January 2007
So, Google beats analyst consensus tonight -- $3.18 in earnings versus $2.92 consensus, and similar on revenues -- and the stock falls 3%. Was it the whisper number that did it in? Good question. The result was an 8% beat,...
Google who? The Google earnings story has been pushed to the back page tonight as Michael Dell is back as CEO at computer company he founded, replacing Kevin Rollins. The Big Question: While Rollins resigned, did he jump or was...
Some company called Google puts out its quarterly earnings tonight and, like usual these days, the analyst updates are flying, as are the whisper numbers. While I am as non-fond of that silly whisper game as ever -- if you...
I'm liking Quote.com's new mobile service at http://quote.mobi. It's interesting financial data, not readily available elsewhere, at least not on smart phones....
The VC glass is half-empty, or half-full, or something:Number of venture firms shrank in 2006 (Forbes)VC Fund Size Tops $200M For Second Straight Year (VentureOne)...
A few things worth checking out:Interview with soon-to-be-public Limelight Network's new CEO Jeff Lunsford on the current bandwidth demand tsunami: "There is not enough capacity on the network to handle this avalanche of traffic." (Barron's video)LightReading's top ten telecom stock...
Yesterday on CNBC I mentioned that Vista upgrades hadn't cracked the top five on Amazon's hourly-updated software bestsellers list. Well, as was just pointed out to me in an email, the Vista Home Premium Upgrade (a marketing person should be...
Quote of the day on unindicted equity analyst Henry Blodget's book- and self-promoting nattering about Jim "Mad Money" Cramer's stock-picking goes to Dealbook:The excoriation by the former Merrill Lynch research analyst, who was sued by regulators and private investors for...
Butch Cassidy: Kid, the next time I say, "Let's go someplace like Bolivia," let's go someplace like Bolivia. - Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (1969)The current ardor for lithium-ion batteries has, given the material relative scarcity, some interesting economic...
How do you explain the existence of golfer Tiger Woods? He is the leading moneywinner on the PGA Tour, the winner of seven consecutive PGA events, the winner of his third consecutive Buick Invitational tournament, at 31 is well on...
FYI: I'm on CNBC tonight around 4:15 pm PST talking Microsoft, Google, the Vista launch, earnings, etc.[Updated] The video is here....
To my way of thinking, Cingular's five-year iPhone exclusivity -- tipped in a USA Today piece on a Verizon turn-down -- is another nail in the iPhone coffin. It's going to take broad distribution of this device to make it...
Shaun Inman's excellent Mint web stats app is out with a new release today. Lots of changes and adds, as listed here. I have to keep myself on a fairly short Mint-using leash or I disappear into stats onanism, but,...
This weekend's Barron's was an embarrassment of IPO data riches -- or at least it gave me something to do while sitting on a plane on Sunday. Either way, I got to thinking about 2006's class of initial public offerings,...
Forgot to mention to folks that I was on CNBC late Friday afternoon for a fairly raucous discussion of U.S. technology companies' China policies. (Darn Sergey Brin brought it on for saying that Google had lost some face for its...
I'm inordinately fond of examples of correlation that could be naively construed as causation. Examples abound, from hemlines and stock markets, to urban murder rates and doctors per capita. Here is another one I ran across recently, and it has...
There is a somewhat over-heated, but still interesting piece in the week Times of London about how some Ebay power-sellers use shills to mess with the bids on their own auctions. Not surprising, but still worth reading -- and certainly...
Combined, China and India added almost 142-million mobile phone subscribers in 2006 (to get to 611-million total). In case you're curious, that works out to about 4 new cell subscribers a second.[IDC via Computerworld]...
Entrepreneurs understandably hate liquidity preferences, that euphemism for a neat trick by which venture investors get paid one, twice, or even three times (or more!) before you get paid at all if you sell your company or take it public....
Here is the stat du jour, this time about German labor markets:Germany, currently the largest country in the 27-member European Union, with over 80 million inhabitants, could find itself with just 25 million people at the end of the century,...
Lots of rhetoric, discussion, and general macroeconomic fretting has to do with the supposed undervaluation of the Chinese currency, the renminbi. So, what if everyone's wrong and it isn't actually undervalued? While that strikes me as unlikely, I have to...
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekend column over at TheStreet:Tech stock are back and out-performing (N.Y. Times) Interesting look at historical P/E ratios for some well-known stocks (TickerSense) Shrinking labor force is a big post-Davos...
