lunes, 29 de octubre de 2012

E N M I O P I N I O N: Por: Ricardo Tribín Acosta


El artículo de Ricardo Tribín: 

Silencio…los malos andan sueltos

Martin Luther King  tenía una frase la cual me parece más que oportuna y aplicable hoy en día “No me preocupa el grito de los violentos, de los corruptos, de los deshonestos, de los sin ética. Lo que más preocupa es el silencio de los buenos”. Y cuan diciente que ella es, puesto que da pie para pensar que muchos de los problemas que hay en el mundo se solucionarían si hubiese individuos con el valor de denunciarlos y de exigir solución a los mismos.

Un caso específico está en la corrupción la cual corroe todos los estamentos del mundo contemporáneo. La gente señala a los políticos pero se olvida que para que exista un corrupto tiene haber otro que le facilite el corromperse y que por tanto será más que oportuno denunciar a ambas partes. Sí, pero y el miedo de las consecuencias? 

incuestionable, pero por ello tenemos que poner nuestro grano de arena votando por aquellas personas que garanticen que la administración de la justicia sea ecuánime e implacable y que le asegure a quien denuncia la debida reserva y protección del estado.
Abusos en la salud, en los derechos humanos, excesos en las posibilidades de acumular ganancias, son apenas un pequeño sector que requiere cada día más atención. Si el mundo queremos que sea mejorado la primera acción deberá salir de nuestras partes, integrando a nuestras vidas y comportamientos componentes de transparencia y claridad en todos nuestros actos.

http://ricardotribin.blogspot.com

Miami, Octubre 27 de 2012

jueves, 25 de octubre de 2012

Small Business: Bloomberg BusinessWeek - This Week's Top Story -


Auburn Avenue in Atlanta where many local businesses have failed.

The Small Business Lending Fund's Tepid Results


Nearly three years ago, in his State of the Union address, President Obama announced a plan to use $30 billion in money repaid by Wall Street’s bailed-out banks to help community lenders make loans to Main Street companies.
The plan, part of the Small Business Jobs Act, passedalong party lines in the Democratic Congress that summer. At the time, the lobby for community banks breathlessly suggested that banks could leverage the capital to make as much as $300 billion in new loans to small businesses.
The results have been much more tepid. The program, known as the Small Business Lending Fund, finally started moving money into banks last year. Only $4 billion of the $30 billion available was disbursed. The banks that got it did increase their small business loans, by $6.7 billion, according to the Treasury Department.
But the majority of the money that the government invested—some $2.2 billion—actually went to help community banks repay their earlier government bailouts. (Remember, it wasn’t just Wall Street that got rescued four years ago.) And while those lenders did modestly increase their small business loans, most of the help that reached Main Street came from banks that didn’t use the new money to repay bailouts, a Bloomberg Businessweek analysis of Treasury data (pdf) shows.
Critics at the time, such as Raj Date, predicted this. Date, now a deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, two years ago was an outside analyst who called the plan “TARP Junior.” He said most of the capital would go to patching holes in bank balance sheets left by legacy assets such as commercial real estate loans gone bad. At the time he told me the money might support $70 billion in new lending. That figure now seems wildly optimistic.
The dividend that participating banks have to pay to the Treasury drops from 5 percent to as low as 1 percent if they increase their small business loans. The Treasury hoped that banks would leverage the capital, lending out several dollars for every dollar the government invested, and many of the 332 participating lenders did. But nearly a third didn’t even increase their small business loans by the same amount of money they got from the government, let alone leverage it.
In some cases, banks say the demand from small businesses just wasn’t there. First Merchants Corporation, an Indiana bank with $4.2 billion in assets, took $90 million in capital from the Small Business Lending Fund. (Some of that went to pay back TARP money.) Even so, the bank decreased its small business loan book by 20 percent, or $260 million, according to Treasury data.
“If we could make the loans, we would,” says David Ortega, first vice president and director of investor relations. “We expected the economy to be improving. Since it really hasn’t, that’s really affected the amount of demand for the small business lending.”
In aggregate, banks that used the new money to repay TARP loans increased their small business lending by about 10 percent, and loaned out about one dollar for every dollar they got from the government. For the banks and community lenders that weren’t repaying earlier bailouts, the results were much better. In aggregate they boosted lending by 35 percent and loaned out three dollars for every dollar they got from the government.
It’s still early days for the program. The data measure lending through June 30, which is less than a full year since some of the participants got their capital from the Small Business Lending Fund. The Treasury points out that nearly 90 percent of banks in the program have increased small business lending, and three-quarters have boosted it by at least 10 percent. And lenders in the SBLF program increased small business loans more than a comparable group of banks that didn’t participate, the Treasury says.
The recovery in the past two years has been slower than most expected. Lending by banks in the program picked up this year, increasing by $1.5 billion in the second quarter alone. Maybe in time it will look like a better deal. One year in, though, it appears to have helped banks far more than it has helped businesses.
Tozzi is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York.

