Finance Geek

At a time when more people need help, the nation’s nonprofits are struggling. And some experts say 2010 looks even worse for shelters, soup kitchens and cultural groups.

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“It’s getting worse, not better.”That’s how Jim Rogers responds to the recent talk of improvement from President Obama, Treasury Secretary Geithner and Fed Chairman Bernanke, among others.”Papering over the problem is not going to solve Ame

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Count famed investor Jim Rogers as an ardent support of Congressman Ron Paul’s effort to audit the Fed.The Fed is “the only institution in the world I know of that doesn’t expect to be audited,” Rogers says in the accompanying video. “It’s

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“It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see a nice rally in the dollar,” says Jim Rogers.  The legendary investor tells Tech Ticker he has started to accumulate more greenbacks as of late.  Rogers is still negative on the long-term fundame

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This is on NewTeeVee:

Amazon.com just launched a promotion dubbed Disc+ On Demand that may well be the start to the industry’s first major multi-platform retail experience. Customers who buy select movies on DVD or Blu-ray will be offered the chance to instantly watch their purchase through Amazon’s Video On Demand service.

One of the biggest downers to any ecommerce buying experience is waiting for the goods to turn up and with this move Amazon eliminates that problem and delivers instant gratification so it easy to see why this makes sense, and might even help maintain DVD pricing in the short term (they are describing the VOD part as a “gift with purchase”).

Looking forward, if this offering takes off the implication is that people will be watching their films over the internet before the physical copy turns up at their houses.  From there it is a small step to ditching the DVD and just taking the stream.

We are seeing in the music industry that having music available everywhere is more important than owning it and I expect we will see something similar in movies and then books.

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From The Business Insider, Dec. 10, 2009:A few media outlets cheered the announcement that Bank of America was
repaying its $45 billion of bailout money ahead of time.  Bank of
America is now obviously healthy again, so it’s time to celebrate,
rig

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The 40-year-old system might be vulnerable to technical collapse and cyberattack, which could cause widespread chaos in fields from banking to health care to government.

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With the federal government’s measure of unemployment in the double digits, President Obama has unsurprisingly moved job creation to the top of his list of initiatives. And while his priorities could surely be worse, his approach has been contradictory to that which might actually lead to the creation of new jobs.
Some will no doubt say Obama’s propoals on job creation are evidence of his lack of private sector experience, but it could be argued that his success in raising money for and running a national presidential campaign speaks to intimate knowledge….

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WASHINGTON–As world leaders meet in Copenhagen to discuss reducing greenhouse gas emissions, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has positioned herself, with President Obama’s approval, to make an end run around Congress and impose regulatory limits on greenhouse gases, including the best known: carbon dioxide.
On Monday Ms. Jackson published a regulatory finding that greenhouse gases pose a danger to Americans’ health and need to be controlled. She said that the finding was a required precondition to the agency’s imposing caps on emissions of carbon dioxide and five other gases:…

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Funds that venture into unusual areas often post interesting, if not superior, results. They include investments for haters of Congress and sin, and for lovers of auto racing and wine.

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The on-demand music video service Vevo finally launches. Does this strike fear into the hearts at MTV, which practically invented the music video? Not especially.

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Global markets tumbled overnight amid fresh concerns about the global economy, and more specifically, the prospect of sovereign debt defaults.  Standard & Poor’s lowered its outlook for Spain’s debt grade as the country’s finances worsened.

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From The Business Insider, Dec. 9, 2009:1. Wind N’ Go Freedom ShaverThe

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I’m at the Le Web conference in Paris for the next couple of days and this morning I caught a panel chaired by Mike Arrington with the platform people from Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, Ning and Six Apart.

The first observation is that these companies have been very successful in getting people to use their ‘platforms’.  There are now 50,000 apps built on Twitter, 60 million people use Facebook Connect every month, and the Ning numbers are also very impressive.

The second observation is that with the exception of Ning these companies all started as applications and have backed into a platform model over time.  Traditionally in IT the move has more been in the other direction – e.g. Microsoft started with the Windows platform and then moved downstream into applications afterwards.

I think the difference this time round is that the web 2.0 success stories built wildly popular free apps which generated the enablers for their platforms as a by product.  The social graphs are the main asset here, although Facebook has something akin to an authenticated identity system as well.

This, of course, is the ‘free’ business model in action, or at least it could be.  Make a popular service that is free to use and then find a way to make money in a related area.  Facebook have achieved this with their application platform and Twitter is saying it will make money by finding a way to generate cash that flows up and down the Twitter ecosystem.

I expect we will see higher and higher percentages of businesses that are able to sell something because of something else they give away.  In fact I interrupted writing this post to talk with a VC about just such a company.

There is a Techcrunch report on the whole panel here.

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SAN FRANCISCO — E-mails from a top eBay executive showed the internet giant was aware that a competing online classifieds site it launched while sitting on the board of Craigslist was a sensitive issue to be handled delicately, according to court testimony

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