Video: Jeff Bezos: After the gold rush, there’s innovation ahead

The dot-com boom-and-bust is often compared to the 1849 Gold Rush, and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos offers historical evidence showing how similar they were: from the riches made by pioneers to the media hype that attracted luckless speculators. But a better analogy can be found in the early days of the electric industry, he says. In the late 1800s, the U.S. was first wired to support lightbulbs; the following century saw a long procession of new appliances, life-changing advances, and of course some amusing failures. His conclusion in 2003: “I believe there’s more innovation ahead of us than behind us.”

Who is Jeff Bezos?

Jeff Bezos didn’t invent online shopping, but he almost single-handedly turned it into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. His Amazon.com began as a bookstore in 1994, and quickly expanded into dozens of product categories, forcing the world’s biggest retailers to rethink their business models, and ultimately changing the way people shop. It now sells more than $8 billion a year of goods, profitably, and its technology will influence the changes to business and media that will come next.

Stocks surge after Fed rate cut by 0.5%

Stocks surged this afternoon after the Federal Reserve’s half-point interest rate cut.

The Dow Jones industrial average gained 335.97 points, or 2.5%, to close at 13,739.39. The Standard and Poor’s 500 stock index rose 43.13 points, or 2.9%, to 1,519.78. The Nasdaq composite index gained 70.00 points, or 2.7%, to 2,651.66.

Stocks had risen in the morning on widespread expectations that the Fed would cut rates. There had been some worry, however, that a quarter-point rate cut would disappoint investors and spark a sell-off.

Those fears were alleviated by the Fed announcement, and stocks bounded upward immediately. Bank and brokerage stocks, which are especially sensitive to rate fluctuations, led the advance.

Investors are betting that lower interest rates will ease the recent credit crunch tied to problems with sub-prime mortgage defaults, as well as stimulate the beleaguered housing market.

In a potential economic warning sign, however, bond yields climbed after the Fed action. That’s a signal that fixed-income buyers worry that a strengthening economy could trigger inflation. The yield on the two-year Treasury bond rose to 4.49% from 4.47% on Monday.

Hopefully this Fed rate cut will lead to better Real Estate Market through Next Year.

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Video: Jonathan Harris: The Web’s Secret Story

Artist and computer scientist Jonathan Harris makes online art that captures the world’s expression — and gives us a glimpse of the soul of the Internet.

Who is Jonathan Harris?

Brooklyn-based computer artist/programmer Jonathan Harris’ work celebrates the world’s diversity even as it illustrates the universal concerns of its occupants. His computer programs scour the Internet for unfiltered content, which his beautiful interfaces then organize to create coherence from the chaos. You can see his work at www.number27.org and commercial art.

Video: Jaw-dropping Microsoft Photosynth demonstration by Blaise Aguera y Arcas

What is Microsoft Photosynth?

Microsoft Photosynth is one of many project under development by Microsoft Live Labs. The Photosynth Technology is most exciting way to view photos on a computer. Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next. You can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.

Who is Blaise Aguera y Arcas?

Blaise Aguera y Arcas authored patents on both video compression and 3D visualization techniques. He also created Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft in 2006), the visualization technology that gives Photosynth its amazingly smooth digital rendering and zoom capabilities. Microsoft Photosynth itself is a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space.