From Bloomberg BusinessWeek: Technology Insider


In Schrep, Facebook Trusts


Facebook Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011

In 2008, an alarming number of Facebook’s top brains left the company. Dustin Moskovitz, the Harvard roommate of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook co-founder, decided to start his own software company. He teamed up with Justin Rosenstein, a Facebook engineer who had driven much of the work behind the Like button and Facebook’s Beacon advertising platform, to form Asana. Adam D’Angelo, a computer science wunderkind and chief technology officer at Facebook, bailed out to start Quora, a type of question-and-answer hub, with Charlie Cheever, an engineer responsible for Facebook Connect and Facebook Platform. And Jeff Hammerbacher, one of the first data scientists at Facebook, left that same year and started Cloudera, a maker of data analytics software.
Following the exodus, Facebook still had plenty of computer science whizzes on staff and the cultural leadership of Zuckerberg. But it needed someone to inject fresh life into the engineering organization to help it create an infrastructure that would have to grow to support 1 billion people. One of the main figures who would end up playing this role of the engineering team’s Obi-Wan was Mike Schroepfer, who came to Facebook from Mozilla in the middle of 2008.
Today, Schroepfer—or Schrep, as everyone at Facebook calls him—is the vice president of engineering and sits next to Zuckerberg at the office. He works on the company’s infrastructure and guides the development of its products, making him more or less the nuts-and-bolts complement to Sheryl Sandberg’s business strategizing.
Schroepfer, 37, grew up mostly in Boca Raton, Fla., where his parents ran an AM radio station. Get Schrep going on the subject, and he’ll recount working shifts at the station from midnight to six in the morning and battling Fidel Castro over the airwaves. “Cuba had built this giant radio transmitter,” he says. “Every once in a while, they flipped this radio station on and essentially the entire Eastern seaboard would be Fidel Castro.”
When not burning the midnight oil at the station, Schroepfer and his brother were at home playing games on their Commodore and learning how to code. They would take turns, with one person reading a program aloud from a magazine while the other person typed in the commands. “We would stay up for two days doing this,” Schroepfer says.
The programming bug really took hold, though, when Schroepfer made his way to California to attend Stanford University. He devoured computer science courses and began working with startups in the area doing a variety of projects and consulting. After bouncing around a bit, Schroepfer co-founded a data center software company called CenterRun in 2000, which Sun Microsystems then acquired in 2003. Schroepfer worked at Sun for 18 months, spending time on the very campus in Menlo Park, Calif., that Facebook now owns. And then he went to Mozilla, where he oversaw engineering of the Firefox Web browser and watched as the product became used by hundreds of millions of people.
Where Sandberg seems comfortable in the limelight, Schroepfer tries to stay out of it. He’s a behind-the-scenes operator, who gets credited time and again with having a knack for assembling teams and making sure they follow through on their goals. He tends to be easygoing but direct in meetings and tries to mix data and intuition to make decisions. Zuckerberg describesSchroepfer as the “cultural center” of the engineering teams. As such, he’s the guy that makes sure the new Facebook recruits get indoctrinated in the company’s “move fast and break things” mentality.
In the years ahead, Schroepfer will be guiding Facebook’s attempt to function as something of a personal assistant. He talks about people today playing 20 questions when they meet each other for the first time, trying to figure out where someone grew up or went to school, or what sports team they like. “You are fishing that common ground and then, when you get a hit, you spend the next 25 minutes talking about the Red Sox and growing up in Boston,” Schroepfer says. “If you never find that common ground, the interaction is unfulfilling. I think we can help people find the common ground better than anyone else.”
This line of thinking stretches to include people using their smartphones to glean more information about the world. “You might see that your friend is in town, or you might be on vacation in Paris and see that your friend Peter visited Paris two years ago and said the duck was great at a particular restaurant,” Schroepfer says. “The question is if we can get to a point on a very regular basis where people are having amazing, serendipitous experiences because of Facebook. I think the more we can make your life be like that and not be boring and lonely, the better.”
Vance is a technology writer for Bloomberg Businessweek



