Archive for the 'tech' Category

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Aapl’s numbers

Published on January 18, 2007 in business, stocks and tech. Closed

For a good break down of Apple’s earnings numbers release Wednesday, take a look here. The quarter was simply amazing and Apple continues to experience explosive growth. Some of the highlights (in my opinion):

the amazing ipod…Apple shipped 21.1 million ipods in Q1 resulting in an astonishing $3.43 billion in revenues or half the company’s total revenue for the quarter
1.6 million mac computers sold, up 28% over last year’s number (compare that to nearly flat growth in pc sales)
Apple’s share of the PC market in the US grew to 4.7% up from 3.6% a year ago

I think Apple is simply an amazing company to have stock in right now, and they are simply on a tear. I remember telling a friend a few years ago that the iPod was simply a “trojan horse,” into the the PC world. By introducing a somewhat revolutionary, yet incredibly simple to use universal device to the world they were able to show the PC users just how great Apple’s products work. The change is occurring with more and more PC users choosing macs as their next computer. This is even more true the younger, and younger you are with the majority of people I know under 21 telling me their next computer with be a Mac. Just imagine when this group enters the workforce.

A final thought comes from a comment on Barrons about the recent quarter and the stock price:

Having demonstrated massive 70%
YoY earnings growth for Q1, and after one of the largest “beats” in its
history (an 80% upside surprise), and having guided for 30% YoY growth
for Q2, it is hard to see how AAPL can possibly grow earnings less than
40% YoY for FY07 now.

Isn’t it insane that it currently bakes in just 20-25%?

Massive
earnings upgrades ahead IMO. And they’ll have to be massive just in
order to accommodate the Q1 results, let alone any bullishness for the
rest of the fiscal year!

This stock should be trading at $120
right now. Its forward PE of 27 is laughably low given growth of 40%
ahead. If you took the almost-$12B in cash out of that, then its
trading with a forward PE of about 22. That’s 22, with YoY growth of
40%. Can you scream “disconnect?”

Once the earnings estimates
upgrades for FY07 start coming out, the stock will finally climb to its
justly-deserved destination, but it might take the end of options
expirations for that to happen, not to mention the SEC rubbish finally
put to rest.

A huge driver for Mac sales near-term is going
to be the imminent arrival of Adobe CS3. Once that comes out, Mac Pro
sales are going to soar, adding, IMO, about 200-300k unit sales in a
single quarter to desktops and a ton of revenue on these high-cost,
high margin products.

I don’t believe the Street has begun to
work out the true impact of this, and it – combined with the iTV, new
iPods, updated Macs, new software, should provide considerable upside
to earnings estimates for the next two quarters.

Apple said
they will be including estimates for iPhone sales in their guidance for
the June quarter, so we can pretty much guarantee that Q3 guidance from
the Q2 report is going to be fantastic. And then there’s the
educational buying season of course, not to mention MacBook updates.

I
see nothing but massive upside for the company going into the remainder
of this fiscal year. I see a market fast asleep at the wheel and with
no clue whatsoever about the true earnings potential of Apple.

40% YoY growth on the cards. Buy this dip.

Predicting the Trends

Published on January 16, 2007 in business, future and tech. Closed

As I’ve said before, the more shopping, communicating, news gathering, and just flat out living people do online the more capable good web stats are at predicting trends, sales, and even votes.

Once again today Hitwise announced their successful prediction of a winner in the the UK version of Dancing with the Stars named Strictly Come Dancing. Utilizing website traffic trends, especially search trends and search market share, Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer correctly picked the winner 7 weeks before the finale.

strictly come dancing small.PNG

The consciousness of the crowds comes through clearly in closely watching website traffic patterns. I wonder how many companies truly use website stats as more than just a way to monitor their own site traffic but instead as ways to innovate existing products, spot sales trends, and follow interest in the competition.

