Yossi Vardi, an Israeli entrepreneur, thinks the technology industry should do more to address social problems"IF YOU print this, I will kill you." Yossi Vardi, a veteran Israeli entrepreneur and venture investor, says it politely, but this is clearly not one of his many jokes. Nor is he trying to protect the top-secret business model of one of the dozens of start-ups he is advising or has financed. He simply hates to appear boastful about a social project to which he donates time and money. "This is more important than any of my start-ups," he explains. "Making it public would devalue what I'm doing here." To prevent loss of life--and to protect a deserving project--the secret will not be revealed. But the anecdote is telling. Mr Vardi has long been Israel's most famous technologist. He is known for having helped build the country's high-tech industry, and for selling ICQ, an instant-messaging service, to America Online in 1998 for more than $400m. Now his aim is to become the industry's conscience. His message: only a happy few are benefiting from Israel's amazing high-tech boom. "We have become two countries: a high-tech one with few children and very high incomes, and a poor one with lots of kids," he says.Born in 1942 in Palestine, Mr Vardi started his career in fields that would be called low-tech today. At the age of 27 he was appointed director-general of Israel's development ministry and then held a similar job at the energy ministry. Later he led or helped to found some 60 companies such as Israel Chemicals, the Israel Oil Company and ITL Optronics. Then, in 1996, he invested in his first internet start-up, Mirabilis, the company behind ICQ ("I seek you"). One reason was that his son Arik was one of the founders. But Mr Vardi also realised that instant messaging, then a novelty, would spread like a contagious virus. "Three major viral products emerged from this part of the world: the Bible 2,700 years ago, Jesus 2,000 years ago and ICQ ten years ago," he jokes. Search for ICQ using Google and there are 675m matches, he points out, compared with 160m for the Bible and 178m for Jesus. ...

  What NetSuite's flotation says about the software industryINVESTORS appear ready to suspend disbelief yet again, at least when it comes to technology firms. On December 20th they drove up shares of NetSuite, which provides business software that runs inside a web browser, by 37% on the first day of trading, despite an already high offering price. The same day the share price of salesforce.com, another firm offering web-based software, reached new heights, briefly giving it a market capitalisation of nearly $8 billion. Do their offerings, known as "on-demand software" or "software as a service", justify such figures?For years, sceptics said that concerns over security and reliability would stifle demand for software delivered using the internet. But both NetSuite and Salesforce have signed up plenty of customers. As of September, NetSuite--a firm created with money from Larry Ellison, the boss of Oracle, a software giant--had more than 5,400 clients. Salesforce, the market leader, serves more than 38,000 firms and recently signed up its millionth paying user. According to Gartner, a market-research firm, the market for web-based applications reached $5.1 billion in 2007 and will grow to $11.5 billion by 2011--by which time it will account for over one-quarter of software sold to companies (see chart). ...

  The best thing about a new supersonic plane is how well it flies slowlyNOTHING, it seems, can slow the demand for business jets. Even a recession in America is unlikely to put a dent in the planemakers' bulging order books. In 2007, as new customers from China, Russia and India queued up, sales outside America for the first time outstripped those in the traditional home of business aviation. Oppressive airport security and chronic flight congestion have given bosses a good excuse to turn their backs on commercial flying. But once airborne, they still cannot fly any faster than hoi polloi.The belief that some of them would like to has inspired Aerion, a firm based in Reno, Nevada, to devise the world's first supersonic business jet. Having refined and validated its design, it began accepting letters of intent for its first 40 planes in the last few weeks of 2007. So far more than 20 prospective customers have forked out $250,000 deposits for the $80m aircraft. Aerion predicts sales of around 300 planes over ten years, a forecast it describes as "cautious". ...

  The greatest ever merger wave is changing shape--but it may not be breaking yet"IT'S A bump in the road, but not an unhealthy one," says David Rubenstein. The morning after paying $21.3m for a copy of the Magna Carta dating from 1297, the boss of the Carlyle Group, a big private-equity firm, is in the mood to take the long view. The golden era of private equity is probably over, he concedes. "After a great ride for five years, private equity is entering a more challenging period," he predicts. Returns are likely to come down, if only because they have been so high, he says. But the industry has been through downturns before, and each time "changes were made and private equity came back stronger."The future of the merger wave that has been sweeping all before it since 2003 now depends on how deep the downturn in private equity proves to be and how long it takes to recover and come back stronger. In the first half of 2007 deal activity was so rapid that last year was still the best ever for merger activity, according to Dealogic. But when credit started to crunch in the summer, activity slowed dramatically, particularly by private-equity buyers, which in the second quarter of 2007 accounted for an unprecedented one-quarter of all deals (see chart). ...

