June 2007
In case people aren't paying attention in all the iPhone euphoria, other things are going on in financial markets. Among them, Blackstone broke through its IPO pricing this week, tumbling to a Friday close of $29.27, and the stock losing...
I keep wondering if there isn't an element of illegal tying in the two-year AT&T contract for iPhone. After all, you are, in effect, forced to buy two-years of voice service -- something of declining value -- to obtain a...
I hear all the time from early-stage companies who brag about their relationships with wireless carriers, and who say "The carriers want this, the carriers want that". Oh, ugh. My usual response is, "So what? What do the customers want?"...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:First iPhone tear down validates Skyworks component speculation (iFixit)World Wealth report 2007 (Capgemini via ResourceShelf)New Yorker primer on hedge funds (New Yorker)Cocaine prices around the world (Economist)Wall Street firms starting to allow wireless...
It seems increasingly clear that AT&T is even more of a weak link in the iPhone launch than people thought. But it's not the Edge network that's the problem, it's that iPhones are glossy bricks until activated by AT&T, and...
On my way to the airport I wandered by two San Diego Cingular stores to check iPhone lines. They were ~50 and ~25 people respectively. The first few people in Line #1 told me they got there about 3am this...
I'm largely on planes and away from my post today. Please be nice to one another, and try not to take the major markets to zero....
I have an editorial in tomorrow's (Friday's) Wall Street Journal. The subject is Apple's iPhone marketing campaign (which is much less remarkable than people think), and the concurrent rebellion going on in mobile telephony....
Time magazine has a lengthy interview with a typically feisty Rupert Murdoch in its upcoming issue. Read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:On Dow Jones, and accusations that he would hurt the company:"Why would I spend $5 billion...
Unintentionally funny (I think) comment from my friend Andrew at MDV:Facebook app users are potentially worth about 1% of what users on your website are worth in my view, but the opportunity is to make it up in bulk.That's not...
Auto company ad accounts aren't anywhere near the plush things they used to be:In the first quarter, troubled GM slashed ad spending by 31 percent to $480.9 million - the fourth straight quarter of 25 percent-plus declines, according to TNS...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:Great iPhone review consensus grid (Valleywag)Firstsecond Facebook app has been acquired ... for $60k (Inside Facebook)If you're not reading Inside Facebook, you should be (Inside Facebook)New study argues iPhone is too expensive (Park)Marchex...
Dan Primack had a dismaying, if unsurprising, discovery Monday when speaking with Rep. Sandy Levin (D-MI) about his sponsorship of a bill that would cause carried interest at VC and PE firms to be taxed as ordinary income.I asked Levin...
Say you stand in line Friday to buy an iPhone, what will be the first you do with it when you get home? Send an email? Browse the web? Download some music? Or, maybe tear it to pieces?Yes, tearing iPhones...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:My friend Nivi is searching for one good man/woman for his excellent Venture Hacks site/service. See here.New digital media news site at ContentinopleOperator11 is mind-expanding as you contemplate the future of live TV...
While you can't watch AAPL shares trade post-iPhone-review afterhours, you can watch the changing price being asked by people who will stand in line for you at AT&T stores in New York (and elsewhere). New York: About $250 and stable.San...
Four iPhone reviews are out, all raves positive, and Walt Mossberg's WSJ review is pretty close to a rave. In particular, two of the three (less so Pogue) are fond of the non-keyboard keyboard, and all think the screen is...
As I said on my panel at Supernova last week, I'm highly interested in the contextual video advertising area. I'm doing a quick survey of all the companies, so feel free to add to this list:KliptronicAdap.tvScanscoutDigitalsmithsBlinkx (via its new AdHoc...
Radio listenership is in near free-fall in the most iPod-hit demographics, according to some fairly striking data in a new release from Statistics Canada. Teenagers listened to their radios barely 7.6 hours a week, the lowest of all age groups. This was...
AT&T and Apple will launch the iPhone with three price plans later this week, according to the TheStreet:The plans will start at $59.99 a month. All three will include unlimited data, Visual Voicemail, 200 SMS text messages, roll-over minutes and...
Nice video of Kazaa/Skype/Joost founder Niklas Zennstrom talking about change, scratching your own itch, etc....
Marc A. ends a recent post on venture capitalists with the following unintentional (I think) bit of wit and wisdom:Editorial note: This will be the last VC-related post in this series for a while. From now on I plan to...
