Meet the Woman Heading Facebook’s Huge International Growth - TIME

http://time.com/3462041/facebook-growth/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Victor Luckerson @VLuck
 

Oct. 4, 2014

    

Nicola Mendelsohn, vice president for EMEA at Facebook Inc., gestures as she addresses delegates during the Dublin Web Summit in Dublin on Oct. 30, 2013.Aidan Crawley—Bloomberg/Getty Images

Like many of the U.S. tech giants, Facebook is increasingly betting its financial future overseas. The company, whose social network has already achieved widespread adoption in North America and Western Europe, is focusing more of its resources on fast-developing markets like Africa, the Middle East and India. In April Facebook announced that it had 100 million users in India, and it reached the same milestone in Africa in September.

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The company is trying to get more people in these regions online through its Internet.org initiative, which aims to beam Internet connectivity to remote areas. At the same time Facebook is courting marketers by offering up region-specific advertising units that are tailored to the different ways people communicate around the world.

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During New York’s Advertising Week, TIME sat down with Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s Vice President for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, to discuss the growth of Facebook’s business abroad, how privacy concerns differ across cultures and whether Yo isn’t such a crazy app idea after all.

TIME: Obviously Facebook’s mobile transition has been a big story the past couple of years. But here when people think about it, they think of smartphones. Was Facebook’s feature phone business one that happened after smartphones or was it happening concurrently?

Mendelsohn: Two thirds of the world are accessing Facebook through feature phones, so it’s a hugely important part of how people access the platform. What we’re trying to do is make the world more open and connected so people can share more. Mobile means many different things depending on where on the planet you are and how you access Facebook and the Internet.

We’ve made a change in how we go to market in terms of our advertising products. It used to be that we had exactly the same advertising product all around the world. We’ve now started to place more and more resources in the developing markets, like Africa, like India, like Indonesia, to really understand how people are using Facebook, how they’re using mobile and come up with different products that work better there.

One is an insight borne out of what we saw in India. Data is expensive, and for a lot of people it can be prohibitive in terms of how they access Facebook or the Internet. What we saw was a whole “missed calls” phenomenon that was going on. Between us we’d create our own language—one missed call means go pick the kids up, two means let’s meet for a drink, three means I’ll meet you for lunch or whatever it is. We set up the missed call product so that advertisers could have the opportunity to tap into this meme and deliver information to people, some of whom are coming onto the Internet and to Facebook for the very first time and who are actually really excited to get messaging from advertisers. That’s the first place that we’ve done this, and the results are such that we’re going to look to do this in South Africa as well.

TIME: You just mentioned that a lot of people in these markets might be excited about seeing advertising because they haven’t been exposed to the Internet as much. Is the appetite for ads there higher than in America, where people are exposed to ads all the time?

Mendelsohn: People like advertising if it’s relevant and entertaining and useful to them. What we see in some of the high-growth markets is that brands are talking to them for the very first time, and there is an excitement about that because it’s new and it has not happened before. We see behaviors where people actually share the adverts that they see with other people because it’s of interest and it’s new information.

 

TIME: Out of that 100 million users in Africa, which are the countries you are most focused on?

A: That’s Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa.

TIME: Do you expect, going forward, that the feature phone market is going to increase, or do you see with Android One and these cheaper smartphones that people are going to transition to those devices really quickly?

I think there will be an acceleration of these cheaper smartphones, driven in particular by the price. But I think they’re not going to have all the same features that the ones we have in the U.S. and the U.K. have. There will still be challenges on things like data costs. Actually the challenge becomes greater when you have the smartphone because it has access to so many more bells, gadgets, widgets. If you want to connect the planet, data and cost is something that is prohibitive to that. It’s one of the reasons that Mark Zuckerberg launched Internet.org.

TIME: Facebook’s average revenue generated per user is much lower in these emerging markets than it is in the U.S. What is Facebook’s plan to boost that number in the future?

What is the primary concern in this part of the world is how we connect everyone to the Internet. That’s the primary focus. In terms of the ARPU, that will emerge in different ways.

TIME: You’re dealing with a lot of different types of cultures across a vast number of countries. Do you see different privacy concerns in different areas? How do you deal with that on an individual basis?

For us, privacy is the most important issue and making sure that people know and are in control of the data they share and who they share it with. I think that’s important for people wherever you are the world. One of the nuanced differences that we see in some of these countries is the fact that people like to be friends with lots more people than perhaps they might in mainland Europe. We see people want to have lots of friends, including people that they’ve never never before, and share information with those people. That is a difference that might sit uncomfortably with other people in different parts of the world.

TIME: Are you familiar with the app Yo?

No, I’m not. Tell me about Yo.

TIME: All it does is send the word Yo to other people. It was actually pretty heavily mocked when it came out over the summer. But it sounds like from what you’re saying that’s a logical use case that actually exists, where people would want to send a single word that can provide context about what they’re doing.

I can’t talk to [Yo], but I think people communicate in different ways. The uptake in stickers—people sending emoticons just to express their feelings—is a different way of showing how people communicate. Not necessarily in Africa but in some of the more developed markets. People are becoming much more visual.

We’ve always seen with any new technology that’s come on since the printing press, that it causes people to think about how they communicate in different ways. One of the things that’s been surprising about this technology revolution is that it’s shortened some of the ways that we communicate with each other rather than increasing it. If the printing press meant that we could write canon of books, the mobile phone means I can write “LOL” and we both understand what that means.

