Did Venture Capitalists mess up Silicon Valley (and startups in general) as much as financial institutions destroyed Wall Street (and big companies)?Think about it: Silicon Valley unemployment is almost at 10%.   Tech giants are proving to be as vulnerable to the downturn as any other firms, and la...

It’s bad out there. How bad is it? It’s so bad that we can’t even afford consumer staples anymore.  That says a lot about this current crap market.  Usually, you know companies like Coca Cola and Gillette (now part of P&G, of course) will do fine. Apparently, not this time ar...

According to CNBC reporter Scott Wapner’s interview with the New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger (via SAI), the NYT is mulling ways to charge for content: Here’s how that model works: Everyone gets access to 3 articles a month. Register with the site for free and you can read 10 ar...

From DShort, via SAI.  Yippie.  Let’s plow another trillion into loser companies (US banks) and industries (US auto).  You’ll “save” a few jobs in the short term, but in the long term, the only jobs you will have created will be soup kitchen servants....

The economic meltdown and accompanying advertising slowdown is the best thing that could happen to Twitter, much the same way that Google benefited from dot com bubble bursting.  Had the dot com bubble not burst, Google’s business model would have been to slap Doubleclick (version 1.0) displa...

If newspapers can’t be saved, are TV networks next? Maybe.  Yesterday Paul Graham highlighted four factors that might lead the Web to “kill” TV.  I’m not a fan of “X will kill Y” pieces, but the fact remains, this is a pretty darn good piece, some highlights, th...

The headline to the news that advertising will shrink, and online ads might shrink by 5%, might as well be: quick, let’s fund more crap, if you ask me. Think about it: we have way too many ways to upload crap onto the Web, creating an influx of low-quality “content”.  Last time I ...

This has to be one of the best lines I’ve read in a while, from SAI’s Nicholas Carlson’s piece on succession planning at News Corp. Know what happens when a boxing referee slips between the ropes and out of the ring in the middle of the match? A hint: The brawlers don’t sudde...

“First of all, a lot of the riffraff is going to go out of business… it’s hard to compete with junk especially when they’re giving it away for free.” That’s coming from EA’s boss, John Riccitiello.  Read more on EA’s plight, more here and here. There’s two part...

Lost in the New Year transition shuffle (read: too much spiked eggnog) is the fact that while December was WatchMojo.com’s second best month ever (after March 2008), Q4 2008 (Oct, Nov and Dec) was far and away our best quarter ever: - Q1 2008: 6.9M streams - Q2 2008: 6.1M streams - Q3 2008: 5....