I wrote about the rise of TMZ last week in the context of Paris Hilton and Supernova, but TMZ continues its rocket-rise this week with a praise-filled profile of the the fast-rising entertainment news site in today's NY Times. The...
Hey, another snow day. Google Reader is down. What a relief!...
Ditherati is back. A kind of boneyard for brief and inane utterings by the rich and geeky, it disappeared years ago. In the current online culture of nuttiness, nonsense, and empty offerings, it is nice to see Ditherati alive again....
I'm as much of a fan of hyperbole as the next breathless sort, but people need to work harder at getting their hype straight. At the recent Supernova conference a music startup on my panel said that there were more...
My friend Albert Lai, of Bubbleshare fame, gets the cover treatment in the current issue of Canadian Business magazine. While there is a quote in there from me about the estimable Albert, what's this Web 3.0 thing? Sounds dangerous....
Google founder Larry Page was at Foo Camp on the weekend, which was interesting, if unsettling to have him plop down near me at a tented talk by Ian Wright of supercar X1 fame. Page helicoptered in, which I don't...
Funny comment from Lucy Kellaway about the real world of work, as opposed to how it is portrayed on television:At work managers do two things. They go to meetings, which are almost always too long and too dull. And they...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:Explanations of swarm behavior in ants has wide applicability in markets and elsewhere (National Geographic)Dark pools and disintermediation in market are growing quickly (II)Algorithms galore: How the machines are taking over Wall Street...
An entertaining "top ten" list of quotes (some perhaps apocryphal) from hedge fund managers, according to a recent presentation by someone from U.K.-based Hermes, an LP:10. “If we don’t charge 2 and 20, no one will take us seriously.â€9. “We...
Lovely. Ebay has decided already to go back to buying ads with Google. Wish I had taken the "under" on that bet. I knew it would turn around quickly, but not this quickly....
Interesting stuff from ITG on the rapidly-shrinking Russell reconstitution trade. This year will be the fewest adds/deletes from the index in more than a decade.[via ITG]...
While I have trouble buying this is as a trend, I still find this WSJ story on the financial sophistication of some young people a bit jaw-dropping. It may not supplant Bear Stearns CDO troubles in the public consciousness, but...
Useful (if somewhat overly Sun flattering) Bloomberg piece out about efforts to cut power consumption and space usage by computer servers. The electricity bill for operating all the servers in the U.S. doubled between 2000 and 2005, to $2.7 billion,...
Interesting to see that Long Term Capital Management is everywhere in the news this week.Nothing like having a few hedge fund problems to send everyone back to their favorite meltdown scare story. It is another example of over-fitting data. Not...
Been playing with this year's IPO data a little. The returns are all calculated from the offer price.Best day of week for total returns: Friday (14%)Best day of week for first-day pop: Thursday & Friday (11%)Worst day of week for...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:Why iPhone will fail (AdAge)Why iPhone will succeed (AdAge)Latest IPO returns show up 11% so far this year (IPOHome)Market data messages will leap from 4-billion messages/day in 2006, to 130-billion in 2010 (Tabb)...
Yesterday rhe space shuttle Atlantis crossed over San Diego on its way to landing at Edwards Air Force Base. I was on the ground in San Diego ready to board a plane to San Francisco, which was delayed. The reason?...
In response to a few emails, etc:While no sane person would ever confuse me with a paid Microsoft shill -- I think the last time I said something nice about the struggling software company was in ... okay, never --...
CHEF: Never get out of the boat! I gotta remember! Gotta remember! Never get out of the boat! -- Apocalypse Now (1979) Mike Bloomberg has some tips for success in a recent commencement speech: Basically, don't leave the office....
Am off to O'Reilly's Foo Camp conference in bucolic Sebastopol, CA, this weekend, so posting may be light, or not. Who knows, really.Meanwhile, am on CNBC with my friend Herb talking Fear & Greed shortly after 4pm pst today, as...
With Blackstone's IPO opening up a scant 18% from its $31 IPO price we have further evidence, if needed, of my point yesterday that being "heavily oversubscribed" is of dubious predictive value....
From news tonight it looks like KKR will follow Blackstone into the public markets, which should come as no surprise. Even in the richer-than-sovereign-states world of private equity partners, the multi-billion dollar windfall about to rain down on Stephen Schwartzman...