Nice and eye-opening comparison in today's L.A. Times of cross-national differences in mortgage markets:Canada: Mortgages rarely have rates that are fixed for more than five years. And they almost always come with "yield maintenance penalties" that guarantee lenders a minimum...
Some interesting data on the state of the tech IPO market today, versus a year ago: 01/2006 01/2007 # tech IPOs registered 13 24 $ value $1.1b $4.5b [Dealogic via Reuters]...
Speaking as the parent of young kids, such people are pint-sized petri dishes, forever incubating and then bringing home all sorts of nasty viruses and bacteria. As a result, I spend an inordinate amount of time with pediatricians and talking...
I scoffed some time ago at the supposed 50% margins iSuppli suggested for Apple's upcoming iPhone. I now have a fellow scoffer in my corner, DisplaySearch, which is saying today that the cost to Apple of the TFT display probably...
Forbes magazine has out its 2007 Midas list of VCs. Some interesting changes from the 2006 list, including the rise of Roger "Elevation Partners" McNamee and Danny "Skype" Rimer, plus a few Chinese VCs making the top twenty-five. And as...
The folks at Compete have some fascinating new data out comparing major web properties on the basis of time per site. By that measure, which is a truer media measure, Myspace is out in front, with Yahoo somewhat further back,...
Like Google's Sergey Brin, I keep wondering how much of the current China crackdown on websites is political ideology, and how much is really just typical protectionism with an ideological comb-over. My take: This issue skews much more towards protectionism...
Jeff Bussgang puts a fine point on something that goes largely unsaid at most venture firms: Many current partners have never received a carry check. (Carry is the proportion of a VC firm's investing profits that goes to the partnership....
There is an interesting quasi-revelation mid-way through a Forbes interview with Sequoia Capital partner Doug Leone. The kids at Sequoia say they didn't want to sell YouTube to Google:So what happened with YouTube?Left to our own devices, we would have...
There is a fascinating new paper out linking climate change in 2006/2007 and disease incidence. Leaving aside that predicting the weather is just about as impossible a task as disease prevention, it's still interesting stuff:...
Ebay's results are out, and they're a little better than I expected, with earnings slightly above consensus, if you grant 'em non-GAAP accounting, and what looked like, to me anyway, in-line guidance. Stock is up 10% in afterhours, which is,...
I'm liking Barron's new Brightcove-based video service (in particular the RSS feed). Mind you, I wish I could reprogram it myself by grabbing the videos I want and embed them here in my own preferred order. Nevertheless, some recent Barron's...
Yahoo yesterday and Google's results next week get all the attention from the go-go crowd, but Ebay's results tonights will be important to watch. I'm in the camp that say Ebay comes in near consensus, and then guides down somewhat....
Some fascinating data out in a new Intuit/IFTF study on small business. One factoid that caught my eye right away was on the rise of "personal businesses", the kind of one-person shows that helped drive the adoption of Ebay, Adsense,...
Couple of analyst comments on Yahoo's Q4 from my flooded inbox:RBC Capital Markets (Jordan Rohan)RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan increased price target to $31 from $30 and maintained his Outperform rating on Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) this morning. According...
Here's a quiz question for you number jockeys out there: What's the longest run in recent stock market history? In other words, what's the longest period of up (down) days without a break for any individual stock? (I got to...
Nat Torkington over at O'Reilly has an interesting tech economy quasi-contrarian indicator: the movement from contractor to full-time employee and back again:... a lot of our friends are changing jobs again... Mike Loukides pointed out that movement in salaried labour...
Sexism, sleeping with superiors, all-day porn ... someone has questions for Ask Metafilter about his David Brent 2.0-ish boss: How do I deal with the most unprofessional and innapropriate boss? I'm about 7 months into my first full time job...
Lots of people are continuing to speculate on why Sun, with $2.68-billion on its balance sheet, would want a mere $700-million convertible debt from KKR. The most obvious answer, of course, is a combination of "because it can", and "because...
Welcome, apparently, to Godless America. One of the unremarked-upon quirks of GW Bush's State of the Union speech last night was the disappearance of God from the text's closing.Other than a paraphrased quote about Dikembe Mutombo, the word "God" doesn't...
