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URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: INTERNET & WWW (90%); INTERNET SOCIAL NETWORKING (92%); TELECOMMUNICATIONS (78%); MARKET RESEARCH & ANALYSIS (73%); MARKET RESEARCH (72%); GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM (66%); DEVELOPING COUNTRIES (60%); MARKET RESEARCH FIRMS (51%); SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY (51%); MOBILE & CELLULAR TELEPHONES (89%) COMPANY: MYSPACE.COM (85%); FACEBOOK INC (58%); NEW MEDIA FORGE (57%) GEOGRAPHIC: SINGAPORE (77%); ASIA (72%); AFRICA (66%) LOAD-DATE: March 6, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1022 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Kosovo Builds Economy From the Ground Up BYLINE: By DAN BILEFSKY SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; Pg. 8 LENGTH: 1372 words DATELINE: PRISTINA, Kosovo Bekim Kuqi has braved civil war, exile, bombs falling on his factories and the detonation of a car filled with explosives in one of his stores. So he says he is prepared for the daunting challenge of doing business in the newly independent Kosovo. For years the electricity grid has been so unreliable that just keeping the lights on in his retail stores has been a daily struggle, forcing Mr. Kuqi to spend more than $1,000 a day on backup generators. Even then, shoppers browse with the lights flickering on and off. And given that the average monthly wage here is about $220, he laments that most people can afford little more than a Coca-Cola at one of the restaurants in his stores. ''I put my faith in God,'' said Mr. Kuqi, 33. He added: ''I often think that staying here requires too much sacrifice, and I should just leave. But I belong to this place.'' Two weeks after Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leadership declared independence from Serbia, with the backing of Washington and the European Union, Pristina continues to pulsate with young crowds at stylish new cafes and shopping malls. But such superficial signs of economic success mask the harsh uncertainties of a newborn nation, whose very existence is not recognized by Serbia, Russia or some European countries. Even if Kosovo can overcome those political hurdles, its economy has been so devastated by war that it imports even staples like milk and meat. It is ranked by Transparency International, the Berlin-based anticorruption watchdog, as the world's fourth most corrupt economy, after Cameroon, Cambodia and Albania. Whether Kosovo can build a successful economy will help determine whether it can become a full-fledged country and stabilize the Balkans, or will remain a poor adopted orphan of the West. Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader, revoked Kosovo's autonomy in 1989 and fiercely repressed ethnic Albanians, who make up most of its population. Some of them eventually turned to armed rebellion. NATO intervened in 1999 to halt Mr. Milosevic's violent response to the rebels, and for the past eight years this predominantly Muslim, landlocked territory has been administered by the United Nations. For the foreseeable future, Western analysts say, Kosovo's economy will remain dependent on generous aid, its security assured by 16,000 NATO troops and its political affairs overseen by a European Union mission that will shortly take over from the United Nations. ''It could take at least 10 years for Kosovo to stand on its own two feet,'' said Joost Lagendijk, who oversees Kosovo policy in the European Parliament. ''Kosovo is a poor agricultural country where the energy supply is chaotic, the rule of law needs to be upheld and the economy is almost starting from scratch.'' Scrap metal from old cars is Kosovo's biggest export. Infrastructure is creaky, businesspeople complain that bribery is commonplace and unemployment is about 50 percent, government officials say. ''For years, we have used not having our independence as an excuse for everything,'' said Shpend Ahmeti, an economist who runs the Institute for Advanced Studies, a Pristina-based research organization. ''Now that we have it, we need to show that we deserve to be a country and that we can create a viable economy.'' For that, economists say, Kosovo needs to foster local industry; imports run at about $1.9 billion a year, but exports are a paltry $130 million. Success will depend partly on the gumption of entrepreneurs like Mr. Kuqi, the son of a farmer. He started by selling clothing from a kiosk in his hometown, Suva Reka, a poor, industrial city in southern Kosovo. The business quickly grew. But during the war between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in 1998-1999, his factories were set on fire and he was forced to flee to Albania. Mr. Kuqi returned to Kosovo in 2000 and rebuilt the business; four years later, the police say, a jealous rival rammed a car filled with explosives through his flagship store. Today, Mr. Kuqi has 