Along with Mike Arrington, Josh Kopelman, and Julie Farris, I was on a startup panel at the Supernova conference today in San Francisco. Thirteen (okay, twelve) companies presented, and we did a kind of wrap-up discussion at the end. Being...
This is a first. Representatives Henry Waxman and Dennis Kucinish said in a letter to SEC chairman Chris Cox today that the Blackstone IPO should be delayed because it presents "investors and the public with new and undisclosed risks". Delayed...
It's like a medieval chorus: Blackstone's IPO is six-times oversubscribed. Blackstone's IPO is six-times oversubscribed. Blackstone's IPO is six-times oversubscribed. The implication, of course, is that with so many people hungry for shares the private equity firm's...
Anyone have any ideas for where I might find good historical market capitalization data? Specifically, I'm trying to find historical figures on the numbers of companies in each major market cap by decade, ranging across micro, small, mid, large, and...
I'm on a bit of a conference jag over the next few days. I'm speaking at Supernova tomorrow (Thursday) afternoon, and then up to Sebastopol on the weekend for Tim O'Reilly's deliriously eclectic Foo Camp. If any readers will be...
Here is my word of the day:pow·er playn.1. The head-down shuffle of someone wandering in an airport, Starbucks, or other public place looking for a power outlet. Usage: Look at the guy on a power play nearly knocking people over....
If Marc doesn't stop writing such great posts I'm going to personally hunt him down and unplug his Macbook. It's making the rest of us look like unthinking layabouts.Anyway, here he is with a new entry on the temporal dependence...
I'm free! I'm free! Gmail is down, and has been down for a while now. It's incredibly liberating, given that Gmail is my mail hub for all messaging, to have it be non-functioning. To put it in Canadian terms, it's...
Interesting news from Apple today with its YouTube client for iPhone. Throws a monkey wrench into some of the more ardent fans of clip-centric UGC subscription sales on mobile....
In case some out there are interested, here is the current stack o' bedside books:Why Most Things Fail, by Paul OrmerodFortune's Formula, by William PoundstoneCapital Ideas Evolving, by Peter BernsteinThe Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Vol. 1, by Imre LakatosThe...
As we get closer to iPhone launch date I expect many market research organizations and others to release attention-grabbing studies and the like. With that in mind, today's IDC iPhone report should come as no surprise, even if it is...
I don't often say this, but I really hope this new Tumbleweed feature in their MailGate 3.5 product doesn't work. Life will get much less interesting if people can't email inside stuff.The new MailGate capabilities extend data leak and content...
The Yahoo board of directors apparently needs to spends some time getting to know itself. Today's WSJ contains two contradictory versions from unnamed insiders about how Terry Semel's departure happened so suddenly:Exact details of how Mr. Semel came to step...
More info, via Om, on the turnaround in the tech IPO market:The deal volume is on the up, and there are six companies out raising money.Of the 23 IPOs (year-to-date), 19 are above issue price.Four deals done in June 2007...
Yahoo's newly ex-CEO Terry Semel insists he jumped yesterday, that he wasn't pushed:“I will not get a separation package because quite frankly I resigned. I know everyone will think I was pushed.â€[via FT]...
Missed this back in March when it came out, but at a Churchill Club tech trends session Elevation Partners' Roger McNamee tipped his investment thesis for buying 25% of Palm. The gist: He thinks people (like him) will carry multiple...
Investors do better if you give them fewer choices. That is the message of some new research out today from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Using panel data from U.S. 401(k) plans, it finds three things:The share of investment...
Around this time last year Josh Kopelman came up with the idea of the Techcrunch chasm. The root idea is/was that too many companies were targeting the then-53,651 readers of Mike A's popular Techcrunch blog. A good review in Techcrunch,...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:Should a skeptical investor time the market? (NBER)The rise and fall of Terry Semel (Valleywag)IPO boosting is okay (Supremes)A friendship predictor on Facebook (Scribd)...
The WSJ Deal Journal wins the award for the most out-there explanation for Terry Semel's departure from the CEO seat at Yahoo. Check this:Semel says: “The Board and I have long talked about the importance of ensuring a smooth succession...
Apple closed up 3.8% today, gaining $4-billion in market capitalization largely on word that its iPhone's battery life will be about two hours longer than expected. Apparently an hour of battery life is worth $2-billion these days. That's good to...
