spotsearch

The SSD Revolution Begins Now

2009-08-16T21:23:00.000-07:00

I think that at this moment in time, solid state drives are about to cross over from the bleeding edge and become more mainstream. They have reached the point that you can have a really usable capacity at a reasonable price point- a decent 120GB SSD can now be bought for under $275.

In addition, some manufacturers such as Apple and Lenovo (Thinkpad) are now including SSDs as configuration options. With benefits of lower power consumption, blazingly faster seek times, and better reliability, I personally am likely to include an SSD in my next notebook computer purchase. I have had too many hard drive reliability problems in the past, and am happy to switch.

Some links to get you thinking about this interesting option:

Putting 2 SSDs in a Macbook Pro for RAID 0 - the performance from a notebook is incredible

A Six Pack of SSDs Compared - from The Tech Report

A Snapshot in time- National Debt more than sum of ALL public U.S. Companies

2008-10-11T20:38:00.001-07:00

I think we have reached a pivotal moment in time. At least according to the best estimates I know of, it looks like our national debt has exceeded the market value of ALL public U.S. Companies! I don't know what this means, but, it doesn't seem good....

According to the national debt clock, our national debt is now

$10.27 trillion.

Whereas the value of all U.S. public companies, as shown by the Wilshire 5000 index (see live chart) is about $9.12 trillion.

Have you been to Hubbert's Peak?

2008-05-16T21:43:00.000-07:00

So, have you been to Hubbert's Peak? Maybe you're there right now and don't even know it.

Hubbert's Peak is actually the nickname fore "Peak Oil", the peak of the oil production curve. It's a significant point because once you're on the other side, oil production is going to go down, and the ramifications on the world economies will be enormous. Some think we're there right now, or soon will be. Just one more thing to think about......

The Kindle Arrives!

2008-04-20T22:22:00.000-07:00

Well, after much debate, I finally decided to get a kindle. I have been mostly using my iPhone for reading news, and, though it works fairly well for that purpose, I longed for a larger screen. The Kindle, with its 6" screen and cellular wireless data connection, seems almost ideal - if you don't mind paying for your news. I liked the idea of buying newspapers on-demand from my Kindle. So far, in the past 3 days that I've owned the device, I have purchased 2 newspapers (the Wall Street Journal and Investors Business Daily). The electronic purchasing experience is fantastic except for one detail- I wish I could see a preview of the newspaper or magazine headlines before making the purchase. The form factor is nice- compact, thin, with a useful cover for carrying it. I think the Sony PRS-505 looks cooler than the Kindle, however, the Kindle's wireless data network won me over as being more useful- I just saw myself using the Kindle a whole lot more due to the convenience factor.

The Kindle screen is nice, though I do wish it had even more contrast. It is about the contrast of a traditional newspaper, and it is black and white (plus greyscale). In bright sunlight and outdoors, the screen is extremely readable, unlike most other display technologies. Indoors, in more dimly lit situations, you need a light source (it has no backlighting built in). The audio playback capability is very rudimentary- I was hoping for a bit better, as I tend to listen to quite a few podcasts. Browsing the web is possible with its built-in experimental web browser, however, this browser is extremely rudimentary, and has a hard time properly rendering most sites. If possible, go to mobile-optimized web sites, or you'll find it a frustrating experience.

So far, the Kindle has been a mixed bag- some nice positives, some disappointing negatives. I'll give another update after about a month of use....

"A Bull in China" - is it full of bull?

2007-12-31T18:59:00.000-08:00

Famed investor Jim Rogers has just written a new book, "A Bull in China: Investing Profitably in the World's Greatest Market ". By the title, obviously, this book has hugely positive things to say about the investing potential in China.

For those who live far away from China, but are interested in investing in it, this book is a fantastic way to get the lay of the land. Jim Rogers discusses major industries in China, such as energy, tourism, the Internet, manufacturing, and much more. He gives a good overview of the growth and current state of each industry and then follows up with a list of major companies (along with a short business summary) involved in those industries. Jim does not make specific stock picks or recommendations, but does give you a good picture of how things are. It's up to you to do your homework and make your own picks.

The writing style of the book is conversational, and makes for very easy reading. He does a decent job of presenting both positive and negative aspects of investing in China. I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about the Chinese markets.

Some Big Things from Small Companies

2007-09-28T20:45:00.000-07:00

Google's main advantage over other companies (and Yahoo in particular) is its distributed infrastructure. By abstracting away the complexity of building scalable, fault-tolerant software using their Google FileSystem (GFS) and MapReduce programming layer, they greatly increase the productivity of their developers and reduce their time-to-market with scalable code.

The open source community has not stood still, and there are some great projects aiming to do similar things. For example, at Kosmix, where I work, we've decided to release our Kosmos File System as open source (download kfs here). Hbase for example, has had support from Powerset and Zvents. In addition, my friends Ethan and Doug at Zvents have been working on cool new things to-be-announced.

The folks at Yahoo have also done a great job of supporting open source scalable software as well, with their strong support of hadoop and Powerset has been using it on Amazon's EC2 computing service. . All of the pieces are falling together for start-ups to build their own scalable infrastructure inexpensively.

What about Google? They'd be smart if they one-upped everyone and released their scalable infrastructure to the public, perhaps as a hosted service. This would make it easy for them to become the defacto supplier of scalable computation, making start-up acquisition and integration easier for them, in addition to expanding their offerings. Then, anyone developing a viral Facebook app would find a natural home for building their app to handle the computation load.

Book Review: When Genius Failed

2007-08-02T23:26:00.000-07:00

"When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management" by Roger Lowenstein is one great lesson in the perils of investing in hedge funds. Combine hot shot traders and Nobel prize winning economists, and you have a company, Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) that was the envy of wall street. LTCM was a super-secretive hedge fund, hugely leveraged (like many of today's funds) filled with brilliant Ph.D.s and sophisticated market models. How could you go wrong? Things went amazingly well for a few years. They racked up huge returns. Their models of the market were doing great. Well, things eventually did go wrong, and LTCM endured rapid spectacular losses before being bailed out by several large wall street banks. It's a fast, easy book to read- highly recommended for anyone with even a passing interest in investing, hedge funds, and private equity.

Black Swans

2007-07-29T19:33:00.000-07:00

Recently, Nassim Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness, just finished a new book The Black Swan. He was on WealthTrack talking about his theory as applied to investing, and, I must say, it is both astonishing and insightful. His main concern is people take too much risk. So, he thinks people should hold about 90% of their investments in extemely safe short-term treasuries (from a diversified set of stable countries). That is an amazingly conservative stance, at first glance (but read on...). This protects the investor from downside risk. And, the remaining 10% should be in very risky investments (think biotech, technology, etc) which have a chance of a major positive black swan event. So, low risk stable base, and small amounts in high risk investments for profiting from black swan events. It's a very interesting theory.

Heads up- more bad news

2007-07-27T00:56:00.000-07:00

At the start of every year, I do a look back at how my investments did, and a look forward at what I see coming. In January, 2007, I wrote:

"According to analysts, 2007 should be a good year for large cap stocks. It should be good for markets too, as interest rates should stay low. I've noticed a large number of private equity LBOs. These seem to be keeping stock prices high. I think I need to watch those events closely, as, if that money dries up, stocks could tank."

Well, events are unfolding now! According to Bill Gross, of Pimco:
Enough is Enough.

"Several hundred billion dollars of bank loans and high yield debt wait in the wings to take out the private equity and leveraged buyout deals that have helped propel stocks to Dow 14,000. And lenders…mmmmm, how do we say this…don’t seem to have much of an appetite anymore. Six weeks ago the high yield debt market was humming the Campbell’s soup theme and now, it’s begging for a truckload of Rolaids. Yields have risen by 100 to 150 basis points in response" - Bill Gross

This looks to me like an ominous sign of more worries yet to come. It's usually wrong to be to reactionary to news- after all, every day something else unexpected comes along. However, the long-term implications of a slow, long, declining housing market, rising foreclosure rates in the subprime loan market, and increasing interest rates for LBO loans is not looking good.

