Here is a sneak peek at some of the links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at the TheStreet/RealMoney:

• New U.S. duties on Chinese coated paper could be first salvo in a trade war (Reuters)
  
• New arms race: China now sees itself as major power, and U.S military spending at highest levels since WWII (CSM)
  
• China's timber trade is corrupt and mismanaged (Washington Post)
  
• Multiple late-stage cancer vaccines set to launch (GEN)
  
• Thin-film solar cell market forecast to grow 40-200% compounded over next five years (EETimes)
  
• Fox's golden financial goose at American Idol may be being slayed by Howard Stern (NY Times)
  
• I-bankers saw income jump as much as 20% in 2006 (IDD)
  
• Trapped between inflation and subprime woes, the Fed is damned whatever it does with rates (Bloomberg/Gilbert)
  
• Bill Miller's hot streak is over, just as Legg Mason needs him -- and he wonders aloud if it was all luck anyway (Boston Globe)
  
• Microsoft is trying to buy its way in into search (NY Times)
  

Some things that didn't make my Weekend Reading column:

• Video-game makers are launching an assault on the music business (NY Post)
• The U.S. IPO business grew by 18% to $12b in Q1 (CBSMW)
• U.S. timberlands are increasingly sought after by private investors, with Yale leading the way (CBSMW)
• The AdultFriendFinder story (B2)
• The coming post-advertising age (AdAge)

Anyone out there actually had any success getting Dapper to work properly on creating working data feeds from real & useful sites? If so, ping me. I'm 0-for-5 or so.

The WSJ is reporting tonight that Google has joined Microsoft in the bidding war for online ad service Doubleclick. This should come as no surprise, but if, as the WSJ suggests, Microsoft allows Google to outbid it again, the result will speak volumes about how difficult it remains for Microsoft to get over itself in making any material advances in its struggling ad business.

Apple's deal with EMI for DRM-free music this morning should come as little surprise, as the discussions had been rumored for some time, and EMI has made it clear it has been considering the move. Last I looked Apple's shares were up slightly on the news, while EMI's shares are off heading into the U.K. market close.

So, beyond the obvious, that a struggling music merchandiser is looking for a miracle from Apple, which in turn stubbornly wants to prove to the EU that interoperability and DRM are the same thing -- it gets the connection in by the second press release para -- what are we to take from this? My quick read is that music vendors are getting part of what they've long wanted, which is tiered pricing on iTunes. While it's not tied to music's newness or vendor-deemed quality, the new $0.99 vs $1.29 split (for DRM-ed 128kbps vs DRM-free 256kbps encoding) is a difference. Apple, in turn, is getting a stick with which to beat other DRM-ed vendors, as well as way to fend off EU regulators who call it a closed garden.

That's all good, even if the paranoiacs are already out in force. For example, one argument is that why would Apple leave the DRM-ed version on market given the mere $0.30 difference: What right-thinking person wants DRM? One theory making the Slashdot rounds is that Apple may be planning to insert highly personalized watermarks in the 256kbps stream, thus making it much easier to pin any people sharing non-DRM-ed music. I'm doubtful of this argument, although stranger things have happened in RIAA-land, and it is a little baffling that EMI/Apple are leaving two almost equivalently-priced music versions on the market.

Compete continues to innovate speedily in the online media measurement market. In a release today the company helps crack the traffic code in combining page view models and attention-based models to come up with a synthesis of the two for traffic measurement.

While this will obviously see continuing tweaks and improvements, it's still good to see Compete breaking from the page-view pack. On a more mundane front, this is timely given the Statsaholic (nee Alexaholic) troubles, and the many legit worries about Alexa data itself.

In what can only be called stunning news, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 today that states and environmental groups can sue the EPA over its unwillingness to regulate greenhouse-gas-causing auto emissions.

Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts have written a strongly-worded dissent that goes after the decision on both a policy and a scientific basis. The essence of their argument is that if Congress had intended the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide it would have said so, and that carbon dioxide is not an "air pollutant" and therefore doesn't fall under the currently enacted EPA legislation. Further, Scalia et al., think the science is sufficiently uncertain that the EPA is justified in waiting to make a decision.

The majority disagreed, and ruled accordingly.

This is big, market-moving stuff, because while the EPA is not now required to regulate, it will be under immense pressure to do so. You will see a national standard be touted for greenhouse-gas emission, and the decision is also likely to take down the share prices of coal-reliant power plants.

Read the whole decision here. Read the auto industry response here.

There is new data today from VentureOne on venture-backed IPOs and M&A. The upswing continues:

Thirteen (13) U.S. headquartered venture-backed companies completed initial public offerings (IPOs) in the first quarter, raising $1.20 billion, double the aggregate amount raised a year ago ($599.2 million), according to the Quarterly Liquidity Report from Dow Jones VentureOne. The number of IPOs held steady with the same number completed in the first quarter of 2006, although with seven technology IPOs, it was the most completed in a single quarter for the IT category since the third quarter of 2004.

[via VentureOne]

Funny that so few Apple fan-boys are pointing out the obvious in praising Apple's DRM-free deal with EMI. The latter company is an also-ran in physical and digital music, with something like 9.4% share. Dropping DRM and thereby increasing piracy is, in those terms, another way of saying that also-ran EMI is slashing prices (to zero at the margin) to buy market share.

I'm not saying that as a consumer that's a bad thing, but let's keep everything in context.

Good comment on "meteoric rises" over at the British Medical Journal. The topic is drug trials:

The next trial carries the acronym METEOR from the initials of Measuring Effects on Intima-Media Thickness: an Evaluation of Rosuvastatin – MEOIMTAEOR. Mmmm. I have never understood the expression “meteoric rise” since meteors can only fall – as this one does, flat on its face. It was funded by AstraZeneca to increase sales of rosuvastatin by showing that it decreased carotid intima-media thickness in individuals with mild increases, but it didn’t.