Hong Kong Protesters Defy Government With Massive Rally - TIME

http://time.com/3466915/hong-kong-protesters-rally/

• Hannah Beech/Hong Kong @hkbeech
 

Oct. 4, 2014

    

Pro-democracy protesters man a barricade in Hong Kong's Mongkok shopping district, Oct. 4, 2014.Bobby Yip—Reuters

As the window for reconciliation appears to be narrowing

A bold rally of tens of thousands of people mobilized in Hong Kong Saturday night, just hours after the region’s Beijing-backed leader Leung Chun-ying issued a cease-and-desist order to protesters occupying some of the territory’s busiest districts. They came to sing, to raise their glowing cellphones in solidarity and to flaunt the nonviolent underpinnings of their movement, which has joined designer-clad mall rats with spectacled students. “Protesting peacefully is the spirit of Hong Kong” went one refrain that resounded across Admiralty, the business district normally populated by bankers and shoppers that also includes government offices.

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If Leung, whose resignation is one of the protesters’ aims, hoped to convince the demonstrators to leave the streets, he failed. Saturday’s assembly was likely the biggest yet in a student-supported movement to bring democratic reform to Hong Kong and safeguard the freedoms that differentiate the territory from the rest of China. Oxygen was sucked back into the movement precisely at the moment when the authorities deemed that the crowds had to disperse from major roads by Oct. 6, the beginning of the workweek.

Some people in Admiralty said Saturday they were inspired to come by the violence the protesters faced from tear-gas wielding police on Sept. 28 and mafia-linked thugs on Oct. 3. “It was different a few days ago,” said Sam Au, a 49-year-old construction project manager. “We were supporting the student movement. But now we’re supporting non-violence against protesters.” The roster of speakers made sure to highlight the peaceful nature of the movement, whose supporters have taken to raising their arms in a Ferguson-style surrender and chanting “calm down, calm down” to any potential troublemaker. Despite the crush of bodies in Admiralty, the protesters shuffled forward obediently. Volunteers offered fresh fruit, cooling plasters and charging stations for cellphones.

“Do we look like Red Guards?” asked Joshua Wong, the wisp of a 17-year-old whose student activism group is one of the rally’s organizers, in reference to the Chinese youth group whose chilling excesses helped Chairman Mao foment the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The crowd in Admiralty, which stretched across a highway as far as the eye could see, responded with a defiant “No.”

Many of the faces in the crowd were young; one typed frantically into her phone trying to convince her mother that she was at a friend’s house. “The [local] government never listens to what we want,” said Hiu Wah, a 19-year-old childhood education student at the Institute of Vocational Education. “They only listen to Beijing.” But others were older—and not offended when some of the rally’s speakers bemoaned a divide between idealistic youth and an older generation warier of displeasing Hong Kong’s overlords in Beijing. “We are here to protect the young people,” said a retired language professor from the Chinese University of Hong Kong surnamed Kwan. “They are the ones who will have to deal with the future after 2047.” Under the joint agreement that set the conditions for the former British colony’s return to China in 1997, Hong Kong was promised significant autonomy for 50 years under a formula called “one country, two systems.”

The protesters have articulated two main goals they say need to be met before they disperse: Leung’s removal and the reversal of Beijing’s Aug. 31 decision to essentially pre-select two or three candidates for Hong Kong’s Chief Executive elections in 2017. Instead of voting for these screened individuals, the protesters want full autonomy to choose their leader. They are also worried that Hong Kong’s freedoms—independent courts, media and civil service, among others—are being eroded by Beijing.

But a steady stream of anti-protester invective in China’s state-controlled media, not to mention Leung’s Monday ultimatum, have raised questions of whether Beijing is in any sort of conciliatory mood. Certainly, under President Xi Jinping, China has pounded a patriotic drumbeat and detained hundreds of dissenters who dared question the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party.

If that’s the case, middle ground between the protesters, who gave rapturous applause to speakers who promised to “fight to the end,” and the government, which has vowed to clear the streets by “all actions necessary,” will be difficult to locate. Further complicating things: there is no one leader of the protest coalition and there is more than one rally site, although Admiralty is by far the biggest. Control will be harder to maintain with mission creep. Early Sunday morning, scuffles broke out in Mongkok, one of the other protest sites, injuring a police officer.

Perhaps the realization that a conciliatory window is narrowing was what gave Saturday’s rally, for all its peaceful hymns and bright yellow stickers, a nervous edge. As some of the protesters exited the site just before midnight, rumors flew. Was a crackdown imminent on the thousands that were still camped out on the pavement—some snuggled in tents, others sprawled straight on the asphalt?

“I am really worried about myself and everyone in here,” said Don Lung, who works in education. “But I believe that many people in Hong Kong will fight for us.” The battle lines are drawn, but will the fight come?

—with reporting by Elizabeth Barber and Rishi Iyengar/Hong Kong

Hackers’ Attack Cracked 10 Financial Firms in Major Assault - New York Times

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/hackers-attack-cracked-10-banks-in-major-assault/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Investment%20Banking&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body

By MATTHEW GOLDSTEIN, NICOLE PERLROTH and DAVID E. SANGER OCTOBER 3, 2014 9:39 PMOctober 3, 2014 9:39 pm 48 Comments

• 
  

The huge cyberattack on JPMorgan Chase that touched more than 83 million households and businesses was one of the most serious computer intrusions into an American corporation. But it could have been much worse.

Questions over who the hackers are and the approach of their attack concern government and industry officials. Also troubling is that about nine other financial institutions — a number that has not been previously reported — were also infiltrated by the same group of overseas hackers, according to people briefed on the matter. The hackers are thought to be operating from Russia and appear to have at least loose connections with officials of the Russian government, the people briefed on the matter said.

