Morgan Stanley Wants You to Churn Your Investments
June 13, 2010
Short honk: The excitement is back. Forget the fire fights among Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others. Forget the lousy economic outlook. Forget the oil spill. Remember the good old pre crash days. To document this moment in time, navigate to “Mary Meeker’s Amazing Internet Presentation.” You can view the great news here. Churn those holdings of your now. Yes, right now. Those data are hot, objective, and darn near as solid as anything Wall Street has to offer its partners. Amazing for sure.
Stephen E Arnold, June 13, 2010
Freebie which is a word that Morgan Stanley does not use with high frequency.
Quote to Note: Management Excellence at AOL and Time Warner
June 13, 2010
This quote to note appeared in the Daily Telegraph’s “Yahoo! Shakes on a New Type of Partnership.” If an accurate statement, it helps me understand the AOL and Time Warner way:
Here’s the passage that made me honk:
A former AOL executive said the best line to me this week – which summed up the crazy technology acquisition culture perfectly: “Every business we [AOL] ever bought we destroyed – until we bought Time Warner and they destroyed us.”
The write up provides some insight into Yahoo, but Yahoo’s track record in acquisitions is notable for the number of business school analyses each has triggered in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, June 13, 2010
Freebie
Quote to Note: Data Pig
June 10, 2010
I don’t use an iPhone. Yes, I pay AT&T for one of my broadband landlines. Yes, I have an AT&T landline. I am not sure if I sympathize with people who make a conscious choice to purchase services which can impose punitive variable pricing. Maybe most people don’t remember the pre-Judge Green days when a person rented a Western Electric telephone device and never owned it? I was at the Piscataway IBM facility when the order was enforced with one part of the building becoming Bellcore and other part remaining Bell Labs. The object of the company was to make money, pay for the fancy stuff like PICS, and build phones you could toss from the second floor of the Western Electric building confident that the clunky thing would work after the 26 foot fall to the concrete below.
Money.
When a telephone carrier with the “old” AT&T DNA offers a deal, I chuckle. I used to put on my Young Pioneers hat, but Tess ate it. Sigh. Memories of a monopoly don’t face quickly.
Point your browser at “AT&T Learns Exactly The Wrong Thing About Data Usage.” Agree or disagree with the write up. What I noted was:
AT&T says that 65% of its users use less 200 megabytes per month; a whopping 98% use less than 2 gigabytes. (NYT) AT&T looked at these numbers and concluded it was time for tiered pricing; time to soak these “data pigs”.
Now that’s a quote to note: “data pigs.” You can take the old AT&T out of the phone business but you can’t alter than DNA easily. Ah, “data pigs”.
Stephen E Arnold, June 10, 2010
Freebie, unlike a long distance call in 1950 when a ringy dingy to Brazil was a major event. Remember differential pricing by class of customer? Ah, remember.
Another Upstart Nation State Bans Google
June 10, 2010
I may have to fire up my old copy of XyWrite III+, create a template, and assign standing text to an Alt key. I read “Turkey Bans Use of Google, Services.” If I weren’t so busy with my World Cup paperwork, I would create a chart with such categories as “banned”, “sued”, “threatened”, and probably a couple of other categories.
The most recent nation state to get frisky with Google is Turkey. Long viewed by the US as a cheerleader, Turkey seems to be willing to make pals with certain countries which are annoyed with the United States.
Here’s the passage I noted:
In an official statement, Turkey’s Telecommunications Presidency said it has banned access to many of Google IP addresses without assigning clear reasons. The statement did not confirm if the ban is temporary or permanent….The banned IP addresses include translate.google.com, books.google.com, Google-analytics.com, tools.google.com and docs.google.com.
I thought companies had an obligation to shareholders to maximize returns. Getting in hot water in countries where there are potentially lucrative markets strikes me as losing an opportunity to make money. After the World Cup, I will work through the countries in which Google faces push back. Fascinating that a single company can become the focal point for frequent hassles with nation states.
Maybe this is a trend, not an outlier? A good question in my opinion: “Who is at fault? The country, a politician, a government, a company?” I can hear my seventh grade teacher now: Discuss in less than 250 words. What’s next? Educational institutions?
Stephen E Arnold, June 10, 2010
Freebie
The UX Crowd Does Harvey the Rabbit
June 9, 2010
I like the blinking dot interface. The 20 somethings poke with fingers. Sigh. The user experience chatter goes unheard by me. I find the cartoons, the mini motion pictures, and cluttered “assisted navigational aids” annoying. The future of interfaces is certainly less cluttered. Point your browser at “‘Imaginary’ Interface Could Replace Real Thing.” And, for a bonus, you get the “real thing”, a phrase much loved by some azure chip poobahs. The point of the write up is that the interface is – well – imaginary. For me, the key passage was:
Researchers are experimenting with a new interface system for mobile devices that could replace the screen and even the keyboard with gestures supported by our visual memory.
I have a gesture in mind.
Stephen E Arnold, June 9, 2010
Freebie.
Evidence of an Open Source Boomlet?
