Finance Geek

There’s a big problem with putting saving and investing on a back burner until you’re earning more. Here are 3 reasons to put it on automatic pilot right now.

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Viagra and its clones created a multibillion-dollar industry that the recession hasn’t touched. And the next generation of sex drugs, including ‘female Viagra,’ is on the way.

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From The Business Insider So the second half of the year is off to a good start, eh?First, the scoreboard:Dow: +146.7 or up 1.44%S&P 500: +16.53 or up 1.53%NASDAQ: +43.67 or up 1.99%And now, some key stories: * What’s funny is th

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As the Wall Street Journal reported Monday — and Tech Ticker discussed with Vinny Catalano — individual investors have run out of patience with the stock market. …

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The U.S. economy is experiencing “a slowdown, not a meltdown” and won’t suffer a ‘double-dip’ recession, according to Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab & Co.The negatives facing the economy are well known,

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Apple appears to have removed discussions from its support site that included references to a Consumer Reports article that ‘can’t recommend’ the iPhone 4 due to a widely reported problem with its antenna, which the publication says can be solved with a little strip of duct tape.

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Despite the market’s May-June slump, Charles Schwab’s Liz Ann Sonders is sticking by a call she first made here on April 5: There’s a better chance of a “melt-up for stocks vs. a melt-down. …

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Provided by PaidContent.org, July 13, 2010:Consumer Reports has confirmed in its own tests that there is a problem with the iPhone 4’s reception and thus …

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By the end of the third quarter it will be clear whether the economy is forging a real recovery or slipping into another recession, says Vinny Catalano, founder and president of Blue Market Research. This is a much more important than some academic debate

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A couple of weeks back I blogged that the increasing importance to startups of partnerships with companies like Facebook are making the internet more and more like traditional areas of tech like software and semiconductors and is a sign of the maturing of the internet sector.  This morning I have been struck by a similar thought this morning reading two articles in the FT.

The first was a report on Domino’s Pizza UK’s first half results – Domino’s is a traditional offline business that was in existence long before the web rose to prominence and they now take fully 33% of their orders over the internet.  Moreover they cite an increase in internet orders as one of two reasons their first half results came in ahead of expectations (the other reason was a boost from the World Cup).

The second was a feature on Google, search engine optimisation, and search engine marketing (SEO and SEM).  The main point of the piece is to say that traditional businesses now understand the benefits of SEO/SEM and devote significant resources to making sure their sites and products feature prominently in search results, potentially crowding out smaller companies with less to invest.  Large companies with a good page rank are also at an advantage when they move into new areas because their page rank will help the new properties do well even though they have different content and may not be as ‘good’.

Thinking about this a little more, good SEO/SEM has moved from being enough to create success for a startup to become one of the things that every business should do well, but won’t generate success on its own.  I saw evidence of this trend yesterday when I attended a board meeting at a company in which we are thinking of investing – by listening to the directors debate the business for three hours I got a very good sense of which areas they are focused on as likely to make the difference for them going forward, and what I learned was that despite the fact that they have a very innovative and effective approach to SEM it is other areas of marketing and avenues of customer acquisition where they hope to stand out and beat the competition.

In summary, I think this tells us that large companies have now pretty much fully woken up to the impact of Google, search and ecommerce on their businesses and that the white space for startups is increasingly concentrated in product areas which don’t have a direct offline equivalent and/or which can drive customer acquisition via social media or other non-Google channels.

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Debtocracy: As a president, it’s one thing to know you have a big fiscal problem. It’s quite another when a panel you appointed tells you the policies you have in mind will only make things worse.
That’s what happened Sunday, when leaders of President Obama’s deficit commission offered up the darkest of outlooks for our financial future - calling current trends in U.S. budgets a “cancer” that will “destroy the country from within” unless halted soon.
Pretty sobering words. Let’s hope Rahm “Never Waste A Good Crisis” Emanuel is unable to…

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