Posts
The Apple iPad will probably change the face of traditional print media. With stocks like News International on single digit PEs, having just increased the earnings forecasts, it is time to examine the future of media. Just as telco operators are beginning to show signs of life, there are some signs that old style media might have a future. Here is a debate between Arianne Huffington and Axel Springer’s ceo. Now watch the Facebook mobile strategy video below.
Wired magazine gives a demonstration on how the iPad will lead to great magazines and content that we will pay for.
Here is a video discussion with Nassim Taleb, Marc Faber and Hugh Hendry about where and in what to invest. The panel session takes place in Russia; when you click on the link make sure you hit the English button, otherwise you’ll hear it in Russian. Hugh Hendry sounds like Scott Fitzgerald in the Crack Up, or a foot note from one of Nietzsche’s minor works. Someone should tell him to loosen-up; this is investment, not a Satanic struggle. As for investing in Russia itself, which one delegate argues for, it might worth remembering what Chekov said: Russia is an enormous plain across which wander mischievous men. I would also recommend that any potential investor read, The Oligarchs by David Hoffman, and Black Earth by Andrew Meier anything by Anna Politiskaya, and listen closely to people like Bill Browder and George Soros, both of whom know the market intimately.
This is a video lecture of Sir Paul Nurse, speaking at the Royal Society earlier this week about the biggest ideas of biology. Nurse, a leading geneticist, has won a Nobel prize, explains that the most recent Big Idea is cells are highly complex systems built of networks that carry out the processing of information. The implications of this are not encouraging for drug discovery and the curing of disease because Nurse suggests we do not yet have the tools to unravel these systems. I attended this lecture and bumped in to both Mike Lynch (Autonomy) and David Potter (founder of Psion, the company that originated the Symbian mobile phone operating system). They, like other IT people, grasp the use of powerful computing systems is one of the ways that we will better grasp the inner workings of cells.
CNBC interview with Mark Gerstenharber, former right hand man of Julian Robertson and now head of a hedge fund called Argonaut. He has some interesting things to say on Greece and the lack of jobs and consumer demand in the US economy. Growth will be hard to come by, which backs up our notion that the right areas of tech will outperform.
Here is a 16 minute video presentation given by a senior Facebook executive outlining the company’s mobile strategy. This is the big year for mobile content, as this video underscores. One interesting nugget, Facebook believes that mobile users are more engaged with the service than those on a desk top. For ‘engaged’ read more like to pay for stuff.
This link takes you through to a short video presentation by a senior executive from Facebook. He explains all about Facebook Connect, which could become a very important development for media companies and their hopes of getting paid. Very interesitng.
A video of a presentation just given to MIT by Paul Krugman. One point he highlights is that it is still too early to end the fiscal stimulus. Sober and provocative.
An interesting report from the frontiers of medical research. In some cases stemcells might be able to reverse premature aging.
This comes from the American Thinker and focuses on the resurgence of Republican fortunes. This is likely to be a bad year for Democrats.
Fascinating news story abour a cyber attack that has affected 75,000 computers.
Ronald Dworkin, a noted US legal expert, examines the bizarre and dangerous decision of by the US Supreme Court to allow companies and pressure groups to make political donations. Against the opposition of their four colleagues, five right-wing Supreme Court justices have now guaranteed that big corporations can spend unlimited funds on political advertising in any political election.
