Interviewer: When you consider an acquisition, what are the first things you look for in a management team? Buffet: Well, what do you look for in a girl? Seriously, you look for the logical things - passion, an interest in running the business, honesty. Such as, do they love the business, or do they love the money? This is the first filter. I mean real passion; Mrs. B ran Nebraska Furniture Mart until she died at the age of 103 - that’s passion.

Cow # 4: Its the only thing An example of the importance of incorporating the marketing element in the service itself “Coachville isn’t a product, it’s a movement. Thirty-two thousand people have joined over the past two years,making it one of the fastest-growing professional organizations . Founded by Thomas Leonard, a charismatic personal coach who recently passed away, Coachville is a group of people focused on helping each other make a living as coaches.

When the outsourcing biz began to make waves in India, it was more or less argued that all said and done, only low level manual jobs will be outsourced to India. Look what’s new : Most of the Indian firms are doing high tech product design and development and let some other US clients slap their brand and market wherever they want. This is I guess what we call moving up the value chain.

VisiCalc was the first commercially successful spreadsheet application in 1979. The developers behind this app were Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. How did all start: Like most of the successful products, the idea behind the product was the result of human frustation.The story is that Dan Bricklin was preparing a spread sheet analysis for a Harvard Business School “case study” report and had two alternatives: 1) do it by hand or 2) use a clumsy time-sharing mainframe program.

Here’s a new service which serves as an auction site…How are they even thinking of competing with ebay ? Jittery , upfront looks like (ebay-listing fees) + open communication between buyers and sellers + intelligent software facilitating market research(similar to amazon book recomm) + use of blogs to list items and quotes . It’s in beta..Watch out for this firm, for it will give a pulse on whether the market is ready to accept services which link blogs and auction.