Welcome Tim Martin,
ODE has a new CEO, Tim Martin. Tim is from Chicago, Illinois. He brings 20 years of experience in business and a ton of positive thinking to ODE. I can speak from meetings with Tim that he’s excited about the future of ODE and ready to do what it takes to improve the website, the quality of the lessons, and customer service. The reason that Tim was brought on to the team (aside from his general excellence) was that the other owners of On Demand Training (ODE’s parent company) Ken Carroll, Steve Williams, and Brian McCloskey, wanted to take a step back and focus on other projects. They knew that ODE deserved the attention of someone with great business knowledge and personal character - thus they searched for and found Tim.
ODE’s definitely in good hands. Good luck Tim,
Kris
Greetings all,
Over the next month or so, Englishpod will publish fewer new lessons.
How many? ODE will publish just 2 lessons for the next 2 weeks (the same amount as this week) and then just one lesson/week for the 3 or 4 weeks after that. I know this sounds like very few lessons, but wait - there is a positive side. ODE currently has 107 lessons on the website - this is a chance for everyone to review the lessons and practice what you’ve learned. I know from previous experience it’s good to take breaks and re-energize whatever you’re learning.
Why? There are several reasons for the slowdown. On reason is the Holiday season. As you may know, people in many countries celebrate Christmas, and they take holidays to visit family and loved ones. All business in Western countries slows down a bit at Christmas (with the exception of retail because of Christmas gift shopping).
Another reason is that I am leaving the company to pursue other career options. ODE is going to find the right person to continue on with the podcasting, blogging, and other tasks I do, but it takes time. The good part is that they’ll be a new voice - variety in the voices you hear can really help build listening skills. Plus, I’m confident ODE will find someone with more business knowledge than myself.
In addition, everyone at ODE thinks this is a good moment to re-think the podcasts and see if there are some improvements we can make in them. Sometimes the staff here spend so much time and energy on production, and we don’t take a step back and look critically at the lessons. So this is a good opportunity to re-tool and improve the podcasts. It will also give our tech team a chance to grow and make improvements to the website.
It was great being a part of Englishpod and helping so many great students. I wish all the people behind ODE the best - I know they will do well, and of course, to the students, I hope every one of you can reach your goals and become confident speaking professional English.
Best Regards,
Kris Fedorak
If you’d like a test to see how your business English vocabulary is, read the article at this link.
Some of the language is quite difficult. The main point of the story is that a very rich man (Kerkorian) is going to sell a large amount of the shares he owns in General Motors. The reason why this is newsworthy is because Kerkorian is a billionaire (has more than 1,000 million dollars) and owns a fairly large amount of GM’s shares (currently 9.9%). This article uses language that is typical of news stories about shareholdings in major American companies. Let’s go over some of the key vocabulary.
stake (n.) - this has the same meaning as share; a percentage of the company. (Remember, stocks and shares are essentially the same, but a share of a company refers to the percentage owned, not the piece of paper we also refer to as a stock.)
His stake in the company rose to 15%.
500 shares were added to her stake in the company.
Solely owned (adjective) - when a person (or company) owns 100% of a company; they own all of the shares.
GM shares closed down.
GM shares closed up.
- these two sentences refer to the price of GM’s shares when the stock market closed. It compares the opening price, the price when the markets open, and the closing price.
speculate - to guess
We can only speculate why he’s selling his shares.
walk away from - to abandon (a plan), to cancel, to forget about
He walked away from a really good job offer because he decided to do volunteer work instead.
They walked away from the new product idea because of technical difficulties.
Great language in this article. There may be other words you don’t quite understand, but the ones I’ve highlighted should clear up the basic meaning of the story. Reading newspapers is extremely difficult, but for those of you who are advanced or upper intermediate learners, it can really add to your vocabulary.
Kris
Hey everyone,
Just wanted to share what lessons are coming up over the next couple of weeks. We’ve been doing a lot of office English over the past few weeks, but of course business English goes beyond the office.
Over the next 4 weeks or so we’ll have lessons on airlines, hotels, insurance and banks. They’ll be lots of great language, both for people who work in these fields and the rest of us, who are customers of these industries.
Enjoy, and as always, feel free to comment on our lessons or suggest some for us to produce.
Kris
Well, Vietnam is set to become the 150th member of the WTO and Russia will be joining soon as well. Time I guess to blog a little on the Business English surrounding this important topic.
WTO stands for World Trade Organization. The aim of the WTO is to reduce tariffs and other trade barriers in order to promote trade. It replaced the GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which had roughly the same function. The WTO is located in Geneva, Switzerland.
The world trading system has been slowly developed in trade negotiations between countries that are called ’rounds’. You’ll see a lot in the news about the Doha Round, launched in November 2001, under which international markets are supposed to be opened up to trade even more. Past rounds have focused on industrial goods, but the Doha round has opening up the markets for agricultural products as one of its main issues. As you may have heard, the negotiations have stalled and as of yet, the Doha round has produced more controversy than results. Developed and developing countries are at odds over many issues, but agricultural subsidies are the main issue.