lunes, 22 de octubre de 2012

From Bloomberg BusinessWeek: Las 50 Mejores ciudades/Fifty Best Cities


Es el segundo año que Business Week construye este indicador (entretenimiento, educación, economía, delitos,calidad del aire). La única ciudad de Florida es TAMPA que por mucho tiempo ha trabajado para ser lo que es. Varias cosas que pensar/ Business Week has done it for second time, based on leisure, education, economy, crime, air quality. The only one city from Florida is TAMPA, with a long time effort to enhance itself. Several things to think about:

1.- No siempre coinciden los números con las aspiraciones. (Imaginense diciendole a la familia: nos mudamos para Anchorage, Alaska para vivir mejor…) Ese es un viejo problema (los matemáticos que descubren las mejores dietas por costo/persona saben hace rato que no hay quien se las coma…)/ Human aspirations and numbers not always go in par (Just wonder how to tell your family they are moving to Anchorage, for a better living…) It is an old problem (mathematicians discover best diets based on cost/person but there is no way that people eat them…

2.- Nuestros líderes civicos debian de pensar sobre el tema para descubrir la receta adecuada para que nuestras ciudades se consideren cunas del progreso y mecas de vida humana…/Our civic leaders must think about this,to discover the right recipe to turn our cities in progress cradles and human living meccas…

It's impossible to say what's "best" for everyone, of course. But where's the fun in not trying? Welcome to Businessweek.com’s second America’s Best Cities ranking. With assistance from Bloomberg Rankings, Businessweek.com evaluated 100 of the country’s largest cities based on leisure attributes (the number of restaurants, bars, libraries, museums, professional sports teams, and park acres by population); educational attributes (public school performance, the number of colleges, and graduate degree holders), economic factors (2011 income and June and July 2012 unemployment), crime, and air quality. Major professional league and minor league teams, as well as U.S.-based teams belonging to international leagues in that city were included. The greatest weighting was placed on leisure amenities, followed by educational metrics and economic metrics, and then crime and air quality. The data come from Onboard Informatics, except for park acreage, which comes from the Trust for Public Land. As the methodology has changed since the 2011 ranking, a city’s rise or fall compared with last year does not suggest that it has gotten “better” or “worse.”

1.- San Francisco
11.- Pittsburgh
21.- Cincinnati
31.- Oalkland
41.- Dallas
2.- Seattle
12.- Minneapolis
22.- Houston
32.- Rochester
42.- Reno
3.- Washington DC
13.- Nashville
23.- Oklahoma ity
33.- San Jose
43.- Scottsdale
4.- Boston
14.- New Orleans
24.- Philadelphia
34.- Lincoln
44.- Phoenix
5.- Portland, Oregon
15.- Kansas City
25.- Lexington
35.- Tampa
45.- Chesapeake
6.- Denver
16.- Atlanta
26.- Milwakee
36.- Colorado Springs
46.- Cleveland
7.- New York
17.- Madison
27.- Arlington
37.- Indianapolis
47.- St. Louis
8.- Austin
18.- Raleigh
28.- Chicago
38.- Tulsa
48.- Omaha
9.- San Diego
19.- Honolulu
29.- Baltimore
39.- Charlotte
49.- Anchorage
10.- St Paul
20.- Colombus
30.- San Antonio
40.- Virginia Beach
50.- Los Angeles


E N M I O P I N I O N: Por: Ricardo Tribín Acosta


Aquí nadie pregunta por ti

Esta es la historia del hombre que se consiguió un trabajo magnifico a nivel ejecutivo que le demandaba bastante actividad, punto que el caballero de marras se tomó bien en serio. 

