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Why do hotels sometimes charge for internet access and sometimes don’t? My take is that most hotels figure that it’s mostly business travelers that use the internet and therefore it’s the guests’ companies who are footing the bill and since it’s a business necessity for them, the companies pay, no matter what the daily rate. Which sucks for those of us who like a little internet on vacation or want to keep our small business expenditures down.
Larry Ellison spends tens of millions of dollars in borrowed money every year, which is worrying his accountant, who wants him to diversify by selling some of his Oracle stock.
An account of how Pixar came about that goes back a little further (Xerox PARC, circa 1973) than the one I linked to a few days ago.
I can’t believe that paying the NFL $330 million for being able to use trademarked terms like “Super Bowl” and “Pittsburgh Steelers” in advertising is worth it, particularly when you can use euphemisms like “The Big Game” for absolutely free.
Matt calculates the cost of a la carte television, i.e. ordering TV shows from iTunes. His yearly cable bill is $648 but the cost of watching all hs favorite shows from iTunes would be $800. I bet the networks love this math, especially since it cuts the cable companies out of the loop. But in an a la carte-only world, how would you discover shows in the first place?
The Pixar model of making creative products: “We’ve made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We’re trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners. It’s no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it’s a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people.” Pixar University sounds *amazing*.
Nice interview with Josh “Shake” Schachter about del.icio.us. “I would not say [that I am an] entrepreneur - the enterprise of the thing was always dragged along by the thing itself.”
It’s a done deal…Disney is buying Pixar. This bums me out in a lot of different ways. The big winner? Apple Computer.
A brief history of Pixar. “Even with the animation group generating income Pixar was still a money pit. That was about to change. Disney had decided they were willing to give a computer-animated movie a shot.”
The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart. “He looked into a future of supplying lawn mowers and snow blowers to Wal-Mart and saw a whirlpool of lower prices, collapsing profitability, offshore manufacturing, and the gradual but irresistible corrosion of the very qualities for which Snapper was known. Jim Wier looked into the future and saw a death spiral.”
Random House, the publisher of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, is offering refunds to folks who bought the book. Wow, this situation is getting out of hand in a hurry for Mr. Frey. And speaking of out of control, the kottke.org thread about Frey is going fast, furious, hot, and heated. Not sure where all the participants came from, but they sure are energetic.
Edward Jay Epstein examines where it all went wrong for Blockbuster Video. Blockbuster had an opportunity to have rental pricing for DVDs like they did with video, but they turned the deal down and the studios priced DVDs for retail instead and have been minting money with that scheme ever since.
In addition to the James Frey thing, we’ve got people digging into the identity of the secretive writer JT LeRoy (a denial). And True Hoop’s Henry Abbott is trying to figure out who William Wesley is…a powerful NBA figure who came out of nowhere and appears to not have a job or any direct influence on anyone or anything but goes to fights with Michael Jordan and has LeBron James on speed dial.
Anil Dash offers a list of dos and don’ts for beating the iPod and iTunes.
What business are movie theaters in? The fast-food business, the advertising business, or the movie exhibition business? All three, but they take the movie exhibition business the least seriously.
A long list of business buzz words compiled from a short time on the job for a big-box retailer. If we don’t boil the ocean, concentrate on the big rocks, and avoid getting thrown under the bus, our surge to streamline is a whole other type of animal and at the end of the day, we’ll all be on the same page.
In an era when players are so much bigger, stronger, faster, and richer than the rest of us, it’s getting harder for fans to really connect with pro sports teams.
Intel is retiring the “Intel Inside” saying/logo and is getting a new company logo as well…no more of the familiar “dropped e” logo. Now they’ll look like everyone else.
More and more, shoppers are judging books by their covers. “Studies show that a book on a three-for-two table has about one and a half seconds to catch a reader’s eye.”
Pepsi’s market cap surpassed Coca-Cola’s last week for the first time ever. The secret to their success? Diversifying into other snacks (Frito-Lay) and beverages (Tropicana and Gatorade).
King Kong gets a slow start at the box office. This is kind of amazing to me…except for the length, Kong is almost a perfect movie for audiences to go see in the theater.
This may just be the Nyquil hangover talking, but I’ve an idea. UPS, FedEx, USPS, and DHL should offer in-transit upgrades for package shipping[1]. I’m having something shipped and I realize that I would like it to arrive sooner than it is scheduled for. With computerized systems, they know exactly where that package is in their shipping system…it seems simple in theory to pluck it from its current route and get it going faster. The upgrade would probably come at premium price and not be a true upgrade in some cases[2], but it would be a useful (and potentially lucrative) feature.
[1] It’s possible that this is already possible. In the grand tradition of weblogs, no real research has been done.
[2] If you’re two days into waiting for a 5-7 day ground shipment from UPS and want it the next day, it may take a bit to get it from a semi in the middle of Montana onto a plane to Miami, i.e. not truly next-day.
Surowiecki on the sorry state of the US patent system. “Since the [USPTO] is funded by patent fees, as opposed to getting its budget from Washington, it has a financial incentive to process applications as quickly, rather than as diligently, as possible.”
The Dayton Daily “News” has a full-page advertisement for King Kong right on the front page of the paper. That’s why they call it a journalism business, I guess.
eGullet recently interviewed author Michael Ruhlman and he had this to say about what he liked about working in a professional kitchen:
You can’t lie in a kitchen — that’s what I like most about it. You’re either ready or you’re not, you’re either clean or you’re a mess. You’re either good or you’re bad. You can’t lie. If you lie, it’s obvious. If your food’s not ready, then it’s not ready. If you’re in the weeds, its clear to everybody — you can’t say that you aren’t. So I love that aspect of it. I love the immediacy of it, the vitality of it.
I’ve worked in a number of different places over the years and the ones I ended up liking the least were the places that allowed people (myself included) to hide. Some companies just have way too many people for the amount of available work. Other times, particular employees have a certain status within the organization that allows them to determine their own schedules and projects. Deadlines are often malleable, meaning that work can pushed off. Inexperienced or nontechnical managers might not have a clue how long a task should take a programmer…budgeting 2 weeks for a six-hour task that seems hard buys one a lot of blog-surfing time. Companies with coasting employees are everything a kitchen isn’t; they just feel slow, wasteful, lifeless, and eventually they suck the life out of you too.
If you want to sell your web startup, don’t take that much money from VCs or bootstrap the whole thing yourself. Too much money invested means that no one wants to buy your company for what your VCs require you to sell it for…especially if your business has limited prospects to begin with.
Rob Walker on the mass-produced individuality of CafePress.
Seven key principles that Google uses to make their employees more effective. “At Google, the role of the manager is that of an aggregator of viewpoints, not the dictator of decisions.”
Why are rental cars American cars? Why don’t rental car companies use the superior Japanese product?
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