Dartmouth's Tuck School Of Business Is The Best In The World

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In its 9th annual list, The Economist ranked Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business as the best in the world.

Grads can expect to earn around $107,000, on average 65% more than their pre-MBA salary. 

But of course, there was a long list of criteria. Tuck's alumni are ranked the most effective in the world (though the school came in 90th out of 100 for "alumni breadth," but that's because of its smaller network), and also came out on top in the "personal development and educational experience" category.  

Trailing Dartmouth are Chicago's Booth School of Business, Switzerland's IMD, University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, and Harvard Business School. 

Interestingly, The Economist says "No purely Asian school makes our top 30. Hong Kong University, at 36th, is the highest-placed. The China Europe International Business School is the only school from the mainland to make our top 100. The Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India’s sole representative, and the toughest business school in the world to get into, is 78th."

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JPMorgan Earnings "Beat" By 10 Cents, But Key Parts Of The Business Stink, And There Was a Big Accounting Gain (JPM)

JPMorgan Q3 earnings have come in better than expected, at $1.02.

But it's a bank report, so were going to need to look deeper to see if it's good.

The first red flag is the Debt Valuation Adjustment: The company booked a big gain BECAUSE its bonds worsened significantly, meaning technically on an accounting basis, the company's equity jumped. Read an explanation here.

Here's their commentary

Jamie Dimon, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, commented: “The Firm reported third-quarter net income of $4.3 billion, representing a 13% return on tangible common equity1. It is notable that these results included several significant items(*), including a $542 million pretax loss in Private Equity, $1.0 billion pretax of additional litigation expense in Corporate and a $1.9 billion pretax DVA gain. The DVA gain reflects an adjustment for the widening of the Firm’s credit spreads which could reverse in future periods and does not relate to the underlying operations of the company. All things considered, we believe the Firm’s returns were reasonable given the current environment.”

This is also some useful commentary about the way things are going:

Further commenting on business results, Dimon said: “The Investment Bank’s revenue, excluding the DVA gain, was down substantially; however, we are gratified that the business maintained its #1 ranking in Global Investment Banking Fees, and we believe that we have maintained a healthy share of the global sales and trading market. Retail Financial Services demonstrated good underlying performance, with solid revenue and increased deposits in Consumer & Business Banking and strong retail mortgage origination volumes in our Mortgage Banking business. In our Card business, credit card sales volume, excluding Commercial Card, was up 10% compared with the prior year. Commercial Banking reported continued loan growth, including middle-market loan balances up 18% compared with the prior year, and record deposit2 balances of $180.3 billion were up 31% compared with the prior year. In Treasury & Securities Services, trade finance loans increased 69% to $30.1 billion, and deposit2 balances increased 41% to $341.1 billion. Corporate/Private Equity results were negatively affected by market conditions, the Firm’s decision to take certain positions in its securities portfolio in anticipation of an eventual increase in interest rates, and additional litigation expense.”

Here are the key points from the press release, which you can download here.

Challenging investment banking and capital markets environment; Firm maintained its #1 ranking for Global Investment Banking Fees year-to-dateConsumer & Business Banking reported solid revenue, up 6% compared with prior year, and deposits up 7%; added 60 new branches during the quarterCredit Card sales volume2 up 10%; net charge-offs declined as expectedCommercial Banking reported solid revenue, with strong loan growth, up 9%, and record deposit2 balances, up 31%Treasury & Securities Services reported strong growth in deposit2 balances, up 41%Third-quarter results included the following significant items:(*) $1.9 billion pretax ($0.29 per share after-tax) benefit from debit valuation adjustment (“DVA”) gains in the Investment Bank, resulting from widening of the Firm’s credit spreads$542 million pretax ($0.09 per share after-tax) Private Equity loss$1.0 billion pretax ($0.15 per share after-tax) additional litigation expense, predominantly for mortgage-related matters, in Corporate

Meanwhile, check out these three charts for a deeper understanding of JPMorgan's business right now.

Original post: Stay tuned.

The first big financial earnings report is due out at 7:00 AM ET.

Analysts expect EPS of $0.93 on revenue of $25.3 billion.

We'll have it out.

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7 Ways Google Analytics Will Improve Your Small Business Website

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Analytics software is essential for any online business: it helps you understand ways to reach your audience and drive traffic to your site.

