Friday, March 11, 2011

About Making Money

On Monday night time, I watched my primary, The Very last Phrase host Lawrence O’Donnell.
Even though O’Donnell laudably tried to emphasis the audience’s awareness onand hopefully previous, Charlie Sheen trainwreck interview, courtesy of the tragic undertow that threatens to pull Sheen below for superior, I used to be overtaken, not through the pulling on the thread, and then the voracious audience he serves. It didn’t make me depressing, it created me angry.

In the case of celebrities, we can be considered a heartless region, basking in their misfortunes like nude sunbathers at Schadenfreude Beach. The impulse is understandable, to some diploma. It may be grating to pay attention to complaints from customers who take pleasure in privileges that most of us can not even think of. If you happen to can not muster up some compassion for Charlie Sheen, who may make far more bucks for any day’s perform than the majority of us will make in a very decade’s time, I guess I can not blame you.



Together with the quick tempo of occasions on the web plus the data revolution sparked through the Online world, it’s extremely simple for your know-how business to suppose it is one of a kind: always breaking new ground and undertaking factors that nobody has at any time completed previous to.

But you will discover other sorts of internet business which have currently undergone a lot of the exact same radical shifts, and also have just as awesome a stake inside long term.

Take healthcare, as an example.

We typically consider of it being a immense, lumbering beast, but in truth, medicine has undergone a series of revolutions with the past 200 many years which have been no less than equal to these we see in technology and info.

Less understandable, but however inside of the norms of human nature, may be the impulse to rubberneck, to slow down and consider the carnage of Charlie spectacle of Sheen’s unraveling, but from the blithe interviewer Sheen’s daily life as we pass it inside the appropriate lane of our every day lives. To become honest, it might be hard for individuals to discern the distinction between a run-of-the-mill attention whore, and an honest-to-goodness, circling the drain tragedy-to-be. On its own merits, a quote like “I Am On the Drug. It’s Described as Charlie Sheen” is sheer genius, and we cannot all be anticipated to take the total measure of someone’s existence any time we listen to something amusing.

Fast forward to 2011 and I'm trying to look into means that of getting a little more business-like about my hobbies (mainly new music). From the stop of January I had manned up and started out to promote my blogs. I had generated several several weblogs, which were contributed to by mates and colleagues. I promoted these actions through Facebook and Twitter.


2nd: the little abomination the Gang of Five around the Supream Court gave us a yr or so ago (Citizens Inebriated) literally incorporates just a little bouncing betty of its own that could extremely very well go off inside faces of Govs Wanker, Sacitch, Krysty, and J.O. Daniels. Seeing that this ruling extended the concept of “personhood” to the two businesses and unions, to check out to deny them any best suited to run inside the legal framework that they had been organized beneath deprives these “persons” from the freedoms of speech, association and movement. Which implies (when again, quoting law college trained household) that possibly the courts should uphold these rights for your unions (as individual “persons” as guaranteed by the Federal (and most state) constitutions, or they have to declare that these attempts at stripping or limiting union rights should utilize to serious companies, also.


How is Elop going to address this by
using Windows OS? He has to do more than just charge more, he has
to produce better product at competitive prices, which keep getting
lower. Elop will have to license the Widows OS, which is an
expense, one that he would bear to nowhere near the same extent if
he used Android. I feel he mistakenly looks at this as Google
commoditizing the Android platform, in lieu of the more reasonable
perspective of Google commoditizing the entire portable computer
space.


Well, the answer has arrived. Microsoft is buying Xx% of Nokia for paying Nokia over $1 billion to product Windows Phone 7 hardware.
Nearly all of this money is undoubtedly going into R&D and
marketing. Nokia and Microsoft (their new defacto owners) invariably see
Google as the pre-eminent trheat and are pulling out all of the stops
to nullify said threat. This also answers the question of how Elop, the
Nokia CEO will be able to deal with the reduced margins of having to
buy OS licenses while competing with vendors who get Android for free –
Microsoft is not only footing the bill, but investing in the business
as well. You see, the drop in Nokia’s share price is highly unwarranted
and their is visible synergy in this deal. Nokia gets to remove the
costs of OS R&D from its line times, sunk costs that have apparently
had negative incremental returns as they have had their asses handed to
them by Apple and most definitely Google – who knocked them off of
their number one market share perch in just over a year.


