govgrantcash.com

It’s a timely idea, not just for consumers, who could always use better stock advice, but for brokerages. The price of stock trading is moving towards zero (see Zecco, among other trading houses). Online brokerages are now trying to make money by holding customers’ assets (offering banking services) and by layering in social networking features that make it harder for customers to leave.

The stock tracking and community site Cake Financial is getting some interesting new features, including its first branded financial instrument, an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that rolls up the best stock ideas from the Cake communuty.

Previous coverage: The Financial Wisdom Of The Crowds: Spendview, Cake, Mint.

If you’re a Cake member and you link it to your stock trading accounts, it combines information about other members’ activities with your own, and in the new “Scout” feature, identifies stocks that are performing better than yours, in users’ accounts with similar asset allocation to yours, but that also evidence lower risk. In other words, stocks you’d be comfortable owning and that should make you more money.

Which brings us to Cake’s ETF, the Cakedex, which should be available via ETF resellers like iShares in 2009 (Carpenter gave iShares as an example only; he’s not revealing the outlets for the Cakedex yet). The Cakedex ETF will be an index fund made up of the top 100 holdings of the top-performing investors on Cake Financial. Details of the fund, such as how the holdings will be apportioned and how often the fund will rebalance, are still forthcoming. But this is a very interesting, efficient, and social financial product.

Cake CEO Steve Carpenter believes that of the approximately $100 billion that consumers pay for stock management services, “a lot is wasted.” He’s built a service that identifies the stock picks from the best performing members in his community, and lets other users take advantage of their investing skills. Importantly, Cake doesn’t show you just which stocks have done well among its users. That’s old information. Rather, Cake identifies the users that are doing well in their portfolios and highlights their transactions, as they happen, for other users. One of the byproducts of that is the Cake Take, a rating service “akin to Morningstar,” Carpenter says. But it’s more predictive, more timely, and a lot less expensive to run, since it’s algorithmic and not based on the opinion of paid analysts. Fair warning: I don’t know if the Cake Take’s predictions are actually better than MorningStar’s. I just think the idea is sound, and more contemporary.

Cake recommendations I'm supposed to be comfortable with.

See also: Marketocracy.

Carr, in a guest column for BusinessWeek Online, wrote that he worried Dell didn’t understand how the computer market and consumer tastes where changing. (Full disclosure: I was the editor on that column, but Carr’s spotless writing made my job pretty easy.) In fact, he found then-CEO Kevin Rollins’ dismissal of the
iPod as a “fad” and a “one-product wonder” troubling. Carr found a nice way of saying, “Are you kidding me?”

Then the market changed. As consumers began to take cars’ basic functions for granted, they started seeking a little pizzazz in their vehicles. An unadorned black roadster was no longer enough–everyone suddenly wanted a stylish set of wheels. Niches proliferated. Fashion mattered.

Correction, 1:20 p.m. PDT: This blog initially had an incorrect first name for the former CEO of Dell. He is Kevin Rollins.

Ford was out-innovated by General Motors, which understood consumers wanted style, taste, something that represented who they are. That’s something Apple has always understood about its customers. Even HP got a handle on this several years ago. By 1926, GM’s Chevrolet was taking market share away from Ford. By 1927, Chevys were outselling the Model T. Carr continued:

But Dell’s issues go a lot deeper than managing expenses, and adding a line of nicely colored laptops and a new ad agency, as Dell has done, won’t make them go away. In short, Dell just isn’t cool anymore, and it probably never was.

The 1990s were for the computer industry what the 1920s were for the automotive industry. One size fits all is long gone. Consumers are going mobile and making statements about who they are with the computers they buy. The question now is whether Dell & Co. can find a way to prevent history from repeating.

