This superb legal drama was one of the best films of the year with George Clooney in excellent form as the “fixer” for a large legal firm handling a massive and complex liability case. Clayton’s friend, a manic depressive in charge of the case, is brilliantly played by Tom Wilkinson. Fast paced, rich dialog makes this a joy to watch as the plot unravels and Clayton faces his greatest personal challenge.
Despite a record fine of 1.4 billion dollars by the EU for failing to share code, Microsoft’s stock price dropped just a tiny bit today – a drop not even clearly associated with the ruling. Given that the fine represents only a fraction of a percent of Microsoft’s capitalization and that it removes some uncertainty from the always massive MS legal equation it is probably reasonable to assume the market had pretty much fully incorporated the EU instability into the price of Microsoft.
The BBC Reports
TechCrunch has a nice summary of several travel review sites and notes that Yelp has now had 31MM in funding and is rumored to be worth about 200MM. For a company that makes under 10MM per year this seems pretty high, but the Yelp model has been fairly strong in Silicon Valley and Yelp appears to be extending the model to other areas successfully.
I do think Yelp will have a lot of challenges as they move out of their Silicon Valley travel sweet spot. Yelp has done a nice job of connecting people offline who meet online by hosting Yelp parties at Bay Area venues. This probably won’t work as well outside of Silicon Valley where hip young net users are …. not as concentrated, even in the large urban areas.
Joe Duck 