It is unclear whether the other intrusions, at banks and brokerage firms, were as deep as the one that JPMorgan disclosed on Thursday. The identities of the other institutions could not be immediately learned.

The breadth of the attacks — and the lack of clarity about whether it was an effort to steal from accounts or to demonstrate that the hackers could penetrate even the best-protected American financial institutions — has left Washington intelligence officials and policy makers far more concerned than they have let on publicly. Some American officials speculate that the breach was intended to send a message to Wall Street and the United States about the vulnerability of the digital network of one of the world’s most important banking institutions.

“It could be in retaliation for the sanctions” placed on Russia, one senior official briefed on the intelligence said. “But it could be mixed motives — to steal if they can, or to sell whatever information they could glean.”

The JPMorgan hackers burrowed into the digital network of the bank and went down a path that gave them access to information about the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of account holders. They never made it into where the more critical financial information and personal information are stored.

The bank’s security team, which first discovered the attack in late July, managed to block the hackers before they could compromise the most sensitive information about tens of millions of JPMorgan customers, said several security experts and others briefed on the matter. The attack was not completely halted until the middle of August and it was only in recent days that the bank began to tally its full extent.

American officials say they have been working with JPMorgan since the intrusion was detected, chiefly through the Treasury, the Secret Service and intelligence agencies that seek to find the source of the attacks. But that is slow work and one official cautioned against leaping to conclusions about the identities or the motives of the attackers.

“We’ve been wrong before,” he said.

Ways to Protect Yourself After the JPMorgan Hacking

By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD

Consumers can lessen the risk of financial harm to themselves from big data breaches like the one at JPMorgan Chase.

JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank, has begun contacting customers and making clear that no money was taken from any accounts. There has been no evidence of any fraudulent use of customer information. Most of the household accounts belong to United States residents. The hackers ended up with the addresses, email addresses and phone numbers of everyone who logged into JPMorgan’s websites and mobile applications in the recent past.

Still, the recent attacks on the financial firms raise the possibility that the banks may not be up to the job of defending themselves. The attacks will also stoke questions about regulations governing when companies must inform regulators and their customers about a breach.

“It was a huge surprise that they were able to compromise a huge bank like JPMorgan,” said Al Pascual, a security analyst with Javelin Strategy and Research. “It scared the pants off many people.”

Several financial regulators have warned that a coordinated attack on the banking system could set off another financial crisis.

On Friday, George Jepsen, the Connecticut attorney general, opened an investigation into the breach at JPMorgan, while Benjamin M. Lawsky, New York’s top financial regulator, began calling bank officials to warn them to take the threat more seriously.

“There needs to be far more urgency,” Mr. Lawsky said in an interview.

JPMorgan has also been working with law enforcement, including the F.B.I., since shortly after detecting the intrusion, which affected about 90 of the bank’s computer servers. The bank said it believed that its systems were now secure and that the threat of the hackers’ returning was over.

“To date, we have not seen any unusual fraud activity related to this incident,” said Kristin Lemkau, a bank spokeswoman. “We have identified and closed the known access paths. We have no evidence that the attackers are still in our system. We have apologized to our customers.”

But much remains unanswered about the intrusion, including just who the hackers are, which other financial institutions were hit and why the hackers went down a path inside JPMorgan’s computer system that contained troves of customer information, but not financial data.

The intrusion also highlights a possible gap in United States regulations. Banks are not required to report data breaches and online intrusions unless the incident is deemed to have resulted in a financial loss to customers. Breach notification laws differ by state, but most laws require only that companies disclose a breach if customer names were stolen in conjunction with other information like a credit card, Social Security number or driver’s license number.

In some states, companies can wait up to a month to inform customers of a breach. Other state laws are more vague.

In California, for example, banks, companies and large organizations must inform the state attorney general’s office and consumers about a breach without unreasonable delay — a rule that some companies interpret liberally, officials say. This year, Kamala Harris, the California attorney general, sued the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, saying that it took more than a year for the foundation to disclose to some employees that their personal information may have been compromised.

For years, there have been attempts in Congress to force companies to inform customers more quickly when their information has been compromised, but recent bills have failed to muster enough support. One bill, sponsored by Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, would create a clearinghouse where companies could exchange information about attacks.

United States bank executives say privately that they already share intelligence informally about attacks, which are occurring frequently on their systems.

This summer, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew called on Congress to pass legislation that he said would bolster the information sharing process.

“As it stands, our laws do not do enough to foster information sharing and defend the public from digital threats,” Mr. Lew said.

That the hackers were apparently able to move around JPMorgan’s computer system undetected for several weeks is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the recent breach, officials at other large banks say.

The hackers were able to attain high administrative privileges within JPMorgan’s network, rooting more than 90 servers and rummaging through customer databases with detailed information for 76 million households and seven million small-business online accounts.

As they looked around, according to one person with knowledge of the breach, the hackers gleaned some critical details of customers’ accounts. With these, the hackers were able to determine whether the accounts fell within the private bank or in other business categories like mortgages.

Some people briefed on the results of the attack contend that it was only a matter of time before attackers could have gained access to customer funds and critical personal data.

Weeks into the attack, in mid-July, unusual behavior on the bank’s network was spotted, and the attackers were stopped before they had a chance to pull any customer data back to their servers abroad.

But they did make off with one file which has unnerved executives. That file contained a list of every application and program deployed on standard JPMorgan computers that hackers can crosscheck with known, or new, vulnerabilities in each system in a search for a backdoor entry.

