The Stanford Center at Peking University will be an architectural combination of east and west, according to university officials. A presentation on the new facility by Coit Blacker, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, is scheduled Thursday for members of the university’s Faculty Senate.
Seven university departments — including the School of Medicine’s Asian Liver Center, the Bing Overseas Studies Program and the Center for Sustainable Development and Global Competitiveness — have committed to establishing a presence at the new center.

“China’s position as a global economic leader means that the university should be at the forefront of helping our students and faculty better understand the country’s policies, culture and views while at the same time forging intellectual ties with its brightest and most important thinkers,” Stanford President John Hennessy said in a statement.

Read more

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke traveled to Los Angeles, Calif., today for the second stop of the New Markets, New Jobs small business outreach tour.  Joined by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and USC Marshall School of Business Dean James G. Ellis, Locke discussed the importance of exports to America’s economic recovery and job creation, and the resources that the government is providing to connect local small- and medium-sized businesses with foreign buyers, especially those from the Asia-Pacific markets, in order to help them sell more overseas and hire more at home.  

Announced on the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s National Export Initiative, New Markets, New Jobs is a year-long, interagency, multi-city outreach campaign designed to proactively bring government services to businesses across the country that are interested in exporting.  The tour was launched in Minneapolis in February, and will continue on to New Orleans, Louisiana in April and Wilmington, Delaware in May.

Since 2009, Chevron has committed $7 million each year through the California Partnership, increasing Chevron’s overall investment in the state to approximately $28 million year-over-year. Chevron has also partnered with Kiva.org and the Opportunity Fund to help support entrepreneurs in California and around the world.

“The economic slowdown has made it especially difficult to secure funding for Bay Area small businesses and entrepreneurs, often a catalyst for job creation and economic growth for the state,” said Stephen Vogel, CEO of Grameen America. “Chevron’s support will help hundreds of entrepreneurs realize their dreams of starting their own businesses.”

In addition to the investment by Cheveron, San Francisco based Wells Fargo has also invested $1 million into Grameen America to support the nonprofit microlender’s expansion into the Bay Area.

The Wine Institute—which manages its own international marketing and shipping export program—will provide campaign materials to winemakers, importers, retailers and restaurateurs actively pushing California wine overseas. “The ‘Discover California Wines’ campaign gives our international representatives the tools they need to build California wine sales exponentially around the globe,” said Robert Koch, president and CEO of The Wine Institute. “We’re setting an ambitious goal of more than doubling California/U.S. wine exports to $2 billion by 2022.”

The good news was tempered somewhat by the fact that California did not quite keep pace with the nation as a whole which boosted its merchandise exports by 19.4 percent. Also, California has a relatively high percentage of re-exports, which are items previously imported into the United States that have had no significant value added prior to being shipped abroad. “California’s numerous trading companies do a superb job sourcing goods from around the world and matching them with foreign customers,” O’Connell said. “That’s why California’s re-export trade leaped by 36.3 percent in November.” Exports of goods manufactured in California, meanwhile, increased just 6.7 percent. Overall U.S. manufactured exports, in contrast, jumped 16.7 percent, O’Connell reported.

California made up 11.1 percent of all U.S. merchandise exports in November, but just 9.6 percent of its manufactured exports, Beacon reported. California’s exports of nonmanufactured goods represented 12.4 percent of the nation’s exports of those goods, but fully 19.8 percent of the nation’s shipments of re-exported goods came from California.

As a result, California’s export trade has a less immediate positive impact on the state’s economy and on its propensity for job creation, O’Connell said. “California manufacturers have become exceptionally efficient in increasing output without adding new hires,” O’Connell said in the release. “And the goods they produce tend to be of increasingly higher value. That’s why it is possible for the value of our manufactured exports to rise without there being a commensurate level of job growth.”

That also explains why California lost 4,400 manufacturing jobs between November 2010 and November 2009, based on seasonally adjusted numbers from the California Employment Development Department, despite California adding 110,900 jobs overall, O’Connell said.

The Chinese government has signed cooperation agreements with the state of California and General Electric to help build such lines. The agreements, both of which are preliminary, show China’s desire to become a big exporter and licenser of bullet trains traveling 350 kilometers, or about 215 miles, an hour, an environmentally friendly technology in which China has raced past the United States in the past few years.