Google Analytics is one of the easiest ways to do this, and is especially helpful for the eternally busy small business owner or the on-the-go blogger.

It allows you to access both general statistics and minutiae in detailed, comprehensive reports. And of course, it includes all the basic specs, like how many visitors you're getting, and lets you refine your information based on date range.

Here are 7 things Google Analytics will tell you about your website:

1. The Browsers and Operating Systems Your Visitors Use

Whether they're coming from Internet Explorer or Chrome, Analytics will tell you. Your website's report will show a breakdown of which browsers are used and how frequently, This feature is useful because sometimes web features are incompatible with certain browsers and operating systems. If a significant chunk of your visitors are using a system that doesn't suit your website, it might be time for you to troubleshoot. Second, browser choice says a lot about your visitor base. If most of them are using a boilerplate program, like Internet Explorer or Safari, your site should be extra user-friendly and easy to navigate. Newer browsers with more bells and whistles, like Chrome, signal net-savviness.

2. What, Specifically, Isn't Keeping People Interested

It's good to know where your visitors are flocking, but it's perhaps more important to know which page of your website they're viewing when they click away to another site. Funneling resources to features that aren't captivating users is clearly not a smart business move, and Google Analytics can help you avoid making that mistake. By showing you the Top Exit Pages of your website, the program shows you the frequency at which web visitors jump ship navigate elsewhere, all broken down by the individual pages of your site. Based on that report, you can decide whether those ill-trafficked parts of your website should be scrapped or just retooled.

3. What Exactly Draws People To Your Site

Very likely, your Google Analytics Keywords report will list a collection of words and phrases familiar to your organization as the main drivers to your site. But the rate for each of those terms, especially when cross-referenced with the feature that shows how many new visitors are logging on versus returning ones, can be substantially useful in developing a marketing strategy. If you know what's pointing people to your site, you can work backward -- explore advertising opportunities with sites that focus on related topics or, if it makes sense, gear your homepage toward the subject matter that's drawing people in. If the point is to captivate visitors and keep them clicking around your site, this tool is a most valuable one.

4. How Many People Just Aren't Interested At All

Your site can have all the hits in the world, but if people aren't finding their way to your site and staying there to explore, it's tough to foster growth online. To help you better understand how many people are coming to your site to stay, Google Analytics offers you a Bounce Rate breakdown. So what's Bounce Rate? It's the proportion of your website's visitors that navigate away without clicking through to a second (or third, or fourth) page. True, you can tally that person's visit as a hit to your site. But there's no lasting power there, and a high Bounce Rate indicates your site isn't making a very strong impression. Check out the ultra-useful Bounce Rate among first-time visitors, perhaps the purest form of the metric because it deals with visitors who are ostensibly entirely unfamiliar with your website.

5. How Much People Are Poking Around

The Depth of Visit function sounds a little Big Brother-esque, but it's important for you to know how many pages people are viewing each time they head to your site. This feature shows the proportion of visitors that view one page, two pages, three pages, and so on. If typically people aren't looking at more than one or two pages per visit, it might be time for a redesign or at least a reorganization of content.

6. Whether People are Viewing On The Go

The ubiquitousness of smartphones and tablets means you need to keep up with that technology. If a significant portion of your website's visitors are finding you on their mobile devices, as Google Analytics can show you, you need to be sure your website is mobile-friendly and accessible. In cases where this feature shows you a sizable enough crop of visitors are seeking you out on such devices, it could be worth it for you to explore building a site specifically designed for use on them.

7. When You've Hit A Million Clicks

...or any other myriad benchmarks you've decided are important. From number of clicks and visitors to increases and decreases in traffic, the Alerts feature of Google Analytics provides you instant updates (which can be sent to your phone) to let you know when you've achieved them. This function could help you mark milestones, like when you finally reach that million-visitor mark, or realize you're in the danger zone, like when the number of unique visitors drops by half. 

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Don't Outsource Your Website If Your Website Is Your Business

I learned the hard way that my business was actually a technology business which just happened to sell music as its content. The fact that we were focused on music was insignificant because the challenges we faced were technological and similar to sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Skype and eBay. These problems arise from servers, scalability, code optimization, search engine results, conversion ratios, decreasing ad revenues, and have nothing to do with music. If I could start over, I would start by focusing on the technology itself, build a great technical team to support it and then work the music into the equation last.

