March 2007
BobZ sent me a link to this fun data-dumpster-diving paper showing how CEOs buying big houses -- greater than 10,000 sf -- is a bad sign for future shareholder returns.We study real estate purchases by major company CEOs, compiling a...
The short-run elasticity of oil demand -- the relationship between price and amount used -- has changed significantly in the last thirty years. Fascinating.In this paper, we compare the price and income elasticities of gasoline demand in two periods of...
While many are making much of the (planned) historically corn acreage to be planted this year, and the connection to ethanol, there is an underlying storm that is at least as interesting, if not more. It has to do with...
The current NEJM has a good piece on the death of the blockbuster drug. The threefold argument:It is ever-rarer for one drug to be the only one in its class. The average new drug in the 1970s enjoyed 10.2-years of...
A good list of Vinod Khosla's clean-tech companies:1) Cellulosic - Mascoma, Celunol, Range Fuels, 1 stealth startup 2) Future Fuels - LS9, Gevo, Amyris Biotechnologies, Coskata Energy 3) Efficiency - Transonic Combustion, GroupIV Semiconductor, 1 stealth startup 4) Homes -...
Further to my edge data thesis, I argued last night on CNBC that the DVD was dying. And the whole blu-ray / HD-DVD thing? Two dog packs fighting over a decomposing bone.The nut of the argument? The usual: People are...
This tussle between Dealbreak and Solengo is great stuff. Having obtained access to marketing materials for the Amaranth spawn, they are rightly having a nice time with it. Kudos, guys....
I'm having a bit of a travel service fixation today, partly because of playing with Tripsync and partly because I'm looking for a Dopplr invite. Can anyone oblige with the latter?[Update] I'm in, so thanks for all the invites folks....
A $2-billion acquisition of Doubleclick by Microsoft would be big news, and a sign that the company has finally figured out NIH (Not Invented Here) is a path to irrelevancy in the face of Google's ad dominance. More later --...
Everyone is gabbing about a leaked, confidential Waggener-Edstrom briefing memo prepared for a recent Wired magazine profile of Microsoft. Spending as much time around the media industry as I do, I know this stuff goes on, and there is nothing...
Great data on the expanding art bubble in the latest Artprice report. We're within 5% of the prior global art price peak set in 1990, and 34% above the 1990 peak in the U.S. [via Artprice]...
I should mention that I was on CNBC yesterday talking iPhone and CTIA. While there are oodles of risks, and I still think Apple announced the gadget too soon, I'm becoming irritatingly (at least to me) positive about the damn...
Mean to mention it yesterday, but wireless networking company Aruba Networks' IPO did well yesterday, up 23% to the close. My IPO resurgence hypothesis that I started talking up last fall now seems more or less a lock.So, anyone still...
I'm interested in issues around white noise, continuous partial attention, serendipitous discovery and the like. For example, many well-known digerati at ETech are fond of settling into busy conference sessions, only to immediately open their laptop and work away, meanwhile...
Tribeca Advisors has coined a nice expression for the usual active investing bumpf in the business press, like "Five Mutual Funds to Buy Now!". They call that sort of thing "investment porn", and even have a little treatise on the...
A new study says that 29% of all Americans (down from 34% last year) have no Internet access and no intent to subscribe. The number one claimed reason? There's not much interesting on the Net. I'm no techno-utopian, and I'll...
Fascinating Bloomberg story on the impact of the subprime mortgage market meltdown on Irvine, California. Not far north of La Jolla, Irvine was, until recently, the closest thing out there to the Silicon Valley of subprime. It was where many...
DFJ's Tim Draper on trains and venture capital:Q: What is your advice for a startup looking for venture capital funding?A: Run your company. The money can help accelerate it but don't wait for the funding to get started. The best...
A guilty financial confession: I am tied to the Enron meltdown. Click here to find out how I pop up in internal Enron emails just before the meltdown.Whew, I said it. I felt I should "out" myself before someone else...
On my ETech panel yesterday I argued that data centers have a Pontiac Laurentian problem. While new generations of semiconductors are becoming somewhat better about power consumption, which is a big deal given upward-spiraling power demands in the data center,...
According to some new research, the U.S. mobile musicphone market is en fuego:While the United States lags these markets, with only 17 percent, or 33 million, of mobile subscribers owning a musicphone, it has shown impressive growth in the past...
Some quick and gentle tips for conference presenters at events like ETech:Be passionate, or at least fake itSmuggle in at least three wildly surprising factoidsNever say "unpack", unless you're talking about boxes or luggageNever say "discourse" -- no exceptionsI'm sure...
According to a new NEJM study, fireman are more likely to die from a heart attack running up the stairs to a fire, than from the fire itself.Firefighting is known to be a dangerous occupation. What is less appreciated is...
