trying to make sense of it all
This simply is an amazing post about the current state of Microsoft in their $500M vista launch. What a disaster, and as Roger explores it could be possible that Apple will pass MSFT in 5 years in terms of revenues. Wow.
Information Arbitrage: Microsoft Revisited: Vista, Apple and the Sony/Nintendo Phenomenon
I have to admit that I’m somewhat annoyed. It seems that people are truly scared to death of responsibility in their life, and they hate when others take it.
I saw an ad in my gmail for a website called howtolive.org, and of course wanting to know how to live I checked it out. The site is ok, but in glancing quickly at the comments I came across this:
I don’t think so. Some are destined for failure and some destined for success. for example, why do ethiopian children starve? I doubt it has anything at all to do with their lack of perseverance to find food. It is quite simple luck is needed for success and sustained success. We all need to understand that the rain falls where the rain falls.
Wow. I guess with this logic there’s really no point in me getting out of bed in the morning. I mean if everything is set for me already, then why do I even bother doing anything? If I’m meant to be wealthy, why not just play the lottery everyday instead of trying to work something else out? I’m not denying that there are many things simply beyond our control. I’m certainly not saying that starving Ethopian kids are choosing not to find food, but I think that you have to believe…everyone needs to believe that they have some sort of power on their perspective and path in life.
If you read as many bio’s as I do, you’ll see that really there are no common threads running throughout the life stories beyond the life perspective these successful people take. They KNOW they can do it. They KNOW they have the ability to bring together the life they want. Their lives may not be perfect, but they did create something that was important to them.
That’s the perspective I choose. I’m not saying we can control everything, and I’m certainly not saying that our lives will always be exactly what we had hoped. But I do know it sure feels a hell of lot better getting out of bed in the morning knowing that I have some control on the outcome of my day.
I remember first reading about the peer to peer lending site, prosper.com a year or so ago and was immediately impressed. I really believe that peer to peer lending will be huge made. For the first time in history people can loan money directly to others (instead of basically doing it through a bank) without ever seeing or speaking to them. Anyone can ask for a loan by pleading their case, and submitting to a credit check. And on the other side, anyone can lend money by creating an account and choosing who to lend to based on their profile, story, and credit score. Prosper takes a little off the top, and manages the loan payments. It’s really an amazing system, you can read more about it here.
But being the true aribtrageur I am, I had an immediate thought about this site the second I heard about it. Because there’s an opportunity for people with better credit to get loans from banks or elsewhere for most likely under 10% and there are some higher risk borrowers on prosper willing to pay upwards of 30% APR, there’s an opportunity to do some lending arbitrage. Of course lending to all the high risk, high apr borrowers is definitely risky, but the nature of prosper allows you to spread your risk just like banks do. So you could borrow say $100k at 7-8% APR with good credit, then lend it out at no more than $1k per borrower. By choosing the right situations to lend with good APR’s it could be possible to generate a risk adjusted ROI of 18% or more. After you pay off your loan the rest goes into your pocket (of course there are taxes to deal with as well), but it seems to be an opportunity to generate some nice fairly low risk returns.
It appears that some people may already be doing this. Take a look at the top lenders on the site:
| Rank | Screen Name | $ Invested | Est ROI |
| 1 | pensioner (details) | $794941.10 | 18.76% |
| 3 | L5 (details) | $547230.73 | 14.26% |
| 5 | MuleShoes (details) | $367585.44 | 3.13% |
| 7 | Sneezie (details) | $190234.69 | 10.49% |
| 9 | reguyncali (details) | $161437.06 | 9.34% |
(via Eric’s Credit Community)
If you have good credit, it may be something interesting to investigate further. I would definitely recommend checking out Eric’s Credit Community for more info on Prosper lenders.
VideoJug, a site with how to videos, has a short tutorial on how to make a good first impression. It’s amazing how much information can be communicated simply with body language, and by being aware of your own you can make sure you’re sending out the message you want.
VideoJug: How To Make A Good First Impression?
(via Lifehacker)
Today I came across a few interesting videos in my normal blog reading that I thought were interesting…
One of my favorite bloggers, Fred Wilson, gave a keynote speech at the Software and Information Industry Association Summit where he talked about the future of information services. I really agree with Fred’s points about information becoming free, while attention is becoming scarce. The real future of information services will create value by capturing, filtering and delivering information at the most relevant time and place. The sea of data has become so vast, that there is no way for us all to stay up to date. There’s a tremedous opportunity in building out a service that can consantly monitor the data from all corners of the web, and alert customers when new, extremely relevant infromation become available. That’s what services like Monitor110 do for companies on Wall St, and I would imagine we’ll see more like them popping up over the next few yaers.
The speech and the Q&A session are worth watching.
Fred Wilson’s keynote
(via Darren Herman)
Get a glimpse at life inside Google from the work environment to the food. I’m really curious about Sergey’s shoes at the end called zcoils, they look comfortable but man are they dorky.
Google Recruiting video
Google came out with blockbuster numbers yesterday prompting everyone but shareholders to gasp in awe. They had a profit of over $1B, nearly triple the amount from the same qaurter a year ago. It also appears that big brands, the slowest movers to the internet ad game, and also Yahoo’s one major advantage over Google are moving aggressively towards Google’s advertising platform. In an article in this week’s Business Week they review the Google call from yesterday, where they mentioned that these big brands such as Proctor and Gamble, Volvo, and Officemax have all placed video, banner, and text ads across google’s network.
I was most interested in the part of the article concerining Google’s ability to advertise on TV.
Schmidt even implied that television advertising was ripe for Google to handle. He said Google’s targeting technology can “really apply well” to TV, and allow television stations to charge much higher rates for that targeting. He said there was an opportunity for Google to use data from TV set-top boxes, which have unique Internet addresses, to do that targeting.
I think there is definitely a huge opportunity here for Google. But I think there may be an equally big opportunity here for a little company called Tivo. They are far and away THE brand of dvr devices. Like Google they have become a verb as people often refer to recording a program as “tivoing” it. My real question is when are they going to drop the hardware/service provider biz and start licensing their name/software to cable companies. If they would’ve done this already, they’d be sitting on top of access to the largest network of set top boxes in the world. We know they are building creative and interesting ways to deliver advertising by their recent patent applications, so why not move forward with the master plan already?
It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again…Tivo is an acquisition target. At $518M market cap, it’s worth less than HALF of youtube, a company with very little revenues at the time of it’s acquistion. For a billion dollars or less (less than Google’s profit this quarter) someone could most likely have Tivo’s loved brand, name, and service to call their own. Can you imagine what a company with deep pockets like Google’s could do with Tivo? They could preinstall google earth on every device, run video ads and video adwords, and even show youtube clips right on the tv. They could open up google video’s video marketplace to let people pay and view videos streamed. There are a million possibilties.
Google, what do you think?
(by the way, I’m a tivo shareholder)
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