FeedUp.com Launches! Personalized News+Blog Search Delivered via RSS

2007-07-24T22:02:00.000-07:00

Well, at last, the project I've been working on for the past few months has been launched (it's in beta)! FeedUp.com is a personalizable news+blog search engine. You simply enter a list of things you're interested in, and it generates an RSS feed of the search results, which you can then subscribe to with your favorite news reader. Or just bookmark it in your browser. In addition, you can even get a widget to put your feed results on your web site or blog.

As someone who reads news all the time, on a large variety of topics, this is really a project that I personally have loved to work on. Although there are Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts, which let you subscribe to individual queries, I have so many interests (hundreds of queries) that emails to my inbox would be way too difficult to manage. FeedUp takes all your interests specified in a feed and ranks the results to deliver to you the best articles to read. Anyways, try it out!

By the way, FeedUp.com is a Kosmix product, but, we chose not to brand it as Kosmix so as not to confuse it with our existing vertical search products.

Why the iPhone Changes Everything

2007-07-20T00:35:00.000-07:00

I was one of the early adopters that bought the iPhone. I even wrote a review of it here. So, after two weeks, I have to say, it is a device that really does change everything. In my opinion, it's the first mobile device that really works as a multi-function cell phone, internet browser, PDA, and music player. For example, here are some of the things I used the iPhone for just today.
* I woke up to the morning alarm I programmed for every Monday-Friday.
* I checked email at least 10 times on it.
* I checked my stocks at least half a dozen times during the day.
* I looked up the address of a restaurant for lunch using the Google Maps app.
* I listened to music a couple of times throughout the day, both with headphones and with the built-in speakers.
* I checked the weather forecast with the built-in app.
* I took a picture of some notes I made on a whiteboard.
* I added a calendar event with an alarm for next week.

It's really a multi-function device that works. And on top of all its features, it's stylish and beautiful too. Being a first generation device, it's obvious there are so many ways that the applications and device could be improved. All of that will happen soon enough. But, today, you can get a glimpse of the future of tomorrow with the iPhone. I am quite certain that the iPhone will follow the path of the iPod. The first generation is an aspirational device, a luxury gadget. But, soon enough, cheaper, better versions will move down the price ladder and into the mass market. Each new version will be a refinement of the previous version, bringing new features, improvements on existing features, cheaper prices, and more variety.

My biggest criticism is that I think Apple needs to be more developer-friendly. That they graciously allow people to develop web-based applications is laughably inadequate. Their closed-platform mentality is very disappointing, both from a developer perspective and a consumer perspective. I hope they will embrace the huge developer community that can make the iPhone a platform for the future.

Prosper Update- It's now a Lenders' Market!

2007-07-06T22:14:00.000-07:00

I've been using Prosper.com as a lender for over a year now, and it has been great! I liked the Prosper lending experience because I felt like I was really helping people. Even now, one year later, I still look forward to browsing the new listings. I especially like entrepreneurial listings- I think it's great to help people live their dreams.I have about 24 loans, of various amounts, and so far, I have had no payment problems and no defaults (but, being realistic, I am sure eventually I will see some defaults). My average loan interest rate is an outstanding 14.49%. When I was first starting with Prosper a year ago, it was very difficult finding good loans I wanted to lend to. However, lately it seems to definitely be a lenders' market- there are so many good borrowers now that I am unable to lend to everyone I'd like to.

PowerSet's PowerLabs Demo Day, 6/28/2007

2007-06-29T01:04:00.000-07:00

Finally, PowerSet opens up! They held a demo day for bloggers and users who signed up for their PowerLabs web site, and revealed some of their thoughts. They've expressed a very refreshing attitude of openness which is, ironically, quite unusual for a search engine company. PowerSet is making use of existing technologies where they can. For instance, they use Wikipedia data, FreeBase semi-structured data, and Wordnet. Of course, they also have announced they will use Ruby on Rails too. Currently their main test index is fairly small (Wikipedia) but, they plan to scale up, with a focus on verticals.

Their main competitive edge is their linguistic approach to search. By augmenting their index with additional linguistic information, they hope to more accurately answer search queries, especially question & answer type queries. Cofounder Steve Newcomb says that Moore's Law is on their side- currently, the linguistic parsing they do during indexing is quite expensive, on the order of 1 second per page. However, machines are getting faster every year, and, code can continually be optimized, making their approach feasible and practical. They make use of both their own 720-cpu-core cluster as well as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cluster (using about 1000 CPU cores in Amazon's cluster) to do their processing.

An interesting experiment on their part is PowerLabs. They view it as a way to build a community that will provide early access to their search engine and will obtain early feedback in the development of their search engine. I'm a believer in getting early feedback and rapid iteration, so, I think they're on the right track with that.

Their demo was impressive, however, it was a series of "canned" queries. They unfortunately didn't take random audience queries or let anyone directly play with their search engine, so at this time, it is quite difficult to make a judgement on how strong or weak their technology is. I think it will take quite a long time for them to perfect the system, as they have to also handle standard short web queries well in addition to their core competence (question & answer queries). One weak area is they currently don't do link analysis for ranking, though they do intend to have some sort of link analysis incorporated by the time they launch. I suspect they will have a significant amount of work in tuning their ranking algorithms. They also mentioned that they intend to create snippets augmented with metadata. For instance, if the result had the name of a famous person, they might add a parenthetical bit of metadata about the person: George W. Bush (President of the United States).

Overall, it was an interesting Demo Day. I liked their attitude of openness and community-building. However, whether they succeed or not will come down to how good their technology is, and if they can get people to switch. Building a good demo is one thing, a good first step- making it work in the real world on a huge range of real user queries is another thing. I look forward to trying out PowerSet soon.

For another take on the event, see OnoTech's post.

Spotsearch is back!

2007-06-28T15:31:00.000-07:00

Hi,

There are too many things I want to blog about, so Spotsearch is now back!

PowerSet is having a demo day today in their San Francisco offices. They have promised great things- a search engine to take on Google, a fresh "open" approach to sharing information (are they the Anti-Google?), so, will they live up to their hype? Only time will tell.

Spotsearch has moved to TopicPoint.com

2006-09-04T21:41:00.000-07:00

SpotSearch has outgrown blogger.com, and is now moving to its own destination site: TopicPoint.com.

Most of the content has also moved as well. The move came because of the limitations of Blogger. In particular, I like blogging on a variety of topics, and moving to more full-featured blogging software (MovableType) let me more easily put blog entries in categories. So, please stop by to the new site, www.TopicPoint.com.

Solar Sailor - coming to San Francisco

2006-08-28T00:23:00.000-07:00

Solar power is on the verge of becoming mainstream in the California housing market. The goal of a new bill passed in California is to create a million solar-powered homes. In addition, new solar energy start-ups such as NanoSolar are expecting to decrease the cost of solar cells by a factor of 10. So, it should be no surprise that here in California, even boats are going solar! Yes, a new solar-powered (hybrid electric + diesel) passenger ferry called the Solar Sailor is expected to begin operation by 2008, shuttling passengers to and from Alcatraz.

And while we're talking about alternative-fuel boats, there's also the EarthRace, a biodiesel powerboat that is circumnavigating the world, and happens to be in California right now. Check it out.. this is one of the coolest looking boats you'll ever see.

Cool Site: Farecast - predict when to buy airline tickets!

2006-08-22T00:57:00.000-07:00

This is the travel site I've been wishing for! Have you ever wondered whether you should buy airline tickets now or wait? Well, now Farecast tries to help you out by predicting for you. It looks at historical patterns to recommend flight ticket purchases. Currently, it's in beta, and only covers the some common destinations. Hopefully they'll have full global city coverage soon!

