December 2006
The folks at Alexaholic have updated their traffic stats on "Seth's List" of Web 2.0-ish companies. Yes, Alexa data is suspect, but that doesn't mean trends aren't interesting. Here are some of the biggest advancers over the last six months:...
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found myself watching video tonight after Saddam Hussein's execution. It wasn't, however, the inevitable snuff stuff that will almost certainly find its way online. Instead it was Scott Turow talking in visceral, ruminative, and convincing fashion (here...
The folks at TheDeal make a provocative and hard-hitting pick for VC loser of 2006: Sevin Rosen ...2006 Losers: Sevin Rosen FundsOn the one hand, Sevin Rosen's decision to cease raising its tenth fund was honorable. The venture capital firm...
I have largely ignored Apple's current stock option imbroglio -- the market seems intent on getting past it, so far be it from me to get in the way -- but am I the only one not entirely buying the...
More and more people are making the IPO case for 2007, with a bullish CNBC piece yesterday, and the following factoids from Trimtabs today:"... shares outstanding in the U.S. contracted by at least $600 billion this year -- roughly 3.1%...
I've been randomly collecting various "top tens" of 2006, so here are a few of them. With respect to analysis, I hardly know where to start with this fascinating stuff, so I'll just dive into a couple of places, and...
I am making a holiday visit to CNBC today (Wednesday) at 4:10pm PST. The subject is Ebay....
Everyone (in financial circles) keeps asking each other (and me) the same question: What will be the big surprise of 2007? What will stop the bull market from a fifth year of gains? It won't be interest rates, which are...
In one of those only-in-academia newsflashes, an upcoming Journal of Finance paper goes through heroic analysis, complex equations, and fifty-seven pages to prove the obvious: the best venture firms invest in better companies, and those tend to go public more...
Amazon mines its own data for some top-sellers over the Xmas season. While it's interesting enough, I generally think this kind of thing is more useful as a sociological document than as a financial one. Fifty years from now --...
The distressed securities subsector of the hedge fund business just turned in the best performance of 2006, putting up a 15.5% number. That was impressive, but comes following similar outperformance in the preceding three years. Remarkable stuff. NET % YTD...
The Wall Street Journal is apparently link-trolling via its article Wednesday, "Is Web 2.0 Another Bubble?". Fine, here you go guys.So, is the piece any good? It's fine, but you won't see anything new here if you've read elsewhere on...
When the disease surfaced again that fall, it was far more severe. Scientists, doctors, and health officials could not identify this disease which was striking so fast and so viciously, eluding treatment and defying control. Some victims died within hours...
I was out golfing the other day -- a sunset ball-spraying adventure around Torrey Pines here in La Jolla -- and my ad hoc playing partners included a fellow who works in the housing contractor supplier business. Business is off...
Many readers of this site may not know that for a few years now I have been writing a weekly column for TheStreet/RealMoney called "Weekend Reading". It's a quick scan of the weekend major papers, finance research, and so on,...
Despite taking a vow of blog silence, I have been wandering (offline) in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (etext here) tonight, and, like usual, couldn't resist sharing an excerpt of Burton on the causes of melancholy among scholars:Two main reasons...
Two things caught my attention floating across the wire on this eve of Christmas Eve. This:Christmas Day Lunch Menu at Camp DavidTurkey with Giblet GravyCornbread DressingMashed PotatoesGreen BeansSweet Potato CasseroleRollsAmbrosiaPumpkin and Pecan Pies[via White House Press Office]And this:December 23, 2006AP:...
According to a story in today's Times of London (thanks for the heads-up Jon), Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is working with Amazon to launch a Google competitor. Like Wikipedia, the new service -- let's call it the Pooh-esque "Woogle" --...
Okay, that's it. I'm going to be mostly incommunicado here until the beginning of next year. I may not be able to stop myself from posting a couple of times, but the next ten days is going to be mostly...
A truly mind-boggling job posting for an assistant to a hedge fund manager in Connecticut. He/she apparently wants to outsource the whole parenting thing:A managing partner of a rapidly expanding $4 billion hedge fund (a multi-strategy credit opportunity fund that...
Impressive numbers from Research in Motion tonight -- it came in at the high end of earnings and subscribers range -- but the factoid that caught me was this one:[RIMM's] Pearl apparently did its job, [Chairman Jim Balsillie] added. Consumers...