JPMorgan Chase Hacking Affects 76 Million Households

By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG, MATTHEW GOLDSTEIN and NICOLE PERLROTH

The disclosure that attackers had gained access to 76 million households’ accounts dwarfed the bank’s earlier estimate of one million.

Swapping out those programs is costly and time-consuming, people say, because the bank would have to renegotiate licensing deals with technology suppliers and swap out programs and applications for hundreds of thousands of bank employees.

As one former employee explained: “It’s as if they stole the schematics to the Capitol — they can’t just switch out every single door and window pane overnight.”

The attack came after a recent turnover within JPMorgan’s information security group.

A number of staff members followed Frank Bisignano, JPMorgan’s former co-chief operating officer, to First Data last year. This year, First Data agreed to pay JPMorgan over accusations that by wooing other executives to the payment processor, Mr. Bisignano had violated the terms of his former employment contract.

By then, First Data had already hired JPMorgan’s chief information officer, Guy Chiarello; its cybersecurity czar, Anthony Belfiore; its head of compliance, Cindy Armine; and Tom Higgins, JPMorgan’s head of operation control.

Anish Bhimani, the bank’s chief information risk officer, remained. Mr. Bhimani, who is well respected in the cybersecurity industry, is a co-author of a 1996 book on cybersecurity, “Internet Security for Business.”

Ms. Lemkau said the bank was pleased with its current cybersecurity personnel. “This is the highest-quality team we have ever had,” she said.

Last December, JPMorgan hired Dana Deasy as chief information officer from BP. Greg Rattray, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel who specialized in cyberdefense was named the head of information security in June.

Challenges quickly followed. That same month, hackers found a way into the bank’s systems.

Reporting was contributed by Michael Corkery, Nathaniel Popper, Peter Eavis and Jessica Silver-Greenberg

33 Ways to Fix Being Utterly Bored at Work - TIME

http://time.com/3449565/bored-at-work/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• The Muse
 

Sept. 30, 2014

    

Here's how to keep yourself motivated

You’ve gone above and beyond. You’ve talked to your boss about additional responsibilities and gotten the old “definitely—once we have a position open / more budget / don’t need you to focus on X anymore.”

Frankly, you’re bored with your job.

And while sometimes, that’s a sign that you should hightail it out of there, others it’s a matter of keeping yourself moving forward (and not gouging your eyes out) until the next busy season, new client, or promotion comes along.

If you’re in that boat, you’re in luck: Here’s a roundup of things you can do in the office or during off-hours to up your professional game even when your current job isn’t exactly doing it for you.

If You Want to Network

1. Start a Book Group

Pick books that are related to your field—or a general business read that everyone can get some use out of, like something from the 99U book series orGood to Great. A great cadence is once per month—take over a conference room for your lunch hour or, better yet, meet for happy hour and chat at a bar.

2. Create a Networking Group

Have a few friends in your field you see from time to time at industry events? See if they’d all want to get together every month for an informal networking group, where you all meet to chat (and get advice!) about challenges you’re facing.

3. Go on Lunch Dates

Ever heard of “Let’s Lunch?” It’s a (free!) online network that matches you up with someone in your area for lunch during the workweek. Connect your LinkedIn profile, provide your availability and geographic flexibility, and the site’s algorithm matches you up with a like-minded lunch partner. It’s a great way to grow your network utilizing the free time that’s already built into your day. (ViaAllison Stadd)

4. Ask a Co-worker to Join You

Go out to lunch with a co-worker you don’t know well. Not only will you get to know someone new, you’ll learn more about how your company operates—and potentially find new ways to collaborate and get involved.

5. Start a Lunch Club

Grab four other officemates, and assign everyone a day to bring enough lunch for everyone else on a specified day of the week. Cook once, get delicious meals (and team bonding) all five days!

6. Start the Company Softball League

Or frisbee team. Or 5K for charity. Showing some initiative to get everyone out of the office and hanging out with each other on a non-work basis will show the higher-ups you have what it takes to shine in the office, too.

7. Build Your LinkedIn Following

One expert suggests we should be using LinkedIn more like Twitter—finding and engaging with as many followers as possible. So start building your network. Here are a few more things you can do on LinkedIn every month, week, and day.

If You Want to Boost Your Skills

8. Try Morning Pages

Start every day with 15 minutes of creative writing. Entrepreneur Chris Winfield says it has “become an essential way to clear his mind, unleash creative ideas, and quiet his inner critic, reducing his anxiety.”

9. Start a Blog

It can be a place for you to write about happenings in your field, share thoughts on pop culture, or even pursue a hobby—just be clear on what your purpose is and who you want to read it. Then, get started by making a long list of topics you could potentially write about. Commit to pushing something out at least once a week to keep your (obviously avid) followers engaged.

10. Or a Podcast

Blogging not for you? Start a podcast. Better yet, invite industry leaders to be interviewed on your podcast. You’re boosting your personal brand and your professional network at once!

11. Write an Article

Then, try to get it published on an industry website. You’ll hone a new skill—writing and researching—and you’ll start to build your name as a thought leader in your space.

12. Get Your Voice Heard

Look for an upcoming conference or event you could speak at, and pitch yourself as a panel speaker or leader. Here’s exactly how to do it.

13. Look for Hidden Benefits

Browse your company’s benefits page, and make sure you’re taking advantage of all of them. Many companies offer free financial planning services, a professional development budget, or even sabbaticals or trips to other offices. Hey, if it’s cool with HR, it’s bound to be cool with your boss.

14. Learn to Code

No, really—it’ll boost your career no matter what you do (take it fromthis PR pro).Here’s a cool way to get started.

15. Or Learn Something Else

Pick a class, any class—here are 50 (cheap) ideas.

