Created By: MBA Online

What would you do with $97 billion in cash? While we may never know, Apple is currently pondering that question. This graphic explores some unique comparisons to put the world’s most valuable public company into perspective. Perhaps more money doesn’t necessarily mean more problems. Enjoy! 

Every year the world keeps on eating up food and technology, but just how much more do people prefer juicy red apples over a succulent iPad? Here we explore how the behemoth tech giant Apple stacks up against America’s favorite shiny fruit. In 2009 138,000 Apple iPads were created, a total worth of around $32 billion. The numbers are pretty outstanding if you compare these Apples to apples — in the same year, total production of the fruit panned out at around $30 billion. If it’s true that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, the world ought to have a pretty healthy outlook for the years to come.

The Gamification of Holiday Shopping

The term “gamification” refers to the use of elements found in video games that have been translated into web and app design. You find gamification in customer-oriented web and mobile sites being used as a tool to get people to engage with a brand and accomplish tasks, such as “checking-in” with Foursquare, scanning in QR codes, or using an app like Shopkick to earn rewards. It’s a great tool for marketers to use, and it takes advantage of peoples’ innate drive to get rewards for their efforts.

Cool, right?

Life would be way more exciting if everything was like a game, wouldn’t it?

Holiday shopping, for example, would turn into the Best! Thing! Ever! instead of just aimlessly wandering up and down mall escalators like zombies from Dawn of the Dead. The good news is that this is actually happening, and businesses are starting to realize that if they make shopping feel more like playing a game, people are more likely to stop in, shop around, and come back again.

Gamification

When we say gamification, we don’t mean that you have to be an expert at Wii Bowling or a master of Angry Birds. What we’re referring to is the way that businesses are starting to explore the new options smartphone technology has to offer. More and more people are carrying smartphones these days, and things like location-based marketing are the new hotness when it comes to finding tools for getting customers through the door and checking out the goods.

During the holiday season last year, lots of retailers had begun to experiment with mobile marketing, but this year, they’re really getting out there! There’s a lot of mobile marketing enticing customers to shop ‘til they drop and reap the rewards for their loyalty.

Location-based marketing

One of the biggest practices we’re seeing this holiday season is location-based marketing. Location-based marketing involves the use of GPS technology to send geographic-specific marketing messages to consumers over their mobile devices. It’s a very big and rapidly expanding area for all types and sizes of businesses. Programs like Foursquare are being used to reward customers for “checking-in” to their stores. Foursquare is a location-based social networking website for mobile devices like smartphones. Users “check-in” at various places via a mobile website, text message, or an app by choosing from a list of nearby participating businesses. These “check-ins” earn them special offers and discounts.

But that’s not all. Some retailers are even trying to lure shoppers who are miles away from their stores with messages about sales and product availability–complete with driving directions, maps and hours of operation.

QR Codes

We’re also seeing lots of retailers make great use of QR codes. QR codes are those square, inkblot looking things you’ve probably been seeing on business cards, product labels, signage, and advertisements. They can be photographed and decoded by smartphone users to access information about special deals, web pages, apps, or any other content the retailer wants them to see. They work a lot like barcodes, but the difference is that QR codes can house a tremendous amount of information, so the possibilities here are practically limitless. Imagine walking into a store, decoding a QR code, and getting access to exclusive information about a product or manufacturer, plus hot deals on merchandise!

Shopkick

There’s also a very cool app called Shopkick that turns shopping into a game where you can earn real-world rewards for going into stores. The app shows a list of nearby participating venues, each of which gives you a certain number of “kicks” or points for visiting the store. The more “kicks” you pick up, the more rewards (such as gift certificates, etc.) you get. There’s even an opportunity to collect enough kicks to win a cruise! That’s an attractive prize especially after all the holiday hullabaloo!

No matter how you look at it, mobile marketing is most certainly the new hotness and we’re going to be seeing a lot more of it in the future. Shopping is about to become more intimate, personal, and engaging!