Estando en plena ejecución de sus funciones y con el ego mas subido que “mico” del congreso, un día se le apareció a su mujer con un papelito en el que pretendía detallarle su horario de las noches para que ella tuviera conocimiento de lo que haría. Mira, le dijo, quiero contarte que los lunes después del trabajo tenemos reunión del comité de relaciones públicas; el martes celebramos los acontecimientos más importantes de la semana; los miércoles es la cena con los otros directivos; el jueves vemos todos el juego de futbol por televisión; el viernes es , como tú sabes el “cultural’ y entonces nos tomamos unos “aguardienticos”; el sábado voy a la casa del jefe a cenar y a revisar los planes de la semana siguiente; y el domingo…bueno, pues ese sí que es para mí ya que, con  tanta actividad termino muy cansado y entonces salgo a divertirme un poco.

Qué opinas de ello, mi vida, le pregunto a su esposa? Bueno, pues por parte mía no hay ningún problema. Puedes hacer lo que te parezca, pero quiero recordarte algo. En esta casa se hace el amor tres días a la semana escogidos al azar y ello sería no más tarde de las nueve de la noche, este el marido o no. Además te sugiero que no te tomes tan en serio tus funciones durante las horas extras pues podría llegar el momento en que llames para preguntar qué hay de nuevo? y se te conteste: “nada, mijito. Por aquí todo muy bien, no te preocupes que nadie en esta casa, incluyéndome a mí, pregunta por ti”.

http://ricardotribin.blogspot.com

Miami, Octubre 20 de 2012


viernes, 19 de octubre de 2012

Small Business : This Week

From Bloomberg BusinessWeek: This Week's Top Story

BIOFUELS 
By  on October 11, 2012
 

ALGAE ARE A GROWING PART OF SAN DIEGO'S APPEAL

This Week's Top Story - Algae Are a Growing Part of San Diego's Appeal

The city's biofuels cluster is a "mecca" for entrepreneurs hoping to turn nonfood crops into fuel

