January 2010
1 post
iPad = Television
I must admit I am not at all enticed by the iPad, but thinking about it led me to an interesting line of thought: the iPad must be a TV.
Advances in technology are pretty much universally about making things smaller. Computers, cell phones, batteries — really everything. Except televisions. TVs the goal is always to make them larger.
If the iPad is a larger iTouch, and they expect it to...
July 2009
1 post
This should be obvious to anyone who has ever had... →
June 2009
1 post
1 tag
Planning and Process
All projects requires some planning and process. The purpose of both is to mitigate risk — as they say, ‘a failure to plan is to plan for failure’. The problem is when people start hiding behind planning and process as a way to mitigate personal risk.
Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of situations where people are propping up planning and process as giant pillars from...
April 2009
1 post
March 2009
1 post
1 tag
Caught in a Lie
This evening my oldest (kindergarten) daughter said something offhand that struck me as odd. It was something like “My friends at school think it is really cool you’re a geologist.” To which my immediate reply was, “I’m not a geologist, have you been telling the kids at school I am?”
I’m pretty sure this is her first experience getting caught in a deep...
February 2009
5 posts
2 tags
Kindle 2: Reference Library
I want a Kindle 2, but I want it for all the “wrong” reasons.
I have no interest in reading fiction on it. I imagine that (and the $359 price tag) is what keeps most people from buying it. I like reading actual books, and they happen to be very well designed for their purpose as it is. I also typically borrow books, or buy them used, at a significant discount. This re-use...
5 tags
Sentiment Accuracy vs. Sentiment Accuracy
** Posted as a comment to this post at lexalytics **
Great post, we’ve also found it pretty easy to build a system that gets 70-80% accuracy in almost no time at all.
Sentiment accuracy is also interesting and measuring it becomes all the more difficult when you consider it as a spectrum rather than simple agree/disagree.
For example, when dealing with financial sentiment measurements as we do,...
LoveRX
I saw this article in the paper this morning, which made me wonder just how soon we’ll start seeing love pills. If they have found the centers of the brain and are narrowing down the chemistry, it can’t be very long. Here are my proposals:
Accumbenz: When the marriage counselor thinks it shouldn’t be saved. (Nucleus accumbens)
PallidumRX: Why tell your boyfriend to...
Two Cows →
Great term: the "Great Repression" →
January 2009
9 posts
John Carmack gives some hate to software patents →
3 tags
Toys For Adults
No, not that kind of toy…
Although if Apple got into that business they’d probably do pretty well there, too.
What I’m talking about is why I think Apple is doing so well in the electronics game while companies like Circuit City are dying off en masse, and Microsoft is losing market share at an accelerating pace.
While some argue they have a superior product, and at least it...
The Important Matter of Position Sizing →
5 tags
A sneak peek at the downturn & its effect on...
This evening my wife and I were driving around Issaquah looking for a place to have dinner. Neither of us know the area very well, so I was searching for restaurants on my G1.
Our results were very interesting: 30-40% of the places we found via Google maps had closed their doors.
You can’t really blame Google, it appeared these were all fairly recent closures, and it isn’t as if Mom...
3 tags
Customization and Discovery →
3 tags
The Seattle P-I Up For Sale →
Another newspaper is biting the dust. It will be interesting to see how this major transition from old media to new media plays out. Will news coverage worsen? Will online news be able to grow into a similar behemoth that print news used to be? Or will some innovative paper out there figure out a model that will allow printed news to flourish again?
3 tags
T-Mobile G1 Review
I’ve been using the T-Mobile G1 now since launch day, and *finally* I’m getting around to writing my review.
I’ll start with the downsides:
Applications only install to built-in memory
You can only install Marketplace applications to the built-in memory, so even if you add an 8-gig MicroSD card, you can still only fit a handful of applications on the phone because of the...
2 tags
1 tag
A Search Junkie Looks At SkyGrid →
December 2008
6 posts
3 tags
2 tags
Too Big To Bailout?
