A source close to Morgan Stanley tells me the firm is holding a firm-wide conference call at 4PM New York time today to discuss the firm's role in the burgeoning Facebook IPO scandal. Another source close to the firm reports that Morgan Stanley has already held at least one such call... and that, during that call, my name came up repeatedly. I don't yet have detailed information about what was said on the prior call, but the gist of it, apparently, was this: Morgan Stanley followed all the applicable rules and regulations in the Facebook IPO Henry Blodget is a disgraced former-analyst-sleazebag-turned-bloviator who is just trying to whip up a scandal out of nothing. (I assume they didn't put it quite that way. At least ... Continue reading →
A source close to Morgan Stanley tells me the firm is holding a firm-wide conference call at 4PM New York time today to discuss the firm's role in the burgeoning Facebook IPO scandal. Another source close to the firm reports that Morgan Stanley has already held at least one such call... and that, during that call, my name came up repeatedly. I don't yet have detailed information about what was said on the prior call, but the gist of it, apparently, was this: Morgan Stanley followed all the applicable rules and regulations in the Facebook IPO Henry Blodget is a disgraced former-analyst-sleazebag-turned-bloviator who is just trying to whip up a scandal out of nothing. (I assume they didn't put it quite that way. At least ... Continue reading →
Editor’s note: This is the first column from our new regular contributor, Jason Calacanis. Every couple of weeks, Jason will be offering advice to a company facing a crossroads. This week: Yahoo. Yahoo proves the most underrated rule of business: scale wins. While we live in an age of excellence, where awesome products break out to levels never before seen (DrawSomething, Pinterest and Facebook), the truth is the world is plagued with laggards. These consumers give up their aol.com and yahoo.com email addresses when they, or their seven-year-old Dell computers, die and they can’t remember their passwords any more. Then they tell their nieces and nephews that their email “broke,” and those nieces and nephews set them up on Gmail. Despite a decade of product ... Continue reading →
A former Apple insider has some harsh words about Siri, the iPhone's voice activated assistant. In a big Fortune article on Tim Cook's first year at Apple, a former employee told Adam Lashinsky, "People are embarrassed by Siri ... Steve [Jobs] would have lost his mind over Siri." What are the problems with Siri? This former employee didn't say, but it probably has to do with the fact that Siri is still in beta, and has had problems like downtime, and it takes a long time to get answers. Those are technical glitches with Siri that need to be worked out, and are understandably embarrassing. The real problem with Siri could be much worse. It could be that people don't actually want to talk to ... Continue reading →