The highlight of the Yahoo conference call tonight has come early:We ... [expect] revenue per search to begin to improve in the later part of Q2. We actually see Q1 as probably the trough in revenue for search although we...
Andrew Ross Sorkin at the NY Times has a great Davos Diary from the current Swiss schmoozefest. I'm particularly fond of the following anecdote from a conversation he overheard today:A Fortune 50 chief executive -- I won’t tell you his...
Speaking of Yahoo's Panama, and large software projects in general, I just finished reading Scott Rosenberg's excellent new book Dreaming in Code. The story of the errant and overdue Chandler project, Rosenberg's new book is sobering and required reading for...
Interesting news tonight that KKR has made a senior convertible debt investment at Sun, as well as taking a board seat. Conversion price is $7.21, versus Sun's close today of $5.66....
While TellMe's 411-like service sounds swell, it doesn't seemingly do anything important that freeware tools like DirAssist don't already do on my Palm. So why all the buzz for a directory assistance product? Good question. As Josh Jaffe points out,...
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has apparently had recent visits from various federal lawyers. Not a surprise, but still worth noting. As a related aside, The Recorder is speculating changes in the U.S. attorney's office make take the Apple option back-dating...
I'm on CNBC tonight at around 4:10 pst talking about Yahoo's earnings. Check your local listings, plant your corn early, etc.[Updated] You can (at least for now) watch the video here. No, I don't know why I persist in leaning...
An idle tech question: Why can't you link to an arbitrary point within an embedded Google video? Yes, you can do it if you link directly to the video -- like this for a great new Charlie Rose interview with...
Bloomberg has up a piece on the rise of Elevation Parters, as well as its origins in a Bono pipe-dream. No real revelations, but lots of color about Roger McNamee and his investing prowess.As an aside, some guy named Paul...
Lots of conflicting forces pushing Yahoo around today, with earnings set for release after the close. A surprisingly detailed story in today's WSJ talks through early advertiser experiences with Panama ad platformConsensus is $0.13 on $1.22-billion in revenuePeople will key...
The old rule in technology stocks used to be, "Buy at AEA, Sell at H&Q". The former was in October, and the latter in May, and the two conferences used to book-end the supposed bullishness season for tech stocks.Is that...
Just as an aside, I am increasingly lost without Google Reader. It is one of those tools that has completely insinuated its way into my online life, to the point that I don't know what to do without it. And...
Prison is apparently good for your health:The nation's state prison officials reported that 12,129 inmates died while in custody from2001 through 2004, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. The deaths over this four-year period constituted an...
Mike Simonsen has a great post on Meebome as a killer micro-marketing app....
Like usual, in 2006 the S&P 500's performance beat more than half of large-cap actively-managed funds. To be precise, the index beat 69% of funds which is a little higher than its five-year 57% beatdown average. While the preceding is...
GM is apparently worried that once-again it has called a trend's peak by making a major shift in strategy. Now that it has begun embracing high-efficiency cars, gas prices are at 19-month lows:With the price of oil at its lowest...
If NYSE floor traders all get fired does that mean that CNBC will have to hire actors to mill about and shout during segments from the NYSE floor? Granted, we're nowhere near there yet, with this news being mostly about...
The ever-insightful Roger Ehrenberg of Monitor110 has a great post up about the trouble with sell-side analysts. Read the whole thing, but the upshot is that despite having their livelihood threatened in every direction, analysts continue to refuse to do...
Here is a sneak peak at some links from my Weekend Reading column over at the TheStreet/RealMoney this weekend: Oodles of unease about collateralized debt obligations (FT) U.S. oil demand dipped 1.1% in 2006 (O&G Journal) $2/gallon gas being seen...
Ivy League schools have turned in remarkable investing track records on multi-billion-dollar endowments. How have they done so well? There are a number of reasons, but my favorite is one cited in the current Economist:According to one former Harvard official,...
Jon Udell has up a great interview with the founders at Dabble DB. Lots of insights into Dabble DB, dynamic languages, and flexible web databases.[obDisclaimer: I'm on the board at Dabble DB.]...
iSuppli's iPhone (oh, all these darn "i"s) teardown estimate -- with its 50% margins -- is getting lots of play. And while it's interesting, people really do need to read to the end. With the Apple iPhone not expected to...
Gosh, higher prices do change people's behavior:Mild winter weather has something to do with it. So does heavy selling by financial funds. But a largely overlooked factor in the recent plunge in oil prices may portend an end to the...
