Guts, Glory, and Megapixels: The Story of GoPro

Nick Woodman didn't set out to redefine digital imaging—he just wanted to shoot decent surfing photos. A decade after he started GoPro with next to nothing, adrenaline junkies around the world are using these tough little cameras to record ridiculous stunts in HD. Here's how it all started.

It's a foggy morning in half moon bay , about 2 miles from the legendary Mavericks surf break just south of San Francisco. The parking lot is packed with 4x4 pickups and other mud-splattered vehicles outfitted with surfboard and bike racks. I'm led inside the GoPro headquarters by Rick Loughery, the company's steel-jawed director of communications, who's wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "manufacturing stoke."

We thread past a cube warren populated by twentysomethings dressed in the wrinkled cotton of passengers who just landed on the red-eye from Reykjavík (which some of the staffers very likely did). Duffel bags stuffed with outdoor gear crowd vacant desks while videographers stare into 27-inch monitors, editing footage captured at the most recent Winter X Games.

We weave our way to an office, where Nick Woodman, the 36-year-old founder and CEO of the upstart camera company, is double-fisting cans of Red Bull—his rocket fuel of choice—and watching a high-definition cavalcade of GoPro-sponsored athletes leaping out of airplanes, tumbling off mountains, plummeting over waterfalls, and diving into hot tubs on every continent. The frenetic action has been stitched into a promotional video for the company's latest creation, the $300 HD Hero2, the culmination of a decade's worth of tiny, armored cameras designed to be mounted on bike handlebars, snowboard helmets, and car hoods.

Woodman's distillation of the essence of the GoPro mission is equal parts corporate messaging and surferspeak: "Our goal was to create a celebration of inspired humans doing rad stuff around the world." In fact, Woodman is, to an extent, underselling the GoPro effect. The 8-year-old company not only has celebrated the antics of those inspired humans, it has also created a virtuous circle of video reinforcement that defines and motivates the culture of extreme sports. Woodman—a wave rider, race-car driver, mountain biker, and snowboarder—lives the lifestyle his indestructible cameras capture. He is proud that those cameras and accessories such as the new Wi-Fi BacPac, which adds remote capture and sharing features, form their own feedback loop that continuously adds functionality without stranding older equipment. The backward compatibility with cameras dating to the original HD Hero from 2009 keeps customers happy—and the Lego-like upgrades encourage people to buy deeper into the GoPro system. That resulting combination of customer enthusiasm and loyalty sold more than 800,000 cameras last year to users who then upload videos to YouTube once every 2 ½ minutes.

Woodman didn't set out to redefine the market for digital imaging. He just wanted to shoot decent surfing photos. In early 2002, after his games promotion company, Fun Bug, flamed out in the wake of the dot-com bust, he took off with his girlfriend (now wife), Jill, to surf-bum in Southeast Asia. The waves were world-class, and the art major from the University of California, San Diego, wanted to take high-quality action shots of his buddies on their boards. "Surfing is such an incredible experience with a huge ego element," he says. "'Did you see that wave? I got so barrelled! No? You didn't!'"

by Robert Moritz, Popular Mechanics |  Read more:
Photo: Nathaniel Welch

Does All Wine Taste the Same?

On May 24, 1976, the British wine merchant Steven Spurrier organized a blind tasting of French and Californian wines. Spurrier was a Francophile and, like most wine experts, didn’t expect the New World upstarts to compete with the premiers crus from Bordeaux. He assembled a panel of eleven wine experts and had them taste a variety of Cabernets blind, rating each bottle on a twenty-point scale.

The results shocked the wine world. According to the judges, the best Cabernet at the tasting was a 1973 bottle from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa Valley. When the tasting was repeated a few years later—some judges insisted that the French wines had been drunk too young—Stag’s Leap was once again declared the winner, followed by three other California Cabernets. These blind tastings (now widely known as the Judgment of Paris) helped to legitimate Napa vineyards.

But now, in an even more surprising turn of events, another American wine region has performed far better than expected in a blind tasting against the finest French châteaus. Ready for the punch line? The wines were from New Jersey.

