Music, Technology, Art, Economy

» Management design flaws and radical remedies | MLab

In the future, all businesspeople are designers…

Strongly recommend ya’ll check out these videos, in which dozens of leading business thinkers and practitioners (Gary Hamel, Marissa Mayer, Hal Varien, all make the same point: the hierarchical structure of most firms is wildly ineffiecient; managers/entrepreneurs are in the business of designing intra-firm markets and incentive structures so that decision-making and innovation can become more decentralized and maximize what I’d call “talent turnover.”

(BIG thanks to Christopher Golda for sending this)

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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Another epic track from Learning Music. Everytime I listen to this stuff I just want to hug John Wood (singer/leader) ‘cuz he’s so effing NICE. A nicer person couldn’t be making this music…

(Original file)

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“ Innovation in complements is an important exception to the commonly heard command Focus on the core.

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Digital Renderings: The Strategic Value of Complements

I’d restate this as “investing in complements is an important exception to ‘focus on the core’”.

This is a killer piece by Nick Carr that leads off with an anecdote of about Michelin road guides:

“Before the Michelin Group could make a go of the car-tire business, more people would have to start buying cars and they’d need to drive their vehicles more frequently. That’s where the Red Guide came in. André and Edouard saw that by giving motorists a practical, problem-solving handbook for traveling by road, they’d encourage the sale and use of automobiles - and in turn pump up their company’s nascent tire business.”

The economics of complements drive many of the best marketing strategies because of the unique characteristics of information, particularly the high “first copy” costs and small/zero marginal reproduction costs.

Businesses that think creatively about these economics are best positioned to scale their marketing. Google did it with Chrome; the Michelin brothers did it with their road guides; Guitar Center did it with TuneCore deal…

Imagine if Kodak or Canon had bought/invested in YouTube (or video sharing generally).

Etc…

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» How Much Do Top Tier Bloggers and Social Media Consultants Get Paid? We Asked Them! - ReadWriteWeb

Business Model Design For Web Services Lesson 19547684939: Develop and offer consulting to companies that want to use your service for commercial or quasi-commercial purposes.

I’d venture that a marketing consultancy owned and operated by Twitter would be the premier authority on Twitter marketing (and command premier rates). I’m not necessarily suggesting that for Twitter at this moment, but I hope you see what I mean…

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» Dow Drops Below 9,000 for First Time Since 2003 - washingtonpost.com

Sweet! We got five years into our lost decade in exactly 12 months!

Keep up the great work!

Best,

Ethan

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How Wikipedia Can Help the World, Even More

I think providing the analytics data from profile pages, etc, is a revenue model that more web services should pursue.

I also think that this is the bias-neutral revenue model that Wikipedia should pursue (i.e. customers pay for individual article analytics)

Anyone want to put this in front of Jimmy?

Originally posted as a comment by Ethan Bauley on A VC using Disqus.

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Has anyone else noticed any other advertising in the right column of the “home” page of the Twitter web interface?

This is a well-designed piece because it advertises an interaction that can occur on the service itself (i.e. it’s not trying to hijack my time or send me somewhere out of the way). It’s hardly “advertising,” per se. Very symbiotic. Exactly what I need for my Big Plans.

I’ll be hollering at Andrew Parker over this one ;-)

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gapingvoid: the porous membrane: why corporate blogging works.

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“ Hello, welcome to Project Ingenesist; an open source economic development program.

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Introduction | Innovation Economics

This is pretty interesting…recommended.

From what I can discern (from a quick overview) it’s about creating a Net-based market for knowledge, where individuals’ and firms’ capabilities can be matched with explicit needs quickly.

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Advertnews.com - Advertising - Media - Agency - Marketing News

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US Economic Analysis In A Blog Comment

To quickly answer the question where the $700 billion will come from, it will come from the sale of treasury bills: we’ll sell treasury bills at whatever they’re currently going for (10 year notes are getting around 3.6% AFAIK), and buy with that money the mortgage security notes. Effectively, we’re going to trade $700 billion of treasury notes for $700 billion in mortgage security notes, thus allowing banks to trade something whose overall economic value is not well understood and at a fairly high risk with something that has a lower face value but whose value is known and calculable.

So in theory the treasury’s exchange will be revenue neutral.

In the future, the treasury will then sell back the mortgage backed security notes, and in theory could make a profit or take a loss: it is at the point when the treasury sells the notes back that taxpayers will either be hit (because we’ll have to pay those T-Bills that came due with money out of our taxes), or we’ll make a profit. Our maximum exposure is $700 billion, though the actual amount will be a whole lot less: if we’re actually out $700 billion, it’s because the value of the houses behind those mortgage backed securities dropped to zero. (Now if Paulson is smart, he’ll issue a whole range of notes from short-term 3-month bills to long-term 30-year notes: this will allow him to spread whatever potential loss may be suffered over a 30-year period, and give him greater flexibility to sell the notes back when they have maximum value.)

As to the credit rating of the United States, the reality is the United States has never failed to pay back a treasury note or treasury bill. And in theory the United States can simply print more fiat money: a dollar bill is essentially a 0% t-bill. So the United States government is the only entity in our economy which can (in theory) hold an unlimited risk exposure because when it comes time to pay people back, we can just print the money.

The measure that the United States has overextended its credit worthiness, therefore, is not the credit rating of various agencies—the United States government, by its actions of creating fiat money and regulating the banking industry and taxing people has in essence created the modern fiat economy. Instead, the measure if the United States has “overextended” its credit worthiness is to look at the core (non-food, non-fuel) inflation rate: this would help determine if the United States has dumped so much fiat currency into circulation that it effectively drives the “worth” of a dollar down by creating high inflation. The combination of inflation and the percentage of GDP taken in by the United States determines the percentage of ‘worth’ that is being directed by the United States: high inflation suggests the United States is taking in more ‘worth’ than the tax rate would suggest.

So the real numbers to watch over the next year are not “credit worthiness” of the U.S. federal government—that is meaningless. No; the real numbers are the GDP growth/decline rate, the core CPI inflation rate (seasonally adjusted), and indirectly the TED spread and the unemployment indexes: each of these will give us a sense of how much damage the current crisis has caused, how much money the U.S. is “overprinting” to cover T-bills bought back to cover the mortgage backed securities, how “illiquid” the banking sector has become, and how sluggish the overall economy has become.

Originally posted as a comment by William Woody on A VC using Disqus.

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“ We went into the college market as a stepping stone - identifying dense nests in the graph that would lead us to the rest of the world.

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Facebook Co-Founder Departs To Build “Extensible Enterprise Productivity Suite”

File under: Revisionist History

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» Information Arbitrage: The Financial Crisis: Reality or Reality TV?

Sigh

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» Paul Kedrosky: Game Theory and Corporate Fear

“Stories are everywhere about people like Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer finally realizing that Congress wasn’t going to get the urgency of the current credit market problems without prodding from companies perceived to well away from the financial nexus.”

One thing I always marvelled at when I was doing my trading job was the ~24hour clairvoyance of really smart contrarian investors. If you go back and watch Paul K’s commentary over the last few weeks, reality has about a 24-48 hour lag ;-)

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» MoMB | The Museum of Modern Betas

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