Tivo began as a disrupter in the Television industry landscape. It was a game changer and an amazing one at that. Suddenly, you could record complete seasons of TV shows, pause your show and fast forward through ads. A whole world of options opened up that brought Television under the viewer’s control.

However, after making a big splash in this arena, it eventually resulted in cable companies incorporating DVR options into their own set top boxes. Today, Tivo is just a great product that never took off!

Sharing a piece from the Atlantic which makes a case for free tuition, albeit at state schools. Read the article here.
The recession, rising tuition costs and debt have all created a vicious cycle resulting in trillions of dollars in debt and rising delinquency rates. Moreover, the continued low interest lending has not helped rising tuition rates.. laments we have heard time and again. This article proposes a solution to make college education affordable and debt-free and I think it brings up some interesting points.

I came across a post today on the Daily Beast that talked about how entry options into careers in finance have narrowed over the years and its implications. From a time when banks and hedge funds hired candidates from diverse non-finance fields to now, when being either a finance major or atleast a minor, having relevant internships and coming from a ‘target’ school have all become important points to check off from the must-haves list for new hires in the industry.

This is obvious from following the posts on WSO as well. The question that I would like to pose here is this and I hope you would share your ideas without bias on this one.

Do you think that following the route of Finance/Business Major in College(B.S./MBA) followed by Internships and then a traditional career in Finance/Management Consulting, has led to an erosion of talent that can exhibit broad-based thinking in the industry? How does the current system of education and hiring in financial services affect the future of the industry?

Where would the next bubble be? This has become a frequent go-to-question in the last couple of years. Call it paranoia or being prepared, we are not completely out of the repercussions of one bubble-burst cycle before there is speculation of the next. Or have we become so inured that from a growth, expansion and recovery cycle, the economy has now moved to a Boom and Bust cycle!

So today I happened to catch a discussion on CNN about what the next Bubble to rock the economy would be, and decided to bring the speculation to WSO. So let’s..

What is your “pet” Bubble?
Junk Bonds? Student Loans? Higher Education? Alternative Energy?

2033! What do you think the World will be like?

Do you remember what life was like before Google? No? This was only fifteen years back!

Ok, How about life before Wifi?

How long can you go without your smartphone?

Remember Maps? – Not the app on your phone but the large paper ones that are folded multiple times to make them ‘less’ unwieldy, the ones that once unfolded could never be put back again.

I came across a really interesting post on Forbes that I want to share here - thoughts from the game changers themselves about technology and education and living in 2033.

Just a few months back, Apple was the king of stocks. After it hit $700 in September, many Analysts predicted $1000 as the next target with some predicting a $trillion market cap in its future. Anticipated launch of new iPhone and iPad products kept expectations high and not even a lower-than-expected earnings report would deter the confidence of investors in the company.

So what has happened just four months after all that rosy optimism, did we all forget our rose-tinted glasses suddenly? Or had our expectations of the company grown 'too big' that the company had to fail to meet them eventually.

How else could we explain a 12% slump following record sales and revenue numbers?

The Fed released transcripts from its 2007 meetings yesterday and it is interesting to note their fluctuating views on the economy and their forecast about the subprime crisis during this time. Rate cuts ofcourse did not begin until September and a tone of cautious optimism is evident over majority of the year 2007.

The Fed’s statement released after their January meeting stated that:

This week we’ve been witness to two ideas – both as silly as the prominence given to them – however, one of them, the issue of the Trillion Dollar Coin was supported by popular economists in the country and the other, I am hard-pressed to believe even the people that petitioned the construction of a Death Star really thought this was going to work.