[via BMJ]

Just fyi: My older son has the week off from school, and we have family with us, so I'm mostly "gone fishing" this week. In other words, while I'm around -- and did a CNBC spot yesterday (on Apple/EMI) -- blog posts may be intermittent, at best. And my email response rate has gone to pretty much zilch.

Mind you, as my friend Mathew Ingram persists in reminding me, pretty much every time I post a warning like the above, I proceed to machine-gun out twenty posts. So ... who knows.

Excitement at Kedrosky Central earlier today while I was out firing golf balls at puzzled and (until then) snoozing lizards: We had a DeLonghi toaster oven decided to toast itself, no food required.

Electrical fire, smoke billowed out, bad smells ensured. The resulting charred toaster, however, was not edible.

Frankly, the least interesting part of Google's television ad deal with Echostar is the AdWords/auction aspect. Instead, the real deal that will get major advertisers to change TV ad platforms is the quasi-realtime analytics. Advertisers, post-Googstar, will be able to know how many people watched an ad, what the drop-off in viewership was during the ad, right down to the second-by-second level.

Of course, while that's true, in the real world it's still a serious kludge. If you're anything like me, you often leave the TV on during commercials -- hey, I don't want to miss a second of Discovery Channel HD's awesome Planet Earth series -- but you rarely pay any attention to what's being flogged during the break. The result of the Echostar dish/ad deal is better data, but still highly flawed stuff that materially overstates viewership.

Can that be adjusted for statistically, however? No question.

[via AdAge]

According to a recent survey by TV Guide/AdAge, advertisers think online offers the best ROI of all media. That's fascinating, and while not necessarily surprising, more enlightened than I had expected.


[via AdAge]

I'm not sure who it was, but last week at the ETech conference I had someone sitting one row in front of me who was an absolute outlier in terms of multitasking laptop use. Simultaneously, and in the space of perhaps two minutes, he was ...

1. In the #etech IRC chat
   
2. In at least two ongoing IM conversations
3. Buying a piece of computer luggage
4. Bidding on something at Ebay
5. Adding a trip to Dopplr
6. Compiling some code
7. And listening closely enough to the on-stage speaker that he laughed aloud at all the right places

As an admittedly outlier multitasker, I felt utterly over-matched. Just the caloric consumption required to navigate, type and do context shifts as quickly as he did was daunting.

Mercer has out its annual list of the top cities worldwide, ranked by quality of life. From a quick glance, not much has changed from last year, with Canada and Switzerland leading the way, the U.S. entirely absent (which I'm suuuure is not political), and Germany somehow sneaking in higher than expected. And Ottawa is a fine place, and mostly harmless, but in the top 25 worldwide? Oye.

Online media measurement firm ComScore has filed to go public. Its S-1 is here, and it's useful reading.

Among other things, we learn that the firm has grown revenues from $23m to $66m since 2003, an impressive 42% compound growth, albeit on relatively small numbers. While the company lost money from 2003 to 2005, it magically made money, at least on a GAAP basis, in 2006, pulling $5.7m in earnings out of its hat. (On an operating cash flow basis, the company has been generating cash the entire period.)

Definitely must-read stuff if you're in the ad or online analytics businesses, which makes it widely worth reading.

"D-arm? What's that?"
    - Someone confusedly asking me about DRM after my appearance on CNBC yesterday

"[I sense] a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."
- Obi-Wan Kenobi, in Star Wars (1977)

The main problem with the entire debate about content, copy protection, media, and the future of television & movies is not that most people don't care. Snide sorts keep saying that, but it's not true -- or at least it's not been tested yet.

Why? Because the entire discussion lapses into proto-legal, inside-geekball speak so fast that the average person, walking through Chicago O'Hare airport, Swiss Army Knife roller bag in tow, just shrugs and walks on. We never explain very well why this stuff matters, why it's important, and why anyone should care -- and do it without saying "DRM" five times in incantatory fashion in first fifteen seconds.

DRM, DRM, DRM, DRM, DRM.

The result is that most times when I'm on CNBC talking about this subject I am increasingly in abject fear of an imminent disturbance in the Force, as if thousands of viewers cried out in terror and their TVs were suddenly silenced. People don't know enough about the subject to know whether it's worth caring about, and we're doing little to help with all the proto-legal geek speak.

Trouble is, this is a big subject, and an important one too. It's also one rapidly heading to the laps of politicians and lawyers, and we leave them at our peril to puzzle it out and present solutions to the rest of us. No, non, nyet.

So, make the pact with me: No jargon, no inside baseball. Let's commit to explain, each and every time, why this subject matters. And why is that? Because innovation and creation -- which are what properly designed and enforced copyright and intellectual property protections are intended to augment and support -- are too important -- economically, societally, and individually -- to be left to politicians and lawyers.


Apologies for being so uncharacteristically earnest, but I had to get the preceding off my chest.

Avi and Andrew at Dabble DB have taken an unsurprisingly idiosyncratic (and smart) approach to producing a white-label version of their data service. They sample your uploaded logo to create an appropriately colorized  version of your DDB site. Very cool.

Read more here.

obDisclaimer: I'm on the Dabble DB board, so I'm horribly conflicted, almost certainly making stuff up, and generally not be trusted. Or something.

Absolutely fascinating new paper out looking at water markets, scarcity, and trading in the U.S. West. Recall that agriculture uses 80% of the water in the West, and pays a horribly skewed price, one that encourages much waste and misallocation. Consider: One acre-foot of water used in the semi industry in California generates $980,000 in a gross state revenue, while the same acre-foot used to grow corn and alfalfa generates $60.

