Finance Geek

Class warfare and income redistribution rhetoric has always been fashionable among self anointed protestors and politicians who play the old game of divide and conquer, telling us the greedy “rich” need to “pay their fair share.” This would be tedious if it did not have serious implications for tearing communities apart. Let’s take a look.
According to IRS data, there are 1.38 million Americans in the top 1% earning at least $343,927 a year. This is a generous living but hardly the cash flow to purchase a corporate jet and luxury yacht. There are 138,000 Americans in…

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In an economically-themed speech last week in Kansas, President Obama revealed for all to see just how divorced he is from reality, and why his departure from the White House in 2013 is essential. It’s not that we can’t recover from another Obama term - that’s the easy part - but that as a serious nation we can’t have a president who possesses such unserious views.  Call it a pride thing. 
Though Obama acknowledged up front the certain wonders of free markets, he only threw out the initial bouquet to decry those same unfettered markets. As he put…

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Samsung is having a banner year for handset sales, passing the 300 million mark for the first time in company history. Samsung attributes the far-reaching success of the Galaxy S II smartphone as a major reason for the record-high sales numbers.

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Warren Buffett, who has vowed to not leave his fortune to his children, has chosen his farmer son Howard to succeed him as Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. It will be Howard’s job to watch over the culture of the company, but not the investment strategy. That will most definitely be left to someone with investing [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! A very big, very busy week on Wall Street got off to a negative start thanks to a new batch of negative headlines out of Europe and a profit warning from Intel. In recent trading, the Dow was down 1.5% on the heels of renewed weakness in [...]

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The talk below from Forrester CEO George Colony was perhaps the most interesting one I saw at Le Web last week.  He had two big points to make:

1. Web service/application architectures will shift to more local processing and storage.  This is a natural result of the fact that processor and storage technologies are improving faster than networks. 
2. Social networks are so well penetrated now that there is little room to grow – that includes penetration into the population and hours spent per day by the active users.

I want to focus on the second of these today.  Both have been bouncing round my mind since I saw the presentation on Thursday, but I think the second is more topical.  Firstly it was the subject of debate on Fred Wilson’s Avc.com from yesterday, and secondly it is more pertinent to the activity of most of the readers of this blog – as entrepreneurs, investors and consumers.

My first reaction to the argument that social is close to saturation point made sense to me, and most of the people I spoke to about it at the conference afterwards agreed.  The reasoning is logical and comes from research Forrester conducted research with over 1m US consumers which found that ‘social is running out of hours and people’.  Taking the hours piece first – people are spending more time on social than they are volunteering, praying, emailing and using telephones, and more than they are exercising, and only a little bit less than shopping and childcare.  His argument is that people simply don’t have much more time to give to social.  The second piece of the argument is that at around 80% in the developed world social is already so well penetrated that growth can’t come from adding new users either.

Colony’s conclusion from this is not that social will go away, but that the next generation of social apps will be about doing things more efficiently and saving time.  That contrasts with many of the current crop of social apps where the use case is often killing time.

Fred Wilson posted the video below yesterday and invited debate in the comments of his post.  Many commenters were simply outright critical of Colony, but several drew the distinction between social as an app, which might be peaking, and social as a platform, which is only just getting started, and this I think probably hits the nail on the head.  Applications are where people spend time, platforms are where things happen.  There might not be much time left in the day for all of us to spend much more time in social apps, but we can all increase our engagement with social by using the platform components more – that means hitting more like buttons, sharing more generally, connecting more sites to Facebook and Twitter, and using social more to help discover online content and interact with the brands and companies we love.

This might have been what Colony meant when he said the next generation of social services will be about driving efficiency.

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Pump it Up
The ECB significantly increased its liquidity provisions. Some observers seem to be disappointed that the ECB did not flout its own legal mandate and indicate it would buy an unlimited amount of peripheral bonds.
This should not interfere with an appreciation of what the ECB is doing. It is willing to lend to member banks as much money as they want (and have collateral for, whose definition was also broadened) for three years. Moreover, this money, like other repo operations continue to be conducted on a full allotment basis-a bank gets as much as it asks for-and at fixed rate,…

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Every day Michelle Leder and her crew at Footnoted.com comb through Securities and Exchange Commission filings in search of telling nuggets about deals, transactions, and executive compensation. Every month, she stops by our studios to share some of the highlights. November’s crop included a familiar mix of [...]

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Opera developer Haavard Moen has accused Apple of repeatedly using patents to undermine the development of web standards and block their finalization.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry group that governs and oversees the development of web standards, requires that every specification it approves be implementable on a royalty-free basis, barring extraordinary circumstances that justify …

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Just 13 days until Christmas and nine days until Hanukkah. But who’s counting? This week tends to be one of the busiest for online retailers as consumers place their orders before the cutoff for guaranteed holiday arrival expires. To drum up business and drive people to the [...]

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