One billion dollars

When Amazon bought Goodreads, BusinessWeek published an article with a headline reading "Amazon likely paid $1 billion for Goodreads".​

This was Kyle Stock's reasoning on the $1 billion figure.​

Here’s how the numbers play out. LinkedIn (LNKD) is the heavyweight champ in this category. Based on its current market valuation and 202 million active accounts, investors are valuing it at $95 per user. Instagram is at the bottom of the spectrum, despite the hysteria over its $1 billion sale to Facebook (FB). At the time of the deal, it had 35 million users, meaning Facebook paid just $29 per Instagrammer.

Much of the social market, however, has settled neatly in between those two points. Facebook has a running value of $58 per user, while Pinterest and Twitter are right around $50 a head, based on recent financing rounds and network statistics.

Working with that range, Goodreads’s 16 million users at $55 each would add up to a sticker price of $880 million.

Then Kara Swisher came out and reported that Amazon actually paid about $150 million for Goodreads.​

BusinessWeek now has amended the headline of that article to read "Rampant Speculation: How Much Did Amazon Pay for Goodreads?"​ Look at the URL, though, and you'll see the original headline remains, even though BusinessWeek has not called out the edit anywhere else on the page.

The ​poor analysis doesn't need my commentary. All users are not created equal. What's equally poor form here is the bait and switch headline. So many media sites rely on the attention-grabbing headlines to attract eyeballs to serve up display ads, and so many of those headlines are skimmed on aggregator sites or Twitter or elsewhere without ever being clicked on. The level of misinformation being spread by stories like this plants them further down the road from journalism, somewhere closer to the county lines of sensationalism. 

Trailer Tropes

​Loved this short retrospective on movie trailer audio tropes from the past few decades. Movie buffs will have no problem immediately hearing terms like:

Until reading the article I hadn't realized how much the Don LaFontaine era had receded.​

The silly voice-overs of the past, meanwhile, have mostly been banished to the ghettos of sitcom television and animated fare. Today’s action movies—with pretensions to deep-thinking, and filled with rueful and angry superheroes or geopolitical conflicts that attempt to mirror the fragmented realities of the War on Terror world—demand a more serious treatment, and those thunderous musical cues seem handed down to remind us that even frivolous popcorn movies aren’t supposed to merely be fun anymore. The trailer has been elevated to a minor art form unto itself, and the auteurs behind them seem to have little patience for the gimmicks of the past. Yet one day, hopefully soon, the “duhhhhn” will be gone, abandoned for the next trailer innovation, and will be remembered as a kind of dated sonic cheese. It may come to seem as absurd as the idea of an eighties-style “Inception” trailer: “If you want to hide top-secret corporate information from these guys, you better not fall asleep. This summer, Leonardo DiCaprio is turning the world upside down in this non-stop thrill ride. ‘Inception’: Life is but a dream.” Or as incongruous as an eighties movie trailer backed by the bass drone.

There's also the trailer trope of the one final piece of debris flying at the screen after the title card, the most vivid example of which is the trailer for Twister, with a tractor tire hurtling at the windshield.​

Personally, I'm fond of the wordless trailer, which seems like a higher form of the art given the increased ​level of difficulty. Think of Alien. 

Little Children came close to being wordless, and its cleverness is in its almost abstract layering, making it feel like it was remixed into a trailer for a horror movie (which, in a way, it is, with its deep focus on suburban ennui, mid-life crisis, and infidelity).

Coin-flip booking

A new travel site called GetGoing offers a unique way of trying to snag airfare bargains.​ Via the NYTimes:

Instead of bidding, you choose two places you would like to visit (say, Miami and Los Angeles), select your travel dates and flights, then enter your credit card details. GetGoing randomly chooses one of the two trips and books your ticket, which you can’t change or cancel.

The company aims to help airlines fill empty seats, which are scarce on some routes but still average nearly 20 percent of the tickets a carrier could sell. GetGoing promises savings of up to 40 percent off published airfares, but the coin flip reassures the airlines that they are giving these discounts to leisure travelers, not business travelers who would pay a higher price because they have to fly.

It's amazing with the level of deep price discrimination in travel that most airlines still can't turn a profit. Not having reliable cost control is brutal.​

​Since my sisters live in Chicago and my brothers in New York, I may have to give GetGoing a whirl sometime. I wonder if they'll consider it a bonus or penalty if the coin flip lands their way.

Purell

The New Yorker had an interesting article on Purell in the March 4 issue. It's behind the paywall, but here are two interesting paragraphs.

Intuition is not an infalible guide to hygiene. People in a growing number of occupations wear latex gloves while they work—a good thing, seemingly. Yet gloves, if used carelessly, can promote contamination. If you handle raw chicken with your bare hands, you will probably wash them before you open the refrigerator, grab a skillet, mince a garlic clove, or meet Gwyneth Paltrow; but if you're wearing gloves you may not, because your hands will feel as clean as they did before you picked up the meat. Valerie Curtis, a behavioral scientist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has argued that the disgust we feel when we manipulate uncooked chicken livers is likely a product of natural selection: protohumans who were never squeamish about where they put their hands would have lived to bring up fewer healthy off spring. Gloves muffle the signal.​

And...​

I asked Don Schaffner, a food microbiologist at Rutgers, whether clean hands might have a medical downside. He said, "We might have a much healthier population if we adopted the kinds of condition that we see in many Third World countries, with poor-quality food and poor-quality water and lots and lots of germs. If we did that, we would have adults who were very healthy and had very strong immune systems. Unfortunately, the price that we would pay would be extremely high infant mortality. That's the trade-off." There's a popular belief that passing exposure to pathogens strengthens the immune system in the way that exercise strengthens the body. But immunity doesn't work that way, and, in the absence of vaccinations, inoculations, or genetic serendipity, populations "acquire resistance" to lethal illnesses the way the indigenous peoples of North and South America acquired resistance to smallpox. Furthermore, alcohol-based hand rubs do not exacerbate the spread of treatment-resistant pathogens, as the overuse of antibiotics does. Alcohol kills germs in a different way, by disrupting cel membranes, a process to which organisms are almost as unlikely to become immune as humans are to become immune to bullets. Indeed, according to the National Institutes of Health, the best strategy for combatting the spread of drug-resistant bacteria is "for everyone to keep their hands clean."​

So there you go. Purell away guilt-free.​