13 stores and malls across Kosovo, which he built in part by harnessing a low-wage, ambitious work force. ''People here are willing to work hard,'' he said. Ahmet Shala, Kosovo's economic minister, dismissed people's doubts about Kosovo's economic prospects, pointing to success stories in neighboring countries like Slovenia, a former Yugoslav republic of similar size. Mr. Shala argued that, until now, Kosovo's uncertain status prevented it from having some of the tools of a functioning economy, from bar codes for supermarket products to access to international railway networks. Independence, he asserted, will allow Kosovo to work with financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, helping it to attract foreign investors. ''Until now, Kosovo was a baby in an incubator, with donors providing the oxygen,'' he said. ''Now, the baby needs to learn how to breathe on its own.'' Still, Kosovo's lack of recognition by Serbia, Russia and several countries in the European Union -- including Spain, Slovakia, Greece, Romania and Cyprus -- could also deter investment, hamper its ability to get loans, impede the European Union from signing trade and cooperation deals with it and place limitations on the travel of Kosovars. Kosovo also faces the threat of an economic embargo by Serbia. Economists say that would hurt Serbia more than Kosovo, because Serbia exports so many goods to Kosovo. Yet, Mr. Ahmeti said: ''Serbia can hurt us by keeping us in the news. We need to overcome our image problem.'' Many here are pinning their hopes on Kosovo's untapped mineral wealth, including 14 billion tons of lignite coal reserves that will be tapped to fuel a new power plant by 2012, if all goes as planned. British geologists conducting a recent survey of Kosovo's resources say the territory has vast amounts of minerals, including deposits of nickel, lead, zinc, cadmium, bauxite and even small seams of gold. Yet the infrastructure for extracting minerals is outdated, and mining analysts say Kosovo's most important mining complex, the Trepca mine, will need hundreds of millions of dollars in outside investment to create a profitable exporting business. On a recent day at the Trepca mine, which has been ravaged by war and mismanagement since its glory days in the former Communist Yugoslavia, miners wearing battery-lighted hard hats descended about 2,000 feet below ground to a labyrinth of hot, dark tunnels. Mr. Milosevic is widely rumored to have used the tunnels to hide the bodies of Albanians killed during the war. Dozens of workers -- some wielding pickaxes, others driving mechanized trucks with electric drills -- bored holes and inserted sticks of dynamite to dislodge lead and zinc deposits. ''This could be the future of Kosovo,'' said Xhafer Peci, a miner, holding glistening stones in his hands. Yet Trepca has become politically explosive because it is run jointly by ethnic Albanians and Serbs, and its mines and processing factories are spread between Kosovo's Serbian-dominated north and the ethnic Albanian-dominated south. With Serbia determined to expand its hold over northern Kosovo, Trepca's future is in doubt. Nazmi Mikullovci, Trepca's ethnic Albanian director, said he hoped Serbian and Albanian cooperation at the mine would continue. He stressed that geological surveys showed that 88 percent of Kosovo's mineral wealth is in the south of the country; however, the mine has up to 300 million euros ($456 million) in debt and must also finance the pensions of several thousand Albanian workers fired when Mr. Milosevic took over the mine in the 1990s.''Trepca will not be the savior of Kosovo, at least for now,'' Mr. Mikullovci said. Even with the challenges, there are a few brave investors here. Ekrem Luka, the head of a sprawling conglomerate called Dukagjini that owns everything from breweries to a television station, said he planned to build a 23-story complex in downtown Pristina, complete with a 100-room hotel, three stories of shopping and private apartments. ''The business attraction of Kosovo is that we are starting at zero and need everything,'' he said. ''Exporters, importers, retailers, you name it.'' URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: RESTAURANTS (90%); WAR & CONFLICT (89%); INTERNATIONAL TRADE (87%); RETAILERS (78%); REBELLIONS & INSURGENCIES (78%); SEPARATISM & SECESSION (77%); ELECTRICITY TRANSMISSION & DISTRIBUTION (77%); EUROPEAN UNION INSTITUTIONS (71%); IMPORT TRADE (70%); EXPORT TRADE (70%); MUSLIMS & ISLAM (69%); LEGISLATIVE BODIES (65%); AVERAGE EARNINGS (55%); ARMED FORCES (50%); ORPHANS (70%) COMPANY: COCA-COLA CO (56%) ORGANIZATION: EUROPEAN UNION (55%) TICKER: KO (NYSE) (56%) INDUSTRY: NAICS312111 SOFT DRINK MANUFACTURING (56%); SIC2086 BOTTLED & CANNED SOFT DRINKS & CARBONATED WATER (56%) GEOGRAPHIC: BERLIN, GERMANY (79%) SERBIA (96%); EUROPE (94%); ALBANIA (93%); EUROPEAN UNION (90%); SERBIA & MONTENEGRO (89%); GERMANY (79%); CAMEROON (79%) LOAD-DATE: March 5, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Crowded cafes and malls like the Ben-af shopping centerin Pristina belie the weakness of Kosovo's economy. Imports far exceed exports and the infrastructure is dilapidated. Miners, above and at left, near Mitrovica at the Trepca mine, which has extensive mineral deposits but significant debt. