While at the recent Digital Hollywood conference, I heard much talk about online video. And the main question was: How can you make money from it?
Well, Accenture (NYSE: ACN) is trying to find some ways. In fact, this week, the company agreed to purchase Origin Digital (the amount was not disclosed).
The privately-held firm calls itself a "global video applications service provider." That is, the company helps with the key elements of managing, syndicating and reporting digital content – across various platforms, such mobile, VOD, IPTV, broadband, and so on.
Accenture already has a Digital Media Service division. But, with Origin Digital, there will definitely be much more heft as well as opportunities for cross-selling.
All in all, this seems like a good fit for Accenture. After all, Corporate America realizes that online video has many benefits in terms of obtaining customers, education, and branding. Yet, it's a process that does require some deep domain expertise.
Meanwhile, if you are a Marvel comics fan, as I was growing up, and can't wait for the sequel, let's hope that the June 13 premiere of the The Incredible Hulk tides you over until 2010. And then, starting with Iron Man 2, you can look forward to the gates opening wide for the pantheon of Marvel Super Heroes.
It seems that Web 2.0 is invading all parts of our lives – including personal finance. One example is Geezeo.
Yes, it has elements of social networking. It is also fun, free, and has a cool name. But, will it make a difference? Will you trust it with your finances?
Well, TheStreet.com (NASDAQ: TSCM) thinks so. That is, the firm invested $1.2 million in Geezeo (getting a 13% equity stake -- with an option to buy the whole company).
Actually, TheStreet.com has had some luck with such strategic deals. For example, it's acquisition of Stockpickr.com seems to have been a success.
Of course, with the strong brand and traffic of TheStreet.com, I'm sure we'll be hearing much more from Geezeo. And, if there is some traction, the application should be quite sticky (after all, it's a hassle to change over to a new personal finance tracker).
So far this year, it's been a tough IPO market. However, there were no problems for the offering of Intrepid Potash (NYSE: IPI), which sold 30 million shares at $32 a piece. In today's trading, the shares are up an impressive 56%.
Intrepid Potash is the largest producer of muriate of potash in the U.S. It operates production facilities, three in Mexico and two in Utah.
According to Fertecon Limited, the global potash market is expected to grow 3.5% per year from 2007 to 2011. Simply put, there is strong demand from China, India and other emerging economies. In fact, as personal incomes grow, there tends to be an increase in consumption of animal protein, which requires significant amounts of grain for feed.
As for Intrepid Potash, the firm is ramping up nicely. Last year, revenues spiked 40% to $213 million and earnings came to $29.7 million.
So far this year, it's been quite volatile in the food markets -- putting lots of pressure on the supply chain. But, there is help from an upstart company, SignalDemand, which uses complex algorithms to manage pricing, supply utilization, and product mixes. In fact, some of the customers include Cargill, Farmland Foods, Hormel and Ventura Foods.
Actually, SignalDemand recently snagged $20 million in venture capital from InterWest Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, General Catalyst and Catamount Ventures.
"With our software, we can add 2% to 4% to the bottom-line," said Michael Neal, the CEO and founder. I recently met up with him while in San Francisco.
No doubt, Neal is one of the thought leaders in the data analytics space. He cofounded DemandTec (Nasdaq: DMAN), which is the largest provider of Consumer Demand Management (CDM) software for retail price and promotion optimization. He even holds a variety of patents.
Interestingly enough, in his office, you will find a chalk board – with many equations. What's more, SignalDemand's employees are a high-caliber group, with economists and statisticians. Yes, this is certainly a next-generation company.
"I think that analytics companies are the next big opportunity," said Neal. "Just look at the impact on financial services, airlines and hotels. We will see mathematical approaches applied to many other industries, such as cattle, lumber and so on."
I recently met up with Suranga Chandratillake, the CEO of Blinkx (a video search engine). He always has something new to talk about, and this time was no different.
His firm has recently launched BBTV, an online service that provides near TV quality. "We have blended our service with the advantages of the web," said Chandratillake. "For example, if you want to know more about an actor, you can click his or her name on a digital transcript and get a profile. This is possible because of our speech translation technology."
Basically, this can be an innovative way to monetize video, which so far has been a tough thing to do.
OK, but isn't high-quality video bandwidth heavy? That's true. However, BBTV uses the power of peer-to-peer networking, which is fairly cost-effective.
To get things rolling, BBTV has a variety of indie films from Dogwoof on the site. "We have more than 250 content partners at Blinkx," said Chandratillake, "and we plan to leverage them on BBTV. We want to be the place for hard-to-get quality content."
