If you have two companies producing the same product then, over time, the price to the consumer will eventually start to hover just above the incremental price of each additional product. Not the price it costs to produce products — but the price it takes to produce one more product. Say, for example, you have two newspapers ...
Blog, JournalismAnother one of our clients — a Wall Street newspaper — shut down publication this month. A couple of staffers were reassigned, the rest laid-off. We lost our anchor client, the client we launched our company with. In the journalism community, it’s common to hear that the problem is with our readers, that they’ve gotten used to ...
BlogOver the past few years, my company has become very dependent on DabbleDB, an online relational database run by a Canadian startup — since sold to Twitter. We run our workflow systems, our accounting and billing, our recruiting, and our customer relationship management on DabbleDB. We use it as a back-end database for the China Speakers ...
BlogI do not, normally, consider myself a low-energy person — I am, after all, running two companies (Trombly International and the China Speakers Bureau) and starting a third (Hyperica). But I do notice that my energy flags at certain times — such as when I’m in Moscow. And I’m full of energy in other locations, ...
BlogDabbleDB, the online relational database platform that our company runs on, has been bought by Twitter. And, according to Dabble’s founders, Twitter has no interest in running a database company — they bought DabbleDB for the brainpower of the team behind it, not for the product. We are promised 60 days notice before the service ...
BlogThis article originally appeared in Shanghai Expat. By Maria Korolov Trombly I’ve seen a sharp influx of potential entrepreneurs to Shanghai when I was in town the last couple of months. As the U.S. and European economies head south, I guess that people are looking at the growth numbers, noticing that China is still in the positive digits, ...
BlogMy theory is, in China, the higher up you are the less work you do — poor people on farms, in mines work the hardest. If you’re unemployed you scramble the hardest to feed yourself and family. In the US and Europe, the poorest people don’t work at all, get subsidies, the highest-paid people work super ...
BlogIn the past, wars were fought over resources. The definition of power was the ability to collect a great deal of physical wealth — land, gold, slaves — and order people to work on your behalf to get you more. Two rulers would go to war and the winner would have more of everything at the ...
BlogBack in the old days … 2004 … we had to buy our foreign-language books in hotel shops — and had as many as five different novels to choose from, if we were lucky, right next to the tour guides and “Your first 1,000 Chinese characters” and “Chinese in 1 million easy lessons.” There were fake ...
BlogA Massachusetts court signed off on my divorce last week – after about three years of separation in which my ex and I weren’t in the States long enough at the same time to get it done. This means that, on January 30, I officially become Maria Victoria Korolov again. And I am never changing my ...
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