You really should watch more tennis. I know, I know, you think it’s too hard to keep up with and you’re so busy. But what if I told you there was a kind of tennis that only had one event a week, and only two people played at a time? Best of all, you can watch it on the internet, and it doesn’t matter when you tune in because everybody always wins. Too good to be true? Nope!
Of course I’m talking about Layer Tennis from Coudal Partners. Each week two talented designers duke it out in a 10 round, no-images-barred match. Designers have 15 minutes to see what their competition has made, come up with an idea and then create a response.
Competitions so far have features some really amazing photographers and designers. My favorite is the first, between Shaun Inman and Kevin Cornell. A great illustrator, a great designer, and commentary by one of my favorite bloggers, John Gruber. Volley after volley of high intensity artwork.
If you have any interest in design, you’ll love it.
John Gruber named Jeff Zucker Jackass of the Week for saying:
Apple “destroyed the music business in terms of pricing” and will invariably do the same to the online video business.
John points out that before iTunes, people were used to downloading music for free. And now that NBC has pulled their shows from iTunes, that’s what people will be doing with TV shows.
It’s important to note that because of their current strategy of releasing shows for free on their websites (and on Hulu in the future), the networks are reinforcing the idea that their shows should be free. If anyone is devaluing their product, it’s the networks.
I mean, hardcore web nerds were already aware of torrent sites, etc., but NBC is advertising the fact that you shouldn’t pay for TV shows. They’re paying to encourage users to devalue their product.
How strange is that?
The only upside is that their behavior will inevitably hasten their demise - something we can all be happy about.
Lately, the correlation between AAPL stock run-ups and actual news regarding Apple is zero. Whereas most of the time there is any actual news, even news that to me seems good for Apple, the stock goes down.
Which is something that I’ve been noticing for a while, and not just with Apple. It seems like the stock market responds to just about any news by punishing the company involved. Did you quarterly results meet analysts predictions? The stock goes down. Did it beat them by too much? The stock goes down. That’s just strange.
But what’s downright dumb is when nothing happens and the stock rises. How is that possible. So here’s my theory: good news does make stock prices go up. But not when most traders first hear about it. To them, anything in the press is bad, so anytime they read about a company, the stock goes down. But a week later when they talk to somebody smart enough to know what’s going on, the price starts creeping up.
The reason for the sudden dip is that there’s a small but significant number of day traders that are nothing but reactionary lemmings. On the other hand, there are lots of smart people out there who slowly begin to fill in the larger mass of traders in on the good news. The thing is that the lemmings all hear about the news at the same time, but the word of mouth filters out slowly over a few weeks.
What do you think?