1:51 PM Jerry opens things up, but Terry is on the call.1:52 PM Jerry turns to Terry. If this keeps happening I will have typos galore. Semel is saying nice things about Jerry Yang and Sue Decker. As an aside,...
A few more thoughts on Terry Semel's departure from Yahoo while I'm waiting for the call to start. They really are soft-selling this in a truly bizarro press release, with everyone supposed to walk away shiny and happy about Semel's...
Whoa, good call by me over and over (and over) on CNBC about Terry Semel's tenure at Yahoo. The company's beleaguered and failing CEO is out, as of market close tonight, with Jerry Yang taking his place. Mind you, Semel...
According to David Faber at CNBC not long ago, Yahoo is being looked at from a number of perspectives, including NWS and others. One rumor has it that NWS would hit YHOO with MySpace, and then have Yahoo drop its...
The entertaining NY magazine Apple/iGod piece is now online. As I explained in a previous post, it is fun to scan, but it really shouldn't move markets, as there is no news here, but then again, there is no explaining...
I'm having trouble buying an argument in today's Times that online sales are somehow in trouble.Sure, sales won't grow 25% into perpetuity. But is that really a surprise? At that "historical" (a term I used advisedly) growth rate, the doubling...
A nice Alan Greenspan quote picked up by a WashPost reporter. Greenie think that as a former Fed Chair that when he says inflammatory things about the market it's really just drive-by damage? Yeesh."There's a general view out there that...
The battle of entrepreneurs vs VCs goes ever on, as this video of the First Annual Labor vs. Capital Dodgeball Tournament shows....
While National Lampoon's stock hasn't been entertaining of late (which may admittedly change, given the current fondness for online comedy plus the advertising boom), it's still nice to see that the company's quarterly financial releases make for funny reading, even...
Great piece in the Saturday Washington Post on the ongoing upheaval in advertising markets. The article touches on why the 30-second spot is imperiled, why the Cannes ad festival is irrelevant, and how software has become the new Darrin Stephens....
As i just talked about on CNBC, there is an entertaining Jobs/Apple cover hit piece coming in New York magazine on Monday. Called iGod, and authored by John Heilemann, the piece argues that Jobs & Apple have peaked; the iPod's...
Here is a quote I never thought I'd hear from any rational venture-backed entrepreneur:"We like to have the dentists as investors because they can help us in many ways," said Gallagher.Given doctors' general crummy reputation as investors, I'm guessing he...
Speaking of Facebook pre-IPO excitement, the following note ex-Googler, and new Facebook-er, Justin Rosenstein has been sending around is vertigo-inducing stuff:A couple of months ago, after three years as a Google product manager, I decided to leave for Facebook. I...
So, when will Facebook file for an IPO? The company is growing gangbusters, doing north of $100m in revenues (allegedly), and is at the epicenter of the social networks and advertising trends. There are lots of reasons, in other words,...
While some view online ads as a zero-sum game -- online gains represent offline losses -- I generally take the view that online advertising is shifting dollars from other media, as well as helping grow the offline advertising pie (at...
A new AAF study (that I haven't been to able to get a hold of yet) says that major ad spenders are in the process of moving up to 20% of their total ad budget to online media. If true,...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:Live HD web video coverage of the U.S. Open golf tournie (usopen.com)New iPhone commercial? (iPhone New York)Streaming ticker of latest live video everywhere online (ClibBlast)Maybe Mark "Colonoscopy" Cuban won't have to blog about...
In an otherwise unrelated post, Nick at Valleywag says that he hears venture firm USVP is going all healthcare. While every multi-strategy venture firm is wrestling how to deal with (poor performing and low capital) IT and (reasonably performing and...
I haven't commented on this nutty eBay-Google catfight, but I can't restrain myself. With Google representing something like 5% of Ebay's lead traffic (versus the 3% of Google revs represented by Ebay), exiting Google's Adsense network in response to an...
Anyone have any thoughts on how much BMW likely paid to be the exclusive sponsor of TED videos? It's good demographics for them, and a shrewd move, me-thinks. Just a seat-of-the-pants guess, but it has to be at least a...
According to TNS, Internet ad spending will be up 16% in the U.S. in 2007, that coming in an overall U.S. ad market forecast to grow only 1.7%. By way of background, the total ad market is forecast at $152.3-billion...
A tidbit from an iPhone user this week: All outgoing iPhone-sent emails contain the tagline "Sent from my iPhone". Shades of Blackberry, of course, but also sensible viral marketing....
