Up Front, Invisible Engines

Up Front is Bill Maudlin's look at drawing his comics about infantrymen in World War II. It is humorous, enlightening, and well worth reading.

Invisible Engines, by David Evans, Andrei Hagiu, and Richard Schmalensee, is a look at two-sided markets with regards to software platforms. The book does a fine job of examining the video game console, cell phone, and operating system markets, but after that it seemed to trail off. I got rather quickly that all of those markets have two different sets of consumers and the text quickly became belabored. The question I was left with is: once I have identified a two-sided market, how do I take advantage of that, either as an existing contender or as a new player?

Children of Men

I saw Children of Men last week. I didn't really know what to expect going into it, beyond "supposed to be good, about the world when women stop having babies." It turned out to be much darker and grittier than I expected, but excellent. Clive Owen was fantastic, and I enjoyed watching Julianne Moore and Chiwetel Ejiofor (yea, from Serenity!) in every scene they were in. Without spoiling the ending, I almost expected the movie to fade-to-black about a minute before it really ended.