A few weeks back I posted about an issue with people leaking sensitive information on their blogs regarding Apple Computers new product line.
It looks like C|nets News.com picked up my opinion and quoted me in one of their articles. You got to really watch what you say on these blogs as you never know where your opinions will get syndicated!
My buddy Greg Hartnett had a blog post about the executives at Enron getting convicted for their fraudulent business tactics. I posted a quick response on his blog that it makes me wonder what else is going on, say in this hyped up housing market?
Well, it looks like some new news is now being reported about one of America’s giant governments-sponsored mortgage company, Fannie Mae. A 340 page report was published on May 24th from American regulators stating Fannie May had been overstating their profits from 1998 - 2004 and has been fined $400 Million Dollars.
This overstating of profits allowed Franklin Raines, the former CEO to get paid $90 Million Dollars for his great work.
I don’t have my hands on that reports but I am sure there are some juicy nuggets of information talking about how this company lied about their earnings to increase its value.
Source: Economist May 27, 2006 – A ton of bricks
If you have not seen this movie yet, grab some drinks with your friends and rent it. I watched it last night and have not laughed so hard in a long time.
South Park’s Matt Stone and Trey Parker have me cracking up every Wednesday night while catching new episodes of South Park on Comedy Central. Their ability to point out fallacious arguments and oxymoronic societal and political logic in a simple ½ cartoon episode is borderline genius.
Now take all your favorite things you like about South Park and put it all into a fun movie. That’s Team America!
Someone close to me hates Jon Stewart! When I asked him what he likes to watch, he said political debate shows. Well, let me allow Jon Stewart to defend himself here with this clip of him in 2004 telling off one of those pointless and lame cable news debate shows.
Click Here To Watch Jon Stewart
(For some reason I am not able to embed videos)
Do you remember the early 1990’s? Do you remember the time we paid by the hour to chat on America Online? Do you remember life before Google?
It was a time before the Internet. It was a time our grandparents thought they were investing in a “soft toilette paper” company called Microsoft.
Then through the grapevine news traveled down to us common folk of a great businessman in the Seattle area; a man who created “Windows” and whom they called “Gates”.
Soon after we heard this mans name we began to hear his urban legends. We heard that he had single-handedly tricked Big Blue IBM into a near death sentence with the signing of an Operating System licensing deal.
Many of us did not understand what this all meant as we pounded away working on Lotus 123 with our Compaq 386 computers. Quickly the news traveled around the world and we all stood in awe as we watched Bill Gates build one of the most powerful companies in the world.
Not many of us really understood what was being built in Redmond, Washington but we knew they were only hiring the brightest minds from all best universities and anyone who was anyone wanted to work for them.
In just a few years the name Microsoft became common place and many of us were in the process of upgrading our 3.1 versions of Windows to 95. Many business news magazines were writing articles about how small startups were trying to compete against Microsoft only to realize their efforts were futile.
As we hit the middle of the decade NASDAQs top Silicon Valley companies started to take action creating ambitious alliances among each other and filing antitrust lawsuits in effort to stunt Microsoft’s growth.
It was a time when we all talked about America Online, Netscape, Apple and Sun Microsystems.
Let us now flash forward 10 years. In this weeks Economist a question is being asked, Is Google the new Microsoft?
It was less then a handful of years ago when many of us had no idea about this company called Google and now we have Bill Gates quoted as saying “too much power is concentrated in Google’s hands.”
We are all taking part in a new revolution, the Google Revolution. Microsoft is big, but many of us walk around saying at least once “That’s sweet, I got to go Google that!”
For many of us it’s as if we are watching history repeat itself. This time, all of the smartest geeks are rushing to work for Google who cant resist Google’s recruiting strategies such as posting billboards around Silicon Valley with messages such as “first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com”.
If you were smart enough to figure out the answer you would realize you had a URL to a Google run website where they were offering jobs.
As Microsoft in the 90’s, today Google has become such a dominating force “Microsoft and other big internet firms, including eBay, Amazon and Yahoo! are now said to be negotiating various alliances in order to provide a counterweight to the new behemoth”.
Really though, just how powerful is Google and should Microsoft really be worried?
