fetched to say that working in Google is a career heaven.

But, when there is light, there’s definitely shadows. According to employees who work in Google, they confess that one of the worst things about working at Google is that they hire the very best people so most of the people there were actually over qualified for their jobs. Secondly, the another worst thing is that most of the engineers are arrogant because they think that they are more superior than everyone. Thirdly, the office space in Google can be too small as most of the space are taken up by open areas food, games and TV etc.

So, every good things definitely has their own drawbacks. It is better to know a company’s internal culture from the employee itself rather than listening it from the general public before making a decision on choosing which company to work for.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/229950

As always and has always been Apple being the world’s most innovative company. Apple has maintained its ranking being the top for a total of nine years. While Google has maintain it ranking being the second top from 2006 to 2012, it has dropped its rank to the third place. Samsung which was in the middle of the pack at No. 26 in 2008, has been on a consistently improving, landing at the No. 2 spot in this year’s ranking. Samsung has increased its ranking all the way up here from during the past few years till it was able to beat Google out of its rank.

It is understandable for Apple to remained being the world’s most innovative company as it was their first time doing something like inventing the iPhone first as it completely innovates future smartphones and tablets industry. While Samsung has done a great job in competing with Apple, it is impossible to win Apple unless Samsung has a new product which could innovate the industry faster than Apple as Samsung has only started its smartphone production right after iPhone was released. In this technology economy, it is the company who came out and create creative approaches that will help maintain the company in staying at the top rank of innovation.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/228607?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

As everyone has expected, Candy Crush Saga is the most successful game of all time. It has passed a number of 500 million downloads in a matter of year! While famous games such as Angry Birds took 2 years to pass over 500 million downloads and the other famous game called Cut The Rope took 3 years to passed 400 million downloads. Therefore, Candy Crush Saga has break the record of passing 500 million downloads in the shortest amount of time.

Having an app with 500 million downloads is equivalent to 1 in a 14 people on this earth who downloads the app which is actually a lot of people. According to a survey, 78% of U.S. fans say they play the app most while watching TV, while 69% of U.K. fans play it while commuting. One in 23 Facebook users is a fan of the game, and it’s played most often between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., and on Sundays. It is noted that people like games which is short, simple and has infinite number of levels which makes the game hard to completed it. Seems Candy Crush Saga has met all of these criteria which is why it is so successful as it creates and fulfils what people wants.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3021744/fast-feed/in-one-year-candy-crush-has-been-downloaded-half-a-billion-times?partner=rss&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

One of the latest tech news today is that Snapchat has reject an all-cash $3 Billion offer from Facebook. The CEO of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel believes that it will only hinder the company’s growth if it became a part of Facebook. The reason is because Spiegel doesn’t want the start-up culture of snapchat to change when it merge with Facebook. Spiegel is aware that Facebook it is no longer cool among youngsters and Snapchat is cooler as it is newer. Therefore, Spiegel doesn’t want to accept the offer Facebook’s deal as he believes his company will be able to grow without the help of any big company.

I personally think that Spiegel has made a very brave choice to reject Facebook’s $3 Billion offer. Honestly, who could’ve reject an amount as high as $3 Billion? It just proves that Spiegel firmly believes Snapchat will worth more than $3 Billion in the coming future. Besides, according to the blogpost, it has mentioned the fact that Spiegel doesn’t wants his company culture to change after merging with Facebook as it will ruin the company’s preposition. It is my first time seeing someone who is wise enough to think far and make decisions based on the future but not on the present. Spiegel knows that maintaining the company’s culture is very important for the growth of his company.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/11/13/snapchat-spurned-3-billion-acquisition-offer-from-facebook/?mod=WSJBlog&mod=&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

The dominating power of Samsung is well-described in this article here. It has stated that Samsung has many ways in earning profits and revenue. Besides producing many smartphones for all classes income in the society and being the biggest maker of smartphones, Samsung is also the world’s leading maker of memory chips. It also sells it chips to Apple. One of the reason why Samsung can still stand at the top is because of its diverse income flow, it not only earn incomes from producing and selling smartphones, it also sells electronics, television and many other more house appliances. On the other hand, HTC has admit it’s loss in the first quarterly sales. It was said that any smartphone company who has loss in either one of the quarterly sales is bound to keep losing as it is very hard to catch up in its very competitive market. HTC has failed to capture high-end users as most consumers prefer to own an Apple and a Samsung. One of the main reason why HTC fall is because HTC has failed to produce any new and innovative products. Not only that, it has also failed on not finding a secondary income source acting as a backup.

