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Is Apple going on an overseas talent shopping spree?

There is much the corporate world can learn from this 25-year-old diva, whose talent for building a brand might even surpass her formidable performing chops.

Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day. Starbucks Stores In India By August . Starbucks will open coffee shops in India by August, serving locally sourced coffee through a partnership with Tata Coffee

MasterCard has revealed it's finally pushing the EMV system (aka chip-and-PIN) across its U.S. credit card infrastructure. Developed well over 15 years ago, the technology is ubiquitous in Europe to the extent some card readers have issues with visiting American tourists' old-fashioned plastic.

Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day.

If Google's going to keep tying all their services together, you may as well know how that will work, and how you can benefit from it. In just over a month, Google will change its privacy policies for all its products. Actually, Google is combining 70 different policies into a single set of rules, defining how the company treats all the personal information you provide

Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day. Jon Rubinstein Leaves HP . Rubinstein , formerly of Apple and then lead at Palm during its efforts to rival the iPhone, is leaving HP

"We're rapidly moving to a world beyond plastic," says Ed McLaughlin. "In many ways, plastic is just convenient packaging." McLaughlin heads up emerging payments at MasterCard, and he's tasked with thinking big on the future of transaction technology. His group has dreamed up loads of creative ways to accept payments, from hacking an Xbox Kinect to pay-by-hand motion, to implanting NFC tech in ultrabooks , to scanning irises to prevent credit card fraud.

Google's new Public Alerts are a continuation of the role Google took in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011. However, instead of simply providing ad-hoc portals to collated and relevant data post-disaster, Google's Crisis Response Team, a new release says , will work to "surface emergency information through the online tools you use every day, when that information is relevant and useful." Meaning if there's a hurricane headed your way, Google will make sure you know it somehow. But how much of this is about altruism?

Your genetic tolerance for risk, coupled with new productivity gains through smart technology, can help your company revolutionize its industry. Mankind's most innovative , large-scale achievements: building the Pyramids of Egypt and the Panama Canal—even putting a man on the moon—were each accomplished with roughly the same number of people: 100,000. Luis von Ahn, the Carnegie Mellon professor who researched these epic projects, makes the observation that 100,000 may well be the practical limit on the number people it was possible to organize, using pre-Internet technology.

Apple's

I ask one question to determine whether a new company has a future. The 15-second answer tells me all I need to know When entrepreneurs ask us to evaluate business ideas, we always respond first with the same question: “What problem will your new venture solve?” Their one-or two-sentence answers---10 or 15 seconds at the most---are often enough to predict the future. Too frequently, entrepreneurs quickly get sidetracked talking about things like the amazing technology they hope to use, the fantastic team members they’ll be working with, or the resources they hope to leverage

Today Apple has an earnings call for its first quarter results for the fiscal year. They'll cover the all-important holiday season sales window, and could be seen as the first real moment when new CEO Tim Cook expresses his leadership of the company that was Steve Jobs's baby until recently.

In our last India edition of The Great Tech War of 2012 , we noted how Facebook was emerging as a clear winner. Since then, things have gotten more competitive.

By the time Norm's new hotel opens, it will have been booked for the next three years, and therein lies an important lesson for any entrepreneur. The news from Tioga, North Dakota, is that Black Gold Suites—the new hotel I'm building there (see "Black Gold for You and Me," September 2011)—will open on March 1. But don't bother trying to get a reservation: By then, we'll have been booked up for the next three years