It must almost be Google four-quarter earnings release day, because the numbers are flying about again via email. Consensus for the upcoming release is $2.90, but there is some disagreement on the consensus issue, with Yahoo Finance at $2.90, the...
So, Consumer Reports is recalling its recent car seat impact study. My question: Given that the lab Consumer Reports used apparently wrongly conducted the side impact tests at 70 mph, not the federally required 38 mph, how in the world...
The exodus continues at Intel Capital. One of their most senior people, Scott Darling, is leaving the firm. He has joined Seattle-based Frazier Technology Ventures as a general partner. Congrats Scott....
While I'm generally skeptical of attempts to harness people into social networks for the purpose of picking stocks -- it reminds me of the adage that two rocks lashed together still don't fly -- I like what my friend James...
Anything written by psychologist Daniel Kahneman is usually worth reading, and his essay in the current issue of the journal Foreign Policy is no exception:Modern psychology suggests that policymakers come to the debate predisposed to believe their hawkish advisors more...
Eric Savitz at Barron's has the best overview of Apple's earnings results and outlook. The shorter version: Fantastic quarter, but weaker than expected outlook.See here and here....
Apple's earnings are out tonight, and the whisper numbers on iPod sales are flying about. So, let's play the home game: How many iPods will Apple announce it sold in its just-completed first quarter of 2007? For those of you...
The IEEE is on a social search search for an upcoming issue of its respected Computing journal. It wants articles and papers on social search, pace the following description:This issue of IC will examine search and analysis of social media...
Foreclosures were up 35% year-over-year in the U.S. in December, and here are the top five states for foreclosures:Colorado (1 in 376 households)Nevada (1 in 392)Georgia (1 in 480)Massachusetts (1 in 541)Texas (1 in 567)At the other end of the...
It's quarterly earnings season, and if you're of a mind to play with stocks in that nutty period, you could do worse than scan Ticker Sense's chart of the most volatile stocks on the date of earnings releases. SanDisk has...
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the...
Funny but thought-provoking discussion on NPR's On the Media about Apple's ability to cloud reporters' minds and turn them into unpaid Apple flacks. The case in recent point, of course, is the over-the-top front-page treatment for the iPhone:BOB GARFIELD: You...
Mark Cuban and I have something in common, other than our fondness for rants. Rants about suits!Exactly what purpose does a suit serve ? Why in the world are so many people required to wear a suit to work ?...
The ticker headline on 39% declining earnings aside, Intel posted solid numbers tonight. Revenues and earnings were ahead of expectations, if only slightly. Perhaps more importantly, inventories are down, and Intel is guiding revenues to the high end of the...
The Weather Channel and BusinessWeek are putting together a new regular segment called The BusinessWeek Business Barometer wherein they will talk about latest news on how weather is impacting the business world. The new weather porn starts on January 23rd,...
Will someone please explain to me why Netflix's announcement today is getting so much attention? The company announces its existing customers will be able to watch a short list of movies, for a severely limited number of hours, and it...
Having apparently just completed a cost-cutting report on Time-Warner's publications, apparently the high-paid kids at McKinsey are moving onto the Wall Street Journal.[via WWD]...
Here is some fascinating data on the top ticker searches at major search engines. While EBAY leads the way in terms of raw ticker searches, AAPL is the stock ticker leader in terms of click-through. Maybe I should write about...
Some great technology-related writing collected in free e-book form from the past year.[via ResourceShelf]...
While the current resurgence of bird flu in Indonesia and elsewhere is largely seasonal and somewhat to be expected, the statistics are still harrowing. Here is the latest data from Indonesia:Cases: 79Deaths: 61...
This back-to-back interviewing on Thursday night of Stephen Colbert (who plays a kinda Bill O'Reilly) by Bill O'Reilly on his show, followed by Bill O'Reilly (who is really Bill O'Reilly) being interviewed by Stephen Colbert on his show, is truly...
Jon Udell makes a great point and crystallizes something that has bugged me for some time:Once in a blue moon I find myself sitting in a new employee orientation. Today, as on other occasions, I was struck by how hard...
I've been playing a little with Confabb (a database of conferences) and with Vizu (a networked survey tool). Both are good examples of how people are trying to use widgets to further monetize blog traffic, in these cases by putting...