In 2006, rising oil prices prompted molecular biologist Stephen Mayfield to shift his research from algae’s medical uses to turning the green goo into green crude. His work prompted a handful of biotech entrepreneurs to found Sapphire Energy in San Diego in 2007 in the hope of producing the sustainable fuel commercially.
Gas prices have continued to climb since then, and the swift jump above $5 a gallon in some parts of California last week “is a reminder of the vulnerability Americans face, due to volatile markets and a continued reliance on finite sources of crude oil,” says Tim Zenk, Sapphire’s vice president for corporate affairs.
The 150-employee company, backed by more than $350 million in public and private funds, is a leader in a rapidly growing cluster of 40 biofuels ventures around the city. The scientific breakthroughs and engineering expertise at research powerhouses such as the University of California, San Diego, the Scripps Research Institute, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies are part of the cluster’s allure. BP (BP) established its Biofuels Global Technology Centre there in 2010, says BP spokesman Matt Hartwig, attracting “leading engineers and scientists especially from the local San Diego biotechnology community.”
That tight-knit community is turning San Diego into a destination for entrepreneurs betting on alternative fuels made from nonfood sources such as algae and jatropha. “San Diego has developed as the Mecca of algae technology development, as well as a model community for the cleantech movement,” David Schwartz, editor and publisher of AlgaeIndustryMagazine.com, writes in an e-mail. “This is largely due to a remarkable convergence of … resources and brain trust [that] has resulted in the development of pioneering companies.”
Martin Sabarsky, president and chief executive ofCellana, a 25-employee company founded in 2004 to commercialize marine microalgae, says “it’s no surprise that San Diego should be a place where [biofuels research] companies are headquartered and dollars are flowing.” Although Cellana’s research and production are based in Hawaii, Sabarsky found it imperative for the company to locate in San Diego. “The breadth of companies attracts top talent and venture capital to the region,” says Jennifer Jamall, communications director for local trade group CleanTECH San Diego. “Biofuels startups benefit greatly from being tightly clustered in San Diego.”
Local and state government is supportive, too, because San Diego’s biofuels cluster “represents a significant opportunity to expand the region’s research corridor to a new field in technological discovery and entrepreneurial business development,” Jamall says. “Policy makers in California have singled out biofuels discovery, development, and commercialization, among other cleantech ventures, as a promising sector for innovation and job creation statewide.”
Algal biofuels research generated $80.9 million in economic activity in the region last year and employed 466, up from 215 in 2009, according to a study (pdf) from the San Diego Association of Governments. A $4 million grant from the California Department of Labor has helped meet growing industry demand for skilled labor by training biofuel workers and job seekers through local universities, community colleges, and extension programs.
Keen to avoid corn-based ethanol’s chief disadvantage, of diverting costly food crops away from the global food supply, entrepreneurs in the cluster are trying to circumvent their own problems. Kirk Haney, president and CEO of SG Biofuels, has staked his 60-employee company on a tropical shrub called jatropha curcas, which produces oil that in August 2011 successfully powered a Boeing 777 Aeromexico test flight from Mexico City to Madrid. “I raised $1.3 million three days before the market meltdown, and it took me a year to raise an additional $750,000,” Haney says. In the worst of times, some of his employees shifted to part-time jobs and others took compensation in company equity rather than cash, he says.
Jatropha production has had its share of false starts, with several industry bankruptcies and disappointing yields in field trials. Haney says SG Biofuels has solved those problems with hybrid crops that produce better yields with less water. A Bloomberg New Energy Finance reportreleased in February says that jatropha-derived aircraft fuel could be competitive within five years.
Sapphire’s scientists have conquered many of the early obstacles to commercial algae production, says Zenk, including growing algae on a commercial scale with salt water and developing a cost-effective, nonpolluting extraction process. Improving yields and protecting crops from pests and disease are ongoing challenges, he says. He estimates that by 2015 the company’s technology will be sophisticated enough to produce the fuel economically on an industrial scale. The Bloomberg report predicts that “large-scale, biofuel-producing algae farms will not appear this decade.”
The biofuel entrepreneurs agree they are not going to discover one magic fuel. “We already found it, and it’s petroleum,” says Mike Lewis, co-owner of 10-year-old alternative fuels distributor Pearson Fuels in San Diego. “It’s absolutely mind-boggling how efficient it is. I don’t think we’ll ever find something that has as much widespread utility.” But petroleum’s political and environmental drawbacks mean that a variety of sustainable alternatives will eventually have to replace it, he adds.
Haney agrees: “I’m very bullish on my peers. I hope they are wildly successful, because we need a multi-pronged attack to get this technology to scale.”
Klein is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers entrepreneurship and small-business issues.


jueves, 18 de octubre de 2012

Bloomberg BusinessWeek : Technology...3D Printing


The World’s First 3D-Printed Acoustic Guitar


The World’s First 3D-Printed Acoustic Guitar

The Era of Retail 3D Printing Begins       Headline created with 3D printer       3D Printing Coming to the Manufacturing Space—and Outer Space

