Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.
Some guy is suing Groupon over expirations dates. Does this guy have a point or is this just another frivolous lawsuit?
A man in Illinois filed the lawsuit after buying a Groupon deal in August that expired on Feb. 16 before he had a chance to use it. Under Illinois law, gift cards must keep their value for at least five years. He is now seeking unspecified financial damages.
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Researchers looking to build technologies that will find their way into the next generation of music apps have received a huge leg up today with the launch of a vast database of information about one million songs by 44,745 artists.
The Million Song Dataset is a collaboration between Columbia University in the USA and music data service The Echo Nest that we previously covered here. Designed for non-commercial use only, the Dataset is an enormous 300GB download containing all sorts of incredibly detailed information about all one million songs.
What kind of information? Everything from basic artist and song data right down to time signatures, keys, pitches, tempos, year of release and a lot more. The idea is that researchers and non-commercial developers can use the information to build and test new services and apps based around music data without having to “reinvent the wheel” by creating a huge database to test them on each time.
The kinds of apps the team behind the dataset imagine it will be used for include apps for song recognition, analysing the ‘mood’ of music, being able to recognise what year a song came from just based on the music, artist recognition and cover song recognition. In fact, there’s so much data in here that developers’ imaginations should spur all sorts of interesting uses. No actual audio is included in the download, although it links to 30 second clips of songs for testing purposes.
While end users won’t see any direct benefit from the launch of this database immediately, it should speed up the development of new technologies that could very well find their way into the next generation of music apps.
Meanwhile, The Echo Nest’s data is making its way into real products you can use today. We previously covered the MTV Music Meter, while a BBC music recommendation engine recently went live too.
The Million Song Dataset is available to download and dig into now, here.
Everyone loves to talk about strategy, but simply having a plan won’t get you anywhere. Mark Forchette, CEO of OptiMedica says strategy is only as good as the tactical execution behind it in this Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture given at Stanford University.
Forchette tells of his time with Alcon, where sustained focus on implementing strategy led to a notably larger market share for the company.
(Can’t see the video? Click here)
Tags: Stanford University
Twitter curmudgeon @derekahunter writes: “With all the medical advances of last 100 years, why hasn’t anyone created a cough drop that doesn’t taste like crap?” Dammit, he’s right! Why hasn’t the market for cold remedies produced a tasty cough drop? Put differently, the market for cold remedies has failed to produce a tasty cough drop. The market has failed. Market . . . failure.
We have now established the appropriateness of a regulatory solution for the taste problem in the field of cold remedies. Have we not? There is a market failure.
No, we haven’t.
“Market failure” is not what happens when a given market has failed so far to reach outcomes that a smart person would prefer. It occurs when the rules, signals, and sanctions in and around a given marketplace would cause preference- and profit-maximizing actors to reach a sub-optimal outcome. You can’t show that there’s a market failure by arguing that the current state of the actual market is non-ideal. You have to show that the rules around that marketplace lead to non-ideal outcomes. The bad taste of cough drops is not evidence of market failure.
The failure of property rights to account for environmental values leads to market failure. A coal-fired electric plant might belch smoke into the air, giving everyone downwind a bad day and a shorter life. If the company and its customers don’t have to pay the costs of that, they’re going to over-produce and over-consume electricity at the expense of the electric plant’s downwind neighbors. The result is sub-optimal allocation of goods, with one set of actors living high on the hog and another unhappily coughing and wheezing.
Take an issue that’s closer to home for tech policy folk: People seem to underweight their privacy when they go online, promiscuously sharing anything and everything on Facebook, Twitter, and everyplace else. Marketers are hoovering up this data and using it to sell things to people. The data is at risk of being exposed to government snoops. People should be more attentive to privacy. They’re not thinking about long-term consequences. Isn’t this a market failure?
It’s not. It’s consumers’ preferences not matching up with the risks and concerns that people like me and my colleagues in the privacy community share. Consumers are preference-maximizing—but we don’t like their preferences! That is not a market failure. Our job is to educate people about the consequences of their online behavior, to change the public’s preferences. That’s a tough slog, but it’s the only way to get privacy in the context of maximizing consumer welfare.
If you still think there’s a market failure in this area—I readily admit that I’m on the far edge of my expertise with complex economic concepts like this—you haven’t finished making your case for regulation. You need to show that the rules, signals, and sanctions in and around the regulatory arena would produce a better outcome than the marketplace would. Be sure that you compare real market outcomes to real regulatory outcomes, not real market outcomes to ideal regulatory outcomes. Most arguments for privacy regulation simply fail to account for the behavior of the regulatory universe.
Adam has collected quotations on the subject of regulatory capture from many experts. I wrote a brief series of “real regulators” posts on the SEC and the Madoff scam a while back (1, 2, 3). And a recent article I’m fond of goes into the problem that many people think only consumers suffer, asking: “Are Regulators Rational?”
There’s no good-tasting cough drop because the set of drops that remedy coughing and the set of drops that taste good are mutually exclusive. Not because of market failure.
MyBuys, provider of multi-channel personalization solutions for online retailers and brands, has secured a third round of funding to the tune of $20 million.
The round was led by Rho Ventures with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Ventures and Palomar Ventures.
MyBuys builds profiles based on individual shoppers’ behavior, and then uses a patented portfolio of algorithms and real-time optimization to deliver the most relevant recommendations to them. The company says over 300 online retailers, brand and agencies currently partner with them to offer personalized recommendations to their shoppers.
The company recently launched predictive display advertising and personalized mobile commerce solutions, enabling clients to optimize the shopping experience for individuals using the iPhone, the iPad, Android or BlackBerry devices.
MyBuys is so certain that it can create a better-performing personalized mobile website for retailers that they let them test the performance of the solution free of charge. The creation of the mobile site comes without implementation fees if MyBuys’ mobile site doesn’t perform better than their current websites.
