Alex Kaminski's posterous

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Wed, 05 May 2010 15:06:00 -0700

So, apple's market cap is the same as all these companies combined. Scary. Just scary.

At current prices, if you wanted to buy the entire company it would cost you about $240 billion.

To put that in context, for the same amount of money you could own Newmont Mining Corp. (NYSE: NEM - News), the world's largest gold-mining company.

And E.I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co. (NYSE: DD - News), the chemicals giant.

And Kellogg Co. (NYSE: K - News), whose products appear on every breakfast table.

And Shrek studio DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. (NYSE: DWA - News).

And H&R Block Inc. (NYSE: HRB - News), the company that does everybody's taxes.

And The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT - News) And Molson Coors Brewing Co.(NYSE: TAP - News).

And the Estee Lauder Cos Inc. (NYSE: EL - News).

And Tiffany & Co. (NYSE: TIF - News), the Hershey Co. (NYSE: HSY - News), Harley-Davidson Inc. (NYSE: HOG - News), Expedia Inc. (NYSE: EXPE - News),Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE: ANF - News), American Eagle Outfitters (NYSE:AEO - News), Burger King Holdings Inc. (NYSE: BKC - News), CBS Corp. (NYSE:CBS - News), Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. (NYSE: CMG - News), Whole Foods Market Inc. (NYSE: WFMI - News), Starbucks Corp. (NYSE: SBUX - News), Netflix Inc. (NYSE: NFLX - News), JetBlue Airways Corp. (NYSE: JBLU - News), NStar(NYSE: NST - News), and Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc. (NYSE: DPS - News).

Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/109446/why-everyones-afraid-of-apple

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Microsoft's Courier 'digital journal': exclusive pictures and details (update: video!) -- Engadget

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:33:52 -0800

via engadget.com

Engadget had another update about the Microsoft Courier. Hopefully this a real product and is past the research stage. I want to this this out in the wild... this is what apple's iPad should have been.

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Twitter Blog: Trust And Safety

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:15:08 -0800

twitter Adam Savage and @Troy get scientific after an energetic and hilarious talk today at Twitter HQ. Thanks @donttrythis! http://flic.kr/p/7JsDEf 23 hours ago reply

via blog.twitter.com

While this is great news for all Twitter users, I wonder what this does to services like SocialToo? A big part of their offering is DM spam protection + fishing protection.

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When social media can be unsafe

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:32:12 -0800

There’s so much positive hype about social media that sometimes its easy to forget the importance of maintaining perspective about it. Recently an acquaintance of mine stopped using Foursquare when she was pranked by several people who told her they were going to rob her house. Because Foursquare is used to indicate where you are, it was for them to know that she was at a restaurant and not at home. Fortunately she wasn’t robbed, but this story is illustrative of how social media can be used for more negative purposes.

via socialmediatoday.com

Social media isn't always safe and I'd love to see some of the well known people in social media call for more education about these topics in schools.

We already see sexting on the rise, and I bet most teenagers don't realize that facebook records every action you make on the site. Nor that any posted videos will be available perpetually... meaning in 30 years when they have kids, the videos will still probably be available.

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Innovation and Disruption, What’s Holding You Back?

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:09:13 -0800

Radical strategies like this either get you excited or terrify you (or both). Could you imagine the NYT or WSJ stopping all print publications and going digital only? Wow, that would be amazing. Lay off everyone connected to print and forge ahead. It won’t happen for years, maybe decades. Maybe they’ll always keep some niche print production, but eventually most printed papers will go away. But it’s easy for us to criticize the media for not being willing to let go, but what about your business? Every business has boats they’re holding on to. And it’s usually the part of their business that’s stopping them from being truly innovative. That’s the part of the business the startups love to attack. In my world, agencies continue to submit to hourly billing even though it’s a pain, unproductive and not conducive to providing the best work. Marketers refuse to give up on the CPM advertising metric (cost per thousand rate advertisers charge). It’s broken and doesn’t prove any type of business ROI. These are two boats I would volunteer to ignite myself.

via newcommbiz.com

Tac Anderson makes a great point here - one that's obvious but needs stating, the issue with how newspapers are reacting to declining subscriptions and content going online is not only industry specific. It's a general problem of a new platform coming along and holding your business back, or even threatening it.