The tasting was closely modelled on the 1976 event, featuring the same fancy Bordeaux vineyards, such as Château Mouton Rothschild and Château Haut-Brion. The Jersey entries included bottles from the Heritage Vineyards in Mullica Hill and Unionville Vineyards in Ringoes. The nine judges were French and American wine experts.

The Judgment of Princeton didn’t quite end with a Jersey victory—a French wine was on top in both the red and white categories—but, in terms of the reassurance for those with valuable wine collections, it might as well have. Clos des Mouches only narrowly beat out Unionville Single Vineyard and two other Jersey whites, while Château Mouton Rothschild and Haut-Brion topped Heritage’s BDX. The wines from New Jersey cost, on average, about five per cent as much as their French counterparts. And then there’s the inconsistency of the judges: the scores for that Mouton Rothschild, for instance, ranged from 11 to 19.5. On the excellent blog Marginal Revolution, the economist Tyler Cowen highlights the analysis of the Princeton professor Richard Quand, who found that almost of all the wines were “statistically undistinguishable” from each other. This suggests that, if the blind tasting were held again, a Jersey wine might very well win.

What can we learn from these tests? First, that tasting wine is really hard, even for experts. Because the sensory differences between different bottles of rotten grape juice are so slight—and the differences get even more muddled after a few sips—there is often wide disagreement about which wines are best. For instance, both the winning red and white wines in the Princeton tasting were ranked by at least one of the judges as the worst.

The perceptual ambiguity of wine helps explain why contextual influences—say, the look of a label, or the price tag on the bottle—can profoundly influence expert judgment. This was nicely demonstrated in a mischievous 2001 experiment led by Frédéric Brochet at the University of Bordeaux. In the first test, Brochet invited fifty-seven wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its “jamminess,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.”

by Jonah Lehrer, New Yorker |  Read more:
Image: via:

鄉間小路四月號-s (April country road-s) by Ra Ra S’ Va
via:

[ed. Well, this brings back a few memories...preview listening booths at the record store. I think that's where I heard my first Monkees album.]

Saturday Evening Post Cover, April 1952
via:

The Heart of the Matter

Over the past 13 years, the S&P 500 has underperformed even the depressed return on risk-free Treasury bills. Real U.S. gross domestic investment has not grown at all since 1999, and even as a share of GDP, real investment remains weak.

The ongoing debate about the economy continues along largely partisan lines, with conservatives arguing that taxes just aren't low enough, and the economy should be freed of regulations, while liberals argue that the economy needs larger government programs and grand stimulus initiatives.

Lost in this debate is any recognition of the problem that lies at the heart of the matter: a warped financial system, both in the U.S. and globally, that directs scarce capital to speculative and unproductive uses, and refuses to restructure debt once that debt has gone bad.

Specifically, over the past 15 years, the global financial system - encouraged by misguided policy and short-sighted monetary interventions - has lost its function of directing scarce capital toward projects that enhance the world's standard of living. Instead, the financial system has been transformed into a self-serving, grotesque casino that misallocates scarce savings, begs for and encourages speculative bubbles, refuses to restructure bad debt, and demands that the most reckless stewards of capital should be rewarded through bailouts that transfer bad debt from private balance sheets to the public balance sheet.

What is central here is that the government policy environment has encouraged this result. This environment includes financial sector deregulation that was coupled with a government backstop, repeated monetary distortions, refusal to restructure bad debt, and a preference for policy cowardice that included bailouts and opaque accounting. Deregulation and lower taxes will not fix this problem, nor will larger "stimulus packages." The right solutions are to encourage debt restructuring (and to impose it when necessary), to strengthen capital requirements and regulation of risk taken by traditional lending institutions that benefit from fiscal and monetary backstops, to remove fiscal and monetary backstops and ensure resolution authority over institutions engaging in more speculative financial activities, and to discontinue reckless monetary interventions that encourage financial speculation and transitory "wealth" effects without any meaningful link to lending or economic activity.