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREW TESTA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) MAPS: The economy is lagging even in Pristina, Kosovo's capital. Maps of Pristina in Kosovo. PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1023 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Facebook Hires a Google Veteran, Sheryl Sandberg, as Its Operating Chief BYLINE: By BRAD STONE and MIGUEL HELFT SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 6 LENGTH: 1043 words DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is not stepping aside for a chief executive as Larry Page and Sergey Brin did at Google or as Jerry Yang and David Filo did at Yahoo. He is following the Bill Gates model and holding the top post as he hires a Google executive, Sheryl Sandberg, as chief operating officer. Ms. Sandberg, currently vice president for global online sales and operations at Google, joined the search giant in 2001 and helped to develop its immensely lucrative online advertising programs, AdWords and AdSense. She will join Facebook this month to work closely with Mr. Zuckerberg, a co-founder of Facebook, the company said Tuesday. ''A big theme of this hire is that there are parts of our operations that to use a pretty trite phrase, need to be taken to the next level,'' Mr. Zuckerberg said in an interview. Ms. Sandberg will help Facebook expand overseas and develop an advertising network that will help justify its $15 billion valuation, set last year when Microsoft invested $240 million for 1.6 percent of the company. She will also oversee Facebook's marketing, human resources and privacy departments -- essentially guiding how Facebook presents itself and its intentions to the outside world. Ms. Sandberg's departure is a blow to Google, where she was a well-regarded executive. ''Sheryl was a valued member of the Google team, and we wish her well in her new endeavors,'' Omid Kordestani, Google's senior vice president for global sales and business development, said in an e-mail statement. Mr. Kordestani said David Fischer would take over Ms. Sandberg's job. Until now, Mr. Fischer was vice president for online sales and operation, reporting to Ms. Sandberg. Facebook has more than 66 million users and is growing rapidly, but the company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., has been dogged by criticism over its business practices. For example, its effort to allow advertisers to exploit the social connections between friends on a service called Beacon encountered stiff resistance from users. ''Communicating what we are about clearly is an important thing for us to do,'' Mr. Zuckerberg said. ''We can do that better, and Beacon showed that, as did a handful of other things.'' Mr. Zuckerberg had a chief deputy once before. Owen Van Natta, a former Amazon executive, held the title of chief operating officer before he was given the narrower role of chief revenue officer last year. Last month, he announced he was leaving Facebook to pursue opportunities as a chief executive elsewhere. Mr. Zuckerberg is 23 and Ms. Sandberg is 38, but the age difference did not stand in the way of building a working relationship. The pair met at a Christmas party last December. Roger McNamee, a prominent venture capitalist and an investor and occasional adviser to Mr. Zuckerberg, helped broker ensuing conversations with a recommendation of Ms. Sandberg. Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg then spent time discussing Facebook's future at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January and over a series of dinners at Ms. Sandberg's home in Atherton, Calif. Ms. Sandberg joined Google three years before it went public, when it had only 260 employees. Like many veteran Googlers, she is a multimillionaire. In building the online operations of AdWords and AdSense, the two programs that accounted for the overwhelming majority of Google's $16.6 billion in 2007, she saw the size of her department swell from four people to thousands of employees. She says that Facebook today reminds her of Google back then. ''For me that is part of the excitement,'' she said. ''I've loved being part of the process of helping to build Google. The opportunity to help another young company to grow into a global leader is the opportunity of a lifetime.'' Ms. Sandberg is only one of a handful of top executives to have made for the exits at Google, including George Reyes, the chief financial officer, who announced in August that he would retire but has agreed to remain in his