The current climate-change driven acceleration in tidewater glacier melt in Greenland is another example of why calling anything "impossible" in complex systems is usually a bad idea:The abrupt acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise. Tidewater...
A new report from Screen Digest puts a nice point on the puzzle faced by companies trying to run ads alongside videos on YouTube, et al. In essence, there is lots of ad money out there, but it's taking its...
Is Microsoft search going to zero? Okay, okay, not zero precisely, but some even more vanishingly small number than the 10.5% search share it sports in the latest ComScore data:...
Why is Google pushing penny stocks via Adsense? Granted, Google can't look at every ad on the Adsense network, but ads that flagrantly promote pump-and-dumpy penny stocks like ActiveCore (OTC:ATVE) -- a grotesquely promotional ad for which I see is...
Funniest comment on the current cost-cutting at Time-Warner magazines goes to the NY Times' Katharine Seelye:People magazine’s article this week on Britney Spears and her “new guy,†model Isaac Cohen, is five paragraphs long. It was reported and written by...
Van Jacobson tells a wonder anecdote about innovation and its critics one-third of the way into a talk of his from last summer: When Copernicus first wrote his paper on planetary motion the predictions that he gave were really crummy...
Given the freakish recent North American weather -- green Christmas in Ottawa; crop-killing frosts in Los Angeles; repeated wind storms in Vancouver -- and the growing business nervousness about global warming, WeatherBill could hardly be better timed. In effect, a...
This will come as no surprise to anyone with young kids -- or those of us trying to buy decent tickets for the upcoming (Greg-less) Wiggles west coast concert tour -- but it is still a fairly remarkable Pollstar factoid...
It seems that pet-related dot-com founders still inhabit an outer circle of hell, and they're not eager to stay there. That was what struck me in reading this piece tracking down some former dot-com daze refugees. Everyone would talk to...
The "if it happens in Vegas" meme is still remarkably strong, as well as having spawned infinite variations. Check this search to see....
Funny piece in AdAge about why so many ad agencies (driven by their clients) have raced to do viral marketing campaigns, almost all of which suck. As the piece points out, most everything sucks, of course, so it should be...
It's possible that Apple's iPhone contains as many as a half-dozen ARM cores. The logic goes like this:So how many core processors from ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England) does [iPhone have]? It's probably one ARM in the Samsung video processor....
I've always found OPEC's real (as opposed to theoretical) power in oil markets fascinating. The following is a typical case in recent point:OPEC had announced a cut of 1.2 million b/d in October, and another 500,000 b/d production cut is...
Here is my favorite weather-related financial factoid in some time: Hurricane-caused financial damages rise with the eighth power of maximum wind speed. Fascinating.[via NBER]...
Some "top ten" data on the share of adjustable-rate mortgages in different U.S. jurisdictions. Scary stuff.1. Nevada, 43%2. California, 40%3. District of Columbia, 35%4. Arizona, 33%5. Florida, 33%6. Colorado, 33%7. Illinois, 28%8. Washington, 27%9. Maryland, 26%10. Virginia, 26%Source: Mortgage Bankers...
This argument, while mostly typical legal hair-splitting, is interesting. Could Cisco be on shakier than expected legal ground over its iPhone tradermark?...
This Alan Abelson quote last weekend of Merrill Lynch's Richard Bernstein got my attention:Rich [Berstein] asserts that the investor who concentratedon the 50 stocks in the S&P 500 that are followed by the fewestWall Streets analysts wound up with a...
Interesting metadata out from Autotrader on the most searched-for vehicles in 2006. It is a mix of the aspirational -- Ford Mustang and BMW in #1 and #3 -- and the practical, which fits appealingly with my preconceptions.1. Ford Mustang2....
Savvy comment by Phil Pearlman on why we're so fond of bubble-spotting these days. Like the old joke about economists and recessions, we have spotted seven of the last two or so....
News tonight that Google, the NYSE, and the SEC are close to an agreement whereby companies (like Google) will be able to provide free realtime quotes to the rest of us. Final numbers aren't clear yet, but it looks like...
Given the stock market run-up that some iPod suppliers have had, there is understandable ardor to do a tear down and uncover the parts suppliers for Apple's new iPhone. Trouble is, of course, there aren't actually any iPhone's kicking around...
