New APC Classes at NYU Stern and Other MBA News Snippets

NYU Stern is offering working professionals the chance to refresh their business knowledge or gain quick insight into a specific area through its new non-degree Advanced Professional Certificate (APC) programs.

The programs will entail enrollees taking classes alongside Stern’s MBA students. To enroll, candidates must have at least two years’ professional experience and submit a GMAT or GRE score, or have previously completed an MBA. Three tracks will be available initially: finance, marketing and general business, with students allowed two years to complete them on a part-time basis.

“We believe our new offerings will appeal to many different types of working professionals,” commented Isser Gallogly, assistant dean of MBA admissions at the school (read our Q&A with Gallogly on the subject of MBA admissions here), in a press release. “For example, the finance track could quickly empower people who didn’t major in finance in college, but who now work in the industry, with a broader perspective that helps them excel in their function. Liberal arts majors can combine the fundamentals of marketing with the latest thinking in analytics and digital through the marketing track. Entrepreneurs without a business degree can customize the handful of business courses they want to take in the general business track. Others with an MBA may want to delve into a new area of interest.”

Cambridge Judge research center publishes benchmarking report on alternative finance

The newly opened Centre for Alternative Finance at Cambridge Judge Business School has published a study of alternative finance across Europe in collaboration with EY (read our Q&A with Kristina Liphardt, EY’s Americas campus recruiting leader for MBA recruiting here). The European Alternative Financing Benchmarking Report looks at funding channels such as crowdfunding and peer-to-peer business lending, covering a total of 255 leading platforms over Europe – an estimated 85-90% of Europe’s online alternative financing market.

Overall, the report finds that online alternative finance activity grew from €1.21 billion in 2013 to €2.96 billion in 2014 (US$1.37 billion to US$3.35 billion). It is on track, the report states, to grow beyond €7 billion (US$7.92 billion), and is becoming markedly less ‘alternative’, with institutional investors beginning to come into the picture. The estimated number of startups being funded through these channels has been growing at an estimated average of 133% over the past three years, rising to about 5,801 in 2014.

Texas McCombs dean to take directorship of Hoover Institution at Stanford

Tom W Gilligan, dean of the McCombs Schools of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, is to take over the directorship of Stanford’s Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace, vacated by John Raisian after 25 years.

The institution is dedicated to politics, economics and international affairs. Gilligan was a fellow there in 1989-90, as well as teaching as a visiting business economics professor at Stanford GSB, to which he returned in 1994. He has served as dean of McCombs since 2008.

"Tom Gilligan is the ideal leader to build upon John Raisian's impressive legacy,” reflected Tom Tierney, chair of the Hoover Board of Overseers. “His broad capabilities will help capture the Hoover Institution's extraordinary future potential to develop and cultivate policy ideas defining a free society."

eBay announces large-scale open-source analytics platform

In another step forward in the world of big data, e-commerce titan eBay has launched a new real-time analytics platform and stream process framework. Pulsar, as it is known, provides insights nearly instantaneously and can process a million events per second.

eBay has open-sourced the code, and it can be easily integrated with metrics stores like Cassandra and Druid. Pulsar has been created in response to a need to move on from batch-orientated platforms in order to provide quicker insight in areas pertaining to personalization, fraud and bot detection and business activing monitoring.