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Forward Thinking
Forward Thinking
By Marta Bright, Jeff Erickson, Aaron Lazenby, Lisa Palmer, and Fred Sandsmark
An Educated Plan
Over the past 30 years, college tuition rates have increased at three times the annual rate of inflation. According to www.collegeboard.com, the cost of tuition at four-year public institutions has increased 7.1 percent in just the past year.
There's no getting away from the fact that the cost of education is on par with a 30-year mortgage—with no signs of easing. Certified financial planner and chartered financial analyst Paula Hogan is emphatic when she says that if you are prepared to begin stashing money away before your child learns to walk, do it. "Don't fall into the trap of not giving college savings enough attention, assuming that things will somehow work out," Hogan states. Hogan is even more insistent about not trusting your college-bound funds to the whims of the stock market. "I see parents making a big mistake by thinking, 'I have X amount of money and I need Y amount by the time my child is in college. I better put it all in stocks so the market can help me get there.' The stock market can be very erratic, so the fewer resiliencies you have in your financial resources for college, the less risk you can take."
In response to rising tuition costs, the U.S. government has developed Section 529 savings programs, which are administered at the state level. While Hogan supports the premise of finding solutions to assist families, she's not a particular fan of this effort. "I'm not suggesting that 529s are terrible; however, from my point of view the plans don't offer advantages that are so compelling that the disadvantages are overshadowed." In other words, like many
government-backed programs, there exist numerous gray areas enmeshed in regulations.
"The way you accumulate money in one type of 529 plan can impact your ability to receive financial aid if you use them incorrectly," Hogan explains. "In this context, I think 529 plans are a bit dangerous for someone who really needs financial aid because the rules are very complicated and you don't know how they're going to be enforced." Hogan asserts that parents can easily put their money into a tax-exempt municipal bond fund and realize almost all of the same tax advantages a 529 plan provides, while at the same time maintaining complete liquidity.
If the advice of an expert
like Hogan is not in your budget, there are resources available to parents and college-bound kids at little or no cost. The CollegeBoard Web site is an excellent jumping-off point, offering comprehensive information on everything from how to spot scholarship scams to college cost calculators. "Many high schools and universities have a full-time professional devoted to helping parents find resources to help pay for college," says Hogan. "Don't be afraid to contact them and say, 'I don't know anything about this—can you help me?'"
CEO? I'll Pass, Thanks
In a study conducted in mid-2005 by PR firm Burson-Marsteller and the Economist Intelligence Unit, 54 percent of executives worldwide said that they would not want to be CEOs if given the choice.
Even powerful leaders shun being CEO, according to Leslie Gaines-Ross, Burson-Marsteller's chief knowledge and research officer worldwide. The survey polled 685 global business influencers, including high-ranking government officials and executives at or above the level of vice president.
What keeps them from accepting the top job? Sixty-four percent said it threatened work-life
balance. The study also unearthed regional differences: The need to make quarterly earnings deterred North Americans; cost-cutting was a greater factor in Europe than elsewhere; and difficulty attracting and retaining talent influenced Asian leaders more than their counterparts. The survey also asked why people would opt to be CEO. Money and prestige ranked low (18 percent and 7 percent, respectively). More than half said they enjoyed complex problem solving. "A lot of CEOs really do want to make a difference in their work and their company's legacy," Gaines-Ross says.
Battery Life:
Five Billion Years
A new high-efficiency solar charger from Better Energy Systems converts sunlight to juice your MP3 player, cell phone, or BlackBerry when you're traveling far from a wall outlet. With sleek new styling and claims that they work as fast as plug-in chargers, consumer solar chargers are ready for their day in the sun.
The sleek Solio, which folds out like three petals of a flower, includes an internal battery so you can store power for charging indoors at night. Learn more about pricing and device compatibility at www.solio.com. Another worthy solar charger is the Soldius 1, which boasts Maximum Solar Power Tracking technology that senses a mobile device's voltage rating and maximizes output for that device. With no onboard battery, however, you must be in the sun with your mobile device to use it. Learn more at www.mysoldius.com.
Update Oracle
360Commerce
In January of this year, Oracle purchased software company 360Commerce, an Austin, Texas-based company specializing in point-of-sale, inventory management, returns management, and workforce management software for retailers. The combination of Oracle and 360Commerce brings together supply chain and optimization solutions from the enterprise to the retail store. The union is expected to greatly reduce total cost of ownership while delivering the flexibility of Java-based point-of-sale solutions.
Oracle SOA Suite
Oracle is now offering Oracle SOA Suite, a comprehensive, standards-based set of middleware products used to easily build, deploy, and manage service-oriented architectures (SOAs). The suite's hot-pluggable capabilities enable customers to take advantage of the many benefits SOAs provide, while leveraging their current middleware technologies. Using Oracle SOA Suite, organizations can
connect, extend, and evolve their existing IT systems to rapidly deliver new business services. Built on a hot-pluggable architecture, Oracle SOA Suite allows customers to bring the benefits of SOA into their existing IT environment without a costly rip-and-replace project.
