Business: BusinessWeek collaborates with readers to publish special issue

BusinessWeek Looks to its Audience to Generate Content in Print, Online, and on TV

New York, (ANTARA News/PRNewswire-AsiaNet) - BusinessWeek will publish a special August double-issue focused on workplace challenges. "Business@Work," will engage BusinessWeek's audience, bringing together readers and editors in an interactive, collaborative exchange.

A first for BusinessWeek, readers will identify the topics covered, and submit case studies, personal vignettes, and videos about their workplace challenges.

BusinessWeek.com users have already selected the most pressing workplace issues. After 8,500 votes, the six topics are: work-life balance, staying entrepreneurial, toxic bosses, time-management, negotiating bureaucracy, and generational tension.

Next, readers will upload essays, videos, photos, and comments via BusinessWeek.com, or through "Business@Work" pages on Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. LinkedIn users will be able to participate in a poll on workplace issues and leave comments and essays. BusinessWeek, working with experts and global gurus, will expand on contributions to create the special double-issue.

BusinessWeek.com will feature articles and videos, and BusinessWeek TV will air segments on workplace issues.

BusinessWeek Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler said, "Business@Work takes the multi-platform model one step further by building an issue from ideas and content generated with our audience. We like to think of this as a joint project with readers, working shoulder-to-shoulder and sharing ideas to produce smart, useful journalism on a topic to which everyone can relate."

"Business@Work builds on BusinessWeek's digital growth and positions the company for continued success in the user-engagement arena, as well as serving marketers' needs," said BusinessWeek President Keith Fox.

Readers can visit http://www.businessweek.com/business@work to contribute their ideas and access the features on Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. The special August double-issue, "Business@Work," will hit newsstands on August 15th.

BusinessWeek is a global source of trusted content that informs and inspires business leaders to make smarter decisions in their professional and personal lives. Founded in 1929 and published by the McGraw-Hill Companies, BusinessWeek magazine is the market leader, with more than 4.9 million readers each week in 140 countries. Local language editions include Chinese, Israeli and Bahasa Indonesian. Launched in 1994, BusinessWeek.com is the preeminent provider of daily, essential business news, information, and services to business decision-makers. Reaching 85% of the nation's households, BusinessWeek TV delivers important business, consumer and financial news to television viewers every week.

SOURCE: BusinessWeek

Business: Amazon.com Tops BusinessWeek's 10th annual InfoTech 100

Number of U.S. companies on the list falls to 33, from 75 a decade ago

New York (ANTARA News/PRNewswire-AsiaNet) - For the second consecutive year, Amazon.com tops BusinessWeek's annual InfoTech 100 ranking of tech's top performing companies. In 2007, Amazon.com vaulted from No.23 to No.1, and the company retains the top spot this year, beating out Apple (No.2), Nintendo (No.4), and Google (No.11).

While Amazon.com and Apple took the top two spots in this year's InfoTech 100, the dominance of U.S. companies in the ranking is in decline: Only 33 companies on the list this year are U.S. based, down from 43 in 2007. When BusinessWeek first began compiling the InfoTech 100 in 1998, 75 of the top performers were U.S. companies.

To compile the InfoTech100, BusinessWeek began with financial data from Standard & Poor's Compustat, also a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies, that has computerized information on over 28,000 publicly traded corporations.

BusinessWeek trimmed this universe to information-technology companies. This year, cable companies that expanded into telecom were added. To qualify, companies had to have revenues of at least US$300 million. Companies whose stock price has dropped more than 75 per cent, whose sales shrank, or where other developments raised questions about future performance,
were eliminated from contention.

BusinessWeek also dropped some phone companies whose monopoly or near-monopoly power in their countries gives them an unfair advantage over competitors. The remaining group of companies were ranked on four criteria: return on equity, revenue growth, and shareholder return (given equal weight), and total revenues (which was weighted).

The 10th annual InfoTech 100 appears in BusinessWeek's June 2, 2008 issue, with expanded content on BusinessWeek.com at http://www.businessweek.com/it100

SOURCE: BusinessWeek