"It's not like you need any clearer a picture of what to expect from the iPhone interface at this point, but we'll show you some real world use of the device in this walkthrough as we churn through just about every app and option the iPhone's got."
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The following has been making the rounds on just about every internal email list I belong to in Microsoft. Here it is to share a little insight with the rest of the world. Microsoft is an amazingly transparent company. Google is not. Any peek is a good peek.
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Business users have frequently cited ambiguity over iPhone’s support for Word or Excel documents as a potentially fatal omission, so their inclusion removes just one more potential barrier to the phone’s popularity. Apple claims that in “about a week,” you’ll be thumb-typing faster on iPhone than any other small keyboard
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You can’t live in New York—arguably, you can’t spend an hour in New York—and remain oblivious to the machinery of profit pumping away under every surface. This city makes money, loses money, houses money; lately, with luxe condos stacking up like casino chips along the waterfront, the city looks like money.
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Organizations that do good and companies that are doing well both rank high with students, according to Universum's latest findings
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Getting a good deal on auto insurance is hard enough. Keeping your premiums from rising? That can feel like playing a game where the rule maker refuses to tell you the rules.
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This detailed interview between Vogelstein and Google CEO Eric Schmidt demonstrates a couple of things: 1) rarely is entrepreneurial success accidental and 2) sometimes it takes a strong editorial effort to pull out nuggets from a tech visionary that crystallizes a story in a way that had never been done before.
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Great tips from the senior editor at the Wall Street Journal about how to complain to a company and WIN. Whatever your gripe, Bounds said, you have to make a decision to make some noise if you want things to change. She gives tips on how to win against airlines, cellphone & credit card companies.
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Former used car salesman Alan Slone grows a conscience and reveals one of the major strategies dealership use to screw you when buying a new car. At the heart of it all is the "4-square." This is supposed to help you and the dealership come to an agreement, but as you'll see, it's really more akin to three-card monte dealer's deck of cards.
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Compiled some of the decent interest rates given from institutions. If you don't get this rate from a tax deferred account like 401(k) or traditional IRA which you should with minimum 6 month CDs, you have to take into consideration the tax you pay on these interests. So the effective rate at which your money can grow completely safe and completely fluid is on an average is like 3.75% AP, which is .75% more than the hypothetical inflation rate of 3%.
Aruba Networks, a wireless LAN provider seems to be coming with an IPO in the coming week after their recent success with getting Microsoft in their client list. With more than 25,000 users on the network at any given time in 60 countries, Microsoft's WLAN is one of the world's largest. It is deployed in 277 buildings comprising more than 17 million square feet. Aruba, which was chosen after independent labs tested its equipment against better-known rivals (CISCO), will supply Microsoft with mobile controllers, software and 5,000 wireless access points. Aruba Networks Seems to be getting into the black zone with a million dollar profit in their first quarter results. They recently signed a potentially lucrative partnership with French telecom giant Alcatel, which will resell its wireless switches. That move was prompted by Cisco's $450 million purchase of Airespace.
| IPO Profile | |
| Expected Date | Week of 3/26/07 |
| IPO File Date | 12/15/06 |
| Price Range | $8.00 - $10.00 |
| Shares Offered | 8.0 mm |
Startups always make mistakes, it's part of the process. But here's a list of the 5 most common ones that you should be able to avoid.
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CompUSA is closing 128 of their 228 stores, leaving them with just 100 open locations. Check the CompUSA Store Locator to find out if your local store is remaining open. Stores will be handed over to a liquidator starting tomorrow, so there may be deals to be had.
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Andy and Jeremy ROCKED THE HOUSE. Panel discusses how to bluff your way through Web 2.0 at a party or conference. Don't be the idiot who does not know how to speak the speak even if you have no idea what it means. Also has a video about the definition of Web 2.0 and pictures of some of the best of Web 2.0 bluffing.
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Spring forward, fall back. We know the drill. But does the clock-switch across America actually save energy? Not if everyone takes the extra hour of sunlight and spends it at the mall.
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Ever wondered what are the top rated A-List blogs for Finance. Here is the list compiled by CNN.
1. Seeking Alpha -- This is a good place to start blogging, because it's essentially a collection of different blogs. The site provides links to everything from analysis of media and Internet stocks to investing in China. The "Sound Money Tips" link offers simple financial strategies for every day life, from buying versus leasing a car, to selling a home without a realtor.
