But that’s exactly what Deborah Cohan did yesterday right before she went into surgery to have her breasts removed. Cohan, an Ob/Gyn and mom of two, held a dance party with her medical team in the operating room of Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco.



This inspiring 6-minute-long video, posted on YouTube, shows Cohan busting some serious moves as she wiggles and twerks to Beyonce’s hit “Get Me Bodied.” Cohan requested that friends and family make videos of themselves dancing to Bey too so that she could watch them during her recovery. “I have visions of a healing video montage,” she wrote. “Nothing brings me greater joy than catalyzing others to dance, move, be in their bodies. Are you with me people?”

They were. You can check out videos of Deborah’s fans shaking their booties in solidarity on her CaringBridge page.

Deborah, we wish you a speedy recovery. And can we go clubbing with you when you’re all better?


| huffingtonpost #end.

If any remote association with Mel Gibson is coveted, this property can fit the bill.

The Hollywood actor’s Costa Rica house hidden away in 500 acres of private forestland is now up for sale.

But at US$29.75 million, Playa Barrigona is way ahead of the prices tagged with some other properties in the country. The property’s name refers to a beach in the local parlance, and Playa Barrigona’s selling point is just that – its beach.

Set in the remote Nicoya Peninsula in the Central American country, with pictures showing hardly a road access beneath a canopy of tropical forests, the hideaway seems right for a celebrity trying to shun prying eyes.

The three houses on the property are located on a hilltop overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Each of these is decorated with native wood and Spanish and Italian tiles, and come with living rooms with vaulted ceilings, kitchens and several verandas. A swimming pool and barbecue areas diversify the property’s entertainment offerings.

The largest of the villas is called Casa Guanacaste. It comes with seven bedrooms and eight baths. The two smaller villas each have two bedrooms.

The interiors eschew luxury for a rustic look with some wood and wrought iron furniture amid ochre-toned walls.

Set in Costa Rica’s northern Pacific coast, the property has access to white coral beaches and lots of lush vegetation. For company on the beach, one might chance upon olive ridley sea turtles. Located between the villages of Samara and Nosara, the property is off the main roads connecting the two.

While Christie’s website, where the property is listed, goes into a few details of the property, it is entirely mum on whether the buying process includes meeting Mr Gibson himself.

| DailyMail #end.

Rajan has no qualms about staging such challenges. In 2005, Rajan was chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and attended the top central bankers’ get together in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to present a paper on how the financial sector had evolved during Alan Greenspan’s era. As Rajan later described the meeting, which was to be Greenspan’s last, in his book Fault Lines: “Some of the papers in the conference, in keeping with the Greenspan-era theme, focused on whether Alan Greenspan was the best central banker in history, or just among the best.”

Not Rajan. He argued that under Greenspan, incentives had been artificially skewed in favor of the managers of the financial system, which reaped millenary rewards if things went fine but paid very little, if at all, when things turned sour. And he added that things were likely to turn sour because the skewed incentives were offering incentive to those managers to take excessive risks. He then focused on the “credit default swaps” which promised to repay delinquent loans in exchange for moderate insurance premiums. Noting that nobody really knew how realistically these swaps were priced, Rajan said that the banks were probably taking excessive risks because they trusted that the insurer would repay them. In these circumstances, a sudden increase in defaulting loans could exceed the reserves of the insurer, leading to a financial crisis. This is exactly what happened two years later, leading to the 2008 financial crisis.

His warning was not well received. Many people thought that Rajan didn’t understand modern finance. As it turned out, he understood it all too well—and it was those who looked down on him who did not.

Now Rajan has issued another warning by increasing the benchmark rate in India, shortly after the US Federal Reserve decided to keep on buying $85 billion of securities per month under its quantitative easing 3 program, to the general happiness of financial sector managers and traders. The Fed’s announcement spurred an immediate mini-boom in all financial instruments. The day after the announcement, I published an article in Quartz in which I argued that the current high rate of monetary creation and the extremely low interest rates caused by QE3 are unsustainable and that, sooner than later, interest rates are bound to increase. I argued further that the long prevalence of extremely low interest rates is likely to be creating the conditions for a serious financial crisis; all the economic activities that are profitable due to low rates will become unprofitable and will not be able to repay their obligations.

For this reason, it is necessary to prepare for such eventuality. This is what Rajan is doing by increasing interest rates in India, by easing the appetite for unsustainable activities that can survive only with low rates. The Financial Times quotes his rationale: “Let us remember that postponement of tapering is only that—a postponement…Let’s not lose the chance, the warning that we have been given, because this is going to come back and what we need to do is put our house in order before.”