And while we are all making fun of newspapers for trying to hold out, how many of us are doing the same thing with our own companies? With our own "new threat"?

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Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 02:17:56 -0800

In 1993, Charlie Bennett at IBM's Watson Research Center in New York State and a few pals showed how to transmit quantum information from one point in space to another without traversing the intervening space.

The technique relies on the strange quantum phenomenon called entanglement, in which two particles share the same existence. This deep connection means that a measurement on one particle immediately influences the other, even though they are light-years apart. Bennett and company worked out how to exploit this to send information. (The influence between the particles may be immediate, but the process does not violate relativity because some informatiom has to be sent classically at the speed of light.) They called the technique teleportation.

That's not really an overstatement of its potential. Since quantum particles are indistinguishable but for the information they carry, there is no need to transmit them themselves. A much simpler idea is to send the information they contain instead and ensure that there is a ready supply of particles at the other end to take on their identity. Since then, physicists have used these ideas to actually teleport photons, atoms, and ions. And it's not too hard to imagine that molecules and perhaps even viruses could be teleported in the not-too-distant future.

But Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University in Japan has come up with a much more exotic idea. Why not use the same quantum principles to teleport energy?

Today, building on a number of papers published in the last year, Hotta outlines his idea and its implications. The process of teleportation involves making a measurement on each one an entangled pair of particles. He points out that the measurement on the first particle injects quantum energy into the system. He then shows that by carefully choosing the measurement to do on the second particle, it is possible to extract the original energy.

All this is possible because there are always quantum fluctuations in the energy of any particle. The teleportation process allows you to inject quantum energy at one point in the universe and then exploit quantum energy fluctuations to extract it from another point. Of course, the energy of the system as whole is unchanged.

He gives the example of a string of entangled ions oscillating back and forth in an electric field trap, a bit like Newton's balls. Measuring the state of the first ion injects energy into the system in the form of a phonon, a quantum of oscillation. Hotta says that performing the right kind of measurement on the last ion extracts this energy. Since this can be done at the speed of light (in principle), the phonon doesn't travel across the intermediate ions so there is no heating of these ions. The energy has been transmitted without traveling across the intervening space. That's teleportation.

Just how we might exploit the ability to teleport energy isn't clear yet. Post your suggestions in the comments section if you have any.

But the really exciting stuff is the implications this has for the foundations of physics. Hotta says that his approach gives physicists a way of exploring the relationship between quantum information and quantum energy for the first time.

There is a growing sense that the properties of the universe are best described not by the laws that govern matter but by the laws that govern information. This appears to be true for the quantum world, is certainly true for special relativity, and is currently being explored for general relativity. Having a way to handle energy on the same footing may help to draw these diverse strands together.

Interesting stuff. There's no telling where this kind of thinking might lead.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1002.0200: Energy-Entanglement Relation for Quantum Energy Teleportation

via technologyreview.com

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10 Tips for Starting Entrepreneurs

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 12:15:46 -0800

I recently came across this presentation by Bart de Waele. I think he has some great tips for aspiring entrepreneurs. Take a look:

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Use your own payment processing for iPhone apps

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:31:00 -0800

Mogees seems like a really interesting service. It gives you an SDK that you can integrate in your iPhone/Blackberry/Android app so that users can buy your app from inside your app bypassing the appstore or android marketplace. Mogees then processes the payment and unlicks the app for the user.

I wonder if this breaks any of Apple's terms of service. I can't imagine they would permit this type of app once they were aware of it. Does anyone have any experince with it?

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Can you make a living off iPhone apps?

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:39:39 -0800

Andy Finnell writes that iPhone app developers must abandon the $0.99 price that many apps are selling for these days.

Andy calculates that a developer who wants to make a living off an iPhone app (at $40k/year) must sell 196 apps per day to do that. He also calculates that at $9.99 per app, you'd need to sell 16 apps per day to do that.

Now instead of analyzing how much money we (app developers) can make off these apps. Let's just go ahead and make some great apps and focus on the money later.

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