Aloha. I'm Maylene.

breakingblog:

We’ve passed a big milestone over on Breaking News’ Facebook page: 100,000 likes!

True, this is a pretty modest Facebook audience compared to many other major brands. But unlike some of those brands, Breaking News is still a relatively new entity in the news ecosystem. We launched our …

So the industry counts those who would never have bought their products anyway as lost sales. There is deception in that number.

parislemon:

Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman of Freakonomics discuss the claims that piracy leads to $250 billion a year in loses and 750,000 American jobs lost:

The good news is that the numbers are wrong — as this post by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez explains. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which is polite government-speak for “these figures were made up out of thin air.” 

And:

So what’s the real number? At this point, we simply don’t know. And this leads us to a second problem: one which is not so much about data, as about actual economic effects.  There are certainly a lot of people who download music and movies without paying. It’s clear that, at least in some cases, piracy substitutes for a legitimate transaction — for example, a person who would have bought the DVD of the new Kate Beckinsale vampire film (who is that, actually?) but instead downloads it for free on Bit Torrent. In other cases, the person pirating the movie or song would never have bought it. This is especially true if the consumer lives in a relatively poor country, like China, and is simply unable to afford to pay for the films and music he downloads.  

Do we count this latter category of downloads as “lost sales”?  Not if we’re honest. 

Renewed my faith in peeps. And reminded me of the love big brothers/sisters have for their siblings.

sweetupndown:

you thought I didn’t really notice. But I did. I wanted to high-five you.

Yesterday I had a pair of brothers in my store. One was maybe between 15-17. He was a wrestler at the local high school. Kind of tall, stocky and handsome. He had a younger brother, who was maybe about 10-12 years old. The…

Just a quick re-post about Codecademy’s Code Year effort.  And yes, I signed up today, too.

parislemon:

Back in October, I wrote about Codecademy, a CrunchFund investment. Love the concept, yadda yadda. Now they have a new initiative called Code Year which is pushing for people to learn to code for their New Years resolution.

When I tweeted about it yesterday, I think it got more retweets than any tweet I’ve ever tweeted before. So there’s clearly some interest.

As such, find the link above as well just in case you don’t follow me on Twitter. Almost 65,000 people have signed up already for the weekly lesson sent via email.