Lifetime Support for Siebel Customers
Oracle is extending its Oracle Lifetime Support Policy to Siebel customers. The Oracle policy covers Siebel 7.8 products as well as the upcoming release 8 of the major Siebel product lines. Oracle also plans to continue maintaining Siebel's currently supported hardware platforms, databases, and operating systems, including IBM and Microsoft .NET. "We help customers maximize their Oracle investment, optimize the system availability and performance of their Oracle products, and give them greater control of their upgrade strategy," says Juergen Rottler, executive vice president, Oracle Support and Oracle On Demand.
A Tale of
Caffeinated Beverages
If your morning French roast isn't quite giving you that body-jolting, caffeinated thrill it once did, get ready for civet coffee (kopi luwak) and monkey-picked tea. The palm civet cat is a small mammal that lives in the jungles surrounding the coffee plantations of Sumatra. These fruit-eating creatures emerge under cover of darkness and eat the choicest coffee cherries. From there it becomes a game of "find and grind" as plantation workers seek out and gather the partially digested cherries. The "magic" happens when enzymes in the civet's digestive system break down the flesh of the fruit. The end result is highly prized—and pricey, at up to US$150 per pound—Sumatran Java. Taste testing proved the coffee to be smooth with an earthy/toasty flavor and no bitter aftertaste.
And where does monkey-picked tea come from? In a village in a remote, mountainous region of China, families of monkeys have been trained to scamper up to the highest outcroppings, pluck the tender tea leaves, and drop them on the ground to be collected by their keepers. The tea has a grassy flavor and is best sipped alongside a spicy meal. Procure these exotic treats at www.edible.com/htmlsite.
Summer Reading List
The dog days of summer will soon arrive. Here are a few selections to add to your summer reading list—all designed to make you smarter by September:
- Primal Branding, by Patrick Hanlon
Learn how the most powerful brands create a community of believers.
- Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, by W. Chan Kim and René Mauborgne
Find out why companies must value innovation that focuses on utility, price, and cost positions to create and capture new demand and why it is critical to focus on the big picture, not the numbers.
- Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Learn about the structure of drug-dealing gangs and whether reading to babies will make them better students.
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell
Learn how snap judgments influence almost every decision you make.
Golf Getaways
for the Busy Executive
One of the best antidotes to work stress is a relaxing and restful vacation. Below are five premier golf resorts for gaining that much-needed R & R.
Pebble Beach Resorts
Pebble Beach is one of the most famous golf locations on the West Coast. It offers spectacular ocean views and a variety of courses, and it's open to the public all year. Guests of the Pebble Beach Resorts can book a tee time in advance. Beginners can feel at ease and get much-needed practice on the Peter Hay Golf Course, a nine-hole par-three course. For more information, visit www.pebblebeach.com.
Kapalua Resort, Maui, Hawaii
Kapalua offers three naturally stunning courses, including the Bay Course, the Village Course, and the Plantation Course. Kapalua also has a golf academy, which provides personalized instruction for the beginner just picking up a club or for the seasoned player trying to reach a new level of play. For more information, visit www.kapaluamaui.com/golf.
The American Club, Kohler, Wisconsin
Rated No. 1 in Golf Magazine's Gold Medal Resorts for 2004-2005, the resort offers two award-winning golf courses: Blackwolf Run and Whistling Straits. Rolling greens, deep dunes, and views of Lake Michigan make the Straits both a beautiful and challenging course. For more information, visit www.destinationkohler.com/tac/tac.html.
Beyond
the Mai Tai
Life for the traveling executive can often be a drag: suspicious airplane food, beige hotel rooms, and anonymous rental cars. If you find yourself in one of the four corners of the world, the least you can do is treat yourself to an exciting regional drink. Here's a road warrior's guide for tossing one back around the world.
Drink Name: BaiJiu
Firewater Rating: 5 flames
This sorghum-based spirit is rumored to be the drink of choice among Hong Kong's fearless cabbies, and no wonder—it tastes like antifreeze. This often-homemade brew is not for the faint of heart, but you can find the top-shelf Kweichow brand for a smoother taste. Not yet available in the U.S.
For more information, visit www.beijingscene.com/v06i010/comrade.html.
Drink Name: Pisco
Firewater rating: 5 flames
Distilled from regional Muscat grapes, this centuries-old spirit is claimed as the national drink of both Chile and Peru. In either place, you'll likely encounter this clear liquor as the main ingredient in a pisco sour—a margarita-like cocktail of lime, pisco, egg whites, and bitters. These cocktails are easy to down, so you may want to choose a designated driver.
For more information, visit www.compra-segura.com.
Drink Name: Classik Bierschnaps
Firewater Rating: 2 flames
From the heart of Silicon Valley—a place famous for mixing business and technology—comes a combination of old-world technique and old-West brewing. This spirit is extracted from a microbrewed California pale ale using a traditional German distillation method. The result is a clear, aromatic liquor that is unique and easy to drink.