Meant to link to this earlier in the week, but BP's 2007 Statistical Review of World Energy came out Tuesday, and it's excellent, data-rich stuff. It has come under some criticism for purportedly showing that world oil reserves take us...
Congratulations to Owen Thomas, the new editor over at Valleywag. I doubt this means Nick Denton is disappearing entirely -- he seems to have too much fun posting -- but it will be in great hands with Owen. In case...
Funny anecdote from an interview with Neil Rimer of Index Ventures. He was apparently at a recent conference in the Bay Area where one discussion was about whether it was worth doing doing venture investing outside the U.S., especially in...
A nearly decade-old piece of quasi-journalism I wrote for the now-defunct magazine Lingua Franca is newly available on the web. The subject is the economics of "charismatic megafauna", i.e., the kinds of large, appealing and furry animals people like to...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:My friend Barry sez this is worst jobs recovery since WWII (Reuters)Apple's current stock decline isn't biggest this year, or in top five of last 12 monthsKorean digital movie distribution is underway (Variety)Intel...
Angel investor Ron Conway is unhappy that some "third-tier VCs" are offering entrepreneurs cash from the financing to get the entrepreneur to go with that VC. While I hear Ron's argument -- all the money raised belongs in the company...
The NYT's ever-intrepid John Markoff today reminds those few people on Alpha Centauri who didn't know it already that Apple's imminent iPhone won't have a traditional mechanical keyboard. Whoa!Of course, for those of here on Earth that's not really news....
Will someone please soon sign up Alan Greenspan for a consulting gig? He's back to predicting China problems, but he has now upped the rhetorical ante by offering that price-earnings ratios are 'discounting nirvana.' Yeesh. I hope he gets some...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:Nice set of agriculture business blogs (DTN)AOL launches open APIs for Xdrive (AOL)CDC probing reports of 11 sick passengers at Miami airport (DJ)Google leading Cisco in acquisitions so far this year (DJ)Me is...
Okay, this is hands-down the strangest headline (and story) I've ever seen to cross a supposedly fact-based newswire:Who Blew Up WWE(R) Chairman Mr. McMahon?Tuesday June 12, 11:23 am ETSTAMFORD, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--While some might say "The Sopranos" went out with a...
Interesting, another popular blogger just got a "real" job. Brian Stelter, the TVNewser blogger, is joining the [New York] Times next month as an 8i reporter to cover the media world for NYTimes.com and for the paper. He will report...
A day in the life of a VC-backed CEO, via PE Hub. Oh, ouch.3:45 am – Wake up in cold sweat, pray that the rising star CFO that VC1 brought to the company doesn’t mis-forecast $3MM in cash like he...
Uber-investor Jim Rogers says the U.S. government is "lying" about the rate of inflation....
Check here for one smart Apple observer's take on who attended Apple's WWDC yesterday on why it was such a bust, even for developers.This was the most attended and least interesting WWDC that I have been to. No iPhone love....
Well, that's that. So, did we see any revelations, any big stuff, in the Apple WWDC keynote today? I don't think so, but let's review:Leopard on target for an October release. Knew that.Leopard is cool and graphical and stuff. Knew...
Lots of places doing live Apple WWDC coverage this morning. Here are some of the best, with MacRumorsLive leading the list:MacRumorsLiveEngadgetsitening (Twitter)sitening (S3 page)Gizmodo...
For my money, the best entry in my friend Marc's three-part-er (see 1 and 2) on the venture business is the third one. While the other two are useful enough, it is in the last one where Marc ponders one...
Some fascinating stuff going on when you get beneath the respective hoods of CNN's decline and CNN.com's ascent in recent years. It starts with traffic, as the following figure shows, and it continues to revenue, with CNN's revenues dropping 11%...
Funny Sunday magazine NY Times interview with the creator of HBO's Entourage program. He is planning a new, avarice-centric series on hedge-fund guys in New York:Why do you find the subject of money so interesting? Sadly, right now, that’s the...
Snippets from an interesting interview with IDEO founder, and Stanford professor, David Kelley:We don't believe in this notion of a bunch of smart people sitting around being clever. We believe in this notion that you hang out with the people...
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet: Iran forecasts oil to hit $80 a barrel this year (Reuters) Hedge funds are increasingly correlated to the broader markets (NY Times) Christmas...
