Famous American blogger strikes back against China

seinfeldA few weeks ago I published a column here about online journalism. You may remember it from the picture of Jerry Seinfeld which I am using again here. While I have many readers in China, my work isn’t normally distributed there so I was surprised when a reader told me that column had been translated almost in its entirety and republished on a Chinese web site. How should I feel about this?

I might be flattered or I might be angry. Certainly the translation was not authorized by me and I received no payment for it. It goes far beyond the 250 word excerpt that is the day-to-day definition of Fair Use […]

By |July 27th, 2016|2016, Media, Newspapers|28 Comments
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Is anyone at Yahoo! paying attention? Probably not.

yahoo-old-logo-v2So Verizon is buying the heart of old Yahoo! I include the exclamation point because it was always there in the Yahoo! we knew back when the Internet was young. $4.83 billion in cash is a lot of cash, but for Verizon it’s a way of buying into the future while buying what to many of us seems to be the past. So let’s get the business part out of the way: Verizon can see Yahoo! as a bargain because Yahoo! has nearly always been more profitable on a gross margin basis than Verizon, a phone company. Even Yahoo! in decline will pull Verizon up. But that’s not why I’m writing […]

By |July 26th, 2016|2016, Companies, Internet, Media, mobile technology, strategy|19 Comments
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Why SoftBank is paying $32 billion for ARM Holdings

Mr. SonSoftBank is buying ARM Holdings for $32 billion. Why would a company not presently in the semiconductor business spend 32 times sales to enter a new industry? By traditional measures it makes little sense. But for SoftBank it makes perfect sense, because here’s a company that has spent more than 30 years making high-risk bets on entering new businesses by apparently over-paying for assets. It’s the way they’ve always done it and it has nearly always worked. In this case SoftBank is paying a 43 percent premium over the recent ARM share price because that’s how much money it took to overcome the resistance of ARM management. And it’s just a guess […]

By |July 18th, 2016|2016, Industry, mobile technology, strategy|40 Comments
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A PayPal Mystery

PayPalMystery

Update from my reader, the small software vendor:

“Mystery solved. The first chargeback came through today for one of the first purchases (June 8th). PayPal opened a claim regarding that purchase with the following: “The buyer stated that they did not authorize this purchase.” Oddly enough, the email associated with the claim is still the same fake email (by fake, I mean it doesn’t exist). So it seems they were just using my order form to test stolen credit cards.
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“I spent 35 minutes on hold with PayPal, was handed off three times, but finally spoke with a person who seemed to know what was up. I told her there were 19 more […]

By |July 18th, 2016|2016, e-commerce|48 Comments
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Thinking about Big Data — Part Three (the final and somewhat scary part)

BigDataIn part one we learned about data and how it can be used to find knowledge or meaning. Part two explained the term Big Data and showed how it became an industry mainly in response to economic forces. This is part three, where it all has to fit together and make sense — rueful, sometimes ironic, and occasionally frightening sense. You see our technological, business, and even social futures are being redefined right now by Big Data in ways we are only now coming to understand and may no longer be able to control.

Whether the analysis is done by a supercomputer or using a hand-written table compiled in 1665 […]

By |July 11th, 2016|Big Data, cloud computing|97 Comments
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