Last night I read Malcolm Gladwell’s review in the New Yorker of Chris Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” followed by Chris Andersons’s response on his blog. I have not yet read the book, so my initial reaction is based on and to Gladwell’s review: there seems to be profound and ongoing confusion about critical economic concepts including marginal and total cost, marginal and total benefit, and price. I tried to clarify these in my posts on the Economics of Abundance an...

Last night I read Malcolm Gladwell’s review in the New Yorker of Chris Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” followed by Chris Andersons’s response on his blog. I have not yet read the book, so my initial reaction is based on and to Gladwell’s review: there seems to be profound and ongoing confusion about critical economic concepts including marginal and total cost, marginal and total benefit, and price. I tried to clarify these in my posts on the Economics of Abundance an...

The post on the USV blog about the challenge of creating native mobile apps (meaning ones that can on exist on the mobile platform) has created a lively discussion with by now over 60 comments. A good chunk of that discussion was about the relative merits of just sticking with the mobile browser versus developing apps. For instance, Fred observes:I’m a big fan of the mobile browser too but it does seem like the prevailing delivery package today is the mobile app, not the browser.That and a co...

The post on the USV blog about the challenge of creating native mobile apps (meaning ones that can on exist on the mobile platform) has created a lively discussion with by now over 60 comments. A good chunk of that discussion was about the relative merits of just sticking with the mobile browser versus developing apps. For instance, Fred observes:I’m a big fan of the mobile browser too but it does seem like the prevailing delivery package today is the mobile app, not the browser.That and a co...

Today’s post is over at the Union Square Ventures site on the challenge of creating native mobile applications. We are fascinated with the disruption that is taking place in mobile. The big question is what “native” applications will emerge based on the unique technical capabilities of the mobile platform and the emerging behaviors around those capabilities. Head on over there to read some of our early thinking. There are likely to be some big opportunites for startups!

Today’s post is over at the Union Square Ventures site on the challenge of creating native mobile applications. We are fascinated with the disruption that is taking place in mobile. The big question is what “native” applications will emerge based on the unique technical capabilities of the mobile platform and the emerging behaviors around those capabilities. Head on over there to read some of our early thinking. There are likely to be some big opportunites for startups!

The team at Heyzap yesterday launched payments to enable virtual goods for Flash games. This is really neat because it is exactly the kind of thing that is difficult to do for an individual game developer or publisher but delivers value to the whole system. By difficult I don’t mean from a technical perspective, but from a social and network perspective. For long-tail casual games, endusers would not necessarily trust an individual game with a payment and the incentive to buy currency that ca...

The team at Heyzap yesterday launched payments to enable virtual goods for Flash games. This is really neat because it is exactly the kind of thing that is difficult to do for an individual game developer or publisher but delivers value to the whole system. By difficult I don’t mean from a technical perspective, but from a social and network perspective. For long-tail casual games, endusers would not necessarily trust an individual game with a payment and the incentive to buy currency that ca...

Yesterday’s post focused on how the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet may or may not translate into inflation. But the Fed is not the only thing to worry about – there is also the growth of the Federal Government deficit. The Obama administration has been spending a lot of money to fight the recession and prevent the collapse of several “too-big-to-fail” companies. Here is a chart which the Washington Post put together to show the upcoming deficits: The first point to make is that governme...

Yesterday’s post focused on how the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet may or may not translate into inflation. But the Fed is not the only thing to worry about – there is also the growth of the Federal Government deficit. The Obama administration has been spending a lot of money to fight the recession and prevent the collapse of several “too-big-to-fail” companies. Here is a chart which the Washington Post put together to show the upcoming deficits: The first point to make is that governme...

Yesterday, I wrote a post about why startups and VCs should care about whether inflation is a real threat and promised a follow-up about some of the arguments floating around. The eye-popping chart that prompts one line of reasoning is this: After 40 years of growth in the 0-10% range (with a brief spike in 2000), the monetary base jumped by 110% 2008-2009. In absolute numbers, the monetary base went from a bit below $1 trillion to a bit over $2 trillion. What exactly is the monetary base? It...

Yesterday, I wrote a post about why startups and VCs should care about whether inflation is a real threat and promised a follow-up about some of the arguments floating around. The eye-popping chart that prompts one line of reasoning is this: After 40 years of growth in the 0-10% range (with a brief spike in 2000), the monetary base jumped by 110% 2008-2009. In absolute numbers, the monetary base went from a bit below $1 trillion to a bit over $2 trillion. What exactly is the monetary base? It...

“Failure to complete your Domain name search engine registration by the expiration date may result in cancellation of this offer making it difficult for your customers to locate you on the web.” - [From my Inbox today] Yeah right. And while I am at it, why don’t I send you my bank account info also?

“Failure to complete your Domain name search engine registration by the expiration date may result in cancellation of this offer making it difficult for your customers to locate you on the web.” - [From my Inbox today] Yeah right. And while I am at it, why don’t I send you my bank account info also?

I wrote last September about the competing views around deflation versus inflation. Interestingly, about 9 months later we still seem don’t seem to have real clarity on the subject. Over that time we have approached deflation but there has also been a ton of government intervention, which has prompted op-eds predicting future inflation and even a new fund run by Mark Spitznagel (a long time collaborator of “Black Swan” author Nassim Taleb) to bet on inflation. On the other hand have been resp...

I wrote last September about the competing views around deflation versus inflation. Interestingly, about 9 months later we still seem don’t seem to have real clarity on the subject. Over that time we have approached deflation but there has also been a ton of government intervention, which has prompted op-eds predicting future inflation and even a new fund run by Mark Spitznagel (a long time collaborator of “Black Swan” author Nassim Taleb) to bet on inflation. On the other hand have been resp...

I have been trying out Bing last week, as has Fred, and the team at Clickable (and probably a lot of other folks). Generally, the verdict seems to be that it’s not terrible but has some obvious shortcomings, especially when it comes to integrating blog and very recent content. Despite these shortcomings, I do believe that Bing represents a real challenge for Google because of its design. This is not just a question of Bing adding some “bling” (could not resist) in the form of a picture on the...

I have been trying out Bing last week, as has Fred, and the team at Clickable (and probably a lot of other folks). Generally, the verdict seems to be that it’s not terrible but has some obvious shortcomings, especially when it comes to integrating blog and very recent content. Despite these shortcomings, I do believe that Bing represents a real challenge for Google because of its design. This is not just a question of Bing adding some “bling” (could not resist) in the form of a picture on the...

For the longest time I would have said that the right way to design a cloud application or service is as multi-tenant. But yesterday I was having a conversation with Peter Soderling from NY-based Stratus Security, which provides a secure managed API proxy (in closed beta). Peter said they had chosen to architect their service from day one as a multi-instance solution for added security and performance. If you are unfamiliar with the terms, a multi-tenant architecture commingles the data and p...

For the longest time I would have said that the right way to design a cloud application or service is as multi-tenant. But yesterday I was having a conversation with Peter Soderling from NY-based Stratus Security, which provides a secure managed API proxy (in closed beta). Peter said they had chosen to architect their service from day one as a multi-instance solution for added security and performance. If you are unfamiliar with the terms, a multi-tenant architecture commingles the data and p...