IN 2013 MEREDITH HALKS MILLER, a laboratory director at Illumina, the world’s biggest gene-sequencing firm, spotted something odd as she examined the blood of expectant mothers, looking for abnormalities in the fetuses they carried. In some cases, the DNA of the unborn children was normal, but that of the mothers was not. Suspecting the women…
Posts published in “Commodities”
The former boss of a notorious failed health-care startup could face jailA CROWD OF reporters, drawn by the drama and glamour of the event, jostled outside a courtroom in San Jose on August 31st to witness the opening of what may be the next, perilous, act for a woman once touted as the next Steve…
“HI, JUST CHECKING in. Can I put in some more?” The bosses of promising startups are bombarded by such texts these days. Big funds in particular are falling over themselves to grab a piece of the tech pie (see chart). Yet one founder seems to have received more than his fair share of pitches: Ali…
The e-commerce giant gets physical“THE WORLD wants you to be typical …Don’t let it happen,” Jeff Bezos warned in April in his last annual shareholder letter as CEO of Amazon. Hence bewilderment that his e-empire is to adopt a retail format that is very typical indeed: the department store. Having helped drive many chains out…
IF YOU ARE going to run a gambling operation, it helps to have luck on your side. Months after Peter Jackson was appointed boss of Flutter Entertainment in 2018, America’s Supreme Court overturned a federal law outlawing most sports betting. For a firm running established bookmakers such as Betfair and Paddy Power, that opened the…
“NERDS WILL invent the future,” declared Vinod Khosla in 2010. The venture capitalist was not talking about the sorts responsible for e-commerce sites, games apps or social-media platforms. Rather, his speech at the California Institute of Technology was intended to inspire brilliant engineers and scientists to pursue climate-related innovation. The “clean tech” investment bubble had…
As the business climate worsens at home and in the West, Alibaba, Tencent and their peers seek friendlier marketsCHINA’S TECHNOLOGY giants are having a torrid time. At home, a regulatory crackdown is intensifying. In the latest move, on August 17th the authorities released draft antitrust rules that would hurt the business models of titans like…
NO CHILD ASPIRES to a life talking the kind of nonsense that many executives speak. But it seems that, as soon as managers start to climb the corporate ladder, they begin to lose the ability to talk or write clearly. They instead become entangled in a forest of gobbledygook.Listen to this storyYour browser does not…
ANTITRUST USED to be as American as apple pie. The Boston Tea Party was, in part, a protest against the monopoly of the British East India Company. The word itself stems from the trusts, such as Standard Oil, that lorded it over the American economy in the 19th century. For stretches of the 20th it…
AS LOCKDOWNS LOOMED last year, people scrambled to stock up on home-survival essentials: food, medicine and a Netflix subscription. In the first half of 2020 the streaming giant registered 25m new members globally, twice as many as had signed up in the same period a year earlier. With viewers hunkering down to see out the…