So GMAC gets $6 Billion, too. Awesome. Every time I think that these bailouts have reached absurdity there is yet another.
For all the Too Big To Fails (TBTF) you hear about every day now, you’ve got to wonder when we’ll finally come across a Too Big To Bailout.
If the concept of TBTF argues that the repercussions of failure are worse than the costs to prevent it, at what point can...
Sick, Vacation, Etc. Etc. Etc.
Just wrapping up a vacation in which I was sick the entire time, finally recovering on the last day to catch something new.
I plan to resume my schedule ASAP.
3 tags
FeedVis →
Very much liking this site. They’ve got a great take on something that is like one of the tools we’re building into MarketOutsider. Worth a look.
2 tags
Value over Pain
One thing you’ll see everywhere reading about starting a business these days is how you need to address a customer’s “pain point”. This never sat well with me. Of course, it is completely understandable that if a customer has a legitimate pain that your product solves, that they will pay you for your product. I simply wasn’t convinced that is the best way to think...
1 tag
An Ounce of Prevention →
Roger writes a great post comparing the lack of preventative medicine today to the lack of preventative maintenance that enabled our financial system to get as messed up as it is.
I really like this comparison, but something tells me that just like your doctor telling you to exercise more and eat less fatty food, it will fall upon deaf ears.
Is it a cultural thing that we wait until pain and...
Too Small To Fail
One of the big things we have going for us at MarketOutsider is that we are too small to fail. Right now, the economy is bringing down some hefty pressure on start-ups from (primarily) two directions: scarcity of funding, and grossly smaller valuations.
While it would be awesome to be able to keep going at the same speed, we’ve come to the conclusion that until things improve we neither...
November 2008
8 posts
Startups Need More Practical Guidance Not Fluff →
Phone-tag2.0
Last night my wife commented that she thought it was funny I couldn’t “just call” anyone anymore, that I almost always email them first to make sure they are available or set up a time to call.
For me this is just the process of expecting, but optimizing “phone-tag”. Email, twitter, and SMS have made coordination frighteningly efficient. Certainly more efficient...
Soon...
I have a few posts queued up, just need a day with more than 4 spare minutes to finish them up and post.
T-Mobile G1 Android phone review
Machine Learning/Data Mining book list
Depression 2.0
Why I’ve been so damned busy the past few weeks
What a week...
What I really need right now is a vacation, unfortunately I won’t be getting one… at this point, I’d settle for just some sleep.
3 tags
5 Pieces of Hard Advice
I spent today at NWEN’s Entrepreneur University in Seattle. It is a yearly event where NWEN gathers a lot of the local experienced entrepreneurs, investors, lawyers, and such to give seminars on various aspects of the start-up. The final keynote pitch was given by Clark Kokich, CEO of Razorfish. He had five pieces of hard to take advice that he’s learned over the years while failing...
CNN Holographs
I’ve seen it getting a lot of derision, but I, for one, think the system is pretty cool.
I agree with the critics that it is a bit uneccessary in this context, but that is beside the point. CNN has a new cool toy, and they got buzz playing with it, so a win for them. What other news networks make you feel like you’re living in Sci-Fi?
Between the touch walls and the holographs...
Stubbornness
My answer to the ubiquitous “what is your greatest weakness?” question is stubbornness.
It certainly gets me in trouble at times. In poker I tend to stay in when I shouldn’t, I don’t give in on arguments with my wife nearly soon enough. I could certainly be better with the whole “live to fight another day” thing.
However, as the cliche goes, It also ends up...
October 2008
25 posts
2 tags
Feeling Bullish
I’ve been to a few panels recently about how miserable the economy is going to be for the next “5-10” years. They have been 100% Doom and Gloom with a consensus on misery for raising money or having a start-up without 2-3 years of runway. (Lots of people say it is a great time to start a company… always with the presumption that you’ve ALREADY raised a 2-3 year...
