I'm assuming they're not asking for requests -- because I'd say please bust and go away -- but a good infographic from Mint on this Friday's shopping silliness.

Great new Watson Wyatt report on extreme risks in society and economics:

A new BofA report names various market tail risks -- big scary things that could happen in an outlier scenario -- and then suggests ways of hedging against them. Here is the list, which doesn't feel all that tail-like to me:

• Inflation/ $100bbl oil
• Double dip
• China bubble
• Protectionism / USD crisis
• Japan debt default
• U.S. housing  / consumer recovery
• No surprise

What would you add to the list?

Assuming gold (as measured by GLD) closes up today, that will makes eight days straight of advances. It is an amazing run of market heads, as it were. Since the inception of the GLD ETF it would rank as the second-longest run of gains, only trailing a nine-day run of GLD that ended November 3, 2006.

Check the figure for the recent list. It is surprising that no other GLD run this year made the top ten list.

Does the Obama Administration have less business experience? According to some semi-whimsical (I think) research in a new J.P. Morgan report that would seem to be the case. The author looked at private sector experience of 432 Cabinet secretaries whose activities touch most on the private sector across all presidential administrations since 1900. Here is the result:

There are obviously many, many issues here, not least of which is that the author isn't entirely clear on what the y-axis percentage means, how different kinds of experience are weighted, etc. Nevertheless, it's still thought-provoking.

• Venture Funds Sweeten Terms to Attract Investors (WSJ)
• Anything but 0.01% (Gross/PIMCO)
• Many casualties in aftermath of bursting bubbles (FT)
• Information obesity (Source)
• Return Free Risk - A Merger Arb Anecdote (Kid Dynamite) 
• British Columbia's salmon: Socked (The Economist)
• Courting convulsion in America (Kunstler)

I was at a board meeting recently where the board and management was discussing the company’s market position. This is a strong company that leads its market and, as a result, one of the board members stated that we were “the 800 pound gorilla in the market.”  In my world view, the market was still relatively small so I suggested that we were the 12 pound gorilla.  While this got a chuckle, it was instructive and moved the conversation down an interesting path.

If the 800 pound gorilla comment had stuck without any discussion, I expect the management team and board (me included) would have leaned back in our chairs, smiled, and indulged ourselves in a moment of self congratulation.  And it’s warranted, as this company has been around for a while and has built a strong, profitable business that is in fact the leader in its market.

However, the market is still relatively small.  It’s growing – and growing quickly now – but it took five years for it to really mature into an interesting market.  We lead the market and continue to be very effective at winning the vast majority of the new business that is out there.  But to view ourselves as an 800 pound gorilla would be an error in my book.

Instead of relaxing, we reset the conversation and said “well – if we are a 12 pound gorilla, what do we need to do to become a 100 pound gorilla on our way to becoming the 800 pound gorilla?”  We decided we could easily become a 24 pound gorilla just based on the growth of the market.  But this isn’t interesting to us, so we’ve got to do more.  What the “more” is started to come out of the discussion we had which I expect will be continued over the next month as the company determines which new products to invest in during 2010.

I find myself in many situations where the words matter a lot.  I enjoy quirky phrases (like Todd Vernon’s “chocolaty goodness”) that help focus the discussion.  The next time you start talking about the gorilla in the market (whether it is you or someone else), make sure you determine whether it’s 800 pounds or 12 pounds – I expect your actions will be very different depending on the answer.

A month ago, NewsGator released TapLynx – their framework for building iPhone apps.  They took the core code of NetNewsWire for the iPhone, abstracted it out, and built a really powerful and easy iPhone app development system as an SDK.  A month later, the iPhone apps built on top of TapLynx are starting to appear, including All Things Digital, Variety, Discovery, TechStars, and the amazing and entertaining Foundry Group iPhone app.

You can download the TapLynx SDK for free to evaluate it.  You only pay if and when you deploy your app to production.  The license price for the TapLynx framework is $3,499 – when you consider the amount of code it includes and the time it’ll save you, it’s a steal.

That said, the folks at NewsGator have gotten into the holiday spirit.  For 24 hours, they are going to celebrate Black Friday (11/27) by offering 50 licenses for $500 each.  

A final note – the TechStars and Foundry Group iPhone apps were built by our friends at Slice of Lime.  They are one of the TapLynx Premium Partners and are ready to crank out an iPhone app for you whenever you are.

Good talk and demos from the just-completed TED India about living with data, including such stuff as coffee cups that can help you find coffee. The speaker is MIT grad student Pranav Mistry.