One very cool aspect of Kickstarter for devotees of the Lean Startup model is that the project proposal itself becomes the Minimum Viable Product.

If it passes the muster of the Kickstarter committee to become a formal Kickstarter project, and then achieves its funding goals from a disparate group of backers, that is pretty strong, low-risk indication that the product has a market.

Pretty hard to beat from a market validation perspective, I think.

Whenever any right-wing loon, or Bloombergite, tries to tell you the mortgage crisis was caused by the government forcing the poor banks to lend to broke black people, please direct them to this passage. The banks not only wanted to give out these loans, they wanted to give them out at the speed of light. They wanted to crank them out so fast that their own auditors literally couldn't read the writing on the loan applications. This was greed, not policy. Anybody who says anything else is high on something.

So really, whom else is Kobe supposed to hate? Channing Frye? Hakim Warrick? He sure doesn’t hate Shannon Brown, his former teammate whom he embraced in a tight hug right after the buzzer sounded. It’s gotta be Nash.

Those 48 points Kobe scored during the Lakers’ 99-83 victory were his most since he scored since March 22, 2011 -- against the Phoenix Suns. *And as Dave McMenamin pointed out, the last time Kobe scored more than 48 was when he put up 49 on March 1, 2009 -- against the Phoenix Suns. This can’t be a coincidence. Kobe is too cold and calculating for this to be coincidence.

“I don’t like them,” Bryant said of the Suns. “Plain and simple, I do not like them. They used to whip us pretty good and used to let us know about it, and I. Will. Not. Forget. That.”

Kobe is very MJ-like is turning real and perceived slights into motivation to crush the competition.

People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.

What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.

Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It's called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

I guess it all comes down to how you define 'skin in the game,' and what being a good citizen really means.

Wall Street believes Apple has become conservative with its guidance for the dumbest f’ing reasons you could ever imagine. After getting overly aggressive with its guidance in fiscal Q4, now Wall Street has turned the wheel just as hard in the opposite direction and has guided only 2.68% above Apple’s revenue guidance. This is going to lead to the largest blowout in company history.

Great, transparent work by Zaky, who is CONSISTENTLY playing chess to every other Apple analyst's checkers game. And don't get me starting on the financial press (clueless).

If you are an investor, read this piece, and also Zaky's sibling piece, where he compellingly argues that Apple is the most undervalued Large Cap stock in America.

Then, get in the pool! 

Anecdotally, developers consistently tell us that they make more money on iOS, about three to four times as much.  To be sure, we pulled a sample of in-app purchase data from a set of top apps with versions on both iOS and Android, comprising of several million daily active users (DAUs). Running the numbers, we find that, on average, for every $1.00 generated on iOS, the same app will generate $0.24 on Android.

 

Juxtaposing the above data with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's assertions about the **imminence** of developers prioritizing Android ahead of iOS, one can only conclude that Google is institutionally confused about the distinction between attributes and outcomes in driving behavior.

I speak to very few developers, except for pure contrarians, who view Android as a more rewarding platform than iOS on a number of levels - personal satisfaction, richness of platform, ease of discovery, ease of modification, fragmentation, etc.

Beside's that, Mrs. Lincoln...