News is out this morning that the seventh and final book in the Harry Potter series of door-stoppers is to be called "Harry Potters and the Deathly Hallows". It is a good time to look back at one aspect of...
Why isn't corporate banking a sellers' market? Greenwich Associates asks (and answers) that question in a new report, one that springs from the following factoid:A handful of large banks are each named as lead bank or co-lead bank by 30%...
The National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) isn't happy with Morgan Stanley's excuse -- 9/11 ate my emails -- in some arbitration cases:NASD announced today that it has charged Morgan Stanley DW, Inc. with routinely failing to provide emails to...
There are some fascinating death-related factoids in a new release from Statistics Canada. Life expectancy in Canada has surpassed 80 years for the first time ever.The male-female life expectancy gap continues to shrink, with it having almost halved in the...
As a very frequent traveler, this story is simultaneously appalling and unsurprising:A woman going through security at Los Angeles International Airport put her month-old grandson into a plastic bin intended for carry-on items and slid it into an X-ray machine.The...
Yet another company has obtained a mischievous and wrong-headed software patent. This time the subject is realtime text communications, and you can find the patent here, and the press release here.Lest you think that's somehow not important, the patent arguably...
Nick Carr has done an entertainingly ad hoc segmentation of the search industry based on the most popular searches of 2006:... I think I can suggest the following market segmentation: Google users are dweebs. Yahoo users are horndogs. And AOL...
Investor Peter Thiel -- a Facebook board member -- thinks that Facebook is worth considerably more than the $1-billion offered by Yahoo:Thiel, 39, says the site's college-aged users make it worth $8 billion or more, as much as Viacom Inc.'s...
There is a Reuters piece pointing out that some private equity firms are quietly struggling with financial backers who are more or less tapped out in terms of commitments to the burgeoning asset class. A combination of a 23% dollar...
A new book on our oil addiction ("Lives Per Gallon")is getting some decent press, including this interview over at Wired. In it the author retells this anecdote:Consumer choice has been reduced by companies including General Motors, Standard Oil (which later...
2,800 –3,200 gallons of water are needed to make a single eight inch [semiconductor] wafer. Source: John Quealey, Adams Harkness...
There is a useful piece in the current San Francisco magazine describing the rise of index funds. Its hook is the Google IPO, and the company's attempts to indoctrinate Googlers in the perils of active fund management, mutual funds, and...
My friends at activist fund Relational Investors here in San Diego are taking on a very big fish indeed: Bob Nardelli of Home Depot. They have announced a significant position in the firm's stock, and are agitating for overdue changes...
I've been reading some fascinating proceedings from the 8th Australasian Conference on Mathematics and Computers in Sport. (Don't ask why.) I have learned some fascinating stuff, including:The average heart rate for lawn bowlers is 57; the peak heart rate is...
Fairly remarkable, even if not entirely unexpected given its troubles in the Chinese market, eBay has apparently decided to exit China directly and re-enter via a partner:Ebay Inc. plans to pull back from the fast-growing Chinese market by shutting down...
I have been expecting a profusion of these NextBerry-ish things, so my main reaction to the following news is, "What took you so long"? Nevertheless, there will be plenty more of these very soon -- and not just aimed at...
The Isilon IPO's performance last Friday has bankers and VCs buzzing. Best opening performance of a tech IPO since the bubble, billion-dollar market cap, 77% first-day gain, etc. etc. This will bring more heat to the IPO market in 2007...
Is there anything more simultaneously amusing and sad than Apple nutters in full froth about an impending Apple product release? Yes-yes, Apple is apparently set to release some information on their iPhone, and that's great. The world desperately needs more...
The current year is now a lock to surpass 2005's IPO traffic. The data shows that in 2005 there were 235 U.S. IPOs that raised $40 billion. As of last Friday the 2006 figures were 227 IPOs and $43.7-billion. With...
The WSJ has a piece (one badly missing a useful chart) today making the bearish case for Google earnings in 2007 based on the declining oomph being delivered by interest income as year-over-year comparables become tougher.Q4 '05: 7xQ4 '06: 1.68xThat...
I'm deliriously bearish on the supposed new YouTube competitor being put together by a consortium of media companies. Even if they do manage to agree to the darn thing, the odds that they can a) get a material foothold online,...
Physicist Richard Feynman once said that if all knowledge about physics was about to expire the one sentence he would tell the future is that "Everything is made of atoms". What one sentence would you tell the future about your...