Here's more:

For example, in 1992, Ronald Griffin and Fred Boadu reported that the value of water used in agriculture, capitalized over 50 years, was $300 to $2,300 per acre-foot (af), (approximately 326,000 gallons) in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. In contrast, urban water values, capitalized over the same period, ranged from $6,500 to $21,000 per acre-foot. Griffin and Boadu estimated that the average re-allocation of water produced net benefits of $10,000 . As pointed out by Hanemann (2005, note 29), this also is historically true for urban areas where metering did not become common until well into the 20th century.

For more contemporary evidence, in California, an acre-foot used in the semiconductor industry produces $980,000 in gross state revenue; that same acre-foot used to grow cotton and alfalfa generates $60. Groundwater for farming near Marana, Pima County, Arizona costs approximately $27 per acre-foot, whereas the same water supplied by Tucson Water, with an increasing block rate structure, will cost customers from $479 to $3,267 per acrefoot. In recent efforts to secure water from southeastern California’s Imperial Irrigation District (IID), San Diego offered $225 per acre-foot for water that IID farmers paid $15.50.5 Even more dramatically, IID farmers paid $13.50 per acre-foot in 2001, while a development near the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park was prepared to spend $20,000 per acre-foot to deliver the same Colorado River water.

Although the costs of treating and distributing water for urban residents tend to be far greater than for rural and explain some of these price differences, the size of the differentials indicate the higher marginal benefits received by many urban versus rural users for water.

My friends Nivi and Naval have a great new site for entrepreneurs with tips for "hacking" venture capital. While the business is already in enough trouble on its own, I'm always fond of kicking irritating people when they're down -- so go get 'em Nivi and Naval.

Somewhat more seriously, their insouciant comments on deconstructing term sheets are worth it alone, especially their mention of the importance of having leverage. Because face it, no hacking is gonna happen unless you have some leverage against the VCs, no matter how much you know about the business.

[See Venture Hacks]

Whoa, TEDTalks have gone glorioski 480p! The latest talks showing from the TED conference showing up on the website are in deliriously rich, relatively speaking, 480p HD resolution, making them a gift to folks with Apple TV and the like.

For example, say what you will about Bill Clinton, but he gives great 480p. Also check out biologist  E.O. Wilson, and James Nachtwey in 480p. Lovely stuff.

The new My Maps feature at Google -- you can annotate and create your own customized maps -- is slick, and something I was recently looking for. But the niftiest aspect of the new feature is how Google has integrated personalized maps into Google search results as just another form of local content. As Brady says, that's much more interesting than mere annotation.

More broadly, is this an example of Google doing a Microsoft? Back in the bad days when Microsoft decided to beat up a would-be competitor it would release the product itself, while integrating it into the operating system (c.f, Internet Explorer). Given that the Google operating system is really search results themselves, how is releasing new features like My Maps (a service that compete directly with existing products like Platial and Frappr), and immediately adding all geo-indexed pages to local search, any different than what Microsoft used to do?

Don't get me wrong. I think it's a fine thing to make new content searchable. I just wonder if we're not seeing the early stages of how lock-in via the Google search o/s will work.

[Update] Had an email conversation with a Google representative on this subject today. The gist: Google is not giving preferential search-ability to its own KML files. Platial and other KML files will be searched and ordered algorithmically, with My Maps not ahead in the queue.

Fair enough, that seems a reasonable way to do things. I still think that immediate data availability in Google search is one of the keys to understanding how non-traffic lock-in might work in a Google search O/S, but my musings here about search-specific lock-in have turned out to be more hypothetical than Google My Maps-specific.

On the other hand, this is still an example of Microsoft competing with its own supposed ecosystem. Granted, annotated maps are a nice feature, but what's the incentive to spend money building on Google's API if you're just going to get creamed? Shades of Microsoft? You bet.

Various people have pointed me to this, Lloyd most recently, so here is a truly stomach-churning way of looking at trends in U.S. home prices: A rollercoaster ride on the data.

My friend Herb has sparked a great discussion on his blog among people assisting on tax preparation, financial planning, and generally saving the ARM-ed and dangerous from themselves. In other words, the discussion is mostly about people with moderate assets living beyond their means, financed largely on credit cards.

Riveting stuff, and here is one sample, but read the whole thing:

Here are some interesting observations from a friend of mine. He's a divorce lawyer in Orange County. He has a very large practice and only handles to the top income/asset cases in the county.

He stated to me last fall that you would not believe the number of divorces, at the high end, where they are in large financial trouble! And there are lots of them, more than ever before.

He and I have often laughed about his practice or divorces per se, as it seems to be a recession ‘contra’ indicator for the county. When he gets really busy ... it's a strong indicator that the folks in this county is not doing well.

Well we spoke last week and his follow up from last fall was - I have never seen our office this busy! We are turning away clients that we would never consider turning away any time in the past.

With its newly (quasi-)released Google Voice Local Search, Google just killed the directory assistance business in the U.S. Okay, maybe not killed outright, and the business was in decline anyway, but who in their right mind would pay for a call to directory assistance when you can call 1-800-GOOG-411 and get free service.

A few people have sent worried IMs, etc., so I'll just reconfirm what I said earlier: I'm out on spring break holidays this week with my family. No email, minimal posting here. Lots of crazy made-up games and made-up stories with my young kids though, which has been wonderful.

There is still strong growth in U.S. online consumer travel sales market, thus explaining the continuing VC and entrepreneur fascination with the category. I ran into three early-stage services in this area at ETech, one of which is about to close funding.