June 8, 2010
I read “What Is Data Science?” with interest. This is a long O’Reilly Radar essay by Mike Loukides. The write up has a message that is going to be of interest to those looking for the next big and some giant companies with data and not much leverage from that asset. The key point in the write up is that there is money to be made by converting data into products. Note that this is not the tired old data-information-knowledge mantra. The days of the quasi-intellectual approach to making money is not sufficiently pragmatic for these economic times. The key is to take data and make a product. When I read the essay, I thought about various online vendors who are doing this now. Candidates for poster children include Google, Facebook, and Yahoo along with lots of other folks. Statistics Canada once signed a deal with a vendor to crunch the StatsCan stuff into more saleable products.
But for me the most interesting item in the write up was a chart that showed the number of job listings for a couple of open source products; specifically, Hadoop and Cassandra.
You can see the lines trending upwards.
My take: there is some tangible data that indicates open source software in the data management sector is gaining traction. I am not sure what this means for other open source software. But I found this factoid interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, June 8, 2010
Freebie
Mobile Search and Apple
June 8, 2010
Short honk: Fascination chart. Navigate to “iPad Web Usage Passes iPod.” The chart is tough to read by 65 year old geese. The message conveyed is that Android’s owners lag iPod and iPad Web surfing usage. Google may be selling 65,000 Android devices via its partners each day, but Apple’s two million iPads are sucking Web content. The startling factoid is that the iPad accounted for more Web content than Apple’s iPod. If the data are correct, Google needs to whip its pony.
Stephen E Arnold, June 8, 2010
Freebie
British Government Reverses Data Support
June 7, 2010
After dog-earing 30 million pounds of financial support at the beginning of the year for a proposed Web Science Institute at Southampton University which was to be headed up by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British government announced plans to cut 6.2 billion pounds from the public sector budget, which unfortunately included the Institute project.
V3.co.uk reports in “Government scraps plans for Web Science Institute“ that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills claimed the government recognizes internet technologies as an important area of research, but that support would come through research councils and the Technology Strategy Board, in supporting the creation of the Institute. Apparently the research and data is valuable, but not enough to pledge public financing for it.
Melody K. Smith, June 7, 2010
Google May Tangle with a Red Bellied Black Snake
June 7, 2010
There are lots of dangerous creatures in Australia. Even the tiniest spider can kill you. Now Google may get a chance to become up close and personal with an Australian Red Bellied Black Snake. Point your browser to “Australia Orders Google ‘Privacy Breach’ Investigation.” The Australian authorities are not likely to kick back and relax over the issue of alleged Wi Fi intercepts. For me, the most interesting comment in the BBC write up was:
Attorney General Robert McClelland said there had been numerous complaints from the public and that police should investigate possible criminal breaches of the telecommunications privacy laws. Australian law prohibits people from accessing electronic communications for unauthorized purposes. Google has said it will co-operate with a police investigation.
Good idea, Google. A very, very good idea. My addled brain generated another observation, “The Math Club method of handling official inquiries from Australian authorities may play in Petaluma, but it may not work in Perth. Oh, here’s more about that Red Bellied Black snake. These creatures sometimes travel in pairs. That’s fun for the unwary.
Stephen E Arnold, June 7, 2010
A definite freebie
June 2010 Columns by Stephen E Arnold
June 7, 2010
Short honk: A reader asked about the for fee columns I do. I don’t put these on my Web site until their value to the publisher has dropped to zero. You can find these columns in the hard copy publications and / or the publisher’s Web sites. Here’s the line up of my June 2010 columns which will run sometime in the next four to 12 weeks. Hey, that’s the way traditional publishing works.
- Information Today, “Google Emulates Bing and Endeca”. The idea is that Google has become a me-too player in the user experience game. The Web site is http://www.infotoday.com
- Information World Review, “A Wandering Yahoo: More Knee Action, Modest Progress”. The point of this write up is that Yahoo has to do more than wave its arms. Real revenue generation is needed, or the company may be in big trouble. Does anyone else see the shadow of Demand Media falling across the purple Yahooligan T shirt? The Web site for the publication is http://www.iwr.co.uk/
- KMWorld, “Google, Rich Media, and the Enterprise”. The idea is that one can learn something about what Google may do with its television / rich media technology by looking at its partner, SnapStream. I know. You never heard of SnapStream. That’s the point of the column. The Web site for the publication is http://www.kmworld.com.
- Smart Business Network, “Dialing in Facebook Privacy”. The column advises a business with a Facebook page about some basic double checks to make on Facebook’s privacy controls. Moving targets are fun, don’t you think? There are 18 or 19 magazines in the SBN network running my column. The 2010 columns are on the company’s Web site at http://www.sbnonline.com. You can see the 2009 SBN columns here.
One person pointed out that my blog sucks compared to these for fee columns. Let me clue you in. The blog is a marketing vehicle, and we crank out stories on a daily basis. Most of the stories in the blog are items that we find potentially useful for our monographs, client reports, speeches, and the for fee columns. Don’t beat up on the people I pay to produce the stories in Beyond Search. We are trying to keep the content flowing in the midst of our begging outside the local Dunkin’ Donuts.
I will try to post the July columns next month. I am a forgetful goose, however.
Stephen E Arnold, June 7, 2010
Freebie. Buddy, can you spare a dime?
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