Disqus - Latest Comments for byrneseyeview

Re: http://bryce.vc/post/11909181900

byrneseyeview — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:16:50 -0000

This is short-sighted. The whole point of technology is to do more with less input, and labor is an input. We're replacing secretaries with Google Docs, and salespeople with ever-smarter ads.

By the time a company is in the S&P 500, it should be done innovating, and should be in the business of refining its model and getting incrementally more efficient. That's the only way for new ventures to pay off: the chance to recreate the status quo, then earn royalties off it until they get knocked off their perch.

Re: Pulse of the Nation | Kid Dynamite's World

byrneseyeview — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:34:40 -0000

Right.

Re: Pulse of the Nation | Kid Dynamite's World

byrneseyeview — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:19:28 -0000

I took it when I first noticed, earlier today.I'm in NYC, but my corporate network does some weird stuff with geography. It usually localizes to Sunnyvale (I work at Y).

Re: Pulse of the Nation | Kid Dynamite's World

byrneseyeview — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 17:44:18 -0000

Screenshot! http://imgur.com/ntbpa

Re: Pulse of the Nation | Kid Dynamite's World

byrneseyeview — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 17:19:02 -0000

Current #1 trending search is Dennis Ritchie (recently deceased inventor of the C programming language, and a big factor in Unix). For what that's worth.

Re: http://digicha.com/index.php/2011/08/digital-due-diligence-plagiarizes-from-digicha-in-report-about-sina-weibo/

byrneseyeview — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:26:52 -0000

Hi, I'm the CEO of DDD. I hope you come back!

As you can see in the updated post, it wasn't intentional plagiarism--basically, we posted the original without any links whatsoever, which is also clear from places where the text flows oddly because we'd originally included a link. The reason Bill saw this in the first place was that we tweeted it to him. Not exactly what you'd expect from someone who knowingly stole someone else's content, but exactly what you'd expect from someone who cited it.
We do apologize, of course, for temporarily posting a quote from his blog without proper attribution.

Re: How to Use Ezinearticles.com For SEO

byrneseyeview — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 21:46:38 -0000

See my update at the start of this blog post: as of the "farmer" update, the
long-term value of article directories is highly ambiguous. This update
shifts things more towards solid on-site content, guest blog posts, maybe
even Adsense.

Re: Here’s Something You Didn’t Know – Pimco Shares Trading on SecondMarket The Reformed Broker

byrneseyeview — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:36:09 -0000

Doesn't SecondMarket have the opposite effect? We already have a lopsided form of capitalism, in which large companies that can deal with Sarbox have one set of capital sources, small companies that can raise VC funding have another set of capital sources, and there's a big gap in the middle. And now that SecondMarket has an open platform, there's even less of a skew.

Seems to me that SecondMarket is creating opportunities, not removing them. It's fine to object to an unequal system, but SecondMarket didn't create the concept of an accredited investor.

Re: How to Use Ezinearticles.com For SEO

byrneseyeview — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:41:32 -0000

Hm. Your comment only lists one topic Ezine won't let people write about.
What other ones are there?

http://siteanalytics.compet...

<http: siteanalytics.compete.com="" ezinearticles.com+articlesbase.com=""/>And
this TC article claims that ArticlesBase gets 20mm visits/month:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/...

<http: techcrunch.com="" 2011="" 02="" 11="" articlesbase-the-profitable-content-farm-with-20m-monthly-visitors-you-dont-know=""/>While
Ezine claims 56mm uniques:
http://blog.ezinearticles.c...

<http: blog.ezinearticles.com="" 2011="" 02="" search-engine-algorithm-changes.html="">Your
move.

Re: How to Short the Higher Education Bubble

byrneseyeview — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 19:06:18 -0000

It's not a direct relationship; if I were putting together a real portfolio
based on this, I wouldn't do the revenue per employee thing; I might use
LinkedIn to find out which companies had lots of Ivy-League employees, but
tended not to get people poached by better banks or by hedge funds.

There are other signals, too:

http://www.forbes.com/2008/...