Say you want to be a biotech VC but are blessed with merely chutzpah and a B. Com. What do you do? I'll give you the one, all-purpose question guaranteed to provoke a discussion and distract people from discovering your...
The Official Tech Cliche Question du Jour:Do you have a way of tying that into Twitter?I'm childishly fond of asking it to people in utterly unrelated business, like, say, an electronics manufacturer....
Two interesting iPhone factoids:At a keynote CTIA speech today AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, whose Cingular is iPhone's exclusive carrier, held one of the devices for the first timeStephenson said in his speech that one million people have registered with Cingular...
According to a release late today, Google is expanding its repertoire of SMS-based search services to include realtime flight information:Simply text your flight number to 466453 ('GOOGLE' on most mobile devices), and the status information will be sent back to...
Microsoft released nominally surprising Vista numbers late today. The company, whose Vista has been widely panned, is saying that one month sales of Vista has been 20-million, which is roughly what the company sold in two months of its predecessor,...
Two great books worth reading that came to mind during the Janeway/Bloom Wall Street panel here at ETech, only one of which was mentioned on stage:Why Smart Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them. Great, readable book on...
Am sitting in a discussion between Peter Bloom, ex- of Goldman and now of General Atlantic, and Bill Janeway ex- of Warburg Pincus. While they're fine folks, it is remarkable to me how many people fixate on looking at the...
You know, I keep hearing about this "Twitter" thing. I saw it on Fox News just now -- picture below from the hotel lobby -- maybe it will be big. Does anyone know if you can buy shares?Photo credit: David...
Good teardown analysis of the new Apple iTV at Andandtech. Andrew over at Nyquist Capital has a nice meta-analysis of the teardown as well. Main takeaway: Nvidia and Intel are winners....
Ah, I finally understand why Microsoft is losing search share, despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars: It uses hamsters for search. Check the following Microsoft search job posting, which I assume is not a joke, even if it sounds...
As media opportunities continue to expand and bifurcate, the temptations for media slut CEOs grow commensurately. A new and cautionary paper shows one effect, that CEOs who win awards and are featured in the media for their success change their...
A simple-minded question: Why do I need a separate settop box for every HDTV in my house? Why can't I share a virtualized tuner elsewhere in the house, one that then streams data -- network capacity aside -- over wired/wireless...
I have a tech grammar question: When you use a Sling box to move content around a house, do you say it was "slinged", "slung", or even "slang" perhaps. I'm fond of the last construction, but I'd like some quasi-definitive...
Biz media is newly resurgent, with CNBC ratings up, Fox to add a business channel later this year, and Conde Nast launching a business magazine called Portfolio in April. Of course, cynics will simply say that all this just marks...
Venture guy Stewart Alsop, an ex- InfoWorld editor, earlier today called the print publication's impending demise "anti-climactic" because, shades of Nick Carr, "computers don't matter anymore":InfoWorld was fun because computers did matter. Personal computers mattered in the eighties; every week...
Speciation and innovation are running amok in financial markets, given cheap compute power and cheaper data. Three financial sites new to me were in the weekend Barron's: InsiderScore: Insider trading dataETFDigest: ETF news, signals and commentarySIFMA digest: Good daily digest...
This week's Emarketer and Comscore reports drive home Microsoft's continuing fall from online grace:...
Here is a sneak peek at some of the links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet/RealMoney:Subprime troubles now snaring people with better credit (Bloomberg) Real estate market troubles have been limited to the regions with the least...
Merrill Lynch is cracking down on unauthorized digital distribution of analyst research. The sell-side has been getting a bad rap for some time, first that sell-side research was no good. So, analyst work has gotten better, but now a) it's...
What gets into people at Motley Fool sometimes? In a missive this week a writer there imagined a fanciful world where a) investment banks all have venture capital "departments", and b) where said groups actually make money. Even more bizarre,...
Yale economist Bob Shiller says in the weekend issue of Barron's that he's still looking for 20-30% housing price declines over the next 5-10 years -- including in untouchable cities like San Francisco and New York (and I'll include Vancouver):......
My friend Andy Kessler recently played journalist and dropped by for a visit with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, with the result in the weekend Wall Street Journal. The most interesting revelation comes about mid-way through when Mark tells Andy about...
Good comment from Roger sparked by a BusinessWeek piece claiming that private equity (and hedge funds) has discovered the joy of biotech investing. Granted, it's mostly biotechs with cash flows so far, but Roger is on the right track in...
As fast as Apple's new TV product has hit the stores, the kidz have figured out how to make it support more video standards than Apple deigned to provide. There goes the iTunes-only upgrade model....
Linear accelerometers in phones will be great for traders at hedge funds. When they screw up a trade and throw the handset across the office, it will make an appropriate sound, like a bomb falling. Whhhhooooooo-crash!Remember how excited you were...
