| Yahoo apologises for Black Monday fiasco
Yahoo is attempting to placate members of its Small Business Merchant programme after an outage left many sellers unable to process orders on the busiest online shopping day of the year. The programme allows users to set up and maintain online stores and process payments. But problems began at 6am US Pacific time when Yahoo said that systems which power the service went down. As a result, merchants were unable to process orders and users were unable to make purchases. Yahoo had restored the service by 1pm, but transactions remained slow to process. The service was not up to normal speed until 12 hours after the outage. Rich Riley, senior vice president of Yahoo's online channel division, apologised to merchants hit by the outage in a blog posting.
Coastal Post Online
In 2001, my longtime dream of owning a community-serving business was realized when, without any retail or bookselling experience, I purchased the Brown Study Bookshop, a sleepy used-book store in Point Reyes Station. I soon came to learn the realities of owning a small independent business in an age when consumers, seeking the best deal, are drawn to purchasing goods online and in big-box stores.
The last two decades have brought sweeping changes in many American communities as strip malls, big-box retailers, and e-commerce replace the locally owned shops on Main Street. Nationally, the number of independent bookstores alone has fallen from 4,700 in 1993 to 2,500 today, as revenues from Internet book sales climbed from $2.6 billion in 2002 to $4 billion in 2006. Describing the mega-corporate takeover in The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, David Korten writes, "unlike the owners of locally based businesses, the absentee shareholder owners of these new businesses have little knowledge or concern for the consequences at the local level for action taken on behalf of the corporation."
In contrast, a growing movement of independent businesses is creating "local living economies" and seeking a "living return"-one partially paid by the benefits of living and working in healthy, vibrant communities.
Ghosn Maps Path Through Slump
Nearly a decade ago, Carlos Ghosn rose to fame for rescuing Nissan Motor Co. from near collapse and turning it into one of the world's most profitable auto makers. Today, Mr. Ghosn, 54 years old, now chief executive of both Nissan and Renault SA, sees the global auto industry in need of a similar reversal of fortune. Strained by a weak U.S. market, rapid expansion in emerging markets and a shift in demand from gas guzzlers to ultra-low cost cars and fuel-sipping green vehicles, the world's auto makers are at a crossroads. In April, Nissan reported its first full-year drop in net profit in seven years and pushed back a key long-term sales goal. At Renault, Mr. Ghosn may have a tough time with his goal to boost global sales volumes by 30% by 2009. But Mr. Ghosn says he is adapting.
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