So, here’s my beef with AppWorld. In short, it reminds me of computing back in about 1987.

via Thursday Signal – Repeat After Me: Apps Are (Currently) Myopic (Or…We’ve Seen This Movie Before…) – John Battelle’s Searchblog.

Pouring government stimulus funds into clean technology may be a great way to boost the economy’s potential. But it isn’t the best way to create jobs, according to the consultants at McKinsey & Co.

via McKinsey: Don’t Look to Clean Tech for Jobs – Real Time Economics – WSJ.

There are countless examples where fat margins in the short term guarantee trouble in the long term.   Do companies even have a choice here if shareholders are putting the pressure to chase the sure thing?

Part of the answer, academics and industry analysts say, is that for years American carmakers made so much money from high-margin behemoths like pickup trucks and S.U.V.’s that ignoring quality held little financial downside — at least in the short term.

via G.M. and Ford, Channeling Toyota’s Focus on Quality – NYTimes.com.

All of this is quite important because search is so central to how people navigate the Internet, and because advertising is the main monetization mechanism for a wide range of Web sites and Web services. Both search and online advertising are increasingly controlled by a single firm, Google. That can be a problem because Google’s business is helped along by significant network effects (just like the PC operating system business). Search engine algorithms “learn” by observing how users interact with search results. Google’s algorithms learn less common search terms better than others because many more people are conducting searches on these terms on Google.

These and other network effects make it hard for competing search engines to catch up. Microsoft’s well-received Bing search engine is addressing this challenge by offering innovations in areas that are less dependent on volume. But Bing needs to gain volume too, in order to increase the relevance of search results for less common search terms. That is why Microsoft and Yahoo! are combining their search volumes. And that is why we are concerned about Google business practices that tend to lock in publishers and advertisers and make it harder for Microsoft to gain search volume.

via Competition Authorities and Search – Microsoft On The Issues.

But “unpaid/earned/proprietary” media spending has seen the sharpest rise, with nearly one-fifth of respondents reporting increases of more than 30%. Climbing unpaid-media spending is likely an effect of the increased emphasis on social networks, where the most effective efforts are earned, not bought.

via Engagement on Social Networks Top Priority for Marketers – eMarketer.

The model is only viable as long as companies feel that the discounts aren’t harming the brand.

“At first we weren’t into being a part of this and marketing our brand on anybody’s Web site,” said Joseph Cabasso, vice president of Mario Badescu, which has been a partner with HauteLook and the Gilt Groupe. “Our first sale on Gilt was last July and we did phenomenally,” he said. “Since we never discount, I knew that offering our customers 20 percent off would make them happy. So, I thought we’d try it once.”

via Skin Deep – Prospect of Deals Is the Attraction for Members-Only Sites – NYTimes.com.

Whatever benefit in the market Apple hopes to achieve by this suit to me seems likely to be worth far less than the loss of good will and prestige Apple will suffer if they vigorously pursue this case (let alone if they initiate more such suits).

via Daring Fireball: This Apple-HTC Patent Thing.

I can’t help but connect this idea:

Copying ideas is how progress is made. It’s copying implementations that is wrong (and illegal). Admittedly there are gray areas, and reasonable people can disagree about whether some specific instances cross that line.

With this quote dug up by Engadget:

“Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal”

Testing this out now

I’m convinced that the Apple fan base is an installed base for all future Apple products.

Mac OS X North American installed base almost 11%.

With regards to algorithmically driven news, the big knock against it is that it will narrow the field of interest.  This interesting link suggests an alternative system that makes more tangential recommendations:

“In a paper that will be released by PNAS, a group of scientists are pushing the limits of recommendation systems, creating new algorithms that will make more tangential recommendations to users, which can help expand their interests, which will increase the longevity and utility of the recommendation system itself. Accuracy has long been the most prized measurement in recommending content, like movies, links, or music. However, computer scientists note that this type of system can narrow the field of interest for each user the more it is used. Improved accuracy can result in a strong filtering based on a user's interests, until the system can only recommend a small subset of all the content it has to offer.”

via Slashdot Science Story | Recommendation Algorithm Wants To Show You Something New.