Subsidies are extra payments or lower costs given by governments to producers to assist them. Many countries have subsidies for agricultural goods in order to encourage farmers to grow more. A country has to make enough food to feed its people - and most countries don’t feel as secure about importing food from other countries as they do about importing electrical goods or cars. I know that my country, Canada, gives large subsidies to farmers, and the result is that the farmers produce more and the price of wheat goes down. It’s great for consumers (buyers) like me, but bad for farmers from poor countries whose governments can’t afford to pay them the same subsidies. The issue is obviously more complicated than I’m making out here. I’m only introducing the topic to demonstrate some of the language and invite comments.
There was an interesting article on America’s trade deficit in the news today - here. Apparently, in 2006 the U.S. trade deficit will be 790 billion dollars.
What is a deficit? It means you are short of something or don’t have enough of something. A ‘trade deficit’ simply means a country imports more goods than it exports. The opposite, when a country exports more than it imports, is a ‘trade surplus’. So Americans import a LOT more than they export to other countries.
American news often has stories about the U.S. trade deficit, especially during the periods before elections (as we had recently). These news articles usually focus on why there is a deficit, not necessarily on what the results might be because of a deficit.
Let’s look at some examples of how to use this word:
a huge deficit
a massive deficit
a small deficit
run up a deficit (allow it to grow larger)
cut a deficit
reduce a deficit
tackle a deficit (deal with it, make it smaller and more manageable)
overcome a deficit
the deficit grew
the deficit rose
the deficit widened last month (got larger)
the deficit decreased
the deficit fell
the deficit narrowed
the deficit shrank
As you can see, a lot of times we speak about past or future deficits, so make sure you have the correct verb form.
Though it has nothing to do with Business English (though it is big business in North America), I’d just like to mention that today is Halloween.
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. There are thousands of websites with information about it: the history of Halloween, photos, etc. Too much to talk about here. If you’re interested, Google it.
Halloween is big business these days in Canada and the U.S.
Companies make big profits off of:
- candy - given out when children go around trick-or-treating
- costumes - for both kids and adults
For more information, follow the links above.
Happy Halloween everyone!
Hi Everyone,
EnglishPod is going to change names. We will now be known as Englishpod and our new website address will be www.ondemand-english.com.
Why the name change? Well, our parent company is On Demand Training, and we felt that the corporate brands should all share the On Demand label. The podcasts and online learning tools will still be made by the same people and our commitment to providing you with the best English study resource will only grow stronger.
Tell us what you think of the new name. The idea of “On Demand” is that the product is convenient to use and it’s personalized. You can listen to the MP3’s anywhere you want, you can request lessons, you can use the online resources wherever you have computer access (home, work, while traveling, etc.) It’s English learning, “on your terms.”
Hope to see you all at the new website soon. The old www.englishpod.com website will be turned into a redirect site (sending you to the new site). For now, everything looks the same, but we’ll be changing the names, the logos and some of the look and feel of the website. The old lessons will all be there and many new ones will follow.
See you there,
Blogs have already become part of the mainstream media. Now, corporations are finding uses for them, too.
Blogs are a great way for a company to share information and news about itself to employees, customers and investors. Blog posts can be made regularly form a record of the blogger’s thoughts and the company’s fortunes. Anyone can go to the website for free with no registration or subscribe to receive news updates via RSS. They are also a great way to get feedback (again, from employees, customers, and investors).
Johnathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, has been blogging for 2 years and is now asking that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) allow companies to release investor related information to the public via blogs on their website. He argues that given the fact that investors could be located worldwide, the internet is even more accessible than the typical press release or the Wall Street Journal. What this means is that instead of holding a teleconference or issuing a press release, a company could simply blog about news that investors need to know, which the SEC could still supervise and regulate. See Mr. Schwartz’s blog, and a newspaper article about it here.
Key language from this post:
mainstream media
-the media are things we use to get information or entertainment from, such as newspapers and TV; it is mainstream if most or many people use it or think of it as common
blog posts
-post here comes from its older use as a verb “to post a letter’, i.e. send something by mail or to “post a note or bill” which meant to put up a public notice; blog posts are when a person writes a new entry and puts it on their blog
the company’s fortunes
-whether the company does well or poorly; its luck
subscribe
-to become a member; to receive something regularly, as in a newspaper, magazine - recently internet sites for newspapers or blogs allow users to subscribe and receive new posts automatically using RSS
RSS
-(Really Simple Syndication) A distribution format that was developed by Netscape in 1999 and became very popular for sending and receiving updates to blogs and the latest news from websites
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
-the U.S. government’s agency that protects investors by making and enforcing rules for companies that offer shares on the stock markets
release information via blogs
-to use blogs to publish information; via often means ‘through’ , ‘using’ or ‘by this way’.
press release
-to give out information to ‘the press’, which usually means newspapers, TV, radio and their associated reporters
Looking through the business news at www.cnn.com this morning I found a great article on how Google can help or hurt businesses.
The article uses the example of a small business that does pretty well and has a good search ranking so customers can find it online. Then, to their shock, Google changes its calculations of web rankings (even a small change can have a great impact) and “poof”, the small business finds itself well down the list for its search terms. Just like that, people using the typical search terms can’t find this particular small business - they find other companies instead.
Knowing SEO (search engine optimization) is vital these days. You want your website to be #1 or at least on the first page when people search using words related to your business. According to the article, about 500,000 businesses rely on unpaid (natural) Google searches, while another 500,000 use paid search advertising with Google. That’s one million businesses from around the world.
More on SEO to come in future posts. For now, check out www.seochat.com.
Anyone out there have SEO tips?
