The Stimulus Was Too Small

Description: Front side (obverse) of one of the Nobel Prize medals in Physiology or Medicine awarded in 1950 to researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I agree with Paul Krugman, my favorite political columnist. How many political columnists have a Nobel Prize? But I liked him plenty before he won the prize. Actually I was in disbelief he did. Columnists are not supposed to win Nobel Prizes, I remember thinking.

The Secret of Our Non-Success

the stimulus was both too small and too short-lived, partly because of administration errors but mainly because of scorched-earth Republican obstruction

And I argued the stimulus was too small back in 2009. Paul was going on deep knowledge, I was going on instinct.

The faster way to reduce the debt would be for this country to do another stimulus, this time a full trillion. But I don't see it happening. Such common sense would be too much to ask of the political system.

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Twitter In Saudi Arabia

King Abdullah ibn Abdul Aziz in 2002 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As someone who would like to see an Egypt style uprising also in Saudi Arabia - I could live with a constitutional monarchy there - I read this with great interest.

Twitter Gives Saudi Arabia a Revolution of Its Own

Open criticism of this country’s royal family, once unheard-of, has become commonplace in recent months. Prominent judges and lawyers issue fierce public broadsides about large-scale government corruption and social neglect. Women deride the clerics who limit their freedoms. Even the king has come under attack. All this dissent is taking place on the same forum: Twitter.

In its early days Twitter was often derided as the place where people posted things like, so I had coffee.

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Sales And Marketing Are Important

English: Red Pinterest logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

LinkedIn has taught us sales is really important. Pinterest is saying marketing is key. I believe.

The Secret Behind Pinterest’s Growth Was Marketing, Not Engineering, Says CEO Ben Silbermann

now the third-largest source of referral traffic on the Internet .... The way Pinterest grew had little to do with Silicon Valley wisdom. It was about marketing — mostly grassroots marketing — not better algorithms. ..... In 2010, three months after Pinterest launched, the site had only 3,000 users. ..... So Pinterest started to have meet-ups at local boutiques, and to take fun pictures of people who attended them, and to engage with bloggers to do invitation campaigns like “Pin It Forward,” where bloggers got more invites to the site by spreading the world. ....... Fundamentally, the future is unwritten ..... he himself thought for a while that the secret to Pinterest’s growth woes would be finding some undiscovered Stanford grad student to build a better algorithm.

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Bill Gates On Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 And Surface

Source: TechNet

Is Google Anti-Competitive?

Image via CrunchBase

I have not made up my mind. But Google gets the benefit of doubt from me.

FTC moving closer to Google antitrust case

The majority of top decision-makers at the Federal Trade Commission believe that an antitrust case should be brought against Google Inc, meaning the search giant could soon be headed into tough negotiations ..... Google illegally used its dominance of the search market to hurt its rivals ..... Google rivals specializing in travel, shopping and entertainment have accused Google, the world's No. 1 search engine, of unfairly giving their web sites low quality rankings in search results to steer Internet users away from their websites and toward Google products that provide similar services. ..... Google refuses to share data that would allow advertisers and developers to create software to compare the value they get on Google to advertising spending on Microsoft's Bing or Yahoo. ..... the FTC is looking at Google's handling of valuable patents, which are determined to be essential to smartphones. The agency is trying to determine if they are licensed fairly and whether patent infringement lawsuits are used to hamper innovation.

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Mobile: Stating The Obvious

To say right now we are in the mobile era is to state the obvious. It is like in the 1980s AIDS became big news. But people are still figuring out AIDS. I have a feeling mobile is something like that. Tech giants might spend the rest of this decade trying to figure out mobile.

Mobile first companies have a leg up in that sense. But then they are going to have to figure out the web in due time.

Mobile is not the Internet as we knew it, just like the Internet was not computers as we knew them. Mobile is a new beast with its own particulars.

A child is not a small adult. Mobile is not a smaller version of the web, it is not MiniMe. Mobile is no child.



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Mobile revolution, economy trip up tech giants

consumers' waning love affair with the stalwart PC and infatuation with mobile -- the most significant tectonic shift in the industry since the advent of the Internet ...... raging mobile hardware demand .... About 800,000 shoppers made their first-ever eBay purchase through a mobile device. ..... "Mobile is not proving to be as straightforward as people thought." ...... a worsening macroeconomic environment. ..... The biggest stunner was perhaps Google, which shed more than $20 billion of market value after it reported that its core advertising business had slowed. ....... Click prices declined for the fourth consecutive quarter .... Zynga, the poster child for mobile transition woes ..... the evolution of mobile Internet, social networking is usually the first to spread around the world, followed by games and then advertising ...... Perhaps hardest-hit are Intel and others closely tied to the PC chain .. While Intel dominated that space in its prime, in smartphones its market share is less than 1 percent

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