"All-New" BUSINESS 2.0 jargon

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

"He can breathe life into what might otherwise be the world's most boring subject."
--PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN author Simon Winchester, profiled in BUSINESS 2.0, Aug/Sept. 2001, pg. 210.

   BUSINESS 2.0 for August/September 2001 now incorporates eCOMPANY.  These jargon-filled, acronym-heavy magazines make me ill, but I just read the NEW YORK POST.
   Gareth Branwyn or Paul McFedries could be employed here.

Pg. 36, col. 1:  In the lexicon of finance, few terms are simultaneously as crude and as accurate as "cram down."  Get used to it.  The phrase is an essential part of the vocabulary of misery and desperation in venture capital today.  Briefly, it describes what happens when a company accepts painful financing terms to ensure getting funding at all.  The new investors--sometimes late-stage venture capitalists, sometimes aggressive mutual funds--essentially take control of the company, "cramming down" the interests of earlier investors.

Pg. 40, col. 2:  Everyone knows what a CEO is.  Most people know what a CFO is.  But a CRO?  When Metricam, maker of the wireless Ricochet modem, announced in early July that it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protections, the company said it was appointing Kevin Dowd, a turnaround specialist, to the position of chief restructuring officer.

Pg. 74, col. 2:  Jeff Skilling, Enron's CEO, points specifically to what he calls "interaction costs," or the expense of finding, contracting with, an communicating with outside suppliers and partners.

Pg. 81, col. 1:  They were _opportuneurs_--opportunists lured by a freak bubble in the capital markets, dressed up in the language and casual pants of entrepreneurs.

Pg. 90, col. 3 (One of three "lingo" boxes in this story.  The others were for "XML" and "Distributed Computing"): _E-wallet:_  A convenient method of paying for things online through either a credit card of a link to a billing service.

Pg. 98, col. 1:  Lonial and his colleagues think they can improve those chances with what they are calling "tailored therapy"--treatments customized for individual patients based on the specific genetic characteristics of their cancer.

Pg. 98, col. 2:  ...mostly obscure companies that use words like "genomics," "bioinformatics," and "proteomics" to describe what they do.  This industry is so new it hasn't settled on a single name yet.

Pg. 123, col. 1:  Winebaum called his brand of business "serial entrepreneuring."

Pg. 153, col. 1:  ...carbon nano-tubes that could shrink computers to the realm of "smart dust"...

Pg. 173:  Will new "nanomuscles" make electric motors passe?

Pg. 176, col. 1:  ...an exotic ceramic material that has the rare property of _"high-temperature" superconductivity_ (HTS), which enables the cables to carry electricity with unmatched efficiency...

Pg. 185, col. 1:  But another imaging chip called CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) is on the verge of a major breakthrough.

Pg. 196, col. 3:  ...Nortel and Cisco--dubbed the "plumbers" of the Internet buildout...

Pg. 198, col. 3:  The company's days sales outstanding (DSO)--a measure of how long a firm takes to collect its bills--had jumped to 16 percent.

Pg. 206, col. 3:  The best laptops use thin-film transistor (TFT) active-matrix screens.

Pg. 206, col. 3:  Some portables use touchpads for moving the cursor, while others use joystick nubbins embedded next to the keyboard's G key (which explains why they're often crassly referred to as "G-spots.").