In the 1980s IBM was one of the first companies to make remote work a priority for its employees. Starting with “remote terminals” installed in staffers’ houses, by 2009 40 percent of the tech company’s 386,000 employees worked from home. In the process, IBM reduced office space by 78 million square feet and started saving $100 million in annual costs. Other companies took IBM’s lead and began to follow the remote trend as well. In fact, 25 percent of American Continue reading
This week United Airlines has faced a surge in public anger following the release of a video that showed a passenger being dragged off of an overbooked flight. Along with its plummeting reputation, the company’s stock price has also experienced quite a bit of turbulence since the incident. At its worst point United shares fell 6.3 percent, reducing the the airline’s market value by $1.4 billion. United’s CEO has repeatedly apologized for the way the company handled the situation Continue reading
On Monday morning, people across the world woke up to find a disturbing video circulating in their social media feeds. The clip showed two men forcibly grabbing a passenger out of his seat on a United Airlines flight and then dragging his body down the aisle. Blood ran down the victim’s face and fellow passengers screamed in horror. Soon the video went viral as millions of social media users directed their outrage towards United for allowing this brutal incident to Continue reading
Since YouTube’s founding, the video s
haring site has prided itself on being a platform that anyone can use to express themselves. This concept catapulted the site to instant success and led to a $1.65 billion buyout from Google in 2006. Along with becoming one of the search engine giant’s most lucrative advertising outlets, YouTube is also the most valuable video platform on the Internet by far.
Despite this lofty status, though, major advertisers like AT&T, Lyft and Johnson & Continue reading
From tsunamis to earthquakes to hurricanes, each year natural disasters strike all across the world and leave devastation in their wake. In the immediate aftermath of these catastrophes, ensuring people’s safety is the number one priority. As a community starts to recover from a disaster, however, their thoughts turn towards rebuilding and returning to normalcy. Still, this isn’t such an easy task to accomplish. Natural disasters can destroy infrastructure and buildings that take millions of dollars and months of time Continue reading
In this digitally driven age, personal privacy is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Along with social networks and websites that track users, many electronic devices also pay close attention to their owners’ personal habits. And in at least one recent case, sometimes people don’t even know they’re being watched by their possessions.
That’s why the Federal Trade Commission recently slapped the television maker Vizio with a $2.2 million fine. According to investigators, the company installed software that allowed Continue reading
For years American Apparel seemed poised to become the next big fashion brand. Their simple but bold cotton clothing and suggestive advertisements catapulted the company to a $1 billion valuation in 2007. A decade later, however, American Apparel filed for bankruptcy and sold its assets to a Canadian firm for just $88 million. Along with shuttering its 110 stores, the company also lost its famed garment factory in Los Angeles.
This production facility was one of American Apparel’s best assets Continue reading
To people familiar with sunny Silicon Valley, Finland may seem like a questionable tech hub. But thanks to the telecommunications giant Nokia, for years the snowy Scandinavian nation served as one of the central destinations in Europe for tech workers. Once Nokia began to collapse, however, the fortunes of many Finnish engineers declined as well.
These formerly prominent staffers then signed up for unemployment benefits in the hopes that the tech industry would turn around. When jobs largely failed to Continue reading
In the years since the economic crisis of 2008, wealth inequality has been an increasingly alarming problem both for scholars and regular people. Last year, the development charity Oxfam estimated that 62 billionaires owned just as much wealth as the poorest 50 percent of the globe. This month, however, the agency had worse news: a group of just eight men are worth a combined $426 billion, equivalent to the wealth held by 3.6 billion people.
Along with foreign billionaires like Continue reading