On Capital
Physical capital is the stock of products set aside to support future production and consumption. In the national income and product accounts, private capital consists of business inventories, producers' durable equipment, and residential and nonresidential structures. Financial capital is funds raised by governments, individuals, or businesses by incurring liabilities such as bonds, mortgages, or stock certificates. Human capital is the education, training, work experience, and other attributes that enhance the ability of the labor force to produce goods and services. Bank capital is the sum advanced and put at risk by the owners of a bank; it represents the first "cushion" in the event of loss, thereby decreasing the willingness of the owners to take risks in lending. See investment. [Back to top]
www.house.gov/budget_democrats/glossary.htm
I've been thinking about Google recently. I've been considering their two latest experiments and it's pretty interesting. I've come to the conclusion they'll let Orkut die because they've found what they want in GMail.
You remember the noise about who owns the personal information you enter into Orkut? And the occasional addition, like degrees of friendship…all in the hope you'd add enough stuff to let them see patterns in your connections and those in the overall community (remember, it's still an experiment). And the data is as rigidly selected as any dating service's profile, self chosen persona stuff. Not but so usefull.
But with GMail, they get up to a gig of a range of information about you a social networking profile could only dream of providing. A database whose value is limited only by developing data mining techniques.People dying…paying…to be invited—if they're smart they'll keep it invitation only like LiveJournal. And all without a jot of new (to them) tech.
Yahoo!, MSN, etc. are playing catch-up while Google is setting up a different game than they think.