This is a warning that the entire global economy should take seriously. Not just other emerging markets.

What can be done in this situation? In emerging markets, central banks should start increasing interest rates now that it can be done very gradually. Higher interest rates would deter investment in unsustainable activities and attract funds to more solid ventures. Moreover, they would help in stopping capital outflows that are seeking higher rates in the United States, and alleviating the trend toward currency devaluations, which are only accelerating those outflows. The postponement of the interest rates increases in the United States will allow these countries to go through the adjustment process in a gradual way. In a crisis, interest rates are raised in leaps, which causes considerable more damage to the economy.

Individual investors should see ahead of the curve, noticing that a world of higher interest rates looms. People now holding the kind of assets that would experience a sharp fall if interest rates go up should get out of them, particularly if these investments are burdened with fixed obligations that will not be reduced as interest rates go up. Of course, this is the kind of advice that cannot be useful for everybody at the same time. Aggregate losses cannot be avoided. Someone will have to absorb them because, as interest rates go up, the prices of the assets will go down. If you sell your assets before prices fall, for example, it is the buyer who will have to take the loss. This is the price that society has to pay for having unsustainably low interest rates for a long time.

Rajan’s warning is just one of the many that point to higher interest rates in the near future.
| Manuel Hinds / qz.com #end.

That people aren't saving enough for retirement is not exactly breaking news. But Bloomberg tells the story in terms that truly resonate. Tom Palome, 77, used to be a VP at Oral-B, making a six-figure salary. But like many middle-class retirees, he didn't save much for retirement, and he's now taken two part-time jobs as a result: flipping burgers at a golf club for $7.98 an hour plus tips, and doing food demos at Sam's Club for $10 an hour.

Palome didn't fritter away his earnings: He put his kids through college, gave them money for down payments, and helped his aging parents. But the $90,000 he had saved shrunk to $40,000 when the financial crisis hit. And though he could technically scrape by without his part-time jobs (Social Security and a pension provide $1,600 a month), the $1,400 he makes with them goes to savings and "extras."

"People who built successful careers, put their kids through college, and saved what they could, are still facing downward mobility," says an economist. Former managers and professionals are now fighting one another for low-income jobs, and 67% more over-65s are still working compared to 10 years ago. Most of them have no retirement account assets, and for those aged 55 to 64, retirement account assets are much lower on average than they need to be. (Ten to 20 times annual income is recommended.) "I never thought I'd live this long," Palome says. Now, "I earn in a week what I used to earn in an hour."
| Newser / Bloomberg #end.

Two words: BOOK SALES. Prior to becoming POTUS, Barack Obama earned roughly $60,000 per year as an Illinois state senator and $174,000 per year when he eventually became a United States Senator. Interestingly, back then Barack was not the big bread winner in the family, Michelle was. In her position as the Vice President of Community Affairs for the University of Chicago Hospitals, Michelle Obama was earning nearly $320,000 a year in salary before her husband became the most powerful man in the world.

Barack’s wallet began to expand after his much praised keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that marked his explosion onto the national conscience. As Obama’s profile rose, so did sales of his 1995 book “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance”. In 2005, the Obama’s income grew from around $200,000 to a combined $1.7 million! In 2006 the Obamas reported income of $916,000. Barack’s second book “Audacity of Hope”, released in October 2006, was a massive hit, selling millions of copies and rocketing the Obama’s income to $4.2 million in 2007! Their income continued to swell in the following years thanks to Barack’s 2008 successful campaign and election.
| MB #end.

If the name Zhenli Ye Gon sounds familiar, it’s because he is the same Chinese-Mexican drug kingpin from the story of the largest amount of cash ever seized in one persons possession. If you don’t recall that story, back in 2007 Mexican drug agents and American DEA raided an unassuming house in the suburbs of Mexico City after receiving a tip about suspicious activity from an informant. After securing the property, the agents proceeded to check the residence room by room. Low and behold, when they opened the door to a back bedroom, agents were shocked to discover a mountain of neatly stacked money three feet high and six feet wide. In total, the mountain was made up of $207 million in mostly US hundred dollar bills. It was the largest amount of drug money ever discovered in history.

That house was owned by a businessman named Zhenli Ye Gon. Zhenli Ye Gon moved from Shanghai to Mexico in 1996 to work in the import/export business. By 2002, he was running a supposedly legitimate chemical importing company called Unimed Pharm Chem. Somewhere along the way, Mr. Ye Gon allegedly began re-directing a portion of his imports from legitimate businesses to the Sinola drug cartel. The cartel then used these precursor chemicals to manufacture massive quantities of crystal meth which were then shipped to the US.

