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Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
My Proposal for Wal-Mart to Replace the US Postal Service
“With this program, we’re able to provide consumers in every rural town or big city across America with … a convenient, free mail delivery system.” – John Agwunobi, Wal-Mart division president In continuing my mental exercise on replacing the USPS I was stuck with solving the problem of delivery and drop-off for rural America. Especially …
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Mental Excercise: Replace the US Postal Service
Yesterday, NPR discussed the challenges of the US Postal Service after reporting a $3.8 billion revenue loss for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2009. The revenue loss corresponded to a reported 13% decline in mail volume. I’ve noticed a significant decrease on my end since Dec 2007 as well. For the 2008 and 2009 …
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Innately Index Me
This morning Andy Parkinson pointed to his Innate Index project. And since narcissism is the perfect way to start a Monday, I indexed myself. That’s the graph above. “The Innate Index is a brief personality inventory based on the five factor personality model that has been shown to be associated with a variety of school, …
Please Exit the Silo in a Calm and Orderly Fashion
In my world – Twitter and Facebook streams seem to be slowing down, while I’m hearing rumors of more people “using” both services – it’s not translating to me seeing new faces. Hell, I’m even seeing fewer familiar faces. And half expecting to hear Whit Stillman‘s next project is titled “Social Network”. Not a bad …
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Mental Exercise: Armored Trucks
http://www.flickr.com/photos/articnomad/ / CC BY-SA 2.0 Sitting in traffic yesterday, an armored Dunbar truck drove by in the other lane – not unlike the one in the photo above. All I know about armored trucks is that carry cash. Everything I know about cash is that it’s going digital (debit cards / automated deposits & withdrawals, …
New$$
I grabbed a coffee with Matt Thompson last week to catch up. Since then – something he said about the challenges of financing news organizations kept rolling through my head. I’m paraphrasing: ‘pick the website of a major news organization – look at the headlines and stories – which ones will you pay for?’ That’s …
Prediction: Dow 12k By End of Year
The Dow hit a 13-month high today closing at 10,226.94. A 200+ point rally today. While I’m still concerned about the 100+ point fluctuations in Dow’s daily closings, I’m confident we’ll close 2009 by recovering the ground lost in October 2008. That’s 1800 points in 7 weeks, ~30 trading days, an average of 60 points …
2010: The Great Restart
I could stare at this image all day. Continually riding its roller coaster in my head – watching geo-political events, holidays, elections, and family gatherings, all unfold. Whether we call it the Great Recession or the Great Nominal Spending Crash1 – I don’t think we’ve seen the interesting part yet. I predict a dramatic recovery …
Garrick’s Quick on the UpTake, 950AM Thurs 5:20pm
Every Thursday on Mike McIntee’s Quick on the UpTake program on AM 950 – I’ll be talking about the week’s crazy technologies for a quick 10 minutes. If you’re not near the AM dial, it’ll be available at TheUptake.org’s ‘Quick on the Uptake’ site.