How not to process an online customer service claim

Published on January 4, 2007 in business, customer service and tech. Closed

I”m incredibly annoyed with Yahoo Search Marketing in a number of ways, but the most pressing is the fact that we have money locked in our account with no way to get it out. Basically they have a minimum charge amount that we can’t remove or spend, and whenever our account balance approaches our daily budget (which can’t be lower than $30 a day) x 4, they charge us $30. So essentially they have $100 locked in our account….very annoying. But I was fortunate to get a little comic relief in the form of this rant I found by an Adbrite (advertising network) customer in my search for Yahoo Search Marketing advice. It’s a classic example of a company telling you what they really think of your complaint/comment in the customer service dept.
This blogger had a very frustrating issue with Adbrite (basically they charged him without his approval) that he ultimately took up with the customer service department in the form of email. Now I know that customer service tickets are a great way for the company to keep track of a complaint/customer and hopefully to make sure the issue is resolved. I can also understand why you would want to slip that ticket into each correspondence with the customer for easy tracking, but why, oh why would you ever send a ticket that looked like this (especially after denying any wrongdoing and only refunding 1/3rd of the money):

Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: DFU-######
Department: Online Support
Priority: Low
Status: Closed

Why would you ever tell a customer where they sit on your priority list, especially if it is LOW?!?! If you have to include a priority level in each email, make it a simple number code that the customer wouldn’t understand/care to see, and then put in a fake priority status of High. No one, especially your paying customers, ever wants to know they are a low priority for you even if it is the truth.

Each customer’s issue/complaint is an extremely high priority issue for them, at least make it seem like it’s the same for you.

The coming of automated scheduling

Published on January 4, 2007 in business, personal and tech. Closed

In my various part time jobs throughout high school (especially at the mall and at a restaurant) and college, I often complained about the scheduling (because I wanted to be there when I had to do the least amount of work), but I also thought that the system could be managed much better. I thought you could create a complex scheduling system that would create a weekly work schedule for the part time employees based on expected demand, drawn from past year data, upcoming events (such as sales, advertisements, promotions, concerts nearby, back to school, holidays, etc), news events (ecoli for restaurants would be bad, for example), and weather (when I worked at restaurant, it was a no brainer we would be dead on rainy or snowy nights). The system would recommend a number of employees for the night, and also have a few on call workers just in case things got crazy. The result would be far happier customers who received the perfect level of service.

In this morning’s WSJ (paid wall) it appears Walmart is planning to roll out this exact system to manage their part time scheduling in stores.

Wal-Mart Stores
Inc., using a new computerized scheduling system, will start moving
many of its 1.3 million workers from predictable shifts to a system
based on the number of customers in stores at any given time. The move
promises greater productivity and customer satisfaction for the huge
retailer but could be a major headache for employees.

Well it’s not the exact same, it will be based more on previous years sales data and not all the extra stuff I listed above, but the point is it appears we are moving in this direction as retailers seek to improve productivity and squeeze out costs.. Payless and RadioShack are also implementing similar systems.

I guess the biggest risk here is that part time work will no longer as reliable as it once was, but instead workers will have to be extremely flexible. Although I would hope that if workers are being used more efficiently, they could be paid better for less time creating a win/win.

Either way, it’s an interesting article and worth a read.

More links:
companies that offer this software-
Kronos Inc

Google OS and embedded affiliates

Published on December 29, 2006 in business, future, links and tech. Closed

Jason Calacanis has a post with pics and rumors of the Google operating system. He thinks that Google will partner with a major PC manufacturer, such as Dell or HP, over the next year and will sell a pc that comes equipped with a google OS (that is instead of windows) at cost or slightly below (thinks $300 for a high powered pc and flat panel monitor). The revenue model would be to split the future advertising revenue generated by that pc’s owner on google’s services. This would open the door for Dell or HP to a stream of high margin, recurring revenue and Google would ensure that their ads are shown to the majority of pc users for the foreseeable future.

I think this is a really good idea, and something I’ve thought of quite a bit myself ever since I read about how much money firefox makes. Firefox gets to share revenue generated by it’s millions of users using the toolbar to search google, and then clicking on ads. This is pretty much how Dell and HP could structure a deal with a google OS.

I think there’s significant opportunity of someone really smart just going ahead and doing this overseas (China, Brazil, India, Spain, etc) with some high powered linux boxes, and a custom built linux OS that somehow ensures that the manufacturer gets not only a revenue share of google advertising dollars (just as you do when you insert a google search box on your site or as firefox does), but also embed ebay affiliate, amazon, and just about any other international affiliate out there into the system. If you can get the cost of the pc down low enough, it wouldn’t take very long to get in the black on each unit, and then everything after that is pure profit.