In one hand you have two completely different companies. Microsoft is a creator of software that has tapped into nearly 90% of every computer user in the world. Google on the other hand is an Advertising broker utilizing a Search Engine platform.
The mistakes made by Microsoft. Anyone who has followed this area knows that with all the product launches Microsoft had made during the 1990’s they completely missed the boat when it came to the Internet.
Microsoft focused a lot of its energy competing with America Online. Quite frankly they should have won that war considering they already dominated the computer desktops. But they did not and today they are left with a third tier search engine called MSN.
Knowing the fact that Microsoft missed its opportunity to capture the Internet market early on, should we really believe Bill Gates is losing sleep over Google?
To start, if Google is planning on sticking around for the long haul, it must overcome one major issue which Microsoft has perfected since the 1970’s; locking in a large user base. I am stuck using Microsoft software unless someone comes out with a free knock off operating system.
Many people believe Google could create competing Microsoft Office products for word processing and spreadsheets. But for years the open source communities have been offering these software solutions free of charge and still Microsoft is dominating this area.
Microsoft may have missed the first round of the Internet Revolution, but we must give them credit for getting us locked in to their products. What can Google do to keep us locked into their products?
Currently, I could easily choose to use Yahoo over Google. There is no software for me to uninstall and there really is no new learning curve. But Google believes it has one ace up its sleeve.
In this week’s TelevisionWeek, there is an article about how Google has been working on developing a new television advertisement solution utilizing the same type of technology it currently uses for the Internet, Print and Radio. They believe they can custom tailor television adverts based upon who is watching the television.
The idea of Google providing me with targeted advertising via my TV is concerning. I’ve used their internet advertising technology, Adsense, for the past 3 years and the adverts are far from targeted.
Google will also have one major obstacle to overcome to achieve it dream of being the master broker of the world’s advertisements, the set-top box.
Cable and Satellite companies currently control the last leg of the network. It is their box that is plugged into my TV and they are the ones who provide me with my channel lineup and interface. Google would have to work out a deal with these providers in order to get their advertising software on this hardware.
If this is the direction Google is headed, Microsoft already has a leg up on them. They have had their hands in IP-TV and Set-Top boxes for years.
I could speculate on these companies all day long. At the end of the day I really will never know what the future holds. Back when I was trying to figure out how to pay off that first credit card I got in college because I spent 48 hours downloading software on my 14.4k modem I had no clue I would be doing things like Googling and Blogging.
But it is exciting to watch.
This is just a quick post. I just got back from spending a long weekend at the Pechanga Casino Resort located between Los Angeles and San Diego. Pechanga is a new four star hotel and casino built over an Indian Reservation in a one time sleepy vineyard town called Temecula.
This weekend I stepped up my game a bit. I finally built up the courage to sit down at a high stakes No Limit Hold’em game. For those of you who don’t play poker or usually just play the limit tables let me tell yea, sitting down at a No Limit high stakes table can really makes your heart pound.
As usual I sat down wearing my sun glasses but this time playing against some of the best players I’d ever come across. Poker is such as hard core game, there were a few times I had been holding pocket A’s, K’s and Q’s but to my demise the flops always seemed to hint to the possibility of a flush draw or straight.
There were a few hands I had to go All In on and did really well. Although I am sure my opponents were able to catch on to the fact I kept on having nervous leg seizers whenever the pot got extraordinarily high.
On this trip I had better luck playing Black Jack. I was lucky enough to find a few tables where I could play head to head against the dealers. I enjoy going Head On because the pace of the game is much faster and I don’t have to see other players making horrid mistakes like standing on 14 when the dealer is showing a face card.
We finished off the weekend celebrating mothers day with a Champaign brunch at Thornton Winery. All in all, it was a great trip. I am sure the casino will be sending me and my wife an invitation to come back soon.
Here are some pictures of us at the casino
Apart from starting a new business there are two other things I really love to do; that is to play Chess and Poker. I suppose it is because I equate both of these games with being in business.
When growing up my father used to say, “Son, chess is life. If you can win at chess you can win in business.” Well today there is not a day I do not think about either one of these two games when making any major business decision. I approach both of these games with very similar business tactics such as coming in with a pre-game strategy. I know coming in without a pre-game strategy I would lack sufficient confidence to beat all of my opponent’s.
This is not to say that every time I play with a pre-game strategy I’m guaranteed win. There are many times I am ready to play with all the confidence in the world but I was just outplayed by a better opponent or they landed a lucky Fourth Street / River Card.
It is at this point in the game when a major decision must be made. Should I continue on knowing that I will inevitably lose or fold early on, accept my loss and play another round?
I believe one of the hardest business decisions an entrepreneur must make is deciding when it is time to call a spade a spade. To me there is nothing harder then making the decision to leave a project which I have spent years building.
There are many times decisions like this that are made for you. There are cash flow issues, the market is not ready for your product or service or you have just taken on a project which is beyond your ability.
What I am talking about here is making a decision to leave a project because you know in your heart that the time has just come.
Whatever the reasons are I think any sensible entrepreneur must set a personal limit on how much time you commit to any project.
The sad thing is this concept goes against what we have all learned in school and by watching movies; they want us to believe a good captain, a real leader should always goes down with his ship.
But in today’s day and age, being an entrepreneur is extremely difficult. Competition is fierce and the name of the game is survival. Does nobility guarantee success? Or does setting personal limits, folding your hands when it is time and use the newly gained knowledge for a new project?
If you have been here then you know what I am talking about. There are entrepreneurs who would say the only way to be a true success is to push on, carry on, fight a good fight and fight till the end. But does that mean be silly, neglect personal responsibilities and live in a fantasy world?
I was watching American Inventor the other night and there were a few applicants who had “sacrificed everything” in order to be the next American Inventor. They wanted to achieve the American dream so bad that the only way in doing so was by quitting their jobs, getting into unrecoverable debt, subsequently destroying their families.
Why are we being told this is the way it should be done?
I hear that nearly 90% of all new restaurants fail in the first 6 months of business. That nearly all small businesses fail in the first 2 years and chances of them making it to the 5th year is slim to none.
It is not the smart play to go down with a sinking ship. The strategic chess player takes everything they’ve learned from past games and applies it to his new pre-game strategy. The tactical poker player folds his hand early enough in a round so he has the opportunity to win later on with better cards.
It’s sad and pathetic, I know. I now have another page to manage. But mom, all the cool people are doing it!
Imagine a computer so small that it can swim around your body and hangout within living cells. Now imagine if you will that this computer is able to act as your own personal doctor, detecting disease and using its preprogrammed medical knowledge to output a therapeutic drug.
This sounds like something you would see in a science fiction movie but the fact is this is very real and is currently being worked on with amazing progress.
There are many names for this technology and the concepts have been around for several decades. I recall about ten years ago one of my professors telling me how he was part of a new startup organization which was researching “Nano Biological Technology”. He described this new technology just as I have above.
Well, it seems scientists have come a long way in ten years. They have currently built a solid foundation for which these biological computers can process simple commands and interact with other living cells. Before you get too excited, they are not yet at the point where these biomolecular machines can run around with a micostethoscope asking cells to cough in a human body but they are at the point where scientist can program molecules to do certain tasks within test tubes.
According to Ehud Shaprio (Professor, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) and Yaakov Benenson (fellow at Harvard University, USA) in a highly detailed Scientific American article;
“We have already succeeded in creating a biological automation made of DNA and proteins able to diagnose in a test tube the molecular symptoms of certain cancers and ‘treat’ the disease by releasing a therapeutic molecule”
As for their sophistication, don’t expect biological computers to replace electronic computers anytime soon. The speed of molecular machines can only process a few hundred operations a second whereas modern day devices can process billions of operations a second.
Every once in a while we get the opportunity to hear about new things that will certainly change the world. These new computer species could possibly change the future of healthcare for everyone. This is definitely one exciting area to follow.
If you have not seen last Saturday’s nights White House Correspondents Dinner, here’s your chance! The big talk around the web this week is on Stephen Colbert.
Do you think he went too far?
I also have a link to the video “Bush Meets Bush”