An interesting report last week from a Bear Stearns analyst looked at the trends in the aggregate percentage of U.S. Internet traffic accounted for by the six top user-generated content sites (i.e., Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Wikipedia, Blogger, and Digg):2004: 0-1%2005:...
As most readers of this site know, I'm an unapologetic fan of the letters of activist investors Dan Loeb and Robert Chapman to their portfolio companies. We have a great collection of Chapman's latest authorship in letters to BMHC contained...
Decent NYT piece this morning on the irritating issue of software patents. But don’t software companies need patent protection? In fact,companies, especially those that are focused on innovation, don’t:software is already protected by copyright law, and there’s no reasonany industry...
Two interesting books reviewed in today's Times:The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy (NYT/Amazon)The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture (NYT/Amazon)...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:Roger McNamee explains the Palm investment (Boomtown)Mobile CPMs are too high (AdAge)Gaming CNBC's investing contest relied on a simple browser session trick (BWeek)...
As expected, Limelight Networks came flying out of the gate today. The newly public content delivery company is up 53%, with both its pricing and stock offering increased in the last few days.I like the company and CDN sector oodles,...
I have written about this a few times before, but I remain endlessly fascinated with the current state of synthetic biology and parallels with design automation's early day. It was the subject of a keynote talk at DAC earlier today...
I'm in meetings today and tomorrow and generally incommunicado, and apparently the stock market can't stand my absence. Sorry about that....
Once again, emptying my ever-overflowing link box:AT&T stores are hiring iCops for iPhone iLaunch (AppleInsider)Great new data on domain name registrations, shows up 30% y-o-y (Verisign)Faux post-Murdoch WSJ front page (WashPost)...
Any readers users of StreetAccount? I keep hearing good things about the service....
This new Neilsen's data on commercial viewing is really throwing a wrench into television ad spending:This year's "upfront" TV ad sales market is stalled with buyers and sellers confused - and in some cases bickering - over new Nielsen ratings...
Been meaning to mention this for a while, but there is a patent showdown looming in the ad insertion market, and it could get messy. I'm in meetings so no time for more detailed comment, but you can find more...
Pace the usual market dictum of "buy the rumor, sell the news", the usual way to play Apple stock around the iPhone launch would be to hold the stock until a few days before the launch, and then sell it,...
You know you travel too often when you find yourself trying to optimize the personal disassembly/reassembly around airport security. It's like the old puzzle of the fox, the goat, and the cabbage. Which goes off/on first? For example, if you...
Having highlighted his new blog last weekend, I now want my friend Marc to stop posting so much good stuff. He's making the rest of us look bad.The Pmarca guide to personal productivityWhy there's no such thing as Web 2.0Hey,...
I'm traveling today, so updates may be more sporadic than usual....
The first quarter 2007 numbers are out for ad expenditures, and they are solid, if largely unimpressive. By way of context, they are skewed by last year's Olympic advertising and they show a fall off in non-Internet areas. The latter...
Don't ask what this is all about, because I have no idea. Nevertheless, check out Infectious Greed as ... cats....
I had a fun conversation today with an entrepreneur where we figured out that too many VCs are really just Waldorf and Statler -- that is, codgers kibitizing from the balcony -- albeit not nearly as amusing....
Apparently you can't get a bet anymore if you want to wager that Harry Potter doesn't die in the upcoming and final Harry Potter book.William Hill Plc, a London-based bookmaker, is so sure of Harry's demise that it stopped accepting...
As if Google Streetview wasn't giving Google PR people enough headaches, apparently the would-be JFK terrorists loved Google Earth's image quality so much they used it to to size up that New York airport for their planned attack. And now...
While the discussion is a little awry -- c'mon, Facebook does not need monetization help -- Jim Cramer tips Google as a Facebook buyer on TheStreet video today. I have no idea how to link directly, so just follow the...
This documentary about Andrew Wiles proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is magical stuff. I saw it when it came out, and it's wonderful to have it online. Now, if only we had Errol Morris's Gates of Heaven too ......
I would never have believed the kind of technology embedded in high-end rice cookers if we didn't have one here at Casa Kedrosky. Fascinating article on same in today's WSJ. Call it -- pace one of my favorite investing themes...
Some interesting (and likely self-serving) musings from a European MVNO operator on the prominence of communications over content in mobile:"The first myth that people tend to believe is that content is king in the mobile domain. You have to think...
