Articles

Throughout the economic meltdown, America's focus has largely been fixed on Wall Street and regulating the executives of major banks and corporations. Slate's Eliot Spitzer, shows us why we should shift our focus to the many Americans who already hold power: shareholders.

We hate to rip on daily reporters who are just doing their jobs, but Bloomberg's Brian Womack has a piece today in need of a little context. His lede: The Nexus One phone isn't selling very well when compared with the iPhone's debut.

While it seems that most businesses are aware that they’re supposed to have a presence on Facebook and Twitter, there’s little concrete evidence that they’ll get a good return on the investment. It’s hard to make the connection between brand building on these sites and cash register sales in stores. After all, winning over a million fans doesn’t necessarily do anything for the bottom line.

A Salon article on how many "hipsters" are using food stamps to buy a lot of foodie-friendly products (arugula, of course, is the default reference) nicely illustrates the intellectual conundrums that poverty and government welfare present, especially when it comes to food.

BYD is arguably the hottest EV company in the world that isn’t Tesla Motors. The Chinese carmaker, really a battery-maker with grad automaking aspirations, is partly owned by Warren Buffett. The company recently signed a deal to work with Daimler. And the money is rolling in from sales, as BYD is building China’s best-selling gas-powered car, the small-ish F3.

What do you get when you hire consultants? You get a four-year-long campaign to convince beer drinkers of your product's "drinkability." A campaign that failed miserably, because, as the marketing executives at Anheuser-Busch (BUD) should have asked: Shouldn't we assume drinkability, and work from there?

To many Americans, paying taxes is, well, a hassle. And the jumbled market of online tax-prep services doesn't help. So this year, Slate's Tom Bartlett set out to score some of the more popular services in order to clear through some of the muck and show us the easiest and most effective tax-prep service:

When Facebook introduced Facebook Connect—an extension of the site which allowed users to carry their identities beyond Facebook—in late 2008, people were practically drooling. It was called “revolutionary” and a slam-dunk success.