Thorough Research Can Lead to a Public Relations Coup

Several years ago when I was covering the dot-com bubble, a German magazine featured me in a story. “The Harbinger of Death,” the writer called me, noting that if I wrote about a company there was a good chance that said company was on its way to the grave. “The Harbinger of Death” is back, but these days I’m an analyst, studying corporate executives who disastrously borrowed money against the stock they own in their company. (Read more…)

Being Cool is Hard

Everywhere I looked on Monday, there was Cuil.

Pronounced “cool,” the search provider made its public debut this week and got enough ink to make an octopus jealous. I read stories about Cuil in/on The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New York Times, Forbes, a blog on The Los Angeles Times, TechCrunch.com and CNET News.com, among others. Most of the initial press concentrated on Cuil’s claim that it indexes more pages than other search engines and that its founders, a wife-and-husband team, are former employees of Google, the clear current leader in the search space. (Read more…)