There is a pretty ballsy/nutty quote from an analyst in a Venturewire story today about Sequoia's Mike Moritz's resignation from the Google board:Moritz's departure "is not sufficient," said Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry, who is among those saying Moritz's...
I've been saying for some time on CNBC appearances, and here on this site, that Limelight's IPO is coming, and it's going to be an interesting one. The S-1 has now been filed, so let's have a look.Quick background first:...
Forrester's Josh Bernoff posits in a post the following:Face it, every YouTuber's real dream is to be on TV.You think so? I'm not convinced, but maybe I'm being naive....
Okay, last post on NewTube. Got one more thing to get off my mind before I drop this darn subject. Advertising.In a nutshell, I don't buy the arguments people make about advertisers' fondness for NewTube. On CNBC tonight the reporting...
After I went off air from my CNBC spot today talking about NewTube -- the News Corp & NBC YouTube-alike -- I came up with another reason why I think the service is no real threat to YouTube. (It may...
In the press release announcing he will not stand for re-election to Google's board of directors, Sequoia Capital's Mike Moritz makes this statement:Larry and Sergey's originality and the remarkable accomplishments of Eric and the Google management have generated substantial returns...
The Blackstone S-1 filing is out, and it's gigantic -- 200 pages plus exhibits -- and entertaining. There is no way to get to everything in it in a finite amount of time, and others will mine it for weeks...
I'm on CNBC tonight a little after 4pm, as well as on NPR's Marketplace program today....
As many readers will know, I've been wandering around recently delivering a heretical presentation called "When Angels Rule the World" on VC 2.0 and the joys of angel investing. Some more evidence came yesterday, with news that New York-based Eyeblaster...
Jim "Mad Money" Cramer was right. No, not about saying that, but about the impact of the business press's constant confusion of non-bias with perma-bearishness. Here is Cramer talking the latter subject on Imus this morning:The [Wall Street] Journal is...
Borders' decision to end its distribution deal with Amazon is probably bad for both parties. Estimates vary, but analyst Mark Mahaney at Citigroup thinks that Borders accounts for 2-3% of Amazon sales, which is not gigantic, but is clearly a...
If you had to hypothesize a playbook for how life would go, post-GooTube (i.e., after Google bought YouTube), it would go something like this:Google tries, with some limited success, to negotiate distribution/rev-sharing deals with major media companies.At least one major...
I'm a big fan of all things to do with the creative process, so the following unsurprisingly struck my fancy. It is from a fascinating BBC documentary on the origins of the original BBC version of The Office. In this...
If you're coming to San Diego for the ETech conference, and you're here early, you could always watch high school do nifty stuff with robots. The San Diego Regional FIRST Robotics Competition is this Friday and Saturday at the ipayOne...
Motorola is getting set to give Apple a nice mobile-market birthday present: It is supposedly buying Palm for $2-billion, which should thoroughly distract Moto around a doomed platform. Steve should send 'em a nice note of thanks.[via CNBC]...
There is some intriguing stuff in an article over at IDD on the re-burgeoning business of Bowie bonds, or IP securitization:But the potential for IP is endless, and many insiders are talking about IP securitizations of books, photography catalogs, sports...
The NVCA has an updated study out on the economic impact of venture capital. While there is no doubt that venture capital is an important component of a healthy modern economy, the NVCA study is overly job-obsessed -- which may...
No wonder SteveJ is off playing junior rocketeer:Draper Fisher Jurvetson has raised $434.5 million toward its $600 million target for its ninth fund, according to a regulatory filing.The fundraising has been remarkably fast, the firm formed Draper Fisher Jurvetson Fund...
Google just called me spyware. There I was, innocently searching for some information at my usual frantic pace, when Google unceremoniously cut me off with the following screen. I must be the fastest Google searcher ever for it to think...
I'm on NPR's "On Point" tomorrow (read: Wednesday) at 8am PST talking YouTube, copyrights, and the changing media industry....
A must-read piece in the WSJ tonight cribs from new Nielsen Soundscan music sales data to show the accelerating decline in the music industry. Shades of what is happening in CRT televisions, sales of CDs are currently off 20 percent,...
I'll mention it again next week, but I'm at the ETech conference in San Diego from the 26-29 of March. If people want to drop me a line and say hello while there, feel free. Or, if you have something...
In addition to living forever, Ray Kurzweil has also apparently created a quantitative-investing tools company called FatKat. While there is undoubtedly a quant explosion going on in the market -- driven by cheaper processing, widespread data, and better algorithms --...
I was playing with some CalPERS venture investing data today while on planes. I decided to split the data into pre-2004 vintage non-biotech and biotech funds. The results were as follows: Multiple IRR Biotech 0.33 1.9% Non-bio 0.58 3.0%...
From the latest draft of Bill Norton's excellent paper, presented at APRICOT 2007, on how video on the Internet is the next disruption of the U.S. peering ecosystem:The kicker, however, comes at the close:Peer2Peer distribution for Internet Videos is by...
