Front-end for a Retail Bank. (more)

Penelope Trunk: *It's not that top universities are telling people directly to Home-School their kids. Instead, top schools are using a selection process (College Admission) that gives homeschooled kids a huge advantage. Here's why: (more)

Jay Rosen gives some background on the news that Glenn Greenwald is leaving the Guardian to join Pierre Omidyar's new Journalism venture. In the spring of this year, Pierre Omidyar was one of the people approached by the Washington Post Company about buying the Post. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, wound up with the prize. But as a result of exploring that transaction, Omidyar started thinking seriously about investing in a news property. He began to ask himself what could be done with the same investment if he decided to build something from the ground up... Attempts to meet with Greenwald to discuss these plans and to find out more about how he operates were unsuccessful until this month. When they finally were able to talk, Omidyar learned that Greenwald, his collaborator LauraPoitras, and The Nation magazine’s Jeremy Scahill had been planning to form their own journalism venture. Their ideas and Omidyar’s ideas tracked so well with each other that on October 5 they decided to “join forces” (his term.) (more)

Jonathan Glick: What should we call a publisher — like Gawker — that provides a tech platform on which anybody, not just its staff, can create content? What should we call a tech Platform — like Medium — that has a team of editors and pays some contributors to create content? It’s something in between a publisher and a platform — something that weaves together the strengths of both. A platisher... So why is this happening now?... The combination of mobile’s small screens and programmatic ad buying has made it clear that successful consumer properties need to have enormous amounts of traffic, and ad units that are essentially content. The platisher addresses both of these requirements. (more)

Time Warner Cable and Em Barq have been using Lobbying to fight the Municipal Net Green Light operation in Wilson Nc. North Carolina's State Senate have proposed bills to not only effectively crippling or banning the local service, but also to prevent such services from getting funds under the broadband portion of the national Economic Stimulus law. Hmm, they spent $28M, and have 3k customers after a year. That's $9k/customer.

What would I do If I Ran Barnes And Noble, esp in terms of EBook handling? (more)

CableCo spun out of Time Warner in 2009. (more)

ComCast intends to buy Time Warner Cable. (more)

Hugh Howey explains what he's do if he ran a Book Publishing company. (Self Publishing, EBook) Each of the following would be fairly simple to implement. Each one highlights an advantage self-published authors currently own. (more)

weird Entrepreneur (more)

I used to think of Amazon as selling every book, like a Common Carrier. But some publishers have started pulling their titles, in 1 format or another. And obviously a number of Kindle EBook-s are exclusively there, so no other store carries them. (more)

Jeff Hawkins' Nu Menta group has been renamed Grok to emphasize the transition from a research venture to a commercial product company. The company has begun deployment of Grok, its patented machine intelligence product which ingests data streams and creates actionable predictions in real-time. (more)

This may become a Thinker Web page if it turns into anything coherent. (more)

Arnold Kling on the cycle of Globalization. The process is likely to be very convoluted. Maybe the Indian workers will outsource the production of yogurt. The yogurt producers may outsource the production of milk to Australia. The Australians may want beer, which they outsource to Germany. The Germans want drug research, which they outsource to the United States, because we still allow drug companies to profit from research. With low interest rates, thanks to the fact that all of our trading partners want crateloads of U.S. Treasury securities, one of our drug companies can finance a new research facility. To build it, the construction company may hire workers who are new immigrants. The new immigrants might want schools where their children can learn to read English. These schools might outsource some of their teaching to Rachel. (Just kidding. The Teachers Union will not allow economic activity. And they do not seem to care much for teaching English to immigrants, either. But you get the idea.) Hmmm, what happens when the PharmCo-s move their research there, and our new houses get prefabbed in China? Will we be left with Pizza Delivery, like in SnowCrash?

linchpin of the Service Economy? (more)

Democracy where the people make decisions themselves (e.g. through Referen Dum) (more)

http://www.lneilsmith.org/ (more)

David Wong notes that we don't really need to buy very much anymore, but at the same time most of us aren't doing anything very important either. Artificial Scarcity is the Shared Delusion Game Rule that keeps us from eating each other... Look at how many of Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs they're getting digitally: Everything from that second tier to the capstone, they can get at a cost that rounds down to zero, if they so choose. (more)

Comic Strip satirizing the insanity of Management. (more)

Jon Udell on Andy Clark's perspective on Augmenting Human Intellect. Ever since the advent of language, and especially since the advent of print, our minds have operated in a hybrid mode, depending on a complex interaction between information processes running inside the skull and information processes running outside it. This is now our natural state, argues Clark, and it is not really meaningful or useful to try to precisely define the inside/outside boundary.