Time Warner’s Jeff Bewkes has kicked out the dynamic duo of Randy Falco (CEO) and Ron Grant (COO) for Google’s Tim Armstrong (former SVP Advertising and Commerce, North America). The announcement came a little bit after 5pm (EST) on Thursday March 12, 2009. While the details are still vague, there has been some mention of a “transition period” before Randy & Ron make bid adieu. Lets wait and see what happens as official announcements come out tomorrow. More to come!

Update – March 12, 2009 8:01 PM

Jeff Bewkes released an official announcement about the CEO switch-a-roo.

Today we made a change in leadership at AOL. Effective April 7, Tim Armstrong, formerly of Google, will become the new Chairman and CEO of AOL, taking over for Randy Falco. Randy and President and COO Ron Grant will be leaving the company after a short transition period.

Could brining a Google insider to serve as the CEO help in any potential future (current?) negotiations to spin-off or merge AOL with Google?

While only finding out about it roughly a year-and-a-half ago, I’ve grown to be a big proponent of micro-financing. Essentially, micro-financing — also called micro-lending — is when an entrepreneur or micro business owners is looking to raise some capital ($250 to $2000) to start or expand their business. Typically, this business is in a 3rd world country, and other means of gaining funding involve too much risk (homes or other property as collateral) or extremely high interest rates (over 100%). Here’s where microlending comes to the rescue and ironically could lead to potential long term government economic issues.

Looking at the loan applications on Kiva, most of the businesses are located in countries with either an unstable government or under the control of a long term regime. As a result, their banking infrastructure does not provide a reasonable method for poor individuals or micro business owners to get loans.

How micro-lending works

• Business owner or entrepreneur looks for a loan
• A Field Agent/Broker assesses the loan (business plan, risk, collateral, payback period etc.)
• The business owner’s profile is posted online
• Lenders can contribute a relatively small amount (typically between $25 to $100)
• After securing the necessary financing, the loan from multiple lenders is disbursed to the borrower
• Borrower pays back the Field Agent/Broker at an agreed upon interest rate
• The Field Agent/Broker pays back the lender at zero percent interest, until it is paid off

On a micro level, these loans are an extremely innovative way of helping out small businesses and /or individuals to grow to become fully self-sustained. Which is great. However, on a macro level, what these loans essentially do is increase a country’s money supply — leading to micro-inflation. The way that the money supply impacts inflation is through the interest rate, which is basically the price someone is willing to pay for money. When key government interest rates are lowered, it makes it easier for people to borrow money, which also increases the money supply in the economy. Micro-lending bypasses certain government monetary controls by operating around them — which can be both a good and bad thing depending on the view point.

I hope this was a good intro into microlending, and its many positive as well as some of its unintentionally negative side effects. In future posts, I’ll look to examine its impact on the value of currencies, draw possible parallels between microlending and the financial/housing market melt-down, as well as look at it from a macro level (these loans help create jobs, distribute money and create infracture).

As always, whether you agree or disagree with me, please leave a comment below.

Google and Wikipedia turn everyone into instant experts on any given subject matter. However, because we know that information is easily available again, we make very little effort to retain it. Plus, with the mobile revolution (slowly) progressing, we now have the ability to get at that information from where we choose. As we learned from Instant Information Devaluation, the value of newly attained information plummets as soon as it is attained. With Google and Wikipedia in cahoots to attain the well intentioned goal of allowing us to find and attain knowledge in a manner of seconds, it essentially lowers the bar for good knowledge. When the bar is lowered, the quality of the subjects who can get over that bar greatly decreases. Essentially, the same argument can be made for GPS, taxi drivers or even chauffeurs. So what are the options? Stop using Googipedia and get left behind?

A basic economical principle is the Division of Labor. In simple terms, it basically states “you do what you do best, I’ll do what I do best and barter/buy each other’s services”. This is the foundation of all modern economies (except for Zimbabwe). A barrier being only the transaction costs (search, information, negotiating a price, etc) associated with the deal. In this situation, we rely on Googipedia to do two things for us better than we ever could: search and aggregate information.

Because Google & Wikipedia make information so readily available, it allows anyone to learn about any topic — essentially turning all of us into jack-of-all-trades. On the surface, this isn’t a bad thing — per se. The problem with that trend is that there are fewer “master of one” trade, and because the information they hold is available so freely, their value is diminished.

Do you feel differently? Googipedia “transaction costs” or “information costs” and let me know what you think in the comments below.

So now that Barack Obama has officially announced his running mate will be Joe Biden, the most important question has to be answered. What should their celebrity couple name be? Make sure you vote (or die) below:

Yes we can-tribute! If you have other suggestions for the Obama-Biden ticket nickname, leave a comment.

Our friend Gideon Gono (Governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe) has decided to tackle the ultra-hyperinflation pummeling Zimbabwe in one fell swoop. His solution? Lopping zeros off of the Zimbabwean Dollar — ten of them! That means, as of August 1st, a 10 Billion Zimbabwean Dollar (ZWD) bill will be worth one ZWD. That’s a 10 000 000 000 : 1 ratio…. or a 99.99999999% devaluation!

A report from the BBC helps to put things into perspective, 100 Billion ZWD will buy a few eggs, with a tray of 24 eggs costing somewhere around Z$600bn. Better not break one of those!

The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has accomplished an impressive milestone. Thanks to Gideon Gono, the present Governor of the Reserve Bank and President Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe now has the highest percentage of Billionaires per capita than any other country in the world. The billionaire ratio is even higher than a recent gathering of the Bugatti Owners Club. Ultra-wealth also attracts crime. However, Zimbabwe has also done an excellent job with crime. In fact, it is common place to see people walking down the street flashing their wealth by carrying hundreds of billions of Zimbabwean Dollars (ZWD) in open daylight. Analysts estimate that at the current pace, Zimbabwe will soon have the world’s highest concentration of Quadrillionaires. You listening Donald Trump?

