Gender imbalance in tech sector must change for startups to thrive

“It’s not OK not to understand the internet anymore,” said Martha Lane Fox during her recent Richard Dimbleby Lecture broadcast live on the BBC. During the speech, the tech champion attacked the UK’s digital divide, the lack of understanding of the internet among UK politicians and the under-representation of women in technology companies. In her opinion, what is needed is a new institution – she suggests the name doteveryone.org – which could tackle these problems head on.
“Let’s create a new institution and make Britain brilliant at the internet. We need a new national institution to lead an ambitious charge – to make us the most digital nation on the planet,” she said.
Across the country, entrepreneurs took note of Lane Fox’s words. She was one of the leading lights of the first wave of dotcoms, creating Lastminute.com, along with Brent Hoberman. She remains an inspirational figure for many business people, particularly women working in the tech space. Among these is Jess Butcher, co-founder of “augmented reality” app maker Blippar, who says: “Martha’s comments around the lack of women in technology particularly resonate as, like her, I feel that technology suffers from a monumental diversity problem which negatively effects both the culture and the output of the sector.”

Lane Fox says she wants to put women “at the heart of the technology sector”. She says sexism is rife in the technology and investment industries – she experienced it firsthand when she was fundraising for Lastminute.com. One investor, apparently more interested in her personal life than the revolution she was spearheading, bluntly asked: “What happens if you get pregnant?”
For Jess Stephens, chief marketing officer at cloud messaging service SmartFocus, such attitudes are all too common. “I would go out on a limb and say that every woman who works in the tech industry has an anecdote similar to the story that Martha Lane Fox used at the start of her lecture. Inappropriate remarks based on your gender are par for the course and represent obstacles that you must overcome as woman in the tech world,” she says.
But if the gender imbalance in the tech industry is to be addressed by the creation of a new institution, what methods should it employ? Entrepreneur and investor Mark Pearson, who founded and sold MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, says he welcomed much of Lane Fox’s speech, but he is concerned that doteveryone.org would employ positive discrimination, which he feels is counterproductive. “No single group should be at the ‘heart’ of it,” he said. “I have twins – a boy and a girl – and I want each to grow up as ambitious and unafraid to succeed as the other. The UK won’t be brilliant at the internet until we stop trying to implement quotas and genuinely celebrate and insist upon the best from the next generations.”

The importance of addressing skills shortages was stressed throughout Lane Fox’s speech and there is little doubt that the UK has a problem. A recent report suggested the UK needs an extra 150,000 workers with digital skills every year and demand only looks set to increase.
Business owners struggling to find staff could hardly agree more with Lane Fox on this point. Jack Bedell-Pearce, managing director of data centre company 4D-DC, says he regular faces the challenge of hiring good staff: “As an employer, we’re still not seeing the relevant skills filtering through from schools and universities. We need kids with a basic knowledge of coding, networking and server infrastructure development.

“It sounds daunting but the earlier you get them thinking about IT not as a social media experience, but in terms of code, networks and connected servers, the sooner they will understand the potential of the internet.”

But the creation of a body, which is presumably publicly funded, raises many questions. Lane Fox avoided laying out a clear blueprint for doteveryone.org, although she did suggest an organisation that was entrepreneurial at heart and far removed from the culture of a government quango.
Laurie Wang, founder of women’s tech entrepreneur group W Kollective, believes this is the right way to do it. “To maximise the institution’s potential, I believe it should be innovative, adaptable and have an open architecture. Very similar to how a startup would be run, in fact, fostering the flow of creative ideas with the flexibility to adapt to the constantly evolving digital landscape,” she says.

Lane Fox expressed considerable concern about the ability of politicians, whose “lack of knowledge breeds fear”, and who are regularly haunted by the words “Government. IT. Failure”. The failure of government to get things right with IT projects leads many in the business world to wonder if a public body is the right approach.

Joe Mathewson, founder of education tech firm Firefly, says the UK internet industry doesn’t need more quangos or government institutions. “For Britain to be better on digital and for British companies to challenge the American heavyweights, we need a fundamentally non-governmental solution,” he says. “We need to create a commercial environment which encourages entrepreneurs, from school age and above, that supports digital businesses and helps them grow.”

