February 2008
39 posts
QQ: What is the fastest "0 to global" brand?
Basically, what brand (company, product, person, any entity that holds a brand identity) do you think gained awareness the fastest. Reblog your answer, if you’re so inclined. TBC Monday (taking a snowboard trip to Stowe this weekend).
$2 barrels of oil
The cost to produce one barrel of oil in Iraq is about $1. In Saudi Arabia it’s $2. Remember that oil is currently traded on the NYMEX at $99.63 per barrel. So where does that margin go? Through a variety of mechanisms like taxes, royalties, production shares, the governments of oil producing countries get between 45-90% of the profits. For example, the Nigerian government made $2M an hour...
"Communication, not cleanliness, is next to...
says Kevin Kelly of Wired, referencing a home in Tibet which has no toilet, outhouse, or designated hole in the ground, but has a cell phone and fantastic coverage. In only 26 years, the cellphone technology has spread faster than any technology in human history – even faster than the polio vaccination. There are now 3.3 billion active cellphones in a world of about 6.6 billion people....
who loves the sun
if we could capture the energy that we get from the sun in just one hour and turn it into electricity, we could power the earth for a year
What is OPEC?
A day doesn’t go by without OPEC mentioned in the news. So let’s learn. OPEC is the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. It’s mission, per its website, is to “coordinate and unify the petroleum prices of Member Countries and ensure the stabilization of oil markets in order to secure an efficient economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income...
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The Dow Jones Industrial Average
You know it’s at 12311, down 116 points from today’s open. But what do these numbers even mean? What is this ‘Dow’ on which investors and the media fixate themselves? Is it really comprised of only 30 stocks? Yes! It’s a market index, which is a listing of stocks which share some similar characteristic; they could belong to the same industry or they could all have...
Castro: a “soldier in the battle of ideas” →
Fidel Castro, the world’s longest ruling head of state, finally resigned today. Rather, he said he will neither aspire to nor accept the position of President at the Parliament session on Feb 24th. He will continue to write his Reflections by comrade Fidel and will “fight as a soldier in the battle of ideas.”
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a different kind of game theory
Allen Iverson – great basketball player, right? I think most people would say he’s one of the best players in the NBA. According to an economic algorithm, that may not be so. In the book “The Wages of Wins,” economists use what they call Win Score to weigh the relative value of fouls, rebounds, turnovers, shots taken, etc, to determine a basketball player’s relative...
“like giving a drink to an alcoholic”
– NY Mayor Bloomberg’s thoughts on the recently approved stimulus package
BYOB part deux: Why I don't buy bottled water...
Mainly because I don’t like being taken advantage of. The bottled water industry is a $46 billion dollar industry. Americans bought over 31.2B liters of water in 2006. It’s a colossal waste of money for what comes out of the tap. It’s not always natural, nor is it spring; most of what you’re buying (25%, or so I’ve read) is just from the...
don't know much about ...tea
I need to learn about tea: consumer trends, various brands, tea producers, etc. If you’re an aficionado or at least have some knowledge and interest in tea, I’d love to chat. Please email me at whatilearned at gmail. Much obliged!
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How do you know that what you know is true?
I’ve been told that every seven years, human knowledge doubles. In researching that I also read that online information doubles every six months. And IBM claims that by 2010 the amount of digital information in the world will double every 11 hours. On the first day of my 7th grade history class, my professor assigned an essay with the prompt - How do you know that what you know is true?...
Exxon 's 2007 annual profit is largest in US... →
Branding Yourself
What’s a brand? Basically, it’s how your product or service differentiates itself from other products or services by instilling in your customers a collection of beliefs, feelings or perceptions about your product. If your product is not differentiated, it’s just a commodity. Everything has a brand – your shampoo, the café where you picked up this morning’s coffee, the...
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the espn of stocks
DCho: what is the espn of stocks?
me: i'm not sure what you're referring to
DCho: like some place where i can see stocks. how they're doing.
DCho: read about whose team is doing well. who's hurt. who's not.
me: well, your fidelity account will track the stocks you own. also yahoo or google finance allows you to create a portfolio so whenever you log onto your homepage you can see how your stocks are doing.
me: but the espn is really bloomberg.
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MSFT + YHOO vs. GOOG
Apparently, this comment by Google’s Sergey Brin admitting weakness in the social networking sector prompted Microsoft to send in its unsolicited bid for Yahoo: “I don’t think we have the killer best way to advertise and monetize social networks yet. Some of the things we were working on in Q4 didn’t pan out, and there were some disappointments there.” Now...
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The Economics of Football
“There has been a trend in the last seven or eight seasons that the team winning the toss in overtime wins the game. That advantage of receiving the ball first is becoming unbalanced.” - former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue Is it right for a team to get possession by the random outcome of a coin flip, then score – and win – without its opponent getting a chance to counter? Some...
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