I'm on CNBC's On the Money program tonight talking iPhone and Steve Jobs. Should be around 4:45pm PST, me-thinks....
The growth in Chinese stock markets -- and the Chinese economy in general -- continues to be fairly staggering:China's stock market topped $1 trillion for the first time and the yuan rose past the Hong Kong dollar, reflecting an economy...
For those who haven't seen it, and are still wondering why so many people are down on Cingular as the sole iPhone wireless provider, read the recent Consumer Reports article:The 20-city Ratings ... also show the major carriers that generally...
One of the more bullish signs I have seen in some time for technology and Internet stocks is this: Ryan Jacob's formerly high-flying Jacob Internet fund is flying again, having turned in an annualized 23% return over the last five...
The full text of Cisco's iPhone suit against Apple is here. The following is a fascinating excerpt showing the kinds of entertaining Spy vs. Spy skulduggery to which Apple resorted in trying to obtain usage of Cisco's iPhone trademark (after...
Cisco has made some reasonably sober-minded comments on the blogstorm concerning its suit against Apple over the name "iPhone". There is clearly fault enough to go around here, with Apple acting precipitously, and Cisco underestimating Apple's self-confidence. (The former company...
Well, you had to know this lawsuit was coming:Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) today announced that it has filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against Apple, Inc., seeking to prevent Apple from infringing upon...
According to BusinessWeek, I'm "trenchant". Thanks guys....
One of the more interesting things to watch when the market moves a number of stocks over a perceived bit of big news -- like yesterday's announcement of the Apple iPhone -- is what the market does the next day....
In the midst of all the hosannas for Apple's new iPhone -- and there is definitely lots to like about it, among the most important being the first significant advancement in mobile browsing in a decade -- here are the...
According to just-released data from the NCDC, 2006 wasn't the third-warmest year in U.S. history, as expected. Instead it was the warmest year since such records have been kept:And then you can look at related data by area:...
Here is a measure of the immediate geek-culture ubiquity of the iPhone. Not even an hour had passed from the San Francisco launch and I was grabbing a bite at McCarron airport here in Las Vegas on the way home...
Cisco -- the owner of the trademark "iPhone" -- definitely got in the best quote today concerning Apple's newly launched phone of the same name:Given Apple's numerous requests for permission to use Cisco's iPhonetrademark over the past several years and...
News this morning of the Apple mobile phone is going to mess with the mobile market. Among other things, it is worth watching how mobile competitors' stocks perform on the news: The gist of the Apple phone: It's a large-screen...
I had a nice visit with the folks at Electric~Spin here at CES in Las Vegas yesterday. They have a nifty golf simulator, which is fun in itself. What was particularly interesting, however, is that they showed off a very...
While I'm very interested in how Apple is planning to mess with the mobile phone market, I find the whole geek/media personality fixation with Steve Jobs' speech today at MacWorld irritating. I thought I'd run a quick Google Trends to...
I'm hearing more and more positive things about Yahoo's Panama advertising tools, including this from analyst Mark Mahaney at Citi yesterday:Our conclusion is thatYahoo!’s new front-end tools represent a material enhancement from Yahoo!’s prior search offering. Further, we believe these...
This video is definitely not for the squeamish or the politically correct, but I'll give its creator credit for coming up with an unusual way of getting the gestalt of one Wall Street's stock picks....
Yahoo Go -- the company's new mobile search, etc. portal thingie unveiled just now at CES -- looks nice, especially (speaking for myself) the Flickr integration, but two things:It doesn't work on Treos. That puts me out of loop right...
Whoa, I take every bad thing I ever said about Las Vegas -- okay, a couple of bad things ... okay, virtually nothing. Nevertheless, the free broadband connection here at the Venetian rocks. Zero latency, no packet loss, highly responsive...
Agree or disagree with Gloom, Doom & Boom report publisher Marc Faber, but he is fun to listen to, and does make entertainingly big market calls. Today on Bloomberg television he said the following:"In the next few months, we could...
One of the more entertaining aspect of technology-enabled rural living is that all sorts of people move to the country to be away from cities and closer to such things as farms, treed landscapes, and so on -- but then...
Interesting sounding Yi-Tan this morning, but I won't be able to make it given Vegas apparently bans both WiFi and daylight:Here's the deal: If we can't sort the wheat from the chaff, the chaff wins. If so, the Net becomes...
