Today knowledge is ubiquitous, constantly changing, growing exponentially… Today knowledge is free. It’s like air, it’s like water. It’s become a commodity… There’s no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn’t care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know.
Source: giothegreat
Would you rather serve a market or a boss?
Man in a complex society can have no choice but between adjusting himself to what to him must seem the blind forces of the social process and obeying the orders of a superior. So long as he knows only the hard discipline of the market, he may well think the direction by some other intelligent human brain preferable; but, when he tries it, he soon discovers that the former still leaves him at least some choice, while the latter leaves him none, and that it is better to have a choice between several unpleasant alternatives than being coerced into one.
Quoted from Individualism and Economic Order by F.A Hayek, via John D.Cook’s blog.
I, of course, have gone with the former.
Stalking Horse Bid
On October 22, 2007, technology company SCO asked a bankruptcy court to approve a deal whereby a purchaser would acquire “substantially all assets used by the Company in connection with its SCO UNIX Business and certain related claims in litigation.” The agreement included a “stalking horse” provision: If the purchaser, York Capital Management, were to be designated as a stalking horse in subsequent bidding for SCO’s assets, and if others outbid York, then SCO would have to pay York a $780,000 breakup fee and reimbursement of all expenses incurred by York up to $300,000. In this way, York would earn its expenses and $780,000 by acting as the stalking horse and preventing other bidders from making lowball offers.
If you lost faith in human creativity after spending a few minutes on YouTube, this should revive it.
Source: Wikipedia
Can these new payment services beat Paypal?
Recurly, Stripe, Chargify and 1000s more to come. Why will they succeed when Google Checkout, with all that Google-y muscle, hasn’t? Perhaps their ambition is to just carve out a niche for themselves instead of replacing Paypal as the dominant online payment solution. Now that makes sense.
Or perhaps they plan to be behind-the-scenes and do B2B (eg: power the Saas businesses) rather than handle B2C themselves (which requires oodles of user trust that comes from brand recognition).
