Ingot Tree

Fortune Small Business' business plans contest

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 09:39:00 +0000

Who's got the best idea for a startup? Students from university programs around the country face off in FSB's annual contest. Check the ideas out here.

Categories: business, idea, contest, fortune, small, business

Buy property from struggling companies, and then lease it back to them at a premium.

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 09:30:00 +0000

Business 2.0 Magazine --

"Jeff Hayden preys on smallish companies on the brink. Not because he's a vulture investor seeking to turn around a struggling business. He just wants its real estate. And he wants it cheap, so he can then rent it back to the company for a juicy profit.
His strategy is a new twist on what's known as a buy-to-leaseback - a deal that's long been used by big companies such as Walgreens that want to get real estate off their books and raise cash.Plenty of investors are glad to have healthy, household-name companies like Walgreens as tenants, so they purchase their properties and then lease them back.
But Hayden is striking deals with companies that big real estate investors ignore, and his approach could mark the emergence of a wide-open multibillion-dollar opportunity."

Read more at Be a landlord of last resort.

Categories: landlord, lease, premium, business, idea, buy-to-lease-back

Red Hat Shares - Worth a look?

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 03:08:00 +0000

Red Hat shares have plummeted to about 18.20 of late, hitting a 52 week low in the process. This in spite of the general upswing in tech stocks.

The drop has largely been attributed to rumours that Oracle may soon be throwing its own hat in the linux ring. For details read Oracle Rumors Surface Once More, Spooking Red Hat Shareholders, By Rick Smith, LocalTechWire. Excerpts:

"On May 8, Red Hat shares hit a 52-week high of $32.48. The surge in stock price came after Red Hat announced the acquisition of Atlanta-based JBoss, an open source software developer for servers. The move struck a positive chord at the time as Red Hat seemed to be broadening its product capabilities.

But the JBoss deal caused heartburn in a number of different quarters, apparently including in the executive suite at server giant Oracle. Ever since the JBoss deal, Oracle’s Larry Ellison has taken potshots at Red Hat, including in the pages of the prestigious Financial Times. Maybe Oracle, which has worked with Red Hat in the past, needed its own Linux version, Ellison said.

Red Hat chief Matthew Szulik responded in those same pages, writing that Red Hat really wasn’t challenging Oracle. And IBM, another Red Hat partner that relies heavily on server business, issued warm and fuzzy words about the JBoss deal.

But the Oracle-Linux rumors persist. Egbert’s report only exacerbated them,

"(O)ur independent checks in the past two weeks indicate that Oracle seems to be close to introducing its own software 'stack.’,” she wrote. Egbert proceeded to cut her target price on Red Hat to $21 from $24.

Not everyone concurs that Oracle will go the Linux route. But Ellison could choose to partner with another Linux developer, wrote Tim Beyers for The Motley Fool.

“My problem isn't with analyst Katherine Egbert's sources, or her conclusion that Oracle is talking with the makers of Ubuntu Linux about working more closely together. My problem is that she believes the collaboration could result in an Oracle-branded Linux appliance. Frankly, I think that's crazy,” Beyers said.

Not so, others say. On Slashdot.org, the website bible for all things Linux, a poster picked up on the Oracle theme on Tuesday:

"There have been rumors floating around of Oracle working on their own distribution of Linux. If this is true, it is widely believed that this enterprise edition of Linux would be in direct competition with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. What is spurring the rumors? Well, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said, 'I'd like to have a complete stack. We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux.' I know that Oracle has been doing a lot more than databases recently, will they go the extra mile and create their own stripped down Linux kernel? If they do, will companies switch to database solutions that are running Oracle only software for the benefits of support and (hopefully) stability?"

Meanwhile, some people continue to doubt the wisdom of the JBoss buy.

Peter Goldmacher, writing in the Wall Street Transcript’s “Enterprise Application Software” issue, blasted Red Hat.

“Open source is very interesting, because the poster child for open source has been Red Hat (RHAT), and it seems like Red Hat is losing their grip on their market because they have branched out into incremental functionality that they only needed some of their larger partners for. So if their larger partners feel like they want to get back into the business that they had previously allowed Red Hat to do for them, I think Red Hat could be in trouble.”

The Oracle rumors and recent sell-off have ruined a rebound for Red Hat. Shares dropped a whopping $6.11 on Sept. 27 after a third quarter earnings report that was regarded in many quarters as “weak”. The news sent RHAT to $20.12 as 62.7 million shares - 10 times the daily trade average – changed hands."

If the Oracle rumours are, simply, rumours, this lowpoint in Red Hat prices may be worth exploiting.

Categories: red, hat, oracle, stocks, shares, tech

How to be great

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 02:23:00 +0000

2 related articles by Fortune Magazine are worth a read, reminding us that talent isn't the formula for greatness, hard work is.

1. What it takes to be great

2. How one CEO learned to fly

del.icio.us tags: greatness, practice, hardwork, talent, success

Sun Microsystem's New Black Box

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 03:42:00 +0000

In an attempt to bounce back into the tech limelight, Sun Microsystems has come up with something that may actually work.

Computing Data Centres in a box that can fit into a parking lot. Saving corporations time spent building their IT systems and, more importantly, saving rent on prime real estate, these black boxes are a simple yet innovative way to use existing contraptions to solve a problem worth solving.

For more on these black boxes, check out these articles in the New York Times and Physorg.com.

Categories: sun, microsystem, data, centre, problem, solution, business, idea, innovation, IT, tech, space, rent, real, estate

Money on the Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 11:24:00 +0000

This guy has loads well, 40 over, ways to make money on the net. I've yet to look through all of 'em but the blog is worth looking at.

