May 2007
Some useful factoids on the S&P index's price/earnings multiple at its peak, at its recent nadir, and today:March 2000: 32.8October 2002: 25.7May 2007: 18Of course, that is all relative stuff, so it's worth looking at the long-term historical figure. There...
Nice post from DailyTech on the democratization of technology, and what we can learn from the surprising success of the Wii game system. It is easy to forget how many people thought the wildly successful Wii was set to fail.They...
Apparently you don't have to be Alan Greenspan to spout stuff and roil world markets. I missed this story until now, but a Tulsa CBS affiliate's website contained an erroneous article about an Oklahoma refinery fire yesterday -- which immediately...
This will come as no surprise to anyone who has tried to get anything useful out of the major public tech companies' investor relations groups, but financial consultants at Greenwich have come out with a ranking of the best IR...
Catching up on a few things from my ever-crowded link box:Spammers have come up with a way to use MTurk to generate "organic" link clicks (Amazon via Greg)The calls for separating efficacy and safety testing at the FDA are being...
In case folks have the patience to watch the whole damn thing in pieces, the D folks are putting up the Gates/Jobs video in small-ish segments here. For now, you can watch Part 1 and you'll get a sense of...
I've mentioned it here before, but there is nothing quite like seeing the real thing. Yes, it's KP venture guy John Doerr's TED speech earlier this year wherein Doerr issues a cri du coeur about the environment, culminating in ......
Ailing back and all (don't ask), I'm heavily medicated and at D for the Bill Gates & Steve Jobs show live on-stage. Should be fun, assuming I don't pass out. Will update this entry throughout.7:19 PM Crowd shots of notable...
With its announcement late today of online-into-offline Google Gears -- and an offline version of Google Reader, among other things -- Google has done a bunch of important things. First, and most importantly, it has made me look sooooo smart...
Oy, Brent Schlender's anti-Apple TV piece in Fortune is hopelessly silly. Sure, Apple TV is not perfect -- matter of fact, I wouldn't buy it. But so what? As Steve said today, it's a hobby, an experiment. Apple TV is...
That's so sweet of Bill Gates. His company announced the Playtable, a pool-table-like multi-touch gesture interface, last night before his tete-a-tete with Apple's Steve Jobs tonight at D. Why so sweet? Because the main thing the oversized and unavailable, low-light...
For those of you fretting about a bubble in the Chinese stock market, here is a fun factoid to keep you awake at night: Four new trading accounts are opened in China every second.[via FT]...
This picture of a Chinese banner is making the rounds among financial sorts. It apparently translates roughly as, "Robbery is not as good as playing stocks."...
Here is another reason why John McCain will never be elected president. He seemingly seriously suggested tonight at D that Steve Ballmer would make a good hire for a cabinet post. What position? Ambassador to China. Interviewer Kara Swisher countered...
Wired's Chris Anderson interviewed YouTube's Hurley and Chen last week at the Churchill Club. Video follows:...
This week it's all conferences, all the time. After hanging briefly at D, and then running a panel at the Transforming Bio/Pharma conference tomorrow, I'm up to the Mesh conference in Toronto to moderate a panel on Thursday. Feel free...
JasonC is live-Twitter-ing from the D conference ballroom -- if/when Twitter works, of course....
Catching up on a few things in my ever-stuffed linkbox:The Huffington Post has a launched a business section (HuffPost)Another reason not to fly: someone with drug-resistant TB has been buzzing around (CDC)The rise and risks of synthetic biology (Newsweek)...
Great Jim Cramer-penned piece in the current NY magazine on ... himself. My friend Jim explains why he is such a polarizing figure, and explains why there is a market for his Mad Money show and its particular brand of...
I pop up in a new BusinessWeek photo profile on "lifestyles of the digerati". What's my favorite digital toy? RIM's Lazaradis has his digital cinema projector; Engadget's Rojas has his WiFi clock radio; and Mena Trott has her Wii. So,...
