Global Briefing

By Julie Rawe; Matthew Forney/Beijing; Richard Hornik

Unclutter Your Briefcase

On-the-go executives who need to recharge their umpteen mobile gadgets can start leaving all but one power cord at home. The iGo Juice ($119) can recharge most major-brand laptops by plugging into U.S. wall outlets (and foreign ones with a standard adapter), airplane armrests or car cigarette-lighter sockets. And for an extra $19, iGo's less than imaginatively named Peripheral Powering System can simultaneously charge most handheld devices and mobile phones. The Juice comes with a sleek vinyl techno-Dopp kit, so you can tote your slimmer, trimmer recharger in style. Warning: although this company's products can adapt to virtually any major-brand mobile device, you'd better check the compatibility charts on igo.com

TV EXPORTS A Chinese David Letterman?

All rise. The judge enters--she's 25, loquacious and the cutest jurist her show's producers could find. This Chinese Judge Judy is deciding if a Beijing man can keep a donkey in his apartment. This is what News Corp.--which entertains America with dwarfs pulling jumbo jets--is bringing to the Middle Kingdom. The company is reformatting hit shows from abroad and adding "rock-'n'-roll energy" to Chinese TV, says Jamie Davis, head of News Corp. in China. There's Wanted! In China to help catch murderers and Late Night Talk with a Letterman knock-off reading Top 10 lists. But censors have refused to clear a Friends-style show with allusions to premarital sex. Although News Corp. won the right to beam its Mandarin-language channel, Starry Sky, across the country to certain hotels and apartments, it is unclear whether Rupert Murdoch will be allowed to reach China's 95 million ordinary cable subscribers. The Communist Party will be the judge on that one. --By Matthew Forney/Beijing

UPDATE They Don't Sniff Wine, They Gulp

Move over, Gallo. The title of world's largest vintner will soon go to Constellation Brands, whose Canandaigua Wine subsidiary was featured on our cover in October. Constellation is swallowing Australia's largest vintner, BRL Hardy, to form a global giant that will boast $1.7 billion in annual wine sales. Based in Fairport, N.Y., Constellation already owns such mass-market wines as Almaden and Inglenook and was running a joint venture with BRL before deciding to buy it for $1.4 billion. "There is no Coca-Cola, Microsoft or Nestle of the winemaking world," says BRL managing director Stephen Millar, who will run the combined wine operations. "We certainly intend to be just that."

C+ New Grades for Governance

Given the rising demand for improved corporate governance and ethics, ratings agencies are rushing to tell who's naughty and nice. But individual investors won't be seeing frank assessments anytime soon. Of the Big Three ratings agencies, only Standard & Poor's offers governance scores--and only to the company being graded. So far, only one firm, Fannie Mae, has elected to publish its--surprise!--nice, high number (9.0 out of 10). Access to detailed ratings for S&P 500 firms on governancemetrics.com costs at least $18,000 a year--too steep for John Q. Public, but several institutional investment firms have ponied up. Management & Excellence, a start-up agency based in Malaga, Spain, is posting unsolicited grades on management-rating.com with the goal of eventually soliciting business from firms that want ethics audits. With M&E's ratings system, companies lose points if no information is available for a particular metric, like a corporate code of ethics.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Turning the Herd

Admit it: no matter how much you enjoyed the Ozzie Osbourne ad for Pepsi Twist during the Super Bowl, it didn't make you switch soft drinks. That wasn't always the case. Until about 20 years ago, savvy ads in mass media were powerful opinion shapers, but the proliferation of media outlets like cable networks and the Internet has blunted their impact. Edward Keller and Jonathan Berry, authors of The Influentials, think they have found a solution. Using proprietary data from their employer, research firm RoperASW, they argue that the trick is to identify the 1 American in 10 who, as the book's subtitle puts it, "...tells the other nine how to vote, where to eat and what to buy." Word-of-mouth buzz has always been a top goal of any marketing campaign, and we all know people whose opinions we value more than others'. But targeting that elusive 1 in 10 is a lot harder than describing why she's important. The authors note that Influentials share traits--they're involved, strong-minded and great networkers--and this book provides interesting examples of different types of opinion shapers. Still, anecdotes do not a target audience make, and Madison Avenue's conundrum remains: everyone knows that 90% of advertising is wasted--but no one knows which 90%. --By Richard Hornik

>>From Our Readers

I take offense at your article "Fill 'Er Up with Crisco, Please" [Jan. 27], which demonizes all home brewers of biodiesel [an alternative fuel derived from vegetable oil] owing to a small number of straight-vegetable-oil and biodiesel users in Wales who tried to evade their fuel taxes. The vast majority of biodiesel home brewers in Britain are honest about reporting their expected tax. This is less of an issue in the U.S. because of different guidelines and the nascent stage of biofuels as a whole. Home brewers play an important part in the promotion of biodiesel, as their passion is focused on sustainable fuels, not just on profit. This keeps us off the Mideast-oil addiction and thus out of a "Big Oil" war. JAMES SLAYDEN, NETWORK ENGINEER San Jose, Calif.