Finance Geek

More…

Box.net — one of the many startups that lets you share large files over the internet — has introduced a new version of its iPad and iPhone application that lets you view and edit as well as share them.

More…

More…

As Apple?s new iPad arrives in households across the world, developers are updating their apps to take advantage of the fantastic new Retina display. Truth be told, however, some apps look better than others — especially photo apps. Here are some of our favorite image-focused iPad apps optimized for its high-res display.

More…

Barring a big decline in the next three days, the stock market is on track for its best first quarter since 2008 and back-to-back quarterly gains of more than 10%. The market’s performance in the past three and six months — much less the past three years — has generated a lot of chatter about [...]

More…

The battered housing market continues to struggle and talks of a housing bottom may be premature. Home prices in January were flat compared to the prior month, suggesting stabilization in the market, but home values fell for the fifth-straight month and prices dropped to their lowest levels since 2003, according to the Standard &Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home [...]

More…

Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! The Supreme Court is set for its second day of arguments over President Obama’s signature health care legislation, the Affordable Care Act, signed into law in March 2010 and currently on pace to go into full effect by 2014. The three-day hearings began Monday with the justices listening [...]

More…

Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! There’s been a disturbance in the natural order of things. In many important realms, competition has historically been dominated by a pair of competitors, the market leader and the long-running runner-up. Coke and Pepsi. Avis and Hertz. General Motors and Ford. McDonald’s and. . . Wendy’s? Yep. As [...]

More…

Bloomberg reported last week on a study by IHS Screen Digest which found that in the US legal online viewings of films will hit 3.4bn this year, up from 1.4bn in 2011, whilst viewings from DVDs and Blue-ray discs will shrink to 2.4bn from 2.6bn.

The shift from physical do digital usually shrinks markets – look at what Wikipedia did to the encyclopedia market – but that doesn’t seem to be the case here, at least for 2012. IHS also found that the average payment for an online movie was 51 cents (typically as part of an all you can eat subscription service) whilst physically purchased videos came in at $4.72. Multiplying these numbers by the predicted online viewings shows that in spite of the big difference in price the growth in online will more than offset the decline in physical, and the overall spend on movies will actually increase slightly ($76m, 0.6%).

Falling prices will inevitably lead to increased consumption of movies, and I suspect that is part of the reason behind the rapid growth in online viewings, and the market is now in transition to a new equilibrium and it will be interesting to see where the market size comes out. If the current prices are maintained then unless we all watch 10x as many movies the market will shrink. I don’t think there are enough hours in the day for that. If we all watch twice as many movies the implication is that the market will contract by a scary ~80%.

More…