Twenty-First Century’s Best Venture

Twenty-First Century’s best venture is the Harry Potter franchise. Starting with a great set of thrilling stories, J.K. Rowling’s marvelous boy-hero has started off a whole generation of youngsters on paths of reading, courage, friendship, adventure, and Rowling herself, on a path of great riches. Traditionally, Venture Capitalists did not finance content plays. But if you look at the numbers, one begins to wonder whether or not they should start … books, music, films, toys, games …

Starbucks and the Music Business

Perhaps, a natural extension would be to start having live-music and dancing at Starbucks cafes as well, with carefully selected musicians, in carefully selected musical genres!

Professor Calculus triggers an LBO?

Need Help With Calculus? Tutors Coach U.S. Students Online — From India is an article from the Wall Street Journal. Tanu Basu lives in Boston, but when she wants extra coaching in math, the 16-year-old American gets online and spends an hour reviewing calculus with an Indian teacher who is based in a suburb of

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Intel gets inspired by Apple in more ways than one!

MovieLink has apparently not got much traction for two reasons:

(1) It takes way too long to download a film
(2) Once you download on your PC, there is no wireless PC-to-TV connection to watch it on the TV easily

Wonder what is going on in Intel’s head, to fix these two adoption road-blocks on the Video-on-Demand roadmap and what Morgan Freeman knows, that the major studios don’t!

Pixar: Animation = ?: Online Shopping

The online world has changed in the last ten years from a basic user experience to a vastly more involved and integrated user experience. And yet, the online shopping experience is still fairly basic, elementary, and non-experiential. Beyond the basics, however, today’s experiential shopping opportunity online has become many times richer and more attractive. Broadband has become ubiquitous. Publishing tools are orders of magnitude more sophisticated, easy, and accessible, and visual merchandising needs to correspondingly evolve to the next level.

Amidst the VoIP action

https://www.rediff.com/money/2003/nov/03it.htm

Advergames: Cross Technologists and Story-tellers

Brand engagement takes on a whole new form, as Advertisers begin leveraging technology and computer gaming. From the current Economist: Gaming: As young people spend less time watching television and more time online and playing games, advertisers have devised a new way to reach them. CROSS the popularity of a new medium with the demands

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Einstein’s Mother

“When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you will become a general. If you become a monk, then you will end up as Pope.’ Instead, I became a painter, and wound up as Picasso.” Famous quote from Pablo Picasso. What did Einstein’s mother say to him?