Blue Nile Struggles Amidst Luxury Industry Collapse

MasterCard’s SpendingPulse recently reported that the 34% decline in sales of luxury items was the highest year-on-year decline of any retail category during the holiday season and that the reduction was led by falling jewelry sales. In such conditions, it is not surprising that Blue Nile (NILE) recently announced a lackluster Q4 performance.

IBM Wants to Buy Sun? Why?

Boy, I wrote the last Sun piece with a recommendation for Sun to hold on to its OpenSource business, and divest the hardware business, and thought that Cisco may be interested in the DataCenter business in particular. And the news this morning is that IBM is considering buying Sun for about $7 billion.

Sun Should Pursue OpenSource Full Blast

Last year when Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:JAVA) took over MySQL, I asked if it would get into open source applications.

Bullish On ERII

After disappointing results for last quarter, Energy Recovery Inc (ERII) beat the market’s expectations this quarter, and the company gave a positive outlook for the coming quarters. For an in-depth look at the global water crisis and business opportunities therein, read Dominique Trempont’s Water Shortages: Opportunities for Entrepreneurs.

Yahoo! Names New CEO

Over the weekend, it became clear that Carol Bartz really wanted the Yahoo! CEO job, and that the board was willing to give it to her. Today, the appointment became official. Carol Bartz is the no-bullshit, down-to-earth, highly successful former CEO of Autodesk. Her story in Silicon Valley is a lesson in career management: boards

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Newspapers Struggling: GCI, NYT, MNI

Poor economic conditions are plaguing all industries and companies alike. In late October several newspaper stocks announced their Q3 results, and, as in Q2 of this year, all of them turned in a disappointing performance. Given that during Q3 viewership was up on account of the US presidential campaigns and the Beijing Olympics, the results were positively

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Where Would The Jobs Come From?

Against the backdrop of the financial crisis, with a bailout package that is as large as the cost of the Iraq war, economic policy emerges as the most important campaign issue for this election. The new American president will need to be extremely careful to not choke up the entrepreneurship engine with a tax policy

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Silver Lining In The Financial Crisis

Amidst the financial crisis, some 40,000 of New York’s 185,700 Wall Street jobs could be lost. The bailout is not exactly offering a great deal of confidence to the financial markets. We are all losing a lot of money. Fear runs through the system like a chilling shiver in the middle of the night. In

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