Reading the comments on Saul Hansel’s NYT piece, An Icon that Says They’re Watching You. The two knee-jerk responses to advertising appear in the first few: #3: “Make a great product and people will seek you out and buy it. The market research dollars should be for learning what people truly want – not what […]

Geithner thinks he’s busy now? Wait until a 4,000 mile high stack of twenties lands on his desk, awaiting his signature. The Fed’s decision to print up a trillion dollars of crisp new greenbacks just a few days after we assured China that their investments in US debt were sound is kind of funny. Slapstick, […]

Saul Hansell’s article in the NYT, Why Are iPhone Users Willing to Pay for Content?, tells the obvious part of the story: Apple has created an environment that makes buying digital goods easy and common. With an infrastructure that supports one-click purchases of songs and videos, it was easy to add applications in the same […]

I was reading Bill Tancer’s book Click last night. I generally hate this sort of book. So practical. But Tancer’s smart and had access to a ton of data, so whatever. At one point, he lists the top ten “how to” queries in the US for the four weeks ending 12/21/2007: 1. How to tie […]

My old friend Josh Reich finally launches out on his own with i2pi, a data consultancy. I’ve worked with Josh for some five years now and he has the most analytical firepower of anyone I’ve ever met. Plus he has some really out there geeky hobbies that never cease to amuse me. If you have […]

Listened to the Kevin Kelly econtalk podcast the other day. Eh. One thing he said that struck my fancy was from his Edge.org answer to “What Are You Optimistic About?” Moving back into the past has never been easier. Citizens in developing countries can merely walk back to their villages, where they can live with […]

I never understood Google buying dMarc, or the price they paid. $102 million up front, with an earnout estimated at more than another $1 billion. The company was a sort of automated rep firm for radio, with about 700 stations in their network and selling primarily remnant inventory for low prices. The idea was solid. […]

Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias pointed to an interview he did for EconTalk. I love Hanson’s stuff, so I downloaded the podcast and listened to it. It was great. The host kept mentioning other big names he had interviewed, so I went back and looked at the archives. It’s a freakin gold mine, even the […]

Fortune updates my graph of stock market cap to GDP (they use GNP, but the two are pretty similar.) (Fortune link via Mankiw.) Warren Buffet said “buy at 75%”, about where we are now. What I’d like to know is, why 75%? Looking at the graph, 75% isn’t a great place to invest, historically, except […]

Geithner announces salary caps on executives at companies receiving government money. This is fair and good and, in fact, not an unusual demand when putting money into a company, especially a troubled company. No investor wants to fund a company just to see the money flow back out to executives. No taxpayer should want that […]