16. Or Teach Something

Consider developing live or online courses, workshops, or seminars in your areas of expertise. (Platforms like Skillshare make it easy to share what you know.)

17. Build a Personal Website

No matter what field you’re in, it’s a great idea. We have a seven-day plan that makes it super easy, and at the end of it all you’ll have an online presence that shows off who you are and displays your best work.

If You Want to Make Your Office Happier

18. Revamp Your Cubicle

It’s amazing what some fresh photos, some non-fluorescent lighting, and some organization can do for your inspiration (not to mention sanity). Here are a few ideas to get you started.

19. Fix Something

Look for a process, procedure, or meeting that everyone grumbles about, and think of one or two ways to improve upon it. Put together a plan, present it to your boss, and see if you can be the one who turns it into action.

20. Teach the Group

Offer to research and present on something to your team—whether it’s socially responsible business practices or a new project management tool.

21. Launch a Brown Bag Program

Once a month, invite cool speakers in to chat with your team about something in your field.

22. Mentor a Junior Employee

Look to see if your company has an official program you can participate in, or just look for younger co-workers who you could take under your wing.

23. Make a List

Create a list of resources you find helpful, sites you love to read, the best conferences or classes in your field, or anything else you think your co-workers might find useful, and send it out to everyone on your team.

24. Ask for a New Employee

If you don’t already have one, come up with a proposal for getting an intern or other direct report. Having someone to take some work off your plate can open up space for you to work on more inspiring projects—and having someone to mentor can be a great growth experience.

25. Create a Client Survey

Ask your customers and potential customers key questions that could help you better serve them (as well as for their general feedback). At minimum, you’ll get some helpful guidance for future sales or initiatives, and you’ll probably look like a star while you’re at it.

If You Want to Get Out of the Office

26. Plan a Trip

Research shows that just the act of planning a trip makes you happier, as you’re anticipating what’s to come. While we don’t recommend doing the actual planning on company time, daydreaming about your destination will certainly make the day go by faster.

27. Plan a Fundraiser

Or otherwise get involved in a cause you care about. Bonus: It’s a great way to network—reach out to people you haven’t talked to in a while or think are interesting with an invite.

28. Do Something Totally Unrelated to Your Job

Take a bartending class, sign up for a half-marathon, get SCUBA certified. While it might not have anything to do with your job, you’ll definitely be more inspired in your off hours, and that’ll give your life inspiration an overall boost.

29. Learn a New Language

Along similar lines, even if you don’t speak Spanish or German at work, speaking and reading in a new language can get your brain thinking in totally new ways. (Here are five fun ways to give it a whirl.)

If You Want Something Totally New

30. Take on a Side Project

Start that funny Tumblr you’ve always wanted to, sell your wares as a consultant in your field, or start an Etsy store. It’ll give you a good challenge outside of your day job—not to mention some cold, hard cash.

31. Go Pro Bono

Use some of your free time to do some work for a nonprofit or early-stage startup with a mission that you’re really excited about. This will give you a chance to grow your skills (or potentially learn new ones) and remind you why you loved your work in the first place, plus it could even turn into an exciting full-time opportunity down the line.

32. Get a New Job

If you’ve tried everything and are still bored at your current gig, it’s probably time to look for a new one. Start making a list of your favorite companies, polishing up your resume, and getting someinformational interviews on the calendar. On that note:

33. Take a Day Off

Hey, if you’re bored at work, you can probably afford it. Try this one-day, 10-hour plan to totally kick start your job search on a day off.

Our Dysfunctional Financial System - TIME

http://time.com/3455631/our-dysfunctional-financial-system/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Rana Foroohar @RanaForoohar
 

6:15 AM ET

    

Tapes of what really happens between bankers and regulators show how far we have to go

In some ways, the most shocking thing about the 46 hours of secret audiotapes made by former Federal Reserve bank examiner Carmen Segarra in 2012 is that they are no shock at all. Did anyone ever doubt that the New York Fed was in hock to Wall Street? Or that Fed bank examiners–the regulators tasked with monitoring the risks banks take–might fear alienating the powerful financiers on whom they depend for information or future jobs?

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It’s one thing to know and another to hear in painful, crackling detail how the Fed’s financial cops slip on their velvet gloves to deal with Goldman Sachs. Or how Segarra, one of a group of examiners brought in after the financial crisis to keep a closer watch on the till, was fired, perhaps for doing her job a little too well. One can only hope that this latest example of regulatory capture by Wall Street will focus minds on the fact that six years on from the crisis, we still have a dysfunctional financial system.

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Consider one of the shady deals highlighted on the secret tapes of New York Fed meetings, which Segarra made with a spy recorder before she was let go and which were made public on Sept. 26 in a joint report by ProPublica and This American Life. The 2012 transaction with Banco Santander, initiated in the midst of the European debt crisis, ensured that the Spanish bank would look better on paper than it really was at the time. Santander paid Goldman a $40 million fee to hold shares in a Brazilian subsidiary so that it could meet European Banking Authority rules. The Fed employees, who work inside the banks they examine (yes, it’s literally an inside job), knew the deal was dodgy. One even compared it to Goldman’s “getting paid to watch a briefcase.” But it was technically legal, and nobody wanted to make a fuss, so the transaction went through.