Zhenli Ye Gon was actually not at the house when the raid went down and when he found out what happened he fled north, to The United States, of all places. When he reached the US, Zhenli claimed he was forced to hold on to the $207 million by a Cabinet member of Mexico’s then President Filipe Calderon. Zhenli admitted that the money was from the Sinola cartel and further claimed it was to be used in Calderon’s upcoming re-election campaign. Oh, and he also admitted that the total amount of dirty money he was “forced” to babysit was actually closer to $350 million.

Zhenli Ye Gon was indicted in The United States in 2007, but after a series of witnesses recanted or coincidentally turned up dead, the case was eventually dismissed. However, he is still fighting the government to not be extradited to Mexico where drug trafficking laws are slightly looser.

So how does this saga connect back to Las Vegas? Earlier this week, The Las Vegas Sands corporation was fined $47.4 million by the US Attorney’s office for failing to alert authorities to Zhenli Ye Gon’s very suspicious gambling activities. It turns out that between 2004 and the raid in Mexico in 2007, Zhenli gambled away just over $125 million in cash mainly at The Venetian (which is owned by Las Vegas Sands corp). Every casino is obligated to alert American authorities to any suspicious transactions that may involve illicit money.

Between 2006 and 2007 alone, Zhenli transferred $45 million in cash to the Venetian from various banks and money exchanges located around Mexico. He proceeded to not only blow the entire $45 million, but an additional $35 million he received on credit from the casino. For a while, Zhenli was by far and away the largest all-cash-upfront gambler in the history of Las Vegas and thanks to these unprecedented losses, the casinos treated him like a God. The casinos showered him with comped rooms, private jets, meals, cars, girls… we’re talking comps that are beyond mortal imagination. In total, Zhenli lost $85 million at the Venetian and another $40 million at a small handful of nearby casinos.

| MB #end.

After years of extravagant over-spending, not only did Nicolas find himself owing the IRS $13 million, but he also managed to blow through a $100 million fortune.

I have to admit, Nicolas Cage is probably my favorite actor of all time. The Rock, Lord of War, Con Air, National Treasure, Raising Arizona, Leaving Las Vegas, Face/Off, Snake Eyes… I celebrate the man’s entire catalog. I realize that some of Nick’s movies can be perceived as slightly cheesy or even flat out bad, but you have to admit his movies are rarely dull. At the peak of his career, Nick was one of the highest paid celebrities in the world who pulled down as much as $40 million per year. Between 1996 and 2011 Nick earned more than $150 million from acting alone. He earned $16 million for Snake Eyes, $20 million for Gone in Sixty Seconds, $20 million for Windtalkers, $20 million for National Treasure… just to name a few.

Not surprisingly, as his income went up so did his spending habits. Actually, to be fair, as his income increased Nick’s spending habits SKYROCKETED. Between 2000 and 2007 Nick went on a spending spree that would make the Sultan of Brunei blush. During that time Cage made the following purchases:15 Personal Homes: Cage’s property portfolio included an $8 million castle in England that he plunged millions more into remodeling. He never spent a single night in the castle. He also bought a second castle in Bavaria, two multi-million dollar mansions in New Orleans, a $17.5 million palace in Bel Air, a $10 million Malibu beach house, a 24,000 square foot home in Rhode Island, a mansion in Las Vegas and a getaway property on Paradise Island in the Bahamas.

A Private Island: Apparently having a house on Paradise Island didn’t fill Nick’s penchant for the Bahamas because in 2006 he spent $7 million on a 40 acre private island 85 miles south of Nassau.

Four Luxury Yachts: Cage at one time owned four luxury yachts including one called Sarita that had 12 master bedrooms that was valued at $20 million.

A Fleet of Exotic Cars: At its peak, Nick Cage’s garage contained dozens of high end luxury vehicles including nine Rolls Royces. He owned an extremely rare $500 thousand Lamborghini and a $1 million Ferrari Enzo, one of only 349 produced. Cage also owned 30 motorcycles.

A $30 Million Gulfstream Private Jet

Other: Nearly 50 expensive works of art, dozens of jewels, a 67 million year old dinosaur skull, two extremely rare albino King Cobras.

| MB #end.

