August 2010
15 posts
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On The Future of Digital Advertising
I just read an article in the NY Times on the “latest breakthrough” in advertising: personalized retargeting. Essentially when you visit an online store and peruse their products, but navigate away without actually purchasing anything, you will be targeted. For a set period of time following that incident you will be hit with targeted ads on those products you had viewed in hopes that...
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The Consequences of HP's Failure To Innovate →
From Steve Cheney:
HP’s Vanishing R&D Budget and The Mark Hurd Effect
This classic “Innovator’s dilemma” definitely applies to HP. But something else has hamstrung its ability to innovate in high-end storage, a market HP has been a leader in for many years.
And it’s correlated to former CEO Mark Hurd’s recent firing. Word on the street is Hurd wasn’t let go for his affair or even for his...
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How Account Deletion Should Be Handled
Earlier today I deleted my Dopplr account. The sad truth is that I never found the need for such a service. I’m not one to leave inactive accounts rotting in a perpetual cyberspace limbo, so I deleted my account.
Upon account deletion I promptly received the following email:
This is exactly how account deletion should be handled.
Promptly delete my account when I ask.
Send me a...
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Facebook: Your Status Is Too Long
Why won’t facebook allow its users to post extended status messages onto their streams? Earlier today I wanted to post a joke as a status update, but sadly I was denied. Apparently I had exceeded a 420 character limit.
Why can’t I post something a bit longer? I don’t want to write a Note as this update is more of an “in the moment” sort of thing, and we all know...
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Apple's Attention To Detail →
From Floodlite:
In July 2002, Appled filed a patent for a “Breathing Status LED Indicator” (No. US 6,658,577 B2). They described it as a “blinking effect of the sleep-mode indicator in accordance with the present invention mimics the rhythm of breathing which is psychologically appealing.”
The average respiratory rate for adults is 12-20 breaths per minute, which is the rate that the...
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Blackberry OS 6 Can't Save RIM, But Android Could →
From Business Insider:
No one who buys BlackBerry products actually cares about the BlackBerry OS.
RIM’s greatest assets are its email service (on BlackBerry phones and back-end server setup), BlackBerry Messenger, and the BlackBerry brand. These could all be moved over to Android, and none of them relies on the BlackBerry OS.
RIM’s mobile app platform is garbage compared to...
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Is This The Look of A Stock That Is About To Be...
Is this the look of a stock that is about to be delisted from the NYSE? The stock price of American Apparel (AMEX: APP) has fallen in the last couple years from a high of $15 to a mere 75 cents. Oh, and let’s not discount the fact that the company is a cool $120 million in debt.
From Formzine:
American Apparel has traditionally been the shirt of choice when making an attempt to avoid...
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You Can Block Any Facebook User Except Mark... →
Facebook is getting way too big and culturally important for things like this to continue. In 2005 it was cool for Zuckerberg to have a business card that said “I’m CEO…Bitch.” And we can forgive early Facebook engineers from perusing confidential user data in their leisure time. But it’s time for this company to go through puberty and start acting more like a teenager than a fifth grader. If...
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Unemployment Index As Per Google Searches →
The Google Unemployment Index tracks queries related to “unemployment, social, social security, unemployment benefits” and so forth. The index is set to 1.0 on January 1, 2004 and is calculated and displayed as a 7-day moving average.
Yikes! Judging from the look of it, unemployment is on everyone’s mind these days. I truly believe that job creation will be the key to a...
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On The Barnes & Noble Sale: →
The company says it is selling because shares are cheap. But in my experience, most companies sell when they believe their shares are expensive.
Wise words from James Stewart, a columnist for SmartMoney.
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Personal Bankruptcy Filing Up 9% In Q2 →
Bankruptcy filings rose to their highest quarterly level in five years in 2010 Q2, underscoring the decline in the American economy heading into summer.
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What Last Week's CPI Is Really Telling Us... →
In his latest daily note, David Rosenberg of Gluskin-Sheff offers up a series of charts based on last week’s CPI about who’s inflating, and who’s deflating.
Not surprisingly, the cost of medical care is still impervious to any deflation. Everything else? Well, things look a lot worse.