Jeff Nolan's take on innovation, entrepreneurship, tech and stuff that interests me
How 10 classic toys were invented… I had no idea that Lincoln Logs were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son. Cheap gas from coal… Wired calls this “bad news”. Can venture capital come in from the cold? 15 tools for gmail addicts. Bad news week for newspapers. The ultimate guide for everything Twitter. Wikia giving [...]
As you might suspect, my confidence that the government is going to go into GM and fix everything that needs fixing is pretty low. The problems that GM (and Chrysler and Ford) have been long in the making and represent intractable conflicts of the kind that government is a poor arbitrator of, between labor and [...]
The notion that Twitter is just content to be manufactured to support a brand, in this case a celebrity, is pretty damn offensive. It shines an unflattering light on the nature of celebrity, that of glossy veneer over a porous substrate. I gotta go with Shaq on this one… “It’s 140 characters. It’s so few [...]
Harvard economist blames Twitter for down economy. The Seinorage Curse, U.S. exposure to number one export, the value of the dollar. 10 newspapers that wills survive the apocalypse. The global economic crisis isn’t about money, it’s about power. Public outrage as a systemic risk.
Hollywood tried this with iTunes and failed miserably. There is no data to suggest that when consumers can’t use their favorite online media service for specific content that they abandon it altogether and flock to a studio or label branded alternative, what happens is that they simply stop watching or listening that label or studio [...]
A few years ago I wrote about the now discredited link between cell phone signals and honeybee colony collapse disorder. Here’s an interesting followup on what the latest research is indicating. The growing consensus among researchers is that multiple factors such as poor nutrition and exposure to pesticides can interact to weaken colonies and make [...]
I’ve been curious about the Financial Times’ news search service, called NewsSift, because it promises to leverage the substantial amount of metadata about financial news held by the FT for a pseudo semantic search experience. In other words, better targeting and categorization about news stories. So I fired up the browser and headed on over [...]
Does this mean I can deduct my share of the mortgage bailout? Among the guidelines the IRS issued yesterday was allowing investors to claim their losses from a Ponzi scheme as a theft loss rather than a capital loss, a personal casualty loss or a personal theft loss. Investors who lost in Ponzi schemes will [...]
Here’s some links to keep you busy today: Kedrosky presents a good roundup of financial research reports worth looking at. “How unlimited interest rates destroyed the economy”. A really neat WordPress plugin that shows you a heat map where people click on your site. MeeHive personalized newspaper, this is a derivative of the Kosmix service [...]