Pretty amazing.  (Thanks, Cagan)

When I was a strategy consultant, I had always hoped to have an engagement in the gaming industry. I love casinos and find myself thinking about the business aspect of a casino every time I am in one.  Matt at 37signals has a fun post looking at the experience from a design perspective.

We have been hearing lots of number being thrown around lately.  First, the rumors of a $750m Viacom offer, and then a $1b figure from Yahoo!, both for Facebook.  Now, I get a headline from Reuters that an analyst at RBC Capital saying MySpace can be worth $15 billion in three years.  At the risk of adding to the hype in the blogland echo chamber, I thought it is worth a link.

UPDATE: PaidContent.org explains the analyst Jordan Rohan’s methodology in arriving at the valuation.  The primary comp was Google at the same stage.

I have been meaning to blog about this article since having read Freakonomics, probably the best non-fiction I read this year.  The article deals with the curious phenomenon of why elite soccer players tend to have birthdays concentrated in the first three months of the year.  Worth a read.

Auren posted about a crazy business idea:

  Let’s create a new cigarette brand.
…
We’ll call our brand of cigarettes "Death".

The slogan will be "smoking WILL kill you."We’d be very up front with our customers — we will probably kill you and we don’t think you should buy our product.

"Death" might encourage people not to take up smoking or to quit.      

Truth in advertising might actually work.   

It’s interesting to think about  However, I think the current economics of cigarette advertising would not allow this to happen.  Even if you called your cigarettes "Death", you are tightly restricted on how you can advertise them.  The one bad effect of cigarette advertising regulation is that it enforces the oligapolistic structure of the industry today.  It would be extremely difficult to create awareness of a new cigarette brand.

At the risk of costing you a few guaranteed hours of lost productivity, I present you the most addictive flash game I have ever seen.  It’s a version of Risk. (via Joe)

Paul Kedrosky writes about different approaches investors can take to make bets on the popping housing bubble, including builders’ securities, CME futures, and Scripps, a media company with a portfolio of housing-related cable channels.

A favorite site of mine would make this job significantly easier, if you’re interested in the major markets.  HedgeStreet allows investors to make binary bets on the housing prices in cities like New York.  I am not sure how they can get away with it, as this is as much gambling as is the bet on the weekend’s football game, but I think it is a valuable tool for independent investors.

Auren has a thought provoking post on the correlation between optimism and fertility.  It immediately reminded me of the recent debate on the "Fertility Gap" between liberals and conservatives.

Can we now deduce that liberals are pessimists and conservatives are optimists?  If yes, does that not clash with the truism that one tends to get more (politically) conservative as one ages?

I suspect that it is more of a geographic bias, as I would guess there are higher birth rates in the red states.

Coinciding with their World Cup awakening, the French have passed a law that looks to force Apple to allow content downloaded from iTunes to be played on players other than iPod.

I support the initiative strongly.  If I legally purchase a song on iTunes, I should be able to shoose whose technology I’d rather use to consume it.  It has to be my call, not Apple’s.

A busy schedule so far in June, and of course, the World Cup have conspired to keep us away from scheduling the June meeting for the Istanbul NEG until now.  We are set for a get-together, at Bizim Tepe, on Wednesday, June 28th, at 6pm.

This month there will be no presentations, just cocktails and networking.

Please let me know if you have not received and invitation, and would like to attend.