Some fun factoids on the current exchange-traded fund (ETF) euphoria:# of current ETFs: 460 (via WSJ)# of ETFs in registration: 288 (via IndexUniverse)# of ETFs launched in all of 2006: 245 (via WSJ)I wonder if I could sneak one of...
It's been a bad year for DRAM makers, with prices off 44% just since the beginning of 2007. Some other factoids on the DRAM market carnage:Average DRAM spot prices were down 6.5% last week aloneDRAM ASPs had been forecast to...
With 37signals' launch today of Highrise, its small-business CRM product, I got to thinking about 37signals and the small & medium business market for software. One of the hoariest and most accepted bits of wisdom about the SMB market is...
Ian Faith: The Boston gig has been cancelled...David St. Hubbins: What?Ian Faith: Yeah. I wouldn't worry about it though, it's not a big college town. - Spinal Tap (1984)There has been lots of chatter in the last few days about...
A surprising number of people operate under the misconception that a high percentage of licensed university technologies end up in startups. Incorrect. Matter of fact, as the latest AUTM data shows, startups make up the smallest group of university IP...
A financial filing last week from activist fund Chapman Capital contained some unusual stuff. The fund has been working to get software company investee Embarcadero Technologies to put itself up for sale, and Chapman's not happy with the lack of...
I realized tonight I haven't written anything about Web 2.0 here in ages. It took reading a Peter Rip piece just now saying that we're past the 2.0 peak to make me think of it.Not only had I not mentioned...
Here is a useful graph of how designed data center power consumption in watts/ft2 has soared in recent years. Remarkable stuff, especially when you consider power consumption's sometimes-surprising inverse relationship with Moore's Law. Increased component density, in other words, is...
Roger uses gaming company ads, now and then, to make some great points about how Nintendo, with its Wii and DS, is the new Atari -- in a good way:Nintendo has captured the imagination of families and casual gamers in...
Some interesting musings from AMAT executive about how solar will drive its business going forward: Applied's Chief Executive Mike Splinter has relentlessly promoted the company's solar message, saying the company aims to sell $500 million in solar equipment by 2010....
Fascinating stuff on the real estate meltdown in Detroit as, in an auction this past weekend, houses were cheaper than cars.Steve Izairi, 32, who re-financed his own house in suburban Dearbornand sold his restaurant to begin buying rental properties in...
A few interesting links to get caught up:Twittervision: Watch the world natter about nothing in realtimeVisible Measures get funding for video measurementPrenova gets money for measuring corporate energy consumptionWeatherbug launches nifty GIS/weather data servicesNewsgator launches Blackberry mobile and realtime data...
Anyone know anything about IdeaWicket? Interesting idea, but a little bit "boil the ocean" big....
Many in the media and analyst community are fretting about the future of Google. While worry about a supposedly "slowing" company that has still grown its share price 30% in the past year might seem misplaced, the company's stock is...
With his one-man online show now over after its deliriously creative and strange one-year run, there are oodles of good-bye notes out there today to Ze Frank -- and if you don't know who Ze is, this L.A. Times piece...
Interesting comment on technology review from Ed Martin of D-Wave (the quantum computer thingie):“Businesses aren’t too fascinated about the details of quantum mechanics, but academics have their own axes to grind. I can assure you that our VCs [venture capital...
Here is a sneak peek at some of the links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet/Realmoney: Blackstone public offering filing may come within two weeks (NY Post) New York is in a mini real estate boom --...
Something that came to me while riding the fun rock-strewn singletrack on the east side of Cowles Mountain today: Say you were picking numbers for a lottery where you had to choose six numbers, all of which could be anywhere...
Google has bought a cool data visualization tool, Gapminder, and is making it available here. Nifty stuff -- but too bad you can't enter your own data yet....
Oh, I'm glad I'm not in New York today. Here is a live shot of the freeway approach to JFK airport:...
The business word du jour:greenspam (v.): to make repeated, increasingly inflammatory attention-seeking predictions about the economy and/or stock market. Sample usage: Boy oh boy has Alan ever been greenspamming this week with all his nattering about the supposed subprime spiral....
It is disappointing that a combination of regulatory sloth and political ill-will has doomed Wal-mart's nascent attempt to enter a corner of the banking business. New Wal-mart-like entrants are coming into banking around the world, and there is no reason...
In a speech to Stanford students yesterday Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called Google insane. Okay, not everything about the search company, just its supposed desire to double headcount in a year.Fair enough, I suppose. Rampant hiring has nasty effects on...
Quiz question: Give three reasons why the following temperature anomaly figure is less worrisome than it seems:...
I've made clear here before how much I like what Expresso Fitness is doing -- interactive cardiovascular exercise, like Wii++ -- so why aren't there more people doing this sort of thing? Nintendo has shown how big this area can...
