Business

Wired on Apple Park.

Customer service needs to be good not great.

Articulating the obvious re the Facebook: it’s a menace.

At the Zapier Blog they note that AirTable, the online database builder, is the fastest-growing app. Competitors include Knack and Zoho Builder. Could be that the online database service might finally be entering public consciousness as a possibility, taking its rightful place alongside word processors and spreadsheets.

Francis Fukuyama coins and explains vetocracy. The intricacies are bamboozling—which is the point. Seems to me that fixing this is the first domino.

New British prime minister Theresa May’s first major decision was the nuclear plant at Hinckley Point and it seems she took the easy way out.

Lately I’ve noticed an irritating profusion of paid-in-kind reviews on Amazon—see Is Amazon Doing Anything To Fight Latest Wave Of Fake, Paid-For Reviews? in The Consumerist. I think that allowing this is a huge mistake on Amazon’s part—the first I can remember seeing them make. It essentially makes their incredibly valuable review functionality—even other retailers include it in their web sites—valueless. Worse, it’s irritating and draining, because you have to scan to the end of a review to find out if it’s been subsidized by the vendor. See “How to Snag a Deal by Writing an Amazon Review” in USA Today. The current antidote? fakespot.com.

Ben Thompson on Apple: if they really want to become a services company they’ll have to change their fabled organizational structure.

Possibly the world’s most important story at the moment? American middle-class impoverishment, or as the author—himself afflicted—calls it, financial impotence.

I found this quite exciting: Mike Maas of Cisco expounds on how the Internet of Things will be integrated into the factory floor. (1:11:34)

According to Michael Schrage in “Whether You’re Qualified Depends on How You’re Quantified”, being a paid-up participant in the Quantified Self movement will soon be a requirement for getting a decent job. “Best-in-class performers are relentlessly dedicated to measurable self-improvement,” he writes. “Consequently, they relentlessly self-quantify.”

Some strategic implications for Israel of Hamas’s tunnels and rockets by JCPA.

On how design has become the new business paradigm, complete with FLLW quote.

Could it be that so many million more cars are being produced each year than are bought?

Released: Steve Jobs’ and James Murdoch’s email correspondence negotiating over HarperCollins e-books for iPad. Note how Murdoch’s careless spelling and grammar improves after receiving a reply in Steve’s impeccable English. Murdoch capitalizes News Corp’s businesses, “Studios, Books, and Newspapers” but then writes lowercase “apple”, which, if deliberate, is kind of thuggy.

Older parents like us are perhaps a severe problem.

Stand up for your work! Or as The New York Times puts it, “Taking a Stand for Office Ergonomics”.

Mercer’s Worldwide Cost of Living Survey 2012. Most expensive: Tokyo. London is #25, Tel Aviv #31, New York #33, and Rome #42.

TV too is dying. The percentage of people who watch video on a computer once a month—84%—is now higher than the percentage who watch TV.

The Ad Age blog on Mad Men is professional and enjoyable.

A brief interview (with longer run-up) with Stan Lee.

Re Facebook, “Mark Zuckerberg is to uselessness what Henry Ford was to the automobile.”

Sober and crisp analysis of Britain’s 2012 budget from an income tax perspective.

Taking his time, Morozov asks the right questions about Steve Jobs, comparing him first to the Bauhaus movement, then to Henry Ford. Many quotable quotes, and good comments, especially the long one from JakeH at 02/27/2012 – 7:46pm EDT.

Toca Boca: ingenious iOS games for kids and not such.

Marxist academic Slavoj Žižek on what are not proletarian protests but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians.

It’s not the economy, stupid. Much like the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, Daniel Bell, co-founder with Irving Kristol of The Public Interest, believed that the economic, the political and the social are separate realms and must be kept in healthy balance.

On parking in LA Mag—the history, the psychology, the economics.

Nice post by the always sensible Boyink re taking on a failed project.

A statement from Louis C.K. on the direct sale of his Beacon Theatre special.

In this Haaretz article on Israelis’ dependence on cars due to lack of adequate public transport, the word “bus” appears 8 times, “train” only once, “bicycle” not at all.

The Wall Street Journal’s Top 25 Economics blogs.

China and Walmart: the symbiosis, the similarities.

Britain goes nuts for hummous.

Sober breakdown of the viability of the streaming music business model.

Best of the Steve Jobs eulogies: John Siracusa, David Pogue. And one about his house. A favorable comparison with Thomas Edison.

Poignant Steve Jobs tale from the Gizmodo guy who got ahold of the iPhone 4 prototype.

Conrad Black, facing more jail time, remains irrepressible.

After Steve Jobs’ resignation, the Daringfireball round-up of anecdotes: Dave Winer, David Cairns, Vic Gundotra,
Allen Paltrow, Jonathan Berger, Marc Hedlund.

The reprap, a self-replicating 3d-printer. Most mind-boggling thing ever.

On the rise and alleged fall of Los Angeles.

Working remotely works.

An investment manager’s view of the top 1%.

New York Times, with restrained glee, on the Murdoch scandal.