They also have a blog.

How to Write a Good Prosper Loan Request

2006-08-21T20:52:00.000-07:00

One of the most important things about getting funded on Prosper.com is writing a good loan description. A good loan description will have to accomplish several key things:
1. Describe why you need the loan.
2. Describe your current expenses. If you're getting rid of loan debts, what are the current debts and interest rates you're paying?
3. Describe your income (and/or your spouse if applicable).
4. Describe your insurance situation (are you covered with health, life, auto, home insurance).
5. Give confidence to the lender of your ability to repay the loan.
6. Tell your story - give the lender a good view of who you are, what your situation is. Let your personality shine!

Here are some examples of well-written loan requests on Prosper:
I Want to be Free - good detail
Debt Consolidation - good detail
Help Consolidate High Interest loans - good detail and story
Help Bring Barking Dog Coffee to Life! - Telling a good story

A few other useful hints:
* Include a nice picture of you and/or your family. Since the lenders can't meet you in person, it helps to make your request more personal.
* Don't end your listings on weekends or strange hours. Ending your listing during normal hours is better because as your listing is about to expire, it shows up high on the list of soon-to-expire listings and you want to maximize the people that see it near the end.
* Be honest. It's all about trust here, and your honesty will be appreciated.

ETFs for Dividends with WisdomTree

2006-08-17T22:56:00.000-07:00

I've been searching for a good way to invest in dividend-paying stocks. The standard ETFs for this include:
* DVY - iShares Dow Jones Select Dividend Index, which covers mid-cap and large-cap dividend-paying U.S. companies.
* PEY PowerShares High Yield Dividend Achievers

Those are fine for covering the U.S. markets, but, now, investing in foreign dividend-paying companies got much simpler. A new ETF start-up, WisdomTree has launched a fantastic array of dividend-focused ETFs, for both U.S. and foreign markets. These are a great way to diversify your investments.

WisdomTree has a pretty good list of superstar names in the investing industry behind it, including Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel, and Arthur Levitt, former SEC chairman.

Are You Saving Enough?

2006-08-17T22:38:00.000-07:00

One of the things I worry about is if I'm saving enough. MSNBC has a GREAT Special Report on Retirement Savings. Over 49% of GenX'ers are likely not saving enough for retirement. That's almost half the population in the future! That means people will have to work longer, or not retire at all. Perhaps even more alarming, over half the U.S. workers aged 55 or higher have less than $50,000 saved for retirement! Many of them may be able to rely on social security or pensions though, but pensions are fast becoming a thing of the past.

Click Fraud- Google Responds and completely discredits Auditing Sites!

2006-08-10T23:21:00.000-07:00

Click Fraud- it's a huge problem, right? Well, maybe it's not as big a problem as you think. Google conducted a detailed study of click fraud, and in particular, looked at the reports from some click fraud detection firms.... and, they totally discredit them. In particular, Google claims the reports from ClickFacts, Click Forensics, and AdWatcher are erroneous and do not reflect the way Google actually counts clicks and charges for clicks.

John Battelle has a post on this. Read the Google Report Here.

The report is quite convincing- Google knows quite a bit more about click fraud than the click fraud monitoring firms.

Happiness Around the World

2006-07-29T16:26:00.000-07:00

This was a really cool site I came across.... some researchers tried to measure "happiness" around the world. Here's a map of happiness (and below it, a table) for different countries!

Some notable results:
#1 Denmark
#2 Switzerland
#3 Austria
#4 Iceland
#5 Bahamas
.
.
#10 Canada
.
.
#23 USA

Buy Your Own Island

2006-07-20T02:11:00.000-07:00

It's fun to dream..... this article talks about Buying an Island (surprisingly, you can buy an island for under $100,000, if you're not too picky about the location!

Here's a web site with island real estate.

First Fundings on Prosper.com

2006-06-28T12:02:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned earlier, my lending philosophy on Prosper is to give to people that I believe in. I'm not just out to make a quick buck- I like the social aspect of lending to help out someone and seeing them succeed at their goals. I just funded two loans on Prosper.com (Technically, I repurchased fractions of loans from Prosper, as lenders on Prosper are actually loan repurchasers). My first two loans, I believe, are great ones, and I am quite positive about them, and feel great about helping out these people.

The first is a loan to BloggingAwayDebt, a blogger who has put her financial life online for everyone to read. She is writing about tackling her large amount of credit card debt and gives interesting tips along the way. It's fun just reading her blog- check it out. If you're interested in reading about the borrower's perspective on Prosper, read her posts here.

The second loan was to the owner of Barking Dog Coffee, a (soon-to-be-started) dog-friendly Coffee House located inside The Book Worm Book Store. There's a yard area too, where dogs can be tied, and walked around. They'll have not only coffee, but smoothies, milkshakes, baked goods, and doggy treats. This is such a great idea, and, I believe the owner has the experience and enthusiasm to make it a success.

Both borrowers had great credit grades (A and AA), both are married with dual incomes (usually helps in that it's less likely both people in the couple would end up being unemployed at the same time), and both exhibited great enthusiasm for reaching their goals.

Looking to Lend on Prosper.com

2006-06-17T00:35:00.000-07:00

As a lender, you have a choice of a range of borrowers based on credit ratings, from AA through HR (High Risk). The rate you get goes correspondingly higher the more risk the loan.

Here's an example of the Credit ratings and default rates that Prosper cites from historical Experian data.


Rating Avg. Default 
  AA     0.20%
  A      0.90%
  B      1.80%
  C      3.30% 
  D      6.20%
  E      10.40%
  HR     19.10%
NC Cannot estimate (no credit history)

Reasons borrowers request a loan are interesting and varied. There are some downright bad borrower ideas- for instance, borrowing money (at rates around 10% or more) to invest in the stock market. This is just plain dumb because you are starting off with a 10% handicap, and over long periods of time, the U.S. stock market (S&P 500 Index) returns around 10.2% so you are unlikely to make much money borrowing at 10% interest. The fact is, most PROFESSIONAL mutual fund managers are unable to consistently beat the S&P 500 Index.

Another often-seen borrower on Prosper is someone looking into borrowing money to lend to more risky borrowers on Prosper. Borrowing (even at reasonable 7% rates) to lend to riskier borrowers is a rather risky proposition. You're starting with a 7% or more rate handicap due to your loan interest, and you're exposing yourself to a huge amount of risk as a borrower lending to even more risky borrowers.

So, should a lender part a fool from his/her money? Or should a lender try and educate them on their folly? Or just avoid these loans altogether? Hard to say. My inclination is to find loans that are for a good purpose, loans that will help someone, make a difference in their lives in a positive way, while earning a fair return.

Is EBay Inflation-Proof?

2006-06-15T01:05:00.000-07:00

With all this talk about rising inflation, stocks for the past few weeks have taken a big dive down. The general theory is that as interest rates and inflation rises, stocks go down because higher interest rates mean more money will shift to safer investments, because returns there are more attractive.

However, we can't indiscriminately assume that all companies are equally hurt by inflation. After all, there might be some companies that are "inflation-proof". I wonder if EBay is one of them. Let's think about the factors:

* Ebay has pricing power. Since it's a near monopoly in several markets, in those markets, it has the ability to raise prices if needed.
* Inflation causes the price of goods to rise. Since Ebay takes a percentage of the price of the transaction, on this front, Ebay should do fine.
* Inflation may reduce consumer spending. It's highly possible that consumers will turn towards secondhand and used goods, which can benefit Ebay.

My guess is, over the long run, Ebay should weather rises in inflation pretty well, even though in the short term, people may indiscriminately drive the price down.

Disclosure: At the time of this writing I own stock or options in Ebay.