The UK has a strong startup scene, but in global terms it lacks big hitters. Lane Fox said among the top 100 visited websites in the world, there’s only one from the UK – the BBC – which comes in at number 74. So what, then, are the chances the UK can, in Lane Fox’s words, “leapfrog every nation in the world and become the most digital, most connected, most skilled, most informed on the planet”? There are many big challenges to overcome, but most entrepreneurs believe a combination of education, greater inclusion and entrepreneurial spirit are the way forward.

However, some argue that it’s not just a matter of inspiring schoolchildren and hoping things will trickle through. Richard Rolfe, co-founder of National Coding Week, worked as a teacher until his early 50s but subsequently taught himself to code and now works with adults to help them do the same.
Rolfe says: “It is a myth that the internet, digital skills and the world of tech belong to the youngsters. There are plenty of entrepreneurs and digital professionals who have adapted to the digital revolution, but there are many who think that digital skills are hard to learn.
“If her plan is to succeed, it needs to genuinely reach out to and embrace people of all ages, all members of society.”
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Prudential's Tidjane Thiam to take top role at Credit Suisse

Tidjane Thiam is quitting as chief executive of Prudential to take the top post at banking group Credit Suisse.
The FTSE 100 insurer confirmed the end of Thiam’s five-year stint as chief executive of the group on Tuesday morning along with its annual results announcement.
Thiam is highly regarded in the City despite a sometimes-bumpy reign at Prudentialwith criticism from shareholders over a failed $35.5bn (£23.5bn) takeover bid for the Asian life assurance division of AIG in 2010 and personal censure from the City regulator over the collapsed deal.
However, his success in building the insurer’s position in Asian markets has tripled the company’s share price since he became chief executive in October 2009.
Describing Thiam as “one of the most exceptional leaders” in the Prudential’s history, chairman Paul Manduca said that while the board were sorry to see him go, they “understand his desire to take on a new challenge with another global leader in a different part of the financial services sector”.
Thiam will be replacing Brady Dougan, who became chief executive of Credit Suisse in 2007 and steered the bank through the financial crisis. However, Dougan’s position came under pressure last year when Credit Suisse pleaded guilty to charges that it helped American citizens evade taxes, becoming the first bank in more than a decade to admit to a crime in the US.
Credit Suisse also agreed to pay $2.6bn as part of the settlement, as Dougan blamed the scandal on a small number of Switzerland-based bankers who “skirted the bank’s controls”.
Dougan’s successor also faces challenges over the bank’s presence in investment banking – an area in which Swiss rival UBS has scaled back sharply – and a $10bn lawsuit over the sale of mortgage-backed securities before the 2008 financial crisis.
Nonetheless, Thiam’s career before Prudential indicates that taking over a national institution such as Credit Suisse will not intimidate the chief executive.
In 1999, while serving as cabinet minister in Ivory Coast, where he was born, Thiam was put under house arrest during a military coup. “I had no job, no career, nothing at all … If you’ve been in a situation where you have nothing there’s nothing much you’re afraid of,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2012.
Thiam was mostly educated in France and graduated top of the class from the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, a training ground for France’s political and business elite.
Once he graduated, Thiam followed a familiar path for corporate high-fliers, working at US management consultancy McKinsey and the World Bank before returning to Ivory Coast and joining the government in 1998. He then joined McKinsey again in Paris and was recruited by insurance group Aviva, where he came to the notice of Prudential as the head of Aviva’s European business.
As well as receiving the backing of the City, Thiam has been courted by politicians. He has served on the former prime minister Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa and has picked up a Légion d’Honneur, the equivalent of a knighthood, from the French government.
Mike Wells, the head of Prudential’s US operations, is widely expected to replace Thiam at the Pru. Manduca said on Tuesday that a successor had been identified and would be announced once the regulatory approval process has been completed.

