I worked at Time Warner from 2001-2006 and during that entire period a perennial questions was when and how to separate AOL from the rest of the company. During that period AOL shrank from 22MM subscribers down to the few million it has left.
But, at last, separation is imminent.
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Friday, May 29, 2009
Ambient Devices: Radios
For about a decade I have been predicting that more and more ordinary devices would marry internet connections with a single simple feature or function. These devices are sometimes called "ambient devices" to distinguish them from trickier multi-function devices like PCs or even smartphones.For about a decade, though. I've been wrong. That said, I love these Tivoli internet radios, which are the kind of device I've been waiting for. More...
Uniting Families Act
Pam Spaulding reports that Sen. Vitter (R-LA), responds that he doesn't support the Uniting Families Act because it "would apply the same standards to same-sex couples that our laws apply to opposite-sex couples."
The Uniting Families Act would give green cards to the spouses or domestic partners of gay Americans whose spouses/partners are not Americans. More...
Thursday, May 28, 2009
BarclaysWatch
Another layoff at my former employer. I believe this is, like, the 5th or 6th in six months.
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The Price of Maternity Leave
Wanna take time off to care for a new kid? Here's what 18 months off'll cost you, according to The Atlantic. More...
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Post-Presidential life
George W. Bush's new 4.5 BR house seems quite nice, if a step down from the old digs at 1600.
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Tuesday, May 26, 2009
The Ring
This cool image shows the major "ring roads" of some big world cities interposed on top of one another. It more or less compares the physical sizes of the cities. More...
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Friday, May 22, 2009
The Debt Clock
Technology Deflation
For more than two centuries, growth and prosperity in Western Civilization has been dependent upon constant technological innovation. We take it for granted that there will always be faster, better, cheaper ways to make and do things.
One of the greatest technological innovations in living memory is the semiconductor, which famously doubles in capacity (or, alternatively, becomes half as expensive) every 18 months. This trend, calls Moore's Law, underlies countless innovations in our lives. That iPod that holds twice as many songs as the last model? Moore's Law. That PC that's half the size of the older one? Moore's Law.
Butwhat if Moore's Law had a limit? The CEO of SanDisk thinks we're about to hit that wall because - get this - semiconductors are shrinking to the point where they would need smaller electrons to get any smaller. And science has yet to figure out how to shrink electrons.
Wow. More...
One of the greatest technological innovations in living memory is the semiconductor, which famously doubles in capacity (or, alternatively, becomes half as expensive) every 18 months. This trend, calls Moore's Law, underlies countless innovations in our lives. That iPod that holds twice as many songs as the last model? Moore's Law. That PC that's half the size of the older one? Moore's Law.
Butwhat if Moore's Law had a limit? The CEO of SanDisk thinks we're about to hit that wall because - get this - semiconductors are shrinking to the point where they would need smaller electrons to get any smaller. And science has yet to figure out how to shrink electrons.
Wow. More...
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Windemere
I used to live near a building a mystery in New York, a huge apartment building seemingly fallen into utter ruin and abandonment except that it had six (!) inhabited apartments who would not leave so the owners could do whatever they they were planning.Well, now they are leaving The Windemere, whose new owners say they will restore the building. More...
More writers at AOL
I'm not sure it makes sense for AOL to double-down on content since the economics for content businesses on the Web have, so far, been those of a blog (nothing wrong with that). A blog is great, as long as you don't have a "real" publishing business with subscription and advertising revenues to protect, which I guess AOL doesn't anymore.Anyway, Jeff Bercovici is a blogger at Portfolio.com who now works for Tim Armstrong. More...
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Wingnuts on Marriage Equality
Perhaps I really do live in a bubble, but how is it possible these people can express these views and still sleep at night? More...
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Music Deflation
This week's Billboard #1 album, Epiphany by Chrisette Michele, sold only 83,000 copies.
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Courting Danger
Jaunted keeps a list of the World's Most Dangerous Airports. At left is the runway at Courchevel, France.
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The Court of Feng Shui
Monday, May 11, 2009
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Million Dollar Homepage
Friday, May 8, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Scalia Deflation
One of the many infuriating things about Justice Scalia is his seeming inability to imagine that some of the complaints that come before him are legitimate. In Bowers vs. Hardwick, for example, he dismissed the complaint that the police don't have the right to come into your bedroom and arrest you for having consensual sex by claiming, almost oddly, that the Constitution doesn't protect homosexual sex. The sex was not the principal complaint - the police state tactics were.Scalia's antagonism to the notion of a right to privacy is also well-known; and here he is getting upset that people are publishing all the information about him that really should be, er, private. More...
World Currency
Having the dollar as a reserve currency is a precious asset for the United States. For decades, though, U.S. policymakers have more or less taken this for granted and have done little to protect this.
Recently, China has surpassed the U.S. as the largest trading partner in a few Latin American countries and, rather than use the dollar as an intermediary, the partners are starting to exchange currecies directly. This is bad news for the dollar. More...
Recently, China has surpassed the U.S. as the largest trading partner in a few Latin American countries and, rather than use the dollar as an intermediary, the partners are starting to exchange currecies directly. This is bad news for the dollar. More...
Monday, May 4, 2009
Personal Finance Deflation
Will all the conventional wisdom about personal finance (e.g., that stocks always outperform bonds long-term) be permanently overturned or will things be back to normal within a couple of years?
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Not the Salvation of Newspapers
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Friday, May 1, 2009
Washington Post Company
Though the Washington Post newspaper is caught in the same terminal decline as the rest of the newspaper industry, the Post company gets half its revenue from Kaplan, which is a very good thing.
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