Finance Geek

Exclusive interview with woman pioneer and former Rep. Patricia Schroeder, and a look at her latest project: The House That Went on Strike.

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Linux developers have accepted a patch that undoes one of Microsoft’s most embarrassing open source gaffes. The problem, uncovered last week, lies in a 3-year-old piece of code that helped Linux run more smoothly on Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization software. Microsoft developers had to name a piece of code used by the software and for some reason chose the hexidecimal moniker 0xB16B00B5 — leetspeak for “Big Boobs.”

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VMware just spent $1.26 billion to secure its place in the future of computer networking. But in acquiring the swashbuckling Silicon Valley startup Nicira, the virtualization giant is also shifting even further into the world of open source software, a world it was once very much at odds with — and in some ways still is.

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Every week, it seems somebody else is calling a “bottom” in the housing market and this week is no different. On Tuesday, Zillow joined the crowd, reporting its U.S. home value index climbed 0.2% in the second quarter vs a year ago, the first increase since 2007. The index [...]

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Mitt Romney heads to London this week as part of a larger European tour, which will also take him to Israel and Poland. While in London, the former Massachusetts Governor is scheduled to attend two campaign fundraisers for U.S. expats hosted by bankers and lobbyists embroiled in the LIBOR-gate [...]

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Apple (AAPL) reports its June-quarter earnings today. And given the fragile state of the overall market, Apple’s earnings and outlook are likely to be important for far more than just Apple and tech sector. As with of Apple’s quarterly results, there is likely a big difference between the formal [...]

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Amelia Earhart would have been 115 today had she lived through her ill-fated attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 1937. Earhart was the epitome of female inspiration in the face of seemingly impossible odds. While her disappearance remains a mystery, her iconic status still inspires women everywhere to break gender boundaries in pursuit of their dreams. Google has chosen to celebrate Earhart’s birthday with a Doodle befitting this impressive woman.

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! It’s been nearly six years since the housing bubble burst but the aftermath of the crash continues to wreak havoc in the towns and cities most affected by the destruction. Home prices have yet to stabilize and foreclosures remain an acute problem for homeowners, banks and mortgage servicers. The [...]

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Nearly three in ten Americans have no money saved for a financial emergency, according to a recent survey by Bankrate.com. Twenty percent of people polled said they have less than three months salary saved up for an unexpected financial crisis. That leaves only 42 percent of Americans financially prepared [...]

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Finnish company RapidBlue has released the results of a study showing that Google Adwords campaigns result in increases in visits to stores and time spent in stores. The study looks like it was pretty thorough. Researchers took data from Royalblue’s proprietary technology which tracks mobile phones in retail outlets and output data from EPOS systems, and then correlated both these data sets with spend on Adwords campaigns, whilst controlling for a host of other variables. You can read more detail on Venturebeat.

For a while traditional retailers have been seeking to leverage their physical stores to improve their online offering by offering services like pick up and return to store, and this research shows that the trend also goes the other way – their online activity is benefiting their offline stores. This is significant for two reasons:

• it should encourage retailers to shift more of their ad spend online
• ceteris paribus, clicks and mortar retailers will have superior unit economics to pure play online retailers, enabling them to either bid higher for key search terms

This research is great, but it stops short of true online to offline attribution of the sort that the deal between Yahoo and UK offline loyalty card scheme Nectar promised back in 2010. That would be a huge step forward.

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