Finance Geek

AT&T’s bandwidth caps go into effect Monday, putting half of U.S. broadband users to a limit on how much net they can use. We’re all poorer for it.

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Netflix now has nearly as many subscribers as Comcast and in the evenings, accounts for more than 40 percent of U.S. bandwidth usage by some measurements. Those astounding numbers are leading some to wonder whether Netflix is reducing the amount of peer-to-peer file sharing, once the easiest way to find movies to watch. But what do the numbers say?

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The Fed has kept interest rates at zero percent for 27 months and has created–out of the blue–2 trillion new dollars in the last few years alone. If these actions constitute a strong dollar policy, Americans can only cringe at the thought of what a weak dollar policy on the part of the Fed would possibly look like!
Ben Bernanke’s hour-long press conference was packed full of an amazing quantity of contradictions, and economic fallacies. For example, the price of gold soared by $25 during the conference as the dollar was falling to a new 52 week low. In fact, the U.S. dollar has lost…

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Provided by James Altucher: “Giving to charity” is another Myth we uphold fervently in the Great American Religion (just like “own a home”, or “send your kids to college”). It’s time we stop blindly believing in mythology. I’m not saying don’t give. I’m not saying don’t be spiritual or don’t be good. But do it [...]

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NEW YORK (TheStreet) — Berkshire Hathaway has thrown David Sokol under the bus, but will that be enough to clear the road for the teflon CEO Warren Buffett?
Berkshire Hathaway tried to pre-empt the firestorm that Buffett is sure to face at this weekend’s Berkshire annual meeting by releasing the results of a Berkshire board audit committee review that slams former Berkshire senior officer Sokol.
The audit committee report states that trades Sokol made in shares of Lubrizol weren’t just a violation of Berkshire Hathaway policy and fiduciary duty, but part of a nefarious plot to fool…

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Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting is always a big deal, but this year’s confab takes on extra importance for its legendary chairman Warren Buffett as the saga over David Sokol’s resignation continues. Earlier this week, Berkshire’s audit committee released its review of Sokol’s trading in Lubrizoil prior to Berkshire’s purchase of the company in March. The [...]

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Presidents and politicians of all political affiliations have said for decades the U.S. must find an energy source that can serve as a viable alternative to crude oil imports from foreign nations — a fair number of which aren’t exactly gushing supporters of the red, white and blue. That talk hasn’t translated into much action, [...]

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The dollar hit its lowest level since July 2008 Thursday, putting more pressure on savers, people living on a fixed-income and all consumers facing soaring commodity prices, most notably in energy. Somewhere, Ben Bernanke is probably smiling. Yes, Bernanke — and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner — talked tough about the dollar this week but “currency [...]

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Gross domestic product slowed to a meager 1.8% for the first quarter of 2011, just as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke (among others) predicted. “We have not seen the GDP number yet but we are expecting a relatively weak number for the first quarter, something a little under 2 percent,” he said during his first-ever press [...]

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There is more evidence today that rising gas prices are having a big impact on consumers. Wal-mart CEO Mike Duke said shoppers at the low-cost retailer are “running out of money” faster than they did a year ago likely do to rising fuel costs, reports CNNMoney. The national average for a gallon of gas is [...]

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Exxon and Shell reported blockbuster first-quarter results Thursday morning, adding fuel to a simmering political debate about federal tax breaks for big oil and the related issue of “windfall” profits. Earlier this week, House Speaker John Boehner seemingly opened the door to a renewed discussion of eliminating federal tax breaks for big oil companies, which [...]

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Our portfolio company Taptu has recently pivoted from a mobile search proposition to the social magazine space.  They have had iPhone and Android apps out for a few months now but I have been waiting on their iPad app which came out a few days ago.

Reading news on my iPad is part of my morning routine and I have been a pretty happy user of Pulse up to this point, which I have preferred over Flipboard primarily because of its speed.  My only gripes with Pulse are the that you can only fit so many feeds onto a page and the limits on the content available.  

Taptu solves both those problems.

The technology that powered the Taptu search offering has now been tuned so that any content source can be brought into a stream on Taptu and they can combine multiple sources into a single stream.  That means you can mix sources to create customised streams and have everything you need in the streams you can see on a single page (4 streams in portrait view, 3 streams in landscape).

I’ve set mine up to with dedicated streams for Facebook and Twitter and then a mixed stream for VC news and a mixed stream for premiership football news.

One of the neat things about they’ve done is allow people to share their curated feeds, or in Taptu parlance become ‘news DJs’.  The VC news feed I’ve got is one that was created by Scott Sage, an Associate here at DFJ Esprit, and the premiership football stream is one that Taptu curates.

The team at Taptu are going to help me curate my own stream with my favourite blogs, sites and Twitters.  I will let you know when it goes live.

The app has a few nice UI touches as well, in particular I like that you can view the full history of a stream and see how old each item is.  That helps you know how up to date you are and whether you have too many or too few sources curated into the feed.

My only substantial gripe is that there is no Instapaper support, which I’m told has been a common feature request since the iPad app went live and will be coming soon.  For now the ‘read later’ options are to email stories or bookmark them inside Taptu which creates a stream of saved stories.

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Fed head Ben Bernanke, at his first-ever news conference on Wednesday, slammed the door shut on any new QE3 pump-priming. The $600 billion QE2 program to purchase bonds will end on target at the end of June, and that will be that. Mr. Bernanke also suggested that the Fed’s “extended period” for the near-zero federal funds target rate could end in a couple of meetings. Perhaps these announcements suggest a bit-less-easy monetary policy. Perhaps.
But Mr. Bernanke had no defense of the sinking dollar, or the inflation it brings, or the drop in middle-class living standards it…

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WASHINGTON–Gasoline prices are above $4 a gallon, and President Obama on Tuesday renewed his call to Congress to raise taxes on oil companies.
Unfortunately, the lawmakers heard not a word from the president about the $5.7 billion a year in ethanol subsidies that are paid to corn growers and ethanol producers. For corn farmers, federal support for ethanol is a windfall that lifts corn prices and makes it profitable to plant additional acres.
Ethanol, as most motorists have learned, is a corn-based additive that stretches gasoline, so reduces gasoline needed to operate vehicles. But the…

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In May 2010 I wrote an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal arguing that the Fed’s low interest rates were actually retarding economic recovery and job creation, not assisting it. Since then, this view has been gaining traction, albeit not at the Fed.
The prevailing view among economists, policymakers and Federal Reserve Board governors — and the conventional Washington wisdom more broadly — remains that zero or near-zero short-term interest rates (negative 2% in real terms) have some unavoidable adverse side effects, but unquestionably stimulate the…

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