While short-sellers abandoning the market usually signals an approaching top, there are two interesting pieces over at CBS Marketwatch that argue structural changes in the short-selling market -- including a 2.5-fold increase in the amount of capital devoted to short-selling...
The June 29th launch date aside, my main impression of Apple's new iPhone ads is that Apple is consciously underpromoting iPhone's ... phone aspect. None of the ads show dialing, and even answering a call is an afterthought. Markoff captures...
Two quick bits of Matthew Simmons-related peak oil reading/viewing. First, this set of PowerPoint slides, and then the following appearance on Bloomberg Television....
Matt Creamer of AdAge went a week without TV, and he has some practical insights -- including that the Google of video could well be bigger than Google. Too bad I can't embed it, but you can watch the video...
This may just be an artifact of most Americans failing geography -- or that we live in a post-geography world of business -- but I was fascinated by a new survey of brands' countries of origin. College-age respondents in the...
It's nice to see Michelle Leder get some more deserved attention for her site Footnoted. A kind of ad hoc spelunking expedition through wrongly overlooked information in financial filings, Michelle's site gets a profile from my friend Herb Greenberg in...
A controversial piece at CRN (that I linked to earlier today) saying its tests show Microsoft's Vista and XP are a wash when it comes to security issues has sparked a heated conversation at the site. Worth reading....
Having only just started his blog, Marc Andreessen is out of the blog-blocks with a lengthy, contrarian and critical piece about the non-bubble in technology. While various digerati have been wailing about the current frothiness in technology, especially in the...
Nice to know that I'm not the only one who practices just so that I can look spontaneous when doing speeches and media stuff, only to make a hash of it now and then anyway. Read on for The Police...
Another anecdotal sign of the continuing high level of interest in search marketing, search engine optimization, etc.: Danny's (admittedly interesting-looking) Search Marketing Expo event in Seattle this week is sold out....
At the risk of making life too easy for early-stage companies I'm talking to, here are three of my favorite questions to ask the team -- which is usually only 2-3 people at this stage -- in one of the...
From Steve Leuthold in the weekend Barron's, the aging U.S. bull market. Interesting, but without distributions, sample size, and variance, a little tough to figure how concerned you should be....
I hadn't realized until this morning the scale of the anti- G-8 riots in German. Staggering and saddening.Germany's worst riots in decades erupted on Saturday, leaving almost a thousand people injured and overshadowing Berlin's preparations for this week's Group of...
Emptying my link box here this morning, so more links that people may find interesting:Netscape co-founder and friend Marc Andreessen finally has a blog (pmarca)Amyris wants to take its anti-malaria technology to biofuels (NY Times/Pontin)James Watson (yes, that James Watson)...
There has been lots of chatter in recent months about the supposed age issue in entrepreneurship, the idea that most of the people worth backing are under 35. I've laid out my view on that subject already, so I won't...
Here is a sneak peek at some of the links from my weekly Weekend Reading column at TheStreet.com:ExxonMobil is only spending on exploration 60% of what it did, inflation-adjusted, in 1981 (Time) Fewer DVR users skip ads than previously thought...
My friend Herb Greenberg and I did our (now) twice-weekly "Fear & Greed" segment on CNBC tonight. You can find it here. The topics were the turnarounds at Wal-mart and Dell, with the former including some sort of analogy by...
Just felt the p-wave bang of a quake here in San Diego. Epicenter was near Palm Springs, so about 150 miles away, and magnitude was 4.2. Was a nice jolt.More here, and you can look at the live California quake...
For all the fans/haters out there, Rafat has a nice photo collage of Bill Gates & Steve Jobs at this week's D conference. Click on it for a larger version....
Well, so much for the multi-touch-meets-accelerometer version of FeedBurner. While I had looked forward to being able to swing my laptop around my head and then caress it to get traffic stats, the Google acquisition of FeedBurner will almost certainly...
News that Evan William is taking venture money for Twitter got me thinking. Is VC bashing finally passe? We went through a period in the late 1990s during which people lusted after VCs and stalked them at conferences. It was...
One of the curses of doing what I do is I talk to a lot of boring people about boring things -- and then they're puzzled why I don't want to talk further. One of the other curses, however, is...
I laughed today when reading an interesting Andrew Odlyzko paper on tolls that cites the Monty Python test for taxes:Man In Bowler Hat: To boost the British economy I'd tax all foreigners living abroad.Ah, isn't that the hallmark of all...
