So Verizon is buying the heart of old Yahoo! I include the exclamation point because it was always there in the Yahoo! we knew back when the Internet was young. $4.83 billion in cash is a lot of cash, but for Verizon it’s a way of buying into the future while buying what to many of us seems to be the past. So let’s get the business part out of the way: Verizon can see Yahoo! as a bargain because Yahoo! has nearly always been more profitable on a gross margin basis than Verizon, a phone company. Even Yahoo! in decline will pull Verizon up. But that’s not why I’m writing […]
Is anyone at Yahoo! paying attention? Probably not.
Why SoftBank is paying $32 billion for ARM Holdings
SoftBank is buying ARM Holdings for $32 billion. Why would a company not presently in the semiconductor business spend 32 times sales to enter a new industry? By traditional measures it makes little sense. But for SoftBank it makes perfect sense, because here’s a company that has spent more than 30 years making high-risk bets on entering new businesses by apparently over-paying for assets. It’s the way they’ve always done it and it has nearly always worked. In this case SoftBank is paying a 43 percent premium over the recent ARM share price because that’s how much money it took to overcome the resistance of ARM management. And it’s just a guess […]
A PayPal Mystery
Update from my reader, the small software vendor:
“Mystery solved. The first chargeback came through today for one of the first purchases (June 8th). PayPal opened a claim regarding that purchase with the following: “The buyer stated that they did not authorize this purchase.” Oddly enough, the email associated with the claim is still the same fake email (by fake, I mean it doesn’t exist). So it seems they were just using my order form to test stolen credit cards.
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“I spent 35 minutes on hold with PayPal, was handed off three times, but finally spoke with a person who seemed to know what was up. I told her there were 19 more […]
Thinking about Big Data — Part Three (the final and somewhat scary part)
In part one we learned about data and how it can be used to find knowledge or meaning. Part two explained the term Big Data and showed how it became an industry mainly in response to economic forces. This is part three, where it all has to fit together and make sense — rueful, sometimes ironic, and occasionally frightening sense. You see our technological, business, and even social futures are being redefined right now by Big Data in ways we are only now coming to understand and may no longer be able to control.
Whether the analysis is done by a supercomputer or using a hand-written table compiled in 1665 […]
Thinking about Big Data — Part Two
In Part One of this series of columns we learned about data and how computers can be used for finding meaning in large data sets. We even saw a hint of what we might call Big Data at Amazon.com in the mid-1990s, as that company stretched technology to observe and record in real time everything its tens of thousands of simultaneous users were doing. Pretty impressive, but not really Big Data, more like Bigish Data. The real Big Data of that era was already being gathered by outfits like the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) — spy operations that were recording digital communications […]