While I'm buzzing up the I-5 tomorrow to the Aviara tomorrow for some conference-created meetings, I'm not really at the D conference in Carlsbad. Feel free to buzz me, however, if any readers are there tomorrow and want to say...
You had to know this was coming. According to the Times tonight, Google's Doubleclick deal is getting some antitrust-centric FTC scrutiny. So, does it matter? I'll say No. This was inevitable, and given the spate of recent acquisitions in this...
The Fenwick & West Venture Capital Barometer for the first quarter of 2007 is out, and the average funded Valley company's valuation ticked up an impressive 75%. Whoa, that is impressive -- at least until you consider that it was...
Yeesh, the world is apparently full of self-styled bubble-prickers. Greenspan last week, Shiller this week, and now we have the Hong Kong Monetary Authority weighing in: The Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Chinese territory's de facto central bank, added its...
Okay, I'm playing with Particls, having been watching it from afar for a while. I generally like some aspects of this next-gen RSS-centric alerting-widget attention-loving thingie, but I still find it irritating and inscrutable in some ways. F'rinstance ... ......
It is the most pressing and important Warren Buffett question ever. No, not why he gets a free pass every year when he talks down stocks so that he can buy them; and no, not why he is so fond...
I love the blog at the British Medical Journal, and I have a been a subscriber for some time. Typical of its great stuff are the following two summaries from the current NEJM:The trouble with medical research is that it...
Apparently both Robert Shiller and Alan Greenspan are feeling ignored and unloved. Echoing the newly non-opaque Alan Greenspan last week, here is Yale's Shiller from a speech in Brazil today:A high degree of "irrational exuberance" among investors could lead to...
Interesting data from the EIA showing the trends in auto fuel/cost per mile since 1981. It captures changing fuel costs as well as changing auto mileage, showing that we're not yet, by that measure, at the historical price peak....
The following is from a studiedly unusual new BusinessWeek interview with Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster. As most readers of this site will know, the online classifieds listings company has built its marketing and hefty profits by cleverly pretending to not...
The NYT has a decent piece in Monday's paper about NameMedia, the well-capitalized domaining company with more than $100m behind it. It competes with iREIT and Marchex, among others.Some quick stats:1.4 million domain names60-million monthly visitorsBacked by Summit and Highland,...
So, the 3-year-old and the 5-year-old wanted to print things tonight. I sent the jobs to the printer and it jammed. I pulled the paper out, and it jammed again. And then it jammed a third time, this time with...
Having spent just enough time with the waaaay over-hyped Facebook to be dangerous, I will now offer the definitive explanation for why people use the thing. Facebook is the Microsoft Office of social apps. In other words, none of the...
A fairly remarkable "interweb as mass media" graph from the OPA that I've been thinking about lately:This is, in many ways, a parallel and more striking version of the VCR/Internet/cell phone accelerating adoption curves slide you have likely seen many...
Here is some visually compelling evidence that venture capital is in the crapper. You're apparently looking at Vinod Khosla's cell phone, and yes, that is a toilet.[via SteveJ]...
Jeff Barr files (indirectly) Part XXIV of the bear case on Google. While his post is harrowing, read the comments to really see the depths of anarchy to which at least some parts of Google have descended....
From today's WSJ, U.S. online ad spending by format. While it's starting from a small base, the fastest grower in recent years is rich media/video, which ties nicely into Google's YouTube buy:Best quote from the piece (even if I don't...
I have been following research related to Mount Sinai work on peanut anaphylaxis and food allergy herbal formula-2 (FAHF-2). Some intriguing new results in the journal Clinical & Experimental Allergy:ResultsAll sham-treated mice challenged at weeks 14 and 18 showed anaphylactic...
So, a talent agent, a publicist, and a cowgirl walk into a bar. The black-clad talent agent says "Whoa, I know everyone here. They're all on my Plaxo contact list." The leather-jacket wearing publicist says, "I know almost as many...
