January 2008
78 posts
Amazon Strengthens Its Digital Hand With $300... →
Amazon is betting big on digital media. This morning it announced the $300 million acquisition of Audible (a 7 percent premium to Audible’s $280 million market cap at the time of this writing). Audible is the leading provider of audio books in digital form, with a library of 80,000 titles. As Amazon begins to generate a greater share of its revenues from digital media, owning a digital publisher...
Le “Bookmarking” ultra simple avec Instapaper →
Instapaper est un nouveau service qui propose une fonctionnalité de mise en favori extrêmement simple. Si vous découvrez un site qui vous intéresse mais que vous n’avez pas le temps de le sauvegarder, il vous suffit de cliquer sur le boouton Instapaper de votre navigateur, puis de passer plus tard sur le site de Instapaper pour les retrouver. Imaginez un Del.icio.us débarrassè de toutes les...
World’s fastest author (first of 2 parts) →
Philip M Parker is the world’s fastest book author, and given that he has been at it only for about five years and already has more than 85,000 books to his name, he is also probably the most prolific.
Parker is also the most wide-ranging of authors - the phrase “shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings” is not the half a per cent of it. Nor are the classic subjects foreign to him.
...
The Earnings/S&P 500 Connection →
What is the relationship between corporate earnings and stock market performance? The naive view says that higher earnings — or at least the anticipation thereof — leads to a higher market. But is it so? Well, let’s just that it’s complicated. I’ll post some more slices of the data later, having spent some Excel airplane time today looking at S&P 500 earnings and...
MacBook Air Now Shipping →
Tumblr Growing: 180K Users, 720K Daily Pageviews →
Tumblr founder David Karp has gotten plenty of love. Now he wants to grow his microblogging business, and wants to hit a million users by the end of the year. So how’s he doing? David sent us some stats on his company’s growth since November: Tumblr has 180,000 registered users, a 59% increase since the beginning of November. At that rate, he’s adding about 17,000 users per...
Clinton, McCain, Obama and Romney only serious... →
RIAA →
[Cartoon inspired by this article.]
A picture is worth ... well, you know →
Much love to dear reader Brinke who sent in this photo and swears it’s genuine, not PhotoShopped.
It worked! →
Jérôme Kerviel confessed that he gambled in the markets because he wanted to be a star… Source: New York Times.
Theory of Tipping Point disputed. →
How to Get Elected President →
I wouldn’t want to be president. I worry enough about being assassinated for what I write on this blog. There’s no point in making it worse. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking about how I would run my campaign. If I ran for president, I’d have to get past the country’s distaste for atheists. That’s a big problem. I would handle it by manipulating the media with a sound bite so catchy the...
Introducing new search views →
Posted by Andrew Hogue, Uber Tech Lead Introducing experimental views for search results There have been a lot of recent improvements to web search, but the appearance of results themselves has been pretty constant — 10 or so web pages in a vertical list. Frequently this is exactly the right format, but for some searches you need more options and more control. That’s why we’ve...
Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge →
More information about this book at Amazon
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the president of the National Library of France, is French. And it must be noted that the French are, well, different when it comes to culture and language. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jeanneney has written a book about Google’s potential to misrepresent, or even damage, the world’s cultural heritage. Jeanneney argues...
Free (legal) P2P Music Downloads? Told You So. →
I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but in case you haven’t heard: The era of paid music downloads is coming to an end (despite the fact that online sales are growing).
Qtrax, which has signed all four major labels (EMI, SonyBMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group), launched yesterday with 25 million songs (compared to around 3 m for Amazon and 6 m for iTunes)
...
Amazon.com will serve DRM-free music to the world... →
Insiders at SocGen Call Kerviel Cover-Up? →
Granted, the following claim is from an anonymous post on a public site, so it’s a little like some masked stranger shouting it at a busy street corner, but the allegation is at least worth a ponder on the SocGen rogue trader story: I work at SocGen. I’ve been there for the last 10 years. I can tell you, even at the higher levels of management no one believes the official story,...
Great moments in journalism, Risk Magazine edition →
Risk Magazine — the finance industry magazine focused on risk management — presented, this very month, its Equity Derivatives House of the Year award for 2008 to… ta daa… Societe Generale. (The Societe Generale rogue trader did his $73 billion of dirty deeds with — you guessed it — equity derivatives.) This is by far the best corporate award since Fortune...
If I'm ever found unconscious and not... →
Thank you!
[Link: Guess who.]
So, THAT's Why Meg Whitman Has Been AWOL at... →
She was getting ready to run for governor of California. LA Times: Whitman has talked with top Republicans about the possibility of a run
for California governor in 2010, according to three operatives who have
had discussions with her. Whitman is said to be asking detailed
questions about the logistics of a run and the effect she could have as
governor, according to the sources, who spoke on...
Suck Less at Photoshop, Redux [How To] →
Last week we posted three Photoshop tutorials from funny guy screencaster Donnie Hoyle, and today we’ve got a new one that covers paths and masks. Even if you don’t use Photoshop, these are worth watching for the (dark) comedic effect, but perhaps not at work while the boss is looking over your shoulder.
You Suck at Photoshop #4 [My Damn Channel]
Scientists Disprove Evolution →
That got your attention, didn’t it? Scientists haven’t disproved evolution. But I found it interesting that some cosmologists are putting a lot of effort into doing just that, albeit indirectly. To be fair, in this context, the cosmologists can’t prove a negative. They can’t demonstrate that evolution didn’t happen. They can only show that evolution is infinitely unlikely compared to an...