The odds of winning the average lottery are 1 in 100 million. That means you are more likely to be killed by a meteor than to win a Mega Millions jackpot. So you can only imagine how crazy the odds must be for someone to win a lottery twice in their lifetime. And to take it a step further, imagine just how astronomically insane the odds must be for someone to win the lottery twice, IN 24 HOURS! Incredibly, that’s exactly what just happened for a man named Cary Collings in Washington state. Not surprisingly, Collings is now being called the luckiest person in America…

Cary Collins bought a scratch off ticket at a River Road Food Mart in Puyallup, Washington while his truck was filling up with gas. Collins, who is a blue collar worker at the nearby Boeing factory, has played the scratch off lottery ever since it was introduced in Washington back in 2004. After leaving the gas station, Cary proceeded to scratch off the ticket while waiting at a red light. To his amazement, his “Red Hot 5s” ticket turned out to be worth $55,555!

After taking his friends out for a celebratory pizza party, Cary drove off to the state lottery department to claim his prize. On a whim he decided to make a pit stop on the way to collect his earnings and buy another ticket. This time he purchased three “Bring on the Bens” tickets for $30. You can only imagine the look on Cary Collins’ face when one of those scratchers turned out to be a $200,000winner. In less than 24 hours, Collins won two lottery tickets worth a grand total of $255,555. What are the odds? Honestly they are probably too high to calculate.

Cary’s lucky streak reminds us of the story of Australian lottery winer Bill Morgan. Bill Morgan is an Australian factory worker who was nearly crushed to death by a freak truck accident at work. After leaving the hospital with a heart condition, Morgan had severe heart attack that left him in a deep coma. The coma was so deep that his family was advised to remove life support not once, but TWICE. Bill’s luck eventually turned around in the most amazing way. Not only did he end up winning the lottery twice, but the second time was on live TV! You really need to read the full story and watch the incredible video to appreciate how it all went down
| MB #end.

Your new company, Sent Into Space, sells do-it-yourself kits to send objects up into the stratosphere. How did you get started?

Alex: Weather balloons have been around for a while as a way to collect data. We thought it would be fun to put a camera on one and see where it went. For the first flight a couple of years ago, we just botched something together: a camera, some foam we found in a bin and a GPS tracker normally used to track pets. It worked – but only just. We posted a video online, and some Canadian guys saw it and sent a Lego man up. Soon people were asking how they could have a go themselves.

How did you go from there to a business? Chris: We didn't really anticipate the attention it would get. We gave a lot of tips to people, and were getting so many requests for help that we thought we should make a kit for the non-specialist. We designed and manufactured components to make it as reliable and simple as possible. We hope to sell the finished product in shops and through our website, so that anyone can do this themselves.

Will you still advise people? Alex: That's the other side of it. If people have a project in mind, we see what we can do to make it happen. We did a launch for a music festival and a publicity campaign for the University of Sheffield. We have also worked with an astrobiologist who wanted to take samples from the stratosphere. And we do projects with schools, which is a great way to get kids enthusiastic about science in a hands-on way. They're putting stuff into space!

Does the kit contain everything you need? Chris: You get the balloon, parachute, container for the payload, tracking devices and a computer system that we call the black box. It records the data – including GPS, altitude, pressure, humidity, temperature and acceleration. Schools really enjoy having all of that information after the flight. You just have to get the helium – we tell you the nearest provider – and apply for clearance from the Civil Aviation Authority a month in advance.

Can you describe a typical flight? How high and far can the balloons go? Alex: They can go up to about 38 kilometres. That is technically near space rather than space, but you can see the blackness of space during the day. It normally takes a couple of hours for the balloon to reach that height. As the pressure drops with altitude, the balloon expands until it finally bursts; they start 2 metres across and get to about 10 metres. When the balloon bursts, a parachute opens and it takes about an hour to come down. On our website, we link to software that helps you make quite accurate predictions about where it will land – anywhere up to about 100 miles away.

What do people who buy the kits usually do with them? Chris: Some people want to use it as a tool for taking pictures from high altitudes. Others want to send up their personal belongings just to be able to say they have been into space. But every project we do is exciting. We still get giddy when tracking the thing coming down.
| DailyMail #end.

Ordinarily, such a goal would seem utopian, were it not for the fact that Williams is among a handful of Internet pioneers who have disrupted the media industry multiple times.
Before Twitter terraformed the landscape of news distribution, Williams’s first smash hit, Blogger, became the branded namesake for an upstart generation of amateur writers to challenge the established players

Most importantly, Medium, his new platform for publishing mostly long-form content, has quickly garnered popularity — and infamy. In only a few months, its most popular contributions are making front-page headlines and snagging millions of views. In our Silicon Valley bubble, its contributors semi-regularly spark industry wide-conversations among the Internet elite.
“The site from Twitter’s co-founders is one year old, and still mysterious,” wrote The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal recently, in one of many stories attempting to understand the Internet multi-millionaire’s enigmatic new project.

