How Wall Street Can Catalyze Innovation - Money: "Given Wall Street's propensity to stay on top of important business trends, I predict it won't take long for analysts to get smart about what it takes to be an innovation leader. Hence, the forward-thinking analysts who have heard the innovation drumbeat from this publication and others will start asking the tough questions of corporate leaders as they assess a company's real growth prospects."
Patents for dynamic Web pages to get another look | CNET News.com: "The patents in question, Nos. 5,894,554 and 6,415,335, cover systems and methods for managing dynamic Web page generation requests--that is, sites that return a customized page based on user input. An enormous number of Web sites use some form of dynamic processing, often through programming languages, such as PHP, that are designed to create Web pages based on database queries.
A Texas-based company called EpicRealm Licensing filed for the patents in 1996 and 1999. Critics have said the firm, which once offered services designed to speed up Web site performance, now exists solely to seek settlements or licensing fees from companies accused of infringing on its patents."
eBay to exempt 'Second Life' listings from virtual items ban | News.blog | CNET News.com: "eBay spokesman Hani Durzy told CNET News.com Monday that that exemption stems from the auction giant's interpretation of what Second Life is.
'If someone participates in Second Life and wants to sell something they own, we are not at this point proactively pulling those listings off the site,' said Durzy. 'We think there is an open question about whether Second Life should be regarded as a game.'"
Computing Machinery and Intelligence A.M. Turing: "A digital computer can usually be regarded as consisting of three parts:
(i) Store.
(ii) Executive unit.
(iii) Control.
The store is a store of information, and corresponds to the human computer's paper, whether this is the paper on which he does his calculations or that on which his book of rules is printed. In so far as the human computer does calculations in his bead a part of the store will correspond to his memory.
The executive unit is the part which carries out the various individual operations involved in a calculation. What these individual operations are will vary from machine to machine. Usually fairly lengthy operations can be done such as 'Multiply 3540675445 by 7076345687' but in some machines only very simple ones such as 'Write down 0' are possible.
We have mentioned that the 'book of rules' supplied to the computer is replaced in the machine by a part of the store. It is then called the 'table of instructions.' It is the duty of the control to see that these instructions are obeyed correctly and in the right order. The control is so constructed that this necessarily happens."
Netflix goes postal | Tech News on ZDNet: "Netflix has appointed a former postmaster general as its chief operating officer to help bolster its mail-intensive business. Bill Henderson, the former postal chief, will replace Tom Dillon, who plans to retire in April, the online DVD rental service said Wednesday.
Netflix is working to distribute movies over the Internet in the future, but the U.S. Postal Service remains its sole delivery method today. The company ships more than 1 million DVDs a day from 37 distribution centers in the U.S. and touts one business-day delivery."
Can HP fool Moore's Law? | CNET News.com: "Researchers from HP Labs plan to publish a paper this month that outlines how it may become possible to substantially increase the performance of certain types of chips, and reduce their power consumption, by replacing the communication wires inside chips with an overhead grid of tiny nanowires."
Evolution by natural selection requires some degree of constancy in order to shape this [instinctive knowledge] heuristic. By contrast, unique or irregular events require a special class of adaptation ( a secondary heuristic, intelligence0 to allow an organism to cope with a future that is unlike its past. Intelligence tracks events that are too rapid to become genetically imprinted within the primary heuristic. Intelligent learning proceeds by the (genetically transmitted ) power of reason. Keynes and hayek. G.R. Steele. 2001
The history of credit card is anticlimactic after everything you have about the history of credit and debt so far. The credit token was developed in the late 1800's because stores wanted a faster way to complete transactions rather than have to lookup individual information or record the name and address of the buyer every time. To complete a transaction the clerk only had to record the identification number from the back of the token on the sales slip.
Winner-Take-All: Google and the Third Age of Computing (Skrentablog): "Google has won both the online search and advertising markets. They hold a considerable technological lead, both with algorithms as well as their astonishing web-scale computing platform. Beyond this, however, network effects around their industry position and brand will prevent any competitor from capturing market share from them -- even if it were possible to match their technology platform.
To paraphrase an old comment about IBM, made during its 30 year dominance of the enterprise mainframe market, Google is not your competition, Google is the environment. Online businesses which struggle against this new reality will pay opportunity costs both in online advertising revenue as well as product success."
Most businesses on the net get 70% of their traffic from Google.
Search engines have zero user switching costs. Unlike switching email providers, there is no user data to move over, or addresses which need to be forwarded or communicated to peers. You just type in a new name and go to the new place.
If switching costs are zero, the first thought is that it should be easy for a worthy challenger to take some share away from the leader. Paradoxically, it's the reverse that happens.
Zero switching costs lead to a winner-take-all market for the leader. Even a modest initial lead will snowball until majority market share is reached and maintained. This is because, faced with a choice between two products, in the absence of switching costs users will choose the better one, even if it is only slightly better.
Google had a vastly better product than any other search engine for a number of years. Competitors have closed the gap somewhat, but Google is still better. Everyone (70-80%) knows this now, and so the Google-has-better-search concept is now built into Google's brand.
Even if a competitor such as Yahoo, MSN or Ask were to fully close the gap at this point, they would still have to overcome the final brand perception gap. This is the effect where market research shows that users who see Google's logo on top of Yahoo's results perceive the results to be of higher quality; users looking at Google's results with Yahoo's logo on top view them as having less relevance. Brand perception effects have been measured to account for about 8% in things like beer. A few years ago an AOL researcher replicated this study in a shopping mall in Virginia with AOL Search results vs. Google.