Prosper - Getting Started - the Lender's Perspective

2006-06-14T00:19:00.000-07:00

It's kind of addictive browsing listings on Prosper.com. For investors that like to take personal control of their finances, it gives you a whole new class of fixed income investment options. Deciding who to fund can be rewarding in multiple ways- the prospetcts of helping out others, and earning a higher rate of return than most fixed income investments. Risks abound, of course. People often put up their sometimes sad stories of misfortune, and your heart goes out to them. Yet, at the same time, it's a question of trust, as they are difficult to verify. Some have poor credit records, and are on the brink of financial disaster. Although Prosper does credit checks to try and prevent fraud and verify identities, Prosper doesn't seem to have any fraud protection guarantees. Paypal for instance, provides at least some guarantees against fraud and partially reimburses those who were defrauded. One mitigating factor however, is that you can select a collection agency so that if a loan goes into default, the agency will try and collect for you (while taking a HUGE cut of what they are able to get).

Well, despite the risks, I decided to jump right in as a lender. Unfortunately, the way Prosper handles new accounts, it takes quite a while for you to get rolling. First, you apply for an account, which gets approved fairly quickly - it takes about 15 minutes. Then, you have to verify your bank account- they make a deposit and withdrawal that you need to enter to verify your account- this took 3 days for me (I signed up on a Saturday). Then, you need to wire transfer money to your account which takes another 2 to 4 days. This is in sharp contrast to the speed and efficiency of doing the same thing with my ETrade account. ETrade has "instant" wire transfers- talk about great customer service and instant gratification! ETrade probably does this by doing a quick balance check, and initiating the transfer from your bank, but then they actually temporarily put up their own money in your account while the transfer is happening so you can start investing immediately. Prosper needs to learn a few tricks in improving their operations and customer experience here.

(Disclosure: I own stock or options in ETrade at the time of this writing)

The Next BIG Thing - Prosper.com (P2P Lending)

2006-06-11T17:23:00.000-07:00

I just came across a new site, Prosper.com. Prosper is a fusion of Ebay+P2P+Lending. It's a site where people can post their loan requests, and then lenders (individuals like yourself) can then bid on them to lend them the money. It's a fantastic idea, with the power to transform a whole industry, similar to what EBay did with product auctions.

I just signed up for it as a lender.... we'll see how it goes. Signing up is straightforward but you need a bit of information, such as your drivers license, a bank account routing number, and information from your credit report (it asks you questions based on the report it pulls from you to verify your identity, such as the servicer of your last auto loan, or a previous employer name).

The attraction to borrowers is that they can try and get loans at lower rates than would otherwise be possible, since people are bidding and competing to get their loan. Also, some people in difficult situations (poor credit) might be unable to get loans otherwise. People with good credit may be just looking to get a better deal or pay off some debt. The lender is there to get a better deal than their traditional fixed income investments. In addition, it's actually gratifying to help someone out of a difficult situation. Risks abound for the lender. But it's a bold and interesting experiment.

Kosmix Launches Finance, Video Games, and News Search

2006-05-25T01:18:00.000-07:00

Last week, Kosmix quietly launched a couple of new features!

Now we have added two new topics:
Video Games Search
Personal Finance Search
and we also have current News results sprinkled into all of our verticals now (our previously launched verticals were Health, Travel, and Politics).

For example, in Finance, here's the latest news about commodities, inflation, and the latest IPO. Our news is updated pretty frequently too- many times a day!

Architected Modern Condos

2006-05-21T16:09:00.000-07:00

I have always wondered why most housing and condos are so dull and ordinary in design- ESPECIALLY large residential projects. Here in California, cookie-cutter homes and McMansions are everywhere. The cost of hiring a world-class architect is often insignificant compared to the total project costs. Well, at least a few projects are beginning to change that as designer condos catch on.

Famous Names Design New Luxury Condos

Starchitecture Comes Home

80 South Street Tower - in New York City, these condo townhouses are a unique stacked cube architecture designed by architect Santiago Calatrava. It fuses both modern art and architecture.

Museum Residences in Denver, overlooks the Denver Art Museum. These residences were designed by Daniel Libeskind.

Aura Condos - Another Daniel Libeskind condo, this one a high rise located in Sacramento, CA. (Warning, annoying audio track in this link). Also related is a condo project in Sacramento called Epic. Here's a list of All Daniel Libeskind Projects.

Out of this world architecture - Dubai

2006-05-21T15:37:00.000-07:00

The amount of money and opulence in the middle east is amazing. It seems that Dubai is becoming the playground for the rich. And so, Dubai is becoming a world center of innovative architecture.

* Burj Al Arab, currently the tallest hotel in the world. It is billed as the world's first 7 star hotel and has a unique sail-shaped architecture. See also the Wikipedia Link

Where do you think the world's tallest building will be? The U.S? Malaysia, Taiwan, or China? How about Dubai?

* Burj Dubai (see also Burj Dubai on Wikipedia ) to be completed in 2008, this is expected to be the World's Tallest Skyscraper when it's done.

* Al Burj is another tall Dubai skyscraper whose height is still unknown, and may possibly compete with Burj Dubai for the tallest building title.

Remember the underwater city of Atlantis? Stuff that dreams are made of. Imagine the beginnings of that, an underwater hotel in Dubai.

* Hydropolis which will be built about 44 feet underwater. See also this link

Perhaps the most amazing project of all- the Palm Islands. This project aims to build a whole series of islands in the ocean into a palm-shaped design, and building residences there. See also this link

Berkshire Hathaway 2006 Shareholder Meeting (Part 2)

2006-05-13T12:50:00.000-07:00

This post is part 2 of my series on the recent Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. The topic: Warren Buffett's thoughts on investing. These are my notes and *interpretations* of Warren Buffett and and Charlie Munger's answers on various investing-related questions.

On Investing in Tech Companies
Tech companies are hard to predict. Five years from now, who know what's going to be hot, or who's going to be on top? We know the edge of our competency- if you don't know your edge, you don't have a competency.

Economics of investing in ethanol?
Agricultural processing has not earned high rates of return in the past. It's hard to have competitive advantages. It also takes too much fossil fuel to be worth it.

Is there a Commodity Bubble?
Not in agriculture, perhaps in copper and oil. At the start of a bubble, it is driven by fundamentals. What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does at the end. We don't know how far up a bubble can go. Be careful that everyone will turn into pumpkins at midnight (and there's no clock on the wall).

Investing in South America and Emerging Markets
We invested in PetroChina (would have like to buy more). Brazil is not off limits. In general, due to emerging market uncertainties, we want cheaper prices.

Investing in Russia
Bad experiences in the past working with Solomon- oil drilling in Siberia. Hard to develop confidence in Russia.

Exposure in Silver?
Used to own silver, but sold it. Consumption of silver is down in photography, but there are few silver mines. It's non-interest bearing, there may be overconsumption.

Investing in Regions of High Per-Capital Natural Resources
This is too macro a trend. We don't play big macro trends.

Views on Chinese Currency and Debt
High probability of a weakening dollar. Expect higher inflation. Fiscal and current account deficits are bad.

Does the CPI track Inflation?
It's not great. The core CPI doesn't include food and oil. The rental factor is lagging and housing factor is not accurate. Overall it understates inflation.

Investing in Newspapers
Circulation is down, advertising in papers is down. Demographics change is going the wrong way (younger people tend not to read them).

Modern Portfolio Theory
Modern Portfolio Theory doesn't make sense. Modern Portfolio theory is assinine. Jeremy Siegel is demented.

Naked Short Selling
There's nothing evil about short selling. But it's dangerous.

Asset Allocation Strategies - Assaults on Modern Portfolio Theory

2006-05-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

Asset allocation (modern portfolio theory), that is, diversification of investments into non-correlated asset classes, is a core principle espoused by many financial advisors. The core idea is that having non-correlated assets reduce risk and maximize returns.