2. The Asset Allocator! – This site's "SmorgasBoard" section provides a handful of links, each day, to articles on top business stories, and that's just the beginning. Hundreds of links are posted for various categories. They include everything from corporate blogs, top business news sites, U.S. Government office sites, and investment resources. This site is not about original content, but rather one-stop shopping for financial information.
3. CANSLIM Investing - Yes it's a long web address, but also worth bookmarking. This site contains many easy to read pieces on stock suggestions, chart analysis, and market commentary using the CANSLIM approach to investing. (The seven letters each stand for an investing criteria, for example, "L" represents choosing an industry leader over a laggard.)
4. The Kirk Report – The site is written by an individual investor, Charles E. Kirk, who promises more food for thought than blind recommendations, and delivers on that promise. Viewers can sign up for a free, weekly e-mail newsletter. And unlike many financial blogs, the site is ad free!!
5. Big Ben's Investing Blog - This site, although anonymous, is called Big Ben's Finance and Investing Blog. There's good, specific information on certain stocks here, including profit expectations and results. Other recent standout posts include advice on finding an online stock broker, and specs and photo of a new Motorola device reportedly in the works.
6. The Thinking Bull - This anonymous site offers a compilation of online financial articles. The screen is split between articles on trading and investing, and it's a useful stop for articles on various investing strategies.
7. Random Roger's Big Picture – This is a good site for investors looking for investing ideas beyond U.S. stocks. Author Roger Nusbaum is an investment advisor representative for Your Source Financial. His posts include insightful commentary on recent print articles and televised financial segments, and so give readers more than one view point on a topic. His writing style is very down to earth, it feels like you're reading personal letters from your neighbor.
8. Footnoted.org – Author Michelle Leder is a veteran financial journalist who has published a book on spotting red flags in corporate documents ("Financial Fine Print: Uncovering a Company's True Value.") The site's subject matter is in the same, investigative vein, setting the site apart from other blogs. Visitors can search for information by company name, and thus make a quick and easy stop here to find corporate dirt and other tidbits.
9. Stock and commodity trading – This anonymous site is technically oriented, covering day to day stock market activity, gold and currency markets. Interesting links like 'coin stories' (includes posts about coins during the era of Alexander the Great, a 17th century coin with a UFO like design) are fun to read.
10. Thinkblog - This is from ThinkEquity Partners, a research and investment banking company. It's of the more straight and sophisticated blogs around, with high quality commentary from CEO Michael Moe and other luminaries. There are also dozens of links to the brightest minds in business, from economist Larry Kudlow of CNBC fame, to tech writer Walter Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal.
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On Monday, Greenspan said told China, "It is possible we can get a recession in the latter months of 2007." Although Greenspan also went on to say that most forecasters are not making that judgment, his remark nonetheless roiled financial markets
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Yahoo pipes is a perfect example of how the Web 2.0 can be 'mashed' and (messed) up. You can get the RSS feed for a news website and analyze the contents and then search Flickr for images pertaining to the analysis. All through a GUI of flowcharts and modules just like building blocks in a lego set. Pipes and filters are the widely used concepts of Unix and Yahoo has just applied the same to Web 2.0. XML RSS feeds makes the job much simpler to look at a web site or content from a website as nothing but a stream of data and you can pipe and filter this list and display it any form you want. Then we can create a RSS of the output and integrate it with your site. So you would have the latest content from web for whatever your pipe's logic is.
They have to work around a edges a bit more, but the concept does provide a starting point for how all the age old programming concepts can be applied to Web 2.0.
As a starting point, i created a pipe for viewing all the pictures, pertaining to a city. Basically getting the Location input from the user and then passing it on to Flickr to generate images for the same. Check it out at
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/nOr_g9nG2xG_KLEJE5PZnA/?input1=new+york&_run=1&=Run+Pipe
. In short, the US government wants to treat eBay as a "broker" who would then be required to file notices with the government about how much money its traders have made. The US proposal calls for this reporting to take place only when people sell more than several thousand dollars worth of merchandise in a year.
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Costco seems to be a steady competitor to the big retailing giant Wal-Mart. The interesting thing about Costco, when compared to other retailers is that they charge a fee of $50 to become a member which is very different from the industry norms, but people would not mind that, because of the savings they end up making throughout the year. Consequently, its margins are among the slimmest in retailing. The privileges also extend to employees, who are paid well and enjoy generous healthcare benefits. The unique selling proposition for this retailer is that, they provide the products in bulk and a rock bottom price with pretty decent quality unlike walmart. Their return policy is one among the best where it permits you to return ANYTHING (except computers) with or without the receipt whenever you want as long as you still have the same membership. This takes the fear out of shopping for many wary shoppers to swipe the credit card, with the feeling that they return it, if they don't like it at any point. Walmart and Target have a 3 month time limit, and most of the other retailers have a 14-day return policy.
