Tag Archive: companies


According to a new report by the United Kingdom’s People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA UK), tea companies PG tips, Lipton and Lyons have been testing their products on animals in some pretty gruesome experiments that are decidedly not “100% natural.”

The report says that rabbits were fed a diet high in fat to increase cholesterol levels to egregiously high levels and to harden their arteries. Then, the companies fed the animals tea in their water, ostensibly to demonstrate that if the levels decreased, they could market their product as having health benefits. Rabbits weren’t the only test subjects; mice were bred with severe bowel inflammation problems, and then fed tea to see if it helped. And piglets were infected with E. Coli, to give them diarrhea, and I suppose the tea companies felt that their product might have an effect on that, too?

In any event, even if tea had helped the artificially, intentionally sickened animals, they were all killed afterwards for their trouble. It doesn’t get less natural than this.

And this might not be all. Other reports have stated that the Lipton brand uses animal products in their teas — like blood. To dye it the right color.

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September is the month that business, school, and real-life kicks into gear for many who had enjoyed the last gasp of August summer. Important articles this week range from the education access funding to the problem of regulatory frameworks for startup growth to the comparative generosity of global citizens.

The Most Generous Countries on Earth: The Gallup World Giving Index recently released data about the most giving countries. The USA comes in at number 5. The criteria used by Gallup includes charitable giving, time spent volunteering, and willingness to help strangers. It’s hard to draw too much from the limited amount of info here, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Making the Grade: This Matthew Bishop piece in The Economist discusses how loans for education may be the next version of microfinance to make it big. He discusses up-and-coming organizations like Enzi — who are experimenting with loans correlated to a percentage of future income — and Vitanna, as well as pondering the potential of Kiva’s entry into the student loan market. Watch this space in the coming months.

Startup Visa Interviews at O’Reilly Gov 2.0: This speech and interview combo posted by Brad Feld, a venture capitalist based in Boulder, CO and one of the leaders of the Startup Visa movement, provides great background on the push. In short, the goal is to create a class of visa specifically designed for immigrant entrepreneurs who wish to build their companies and create jobs in the USA.

Schools: The Disaster Movie: I expect that education reform will be one of the most talked about issues in our field over the next year. This is in part due to the fact that the field is so ripe for disruption, and that more and more startups are being created to tackle it. But it is also in part because the filmmaker behind “An Inconvenient Truth” is back with a much-anticipated film about the deplorable state of American schools. Early reports have suggested that Teacher’s Unions come out looking pretty bad, which will be sure to poor additional fuel on an already intense flame.

Instead of IPOs, Startups Look to Be Acquired: Tomorrow I will publish a piece about new evidence that suggests that startups are the most important economic engine of job creation in the United States. This piece reinforces the point I make then about how economic policy designed to promote small business and bank reform is not necessarily the same — in fact can be down right opposite — for policy needed to allow startups to flourish. This piece shows how both too much and too little regulation has ruined the market for technology IPOs, impacting job creation and the venture industry as a whole.

Photo credit: Schlüsselbein2007

Weekend Entrepreneur Links: Global Generosity, Education, IPOs

With the World Cup over, all that’s really left to do is resume the drudgery of waking up every day to try to make the world a better place. Bo-ring. If we have to do it though, may as well be as informed as possible. Start with these important reads from the last week.

How Experience in Foreign Cultures Facilitates Creativity: Most of the folks I know who have spent significant time of broad probably would have argued this point before they had any data to back it up, but it’s very cool to see some significant research suggesting that being exposed to foreign cultures has significant, measurable positive impacts on people’s ability to think creatively and solve problems. Importantly, however, the study also shows that the attitude you have going in — the desire to actually engage with that foreign culture — is key to actually getting these benefits.

Revitalizing the American Dream: Inc magazine put together this awesome list of tips for revitalizing the American Dream, and it’s all about making it easier for people to start, join, and succeed in startups. This means teaching entrepreneurship across disciplines (not just in B-School), changing our general approach and disposition towards immigration (and immigrant entrepreneurs), and even some legal ideas like to stop enforcing “noncompete” agreements that force former employees of companies not to work for (or start) competing companies after leaving. Total must read.

Microfinance Group Unitus Shuts Down, Eyes ‘Reinvention’: This is one of those confounding stories that could be incredibly significant or totally irrelevant, depending on what’s behind it. Basically, one of microfinance’s leading institutions has shut its doors and laid off its staff, saying that it’s exploring a reinvention, without saying much of anything about what that is. If this is due to a lack of confidence in microfinance, it’s significant. If it’s a real-life example of a nonprofit actually “putting itself out of business” because it feels it has accomplished what it set out to do, it’s significant. If, more likely, the root of this is just difference in opinion about future direction within the leadership, it’s just internal politics and doesn’t much matter. A story worth watching, though, for sure.

Start-Up Chile: Putting some of the ideas from the Inc story above into practice, this new program from the government of Chile is offering $40,000 in startup grants for companies that are willing to relocate to Chile for a time. The goal is to welcome the global entrepreneurship community to the country and hope that some people decide to invest in Chile as a primary or secondary home for their companies. Few strings attached money is definitely a good way to grab an entrepreneurs’ attention.

Photo credit: Gonzalo Baeza Hernández

Weekend Entrepreneur Links: American Dreams and Foreign Cultures

Given the nationwide tension behind immigration reform, many people may not agree with this statement, but it is time for budget cuts within the U.S. Immigration Services sector.

On June 22, the AP broke what should be a significant story to very little attention; most media outlets simply reprinted the brief report. “CSC gets $25M gov’t records task order,” read the headline. The $25 million order allows CSC to perform scanning, indexing, and records management for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Good for them right? Well not really. Further investigation shows that CSC — Computer Sciences Corporation — has a long history of “winning” government contracts. Yet the disastrous state of the immigration system suggests that we’re not getting what we pay for.

According to the company timeline, starting in May of 1961 with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory contract, CSC has won billions in government contracts, including services for every U.S. Armed Forces division, NASA, the IRS, and major airports; Medi-Cal and Medicare claims processing; and even processing claims when natural disasters strike. In cases where CSC has not won the contracts, CSC often buys the companies that do, like DynCorp, which they acquired in March of 2003.

Through DynCorp, CSC was able to profit from a $50 million contract to support law enforcement functions in Iraq and a $200 million contract extension from the U.S. Postal services. With every awarded contract, CSC’s goal is eerily similar: to modernize the respected agencies technology capabilities with innovative concepts such as outsourcing so they can focus on their tasks. So what, this is America and we reward innovation, right? And what does it have to do with immigration reform?

What happened to rewarding competition? CSC has long had been profiting from contracts with divisions of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and USCIS.

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