BLOG STARTUPS, VENTURE AND THE TECH BUSINESS
Author Archive
January 31 2012
by Todd Hixon
My Three Biggest Tablet Computer Surprises Of 2011
Las Vegas recently hosted the Consumer Electronics Show (“CES”). At CES 2011, “The Year Of The Tablet” was proclaimed, but that struck me as the hyperbole of bloggers hungry for a tag line. Nine months in to the tablet era, Apple was off to a great start, and lots of other vendors had announced products, ...
January 31 2012
by Todd Hixon
Android: The Consequences Of Open
The Other Side Of Open | TechCrunch The link above leads to a post by TechCrunch’s MG Siegler about the perils of the open Android OS to Google: major competitors will hijack Android by building their own version, and then lock Google’s services out. MG observes that Amazon is starting to do this: the Kindle ...
January 11 2012
by Todd Hixon
The High Stakes Games Around Generic Lipitor
Last month Lipitor became a generic drug. Get used to saying “atorvastatin”, the generic name; it will be worth the effort. Lipitor is the greatest drug in history: $130 billion of cumulative revenue for Pfizer, and control of high cholesterol with minimal side effects for millions (currently 3 million in the U.S.). And, Lipitor is ...
December 8 2011
by Todd Hixon
The Battle For The Clouds
The recent launch of iCloud introduced a new phase of cloud computing: the battle for dominance of the consumer cloud. Consumers have used cloud-based services for years: Facebook, Yahoo Mail and Flickr, Hotmail and Windows Live Mesh, Apple’s MobileMe, and a series of loosely connected (often great) offerings from Google (GMail, Google Docs, PicasaWeb, etc.). ...
December 7 2011
by Todd Hixon
Consumer Driven Healthcare Proponents Finally Proven Wrong — NOT!
I’m commenting on a blog post by fellow Forbes.com contributor Rick Ungar: Consumer Driven Health Care Proponents Finally Proven Wrong. I am an advocate of consumer-driven health care, and I don’t agree with his conclusion. Rick cites the example of Grand Junction, Colorado, a community that has achieved low health care costs (Medicare spend about ...
November 22 2011
by Todd Hixon
Down With The 1%! Whoever They Are …
Unless you live in a deep cave, you’ve probably heard that the “1%” (top 1% of U.S. households ranked by income) enjoys a large percentage of U.S. after tax income (about 20% in 2007), famously documented by the CBO* (link). The Occupy Wall Street protesters imply that the 1% is mostly Wall Street traders and ...
November 11 2011
by Todd Hixon
Steve Jobs And The Jobs Crisis
Homage to Steve Jobs’ exceptional qualities as a business leader has poured out since his death last month. I’ve been reflecting on the learning and inspiration that I draw from his career relative to the work I do and the economic challenge of this decade, which, ironically, has come to be called the “jobs crisis”. ...
November 4 2011
by Todd Hixon
Occupy Wall Street: No Whining!
Rush Limbaugh might see justice in the early snow that descended on the tents of the Occupy Wall Street (“OWS”) protesters last weekend. He told his radio audience “When I was 10 years old I was more self-sufficient than this parade of human debris calling itself Occupy Wall Street.” More temperate observers criticize OWS for ...
October 28 2011
by Todd Hixon
One Network To Rule Them All
It’s not news that Facebook is the leading social network, but sometimes (as the U.S. Army says about the Chinese) “quantity has a quality all of its own”. I was amazed when I came across the chart below, which shows how completely Facebook dominates time spent on social networks. Source: Comscore Mark Zuckerberg and his ...
October 14 2011
by Todd Hixon
How Entrepreneurs Can Survive and Prosper In The Political Crisis
We’re in the midst of a political crisis that has been a century in the making: in the U.S. and Europe the bill has come due for a welfare state that demographic trends and escalating health costs make unaffordable, which has been financed with debt and future promises. The political system is mostly seeking ways to ...
