I just finished reading "Moneyball," by Michael Lewis, the surprisingly engrossing story of how the Oakland A's used statistical data to build a winning team. Like a lot of other racing fans, I have an overlapping interest in baseball stats, and I find it fascinating to follow another sport also afflicted with a sclerotic power structure, dominated by people who believe they know everything about their fans and how to put on the show or market their data. The result, a collective failure of imagination leading to a management culture more interested in brand caretaking than innovation, opens up intriguing little niches, exploitable market inefficiencies. In the late-1990s in baseball, the inefficiency was in statistical analysis, in the mid-2000s in racing, the inefficiency is in technology, which no one has quite figured out yet ...

Related: Over on Handride, Patrick picks up on the news that Intel is producing chips that will substantially improve online video quality, sees a glorious opportunity for the industry.

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