BUSINESS NEWS

By Jon Fernquest

To remain competitive in international export markets Thailand must continually upgrade product standards.

Two recent examples:


Upgrading shrimp standards in the future may also be necessary to win new market share in the lucrative EU shrimp market, a market that Thailand has barely penetrated:

Good Agricultural Practice (GAP)

Today's article is about a set of local standards for Thailand's shrimp industry known as Good Agricultural Practice (GAP).

GAP standards address many different aspects of shrimp production and marketing including "food safety, food quality control, environmental management, social responsibility and animal welfare."

EU retailers have also initiated their own set of European GAP standards known as "GLOBALGAP" (Read article).

With its vast, free database, researcher BrightScope could alter the retirement landscape as much as Morningstar changed funds

By Amy Feldman

Americans increasingly rely on their 401(k) plans for retirement, yet typically understand little about how their plans work, or how they compare with offerings at other companies. Is your 401(k) cheap or expensive? Does it offer good investments or mediocre ones? A generous match or a stingy one? And most important: Will your 401(k), and the way you take advantage of it, get you through retirement without running out of money?

BrightScope, a San Diego startup, wants to help 401(k) participants and administrators answer those questions. It has created a massive database from corporate filings with the Labor Dept., Securities & Exchange Commission, and other sources, to rate 401(k) plans. To mine all that data, it developed a quantitative model that takes into account hundreds of factors—everything from the plan's investment choices and fees to its structure, including its generosity to employees. BrightScope then runs simulations to ascertain how well each plan serves the average participant. The final result is a score of 1 to 100 called the BrightScope rating. The company also assigns each plan six component ratings (on fees, average account balance, etc.) that range from "great" to "poor," so participants and plan administrators can see where the 401(k)'s strengths and weaknesses lie.

This exercise isn't without precedent. Retirement consultants at Callan Associates, Marsh & McLennan's (MMC) Mercer unit, and Watson Wyatt (WW) have long done proprietary analyses—"benchmarking," they call it—for big 401(k) plan sponsors. What makes BrightScope unique is that its ratings are publicly available on brightscope.com, and its analysis has been boiled down to a level anyone can understand. The company now rates about 30,000 plans, double the number it had completed in October.

Mike Alfred, BrightScope's chief executive, believes people should be able to see how their 401(k)s stack up as easily as they are able to access quality rankings on their mutual funds, their cell phones, or their cars. With nearly $3 trillion socked away in 401(k)s, "it's ridiculous that no one has done anything with the data," he says. "The person who gets it right will find the business opportunity. We're just naive enough to think we'll be the ones to do it."

BrightScope's efforts come at a perfect moment. Even before the market meltdown of 2008, Americans were headed for a retirement crisis, with the average 401(k) balance hovering around $60,000. Now, legislators and regulators are debating how to reform these plans and whether there should be new rules on fees, which can seriously damage a plan's performance, or on target-date funds, investment vehicles geared to a specific retirement date that are the default offering in many 401(k)s for participants who do not choose their own investments.

The first big hurdle is getting the rating formula right. If BrightScope's data aren't good enough, or its model proves defective, its analysis could be useless, or could even nudge both participants and corporations to make decisions based on faulty assumptions. "It's not as simple as a good plan vs. a bad one," says Lori Lucas, who heads Callan's practice in 401(k)s and other defined-contribution plans. "A mutual fund might have 100 moving pieces. But a 401(k) might have 1,000, making it difficult to come up with a single rating."

SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY

In 1937, Bill Jones III's grandfather, A.W. "Bill" Jones, inherited Sea Island, much of nearby St. Simons Island, and large tracts elsewhere in coastal Georgia from his cousin, Howard Coffin, who had been a top engineer for Oldsmobile and Hudson Motor Car.

Jones' resort grew slowly, subsisting mostly on cash flow from the Cloister Hotel and proceeds from occasional land sales. (Jones Sr. swore off debt, says Blaine Kelley Jr., an Atlanta developer who knew him.) Families from across the South would flock to Sea Island every summer, holing up in rental homes brokered by Sea Island Co. or in rooms at the Cloister, where the Joneses would roll in cots to accommodate the overflow. Through the mid-1980s, the Cloister's rooms didn't have TVs and the front desk didn't take credit cards. Parents dropped their kids off at the beach club, where they were watched over by some of the same people who had watched over the parents years earlier. Bill Jones Jr., an avid hunter and farmer, ran the company from 1966 to 1992; former employees say he fixed toilets himself.

The resort underwent a pricey makeover with easy money, and insider lending that bordered on crony capitalism

By Peter Waldman
BW Magazine

* 10 Ways to Cut Health-Care Costs Right Now
* Taiwan's New Tech Dreams
* Innovation in a Downturn
* Executive Summary
* Byron Wien: What the Seer Sees in the Short Term

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January 11, 2010
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A.W. "Bill" Jones III had an eye for the finer things. After taking over his family's sprawling golf resort on Sea Island, Ga., in 1992, he toured America's top clubs for a sense of what the competition had to offer. Soon Sea Island Co.'s clubhouse locker rooms boasted antique wood beams, overstuffed couches, fireplaces, libraries, and mounted game from Jones' hunting trips to Africa.

Sony and other TV makers, along with Hollywood studios, want three-dimensional entertainment in your living room, but high price tags may slow adoption

By Cliff Edwards
Consumers are falling fast for 3D entertainment. For proof, consider the success of Avatar, an otherworldly adventure film full of three-dimensional imagery that in just two weeks has grossed more than $640 million at the box office.

In hopes of capitalizing on the public's burgeoning thirst, Hollywood studios are cramming 3D content into more films and TV manufacturers are equipping gear so that it showcases the technology in people's living rooms.

But as much as consumers demand 3D in theaters, they may not quickly usher it into their homes. Making a living room theater 3D-capable can cost upwards of $4,000, a hurdle that even the most ardent 3D backers say may slow adoption. "We don't expect to see an explosion of 3D in the home until the 2012 time frame," says Mike Fasulo, chief marketing officer for Sony Electronics, which nevertheless is betting its future on the technology. Sony is among the electronics makers that plan to introduce 3D-friendly TVs and DVD players at the Consumer Electronics Show, due to begin Jan. 7 in Las Vegas.

While Apple's iPhone grabs headlines, the cheaper iPod touch keeps gaining devoted fans

By Peter Burrows
Ever since Apple (AAPL) introduced the iPhone in the summer of 2007, it has been hailed as one of the most revolutionary products in tech history. By comparison, the iPod touch, which has all the iPhone's features without the cell phone, has been downright publicity-starved.

But this holiday season, it seems the thinner, cheaper device may be Apple's breakout hit. While actual sales data are not yet available, Broadpoint AmTech (BPSG) analyst Brian Marshall figures iPod touch sales soared more than 100%, to 7.2 million, in the final quarter of 2009, while iPhone sales rose 53%, to 11.3 million.