The new up-and-coming emerging economies are the CIVETS: Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa, according to Robert Ward, global forecasting director for the Economist Intelligence Unit. According to Mr. Ward, they are ready to become the next BRICs. Unless you have been living under a brick yourself for the last 10 years, you’ve
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I was recently shopping at an EMS store for a fleece vest for my wife. I found the one I wanted, in the color I wanted, but they didn’t have her size. “Do you have this in a small?” I asked a clerk. “Let me check,” and off he went to the back room. A
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According to the U.S. Department of Labor, almost half of Millennials—defined by the Pew Research Center as Americans 28 years old and younger—were unemployed in 2010. The question is, what are they going to do about it? Late last year I attended a company meeting highlighting Dell’s America’s Favorite Small Business campaign, run in partnership
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Despite the best intentions of parents, educators, and the media, teenagers continue to engage in risky behaviors that adults don’t approve of. I’m talking about teens sharing their Internet passwords with their boyfriends and girlfriends. The wisdom of this trend highlights an important issue in digital culture that is transforming how people—and businesses—act online: How
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Any global, broad-based payments issue first yields a lot of noise in the data: Every market in the world is going to vary, subtly or not, from every other market. That means that when common denominators do emerge, they’re very powerful—in part simply because they are applicable globally. Here’s one: Consumer adoption of electronic payment
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The good news this week is that consumer borrowing in the United States jumped by over $20 billion in November, the biggest increase since November of 2001, according to Federal Reserve data. Leaving aside whether or not this reflects a real turning point in consumer confidence, the increase reminds us that in an economy where
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Back in the day, there was e-commerce, consumers shopping for goods and services on their PCs. Then, along came smartphones, which ushered in m-commerce. Now, a new form factor has created a new term—t-commerce, consumers shopping from their tablets. Tablets will reach one-third of U.S. adults by 2015 via a 51 percent CAGR from 2010
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