By our analysis, the U.S. economy is presently entering a recession. Not next year; not later this year; but now. We expect this to become increasingly evident in the coming months, but through a constant process of denial in which every deterioration is dismissed as transitory, and every positive outlier is celebrated as a resumption of growth. To a large extent, this downturn is a "boomerang" from the credit crisis we experienced several years ago. The chain of events is as follows:

by John Hussman, Hussman Funds |  Read more:

Did He Feel Good?

James Brown’s legendary reputation as the Hardest Working Man in Show Business was part virile boast and part canny PR. Had a bad week at work? The Man will give you a show to raise your spirits and cancel out the pain. He put as much work into his act as his audience put into their low-end jobs. Showbiz was man’s work, hard labor, as much sweat of his brow as swish of his cape. The audience got its money’s worth; and if Brown understood one thing above all else, it was the many uses and values, financial and symbolic, of money. He never went on tour without a big bag of ready cash—to grease wheels, ameliorate tensions, make obstacles disappear. After he died, people found boxes of dollar bills stashed in the walls of his house, or buried out back on his land.

Born in 1933, Brown learned his hard-headed ways in a 1950s music business that was a rough twine of Mafia hegemony and outta-sight profits. He believed in the redemptive power of hard work as others believed in the blood of the lamb. A true believer in the do-it-yourself ethos of the American Dream, he didn’t see why race should be a barrier to getting the good things in life. Hard work was how he shaped his destiny in a sectarian world, his eventual success the product of near tyrannical drive and will. He could be hard work personally, too. He rarely took no for an answer, whether it was a question of getting an encore, sleeping with him, or signing away your royalties. In his music as in his wiles, Brown was no suave pinkie-ring seducer. He had none of the snake-charmer sweetness of a later generation of soul men. If the key to musical seduction is hiding all artifice behind a carefully disheveled front of natural élan, Brown took another road, emphasizing all the stuff other artists tucked away. Listening to Brown’s classic hits—“Cold Sweat,” “Out of Sight,” “Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine”—you could be eavesdropping on some 11th-hour rehearsal, the air jumpy with back chat, barked instructions, and flip, musicianly code. You can all but hear the effort that goes into summoning up the bumpy and volatile groove.

Brown’s music seems fully dependent on its front man, entirely led by his sandpaper rasp—but if you want to dig its secret flow, you have to listen down past Brown himself into a song’s boiler-room frequencies, where the bass and drums make things shake. If you’ve always been baffled by just what it is a bass player does, play “Sex Machine” and try tuning your ear to the sinuously pivotal bass line William “Bootsy” Collins lays down; bass and guitar supply the song’s true harmony, with Brown’s vocalizing so much scattershot percussion. This music is hard work, in the best sense: you can feel the sweat, see the crooked smiles on the musicians’ faces. It seems to bypass all rationale and go straight to the sacroiliac, its emphasis never quite where you expect it to be. Brown had his own code for this hypnotic way of playing off the beat: he called it The One. (...)

Brown could fake a lot of things, but he couldn’t fake vulnerability or regret or confusion. He didn’t do weakness or softness. He was James Brown! He was the One, and he always got what he wanted. Unlike other troubled soul-men like Marvin Gaye and Al Green, Brown had no Church in his soul. Sure, he put over some songs like an old-time preacher, but that was projective shtick, just like he borrowed bits of flash from drag queens and tap dancers in the street. He didn’t need God because he worshipped at his own rugged altar. His ego was impregnable. His music doesn’t have the carnal/devotional tension that marks the work of the greatest soul singers, many of whom were made personally unhappy by its grip but found a way to project the spiritual malaise into songs of unearthly bliss and strangeness. What’s missing from Brown’s music is any hint or breath of otherness, sweetness, light. His is a roar of certainty, done deals, and finality.

by Ian Penman, City Journal |  Read more:
Photo: Gilles Petard/Getty Images

Yoshihiro Suda. Weeds, 2008.  © Yoshihiro Suda / Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo
via:

The Last Days of MF Global

At about 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 25, David Schamis, a director of a once-obscure futures brokerage company called MF Global, placed a call to his friend, Jacob Goldfield.

