Todd G. Simpson

Like everyone, I have an eye on Greece right now.  If the media is to be believed, if Greece defaults there will be a domino effect that will ripple around the world, starting with the impact to European banks that hold a huge amount of Greek debt, and spreading to interconnected markets, including the US. Thus, I was encouraged, reading the Greek Prime Ministers  speech  to find the quote which is the title of this post.  Here is a guy who is willing to do the right thing, even if it is unpopular. The US is "Greece in waiting."  In USA Inc ., you will find lots of data on the dangers facing the US, including this note: "Less than 15 years from now... USA Inc....would have nothing left over to spend on defense, education, infrastructure, and R&D, which today account for only 32% of USA Inc. spending, down from 69% forty years ago. This critical juncture is getting ever closer."  In just 15 years, at current course and speed, entitlement pr...

Listening to the playground antics of the US government around the debt ceiling is very painful.  I still expect there will be a "last minute deal," but I also hope that the pathetic posturing that is bringing the US to the brink causes people to rethink the process. On NPR this morning there were two interesting comments on the underlying psychology that is aiding and abetting the current process. Short term considerations overwhelmingly override long term ones.  The example was that if I ask you to give up an ice-cream cone next year, it is easy to say "yes".  If I swing by right now with the desert tray, you will have a hard time saying "no".  The debate around the debt ceiling is really about long-term concerns....but the (somewhat artificial) deadline of August 2nd is making it into a negotiation about the short term. Men are hyper-competitive without women present to moderate things.  Maybe not too surprising, but it leads to men acting in no...

Such is the title of a great article in the Atlantic magazine. The article clearly articulates why the US political system is completely broken, and not even close to a "democracy".  In my view, the system has devolved into a religious war - there is no room for compromise, intelligence, facts, or the good of the people.  There is only room for bickering, hard stances, and 100% faith in your party. As many of the comments point out, while the article outlines some ideas for fixing the system...it gives no guidance as to "how."  Obama's social media campaign in the last election was largely one-way: he broadcast his message to people through SMS and twitter.  Perhaps two-way social media is now at a point where average people can have their voices heard.  That said, Google Groups or Facebook Groups don't seem to be organized enough, or mature enough, to handle the task of synthesizing the voice of large groups of individuals into something cohesive and co...

"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. 

This is one of the better books for laymen that I have read in a while.  In large part, I think this is due to the fact that I knew very little about the recent developments in astronomy, and was surprised to find that Neutrino Telescopes are alive and well.  The last time I had looked, it was so hard to detect a neutrino, that even thinking of a telescope was absurd. While the book follows many of the pioneers of the area, I was most intrigued with the storyline that exposed how neutrinos come in three flavors, which can change through interaction with mass and/or time.  Thus, an electron-neutrino at birth, may be a tau-neutrino upon detection.  This is visualized well by Close as neutrinos being like harmonics of several frequencies which interact in wavelike ways as the neutrino travels through space and time.  It is interesting that this is the same visualization invoked by superstring theory. To explain the flavor-changing behavior, neutrinos (or a...

With Borders scaling back so many of their stores, I have ended up buying more books than I normally would. One I picked up is "What is Life?" by Ed Regis.  It is a good short read, although it is now 2 years old, which is a long time given the rate that "artificial life" is moving at.  Since the book came out, Craig Ventor claims to have created the first artificial life . One thing I did not know was that Schrodinger wrote a book with the same title in 1944 which predicted the existence of a DNA-like molecule;  Crick actually credits Schrodinger with inspiring some of his early work. Ed Regis points out that Schrodinger's book never actually defines what life is; that is left hanging.  Interestingly, I felt the same about Regis's book.  While he argues that life is defined by having an "embedded metabolism" that argument still seems weak.  Carl Sagan pointed out, many years ago, that cars have a metabolism, which is hard to argue against....

It is gut-check time. Do I cheer for San Jose or Vancouver? I have two conflicting logic trees: I am Canadian Vancouver is in Canada Therefore, I should support Vancouver San Jose has 22 Canadians on their Roster Vancouver has 16 Canadians on their Roster I am Canadian Therefore, I should support San Jose So, I have turned to "How We Decide" which I just recently read to see if it has any answers. Jonah Lehrer would suggest that I check two aspects.  My emotional brain, and my rational brain. My emotional brain screams "Vancouver"; obviously there is a stronger emotional link between location (Canada) than roster. My rational brain says "San Jose".  In the last three years, I have never watched a Canucks game, or followed the team very closely.  However, I have been to many Sharks games, enjoy watching there progress, and even listen to quite a few games on the radio. Lehrer suggests that typically your rational brain is the one to follow. I...

A lot of the press today is claiming that Microsoft overpaid for Skype.  I am not so sure. Here are some numbers for comparison. Skype has 560 million registered users, of which about 2% (say 11 million) are paying customers with an average ARPU of $8.  Thus, Skype should be generating about $8*12*11M ~ $1B/year in revenue right now, with an EBITDA of about $250M.  So, Microsoft is paying about 8X revenue, and 32X EBITDA. T-Mobile US has about 33M subs, with an ARPU of about $50.  So, T-Mobile's revenue should be around  $21B/year.  AT&T is paying about 2X revenue, and 7X EBITDA. Thus, Microsoft is paying a 4-5X premium for Skype compared to what AT&T is paying for T-Mobile. The obvious question is : Can Microsoft leverage Skype 4X more effectively than a traditional mobile carrier?  To that, I think the answer is yes: 1) Skype is not a major enterprise player, yet.  Microsoft should be able to make this happen.  That alone...