The eternal task of finding a job has undergone a couple of huge transformations in the past few years. Around the turn of the millennium, Craigslist revolutionized the job hunt by taking a city’s worth of classified sections and condensing them into a single, easy-to-navigate web page. Now job hunting is undergoing another big shift – this time into the world of social media. A new breed of work searchers – call them ‘social job seekers’ – are utilizing the big social networks in ingenious ways in order to find their dream jobs, and so far they’re having great success. It turns out, the more you use a social network, the more likely you are to find a job through the service: 1 in 4 ‘super social seekers’ successfully nets work through Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. The MBAs among us should take note – that degree won’t work the magic it used to, so it’s well worth it to utilize the most up-and-coming job seeking strategies in your hunt.

Living in the United States, most people have a distinct sense of ubiquity of texting. When we’re not busy texting, we’re seeing someone on the street who is, and it has become apparent that the text message has irreversibly woven itself into the fabric of social life for a vast majority of us. What most Americans probably don’t know, however, is that texting has spread all around the world in ways so huge it would make a 7th grade text-maniac blush. Though texting as a form of simple communication will likely be its dominant use for a long time, inventors, entrepreneurs and social activists have utilized the medium for an incredible diversity of different uses. From mobile banking in Kenya to reporting drug crimes in the Philippines, texting has empowered those in developing countries worldwide to participate in many of the same institutions we Americans take for granted. Texting has truly revolutionized the world.v

2011 has been the year that decisively marks the coming-to-light of the stupidity inherent in the way our patent system operates. After an enthralling episode of This American Life cast the spotlight on Intellectual Ventures, Nathan Mhyrvold’s multibillion-dollar, patent-hoarding company, the story spread like wildfire and the larger public suddenly became aware of the vast inequity the dominates the tech world from behind the scenes. Designed to protect inventors and innovators by helping them prevent competitors from stealing their ideas, the patent system has evolved into a weapon wielded by mighty tech companies as a last-ditch effort to keep competitors’ products off the market. Patents are still protection – though now they more resemble Mafia-style, buy-it-or-die protection than anything intended by our government when they instituted it decades ago. As a result, innovation suffers. In the long run, business is sure to suffer too.

The national debt has been one of the biggest talking points of the year in world politics. From the American debt ceiling fiasco in July to the impending crisis in Europe, the astronomical levels to which worldwide national debts have risen is have become a tremendous source of worry for economists, businessmen, and the general public alike. Our debt problem in the US is one that seems so large that it would be nearly impossible to clear it, and markets seem to plunge whenever this problem returns to the news cycle. Foreign debt, especially, freaks a lot of people out, especially when talking about the enormous chunk we owe China – something to the tune of $1.2 trillion. But China is not the only owner of US debt – far from it. In fact, name a random country somewhere in the world, and we probably owe them something. And though many debts are small in comparison to those of big lenders like Japan, the UK, and aforementioned China, they aren’t chump change either. We owe Sweden around $20 billion, quite a tidy sum indeed. This infographic breaks down exactly where our debt is owed, and even breaks it down to the per-citizen level.

It’s sometimes amazing to step back and take stock of how much technology has penetrated our lives. The idea, even just 10 years ago, that every one of us would be walking around with a cell phone – let alone cell phones that could access the Internet, play video, and come equipped with touch screens – would have sounded like mere fantasy. But that’s exactly the world we live in now, and for most of us, it’s been a welcome change. News is now at our fingertips as it occurs. Twitter feeds keep us up to date on the minutiae of celebrity’s lives, as well as huge world events. Some might not agree that our media consumption is of a higher quality these days, but no one can deny that it’s both increased and diversified.

That’s why the 2011 report on media consumption, based on data provided by Magid Generational Studies and compiled by Advertising Age, comes at such an ideal moment. We know that we’re all constantly bombarded by media streams from a variety of platforms, but that’s always as detailed as our knowledge gets. Finally, we can look at a picture – literally – of exactly when and where this consumption takes place, and by whom. Media consumption is broken down by generation, profiling the Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Teen Millennials and newly christened iGen. The age range is wider than any media use survey we’ve come across, and it provides a wonderful opportunity for comparison across generations. Which brings us to the next cool feature of this data set: use is also broken down by time of day. When Gen X is at work, for example, all Internet activities shoot up in usage, while newspaper reading drops out completely.

While this information is valuable from a pure interest angle, it will also doubtlessly pique the interest of business leaders as well. As tech comes into its own as one of the dominant forces in world commerce, consumers’ trends of consumption become priceless data for companies attempting to reach them. Who uses what media products, and when, is the crux of market research for many in the tech sector.

