dannyman.toldme.com : 2012 : April

April 9, 2012
News and Reaction, Technology

Tech Bubble Spotted

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/04/09/bubbledar-pinging-loudly/

Remember pets.com? Back in the Dot Com Bubble, they had this awesome business plan to sell pet food … using the Internet! They had a Superbowl commercial, than they died like so many other startups when the Dot Com Bubble imploded on itself.

So, my Bubbledar pinged when I saw this headline this morning:

http://allthingsd.com/20120409/woof-rover-com-fetches-3-4-million-to-be-airbnb-for-dogs/

Yes! Peer-to-peer vacation homes! For pets!

And then, this thing dropped, and my Bubbledar is pinging louder:

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/09/breaking-facebook-buying-instagram-for-1-billion/

Yes! A billion dollars for an iPhone app that takes pictures that look like Polaroids. But you don’t just get the app, you get the iPhone users who have been uploading their photos to social networking sites, because that is a key demographic that Facebook has yet to crack!

A few years ago, Zuckerberg thought $500 million would be a lot of money to acquire Twitter. Fun story here:

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/16/138160765/twitter-co-founder-biz-stone-plays-not-my-job

Feedback Welcome

April 14, 2012
Excerpts, Good Reads, Photo-a-Day, Sundry

We are the supermen . . .

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2012/04/14/we-are-the-supermen/

“We are the supermen who sit idly by and laugh and look at civilization . . .”

I am reading a book by W.E.B. Du Bois, based on this quote which was captured in a photo of New York graffiti.

Even as America’s race problem has evolved since Du Bois published Dusk of Dawn in 1940, his perspective is valuable. A fuller excerpt from Chapter 6, wherein he conducts a Socratic dialogue with a pair of composite “White Man” colleagues, and delivers an excellent perspective on world history, and modesty: (more…)

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April 17, 2012
Photo-a-Day, Sundry