Events

The brokerage house Evercore doesn't believe Groupon. No one else does either: The brokerage said Groupon Goods, the company's consumer products category, is increasingly becoming the merchant of record - the owner of goods being sold or the first-party seller. As first-party sales assume inventory risk and drive higher revenue contribution, the composition of Groupon's first-quarter revenue beat in North America has become questionable, analyst Ken Sena wrote in a note. "Growth in unique visitors in...

...because most of our maize corn is dying too: The latest U.S. Drought Monitor has expanded D3 “extreme” drought across Illinois. It went from 8 percent of the state last week to 71 percent this week. This major shift was based on a number of short-term drought indicators based on rainfall, streamflow, and temperature, as well as from widespread reports of significant crop and pasture losses. Earlier this week, the USDA NASS reported that 66 percent of the corn crop, 49 percent of the soybean crop, and...

Chicago today looks set to get up to 39°C, part of an emerging pattern of worsening heat waves in the region. The holy terror this summer, however, is 2,000 km to the northeast. Greenland has experienced unprecedented thawing this month: The set of images released by NASA on Tuesday show a rapid thaw between 8 July and 12 July. Within that four-day period, measurements from three satellites showed a swift expansion of the area of melting ice, from about 40% of the ice sheet surface to 97%. About half of...

Krugman yesterday reminded us that people are so desperate for the security that investing in the U.S. brings them, they're paying us to take their money, at alarming rates of negative interest: That’s right: for every maturity of bonds under 20 years, investors are paying the feds to take their money — and in the case of maturities of 10 years and under, paying a lot. What’s going on? Investor pessimism about prospects for the real economy, which makes the perceived safe haven of US debt attractive...

Last week I offered developers a simple way to simultaneously deploy a web application to a Microsoft Azure web site and an Azure Cloud Services web role. Today I'm going to point out a particular pain with this approach that may make you reconsider trying to deploy to both environments. Just to recap: since Azure web sites are free, or nearly so, you can save at least $15 a month by putting a demo instance of your app there rather than having a second web role for it. You'll still use a web role for...

Via Gulliver, airlines earned $22.6 bn from ancillary fees in 2011 (pdf), up 66% from 2009: Once largely limited to low fare airlines, ancillary revenue is now a priority for many airlines worldwide, and the Review announced today shows how far the industry’s approach to ancillary revenue has developed in recent years. Jay Sorensen, President of IdeaWorksCompany, says: “Our first report into ancillary revenue was issued in 2007, when only 23 airlines worldwide disclosed ancillary revenue activity in...

Two examples of how Europeans handle things differently than we do. First, Norway's refusal to be terrorized by lunatics with guns: The car-bomb in Oslo designed to kill the leadership of the country, and the shootings on the island of Utoeya designed to destroy the next generation of Labour party politicians, left 77 people dead, the majority of them teenagers. But even in the first days of shock after the attacks, it was clear the response of the Norwegian people and their government to this act of...

I hung out with some very old friends yesterday, and throughout our barbecue we checked up on the Cubs. By the time we went inside, it was top of the 7th, no score. Then this happened: Rafael Furcal's go-ahead single in the seventh turned out to be a mere appetizer as the Cardinals also matched an 86-year-old franchise record for runs in an inning. St. Louis totaled 10 hits with multiple hits by three players including pinch-hitter Allen Craig, who doubled twice with an RBI. The Cardinals totaled nine...

After seven days above 32°C in a row, Thursday gave us a humid, rainy 28°C before yesterday's perfect, dry 27°C. We've had a record 32 days above 32°C since June 1st, six more than we had by this time in the previous-hottest summer I remember, 1988. The forecast for the next few days looks grim: 32°C today, 34°C Sunday, and 39°C Monday. Welcome to the new normal: in just a couple of years, Chicago has gone from hard winters and mild summers to mild winters and broiling summers. And the climate is still...

(This is cross-posted on the 10th Magnitude blog.) In my last post, I talked about using Azure web sites to save beaucoup bucks over Azure Cloud Services web roles on nonessential, internal, and development web applications. In this post I'll go over a couple of things that bit me in the course of deploying a bunch of applications to Azure web sites in the last two weeks. First, let me acknowledge that engineering a .NET application to support both types of deployment is a pain. Azure web sites can't...