Business

• Collision course
  

  New European Union emission rules are bad news for Germany's carmakers

  IF 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. ...

• Concrete proposals needed
  

  The construction industry confronts its carbon footprint

  FANS 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. ...

• The accidental innovator
  

  Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger and Twitter, epitomises Silicon Valley's right brain

  AT 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. ...

• Fizzy or still?
  

  Italy's cheaper alternative to champagne is growing in popularity

  ITALY'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-wine cluster, 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. ...

• Hostility, of sorts
  

  A takeover in Japan underscores how the country is slowly changing

  IN 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. ...

• Not the heir, apparently
  

  Peter Chernin, number two at News Corporation, holds the key to a smooth Murdoch family succession

  ALL 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. ...

• Entrepreneurial push
  

  Is Bangalore another Silicon Valley in the making?

  HYPE knows no borders. So it was probably inevitable that Bangalore would be branded another Silicon Valley, soon to be populated by armies of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Reality is more sobering, but something is afoot. More venture capital (VC) is flowing into the country--including some from American VC firms active in India--and a growing share of it is being invested in innovative early-stage firms.

  Things are moving in the right direction, but this is hardly Silicon Valley. For one thing, the infrastructure for technology entrepreneurs is at "an early stage", says Surendra Jain of the Indian arm of Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley VC firm. The "term sheets" listing the financing conditions are the same, he says, but the courts may not interpret them in the same way. Similarly, professional networks and the collective knowledge of how things are done are still developing. This is why Helion Ventures, a local VC firm, has made a speciality of advising entrepreneurs by, say, helping them find a chief financial officer. ...

• Broken pottery
  

  A political spat with China puts German businesses on edge

  EIGHT life-size terracotta warriors, thought to be from Xian, China, went on display in Hamburg on November 25th, but are now suspected of being fakes. Museum officials are investigating the latest twist in Germany's fraught relations with China, which took a nosedive after Chancellor Angela Merkel received the Dalai Lama on September 23rd.

  The worries about China come as German businessmen are having a difficult time with Ms Merkel closer to home. She has attacked the excessive pay of top executives who put their companies at risk at the expense of other employees, though she stops short of proposing a legal ceiling. She has also threatened to impose a minimum wage on more industries where collective agreements are being side-stepped. German business confidence fell to a 15-year low in the latest poll carried out by ZEW, a research centre in Mannheim. ...

• Your call
  

  Passengers are being asked for their views on the in-flight use of phones

  LIKE many flights, the use of mobile phones on aircraft has been subject