This morning I was rereading Merton and Bodie’s “A Conceptual Framework for Analyzing the Financial Environment” in The Global Financial System: a Functional Perspective, published in 1995 but still immensely interesting*. This passage, though, ended the paper: In the traditional bank arrangement, there is a mismatch between the liquidity of the deposits issued by the […]
If the ad exchanges aren’t exchanges, what are they?
I should note that I don’t claim to have had an original thought in my post yesterday on why ad exchanges are not like financial markets/exchanges*. In addition to Huayin Wang‘s insight in the comments, @jonathanmendez points me to a Cogblog post touching on this, and Jordan Mitchell of Rubicon mentions his own post from […]
The limits of the exchange analogy in the ad marketplace
huayin commented on Open source the ad exchange just now on an issue that has been top of my mind for a while. He says We need to be cautious of the limitation of any analogy… In my 2c, Ad Exchange marketplace is an order of magnitude more complex than NYSE! The current ad buying/selling […]
Apple acquires Quattro
A couple of months ago I said Apple had to acquire some advertising DNA. Now they are, by buying Quattro Wireless. I’m not sure why Google, Apple and Microsoft all need to compete in all of each others’ lines of business. It seems to me that Apple’s incipient stranglehold on the mobile internet put Google […]
Open Source the Ad Exchange
My last post, long and long-winded and written when you should all have been out celebrating, sent more traffic my way than any other post in this sleepy blog’s history. I think the prospect of a new year and (in a sense) a new decade, makes us all a bit introspective and open to thinking […]
Musing on luck & Thank You
I was visiting a venture capitalist friend of mine a few months ago, talking about what we thought the future held and what kinds of companies intrigued us. He made a comment regarding a company I liked and he didn’t. He said “I only invest in companies I know will be successful.” On further questioning […]
Pinch and Flurry Merging
Pinch Media and Flurry, the two best providers of analysis services to mobile phone app developers, are merging. This is a huge step in enabling the better monetization of these apps, and I think Pinch/Flurry will be a key enabler in the growth of this market. A year and a half ago I sat on […]
Information and markets, 3
An anecdote. A few years ago a private equity firm asked me to help them look at some lead-gen companies. One of the target companies had a network of many thousands of small lead buyers and were known to produce high-quality leads. They had worked years to build this reputation. They got good prices for […]
Information and markets, 2
Those most familiar with the cattle trade agree that there often exist wide differences between the actual selling price of cattle in the market and the previous estimate by the feeders sending them forward as to the prices they should bring. The small feeder, who seldom follows his cattle to market, has a poor chance […]
Information and markets, 1
There are many markets in which buyers use some market statistic to judge the quality of prospective purchases. In this case there is incentive for sellers to market poor quality merchandise, since the returns for good quality accrue mainly to the entire group whose statistic is affected rather than to the individual seller. As a […]