Privacy on the Web: Is It a Losing Battle? What if you visited an investment site and found advertising messages suggesting therapies for your recently diagnosed heart condition? Chances are you would experience what Fran Maier, executive director of TrustE, a nonprofit advocate of online privacy, calls the "creepiness factor." Maier and several others discussed the challenges of maintaining online privacy -- amid rising Internet use and plummeting costs of data storage and tracking -- at the recent Supernova conference in San Francisco.
To Love, Honor, Cherish and Consume: The Selling of the American Wedding Money, to paraphrase the Beatles, can't buy you love. But it can certainly buy a lavish wedding, as noted in Rebecca Mead's new book, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. Indeed, according to Mead, America's wedding industry exceeds $161 billion annually -- an enormous sum that suggests how much weddings have become not only big business, but big fantasy. Yet as our reviewer notes, the wedding boom is not just confined to wealthy Western nations, but has become a global phenomenon, concerned with "displaying and solidifying social position in a world where such things are fluid and changeable."
Judgment, Character and Ambition: David Gergen on Leadership in the 2008 Presidential Race According to David Gergen, the man elected president of the United States in November will face the most daunting foreign and domestic challenges since Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. Gergen, who has been an advisor to four U.S. presidents and who currently directs the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, equated the presidency to "feeling a little like Gulliver in Lilliput.... Giant accomplishments are expected" even as presidential powers are not always what they seem. Gergen discussed today's presidential candidates, as well as former presidents, at the recent Wharton Leadership Conference.
Will Technology Firms Bridge the Chasm Between Computer and TV? Hewlett-Packard, Netflix, Apple and others want to move content from the Internet to that big flat-screen TV in the living room. Wharton experts wonder if there is a market for this and indeed, whether consumers are even willing to accept interactive television. The best advice to companies for now: Hedge your bets.
The Credit Crisis and Failed Risk Analysis: 'We're Nowhere Near the End Here' When you sit down, you probably don't check under your seat for a bomb. Even though it could kill you, chances are slim that it's there. A similar view of risk led bankers, their regulators and other government officials to overlook dangerous investments and business models that contributed to the global credit crisis, according to speakers at the financial risk roundtable held by the Wharton Financial Institutions Center and the Oliver Wyman Institute.
UTV's Ronnie Screwvala: 'We Will Have Our Own Oprah and Our Own Larry King'When The Happening, M. Night Shyamalan's controversial sci-fi horror film, opened on June 13, many movie fans turned to the reviews to see what critics had said. Among them was Ronnie (Rohinton) Screwvala, managing director and founder-CEO of UTV Software Communications (UTV), a Mumbai-based media and entertainment company that co-produced the film with 20th Century Fox. Unlike most movie producers in India, UTV is an integrated company that operates across four divisions -- movies, television, broadcasting and interactive (which includes animation and computer gaming). Screwvala, who was in New York City earlier this month, spoke with Knowledge@Wharton about the company's strategy in India's rapidly globalizing media and entertainment business.
China Knowledge@Wharton
Clearing the Air: How Companies Operate in a Climate-conscious Era
Secrets of the Private Equity Trade
Bridging the Global Digital Divide, One Laptop at a Time
Russia's Best-known Investment Banker, Ruben Vardanian, on Building Trust in a Fast-moving World
Yanked from Obscurity: Why Finance Experts Are Rethinking LIBOR
What's Ahead for China's Real Estate Market: Some See Reasons for Optimism
Mainland Travelers Set To Revive Taiwan's Sagging Tourism Industry
Universia Knowledge@Wharton
Farming Conflict in Argentina: Cristina Kirchner Confronts the Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs
Spanish Insurer Mapfre, Intent on Expansion, Looks to the U.S. and Beyond
Bridging the Global Digital Divide, One Laptop at a Time
Clearing the Air: How Companies Operate in a Climate-conscious Era
Secrets of the Private Equity Trade
Russia's Best-known Investment Banker, Ruben Vardanian, on Building Trust in a Fast-moving World
