Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be Wall Street quant cowboys. My alma mater, northern Virginia's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology, is in the papers for offering advanced postcalculus math courses. (Yeah, yeah — tell me something I didn't know in 9th grade.) Why is this news, two decades…
"Email becomes a dangerous distraction," headlines a guest column by an "expert in collaboration and communications" in the usually tech-savvy Sydney Morning Herald. If you check mail every five minutes, you lose eight hours a week of mental concentration, according to some glib algebra done on the results of a…
NPR reports that someone edited Sarah Palin's Wikipedia page Friday just before the word got out that she was John McCain's pick for a running mate. The edits were obviously made to make Palin look good. There were about 30 of them, made by one person. I'll spell out what NPR is dying to say: That one person was…
Apple's iPhone has some 2,000 apps available for download. Of those, 65 have some arguable business application, Ben Worthen notes in a Wall Street Journal blog. Only 3 out of the top 100 most downloaded applications are business-related. The most plausible interpretation of those numbers: iPhone buyers and…
"Your math is indeed bullshit," writes commenter Jeffrey McManus about yesterday's Zogby poll result that gave John McCain a 5 percent lead over Zogby's usual front-runner, Barack Obama. "The presidential election is chosen by electoral votes selected on a state-by-state basis. Any poll that tries to dumb down the…
In just a few short months, the value of a Twitter user has gone up over 1,200 percent, according to completely arbitrary and illogical calculations. I initially pegged it at around $1 based on the value buyers were willing to pay for Andrew Baron's Twitter account at auction. When Twitter received $15 million in…
Blockbuster has abandoned advertising TotalAccess, its also-ran DVD-by-mail competitor to Netflix. CEO Jim Keyes would like you to think his company's still a contender, though, and PaidContent's Rafat Ali is happy to oblige in a softball interview. Ali's far-from-knockout closer: "This is a hypothetical one. Would…
You'll be seeing a lot of articles this week claiming the U.S. is 101 years behind Japan in broadband, or some similar number-fumbling. The source is a report sponsored by the Communications Workers of America, a union which represents more than 700,000 workers in telecom and other jobs (for comparison, AFL-CIO…
Miguel Helft of the New York Times looks at shareholder discontent at Yahoo another way: If one assumes insiders voted their shares for the company's slate of directors, and discounts those, then the withheld votes on CEO Jerry Yang and Roy Bostock, the board's chairman, are even more striking. One problem with this…
"Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization" is the new cover story from Adbusters. If you're not familiar, Adbusters is a fun, angry, Starbucks-hating publication whose credo states that we've all been brainwashed by advertising and mass media into an orgy of overconsumption that lets the American Empire destroy…
Apple profited some $330 million from 3G iPhone sales over its first weekend, Fortune's Philip Elmer-DeWitt estimates that . His back-of-the-envelope formula factored in iSuppli's estimate of the manufacturing costs of each iPhone 3G, Apple's numbers on how many iPhones it sold over the weekend, analyst estimates on…
Analysts say the craziest things when trying to guess what the supersecretive Steve Jobs is up to at Apple. Last quarter, Jobs has only billed the company for $30,000 in business-related travel reimbursements. That's down from the $550,000 peak in the previous quarter, which was the high-altitude mark for the year.…
ABC News's thesis that "Everyone Is 'Tweeting'" is quickly disproven — in the latest article on Twitter from ABC News. It begins with the obligatory anecdote about James Buck, the Berkeley student briefly jailed in Egypt:
Interviewing Muxtape's Justin Ouellette for Listening Post, Eliot Van Buskirk asked "How many users are there at this point? How many muxtapes?" Ouellette's response — "more than the population of Germany, less than the population of Japan" — puts the number between 82 million and 127 million users. Compete.com…
Yahoo beat analyst expectations for its first-quarter revenues by $30 million, $1.35 billion to $1.32 billion. Its net income, at $542 million, was considerably higher than Wall Street had hoped for, too. But $401 million of that profit came from a noncash gain, Yahoo's take from Alibaba.com's initial public…
There's no real market for applications written for Google's Android cell-phone operating system — the sad, software-only remnant of the abortive quest for a Googlephone — but Google's trying hard to create an artificial one. Participants in Google's Android Developer Challenge submitted 1,788 Android programs. In…
Here's what you really need to know about Ning, according to Fast Company writer Adam Penenberg. Its chairman, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen, has an egg-shaped head. Its CEO, Gina Bianchini, who posed for Fast Company's cover in a tank top, is a "hottie." And Ning, a provider of websites for niche social…
To fend off Microsoft, Yahoo is conducting a test with Google to have the latter broker ads for Yahoo's search results. The notion: Google will be so much more effective at selling ads than Yahoo that it will raise Yahoo's revenues, and therefore boost its value well beyond Microsoft's $44.6 billion offer. The test…
Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is an entrepreneur now, but back in the 1990s, he ran a publication called Silicon Alley Reporter. And sometimes, his journalist roots show. Like during this recent interview with The Deal when Calacanis explained who uses Mahalo. Seems 80 percent come from one place and 80 percent from…