Carr nailed Dell on this. For people who want to understand how the computer industry works (and how in many ways it’s not all that different from other industries), the column he wrote for BusinessWeek should be required reading. Carr compared Dell’s run in the 1990s to Ford’s early success in the auto industry. Like Ford with its Model T, Dell stuck with its bland box strategy for too long. Carr wrote:

Tech pundit Nicholas Carr predicted Dell’s current predicament more than three years ago.

Ford was slow to respond to the rise of the mass-class market for cars. Finally, however, it took action. On May 25, 1927, Ford announced it was discontinuing the Model T and would close down its main factory in order to revamp it for a new line of more attractive models. But the carmaker’s glory days were over. It would never again come close to dominating the market the way it had just a few years before.

Is Dell the Ford of computers?

Ford’s fall stands as a cautionary tale for all companies that have thrived by riding the commoditization wave of a new consumer product. If Dell wants to continue to rule in the home as well as the workplace, it may need to class up its act. Rather than dismissing fads, Rollins should try starting a few.

Spin forward three years to the onslaught of bad Dell news: Rollins is long gone, and Michael Dell is back in the corner office, trying to get his company back on track. Dell announced Thursday that layoffs are likely to go deeper than the 8,800 already announced. It has lost the biggest computer maker mantel to Hewlett-Packard (CNET blogger Don Reisinger has a nice take on Dell’s market share issues), and the stink of the subprime loan mess could even rub off on the Round Rock, Texas, company.

(Credit:
Dell)

Like Dell with PCs, Ford Motor came to dominate the
car market a century ago by turning the automobile into a cheap, mass-market product. Other manufacturers couldn’t compete with Ford’s extraordinarily efficient operations. By the early ’20s, sales of Ford’s drab but well-built Model T surpassed those of all other U.S. automakers combined.

Ditto for the styling imperative for some of the sveltest, lightest, and most impressive of notebooks: the Air, X300, and just-released U110.

The MacBook Air, IdeaPad U110, and ThinkPad X300 are the three hottest ultraportables out there. They all sport unique styling outside. And Intel blue inside.

Scratch the surface (or lift up the keyboard in this case), however, and you’ll find that their unique exteriors house similar Intel core electronics.

The IdeaPad U110, like other ultraportables, uses an Intel low-voltage processor

The 13.3-inch ThinkPad X300 uses the Core 2 Duo SL7100 LV chip running at 1.2GHz. This is a 60 percent package “shrink” of Intel’s original Core 2 Duo design and draws a mere 12 watts. Why the shrink? These variants consume less power compared to larger counterparts, giving laptops longer battery life.

The Mermon package shrink featured in the X300 debuted with great fanfare in the MacBook Air. The Air uses 1.6- and 1.8-GHz versions of this Intel chip with a 20-watt TDP.

(Credit:
Lenovo)

The newest 11-inch U110 IdeaPad has gone with the Intel Core 2 Duo L7500 processor. It runs at 1.60GHz and integrates 4MB of cache. The low-voltage L7500 has a thermal envelope (referred to as Thermal Design Power or TDP) of only 17 watts. Much lower than the typical 35-watt Intel mobile processor. AMD mobile processors have similar above-30-watt thermal envelopes.

Styling and design are now so crucial in notebooks that when a model arrives in pink the color change alone is news.

Similarities between ultraportables extend beyond Intel to storage options too. The Air, X300, and U110 all offer either 4200RPM hard disk drive options or 64GB solid state drives. The 4200RPM drives in the U110 and Air can be real performance bottlenecks if a user pushes the usage envelope. The X300 only comes with a solid state drive.

Graphics–an increasingly important differentiator in any computer–is the same across all three notebooks: Intel X3100 integrated graphics. No Nvidia option here. No AMD-ATI. Intel across the board. The reason for this is strictly practical. For heat and power consumption purposes, these ultrasmall designs cannot accommodate an extra graphics processor. (It should be noted also that Nvidia and AMD-ATI integrated graphics are typically not used in ultra-low-power designs.)

