Of Thanksgiving Turkeys and Black Swans

A couple of months ago I finished reading The Black Swan (TBS) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I suspect I'll read it again sometime. In a nutshell, TBS is about (un)predictability, uncertainty and knowledge. Karen and the kids bought me the second edition of TBS for Fathers'

The Australian and the new Battle of Jericho

When the Israelites crossed the River Jordan into the land of Canaan, they came upon the city of Jericho. God spoke to the leader of the Israelites, Joshua, saying he and seven priests should walk around the city once a day with the Ark of the Covenant, until the seventh

No startup culture in Australia

Occasionally I go back and read some of Paul Graham's past essays. I find them to be a source of enlightenment, mostly on issues surrounding startups. Some gems are consigned to the footnotes: There are two very different types of startup: one kind that evolves naturally,

» business

From Zero to 1.65 billion in less than two years

Posted on by ricky in Random observations | Leave a comment

Speaking of Google acquisitions, YouTube has been snapped up by the Web search giant for the not insignificant sum of US$1.65 billion. YouTube was founded in February 2005. Not a bad pay-off for twenty months’ work! Okay, so a lot of the work was probably done before the company was founded, but still…

Anyway, this acquisition comes less than two weeks after Mark Cuban suggested that you’d have to be a moron to buy YouTube because of the litany of lawsuits that are, apparently, just waiting to happen. Material is often posted to YouTube by users who are not the copyright owners.