By  on October 12, 2012
 

Scott Summit does unusual things on his vacations. For instance, he just spent a week up in the mountains, taking in the majestic scenery and all that, but also sitting at his laptop creating a 3D model of his ideal guitar. Then he sent the computer design to 3D Systems (DDD), which used its massive 3D printers to transform the graphic model into an actual acoustic instrument that Summit can play.
As far as anyone seems to know, this is the first 3D-printed acoustic guitar on the planet, and it raises all kinds musical possibilities. (As several readers noted, people have already made 3D printed electric guitars.)
As a kid, Summit pined after fancy guitars. “I wanted a $3,000 one like Jerry Garcia would play,” he says. At the time, Summit didn’t have the money, so he spent around $100 on wood and other parts and fashioned his own guitar. “It sounded like crap,” he says.
These days, Summit spends most of his time designing custom body parts and stylish prosthetics that get built from 3D printers. He is, in fact, one of the world’s leading 3D printing and design experts, and he decided to put those skills to use over a holiday, refining his childhood vision.
Since the acoustic guitar would be made from fused plastic, Summit figured it would have some serious shortcomings. If it actually worked, it would probably sound worse than his old $100 model. But chances were the guitar would break under the 200 pounds of string pressure that comes with tightening the strings via a tuning machine. Summit set up a video camera to record what would happen when the stringing process started. “I thought it would at least be cool if the guitar exploded,” he says.
But, no. It worked, and it sounds pretty good. “It’s rich and full and has a great tonal range,” says Summit, who’s been known to play at friends’ weddings and at dive bars.
Summit describes this version as a rough draft. He wants to start experimenting with more radical designs to see how they change the sound. Somewhere down the road he figures people will be able to use software to pick out what sort of treble, bass, or sustain they desire and then print a guitar to match those qualities. “It will arrive in the mail and sound just the way you wanted,” he says.
Earlier this year, 3D Systems acquired Summit’s body part printing startup. He’s shown the guitar to the 3D Systems crew, and they’re thinking about how to advance the idea. The one-off model used about $3,000 worth of plastic and had a headstock 3D printed with sterling silver; the plate on the neck was 3D printed out of stainless steel. “It’s sort of this salad bar of 3D printing,” Summit says.
Vance is a technology writer for Bloomberg Businessweek.

lunes, 15 de octubre de 2012

Bloomberg Businessweek Politics & Policy


The promise: 5 million green jobs

Unemployment The 5 Million Green Jobs That Weren't


In 2008 candidate Barack Obama promised to create 5 million green jobs. He laid out a plan to invest $150 billion over 10 years that would advance a clean-energy economy built around biofuels, hybrid cars, low-emission coal plants, and renewable sources such as solar and wind. How many has he actually created?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking green jobs two years ago, but it counts only how many existed as of the end of 2010. It doesn’t keep a running total of newly created jobs, so there’s no way to tell how many existed before Obama’s election. The Brookings Institution also has a tally, but it too goes only through 2010, and of the nearly 2.7 million green jobs it identifies, most were bus drivers, sewage workers, and other types of work that don’t fit the “green jobs of the future” that Obama imagined. The report does zero in on cleantech, which includes the wind, solar, fuel-cell, and smart-grid industries. In 2010, Brookings shows, there were 184,699 such jobs nationwide—up 2,642 since the president took office in 2009.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 set aside $90 billion in renewable energy grants and loans for a grab bag of thousands of projects—wind farms, solar installations, natural gas fueling stations, biofuel research, and a $5 billion weatherization project for low-income homes. Digging into the public records of the $21 billion spent so far through 19 U.S. Department of Energy programs reveals 3,960 projects that employ 28,854 people.
That’s not 5 million. In November 2010, the President’s Council of Economic Advisers said federal recovery spending had “saved or created” 225,000 clean-energy jobs, including “both the direct jobs of people involved in the construction of a particular project and also the jobs generated by the additional economic activity sparked by these projects.”
There’s no way to know whether this multiplier effect really resulted in the number the administration claims. But if you take it as true and generously assume similar growth for 2011 and 2012, that’s 675,000 jobs created at best—and 4,325,000 to go.
The promise: 5 million green jobs
Sources: BLS, Brookings Institution, Council of Economic Advisers

E N M I O P I N I O N: Por: Ricardo Tribin Acosta



El “Abuelazo” y “el hombre del tabaco”

Por tiempos cada vez que he almorzado con mi buen amigo samario, ex gobernador del Departamento del Magdalena en Colombia,  “Rafa” Infante, le he preguntado siempre por su gran amigo Don León Londoño Tamayo, dirigente del futbol colombiano de grata recordatorio por sus positivas ejecutorias en este campo, y a quien lamentablemente ya no podrá el ver pues el pasado sábado seis de octubre de 2012 le entregó su alma a Nuestro Señor. 