I've focused some of my writing and research on these pages on the hype surrounding WiMAX, an emerging telecommunications technology that could make broadband wireless access a reality. Some of the best WiMAX technology in being developed in Israel by firms like Alvarion (NASDAQ: ALVR) and Ceragon (NASDAQ: CRNT). In spite of on-again, off-again news coming out of big players like Sprint Nextel (NYSE: S), my thesis has always been that we can debate all we want as to whether WiMAX will hit in the U.S. The truth is that WiMAX is already happening in the rest of the world.
MarketWatch is out with a story this morning about some of the action happening in the telecommunications space surrounding WiMAX. In Big investments rumored for wireless technology, MarketWatch reporter, Therese Poletti takes the usual tack by pointing out both sides of the argument that WiMAX "is full of potential to drive cheaper, high-speed wireless data, voice and video communications, or a dismal failure, depending on who you talk to."
The same article cites a spokesperson for chip-giant, Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), as saying that Intel "remains bullish on WiMAX, saying the technology is definitely 'ready for prime time.'" .
Back in 1998, Gene Hoffman founded eMusic. No doubt, it was smart timing. However, with the emergence of Napster, Hoffman realized he needed to provide users with a better option. "Our approach was to allow full access to our music library for a fee," said Hoffman, in an interview with me.
It was certainly a smart move. In fact, it became the basis of his next venture: Vindicia, which has announced a venture round of $5.6 million. The investors include Leader Ventures and DCM.
Over the past few years, Vindicia has built a robust platform to allow for on-demand payment management, especially for digital goods. The system helps with credit card breakage, fraud, compliance and various currencies. Some of the customers include Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) and Reunion.com.
As seen with the success of companies like Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the subscription business model definitely has a lot of power. Yet, it requires a sophisticated infrastructure, which can be expensive. "Billing is not a core competency," said Hoffman. "It's something that should be outsourced so a company can focus on what it does the best."
With the popularity of Facebook, bebo and MySpace, companies are trying to find ways to leverage social networking. However, it can be expensive to build out a strong platform.
Well, things are getting easier; that is, Ringside Networks has launched an open source server to build social networks (it's in the beta mode).
True, there are other systems on the market. However, in the case with Ringside, it allows for seamless integration with other sites, such as Facebook. In other words, it will help companies migrate users to their own platform.
What's more, Ringside allows companies to keep their own branding and the look-and-feel of their own websites.
Oh, and some of the co-founders of Ringside -- Bob Bickel, Rich Friedman and Mark Lugert -- were instrumental in the development of JBoss, which turned out to be one of the most successful open source projects in tech history.
To get some perspective on this, I talked to David DePaolo, who operates WorkCompCentral.com. He has known about Ringside for some time. His take: "It makes sense that someone would start this up as they have with other technologies, and just in time. As technology progresses, we find that it is not all about the technology and patents, it's the application of that technology to a specific market."
First we had airlines; now we also have spacelines. Virgin Galactic of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin empire has been selling space tickets since mid 2005 for $200,000. Now, Virgin Galactic may see some competition from XCOR Aerospace as the California aerospace company also plans to enter the space tourism industry, estimated at over a half-billion dollars. XCOR is building a rocket ship, the Lynx, capable of suborbital flights.
There are some big differences between the Lynx and Virgin's SpaceShipTwo. The Lynx is a two-seat craft while SpaceShipTwo will carry six passengers in addition to two pilots. The Lynx will reach an altitude of 37 miles above the earth and a speed of Mach2, while the SS2 will reach 68 miles and three times the speed of sound. The lynx is expected to start flying in 2010, the SS2 may start as early as 2009. While XCOR has yet to put a price on the flight, it has called it affordable.
There are other differences as well though. Unlike the SS2, which is launched attached to a mothership and is then released at 50,000 feet when it ignites its hybrid rocket to climb to 360,000 feet, the Lynx, about the size of a small private plane, will launch itself, taking off from a runway like any plane, and reach 200,000 feet.
I primarily trade fun smallcap stocks, so until the past few days, I hadn't either. But when I began researching, I just kept finding more and more interesting ETFs -- it was addictive! Almost addictive as my new Twitter account where I've discovered I can chat with business legends, yesterday it was the founder of eBay Inc (Nasdaq: EBAY). Okay, maybe ETFs will never be that addictive!
Out the few hundred ETFs I looked into, here were some of the more interesting of the bunch:
Retrevo calls itself a "matchmaking service," although it's not another place for dating. Rather, the site allows consumers to deal with something that is perhaps tougher than dating – trying to understand consumer electronics products.
As a sign of Retrevo's opportunity, the company has raised $8 million. The investors include Alloy Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners (NVP).
The core of Retrevo is its Product Advisor. Basically, it's an amalgam of things like community reviews, feature comparisons and pricing information. In fact, Retrevo helps you with the best timing for buying a product (for example, if a product has recently launched, it might be smart to hold off for awhile).
Even though I just recently started blogging in October 2007-- after I closed my hedge fund -- I first began to understand that there was some real money to be made when Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney.com posted THIS picture of a check for $132,994.97 from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) as his AdSense income in August 2005.
Later that year, John Chow of JohnChow.com also started blogging about ways to make money online and now he, too, regularly earns $30,000 per month from blogging, all broken down and detailed on his site. Since my monthly blog income on my own personal blog is just a few thousand dollars, I decided to ask John Chow for some pearls of wisdom, here's the interview: 1. What have been some of the keys to your success?
I think one of the biggest reasons for my blogging success has been consistency. There has never been a single day that has gone by where I did not have a new blog post for people to read. One of the biggest mistakes a new blogger makes is by being an on again off again blogger. You can't build a blog this way.
Another key is just being myself. I show the good and the bad and let the chips fall where they may. A blog is not CNN or News.com. Your readers are there to read your opinion. You should give it to them instead of just giving the news without an opinion.
There's lots of buzz about so-called widgets. Essentially, a widget is a small amount of code that's put on a blog or other website to allow for some cool functions (such as news, updates, friends and so on).
And venture capital money is pouring in. One of the latest deals is the $15 million funding for ShareThis.com. The investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Reservoir Venture Partners, RPM Ventures, and Blue Chip Venture
Actually, ShareThis' widget is fairly simple – but useful. That is, it helps web users to send content to others (such as through email, SMS, IM and so on). It's pretty neat stuff and also has some interesting analytics (to keep track of user patterns).
It certainly helps that ShareThis has snagged key deals with large blogs (for example, Wordpress). Keep in mind that the widget gets more than 100 million page views per month.
Now, the company will need to formulate a business model. But, thankfully, the company has enough cash to think about it.
With all the hysteria about global warming and the impact that it will have on the globe, I found it quite funny that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported yesterday that we just experienced the coldest winter since 2001. Hey Al Gore -- how can that be? I remember when I was growing up, in the mid- 1970's, Newsweek magazine had a cover story about the beginning of the ice age. Amazing what can happen in 25 years. We can go from an ice age, to global warming. Not bad.
"In the contiguous United States, the average winter temperature was 33.2°F (0.6°C), which was 0.2°F (0.1°C) above the 20th century average – yet still ranks as the coolest since 2001. It was the 54th coolest winter since national records began in 1895. "
Why not ask the Chinese about global warming? They just experience a horribly snowy winter which has been a major cause of inflation. Extreme cold temperatures were the norm this winter. Over the last 150 years or so the global mean temperature has increased by 0.7 degrees Celsius. This small amount of warming is not unusual, and falls well within the range of variation for both warming a cooling.
While at the recent Digital Hollywood conference, I heard much talk about online video. And the main question was: How can you make money from it?
It seems that Web 2.0 is invading all parts of our lives – including personal finance. One example is 
and 
. He also operates 
So far this year, it's been a tough IPO market. However, there were no problems for the offering of 
So far this year, it's been quite volatile in the food markets -- putting lots of pressure on the supply chain. But, there is help from an upstart company, 
I recently met up with Suranga Chandratillake, the CEO of 
Back in 1998, Gene Hoffman founded eMusic. No doubt, it was smart timing. However, with the emergence of Napster, Hoffman realized he needed to provide users with a better option. "Our approach was to allow full access to our music library for a fee," said Hoffman, in an interview with me. 
With the popularity of 
First we had airlines; now we also have spacelines. 
If you've ever delved into investing in ETFs (exchange-traded funds, basically entire indexes and sectors that trade like stocks), you're already familiar with the most popular, those being 
There's lots of buzz about so-called widgets. Essentially, a widget is a small amount of code that's put on a blog or other website to allow for some cool functions (such as news, updates, friends and so on).
Comfort Zone Investing: One thriving area of real estate: Apartments
Just how high will U.S. gasoline prices rise?
Nordstrom and Kohl's post smaller-than-expected Q1 profit declines