Re: A Challenge for Net Neutrality Supporters

byrneseyeview — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 13:38:35 -0000

That doesn't make much sense. What does Pizza Hut's cost structure have to
do with anything? If they're a more profitable company, that doesn't mean
that they can do stuff that doesn't make economic sense. It's orthogonal to
the main point. Regardless of how profitable they are, driving competitors
into bankruptcy is only beneficial to them to the extent that they can
capture most of the benefits. And yet without extremely high market share,
they can't--for example, if they have 20% market share, eliminating
competitors provides 4X as much benefit to non-Pizza Hut companies compared
to Pizza Hut (80% versus 20%).

Your hypothetical example only makes sense with monopolistic ISPs, and those
are going to be increasingly hard to maintain.

There are few direct analogies to online businesses, which is why I
suggested the thought experiment: if Comcast makes themselves an inferior
service for everything except Comcast-specific content, is that a net
competitive advantage? Or is that a net subsidy to everyone but Comcast? If
you were Comcast's CEO, is this how you'd behave? I don't see how it's
possible to be a) outraged at such behavior to the extent that it makes your
Internet experience worse, and b) pretty sure it's a good idea, from the
company's perspective.

Re: How to Use Ezinearticles.com For SEO

byrneseyeview — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 12:46:04 -0000

The resource box link(s) are followed, so that's useful. The other link is
nofollowed, but gets a decent number of clicks. For example, this article:

http://ezinearticles.com/?2...

<http: ezinearticles.com="" ?2008-tax-extension-form---missing-this-deadline-could-cost-you!&id="2578190">Has
about 3K views with a 20% click-through. Given where those users go, their
conversion rate, and what they pay when they get there, the ROI on this
piece was just staggering.

In general, more links = more clicks, so that bumps up ROI further.

My rule of thumb is that I write good, original stuff on my own site, but
I'll usually benefit from rehashing it on Ezine (or any of about a dozen
other article directories).

Re: Demand Media’s IPO: Everything You Need to Know

byrneseyeview — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 13:07:12 -0000

It's in an old press release on the merger, I believe. Or possibly from
their last 10-K, which is on sec.gov.

Re: Higher Education: The Next Big, Bad Bubble

byrneseyeview — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 23:27:12 -0000

Thanks! If you have some post-recession data, I would be interested. I've
heard about budget cuts for schools, but salary cuts for teachers tend to be
rarer. And pensions appear to be untouched.

My main point was not that you'll make six figures as a teacher, but that
within a given market, teacher salaries are very predictable. If you know
what a teacher made at 25, and you know they won't change jobs, you have a
pretty good idea of what they'll make at 50. The same can't be said for e.g.
engineers, lawyers, doctors, or manual laborers.

Re: Demand Media’s IPO: Everything You Need to Know

byrneseyeview — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 23:24:46 -0000

Thanks!

Social bookmarking sites either do vastly better or vastly worse than
expected; an article like this, posted on HN, will either get 50 views or
5,000, but rarely anything in between.

Re: Demand Media’s IPO: Everything You Need to Know

byrneseyeview — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 23:23:50 -0000

Revenue = all the money paid to the company, ignoring expenses.

Operating cash flow = revenue, minus expenses relating to the operations of
the business, ignoring depreciation and cash flow.

So if your lemonade stand sells $10 of lemonade, that's your revenue. If
it's staffed by volunteers and you used $5 worth of lemons, your operating
cash flow is $5. If you invested $1 in a pitcher, and paid $2 in interest on
the loan you used to get started, your total cash flow is $2 ($10 in
revenue, minus $5 in operating costs, $1 in capital expenditures, and $2 in
financing cash flows).

Re: The Phony Scalability of “Local,” and “Long-Tail.”

byrneseyeview — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 13:04:14 -0000

That's a good point. Yelp appears to have tons of salespeople, or at least
sales and marketing people:

http://www.linkedin.com/com...

But they do have a competitive advantage because business owners know who
they are. It will be interesting to see if that helps them compete with the
other group buying sites.

Re: Win a Date with ME to Wall Street 2!

byrneseyeview — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:07:37 -0000

'The most valuable commodity I know of is information. Real-time information, in 140-character increments."

Re: Next Step for Facebook $FBOOK…Debt Sale

byrneseyeview — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 07:06:22 -0000

They've issued debt before--some through Western Technology Investments (which lent early and got cheap warrants) and $100mm through TriplePoint.

