Early this morning, someone filed a CNN iReport (citizen generated content) saying that Apple (ticker: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs had a massive heart attack. Apple’s stock immediately dropped 5%. Apple PR responded to mainstream media inquiries denying the rumor, that Jobs was perfectly fine. (hat tip to the Unofficial Apple Weblog for breaking it on…
I’ve been playing World of Warcraft (WoW) for fun the past couple of weeks or so. It was a fun game in the beginning, but now it’s a useful game, at least in the sense of honing two vitally important skills, arbitrage and information asymmetry. (two skills, I might add, come in handy in today’s…
“The market crashes, turns to ashes that you’re dancing on while some fat lady cues up for a song.” – Matthew Ebel, Better Off Dead Well, folks, the great unraveling is picking up pace, with more banks failing, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac taking up hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in a bailout, and…
How To Monetize Your Social Media Outlet In a variation of a Financial Aid Podcast blog post this morning, here’s a brief economics 101 explanation of how you can monetize your blog, podcast, Twitter lifestream, or other social media outlet. Economics 101 Supply and demand are inversely related. When demand exceeds supply, you have to…
Imagine for a moment that your industry, that your specialty, is a single post, a single beam. It represents your vertical, everything you’re good at, and also everything that’s wrong with your industry’s growth. It’s fishbowl. It’s vertical. It’s a silo, an echo chamber in which no new ideas flow in or out. You keep…
The Death of Brands Something is killing off brands in America. Perkins. Uno’s. Marie Calendar’s. Fresh Mex. Bennigan’s. Steak and Ale. Who killed these brands? Private equity. Over the past decade, private equity funds have bought up popular brands and essentially stripped them of assets by issuing debt, borrowing heavily against them, then keeping the…
