| I was trying check my credit score recently on
Experian. I learned that since I live in
Massachusetts, I am entitled to a free credit report each year. So I went to the website, entered my information
and got the following error message:"We're sorry. We are unable to process your request online.
We understand that the privacy and security of your information is important to
you; therefore we cannot provide a specific reason as to why we cannot deliver
your report online. Our registration process is designed to ensure that your
online perso |
- Last Modified: 2005-04-12 20:09:20
| Top 2 most interesting business links: Buffet?s Collected Letters to ShareholdersWarren Buffet?s letters to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. More than just a stock picker, Buffet is the epitome of long-term value investing. The letters are pleasantly readable to boot.linkGoogle's S-1?Don?t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served?as shareholders and in all other ways?by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.? This deserves applause. Of course a booming onl |
- Last Modified: 2005-03-24 23:04:00
| Imagine Amazon.com answering each technical query with a personal phone call and following up with a thank-you note one week later. Or Cingular dispatching a technical crew to investigate the slightest technical hiccup with my cell phone. While it would be great to simply get a person when you call customer support, it is also very expensive. Generally, the resources required increase exponentially with the quality of customer service provided. The secret is then not to go overboard, but instead to focus resources on the two or three customer s |
- Last Modified: 2005-02-19 22:44:00
| Quick, Humane End AT&T?s twenty year death spiral has finally come to an end. Once the largest company in the world, last week it was acquired by SBC, one of the Baby Bells spin-offs from the government mandated breakup of AT&T in 1984. The child bought the parent. A shadow of its former self, AT&T was acquired for $16 billion (or roughly a quarter of Google?s current market cap.) It will be interesting to see what will happen to some of AT&T?s forward-looking projects.Relaunch of AT&T Wireless Now UnlikelyTo the grea |
- Last Modified: 2005-02-05 23:35:00
| SAP Ventures' Jeff Nolan posted his response to 10 questions to ask a VC. All 10 of Jeff's responses can be found here, I've posted a few of the more interesting ones below (his responses are in red.) When you fundraise and tell the story of your three most successful investments, how will you describe how value was created for LPs? The answer to this question will give you some insight regarding how you might be expected to create value. For example, if the firm's biggest success came as a result of increasing valuation multiples t |
- Last Modified: 2005-02-05 08:47:00
| I was at a charity benefit auction in early December. The was a professional auctioneer running the bidding and he was absolutely amazing. Aside from his amazing sense for the ?micro-tactical? issues of running an auction -- knowing what to say, when to pause, when to egg someone one, etc. -- he was also changing up the type of auction based on the item up for bid. The fancy name for the most common type of auction is ?open-outcry, second price.? The open-outcry is pretty clear (as opposed to a sealed-bid or some other means of signaling such a |
- Last Modified: 2005-01-25 10:52:00
| We humans are not wired to live in modern society. We are wired to live in nomadic packs of 20 people or so, which we did quite successfully for millions of years. The amount of information and the complexity of our social system is too much to keep track of. As a result, we occasionally exhibit really odd behavior and biases. For example, the Journal of Marketing Research provides some excellent examples of ?recency bias? and ?anchoring? in a recent article (brought to my attention by a recent post at the always interesting BusinessPundi |
- Last Modified: 2005-01-18 15:41:00
| The copyright battle is dominated by extremes. On one hand, the RIAA and the MPAA believe that their customers should give thanks for such innovative distribution channels as Tower Records and Blockbuster. On the other, there are the free culture folks who fear that intellectual property laws are getting out of hand, and that corporations already have too much control over culture. Both sides have valid points. The RIAA/MPAA folks are understandably concerned that digital content can be stolen so easliy. The MPAA, a rel |
- Last Modified: 2005-01-18 01:09:00
| (this is a follow up to my entry on Google Print from last month.) Lawrence Lessig has written an op-ed in the LA Times that takes some of the problems I pointed out with Google Print a step further. He suggests that Google is taking on a huge liability just by scanning books that are potentially under copyright. He writes: "...for work not in the public domain, Google's right to scan ? to copy ? whole texts to index is uncertain at best, even if it ultimately makes only snippets available. When permission has been given by the copyr |
- Last Modified: 2005-01-14 02:27:00
| There was a fascinating interview of Amazon?s Jeff Bezos in this month?s Wired (which was discussed recenly on Slashdot.) I read it maybe a week ago, and two thing have really stuck with me. The first:? About three years ago we stopped doing television advertising. We did a 15-month-long test of TV advertising in two markets - Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis - to see how much it drove our sales. And it worked, but not as much as the kind of price elasticity we knew we could get from taking those ad dollars and giving them back to consumers. S |
- Last Modified: 2005-01-09 11:45:00
|
|
