From China to Canada and London, fast-rising property markets are haunting the global economy again, five years after the U.S. subprime mortgage bubble burst and triggered the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. For now, house price inflation is neither as high nor as widespread as it was in the middle of last decade. Except in a few cases, the warning signals are flashing amber, not red, and several countries have acted to cool overheating markets.

China is awash with cash, even if it is concentrated among a relatively small percentage of professionals and business owners. The buying power generated by all that money has been inflating a Chinese property bubble, which some believe is primed to burst.

In the upcoming Christmas, merchants began to discounts, some even offer a 50% off. However, it is hard to get a discount from the retailers of Apple, no matter what time it is. The success of apple’s products has not only the unique product design and human nature resonance, but also lies in its reasonable product price and layout, which can make consumers to open their wallets directly. Additionally, the most important thing is in apple’s pricing strategy, discount will never be talked about.

Apple’s pricing technique is legitimate, which is widely used in other industries as well. However, Apple is just relying on consumers’ desire of Apple’s products which makes the strategy more efficient.

However, apple’s strong control has long been notorious, although the pricing strategy is very attractive. On the other hand, the stable of apple products’ price will ease the pressure on consumers in the shopping: the only thing they need to do is to wait for the express in their home.

More than 30 years ago, Deng Xiaoping, the father of China’s economic miracle, supported the creation of special economic zones as a method of introducing capitalism into the country’s communist economy. The zones, most famously Shenzhen, allowed foreign companies the freedom to invest and build factories, kick-starting the nation’s rapid growth. Such reforms eventually spread throughout the entire nation, turning China into the workshop of the world and forever altering global manufacturing.

However, as the second largest economic entity, China is facing the most serious problem since its economic miracle, the advantage in the cost of products is vanishing as the development of its nearby countries, such as Thai and Vietnam. As a result, the economic growth in China is slowing. There is some hope that this Shanghai experiment will have stronger prospects.

Undoubtedly, it’s everyone’s dream to hold a company, and make huge amount of money   every year,like Bill Gates. Therefore, many young people who have dreams start their startup every time. However,  they may easily fail at business because of a lack of preparations which means a high rate of failure (approximately 70%).

To most young people, the most important thing to do after they graduate is to gather experience in the field they working at. Thus,  they will have a significantly higher chance of success if they already know how to navigate a startup’s unique challenges such as raising money, changing product direction, and cultivating a culture. After all, not everyone has the chance and the courage to give up their school work like Michael Dell. Just learn the useful things from the success of those celebrities, but not follow them.

Managers will no longer be required to rate workers on a fixed scale of performance rankings, Lisa Brummel, Microsoft’s executive vice president of human resources, said in a memo to the company’s 99,000 staff.

The Employee Ranking system was established by the CEO of the Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, it was to encourage the employees to make better performance when competing with others.

However, the ranking system makes the firm might mandate that only 10% of a supervisor’s employees can rank in a top category and 2% must be in the bottom group. Which means employees may prefer to work themselves but not with their group.

Undoubtedly, that system could help the Microsoft to retain the best talent of their employees who are best able to remain the Microsoft’s competitiveness. However, to the large tech company, the structure is like a ‘horizantal’ triangle. That is to say, the employees take up the majority of the company. The rate system may makes them confused and being afraid lose their job so it seems not a good strategy to rank employees by their performance.

http://business.financialpost.com/2013/11/13/microsoft-axes-bell-curve-for-employee-grading-in-move-to-foster-greater-teamwork-collaboration/

Twitter now expect raise the price of its IPO to the range of $23-$25 a share, up from the original price revealed last month of $17-$20 a share, according to a new filing with the SEC.

The change of the price range shows the high expect and demand of the investors. At the same time, Twitter will remain the amount of the share at $70-million which means Twitter could have a market value of $17.3-billion on its first day of trading. For a company that generated revenue of only $534-million in the past 12 months while losing money, that is a hefty valuation.

