Articles

  • Luxury Items in Short Supply


    Posted Thursday, November 19, 2009 - 5:58am

    Luxury retailers that have cut their inventories this season are already selling out of hot items, the New York Times reports. High-end stores, like Neiman Marcus and Saks (SKS), are treading carefully this holiday season, aware that consumer spending hasn’t yet bounced back entirely.

    TAP Tagline: 

    Luxury stores purposefully not selling as much as they could.

    • Caitlin McDevitt is an editorial assistant at The Big Money.

  • Norah Jones and Hulu Unintentionally Create Good Idea Having Nothing To Do With Norah Jones


    Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - 4:30pm

    Norah Jones is not really an actress. Yes, she was in that Wong Kar Wai movie My Blueberry Nights, but her career path does not exactly fit itself into Hulu’s wheelhouse. And yet today was her big debut; she now has an entire page dedicated to her on the streaming video site. Why?

  • Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - 4:09pm
    Illustration by Jenny Livengood.

    In October 2006, Reddit co-founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian decided it was finally time to sell. A year earlier, their Digg-like social-news Web site had attracted an offer from Google, but the founders wanted to keep developing the fledgling company in-house. This time, though, the buyer that came calling was not the 800-pound gorilla of search engines. It was the 800-pound gorilla of magazine publishing, the one wearing Gucci loafers and a Patek Philippe watch: It was Condé Nast.

    TAP Tagline: 

    Why Condé Nast Execs Don't Even Say Reddit Anymore.

     

    Single Page
    • Paul Smalera has written for Condé Nast Portfolio, The New York Times and The New York Observer among others. He blogs at true/slant.
    Illustration by Jenny Livengood.

  • Is Google Plotting a Super-Phone?


    Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - 2:53pm

    We're used to Google (GOOG) doing something unexpected, or diving into a business no one could have foreseen. But the latest rumors are so completely counterintuitive that we have a really hard time believing them: Google is building its own smartphone. Not an operating system or software platform to hand out to handset manufacturers. Its own phone.

    • Chris Thompson is a writer living in Brooklyn.

  • Can Anyone Swallow Cadbury Debt?


    Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - 1:54pm

    Bloomberg News reports that Hershey and Italy's Ferrero are both "evaluating their options" for whether and how much to bid for Cadbury, the British confectioner for which Kraft Foods has made a hostile bid.

    Single Page
    • Dan Mitchell has written for The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The MInneapolis Star-Tribune and Wired.

  • Toshiba's Floating Furniture

    Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - 12:01pm

    Surely you’ve heard about the Balloon Boy. Well, now there’s the Balloon Chair. In this ad designed to get everyone talking about Toshiba’s new flat-screen television, the views get cooler and cooler as a chair floats up to space. And, even better, this footage isn’t a fake-out!

    Title: Space Chair Project

    TAP Tagline: 

    Toshiba Thinks Sending a Chair Into Space Will Make You Buy a TV

    Single Page
    • Bernhard Warner is editorial director of Social Media Influence.
    • Matthew Yeomans runs Custom Communication

  • The Boss From Hell

    Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - 9:23am

    TAP Tagline: 

    My Boss Is a Total Jerk. Hey, Penny, What Should I Do?

    • Win Rosenfeld is the multimedia producer for The Big Money.

  • Goldman's Mea Culpa


    Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - 4:02am

    Has the holiday spirit hit Goldman Sachs?

    • Bernhard Warner is editorial director of Social Media Influence.
    • Matthew Yeomans runs Custom Communication

  • Latin TV Comes to YouTube


    Posted Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - 1:30pm

    Well, it's finally here. Google (GOOG) and the Authors Guild finally unveiled their second attempt at setting up a settlement to the class action stemming from Google's Book Search project to digitally archive all human knowledge. And wouldn't you know it? It's not very interesting. Under the new agreement, an independent "fiduciary" would be set up to oversee and license the sale of orphan works, or books that are still under copyright but whose owners can't be found.

    • Chris Thompson is a writer living in Brooklyn.

  • Why Cadbury is Like California


    Posted Tuesday, November 17, 2009 - 1:26pm

    According to the Italian business newspaper Il Sole 24, Ferrero, the family-owned maker of Nutella spread and Kinder chocolates, might try to buy Cadbury (CBY) out from under Kraft Foods (KFT), which has mounted a hostile bid for the British confectioner.

    Single Page
    • Dan Mitchell has written for The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The MInneapolis Star-Tribune and Wired.