But, what is now happening is that previously uncorrelated asset classes are now becoming more correlated! The core idea of asset allocation is unchanged, but, it seems that commodities, hedge funds, and small cap stocks, which have been touted as good diversification assets are now much more correlated with the S&P 500 than they used to be. This makes what was a previously low risk diversified portfolio a little more risky.
According to this Fortune article, the correlations of various assets has changed from February 2000 to February 2006:


Asset classes   2000   2006  
--------------- -----  -----
 T-bills         34%   -58%  
 LongTrm Treas.  37%   -54%  
 Commodities    -14%    33%  
 Small stocks    62%    94%  
 Hedge funds     35%    96%  
 Non-U.S. stocks 32%    96%

(Correlation of Asset classes to the S&P 500)

Buffett and Munger dislike Modern Portfolio Theory

At the 2006 Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting, both Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger expressed their dislike of modern portfolio theory. They also strongly disliked the views of the wizard of Wharton, Jeremy Siegel. In fact, Charlie Munger called it assinine! Strong words from some of the most respected investors in the world. They would rather buy good solid companies with predictable earnings. Well, it's worked for them! I can see their point somewhat- if you want to maximize your returns, just pick the best companies, instead of diluting your investments with companies or assets that are not as good. The problem is, a lot of random events cause unexpected things to happen. In addition, for many people who do not live for reading company reports and balance sheets, it's impractical to expect someone to do the level of research needed to select the best companies. Maybe if Warren would publish a book about how he values companies, that would help out some of the rest of us :)

Diversification and asset allocation will probably not give you the highest possible rate of return, but will give you a reasonable return with reasonable risk. Nevertheless, we should all be open to criticisms of popular investing strategies, as often what works for one time period ceases to work for another. Here's an excellent article discussing flaws of MPT. And here's another article on the criticisms of MPT.

Berkshire Hathaway 2006 Shareholder Meeting (Part 1)

2006-05-09T09:08:00.000-07:00

The Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders' Meeting is a BIG event. This year, over 24,000 people attended. It was held in Omaha, at the Qwest Convention Center, which was pretty much filled with shareholders. It was also of interest that we were sitting in the same room as the two richest men in the world, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Bill Gates happens to be on the board of directors of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK), while Warren Buffett is the founder of BRK.

In order to attend, you have to own at least 1 share of his company stock, which doesn't sound like much, but is actually quite a bit because he doesn't believe in splitting his stock. The class A shares, BRK-A, cost about $90,000 a share. The class B shares, BRK-B, cost 1/30 of that, about $3,000 a share today.

We got to the convention center around 6am, well ahead of the 7am door opening. There were already what seemed like a thousand people in line ahead of us. Fortunately waiting in line was not too boring, as there was entertainment to keep you somewhat occupied. Among the entertainers were a guitar player, a man on stilts, a bull(?) rider, and abortion protesters. As the doors opened, the crowed hurried in. Apparently, it's good to be at the front of the line because then you have a chance to snag one of the spots for asking questions by standing in front of a microphone. Since the meeting doesn't start until 8:30am, after snagging a set, you have about an hour and a half to wander around the exhibit floor filled with Berkshire company products.

The meeting portion starts off with a short fun movie about the company. They apparently make a new one each year. This year's movie featured "Omaha Idol", a spoof on American Idol, where entrepreneurs pitched ideas to Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. My favorite invention was the Specks Pod (iPod with wearable video). Also featured in the movie was Bill Gates and his quest for a present for Warren's 75th birthday.

The meeting itself is rather long- over 4 hours of question-and-answer. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger field just about any investing-related question. Getting the views of one of the most successful investors of all time is a great experience. His knowledge of a wide range of topics gives you confidence that he's aware of the details in a wide range of economics topics. And, unlike many other CEOs, he's willing to share his opinion.

(Stay tuned, future posts will talk about specific things Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger addressed)

Pilgrimage to Omaha - Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders' Meeting

2006-05-04T21:47:00.000-07:00

It's here... the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders' Meeting. This is the big yearly "Woodstock for Capitalists" event that Warren Buffet holds. This year I'll be checking it out for the first time.

See Also:
Warren Buffet acolytes descend on Omaha

Prefab Modern - BreezeHouse and GlideHouse

2006-04-30T20:30:00.000-07:00

I have always wondered why prefab houses had to be drab houses. Why doesn't someone just spend some time to design a cool, modern prefab that can be produced cost effectively while exuding style and class? San Francisco architect Michelle Kaufmann has done just that, and thrown in some eco-friendly design as well. I want one!

Video Tour of a BreezeHouse

Some Assembly Required - Wired

Michelle Kaufmann Designs

BreezeHouse- LiveModern

GlideHouse - LiveModern

GM Pension Asset Allocation

2006-04-16T13:48:00.000-07:00

GM has been getting a lot of press recently about its deteriorating credit ratings, its underfunded pension, and its possibility of bankruptcy due to deteriorating financials. One of the biggest problems is its huge number of retirees, and the pensions it needs to pay to them. In the past, they have forecast a 9% rate of return for their expected pension returns, which some say is rather optimistic. The traditional media has a particularly annoying habit of leaving out the real details, so I had to do a bit of research on my own to find out what GM's pension situation is really like. I though it'd be particularly interesting to look at their asset allocation in which they plan to use to achieve this 9% rate of return.

According to this ValueLine report, GM has $115.9 billion in pension assets as of September 2005, but its pension obligation is listed at $184.9 billion. So, exactly what are they doing with their huge pension fund? Here's a published report on GM's Pension from December, 2003 that gives some details on asset allocation.


U.S. Equities    24-28%
Foreign Equities 17-21%
Global Equity    41-49%
Global Bonds     32-36%
Real Estate       8-12%
Alternatives      9-13%

This contrasts with their past history of allocating:


Equities                55-60%
Bonds                   30-35%
RealEstate/Priv. Equity 10-15%

The report states that they had considered shifting more into bonds to lower volatility, but that was deemed non-optimal due to low returns. Instead, they opted to shift assets into asset classes where active management generated higher excess returns with low correlation to stocks and bonds. In particular, such assets might include emerging market equity, emerging market debt, domestic high yield, small cap equity, real estate, private equity, and absolute return (hedging) strategies.

They consciously reduced exposure to large cap equities and diversified quite nicely into non-correlated assets. Overall, it looks like a reasonable financial plan. Diversifying to non-correlated assets makes financial sense. The main risks, however are that they are relying upon the skill of active managers to deliver outstanding returns. It's a big question mark whether those managers can do that. Unfortunately, the report doesn't give any more details on the asset classes and managers chosen.

Asset Allocation Strategies

2006-04-07T00:22:00.000-07:00

A quick post here..... I came across this very interesting page on asset allocation strategies:

http://www.geocities.com/finplan825/ModelPortfolios-Data.html

I think these are all underweighting foreign markets, which now constitute around half the total world market capitalization of stocks, and completely ignore commodities, which are an important inflation hedge.

How a Multibillionaire Invests - Lessons from the Yale Endowment

2006-04-06T23:38:00.000-07:00

The Yale Endowment is one of the most successful long-term investors. Last year (2005) their return was over 22%. And they have a long-term 20 year track record of over 16% in annual returns. They achieved these remarkable returns by careful asset allocation strategies. Anyone interested in asset allocation should read the Yale Endowment Report, which reads like a blueprint of their asset allocation strategy. It's interesting to see their historical graphs on how their asset allocation strategy has changed over time from being U.S.-centric 20 years ago to being much more diversified.

Some of the things they favor include hard assets, small caps, and value investing. They have a surprisingly small amount devoted to fixed income. They also tend to like active management and trying to beat benchmark indices.