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Joost seems to be the next buzzword going around the web. The 'Venice Project' started by the developers of Kazaa and Skype are going to battle, heads on with the Cable TV. With the astounding success of Skype which just reached its 500 millionth download, Joost seems very promising to change the way the television network works. Joost [pronounced yohst] uses the java implementation of the Streaming Transformation of XML (STX) technology, which does not transform the XML documents to a tree structure as XSLT which consumes memory. This seems like a faster approach and is optimal for a resource constraint system and hence the near TV quality pictures. More resources on STX is available at stx.sourcefourge.net
There has been good reviews going around for people who had the invites and Joost seems picky about giving the invites, dunno why?. There is even a site called www.joostswap.com that helps people get invites from who have already got one and trade joost related items!!!
Check out this video on a first hand demo on what this product is like, from David Clark, the Executive Vice President of Joost
Came across this awesome video, which talks about how Web 2.0 actually transforms the way ones thinks about the web and how it facilitates the path to expressing yourself with the least amount of effort.
HTML was all about Content and Form together, XML seperated Form from Content and Web 2.0 is taking the experience to the next level.
Check it out!!
In the year since its launch, Zillow Inc. has made millions of Americans familiar with computer-generated estimates of home values, created a new online addiction and, become a staple of dinner-party chatter. But just how accurate is it? A Wall Street Journal analysis of 1,000 recent home sales shows some interesting results. As we saw earlier, the top down approach is a a bit skewed when it comes to home prices for all of America.
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I am trying to pick out the Content Management system to use for www.biggthoughts.com. Searching the web alias (google) for something that i can get started right away...
Joomla (Mambo) and Drupal seems to be very strong competitors in the open source content management domain. Lets analyze the pros and cons...
Use Mambo(Joomla) when:
Some web-sites offer high quality templates for the best price you would ever get - for free. You can download Flash-based templates as well as CSS-based layouts; furthermore, you can use them for your personal and commercial projects without any restrictions whatsoever. This article shows, where you'll find them.
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Great article on various web 2.0 resources that are useful to entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes.
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Wanted to pry into the stock holdings of the second richest man, and what made this guy, what he is now. The stocks Berkshire Hathaway holds seem to be well grounded ones mostly, with a Wide Moat Rating from MorningStar. Despite having 39 names in his portfolio, the top 10 stocks account for more than 80% of the portfolio: American Express (AXP), Anheuser-Busch(BUD) , Coca-Cola (KO), Conoco Phillips (COP) Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Moody's (MCO), Procter & Gamble (PG), Washington Post (WPO), Wells Fargo (WFC), Wesco (WSC). Reminds me of his quote that Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.
At Berkshire Hathaway's last annual meeting in May 2006, Buffett said that if he were starting his investment partnership over again, he would invest in securities around the world and focus on smaller companies. To illustrate this, he used the experience of his relatively recent investments in Korea, Israel, stating that since companies with strong balance sheets were trading at a meager 3 times earnings, he would have been almost 100% invested in Korea.
I was surprised not to see any dot com stocks in his portfolio, and i believe he was heavily critiqued for not getting the piece of the action during the dot com boom, but then we all know who had the last laugh during the dot com crash. Like his concept of investing in a business that one really knows and understands.
I was actually surprised to see that Yahoo still holds the number 1 page ranking after seeing Google literally take over the search marketing and entering into every domain possible to put its brand name. Looks like Yahoo still retains the email overall portal domain.
In the last three years, Yahoo has reshaped one of its core businesses around Web search and related advertising, making itself second only to Google in search ad dollars, with technology that many believe is keeping pace with that of its younger rival. Google--in roughly the same time span--has broadened its business to do something its executives said they didn't want to do, a portal like Yahoo that offers services like free Web e-mail, social networking, publishing tools, maps, shopping, news and video search, and now brand advertising sales. Looks like a real stiff competition for the top dollars.
Also Orkut which has infested itself only among the indian and brazilian communities is sitting at Number 8!!! They have added the videos section which can be linked to Google video or Youtube just like Myspace.