Now, for the first time since Williams launched the beta of Medium last year at our own TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Williams is ready to talk.

News “Crap” Vs. A Book

Williams is taking aim squarely at the news industry’s most embarrassing vulnerability: the incessant need to trump up mundane happenings in order to habituate readers into needing news like a daily drug fix.

“News in general doesn’t matter most of the time, and most people would be far better off if they spent their time consuming less news and more ideas that have more lasting import,” he tells me during our interview inside a temporary Market Street office space that’s housing Medium, until the top two floors are ready for his growing team. “Even if it’s fiction, it’s probably better most of the time.”

It’s true. The daily news cycle doesn’t always do its job at enlightening American democracy. In the aptly titled research paper, “Does the Media Matter”, a team of economists found that getting a randomized group of citizens to read the Washington Post did nothing for “political knowledge, stated opinions, or turnout in post-election survey and voter data.”
News, alone, is evidently insufficient to make us a more informed society.

Instead, Williams argues, citizens should re-calibrate their ravenous appetite for information towards more awe-inspiring content. “Published written ideas and stories are life-changing,” he gushes, recalling his early childhood fascination with books as the motivation to take on the media establishment. The Internet “was freeing that up, that excitement about knowledge that’s inside of books–multiplied and freed and unlocked for the world; and, the world would be better in every way.”

In Williams’s grand vision, the public reads for enlightenment; news takes a backseat directly in proportion to how often it leaves us more informed and inspired.

In addition to better content, the news itself might be better written by industry professionals. Climate deniers from conservative outlets, he argues, are a prime example of how the media has failed in its obligation to inform the public. During an extended rant on global warming during our conversation, he didn’t complete the explanation on why industry-professionals-as-writers would solve the problem. But, it’s easy to imagine that if nearly all climate scientists believe in man-made global warming, it would be difficult for media outlets to find a credible writer to claim otherwise.

The elephant in the room was that Williams was not-so-subtly attacking me and my colleagues, especially considering he had claimed that “the state of tech blogs is atrocious — its utter crap.” I asked him to explain what he meant, trying not to sound offended.

Diplomatically clarifying his words, he responded: “Part of the reason a lot of tech blogs are bad is the people writing them don’t really understand what they’re writing about. And so I want to change our definition of professional writing. At least expand it.”

Clearly taking a position on the long-standing debate between journalists and industry insiders, Williams says that the kinds of weekend columns TechCrunch runs from noted businesspeople “are absolutely more valuable” than some of the daily news written by reporters with little business experience.

However, Williams was clear: “please don’t set this up as Evan thinks tech blogs are crap and therefore is fixing them with Medium. People are going to publish crap on Medium.”
Williams was referring to a number of infamous Medium posts that were brazenly elitist and spread misinformation. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Shih’s “10 Things I Hate About You: San Francisco Edition,” was widely criticized for, among other things, perpetuating Silicon Valley’s abject misogyny and callousness toward the homeless. In another embarrasing moment, Medium contributor Michele Catalano wrongly implied that nefarious government spies seized her computer after she searched Google for “backpacks” and “pressure cookers” . Both posts were later modified or taken down. Though the missteps spawned a series of thoughtful counter-posts on Medium and a handful of media outlets, Williams didn’t try to spin the reactions a win.

“People are going to publish crap on Medium…. And guess what? There’s crap on Twitter. There’s crap on blogs. There’s crap on the Internet. And if we try to keep crap off the Internet, the Internet wouldn’t be important,” he argues, with a noticeable defensiveness in his voice that belies his leaned-back posture. “The system’s working if there’s great stuff that otherwise wouldn’t see the light of day and/or gets more attention than it would otherwise.”
Okay then, so what’s Williams’s solution for putting a spotlight on the good stuff?

A Simple Medium To Attract Every Good Idea

“Everyone has a story or insight that is worth repeating and they just don’t have the venue to get it heard,” adds former Wired.com Editor Evan Hansen, a senior editor at Medium, charged with building out its tech, science, and business coverage. Medium sees itself as a hybrid between professional outlets like The New York Times and the unwashed blogger free-for-all of The Huffington Post (which is owned by TechCrunch parent company, Aol). Instead, Medium wants to be the platform for everyone’s one truly viral idea.

Health startup entrepreneur Nick Crocker probably never thought his simple post about a walk through the junk food aisles at his local grocery store would snag over 1 million(!) views. Crocker’s rather elegantly crafted “The World Is Fucking Insane” is a photo-heavy, first-person journey though grocery aisles lined with monster stacks of chemically altered sugary foods on his way to pick up some milk. Its visual simplicity evidently expressed the public’s latent frustration for America’s health crisis in a way that other statistics-packed medical news did not.