Four new investments-related NBER papers worth scanning/reading:Fed funds futures contracts are excellent predictors of the fed funds rate (Hamilton)Rational pessimism and rational exuberance in explaining the equity risk premium (Bansal, et al.)Markets don't care who chairs a central banks, except...
My friends at CNBC's On the Money have a hilarious post on Alan Greenspan's newfound penchant for clear speech -- at least so long as he talks down a market somewhere:You really have to wonder what's going on with Greenspan....
I'm doing my weekly Fear & Greed segment on CNBC tonight with Herb Greenberg at 4:40pst-ish. Should be fun....
Emanuel Derman relates a Fischer Black observation on trading from 1994 that is worth pondering:All opportunities have stories. When prices are funny, and we can tell a good story about why they are funny, we should take big positions. But...
Ventures West portfolio company EQO -- helmed by the estimable Bill Tam -- just launched its mobile VOIP client, complete with multi-protocol IM. So far, I'm impressed with its clean interface, thoughtful design, etc. My biggest concern is battery life,...
This should be controversial: Google announced in a filing at the close today that it has invested $3.9-million into a bioinformatics startup called 23andMe. The company's co-founder is Ann Wojcicki, Google co-founder Sergey Brin's new spouse. According to the filing,...
The Financial Times's excellent Alphaville is looking for more finance bloggers. Check here....
Interesting news. BI vendor Business Objects has bought Inxight, a maker of software for unstructured textual analysis. Cool, and further evidence, if needed, that unstructured data -- call it Web 3.0, the semantic Web, or whatever -- is already here....
Whoa, World Golf Tour rocks! This is impressive multiplayer online golf gaming, with everything done in Flash, built-in teams, realistic physics and sounds, global play, etc. It makes you rethink what's possible in pure web-based gaming.More later after I get...
There is going to be a disruption in the SoCal space/time continuum next week. I had forgotten until today that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are doing a joint appearance on-stage at next week's "D" conference here to chat with...
Tidbit from a Kara Swisher interview with Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners: During the piece (at 1:58) he points through his window to a single golf hole right outside his office built by private equity guy George Roberts of Kohberg...
Skepticism about municipal wifi is growing again, and this time it's more than just technologists and policy wonks. Now we have people inside recent roll-outs who aren't happy with the results, prices -- and I did I mention incumbent broadband...
Now that Wallstrip has been sold to CBS, the market is wide open for independently-owned, eye-pleasing sorts with offbeat takes on the business & financial news of the day. As I just told Om, I'm thinking it's time for "Omstrip":...
I'm as fond of world-weary, fin-de-siècle Gallic shrugs as the next nihilist, but I don't get this comment from my friend Mike at TechCrunch. Sure, there is lots of enthusiasm about starting all sorts of frivolous things on the web,...
Heading into a day full of meetings, so I'm pre-emptively emptying my link-box:Good cleantech learning curve data in this Morgenthaler presentations (Morgenthaler)McKinsey has a lengthy and interesting new report on increasing energy productivity (McKinsey)$50m for Manhattan condo passed hedge fund...
On a Friday CNBC appearance I opined that the advertising is the tech sector. Far from being some lonely outpost, it is the enchilada. Sure, we still do lots of other things, in tech, from selling hard-drives on outward, but...
If you haven't read either of Rory Stewart's books -- on Afghanistan and Iraq respectively -- you really should. While taking somewhat unusual perspectives on both countries, they are painfully personal narratives that communicate more of the tragedies in these...
The first quarter of 2007 was the best first quarter in seven years, so my "Return of the IPO" thesis looks ever better. Q1 IPOs by Industry 2007 2006 # IPOs Value # IPOs Value Financial services 23 5,152.6 7...
Microsoft used some interesting numbers to justify its $6-billion aQuantive purchase:Ad Age: Don't the valuations seem a bit wild in this interactive space? Joe Doran: When we look at this we're looking at the marketplace -- not only the interactive...