post until Google hires a successor. The company has suffered a larger number of defections among vice presidents, senior managers and engineers in recent months as its size has ballooned to more than 16,000 workers. Most employees who joined before the company's 2004 initial public offering have seen their initial grant of stock options fully vested. Ms. Sandberg's appointment comes as the competition between Google and Facebook intensifies. The two companies are growing rapidly and find themselves going after many of the same top engineering talent in Silicon Valley. In addition, Google competed furiously for a part of Facebook's advertising business last year and lost to Microsoft. Google, which has had mixed success with its own social network initiatives, subsequently announced that it was leading an alliance of social networks to promote a new standard for third party developers to create programs that run on their sites. The alliance, which includes the leading social network MySpace, was seen as a way to counter Facebook's growing popularity with software developers. Google's own social network, Orkut, is popular in Brazil and other countries, but not in the United States. Still Google's social networking ambitions go beyond Orkut, and the company has begun allowing users of Google's mapping, blog reading and other online services to share their activities with friends. When asked if she thought Facebook and Google were competitors, Ms. Sandberg said she thought ''they are at their core very different companies.'' Before joining Google, Ms. Sandberg was chief of staff to Lawrence H. Summers when he was Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. The experience in government could serve Facebook well if the company again encounters federal or state inquiries over its privacy policies. Ms. Sandberg, who serves as a director of Google's philanthropy, Google.org, wields influence in Silicon Valley political circles, where she is backer of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Ms. Sandberg is married to David Goldberg, a former vice president at Yahoo, where he ran that company's music business. He left last year to become an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital, a venture capital firm.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1024 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Gene Map Becomes a Luxury Item BYLINE: By AMY HARMON SECTION: Section F; Column 0; Science Desk; THE DNA AGE; Pg. 1 LENGTH: 1184 words On a cold day in January, Dan Stoicescu, a millionaire living in Switzerland, became the second person in the world to buy the full sequence of his own genetic code. He is also among a relatively small group of individuals who could afford the $350,000 price tag. Mr. Stoicescu is the first customer of Knome, a Cambridge-based company that has promised to parse his genetic blueprint by spring. A Chinese executive has signed on for the same service with Knome's partner, the Beijing Genomics Institute, the company said. Scientists have so far unraveled only a handful of complete human genomes, all financed by governments, foundations and corporations in the name of medical research. But as the cost of genome sequencing goes from stratospheric to merely very expensive, it is piquing the interest of a new clientele. ''I'd rather spend my money on my genome than a Bentley or an airplane,'' said Mr. Stoicescu, 56, a biotechnology entrepreneur who retired two years ago after selling his company. He says he will check discoveries about genetic disease risk against his genome sequence daily, ''like a stock portfolio.'' But while money may buy a full readout of the six billion chemical units in an individual's genome, biologists say the superrich will have to wait like everyone else to learn how the small variations in their sequence influence appearance, behavior, abilities, disease susceptibility and other traits. ''I was in someone's Bentley once -- nice car,'' said James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, whose genome was sequenced last year by a company that donated the $1.5 million in costs to demonstrate its technology. ''Would I rather have my genome sequenced or have a Bentley? Uh, toss up.'' He would probably pick the genome, Dr. Watson said, because it could reveal a disease-risk gene that one had passed on to one's children, though in his case, it did not. What is needed, he said, is a ''Chevrolet genome'' that is affordable for everyone. Biologists have mixed feelings about the emergence of the genome as a luxury item. Some worry that what they have dubbed ''genomic elitism'' could sour the public on genetic research that has long promised better, individualized health care for all. But others see the boutique genome as something like a $20 million tourist voyage to space -- a necessary rite of passage for technology that may soon be within the grasp of the rest of us. ''We