Customers never see your brand the same way you do

I started Audimated.com because I was an independent musician who needed help promoting and marketing my music. I had picked up a lot of skills and tricks along the way and wanted to build a business which would help other artists be successful in the same way that I had. The problem I ran into was that each artist defined success differently. I figured that a website which helped artists make money with their music would be appealing to artists because that is what appealed to me, but after launching the site I quickly realized that making money was not how most artists defined their success as musicians. The majority of independent artists value exposure and reaching new listeners higher than making money from their music, which was not what I expected.

The lesson? Build your branding around what your customers value,  not around what you assume they value. Your business may be your "baby", but you need to be flexible enough to make adjustments to your logo, message and branding to reflect what your customers are interested in and need. Create focus groups, distribute surveys and get a feel from your potential customers what your next big idea means to them. Make sure that your vision for the business and your brand are aligned with theirs or you will likely miss the mark entirely. You need to match what your business intends to do for its customers with what those customers believe they need.

Less is almost always more

One of the most valuable and simplest lessons I have learned as an entrepreneur is to keep it simple. Audimated.com launched with far too many features and as a result confused users and left them wondering what the site was asking them to do. I wanted users to fill out data about their musical preferences and upload music, but that feature was lost among the other ten features users were able to access. As a result, many of our initial users experienced "decision paralysis" when being presented with so many buttons to click and options to choose from. This lead to incomplete data and many users creating accounts which didn't have music or photos.

All the extra features caused additional support problems as well. If you offer 10 different features, that's 10 moving parts that need to servicing and maintenance. Users will have questions about these features and they will need help using them. We didn't have the staff to address this growing problem and our users began to get frustrated by the time it took to get a response from support. Our developers became overworked fixing the small bugs that came from the use of these features. As we began to grow it became clear that having these extra features was more of a hassle then a benefit.

Since launching, we have reduced the number of features available on the site to address this problem. We dropped things that were auxiliary and focused on the core of what our service provides: the music. A much higher percentage of our users are completing their profiles and using the services, rather than being distracted by our extra features and being confused about to what to do. Our support staff is able to quickly address issues, our engineers have less bugs to worry about and have our existing features working better, and overall customer sanctification has increased. The lesson is to do less things at a higher level than a bunch of things at an average level. Your users, staff and bottom line will thank you.

Lucas Sommer started three successful music business companies which he continues to own and operate profitably. His newest venture is Audimated.com, a game-changing site that is revolutionizing the independent music scene.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (Y.E.C.) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country's most promising young entrepreneurs. The Y.E.C promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to youth unemployment and underemployment and provides its members with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of a business's development and growth.

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WATCH: A Robotic Ball Runs Amok In Business Insider HQ

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We were lucky enough to have the Sphero team stop by our office for a quick product demo, so check out the video below!

If you like what you see, Sphero is currently available for preorder at GoSphero.com.

Don't Miss...

Produced By: Robert Libetti

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Magazine Publishers Are Basically Just Stealing Cable's Business Model For Their Tablet Plans

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The magazine tablet business model sure looks a lot like that of the cable companies'.

David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, explained at Paid Content's advertising conference: 

How many people here pay more than $2,000 per year for their cable bill? A lot, but the companies don't ask you for that all at once. They want $160 per month. 

For the magazine business, what tablets allow us to do is to get into continuous service monthly billing. We're selling a lot at a $1.99 per month. That's $24 per year, which is often more than you get in print.

Presumably, the lifetime value will be longer because we don't have to go through this archaic process to go back after 12 months and say, "Are you sure you want to continue with this?" So it takes all the friction out of the retention business.

We're seeing really good numbers there. 

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INSTANT MBA: Be Flexible In Your Business, But Not In Your Ideals

  x You have successfully emailed the post. Today's advice comes from TerraCycle founder and CEO Tom Szaky:

"Be flexible in your business model but not in your ideals, and harbor determination."

Szaky founded TerraCycle when he was just a 19-year-old Princeton freshman. The company made worm refuse into fertilizer and packaged it in recycled bottles.

Now, TerraCycle has completely altered its focus, after Szaky saw an opportunity and went for it. TerraCycle's main business is now in 'upcycling' -- the repurposing of used material -- and things are going better than ever.

