Matoda.com posted a write-up of an interview with Warren Buffet on CNBC. This is his take on why people repeatedly make mistakes that cause stock market crashes:
[when it comes to] greed … you can’t stand to see your neighbor getting rich. You know you’re smarter than he is, and he’s doing these things, you know, and he’s getting rich, and your spouse is getting unhappy with you because you aren’t — pretty soon you start doing it. And so you get what I call the natural progression, the three I’s: the innovators, the imitators, and the idiots.
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Posted September 26, 2008, under
Books
I wandered into Waterstones’ sci-fi section in Piccadilly the other day and before me stood the strangest book cover I’ve seen since Seth Godin‘s Purple Cow:
Halting State, by Charlie Stross.
What’s clever is that the praise for the book isn’t on the back, the praise is the cover. The fact that the first quote was from William Gibson and that Eric Raymond is in the acknowledgements meant that I purchased a copy straight away. I later found out that the author is a Linux guru with a subsection of his homepage dedicated to published writings on Perl!
If a great cover, a Gibson quote and an author who uses Linux isn’t enough to sell you this book, check out Cory Doctorow’s review on Boing boing:
Blend an Iain Banks thriller with a copy of Count Zero, throw in the Tokyo Games Show and a Bourne movie (and possibly a Bourne shell) and you’ve got something approximating Halting State.
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The Future of Web Apps conference here in London is only a few weeks away and Ryan Carson has announced that Mark Zuckerberg will be speaking at the conference.
This should be pretty interesting.
I’m also going to make sure I catch Soocial’s Stefan Fountain’s talk. He was there in early 2007 as well and won the Industrialist’s award for best theatrics.
Check out the Soocial intro website. “Hassle free” indeed.
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Jemima Kiss on Seedcamp in the Guardian recently:
Seedcamp … is like Dragon’s Den, but without the bullshit and the TV primadonnas
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Posted September 19, 2008, under
Business
John Gruber on Microsoft pulling the Gates & Seinfeld ads:
I suspect what sparked the panic is that the Seinfeld ads were too good, too accurate at capturing just what it is that Microsoft, as a company and brand, stands for: nothing.
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Paul Carr‘s book on the London Internet startup-scene, “Bringing Nothing to the Party“, is an enjoyable read. The location is Internet London, the main character is Paul as Holden Caulfield and the storyline resembles “How to lose friends and alienate people”.
On jealousy as a motivator during the dot-com recovery, aka web2.0:
People who six months before had been struggling to break even were now starting to get more money from investors and even buyout offers from big media companies. The less Schaden they experienced, the less freude I felt. My jealousy was moving from mild, to strong, to intense to seething.
And on angel investors:
Quite why [they] need to call themselves angels is not entirely clear, but, frankly, if someone is giving you a couple of hundred grand, you’ll call them whatever they want you to. “Who’s your angel?” “You are, you big, generous hunk of money you.”
It’s the antitheses to the “how they made it big” genre popular in start-up literature. As Sarah Lacey puts it:
Anyone who’s seduced by the Web dream, should read my book (duh!) but then read Paul’s book immediately afterwards.
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Posted September 15, 2008, under
Internet
Chris Brogan quote (via Seth Godin):
Never, ever, ever post a “sorry I haven’t posted lately” blog post again. Ever.
Read Chris’s full list of 50 ways to reach blog supremacy here …
Last weekend I went to an exhibition at the British Museum called The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock. The exhibition is finished , so you’ve missed it!
Early 20th century American prints are not something I’ve seen much of before and some of the work on display was quite interesting. One of the movements is called; “Machine aesthetics”. That’s almost as good a name for an art movement as “Brutalism“.
The image on the right is New York, by Louis Lozowick (click on the image for larger version).
Even though you’ve missed the American prints, you can still catch Hadrian: Emprie and conflict, which I highly recommend. If Roman Emporors don’t float your boat however, a visit to the museum is still recommended if only to see the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, the “largest covered square in Europe” designed by Foster and Partners among others.
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One of the biggest investment repellents in global business is when a country becomes unstable. If it seems like industry nationalisation or any other grand idea is likely to take place, investors disappear like rats from a sinking ship.
In its post “Facebook Takes Another Jab at Developers“, Allfacebook reported yesterday that by changing its interface and decreasing the visibility of third party applications without keeping its developers in the loop, Facebook is causing uncertainty among the developers for its platform.
Facebook isn’t alone:
What Facebook and other platform providers should do is imitate shopping malls. Instead of blocking applications or decreasing their visibility, they should increase their visibility.
Alfred Taubman, the shopping mall mogul, describes a mall’s layout like this:
You have two levels [and two escalators]. The customer comes into the mall, walks down the hall, gets on the escalator up to the second level. Goes back along the second floor, down the escalator and now she’s back where she started from. [The customer has] seen every store in the centre.
Why aren’t they doing this already? The answer is probably a classic one: Follow the money.
An application developer can make a bundle by creating a popular Facebook app, but how does Facebook make money off its platform? In a shopping mall, just as on other platforms like Windows, the customer is eventually charged. Facebook however, is free.
Further reading:
- Umair Haques Bubble Generation Strategy Lab. The most insightful, cynical Facebook coverage on the web.
- Catalyst Code, by David Evans and Richard Schmalensee. A detailed, interesting dissection of the platform business model.
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Posted September 9, 2008, under
Business
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a visit to Ikea must always include a meal of Swedish meatballs. While waiting in the meatball queue in one such visit recently, I snapped a photo of Ikea’s meatball pricing model, which bears a striking resemblance to the pricing model used by 37signals. Click on the images below for a larger image.
The 37signals pricing model for their most popular product, Basecamp, offers the “basic”, “plus” and “max” pricing plans equivalent to 10, 15 and 20 meatballs at Ikea. Upgrading from 10 to 15 meatballs only costs 13% extra, while the next upgrade costs 23%. At 37signals, add 100% to go from basic to plus and 200% to go from plus to max.
The mid-level pricing plan at 37signals has the tag-line “Most popular, best value” while Ikea goes one step further and highlights their 15 meatball option in red.
It’s a great tactic, which I’m sure is tried and tested in various industries and covered in countless Harvard Business Review case studies. This Ikea customer at least, always goes for 15 meatballs instead of 10.
For further reading, Paul Farnell at Salted who runs Litmus wrote an interesting article on pricing in Vitamin.
Update 09/10/08: 37signals discuss their meatball pricing strategy in a blog post: Ask 37signals: How did you come up with pricing for your products?
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