Their current target allocations are:
Domestic Equity 14%
Fixed Income 5%
Absolute Return 25% (hedging strategies)
Foreign Equity 14%
Private Equity 17% (VC and leveraged buyouts)
Real Assets 25% (Real estate, oil, gas, timber, commodities)
Cash 0%

Green With Envy (Investing in SRI Funds)

2006-04-02T12:00:00.000-07:00

Energy prices have been at record highs in recent months. The price per barrel of crude oil is around $66, which is near historical absolute highs (prices not adjusted for inflation though). So, with such high energy prices, everyone, even (surprisingly) President Bush, is suggesting we look at alternative energy sources. Socially responsible funds might fill the bill here- there are a few that I'm looking at.

At the top of the list is the Winslow Green Growth Fund (WGGFX) which invests in environmentally responsible, environmentally benign, or best-of-the batch (least irresponsible) companies. It is not a pure energy focused fund, but diversifies into various industries, including alternative energy, software, health care, and industrial materials among others. It currently has a 5 star Morningstar rating. It's a bit risky though, with a high beta of 1.81, and it is weighted more in small-caps. It's a no load fund with a 1.45% expense ratio (higher than I'd like, but within the range that I would consider).

Another SRI fund is the New Alternatives Fund (NALFX) which is more focused on the energy and industrial materials sectors than WGGFX - more concentrated, if that's what you're looking for. This fund has a 1.32% expense ratio, however, has a HUMONGOUS 4.75% front load- rather ironic that a socially responsible fund is gouging its investors charging such an outrageously high fee- Shame on them!

See also:
* Top Morningstar SRI Funds
* In the year of the oil boom...

(disclaimer, at the time of this writing, I currently do not own, but by the time you read this I may buy or have already bought and have sold funds mentioned in this article).

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

2006-03-24T02:02:00.000-08:00

(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

2006-03-21T00:50:00.000-08:00

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

2006-03-19T15:59:00.000-08:00

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!

2006-03-18T10:56:00.000-08:00

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

2006-03-16T16:09:00.000-08:00

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

2006-03-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

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

2006-03-13T10:58:00.000-08:00

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

2006-03-09T08:58:00.000-08:00

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

2006-03-04T12:22:00.000-08:00

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.

Kosmix News Roundup

2006-02-28T09:16:00.000-08:00

It's interesting seeing all the recent press about Kosmix. Since we launched at Demo 2006 a few weeks ago, we've been getting good coverage. Some notable articles include:

Wired News
Kosmix Plays Politics With Search

San Jose Mercury News: SiliconBeat
Kosmix raises cash for a new search engine -- to compete with Google"

Demo 2006: Official Demo God Award
Demo God Award

TechCrunch
A Taste of Demo2006

PC World
More DEMO: Kosmix's Category-Specific Search

ZDNet
Demo 2006: Advancing search–Nexidia, Transparansee, Kosmix, Truveo

CNET
Trying to find end-runs around Google

Torsten Jacobi's Weblog
Interview with Kosmix Founder Anand Rajaraman

PMA 2006 - Most Promising New Digital Cameras

2006-02-26T22:50:00.000-08:00

Well,

The PMA 2006 photography product conference is underway, and all the major camera manufacturers have made recent announcements. With such a flurry of new products, you have to do a bit of homework to figure out what's really interesting. Here's my take on the most promising new products:

1. Fuji FinePix F30 - this pocketable, compact point-and-shoot camera is the successor to the Fuji F10 and F11 boasts an amazing ISO3200 sensitivity, making it an amazing low-light, ambient light camera. Unlike other recently announced cameras that use "pixel binning", this one is likely to really give you full-resolution low light pictures.

2. Panasonic Lumix TZ1 - this is a one-of-a-kind (as of right now), an image-stabilized 10x super zoom camera that is almost pocketable. The reason this 10x zoom camera is small compared to other 10x zooms is that it uses folded lens optics, in which the lens is bent 90 degrees within the camera body with a prism. Although this technology has been seen before, this is the first one with a 10x real optical zoom.

One disappointing trend in digicams is that lenses are getting less bright. For instance, the classic Sony F717 opened as wide as f/2.0, as well as the Canon G6 and Panasonic Lumix LC1. Pretty much all of the new cameras have f/2.8 or worse lenses. Although image sensors are improving on noise, it is offset by giving up a stop in lens brightness.

Everything you need to know about investing

2006-02-20T21:37:00.000-08:00

It's rare to find a web site that is so useful and so well done that I would recommend it to just about everyone I know. I just came across MoneyChimp, and I think it is one of THE BEST investing education sites on the web. What sets it apart is, it does an exceptional job of explaining why and how things work, using interactive calculators and graphs. It makes great use of the interactive medium of the web. It also delves into the details of how things work in a clear, concise way. If you like to know the real math behind things, or the background references behind a concept, this site also gives you those details. Some of the many topics covered include:

Index Funds
Stock Valuation
Modern Portfolio Theory

Highly Recommended!

Photo(s) of the week - Web 2.0 Logo Mosaic

2006-02-20T13:06:00.000-08:00

This was very kool, someone designed a mosaic of Web 2.0 company logos (including Kosmix).

Web 2.0 Company Logos
http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=101793493&size=l

It reminds me a bit about the Million Dollar Home Page though is quite a bit cleaner and quite a bit nicer. The Million Dollar Home Page is unfortunately full of useless spammy sites.

Photo(s) of the week- The Art Of Music

2006-02-20T12:46:00.000-08:00

I love photography and I love design. So, what better photo album to choose for my first Photos of the Week series than "The Art of Music" by my friend Paula? This photo series shows a guitar building shop.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/inkvision/sets/1634089/

Kosmix Launches New Categories and New UI at Demo

2006-02-06T09:28:00.000-08:00

Wow, our hard work is finally realizing the light of day! Our site, Kosmix.com, just launched with a new UI and new categories for the Demo conference. Now we have Health, Travel, and Politics.

Looking through rose-colored glasses

Politics in particular shows the uniqueness of our technology. You can see your query results from different points of view (liberal, conservative, libertarian). Each point of view essentially biases the results in a certain direction. Keep in mind that since we do this algorithmically, occasionally there will be things that are not as precisely categorized as a human could do it. However, obviously, human categorization of every result for every query would require far too much person-power for a small start-up.

DBC - A New Way to Invest in Commodities

2006-02-04T01:36:00.000-08:00

Some experts predict that there will be a long-term bull market in commodities, mainly due to rising demand from emerging markets. However, there aren't very many choices for investing in commodities. Well, FINALLY, there's a commodities index fund available, DBC, the Deutsche Bank DB Commodity Index Tracking Fund. See:
Press Release.

Assets covered by the fund include:
Crude Oil (35%), Heating Oil (20%), Gold (10%), Aluminum (12.5%), Corn (11.25%) and Wheat (11.25%).

It would have been nicer if the fund covered a few more commodities though. And, because of its lower exposure to oil, it's a nice complement to an energy ETF or fund.

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Other interesting reading:

Beyond the Headlines - Commentary on current financial news from Legg Mason

Efficient Frontier Online Asset Allocation Journal - Good articles about asset allocation.

Watching All things Kosmix

2006-01-28T12:43:00.000-08:00

I've been at Kosmix.com for over a year now, and finally, Kosmix is getting ready to leave stealth mode. So, as we enter a more "public" phase, it'll be interesting to track our progress. There are all kinds of interesting ways of tracking things on the web now. Let's see what happens.....

Cloudalicious is a very cool web site that tracks the tag cloud associated with an URL over time. As Kosmix branches out from health, we should see an evolution of this cloud.
Kosmix.com Tag Cloud from Cloudalicious
Kosmix.com Cloudalicious Tag History with details

Del.icio.us tags about Kosmix

Google News articles about Kosmix:
Kosmix in the news

Looking at just Tags from Technorati:
Kosmix Tags from Technorati

Alexa is a site that tracks site popularity through a browser plug-in.
Kosmix Alexa traffic

Links TO Kosmix. Yahoo's search engine does a good job of showing who links TO a site.
Links TO www.kosmix.com

TalkDigger is a meta-search-engine that covers major blog sites. Here's an RSS feed of Kosmix mentions.

