sylviechen

AT&T: The iPhone's Achilles' Heel

When my friends switched to iphones this year, the number of dropped calls, bad voice or even connections went through the roof. And these friends live in metro areas, not in rural cellular networks. As the former head of business research at the original AT&T I think that they are reverting to this attitude that the Bell System had that the problem was never the network (cell and landlines) it was always the user's phone or home wiring after the protector block. Seems they never learned. Apple should have acquired their stock when they were tanking.
Remember, AT&T cellular is a ghost system not the strong one in the past

PG&E: Solar Not as Important as Energy Efficiency

you forgot condoms...

The End of the U.S. As We Know It: Tracking the Dollar Downward

Maslow proposed a pyramid of 5 needs.
You need to accomplish all previous needs at any point to achieve the next.
Starting from the base and upward:

1. Physiological (food, water, sex, sleep)
2. Safety (family, health, resources, economics)
3. Love (friendship, family, intimacy)
4. Esteem (confidence, achievement, respect)
5. Actualization (morality, ethics, creativity, growth)

My take on the average American re purposes Maslow's theory to:

1. Shelter (rent, own, occupy)
2. Sustenance (food, clothing, health)
3. Security (protection, insurance, community, trust)
4. Motivation (goals, beliefs, faiths, opportunities)
5. Wealth (owning things, increasing their value, protecting assets)

If we assume doom and gloom forecasts for next 2-3 years, then we are going back to stages 1 and 2; Wealth has vanished for now, our motivations are not so important, our security is shot. This leads to keeping shelter and food, and making sure we don't get sick since we can no longer afford it.

The Efficiency of Internet Advertising

Wow! So many ideas, so few true facts from the writer.

Comparing newspapers with online advertising is like comparing the Yellow Pages with directory assistance - an irrelevant comparison. Shame on the author.

Newspaper ads worked off of two models (page advertising and classifieds). Page ads tend to be large to capture attention during page skimming. Classifieds work on the search concept (people are actively looking for something).

One can say that Google's Ad Words is a form of classified ad although Froogle is a form of intelligent page ad, ranked by price. As for ads displayed on web pages, these are increasingly dependent on ad metrics that measure how long people stay on a site, where they came from and go to, the context of the page and other metadata.

With social network sites like Facebook, you also have behavioral data gleaned from membership information, links to others, applications used, time spent and so on. Newspapers never had this information but with the decrease in privacy regulations, in the online world, rich profiles are now the norm.
More sinister, companies such as Phorm and Nebuad are selling services to internet service providers that track every site you visit, 24 hours a day.

While the author is right for all the wrong reasons about online advertising replacing newspapers, one must remember that profiling readers of a newspaper is too difficult when compared with the Web traffic. The future of advertising is the Web because there is very easy to determine the who, when, what and why behavior of a viewer when compared to a reader.

After all, society spends more time viewing images than reading words.
That's the future and that's why newspapers will fade away.

Why Wall Street Razzed Obama

credit swaps, credit swaps, credit swampland, that's the reason...

China's Economy Faces New Problems

It would be interesting to know which China export segments have fallen and which are stable (e.g, toys vs electronics vs machinery). Since a lot of industries are concentrated in single areas (button mfg comes to mind), a drop in one segment could cause extreme economic hardships in local areas. I know that textiles are heavily impacted but solar panel mfg as yet continues to expand.

Anyone know a source?

Lithium Unicorns and Alternative Energy Storage

I believe that current battery technologies will soon be supplanted by multi-stage thermoelectric devices once they cross into the kwH output range.

Thermo electricity occurs when a temperature difference creates an electric potential or an electric potential creates a temperature. A commonly used material is Bismuth telluride (Bi2Te3).

With respect to output power to device weight ratios, a 1Kw/2Kg ratio is ideal for vehicles based on ambient temperature difference within a practical range. 12Kw multi-stage thermoelectric generator would weigh 24Kg and occupy space of 4 lead acid batteries, well within design efficiency parameters of small vehicles.

The key advantage with TE is that it produces continuous power without recharging from an ambient heat source.

Experiments show that scavenging heat from hybrid engines could provide continuous power generation. If you have a mix of TE and battery power units, the batteries would never need recharging.

