Being back from my break, I spent a lot of time this morning catching up on various blogs, newspapers and other editorial sources. Here are seven stories that stood out and are worth reading, especially if you are on a lunch break.
- Facebook’s China Problem: Everyone is hyperventilating about Facebook’s (s FB) IPO. The social network’s big problem is growth, and in order to grow it has to crack China. Tough luck, for as Jessi Hempel of Fortune points out, local players are ahead of the game.
- Lunch with Sir Tim Berners-Lee: Financial Times goes to lunch with the web’s founding father and talks to him about the state of web/Internet today.
- Flash in a tab: Looks like Apple (s AAPL) and Amazon (s AMZN) are making a killing on flash storage chips, reports Brian Chen of The New York Times. The prices of flash memory have declined by almost half and the devices – well, no discounts there.
- HD Video? You need bandwidth for that: According to Wistia’s State of the HD Viewing in America report, nearly 20 percent of broadband users don’t have enough bandwidth to view HD video, meaning their connections are slower than 2 Mbps.
- Swarm Robots: The droid workforce of the future: Taking cues from social insects such as ants, some believe that swarm robots could find their way into farming and even medicine. Seems a bit too sci-fi? Well, so did the social web a few decades back.
- Negative consequences of scale and financialization: Good short piece on how too much finance ruined supermarkets and other similar businesses and destroyed a lot of value.
- Why do people reject science? Now with more data to prove that there is something really weird about society’s science denialism.
Hi Om, welcome back from your summer hiatus! Looking forward to some great inside stories.
Thanks Sam and looking forward to writing more as well.
The article on financialization is ill-informed drivel – random observations that are largely incorrect and don’t tie back to how firms make money.
Has the author of that piece ever looked at the income statement of a big box retailer? Profit on selling products is their primary source of profit, not investment or interest income. Products are cheaper at larger chains largely due to economies of scale in manufacturing, distribution, and retailing – i.e., less hours and dollars of labor and other costs per dollar of product sold.
Similarly, the marginal cost of putting one more passenger on a plane or one more guest in a hotel is extremely close to zero if that plane seat or hotel room would otherwise be empty.
It still amazes me today that its only back in 1989 and out of frustration Timothy Berners Lee wrote a shareable code. http://
18 months later, from grass roots support it started to grow in popularity..to an essential part of our daily life today A.K.A. Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc..
Sir Timothy-Lee-Berners you are eXtraordinary.
Isextraordinary
Information with Inspiration