It’s hard to know where to begin with what’s problematic here. I’ll focus on the least sexy but perhaps most important point: existing capital requirements–the cash that banks are obligated to hold to offset risk–are pathetic. Despite all the postcrisis backslapping in Washington about how banks have become safer, our system as a whole has not. No too-big-to-fail institution currently is required to keep more than 3% of its holdings in cash (a figure that will rise to 5% and 6% in 2018), which means banks can fund 97% of their own investments with debt. No company outside the financial sector would dream of conducting daily business with that much risk. As Stanford professor Anat Admati, whose book The Bankers’ New Clothes makes a powerful case for reining in such leverage levels, told me, “We’ve got to get rid of this idea that banking is special and that it should be treated differently than every other industry.”

Of course, if you start telling financiers they should use more than a few percentage points of their own money when they gamble, they’ll throw a fit. They will tell you that would make it impossible for them to lend to real businesses. They will also uncork lots of complex financial terms–“Tier 1 capital,” “liquidity ratios,” “risk-weighted off-balance-sheet exposures”–that tend to suffocate useful (a.k.a. comprehensible) debate. Financiers use insider jargon to intimidate and obfuscate. This is something we need to fight. In banking, as in so many things, complexity is the enemy. The right questions are the simplest ones: Are financial institutions doing things that provide a clear, measurable benefit to the real economy? Sadly, the answer is often no.

One thing we’ve learned since the crisis is that bailing out Wall Street didn’t help Main Street. Credit to individuals and many businesses plummeted during and after the bailouts and remains below precrisis levels today. Numerous experts believe that the size of the financial sector is slowing growth in the real economy by sucking the monetary oxygen out of the room. Banks don’t want to lend; they want to trade, often via esoteric deals that do almost nothing for anyone outside Wall Street.

This disconnect between the real economy and finance is now being closely studied by policymakers and academics. Adair Turner, a former British banking regulator, thinks that only about 15% of U.K. financial flows go to the real economy; the rest stay within the financial system, propping up existing corporate assets, supporting trading and enabling $40 million briefcase-watching fees. If the New York Fed really wants to redeem itself, it might consider commissioning a similar study to look at Wall Street’s contribution to the U.S. economy. After all, if finance can’t justify itself by showing it’s actually doing what it was set up to do–take in deposits and lend them back to all of us–what can justify it?

Business Magnate Richard Branson Gives His Staff Unlimited Vacation - TIME

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• Sam Frizell @Sam_Frizell
 

Sept. 25, 2014

    

Virgin founder Richard BransonMichael Buckner—Getty Images

Is Virgin's Richard Branson the best boss ever, or an eccentric?

Richard Branson, the chairman and founder of Virgin Group, said on his website Tuesday that he’s giving his whole personal staff unlimited vacation days.

Branson’s staff of almost 200 can “take off whenever they want for as long as they want,” the executive said on his website, adding that employees don’t need to ask for approval, nor are their managers requested to keep track of their days away from work.

Employees can take however much time off from work they choose, “the assumption being that they are only going to do it when they feel a hundred per cent comfortable that they and their team are up to date on every project and that their absence will not in any way damage the business,” Branson said.

The flexible hours employees were working both in the office and at home already make it hard to track how many hours they’re working anyway, Branson said.

The Financial Times reported that the new rules apply to around 170 staff at the Virgin head offices in the U.K. and U.S., whereas the 50,000 employees of the larger Virgin Group won’t enjoy the same policy — though Branson said in his note if it’s successful, he’ll encourage Virgin’s subsidiaries to adopt the policy as well.

Branson said he was inspired by Netflix, the video-streaming service, which has a similar policy.

PayPal to Separate From eBay in 2015 - Associated Press

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• Associated Press
 

7:23 AM ET

    

(SAN JOSE, Calif.) — PayPal is splitting from EBay Inc. and will become a separate and publicly traded company next year.

The separation is expected to occur in the second half of 2015.

EBay said Tuesday that its board decided that the separation was the best path for growth and shareholder value creation for each business.

Dan Schulman, the president of the enterprise growth group at American Express, will be the new president at PayPal, effective immediately. The 56-year-old will become PayPal’s CEO once the separation takes place.

Facebook Takes Its Ad Game to the Rest of the Web - TIME

http://time.com/3444798/facebook-google-atlas-ads/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Maya Rhodan @m_rhodan
 

7:59 AM ET

    

The Facebook logo is reflected in the eyeglasses of a user in San Francisco on Dec. 7, 2011.Bloomberg/Getty Images

In a challenge to online advertising leader Google

Facebook is set to share dataon its millions of users with companies looking to sell targeted ads outside the company’s social network,taking its ad business to the rest of the Internet in a major challenge to Google.

The company on Monday willlaunch a new ad platform dubbed Atlas, through which it promises to deliver “people-based marketing,” especially mobile devices. The idea is to leverage Facebook’s vast troves of data on its users to deliver targeted demographics to advertisers and provide metrics on results. Facebook is already the second-largest advertising platform on the web.

“People spend more time on more devices than ever before, Erik Johnson, who is heading Atlas, wrote in a blog post Monday. “This shift in consumer behavior has had a profound impact on a consumer’s path to purchase, both online and in stores. And today’s technology for ad serving and measurement—cookies—are flawed when used alone. Cookies don’t work on mobile, are becoming less accurate in demographic targeting and can’t easily or accurately measure the customer purchase funnel across browsers and devices or into the offline world.

“People-based marketing solves these problems,” Johnson added.

Atlas has already signed up with the advertising giant Omnicom Group to test automated, targeted ads, starting with campaigns for Pepsi and Intel.

PayPal Co-Founder Takes Aim at Credit Card Industry With New Lending App - TIME

http://time.com/3430817/paypal-levchin-affirm-lending/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Dan Kedmey
 

Sept. 27, 2014

    

Max Levchin speaks during a Bloomberg West television interview in San Francisco on Thursday, March 28, 2013.David Paul Morris—Bloomberg / Getty Images

“You have to have a credit card. You have to use it. You are going to get screwed and you know it."

