Datanomics

Corporations like Google and Cisco and spending a increased amount of their cash reserves on start-ups in the US and abroad.  Moreoever, in contrast to the corporate VC activity of the late 1990s, they are taking a longer-term view: 

Intel has restructured its fund to emphasize financial returns and is investing in follow-up rounds in its portfolio companies—something it didn’t do before. “There’s no strategic value unless each individual investment is successful,” says Intel Capital President Arvind Sodhani. “A bankrupt company is not very strategically valuable to Intel—or to anybody for that matter.”

Read the rest.

Suppose you have a string variable with a finite number of values (e.g. US states, industry, etc).  The encode command plus the generate command will create a new variable that assigns unique ids to each string value: 

encode your_string_variable, gen(new_string_as_int) 

The labels in the edit/browse view will look like strings, so make sure you use ‘nolabel’ on any export or tab commands.