Move over Google+ and Tumblr, there’s a new star in social media town. Pinterest, a Palo Alto-based startup, is quietly becoming one of the most-trafficked social networking sites on the web.
The still-invite-only, one year-old digital pin-board site attracted nearly 11 million visitors in the week ending December 17, according to data intelligence company Hitwise. Hitwise counts Pinterest as one of the top 10 websites in the social networking and forums category.
In Silicon Valley, all the Sturm und Drang of 2011 seemed as relevant as the Cricket World Cup. High unemployment? Crippling debt? Not in Silicon Valley, where the fog burns off by noon and it’s an article of faith that talented, hard-working techies can change the world and reap unimaginable wealth in the process. “We live in a bubble, and I don’t mean a tech bubble or a valuation bubble. I mean a bubble as in our own little world,” says Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. “And what a world it is: Companies can’t hire people fast enough. Young people can work hard and make a fortune. Homes hold their value. Occupy Wall Street isn’t really something that comes up in daily discussion, because their issues are not our daily reality.”
It was never clearer than in 2011 that Silicon Valley exists in an alternate reality—a bubble of prosperity. Restaurants are booked, freeways are packed, and companies are flush with cash. The prosperity bubble isn’t just a state of mind: Times are as good as they’ve been in recent memory. The region gets 40 percent of the country’s venture capital haul, up from 31 percent a decade ago, according to the National Venture Capital Assn. And the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that growth of the area’s job market led the nation, jumping 3.2 percent, triple the national rate. Even real estate, a cesspool of despair in the rest of the country, is humming along. It’s next to impossible to get a table on a weekend night at the Rosewood in Menlo Park, a watering hole for Sand Hill Road’s technology financiers where the olive-oil-poached steelhead goes for $36. The closest we got to “Occupy: Cupertino” was the line outside Apple stores in October for the iPhone 4S.
"Uzzi and his Northwestern colleagues analyzed a year and a half of trades — more than a million transactions — made by 66 day traders at a single firm. Parsing the trading behavior down to a scale of seconds revealed sweet spots of synchronization —seconds to minutes when many traders were engaged in frenetic activity. On average the traders made money on 55 percent of their trades, but those who were in sync with their peers profited 60 percent of the time.
“I love the counterintuitive nature of the finding,” says complex-networks expert Albert-László Barabási of Northeastern University in Boston. “The dogma is that the successful investors are the Buffets — those who swim against the current. Yet this study shows that when it comes to day trading, going with the wave has real benefits.”
A peculiar aspect of the emergent intelligence is its lack of intentional coordination. There wasn’t a preestablished crowd for traders to glom onto, nor a leader to follow. The assessment suggests instead that instant messaging among traders helped couple their behavior. Instant messaging volume went up and down with trading volume, and the flow of instant messaging became less random as traders got more in sync, the researchers found."Article here.
In 2004 less than 14 percent of U.S. residents moved--the lowest figure since the Census Bureau began collecting the data in 1948, when the moving rate was 20 percent. What's more, the movers aren't going very far: Fifty-eight percent of people who moved in 2004 moved within the same county, while 20 percent moved to a different county within the same state. Nineteen percent of movers (less than 3 percent of U.S. residents) set off for different states, a bit lower than the interstate moving rate during the late 1940s. And those who move usually aren't in hot pursuit of economic opportunity: Just 16 percent of all moves are work-related. (Most people move for reasons related to housing: to shift from renting to homeownership, to find a cheaper or more spacious place, and so on.)
"The idea of an increasingly mobile society is a widely held, but untrue, fact," says Douglas A. Wolf, a professor at Syracuse University's Center for Policy Research, who published a paper on the subject in the February 2005 issue of The Gerontologist. Indeed, according to the historian Stephanie Coontz, whose books include 1992's The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap and last year's Marriage, a History, a person born today is more likely to remain near his birthplace than a person born in the 19th century.Article here.
