Say what you will about former Speaker Newt Gingrich. His philosophy, his policy proposals, his track record, his campaign, and all the rest. But the one thing you have to acknowledge about Gingrich is that he’s a sizzler. He has a way with words. And he’s as good a communicator as anyone in modern politics.
In my CNBC interview with Gingrich this week, he slammed President Obama’s tax-the-rich, class-warfare attack on bank’s and businesspeople. He hammered Obama, calling him a hard-left radical who is opposed to free enterprise, capitalism, and “virtually everything…
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The world has been captured by the unending and unfolding drama in the European theatre of dysfunction. Just a little over a month ago the Grand Bargain of European salvation, the European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF), had been proposed to cheering stock markets and commentators. It was breathlessly proclaimed that a comprehensive solution had been found, planned and was ready for implementation. The aligning lights of undemocratic integration would once again triumph over the messy, unseemly free market. Because the economies of the earth had been saved by the mathematical genius of the…
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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! U.S. stocks were lower midday Thursday and European bourses sold off into the close after the European Central Bank failed to live up to the most-bullish expectations for dramatic action. The ECB cut rates by 25 basis points (vs. hopes for 50) and, more critically, President Mario [...]
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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Despite some recent better-than-expected economic data, the global economy is likely to stall next year due primarily to “avoidable reasons,” writes Zanny Minton Beddoes, economics editor for The Economist, in the magazine’s The World in 2012 edition. Political policy errors, or lack of policy action for that [...]
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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! It’s been three years since the financial crisis, which spurred the great recession. In that time little has been done to fix the ‘too big to fail’ banks or the government sponsored agencies — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — responsible for the global economic meltdown. Today [...]
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Dave Morin CEO of Path and Mike McCue CEO of Flipboard were both interviewed on the main stage yesterday at Le Web. They are both high profile CEOs of high profile startups that have raised a lot of money for very design focused mobile apps.
They have also both recently launched new iPhone apps and we had demos of both. Morin and McCue were both at pains to show how beautiful their apps are and how much time and effort they had put into making the interface intuitive and easy to use. They both also explained that they had wanted to get the apps right before launching and had preferred to take their time and get it right rather than launch early with an imperfect product.
Morin explained how with the first version of Path they had launched early with a minimum viable product but they found that iteration cycles on mobile were too long to make the lean methodology work, which was why they switched methodology for the second release.
So we have two leading companies that are moving away from the lean startup methodology just at the point when the rest of the world is adopting it as an orthodoxy.
I haven’t figured out what to make of this yet. Path and Flipboard have both raised huge amounts of capital so they have the luxury of not being lean if they don’t want to, and that might explain why they are adopting a different approach to everyone else. Alternatively, it might be that as great design becomes more and more important there is less and less to be learned from minimum viable product. Put differently, if great design is the essence of the product there is no way to quickly develop a rough version.
The point about iteration cycle times on mobile is also interesting. I’m assuming that is because of app store approval processes, and if we move back towards a more web oriented world that will become less of a problem. And if we don’t, it won’t. I’m not sure which way that will go, but if Morin is right the outcome will have a big impact on the way startups approach product development.
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By Zachary Roth and Daniel Gross On the long list of risks the economy faces in 2012, the prospect of Congressional inaction would seem to rank quite low. But thanks to legislative tripwires on issues such as the payroll tax, unemployment benefits, and Medicare reimbursement rates, gridlock over the next few weeks may have a [...]
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