JasonC has a nice catch of a major Google ouch-quote by Sam Zell, who just paid billions for "a bunch of newspapers":

"If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal
their content, how profitable would Google be?" Zell said during the
question period after his speech. "Not very."

As JasonC points out, this is not only factually incorrect -- news doesn't drive Google revenues -- it shows little knowledge of how Google does make money. Doesn't augur well for the future of the business.

[WashPost via JasonC]

Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading over at TheStreet/RealMoney:

• Job losses in mortgages, real estate, and construction are up 346% year-over-year (L.A. Times)
  
• Profile of Bloomberg, the company, puts its value at $20-billion (Fortune)
  
• Google is getting hit with a brain drain as pre-IPO hires get IPO riches (SiliconValley.com)
  
• Only 12% of Windows users plan Vista upgrade (EETimes)
  
• Mobile ringtone market expected to decline in 2007 (NY Times)
  
• The adult entertainment adoption indicator favors HD-DVD over Blu-Ray in the DVD wars (Reuters)
• The boomer boom is coming, with $1-7-trillion in active retirement spending (AdAge)
  
• New and gossipy book about investment bank Lazard Freres is getting lots of attention (Amazon)
  
• Akamai's audacious comeback (Forbes)
  

European markets are worth more than U.S. markets, for the first time since WWII.

[via NY Post]

Economist, former Clinton economic advisor, and, oh yes, five-year Harvard president, Larry Summers will be speaking at the UC San Diego Economics Roundtable on April 30th. Should be fun.

More here.

Fred at Wired's Epicenter blog has a useful "found" interview from 2005 with Google's Schmidt. Funniest part: How Google's BinPage were so pissed at Oracle install costs that they nearly wrote a Quicken killer. Luckily, I think, they surmounted their own NIH problem.

For example, we had an accounting system which was an Intuit based system designed for five users, and they were using it for 20 people. It was too slow to use, so I suggested that they implement an Oracle system. It was a huge crisis. We ended up spending $100,000 for this. Larry and Sergey nearly had a cow over it (because they thought it was so expensive). A hundred thousand dollars is the cheapest Oracle system ever implemented in history I think.

How did you convince them that you needed to do this?

Well, it was actually very interesting. Larry and Sergey suggested that we should build our own, because most of the existing accounting systems weren't any good. And I said, "I'm sure that's true, but you'll never get it audited," And I thought that was a pretty clever argument. The auditors would never pass financials (generated out of software) that we built ourselves. And Larry and Sergey today will complain about the Oracle system, but they'll also say "We had to get one that was auditable."

I've always said that if the company were founded today on an empty lot, we would build the buildings brick by brick. We can't imagine someone else building our buildings, we'd have to build it ourselves. This is a build-it-yourself culture. The good news is there's no free land, and so we have to rent the buildings, rather than build them. But the culture is around building things. In that sense, by the way, it's similar to some of the companies (Intel, Dell, Sony) that I mentioned earlier.

Provocative (if somewhat purplish) essay at Cato on happiness in this age of abundance.

Lovely Gene Weingarten piece in the weekend WashPost on whether one of the nation's great musicians -- violinist Joshua Bell -- can make any money busking incognito in a Washington subway at rush hour. Read the piece for the answer, but it turns into a wonderful meditation on street corner economics, partial attention, and epistemology.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

Great stuff from Gene. It ranks up there with his classic political confab in a Britney Spears chatroom.

Gene Weingarten has an interesting anecdote in the weekend Washington Post on how violinist Joshua Bell's parents recognized his talent at the very young age of 4:

One biographically intriguing fact about Bell is that he got his first music lessons when he was a 4-year-old in Bloomington, Ind. His parents, both psychologists, decided formal training might be a good idea after they saw that their son had strung rubber bands across his dresser drawers and was replicating classical tunes by ear, moving drawers in and out to vary the pitch.

Some online sports video stats for this weekend's Masters golf tournament:

For the first three days, [CBS Sportsline's] Amen Corner Live and Masters Extra nearly four million streams with an average time spent viewing of about three hours per visit. They produced over 45 hours of streaming video.

[via PaidContent]

A Charleston, South Carolina, economist apparently was better at attracting assets than at managing them, at least according to a new SEC suit. It alleges he invested and invested and invested $134-million in investor assets until there was nothing left. He, however, claims amnesia.

An economics professor at Charleston Southern University, Parish was the go-to guy for business leaders, local reporters, and people with a little money to invest. He provided advice, analysis and — through several investment companies — a great way to get rich. Except for one problem: According to a suit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission last week, the reports that investors received were false and the money invested — about $134 million — is almost all gone. As SEC investigators attempted to question Parish, he claimed to be suffering from amnesia and checked himself into a hospital, so he has not commented on the mess, leaving investors and investigators very much in the dark.

[via InsideHigherEd]

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
     - Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), by Kurt Vonnegut

Tonight, in part because I'm getting back into things after being away for longer than expected, I'm feeling awfully Billy Pilgrim-ish. Unstuck.

Interesting looking paper on data mining mistakes -- Stupid Data Miner Tricks: Overfitting the S&P 500 -- in the current issue of the Journal of Investing. I think I read the 1997 First Quadrant monograph by David Leinweber, but I'll see if I can track down a copy of the new paper. It was in that paper, if I'm remembering correctly, that Leinweber "discovered" in mining some U.N. data the the best predictor of the S&P 500 was Bangladesh butter prices.