A note just now from a friend attending today's private Microsoft event in the Valley for venture capitalists:Signing up for an iptv demo.Guy in front signs up for 3:45. I do the same. Vc behind me says, " that sounds...
Jordan Rohan at RBC makes a good case this morning for upping Google estimates. His four points:Worries about Google's exposure to sub-prime mortgage company advertising are overdoneYahoo's Panama is a tide that lifts all advertising boats by improving the quality...
A Cisco exec has reminded Reuters that the WebEx buy was less than 2% of Cisco's market-cap, and that we should expect "more of these" acquisitions soon. Okay, so let's start the engines: Who else is newly in play with...
Cisco continues its redefinition today, with news the networking company is buying WebEx Communications, the online conferencing service. You can argue, I suppose, that WebEx sucks up bits, and Cisco sells bit-shunting equipment, so they're complementary, but pretty much everything...
You can now find my Wall Street Journal editorial on Viacom vs. YouTube at OpinionJournal. Or you can buy the dead tree version and wallpaper the house. Your choice, really....
Tip to reader Fred for pointing it out to me, but the current issue of The Atlantic has a highly provocative look at global warming winners and losers. In other words, how do you make money from climate change? While...
Speaking as the father of a child with peanut allergy, as well as an investor with a personal interest in the area, I track the related science and clinical work fairly closely, so I was intrigued to read the following...
If you've not been reading National Mortgage News, you should: It's realtime mortgage market carnage. For example, late today People's Choice Financial pulled a filing related to its S-1, and subprime lender Master Financial closed its wholesale division and put...
There is classic stuff in some of the early clips from jury selection at the Chicago trial of Canadian and one-time media tycoon Conrad Black. For example, jurors were asked whether they thought there was anything wrong with execs being...
The NY Times has completed an usual Ivy League two-fer, with recent profiles of Yale endowment manager David Swensen and, today, new Harvard endowment guy Mohamed El-Erian. The latter is ex- of Pimco, of course, where he was the emerging...
Speculation is rising again about Wal-mart's banking plans. While the company has long insisted it has no interesting in retail banking [ed., who does?], apparently the retail giant's lease agreements have become somewhat more specific about what it might one...
There is a survey floating around today saying that people around the world are united in their belief that global warming is a serious cause and worth fighting. I'm not going to argue that one either way -- although it...
Steve Jurvetson gets to play with all the best toys. As the following dash-shot shows, he was recently tooling around Monterey in BMW's new hydrogen-powered 7-series....
It is being alleged that Gmail storage quotas are set to increase by 0.4mb/year going forward as follows:2835 MB on April 1st 20072980 MB on April 1st 20083125 MB on April 1st 20093270 MB on April 1st 20103415 MB on...
I have an OpEd in the Wall Street Journal tomorrow on the Viacom/YouTube legal dustup. Will post a link if/when I have one....
Completely frivolous stuff, but the story of ex- Goldman Sachs i-banker Christiana Stamoulis and her $63,169 annual clothes expenditures is about as insightful into banker culture as anything more serious you'll read in Fortune. The story only became public because...
Apax Partners has decided to drop out of the venture business in favor of the "more stable" returns from buyout investments:Apax Partners Worldwide LLP Chief Executive Officer Martin Halusa plans to stop investing in startup companies to focus solely on...
I'm live on CNBC at around 4:40 PST talking Google/YouTube/Viacom.[Update] You can watch the food fight here....
Seth on why you don't want good salespeople at your startup -- you want great ones. Why? Because there is a major discontinuity between good and great:Discontinuities are interesting, because that's where you can see how a system works. In...
Great post from Josh Kopelman on startups and the "penny gap":The truth is, scaling from $5 to $50 million is not the toughest part of a new venture - it's getting your users to pay you anything at all. The...
People have all kinds of trouble figuring out venture capital performance, as I alluded to in an earlier post today. Just to help things along, here is some data (courtesy of Cambridge Associates) showing U.S. venture capital fund performance by...
An interesting snippet from the Viacom suit text. Is GooTube playing infringement favorites?YouTube’s failure to take reasonable measures to prevent infringement of Plaintiffs’ copyrights stands in stark contrast to the protection which YouTube offers for the content to which it...
How seriously should we take this newly-announced Viacom suit against Google over copyright infringement? The former alleges that $1-billion in damages over 160,000 "unauthorized" clips of Viacom programming that have, Viacom says, been viewed more than 1.5-billion times. Read the...
Don Dodge has up a post highlighting recent poor venture capital asset class performance. I responded in his comments as follows:Don -- Interesting data, and stuff I have obviously seen many times, but I'd be careful drawing many conclusions from...
Some funny/pithy quotes from Virgin founder Richard Branson at TED last weekend. For example, despite running a $25-billion company, the dyslexic and accounting-challenged Branson struggles with the whole gross/net thing:"I'm dyslexic and would have failed an IQ test. In business,...