There is some new research out from Fair Isaac that it says shows click fraud represents 10-15% of advertisers' billed traffic. Nicely timed to make ad-network buyers sweat.Fair Isaac Corporation ... today announced preliminary results of its research study into...
The Telegraph says tonight that Yahoo is working to buy U.K.-based social network Bebo for $1-billion.Bebo has around 25m users worldwide, compared with MySpace's 100m or so registered users. Birch is rumoured to have turned down an offer from BT...
While I think Engadget is a great site, and Ryan has already stabbed himself enough in apologizing for his misstep in running as news a spoofed internal Apple email, he and others are still missing an important point on this...
Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi said on CNBC earlier today that aQantive serves up more ad impressions than soon-to-be Google's DoubleClick. I thought it was the reverse. Anyone have recent data?...
I'm on CNBC tonight at 4pm talking about, to borrow Om's felicitous phrase, the eyeball boom (i.e., Microsoft/Aquantive, etc. etc.). I'll post a link here after the show....
If the rumor is true that Google is buying Feedburner, huge congrats to my friend Dick C., as well as to Brad. Great stuff, and it couldn't happen to two better guys.And if the rumor is not true, then ......
That Seattle-based Aquantive was in play was one of the worst-kept supposed secrets in recent dealmaking history. It had been talked about for most of the year, and Google's DoubleClick deal had sealed the likelihood. What has surprised people, however,...
A great example of the representativeness heuristic at work:The more a high school student overestimates the percentage of people in the general population who smoke cigarettes, the more likely he or she will be to smoke, according to a recent...
Along with my IPO resurgence thesis, one of my favorite 2007 themes is the Return o' Telecom, or at least of some parts of that broken business. Further food for thought on that theme comes from a new iSuppli report...
Question for folks: Anyone have a favorite stock/new info widget? I use Yahoo/Konfabulator's quote widget now and then, but I don't like that prices are unconnected to recent news, and I don't like how much wasted white space there is.Some...
For all the built-in liquidity in the market for "shared" media -- music, games, television, movies, anime, etc. -- it is interesting to see that torrent providers and consumers are fairly seriously out of sync.The figure on the left below...
A somewhat puzzled aside from Variety today in an article otherwise about Google's changing video search:Google co-founder Sergey Brin appeared at Wednesday's press event in biking gear and rumpled hair.Oh, those tech company founders are sooo quirky....
It's always worth knowing when a smart investor cuts its position in a high-profile stock. The $29-billion D.E. Shaw fund has cut its Apple holdings by about one-third:D.E. Shaw & Co., a New York-based hedge fund firm, sold Apple Inc....
I did my weekly Fear/Greed segment on CNBC with Herb Greenberg late today. Topic #1 was the Engadget/iPhone affair, and the bigger picture of blog impact on financial markets. Watch here, and yes, I know it doesn't work well on...
If Rafat's right, and he seems to have it cold, Sony buying ClubPenguin -- the kids online virtual world that has grown to 4.5m users in 2 years -- is big news:Sony is in advanced talks to buy the two-year-old...
Okay, Apple's iPhone isn't delayed, contrary to Engadget's market-moving retracted story this morning. The incorrect news whacked Apple's stock, taking it down almost 3% on what now seems to been a spoofed email somehow inserted into Apple's internal email system.This...
Pardon the geek out, but Google's timeline and map views are nifty. Check 'em here.As an aside, it is entertaining that Google Labs now has competitition: Google Experimental. Where do we go from here? Google Hyper-Early? Google Will-Crash-Your-Computer? Inquiring minds...
Watch Google Searchology conf live now here....
New all-time bestsellers list of "DVD Sleepers & Keepers" from Amazon is interesting list. Shows how many fringe (to my way of thinking) products aren't in the long tail at all, and are actually top of the DVD pops. Call...