"I've gotten to this point with TerraCycle because I was open to adapting my plan when I needed to, but I stuck to my principal of an eco-friendly company built from, and run on, trash. No one was going to change that.

I was determined to make it work, and the trick was doing what was needed to make it happen -- not always the path I had in mind, but the same end result nonetheless. Be willing to consider a different path."

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Interview: An Update On Small Business Hiring In America

President Obama has received a lot of flak for failing to create jobs. He is expected to pitch a national job training program during his big jobs speech tomorrow. 

Meanwhile, small businesses credited with creating 58,000 of the 91,000 new private sector jobs in August are struggling to get government funding. 

Year-to-date hiring by small businesses is down 2.6%, while paycheck's have declined 0.3%, according to SurePayRoll's 2011 small business scorecard. The survey which collects data from 32,000 customers and looks at the smallest businesses across 35 cities, found that cities like St. Louis bucked the trend. We spoke with Michael Alter CEO of SurePayRoll about his findings and what he expects for small businesses in the coming year.

BI: Based on the scorecard, what are individual cities doing right or wrong?

A lot of these are very local. Our data includes small businesses and contractors. In cities where you see growth, contractors are higher and are doing more to create jobs. In St. Louis we've seem month-over-month and year-over-year growth which is a good sign but small businesses aren't sure whether they should be hiring full time employees because they are getting new orders, so you see them take on contractors but the paychecks may go down. 

There are 5 stages really first small businesses reduce work hours, then they layoff workers and both indices go negative. Then they come back and increase work hours and overtime, then they start to bring in contractors and finally start hiring permanent employees again. 

The challenge is we've been hovering from the bad stage to stage 3 and aren't moving up from there. 

BI: Do you think the burden to help small businesses should fall on the federal or state/local governments? 

The burden should really be on all of them. Small business owners are not discerning on where they get the funding, they just want access to it. We survey small business owners on economic prospects. Now, only 1 in 2 is optimistic i.e. 1 in 2 in pessimistic, and 2 in 2 has given up belief in any government help. One of the small business owners we have said "I choose to be optimistic about the future, not clueless". There is a lot uncertainty about what the government might or might not do. 

BI: Small businesses are adding more jobs than big firms but even they have been cutting down on jobs. Do you see a similar trend in the future?

I expect to see reduction in hiring. The ADP report overstates larger companies and understates smaller companies. Until optimism picks up I see this trend continuing. If a business owner is optimistic he may add a second delivery truck, if he is pessimistic he won't because he doesn't want people hunkering him down. 

BI: What do you expect from President Obama's job speech on Thursday?

Government programs that provide short-term and long-term funding and reduce paperwork and allow more Small Business Administration (SBA), quicker. Maybe a reduction in corporate tax rate. I would like to see an infrastructure bank set-up for small businesses. Coming out of past recessions, small businesses have got us out of it. Earlier SB owners could max-out their credit cards, 401K, borrow from friends and family. Now banks are cutting down on credit, gyrations in the stock market affecting 401K there isn't much to borrow and getting a second mortgage on a home is pretty tough. These ways of bootstrapping aren't there anymore and the government needs to step in.

BI: Additional thoughts?

If you look forward we continue to bounce at the bottom. The challenge is that small business productivity has been growing at a rate greater than their revenues. Thus, others are more stable because a number of existing businesses are able to increase their revenues without adding additional employees (revenue growth at lower cost). But that doesn't put us back to work.

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It Makes Sense For Google To Own Motorola's Hardware Business To Build Super Cheap Tablets (GOOG, MMI)

There was some speculation that Google was buying Motorola for its software patents and would spin off the hardware business as soon as possible. 

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt poured cold water on that idea. Google wants Motorola's hardware business. 

There's only one way that makes sense: if Google makes cheap tablets to compete with the iPad on price.

The success of the HP TouchPad fire sale and customer surveys show that there is pent-up consumer demand for a cheap tablet. And given the superiority of iPad hardware, the only way for Android to compete is to undercut on price. 

Is that possible? Well, iSuppli estimates the 16GB TouchPad's bill of materials at $296. The biggest cost items in a tablet are the touchscreen and memory chips, which could both be knocked down a peg for an explicitly low-cost tablet. Google could buy huge inventory upfront to bring down unit costs even further. 

And of course, it could sell a tablet at a loss or just breakeven. 

Could that bring a tablet to $300? $249? $200?