According to this article, Japan Airline is making a deal with Airbus announcing a $9.5 billion order for 31 A350 wide-body jets. Japan Airline has never brought any plane from Airbus, it’s recent decision to order planes from Airbus was because the new planes from Boeing was taking too long to complete. This huge decision made by Japan Airlines also implies that Boeing’s marketing plans aren’t that good and it is potentially threatening Boeing’s relationships in a country that has invested billions of dollars in helping develop its planes as Japanese companies have been important suppliers for Boeing, 35% of it’s parts were made in Japan. Besides Japan Airline, Cathay Pacific Airways and British Airways which has been a longtime customer of Boeing also have ordered planes from Airbus.

From this article, it seems it is very important to produce new products for the market in order to win in the market. Both Boeing and Airbus has been rivals for global leadership for years and Boeing has long been the top spot in orders last year for the first time in a decade. Airbus uses this opportunity to boost it’s amount of orders by providing new planes faster than Boeing which attracts many customers, while Boeing can only hope their new and innovative plane in the later future to be released and turn the tables around between their rivalry war with Airbus.

I found this article to be very interesting in knowing how will Blackberry respond with their huge amount of loss on their fortunes. In order to increase the amount of smartphone sales in the market, BlackBerry decided to launch a new operating system called BlackBerry 10. It was specifically designed for smartphones and it also has a few numbers of mobile carriers which supports BlackBerry 10. Unfortunately after a recent survey, Google’s Android and Apple iOS is still the two most dominating operating system in the market. Although there were many positive feedback regarding the new BlackBerry 10, it is still inferior to the two biggest operating system market. The main selling point of BlackBerry 10 is that it allow the strict separation of applications and content for personal life and work, which may attract companies that do not yet let staff use their own devices. It also allow users to see and deal with messages, tweets and so forth in a central “hub” without needing to switch applications.

It seems BlackBerry isn’t the only one trying to rise in the market, Microsoft’s Windows 8 mobile operating system was also facing similar problems. However, BlackBerry has more current users than Microsoft which makes BlackBerry more superior than Microsoft.

Have any of you guys ever did something good and beneficial and yet there is no one who acknowledges it but instead hated you for that? I believe most of you have experienced something similar or the same before.

Now let’s take a look at a company who has gone through the same thing, Chiquita Brands, one of the largest fruit suppliers in America. Despite it’s great effort on promoting a sustainable environment, it has earn itself with a minimum amount of reward. Chiquita Brands decision on investing on sustainability by avoiding the use of a certain type of fuel has angered some oil industry to the point that Chiquita Brands was being boycott by the oil industry which cost the company a large amount of fortune. Not only that, Chiquita Brands also initiates an anti-sexual harassment policy for women on it’s plantation and still hasn’t received any benefits for it. Next, Chiquita Brands was also the only one who admits that they have been paying protection fees to Colombian paramilitary forces surrounding its plantations. Thus, the lack of rewards received by Chiquita Brands after it’s efforts on doing good has caused it’s main rivals to lost it’s interest on signing a global union agreement with Chiquita Brands.

After reading the statement above, I guess it is not far-fetch to think that doing good, being socially responsible on world issues around us was actually a waste of time. But that is not the main problem here, the main problem lies on there are so many companies and organizations which are actually discouraging and interrupting other companies from doing something ethical and socially responsible to the world issues we face nowadays. This is a very frightening truth as it has showed there are so many companies out there who has no interest in being socially responsible. From my opinion, I believe every company have to practice good business ethics and let the public know exactly what are the benefits of doing it in order to earn public support which will be a very valuable asset for every company which will also help stopping other unethical companies from interrupting.

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www.economist.com/node/21551500