Sorry folks, was editing my most recent post this morning with a very beta new editor and blew it up. If anyone has a copy, feel free to send it and I'll repost.[Update: Now fixed. Thanks all.]...
Josh Quittner is wrong in his Time magazine hymn to all thing Web 2.0. Far from being different from the prior dot-com boom, this boom is achingly similar in many ways, with the main difference being that it is cheaper...
The wolf will live with the lamb,and the leopard will lie down with the goat.The calf, the young lion, and the fatling will be together,and a child will lead them.-- Isaiah 11:6There is a good Matt Richtel piece in the...
Time just named "you" its Person of the Year for 2006. Yes, it's an incredible cop-out in a year when wasted multitudes died in Iraq, in a year containing newsmakers like Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Korea's Jim Jong-Il, and even...
Bob Metcalfe's speech on cleantech -- enertech, as he calls it -- from the Massachusetts Energy Summit is a great read. It's full of typically Metcalfe-ian quotable quotes which I won't spoil -- just read it....
I've been pushing realtime relentlessly here, but I haven't made the connection to mobile as often as I should have. Let me be clear: Most of the more interesting realtime apps going forward will bring realtime's immediacy to mobile. I...
I like this quote from Bob Metcalfe on the evils of collegiality:Please excuse any lack of collegiality on my part. Collegiality is not high on my priority list. After decades of fighting the status quo, I am wary of collegiality....
It's not often a $100m-plus hedge fund melts down, but gets next to nada coverage. This one admittedly happened a couple of years ago now, but all the best stuff has been in the subsequent reports from the court-appointed receiver,...
For lawyers out there considering using Google's new patent search tool you should know that there is considerable results filtering going on. See the following comparison from Bill Slawski wherein he searched for "internet" as the U.S. PTO site and...
The World Bank has out a lengthy new global economic outlook report filled with things to fret about in 2007. Here are just a few of 'em:An oil-sector supply shock could disrupt growthA disorderly unwinding of global imbalances remains possibleA...
You have to give KP partners credit, especially John Doerr: They never see a Next Big Thing that isn't waaay bigger than the Last Big Thing. Some cases in point:The Internet:John Doerr (1997-2000): "The Internet is the largest legal creation...
I posted recently on Amazon's bestsellers' list and implications for takeup of Microsoft's Zune. I've now heard from the folks at Compete who have some interesting data as well. See the following figure, and the post here:...
The SEC has just brought in a new rule that is a kind of full-employment act for activist hedge funds. The regulator has decreed that proxy solicitations can now happen quickly, cheaply, and electronically, which will mean, almost certainly, significant...
Good discussion at Bloomberg about Harvard's endowment asset shift under a new manager from bonds to buyout funds. More broadly, it's also a good luck at how moving assets around in a $28-billion fund is like navigating a supertanker....
My friend Dorrian at Mozes got visited yesterday by MC Hammer. Too funny....
Sad news: Actor Peter Boyle is dead. While most people today know him from the show "Everyone Loves Raymond" (which I haven't seen, pop culture troglodyte that I am), I remember him most fondly from his wonderful work in the...
Fascinating factoid: Numbers of hours required to produce one on-screen frame in two decade-apart animated Pixar flicks: 1995 (Toy Story): 2 hours2005 (Cars): 15 hoursThe kicker, of course, is that there has been at least a 300x improvement in computer...
Hey, when did Google launch Google Patents? Just noticed it tonight, and it's very nice. Being the vain fellow that I am, I immediately, of course, searched for myself, with predictably unusual results. Too bad you can't straightforwardly subscribe to...
I was on CNBC tonight making the bullish case for Yahoo:Yahoo needs to grow earnings faster than Google to regain investor interestIt can do that by cutting costs, growing audience, acquisitions or improving monetization (or some combination of all four)It...
It's hard not to read into the following bit of news that Microsoft's Zune music player is struggling:To tout its Zune, Microsoft launched a marketing campaign on par with that for the original Xbox. But now that the music player...
A list of recent books (partially via NDE) of possible interest to entrepreneurs and investors. To be upfront, the only ones on the list that I have read are the first two -- Schramm's and Fisher's, which are both excellent...
Google has announced Gooptions, an experiment in making a market in non-executive Google employees' vested stock options. The upshot: This will make it easier for Google to internally account for option costs (via a market vs. Black-Scholes), while potentially creating...