This article originated over ten years ago as a set of joke slides showing silly spurious correlations. ... Without taking a hatchet to the original, the advice offered remains valuable, perhaps even more so now that there is so much more data to mine. Monthly data arrives as a single data point, once a month. It's hard to avoid data mining sins if you look twice. Ticks, quotes, and executions arrive in millions per minute, and many of the practices which fail the statistical sniff tests for low frequency data can now be used responsibly. Nevertheless, fooling yourself remains an occupational hazard in quantitative trading.

In a press release today, the merry folks at NASDAQ banged the IPO drum about their first quarter initial public offerings stats:

NASDAQ(r) had its strongest first quarter performance for IPO listings since the beginning of 2000. The total number of initial public offerings (IPOs) for the quarter, 42, were the most IPOs in a first quarter on NASDAQ since the same period seven years ago. Six of the 10 largest IPOs in the U.S. by proceeds raised listed on NASDAQ in the first quarter, led by National CineMedia, Inc. -- the largest U.S. IPO year-to-date.

I've been listening tonight to a harrowing BBC program on the importance of anaesthetics' advances to modern surgery's progress. Absolutely riveting.

The suffering experienced by patients in the age before anaesthetics is almost unimaginable. In the 19th Century, a simple fracture often led to amputation carried out on a conscious patient, whose senses would be dulled only by brandy or perhaps some morphine. Many patients died of shock. The properties of gases like nitrous oxide or “laughing gas” held out hope. But it wasn't until the 1840s that there was a major breakthrough in anaesthetics, when an enterprising dentist in Boston managed to anaesthetize a patient with ether. Ether had its drawbacks and the search for a suitable alternative continued until chloroform was tried in 1847, winning many admirers.

In all the chatter these days about solar power, it was interesting to see the following wind news cross the wire:

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. (7011.TO) said Tuesday it will invest about Y4 billion to triple its wind turbine production capacity to 1,200 megawatts a year by March 2009.

The company decided to hike capacity to meet rising demand from the U.S., the Tokyo-based company said in a statement.

While tripling is substantial stuff, you still need to put that 1,200 megawatts in context. It is about two-thirds of what the city of Atlanta requires on a typical summer day.

My friends at TheStreet.com have added a plethora of RSS feeds, all managed by Dick et al., at Feedburner. Good on both!

As a semi-related aside, Dick and I hung out for a bit at ETech while I apparently made up (long story) industry acquisition news. On a subsequent panel Dave Hornik made fellow panelist Dick seem quiet, which is perhaps unsurprising, given that the ebullient and profane Hornik makes your average freeway construction project seem pastoral.

Anyone going to Milken Global conference in LA week after next? Went to one of these years ago, but wasn't planning to attend this time around. Feel free to talk me out of it.

My biggest takeaway from this funky new data-driven exploration of the Twitter universe is that the biggest topic of conversation on Twitter is ... well, Twitter.

Traders Monthly has out its list of the top 100 highest paid income hedge funds. While these sorts of lists are always prone to errors and missed managers, the numbers are still staggering, as the following subset of the top ten payees shows.

Other than shock and awe at the numbers, the main takeaway is the diversity in the strategies underlying the comp figures. We have two energy guys, two macro guys, two quants, a macro guy, two multi-strategy firms, and a would-be Buffett. In other words, there are as many strategy paths as ever to the top of the comp charts.

Name	City	Firm	Age	Est. Income
John Arnold	Houston	Centaurus Energy	33	$1.5-2B
James Simons	East Setaucket, New York	Renaissance Technologies Corp.	68	$1.5-$2B
Eddie Lampert	Greenwich, Connecticut	ESL Investments	44	$1-1.5B
T. Boone Pickens	Dallas	BP Capital	78	$1B-1.5
Stevie Cohen	Stamford, Connecticut	SAC Capital Advisors	50	$1B
Stephen Feinberg	New York	Cerberus Capital	47	$800-900M
Paul Tudor Jones	Greenwich, Connecticut	Tudor Investment Corp.	53	$700-800M
Bruce Kovner	New York	Caxton Associates	62	$700-800M
Israel Englander	New York	Millennium Management	58	$600-700M
David Shaw	New York	D.E. Shaw & Co.	55	$600-700M

Hitwise has out its March 2007 U.S. search market stats, and Google's dominance continues and grows. The company took in a whopping 64.1% of all U.S. searches in the month, up from 63.9% in February, and way up from 58.3% in the year-ago month.

At least as importantly, the Microsoft-stomping continues as well. That company's share of U.S. searches was down from 13.1% to 9.15% year-over-year, as well as declining slightly from February to March. Lest anyone think otherwise, Microsoft has virtually no choice but to launch an acquisition in this area this year, and Yahoo remains as good a guess as anyone.



Google's importance in driving industry flow grows as well, as the following Hitwise figure shows. Good thing Utah is, via its new legislation, keeping the world safe from this sort of predatory keyword-driven traffic. Nitwits.

I'm sure writer Kurt Vonnegut would find it bleakly amusing to see that I quoted him in a silly context a few days ago in a posting, only to find out tonight that he is dead at age 84. Then again, while Vonnegut might see it as  comedic, his death is a great loss.

Read the Times obituary, sure, but it's not that funny -- actually, it's not funny at all -- so go read one of his books. The early ones are best, and I am particularly fond of Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, but make your own choices and honor this funny, talented, sad and demented writer who is now gone.

Best Vonnegut quote I've come across tonight come from his son, Mark Vonnegut, defending his father in a 2005 Boston Globe editorial:

Kurt loves to be gloomy and tragic. It's a loss to him that his life has mostly gone so well. He envies Twain and Lincoln their literary talents, but also their dead children. If my sisters and I were a little more devoted, we would have drawn straws.

