Finance Geek

Flexible displays have tickled our imaginations for years. And before the end of 2012, we’ll finally see companies employing flexible displays in their products. But while the possibilities are tantalizing, don’t let your imagination run wild.

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Some have painted Oracle’s lawsuit against Google as mere opportunism — an effort to squeeze some money out of Android, a skyrocketing mobile operating system. But as the Google-Oracle trial reaches the end of its second phase, Oracle lead counsel Mike Jacobs is adamant that this case is about protecting the future of Java, the programming platform that Oracle acquired from Sun Microsystems in 2010.

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Google’s daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.

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The latest Firefox for Android beta is out and shows mobile Firefox nearly ready for a starring role on Android phones and tablets. This release looks different, but underneath the revamped design — now tailored to the Android platform — is the same Firefox you know and love.

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! The fallout from JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion trading loss continues. Following yesterday’s departure of three high-ranking execs, including CIO Ina Drew, the focus is now shifting to the firm’s chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon. At Tuesday’s annual shareholder meeting, there’s a proposal on the ballot to strip Dimon of [...]

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When I read on Techcrunch this morning that Quora has raised $50m at a $400m valuation I thought “‘wow’, that’s interesting, I haven’t heard much about them recently, I wonder how they are getting on”. First I checked their Alexa graph which seemed to confirm my initial impression that progress has slowed following a meteoric rise in 2010 (or more precisely their Traffic Rank dropped Q2-Q3 2011 and has been rising again since, recently regaining the earlier peak).

Then I took a look at Quora itself.

And ‘puff’ an hour of my life disappeared, just like that. The content on Quora is now of an amazing quality, and much of it is sifted and prioritised for me by my friends asking, answering and following questions and upvoting other people’s answers.

I’m a very task driven person and as a result Quora doesn’t fit very well into my reading habits. Every morning I exhaustively read two feeds I have created on Taptu and the Financial Times mobile app on my Android – a reading habit developed to reliably complete two tasks – staying on top of the news (politics and finance news from the FT, tech news from my tech news feed on Taptu which aggregates The Kernel, Techcrunch, Venturebeat, GigaOM, and a selection of other tech news blogs) and reading everything produced by a small number of my favourite bloggers (most notably Fred Wilson and Brad Feld). Spending time on Quora doesn’t help with either of these tasks which is I think why I don’t go there very often. Rather Quora is good for improving your general understanding of the world in unpredictable ways, which isn’t something I currently make time for in my daily schedule.

But maybe I should. I read some great stuff today on topics like why VCs are lean and scrappy, and why Pinterest took so long to go viral, but the pick of the bunch by far were some of the answers to What are some decisions taken by the "Growth team" at Facebook that helped Facebook reach 500 million users?. Here are some of the highlights:

• they had a ‘fundamental understanding’ of their product and why people use it
• they combined simple frameworks for understanding the business with rigorous analysis to precisely target development efforts on areas which would yield big improvements – e.g. their user framework had four elements – acquisition, retention, engagement and resurrection and they mapped different products and different areas of the site onto each of these elements so they could precisely figure out how to optimise each of them
• they were incredibly thorough – e.g. going the extra mile to support contact imports from a huge variety of services (to maximise virality)
• they have a team of great people and a unique culture

This list reads like a checklist of attributes for a great company generally (I’m mentally checking my portfolio against it now….). The Quora post has much more colour.

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! When Facebook (FB) goes public later this week, the next generation of ultra-rich 20-something techies will have been created. “You are looking at the potential of scores, if not hundreds of millionaires,” says Matthew Miller, editor for the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the wealthiest 20 people [...]

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! In, Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong, Edward Conard sets out to provide “a prescription for how to grow the economy.” Thanks to a recent NY Times Magazine article, and because he worked closely with GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney at Bain Capital, [...]

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! In late February Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke started warning lawmakers about the looming “massive fiscal cliff” that would bring the U.S. economy to its knees if Congress cannot agree on long-term fiscal decisions. Bernanke explained that the confluence of events happening Jan. 1, 2013 - the expiration of the [...]

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Two weeks ago, a patent filing by General Motors was uncovered that proposed using data collected from its OnStar service to tailor public advertisements to individual drivers.

Like the billboards Tom Cruise encountered in Minority Report, the OnStar-linked ads would be tailored to passing motorists based on personal information they’d shared with their telematics service. Perusing …

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The crowdfunding website Kickstarter has become the launch point for a number of clever and useful smartphone accessories in the past two years. Now Portland-based photographer and design engineer Charles Waugh is using Kickstarter to raise funds for his own addition, the SlingShot smartphone video/photo stabilizer. It’s already at over 250% of its goal.

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Google’s daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.

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Apple is said to be working on an upgrade to its iCloud service that will work like Instagram on its next mobile OS, with both set for a June launch. With iPhoto and OS X itself set for iCloud integration, is 2012 looking like the year the personal cloud takes over for the PC?

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After a high degree of confusion over the third generation iPad’s 4G name and capabilities, Apple eliminated the “4G” iPad’s name on Monday.

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