On Groupon
Good analysis of what’s going wrong over there. Fits nicely with what I wrote in October of last year.
Capital Economy As A Service
The Community Platform will provide direct, on-demand access to the entire NYSE Technologies portfolio of services, including Superfeed, a global trading platform providing microsecond data transmissions via a secure network; the Risk Management Gateway (RMG), a low-latency routing engine that allows broker-dealers to provide direct market access to clients, and the NYSE’s Managed Services Hub and global Liquidity Center Network.
Beginning the transition of this financialized economy to a service model. Eventually, boot up your public business using these cloud-based assets, a la:
Initially, the trading data residing in the Community Platform cloud could facilitate everything from testing and validating new trading applications and strategies to processing huge volumes of data for regulatory reports, King said.
This capital-economy will be complimented by different economies focusing different sectors. (Tangible products, information, etc.)
Spam Financiers
After examining millions of spam e-mails and spam Web sites—and making over 100 purchases from the sites advertised by the spammers—the research team found that just three banks were used to clear more than 95 percent of spam funds.
The banks:
Azerigazbank in Azerbaijan, St Kitts & Nevis Anguilla National Bank in St Kitts &Nevis, and Norwegian-owned DnB Nord in Latvia
Probably better off leaving this alone. Not sure you want to incentivize the decentralization of spam/gambling/deviant global financing (a la terrorism).
But where those efforts have had only short-term success, work against the banking bottleneck may well prove more fruitful. If dealing with the handful of banks were made impossible—for example, if Western banks refused to settle certain kinds of credit card transactions with banks known to be spam-friendly, an approachalready used in the US to block access to online gambling sites—it would severely diminish the ability for the spam vendors to get paid, sucking the cash out of the spam business. And given the time and complexity of setting up new merchant agreements, this might be one area where the good guys can move faster than the spammers. Killing spam won’t be easy, but going after the money could be our best bet for an end to the junk mail menace.
Review: Low Town by Daniel Polansky
I love all things noir, so I was interested when a fantasy riff came out on it. I’m not generally a fantasy reader however, though I absolutely adored the Dragonlance series. I appreciated that Low Town’s gritty, cold streets resonate you despite the nuances of its genre. It’s a murder mystery wrapped in a cloak of magic, warfare, and swords.
Polansky can definitely write. Every page is an opportunity to enjoy his witty, dark prose. This is an enjoyable debut novel, though the plot pacing is a bit uneven. I am definitely excited to read follow-on efforts. (I hear there’s a series in the works.)
iA Writer’s Sweet Feature
iA Writer has a great feature. It fades out previous sentences as you write a new one. In their words:
Why? It’s a common pattern, that, instead of following the voice and fleshing out the text in one go, people start editing before the text is done.
This, coupled with these two posts, could yield an amazing new product.