The SEC is chock-a-block this morning with interesting litigation releases. Right after the Nortel entertainment, noted in previous post, we have action brought against three Indian cyber-fraudsters who allegedly obtained usernames and passwords for various online brokerage accounts, sold existing...
The SEC fraud complaint this morning against Nortel is fascinating forensic reading. While many of us had wondered at the repeated accounting restatements at Nortel, the SEC is saying that the root problem was that management refused to acknowledge the...
Good Science Friday this past week on biofuels. Have a listen....
My friend Om is hawking the idea of bringing west "Peak Pitch", an eastern VC thingie whereby entrepreneurs go skiing with VCs and have to make their pitch on the chair lift. The lengthier elevator pitch kinda idea may work...
Here is sneak peek at a few links from my weekly Weekend Reading column at TheStreet/RealMoney:How Sears is being recast as a hedge fund by Eddie Lampert (WashPost) Low-end cellphones are now touching record low $25 cost (EETimes) Waves in...
Any site designers out there among my readership? I'm tired of my current site design -- not to mention that it's become limiting -- and I'd like to have someone engineer a redesign. If you're interested, contact me at the...
The folks at the excellent Google Reader -- my favorite and only feedreader -- are looking for an intern this summer. Go read more here on Mihai Parparita's blog. If you read it here and get hired, however, you have...
Some highlights from this weekend's Barron's cover interview with business historian Niall Ferguson: The current period is similar to the pre-war period of 1880-1914, with "steady economic growth, low inflation, growing world trade, benign and liquid capital markets and a widespread...
I spent this afternoon today skiing at Whistler. We finished with meeting-related stuff at noon -- and I will eventually post about a cleantech panel I moderated yesterday with Tim "Weather Makers" Flannery, Vijay Vaitheeswaran from The Economist, and Larry...
My friend Andy Nelson has a good comment here on Saudi oil production that I'd like to elevate to the level of a post:I think the Saudis could still swing if they wanted to. Their downstream investments in Jubail and...
I looked today at Wikipedia's entry on blogging, and discovered two ironies. The entry on blogging -- an inherently democratic, user-centric activity -- is protected from non-administrator editingThe entry has had mention of my own 1999-launched GrokSoup product, one of...
Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson's answers on peak oil during a CNBC interview yesterday with Maria Bartiromo were instructive:Bartiromo ... asked Tillerson how Exxon could be expected to keep growing its reserves of oil and gas when $20 billion a year...
When the world falls apart some things stay in placeShe takes off the Four Tops and puts it back in its caseWhen the world falls apart some things stay in placeLevi Stubbs' tears.-- "Levi Stubbs' Tears", Billy Bragg (from Talking...
Remarkable stuff today in a Federal Reserve hearing about how home foreclosures are already leading to urban blight in some areas. I find it somewhat of a stretch, and I'm guessing that at least some of the blight predates the...
There are many fascinating aspects of the SEC's just-completed Operation Spamalot -- its investigation into stock-spamming that has resulted in 35 companies having trading suspended. Among them, is there any common link among all (or some) of these companies, beyond...
The following figure at The Oil Drum -- purportedly showing a post 1/3/05 Saudi inability to respond to oil market demand shifts -- is driving a gigantic debate at TOD about peak oil, Saudi production, and the cornucopian hypothesis:...
Roger's comments today on the dangers of an Apple corporate venture group are, as usual, smart and spot-on. And if you're daunted by the 2,126 words (!!), just skip to the conclusion. You'll still get the gist -- even if...
Guy Kawasaki has joined me in the Founders at Work fan club. He has some equally positive comments -- and some great excerpts -- on the excellent new must-read book for startup teams....
This was no time for play. This was no time for fun. This was no time for games. There was work to be done.-- The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (1958)Great Hal Varian column in this morning's Times on...
Puzzle question for people: How would you turn on the shower in the attached photo? Be sure to click through for a larger version.Hints: You don't turn the handle, and there are no buttons or switches. It flummoxed me this...
Continuing a theme I have now highlighted here a number of times, another major university endowment fund manager has left for bigger bucks elsewhere: Robert Boldt, who managed the $19 billion endowment of the University of Texas, is planning to...
Catching up and emptying my cluttered inbox and feed reader:Google had added very nice afterhours trading charts to GFinance. Now, if only it would get some decent analyst/earnings/comparative/historical data (Google Finance)Felix Dennis on how rich people took more risk to...
I've now spent some more time with the IAB data, and it's interesting stuff. There was a nice jump in Q4, as there has been in most Q4s of late. Mind you, a 15% consecutive quarter improvement is good, but...
Very impressive new data from IAB on fourth-quarter online advertising:The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) today announced that Internet advertising revenues for 2006 are estimated at $16.8 billion, a 34 percent increase over the previous revenue record of...
