Certain Habits

It sounds like it’s straight from a sci fi novel. But a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine confirms that patients formerly thought to be in a persistent vegetative state are able to communicate with the outside world with the help of brain imagery. As described by MIT Technology Review:

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If the iPad will accelerate the shift of current print media to electronic publishing, it’s worth asking what this means for the future of advertising.

Yesterday, I noted that advertisers will face a choice: between making advertising even more interruptive of the user experience, or by making ads more enticing and more useful, blurring the line between advertising and content.

With the iPad now available for order and software companies, publishers, and game providers having had several months to begin product development, demonstrations of future products are starting to trickle out on Youtube.

What the demonstrations show, I think, is that the user interface / user experience potential of the iPad is much greater than the “it’s just a giant iPod Touch” critics realize.

Cantor-Fitzgerald, the bond-investment firm whose offices famously were atop the World Trade Center on September 11 has introduced a new innovation to the world of sports gambling.

Using sophisticated algorithms first developed for pricing bonds and other, more exotic, securities, Cantor has now developed software that enables betting on sports contests, in real-time, as the games occur … and the odds change. According to Fortune:

In today’s Wall Street Journal, there’s an article about how some companies, like Sprint, Harman, and Home Depot are using bi-annual bonuses to motivate employees. Home Depot in particular has seen a six-month bonus plan dramatically reduce turnover among frontline staff.

In the middle of the article, I came across this paragraph:

What do you do when you have great employees, but not enough work to keep them—or afford to pay them—full time? Wouldn’t it be great if you could lend them out to other firms and be able to bring them back when the work ramps up again?

That dream is now a reality for some in the UK. Work Wise has opened an online swamp meet where employers can effectively trade employees. Staff Share originally opened to nonprofits only, but early success caused it to serve more industry as well.

Investors Business Daily is fast becoming invaluable on current U.S. fiscal policy and the probability of a (United States) sovereign debt crisis if we don’t change course.

Friday’s editorial contained this startling fact:

A new company called Organovo is ready to release the first commercially available 3d bio-printer this year.

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TechCrunch reports that AOL may be (much) better off abandoning social media network Bebo (acquired for $850 million) rather than trying to sell it. The reason? They can write off the whole purchase price if they abandon the asset (a $350 million tax savings) and if they sell it the write down of the asset can only be used to offset capital gains taxes (of which they have none).

I understand treating capital gains separate from income. I also understand that there’s a (byzantine) logic to our corporate tax laws. But surely there must be a way to write the tax laws so that destroying assets isn’t more valuable than selling it, right? If that’s not the definition of a perverse incentive, I don’t know what is.

According to a recent article from the McKinsey Quarterly, internet use in China is up … way up. In 2009, 384 million people in China had access to the Internet. That’s 50% growth over 2008.

And they’re not just passive users: