What is Mittelstand?
…Germany’s famous Mittelstand—more than 3 million small and midsize enterprises that form the backbone of Europe’s largest economy, 82 million people and 2.4 trillion euros strong, sprawling from the Rhine to the Oder—the hinge between the European Union’s east and west.
Family-owned companies with fewer than 500 employees and annual sales of less than 50 million euros—that employs more than 70 percent of German workers and contributes roughly half of the country’s GDP.
They take on 83 percent of all apprentices in Germany, more than their share of total employment.
“In the U.S., the focus is on entrepreneurship—it’s important to be a businessman and self-employed,” said Volker Wittberg, professor at a university of applied sciences in Bielefeld, which trains future Mittelstand employees. “Germany is a tinkering country, where you found a company once you’ve made an invention. Mittelstand is about products, not so much about the people behind.”
Drop-In Game Mechanics Platform
Bigdoor –
new “MiniBar” features, which consist of Facebook compatible widgets that allow website owners to incorporate game mechanics and loyalty programs easily onto their own sites.
With this new service, the BigDoor platform will custom generate the code site owners need to to create virtual economies in under five minutes, including defining site currency, defining transactions, defining virtual goods and well as building badges and providing analytics.
Adding Game Mechanics to Kiva
If you can’t offer real returns via P2P lending, you can offer reputation and accessories.
According to Shah, over the next few years, the non-profit will focus on the integration of game mechanics, social tools, mobile and new philanthropic verticals like green and water loans. In terms of numbers, Shah predicts Kiva will raise $1 billion in microloans by 2015.
That’s a cool move.
Toys ‘R’ Us Express
600 temporary stores with 10,000 temporary workers.How long before this company is reduced to street vendor status?
On Daily Deals
Instead of lending rise to an ecosystem, GroupOn gave birth to a litter of niche-babies. The difference? The babies will eat your market share instead of sharing (finite amount of daily deals to be had).
A platform play could have taken the form of tools to create your own deals, segmented by type (restaurant, activity, bar, etc), they could have kept a piece of the pie and had Yelp, OpenTable as clients. This would have given a more sustainable purpose to its 1,600 person sales team. Instead, it’s a race to the bottom as those and others jump into the fray.
In an effort to offset this, GroupOn’s gone international with an $135 million infusion (some Russian). I suspect that’s just going to delay the inevitable (unless they have the ability to buy all competitors).