Venture investment in India was up a sparking 90% year-over-year, according to some new data, with IT leading the way:Venture Capital firms invested $508m across 92 deals in India during 2006, according to a study by Venture Intelligence in partnership...
Many -- okay, most -- VCs aren't paying attention during pitches. Either they've already decided they don't like the deal and haven't told you, or they are distracted by email, or something else, but the upshot is the same: They...
I feel like I'm on the road perpetually right now, and it's really tiring, not to mention getting awfully old. I've criss-crossed the country twice in the last few days, and am now on the way to moderate a panel...
Lots of media only now picking up the story I highlighted here last weekend on how Microsoft is moving much its advertising allocation online from offline. Two things jump out at me:People continue to wrong think incrementalism in ad shift,...
While I'm thinking online video, here are three sites worth visiting:ChooseandWatch: A compendium of free TV streamsFreeTube: Another free TV compendiumSmashingTelly: The best full-length archived TV programs on the webThe first two sites are interesting, as it's nice to know...
It had to happen eventually, but penny stock promotions are another sign of how much public market heat remains on YouTube-y grassroots video. This one turns out to be more timely than most, given the UUSee deal announced today:Admax Resources,...
An interesting comparison in school admission rates:Harvard: 1 in 11Manhattan preschools: 1 in 15[via Bloomberg]...
Oh, bliss: the Weather.com folks have brought out realtime interactive weather maps. You can, like, zoom in to your neighborhood and watch weather happening in realtime. Mind you, we don't really have much weather in San Diego, so I've been...
I have a new favorite phrase: "One of our flight attendants is missing!". It just came over the P.A. from an adjacent flight boarding here in Toronto. It put me immediately in mind of "One of our porters is missing!"...
Zoli is arguing that the DST debacle proves (again) that desktop software is (still) doomed. Too many points of possible failure, too difficult for real people to manage. I couldn't agree more, and I'm already there. I do very little...
As my colleagues at mountain-bike-mad Ventures West will testify, I'll never be confused with some high-flying North Shore downhiller. Lately, however, I have gotten a little better, having upped my riding again after becoming the proud owner of a Santa...
Some ruminations from Seat 5A high over Illinois ...As I have written here before, every venture capital firm of note in the U.S. is a bubble baby. Kleiner, NEA, DFJ, Sequoia, and so on all cut their teeth by getting...
I've been looking at the latest data on the top hedge funds in the U.S., which shows the dominance of Goldman, Morgan Stanley, D.E. Shaw, et al. These firms all manage more than $20-billion, and the top ten together account...
I'm running a panel on cleantech investing later this week, and I've generally been doing a fair amount of reading/talking lately on such stuff, so here are a few books I've read recently that I can recommend. I'm not saying...
Further to my earlier post about innovation and the oil industry, the folks at Popular Mechanics have up a fascinating piece on the same subject. It comes to a somewhat more worrisome conclusion about steam injection:Only about 10 percent of...
Given the outrageous number of people on airplanes and in airportdeparture lounges I see doing Sudoku these days, I have two questions:What did these people do pre-Sudoku?Whatdo they see in Sudoku anyway? I can't stand it. Sudoku takes all thethings...
Bloomberg has some puckish fun pointing out that last week's market drop did diddly to the sunny optimism of Wall Street strategists:A group of 15 strategists surveyed [post-tumble] by Bloomberg all expect U.S. stocks to advance this year, with an...
Marty Algire just drew the following December comment of his to my attention. Provocative and savvy stuff, doubly so with RIM in the news for its option-related restatement. And as a Gmail mobile user, which, for my practical purposes, has...
Great IPO market data in the following slide from a recent Carlyle Group presentation:...
There is a must-read article in the Times on Monday looking at how changes in technology -- combined with, yes, higher prices -- are leading to significant improvements in extraction rates from both new and declining oil fields. The main...
Monday is starting out badly in Asia for the major markets, so it should be an entertaining start to the week tomorrow when trading gets under way in North America. Once again, apparently, the markets want me at my post...
An interesting new paper tries to figure out causality and proportionality in looking at the various causes of wildly increasing prices in California real estate:The median price of an existing, single family detached home in the state jumped from $241,350...
Apparently investing in Chinese stocks is a little different from what many might expect:"It's driven by speculation about the government's intentions. If you want to invest in Chinese stocks, don't waste time figuring out what companies will be profitable or...
I'm heading up to Toronto from La Jolla tomorrow to give a talk at the Canadian Venture Forum. It's currently 22 C here in La Jolla, while it's apparently going to be around -20 C (or colder with windchill) when...
I have no real view one way or the other on USA Today's social revisions -- that said, all the blogger high-fiving is typically silly and overdone -- but the many plaintive comments to the editors' letter are worth reading....
I know diddly about basketball, but from an investing point of view I enjoyed a piece in the excellent new Play Magazine on lessons from betting on the NCAA tournament. Here are four key points:Ignore "seeding" trends: Once they have...
Many people forget that before becoming a VC, Sequoia's Mike Moritz was a card-carrying Time magazine journalist. Interestingly, however, while Mike didn't have an investing background, he did write about VCs for Time. Here, for example, is Mr. M. in...
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column at TheStreet/RealMoney: Don't trust the tired explanations for last week's market metldown (Bloomberg/Baum) Troubles in sub-prime mortgages are set to ripple through collateralized debt obligations (IDD)...
I have such a weakness for stories about public company conference calls than run amok. The latest example: Someone at RadioShack apparently dropped an f-bomb in the later stages of the company's February 27th earnings conference call. Interestingly, however, there...
Hedge fund guy and Nobel prize winner Myron Scholes making some observations on large information sets and market hiccups in the context of last week's stock market entertainment:In chaotic times, speculators ... doubt their models. They want to reassess. In...
Been meaning to mention it, but I'm loving the new Y Combinator newsfeed. Great, high-quality stuff that I don't find elsewhere....
The weekend WSJ has a frightening piece on how much many parents are spending to raise their children, from $800 strollers, to $2,000 SAT preps, to podcasting courses for 7-year-olds. All in all, it wouldn't be unreasonable, the writers argue,...
I don't think this screenwriter-turned-entrepreneur is serious -- he is riffing on some recent silliness in L.A. -- but his closing comment on VC fund-raising is still a little strange:As I write this, I'm sitting in a Starbucks on Sand...
Techdirt has a good deconstruction of some of the more mischievous arguments in favor of patent trolls -- litigious sorts who collect patents and use them as clubs:The success of a product usually doesn't have very much to do with...
Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris is one of my favorites. His Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is the best documentary about nerds ever; his Gates of Heaven is masterful, nominally about a pet cemetery, it turns into the most profound...
I wrote earlier this week about one ad agency seeing a positive monetization impact already from Yahoo's new Panama ad-server system. Well, the folks at Rimm-Kauffman are reporting a similar upswing among their clients:...
I'm not sure when they launched it, but the WSJ now has a Deal Journal blog alongside its other blogs, like MarketBeat and Energy Roundup. So far, I like it....
WSJ/Dow Jones has out a partial transcript of Alan Greenspan's comments last weekend that some argue helped set in motion this week's sell-off:Greenspan was asked if he shares the reported opinion of George Soros that the U.S. will have a...
At a Forbes conference in Doha, Oilman T. Boon Pickens has picked the current global oil production capacity of 85-million barrels a day as the peak of petroleum production. ... most industry and government analysts are far less pessimistic than...
I know diddly about most professional sports -- other than maybe road cycling -- but I surprised myself at how interesting I found this list of the most influential sports bloggers. Among many other things -- including some great writing...
BestBuy has allegedly been playing a web-age trick whereby it shows customers inside the story an internal BestBuy website that has different -- and higher -- prices than the external BestBuy site that brought people into the store.Based on what...
Here (using Dabble DB and a new SEC filing) is a click-able map view of all Google-owned companies and subsidiaries worldwide. It contains some surprises, in particular in the U.S., at least to me:[via Resource Shelf]obDisclaimer: I'm on the Dabble...
The work word du jour is presenteeism:presenteeism (prez.un.TEE.iz.um) n. The feeling that one must show up for work even if one is too sick, stressed, or distracted to be productive; the feeling that one needs to work extra hours even...
Another of those damn author/consultant/gadfly types has become a VC. Rich Moran has joined Venrock as a partner with its new fund:Venrock today announced Richard A. Moran, award-winning author and world-class organizational consultant, has joined its elite group of investment...
There is some impressive new comparative data out on the impact Yahoo's Panama ad system is having on one agency's clients:Search Impressions – Up an average of 5%Cost Per Click – Down an average of 6%Click Rate – Up an...
Interesting-sounding upcoming talk on energy trends & technologies:Energy Trends and Technologies for the Coming DecadesGuest Speaker: Steve Koonin, Chief Scientist, British Petroleum Date: Wednesday, March 7, 2007Time: 2:30pm (Reception); 3pm (Presentation)Location: Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall, UCSDLive Webcast: http://rpvss.ucsd.edu:8080/ramgen/broadcast/live.rm [Real media...
Fascinating piece in the WSJ today about the rise of parasitic power generators: technologies that capture electrical energy that is otherwise a wasted byproduct of everyday human activities, such as walking or exercising. While this has long happened with bike...
Long ago I was a salesperson at Digital Equipment Corporation. One of the first things that happened to me on starting in early Q1 was that the end-of-Q4 sales by my predecessor in the territory were unceremoniously debooked, which put...
Floor tickets for the upcoming The Police reunion concert in Vancouver BC are on StubHub for a whopping $1,177. Incredible....