For more information, visit www.essentialspirits.com.
Drink Name: Chartreuse
Firewater Rating: 1 flame
Made from a 400-year-old recipe known only to the Carthusian monks, Chartreuse is a bright-green herbal liqueur with a one-of-a-kind taste. If you're in southeastern France, keep an eye out for the special V.E.P. variety, which has been made with the same process since the 1600s.
For more information, visit www.chartreuse.fr.
Oracle Events
GTC West 2006
May 15-19, Sacramento, California
GTC is the largest and most respected technology conference for state and local government officials, offering sessions on policy, management, and technology issues to more than 25,000 professionals throughout the U.S.
Healthcare Industry User Group Annual Conference
June 4-7, Orlando, Florida
The 12th annual HIUG conference is a conference for Oracle's PeopleSoft healthcare applications customers. Pillars include tools and technology, supply chain, human capital management, and financials.
Forrester's IT Forum EMEA 2006: GigaWorld
June 7-9, Lisbon, Portugal
This conference features keynotes, one-on-one meetings with more than 40 Forrester analysts, and more than 100 breakout sessions designed to help IT people and business executives make informed decisions, understand IT trends, and leverage business opportunities.
AME Conference
October 16-20, Dallas, Texas
This Lean manufacturing event features more than 160 revolutionary ideas to improve your business. Come for best-practice presentations, audited Lean tours, and workshops.
From Tax Relief to Efficiency
Oracle and Taxware Bring Countrywide Financial Tax Relief
Oracle Certified Partner Taxware, a leading provider of global transaction tax calculation and compliance solutions based in Wakefield, Massachusetts, is now offering integration between Taxware Enterprise version 4.3 and Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise version 8.9. "With Taxware Enterprise, businesses can more quickly implement a single tax solution that is automatically updated for thousands of jurisdictions in more than 150 countries," says Tony Chavez, vice president of enterprise solutions at Taxware.
"Since the day we began working with Taxware, they've always brought an experienced team of professionals that were tremendously dedicated to our success," says Michael Figueroa, first vice president of tax systems and administration at Calabasas, California-based Countrywide Financial. "Their support made a big difference in our ability to go live on a very aggressive timetable with no significant problems around the tax component of the implementation."
Before going live with PeopleSoft, Countrywide Financial could not calculate tax in real time at the transaction level. By integrating Taxware with PeopleSoft, they can now capture a greater volume of tax-sensitive transactions, process the information with tax department-defined rules, and report the tax to the general ledger instantly. "When the month closes, we now spend just two to three days processing our tax returns instead of the three weeks we used to spend on data mining, manual calculations, and compliance," Figueroa adds. "With our improved data quality and streamlined process, we can now allocate more time to partner with business units to share tax knowledge related to the procure-to-pay process."
FlexFrame for Oracle Brings Grid Computing to the Data Center
Fujitsu Siemens Computers and Oracle are now offering FlexFrame for Oracle, the first end-to-end infrastructure for Oracle Grid Computing. This offering is designed to automate all tasks across the grid and to gain a single view of the entire server environment while saving valuable IT resources through optimized utilization of the infrastructure. "IT directors need infrastructures that enable them directly to address the needs of their business. FlexFrame for Oracle does just this and provides them with an answer that helps them on two fronts: It brings down costs and increases efficiency immediately, and it fits into existing environments," says Dieter Herzog, executive vice president of enterprise products and solutions at Fujitsu Siemens.
Visa to Enhance Transaction and Payment Integration with Oracle
E-Business Suite
Visa International and Oracle have announced a partnership designed to integrate Visa Commercial payment data with Oracle E-Business Suite. The resulting combination will improve operational efficiency, financial control, and cash flow visibility in the processing of expense reports for Oracle
E-Business Suite customers who use Visa Commercial's services.
Visa can collect enriched transaction data, such as airline itinerary, hotel folio, and fleet data, using the Visa Commercial Format (VCF), the standard data set used in Visa Commercial payment cards. Visa developed VCF as an extension of its proven, reliable settlement system to enable turnkey integration of Visa data into enterprise resource planning systems. By integrating Oracle Internet Expenses (part of Oracle E-Business Suite) with VCF, corporations and employees can receive detailed expense and spending data with less manual effort.
Applimation Informia Now Supports PeopleSoft Enterprise and Siebel
Applimation will support PeopleSoft Enterprise, Siebel, and custom archiving with Applimation Informia Archive Release 5.2. With Informia, all archiving regardless of application and database is done within a single, unified technical architecture.
Applimation Informia manages the impact of data growth in both production and testing environments. Informia Archive provides flexible archive/purge functionality to reduce the overall size of production databases.
Informia also includes Applimation MetaStudio, which enables developers to detect, create, and configure metadata relationships within applications; and Applimation Dashboard, which displays mission-critical application and data growth information across applications and databases.
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