Here are some places to go for CES news this week, in increasing order of flow:Paidcontent (tagged CES 2007)Engadget (tagged CES)PR Newswire (custom feed)Businesswire (custom feed)Google news (keywords "vegas" and "ces")...
I'm assuming the following 42-minute video of a bunch of bloggers lunching with Bill Gates at CES is intended to be shared. If it's not supposed to be, hopefully Mssr Scoble will let me know.To be honest, I haven't made...
Here is a sneak peek at just a few of the links in my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet.com today:GM is set to announce a new effort to build an electric vehicle (but it requires a battery that...
Everything I know about business I learned from M*A*S*H's Colonel Flagg:"I've trained myself not to laugh or smile. I watched a hundred hours of the Three Stooges; every time I felt like smiling or laughing, I jabbed myself in the...
A Gartner analyst picks up on something I've seen saying for some time:Isn’t [Windows Vista] already done? Well, in a word, no. In past postings, we talked about the importance of Microsoft Update (MU) to Vista’s launch. The reality is...
My Yahoo pick (what John K. calls my "Dogs of the Internet" stock strategy) is going gangbusters today. Yahoo's up nicely, and has already gained 8.3% this year....
Great, great Bloomberg piece out describing how Barclay's Global Investors (BGI) has used Ph.D.s and technology to reshape the hedge fund business. BGI is one of the most powerful forces in money management today. It's a den of finance Ph.D.s,...
For we weather buffs only: Weatherbug now has some nifty historical weather data. I'm still looking for a good source of live global data, but this is still fun....
A blast from the prediction past: Technology market predictions from year-end 1994. Reassuring that there was no sign of Duke Nukem on the list though....
As a former computer sales guy (many moons ago with Digital Equipment Corporation), I was fascinated by this piece by a former Apple sales exec on the art and science of managing Steve Jobs. I am particularly fond of his...
Venture guy Jack Biddle on the impending Google collapse:1. The web 2.0 advertising model collapses when people realize that Google is every bit as smart as they are cracked up to be...and don't have a nickel of EXCESS margin left...
CES-related newswires are here and here. Following everything faster and with less hassle than going to Sin City....
I'm briefly in out of the big CES electronics conference in Las Vegas next week. I think this will be one of the least compelling shows in some time, with more hyperbole and less content than usual -- if that's...
Okay, a language usage aside: Is it "key tenets", or "key tenants"? I've always thought the latter was wrong, stemming from people's mishearing of "key tenets", but I increasingly see the latter used. I still think it's wrong -- what...
The re-arrived Adam over at TheStreet has a good overview of next week's big J.P. Morgan biotech conference in San Francisco. This is the grand-daddy of the sector, and Adam knows his stuff. [Update] A few people have asked, so...
Business news is newly hot in 2006/2007. Consider that last year CNBC was the only cable news network that grew its audience significantly, with, according to MediaWeek, its prime time audience increasing by 32 percent. At the same time, in...
Feedburner has now enabled the free site stats service obtained via its Blogbeat acquisition. It's nice, and I will use it, as well as continuing to use the excellent Mint....
Here's Randy Komisar of KP explaining that storied venture firm's non-presence in web 2.0 investing:I’m personally not doing much in Web 2.0 at the moment. I’m looking for more fundamental innovations. I’m less interested in the content and media fallout....
I'm on CNBC tonight a little after 4pm PST talking Google's stock outlook for 2007. In case people have forgotten, I've been arguing that YHOO will outperform GOOG in '07.[Update] Here is the video link....
I have people sending me online video editing/markup/manipulation/annotation tools by the bazillion these days. Here's another interesting one worth checking out: BubblePLY....
Banks are finding it ever-better to be in the cash management business. There is more concentration, more customers, and less competition:Companies participating in Greenwich Associates’ 2006 U.S. Cash Management Research Study are steadily increasing the share of their total cash...
My friends at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City have made a great catch to run their investment portfolio:Harold Bradley Joins Kauffman Foundation as Chief Investment OfficerAmerican Century Executive to Oversee $2.1 Billion Portfolio of Nation’s 28th Largest FoundationKANSAS CITY,...
A big move today in the Powershares China ETF. It's up 4%, and that comes after a strong 2006. Interestingly, of course, historically, there has been little relationship to investor ardor for China and the performance of Chinese stocks. Has...