The current National Geographic has a fascinating feature on capitalism in China's boomtowns, cities like Lishui that are growing so fast that city planners have razed 108 hilltops to accomodate the runaway growth. The government motto of the Lishui Economic...
This may or may not turn out to be worth watching, but Google is doing a live webcast of its invite-only Searchology press conference tomorrow, May 16th. It will run from 9:30am-12:30pm PST, and you will be able to view...
Good stat on comparative seller remorse in private equity deals:Corporate sellers who feel like they've left money on table: 46%PE sellers who feel they've left money on table: 25%Now, the latter group may be delusional while the former is realistic,...
Many venture partnerships struggle with getting enough media attention for their partners and deals. Such is not the case with Elevation Partners, which, despite having done only three deals since 2004, has more than 1,000 print mentions to date (according...
The U.S. Federal Reserve has just released a fascinating historical document, the minutes from the first post-9/11 meeting (as well as other minutes from 2001). Read it here as Greenspan, et al., try to understand just what the economic consequences...
We're Number 1! We're number 1! 1. San Diego Median home price: $601,800 P/E: 5th highest Affordability rank: 2nd least affordable Housing price trend: -4.5%[via Forbes]...
Nice demo from NYU of looking at minimalized immigration data via a (Space Invaders-ish) visualization. Nifty stuff, even if I can't figure out who all those people are who are streaming to Russia....
Interesting idea. The new site iminlikewithyou (IILWY) is sort of like Google Image Labeler crossed with eHarmony. Participants entertain one another via an ad hoc game, and if you're good at the game then the service hooks you up for...
Whoa, flickrvision. It's a Twittervision-style solipsism stream, but for people who can't read. Also check my friends at Poly9's 3-D version of Twittervision. The horror, the horror....
Lots of link catch-up to do in energy today, with some outstanding content:Great all-energy week at Marketwatch continues, with good stuff on residential solar (Marketwatch)Worldwide solar energy production is up 24-fold measured in MW over last decade (Navigant)Depletion levels in...
Good video (at least for we wonks) from an MIT get-together about the future of nuclear power. Direct link....
I have a new front-loading LG TROMM uber washer/dryer combo that is just too waaay too much fun. Lots of flashing lights, nifty knobs, chimes, communication thingies, and cool geegaws, all juiced up with minimal water usage and less current...
A week or so ago I argued with Herb on CNBC that a little insider trading is an acceptable price for keeping insider trading payoffs down, and reducing the cost of market oversight. He disagreed, but I was still right....
Vanity Fair is publishing snippets from Ronald Reagan's presidential diaries. Here are some favorites so far:Wed. Feb. 11 Intelligence reports say he Castro is very worried about me. I'm very worried that we can't come up with something to justify...
There is a new report out from Forrester trumpeting the end of the paid video download market. Cynics like me might say that there would have to have been a market first before we could herald the end of it,...
Couple things worth reading to help empty the link box:Video of MIT symposium on emerging technlogies (MIT)The polysilicon shortage is causing non-solar semi firms to do multi-year buys, which will not end well (Marketwatch)Huge influx of Chinese capital could drive...
I have a short post over at Geekdad about my older son and I's current infatuation with the Planet Earth series on Discovery Channel HD. In particular, the last episode on the making of Planet Earth is absolutely fascinating....
I'm participating in an online bookclub this week over at TPM on Dan Gross's Pop!: Why Bubbles Are Great For The Economy. Fellow natterers include Andy Kessler, Barry Ritholtz, Dan Altman and others. As I understand it, the first posts...
I'm sure I won't be the only to be intrigued by the juxtaposition of Daimler paying Cerberus almost a billion dollars to take Chrysler off its hands today; and last Friday's announcement that Tesla Motors had raised another $45-million. The...
Some typically entertaining comments over at Daily Speculations, this time on the relationship between lob shots and trading:The primary reason the lob shot is much more difficult to master is margin of error. The ball must be struck with almost...