The Wall Street Journal is a great paper -- hey, I write OpEds there now and then, so it must be good -- but is it not getting Google press releases anymore? I ask because it has a story today talking about Google's 1-800-GOOG-411 voice-based search service, and it sorta acts like it's new news. But it isn't, because the service was launched last week as the story concedes.

What gives? How is this breaking news, and why is it getting coverage like this days after launch? I feel like I'm missing something here, especially given that it's Don Clark writing the piece and he's usually fairly savvy at this sort of thing.

Funny/harrowing story out today about two Dow Chemical people who allegedly tried to sell the company without permission. One was a former CFO and current board member, and the other was a vice president. Dow Chemical says they were "involved in unauthorized discussions with third parties about the potential acquisition of the company".

You have to love it. But where does it stop? Tellers selling Citi because they don't like the current restructuring? Maintenance people at Exxon selling the place over unhappiness with icky oil  smells? I can't wait.

More here and here.

Some useful stats on music/media markets from a new Piper Jaffray teen shopping survey:

In addition, students were asked about their buying habits of MP3 players and online music. Of those students who own a MP3 player, 82 percent indicated that they also own some form of iPod, which is up from 79 percent in fall 2006. For online music services, 89 percent of students indicated that they use iTunes, slightly down from 91 percent in fall 2006. In total, 84 percent of the students had heard of Apple's iPhone and 25 percent said they would pay $500 for the iPhone.

Vizzini: He didn't fall? Inconceivable.
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
            -- The Princess Bride (1987)

Inigo Montoya has apparently gone to Microsoft in the guise of search czar Steve Berkowitz. He told the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York this week that Microsoft will "earn" a top spot in Web search via technology and innovation.

No way. As I've said here many times, most search users wouldn't know better any more in search if it clobbered them in the head. Stuff just works, and they're happy and comfortable. Microsoft isn't going to innovate its way into a God algorithm for search.

So, either Berkowitz/Montoya is delusional, playing silly word games, or Microsoft is set to buy Yahoo.

Guess what? People apparently just rediscovered that writing software is hard, and it's even harder on embedded devices like Apple's upcoming iPhone. Nevertheless, the delay in the schedule for Apple's Leopard, announced today, is troubling on a number of fronts.

First, Leopard's delay pushes out $45-70 million in quarterly upgrade revenues, but could also push out the release of Apple's next generation of laptops, which most people figured were tied to the Leopard ship. While Wall Street didn't talk about this immediately after the news today, it could become a material problem.

Second, moving people at this late date from Leopard to iPhone doesn't augur well for the status of iPhone's software. You don't put on a crash completion program on a soon-to-ship software product (iPhone) unless you are really, really desperate. After all, adding more people to a late software project almost always makes it later.

Finally, Apple's release today is strange. It feels rushed, as if something changed and the company was worried the news was about to leak. We have a "statement" on the company's Hot News subsite, but nothing yet in the press releases. Puzzling.

More broadly, however, does this make the outlook cloudier for the iPhone? While some critics will salivate at the news, it really isn't that material overall for iPhone. Apple's move into phones and mobility is the right one, even if there are some pains at the front end. This is the first product in what will almost certainly be a rapid-fire succession of iPhones, and anyone who thought Apple, or anyone, could get it right the first time and on time hasn't been around the software industry very long.

[Update] My friend Herb Greenberg has a typically entertaining and savage take, calling the Apple release "spin", and echoing most of my above points. Where Herb and I differ, I think, is that my view is this is still early days and problems were predictable, and iPhone still has a great shot; Herb feels otherwise.

I was on CNBC late today talking iPhone, etc. My fellow guest was columnist John Dvorak, who was invited on to defend his "Apple should kill the iPhone" column, as well as to substantiate his poor battery performance claims for the device.

As you'll see, Dvorak didn't really do either. He hedged almost entirely on his previously much-cited "40-minutes of iPhone battery-life" claim, saying it could be any number from 40 minutes to 5 hours. Too bad, because he had a stronger case on that one -- iPhone can't help but have lower battery life given its large screen, etc. -- but he gave it even weaker support than he did his ill-considered argument for Apple backing out of the cell phone market.

Watch here. I'm particularly fond of the part where Dvorak goes all conspiracy-ish and suggests I'm on the Apple payroll.

I pay near zero attention to the political nattering class, but a lot of people are bringing technology into this Don Imus racism shouting match, so it's worth a comment. While some people seemingly think that the lesson here is that negativity is out and niceness is in, I disagree entirely. Negativity and shock work as well as ever, and they will get work even better in a world preoccupied with niceness.

The main lesson, captured in part by David Carr in the NY Times today, is that all media is now visible and permanent, even radio. As a media personality you can never assume anything you say will go sliding by into the ether, and eventually forgotten. Everything is being archived, everything is permanent. Your media life now has URLs -- as Don Imus just discovered when something that would have ordinarily blown over quickly got a second thru twenty-second life online.

How much worse can things get for Microsoft? After having almost certainly begun the DoubleClick bidding, thus putting the online ad company in play, Microsoft has seemingly been outbid -- again -- by Google.

Some seemingly think the price is vertigo-inducing, working out to something like 30-times DoubleClick's $100-million in 2006 ad placement revenues, or 12-times this year's forecast ad revenues of $230m or so. Yoicks! Can you justify that price based on economics? Some people will try, and that is always good fun; others will go on endlessly about the bubble-ish price. Both sides are wasting their time because the more interesting rationale is mostly elsewhere.

To borrow a phrase from Microsoft's past, this is a brazen attempt to cut off Microsoft's future air supply. The latter company is losing share in search, failing at ad placement, trying to find a new leg to growth, and generally floundering expensively in these crucial new fast-growing markets. What better way and time for bid-'em-up Brin to stick the knife in deeper every time Microsoft spots a possible life raft than for Google to buy the target acquisition company -- like DoubleClick -- out from under Microsoft.

