November 2000
Thursday, 30 November 2000
.Com: The World’s Most Expensive Address: “the seven new address structures are likely to be no more successful or popular than the .net address”
Study: E-tail Gaining on Retail
Net Myths You Should Ignore: “Myth No. 5: Telecommuting is how you’ll work in the future.”
Wednesday, 29 November 2000
Look Out Below!: “The automakers are all in hope mode, betting that sales will come back. But all that does is put more unsold cars on the lots, forcing lower prices and lower profits than expected. I suspect that sometime, hopefully after Christmas, they will come to their senses and address the markets in their own time-honored way: with massive layoffs.”
Tuesday, 28 November 2000
G.E. Taps Successor to the Chief: “We spent Saturday night drinking much too much wine, then we met again all day Sunday, and it was done”
Japan’s Men Date Hot, Sexy Bots: “It was hard sometimes to remember that Yumi wasn’t real. She would yell at me and ignore me the exact same way as all my other girlfriends have.”
Forget options – show me the money!
Judge rules on rights to sex.com: “wrongful activities have accelerated in recent weeks”
Crosspoint scuttles $1 billion venture fund, citing bleak conditions
APOD: 2000 November 27 - Earth at Night: “This is what the Earth looks like at night.”
Looking for Madam Tetrachromat: “a few decades from now, men and women will still be seeing the world differently. But the expression might not be merely figurative any more.”
Monday, 27 November 2000
How to be a whistleblower and keep your job: “If you are British, or to be more precise if you live in Britain, your home is a risky place to store or send confidential information. Your employer, should it suspect that you are the mole, can seek an Anton Pillar order against you. Rarely used, because the legislation is so draconian, Anton Pillar orders are obtained in secret, and give companies the power to raid suspects’ homes (it’s the police what does the raiding) and seize anything they consider relevant to their case. The PC and the filing cabinet will be the first things to go in the back of the police van for inspection.”
In the Soup at The View: ABC allows corporate sponsor to buy talkshow content: “Didn’t we grow up…eating Campbell’s Soup?”
Dot-Com Layoffs Hit Record in November
Dot-coms fail customer service test: “You order the thing, it’s easy to order, and you get it quickly. Apparently, the system works.”
Profit - Elusive Stocking Stuffer For Amazon: “When will the world’s largest Internet retailer become profitable? ‘I don’t want to answer the question anymore. I’m tired of it,’”
Friday, 24 November 2000
E-Commerce Dream Proves the Undoing of a Solid Business: “Shaw’s old computer system, designed for furniture industry sales people to check prices, place orders and track inventory, was replaced with a state-of-the art Oracle database system. Unfortunately, sales people often could not find an item’s price in the computer. The system also falsely reported whether an order was in stock or had been shipped.”
Wednesday, 22 November 2000
Study Shows Sleep Helps Memory
Tuesday, 21 November 2000
Silicon Valley: Tech mecca or materialist wasteland?
A great time for building great companies: “there are really four types of predictions based upon two criteria: accurate and inaccurate, consensus and non-consensus. The problem is that only accurate non-consensus predictions are valuable.”
Monday, 20 November 2000
Who Is Your E-Fluential?: “A true marketing sweet spot is people who are both opinion leaders and early adopters.”
Apple ad plays off Florida ballot design: “Good design isn’t a luxury.”
Friday, 17 November 2000
How to Succeed in Darn Near Anything: “I can assure you, it feels great to have someone go to that amount of trouble to prepare. When you’re on the receiving end of this type of treatment, you find yourself looking to find a way to do business.”
Thursday, 16 November 2000
Cell Phone or Pheromone? New Props for the Mating Game: “The researchers point out that cell phones, like cigarettes, keep the hands, mouth and weekly allowance well occupied, and that both objects satisfy a pubertal desire to appear mature, worldly, involved, indifferent, rebellious, ambitious, autonomous, fashionable and fully peer- bonded.”
The Zen TV Experiment: “In examining the results of this experiment, one of the first things that consistently comes up is students’ anger and resentment at being made to do such a thing”
Shirky: An Open Letter to Jakob Nielsen: “You despair of any systemic fix for poor design and so want some sort of enforcement mechanism for these external standards. I believe that the Web is an adaptive system, and that what you deride as “Digital Darwinism” is what I would call a “Market for Quality”. Most importantly, I believe that a market for quality is in fact the correct solution for creating steady improvements in the Web’s usability.”
Who Runs a Web Site? It May Soon Get Harder to Find Out: “The problem with being accessible to the public is you’re accessible to the public.”
Wednesday, 15 November 2000
Where tech reigns and families network: “Some parents fret, according to the research, that their children aren’t ‘entrepreneurial’ enough.”
MP3 sets final pact: “As part of the settlement, Universal also agreed to license its entire music catalog to MP3.com in exchange for unspecified royalty payments. Universal also said it would buy an unspecified number of options in the company at an undisclosed price above the value of MP3.com’s stock.”
Bush, Cheney’s Texas votes challenged: “A federal lawsuit filed Monday says George W. Bush and Dick Cheney can’t legally claim Texas’ 32 electoral votes because both are inhabitants of the state – a violation of the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
GOP ponders recount in Iowa as Bush picks up 900-plus votes: “New Mexico statute requires that in case of a tie, ‘the determination as to which of the candidates shall be declared to have been nominated or elected shall be decided by lot.’ In practice, the usual method for this rare event has been to play one hand of five-card poker.”
Tuesday, 14 November 2000
Why Pets.com Died: “perhaps the way that the venture capital system works is too often counterproductive to creating long-term shareholder value,”
Monday, 13 November 2000
Amazon.com–Earth’s Biggest Selection: “Inspired by the Palm Beach County, Florida, ballot form, we’ve devised a totally new way for you to find and discover anything you want to buy online.”
Train Your Customers to Talk Back: “customers have decades of experience that has taught them that companies are terrible listeners. While online customers are starting to realize that they do have a voice, they’re not talking directly to the companies.”
May the Farce Be with You: “Not only will Rebel filmmakers and animators be able to send up their favorite saga and safely exercise their creativity as filmmakers without worrying about copyright infringment (Lucas has cleared a library of audio clips for use), but novice moviemakers whose flicks are selected for the site might also earn a few credits.”
Sunday, 12 November 2000
Thursday, 9 November 2000
The Electoral College Flunks Out: “What can be described only as an absolute charade of an election will have given hope to dictatorships everywhere”
Best Things on Internet May Not Be Free: “Unlike Napster, which agreed to add a fee to its service mainly to settle litigation with music companies over lost royalties, many other companies from Yahoo Inc. to America Online may decide to add new fees simply because they can.”
Wednesday, 8 November 2000
Florida recount begins as candidates wait: “The American people have spoken. It’s too bad it’s going to take a little while to determine what is was they had to say.”
Mike’s Message: “You and the Democrats have created the monster know as ‘W.’”
Tuesday, 7 November 2000
Monday, 6 November 2000
Managing Software Engineers: “Software engineering is different but it is not that different.”
M$ charges students who don’t use its software: “Most of us with computers already have the software that the campus would offer, and those of us who are computerless would have no use for it”
Wednesday, 1 November 2000
Rational irrationality: “Markets are “rational” in the sense that investors’ behavior is directed toward their self-interest and they will generally make reasonable choices to promote that interest. The problem occurs when the word ‘rational’ is used as a substitute for ‘efficient,’ or to suggest that stock price should conform to other measurements of the value of a company. Often stock prices will reflect these external value measurements, but only when investors are collectively possessed by the belief that it should. “