I'm briefly on CNBC's Power Lunch today in about an hour, at noon EST. Talking tech stocks, earnings, GPS, etc. If you have anything particularly striking you think worth mentioning,  feel free to post it here.

[Update] Some stocks I mentioned, or meant to: CSCO, CRM, GRMN, SIRF, and AMD. Only the first two were positive mentions.

In scanning the Fed's minutes from its March meetings my eyes kept glazing over, even more so than usual for such turgid stuff. So I decided to check the document's readability, via the Flesch-Kincaid test. Here is the result:

How does that compare to other documents? Well, lower numbers on the F-K test mean the text is less readable, so higher, to a point, is better. Time magazine scores around 40, and a random academic paper I grabbed out of Current Biology (okay, a classic on why monkeys trade-off juice for images of female monkeys) comes at a reading ease of 30-ish, and a similar grade level.

In other words, the Fed transcript is tough stuff to slog through. Maybe the Fed is trying to cloud our minds with unreadable text. Admittedly, it's only a theory.

Rather than wasting so much time doing pre-emptive reputation management, as he did yesterday in the FT and today in the WSJ, ex- Fed chair Alan Greenspan might mull why so many people think he is so tone deaf to his own tone deafness.

Why? Because here is a guy who presided over back-to-back bubbles -- tech equities and real estate -- in the U.S. market, and yet seems genuinely puzzled why so many people are questioning his actions. Might he not have some minute responsibility for what happened on his econo-watch? Granted, greed helped, whether in dot-coms or in mortgage markets, but the Fed was a facilitator.

One of my favorite points with young growth companies, whether private or public, is that I focus on the people because the company almost certainly won't end up building what it says it will, so I better like you guys. That point -- i.e., companies mutate or die -- is less understood than it should be.

Here is one example:

In the 1890s Wrigley's Scouring Soap started bundling baking powder with its products. Eventually the baking powder proved more popular than the soap, so the company decided to focus on that instead. Soon afterward they started bundling two sticks of chewing gum with every can of baking powder, and eventually the gum became more popular than the powder. Naturally Wrigley's decided to start focusing on selling chewing gum, which worked out pretty well.

And another:

Lamborghini started as a tractor manufacturer.

More here.

While chairing Money:Tech 2008 I got to see oodles of early-stage financial technology companies, and many of the most interesting were in the New York area. It's nice to see New York leading in this area (along with doing well in media technology), and that point is reinforced by an article in Reuters today.

Admittedly, it isn't cheap to start a company in New York, but it sure isn't cheap in the Bay Area either -- and you have considerably more experts in financial technology in New York than in Menlo Park.

I love teardowns -- taking apart consumer electronic devices to find what public company components are hiding inside -- and I'm doubly fond of fantasy teardowns. What are those? That's when analysts tear apart, metaphorically speaking, a product that hasn't shipped and isn't available yet, trying to come up with a best guess as the components therein. Yes, it's silly, but the suppositions can be decent.

We are seeing some of that right with Apple's upcoming 3G iPhone. Given that Walt Mossberg tells us it's coming in June, analysts are wasting no time doing fantasy phone teardowns. Here is one from Friedman, Billings Ramsey quoted by Eric over at Barron's today:

• Broadcom (BRCM), he says, keeps the touch screen controller socket in the 3G iPhone and a potential iPod Touch refresh design. He also thinks the company could have a Bluetooth/WiFi combo chip in the next iPod Touch.
• Marvell (MRVL), Berger says, likely keeps the 802.11 WiFi socket in the iPhone, but may have lost the WiFi socket in the Touch to the Broadcom combo chip mentioned above.
• Infineon (IFX) and Samsung “remain overall device winners,” he says. Berger says Infineon may be providing the 3G baseband chip, the RF transceiver, a power management chip. (The company supplies the EDGE baseband chip in the current iPhone.) Samsung is likely to provide the application processor, as it does in the current phone.
• NXP and Texas Instruments (TXN) “also have peripheral smaller sockets in the 3G iPhone,” he writes.

From the above, Infineon looks like the big winner. Could the stock eventually get a lift from its current languishing status, not far from its lows and down almost 40% this year? Granted, Infineon has big issues, like a money-losing memory subsidiary, but once/if investors look through that to a (reputed) position on the 3G iPhone, we could see a speedy lift in the stock.

Here is Reason #7,732 why Yahoo management is delusional, just in case you needed it:

Yahoo Inc. Chairman Roy Bostock said the Internet company's plan to grow on its own received a "very positive'' response from investors, countering reports that they would prefer a takeover by Microsoft Corp.

"The feedback that we got from the roadshow and from our investors certainly helps inform the positions that we have taken and will take in the future,'' Bostock said today in an interview in Purchase, New York.

Translation: Smart investors told Bostock that if any idiot investors bought into his and Jerry's line of patter about organic growth and the stock soars before the Microsoft deal closes, they'll happily hang on for the ride.

[via Bloomberg]

People outside of financial services are much more fascinating with hedge fund managers than are the rest of us. Like many/most of my readers, having spent an unholy amount of time with hedgies over the years, you realize fairly quickly that they really aren't that special. Some are smart, some are stupid, some are larcenous, etc. Nevertheless, the outside fascination with such people persists, with them often the deux ex machina of capital markets.

The latest example comes in a series in online literary journal n+1 called "Interviews with a hedge fund manager". Assuming we are meant to believe these interviews are real -- a point about which I'm not entirely clear -- I'm not convinced. Read this latest one through for yourself, but there are a host of things that ring falsely to me, including word usage (no hedge fund manager says "off-laid" about risk), vocabulary (the number of fund managers who can use "solipsistic" in a cogent sentence is vanishingly small), etc.

Other thoughts?

Quote of the day comes from a piece up on Bloomberg today. It is purportedly about the environmental consequences of 100 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons, as the following snippet shows:

A nuclear war involving 100 Hiroshima-size bombs would open a massive hole in the earth's ozone layer, exposing life to dangerous levels of the sun's rays, a new study shows.

Again which the loss of a million or three lives from bombing admittedly pales, of course.

Thanks to a reader for the pointer.