In another example, Aron Solomon put a national spotlight on smartphone taxi app, Uber, after it unintentionally instituted surge pricing during Toronto’s massive summer storm. A few news outlets covered the embarrassing incident, but nothing else went viral like the voice of an innocent bystander outraged at the negligent price gouging in his hair-raising post, “The Don’t Be An Asshole Rule.”
Most importantly, both of these posts were composed in the heat of the moment. At Medium, there’s no need to register a website,  sift through a mountain of design options, and re-organize your schedule for the habit of blogging. You just write. “If it’s on a whim, that whim is killed the moment you’re forced to find a unique sub domain and find a template,” explains Williams.

The sheer simplicity of Medium’s writing platform is garnering accolades from respected writers and designers. Medium is “the best composition experience on the web, hands-down” wrote early Facebook designer Julie Zhuo, in a Medium post about Medium (so meta). “You see exactly what your post is going to look like. There is no translation, no guess-work, no typey-typey into some fat text area and wondering whether it’ll do ‘s and ‘s and ‘s correctly.”
New York Times tech columnist Nick Bilton also gives Medium a thumps up. “I really like Medium — it’s one of the rare instances where the technology is truly in the background,” he writes to me in an email. “I’d love to be able to replace WordPress with Medium on my personal site.” Fortunately for WordPress, Medium has no plans to become a separate blogging platform — but, it might become home to the occasional industry muse who doesn’t want to hassle with setting up a blog.

Still, Medium isn’t betting that viral posts from one-hit wonders are a sustainable foundation. It has allocated a sizable budget to pay for professional magazine-style exposes. Most recently, it bankrolled a massive 10,000 word, movie-worthy script about a 62-year-old commando whose tantalizing life has included a mission to recover $3 million in gold bullion in the Peruvian mines. “Mercenary” was edited by the same acclaimed author whose 2007 Wired piece about freeing Iranian hostages eventually became the Academy Award-winning fictionalized re-enactment, Argo. Over the next 18 months, the partnering studio, Epic, promises five more edge-of-your-seat stories.

War correspondent, David Axe, is also bringing some heavy long-form explainers about creepy military tech to the pages of Medium. Despite Medium’s implied reluctance against professional writers, it’s clearly willing to invest in public Internet journalism.

“I always felt you couldn’t live without the big expensive scoops as a serious brand in media,” explains Hansen. “If you pursue the low end all the time then the advertisers want nothing to do with you. People with money and affluent readers and people with positions in the areas that you cover of authority and influence don’t read you. You become kind of like, you’re nothing.”
Hansen maintains that Medium is still experimenting. Wherever its ends up, Medium evidently wants to be the home of any bold, viral idea — and it’s willing to run a financial and engineering bulldozer over any barrier to writing.

Yet, even if writers are willing to come to Medium , how will readers find them at a still-obscure publisher?

A Pandora For Substantive Reads, Pageviews Be Damned

Traditional news editors stake their reputations on having an intuition for what drives eyeballs to their sites. Editors don’t, however, know whether readers leave more informed.

Williams thinks Medium has an answer: an intelligent algorithm that suggests stories, primarily based on how long users spend reading certain articles (which he’s discussing publicly for the first time). Like Pandora did for music discovery, Medium’s new intelligent curator aims to improve the ol’ human-powered system of manually scrolling through the Internet and asking others what to read.



In the algorithm itself, Medium prioritizes time spent on an article, rather than simple page views. “Time spent is not actually a value in itself, but in a world where people have infinite choices, it’s a pretty good measure if people are getting value,” explains Williams.
In fairness to news editors, we do know how much time readers spend on an article: We know that less than 60 percent will read more than half of an article, and a significant slice won’t read anything at all. “I’m going to keep this brief, because you’re not going to stick around for long. I’ve already lost a bunch of you,” joked tech columnist Farhad Manjoo, in a cathartic post for Slate that was aptly titled “You Won’t Finish This Article: Why People Online Don’t Read To The End.”



But, because advertisers pay for page views, the incentive is to fish for clicks, no matter how much we try to feature other kinds of higher-quality content.

For example, after Miley Cyrus’ infamous burlesque dance in front of the MTV’s Video Music Awards’ impressionable tween audience, The Onion brilliantly lambasted CNN’s decision to make a burlesque show front-page news.

