Asset management

Asset management, broadly defined, refers to any system that monitors and maintains things of value to an entity or group. It may apply to both tangible assets such as buildings and to intangible assets such as human capital, intellectual property, and goodwill and financial assets. Asset management is a systematic process of deploying, operating, maintaining, upgrading, and disposing of assets cost-effectively.

The term is most commonly used in the financial world to describe people and companies that manage investments on behalf of others. These include, for example, investment managers that manage the assets of a pension fund.

Alternative views of asset management in the engineering environment are: the practice of managing assets to achieve the greatest return (particularly useful for productive assets such as plant and equipment), and the process of monitoring and maintaining facilities systems, with the objective of providing the best possible service to users (appropriate for public infrastructure assets).

Management

Management in businesses and organizations is the function that coordinates the efforts of people to accomplish goals and objectives by using available resources efficiently and effectively.

Management includes planning, organizing, staffing, leading or directing, and controlling an organization to accomplish the goal or target. Resourcing encompasses the deployment and manipulation of human resources, financial resources, technological resources, and natural resources. Management is also an academic discipline, a social science whose objective is to study social organization.

Etymology

The English verb "manage" comes from the Italian maneggiare (to handle, especially tools), which derives from the two Latin words manus (hand) and agere (to act).

The French word for housekeeping, ménagerie, derived from ménager ("to keep house"; compare ménage for "household"), also encompasses taking care of domestic animals. The French word mesnagement (or ménagement) influenced the semantic development of the English word management in the 17th and 18th centuries.

GAM (company)

GAM (SIX: GAM) is an independent, pure play asset management group.

The Group sells to a wide range of client segments such as institutions, wholesale intermediaries, financial advisers, and private investors through two brands — Julius Baer Funds and GAM. The Group’s investment management business is complemented by a private labelling unit which provides outsourcing for third-party asset managers.

Headquartered in Zurich, GAM has been independently listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange since October 2009, following the separation of the former Julius Baer Group Julius Baer, and is a component of the Swiss Market Index Mid (SMIM) SIX Swiss Exchange with the symbol “GAM”. The Group has assets under management of CHF 124.2 billion (as at 30 June 2015) and employs over 1,000 staff with offices in eleven countries.

History

GAM was founded in 1983 by Gilbert de Botton, who is considered the pioneer of the "open architecture" model. In 1999, it was acquired by UBS. It remained under the UBS umbrella until Julius Baer acquired GAM and three other private banks from UBS in 2005. GAM acquired Augustus Asset Managers in 2009, and later in the year separated from Julius Baer to form an independent, pure-play asset manager. The spinoff was completed by listing GAM as a separate company in the Swiss SIX exchange.

Adidas Questra

Questra was the name given to a family of footballs originally produced by Adidas for major international events in the mid-1990s. The name was derived from an ancient word meaning "the quest for the stars."

History

The first ball of the family was simply named the Questra and was originally designed to be the official match ball of the 1994 FIFA World Cup in the United States. Following the convention of the addition of decorations to the established Adidas Tango style since the Azteca and the Etrusco Unico, this one featured space-themed decorations, not only due to its name, but that 1994 marked the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, which is considered to be one of the most important moments in the history of the host country.

Due to the popularity of that ball, there were two new editions of the Questra released in 1996. One of them was named the "Questra Europa" and was intended to be the official match ball of UEFA Euro 1996 in England, while the other one was bearing the name "Questra Olympia" and was the official match ball of the football tournament at the 1996 Summer Olympics. Both of these balls reported colours.

Wii Menu

The Wii Menu (known internally as the System Menu) is the graphical shell of the Wii game console, as part of the Wii system software. It has four pages, each with a 4:3 grid, and each displaying the current time and date. Available applications, known as "channels", are displayed and can be navigated using the pointer capability of the Wii Remote. The grid is customizable; users can move channels (except for the Disc Channel) amongst the menu's 47 customizable slots by pressing and holding the A and B button while hovering over the channel the user wants to move. By pressing the plus and minus buttons on the Wii Remote users can scroll across accessing empty slots.

Pre-loaded channels

Homebrew Channel

The Homebrew Channel, commonly abbreviated as HBC, is a freeware homebrew application loader that was developed to provide a way of easily running unofficial software on the Wii console. Once installed, it appears as a standard Wii Channel on the Wii Menu. When launched, it displays a list of applications found on an SD card or a USB drive. The user then can control and select an application to launch by using a Wii Remote or the GameCube controller. It also accepts application uploads via a USB Gecko or TCP/IP (over Wi-Fi or Ethernet), which allows for quick application testing during development. When first launched from the Wii Menu, the Homebrew Channel will check for updates to itself and automatically download them if the user chooses to do so.