Todd G. Simpson

"Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income" ( Acsoi ), is a measure of what a companies profits would be if they were not spending like crazy to acquire a space:  in GroupOn's case, this would be retailers. To me, using Acsoi as a measure is really an admission that a company has no staying power beyond brand awareness.  So, they need to grab and own as much mindshare as they can, as quickly as they can, to increase the barrier to entry for competitors.  Without intellectual property to help protect them, and with the cost of switching (for a user) being effectively zero, building a global brand, and relying on brand stickiness, is the best way forward. Companies like Amazon that have been effective at this have also built in other "sticky" factors over time: recommendation engines, one-click purchasing, etc.  This increases the cost for the user to switch, and allows the company to stop pouring money into marketing and acquisition costs.  You also buil

@toddsimpson: I am a fairly recent twit, so I have not figured out how to get this into 160 chars or less. I have noticed that about 5% of twits create at least 75% of the traffic, which has been documented before .  One minute I want to stop following that 5%, as it starts to approximate spam, and the next minute I am interested in what they have to say.  So, the real problem is that they are peppered throughout my timeline, all the time. Here is my suggested fix.  Modify the timeline so that I can easily control if I only see the most recent tweet from a person, or all of the tweets.  This could be done with a simple "+" or "-" icon next to the persons image.  If I switch a person to "-" then I will only see their most recent tweet.  If they are on "+" they are interleaved into the timeline as per usual. #MostRecentTweetOnly

I had a great opportunity to participate with thec100.org over the past two days as they ran their fourth "48 hours in the Valley" program. We had a great showing of Canadian Facebook employees on a panel this morning, and covered topics from how to best engage with Facebook, to the culture of both Facebook and the Valley. One question from the audience was "what would it take for you to come back to Canada?"  And the answer was uniformly "I won't." The reasons had nothing to do with Canada (someone mentioned that they would not go LA or anywhere else either), but had everything to do with the unique appeal, energy, and community in the Valley for anyone in tech.  The bittersweet part of this was: I agree.  I would love to head back to Canada - it is home.  But, I won't.  The advantages of being here in the Valley (much more obvious to me now that I am at Mozilla) are just too strong.  Sigh.