Okay, okay… facetiousness aside, what’s happening in Zimbabwe is a sad textbook example of how social policy mismanagement can lead to a full economical collapse. The whole domino effect started back in 2000, when the government enacted policies focused on claiming land owned by white farmers and redistribute it among black farmers. As a result, food production and export dropped off drastically. This coupled with an 80-90% unemployment rate (and some other factors) led to an implosion of the economy. In November 2007, inflation was floating near 27,000 percent. The latest inflation estimate for July 2008 is at an unheard of 2.2 MILLION percent. We’ll see what August has in store for Zimbabwe.

I ran across a couple of really interesting sites today while on a search for a new alarm clock. They make generally dull clocks/calendar applications from a pure functional tool and turn them into social activities. As odd as it may sound, Human Clock is basically a photo repository where people submit pictures of themselves or photos they take of a time during the day. Think of it like Flickr on a scavenger hunt. The cool (and possibility annoying) part of this application is that you don’t just get the time by glancing at a clock, but you have to search for it in the picture. Even better, those not in the know will be puzzled at why you have a gallery of random pictures (scores, addresses, product names etc) flashing on your screen.

The sister site to Human Clock is Human Calendar. Because its development only started after the clock was released, it doesn’t seem to have the same polished look or social popularity. Also, the photos in the calendar seem a bit more complex than just someone holding up a sign for 9:59PM. At first glance, I didn’t appreciate the full interactivity of the heads in the month, but if you tweak with it a little bit — change the week to start on a Monday vs Sunday or change the timezone — you’ll really begin to see how much coordination it took to put it together. Craig Giffen did a great job on both sites!

For all you space and science geeks out there, I’m sure Discovery’s “When We Left Earth” series was the HD event of 2008. If you didn’t get a chance to watch it, missed an episode (like me), or just want to see all the NASA footage in all its HD glory, you can pre-order the six episode DVD box set. The box-set comes with 4 discs and is available in two formats — standard definition and Blu-Ray HD. Bonus features include 4 hours of NASA highlights, extra mission clips and detailed astronaut interviews. The standard version runs $64.95 and will ship on July 10th. However, the Blu-Ray version will set you back $74.99 and ships a couple weeks later on July 24th.

DVD Highlights:

• All 6 Episodes
  • Ordinary Supermen
  • Friends and Rivals
  • Landing the Eagle
  • The Explorers
  • The Shuttle
  • A Home In Space
• 4 DVDs
• Digitally restored NASA behind the scenes films, extra footage of missions and detailed astronaut interviews.

In these times of online ad media spend continuing to increase (projected to reach $70B by 2010), it may sound absurd to diminish the value of page views. However, with the growth in popularity of AJAX & Javascript, user generated content and advances in dependable CPA/CPL based advertising, I believe page views as a metric has less and less value. If you think about it, sites using a large amount of AJAX for navigation don’t really generate a new page, unless they really want to. Sites depending on User Generated Content run into the reverse problem, with users who contribute content artificially inflating the PPV number. Finally, as the industry gets closer to precise tracking for CPA campaigns, the ad impression count will really be used to gauge success versus another ad network.

So what exactly is a Page View in the world of AJAX of Javascript? Take GMail for example. I can browse through a dozen different labels, but really have not loaded a new page. Comparably, it’s possible to login/logout of many sites without triggering a real page view. ComScore’s Media Metrix, the internet’s self-proclaimed sample based traffic gauge, counts a page view when at least 50% of the page’s content changes along with a 200 server code response its software can recognize. What happens when javascript is used to show/hide divs? Is that a page view?

Think about the flow of a site dependent on user generated content. A user enters a site, clicks/searches on a topic, sees something that makes them want to contribute, adds their contribution, reviews the contribution and finally, possibly checks up on the contribution to see community opinion. That simple scenario rolls up 2-3 page views in just the contribution part. Now imagine if you have a great site and the user bounces between multiple items, stopping every once in a while to add to them. During that time, is the user really concentrating on adding content… or looking around to see offers from advertisers?

If I am an advertiser, with a promotion running on a CPA/CPL deal, do I really care about any number other than the number of direct sales or leads generated by that promotion? Well, maybe I care a little… if I want to know how efficient my advertiser network was in displaying my ad. The metric I would really focus on would be visits (unique and repeat). Once I, as an advertiser, get that referral or lead there is not much value for that referring site on that session. As long as the user fulfills my defined action, it does not matter to me that it took a dozen page views to get that user on my site.

When it comes down to it, a simple fact cannot be over come by any amount of technological advancement. A user can only view one page at one time. Regardless on how many how targeted an ad is or how many impressions it gets, it’s worthless if its not seen. With tabbed browsers becoming the norm, this compounds the issue. So, it seems, one of two things must happen. The industry assigns much less weight to the page view metric, or sits down to (re)define what a page view really is.

Advertising at its core is paying someone to buy their audience at a lower cost than the amount of revenue you can generate from that purchase.

**update 2/15/2009** Others who agree

All 190 megs of Spore’s Creature Creator was made available to the public on June 14th. Within days, YouTube was flooded with thousands of videos of user-made creatures hanging out in a swamp and dancing to some bongo music. The video game is a “MSO” (massively single-player online game) and the brainchild of Will Wright, creator of SimCity and the Sims. The user starts off by creating a cellular organism but have full control of its evolution into an intelligent being with the ability to travel into space. The unique thing about this game is that each user gets their own world within a galaxy of other users’ planets. The release date is still a fuzzy “late 2008“. Can you say Christmas release?

Let me know what you think of this game in the Comments.