Are China’s Multinational Corporations Really Multinational?

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While ranking on the Fortune Global 500 list indicates the growing clout of Chinese corporations, it does not mean that a company is internationally active or even that it is a real multinational. When these companies are ranked by foreign assets and sales, it becomes clear that, with few exceptions, they all operate predominantly within China. In other words, despite the government’s directives and financial incentives to ‘go global’, many leading Chinese corporations have yet to do so.

via Are China’s Multinational Corporations Really Multinational? | Brookings Institution.

Second, the Achilles heel of Chinese multinationals is human resources—particularly management. Multilingual and multicultural managers are few and far between, and all assessments of Chinese corporations note this to be a fundamental weakness.

Hackers reveal critical vulnerabilities in Huawei routers at Defcon

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The vulnerabilities — a session hijack, a heap overflow and a stack overflow — were found in the firmware of Huawei AR18 and AR29 series routers and could be exploited to take control of the devices over the Internet, said Felix Lindner, the head of security firm Recurity Labs and one of the two researchers who found the flaws.

via Hackers reveal critical vulnerabilities in Huawei routers at Defcon – Computerworld.

According to the Huawei website, the AR series routers are used by enterprises and AR18 in particular is marketed as product intended for small and home offices.

Facebook Page Owners Can Pay $500 For 250,000 Eyeballs With ‘Promoted Posts’

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‘Promoted Posts’ didn’t come up much during Facebook’s recent earnings call despite being launched at the end of May, but COO Sheryl Sandberg did spend a lot of time talking about the importance of advertising — such as Sponsored Stories — that appear organically in Facebook News Feeds rather than explicitly as ads. This was Sandberg’s only nod to the new strategy of asking Facebook users to pay to reach more eyeballs with their “normal” posts, via the transcript of the call on Seeking Alpha:

via Facebook Page Owners Can Pay $500 For 250,000 Eyeballs With ‘Promoted Posts’ – Forbes.

How the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7 harmed the tablet market

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So the problem with the Kindle Fire — and the Nexus 7 — is the same problem that’s plagued the PC industry. Deep and extreme price cuts give the makers no wriggle room to innovate. There’s no doubt that a $199 was an attractive price point for a tablet, but it’s possibly that it was unsustainably low, and that by driving prices down to this level so rapidly, both Amazon and Google have irrevocably harmed the tablet market by creating unrealistic price expectations. It’s quite likely that these impracticable price demands could harm Microsoft and its tablet ambitions.

via How the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7 harmed the tablet market | ZDNet.

Building QuickBooks: How Intuit Manages 10 Million Lines of Code

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As the manager with primary responsibility for build management, Burt has supervised the construction of automated systems that perform continuous builds and continuous integration. The systems incorporate tools for testing, version control, and scheduling.

via Building QuickBooks: How Intuit Manages 10 Million Lines of Code | Dr Dobb’s.

Most of all, the key to managing a large project was automation. “We automate everything that can be automated,” says Burt. “The tools make a huge difference. We maintain all the different versions of QuickBooks, on all our supported platforms, with about 60 code-writing developers. We couldn’t do that without automation.”

Start-up says 80% of its Facebook ad clicks came from bots

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In a Facebook status post as well as a blog posted Monday, Limited Run said it built its own analytics program, which found that 80% of its ad clicks were coming from users with JavaScript turned off, which makes it difficult for analytics software to verify clicks. The company added that in its staff’s experience, only about 1% to 2% of clicks typically come with JavaScript turned off.

via Start-up says 80% of its Facebook ad clicks came from bots – latimes.com.

More info on this here:

BBC News – Who ‘likes’ my Virtual Bagels?.