Wall Street really has evaporated and the commercial bank has won as the dominant business model.

While I wrote about it a few days ago, who knew it would’ve come so fast -with the government actually converting the last two remaining Wall Street investment banks into commercial banks.

This is great news for the American Economy. On the one hand, it wipes out the extreme profits large investment banks have had to aim for since the deregulation of brokerage commissions in 1975. On the other hand, it cuts off avenues for extreme risk taking in secondary markets.

This should translate into more funds being available for lending in the primary markets -directly to businesses -based on the strength of a business, rather than being based on the hope of being able to flip that obligation to a greater fool in the secondary market.

Every once in a while I feel compelled to put my economics degree to use. This is one of those times.

There’s a tremendous amount of pain around the collapse of Lehman Brothers. I don’t want to belittle or take attention away from that pain. I have been in two market collapses myself (Latin American stock markets in 1994 and the internet business in 2001) and it is not fun.

But there is a silver lining in the collapse of Lehman. Lehman’s bankruptcy, along with Bank of America’s purchase of Merrill Lynch and Bear Sterns disappearance are the end a particular type of business: the large scale broker-dealer investment bank. These banks made huge amounts of money in secondary markets for stocks, bonds and financial products derived from other underlying assets. The money in these markets is primarily traded among participants in those markets. It does not directly go to the companies, governments or people whose name might be on those assets.

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Content is Critical

Content is an important part of business –both on the marketing and sales end, as well as when talking about internal communications. On the marketing side, we’ve been encountering content for as long as we can remember. It is used in newspapers and magazines to tell a story, on billboards advertising a service. We read it on labels in grocery stores.

Good Content = Good Business

If you don’t have the proper content or if the content isn’t managed to get your message across, then what’s the point of having it?

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It seems like the privacy features in IE8 could pose a threat to Google’s ad revenue. With the ability to hide where a user came from prior to arriving at a website will this impact Google’s ability to track click-throughs? If users choose to keep this on, will it limit the usefulness of the data collected by Google’s web-analytic’s suite, Google Analytics or related tools used to optimize ad spending?

If so, the launch of Google Chrome might be more than a bid to take market share from Microsoft or offer a Google-based platform for the web as OS -it might be a first defense against protecting their main revenue generator -Adwords.

You can now export Basecamp projects to PDF with a free trial of ExportReports.com version 1.0.

We’ve officially launched version 1.0 of the popular Basecamp add-on.

New features include:

• Project list sorted by company;
• Information about any attached files in Basecamp if a comment has attached files and;
• Customizeable page size to accomodate European Basecamp users, other non-US sizes and attornies using Basecamp;
• These are US Letter, US Legal, A4, A5, B4 and B5.

And in honor of the official launch we are offering your first PDF report for free.

Your first export of a Basecamp project is now free with ExportReports.com!

All of these features came from feedback from our Basecamp users. Please let us know what you’d like to see by adding a comment here.

The Midwest Technology Leaders conference hit a home run this year with the quality of the people it drew. I’m talking about the CIO’s, Directors of IT and most excitingly the IT entrepreneurs, those small business people who have slugged out an IT business in Michigan and have continued to grow.

Frankly, this was a group of people I didn’t know existed in the area (and I’ve been here for 11 years). I saw a slue of these companies come into existence during the .com boom but after the implosion, the landscape seemed dead. Seeing these people all in one room, talking to them -all still hungry, seasoned and focused on growth, created a buzz that I haven’t felt in Michigan in a long time.

I’ve attend conferences and business meetings across the America’s, felt the buzz and creativity in other cities. Attending this event opened the door for a perception change about this region.

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Vertabase is proud to have been honored by the Michigan Council of Women and Technology at their annual Partnership Recognition and Scholarship Award event.

This great organization encourages the advancement of women in technology related fields through mentoring, Summer tech camps for girls, laptop awards and, to-date, 0ver $300,000 in direct scholarships to a remarkable group of people (through the MCWT Foundation). Keep up the great work!

Export Reports.com added a new feature this week. ExportReports.com will now embed any images in your Basecamp project in the exported pdf. Supported formats include: bmp, gif, jfif, jpeg, jpg, png, pnm, raw, tif, tiff, wbmp

I’d been meaning to write a review of the XO Laptop for the last couple of months.

This recent article in the Wall Street Journal finally prompted me to put this response together.

I purchased one through the special promotion and our kids love it. And continue to love it. It has proven to be a staple when they are bored at home or when we travel -particularly to places without connectivity.

The main functions they use are exactly the creative programs that come pre-loaded.

They are more intuitive than the off-the-shelf equivalents and still offer a tremendous range of creativity -particularly Tom Tom and eToys.

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Amazon has a good example of the selective and sensible use of AJAX type controls in an interface. In various presentations on software design I often talk about using AJAX and Javascript wisely and sparingly. Too much and the rate of confusion and user error rises significantly.

On Amazon’s holiday-ready site they use Javascript pulldowns and mouseovers to show the user the different departments they can shop from. However when letting the user select different areas to search on, the site doesn’t automatically take the user anywhere. It lets the user manually select the specific area they want to go to, enter a search term, then click GO.

If a user knows exactly where they want to go its important to make sure they can get there unhindered. The interface shouldn’t try and guess what they want or, worse yet, mistakenly take the user somewhere they don’t want to be. A good interface should show the user all the options available to them, then let them get there quickly and directly (and help them avoid any wrong turns). Nice job Amazon.