  Is in-store television an effective advertising tool? Perhaps, if done rightIN-STORE television would seem to be a no-brainer for big retailers. It makes their shops more attractive to consumer-goods companies because they can advertise their wares direct to a captive audience. It lets retailers run their own advertisements and promotions. It keeps shoppers informed and entertained. And after an (admittedly large) investment in the in-store network, it can be a lucrative source of advertising revenue. Even so, in-store television has so far worked well for only some retailers in some countries. America's Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, started with in-store TV ten years ago in partnership with Premier Retail Networks (PRN), a firm based in San Francisco that is owned by Thomson, a French technology firm. It has the world's biggest network, with screens in over 3,000 of its huge shops in America. After much trial and error it seems to have learnt how to carry it off. Some 140 firms, including Procter & Gamble (P&G) and Unilever, the world's biggest consumer-goods companies, pay to advertise on Wal-Mart TV. (Wal-Mart and PRN split the proceeds, but will not say how.) A survey of retailers by Retail Systems Research (RSR), a consultancy, found that in-store TV increased overall sales by 2%. ...

  Norwegian companies' boards are now stacked with womenHENRIK IBSEN, author of the play "A Doll's House", in which a pretty, frustrated housewife abandons her husband and children to seek a more serious life, would surely have approved. From January 1st all public companies in Norway are obliged to ensure that at least 40% of their board directors are women. Most firms have obeyed the law, which was passed in 2003. But about 75 out of the 480 or so companies it affects are still too male for the government's liking. They will shortly receive a letter informing them that they have until the end of February to act, or face the legal consequences--which could include being dissolved. Before the law was proposed, about 7% of board members in Norway were female, according to the Centre for Corporate Diversity. The number has since jumped to 36%. That is far higher than the average of 9% for big companies across Europe--11% for Britain's FTSE 100--or America's 15% for the Fortune 500. Norway's stockexchange and its main business lobby oppose the law, as do many businessmen. "I am against quotas for women or men as a matter of principle," says Sverre Munck, head of international operations at Schibsted, a media firm. "Board members of public companies should be chosen solely on the basis of merit and experience," he says. Several firms have even given up their public status in order to escape the new law. ...

  Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger and Twitter, epitomises Silicon Valley's right brainAT SOME point in the decade after he moved from the farm in Nebraska where he grew up to the innovation hub that is the San Francisco Bay Area, Evan Williams accidentally stumbled upon three insights. First, that genuinely new ideas are, well, accidentally stumbled upon rather than sought out; second, that new ideas are by definition hard to explain to others, because words can express only what is already known; and third, that good ideas seem obvious in retrospect. So, having already had two accidental successes--one called Blogger, the other Twitter--Mr Williams is now trying to make accidents a regular occurrence for his company, called Obvious.Of his previous successes, Blogger is today the best-known. It came about in the late 1990s when Mr Williams and his team struggled to build a complex software tool to let people collaborate. To keep each other abreast of the project, they kept a simple internal diary. Since that seemed to be the only thing working well, they joked that it, not the original project, should become their product. Thus was born Blogger, a web service that lets anybody create a blog with a few clicks. At the time, almost nobody understood what a blog was, or why anybody would want one. But in 2003 Google bought the company, and both blogs and Blogger are today part of the internet's mainstream. ...

  New European Union emission rules are bad news for Germany's carmakersIF BALI failed to produce much besides cop-outs and compromises, at least the European Commission showed this week that it means business when it comes to tackling carbon emissions. Transport-related CO2 emissions in the European Union grew by one-third between 1990 and 2005 and now constitute 27% of the EU total. Of these, the commission reckons, cars and vans are responsible for about half.On December 19th, as The Economist went to press, the commission was due to publish its final proposals for cleaning up Europe's cars. Although it will be at least a year before they become law and there is still scope for some of the details to change--both the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers will want their say--there is now little doubt that in only a few years' time European carmakers will have to meet the world's strictest CO2-emission standards. ...

  The construction industry confronts its carbon footprintFANS of cement like to point out that it is the most widely used substance on the planet after water. Unfortunately it is also one of the most polluting. The main ingredient in concrete, cement is made by heating limestone and clay until they fuse into a material called clinker, which is then ground up and mixed with various additives. Both the heating, which is normally fuelled by coal, and the chemical reaction it induces release large amounts of carbon dioxide, and so contribute to global warming. By the industry's own admission, cement-making accounts for some 5% of the world's emissions of greenhouse gases--twice the amount attributed to aviation.The European Union already restricts emissions from cement kilns, and other jurisdictions are likely to follow suit. The biggest cement firms have joined an outfit called the Cement Sustainability Initiative, which promises to realise voluntary emissions cuts--doubtless in the hope of heading off further regulation. But with demand for cement growing by around 5% annually, the industry's environmental headaches are only likely to grow. ...