“So, you may ask, why was this morning’s top story, a spot usually given to the most important foreign or domestic news of the day, headlined “Miley Cyrus Did What???” and accompanied by the subhead “Twerks, stuns at VMAs”?,” wrote The Onion, in a parody OpEd by CNN’s managing editor.

“The answer is pretty simple. It was an attempt to get you to click on CNN.com so that we could drive up our web traffic, which in turn would allow us to increase our advertising revenue. There was nothing, and I mean nothing, about that story that related to the important news of the day, the chronicling of significant human events, or the idea that journalism itself can be a force for positive change in the world.”




I think most of us in the news industry would love if our audience only cared about deeply substantive stories, but expensive content with relatively few page views doesn’t pay the bills. So, what’s Medium’s plan to make money without advertising?

“Web People” And Financial Stability

The short answer is that no one really knows. “Well, it’s got to be sustainable at some level. So I think revenue is in the model,” says Hansen, with a casual attitude that indicates just how little focus Medium is currently devoting to the issue of monetization.

One option is selling eBooks off of its cinematic scripts. A portion of the readers may be willing to pay for the convenience of a Kindle version of “Mercenary,” for instance. But, traffic has to be outstanding for that kind of venture to make money. Pageviews to Mercenary have been okay. “It hasn’t blown the lid off,” admits Hansen, in reference to other Medium pieces that snagged a few million pageviews.

Other monetization options include licensing its technology, and revenue sharing with established media brands that want to post stories on and from Medium (Mother Jones has placed some stories on Medium, while Gawker has wholesale reblogged popular Medium posts on their own site).

Though Medium doesn’t have a solid business plan yet, there is a method to the madness of thinking about product first and money second (or third). Williams has a fascinating way of grouping business types in Silicon Valley between those who successfully managed companies through the dot-com bust (“Web People”) and those who packed up their empty bags and left (“Dot-com People”).

He explains that Web People “loved the web. We loved what was possible and we loved the creativity and we were in it to create; we weren’t in it to make money.”

So, when the bubble burst, Web People stayed — some ultimately making the (very) profitable products we all use today. “The Web People are more sustainable because they kept going. Because they’re driven to create, they’re attracted to the web because of its creative potential. They weren’t scared away when it seemed like it wasn’t an instant path to riches.” he explains, “They were persistent.”

An Optimistic Bet That Keeps Williams Persistent

“I think more people would be in a better place if more people shared their ideas,” says Williams. Seen this way, Medium is just the next logical step in Williams’ three-product cycle to inject better ideas into the world. Blogger helped open the doors for pajama bloggers to compete with the media moguls. A few years later, Twitter gave the power of broadcast distribution to everyone who had 140 characters to share.

Now, to complete the circuit, Medium wants to make viral information more substantive — the hope in the Pandora’s box of communication. “It’s also an optimistic stance to say that we can build a system where good things can shine and get attention. And there’s an audience for ideas and stories that appeal to more than just the most base desires of human beings.”
Or, in essence, Medium’s biggest bet is, “people will read long things — they’ll read a lot.” And that there’s a business in this.
| techcrunch.com #end.

Andrew Mason met Groupon’s earliest investor Eric Lefkofsky in 2003 when he was working as a web designer. The two stayed close and five years later Lefkofsky provided $1 million to fund Mason’s first entrepreneurial attempt, a company called “The Point”. The Point, which eventually became Groupon, was an interactive web platform that originally intended to bring groups of like minded people together behind a social cause like hunger or helping the homeless. When this idea proved to be too abstract, Mason and Lefkofsky pivoted to a more commercially friendly application of the same concept: Groupon. Groupon, as we all know, would eventually grow into one of the most talked about and hyped tech companies in recent history. Groupon today has over 11,400 employees worldwide and has sold an estimated six million group coupons. Groupon was so hot at one point that they even turned down an all cash $6 billion buyout offer from Google. That offer would have put $420 million cash in Mason’s pocket and exactly $1 billion in Lefkofsky’s. Turning down $6 billion from Google shocked the world. On the other hand, investors were confident that a company with as much heat and momentum as Groupon had back in 2011 would surely fetch far more in value with an IPO.

So what went wrong? GRPN debuted on the NASDAQ in early November 2011 at $26 per share. Investors and employees rejoiced at their new found fortunes. Mason’s 45,934,504 shares were worth$1.196 billion. Eric Lefkofsky’s 109,364,216 shares were worth a whopping $2.86 billion. Unfortunately for Groupon, the $26 debut share price would be the company’s all time high point. Thanks to a series of embarrassing accounting errors and irregularities, not only did the stock decline but it began a slow death march right around December 23, 2011. Adding fuel to the fire was the unforeseen fact that group daily deals turned out to be somewhat of a fad. Most people have tried Groupon or one of the dozens of imitators, at least once and many were not impressed. Worse, stories of small businesses who lost thousands of dollars offering a Groupon became common. One of Groupon’s biggest challenges was fending off the never ending crop of imitator companies and the need to constantly hunt for new local businesses to offer a deal. In order to successfully meet these challenges, Groupon had to hire thousand of new employees around the world. By comparison, Groupon today has 11,400 employees while Facebook only has 5000. These rising costs shrunk margins at a time when revenue was falling precipitously.