certainly don't want a world where there's a great imbalance of access to comprehensive genetic tests,'' said Richard A. Gibbs, director of the human genome sequencing center at Baylor College of Medicine. ''But to the extent that this can be seen as an idiosyncratic exercise of curious individuals who can afford it, it could be quite a positive phenomenon.'' It was the stream of offers from wealthy individuals to pay the Harvard laboratory of George M. Church for their personal genome sequences that led Dr. Church to co-found Knome last year (most people pronounce it ''nome,'' though he prefers ''know-me''). ''It was distracting for an academic lab,'' Dr. Church said. ''But it made me think it could be a business.'' Scientists say they need tens of thousands of genome sequences to be made publicly available to begin to make sense of human variation. Knome, however, expects many of its customers to insist on keeping their dearly bought genomes private, and provides a decentralized data storage system for that purpose. Mr. Stoicescu said he worried about being seen as self-indulgent (though he donates much more each year to philanthropic causes), egotistical (for obvious reasons) or stupid (the cost of the technology, he knows, is dropping so fast that he would have certainly paid much less by waiting a few months). But he agreed to be identified to help persuade others to participate. With only four complete human genome sequences announced by scientists around the world -- along with the Human Genome Project, which finished assembling a genome drawn from several individuals at a cost of about $300 million in 2003 -- each new one stands to add considerably to the collective knowledge. ''I view it as a kind of sponsorship,'' he said. ''In a way you can also be part of this adventure, which I believe is going to change a lot of things.'' Mr. Stoicescu, who has a Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry, was born in Romania and lived in the United States in the early 1990s before founding Sindan, an oncology products company that he ran for 15 years. Now living with his wife and 12-year-old son in a village outside Geneva, he describes himself as a ''transhumanist'' who believes that life can be extended through nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, as well as diet and lifestyle adaptations. His genome sequence, he reasons, might give him a better indication of just what those should be. Last fall, Mr. Stoicescu paid $1,000 to get a glimpse of his genetic code from deCODE Genetics. That service, and a similar one offered by 23andMe, looks at close to a million nucleotides on the human genome where DNA is known to differ among people. But Mr. Stoicescu was intrigued by the idea of a more complete picture. ''It is only a part of the truth,'' he said. ''Having the full sequence decoded you can be closer to reality.'' How close is a matter of much debate. Knome is using a technology that reads the genome in short fragments that can be tricky to assemble. All of the existing sequencing methods have a margin of error, and the fledgling industry has no agreed-on quality standards. Knome is not the only firm in the private genome business. Illumina, a sequencing firm in San Diego, plans to sell whole genome sequencing to the ''rich and famous market'' this year, said its chief executive, Jay Flatley. If competition drives prices down, the personal genome may quickly lose its exclusivity. The nonprofit X Prize Foundation is offering $10 million to the first group to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days, for $10,000 or less per genome. The federal government is supporting technology development with an eye to a $1,000 genome in the next decade. But for now, Knome's prospective customers are decidedly high-end. The company has been approached by hedge fund managers, Hollywood executives and an individual from the Middle East who could be contacted only through a third party, said Jorge Conde, Knome's chief executive. ''I feel like everyone's going to have to get it done at some point, so why not be one of the first?'' said Eugene Katchalov, 27, a money manager in Manhattan who has met with Mr. Conde twice. Mr. Stoicescu, who wants to create an open database of genomic information seeded with his own sequence, hopes others will soon join him. A few days after he wired his $175,000 deposit to the company, a Knome associate flew in from Cambridge to meet him at a local clinic. ''What the heck am I doing?'' Mr. Stoicescu recalls wondering. ''And how many children in Africa might have been fed?'' Then he offered up his arm and gave her three test tubes of his blood. Directory: ~hesterj -> Entrepreneur Entrepreneur -> Byline: By richard siklos section: Section C; Column 5; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1 Length Download 3.51 Mb. Share with your friends:
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