NYT in credit crisis meltdown?
The New York Times is frighteningly close to running out of cash.(Perhaps you missed this, distracted as you were in reading The Times' glowing endorsement of Barack Obama). Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider posted a chilling breakdown and analysis of the situation
yesterday, saying: "Not sure how it came to this so fast, but the New
York Times (NYT) is approaching the point where it will have to manage
its business primarily to conserve cash and avoid defaulting on its
debt. This situation will only get worse as advertising revenue
continues to fall, and it will be very serious by early next year.

"The
company has only $46 million of cash. It appears to be burning more
than it is taking in–and plugging the hole with debt. Specifically, it
is funding operations by rolling over short-term loans–the kind that
banks worldwide are cancelling or making prohibitively expensive to
save their own skins. … So that's why the company raised the
possibility this morning that it might default on its debt. More likely, it will have to start selling assets. At some point, it will also likely have to undergo a major restructuring."

Tom Steinert-Threlkeld on ZDNet's Between The Lines blog sees an opportunity:
"Maybe Arthur Sulzberger should be talking to Jerry Yang. Yahoo’s way
to distinguish itself from Google has been to present itself as an
information portal. The online gateway to finance, sports and general
news. Yahoo, despite all its market positioning and mating troubles,
still is growing and makes about $1 billion on the bottom line on $7
billion in revenue. The Times?
About $90 million on $3 billion. It’s worth at least a talk, Arthur.
Yahoo needs an info engine that sets itself apart from a search engine.
And you need growth and a way to shed The Times’ birth and life as a
‘Gray Lady.’ Fast."

Yahoo Search takes on FF 'Awesome' bar and Chrome's auto-search
From
Yahoo's potential opportunities to actual potential realised: Firefox
and IE users can now get a beta taste of what the cool Mac kids have
been using for their search since just about forever (or at least,
since 26 March 2007). Barely six months since David Watanabe sold the rights for his Safari search engine plug-in Inquisitor to Yahoo (while choosing to remain an indie Mac developer), the team at Yahoo Search has ported Inquisitor to Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Paul Glazowski at Mashable explains: "Inquisitor … [scours] an engine like Yahoo for relevant material, suggests additional keywords, and grants easy access to sites like Flickr
and Wikipedia. If you frequently create bookmarks, but don’t bother
sorting them manually for fast perusal at a future time, this can
certainly be helpful if you happen to condition yourself to trigger
Inquisitor for regular Web searches."

Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb gives it a whirl:
"In our tests, the personalization seemed to work quite well, though it
takes a few searches before the plugin learns enough about your
behavior to become useful. The plugin can now also analyze your
bookmarks and include them in your searches. This is useful, but modern
browsers like Firefox 3 and Chrome already include this functionality
in their own address bars now and can display their results a bit
faster than Inquisitor."

Lovefilm distribution genius in new UK startup
Earlier this week, Mike Butcher at TechCrunch UK profiled Graze
, a UK startup created by ex-Lovefilm distribution genius Graham Bosher
and launched three weeks ago. Inspired by Bosher's own difficulty in
finding good, healthy food to eat while at work, Graze
(how lucky were they with that domain name?) makes it easier for people
to eat healthily at the office for not very much money at all. They
deliver a letter-box-sized box of healthy food selected on the basis of
the customer's tastes and nutritional needs.

Seamus McCauley is an early adopter:
"Two things are notably clever about the Graze.com concept. First is
the Pandora-style reviews and preferences system, which lets you tell
the website what you like and want more of. Like Pandora, I don't
expect Graze to send me anything I don't like twice, so long as I can
be bothered to tell it what I've enjoyed. That's a good and useful
feedback system.

"The other clever thing about Graze is the
psychological trick it lets you play on yourself. … Graze.com gives
you the chance to decide today what you're going to eat tomorrow.
That's a very valuable aid to your decision-making process, because
you're letting your (wise) cognitive system order you some fruit, long
before your (greedy, stupid) dopamine system decides you should be
stuffing down Mars bars. … What I'm really paying for is to have the
decision about what to eat taken out of the hands of a future me that
both theory and experience tells me can't be trusted with that
decision. And that's £2.29 well spent."

Word is spreading
virally, as one would expect. As to the sustainability of the model,
Mike says: "Can an e-commerce company scale like a web app? The answer,
as we all know, is no. However, given that Amazon ’scaled’ by creating
a market for items which could fit through a letterbox, a UK company
plans to do the same … Graze of course is limited by the need for a
warehouse. But if it can be as efficient as Amazon’s then I guess the
idea can ’scale’ to whatever that can take."

What does this
have to do with social media? To be honest, not much – unless we
ham-fistedly force a connection between the people who make things
happen in social media and the food they eat – but it's a cracking idea
that deserves a mention. It's going to be interesting to see how
quickly a major supermarket hits back with its own copycat strategy.