Ivy Bytes

"Ivy Bytes" was born in 2011 as a result of a growing frustration at the failure of traditional media and publishing companies to address the serious issues that are essential to all of our futures in a concise and accessible format.

The genesis of the idea came during the Health Care reform debate of 2010, when I realized from my business school dorm room that not only was I not clear on which side of one of the most important issues of our time that I stood on, but I was also not quite sure what "Obamacare" even was. And the more newspapers and magazines I read, the more confused I became.

I thought maybe I was just out of the loop, but then I realized that many of my classmates at the Ivy League institution that I was attending also had little idea what was going on. And the subset that claimed to be experts on the topic seemed to drastically disagree amongst themselves. It was like the conservative crowd and the liberal crowd were describing different legislation entirely - one bill came with death panels and bureaucrats peering over the doctor's shoulder, and the other featured sick-now-cured children holding hands in a circle and singing kumbaya!

I thought at the time that there should be a better way of getting unbiased information on essential topics - something that was authoritative, yet also concise and accessible. The idea lingered, but was placed on the back-burner as I finished up my MBA classwork at Harvard. It was brought to the surface again by the events of the past summer and fall. At an enormously important inflection point for our politics, our economy, and our financial system, I am continually stunned by the level of divisiveness, misinformation, and sheer nonsense out there.

I am a news junkie, but I find it is taking more and more time than ever to really figure out what is going on right now. Whether it's the European debt crisis, the debate over spending cuts in the US, or even the latest twist in the Presidential campaign, it's become harder and harder to separate the actual substance of what is happening from the overwhelming amount of noise and rancor surrounding everything. It seems all to painfully obvious that the result of this lack of clarity is yet more rancor, yet more partisan divide, an even bigger gap between the parallel universes that liberals and conservatives seem to live on.

Ivy Bytes is for busy, no-nonsense people that want to cut through all of this noise and get a 20-50 page read on the actual facts of a topic. It's kind of like one of the Special Reports in The Economist - except that you can actually read and understand the whole thing in one or two sittings. I guarantee that each guide has been thoroughly researched and vetted and represents the latest in mainstream thinking on the subject. I hope you will agree.

These guides remain a test. If you like what you see, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. Also, keep your eye out for more Ivy Bytes guides on other topics, including A Beginner's Guide to Investing: How to Grow Your Money and Smart and Easy Way, available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble today. You can sign up for our free email newsletter on our website (www.ivybytes.com) to find out as soon as additional guides are released. Finally, please let us know personally what you think via one of the contact methods below:

Email: feedback@ivybytes.com
Twitter: @ivybytes
Facebook: IvyBytes
Web: www.ivybytes.com

Thanks for reading!

Alex Frey
Oct, 2011

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