There has been a lot of talk going around with new websites coming up with Web 2.0 buzzword and i wanted to dig into it to actually see what this means and what defines a website with Web 2.0 technology?
The concept of "Web 2.0" began after the dot com crash with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. They initiated talks that the sites that survived the dot com crash had something in common, and the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web.
Thus emerged the Web 2.0 concept where we should be looking at it as a set of principles and practices that tie together a certain level of standards that has to be met by the website to be categorized as Web 2.0. The Meme map here kind of delineates such standards and services one would be expecting.
O'Reilly has a lot of work in progress in this domain and have come up with some initial thoughts on this matter. If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0 and some technologies used by a website most likely delineates Web 2.0 from Web 1.0 as listed below.
Web 1.0 --> Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication
Thats what the fastest growing wesbite Flixter is all about. Basically a movie review site where you get to see your buddies review about a movie.
Why is this not like any other review site like yahoo or tons of others out there? Because you would value your buddy's opinion more than some strange critic or xyz.
They use an aggressive marketing strategy of sending messages to everyone in your address list, and the response is like viral.. They started with 300,000 hits per month from Mar '06 to like 32 million this month!!!
LightSpeed ventures have initially given a funding for $2 million dollars, which is not bad for a start.
This site tries to combine movies and social networking together and if you are a movie buff they've got tons of features for you!!!
My Currency is entering into the online home valuation domain. However the approach of this company is completely different using a rating system by the people to determine the price of the house.
Founded last March in San Francisco, the company compares its service to a stock exchange in which people come together on the Web site to settle on a price of a product, in this case the value of a home.
This is a bottom up approach which is right opposite of what zillow does, where zillow has zestimated the price of say 50 million homes in the U.S from a top-down approach
You could be an evaluator of the home where you can predict the upward and downward movement of a house and if you are right your rating and credibility strengthens.
Barring the Real Estate agents and home owners, not sure how many active contributors would be willing to take part in such a system unless they have a direct monetary benefit from this.
If you are someone who hates making international calls using your computer(Skype,Yahoo...)???Then you gotta check this out. You basically call a gateway number on the site and it allows you to make your call after a brief commercial. Right now they allow you to call 80 countries without the commercial as a promotional offer. Check out the country list you can call at www.futurephone.com. The firm, which has about 30 employees to start, uses Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to route the calls for next to nothing. .
Technically, the call the consumer makes is not entirely free; one does have to have domestic long-distance service. But all of America pay monthly fees that allow them unlimited long-distance calls.
Where, by the way, are you calling when you reach their gateway number 712-858-8883? It turns out to be an exchange in Superior, Iowa, a town of 142 people on the Iowa-Minnesota border. The company has made deals with the township to route calls inexpensively..
The next obvious question is how the company hopes to make money without charging anything, and the answer is simple. Like many other Internet-based firms, they plan to work on an advertising model. They'll listen to a 10-second commercial if they can make a free call.
Tried the service for a call to new zealand, needed to wait for 5 minutes to get the line, but the interesting part is that, the connection was crystal clear and did not get interrupted or terminated. The company will have to work on load balancing the network when more people start pounding the gateway number though!!!
Seems like a revenue zone for bloggers, where they can link the small image of the BooBox to the product they are talking about say for eg. a T.shirt, shoe and if the user clicks on the image, the link opens up the Amazon checkout counter where the purchase can be made. What this means for the bloggers is revenue based on commission if its directed from their site.
Seems like an interesting concept and will kick off, just like adsense. Anyone using adsense in their website would like to go for boobox. The downside is that, it only takes you to amazon.com and would be nice if this gets linked to a comparison shopping wesbite.
Seems to be a kind of a concept, where you can have a family tree set up just like orkut and other social networking sites. Not sure how successful this idea will be because, the younger crowd is not too keen on connecting with the families, and ofcourse the generation gap for the elder people dont allow them to use the net as much as the teenagers.
Also noticed that there is a general flaw with the site, it does not allow relatives who are already members to connect using mail ids- For eg. I am not able to invite my cousin who is already havin a tree of his own.So basically, I gotta duplicate his tree onto mine. I did setup a whole network for my family, but nothing makes me keep going back to the site.. and not too happy about the non linking feature.. ..
I have been trying to get my ideas in focus to start something pretty interesting for people who have new ideas and big thoughts just like you do, just to create a community where we guys are able to share our ideaz, discuss them and just see how people react to them. I am sure lot of you who are reading this are going through such a process. Here is the place for you to let loose.