Greek and German finance ministers clash at debt relief talks

Greece’s radical Syriza government remained locked in a bitter standoff with its German paymasters, as finance minister Yanis Varoufakis issued a stark warning of the rise of nazism in his country if the eurozone fails to heed the democratic voice of Greek voters.
As Varoufakis completed the last leg of a whistle-stop round-Europe tour to seek support for Syriza’s plans to halt austerity and renegotiate the country’s debts, he told a tetchy press conference on Thursday in Berlin that Greece had a proud record in fighting Nazis, but ignoring the clear message from Greek electors could feed far-right forces.
“No one understands better than the people of this land how a severely depressed economy, combined with a ritual national humiliation and unending hopelessness, can hatch the serpent’s egg within its society. When I return home tonight, I will find a country where the third-largest party is not a neo-nazi party, but a nazi party,” he said, referring to the far-right Golden Dawn. “We need the people of Germany on our side.”
However, Wolfgang Schäuble, his German counterpart, maintained that Greece must be held responsible for its own problems, saying: “We have to appreciate their efforts and their situation, and above all we have to appreciate the progress that has been achieved in Greece over recent years. At the same time, however, we must say that the reasons, the cause for the difficult journey to be undertaken by Greece, that the reason for this is to be found in Greece, and not outside Greece, and definitely not in Germany.”
Schäuble repeated an earlier offer to send 500 German tax collectors to help the Athens government collect taxes from wealthy Greeks.
He then told reporters he and Varoufakis had “agreed to disagree”, but the Greek said they had not even got that far: “We did not reach agreement because it was never on the cards that we would.”
Greece and Germany are on the frontline in a fierce battle about the future of European economic policy, with Syriza determined to show that ditching austerity is a better recipe for economic recovery than relentless cuts, and Germany determined to make Athens stick to the deficit-cutting agenda – and pay back the €240bn (£180bn) in bailout loans it received from the international community.
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As Varoufakis returned to Athens , thousands of people gathered on the streets to show solidarity in the party’s battle with Greece’s creditors.
The fresh outpouring of public concern, with protesters gathering in Syntagma Square, the centre of anti-government riots during repeated crises in recent years, came after the European Central Bank outraged policymakers by restricting access to emergency funds for Greece’s struggling banks.
In Berlin, Varoufakis promised to meet the alarmist warnings of some in the eurozone about the consequences of Syriza’s radical policies with “a frenzy of reasonableness”.
Just before the Berlin meeting the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had ratcheted up the pressure on the eurozone to find a solution to the crisis by inviting the new Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, to talks in Moscow in May.
Schäuble said Germany would “fully respect the mandate” handed to Varoufakis and his colleagues by the electorate in the general election last month, but Germany had its own democratic pressures.
German public opinion is deeply sceptical about the need for fresh debt relief for Greece, after repeated bailouts since 2010. But Syriza argues that it has been burdened with a series of impossible-to-repay loans, and has seen growth hobbled by the austerity imposed as a quid pro quo.
Back in Athens, Tsipras told the Greek parliament: “Greece is no longer the miserable partner who listens to lectures to do its homework. Greece has its own voice.” Protesters on the streets held up placards saying “People Before Markets”.
Syriza and its coalition partners had hoped to receive temporary support from the ECB while it holds debt restructuring talks with its creditors, but Wednesday’s decision by the Frankfurt-based bank, which tightened the rules on the collateral Greek banks can post in exchange for loans, made the prospects of short-term support appear bleak.
As fears mounted of a fresh run on Greek bank deposits – one of the factors that led to the country’s previous financial bailouts – central bank governor Yannis Stournaras said: “The ECB’s decision can be taken back if there is a deal from the Greek government. Deposits and liquidity are absolutely safe.”
Greece’s bailout from the troika of the European commission, International Monetary Fund and the ECB – which came with stringent conditions, including hefty spending cuts – is due to expire at the end of the month. Syriza insists it will not accept an extension which would, it says, be tantamount to agreeing to a new bailout with foreign lenders..
Finance chiefs can’t agree to disagree over Athens’ debts as Varoufakis brings up spectre of Greek nazism and Schäuble offers 500 German tax collectors

Apple will raise iOS app prices in next 18 hours (unless you're in Iceland)

App Store prices are set to rise with little notice. Photograph: Alamy
Apple is implementing a blanket price-increase on the App Store in the EU and Canada, the company has said in an email to developers.
Without specifying what the new tiers would be, the company told developers that “prices on the App Store will increase for all territories in the European Union as well as in Canada and Norway, decrease in Iceland, and change in Russia. These changes are being made to account for adjustments in value-added tax (VAT) rates and foreign exchange rates.”
Apple also fails to give a specific time as to when the increases would hit the store, saying only that it would be “within the next 36 hours”, a timeframe that ends at 11am Friday morning.
The increase is likely linked to a new pan-EU policy which requires the company to deduct VAT based on its rates at the customer’s location, rather than the company’s. Since Apple’s European headquarters are nominally in the low tax jurisdiction of Luxembourg, that represents an increase in VAT for many users. Until now, that increase had eaten into developers’ margins, rather than be passed on to consumers, but that seems about to change.
Developers don’t have the option to pick any price they want for Apps on the store, instead being limited to a series of tiers which are linked across nations. The cheapest apps are currently $0.99, €0.99 and £0.69 (the latter two prices converting to $1.17 and £1.04 respectively), with prices increasing at different rates from there: a doubling in dollars to $1.99 more than doubles the British price, to £1.49 ($2.25), and less than doubles the European price to €1.79 ($2.12).
With the cost set to increase, the discrepancy between European and American prices will only grow. Users with a wish-list of apps to download can sneak in ahead of the price rise if they hurry, although how much they save will only become clear after the fact.
For Russian app store users, the prices are only going to “change”, rather than “rise”, suggesting Apple will be fiddling with some of the tiers in response to the country’s significant currency devaluation in recent months.
Apple did not respond to requests for comment.

