Skye Hauptman, 41, is the founder and ceo of BlueMatrix. The firm was started nine years ago and now has offices in New York and Europe, employing 55 people. ExecutiveSurf caught up with Skye on a recent business trip to Moscow. Tell us about BlueMatrix? What does your company do? We provide an online (web-based) suite of applications to help financial analysts or stock researchers publish their ideas and disseminate them to their clients. The process has become quite regulated over the last decade and our applications try to make this process as quick and accurate as possible. Our clientele is mostly the boutique or industry vertical investment houses. These are firms that do not wish to build a proprietary system but want to greatly improve the time it takes for their investment ideas to reach the marketplace. We find that most of the really innovative ideas and requirements come from the smaller type of firms; they are usually run by very smart people who…
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Six degrees of separation: In 1929, Hungarian writer, Frigyes Karinthy, proposed that anyone can be connected to anyone else on the planet through a chain of acquaintances with no more than five intermediaries.In the 1950s, professor JA Barnes described a social network as an association of people, drawn together by family, work or hobby. Today, googling 'social networks' produces 135 million results and the definition has changed somewhat.Most people now think of somewhere on the internet where people meet to chat, socialise and network. MySpace, Bebo and Facebook are all social networks that help people with similar interests to connect.They are a very new phenomenon. Facebook was founded at Harvard University, by Mark Zuckerberg, in 2004 and was restricted to Harvard students, but gradually others were added. Since 2006, anyone with an email address has been able to join. It has grown exponentially and currently has around 50 million members worldwide.Last month Microsoft bought a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, which values the…
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"A face only a mother could love"Europe's working-age population is shrinking and there is concern that this demographic decline will lead to a similar economic collapse. With fewer workers to pay the health and pension bills of an elderly population, states will face unforeseen financial burdens. The current European ratio of over 65s to those of working age is one-to-four and is set to rise to one-to-two by 2040.In Germany, in 2005, births fell by 2.8% on the previous year and it has Europe's lowest birth-rate (see fig 1). One minister warned that they were risking "turning the light out” if it did not pick up.(Fig. 1)Births per 1,000 inhabitants in Europe in 2004Germany: 8.6Latvia: 8.8Poland:9.3Hungary: 9.4Greece: 9.4Czech Republic: 9.6Austria: 9.7Italy: 9.7Spain: 10.6UK: 12.0France: 12.7Ireland : 15.2EU average: 10.5Source: EurostatWomen account for 45% of the European workforce and the question is: "How do they contribute economically whilst providing the future workforce?” Governments introduce incentives to encourage children, but companies are left to pick up the…
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