The processors are all Intel too with some differences. Again, a practical consideration since AMD doesn’t offer ultra-low-power x86 processors with relatively high performance.

Does this have anything to do with nefarious strong-arm tactics on Intel’s part? Or just that AMD and Nvidia don’t have competitive offerings in this space? The evidence points pretty convincingly to the latter.

The solid state drives, while expensive, have proved to be able performers, even bettering high-end hard disk drives in some benchmarks.

Though I could be persuaded otherwise. I suspect it’s evidence of Google being witty, mostly because I’m having trouble figuring out the utility of the feature besides to show off what I see as a generally pretty impressive text-to-speech engine. Perhaps they’re trying to see how well the engine can handle a little more load.

At least if the supplicant is the Net’s most prominent techie cartoonist and Google is in a position to fulfill the request.

(Credit:
CNET News)

Is it a coincidence? Speak your mind in the comments below, and I’ll update if Google gets back to me with a response.

YouTube comments, now with a text-to-speech engine.

It would be more useful if there were some way to train the audio engine when it flubs, as it does with some foreign terms and proper nouns, or at least let it know its errors. I was impressed it could handle some awkward terms, though, including “CNET” and “syzygy.” It runs out of available syllables before the comments field runs out of room for words, though it seems well suited to the typically brief, if inane, YouTube comment.

Well, lo and behold, such a thing now exists, as Google Blogoscoped pointed out Thursday, though alas not with the mandatory listen-before-you-post requirement Munroe suggested. Google added a text-to-speech button that will play back your comments.

In late September, I chuckled at Randall Munroe’s XKCD cartoon about living to regret YouTube comments. The cartoon suggested a virus that would read people’s YouTube comments back to them before they posted. The result was the mass realization that we’re all a bunch of morons, which, judging by the average YouTube comment I see, doesn’t seem too far off the mark.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Update 7:52 a.m. PDT: Matt Cutts, Google’s Web spam guru, believes the audio feature is indeed a hat-tip to XKCD. “I love that Google had the sense of humor to add this feature,” he said.

Also, Munroe himself remarks on his own blog about the audio feature, aptly pointing to one commenter’s post: “It’s the DUMBEST FEATURE I’ve seen thus far. There is no practical use for it. None. Zero. Nada. Sheesh. (The audio preview of my own post sounded moronic!)”

In another case, Columbia Forest Products has started using a wood adhesive that uses a protein found in ocean mussels. The company uses soy flour rather than formaldehyde to make its adhesive.

“Green chemistry is pollution prevention at the molecular level,” he said.

In general, the focus of most green chemistry techniques is choosing renewable feedstocks that obviate the need for hazardous compounds, Engler said.

A company called Battelle, for example, developed a binding agent for printer cartridges that is made from glycerin, a by-product of biodiesel production. The process means that it has a cheap feedstock and lowers the energy production needed to make the toner binder.

The impact of the green chemistry movement is substantial: The winners of last year’s EPA Green Chemistry award program have prevented 200 million pounds per year of hazardous substances, he said. Since the program started, over 1 billion pounds of hazardous substances have been kept out of the environment.

Engler gave an overview of green chemistry at the CTSI Clean Technology conference here on Monday, where he said that most of what qualifies as green chemistry is focused on reducing the amount of hazards that chemicals introduce.

All chemical products won’t become benign overnight but they can get greener, even taking small steps, said Rich Engler, the program manager for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Chemistry Program.

“We recognize that there is an incremental nature to green chemistry. You can’t take a year or two and make the chemistry industry completely benign. It’s really a question of what is greener,” he said.

Engler said that investing in new innovations costs chemical companies more. But there are a number of financial benefits, including cheaper and recyclable raw materials and less regulatory burden.

BOSTON–To many people, the term “green chemistry” is either a contradiction or a fancy name for long-held sensible chemistry practices.

Venture capitalists, including famed investor Vinod Khosla, have made green chemistry one their investment themes. In many case, green chemistry companies make better materials, such as Hycrete which makes a water-resistant concrete that is more durable.

