 |  |
Apparently former CEO of Yahoo, Tim Koogle will be replacing Johnathan Abrams as CEO of Friendster.
Tim Koogle is an investor in Friendster and a heavyweight like this suggests that the investors are confident enough to go the full distance with it.
It will be interesting to see if Orkut will bcome Google’s first dud.
“There is a precedent for price hikes to compensate for dollar devaluation, and it is not a comfortable one.”
“The first oil crisis, although prompted by the political furore over the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, and the use of the “oil weapon”, was also a response to the devaluation of the dollar that took place in the course of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system in 1971-73.”
Saudi is at odds with Kuwait and UAE, Saudi wants to cut oil supply to maintain oil prices.
Oil price rises are compounded by fact that OPEC revenues are pegged to dollar and the dollar is very weak and that economic growth in China is increasing demand.
Higher gas prices in the US are not good in run up to election. US needs lower oil prices and more control of pricing.
Iraq plus Kuwait oil reserves equivalent to Saudi’s
The US has played its hand with the Iraq invasion, a stable Iraq mitigates against a fragile Saudi. An unstable US controlled Iraq creates further instability for Saudi Arabia.
De facto, stability in Iraq is now the key to western economic wellbeing.
Coke has had to recall Dasani feared to be contaminated with a carcinogen.
Coke started by selling drink with narcotics, last century.
It then took the narcotics out, building a brand by selling sugared water at a massive premium.
It then launched Dasani, removing the sugar and selling water at a massive premium.
It turned out that Dasani isn’t a mineral water, but is purified tap water, selling at a massive premium.
With this recall, they were selling lipsmackin, thirstquenchin contaminated, non-mineral, unsugared, ‘coke’ free water.
In the English speaking world Ebay looks unstoppable, but check out Alibaba.com and sister site Taobao.com, the Chinese Ebay.
A Chinese owned, English language site, Alibaba.com is the biggest supplier portal on the Internet - import/export for the wired age. While Ariba, the poster child of the once fashionable B2B space, has retrenched into enterprise procurement, the main action is going offshore.
Alibaba, which is in the top 100 high traffic sites with hockey stick growth is an example of how the Internet fits into the outsourced economy. Alibaba raised $82 million in VC money last month. How many Silicon Valley Internet companies raised that amount recently?
“none of the 20-odd patrons scattered about the restaurant’s two dining areas appears to have a laptop computer or wireless PDA on hand”
A McDonalds rep says:
“Why would these customers use this service when they can go back to their offices to use their computers?”
Is this the real reason, or is it the fact that McDonalds architecture is designed to have people pass through quickly, with harsh lighting and hard seating? McDonalds is the artithesis of an environment where you would want to hang out.
In April 1937, Hitler deliberately bombed civilian targets in a small Northern Spanish town on behalf of his friend Franco. One thousand people were brutally murdered, inspiring the most famous anti-war painting, Picasso’s Guernica. Guernica was a Basque town and the atrocity was used to justify further barbaric atrocities by Basque separatist terrorists, ETA.
Swiss bank account money scams are one of the rare delights of spam email, if only for the reason that somehow everyone involved seems to use a particularly obsequious form of convoluted Victorian English that is usually reserved for UK civil servants.
“It is of great importance that I would require your humble help in assisting me to claim a deposited consignment at swiszerland.”
Swizerland - classic
When you are organizing things you usually have a miscellaneous category for stuff you are not sure where to put. If the miscellaneous category becomes too big then you haven’t really organized things properly.
With Amazon’s product RSS feeds, has RSS broken ‘out of its news-and-weblog-tracking ghetto’ as Loosely Coupled suggest?
RSS is XML and XML allows you to put things in tags that say what they mean - metadata. News has headlines and products have descriptions, so Amazon logically puts the descriptions in the ‘description’ tag.
Here’s the problem? Where does Amazon put the price information. Logically, you would think, in a price tag, since RSS is now extensible. The problem is twofold:
1. people are often nervous about creating their own modules or tags for RSS, there is no simple web forms interface for example that will build one for you (using your email address as a namespace perhaps).
2. aggregators do not read or display all RSS metadata, so putting the price in a price tag might actually make things worse.
With only four things to organize (product name, price, link, product description), Amazon is forced to shoehorn the price of an item into the description tag, the ‘miscellaneous’ bucket.
There are other bits of metadata in the Amazon descriptions, author, publisher etc., and since RSS has taken off because of simplicity, I’m not suggesting that Amazon adopt some hugely complicated committee-driven standard for a book seller module. But price is important, something that really needs to be marked as such to be useful.
RSS is a very good way to syndicate links with clean titles (believe me, this solves a big problem for news aggregation), but until it regularly uses fundamentally important metadata such as prices, then it hasn’t really grown out of the news and weblog ghetto.
Om Malik on Vonage’s Circuit city deal
“By its presence in Circuit City, Vonage is now a mass market product, not some tech curiosity. With 300,000 new customers from the deal likely in the first year, Vonage could have over a million customers before the first snow falls in New Jersey.”
When the first snow falls in New Jersey? Wouldn’t that be when hell freezes over?
My enemies’ enemies are my friends, not when my enemy’s enemies are hosted by my enemy.
Sign up for the Google Newsletter at Yahoo Groups
Another classic via NTK
You are currently browsing the David Galbraith’s Blog blog archives for March, 2004.
rss