This was, in other words, a strategic and offensive buy, not a financial one, even if you can make a financial quasi-justification for the price. Google is playing very hard ball with Microsoft, deploying brutal tactics right out of the Redmond playbook, circa 1995. Call it $2-billion for DoubleClick's revenues and customer list, plus another $1-billion for a pinched air tube to Microsoft.

As a a related aside, this buy pretty much guarantees that Yahoo will sooner rather than later be in play, perhaps in the next two quarters, and I can't wait to see what happens.

I'm at the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) meetings in Washington DC early next week. I have a couple of meetings, and am giving a short talk ("Venture Capital Myths") on Tuesday. If any readers will be around, send me a note.

Conde Nast's new biz magazine Portfolio is now live. There are way too many stories to read 'em all, which is good, I guess, considering the next issue won't be out for months.

I'll a closer look later this evening when I'm doing prep for tomorrow's TheStreet column. I promise a marginally less glib take then.

[via PaidContent]

I'm a glutton for punishment, so I generally do our taxes myself using TurboTax. It is, of course, an insanely irritating experience, only partly because of TurboTax.

Anyway, every year I am amazed at how bizarre things get, in particular the permissible California state deductions. This year, in passing, I noted such things as ride-sharing, low emission vehicles, and, of course, the newly introduced sea otter support deduction. I could really cut taxes payable, I bet, if I could somehow ride share with a sea otter in a Toyota hybrid. Oooooh!

The new CN Portfolio mag has a stupidly-named feature ("Behind the Green Doerr" -- beyond a cute title, what's the connection to the long-ago Chambers porn flick?) on KP and John Doerr's cleantech investing ambitions. Despite working semi-diligently to come up with something controversial --- oooh, taxpayers may foot the bill for some cleantech investing! -- the piece doesn't advance any story, nor shed any new insight on what KP/Doerr are doing in cleantech.

The only fun nugget was at the close, where newbie KP VC Ray Lane offers up that cleantech will almost certainly become a bubble. (And earlier in the piece Doerr sez that the dot-com bubble wasn't a bubble.) But KP, of course, will prosper he says. You go, Ray.

Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet/Realmoney:

• Nassim "Fooled by Randomness" Taleb's new book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is thought-provoking and excellent (Amazon)
  
• IEA says China oil demand for 2007 forecast to be 6.1% higher than originally expected (O&G Journal)
  
• $3/gallon at the pump seems to be the new price that changes driver consumption behavior (TWIP)
  
• The Google/DoubleClick deal price is a bargain for its strategic value, but it does have advertisers nervous about concentration of power (AdAge)
  
• Portfolio magazine first issue includes rare profile of T. Boone Pickens (Portfolio)
  
• An aging wave is creating a gold rush mentality among many pharma companies and health service providers (NY Times)
  
• San Diego home sales were down 26% year-over-year, the largest drop since 1995 (SD U-T)
  
• Low levels of market volatility continue to encourage risky behaviors (Economist)
  
• Softbank may have changed its business, but it still chews through cash like few others (Economist)
  
• Apple's iPhone is already passe (Economist)
  
• Some savvy comments on supply, China demand, and alternatives from the 8th International Oil Summit (O&G Journal)
  
• Politicians have appalling post-bubble real estate ideas, including suing mortgage-bond investors (Bloomberg)
  

"For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." -- Matthew XXV:29, KJV

The so-called Matthew Effect is well known in science. It is the idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, with eminent scientists tending to become even more eminent. It is to the point, for example, that some ethical eminent sorts, troubled by how they increasingly given credit for innovations with which they had minimal involvement, shy away from allowing their names to be added as umpteenth author on scientific papers.

The idea first appeared a well-known paper by sociologist Robert Merton, and it has gained wide currency ever since. In a slightly altered guise, the Matthew Effect pops up in a thought-provoking piece by Duncan Watts in today's NY Times magazine. The gist: He summarizes a study of his where he compared musics tastes among an otherwise similar group of students who consider popularity lists, and another group who did not. Unsurprisingly to anyone who has paid attention to the ascendancy of Digg et al., the popularity lists tended to be uncorrelated with what people without access to those lists thought were the best pieces of music.

It is, as I said, thought-provoking stuff. While social networks can amplify overlooked ideas, they can also serve as a high-speed echo chamber, where things go ricocheting around faster than at any other time in previous history, creating bonanzas for more than a few objectively undeserving blogging boffins.

Weekend financial mag Barron's uses a Web 2.0 hook this week to hang a buy recommendation on Adobe. The combination of tools, Flash, Flash Lite, Apollo, and growth in 2.0-ish interactive web properties has the publication thinking Adobe looks like a buy at these prices.

For the fiscal year that ends this November, the company is looking for revenue growth of 15%, which would mean about $2.96 billion, up from $2.6 billion in '06. Margins are expected to come in at around 37%, a major leap forward after the downturn last year that followed the Macromedia deal.

Do the math and Adobe appears to be looking for earnings of about $1.44 a share, up 17% from last year. But that estimate, as well as the higher consensus target of just under $1.50, is probably too low. Demand for the updated software should remain brisk; surveys show that more than two-thirds of those using CS2 plan to upgrade, half of those within three months. And given the strong pricing, sales could come in half-a-billion or more above Street hopes.

The upshot: Earnings could approach $1.60 this year, up about 30% from last year. That makes the high P/E ratio far more palatable. And earnings could climb to $1.80 next year.

While this is an old story to readers of this site, and I'm far less optimistic about Apollo than is Barron's, it's a general thesis I buy into.