Goldfield, 52, was a former trading superstar who had spent 15 years at Goldman Sachs—brilliant and impeccably connected (Bob Rubin and Larry Summers loved him), but equally quirky and unassuming. Raised in the South Bronx, he'd majored in physics at Harvard before dropping out of law school there to start at Goldman, where he made partner in record time.

After leaving the partnership with a fortune in 2000, Goldfield helped manage U.S. Senator Jon Corzine's blind trust and spent a year and a half as chief investment officer for George Soros' $11-billion hedge fund. Now on his own, he periodically journeyed west to Stanford, where he conducted economics research at a university think tank.

Goldfield was a crisis junkie. He exuded a childlike fascination with economic events, especially disasters. He found himself summoned to the scene of each new meltdown—AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers—by desperate men seeking his aid in the often-hopeless struggle to save a balance sheet under siege. Sometimes he stood to make some money, if a private rescue actually went through. Sometimes it was just volunteer work. Goldfield did it for his friends, or simply because he found it interesting.

Goldfield held a singular notion of how to think about a financial crisis. He viewed it as a predator, intelligent and merciless, hunting you. If you didn't move fast enough, you'd meet a swift and certain end.

Now MF Global needed his advice.

The collapse of MF Global in October 2011 was a remarkably powerful event: It destroyed the reputation of a famous man; it elevated a firm that no one had ever heard of to infamy; and it shattered public trust in the belief that brokerage customers' money is always safe.

In the months that followed, America's eighth-largest bankruptcy has become a spectacle and public scandal. Jon Corzine, the former U.S. senator, governor, and chief of Goldman Sachs who rode MF Global into the abyss, finds his legacy in tatters. And the hunt for the money continues, with investigators chasing $1.6 billion in customer cash that went missing—something that's never happened before on Wall Street.

A six-month Fortune investigation into the failure of MF Global reveals a mismatch of tragic proportions: how a too-small company came together with a too-big CEO. Combining their mutual shortcomings—in ambition, controls, and discipline—simply proved toxic.

This story is based on more than seventy interviews with regulators, industry executives, legislators, lawyers, friends and family of Corzine, and people at all levels of MF Global. Fortune also gained access to hundreds of pages of confidential board minutes, internal reports, company emails, and other documents.

by Peter Elkind with Doris Burke, Fortune |  Read more:
Photo: Chip Somodovilla/Getty Images

via:

Electric Guest

Is Stretching Useful?

Today we have a guest post from author Alex Hutchinson.  Alex writes a monthly column in Runner’s World (they also host his excellent Sweat Science blog) and is a Senior Editor at Canadian Running magazine.  You can find more on Alex at the bottom of this post.

As Alex mentions below, he recently published a fantastic book which has a rather large section on the health benefits of stretching (or lack thereof).  As a longtime skeptic of stretching myself, I was very excited when he agreed to summarize the research evidence in a guest post.  Enjoy the post!

I guess I should start by stating my bias: I don’t like stretching. For over a decade, I stretched every day, usually twice a day – but I never enjoyed it. I still try to be as impartial as possible in analyzing the evidence for and against stretching, but I figure you have the right to know that I’m a stretching skeptic!

So what is this evidence I refer to? Over the past decade or so, there has been a complete change in how coaches and exercise scientists view stretching. It’s the biggest change in elite training that I’m aware of during that time, and these days it’s the biggest gap between elite athletes and the average person at the gym. I devote an entire chapter to the topic in my recent science-of-exercise book, Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights?, and I’m going to draw on that to present a few highlights of the recent research.

1. Does stretching help you avoid injury during exercise?
This is very difficult to “prove” one way or the other, because every person and every injury is unique. Still, a 2004 systematic review that analyzed 361 studies concluded that “stretching was not significantly associated with a reduction in total injuries.” Other reviews have reached similar conclusions. The early studies that suggested stretching would help always included stretching as part of a warm-up; it now appears that a warm-up (e.g. five minutes of gentle jogging) is important but stretching isn’t.

