The Big Interview with Daniel Yergin

Daniel Yergin is the author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning book ‘The Prize‘, a stellar run through of the oil industry that is on Credit Writedowns’ recommended reading list. Below is a twenty-minute interview of Yergin by the Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel. Yergin discusses the recent uprisings in the Middle East and what they mean

Gasland and Natural Gas Drilling

Below is a film clip from the Oscar-nominated picture, ‘Gasland‘. The film on the effect of natural gas drilling on country landowners is up for best documentary tomorrow night. Also see Industry tried to get "Gasland" out of Oscars and A Colossal Fracking Mess for why this film is causing a buzz. Update 28 Feb

Taiwanese Animation: Airline travel – steerage edition

Here’s a tip on what airline travel is now like. Note, travel on Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific is infinitely better than on the U.S. airlines

Kedrosky Sees No Bubble, Facebook Value Could Go Higher

Paul Kedrosky told Bloomberg’s Pimm Fox that he doesn’t believe we are in a social media bubble yet and that Facebook’s valuation could go even higher in coming months. Revenue is doubling year-on-year at Facebook and that has Kedrosky saying that Facebook is further ahead than Google as a company pre-IPO. Right now Facebook is trading in SecondMarket’s 10th auction at a valuation $67.5 billion.

Desperately Seeking Search

Internet search is broken.

Battered by spammers, content farms and black hat optimizers, the typical Internet search is a horrible mess. Try basic search terms like "washing machine". Or try a term relevant to this site like "Finance Blog". What you get is a bunch of tricksters who have gamed the search engines to bring their clearly less relevant sites to the top of the pile. You as the user have to wade through these sites, hoping to find something remotely relevant to your search. Many give up in frustration. And while this situation is most acute at Google because their large search market share makes them a target for these shenanigans, the situation is better at Bing/Yahoo, but pretty much the same.

How do we solve this problem?

Why Nokia and Microsoft are getting together

If you saw the last round of data for the burgeoning mobile market, you would understand exactly why Nokia and Microsoft are banding together. These two companies are also rans in a market that has shifted away from voice communication to data and internet as the driving factors. According to Gartner, Nokia’s Symbian operating system

Taiwanese Animation: How AOL snared HuffPo

In case you don’t have the time to read my text version of the AOL acquisition of the Huffington Post, here is the Taiwanese animated version

Some Nice Super Bowl Ads

Ozzy Osborne and Justin Bieber for Best Buy Volkswagen and Vader, Audi in Jail, and the New GoDaddy Diva Chrysler’s Imported from Detroit Eminem Ad

What You Need To Know About AOL’s Huffington Post Acquisition

AOL is buying Internet News site Huffington Post for $315 million. Here’s what you need to know about the deal and what it says about the tech world, investing and the economy. Mergers are tough Most mergers fail because the ‘synergies’ which deal hounds expect never come to fruition or because the distraction of post-merger

What’s really happening with Bing ‘Cheating’ and Copying Google Search Results

[Updated with a view from a former Google search engineer below] Earlier this week Google disclosed that it had run a sting operation on its main search page which clearly ascertained that Bing, a competitor search engine by Microsoft, was using Google’s search results to tweak its own search results. The furore over this has

SNL: The real Zuckerberg yucks it up with the actor who played him

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on Saturday Night Live last night with guest host Jesse Eisenberg, the actor who played Zuckerberg in the acclaimed movie "The Social Network" and it was all hugs. Zuck came on the show to show he has a good sense of humour despite the unflattering portrayal of him in the

The $50 Billion Myth – Facebook and Goldman Sachs

By Alex Daley, Casey’s Extraordinary Technology The past few weeks have seen a flurry of news in technology with the mega-sized Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas ushering in the first new platform for Microsoft Windows in over a decade, the announcement of at least 40 forthcoming mobile phones to be the first class labeled