Microsoft gets the economic benefits of an existing hardware platform
that happens to have the number one marketshare metric in the world,
and gets it for just over a billion dollars. This is a win-win
situation. The question is,  will it win againt Google. Both companies
will still fail if they don’t execute on Google-time, who has compressed
development cycle years into months – literally!


From the Bloomberg article linked above:


Shrinking Margins (yeah, you’ve hear thist from me often enough)


Espoo, Finland-based Nokia needs to cut
costs to keep operating margins from narrowing further, after they
shrank to 4.9 percent last year from 19 percent a decade earlier. For
2011 and 2012, Nokia may cut its budget for research and development in
devices and services by about a third from last year’s spending of about
3 billion euros, said Sami Sarkamies, a Helsinki-based analyst with
Nordea Bank.


Microsoft spokeswoman Melissa Havel
declined to comment on the specifics of the agreement. Laurie Armstrong,
a spokeswoman for Nokia, said the final contract hasn’t been signed and
the company will share further details when they are complete.


Nokia’s royalty payments will help
Redmond, Washington- based Microsoft make a profit on the accord even
after the payments to Nokia, one person said. Some of the payment to
Nokia would be made before the company starts selling the phones,
meaning Microsoft bears some upfront cost in the partnership.



Microsoft shareholders want the company
to salvage its mobile-software business while also reining in costs. The
company doesn’t break out results for its mobile-software unit, and
instead groups them with the profitable Xbox video-game business, making it difficult to evaluate the financial performance of phone software.


Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer
has come under pressure from investors and his own board to improve
sales of mobile software after the company lost market share to Google
and Apple. Microsoft stock has declined 7.8 percent so far this year.


The agreement for the more than
billion-dollar payment was part of a campaign by Microsoft to keep Nokia
from choosing Google’s Android operating system, one of the people
said. Nokia also opted for Microsoft because Windows Phone software,
which is newer than Android and has a smaller number of handsets for
sale, gives Nokia a better chance to stand out, one of the people said.


The agreement also has Microsoft paying Nokia for the right to use its patent portfolio, one of the people said.


As part of the deal, Microsoft will use
Nokia’s Navteq mapping products for functions such as geolocation
services and selling local advertising and coupons tied to a user’s
position. If successful, that also could generate additional revenue for
Nokia, which will share in the sales. The two companies will also
divide revenue from services like search and advertising, Microsoft
President Andy Lees said last month.


I’ve been warning my subscribers about margin compression in this
space, and its about to get much uglier – to the extreme benefit of
consumers of personal and enterprise tech. Previous (and prescient)
posts from last year on this topic…


  • Don’t Count Microsoft Out of the Ultra-Mobile Computing Wars Just Yet
  • After Getting a Glimpse of the New Windows Phone 7 Functionality, RIMM is Looking More Like a Short Play
  • As
    I Warned in June, DO NOT DISCOUNT Microsoft in This Mobile Computing
    War! Their Marketing Campaign is PURE GENIUS! and it Appears as if
    the Phone Ain’t Bad Either
  • Apple on the Margin
  • How
    Google is Looking to Cut Apple’s Margin and How the
    Sell Side of Wall Street Will Enable This Without
    Sheeple Investor’s Having a Clue

Monetizing the Mobile Computing Race


We have a pretty firm idea of who is in the pole position as of now,
but that position is both risky and volatile, not to mention medium to
long term in nature – see Navigating BoomBustBlog Subscription Material To Find The Google Valuation Drilldown.