2. Does stretching help you avoid soreness after exercise?
No. A 2011 Cochrane review of 12 randomized studies with more than 2,000 subjects in total concluded that “muscle stretching, whether conducted before, after, or before and after exercise, does not produce clinically important reductions in delayed-onset muscle soreness.” This is not a surprise: post-exercise soreness is thought to result from microscopic damage to muscle fibres; you can’t “undamage” the muscles by stretching them.

by Travis Saunders, Plos Blogs |  Read more:

Lee Friedlander, Car 1963
via:

Return to Sender

On a warm evening in the middle of march, V.A. Shiva Ayyudarai sat in the front row of a packed auditorium at the MIT media lab.

Dressed in a black blazer and T-shirt, Ayyadurai was on comfortable turf. He had four degrees from the Institute, lectured in two of its departments, and, at 48, had earned his place on a campus where success is measured in the number of businesses launched and millions earned.

Ayyadurai — known to everyone as Shiva — has been a Fulbright scholar, a Lemelson-MIT student prize nominee, and the entrepreneurial brains behind seven businesses, including EchoMail, a $200 million company that counted Nike, the U.S. Senate, and the Clinton White House as customers. But his greatest achievement came when he was just 14 and living with his immigrant parents in New Jersey. Back then, toiling away in his spare time, Shiva had invented e-mail, an accomplishment that would, in time, change the course of human communication — a fact not lost on Shiva, whose personal website is called inventorofemail.com.

For all his spectacular successes, Shiva was most proud of devising e-mail. Yet he’d been plagued for decades by a guilty sense that his invention had led to the unraveling of another great component of human — or at least American — communication: the United States Postal Service. Since as far back as 1997, Shiva had been trying to get the post office to imagine a world beyond merely delivering letters and packages, to embrace and profit from the growing business of e-mail. But for reasons he’d never understood, the U.S. Mail had been content to keep things as they were. Last fall, when the post office announced massive layoffs and service cuts in a desperate scramble to deal with its billions in debt, Shiva had had enough. “I think that if the Postal Service dies,” Shiva said at the time, “it will be the end of democracy as we know it.” He proposed that the post office create a new form of e-mail, one that was safe, private, and subject to the same federal regulations that protect the bills and junk mail that are delivered to our mailboxes. He was flummoxed by the agency’s ineptitude: “What the f*#@ was the #USPS management doing for 10 years?” he tweeted. “They should have owned EMAIL …. ” Caustic comments like these coming from the inventor of e-mail sparked the interest of the media, and soon Shiva was being quoted in Fast Company and Time magazines.

Then, in a breakthrough, the post office’s inspector general came calling, asking Shiva for his ideas on how they could enter the digital age. A few weeks later, the Smithsonian announced that it was accepting the documents from Shiva’s adolescent e-mail work into its archives, where they would be counted among other great inventions like the telegraph, the light bulb, and the artificial heart. While he was in DC to hand off his papers, the Washington Post recorded a video series with Shiva and published a fawning profile of him.

Now he was at the MIT Media Lab with a group of experts he’d assembled for a panel discussion on “The Future of the Post Office.” Among the participants was the Postal Service’s inspector general himself, David Williams. Thirty years after inventing e-mail, Shiva had now positioned himself to solve a national crisis. His moment had arrived. But he kept looking nervously around the room. (...)

The truth is, I’m somewhat surprised, given all the controversy, that the Institute has gone forward with this event at all. Shiva’s detractors contacted several of the panelists, demanding that it be ­canceled to save the reputation of the school.

You can feel the tension in the room as David Thorburn, director of MIT’s communications forum, steps to the podium.“I’ve received a number of thoughtful and sometimes not-so-thoughtful messages on e-mail in the past weeks from MIT alumni and others,” Thornburn says. “But today’s event is not about the history of e-mail, nor about Shiva himself. It’s about the future of the post office.”

by Janellle Nanos, Boston Magazine |  Read more:
Photo by Miller Mobley

The Small Cardboard Box

For as long as archivists at Rutgers University could remember, a small cardboard box marked with the letter W in black ink had sat unopened in a dusty corner of the special collections of the Alexander Library. Next to it were 60 sturdy archive boxes of papers, a legacy of the university’s most famous scientist: Selman A. Waksman, who won a Nobel Prize in 1952 for the discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic to cure tuberculosis.