Some folks are arguing to me via email that the real upshot of all this private equity activity is that we are under IPO-ed. In other words, has the combination of failed dot-coms, plus private equity buyouts, plus Sarbanes-Oxley, left...
With technology publisher Cnet losing senior people, flat-lining on traffic, and generally feeling adrift, here is the Cnet understatement of the day. It comes from Scott Kessler over at S&P:"We think this evidences and exacerbates continuing fundamentals, corporate governance and...
The new Google Finance is out. Here are some of the new features.Overall it's nice, with some useful improvements -- like auto suggest, better market summaries, and so on -- but I'm still not seeing anything that will make a...
With news tonight that Silver Lake and Texas Pacific Group have teamed up to purchase Sabre, that means all three major airline reservation networks -- Sabre, Travelport, and Worldspan -- are owned by private equity firms. We have, in other...
Tim and Fred are wrong about the impending death of pre-roll advertisements. While the blogger intelligentsia and media-hip sorts may think the things are doomed, they're dead wrong that most consumers won't watch 'em. Recall: People used to boo ads...
As I have written here many times, we are in the middle of a a largely unremarked IPO resurgence, and 2007 will be the best tech IPO market since the bubble burst. You can really see the IPO market kicking...
The following is from a CQ interview with the incoming Democrat chair of the House Intelligence Committee:Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?"Al Qaeda, they have both," Reyes said. "You’re talking about predominately?""Sure," I said, not knowing what...
I'm hearing that a new iteration on Google Finance will come out today or tomorrow. Sure, many of you will be saying, "Whoa, Google Finance? I thought that had been canceled", but you're thinking of Google Answers. Different service, same...
Funny piece in the current Inc outlining some of the trials and tribulations that my friends Stewart and Caterina of Flickr fame experienced in launching that now Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site. Read the whole thing, but highlights are the multiple near-death...
There are some harrowing stats on so-called negative amortization (or "pay option") mortgages -- loans where your principal increases every period -- in today's L.A. Times.New negative amortization mortgages in California:2003 -- 8 of every 1,0002005 -- 1 in 52006...
Funny article in the SJ Merc about VCs turned entrepreneurs newly discovering that a) startups are hard work, and b) many VCs are clueless assholes. Nothing like being whacked in the head by reality to learn things that the rest...
There are some bad headlines being repeated today, all basically saying that VC funding is back to dotcom levels. Wrong. It's not even close, with something like $32-billion set to go in this year, versus $51.2-billion at the peak of...
Oye, I can see how Wordie might eat a word-lover's life.As the site's description says, it's "like Flickr, but without the photos". Try it, and unleash your inner wordsmith -- or at least your amanuensis's inner wordsmith. Addictive stuff....
Tom Perkins, yes that Perkins, has a new tell-all book coming out about. Among other things, like his HP boardrom adventure, it is apparently about his life helping drive modern venture capital....
Great, great tick-tock on Bloomberg about the Amaranth meltdown. No big surprises, but lots of new detail that fleshes out how over-concentrated bets, young and inexperienced traders, indecisive executives, and an over-large fund conspired to cause the biggest hedge fund...
The WSJ has a piece today reporting that Fox, NBC, et al., are busily discussion a YouTube-a-like they would jointly create. This is one of those only-in-a-VPs-boardroom ideas, the sort of thing that aspiring young MBA Veeps dream up (and...
Realtime locations of current Webex conferences. Nifty.[via Brad]...
Speaking as the father of young children, as well as a frequent backcrountry winter hiker, I am deeply saddened that the search for CNET editor James Kim has concluded with finding him dead. While finding his wife and two children...
There is something magnificently nifty and creepy about this article on removing tourists from your photos: Every notable landmark seems to have one thing in common: visitors, and lots of them. But if you want that postcard shot or that...
More investors are joining me in the broader conclusion that Pfizer's recent failed Phase II drug trial is another reminded that drug discovery isn't just hard, it's broken. At a recent conference, Highland Capital's Bob Higgins argued, like me, that...
The real upshot of the recent rise in image spam is that spammers have so many spamming bots out there that they have been able to economically dump the CPC (cost per click) model of advertising for the CPM model...
Just for fun, I've been trying to keep track of all the wish list sites out there that people have mentioned to me this year (not counting wish lists at Amazon et al.). A partial list so far:MetawishlistKaboodleGifttagging.comWishlistrTheThingsIWantWishRadarInterestingly, I'm not...
