"Innovation has become a fertile area in which companies seek competitive advantage today. This has served Apple well over the past decade. I don’t think innovativeness will be going away soon as a source of competitive advantage. But I do wonder whether time is running out on time as a competitive advantage. If agile and other innovations lead us to a world where all companies can deliver new products and services equally quickly, companies will need to find newer ways to differentiate themselves."

"…For cyclic games with two players and three strategies, we show that the resulting deterministic dynamics crucially depends on the initial condition in a non–trivial way."

'These developments suggest that the United States is spending huge amounts of money in ways that are actually making Americans less secure, not only against irregular insurgents, but also against smart countries building different sorts of militaries. And the problem goes well beyond weapons and other high-tech items. What’s missing most of all from the U.S. military’s arsenal is a deep understanding of networking, the loose but lively interconnection between people that creates and brings a new kind of collective intelligence, power, and purpose to bear — for good and ill…..”'

"In this post I present the development model that I’ve introduced for all of my projects (both at work and private) about a year ago, and which has turned out to be very successful. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now, but I’ve never really found the time to do so thoroughly, until now. I won’t talk about any of the projects’ details, merely about the branching strategy and release management."

"The reason the internet is such a home to wow business models is that it's easier to create a network here than any other time in history."

"Harry Markowitz, 81, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1990 for his work on portfolio theory, says that last year’s collapse reinforces his view that even the most unlikely outcomes are possible in any year. “The thundering herd is still with us,” said Markowitz, a professor of finance at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego. “Nature draws into a bushel basket full of returns and finds a next return every year, and I believe there’s another 1929 somewhere in that bushel basket. 2008 was not a refutation, it was a confirmation.""

"Overlooked in tax strategy is the huge tax advantages owning and self-managing real estate. I prefer residential real estate. You have write-offs and phantom depreciation galore (which can be deferred until death via 1031 and similar property exchange programs, or simple refinancing)."

"This being the case, it's entirely possible that cash-strapped advertisers will have exactly the same kind of "moment of clarity" that shopaholic consumers are reportedly having now that they've seen entire store inventories marked down 50 percent or more in pre-Christmas sales—that is, they may say to themselves, "We knew all along that this stuff was made in China for a tiny fraction of what it sells for here; we were nuts to pay so much in markup for it.""

"The time-tested response is that you're not sure, that ads are risky, that you can't tell. And for some sorts of products and some sorts of ads, you'll get no argument from me.

Digital ads are different (or they should be). You should know cost per click and revenue per click and be able to make a smart guess about lifetime value of a click. And if that's positive, buy, buy, buy.

And if you don't know those things, why are you buying digital ads?"

"The Republicans are playing to voters' identity. The Democrats are campaigning on their economic interests. The outcome of this year's election will ride on whether or not a segment of the working and middle-class electorate in economically-devastated states will support a ticket whose candidates pretend to be the cultural allies of the people or a ticket whose candidates are challenging (at least in part) the failed economic policies that should be the real source of bitterness at the grassroots. "

"But I’m actually thinking that there are some lessons here that the mathematics community could learn from..."

seeing this as the tail-end of a much longer discussion....