The most miserable year of Max Levchin’s life began in 2002, shortly after he sold off his ownership stake in PayPal to eBay for an estimated $34 million. “At the time, I had a fascination with the color yellow,” Levchin told TIME. He would arrive to work in a yellow car, wearing a yellow jumpsuit and hole up in his executive suite, blending in with the all-yellow office paraphernalia. His former direct reports, who numbered in the hundreds, shuffled past the door, “staring at me every morning,” he recalls, “as I would sort of mope around going, ‘My baby’s now been sold to a giant company’ while wearing a yellow clown suit.”

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He was 27 years old, flush with cash and adrift in an ocean of downtime. If that sounds like your idea of heaven, then you’re no Levchin. “I literally — I think I started hearing voices,” he says. His girlfriend left him. He wrote 10,000 lines of code, a “minuscule amount,” he insists. His friend persuaded him to take a scenic drive along the Oregon coast. “We saw a lot of very beautiful places,” he says, “and I don’t remember any of it other than the fact that Oregon is a really messed up state, economically.”

Nothing could lift his spirits, short of launching another company, which he did in 2004. It was called Slide, and it was a fun ride down the chute toward another sale in 2010 to Google for $182 million, Levchin says.

Today, he knows better than to slip back into the interminable boredom of easy living. He’s in the thick of a third venture, Affirm, and to sop up the last waning moments of his spare time, he also oversees an investment fund called HVF, short for “Hard, Valuable and Fun.” “Fun” has a very peculiar definition in this case — referring to any massive, globe-spanning problem that Levchin might get to noodle over in his scrappy new office in downtown San Francisco.

Affirm’s 32 employees have set up shop on a quiet street lined by venerable brick buildings, some of which withstood the great fire and earthquake of 1906 and have the commemorative plaques to prove it. Here, Levchin is thriving in his element. His girlfriend came back. They got married and had two kids. He still favors the style of clothing that might diplomatically be called “start-up chic,” a puffy sleeveless winter vest, unzipped and revealing a weathered t-shirt that practically whispers, “I’ve got bigger things to worry about than shopping.”

In fact, though, he does worry about shopping. Obsessively. Levchin has been visiting retailers across the country, asking about the state of consumer lending. He sums it up grimly: “You have to have a credit card. You have to use it. You are going to get screwed and you know it.”

Millennials are ditching the plastic in droves. More than 6 in 10 of them say they have never signed up for a credit card, a group that has doubled in size since the financial collapse of 2007. Evidently they’d rather scrimp on their purchases than get snagged on finely printed fees or mired in debt. “Which is wrong,” Levchin says. “If you are living hand to mouth every month you’re not going to improve your standard of living and you’re not going to scale up.”

Enter Affirm, a startup that that offers consumers the option to split payments over time, which a growing number of online retailers have added to their checkout pages. Users can get instantly approved for a loan by downloading the app to their smartphones and tapping their personal phone numbers into the welcome screen. From that phone number the app launches into the murky world of online data. “It anchors you to a whole host of information that is entirely public, or pretty close to public,” says Levchin. It can scan for social information across social media or dip into proprietary marketing databases or combine that with credit histories. In total, the Affirm team has identified more than 70,000 personal qualities that it thinks could predict a user’s likelihood of paying back a loan. If old fashioned credit scores provide a fixed, black and white portrait of the borrower, Affirm claims to capture that borrower in full, moving technicolor.

The company is so confident in its claims that it puts its own money on the line, extending loans to people who are normally considered a risky gamble. Active duty soldiers, for instance, return home with scant credit histories. A raft of regulations require lenders to extend credit to the soldiers, even if the decision goes against their better judgement. As a result, lenders have historically eyed returning soldiers with suspicion.

“I couldn’t care less about the narrative of why that might be true,” Levchin says, “except that I know it’s actually not. From all the loans that we’ve issued I think we’ve had literally 100% repayment rate from active duty servicemen.” Of course, military service is just one of at least 70,000 variables that can tip Affirm in the user’s favor. The formula is complex by design, so that no user can game the system by, say, posting “brain surgeon” as a new job on LinkedIn and then asking for a fat line of credit.

Whether Affirm will truly upend the rules of lending or foolishly rushed in where lenders fear to tread will depend on its ability to collect interest on loans without resorting to hidden fees. After all, credit card companies do that for a reason: It’s lucrative. Affirm, on the other hand, actually alerts users to approaching payment deadlines and clearly states fee rates before they arrive.

In short, Affirm has to lend at the right rates to the right people. Fortunately for the company, it has $45 million of venture capital to test run its unified theory of lending. It also has no shortage of potential competitors circling in on the hotly contested field of smartphone payments, from Apple Pay, to Google, to Levchin’s old “baby,” PayPal, all competing for the same “under-serviced” customers, as he put it.

But perhaps Affirm’s greatest asset is Levchin himself, who was practically bred for this kind of work. His mother was a radiologist at a Soviet-era research institute, where she was tasked with extracting reliable measurements from Geiger counters. The old Soviet era instruments spewed out a tremendous amount of error data. Her manager dropped a computer on her desk and asked her to program her way to a more reliable reading. Stumped, she turned to her 11-year-old son and asked, ”Do you know anything about this stuff?” The question kicked off Levchin’s life-long love affair with programming, and it made him acutely aware of what data a machine can capture, and what essential points might elude its sensors. He points out that a heartbeat counter may measure 64 beats per minute, but it almost certainly misses a number of half-beats along the way. Affirm, in a sense, listens for those missed beats.