I think that local coffee shops should abandon their whole, let us charge you for $2 for an hour of access model, and instead get google revenue split and amazon, ebay, walmart, etc affiliate commissions for any ads their customers click on while browsing. I would imagine there would be someway to embed cookies or something on to the coffee shop browser’s computer when they agree to terms of service for the free wifi access. It seems to me that would be far more lucrative than attempting to charge $2 an hour. It’s also a win/win, which should always be the goal.

linkedin worth $250 Million

Published on December 27, 2006 in business, future and tech. Closed

Mashable has a post about LinkedIn supposedly being valued at roughly $250 Million in their latest round of funding. LinkedIn is expected to generate $45 to $65 million in sales in 2007, and $100 million in 2008. They are also profitable and boast 8 million users. I think this seems like a reasonable valuation, and quite frankly seems even ridiculously cheap after hearing facebook buyout rumors in the $1 Billion range or even higher than that ($8 Billion!?!?). I’m not really sure what Facebook’s numbers look like, but I would imagine you would be hard pressed to find a social network with numbers that look as good as LinkedIn’s. They are really the only social network that have services the members themselves would actually pay for in addition to the standard advertising revenue model.

I am not really an active user of other social networks, although I am a member of Facebook and do find it a lot of fun, I see LinkedIn as the most useful. I believe that it sits nicely in a great space (business networking) surrounded by people who not only will find it incredibly powerful, but will be willing to pay to use it multiple ways. I’m a paying member which allows me to send mail to people I otherwise would not be able to contact, and to see people I otherwise would not be able to see…which is very powerful (see my past post on networking). The minimal amount they charge me to send messages to others in the network really has 2 benefits: 1.) it really cuts out spam 2.) it shows the receiver that the sender really values their attention, and will not waste their time. Finding people that you only used to bump into by either knowing the right person, or just luck now only takes a search and an email or phone call. If used properly, LinkedIn could really propel your business or your career to a whole different level…and that is why I think its revenue numbers will explode over the next 24 months and a $250 Million valuation is a steal for any current investors. This thing has more money making potential, in my opinion, than Facebook and surely is worth more than them.

See what others are saying about LinkedIn:
Jason Calacanis

Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda…

Published on December 14, 2006 in business and tech. Closed

I just read about Jaxtr, a company that lets users make free calls generated by a widget on their myspace profiles. It lets users take private phone calls from myspace visitors, without revealing their phone numbers. While I think this is cool, I don’t really find it that useful and I doubt that it will really take off.

But it does validate some thoughts Brian and I had about the direction of Call True (one of my startups, you can read about my past here) last year. We thought there were two really interesting applications of our product that held a lot of potential, both of which Jaxtr seems to be acting on.

1.) Anonymous calling for first time chatters, especially beneficial for dating sites. Imagine speaking with someone you may want to go on a date with from say match.com, and realizing it’s a total disaster…and you would wish you hadn’t ever given them your phone number (or revealed it through callerID). Instead our service would allow you to click the button and generate an anonymous call between you and the other person (on your cell phone,etc) before moving things any further. That way if the call was not something you enjoyed, you could easily block that user from ever calling again just as you do now with myspace mail etc. I spent a few months hounding a biz dev guy over at eharmony without making too much progress. Still think it can work

2.)Email click to call….We had this feature but didn’t really sell it….and it got a lot of attention. It’s really nothing more than email signature with a little html in it, but people seem to think it’s really cool and far more complicated than it really is. It’s a great tool for sales people to put in their email signature files because it tempts visitors to call, all they have to do is click and enter their number…and bam they’re connected. I would say that email signature with click to call generated more interest than really anything else we tried. It seems jaxtr is offering that as well.

It all comes down to execution. We certainly had the ideas and the talent to make both of these things above come true, but we struggled going in all 10 directions we were tempted by. Lesson learned…focus then execute.

The Future of the web

Published on December 13, 2006 in business, future and tech. Closed

In this month’s Fortune Magazine, there is a great article on “Finding the next Google,” in which they talk about the next big thing on the web. They believe that Google rode the wave of finding to incredible profitability, realizing that people would use the web to find specific items or bits of information. The future, according to the article, is in discovery,that is showing you things based on your current likes and dislikes that you are not currently aware of but will probably be interested in.

The most obvious examples of success in the discovery space are sites like last.fm and pandora, who are both building extremely popular communities
around the concept of music recommendations (discovery). They know that if person A loves Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews, and person B loves Dave
Matthews then they will probably like Jack Johnson, and they’ll then play a song of Jack Johnson for person B. These optimized music introductions are incredibly effective at pushing your music limits very quickly because all the new songs you are exposed to have been carefully screened…by others.