Another Dr. Doom: Peter Schiff

What makes today different than historical financial burps is the inter connection of economic policies, fostered by the G8, Asia tigers, and the EU Zone. This provides an effective lubrication for optimizing yields as well as spreading infectious, bad financial deals. In growing markets, yields are always positive and create a fertile area for exotic financial instruments. As the become more obscure they create a side industry of insuring players when the instruments are difficult to understand such as risk derivatives and CDOs. That's why the dirty secret of AIG is desperately covered up by governments worldwide. There were the de factor insurer of credit swaps, the basis of most interbank transactions. Our exposure is so immmense that collectively the world does not have enough liquidity to cover the collapse. This is the big one and bears watching in the near future

Cleantech's Solar Conundrum

Another economic factor to consider is solar/wind power, smart metered into the existing grid from points of use. This demand depends on commercial financing or municipal bonds used to pay for renewable energy through special assessment on the property tax of a dwelling. California AB811 bill is one such case. If this program works it provides two benefits:
(1) it spreads the cost over a much longer period than the average household occupies the dwelling, making the annual cost much lower than leasing or financing.
(2) it levels the playing field for low income housing which currently cannot afford solar PV costs.

This all depends on the municipal bond market in the future, something not working in favor of California and its unfunded debt.

Walgreen: Can Scaling Back Boost Profits?

It would be interesting to determine the profit margins by product by shelf.
I suspect that cosmetics and pharma products are the core of their profits with convenience items as well as household supplies a distant second.
They need to better monitor their margins based on price optimization software.
Do they really need to continuously promote cheap t-shirts and sports stuff that cannot compete with the likes of Target and WalMart?. It's one thing to be a one stop shopping experience but their store size does not support such an inventory of product channels. As someone recently said: "you can't fix stupid".

Walgreens, back to school for a refresher on profitability! CVS may clean your clock as they already did with Long's Drugs. They also need to move away from shopping inserts and follow the Costco model of select products online with store pickup. That is the most efficient way to handle inventory and space.

Our Clueless Congress Strikes Again

Bailout for auto? OK...

a. $5B from oil companies as investment (cars are consumers)
b. $5B from taxpayers through TARP, renewable energy, etc.
c. $5B from lending institutions.

Done

America Must Rebuild Domestic Battery Manufacturing Infrastructure

Keep watching developments in thermal electric solid state devices. These could solve the weight issue of an all battery energy source.

A New Use for Solar Energy - Highway Right of Way

Not such a stupid idea. Yes, placing on highway right of way creates other unrelated problems but the principle is sound. What it did spawn in my head was a modified version where concentrated solar plants (protected of course) are daisy chained on their own power distribution line. These lines connect to the grid.
I think this can also spawn coop arrangements in the right areas where wind power plants can hook into this distribution system. I suspect that this would spread the capital cost of the distribution system across multiple providers making renewable concentrated energy investments more practical.

Keep on driving and thinking...

Obama says he'll "create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s." (weekly address)

Ok, its about (1) rebuilding highways,roads,bridges and (2) getting our internet broadband speed up to international standards. Let's see...

1 .Construction requires workers skilled in a profession, not day laborers. Most govt projects require contractors to provide union labor so that leaves out most of the rest of the unemployed as qualified. Well, they can walk the new roads to the next promising town looking for work.

2. Internet broadband is held hostage by three sets of crooks: the cable companies, the telephone carriers, and the optical fibre pipelines that form the backbone. The cable guys don't need additional jobs to upgrade their service since most of the improvements will be at the hardware level. The telcos are shedding jobs to improve productivity. The pipeline carriers are bleeding cash with a lot of dark fibre (unused) in place, fully depreciated so no jobs here.

Obama has bold macroeconomic views but they do not translate to the micro economics required to get employment up. The only bright spot is health care. Why? it remains the least productive market segment based on human capital . But, if more people are unemployed, less health care coverage will be available, leading to less paying patients, therefore lowering productivity even more, because the ratio of patients to care providers will fall.

Maybe his wonks working for him are not that bright after all.

Yahoo: Innovating in the Search Ad Space

Text vs Logo? Links vs Poppets (mini popup, hover, roll)?
Most of the ad innovation is on the fringes such as categorical segmentation of links, graphical 3D linking, contextual snippets and more. Clusty and Ask are good examples of where we are going.

One of the innovations that could help is semantic tagging by web sources so we could search using any engine. For example, if you want to find a product you could check a radio button that identifies the category (amplifier), a price range (100-200), geography (zipcode), shipping rates (free), etc.

What this could do is simplify the results and return an intelligent subset of links. Today, the contextual search data is usually limited to <html> text which is not managed intelligently.

One innovation that seems bold is the insertion of advertising (ghosting) into video content, a lot of it generated by web users. When you start doing this, the line between the ad and the content blurs.

I give the existing search/display model less than 2 years before it morphs into something even more useful. Google needs to stay in the front of the feature trend to keep its market share. The only thing going for them right now is not the text simplicity of their display page, its the pathetic laziness of people to try using other tools. We are creatures of habit and will prefer to sip at the well we are familiar with, not the one that provides better water.