Don León fue un hombre espectacular quien en su equipo el Cúcuta Deportivo por allá en 1959 trajo grandes figuras suramericanas a jugar como lo fueron entre otros Walter Gómez, Omar Verdún y Juan Eduardo Hohberg. Estas eran mis épocas doradas pues, desde nuestro Deportivo Pereira con mi padre Carlos Tribin Biester y con Alfonso Roldan García, les hacíamos barra a jugadores de la talla del número nueve Eusebio Escobar, conocido como “la locomotora negra “y del cancerbero del elenco Matecaña, Adelmo “Achito” Vivas,
León Londoño, llamado “el hombre del tabaco”,  hizo muchísimas cosas dentro del futbol colombiano entre ellas estar en su división  mayor “Dimayor”, entidad en la que se quedó treinta y tres años , primero como gerente y luego como presidente, cargo en el que permaneció entre 1983 y 1988. Su paso por la Federación Colombiana de Fútbol le llevó a la FIFA en donde estuvo en la comisión técnica, organizadora del Mundial, proyecto frustrado por la miopía del gobernante de turno, y en la del estatuto del jugador. Su nombramiento como miembro honorario resultó toda una curiosidad, puesto que Joao Havelange, presidente de la entidad, hizo modificar los estatutos durante veinticuatro horas, en razón a que el colombiano no cumplía con el requerimiento de edad.

Londoño Tamayo ha dejado sin “compinche” de traguitos a mi querido “Rafa”, y este, quien tanto lo apreciaba, deberá por tanto destinar más tiempo a su único nieto que le dio origen a su denominación de “El abuelazo” y entonces, cuando vaya a Bogotá, le tocará buscar a ver con quien poder meterse sus “anetoles” en el Restaurante Salinas del norte, lugar adonde se reunía con su gran amigo León. Paz en su tumba, querido dirigente del futbol, y esperamos que en el cielo conforme un equipo a todo dar y que allí haga, no el mundial que le frustraron en su época, sino el universal del maravilloso juego del balompié.

http://ricardotribin.blogspot.com

Miami, Octubre 14 de 2012.

jueves, 11 de octubre de 2012

Small Business, from Bloomberg BusinessWeek


Maurice Lim Miller, 2012 MacArthur Fellow




Why 'Makers' vs. 'Takers' Is the Wrong Conversation


By  on October 08, 2012
 


For Maurice Lim Miller, election season chatter about “makers vs. takers” misses the point. Miller, who was just awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for studying how people in poverty improve their lives, says America’s poor are an entrepreneurial lot. They have to be.
“In Oakland, if you walk down International Boulevard, you see tons of entrepreneurs,” says Miller, who grew up in a poor immigrant family. “You see people selling CDs on the street, you see food carts, you see people repairing cars in their garages.”
The Family Independence Initiative, Miller’s Oakland-based nonprofit, has tracked 350 families with a median income of about $26,000 in San Francisco and Boston. His group doesn’t give them social services or tell them what to do. Instead, he asks them to report what they’re doing to get out of poverty and pays them a modest amount, about $160 per month, for documenting how they’ve met their goals. They could choose to focus on improving a child’s grades or paying down credit-card debt. Miller wants to find out what people do to help themselves when they’re not being steered in certain directions.
It turns out a lot of them start businesses. In the past three years, those 350 families have started 41 businesses that have created the equivalent of 74 full-time jobs. Miller says small, informal ventures, such as driving taxis or making floral arrangements, are one way families make up for lost income when they lose jobs or have their hours cut back. Some enterprises became more permanent, such as a storefront candy shop in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. “The way families were dealing with the recession was by becoming entrepreneurs,” says Miller.
About a third of the families Miller tracks receive some kind of government support, such as food stamps or living in public housing. Entrepreneurship is one way families reduce their dependence on government. Miller’s data show that, far from the caricature of welfare queens, families in poverty work hard and find creative ways to get off welfare. “Given alternatives, you see families really try to drop out of that system,” he says. “So how do they do that? They start creating their own jobs. They try to get their kids to go to college. There’s a lot of initiative.”
Tozzi is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York.

For Technical people: Do not be a bad manager ... From TechRepublic


A tech can earn more money without becoming a manager. If, however, you still want to pursue the management track, please know that leadership is a skill in its own right. You may be a great tech, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be a great manager

Here are some behaviors that I see most often in poor leaders:


#1 You don’t seek feedback, or if you do, it’s for the wrong reason.

