The stock market’s rebound has been so fast and furious that it might make folks forget that we just experienced a nasty credit crisis and market downturn. Have sinking home values not registered with the national psyche? Surf around on Zillow.com and witness the vast amounts of wealth disappearing over the last few months as homeowners see their most significant asset crumbling on a shaky credit foundation. Of course, institutional money managers are the ones buying furiously and fueling this market rebound. It is entirely plausible that, unlike the average …

A few days ago, I wrote about the commoditization of social networks or rather the social networking feature sets that currently make Myspace and Facebook so unique and neat. Pioneers in social networking like Friendster and Myspace introduced a new data and software architecture that, at the same time clumsily and elegantly, met Internet users’ desire to interact and share content with each other. Finding old friends, connecting with new friends, sharing music and videos, playing collaborative games, and expressing oneself to virtual audiences of thousands all were groundbreaking features …

Chris Anderson, a writer at Wired Magazine and author of the influential The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, makes some good points about the insanity of Facebook’s $15 billion valuation, the inadequacy of current approaches to social networking, and the implications of an over-reliance on advertising as a business model. His arguments are useful because entrepreneurs can use them to make concrete business or strategic decisions. He doesn’t use namby pamby qualifications to hedge his bets and predictions. I do …

Tight US immigration forces outsourcing: Bill Gates – Microsoft (MSFT) chairman, and no longer the wealthiest guy in the world, makes some interesting points about our immigration policy regarding skilled workers. At SocialOptimize, we’ve been outsourcing some of our work to Guatemala and the Philippines.
Google could be superseded, says web inventor – Tim Berners-Lee shares some wisdom about the semantic web. He talks about how a new company in the future could exceed everything Google (GOOG) has done up to this point. Wouldn’t Google just buy that company?
Japanese government investigates …

Since my current work is in new media and social networking, I am keenly interested in the turbulence facing the newspaper industry. Clients, ranging from Fortune 2000 companies to small innovative startups, come to my team at SocialOptimize to gain an understanding of the new media landscape and to develop an actionable strategy for building a meaningful presence in social networks. They ask about their traditional marketing budgets and I tell them that we will see the disappearance of many old model newspaper, radio, and television companies as they struggle …

The New York Times (NYT) is reporting that Yahoo’s (YHOO) board plans to reject Microsoft’s (MSFT) $44.6 billion bid, launched about a week ago. This on the heels of an article, titled Yahoo Sale Could be Bad for Minnows, in which the New York Times explored the implications of the potential diminishment of one of the traditional “exit strategies” for entrepreneurial startups. Venture capitalists and startup entrepreneurs have long adhered to a playbook of creating cutting edge technology with the hope of being acquired by the big three of Google …