Yelp’s [NYSE:YELP] successful IPO this past Friday was a modern validation of an age-old economic precept. People migrate to better and cheaper ways to do things they like to do. People like shopping and going to restaurants. And technology drives those trends. Social media is the new Mega Mall, the most effective way for retail…
Can we talk about oil? Tom Friedman now evinces excitement about his discovery of the emergence of America as “a major oil and gas producer.” (See his Sunday New York Times column.) No kidding. He was, he says, tantalized by a tongue-in-cheek idea; the U.S. could join OPEC. Some folks are late to the party. …
One of comedian George Carlin’s great riffs was about our propensity to cherish and store “stuff.” We all like to store stuff. So it’s a big deal when we learn that Google will soon launch a consumer-oriented Cloud storage service called Drive. Another place to store our digital stuff.
WALL STREET JOURNAL In January 1912, the United States emerged from a two-year recession. Nineteen more followed—along with a century of phenomenal economic growth. Americans in real terms are 700% wealthier today. In hindsight it seems obvious that emerging technologies circa 1912—electrification, telephony, the dawn of the automobile age, the invention of stainless steel and…
What do cadavers, Tricorders and Qualcomm have in common? Only the biggest thing that’s happening in medical technology these days. And it’s not happening in a pharmaceutical research lab or at the National Institutes of Health, but at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. With the glitzy Vegas-style keynote announcement of the Tricorder…
With headlines featuring words like fizzle and slump, do we conclude from Friday’s “disappointing” IPO of Zynga [ZNGA:NASDAQ] that social media is a bubble that’s run its course? Hardly. We are witnessing the inverse: the real beginning. By any reasonable business standard, especially in these dismal economic times, it is remarkable that a four-year old…
