Online
Reading an article about an interesting Education business had us thinking of regulation and, primarily, goals for Education. The current debate about Public Education in the US focuses on adjustments/ improvements to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which is all about accountability. In a separate story, Tom Friedman reminds us that the top-notch jobs of the future may require skill-sets (and individual attitude) that current education models may simply be unable to provide. But when you’re a Brazilian public education student and the debate isn’t even close to scratching the surface of the “accountability” trend, it’s definitely a scary future.
Every source has its biases, but it’s fair to say that the New York Times produces top-quality content over a surprisingly wide range of topics. For instance, its DealBook section and daily emails are a very valuable source for investors, as are the many business, scientific and cultural articles that can, over time, foster different/ multidisciplinary mental models. So it’s only natural that news of a documentary called Page One, in which the film crew spends almost an year inside the NYT in the midst of the current media revolution (blogging/ socialmedia/ iPad/ Kindle/ Wikileaks/ etc.), had us pretty excited.
We often find relevant articles related to subjects we’ve already discussed at Buysiders.com, and we post them as updates while linking to the original post(s). While each update should be interesting on its own, the idea is to read the whole “thread”, especially as time goes by and we develop a sense of history. In IP’s case, our Intranet dates back to 2003 and back then we made an effort to find older articles about companies and sectors we were studying. Being able to tap into this rich history is quite valuable and we hope to build the same wealth of links at Buysiders.com. In today’s piece we’re posting two updates about different subjects: crowdsourcing and e-publishing/ the “Web is dead” debate.
Free e-book organized by Seth Godin sounds a lot like the Red Balloon experience we just discussed on Dec. 6th: it’s less about advertising the authors’ work than it’s about discovering ways that content gets disseminated online – how does an e-book become “viral”? Interesting experiment, so-so book.
DARPA, the US military agency that 40 years ago spawned the Internet, organized a contest to study how people collaborate online and, most importantly, how information spreads virally through social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter. The winning team took less than 9 hours to locate 10 balloons spread throughout the US – unthinkable maybe even 5 years ago… And the implications are quite interesting.
Netflix is one of the most admirable cases around on corporate strategy AND execution. It shows how you can make billions out of simple things. That said, they have to kill a lion a year to stay ahead. Investment-wise, we never got to the point where we felt we knew enough to invest in them – and don’t regret not doing it.
Read more about Netflix doing the right things at the right time
