jakke

May 21 2013 ∞
Hey so somehow I ended up with a Greek eurocent coin! It’s a little smaller than a North American penny but also pretty copper-y, and it has a boat on it, and the writing says “1 CENT” in Greek (because apparently they use λεπτό, which means “minute”, instead of the transliteration σεντ).  I haven’t posted as much about Greece and the eurozone lately because there hasn’t been much exciting news - but the TL;DR is that investors are enthusiastic but their enthusiasm hasn’t trickled down to the rest of the economy. Pretty much everyone’s still unemployed or unpaid or poor and banks aren’t lending and more austerity is coming.

Hey so somehow I ended up with a Greek eurocent coin! It’s a little smaller than a North American penny but also pretty copper-y, and it has a boat on it, and the writing says “1 CENT” in Greek (because apparently they use λεπτό, which means “minute”, instead of the transliteration σεντ). 

I haven’t posted as much about Greece and the eurozone lately because there hasn’t been much exciting news - but the TL;DR is that investors are enthusiastic but their enthusiasm hasn’t trickled down to the rest of the economy. Pretty much everyone’s still unemployed or unpaid or poor and banks aren’t lending and more austerity is coming.

6 notes

May 20 2013 ∞

If Yahoo Buys Tumblr, What Will It Do With All That Porn?

So yeah this seems like one of the actual big changes that Yahoo could possibly make around here - namely, shutting down porn blogs. Relatively few companies want to know that their ads are showing up with a bunch of porn (except maybe SmileyCentral I guess?) and this is already a transition that Tumblr has started.

Personally I’m not too crushed by this? I dunno, maybe I’m just not that motivated by the easy availability of porn gifs. Going to be suboptimal if blogs with a mix of actual content and porn gifs get shut down, though.

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“ Yahoo will need to balance its involvement with Tumblr to let the creative site flourish while also driving some benefits to core Yahoo. While Tumblr likely needs to take its feed advertising slowly so as not to negatively impact the user experience, the company should be able to leverage Yahoo!’s sales force and advertising relationships.
— So it’s kind of cool to see what actual analysts say about Yahoo buying Tumblr. But I have a pretty hard time figuring out what benefits the site would be driving to “core Yahoo”. Better integration with Flickr, maybe? Not really sure what core Yahoo comprises, anymore.

7 notes

May 19 2013 ∞

Microsoft buys Hotmail

As previously reported by CNET’s NEWS.COM, Microsoft  had been in talks to invest in Hotmail, and sources predicted that a deal might be sealed by year’s end. The stock deal for the two-year-old company has been estimated in the hundreds of million of dollars, according to industry sources. Microsoft and Hotmail officials would not comment on the price.

“This [acquisition] completes our lineup,” said Laura Jennings, vice president of the Microsoft Network. “We were missing a search engine and free email on MSN until last summer. So we did a deal with Inktomi for search [capabilities] and Hotmail is head and shoulders above the others in terms of scalability of service and members.”

During the next few months, Hotmail will be integrated into sites on the Microsoft Network, such as MSN.com, travel site Expedia, and car-buying site CarPoint. Microsoft’s idea is to drive traffic to its revenue-generating sites, such as Expedia and CarPoint, and then keep surfers within the Microsoft circle.

Wow, this happened three weeks before Yahoo bought Geocities. I like how Microsoft is up-front about the fact that they’ll be using their new search engine capabilities to drive traffic to their own sites. I also like the judicious use of square brackets in the quotes; it seems like news articles tend to avoid that now.

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“ GeoCities (GCTY) is the third most visited site on the Web behind AOL and Yahoo!, with 19 million unique visitors in December, according to Web research company Media Metrix.
— Wow, that January 1999 CNN article is seriously a glimpse into another era. 

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imagenhaler replied to your photo: Tumblr in the context of previous Yahoo…

$4.9B FOR GEOCITIES?!

In inflation-adjusted dollars? You bet. From the awesomely still-online CNN Money story dated January 28, 1999:

Internet search engine Yahoo! Inc. confirmed Thursday it will buy GeoCities, a fast-growing Web site community, in a $3.6 billion deal that will further solidify Yahoo!’s position as a frontrunner in the online popularity contest. 

Under terms of the deal, expected to close in the second quarter, GeoCities shareholders will receive 0.3384 share of Yahoo! for each share of GeoCities they own. GeoCities has 31.4 million shares outstanding. 

Based on Yahoo!’s closing stock price of $335.875 on Wednesday, the transaction is valued at roughly $3.57 billion, a hefty premium over GeoCities’ market capitalization of $2.3 billion. 

But that’s not unusual in the fast-track Internet sector where multi-billion acquisitions have largely defined its growth — @Home, for example, agreed last week to pay a 40 percent premium for Excite. 

So if you think Yahoo is spending a whole lot of money on Tumblr - well, that’s not unusual in the fast-track Internet sector.

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Tumblr in the context of previous Yahoo acquisitions. It’s the biggest in a long time, but it’s waaay smaller than companies they’ve bought previously.

Tumblr in the context of previous Yahoo acquisitions. It’s the biggest in a long time, but it’s waaay smaller than companies they’ve bought previously.

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American Cities of the Future 2013/14

Hey so the Financial Times runs a biennial ranking of cities in the Americas  in terms of attractiveness for foreign direct investment. It’s kind of cool to see how Some highlights:

  • New York won overall, as it does every year. But São Paulo ranked second overall, and it’s never even been in the top ten before. I guess it makes sense that Brazil is very quickly becoming a preferred FDI destination?
  • Vancouver is the best “large” city (which is a degree down from “major” cities like New York or São Paulo or even bigger Canadian cities like Toronto) overall.
  • Kamloops is apparently the friendliest small city for FDI. I lived in Kamloops for like a decade and this seems like a pretty effing grand claim. The only way I can imagine Kamloops being less friendly to FDI would be if the citizens actively chased out prospective investors with pitchforks and torches.

Anyway, click through if you want to see tons of rankings. They’ve helpfully broken out Latin American cities, so you can see the rapid gains in FDI compatibility there.

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“ It takes longer to get through the McDonald’s drive-through than it used to, according to a study by QSR Magazine and Insula Research Inc. in Columbus, Ohio. On average, it took almost 189 seconds for customers to get in and out of the drive-through last year, compared with 184 seconds in 2011 and about 167 seconds in 2007. Wendy’s and Taco Bell are faster, with average times respectively of about 130 seconds and 150 seconds in 2012. Burger King is slower, with a drive-through time of 201 seconds, the data show.
— I am honoured and humbled to live in a world where this dataset exists.

11 notes

May 18 2013 ∞
“ More than 11 percent of investments under U.S. professional management were selected for companies’ financial performance and their social and environmental responsibility in 2012. That’s $3.74 trillion of the $33.3 trillion in investments scanned for environmental, social and governance criteria (known as ESG), according to a November report by the U.S. SIF Foundation.
— So this is kind of cool, I guess. I feel like investment won’t get more ~ethical~ (or less actively predatory or whatever) because regulation tightens up but rather because enough rich people are getting rich enough to basically reach their personal satiation points on investment and would rather be able to tell their friends about their socially responsible investments than max out their rate of return by a couple tenths of a percentage point? Probably wildly optimistic though.

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