A recent video of Vint Cerf here in San Diego talking Google directions. I was stage left and three rows back for the first half....
My friend James at TheStreet has a good summer reading list of entrepreneurship and investing books:Founders at WorkThe Only Three Questions That CountHackers and PaintersConfessions of a Street AddictThe Dhando InvestorThe Wisdom of CrowdsGrande Expectations...
A brief personal digression. Was sitting here moments ago and the five-year-old came in to chat for a second before leaving for school. The following dialog resulted:Him: Daddy, I love you a lot.Me: Oh, that's great. Thanks for telling me.Him:...
I won't pretend to know much about car racing (and most of what I do know about oval racing of any kind comes from Hunter Thompson's "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved"), but I couldn't be happier about an...
I was on CNBC's OTM tonight for two spots. First was about Google's annual meeting, and whether the company needs another leg to drive growth. I argued no, said the other leg was there -- it's taking share, improving monetization,...
Online travel company Orbitz has filed for an IPO. It's useful reading, but these are absurdly complex financials with difficult historical comparables. I think the company did $752m in revenues in the year ended December 31 2006, losing $144m in...
Catching up with a few factoids on the incredible shrinking equity supply on major markets. The supply of stocks shrank by $604-billion in 2006, a recordIn first four months of 2007 it fell by another $300-billion, which is 1.4% or...
Couple of quick tidbits on WiMAX from the Intel Capital CEO Summit. Intel says that, with the exception of North Korea, its WiMAX wireless technology is now rolled out across all the axis of evil countries. Make of that what...
I must be mad. I'm in the process of writing two -- count 'em, two -- Greasemonkey scripts. Both are in finance, so I'll share them at some point here....
I'm on CNBC tonight around 4:20 tonight with my friend Herb Greenberg. We're talking insider trading, Richard Russell's bullish turn, and Toyota's sales....
Just for fun, I am Twitter-ing Intel's press briefing live (1:35pm PST) here....
Lots of buzz and hubbub here at the Intel CEO Summit in Carlsbad, California. We have oodles of companies doing quick pitches, the usual list of keynotes, and, I should mention, unseasonably warmhot weather. While I can't write anything overly...
In the current issue of ACM Interactions Don Norman says the next two major interface changes in technology are command lines and physicality. In the former case he's talking about interacting with search engines via command lines; in the latter...
Anyone have a good location for large images of Fortune magazine covers online? I can only find smallish ones on the Fortune site.Specifically, I want a larger version of the image at right. It's a keeper, even if only for...
Some useful updates to the mobile version of Quote.com:Watchlists of up to 10 trading symbols each A chart-interval feature for economic analysisA currency calculator for the U.S. dollar, Canadian dollar, euro, British pound, Swiss franc, Australian dollar and Japanese yen,...
Bess at DealBreaker has a typically entertaining post up on the "activist investor" home game. Identify the activist investor speaker and you'll win a ... well, copy of some Jack Welch book, but still....
Folks may notice that over to the right I now have search service Lijit running on this site. Try it and see what you think. I got many (many^100) complaints about my prior blog search, so this has to be...
Echoing Arnie Berman at Cowen, Om asks a variant of a question today for which Mark Cuban got pilloried a month or so ago:“In the past, consumers replaced their PC’s every 3 years and their televisions roughly every decade. Is...
I'm at Intel Capital's CEO Summit in Carlsbad tomorrow and Thursday. The gist: The company annually brings together execs of its myriad portfolio companies, plus Intel's division GMs. This year the venue is the La Costa Resort, 25-minutes up the...
There is lots of talk of patent reform, so news today that Amazon & IBM have settled their many suits is timely. Anti-reform sorts will use this to argue that the market and property rights allows patent owners to sort...
Here is the IP entrepreneurship quote du jour, via Lee Hood at ISB:"... for a lot of states it is far more important [for universities] to have a really good football team than it is to have a really good...
