Barry Ritholtz: Facebook is valued at “plenty” By Wall Street’s tech cognoscenti, Take 1 billion friends Times 5 dollars, then Times IPO multiple: 20! — Limericks Économiques Last week, I made a surprising discovery about Facebook: It has far fewer “active” users than it claims. I learned this from a note buried deep in the [...]
Andrew: It started dawning on me recently that the things I read in any given day (on news sites, in magazines, newspapers, blogs, internet forums, etc) are all mostly useless. That is, after reading them I am in almost no way better than if I had not read them. And yet, I still go through [...]
Nielsen: While overall smartphone penetration stood at 48 percent in January, those in the 24-34 age group showed the greatest proportion of smartphone ownership, with 66 percent saying they had a smartphone. In the same age group, 8 of 10 of those that had gotten a new device in the last three months chose a [...]
Lucy Kellaway: The other day I was invited to a dinner for non-executive directors to talk about women on boards. Even though I would much rather watch MasterChef on the television than go out and discuss this most worn-out of subjects, I said yes because I liked the person arranging it. Before the event I [...]
James Stewart: Mitt Romney is not alone. I thought Mr. Romney’s 13.9 percent federal tax rate would be hard to beat. But among the 400 Americans with the highest adjusted gross incomes in 2008, 30 of them paid less than 10 percent and another 101 paid less than 15 percent. And these people earned, on [...]
Charles Duhigg: Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ” [...]
Dennis Berman: Holly Chen is a former first-grade teacher, just over 5 feet tall, with a taste for sequins. You wouldn’t know it by looking at her, but this 68-year-old grandmother is one of the most prolific salespeople on Earth. Late on this January night, in a cramped casino ballroom, some 1,100 people rise to [...]
Tom Foremski: Increasing numbers of studies of social networks point to much smaller numbers of real and active users — sharply reducing the value of the platforms, and social media marketing. The numbers of users reported by Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many other sites, are closely watched. They reveal trends in adoption and they are [...]
The Economist: AMERICA’S chaotic response to its housing crisis moved into new territory on February 9th with the announcement of a $25 billion settlement between five large financial institutions and a slew of state and federal entities. Only Oklahoma stayed out of the settlement, with its attorney general Scott Pruitt releasing a scathing statement saying [...]