Wild Idea of the Day: Ebay or ETrade should buy Nasdaq and/or the NYSE

(Disclaimer I probalby own all of the stocks mentione in this article as of this writing, either directly through stocks or indirectly through ETFs, mutual funds, or options, and I may sell them at any time or buy more, who knows, not even me!).

Ebay is, I believe, the largest online marketplace. Its market capitalization as of 3/23/2006 is $52.6 billion. As its growth begins to slow, it needs to look into new markets, or perhaps, old ones, like stock exchanges. One of the nice things about online marketplaces (exchanges) is that you have fixed costs, but, as you scale in volume, beyond a certain point, every dollar in revenue is pure profit. I think that there is no greater opportunity for consolidation than now for stock exchanges, which have gone public. Whether stock exchanges should be public for-profit entities is another debate, however, the reality is, the NYSE and NASDAQ are now public, for-profit institutions.

Surprisingly, these venerable U.S. stock exchanges, pillars of the U.S. economy, have a fairly small market values. The Nasdaq's market value is $3.4 billion (That's far less than what EBay paid for Skype!) and the NYSE's is about $12 billion. EBay could easily in one fell swoop swallow up both of them and instantly dominate the financial trading markets in the U.S. What an incredible, grand move that would be (though surely this would raise some regulatory eyebrows and scrutiny).

The other logical acquirer I could see would be a major brokerage or financial institution such as ETrade, whose market cap is $9.7 billion. This would be a nice fit in that it would produce synergies in saved trading costs, and complementary products, to create a financial conglomerate.

Well, I'm not running either of those companies, so these are just crazy ideas at this point.

Review of Google Finance

Google just grew a little bigger. Today, Google launched a new Google Finance web site to compete with Yahoo Finance and Morningstar.

Like Yahoo's site, Google Finance provides recent news, market information, stock quotes, charts, and stats and facts about stocks and funds.

Google one-ups Yahoo's finance site by making their charts more interactive- you can drag the chart to scroll forward or back in time (and the news articles move along correspondingly too).

Google does a good job of linking to external data sources such as SEC filings from EDGAR Online, Analyst Estimates from The Street.com, Reserach Reports on Yahoo Finance, and more. In addition, their page also incorporates recent blog articles and discussion group articles for a particular stock or fund as well.

It's still in beta and is missing some things that Yahoo has. First is completeness- for instance DBC (Deutche Bank Commodities ETF), a recently introduced commodities index fund, is missing from their system as of this writing. Also, they don't provide any stock or fund screeners and calculators.

Overall, Google Finance is a good solid entrance into the financial information vertical. I think of the three finance portals that I have mentioned in this article, Morningstar's is the best. Morningstar's free infomation is excellent, just edging out Google and Yahoo Finance. Additionally, with a PAID subscription, Morningstar's content is light years beyond Yahoo and Google's free sites in terms of useful information in my opinion (Yahoo does, however, also let you buy premium content). Yahoo's site is in a narrow second place, but Google's site is on the verge of surpassing Yahoo's site if they just round out their feature set, which I'm sure they will, since Google Finance is still in beta.

Comparing 4x5 Film vs. Digital

Serious landscape photographers use large format film cameras. 4x5 film is film that is 4 inches x 5 inches in size, and yields extremely detailed images (over 100 megapixels). For instance, here is a 4x5 camera.

This is a great article comparing 4x5 film to a modern digital camera, the Nikon D200 done by Ken Rockwell. Which one is better? The results may surprise you :)

Read on to find out- I think the author is right on!

Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders' Meeting - Ready, Set, Go!

Well, billionaire Warren Buffet's company, Berkshire Hathaway, has just released its annual report. If you haven't read his reports, I highly recommend you spend some time to read one or more. They're filled with general investing information, and useful advice, as well as Warren's views of the economy and market outlook. It's easy reading too. This year he talks about investing fees and hedge funds, investing in foreign markets, and of course his company's recent acquisitions and investment activity.

Buffet's shareholder meetings are becoming a cultural event- attendance is often over 10,000 people. This year, for the first time ever, I'm going to attend the shareholders' meeting, May 6-7, 2006. It should be pretty interesting. Here's a brief description of what the meeting is like. If you're planning on going, or have gone before and have some comments, or experiences to share drop me an email .

Add a Kosmix.com search box to your site

We're continually adding more new Kosmix features... now you can add a Kosmix search box to your web site by just putting in a short snippet of code in your web page.

Web 2.0 Company List

It's like the web is reborn! The past year or so has seen a new generation of web start-ups spring to life. I just came across this list, which is an extremely comprehensive list of Web 2.0 start-ups. Someone did an amazing job of putting this huge list together and categorizing the sites. The list of search start-ups is impressively large.

Kosmix - New Features

OK, time for a commercial break :) For those that are very observant, you may have noticed a few new features on the Kosmix web site.

Health Quizzes - a new category with pages about health quizzes is now available. For instance, Dieting Quizzes

Travel- Hotel Chains - Find chains of hotels, such as Maui hotel chains

Travel - Hotel Consolidators - Find hotel consolidators that are selling hotel reservations, such as Maui hotel consolidators

Word variations - Kosmix.com now does automatic searching of morphological variations of words, so for instance, if someone types in a query for "diseases", pages which contain the word "disease" may also come up.

Just in time for PC Forum(Release 1.0), we've introduced personalization features. Here's the CNET PC Forum summary

Now you can build your own Kosmix personalized topic. You just select which topics are important to you and you'll get customized results based on your selections.

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One last new feature, you can now add a Kosmix search box to your web site.

The Ever-present Cubicle

There's an interesting article in Fortune about The Birth of the Cubicle. Interestingly enough, it wasn't designed to pack lots of people into a space at all. The inventor of the cubicle, Robert Pobst, had a vision of a flexible dynamic work space. I liked some of the later designs in the picture slideshow in the article.

In Silicon Valley, space is at a premium, so it's pretty standard to live at work in a cubicle. At Kosmix, until recently, we were small enough that almost all the developers fit in one medium-sized open space room. Surprisingly, I liked the everyone-in-one-room concept. I guess it also helped that the room had a lot of windows. Now, we've grown and needed more space so we all live in a new cubicle-land office :)

The New ask.com

The Ask Jeeves search engine (ask.com) has been one of the minor search players for years. But they have quietly been broadening their search-related holdings. Now they have re-launched as ask.com, dropping Jeeves, which I think is a good branding move.

Ask.com has pretty good underlying search technology, having bought Teoma.com in 2001. They also purchased the desktop search company Tukaroo and Interactive Search Holdings which owned Excite, My Way, My Search, and iWon, and finally, they acquired blog feed aggregator and search engine Bloglines. So, Ask now has assembled a reasonable portfolio of search properties.

The main search site, ask.com, has a number of nice features, as well as some rough edges. For instance, you can see a small graphic preview of a page if you hover over the binocular icons next to a result (cute, but I don't think very useful). You can save results and organize them and add tags to results you saved (though the UI to manage and tag saved results is a bit clunky and old-school). They need to fix some rough edges, for instance, URLs they display are not as nice as Google and Yahoo's (try the query: sf giants) because they are not handling redirects as well as Yahoo and Google. They do, however, provide query suggestions for narrowing and expanding your search, as well as related queries. And, they've added special-case results at the top for specific types of queries (similar to what Google does for airline flights). For example, type the query: weather san francisco and you'll get the weather at the top. Type in a major sports team such as Pittsburgh Pirates and you'll get links to scores, schedule, stats, and more. Wikipedia hits are also shown right at the top. All in all, it's good to see some healthy competition in search.