If you know of any cool site tracking web tools, leave a comment.

JSCH - Java SSH Libraries

2006-01-28T12:38:00.000-08:00

Open source is great. I recently discovered Jsch a Java Secure Channel library. It's a full implementation of SSH2 in Java. As a plus, the author was very responsive to making improvements (such as supporting the ssh "none" cipher in a future release). If you need to write a Java application that needs to talk securely to other systems, this is a great package to start with.

New Personal Finance Search Engine Vertical - by Fidelity

2006-01-16T23:38:00.000-08:00

Breaking news! Fidelity has a beta version of their Personal Finance search engine. It's from FidelityLabs, which apparently is their site for testing out new products.

It has a nice clean, simple user interface- I like the fonts a lot. They seem to be crawling the web, but are limiting the crawl to finance-related web sites, so coverage seems to a bit limited by their restricted set of sites or pages. They say that they have a manually curated set of sites, and then augment those sites with "hidden gems", sites that they classify as on-topic, and manually accept or reject those sites. In addition, they also index web sites of major financial services companies.

Result quality needs a bit of work, though it's not a bad start. We'll have to see how it evolves.

See:

http://www.fidelitylabs.com/pf/financialsearch/index.shtml

Apple Announces x86 Laptop, Stock closes at $80.86

2006-01-11T00:45:00.000-08:00

What was once almost unthinkable has become reality- Apple has announced a new laptop, based on Intel's x86 architecture. The new MacBook Pro is based on an Intel Core Duo processor, which is a fast, energy-efficient dual core processor. The new MacBook Pro seems like a quite decent machine, but at least right now, isn't so compelling that I HAVE to have one.

By an amazing and true coincidence, Apple's stock closed at $80.86 on the day of the announcement!

[Source Citation: Quote from Yahoo]

Google now bigger than IBM

2006-01-04T23:57:00.000-08:00

An amazing thing happened today. Google's market value just surpassed IBM. This is an amazing feat. Is it a bubble? Is it a reflection of the inability of IBM to take risks and grow in new directions? Or maybe a little bit of both.

In my days at IBM, we had some of the best and brightest people working on search. We had tremendous resources and ground-breaking algorithms and patents related to web search. But, we were not allowed to build a consumer web search engine. Now most of those great researchers and engineers are at Yahoo and Google.

[Source Citation: Quotes are from Yahoo]

Asset Allocation - A GREAT tool, Portfolio X-Ray

2005-12-18T16:51:00.000-08:00

One of the biggest factors in investing performance is your asset allocation. What areas are you in and what are you not. I was looking at my investing portfolio's asset allocation, with an absolutely amazing tool on the web, Portfolio X-Ray. It's available from Morningstar or T. Rowe Price.

It's a FREE tool that lets you enter your stocks, mutual funds, bonds, and ETFs, and it shows you detailed breakdowns of your portfolio in all different ways, such as by:
* Asset Class (cash, u.s. stocks, bonds, foreign,)
* Stock Style (large cap, midcap, smallcap, and growth or value)
* Stock Sector (such as software, hardware, healthcare, energy, etc... even compares your allocation vs. the S&P 500)
* Stock Type (high yield, distressed, hard assets, cyclical, slow growth, classical growth, aggressive growth, speculative growth)
* Word Regions (your allocation in various foreign markets)
* Fees & Expenses (how you're doing vs. the average fund)
* Stock Intersection ( a total portfolio view of the stocks you hold and where they are held, by counting shares held even within your mutual funds and ETFs)

This is an incredibly useful tool, and opened my eyes to a missing asset class in my portfolio (small cap stocks). If you like looking at numbers and data, you'll love this tool. It's rare to find such a useful, well-thought out financial tool, and the fact that it's free is all the more amazing.

Search Revenues Per Click (Google and LookSmart)

2005-11-22T20:50:00.000-08:00

Working at a search engine company, it's interesting to see what other search companies are making on searches. So, just how much is a search or a click worth? Doing a little research, it's not hard to find out.

Looking at public financial information from LookSmart's shareholder earnings report, we see:

LookSmart earned $9.2 million in 3Q 2005 on 70 million paid clicks, which comes out to $0.13 per click. The company states that their revenue per clic was $0.15 per click excluding their Run On Site (ROS) product.

Google's revenue per search is reported on John Battelle's Search Blog. In Q3 2004, Google earned $0.09 per query (a different metric from LookSmart's revenue per click).

Searching for Growth in China

2005-11-13T16:31:00.000-08:00

It's pretty tempting to invest in China's growth, and no other place to me seems more tempting than the growth of the Internet in China.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial professional, so do your own research. I own stock or options in Baidu and Sina as of this writing, and plan to buy more in the future, but may also to sell them in the future at an unspecified time. Investing in emerging markets is especially risky and you should do so with extreme caution.

As of July 2005, internet users in China totalled over 100 million people [see reference], nearly as large as the U.S. internet population. In addition, as of today, the #5 (baidu.com) and #6 (sina.com) most visited web sites in the world are from China [See Alexa Global Top 500]. Even with so many Chinese people already online, there's still plenty of room for growth given China's staggering 1.3 billion population. Due to the low incomes in China, it will take years or decades for a significant fraction of the Chinese population to get online, but then, that's also years to decades of growth ahead. For those with nerves of steel and a long time horizon of several years, it's a attractive, though risky place to invest.

The Case for China
Many economists and politicians think Chinese currency is undervalued. The exact amount is up for debate, but this paper pegs it as about 22.5% undervalued. This would work in favor of those owning assets in Chinese companies and in favor of owning companies profiting in Chinese currencies.

The Case for Sina.com
Sina.com is one of the largest web portals in China and also provides mobile phone data services, web hosting, and more. I view it like a "Yahoo of China", they do a little bit of everything. As of today, it actually has a reasonable forward P/E of 23.16 (current quote: SINA). It's profitable and should benefit from the overall growth of internet use in China.

The Case for Baidu.com
Baidu had a spectacular IPO earlier this year. Its offering was at $27 a share, but on the opening day it closed at $123.90 a share. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone that would say it's undervalued with a forward P/E today (November 13, 2005) of 166.79! In addition, some analysts think its current fair market price should be around $45/share (see Baidu Shares Appear 'Extremely Overvalued'). I think that it's certainly true, it's overvalued by any normal measure. But what if you look into the future, say 5 years from now. According to this article research firm Piper Jaffrey thinks the China search market will grow from $134 million today to $1 billion by 2010. Currently Baidu has a 44.7% market share, but if that erodes due to competition by 2010 to around 30%, that means Baidu would be pulling in $300 million in revenues. Expenses at search companies tend to be low, around 30% of revenues, so earnings might be around $210 million. That puts my Baidu at a valuation of between $4.2 billion and $6.3 billion (assuming a P/E of between 20 and 30), compared to its current market value of $1.68 billion when the China search market reaches $1 billion. Whether it will happen in 5 years or not is a big question, and whether the competition will acquire, or kill Baidu is another big question, since 5 years is a long time in Internet time. Interestingly enough, Google also has a minority investment in Baidu.

Also of interest:

Speech by Baidu's Cofounder Robin Li

Web traffic at Baidu today is about 1/3 of Google's U.S. traffic, according to Alexa.com. See the current traffic numbers here.

How Do Search Engines Handle Chinese Queries - A comparison of Chinese search engines.

Buying Emerging Markets

2005-11-13T15:59:00.000-08:00

I've been noticing over the past few years (as many others also have noticed) that China, India, and other emerging markets have been growing quickly. Anyways, recently I have finally decided to take action and expand my investments to these emerging markets.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial professional, so do your own research. I own the investments mentioned in this article as of this writing, and plan to buy more in the future, but may also to sell them in the future at an unspecified time. Investing in emerging markets is especially risky and you should do so with extreme caution.