Funny new paper out look at stock-trading habits of finance professors. Of those trading stocks at least monthly, most are using fundamental factors like P/E and market cap, as well as technical factors like momentum, to rate stocks, not the high-falutin' stuff they teach MBAs. Maybe that's because, as the paper points out, they don't have much, you know ... experience actually buying and selling stocks, beyond the basics.

... we surveyed all finance professors at accredited, four-year universities and colleges in the US to assess our profession's collective opinion on the matter. Our sample of 642 useable responses indicates that over two-thirds of the sample are passive investors, and not because they don't have the time to invest. The responses for all investors indicates that the traditional valuation techniques (specifically, the dividend-based valuation models) and the traditional asset-pricing models (namely the CAPM, APT, and Fama and French and Carhart models) are all unimportant in the decision of whether to buy or sell a specific stock.

Instead, finance professors, particularly finance professors who trade stocks at least monthly and who admit they are trying to “beat the market” with their investment dollars, believe that firm characteristics (especially, a firm's PE ratio and market capitalization), along with momentum related information (a firm's returns over the past six months and year and a firms' 52-week low and high) are most important when considering a stock sale and purchase.

We also show that finance professors have less investing experience than one might expect, especially in the areas of margin trading, short selling, and derivatives.

Here's the trouble with Portfolio magazine: Having stuffed as much circ-building marquee stuff in the first issue -- Pickens profile, Doerr piece, etc. -- it's not easy to figure how it doesn't descend into trend-of-the-month BusinessWeek mediocrity going forward. That was my conclusion after reading yet another marquee piece in the premiere issue, a profile of reclusive hedge fund manager Ken Griffin.

It is a great get, as Griffin doesn't do often this sort of thing. Trouble is, while it's personality rich -- we learn about his art collecting tastes, his French wife, etc. -- we learned next to diddly specific about his trades. Sure, he likes to overlay Shaw-style quant with Cohen-class oportunism, but that's not saying much of any import. What trades have worked lately? What trades haven't? What's really going on at Citadel with those ranks of khaki-clad MBAs staring into flat screens? I have no idea, and you won't know any more than that 2,500 words later.

Okay, there is one quasi-relevation: Citadel is contemplating an IPO, a la Fortress and Blackstone. Mind you, the author didn't get Griffin to say it, so I'm not sure if it really counts -- doubly so considering most people knew this was being considered anyway.

Okay, this is the last item from Portfolio magazine. I promise. But, if for no other reason than to say you did, you need to read Tom Wolfe's mega-entry on the hedge fund manager subculture.

The Wolfe piece -- and there's literally no getting around this -- is really, really long, 7,501 words, to be precise. If nothing else, that makes it longer than any Forbes/Fortune/BusinessWeek piece in recent memory, which has to be worth something.

Given Wolfe's fondness for euphonious onomatopoeia, the article will delight Wolfe fans by starting, "Not bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, but bama bampa barama ..." etc. But in a kind of modernist irony, the initial upload of the piece to the Portfolio site starts with an accidentally unclosed meta tag, creating "\>Not bam, bam, bam..." etc., which adds a certain web-age frisson to the frothy concoction.

Anyway, is the Wolfe piece any good? If you're looking for insights into trading strategies of the most storied hedge fund managers, run away. There is none of that here. If, however, the idea of reading about hedge funds through the prism of status and culture turns you on, then Tom's your man. He wanders about, doing the sort of subtle observation stuff he does best, and generally get an angle on these jeans-wearing sorts that you don't see elsewhere.

Mind you, a little goes a long way. If I never read another lifestyles article about hedge fund managers again, I'd be fine with that. So, let's not make this sort of Wolfe-ian thing a regular feature, okay Joanne?

You knew I was going to do this, so here you are, your moment of Microsoft Word auto-summarize Zen. Tom Wolfe on hedge fund managers in six sentences:

... hedge fund managers are possessed by a previously unheard-of status fixation. Virtually every hedge fund manager has it, but many hedge fund managers are perfect gentlemen, so well do they restrain the fixation. Paul Tudor Jones II cries out. Some huge funds operate with fewer than 20 people.

Barton Biggs, a hedge fund manager himself, writes in his book Hedgehogging that hedge fund managers tend to be screamers. We will build our own clubs! Daniel Loeb … club man at last!

That almost turns into a moving kind of haiku.

Writer Michael Lewis has a typically inverted take on the subprime mortgage meltdown. The infrequent Bloomberg columnist wonders how it is that the media portray rich people who lent money to people who didn't have the means to pay it back as crooks, while the recipients of that largesse are made to look exploited.

Moving is never pleasant or cheap, but that is the main cost to the subprime defaulter: He hands back the house, whose value has presumably plummeted, to the people who lent the money to buy it, and walks away. He rents. (Shrewdly!) In effect he bought a very cheap call option on the U.S. housing market. While he waited to see if his call option made him richer, he lived in a much nicer house than he could otherwise afford and probably wondered why rich people had become so recklessly open-
handed. His behavior was irresponsible, but the markets let him do it and so it's hard to blame him for taking a flier.

Am I the only one who wonders how a person who borrows money he can't repay, buys a house he can't afford, and then stiffs his creditors, is allowed to play the victim?

A more convincing victim, I would have thought, is the person with weak credit but strong resolve who stood to benefit from a subprime loan -- and who now can't get one because the market is scared of his shadow.

More here on some of the people playing subprime victims.

The Financial Times has a piece up on a subject I have written about here a number of times, and that has to do with the rise of trading algorithms built around news textual analysis. While this is vastly easier to explain than to actually do profitably -- and,