Nice factoid on the current wealth boomlet using Ferrari delivery times as the measure:Historical wait: 1 yearCurrent wait: 3 years[via WSJ]...
I'll give you five guesses how the following almost certainly happened, and the first four are wrong. The fifth, of course, likely has to do with a fine young investment banking associate who mentioned in passing the cool Dow Jones/News...
Normally when comparing things you would say "stacks up", as in "I wonder how the Hyundai Azera stacks up against its fellow land yacht competitors." Ignoring uses in financial markets, I keep running into prose containing "stocks up" when i...
Some interesting data in a new biotech report from Marks and Clerk in the U.K. Among other things, academic patent filing outpaced biotech industry filing by 51% between 2002 and 2006, and it is now to the point that only...
Great column by my friend James Altucher in yesterday's FT on one-click entrepreneurial fortunes online. The best part is how it starts, with James 'fessing up to his addiction problem, and how it kept him from make millions with Lycos:In...
Further to my earlier Richard Russell global economic boom post, some great data in a new Bloomberg piece on the changing reliance of U.S. public companies on overseas sales. Companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index get 49 percent...
One sure sign of a market top is when even uber-bears capitulate. So, with Richard Russell turning highly bullish about a world boom after refusing to buy into the market advance since 2002, is the end nigh? I think not,...
There is a piece in today's WSJ on some of the unintended consequences of startups that can all-too-readily change markets on a dime. The piece uses Peter Rip as an example, but the gist is that active VCs can wake...
I'm emptying out my linkbox with a few things other people may find worth reading:Fascinating stuff on why a .338 hitter in baseball is better than a .833 hitter. And, more importantly, why a .334 batting average is the best...
Nice to see that people other than me now and then screw up cc-lists on emails. In the latest example, HP apparently cc-ed someone external that it shouldn't have on an internal email, thus forcing it to send revised sales/earnings...
Two useful updates on Google Finance today:You can pull up historical stock prices on all stocks.You can add events on portfolio stocks (and other financial events) to your Google Calendar.Both are great features, and while the former merely adds something...
Traveling and in many meetings today, so postings will be very slow....
Many/most readers will have noticed that the way insider trading has been detected on the proposed Dow Jones/News deal is via unusual option activity. In the case of Dow Jones, there was some big buying pre-announcement of $45-ish calls that...
Jon Friedman's latest column is more than a little breathless and intermittently fan-boy-ish about Rupert Murdoch's "stunning" bid for Dow Jones, but it also contains some penetrating comments directed at my sometime hang-out at CNBC. Agree or disagree, this is...
Good stuff on surviving a meeting with a bully, albeit a very specific and well-known one: Microsoft's Bill Gates.So you’re in there presenting your product plan to billg, steveb, and mikemap. Billg typically has his eyes closed and he’s rocking...
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading at TheStreet/RealMoney:High current correlations in the hedge fund industry may not be as ominous as back in 1999 (NY Fed) Google is locating new data centers in...
There are two thought-provoking pieces in the current New Scientist. The first is on data hidden in rocks, the idea being that delicately balanced rocks in quake-prone areas are an untapped data set of the maximum strength of quakes in...
Some guy who sounded like Wolfman Jack was on CNBC late today nattering about the Microsoft/Yahoo non-deal, plus the News/DJ bid, not to mention Thomson/Reuters. Was hard to focus on the content given the gravelly voice.Who lets people who sound...
One semi-rational two-fold way to look at today's rumor du jour -- Microsoft buying Yahoo, or not ... maybe -- is a) that people want Microsoft to do something to get out of its perceived funk; and b) that everything...
Ooooh, I knew I shouldn't have told David Ascher about my Yahoo plans. Damn....
I pretty much entirely disagree with Fred Wilson's implication earlier this week that age is an obstacle to entrepreneurship. It may be an obstacle to a particular kind of entrepreneurship -- venture-backed companies where you give up equity to parental...
