Monthly Archive for November, 2010

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Sequoia Capital Investment Strategy

Published on November 13, 2010 in International Business. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

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Since founding Sequoia Capital in 1972, Valentine has financed many of the companies (Apple, Oracle, Electronic Arts, NVIDIA, Cisco, Google, and YouTube) that have been Silicon Valley’s biggest technology and business success stories.

One of the latest investments by Sequoia is in New York based startup Tumblr, which offers easy-to-use publishing and social networking tools for bloggers.

Sequoia is looking for the best and brightest who may not know about managing a company but who may know a crucial piece of information about a technology or an industry. “People who have a dream and a way to solve a problem — who are interested in solving technological problems and creating new products.”

Markets are Sequoia’s focus, he said: “The size of the market, the dynamics of the market, the nature of the competition. Our objective is always to build big companies — if you don’t attack a big market, you’re highly unlikely to build a big company.”

GE’s $500 Million Electric Vehicle Push

Published on November 11, 2010 in Greentech and International Business. 0 Comments Tags: , .

General Electric has said it will make a record order of 25,000 electric cars, to try to kick-start the EV market. GE is furthering its ambitions to promote cleaner energy and its Ecomagination initiative, although this is actually a company-wide issue [Source].

Its first order is for 12,000 Chevrolet Volts, which will start to roll off GM’s production lines this month. GE will use them as company cars and lease them to corporate customers [Source].

It’s an expensive investment, but GE thinks it will pay out in the end. That’s because, the company sells a number of smart grid and EV charging products. One of the most high-profile GE-branded EV products is the WattStation, an Yves Behar-designed EV charging station set to be released in 2011. So it makes sense that GE wants to jumpstart the EV industry–the company will profit handsomely if it takes off [Source].

You can find a video on the electric car revolution here, as part of the GE Show episode 2.

Web Browsing is turning into Social Browsing

Published on November 9, 2010 in Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

In a recent study of 21-29 year old females, there was a surprising number spending as many as five hours per day on Facebook, with much of that activity being what the respondents nearly all called “nosing around” (called “social browsing”).

This largely consists of seeing what your friends are or were up to: Reading status updates, clicking and watching video links, shuffling through photos of friends’ nights out and comparing those nights to ones own.

To people familiar with Facebook, this behaviour, of course, is not unexpected. But what there can be found most interesting about it was that, for this group, social browsing had largely replaced all other forms of web browsing.

What’s most important about this behaviour, from a brand marketing perspective at least, is that when many of these women needed to look something up—information on a venue, or a band, or a consumer brand—they were more likely to look first for information on the site where they were already spending all their time: Facebook.

What does this kind of behavior mean for online marketers? Well, for starters, brands primarily interested in targeting a younger, female demographic should focus on building brand Facebook pages at least as comprehensive as their brand websites [Source].

eBooks Now $1 Billion Industry

Published on November 8, 2010 in International Business. 0 Comments Tags: , .

In 2002, sales of e-books were at a paltry $7 million. Consumers had few convenient ways to read them. The Kindle was a distant vision for Amazon, and the iPad was a dream in Steve Jobs’s mind. Fast forward to 2010: e-books are set to pass sales of $1 billion

According to a report released today by Forrester Research, U.S. sales of digital books have rocketed 220% from last year’s total of $301 million, bolstered by huge increases of e-readers to 10.3 million, up from 3.7 million in 2009. What’s more, Forrester estimates e-book sales will triple by 2015, and that more than 29 million e-readers will have been sold.

E-books still have tremendous room for growth. According to Forrester, just 7% of online adults in the U.S. who read books read e-books. That figure is expected to double in 2011 [Source].

The Web Is Reborn (HTML 5)

Published on November 6, 2010 in High Tech & Media and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , .

The last decade expanded what we could do online, but the Web’s basic programming couldn’t keep up. That threatened to fracture the world’s greatest innovation engine—until a small group of Web rivals (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) joined forces to save it.

The central goal of HTML5 is to give websites the chance to expand beyond pages and into programs. For instance, the language will have tags for video and audio, which should dramatically streamline the way the Web handles multimedia: it will be as easy for a Web developer to incorporate a film clip or a song as it is to place text and images.

In some ways, HTML5 is taking the best of how the Web works and making it standard. For instance, today Gmail lets you take a file from a computer desktop and instantly attach it to an e-mail by dragging it into the browser window [Source].

One of the most illustrative applications of HTML5 is “The Wilderness Downtown,” an interactive video that the Canadian band Arcade Fire unveiled in September through a collaboration with Google.

Why High-Frequency Financial Traders Should Set up Shop in Siberia

Published on November 5, 2010 in Ranting and Raving. 0 Comments Tags: .

Thinking of entering the world of high-speed computer trading, but don’t know whether you’re best situated in New York, London, or Hong Kong? Your best bet may be Siberia instead, according to a new study from two MIT researchers.

The insight of the MIT researchers, Alexander Wissner-Gross and Cameron Freer, is that some automated traders–or at the very least, their server farms–will be best positioned in-between certain exchanges. Since some trading strategies capitalise on price fluctuations between separate exchanges in different parts of the world, the optimally located server will receive information from those exchanges at precisely the same moment, gaining that millisecond advantage over the competitor. In some cases that pefect location is the midpoint between the two exchanges, but not always–it depends on whether the exchanges’ prices move at the same speed or not [Source].

Relativistic statistical arbitrage: Recent advances in high-frequency financial trading have made light propagation delays between geographically separated exchanges relevant. Here we show that there exist optimal locations from which to coordinate the statistical arbitrage of pairs of spacelike separated securities, and calculate a representative map of such locations on Earth. Furthermore, trading local securities along chains of such intermediate locations results in a novel econophysical effect, in which the relativistic propagation of tradable information is effectively slowed or stopped by arbitrage [Source].

Intel Invests in Middle East

Published on November 4, 2010 in Emerging Markets and International Business. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

At last week’s World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Marrakech, one interesting announcement largely flew over Western heads: Intel Capital has made large-scale investments in three Jordanian and Lebanese companies.

The three startups that have received fresh capital from the investment organization are UK/Lebanon based Nymgo (which delivers cheap VoIP telephony services), Jordan-based Jeeran (social networking site) and ShooFeeTV (which operates a Web-based entertainment guide) [Source].

Intel Capital’s interest in the Middle East region coincides with WEF meetings in the area–a 2009 conference in Jordan was marked by a similar round of investment. The mere fact that Intel is exclusively going after internet portals and communication facilitators will have an effect on the shape of the local start-up scene: Newly minted investors and techies will naturally want to go where the money is [Source].