The 60 boxes contained details of how streptomycin was found — and also of the murky story behind it, a vicious legal battle between Dr. Waksman and his graduate student Albert Schatz over who deserved credit.

Dr. Waksman died in 1973; after Dr. Schatz’s death in 2005, the papers were much in demand by researchers trying to piece together what really happened between the professor and his student. But nobody looked in the small cardboard box.

The story of streptomycin is no ordinary tale of discovery. It began in August 1943, when Dr. Schatz, a 23-year-old graduate student at the Rutgers College of Agriculture, isolated the powerful antibiotic produced by a bacterium, Streptomyces griseus, that had been found in a pot of farmyard soil.

His supervisor, Professor Waksman, arranged for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., to test the substance in guinea pigs, and then in humans. It worked. Streptomycin, cleared up infections, including TB, that had defied even the first wonder drug, penicillin.

As word of the discovery spread, reporters flocked to Rutgers to record the amazing event. But in telling and retelling the story, Dr. Waksman slowly began to drop Dr. Schatz’s name and claim sole credit. He also arranged with Rutgers to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from the patent that he and Dr. Schatz were awarded; Dr. Schatz received nothing.

Dr. Schatz became aware of the deal when Dr. Waksman started sending him $500 checks — $1,500 altogether — that he said came from funds he had been receiving for the sales of streptomycin. Dr. Schatz wanted to know more, but the professor wouldn’t tell him.

by Peter Pringle, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries

via:

Who’s Got Your Back?

In a city with more than 20,000 registered real estate agents, is it any wonder that choosing one can be a difficult and sometimes fraught process?

There’s the agent who sold your best friend’s apartment for 20 percent more than she dreamed possible. But what about the downstairs neighbor who never misses a chance to remind you that he’s a broker? And what would Aunt Myra say if you didn’t use Cousin Bob, who just got into real estate and hasn’t sold anything yet? (“He just needs a little confidence.”)

A good broker can help you make sound decisions and guide you through what might easily be the most expensive and emotionally charged transaction of your life. So, how to weed out brokers who can’t stop talking about themselves, or who can’t tear their eyes from their BlackBerrys long enough to answer a question, and perhaps more important, know shockingly little about their listings or the market?

Whether you’re buying or selling, interviewing an agent is the best way to figure all of that out and to determine whether you would get along over the course of an intense several months. The interview can be as informal as a quick conversation at an open house and a follow-up phone call.

Find out what a broker has already sold and how he or she would help you sell or find a home. Dottie Herman, the chief executive of Prudential Douglas Elliman, also suggested asking what the broker would do “if not everything goes right” and an apartment doesn’t sell quickly or a board rejects a buyer. “You want someone who has confidence and knowledge and who you have a rapport with,” she said. At the same time, she added, “You don’t want a know-it-all, because nobody knows it all.”

Sellers sign contracts with their listing agents, and many buyers also work with specific agents in finding a home. A buyer’s agent is paid by the seller in a deal, but will shepherd the buyer’s bid through to the closing, which could be especially helpful in the notoriously enigmatic co-op board process.

“For buyers, you’re not getting the discount or saving a commission,” said Diane M. Ramirez, the president of Halstead Property, “so if you don’t have a broker, you’re just on your own. Do you really want not to be represented when the other side is?”

Buyers who don’t work with a specific agent sometimes agree to “dual agency,” in which the seller’s broker also represents the buyer. But Frederick Peters, the president of Warburg Realty, recently wrote a blog post in which he challenged the notion of dual agency, saying what many brokers believe but are reluctant to admit. “The buyer wants to pay as little as he can; the seller wants to net as much as he can,” he wrote. “What agent can fight simultaneously for both those outcomes?”