Some useful new data is out from E&Y on global IPO activity in 2006. In a nutshell, the just-completed year was the biggest ever for global IPOs, at least by dollars generated. Granted, if you net out the $22-billion ICBC...
Investor Jim Rogers continues to get start treatment in recent articles. This one at the New York Sun is still worth reading, even if it is fairly one-sided on Rogers' ardor for all things Chinese....
With Mojiti (out of Beijing!) and Cuts, among others, we're getting closer and closer to a true online video-editing suite. It can't come a minute too soon....
Quick CNBC clip from earlier today on the outlook for venture-backed IPOs in 2007. You know my view, but it's still nice to see other people catching up ...[video removed because it wouldn't stop autoplaying in firefox. darn windows embeds.][Update]...
Hey, since I started doing more spots on CNBC tis ratings have jumped among 25-to-54 year-olds. Apparently that's my core demographic:Ratings are soaring among [CNBC's] target audience of 25- to 54-year-olds, up almost 60 percent from last year....
Some fascinating stats on the rapid growth in people learning Chinese worldwide:Confucius Institutes have grown from 25 in 2005 to 123 by the end of 2006In 2003 there were 200 primary and middle schools in the U.S. teaching Chinese, and...
Okay, you have decided to raise venture money. You have had a few meetings with a VC, presented to some partners, and you are in the pre-termsheet pipeline with a venture firm that you're interested in. Okay, but that is...
Chinese authorities are saying that the number of fatalities (and accidents) on Chinese roads is falling, despite something like an 80% year-over-year recent increase in traffic:The number of road traffic deaths in China was 89,455 in 2006, 9.4 percent fewer...
While it's dense as heck, and it makes me pine for a nice vertically-oriented monitor, I like the WSJ's new online data center....
The hot Christmas present this year wasn't Nintendo's Wii, but an electric wrench from Black & Decker:Who could have guessed one of the most sought-after gifts this holiday would be a wrench?Well, when Jeremy Wheeler, director-sales at Black & Decker...
Has hedge fund manager Dan Loeb been muzzled? If so, it's a dark beginning of the year for those of who enjoy his poison prose:But that was then. When confronted by a Men's Vogue reporter at a fund-raiser, Loeb snapped,...
With a few isolated exceptions, most of the optimism in answers to The Edge's annual question -- "What are you optimistic about?" -- make me ... pessimistic. There is too much self-serving stuff from the assembled Big Brains, with physicists...
Here are the ten largest exits for venture-backed startups in 2006. The most interesting thing to me is that four of the ten largest are from pharma/life sciences. I may be wrong on this, but I'm reasonably sure it is...
Peter Brimelow has some amusing comments on the uranium-loving, grouchy author of the well-performing The Dines Letter, which writer Brimelow has picked as the investment letter of the year for 2006. Dines is probably the most arrogant, egotistical, aggressive and...
A pose l found congenial in those days — fairly common, l hope, among pre–adults — was that of somber glee at any idea of mass destruction or decline. -- Thomas Pynchon, Introduction to "Slow Learner" (1984)While I plead guilty...
Global art prices grew 27% in 2006. That is an incredible figure, especially when you consider how quickly they have grown in preceding years (2005: 10.4%, 2004: 19%). Art prices in the US rose this year by an average of...
From Dave Barry's year-end review:[May]In Houston, former Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling are convicted of fraud by a federal jury, which apparently is not persuaded by the defense's claim that Skilling and Lay could not have been responsible...
Some 10 per cent of television will be soon be watched via the internet rather than traditional broadcasts, according to the BBC.Ashley Highfield, who is overseeing development of iPlayer, the BBC's video-on-demand service, believes that the medium will take off...
Don't know how I didn't see this before, but the leveraged sell-out blog is funny stuff -- on i-banking, no less....
Nothing like a business where you owe a customer money, and they only intermittently collect:...
There are some eclectic and interesting new papers up at the National Bureau of Economic Research:An Economic History of Fertility in the U.S.: 1826-1960Coping with Disaster: The Impact of Hurricanes on International Financial Flows, 1970-2002Entrepreneurial Learning, the IPO Decision, and...
While Thomas Pynchon's new novel Against the Day is attracting wildly differing reviews, Michael Wood in the current London Review of Books comes closest to my feeling for Pynchon's math-filled, Python-esque, infinitely digressive, and lovely creation:Much of this book seems...