There are two basic approaches I see to benefitting from emerging markets. First, invest in companies that are in those emerging markets, and second, invest in companies that would be affected by emerging markets (in particular, emerging markets will have a large effect on raw materials and commodities as they grow industrially and build infrastructure). The podcast China: Stalking the World's Commodities discusses the long term trend in the growth of commodity prices and usage due to increasing demand from emerging markets such as China. It's worth listening to.

The best way to get exposure into a market is through an index fund. For investing in companies in emerging markets, I chose the BLDRS Emerging Markets Fund(ADRE) which is an index of 50 stocks in diversified emerging markets. It has a low expense ratio (0.3%) and is an ETF so can be traded just like a stock. At the time of this writing, the fund's top country holdings included Brazil (24.7%), Korea (15.4%), China (13.0%), Mexico (12.4%), Taiwan (10.7%), and India (7.0%). See the ADRE fact sheet for more information.

As for commodities, it's a bit harder for individuals to directly invest in commodities themselves (such as oil, natural gas, etc.), so I chose a mutual fund that invests in companies that own or are involved in the development or processing of natural resources, the T. Rowe Price New Era Fund (PRNEX). Although not exactly investing in commodities, this fund should benefit from rising demand for commodities.

The iPod Revolution

2005-10-28T00:38:00.000-07:00

I just bought a new 5G Video iPod (see my iPod with Video Review). Audio quality and convenience is great, video viewing is not too bad. Sure, it's a shiny new toy for listening to music, but, it's actually more than that these days. That's because it's the beginning of the "podcast" revolution. Podcasts are really nothing more than audio (or video) content that people or companies have created and are distributing freely (like broadcasting, except you listen to it on your iPod). What's significant is that now podcasts are aggregated in one convenient place, iTunes, and that there is a mass market of tens of millions of iPod and iTunes users that will soon rival the reach of the U.S. television broadcast market. I already get much of my news from podcasts. I listen to ABC news and NPR shows on my iPod, I listen to investing shows on my iPod too. I even listen to Ebert & Roeper on my iPod.

I think this is the start of something big. Sure, radio and television will be around for a while, but, over the next few years, I predict that podcasting will rise as a new media distribution outlet that will significantly eat away at radio and television viewership. Podcasting lets you get exactly what you want and lets you timeshift (listen or watch WHEN you want) AND spaceshift (listen or watch WHERE you want). The audience is out there now, the devices are good enough for audio and not too bad for video (probably in a year or two really good video podcast devices will be out there), and great content is starting to appear.

The Kosmix Health Search Engine is alive!

2005-10-24T20:39:00.000-07:00

After being at Cosmix Corp. for about 8 months, the parent corporation for our consumer search site, on Friday, October 21, 2005, we have left stealth mode. Well, sort of. We just had a stealth launch of our consumer search site Kosmix.com, a Medical and Health Search Engine. At this early stage, it's still in alpha release mode, as we have plenty of work to do, but, it is actually working very well. Search quality is excellent right now for most queries.

So, what have we done? We've built the most comprehensive (as far as I know) health-focused vertical search engine to date. Our coverage is *far* better than HealthLine, which also debuted this week (you can see for yourself by trying out some rarer queries). You can see that we also have sub-categories that help you learn more about and discover other information about your query beyond the normal one-size-fits-all list that is the standard for the major web search engines.

We have a few cool features included as well. For instance, if you type an acronym in all capital letters, such as: MS we suggest the fully expanded acronym as a query. Also, we give Wikipedia, the "open source" encyclopedia on the web, first class status: If you type in a query that matches a Wikipedia topic, a link to it shows up at the top.

Search Freshness

2005-10-08T20:11:00.000-07:00

I was curious to see how well some search engines deal with freshness. A perfect test for this task is the debut of a new company, so I'll use Zvents as my test subject. Zvents went live on October 4th, and today is 4 days later, 8pm October 8th, so let's see what we can find....

Technorati.com: 85 posts found
They claim to be able to index blog postings within 5 minutes of them going up, pretty impressive. And they try to index every blog site. The problem is coverage- they tend to miss blogs that are not part of a major blogging site.

Blogsearch.google.com: 97 posts found
Google's new blog search engine seems to have slightly more coverage than Technorati. One drawback, they currently only index the RSS feed data (and not the actual target pages themselves).

IceRocket.com: 85 posts found
IceRocket is Mark Cuban's blog search start-up. It does a reasonable job of matching Technorati.

DayPop.com: 3 pages found
DayPop is a news and blog search engine. Clearly they're lagging behind the competition in terms of coverage.

News.google.com: 9 pages found
Google's search engine for news sites.

News.yahoo.com: 9 pages found
Yahoo's news search.

Search Engines: I list the number of pages found as well as the number of pages reported because they differ. Pages found is much less than what they report, possibly due to many reasons, such as estimation algorithms, duplicate counting, etc).

Search.msn.com: 49 pages found (6,686 pages reported)
Microsoft's search engine is doing pretty well.

Google: 195 pages found (12,100 reported)
Google seems to have excellent coverage and freshness.

Yahoo: 224 pages found (1,160 pages reported)
Yahoo also has excellent freshness and coverage.

One final test, checking major search engines for links to Zvents, using the query link:http://www.zvents.com

Yahoo: 86 pages found (174 pages reported)
Quite good.

Google: 1 page found
Strange- google had tons of pages it found for the "zvents" query and yet only had 1 inlink. What's going on here?

Search.msn.com: 49 pages found (837 pages reported)
Microsoft's search is even beating google on link queries.

del.icio.us bookmarks - 80 user bookmarks
The bookmarks of del.icio.us users is interesting to see. This link comes from OnoTech (Ethan Stock).

Zvents - event search is here!

2005-10-05T21:23:00.000-07:00

My friend Ethan Stock's startup, Zvents, has just gone live. I've been playing with it for a few days now and, I think it is a fantastic idea, and is well-executed. It's the synthesis of event search, tagging,blogging, and communities all rolled into one site.

One of the coolest things about Zvents is that it lets you embed live events calendars and listings on your site. For instance, the examples below are live Zvents event listings.

Upcoming Search Engine Events in the bay area

Leaving IBM. Is Anybody Safe Anymore?

2005-10-02T18:49:00.000-07:00

I worked at IBM Almaden for over 7.5 years, until February, 2005. In my last 5 years there, I worked as a researcher in search and information retrieval, as the lead architect for the Webfountain indexer and the OmniFind (Enterprise Search) product. Life at IBM Almaden was pretty good. The salary was comfortable, the work environment was great (window offices), the people are great, the work was interesting. But with a large company like IBM come disadvantages of being at a large company like a massive beaurocracy that gets in the way of getting things done, difficulty in bringing research to market, way too many meetings due to way too many people being on a project, and a somewhat unexciting direction. IBM seems to be morphing into a services company. It's shedding its core technology businesses that made it great. No more PCs, no more Thinkpads, those divisons are sold to Lenovo. Likewise, IBM, the inventor of the hard drive, shed its hard drive division to Hitachi. Previous technology divestitures include selling its global network to AT&T, spinning off its printer division to Lexmark and selling its Network Hardware Division to Cisco.

And then there are layoffs. During my time at IBM, there was an across-the-board layoff of 10% of its U.S. workforce, potentially no one was safe. I guess it's the reality of doing business in a competitive world. Although I was not directly affected, I knew people who were, and it sent a strong message from IBM management that you were a commodity that could be outsourced.

IBM also has made the philosphical decision of avoiding consumer-facing markets. This leads to projects and research that are well, boring, or less satisfying (at least for me) to work on. I'd much rather work on something that people I know can actually use. All this set the stage for my departure...