by John Jorgensen on December 8, 2008

- Citibank’s Mark Mahaney went to a SEM conference and execs gave him a nervous outlook for search marketing’s future in Q1 of ‘09: “We sensed specific nervousness about the Q1 outlook and the possibility that Q1 could actually be the real inflection point quarter–i.e. the first negative sequential growth quarter ever for Search.”
- To paraphrase Mark Cuban: “Advertising is always one of the first things to be cut and it’s almost always a mistake.” Especially when it comes to search marketing, which traditionally has the highest ROI.
- I see a decline in search marketing from companies who are using it simply for branding purposes, but for performance-based marketing I see search continuing to grow.
- Out of all forms of advertising, search draws the straightest path to cost-per-conversion, the holy grail of advertising metrics. If your performance-based search marketing is positive ROI there’s no good reason to cut it.
ATD
by Jason Wilk on November 30, 2008

- As Mark Cuban pointed out this morning, (an appropriate post considering he is in trouble with them), the SEC system has some broken pieces inside of it and the legendary finger pointer is finally turning its finger back at itself.
- As most would not think, employees and executives of the SEC are actually able to play the stock market. Not that they shouldn’t have a fair chance to invest their money, but doesn’t allowing them to invest in individual bonds or stocks seem just a little bit ‘insider to you?’
- What policy currently governs this? Well, there is a SEC policy in place that outlines do’s ad don’t of trading stock, most of which emphasizes employees not investing in a company they are inpecting. But as Cuban points out, “if you know about actions of one company, even if you don’t trade that company, doesn’t that provide you insight into an entire industry ?” Sounds very unfair.
- It gets worse. In a recent Inspector General’s Report to Congress regarding the SEC, they had determined the current system in place governing the SEC is “insufficient to prevent and detect insider trading on the part of
Commission employees or violations of the Commission’s rules”
- The recent investigation found that the reports employees are required to file when they buy, sell or own securities are not meaningfully reviewed or sufficiently checked for conflicts of interest. So in a nutshell, for the last decade or longer, SEC employees have been bringing down insider traders, while they have been operating under their own non-regulated umbrella for personal investments. Serious joke.
by John Jorgensen on November 9, 2008

- In a post on his blog, Mark Cuban criticizes President Elect Obama’s selections for his 17 person economic advisory board for not including a single person who is a real world entrepreneur with experience in starting or running small businesses.
- “The economic advisory team that he has put together looks more like a semester’s worth of great guest speakers for an MBA class than an economic advisory team that can truly help him.”
- Cuban says that without having someone to tell you how business will actually react to his policies, such as forcing new hires to be classified as independent contractors to avoid paying their medical insurance, Obama is keeping himself in the dark and remains vulnerable to unintended consequences.
by Jason Wilk on September 30, 2008
- Mark Cuban has been telling Comcast they need to eliminate P2P sharing and put a cap on broadband usage.
- Wednesday they will start the capping, charging users stiff prices if they break the 250GB data usage.
- Their claim is 5% of users account for 40-80% of total data.
- 51% of people say they would jump to another carrier if a download cap were forced on them.
- Om Malik has been vocal in saying this will stunt innovation and today’s large data consumers are the average user of tomorrow.
Will heavy data users that break the cap, be more prone to be fed to the RIAA?
Om
by Jason Wilk on September 18, 2008

List of the top 20 richest people in tech. The number next to their name is where they stand in the Forbes 500 released today.
1. Bill Gates (Microsoft), $57 billion
3. Larry Ellison (Oracle), $27 billion
11. Michael Dell (Dell), $17.3 billion
12. Paul Allen (Microsoft), $16 billion
13. Sergey Brin (Google), $15.9 billion
14. Larry Page (Google), $15.8 billion
15. Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), $15 billion
33. Jeff Bezos (Amazon), $8.7 billion
47. Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.), $6.8 billion
54. Pierre Omidyar (eBay), $6.3 billion
59. Eric Schmidt (Google), $5.9 billion
61. Steve Jobs (Apple), $5.7 billion
84. Gordon Moore (Intel), $4.4 billion
84. John Sall (SAS Institute), $4.4 billion
91. David Sun (Kingston Technology), $4 billion
91. John Tu, (Kingston Technology), $4 billion
105. Richard Shulze (Best Buy), $3.5 billion
144. Ray Dolby (Dolby), $2.9 billion
161. Mark Cuban (Broadcast.com), $2.6 billion
246. Irwin Jacobs (Qualcomm), $1.9 billion
Honorable mention: 321. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), $1.5 billion
Made tiny from: TechCrunch.com original