  A takeover in Japan underscores how the country is slowly changingIN OTHER countries it would barely qualify as news. But the deal that took place in Japan on December 13th has caused a stir: the first successful hostile takeover, many are saying, of a company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The transaction itself is mundane, and whether it was really hostile, or really the first such example, is debatable. But it highlights the ways in which Japan's style of capitalism is changing--and how far, to Western eyes, it still has to go.The deal involved the takeover of Solid Group, a network of secondhand-car dealers listed on the less glamorous second tier of the exchange, by Ken Enterprise, an investment firm. It bought 114.4m shares, or 48.48% of Solid Group, from Lehman Brothers, an investment bank, for $27m. The bank had taken the shares as collateral when it provided a loan earlier this year to Solid Group's parent company, Solid Acoustics, which defaulted in July. ...

  Italy's cheaper alternative to champagne is growing in popularityITALY'S manufacturing clusters are well known: machine tools north of Milan, jewellery in Valenza Po, tiles in Sassuolo and many more. Less famous is the country's sparkling-winecluster, the official "prosecco district" established in 2003 around the towns of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, just north of Venice. Regional legislation recognising the cluster has brought public money to promote prosecco, a wine made mainly from the grape of the same name.Not that prosecco needs much help, judging by what has happened in recent years. Sales of the best prosecco, labelled Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC), have doubled in the past 15 years, to reach about 50m bottles in 2007. ...

  Peter Chernin, number two at News Corporation, holds the key to a smooth Murdoch family successionALL eyes in the media industry this week were turned on Rupert Murdoch's youngest son, James, who was appointed on December 7th as News Corporation's chairman and chief executive for Europe and Asia. At 34, James is now well on his way to the top job at the world's third-biggest media company. No one spared much of a thought for Peter Chernin, News Corporation's chief operating officer, who runs the firm from day to day--after all, he is a mere employee, not a Murdoch.Investors, however, know how important Mr Chernin is to News Corporation. They want him to stick around for several more years while James gains more experience. But insiders say that James's new role, together with other changes at News Corp, mean that Mr Chernin may not stay beyond June 2009, when his five-year contract ends. That in turn could make it harder to pull off the elder Mr Murdoch's plan for James to succeed him as chief executive. ...

  A renowned activist investor turns his attention to yet another food companyNELSON PELTZ is stepping up his campaign for more influence over the management of Britain's Cadbury Schweppes, the world's biggest confectionery-maker measured by sales. In mid-March the activist investor, who specialises in big food companies, revealed that he had a 3% stake, spurring Cadbury's management into disclosing its plan to demerge its American soft-drinks business. This week, in partnership with QIA, Qatar's state-owned investment fund, Mr Peltz's investment vehicle, Trian, increased its holding to 4.5%. Cadbury Schweppes, which makes gum, sweets, chocolate, iced tea and fizzy drinks, is just recovering from a series of disasters. Todd Stitzer, who became the firm's boss in 2003, had to preside over several profit warnings, an accounting scandal at the firm's Nigerian division, the botched launch of a computer system and two product recalls. All this happened on Mr Stitzer's watch, though it was not all necessarily his fault. "He was a bit like Gordon Brown," says Julian Lakin, an analyst at Mirabaud Securities, a stockbroker. ...

  Lululemon, a Canadian clothing firm, rides the yoga boomIF THERE is no seaweed in a T-shirt, does it still reduce stress and make your skin feel softer? That was the worry that threatened to distract North America's yoga practitioners from their routines last month. Shares in Lululemon Athletica, a Canadian firm that sells yoga clothing and equipment, fell after news reports claimed that tests had failed to find any trace of seaweed fibre in some of its garments, which were supposed to contain the stuff. Lululemon insisted that its own test results showed seaweed really was present, though it agreed (at the request of Canadian regulators) to withdraw unsubstantiated claims about its supposed therapeutic benefits.None of this appears to have affected the devotion of Lululemon's fanatical customers, of which there are many. Yoga Journal, a magazine, estimated in 2005 that about 17m Americans practise yoga, spending about $3 billion a year in the process--$500m of it on clothing. "This is one ofthe best growth stories in retail," says Paul Lejuez, an analyst at Credit Suisse. Lululemon, with sales of $66m in the most recent quarter, is by far the most visible brand. "If you're going to call anything a yoga pure-play, this is the one," says Mr Lejuez. ...