Undoubtedly, investors pay for the future, not the past. Even those who do not use twitter know how it have influence in our life. It is revealed that 8% of the Americans get news on their twitter, though it’s much smaller than the number of 30% of those who get news on Facebook.

However, the positive signal from the market is only a small step of the success of Twitter, what they should pay high attention to is how to make the continuous profit for their investors but not only make revenue from advertisments injected in webpages.

An Ottawa man donated cash for the equivalent of hundreds of Tim Hortons coffees, as well as some breakfasts, making it the third identical gesture in Canada this week.—cbcnews

The donation, given by an unnamed worker for OC Transpo, ran out in just over an hour, though. This comes after a “mystery man” gave a downtown Edmonton Tim Hortons about $900 on Monday of that week and another person gave the same amount to a Calgary location on Wednesday that week.

When first time heard the news, I realized that it may have some connections between those donations, as what I thought, the newspapers reported that there was some debate over whether these acts were hidden moves by Tim Hortons for publicity, but the company sternly denied that.

Whether it was donated by the individials or acted by the Tim Hortons itself, the Take-up did advertised fot the Tim Hortons because it caused a social attention. What’s more, the action itself helps to improve the brand image by the take-up coffee.

Bell said today it is cutting in half the rates on its most popular mobile data, voice and text roaming plans for Canadian customers travelling to the U.S.

Speculation that U.S. telecom giant Verizon was considering a bid in the upcoming radio spectrum auction or might potentially buy out one of the smaller players such as Wind or Mobilicity raised the ire of the big three telecom companies in Canada, including Bell.

It seems like a wonderful policy to people because they don’t need to pay for the hefty bills if they travel to the U.S, but does it really works?

Actually, a huge amount of people only travell to the America for serveral days or even shorter, they can just use limited data. What’s more, not all of them are the consumers of the Bell, it is unadvisable to pay for a high liquidated damages to move to Bell.

In my opinion, to decrese the high price of the phone calls and data is the high priority to Bell now, it is very clear that Canadians are unhappy with how much it costs to use their phones a lot not only when they are in Canada, but also when travel abroad.

Smartphone maker BlackBerry has agreed to go private in a $4.7 billion deal led by its biggest shareholder, allowing the on-the-go email pioneer to regroup away from public scrutiny after years of falling fortunes and slumping market share.

BlackBerry, based in Waterloo, Ontario, once dominated the market for secure on-your-hip email. But it introduced consumer-friendly touchscreen smartphones only after it lost the lead to Apple Inc’s iPhone and devices using Google Inc’s Android operating system.

As a leader once shared 53% of the phone market, the BlackBerry prefer to position the products to the high end market, it is really curious why  a market leader give up the most of their consumers but to narrow their revenue steams. In addition, the persistence in the technology is one of the most important factors of the decline of the BlackBerry.

During the last ten years, many other companies like Apple, HTC, Nokia tried their best to develop the user experience of their products such as the camera, the traversing carriage like Passbook in Apple and NFC in Android, the quality of the products and the cost performence. However, the BlackBerry persisted in their full- keyboard design and the system OS which can only provide a few entertainment softwares to their consumers.

For a long time, the RIM model itself a serious and high-end image, which makes their new users confused and the old users feel disappointed because of the conservative strategy of the company and the terrible ecosystem of the platform.

As a result, the BlackBerry missed the chances again and again and, at last, beaten by their opponents.

As one of the most important factors of the high-speed development of China, the state-owned companies achieved remarkable achievements over the past thirty years. On one hand, they make amazing profits by monopolize the market, while on the other hand, they are more and more likely to be censured by the people in some issuses such as environmental protection and use of ingredients.

The real question that the state-owned companies facing now is ‘profit’ or ‘persist’ which means whether strong the industrial by  promoting the brand image or not. It cannot be denied that all of the large enterprises have the core spirit of their business based on business ethics. Only in this way, companies can achieve a strong consumer-company identification. In fact, many of the state-owned companies do not realize the importance of the consumer and the basic business ethic–integrity.