In the end, both buyers and sellers should have representatives. People tend to gravitate to agents with whom they feel comfortable. It could be their Type A personality, a shared love of the opera, or a favorite neighborhood deli. Or maybe they vacation in the same place, or have children in the same school. Maybe the agent tells hilarious jokes. New York City’s legion of real estate agents can be categorized in many ways. Here are a few of them.

The Hand-Holder

Some agents are better than others at anticipating a client’s needs and at catering to people who need a little more attention through the machinations of a real estate deal. Someone who is patient and a good listener can play that part, be it for a jittery first-time buyer or a high-strung owner who needs frequent calming down.

Brian Lewis, an executive vice president of Halstead Property, is an easygoing Southerner who knows how to take the edge off the most frenzied real estate transaction.

“I take my cues from the client,” he said. “I understand that buying or selling a home is an emotional thing. When you add that emotion to the kind of money we’re dealing with, you get a perfect storm of crazy.”

by Vivian S. Toy, NY Times |  Read more:

Wising Up to Facebook

After a period of idealizing social media, the public is beginning to recognize that these are enterprises with ambitions and appetites. They are businesses. Public companies have an imperative to grow profits, which Facebook will do by monetizing you and me — serving us up as the targets for precision-guided advertising.

One of the most interesting stories I’ve read in the recent, more aggressive spate of coverage was Somini Sengupta’s report in The Times about Facebook’s entry into the Washington influence game. Every company, of course, protects its interests in the places where laws are made and adjudicated, so in hiring its corps of Washington insiders and dispensing cash from its political action committee, Facebook is just joining the mainstream. But Facebook’s way of friending the powerful is original. It ingratiates itself with members of Congress by sending helpers to maximize the constituent-pleasing, re-election-securing power of their Facebook pages. “If you want to have long-term influence, there’s nothing better than having politicians dependent on your product,” one envious Silicon Valley executive told me.

What might Facebook want from its new friends in Washington? It’s not hard to imagine. Since Facebook’s most promising path to prosperity is selling ads based on your likes and dislikes, the company will be wary of any government attempt to enforce privacy standards that interfere with the company’s ability to mine your information. Since the company is jostling for dominance with the likes of Google, Apple, Twitter and Amazon, it will be paying attention to antitrust actions that could curtail its ability to use its market muscle. (Jonathan Zittrain sent me a graphic that gives you a little sense of Facebook’s power in the marketplace. In 2010 Facebook was displeased with the developers of a game called Critter Island, one of many online games and services that basically rent space and services in the Facebook condominium. Facebook simply disabled the game, and the chart shows the user base collapsing from 14 million to zero in a couple of days.)

Beyond Washington, activists for various causes have upbraided Facebook for failing to protect dissidents who use the site to expose and mobilize against oppressive regimes. Critics say the company’s policy of forbidding pseudonyms — intended to assure more civil behavior online (and, a cynic might speculate, to enrich the value of the user base to advertisers) — makes it a risky communications tool in authoritarian states.

“That’s fine if you live in an ideal world,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, whose recent book, “Consent of the Networked,” examines the corporate sovereigns of cyberspace. “If you’re an activist in China, it leaves you extremely vulnerable.”

Her book persuaded one high-profile journalist, Steve Coll, to announce in The New Yorker that he was renouncing his citizenship in “Facebookistan,” which he had come to see as a highhanded corporate autocracy.

MacKinnon herself is not encouraging an exodus. She favors sticking around to help Facebook become more responsible. “It’s kind of like China — do you engage, or disinvest?” she said. “I’m still at the engagement stage. The main thing is that people need to act more as constituents, not as passive residents.”

by Bill Keller, NY Times |  Read more: 
Illustration: Nicholas Blechman

Stranglehold

Amazon Infographic: How a Single Company Gained a Stranglehold over Online Shopping and the Future of Retail.

Amazon is doubling in size every 2-3 years, putting it on pace to be bigger than Walmart by decade's end. 

[ed. Click here for larger graphic.]

by Stacy Mitchell, Institute for Local-Self Reliance

Lyle Carbajal.
Gatto (in blue).
via:

jackbarnosky:  orchid
via: