Finance Geek

Provided by The Business Insider: That sound you’re hearing is a gigantic exhale of relief, as the August jobs report actually came in better than expected, with the private sector creating 67,000 jobs.Of course, that’s not a wildly good number on an abso

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It’s almost Labor Day, but before Wall Street and investors take off for a long three-day weekend, all eyes were on the August jobs report. The report showed unemployment for August rose to 9.6% from 9.5% in July. Nonfarm payrolls shed 54,000 jobs last mo

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The increasingly popular online shopping site Thefind has finally found a way to connect with Facebook, without being creepy. It’s not a technical breakthrough — plenty of sites now work with Facebook to let users log-in — but Thefind has been grappling with how to integrate with Facebook in a way that’s relevant and privacy-respectful.

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It is almost Labor Day, but before Wall Street and investors take off for a long three-day weekend, all eyes are on the August jobs report due out this morning. Projections from Thomson Reuters say the 9.5% unemployment rate will rise to 9.6%, due to temp

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Provided by the Business Insider:

ASIA: Rose moderately, but China was hit by bank concerns. Markets appear to have cheered yesterday’s U.S. rally. Techs outperformed while there was weakness in Chinese financials. Mainland Chinese stocks lagged the re

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Japan’s currency keeps rising, making it a haven from US economic woes and creating bargains for investors. Here are 3 stocks to consider buying in the fall.

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This week’s big Apple announcement featured one big disappointment: Apple TV’s relative lack of, well, TV. Out of all of the hundreds of channels available on cable and satellite, only ABC and Fox agreed to offer their programs for rent on Apple TV. The fact that Steve Jobs is the largest single shareholder in, and on the board of, Disney — owner of ABC — perfectly illustrates this digital divide.

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People in Silicon Valley have focused on the set-top box as the lever to attack the cable industry. Cable boxes blow, but that’s a losing battle. So why is Apple TV different? Because Steve Jobs has not just created a new set top box. He’s actually created a whole new media ecosystem built around the mobile phone.

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Markets took off yesterday shortly after the morning bell, as positive manufacturing reports for the U.S. and China bolstered investor confidence. The ISM Index found U.S. manufacturing
grew in August to 56.6, up from 55.5 the previous month. The rally l

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Money-manager Barry Ritholtz has a message for the National Association of Realtors, the trade group that always puts a sunny spin on the outlook for the housing market, no matter how horrific the facts may be:

You’re making the problem

Ritholtz, wh

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Investors felt better about the economy on Wednesday after the August ISM manufacturing index improved compared with July. Forecasters were looking for a decline, and when that didn’t happen, stocks took off.After so many disappointing data points this su

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Video calls aren’t for people to see you — they’re for people to see what you see.

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I got up this morning to find the world going crazy about the new Twitter iPad application – see this glowing Engadget review and the Techcrunch titled Twitter Just Killed Something Else: Their Own Website – the title gives a hint of where I’m going with this post. (Apologies for the fact this link is to the shortened post on TC – the full one seems to be currently unavailable).

So I installed the Twitter iPad app on the iPad I have in my kitchen at home, and  – I loved it too.  I won’t go into the features here (check out the Engadget review for that), but I will say that I got lost clicking around my timeline, user profiles and the tweet history of individuals in a way I haven’t done for a while.  Put simply, the Twitter iPad app is a much more engaging way to use the Twitter service than any other interface I’ve seen.

I feel the same way about Flipboard for looking at my Facebook.  Again I get lost browsing Facebook through Flipboard in a way I never do when I’m on the site itself.  In fact, post Flipboard the site feels a bit dull.

Finally – I love reading Techcrunch and The Guardian via the Pulse app.  It would be nice to have more flexibility to include the feeds I want, but it is a great experience for those two sites.

It is still early days for the iPad, and UI innovations are coming thick and fast – the Twitter app only just came out and Flipboard is only a month or two old – and already for media consumption the experience is getting way ahead of the browser.  Apple and Steve Jobs have copped some flak for describing the iPad as revolutionary, but I’m starting to think they might be right.

Regular readers will know that I’m no Apple fanboy, and I don’t think that it is the iPad in and of itself that is making the difference.  Rather I think it is richness and variety of touch screen navigation and the speed of the iPad apps that makes the experience so good – both features that can be replicated on other devices – e.g. these new Archos tablets.  That said, the iPad is a beautiful and brilliant machine and Apple is clearly way out in front here.

What I’m wondering is whether consuming content on touch screen tablets is going to become such a better experience to consuming it on desktop or laptop computers that it will start to change the way offices are set up.  As I said, we have an iPad in our kitchen at home, but I don’t have one in the office (yet) which is where I do the majority of catching up with blogs.

I’m also wondering if there might be a much better way read emails.  One of the nice things about the iPad Twitter app is that it makes it easy to read the content behind links and navigate back and forth to the original Tweet and your timeline.  By contrast Outlook forces me to open a browser and change application to look at a link (or any attachment for that matter).

If I’m even half right with the ideas in either of these last two paragraphs then revolution isn’t too strong a term for the changes the iPad is bringing.

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WASHINGTON-Another Labor Day is about to arrive, and once again, organized labor in the United States has little to cheer about.
Unemployment is high, union membership has fallen to 7 percent of the private sector labor force (down from 15% a quarter century earlier). Despite Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, labor is unlikely to win passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, its heavily-lobbied bill to take away the secret ballot in elections for union representation and impose collective bargaining on employers.
And now a new problem looms for some of the larger unions. The…

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Corporate profits are at all-time highs and bond rates in the Treasury market are virtually at record lows. That’s a good combination for stocks, and it helped trigger a 255 point rally in Wednesday’s trading. What’s more, a surprisingly positive read on the ISM August manufacturing report delivered a strong blow to the double-dip recession pessimism that has plagued investors for many months.
Without question, the jobs picture is going to remain cloudy. There’s just too much uncertainty over the economy and the tax-and-regulatory threats coming out of Washington….

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