Here's why it makes sense for Google to potentially spend billions of dollars on this: Apple is right, we're moving to a post-PC world. Smartphones and tablets are the future of computing. And in that world, there is a race on to be the platform of the future, with network effects accruing to the biggest platform, just like in the PC wars of the 1980s.

On smartphones Google is winning that race, narrowly. By taking a disruptive approach, distributing Android for free, it has gotten manufacturers and carriers aboard and can flood the market with devices. Despite the iPhone's stunning success, Android is edging past it.

But this strategy doesn't work for tablets, where carriers offer few subsidies and Apple's manufacturing and design superiority means it can offer the best tablets at a price others can't match. Tablets are Apple's ace in the hole in the post-PC platform race. 

Google isn't going to beat Apple on design, so it needs to beat it on price, like PC manufacturers did in the 1980s. But Apple having become a manufacturing behemoth, that probably means selling tablets are breakeven or at a loss. Samsung and Motorola can't afford to do that, because they are commodity manufacturers with razor-thin margins. Google can. 

What's more, there's no time to waste. Apple knows what's at stake and has priced the iPad very aggressively. If and when Apple lowers the price on the iPad, all that pent-up consumer demand of people who want a tablet but can't bring themselves to spend $500, will go away and take away an opportunity to grab a big slice of marketshare right out of the gate.

If anything, that's what we suspect is behind the Motorola buy.

This post was published as part of BI Research, a new industry intelligence service from Business Insider. BI Research provides real-time research and analysis on the technology industry. The service is currently in beta and is free. To learn more and sign up, please click here.

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From Whole Foods To Sex Shops In Times Square: What Hurricane Irene Did To Business In New York City

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This nearly-last weekend of summer is usually a big one for New York City's $31 billion tourism industry. 

But Hurricane Irene has changed all that. 

Now that nearly 400,000 New Yorkers have been asked to evacuate, and the rest stayed inside as the transportation system ground to a halt, the landscape looks quite different. 

We took a look at what businesses decided to stay open, which ones offered employees car services, and what New Yorkers prioritize before disaster strikes. 

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Samsung Is Not Buying HP's PC Business (HPQ)

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Samsung shot down rumors that it was looking at buying HP's PC business this morning.

Here's the announcement in its entirety, from the Samsung Tomorrow blog.

The recent rumors that Samsung Electronics will be taking over Hewlett-Packard Co.'s personal computer business are not true.

We hope this clarifies any confusion that may have occurred.

This is what a denial should look like. 

No word on whether Samsung might be interested in buying or licensing HP's WebOS business, but it seems pretty unlikely given that neither Palm nor HP was able to make a go with WebOS devices, and Samsung already has its own mobile platform, Bada, in case its deals with Google (Android) and Microsoft (Windows Phone) run into trouble.

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A Simple Explanation For Why HP Abandoned Palm And Is Getting Out of the PC Business

HP acquired Palm at the end of April 2010, for $1.2 billion. HP’s CEO was Mark Hurd.

Three months later, in early August, Mark Hurd was forced to resign over that scandal with forged expenses and lies about his lady friend.

HP then named Léo Apotheker president and CEO on 30 September 2010.

The thing is, Apotheker’s relevant experience was serving as CEO of SAP. What’s SAP? SAP is an enterprise software and consulting company. Honestly, we all should have seen this coming. You don’t bring in an enterprise consulting guy to turn around a PC and device maker. You bring in an enterprise consulting guy to turn a PC and device maker into an enterprise consulting company.

Palm wasn’t Apotheker’s acquisition. It was Hurd’s. And the PC business wasn’t why Apotheker took the job. Apotheker’s acquisition was announced this week, coincident with the news that HP wants out of the PC and device business: Autonomy — a company I’d never heard of before but which more or less sounds like a rival to SAP.

I suppose Apotheker gave the Palm/WebOS guys a chance, and let them get the TouchPad on the market. But apparently their chance was a one-strike-and-you’re-out opportunity to gain traction in the market immediately. But the TouchPad didn’t get any traction immediately, so, boom, that’s it, Apotheker is done with them. Apotheker simply never had any interest in the consumer market or product development. My guess is that he planned on getting HP out of the hardware business all along, and Palm, at best, was an afterthought. If he’d been named HP’s CEO six months earlier, they never would have acquired Palm in the first place.

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