Days of Wine and Rent-Seeking

December 6, 2002 – 12:00 am

Professor Kiesling discusses how new markets created by the Internet ran afoul of existing institutions (wholesale liquor distributors) that had their niche by law.
New York, Michigan and other states prohibited shipments to individual buyers from out of state wineries.
The liquor wholesalers arrangements grew out of the post-Prohibition environment. Laws which were enacted out of a [...]

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Amazon’s Web Services:REST and SOAP

July 16, 2002 – 12:00 am

[ via Hack the Planet ] Amazon.com has extended their Web Services offering, supporting both REST and SOAP. No docs online, however, you have to click-through an agreement and download the kit.

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ISMIR 2002 - 3rd International Conference on Music Information Retrieval

July 8, 2002 – 12:00 am

[ via Spike the Librarian ] From the conference site: “The annual ISMIR Conference is the first established international forum for those involved in the tremendous growth of music-related contents available digitally, locally or remotely, through networks.”
The organizers want musicians, librarians, developers, industry reps, and others to attend. Douglas Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach) is the [...]

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Xenomusic

July 5, 2002 – 12:00 am

I am a fan of crazed Gypsy music, and go out of my way to hear groups like the Reptile Palace Orchestra and Kayla Flexer’s combo. So I was pleased to hear about Xenomusic, a site which sells MP3s of bands from all over Eastern Europe. The site’s founder says that while LA tries to [...]

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Cirque du Ticketing Pain

June 26, 2002 – 12:00 am

So tickets to Cirque du Soleil’s new show, Varekai, went on sale today for folks in the Bay Area who signed up for their notification list. Oy, getting tickets was painful. Their ticketing vendor’s site (The Canadian branded version of TicketMaster) was swamped, and if you got in, you risked losing your session in the [...]

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VillainSupply.com

June 21, 2002 – 12:00 am

[ via FoRK ] The online superstore for everything you need to take over the world, or just extort “one million dollars” (pinky at corner of mouth) from the UN. You’ll find uniforms for henchmen, sexy assassins, antimatter and other doomsday devices at the site. Their webmaster is the preserved head of a Nazi in [...]

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How to Read a Press Release

March 25, 2002 – 12:00 am

[ via the Muted Horn ] A press release with the brand names changed has been annotated at CIO magazine. It’s like those wonderfuly nasty dissections they do of official documents in Harper’s Magazine.
The source document has been found at True Advantage, a sales automation vendor.

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An Editors’ Choice Award and Three Bucks Will Get You a Latte

March 15, 2002 – 12:00 am

Several friends have pointed out a snippet about my previous company from PC Magazine’s 20th Anniversary issue:
April 24, 2001 2Roam’s wireless development tool is chosen as our Editors’ Choice. Within a few months, the company went out of business.

It’s at the bottom of the article.

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Air2Web buys 2Roam

March 5, 2002 – 12:00 am

Well, well, Air2Web bought the assets of 2Roam.

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National Association for Information Destruction, Inc.

February 24, 2002 – 12:00 am

[ via Tim Bray ] The document destruction industry has a trade association.
They want to remind you that in light of the recent Enron scandals, shredding is good.

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Lisp wins big.

February 15, 2002 – 12:00 am

[ via Red Rock Eater ] Lisp is quietly gaining ground on the server side. Orbitz and Yahoo! Store are using it.

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Excite@Home on verge of shut down: now how will people buy crap on Amazon?

November 30, 2001 – 12:00 am

A US Bankruptcy court judge has granted the fervent wishes of Excite@Home’s creditors to allow the cable modem provider to abandon contracts with cable companies and shut down operations.
The threat of a shut down has worried the Administration:
Earlier in the morning, Federal Communications Commission chief Michael Powell made a plea to the courts asking it [...]

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Warren Buffett on the Bubble

March 15, 2001 – 12:00 am

[via FoRK ] Irrational exuberance my a**, in Warren E. Buffett’s letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, he calls all those dogfood.com IPOs what they really were, Ponzi schemes.
“What actually occurs in these cases is wealth transfer, often on a massive scale. By shamelessly merchandising birdless bushes, promoters have in recent years moved billions of dollars [...]

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NASDAQ Quotes in XML

February 27, 2001 – 12:00 am

NASDAQ has an XML quotes feed. Plenty of data to experiment with in it. To customize it, just append your stocks as symbol=TICKER to the URL after mode=stock.

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Sock Puppet over Rainbow Bridge

November 7, 2000 – 12:00 am

Pets.com shuts down. Dog sock puppet mascot to be put down on a special, live edition of Emergency Vets.

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