Getting Real About Getting To Mars

SpaceX founder Elon Musk deserves kudos for outlining an ambitious plan to get humans to the Martian surface and beyond.  But chutzpah alone will not solve the multitude of research problems that are going to have to be solved before anyone --- NASA, ESA, the Chinese, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, or even the Russians --- successfully land crews on Mars.

Needed: neighborhood heliports for drone deliveries

Home builders and architects are behind the curve on our 24/7 delivery lifestyle.

6 Scotch Whisky Microdistilleries That Will Change the Industry (Part 1)

Craft distilling is already becoming a hot trend in the Scotch whisky world.

North Korea Has A Best Friend Forever, U.S. Sanctions Show

Chinese nationals and companies faced sanctions over suspected military support for North Korea, but a broader probe shows one thing for sure: China is North Korea's BFF.

MarketWatch First Take: Tech must look to past to protect the future from an artificial intelligence apocalypse

Through a joint alliance on artificial intelligence, five tech giants need to take a better look at the guidelines established by one of the most influential writers of modern science fiction to protect us from an apocalyptic future.

Key Words: What Twitter can learn from the Green Bay Packers

Writing in the Guardian, Nathan Schneider digs into the Packers organization's playbook, suggesting that, rather than selling out to another publicly traded company, Twitter should team up with its users to take the company private.

Like Old HP, BlackBerry Is Giving Its Advantage Away . . . Piece By Piece

Unable to keep up with Apple, Samsung and the like, BlackBerry is making a big strategic mistake: it is giving its advantage away piece by piece to Asian competitors through outsourcing, as old Hewlett Packard did decades ago.

Not All Captive Insurance Risk Pools Are Created Equally

A "risk pool" is a device used by captive insurance companies to pool their risk with other, like captives, so as to attempt to meet the IRS's so-called "50% third-party insurance" test for risk distribution.

Apttus valued at more than $1.3 billion, eyes IPO next

Apttus raised a new funding round of $88 million at a valuation “significantly north of $1.3 billion,” the last investment planned before an initial public offering, the company's chief executive told MarketWatch.

Netflix is pouring money into some of TV's most expensive shows

Netflix is pumping a lot of money into its shows and producing some of the most expensive TV ever made.

How to Identify Best Practices from Other Organizations that Will Work for Your Company

Best practices, or those methods and procedures that are widely considered to be most effective, can take businesses years to cultivate. For this reason, it is not uncommon for companies to look to organizations that are thriving, and to model their techniques on these examples. But when there are dozens of examples to choose from, how do you identify the best practices with the most promise? Here is a three-step guide to recognizing best practices from other businesses that will work for your company:

Why Trump Is Right About China

The debate last night was entertaining. It's sad to see how the media manipulates facts and cherry picks quotes to fit their narrative. But that's what they do and it ultimately shapes views for voters, unfortunately.

Framework Of Trust Between Founder & VC

The value that comes from a trusting investor-founder relationship cannot be overstated for either party in the relationship. However, the dynamic of the relationship often does not lend itself to one of trust. Understanding the framework of trust, doing your homework on a VC and communicating openly and regularly will help bridge the gap.

Can Taiwan Come Back As Asia's Silicon Valley?

Taiwan plans to create its own Silicon Valley. The island with IT talent but without the culture of imagination that defines California?s Silicon Valley might feel inspired by having its own place by the same name.

Asian FinTech Sandboxes -- Can They Work And Do We Need Them?

Are they really beneficial for the FinTech ecosystem and will they support the transformation the financial industry is going through? Or are they just another buzz word with little substance and limited benefits?

How Beijing Can Gracefully Win The South China Sea Dispute

The South China Sea verdict in July, which Beijing called a ?farce,? may ultimately favor China over four Southeast Asian countries.

The FashTech Start-Up That Could Transform The Smartwatch Industry

Want to turn a mechanical timepiece into a smartwatch? Here's a fashionable solution.

The Wall Street Journal: Labor Dept. sues Palantir, alleging discriminatory hiring

Palantir Technologies has discriminated systematically against Asian job applicants since at least January 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor said in a lawsuit filed Monday.

Can You Make Teleworking Work For You?

Here's a scenario that every small business owner fears: A key employee resigns because he or she cannot continue to come to your place of business to work for reasons out of their control, such as an illness or a family issue. Is there another answer besides accepting the resignation?   With

The Tell: Disney knows a good buy when it sees it

Walt Disney Co. is reportedly considering a bid for social media platform Twitter Inc.

China's "Other Sea"

Investors paying too much attention to China's dispute over the writing of the navigation rules in the South China Sea -- one of the world's biggest trade routes -- have perhaps missed China's “other sea,” the sea of debt that is threatening to derail its robust growth and progress in recent years.
But the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) hasn't. 
In a recent report, the Swiss-based institution pointed to the rapid rise of China's credit-to-GDP ratio, which now stands at 30.1, three times the threshold of 10 that indicates an impending financial crisis. 
To be fair, China isn't the only country with high credit-to GDP ratio. So does Japan, the UK, and the Eurozone.
The trouble is that China's debt is a routine political process. China's credit is extended from state-owned banks to state and province-owned corporations. By contrast, the situation is a credit risk management problem in the UK, Japan, and most of the Eurozone. Additionally, some of China's state owned enterprises, which receive the loans, are stockholders of the state banks that provide them.
That's why nobody really knows what the size of China's debt-to-GDP ratio is.
Compounding the problem, parallel government ownership of both creditors and borrowers concentrates and magnifies rather than disperses and diffuses credit risk, leaving the Chinese economy vulnerable to a systemic collapse -- as the Greek crisis so colorfully illustrated.
Worse, parallel government ownership of lending and borrowing institutions complicates creditor bailouts. The reason why the “haircut” of Greek debt had such a pervasive impact on the Greek economy was that government-controlled banks and pension funds were the creditors of the general government and government-owned enterprises. So the haircut shifted losses from one government branch to another.
The situation is even more serious in China, where the outright simultaneous government ownership of banks, pension funds, and common corporations has yielded an odd state in which both the creditor and the borrower are government branches.
Government-owned banks lend money directly to government-owned corporations -- which usually function as welfare agencies -- and to land developers, who are behind the country's “investment” bubble, one of the engines of the Chinese economy.
Could you imagine what would happen to financial markets if China suffers a Greek-style crisis, one day?
That could, perhaps, explain investor skepticism over Chinese equities, which have been underperforming the neighboring market of India in the last year.

Behind the Storefront: Oculus VR feels backlash over founder's support for pro-Trump group

Revelations that Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey secretly funded a pro-Donald Trump organization have led some developers to pull their support of Facebook's Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset.

Women In VC: Why They Get Ahead Faster In China, View Video

Women are getting ahead faster in China venture capital circles than in the U.S. View this Silicon Dragon video interview with three leading VCs in China to hear how they're rising and challenges they face.

Snap's Spectacles: Cheers for circular video but the design is up for debate

Response is mixed, and a little confused, over Snapchat's - scratch that, Snap Inc.'s - first push into hardware with a late-Friday rollout of its camera-fitted sunglasses called Spectacles.

Maximizing Revenue: Align Your Selling Season With Your Customer's Buying Season

You must put your foot to the pedal in peak seasonal buying periods to ensure you maximize sales when the buying is good.

The Wall Street Journal: Yahoo executives detected a hack tied to Russia in 2014

Yahoo Inc. executives detected hackers in their systems in fall 2014 who they believed were linked to Russia and were seeking data on 30 to 40 specific users of the company's online services, a person familiar with the matter said.