captainccs

Why Christmas Will Kill Retail

There is nothing I like better than to start a Monday morning with a scare headline. So I read the linked "(Weekly update from WHO)" which says:

>>>In temperate areas of the northern hemisphere (represented by North America, Europe, and Central Asia), influenza and respiratory disease activity remains low overall, with some countries experiencing localized outbreaks. <<<

What did Ross Snyder read?

Can Traditional Print Newspapers Survive Creative Destruction?

>>>Can Traditional Print Newspapers Survive Creative Destruction?

No, not the "print" part. They might remake themselves into something else but print news is dead.

The Internet as an Operating System and Maximizing User 'Default' Behavior

>>>Only they didn't. Somehow they got to be the default. Most often by being sufficiently superior to the other services of their kind. Or in some cases, by simply being first and building up a network effect or a data asset that was unassailable by newcomers.

This has been amply studied and documented, it's called "path dependence" and it's part of the economic law of Increasing Returns. See:

www.amazon.com/Increas...

Can a Stock Market Meltdown Happen from Here?

Investing has never been easier. Sell everything now, go short and buy back when that S&P hits 475 -- no sense trying to squeeze out the last few pennies.

Now, why didn't I think of that?

40 Stocks That Have Defied the Downturn

If they didn't go down why would they now go up more than the average?

Best Buy Induces Ridiculous Consumer Discretionary Rally

Shorting at the bottom of the market?

Traditional Retailers Return Dismal Online Search Results

If they only knew how to optimize their web pages for search engines their listings would improve. Many websites are inward looking: "What have we to offer?" A website optimized for search engines is outward looking: "What are people looking for?"

I manage a marina website and we get about half the hits from "Information Portal" pages such as weather, charter, marina directories and other activities related to marinas but not necessarily services we provide. After all, how much can you say about a marina? About a dozen pages worth. Yet we have many times that number of pages with information that is of interest to the sailing community so we get a lot of hits.

Signs of Consumer Spending Stabilizing, But Overall Outlook Remains Negative

Very interesting for me since I have several retail investments, thanks!

Mobile Reading: Next Big Area of Innovation

I've been reading on mobile devices most of my life: books and magazines. I seldom read on fixed devils like statues, pyramids, and murals.

But I do admit that being able to take a laptop into the john has made books less of a necessity when performing that necessity.

Intuit: How To Improve Cloud-Computing Safety

I don't see what the big ado is all about except maybe assigning insufficient resources to these "clouds." I've used online stock brokers for over 20 years (starting with E-Trade on CompuServe) with hardly a problem. How is cloud computing different from what these online brokers do? Cloud is just a fancy name for client-server architecture on the web.

One thing these cloud people should remember is that their pipes have to be as large as storm sewer pipes, they must be able to take the largest surge which also means a lot of idle time most of the time. Lots of resources is the solution which also means that it's not as cheap as you think it might be.

Online Sales: Poking Holes in the Long Tail Theory

I don't sell books. I collect eyeballs for my web customers. By having 2,500 pages instead of 250 I collect a lot more eyeballs. These additional eyeballs are not as focused as the ones I collected with the original 250 pages but the cost of the extra pages is vanishingly small. This is very much like the transistor count on chips. The original ICs had a few transistors and each transistor had a sizable cost. Now, with millions of transistors on a chip, the cost per transistor is vanishingly small. The effect is similar, with chips you have vastly more processing power and with websites you have vastly more eyeball collecting capacity.

How to convert those extra eyeballs into additional sales is a different issue and that is what professor Anita Elberse is addressing.