“The fact that we can look at data, pull it, and underwrite a loan for you in real-time is very valuable, because we can literally decide, ‘Hey, in the last 48 hours you got a new job, that changes things a little bit. Now you’re able to afford more,'” Levchin says.

Maybe that’s a hasty gamble, or maybe it’s sound financing. In either case, it’s Levchin’s idea of fun.

CEO of Trillion-Dollar Company Resigned After His Daughter Told Him How Much He Has Missed - TIME

http://time.com/3432717/ceo-of-trillion-dollar-company-resigned-after-his-daughter-told-him-how-much-he-has-missed/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Laura Stampler @LauraStampler
 

Sept. 26, 2014

    

Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic advisor at Allianz SE, speaks during the 31st Annual Meeting of the Bretton Woods Committee at the World BankBloomberg—Bloomberg via Getty Images

Former PIMCO CEO Mohamed El-Erian's daughter made him a list of all the milestones he had missed

A 22-point list written by his 10-year-old daughter was all it took to change the trajectory of Mohamed El-Erian’s life.

In January, El-Erian made headlines for announcing his resignation as CEO of trillion-dollar investment fund PIMCO in January. In anarticle for Worth this summer, which has recently gone viral, El-Erian explains that he decided to step down after his daughter listed out the many milestones he had missed in her life.

When El-Erian asked his child why she wasn’t listening to him when he asked her to brush his teeth, she gave him a list of 22 things he had missed (from first soccer matches to Halloween parades) because of work.

“Talk about a wake-up call,” El-Erian writes. “I felt awful and got defensive: I had a good excuse for each missed event! Travel, important meetings, an urgent phone call, sudden to-dos… But it dawned on me that I was missing an infinitely more important point.”

While discussion of work-life balance is often discussed with women in the C-Suite, men are rarely asked whether or not they “have it all.”

But the conversation is now opening up. And this is largely because men are speaking out. For example, former CEO of MongoDB Mike Schireson wrote a popular blog post about his decisions to step down from his position after he realized how much he was missing in his children’s lives.

A recent TIME article asked 7 C-Suite dads, many of whom were CEOs, to reflect on their struggles to maintain a strong work and family life. Intuit CEO Brad Smith recalled leaving his wife and newborn daughters the day after both of them were born for work trips. Since then he has learned that there are “crystal” and “rubber” moments — while you can bounce back from missing a few occasions, the crystal moments (graduations, weddings, births) should never be dropped.

Since resigning, El-Erian now manages “a portfolio of part time jobs” that provides more flexibility. (Meanwhile his former firm, PIMCOhas run into some troubled waters.)

“I now alternate with my wife in waking up our daughter every morning, preparing her breakfast and driving her to school,” he said. “I’m also around much more often to pick her up after school and take her to activities. She and I are doing a lot of wonderful talking and sharing. We’ve even planned a holiday together, just the two of us.”

Here’s How Long It Would Take Most Americans To Earn As Much As The Highest-Paid CEO - TIME

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• FindTheBest/Kiran Dhillon
 

Sept. 25, 2014

    

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., arrives to a morning session at the Sun Valley Lodge during the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., on Wednesday, July 9, 2014.Bloomberg—Bloomberg via Getty Images

Most workers in America would have to work 354 years in order to make what the average CEO makes in one year

Most Americans know that the CEOs of America’s biggest companies rake in piles of wealth, but according to a recent study by Harvard Business School, they have no idea just how much.

“People dramatically underestimate actual pay inequality,” the study said. Americans, for example, estimate that the pay ratio between CEOs and unskilled workers is about 30:1, but the actual ratio is a whopping 354:1.

That means that most workers in America would have to work 354 years in order to make what the average CEO makes in one year.

And that’s just compared to the average CEO. According to calculations by research engine FindTheBest, it would take most Americans thousands of years to catch up to the highest-paid CEO—Charif Souki of Cheniere Energy—who made $141,949,280 in 2013.

How many thousands of years, exactly?

We calculated how long it would take people in seven professions, with median salaries from $18,000 to $187,200—which represents the low and high end of U.S. occupational salaries based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics—to make as much as Souki does in one year.

For jobs that are most often paid on an hourly basis, workers would need about seven to eight thousand years to make what Souki did in 2013.

Fast food workers: 7,774 years

Cashiers: 7,483 years

The results are still grim for Americans who earn near the median U.S. household income of $51,058 per year.

Telecommunications line installers and repairers: 2,761 years

Elementary school teachers: 2,658 years

And as for those who’ve managed to break into the six-figures?

Computer hardware engineers: 1,407 years

Lawyers: 1,250 years

It would even take professionals with the highest-paid jobs by median salary over half a millennium to amass the kind of wealth Souki did in 2013.

Physicians and Surgeons: 568 years

But keep in mind that $142 million was Souki’s 2013 total compensation, which is different from salary because it includes earnings like bonus, restricted stock awards, and non-equity incentive plans — indeed, some CEOs take a $1 salary, making up the difference with these other earnings. So how long would it take the above professionals to make as much as the highest-paid CEO, just when measuring salary?

The CEO with the highest salary was Rupert Murdoch of Twenty-First Century Fox, who made $8.1 million in 2013.

Although it’s a ways below $142 million, $8.1 million is still more than a lifetime’s work away for Americans making the median salary within their professions. It would take cashiers 427 years, teachers 152 years, and lawyers 71 years to make what Murdoch did in one. Our highest-paid professionals, physicians and surgeons come closer, but it would still take them almost half a century (43 years) to catch up.