"There's no question about it," Bush said. "Wall Street got drunk, that's one of the reasons I asked you to turn off the TV cameras. It got drunk and now it's got a hangover. The question is how long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments."

With Bush at the country's helm, why wouldn't they?

The Hill's Blog Briefing Room » Bush on Economy: 'Wall Street Got Drunk'

Memestreamer Cyan got $7 million in funding for Zivity!

The site allows both amateur and professional models and photographers to show their stuff. Users vote on those that they like, which channel real dollars to the talent. The more votes, the more money. The basic site is free, but users must pay to vote. About 40% of gross revenue is given directly to the talent. With a recent redesign, the site is focused much more on social networking - users and talent have profile pages and can add each other as friends. They’ve even added a news feed feature that shows who is adding who as friends, and which models users have voted for.

Go Cyan!

Zivity Takes $7 Million In Venture Financing

Rapidly rising Internet star Facebook Inc. has sold a 1.6 percent stake to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million, spurning a competing offer from online search leader Google Inc.

The deal announced Wednesday after several weeks of negotiation values Palo Alto-based Facebook at $15 billion

These deals keep having more and more insane valuations. I think Decius and I should start practice claiming that MemeStreams is worth four billion while keeping a straight face..

Microsoft buys Facebook stake for $240M - Yahoo! News

"The idea behind capping our investment at $1 million is tied to making sure we avoided investments from traditional adult media sources," Banister explained. "It's all part of a plan to methodically decide how much money we want to take and on what terms. Investors that would want to alter the amount we pay out to models would be changing the focus of the site, and we want to avoid that."

An interview with Cyan about Zivity is on one of Wired's blogs.

Epicenter - Zivity's CEO, CSO Discuss Funding An Adult Startup

Amazing. This is a short slideshow about Shenzhen, which includes photos of the biggest electronics components market in the world.

Made in China

“The longer you work, the less efficient you are,” said Bob Kustka, the founder of Fusion Factor, a productivity and time-management consulting firm in Norwell, Mass. He says workers are like athletes in that they are most efficient in concentrated bursts. Elite athletes “play a set of tennis, a down of football or an inning of baseball and have a pause in between,” he says. Working energy, like physical energy, “is best used in spurts where we work hard on a few focused activities and then take a brief respite,” he says.

And those respites look an awful lot like wasting time.

Time Wasted? Perhaps It's Well Spent

Search engine leader Google is buying privately held DoubleClick, a top digital marketing services firm, for $3.1 billion in cash, the companies said Friday afternoon.

Google (Charts) is buying DoubleClick from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, which bought DoubleClick in 2005 for $1.1 billion in a deal that took the company private.

All your ad are belong to Google.

Google scoops up DoubleClick for $3.1 billion - Apr. 13, 2007

House prices in the U.S. from 1890 until 2005, plotted as a roller coaster that you ride from a first person perspective. Here is the data source. Hold on to your hats.

Also check out these two posts from Decius about the current state of the housing market.

Real Estate Roller Coaster

It began as a covert guerrilla action that spread virally and eventually became a revolution.

What is it?

At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical -- if risky -- experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.

They are going to do this not only at corporate, but also at the retail outlets.

Every so often I see articles on changing work environments like this come up. I am very happy to see experiments like this happening in the corporate workplace.

Reading this made me think of the place where Decius and I worked "before all hell broke lose"... We both managed trans-continental teams. Our direct reports were in the states, but all the people we had to coordinate projects with were sprinkled across several Asian countries. Every country's management handled it's own staff, but we drove most project goals. It was all stress, frequent flier miles, and a clock that never stopped.

In the states, the engineering staff showed up around 10am-11am. We'd show up at the office, address any immediate concerns for a few hours, and do lunch. Lunch was a strategy session with food. Most of my average day in the states was working with the product development group. The phone conferences with the Asian offices started around 6:30pm. Getting out of the office was always hard, and we always aimed to get out around 9pm, because food became hard to come by in SF after 10pm. At that point, work quasi-resumed at home in the form of phone calls and poking at laptops. Decius had this worse than I did. His phone rang off the hook with technical problems overseas that couldn't wait. I tended to just sit on the couch poking out lists and responding to emails. The workday didn't really end, it just phased itself out slowly.

Overseas, my average day started at 8am. I'd roll out of bed, as my prearranged breakfast arrived, and start parsing in and hammering out emails. Almost all my collaboration with the US would happen before I left the hotel. Sometime around 10pm, I'd shower and head off to the office with the day's objectives lined out. The overseas offices shut off like a switch around 6pm. Completely different work culture. After 6pm, most of our time was spent with sales and professional services folks. Half social, half work. I'd get back to the hotel, late, and start on the morning email barrage for about an hour or two before passing out. I liked my wake-up period to be spent proof reading, eating, and hitting numerous send buttons.

In short, the vast... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Smashing The Clock

MemeStreams user terratogen has posted up some thoughts about the Arby's logo on his other blog.

I hate Arby's. I've only eaten there twice, and both times I've gotten food poisoning. First time I thought it was a fluke..

frottage. | The Arby's Logo...