“We are the most advanced in many fields, and we are willing to share with the United States,” said Zheng Jian, the chief planner and director of high-speed rail at the Chinese Railroad Ministry.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California has closely followed progress in the discussions and hopes to return to China this year for talks with rail ministry officials, said David Crane, the governor’s special adviser for jobs and economic growth and a board member for the California High Speed Rail Authority. China is offering not just to build a railroad in California but to help finance its construction, and Chinese officials have already been shuttling from Beijing to Sacramento to make presentations, Mr. Crane said by telephone.

China is not the only country interested in selling high-speed rail equipment to the United States. Japan, Germany, South Korea, Spain, France and Italy have also approached the state of California.

The state’s high-speed rail authority has made no decisions on whose technology to choose. But Mr. Crane said that there were no apparent weaknesses in the Chinese offer and that Mr. Schwarzenegger particularly wanted to visit China this year for high-speed rail discussions.

Personal payments to and from India and transfers to local banks in India have been suspended while we work with our business partners and other stakeholders to address questions they have about the service

PayPal executives have been unavailable for comment on specific reasons why the service was discontinued. There is speculation that this may have something to do with new Indian government rules aimed at preventing money laundering. Last November, the Indian government introduced rules requiring financial institutions and other intermediaries to verify the identity of clients carrying out international money transfers.

Paypal has not just been blocking all their money transfer but has also not letting the Indian account holders withdraw money they already have in their accounts. For the past week, merchants have been unable to withdraw funds in Rupees to local Indian banks. shocking many Indians who have relyed on the service. The blocking started on January 28th and Paypal will only say that it is working to resolve the current situations in “the shortest span of time.”

The numbers announced last week by Woodside wine research firm Gomberg, Fredrikson &amp Associates analyst Jon Fredrikson at the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento. “As we basically had a financial heart attack, people just reined in their spending and were very cautious,” Fredrikson said. “They moved dramatically down to lower price points, below $5 and $7. Small wineries in the North Coast that sell bottles from $25 to $100 were basically shut out. Inventories backed up, and that just made it an ugly year.”

The biggest drop in wine sales is for bottles that retail for more than $20. Sales were off between 20 and 30 percent in 2009, Steve Rannekleiv, an analyst for Rabobank told the Chronicle.  During the same time, sales for wines that cost less than $6 a bottle rose 5 percent.

As consumers have tightened their purse strings, bulk wine imports from countries with lower production and land costs have climbed. Between 2007 and 2009, imports more than doubled to 13 million cases to capture 32 percent of the U.S. market. “Argentina is the sleeping giant,” Rannekleiv said. Argentina has 510,000 acres planted in grapes, compared with 480,000 in California, which produces 90 percent of the wine made in the United States.

The company, a subsidiary of Japan’s Sony Corp. also cut back last March, when it laid off nearly 250 people and eliminated nearly 100 open positions. Company staff was informed of the latest cuts in a memo Monday and through videos by the studio co-chairs on an employee Web site. “Our industry is affected by two things: It’s affected by the economy, of course, and it’s affected by technology,” co-chair Amy Pascal says in the video. “Over the last two years, it’s changed people’s DVD buying habits, which has had a huge effect on our company and the industry at large.”

The home video market has been declining as people have not been buying videos as often, and instead turn to rentals, which are far less profitable for the industry.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on the board of Apple for three years and at one time it was said that they had a pact not to poach each other’s employees. They were always thought to be united in fighting a bigger enemy – Microsoft.

In 2007, however, Google released Android, a mobile phone operating system; while the iPhone runs on a propitiatory operating system developed by Apple. At first, this was was seen as primarily an attack on Microsoft and its Windows OS. Still, the handwriting was on the wall, and Schmidt resigned from the board of Apple a month later.

Then, in the July 2009 Google announced the Google’s Chrome OS, a web-based operating system meant for netbooks, and has more recently even announced its own “app store” that would directly compete with the Apple app store. With the launch last week of the iPad – essentially a high end netbook – it seems Apple now considers the Chrome OS a direct threat.

Now it has really come to a head. Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs reportedly verbally attacked Google Inc. at an employee meeting after rolling out the new iPad tablet computer last week. Wired reported that Google’s entry into the phone business with its Nexus One drew the ire of Apple CEO. They quoted attendees of the meeting in which Jobs reportedly let loose a tirade where he called Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto “bullshit” “We did not enter the search business, they entered the phone business,” it reported Jobs told his employees. “Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.”