Mason didn’t exactly help his own cause. The 31 year old CEO was known for being a bit of a goofball who perhaps did not take his role as CEO of a major publicly traded company seriously enough. For example, at one point without explanation Mason posted a 9 minute video of himself doing yogo in tighty-whitey underwear on YouTube. As Groupon began to plummet, Mason was named “Worst CEO of the Year” by several CNBC anchors and many investors called for his head. That finally happened yesterday, February 28, 2013, when the Groupon board announced they had fired Andrew Mason. Mason’s severance package is not what you would expect from a big wig corporate CEO. He will walk away with six months salary which unfortunately amounts to just $378.36 because as CEO Mason took an annual salary of $756.72. He will be covered on the company’s health plan for 180 days. Mason has been hit the hardest when it comes to his personal net worth. Over the 16 months Groupon has been public, the value of Mason’s 46 million shares peaked at $1.2 billion. Today, after the company has lost 80% of its value, Mason’s shares are worth $230 million. Hard to feel too bad for a guy who is still worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but it still can’t be fun to lose $1 billion in a matter of months. And who knows what the future holds for Groupon. Its shares were up 11% on the news of Mason’s firing, but is that enough to turn the bloated and potentially doomed company around?

| mb #end.

Eike Batista was born November 3, 1965 in Governador Valadares, Minas Gerais, Brazil. His father was the Minister of Mines and Energy for a state-owned conglomerate. As a teenager, Batista moved with his family to Europe when his father was promoted to new positions in Switzerland, Germany then Belgium. After the family returned to Brazil, the 22 year old Batista stayed in Europe and took a job as a door to door insurance salesman. When he was 23, Eike moved back to Brazil where he launched a gold trading company called Autram Aurem. Over the next 20 years, he went on to launch five new companies that specialized in mining gold, silver, natural gas, petroleum and various other commodities. The companies were controlled by Eike’s umbrella firm, EBX Group.

Eike’s wealth began to soar in the mid-90s, thanks to booming markets in commodities, real estate, entertainment, tourism and hospitality in Brazil. Pretty soon, Mr. Batista found himself sitting on a bonafide 10 figure bank account. When times were good, Eike violated one of the most important rules of modern business: Never personally guarantee anything. If your business borrows money, never personally guarantee to pay the loan back.

In December 2010, Eike Batista told 60 Minutes that Carlos Slim should watch out, because some day soon he would be stealing the Mexican tycoon’s title as richest person in the world. Two months later, Batista told Business Week that within 10 years his net worth would top $100 billion. Bold statements for a man whose net worth at the time was just $8 billion, compared to Carlos Slim’s $63 billion. But fast forward two years and those predictions didn’t seem so crazy after all. As worldwide commodities markets continued to soar, by August, 2012, Batista’s net worth grew an astonishing 331% to $34.5 billion. That was enough to make him the richest person in South America and the eighth richest person in the world.

Unfortunately, August 2012 turned out to be the absolute peak of the worldwide commodities market and subsequently Eike Batista’s personal wealth. Over the last 12 months, Batista’s OGX has declined 87% after oil production slowed from 750,000 barrels per day to just 15,000. The collapse of mineral prices equally obliterated Batista’s remaining four companies. Making matters worse, because Eike personally guaranteed $3.5 billion worth of corporate loans, a variety of creditors began to circle him like vultures.

In less than a year, Eike Batista has seen his wealth decline 99.4%, from $34.5 billion to just $200 million. If this decline remains or gets worse, it may turn out to be the largest evaporation of personal wealth in human history. After his Playboy model wife left him, he actually began parking his $1.2 million Mercedes-Benz McLaren SLR in the living room, because he could. In recent weeks, Eike has been forced to the Benz along with mansions, artwork, a $19 million racing yacht and three private jets. Only time will tell if Eike can make a comeback, but things are certainly not looking good at the moment. Eike himself announced over twitter that anyone who bets against him now will be “caught with their pants down”. I guess anything is possible… How would you feel if you lost $34.5 billion in 12 months?

| DailyMail #end.