Free market economy and pricing

I'm amazed at how the free market economy works through... Met a diehard Packer fan on my flight back from NJ. He was traveling this weekend from NJ to Green Bay for the NFC Championship game. He told me about the flight tickets that he bought the previous week. During the Giants Cowboys game, the ticket prices were hovering around $500 and as soon as the game was over, all flights to the Wisconsin area were a $1000 dearer! Free market economy and demand based pricing at its best. But, in a stark contrast to this is the price of coffee beans which is the second most traded commodity after oil. No matter how much you pay for your coffee at your neighborhood Starbucks, the farmer who produces the beans with 5 years of toil spent on each coffee tree, gets paid less than a $1 per pound! Taylor Clark in his book "Starbucked" analyzes this conundrum with the conclusion that the cheaper robusta coffee beans flooding the market have brought the coffee prices down and even the genuinely good arabica coffee bean prices have been hit as a result. The book was an amazing read for its insights into coffee and its roots.

Cloud computing

Got interested in Cloud computing recently and the potential it has in revolutionizing the IT world. This distributed computing model is akin to the commoditization and distribution of electricity a century ago. Google, Amazon, IBM, Yahoo! and Microsoft will fight this battle and the winners would emerge as the utility computing leaders of tomorrow. Jeff Bezos' EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) initiative has been catching up with the SMBs. Yahoo!'s Hadoop support which is the Open source distributed computing leader places it at an advantage. Google is investing $2billion a year in data centers and is the leader in cloud computing. My bet is on Google-IBM and Amazon winning the cloud computing war.

WMG - EMI

With WMG deciding not to bid for EMI, the Big Four label groups remain intact.

Market share of record music companies:
Sony BMG - 25.7%
Vivendi Universal - 21.2%
WMG - 13.8%
EMI - 12.8%

Apple iTunes continues to dominate digital music sales.

Recently, while doing my daily reading on 247wallst.com, I found newly inserted in-text ads. Chances are, while you hate invasive ads which hamper your web-surfing experience, user initiated online ads within the text of relevant web content are going to get you excited. This is a step further from google's text ads which show up as part of search results.



Vibrant Media is the in-text advertising leader and I can't help but wonder that they are a potential acquisition target for Google in the not-so-foreseeable-future, once they gain some traction in the content driven blogosphere.



We are slowly evolving into a world of advertising as portrayed in the futuristic interactive personalized ads in the Hollywood flick "Minority Report". 2054 is not too far away, after all!