So check out the infographic, and see where you fit into 2011′s media matrix.

Click here to see the graphic!

Being on a board of directors is one of the most lucrative career options available. Disregarding the years of education and work experience the typical board member has, a nuanced job description requires board members to deliberate in board rooms for a couple of hours every week to earn lucrative salaries, stock options, and insurance benefits.

Since the financial crisis of 2007, corporate pay structures have come under intense debate. Board members of too-big-to-fail financial institutions made risky business decisions which only enlarged the housing market bubble which led to the demise of the global economy, yet were still offered golden parachutes for running the economy to the ground. This article will look at how corporate governance have affected businesses, and contemporary problems arising from boardroom structures.

Corporate Governance

The way boardrooms are structured vary depending on the size, field of work, and scope of different organizations. For example, a five-person company obviously doesn’t need a ten-person board and a mineral-extraction company would prefer engineers in addition to financial experts on their board. With that said, there are several factors that every company faces when designing the structure of their respective boards.

Shareholder Equity

The role of the board of directors is to ultimately represent the opinions of shareholders in the company. For publicly-traded companies, this might involve weighing the majority versus minority shareholder opinions, while private entities will most likely have a smaller number of interest holders to account for.

A Freakonomics post focuses on how corporate mismanagement affects shareholder equity in corporations. According to its authors, Andrew Lo and Jeremiah Chafkin, corporate risk taking has in recent years has diminished shareholder equity due to the tunnel vision of both board members and shareholders. The authors point out that, “While ‘greedy’ CEO’s are easy scapegoats, the main object of everyone’s attention — the stock price — is often driven by shareholders looking for short-term profits, not long-term capital appreciation.”

In other words, a good board will lead a company to financial success. A great board can rescue a company during financial hardship. Incurring risk may lead to greater grains at the cost of greater losses, and both shareholders and board members must understand this risk. In addition to stock price, other factors such as price volatility and capital accumulation must be taken into account when measuring the value of shareholder equity.

Non-Shareholder Interests

Non-shareholders include employees, consumers, and business partners of a corporation. Although they have no direct equity in the corporation, the board of directors must also consider their interests when making business decisions. For example, under Delaware Law, “a board has no duty to maximize short-term value. So long as there is a rationally related benefit for shareholders, a board may consider the interests of non-shareholder constituencies.” What this means is that the board of directors can build long-term relationships without being hindered by the possibilities of short-term losses.

Board Responsibilities

An up-and-coming trend in boardroom responsibilities is the role of social corporate responsibility (SCR) to augment existing operations within a corporation. An example of SCR is the Danone Communities initiative. Started by health foods producer Danone in partnership with Grameen Bank, the two corporations combined their expertise in yogurt production and financial services to employ locals and produce healthy yogurt options to rural and urban areas around Bangladesh.

Investors in this fund include both traditional investors in Danone and outside investors looking for to invest in a social cause. Regardless, both groups understand that their investments will be paid back without interest or financial returns. Instead, capital is used to strengthen infrastructure, improve nutrition, and increase unemployment throughout neighborhoods.

Current Issues: Gender Roles in Boardrooms

There is no doubt that female board members are just as effective as their male counterparts. For example, Carol Bartz at Yahoo! and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook at two of the most prominent leaders in corporate America, regardless of gender. As you can see below, females make up for only 15% of executive committees and board members in American companies, a shocking number considering that in the United States, more females graduate with bachelor’s and master’s degrees than males every year.

According to an article in The Economist, the lack of female representation in executive positions is actually a hindrance in terms of overall performance. Borrowing from behavioral psychology, a more diverse boardroom reduces the amount of herding and prevalence of group mechanics, factors which usually lead to riskier and less-informed decision making. Furthermore, by drawing on an underutilized female talent pool, corporations have a better chance of landing a successful executive.

Data supports the idea behind a more diverse boardroom. According to consultancy firm McKinsey, a survey comparing 89 gender-diverse European firms to average firms of the same industries yielded surprising results. The survey found that these corporations enjoyed a “higher return on equity, fatter operating profits and a more buoyant share price.”

Board compositions are an important reflection of the company’s aspirations and goals. Healthy corporations need managers who are capable of running a company at both the peak and troughs of the business cycle. Hiring a diverse and experienced executive team is a great way to start.