I think everyone has had the experience of being asked for feedback, sometimes even in a formal program, and then have all that feedback subsequently ignored. Some managers like to say they welcome feedback just so they can look like the kind of person who, well, welcomes feedback. But, in reality, they have no intention of ever using it.
Don’t do that. Don’t ask for feedback unless you’re prepared to actually implement some of it. It’s a different story if all the feedback you receive sucks out loud and you can’t use it, but at least go in with the best intentions. There’s nothing worse for employee morale than to make them feel like they’re being condescended to.

#2 You never exhibit vulnerability.

You may be that person who knows everything about everything. If so, you should make plans to donate yourself to science, because that’s one heck of a claim.
Maybe you’re not perfect, but maybe you think you need to project that image to gain and retain the respect of your direct reports. Well, that’s just dumb, and here’s why: Your staff knows that you’re not supernatural, which is what you’d have to be to have all the answers all the time. By pretending like you do, you are only portraying yourself as someone who thinks he/she knows everything — in other words, a phony and/or an obnoxiously insecure person.
Also, acting like you know it all is bound to make your staff feel insecure. If you can’t admit to not knowing something, then they know that there will be quite a few times when you’re basically taking them down blind avenues.
Just remember: You hired your staff members for their expertise. Take advantage of that.

#3 You’re unavailable.

I had a boss once who boasted about his open door policy at every opportunity. The only problem was, the door might have been open but he was never in his office. That’s like saying someone can have the keys to your car any time but then hiding the car.
It is true that with a management role, there is a lot of liaising to do with upper management. You should never let that take over your availability for your team. I’m fairly sure upper management doesn’t need every second of your time.
If you’re chronically unavailable then it will be translated by your team that you just don’t care. And why should they care if you don’t?
Some managers get so involved in the day-to-day that they don’t even realize they’re committing one or more of these leadership sins. Make sure you’re not one of them.

Toni Bowers  ...Toni Bowers is an award-winning writer and Head Blogs Editor for TechRepublic 

miércoles, 10 de octubre de 2012

E N M I O P I N I O N: Por: Ricardo Tribín Acosta



Dejando ir

Dejar ir no significa claudicar sino más bien abrirse a nuevas perspectivas. Por ello cuando nos quitamos ciertas “cucarachitas” de la cabeza y permitimos que los pensamientos que nos atormenten salgan de nuestra mente, empezaremos a encontrar libertad y paz en el pensamiento. Esto es posible alcanzarlo cuando finalmente comprendemos que aquellas ideas obsesivas acerca de algo que guardamos en nuestro cerebro solo traen malestar ya que, aunque sepamos que los resultados no serán los que esperamos, creemos equivocadamente que seguir pensando en ello nos traerá la solución.

Dele, dele y dele con la idea, y la solución? Esto pasa hasta en las mejores familias, personas, grupos, etc., pero se particulariza en cada caso, concentrando la situación en la mente de cada cual. Un negocio frustrado, una oportunidad perdida, una relación afectiva finiquitada, en fin tantas cosas sobre las que a veces no poseemos ningún control, pues los resultados ya se han dado y no hay como cambiarlos. Para tales situaciones lo mejor será dejar ir y continuar viviendo en la búsqueda de nuevas y mejores oportunidades.

http://ricardotribin.blogspot.com

Miami, Octubre 7 de 2012

viernes, 5 de octubre de 2012

Small Businesses Get the Spotlight in Presidential Debate

The conventional wisdom is that Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama in the first     presidential debate, but there was another winner in terms of attention Wednesday night: America's small businesses.

"Small business,"  appeared 27 times in this transcript of the debate and featured prominently in both candidates' opening statements.

Obama, who went first, said, "I think it's important...that we change our tax code to make sure that we're helping small businesses.

In his turn, Romney named "champion small business" as the fifth element of a five-part economic plan. The Republican nominee elaborated, "It's small business that creates the jobs in America. And over the last four years small-business people have decided that America may not be the place to open a new business, because new business startups are down to a 30-year low. I know what it takes to get small business growing again, to hire people."

Amid their general agreement that small businesses are an important engine of economic growth, the candidates drew clear distinctions between themselves...