A more risk averse strategy is to go long on the component vendors
who supply those battling for pole position. Last week we released the
document Long candidate #1 – Hardware: The Mobile Computing Wars
to subscribers that outlined who our number one pick was after an
initial scan. This is not necessarily the absolute final say on the
matter since we have yet to perform a full forensic analysis, but the
company does look good in comparison to over 120 peers. Non-subscribers
should reference The Potential Equity Investments Most Likely To Prosper From the Google/Apple/Microsoft Mobile Computing Battle.


I am releasing the draft of the full shortlist of prospective long
candidates as of now (17 pages, 5 companies) to subscribers. Please be
aware that is a draft document and work in progress, but it is quite
informative nonetheless.  See Mobile Computing Vendor Long List Note WIP. Those who wish to subscribe should click here.


Click here to read up on all of Reggie Middleton’s Mobile Computing War opinion, analysis, and research.


Of all the interesting new tech that seems poised to garner a lot of buzz in 2011, near field communication (NFC), is probably the most exciting. If it takes off, it will transform the ways we communicate, share, and make payments with digital devices. This will likely take years to happen, but the groundwork is being laid right now. And RFinity is one of those companies at the forefront.


While Google and Apple are responsible for generating much of the buzz about NFC at the moment, the technology goes far beyond simply having the right type of chip in your mobile device. For example, how do you handle different types of data transfers being made from one device to another? And how to you ensure that they happen as quickly as possible? And most importantly, how do you ensure that they happen securely? Those are the things that RFinity is thinking about.


The company has just raised $4 million from Horizons Ventures in Hong Kong. And the space has gotten so red hot, in fact, that we hear they’re already out raising another round.


And it’s an easy bet for investors to make not only because of the space, but because of where the project originated: The U.S. Department of Energy. Specifically, RFinity was born when a bunch of infrastructure security experts working for the government were assigned to find all the vulnerabilities in cell phones. Through software they came up with, they were able to quite easily eavesdrop, manipulate SMS messages, and even compromise LAN security. Then they set out to figure out a way to stop people from doing those very things. That work led directly to RFinity.


Work originally began in the person-to-person and person-to-vendor sales space by way of mobile applications that route transactions through RFinity’s own secure servers. But now that NFC appears ready, RFinity is making sure they’re ready for it. The idea is that their technology could cut out the middle man here: themselves.


Obviously, the company isn’t going to share all the details on how they secure NFC transfers. But the basic overview is that they verify an incoming NFC signal and ask for a user’s permission before taking any action. Further, if the action is a transaction, it requires a PIN, just as you might do an ATM withdrawal. That’s all pretty standard. But the key is one-time-use transaction codes that RFinity creates on the fly along with complex cryptographic signatures. These ensure that an transaction is secure since it means that every transaction can only happen once. Even if those numbers were intercepted by a hacker, they would be useless beyond the one-time payment.


And even if your phone is lost or stolen, a thief couldn’t do anything without your PIN. And you can remotely shut down your NFC capabilities via RFinity. It’s enough to make me wish I could throw out all my credit cards right now. “Today’s identification and transaction systems are based on what? A magnetic strip on the back of a card, based on a 1950’s technology that relies on a base station to read the information embedded as a series of simple magnetic markers in plastic tape,” writes Josh Jones-Dilworth, who is working with the company to bring them to market.


Again, NFC as a technology is great and potentially game-changing. But the software is still needed to make it actually work. And some of the big guys began realizing that early on as companies like PayPal, Bank of America, and even Subway have been testing out different things with RFinity for some time. In fact, RFinity has actually been doing field tests of the software end of their technology since 2009 in places like Idaho, well before most people in the U.S. had ever thought about NFC.


But now people are starting to care. And soon, they could be caring a lot more. NFC is already built-in to Google’s new Nexus S device — and the company has put out a call for developers to start using the tech. Rumors have the next iteration of the iPhone gaining the technology as well. In other words, I suspect we may be seeing acquisition rumors starting to fly around RFinity in about six months or so. Provided their technology proves up to the NFC challenge, of course.




Source: http://removeripoffreports.net/ corporate Reputation Management

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