There is something in the media/advertising water. Having had DoubleClick and RightMedia dealt for, and Dow Jones kinda put in play, and Microsoft noshing with Yahoo on a deal, word is now that Reuters has been approached by a group,...
As much as I believe that Microsoft needs to do something major, and as much as I have predicted that it would put Yahoo in play in 2007, the idea of Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo, while in a sense...
Biz media is never more nutty and self-involved than when it gets to write about itself. Some of the overly fawning Murdoch coverage this week has put me in mind of the classic New Republic piece of a decade ago...
A few quick things to get caught up and empty my link-box:Why Murdoch should walk away from the WSJ (CNNMoney)U.K. pre-paid cell phone usage is down (J.D. Power)The eating life of a VC (Dave Feinleib)...
Now and then I'm fond of running top ten lists, including my list of top ten VC lies a little while back. Well, that latter post provoked another venture guy to send me, with a request of anonymity, the following...
At the same as a number of engineering friends of mine are leaving Google -- most common complaint: too big and bureaucratic -- MBAs have declared it to be their employer of choice. Food for thought, n'est-ce pas?...
Good video from recent Milken Conference of Steve Forbes and Boone Pickens debating peak oil....
The real news tonight in the Dow Jones board announcement it will "take no action" on the News Corp offer is that only 52% of the shares are against. Why? Because the Bancroft family control over 62% of the voting...
Bloomberg is carrying a story speculating -- based on brand marquee value, not finances -- that the Dow Jones purchase price could hit $100 in an auction....
Jon Friedman on Fox/WSJ is typically interesting:I think company chief Rupert Murdoch is a marketing genius.With the news Tuesday of a dramatic, unsolicited bid to acquire Dow Jones & Co. for $60 a share, Murdoch has created a tremendous amount...
There is a fascinating result in a newly published study in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The gist: Early exposure to Helicobacter pylori may reduce risks of asthma and allergy. While h. pylori is now known as the stomach bacterium...
I hate shopping, but I love shopping data. I was reminded of that today in scanning a recent ResourceShelf post about services that combine shopping and price data to give insights into market trends. Here are some of the services...
My friend Barry "Bling-less" Ritholtz has a cry from the heart appended to a recent post and directed to financial journalists, et al.:NOTE TO MIDDLE-AGED WHITE PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY BANKERS, INDEXORS, PR FLACKS AND MEDIA STILL USING THE WORD "BLING": Stop....
Being a millionaire is becoming so ... common. The damn people are seemingly everywhere, as a new report from TNS points out. The number of U.S. millionaire (excluding primary residence) households is up 5% to 9.3m, which means, given 92m...
Conference registration is now open for the Defrag conference. Eric Norlin has put a ton of work into this (and, full disclosure, I'm an advisor), so check it out....
A great example of using multiple information sources to ferret out Apple's internal projections for iPod/iPhone sales:Digitimes via EE Times Asia reports that Apple is negotiating to buy 500 million Samsung NAND flash chips. These are 4 GBit chips, so...
Here is a criticism I haven't heard leveled recently at online ad spending: It's too inefficient. The comment comes from DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt in today's WSJ:Advertisers are interested in two things. One is increasing the efficiency of their media...
A nifty factoid on the ad market, courtesy of WPP Group CEO Martin Sorrell in a recent speech:Google has revenues of $11 billion, and a market capitalization of $150 billionThe top four advertising companies have combined revenues of $33-billion, and...
Any WSJ/Dow Jones acquisition involves inevitable discussion of the Bancroft family, which has owned the company for more than a hundred years, meanwhile consistently spurning buyout offers. For more, read this lengthy Ken Auletta piece from the New Yorker back...
I am merely an occasional commentator on CNBC, so the biz network can do with the following advice what it sees fit, but given that Dow Jones is in play GE/NBC should be bidding aggressively. A new Fox biz network...