At current valuations, they would probably prefer equity, just because they'll get more flexibility. At a $25b-$30b valuation, Zuck can raise a lot of money without giving up control. But if he has some kind of plan that involves switching from revenue growth to another goal for the next few years, debtholders might be able to stop it, while shareholders won't.

Re: Higher Education: The Next Big, Bad Bubble

byrneseyeview — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:37:37 -0000

Interesting.

1. I have a job. I know a bit about the job prospects of people who
graduated from college when I would have; I invited a lot of them to job
interviews, and rejected the vast majority.
2. You read my blog post--not all of it, but some of it. Did you find any
flaws?
3. I don't have a problem with it. I tell people I had better things to do.
Life is short; how much of it do you want to spend jumping through arbitrary
hoops?
4. I guess you're talking about used bookstores. Or libraries. Or the
Internet. I've learned a lot more from all of those than I have from school.
5. College does a terrible job of actually handling diversity. Colleges
encourage people to isolate themselves in clubs and student organizations
that are stratified based on minority group identification. Meanwhile, I
have no trouble meeting such people in real life.
6. Okay.
7. They would kill for an Ivy League education, or a hard-science education
from a lower-tier school. But nobody immigrates to the US so they can send
their kids to the University of Phoenix. Meanwhile, as I discussed in the
post, the biggest growth is coming from bad schools and low-value degrees.
Meanwhile, the average value of a degree is going up at less than the rate
of inflation, while the cost is going up at twice the rate of inflation.

The data are clear. On average, the person who joins the college-going
population now is going to pay too much for a bad degree from a bad school,
if the even manage to finish. This is subsidized by the government (i.e. by
the taxpayers). The situation will worsen unless people are aware of it, and
I'm raising awareness.

Thanks for your comments, but I don't believe you have properly addressed
any of my claims.

Re: http://ziweb.tumblr.com/post/1077707392

byrneseyeview — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:27:05 -0000

I believe you've misunderstood a few parts of the essay.

1. Progress doesn't end with the Great Boom. The Great Boom would be a period of globalization similar to what you'd get if you extrapolated from the mid- to late-90's: lots of growth, lots of specialization, rapidly advancing technology, etc.

2. He isn't saying that we must spend money on defense. Just that the defense sector has not advanced technologically in the way that other sectors have. I sort of disagree with this; we're actually very close to the kind of invulnerable armored cyborg someone might have predicted in the 80's, except that the 'cyborg' part is more widely distributed, and the balance between medicine and body armor currently favors medicine.

War has a terrible ROI. Assets get destroyed. But losing wars has a worse ROI than winning them, so some nonzero level of defense spending is optimal.

Re: Introducing our Partnership with SecondMarket and Private Company Streams

byrneseyeview — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 11:50:56 -0000

Ha, I think I asked SecondMarket *and* Stocktwits to do this. Extremely cool.

Is the list based on what's on the SecondMarket system, or another list? Could also be interesting to add secondary interests in hedge funds and PE firms (i.e. "$BX_CAPV" for Blackstone's 2006 fund, or "$DESHAW" for D. E. Shaw), since SM is involved in those, and the folks who care about private company stocks may also have an interest in that kind of asset.

Re: Symbology

byrneseyeview — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 11:27:02 -0000

There's a big difference between thinking about the company and thinking about the investment. There are lots of people who think Google is evil and $GOOG is fantastic.

The information isn't necessarily accurate, but the point is not to have perfect information, just to aggregate a certain kind of information.

The conversation about how Open Graph should impact someone creating a consumer web service is orthogonal to the conversation about how Open Graph's data could help $FBOOK target ads better, thus raising their revenue materially. Better to have specific venues for each part of the conversation.

Re: Symbology

byrneseyeview — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 11:21:50 -0000

Five letters also used to mean delinquent filers (if the letter was "E"). Here's the list of other stuff it can mean:

http://docs.google.com/view...

So someone who has been trading for a while and sees $SKYPE assumes that it's $SKYP, but they haven't filed their latest 10-Q.

Re: Symbology

byrneseyeview — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 11:18:52 -0000

Wouldn't it be analogous to Foursquare location descriptions, or Twitter handles and hashtags? i.e. I identify myself as @byrneseyeview on Twitter; it's open in the sense that I didn't have to ask permission. And I've created and edited venues on Foursquare, too.

What is so closed about Twitter and Foursquare? They both seem designed to let other people do interesting things with them.