At first glance, the web app provides a simplistic view of things. Features included are looking at who owes you, who you owe, vendors, employees, and bank accounts. Despite the initially simplistic look, as you drill down, you uncover a whole new level of detail.

Even though this seems to be a killer app for referring to your financial information, I have to point out some points where they have missed the mark. First off, a standalone app, available through the App Store would have been nice for the iPhone, but it’s not completely necessary. The largest oversight here is not being able to edit or add data. In my opinion, this would be one of the primary usage scenarios for this app. That said, this is version one of this app and we may see this sort of functionality being added at some point down the line.

If you are already a Quickbooks Online user, these new web interfaces for Blackberry and iPhone are nice perks. I’m not sure that the introduction of these apps would be the deciding factor in jumping to Quickbooks Online, but it might help the decision.

Quickbooks, one of the leading accounting packages for small businesses, has just released web interfaces for Blackberry and
iPhone. The iPhone version, seen to the left, sports a very slick UI and allows easy, at-a-glance access to all of your financial information, entered into Quickbooks Online.

You can try it out for yourself, before signing up by going to https://accounting.quickbooks.com/m and tapping “Demo.”

At the time, Apple was just getting onto solid financial ground, growing revenue by 30 percent compared with the previous year while posting net income of $61 million. By contrast, Apple recorded a net profit of $1.14 billion during the fourth fiscal quarter of 2008.

Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster might have said it best late Wednesday: “While the iconic leadership of Steve Jobs cannot be fully replaced, we believe his core attributes as a CEO, operationally and with products, can be replicated.”

The point? These were all crucial projects that were under way when Jobs took his first medical leave of absence, from August 2004 to October, when he returned to full-time duties. And Apple managed them well enough.

CNBC reported Wednesday that two prominent tech industry executives have recently expressed “dire concerns” over Jobs’ health. While unpleasant, Apple has no choice but to consider the possibility that Jobs’ absence could be longer than anticipated.

But therein lies the question: what will Apple do in the long term?

Clearly, Apple will miss its legendary CEO while he takes a leave of absence to recuperate from health problems that are apparently much more serious than previously thought. But Apple is in far better shape in January 2009 than it was in August 2004, when Jobs announced he had undergone surgery for pancreatic cancer and would have to take a few months off.

The
iPhone was barely a concept, about to make the leap from vision to hardware, according to a Wired article detailing the behind-the-scenes development of the product that has become one of Apple’s most important cash cows. It would be years–and many redesigns–later before the iPhone came to resemble the product we now know.

This is the likely scenario for the next five months or so, while Jobs recuperates and Apple COO Tim Cook runs the company. We don’t know exactly what kinds of projects Apple is working on behind closed doors, but Apple has shown in the past it can continue to develop crucial projects while its leader is sidelined, something they’ll have to prove again in 2009.

And the
iPod was about to make a huge leap, with game-changing products such as the iPod Nano and iPod Video in development before their eventual release in 2005.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News)

These days the company has three strong product lines, a worldwide network of retail stores and, with $24 billion in the bank, the financial resources to outlast a deep recession. Flash back to the summer of 2004, when Apple was a very different place.

Apple will be fine without Steve Jobs for six months, but better have a plan concerning the longer-term issues.

How will Apple fare without CEO Steve Jobs at the helm for six months? History provides some indication.

While the
Mac was starting to make a comeback, that resurgence wouldn’t really start in earnest until 2006 when Apple switched its processor supplier to Intel. Behind the scenes, Jobs and Co. were hard at work on that transition. The project involved a massive overhaul of Apple’s code even though for years, the company had maintained a laboratory version of Mac OS X that was compatible with Intel’s chips.

That potential challenge, more than anything else Apple will do this year, is what Cook and Apple’s board of directors must tackle in the coming months. The products? They’ll be fine.