Portfolio managers are creatures, in large part, of their times. It's worth considering, therefore, that today's typical 40-year-old U.S. portfolio manager was ...... 31 years old in 1997 during the Asian financial crisis... 24 years old in 1991 when the...
Yahoo has a typical of its prolix (1,540 words!) and over-capitalized kind ("Yahoo! Re-Aligns Organization to More Effectively Focus on Key Customer Segments and Capture Future Growth Opportunities") press release out tonight making a big deal tonight about a reorganization,...
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria. - Ghostbusters (1984)Well, the entrepreneurial end is apparently nigh. Jason Calacanis is joining venture firm Sequoia Capital. Sure, he's an "EIA" (no, not Energy Information Administration, but Entrepreneur in Action),...
There is a sure-fire unpleasant article in the January 2007 issue of Consumer Reports on a rapid recent rise in bacterially-infected chickens. According to the magazine, which just conducted the largest ever study of the subject, 83 percent of chickens...
An interesting MIT interview with GM CEO Rick Wagoner:...
There has been lots discussion lately about petrodollars and the effect on markets, some of which showed up in a recent Barron's roundtable with Peter Thiel, the chief proponent of the bearish take on petrodollars' distorting market impact. For folks...
I see that word is out of Brian Mulloy and Dmitry Dimov's new service, Swivel. Brian tipped it to me recently, and, as I told him, I like the idea of a "YouTube for data" immensely. This site is nothing...
Great Bloomberg profile of Peter Thiel, an early investor in PayPal, and manager of a highly successful hedge fund, Clarium Capital. Thiel has had a great run, as Bloomberg's writer points out, with more successes before the age of 40...
Mark Suster of Koral writes painfully entertainingly on the un-joy of doing VC pitches. Moral of the story: Expect nothing from VCs in pitch meeting beyond apathy, confusion, late meetings, and you won't be disappointed. Also remember, of course, that...
Many people are walking away with a wrong impression from Pfizer's torcetrapib's clinical trial being canceled over the weekend. Drugs stocks are up, because investors think they're all in play with Pfizer, facing patent expirations and an emptying product pipeline,...
A "lost" interview from 2000 with Sergey and Larry from Google is apparently soon to be available online....
It's not just you that's getting older, the rest of the world is getting younger. According to recent U.N. data (via the BBC), there are currently about one-billion 12-to-18 year-olds worldwide -- and nine out of ten of them live...
According to OECD figures (in .xls format), China R&D spending will have passed Japan in 2006, making that country second only to the U.S. worldwide in such expenditures.Remarkable stuff....
Fred over at Union Square Ventures apparently has some primo New York real estate for sale:According to the real-estate database ROLEX, a compilation of listings shared by city brokerages, a 55-foot-wide townhouse at 11 West 10th has gone to contract....
Okay, having spent waaaay too much time trying to do some online editing of a .flv video -- the one of Tim Draper dancing -- I can now say with high confidence two things:It's way harder to do that sort...
Ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was cribbing from the Tech 2.0 playbook shortly before he left his position. Here he is in a classified memo describing a new approach to dealing with the U.S.'s troubled policy in Iraq:"Announce that whatever new...
According to the Daily Telegraph, traffic measurement service Hitwise is up for sale. Deutsche Bank is advising Hitwise on the proposed sale, and the company is looking for around £180m. No word on revenues, earnings, etc., however....
The new CNBC site is up (disclaimers below) and it's a nice change: Cleaner, brighter, and with much more compelling content from that other CNBC, the television network of the same name. The biggest two questions most people will have...
I tried to stay balanced while reading this week's Supreme Court oral transcripts from Massachusetts vs. EPA, the global warming case, but it's tough. This feels like instant history, the kind of document that people will look back on in...
Some remarkable stuff in the ICI data (on mutual funds) and HFM data (on hedge funds) this week. The former pegged mutual fund assets at a little over $10-trillion, while the latter put hedge fund assets at having just broached...
Apparently hedge fund Citadel is trying to purchase data from bankrupt Plusfunds that would detail trading strategies at some of its major competitors. The latter company had run a hedge fund index underlying which were trading strategies run by various...
"You never ask board members what they think. You tell them what you're going to do."[From a Fortune interview with Seagate CEO Bill Watkins]...
Fund manager Stuart Peterson, president of San Francisco hedge fund Artemis Capital, which was a late investor in YouTube, just bought a house -- a $20m house....
