Those: * Interested in the financial meltdown, * Who are fans of Nassim Nicolas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan), * Who enjoyed When Genius Failed, the story of the ironically named Long Term Capital Management, * Who enjoyed Against the Gods by Peter Bernstein, * Who are generally quants interested in finance, Should
Silicon Valley
In keeping with my predictions series, here are the results of a recently released survey by the National Venture Capital Association featuring predictions about venture capital in 2009. The survey includes responses from more than 400 venture capitalists and was taken between 11/24 and 12/12/08. Some takeaways:
See this Cnet article by Dan Farber entitled Print News is Fading, But the Content Lives On. Among other things, he presents the result of a recent Pew Research survey that showed the Internet passing newspapers in 2008 in response to the question: "where do you get most of
As they did last year, the FBI has again issued a code-breaking challenge. But this year, they say, the code is slightly more difficult. For assistance, they offer up a primer entitled Analysis of Criminal Codes and Ciphers.
Marketing
Thanks to a post by Darren Cunningham on LucidEra's blog I found this wonderful Dilbert cartoon which concludes that EVERYTHING IS A PLATFORM. I was happy to find this because tech marketers have so thoroughly over-used the word "platform" that I now rarely use it
Marketing
Continuing my recent rants about newspapers, please see this interesting story in the New Yorker by James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, entitled News You Can Lose. On the source of the problems: There’s no mystery as to the source of all the trouble: advertising revenue has
Marketing
Here's a fun software industry rendition of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas by Peter Cohan of marketing / demo consultancy The Second Derivative, entitled 'Twas the Night Before the Big Demo. Here's my favorite excerpt, from the middle of the poem: Enjoy.
IPO
See this article on Bloomberg, entitled Fewest US IPOs Since 1979 Mean Pent-Up Demand. Excerpt: More than 200 U.S. companies are planning to go public, according to the firm. Only two, Home Bancorp Inc. and Grand Canyon Education Inc., have done so this quarter. While I hate to
VC
I was reading Worth Magazine the other day and stumbled into a one-page interview with Gordon Getty, son of oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty. Perhaps I'm the last guy on the planet to hear this quote, but I thought it was too good not to share. Increasingly,
I'm in the UK this week, ostensibly for London Online, but have been so busy that I've yet to make it to the show. Digging through email this morning, I took a brief break, headed over to Facebook to check for personal messages, and was greeted
Check out Google Flu Trends, a site at Google.org, which uses Google flu-related searches as a predictor of flu activity, giving them what they estimate as a two-week advantage over the CDC's US Influenza Sentinel Provider Surveillance Network. The basic explanation of how it works
Every once in a while I sneak the odd book review into my blog, and this time the selection is Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Duber. This is not exactly a timely review; the book was published in