Walmart officially in the running for worst corporation in the world

US Money walmart America Is Walmart deserving of Public Eye’s Lifetime Award for ‘worst corporation in the world’? Photograph: Marc F. Henning / Alamy/Alamy

Walmart workers in 10 countries joined a global day of action on Wednesday to demand better wages and treatment for employees, as a public interest group nominated the retailer for a Lifetime Award as “worst corporation in the world”.

Organizers with the group OUR Walmart estimated that about 300 protesters would march on Walmart’s headquarters in India and block the gate. Another 200 people were expected to protest at the company’s headquarters in Mexico City. Workers in Argentina, Brazil and Canada were also expected to participate.
Walmart protest India Workers in India joined a global day of action against Walmart. Photograph: Courtesy of OUR Walmart

In the US, despite steady rain, workers gathered in Miami at 1pm local time outside Walmart’s Latin American headquarters. Turnout was about half of the expected 100 people, organizers said.

“I’m standing with protesters all over the world today to send a message to Walmart and the Waltons that we need better pay,” said Emily Wells, one of the protesters. Wells makes $9.50 an hour and relies on food stamps to make ends meet. “As the richest family in America and one of the richest in the world, we all know the Waltons can afford to pay $15 an hour to the workers that make them richer every day.”



The Walton family, which descended from founder Sam Walton and owns more than half of Walmart, is worth about $145bn.

As the protests played out, Public Eye, a campaign started by the Berne Declaration and Greenpeace in 2005 as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum’s yearly meeting in Davos, Switzerland, declared Walmart a nominee for “worst corporation in the world”.

In 2005, Walmart received a Public Eye award in the labor category for “lack of respect for human and labor rights along its supply chain in places such as Lesotho, Kenya, and Thailand”. This year, Public Eye will give a lifetime achievement award to one of its previous winners. Walmart was nominated by the UNI Global Union. Goldman Sachs and Chevron are also among those nominated. Consumers can submit their votes over the next two months.

Walmart operates 11,156 stores in 27 countries – including South Africa, China, India, Mexico and Chile. The company’s assets in the United States include 4,344 stores and 643 Sam’s Club stores. While fewer than half of Walmart’s stores are located in the US, 59% of its workforce, or about 1.3 million workers, live here.

Members from about 2,224 US stores have signed a petition calling on Walmart to raise the hourly wage to $15. As part of the global day of action, protesters in Miami attempted to hand-deliver a petition from 2,100 stores to the company’s headquarters but were turned away by the security. Police were called, organizers say, but no arrests were made.

In a previous attempt by workers to deliver a petition to Walmart heiress Alice Walton, 26 of them were arrested for blocking traffic outside her New York City building. Courtney Moore, who works at Walmart in Ohio and makes $8.35 an hour, said at the time that the doorman, who was sympathetic to the workers’ cause, promised to personally deliver the petition to Walton.

In the month since that protest, neither the company nor Alice Walton have responded to the petition.

Thomas Cook shares crash after Harriet Green is pushed out

Thomas Cook chief executive Harriet Green has announced her surprise departure. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

Harriet Green has been pushed out as chief executive of Thomas Cook in a shock departure that wiped £400m off the value of the tour operator.
Green had garnered investor plaudits, and an award for businesswoman of the year, for turning around a business that was recovering from the brink of bankruptcy when she joined two years ago. But her board was less enamoured. As Green departed with shares worth more than £9m, Thomas Cook’s chairman said the group needed a leader with more knowledge of the leisure industry.
The surprise ousting came after Green told the Daily Telegraph in May: “I’ve always said that I’m going to stay six years”. Five days ago, Green told an Inspiring Women conference: “You can’t do a transformation on this sort of scale in a year or two years. I usually say it’s about six years ... we’re absolutely not done.”
However, Green has left with immediate effect and Peter Fankhauser, the chief operating officer and a company veteran, is taking over.
Spokespeople for Green and for the company stuck doggedly to the party line that the departure had been agreed by both sides. However, one company insider admitted: “Is she going maybe a year earlier than she wanted? Probably ... If your management style is shaking people by the throat, there is only so long that people can put up with that.”

