Entrepreneur Spirit

In late 2008, a startup called Moksha8 convinced Pfizer (PFE) to do an unusual deal in Brazil. In exchange for a cut of sales, Moksha8 would promote a decades-old antibiotic called Vibramycin, along with several other brands in Pfizer’s portfolio of older drugs no longer protected by patents. Forecasting declining sales against competition from lower- [...]

When she started at the University of California at Berkeley, grad student Christen Penny tried to transcribe her professors’ lectures faithfully by hand. Within two weeks she recognized she was falling behind because she couldn’t take notes fast enough. So when a fellow student recommended a boxy black pen with a recorder inside, she bought [...]

A raid on Gibson Guitar Corp. by U.S. agents seeking illegally imported wood has given anti- regulation activists from the Tea Party to fiddler Charlie Daniels one more reason to dislike the Obama administration. “Thirty agents with guns” showed up unannounced at Gibson’s Nashville, Tennessee, factory on the morning of Aug. 24, Chief Executive Officer [...]

The holy grail of the music business is the power to anticipate which songs will jump to the top of the charts. Record companies rely on everything from focus groups to superstitions to place their bets on smash hits. Onetime Sony Music (SNE) Chairman Don Ienner says he used to recognize a hit when a [...]

Four years ago, Ethan Diamond underwent an ordeal trying to buy an album online that a band had self-released: First the website crashed, then the download failed and left him struggling to find a link to report the problem. Eventually the band’s singer e-mailed him a link to the songs, which were low-quality audio files [...]

Groupon Inc. founder and Chairman Eric Lefkofsky may parlay a $1 million check to co-founder Andrew Mason four years ago into a stake worth $2.3 billion when the daily-deal site sells shares to the public next month. Lefkofsky owns 129.2 million common shares, according to the company’s prospectus, at least double the amount owned by [...]

Anglo American Plc (AAL) agreed to buy the Oppenheimer family’s 40 percent stake in De Beers for $5.1 billion in cash, ending the dynasty’s 80-year ownership in the world’s largest diamond miner. The transaction will increase Anglo’s holding in De Beers to as much as 85 percent, the London-based company said today in a statement. [...]

Deutsche Bank AG (DBK), BNP Paribas (BNP) SA and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) are among banks that must hold additional capital buffers ranging from 1 to 2.5 percentage points under plans approved today by the Group of 20 nations. A total of 29 lenders may have to meet the requirements, according to a provisional [...]

Indonesia, a vast polyglot nation, has weathered the global financial crisis relatively smoothly because of its heavy reliance on domestic consumption as the driver of economic growth. Although the economy slowed significantly in 2009 from the 6%-plus growth rate recorded in 2007 and 2008, by 2010 growth returned to a 6% rate. During the recession, [...]

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Indonesia expanded 2.90 percent in the second quarter of 2011 over the previous quarter. Historically, from 2005 until 2011, Indonesia’s average quarterly GDP Growth was 1.50 percent reaching an historical high of 3.82 percent in September of 2009 and a record low of -3.57 percent in December of 2008. [...]