4 tags
Quick complaint about the T-Mobile G1
I’ve had the T-Mobile G1 for a week now, and I’m planning on writing a more detailed review soon, but I’ll mention one thing that is bugging the HELL out of me:
Applications must be installed to the built-in memory. There is only about 64 megs of memory free when you bring the phone home, to be shared between downloaded apps and cache for running apps. Downloading applications...
Shiver Me Timbers!
My friend pointed me to a great comment on a post over at The Big Picture. The comment is about this image from the New York Times:
The most alarming stat to me is the inequality of income.
Even Blackbeard the pirate had a better ratio, the captain in pirate ships would take two shares to a crew member’s one. On a crew of 100, the captain would take two shares and the remaing 99 crew...
MarketOutsider Tells Investors Who's Up, Who's... →
Traffic as a trading analogy
While stuck in traffic this evening, I realized that traffic makes a good metaphor for the basic archetypes of stock traders.
The car that weaves in and out of traffic, always jumping into the lane that is moving the fastest is the day trader (scalper). They are in and out very actively trying to catch the most movement at any given time and never can stand to sit still.
The swing trader car is...
Yet he continues to ride subsidized busses...
Bus Rider: Wow, this bus is packed, you should buy more busses.
Bus Driver: Call your representative and encourage them to expand light-rail and transit.
BR: That'd mean more taxes.
BD: I suppose so.
BR: I got tired of them adding more taxes, so I simply stopped paying them a few years ago.
1 tag
Intracommunication
Startups will always have some advantages over larger, entrenched competitors. One of those advantages is intracommunication.
As companies grow and products differentiate, the ability to know what is going on with every product and to make all of their products seamlessly integrate is lost. Even if they kept the desire to keep perfect inter-operation, the communication and organization cost...
1927-1933 Chart of Pompous Prognosticators →
Perfection
Nothing is perfect. An unfortunate reality, perhaps, but something you can learn to embrace.
I’m in the market for a new phone soon, and I’m down to essentially three options.
iPhone 3G
T-Mobile G1
Nokia E71
The problem is none of these phones does everything I want in the way I want. No matter which I will choose, the others will do something I wish that the one I pick would...
Contingencies
Someone I have a very high opinion of when it comes to financial intelligence said today that a 5700 Dow is likely. I didn’t ask if he was being flippant or not, but if not, that is a pretty serious cut from where we are now. I’d have to assume that the american (and world) economy would come out looking pretty miserable.
What sort of contingency plan would you do if you were 30%...
4 tags
Stealth
I’ve been meeting a number of new startups recently that are in ‘stealth mode’. Sure, it sounds cool, and lots of the cool kids do it, but really… what’s the point?
As i’ve relayed before, ideas aren’t worth anything, it is all in the execution.
Hoping your opponent doesn’t know what you are doing isn’t a winning strategy. Assume your...
Publish and be wrong →
Ads
I almost never watch TV.
I especially almost never watch TV without recording it first and skipping the ads.
Whenever I’m watching and I catch the ads I’m dumbfounded, here are two that struck me tonight:
An ad where a child soccer team loses, the other team gets the trophy and celebrates while the losers sulk… until someone brings them all McDonalds! That’s right...
Lucky
We should all consider ourselves lucky. We are going through a period of history that will be unlike anything else most people ever experience in their life.
For those that have their eyes open, we are getting to learn so much; for example, just how much fear and panic and capitulation has to occur before a stock market crashes. We get to see it in even more detail than most, because we get to...
3 tags
Fear
Lots of fear out there about the stock market. It’s palpable, everywhere you go that’s what people are talking about.
Sure, there is plenty to be afraid of, but we all have plenty of things to be afraid of that are completely independant of the stock markets.
For example, in about 13 years I will have three daughters who will all be teenagers at the same time.
If you are worried...
3 tags
Simple Stock Advice
A friend of mine today said now’s the time to buy, pointing at GOOG.
Sure, Google is an awesome company and isn’t going anywhere, but why buy now?
I made this image to help illustrate my point to him:
Trying to guess the bottom (B) is pretty much impossible. You’re highly likely going to end up buying at A. Why try? If you waited until everything looked much better and...