Hulu: Open Launch in March →
Hulu’s chief technology officer Eric Feng sits down with TechCrunch’s Mark Hendrickson. The most interesting bits: The site won’t open to the public any time soon — Feng is eyeing a launch in late March.
Hulu is more concerned that OpenHulu is using Hulu’s name than the fact that it’s posting all of Hulu’s videos and running its own ads next to them....
The economics (and biology) of free ice cream →
From a fascinating blog post, cheekily quoted here in its entirety:
When McDonald’s introduced ice cream to its franchises operating in Indonesia, it faced a problem: many people had lactose problems and would not buy the product because it made them sick.
So what did they do? They gave ice cream cones away for free.
You’d be surprised at what people will consume when its free,...
MapReduce Explained →
Mark Chu-Carroll is a Google software engineer, and in a personal blog post this week explained the concept of one of Google’s programming models: MapReduce, which splits a task onto many computers on Google’s server farm (server farm, or single super computer, depending on how you look at it) to be quickly crunched. «What is MapReduce? What does it do? Suppose you’re at work, and you need...
Death by Media →
In 1997 The Dilbert Future was published. One of my predictions was that the media would start killing celebrities just to generate new sensational headlines. I based this prediction on three inescapable truths: 1. The media can influence people’s actions 2. Death is the most interesting form of news 3. The news business is a capitalist enterprise Therefore, it makes sense that the media would...
Virgin Galactic Unveils Design For SpaceShipTwo →
This morning, Richard Branson’s spaceship startup Virgin Galactic unveiled the second design of its suborbital vehicles, SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two. I am blogging this from the press conference at the Museum of Natural History in New York City.
SpaceShipTwo is what the passengers will actually ride in, and White Knight Two is the launch vehicle that carries it to a high altitude before...
What the Hell Happened With Apple (AAPL)? →
Why did Apple’s stock plummet after the company ostensibly “beat the street”? Two reasons: The company missed the Street’s real expectations (a.k.a., whisper numbers)
The company’s outlook was weak.
Whisper Numbers The concept of “whisper numbers” frustrates the hell out of people who don’t work in the investment industry, but they’re an...
Dow opens at 3% down after Fed makes .75% interest... →
Ebay’s Meg Whitman to Step Down After a Decade as... →
It is not just Yahoo that is going through some rough times. After a decade at the helm, eBay CEO Meg Whitman is preparing to retire, reports the WSJ (subscr. req.). John Donahue, the president of eBay Marketplace, who was trotted out on a press tour about a month ago, is said to be the front-runner to be the next CEO.
During most of Whitman’s tenure, eBay seemed unstoppable. But the network...
Curious →
Nic created the video below—the subtitles and edits are his. The bad cold is mine. I hope you like it (the video, not the cold).
How much for digital? →
The movie studios are starting to get excited about renting movies digitally (via Apple and others). The pricing seems to be modeled on Blockbuster (+). Figure $3 a rental, another buck or so for HD. That seems ‘fair’, because it’s in the same range as we’re used to. But wait. Blockbuster buys DVDs for $15 or $20 (probably a lot less in volume, but I have no clue what the...
The Data So Far →
“In the same fashion, if you assess the attractiveness of a trade based on...”
– Interview with a hedge fund manager
A shortage of digital coaches →
Here are three things that are true: 1. Digital technology, especially computers and cell phones, can dramatically increase productivity. 2. More and more users of digital technology are small firms or individuals. 3. The vast majority of users of digital technology are totally lame in getting the most out of the investment of their time and money. “Oh, I didn’t know I could do...
The List: Crunchies 2007 Winners →
The Man at the Summit →
The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos, seems to have been around forever, although it started only in 1971. But the founder and leader of the forum, Klaus Schwab, who turns 67 in March, won’t be around forever and there have been questions about succession. While a life-long jogger and a physical-fitness addict, Schwab is a cancer survivor....
Deal Of the Day: CNN Pays $750,000 For Web Address →
CNN just made self-styled “Domain King” Rick Schwartz a happy man. The network paid $750,000 to acquire urls ireport.com and i-report.com from Schwartz, who told SAI he paid “$70 or $100” to register the domains back in 1997. We are in the wrong business! The deal was negotiated last year but closed in the last few days. Domain Name Journal said had it gotten done last...
Mainstream Business News Site Gets $30-$80 Video... →
A major mainstream-media brand business-news site is getting $30 video CPMs (pre-rolls, sometimes up to $80), an insider tells us. This is why the site is adding as much video as it can. We remain skeptical that people really want to watch most business video, but at that price, who cares. See Also: Online Video Ads Now a $1.3 Billion Business!
Yahoo! accounts become valid OpenIDs →
Yahoo! is jumping on the OpenID wagon and is making it possible to use your Yahoo! account as a valid OpenID. That’s another quarter of a billion OpenIDs out there! Put that together with the fact that AOL made their AIM logins work as OpenIDs as well and most everyone in the US at least will already have an OpenID. At 37signals, we love OpenID. We support it in Basecamp, Highrise, and Backpack...
Thank you, and much love →
Dear Apple Faithful, This letter is intended for the thousands of you who are here at the Macworld conference and to the millions who are here with us in spirit. From all of us at Apple, I want to say: You’re welcome. And, thank you. Thank you for sharing our excitement about our revolutionary new game-changing products that have already, in just 24 hours, permanently altered the landscape...
Ultradark Material Is Thirty Times Blacker Than... →
Scientists have created a new material that absorbs more light than any other substance on Earth, giving it a reflectivity value of 0.045 percent. It’s also 30 times darker than the standard we currently use to measure what counts as “black.” It’s practically like having a black hole in a fabric, which should lead to some extremely cool t-shirts. [Reuters]