Archive for October, 2011
Some things change
Saturday, October 29th, 2011
The elevator works, in IE9 and IE10, but not in Chrome, or Fx without a plugin.
The Marshmallow Test
Sunday, October 23rd, 2011
These results hold even when adjusted for individual intelligence, social class and their home environments. Kids with low levels of self-control are more likely as adolescents to smoke, leave school early and have unplanned babies. As young adults they’re more likely to have health problems, money issues and criminal records. The study, so far, has only reached their early thirties, so what they’ll look like as old people is as yet unknown: but a good guess is that more of them will die younger than their better controlled cohort.
Leaving aside all of the implications for this it’s worth standing back from the research and thinking quite hard about what this means. That this simple test, applied to your four year old, is strikingly predictive of their future life chances is quite extraordinary when you consider the confusion and lack of coherence in most of the findings of psychology and economics.
The Marshmallow Test – Psy-Fi blog
The side effects of single channels
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
The internet investing market is transitioning. Social was the driving force for the past three or four years. In the wake of Facebook and Twitter, how could it not be? Mobile has also been a hot theme. Both sectors have consolidated a few winners and a number of additional interesting emerging companies. But how many social platforms of scale will there be? Five, ten, twenty? And mobile is hard because distribution continues to be limited to the app store model where you get on the leaderboard and win or you don’t and you don’t. Investors are moving into new areas like cloud, peer to peer marketplaces, and trying to take what worked in consumer into the enterprise. There is no lack of interest in internet investing, but investors are having to learn new markets and new sectors. And that kind of transition takes the heat out of an overheated market.
Noticed this little blurb in the discussion about venture drying up – it sounds like locked down mobile app stores are hindering innovation.
Jobs – R.I.P.
Wednesday, October 5th, 2011
Knew it was coming, but wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it until now. Generally, feels a little bit like winning a game by default because the guy on the other team broke his leg. Sort of takes the fun out of it. Ballmer vs. Cook? There’s no ring to that. A sad end to a wonderful era, for sure.