This is also clear on Amazon.com, where they have watched the buying habits of others and have your buying history handy, so they can easily create targeted, automated product recommendations to you on the homepage instantly. This creates a far more effective landing pages, than just a bunch of categories or instant products. This is about personalization and automation.

I believe, as Fortune mentions, the next wave of the web lies in the ability to assist in targeted discovery. People want to explore the endless supply out there, but have no idea where to start. It’s extremely complicated to ever think of recommendation engines knowing if you like BMW’s then you’ll like Starbucks and Kenny G, but with enough connections (ie connections to your existing personality online…myspace, email, amazon account, last.fm account, ebay account) and enough computing power, it’s possible to start building comprehensive personal profiles, which in turn would allow for more and more relevant recommendations. Imagine taking it a step further and offering a last.fm like scrobbler, that sits in the background of your internet browsing quietly building an anonymous (anonymous in the sense that NO ONE ever would have access to it with your name on it…it would only be viewed by machines for the purpose of recommending things to you) profile that could offer you the perfect vacation designed just for you, the ski jacket you’d love, and a news site right up your alley. I’m in a situation where people are asking what I want for Christmas, and I really have no idea what’s even really out there. If had a stream of recommendations, it would be easy for me and everyone I want to share those recommendations with, to know instantly.

Another way these profiles could be built (and maybe this is why google is offering discounts to people using google checkout this holiday…to build a user base and profiles) would be to have access to, and analyze your real life spending. I would imagine that most purchases over $30 are made with a credit or debit card, which of course means they are entirely electronic and can therefore easily be analyzed for patterns, and used to build a preference profile around you. What if google check out was an easy, back end way of doing this? If they got enough people buying across all sorts of sites, they’d be able to start building recommendations as well. Or even more possible, would be someone partnering with a credit bureau to build personalized shopping recommendations based on current credit and past buying history…just rambling here.

It’s a scary tight rope to walk between big brother and making sense of all that is out there, but I think we’ll get there in a way that ultimately proves to be a major win/win for companies and consumers alike.

Another company moving into this space is Aggregate Knowledge, see them here.

Search trends for better investments?

Published on December 12, 2006 in business, nyc, stocks and tech. Closed

Hitwise , a great blog that talks about general web traffic patterns, had an interesting post this morning about Heelys the company that makes those shoes that have built in wheels. I remember seeing those shoes years ago, but only recently have I started to see them everywhere. The company went public this week and the stock did very well. It was priced at $21 a share, but opened at $38…one of the best IPO performances of the year.

Anyway this post with it’s exploration into why Hanleys was getting so many searches over the last month, really got me thinking. Ultimately Hitwise determined that the boom in search traffic was not related to the hot IPO, but instead to the fact that Heelys are a hot holiday gift item. So I’m wondering if more shopping is done online, which means that sales can be tracked in almost real time with website statistics, could one invest more wisely in retail related companies by closely monitoring web stats? I’m sure smart money is already actively doing this, but why haven’t I heard more about this? It seems really straight forward…Sign up for Hitwise (I’ve heard it’s fairly expensive, over $5-$10k a month), and then setup some keyword monitoring reports on items related to stocks you may or may not want to invest in. If the numbers look good, maybe way better than last year or better than expected, then buy (or worse, then sell). Presumably, you’d know way before most who would rely on company numbers or retail interviews.

I was fortunate enough to meet Jeff Stewart a few weeks ago, a successful New York serial entrepreneur and founder of monitor110.com, a company that scours the web to find relevant news before it hits the wires. They are providing enormous value to big traders, where knowing first can be worth billions. I think this is a fantastic service, but it’s still not quite what I’m talking about above.

I’d love to find a way to estimate sales numbers based on search numbers/web traffic trends. I bet it’s easier than you think.

challenging your perspective

Published on August 16, 2006 in books, personal and tech. Closed

I am reading Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos and it really is making my head spin. Greene discusses everything from the description of reality and spacetime as accepted in modern physics to the origins of the universe and the big bang. While I’ve always been somewhat of a space geek and an admirer in physics (even though I never got good grades in it), and this book is supposed to be written from a pedestrian perspective, I still find it a fairly difficult read. It is written really well, it’s just that the way I’ve grown up and the way we’ve grown up with this world around us and the 5 senses we have to live in it, are truly incapable of understanding what else is out there.

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