Another company insider confirmed that Green’s exit was earlier than she had originally hoped for: “What was in everyone’s mind was that Peter would take over. The question was when. What has been agreed most recently is when.”
Fankhauser, who has worked at Thomas Cook for 13 years, survived the management cull implemented by Green when she joined from electronic components distributor Premier Farnell.
Thomas Cook’s chairman, Frank Meysman, said the board had been unanimous that it was the right time for Green to hand over to Fankhauser as the company needed a leader with more travel industry experience. He added that she would be paid her six months’ notice and be allowed to keep 8m shares, worth about £9.2m, that were originally due to vest in 2015 and 2016 as part of her performance share plan.
The company was keen to stress that Green had done a “phenomenal” job. She is widely credited with rebuilding the tour operator after its near collapse – taking the company’s stock market value from £148m to just under £2bn before Wednesday’s news. She was paid £2.86m in 2013, including £680,000 salary and a bonus of £1.79m.
Thomas Cook shares plunged 22% to 107p as the group announced Green’s departure and warned that trading had become more difficult and growth would be slower in the current financial year. Business in Germany has weakened as consumer confidence has dropped in Europe’s biggest economy and the UK winter programme has failed to fill increased capacity.
Meysman said: “It’s a different balance of requirements that is needed going forward. Knowledge of the market and implementation of the strategy that Harriet has set out is more important than continuous strategy. She loved this job tremendously but she has always been very realistic that this job will end at some point in time.”
However, the notion that Fankhauser had always been groomed to take over appeared to be undermined by one major Thomas Cook shareholder, which issued a statement saying it had yet to even meet the new boss.
Simon Skinner, European equity analyst at Thomas Cook shareholder Orbis Investments, which has a stake of about 3.5%, said: “Harriet did a great job. As long-term investors, we’re always on the lookout for great managers and we’ll certainly be keeping an eye on where she goes next. In the meantime, we’re looking forward to meeting Peter and seeing him settle into his new leadership role”. The investor said it had been informed of the change in chief executive “in line with the rest of the market”.
Green, known for her minimal sleep, high-intensity workouts in the gym at 5am and a robust management style, was one of the few female chief executives of a leading UK public company. She said in a statement: “I always said that I would move on to another company with fresh challenges once my work was complete. That time is now. I wish all of the team at this re-energised company continued success, as they move to the next phase of the company’s development.”

There Are Four Business Negotiation Skills You Need To Know

I believe that everything has its own rules and skills to follow, of course, including the business negotiation, it owns some skills you must know. Here are four pieces of advice that current business negotiation research offers to reduce your overconfidence:

1. Collect information

When the stakes are high, you must overcome the common tendency to spend too much time looking in the mirror, admiring virtues and fretting over flaws. Negotiators get into trouble when they lack information about the other players in the game. For this reason, seek out as much relevant, high-quality information about the other side as you can, and use that information to your advantage.

2. Consider the opposite

One of the best ways to correct the biases in your judgment is to think of reasons why your initial guesses could be wrong. In particular, consider the possibility that the opposite of your assumption is true. Suppose that you are negotiating with a prospective employer and you suspect that the employer is meeting with many other strong job candidates.

3. Find a devil's advocate

Before and during a negotiation, ask others within your organization to question you about your approach and assumptions. If you're the boss, this technique may be politically awkward; your subordinates won't want to tell you that you're wrong. Yet good negotiators base their decisions on high-quality information, not the information that makes them feel good.

4. Don't be afraid to ask

Many people find negotiation stressful and avoid it whenever possible. The fear of not knowing what to say may lead you to assume that you won't get what you want from the process. Note that this prediction rests on the parallel assumption that your negotiating counterpart is an avid, expert bargainer. In fact, it's just as likely that your counterpart is as nervous as you are. Don't let negotiation opportunities pass you by.