Categories: money, internet, ideas, blog

Technology that help startups compete with the big boys

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 07:18:00 +0000

"Once upon a time it was easy to tell the difference between a small business and a large competitor: Big firms had access to more capital, diverse markets, better technology, and economies of scale; small companies had to make do with whatever they could afford. But as technology has advanced, that distinction has blurred. Just as mainframe computers gave way to cheap PCs on every desk, Yellow Pages ads are being replaced by low-cost websites, and regional sales forces by search terms purchased from Google and Yahoo. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen cites overnight shipping as another of history's great leveler, giving smaller manufacturers the ability to send parts across the globe in less than a day and robbing big firms of a competitive advantage.

The past couple of years have ushered in a new wave of tools for entrepreneurs who want to play big, as software and service providers have begun to adapt their offerings-previously available only to large firms-for small businesses. "The attitude used to be, 'We're going to take this product we have for enterprise, strip out a lot of functionality, and small business is going to have to use it,'" says Chris Hazelton, senior analyst at IDC, an IT market-research firm based in Framingham, Mass. "Now companies are either building products specifically for small business or making the products modular so they're lower-priced and scalable."
The result: startup multinationals. Small firms with bigtime online security. Low-profile companies using high-powered software to perfect their websites. No-name startups with big-name shipping partners. Over the next several pages you'll meet entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of new technologies and strategies and learning a powerful lesson: It's never been easier to play big."
- From this interesting article on some interesting examples of big corporation efficiencies now available to startups.

Categories: startup, entrepreneur, software, tool, big, multinational, corporation, compete, logistics, VPN, startup, website, efficiency

7 steps to a healthy medical startup

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 04:40:00 +0000

This one should interest HL.

By Jeanette Borzo, Business 2.0 Magazine

October 11 2006: 2:26 PM EDT

Categories: healthy, medical, startup, doctor, HL

How not to make money from a great invention

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 07:16:00 +0000

- Not knowing what problem your invention solves
- Poor intellectual property rights protection
- Poor licensing agreements
- Poor marketing

For more tips, check out this poor genius' story at Fortune Small Business.

Categories: intellectual, property, rights, licensing, agreements, marketing, genius, invention, fortune, small, business

DVDs by demand

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 02:42:00 +0000

For the first time, consumers will be able to download and burn movies onto DVDs legally - that is, with the copyright protection technology that the movie studios demand.

Despite the advent of movie downloads, DVDs are still highly sought after. They pack more information than the typical downloaded movie. Their quality is far superior than streaming movies wirelessly - which are going to look horrible on a regular Wi-Fi connection.

You can lend DVDs to friends and family. They're easy to mail. And you get instant access to all of their features and every scene in a movie, instead of having to wait for the download to end.

This week, software developers Sonic Solutions and Macrovision Corporation made a deal that could save retailers a lot of rent money. Sonic makes software that helps consumers burn discs, while Macrovision sells copyright protection services to the entertainment industry.

Because suddenly it becomes possible for stores - both online and off - to burn DVDs on demand.

A video store offering hundreds of thousands of movies, instead of, say, the thousand that currently fight for space on store shelves. Amazon will be a big winner because it will be able to burn discs as customers order them, thereby reducing inventory costs and boosting margins.

This post was adapted from DVDs: They will survive.

Categories: DVD, copyright, movie, inventory, costs, margins

Lord of the batteries

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 04:17:00 +0000

A friend of mine has started selling a battery pack that may be used with almost all portable electronic devices, from laptops to mobile phones. One power source to rule them all.

You can select the appropriate voltage to suit the device, and use the the appropriate adapter to connect the battery to the device.

This would save business travellers from carrying numerous duplicitous chargers for their phones, laptops etc.

Brilliant example of someone finding a good problem to solve.

It's going for around S$235, in case anyone's interested.

The Specs, according to the website are:

myPower ALL Tech Specs

• Weighs just 11.8 oz (MP3300) and 15.9 oz (MP3400)

• Size is 3.28” (W) x 6.80” (L) x .92” (D)

• Output current: 4A max

• Rechargeable lithium polymer battery

• 4 hour charging time

• Supports multiple voltages

• Output power 40 Wh (MP3300) / 56Wh (MP3400)

• Includes 8 adapter tips that connect to most devices

• Comes with leather carrying case with belt strap

• Full one year warranty

The sales pitch I received by email is as follows:

Unique Selling Point of the MP3400 in Singapore :

Come next year, the government’s iN2015 plan will include a nationwide wireless internet implementation. By then, we can get connected wirelessly in a lot more places and not only limited to hotspots. More people will be working on their laptops outdoors but the only problem they will always face would be : Power ! There is no power outlets in the outdoors readily available to let you power up your laptop or PDA when your laptop/PDA battery runs out. Your only option now is only to buy a spare laptop battery proprietory to your current laptop brand/model, when you change your laptop, this extra battery will be deemed useless as most likely than not, it is not compatible to your new notebook, even if it is of the same brand.

BUT NOW, you have a choice !!

1) myPowerall MP3400 Universal Rechargeble Battery aims to solve the problem of providing additional battery power, by extending your outdoor laptop power usage by another 3-4hrs. In total, a typical user whose laptop battery lasts 2 hrs can basically get 5-6 hrs of total usable power in the outdoors instead of the usual 2hrs from his current laptop.

2) The MP3400 is not limited to your current laptop model or brand, if you are using a Toshiba now and changing to Compaq later, this battery can still be use, the Universal MP3400 is compatible to over 80% of all the portable electronics (including laptops) in the market.

3) The cost is near or equivalent to most laptop batteries in the market. If you are considering to buy another laptop battery, why not consider this new option that gives you not only more power but also more value.

4) It charges PDAs, MP3, portable DVD/VCD players, mobile phones and digital cameras etc.

5) It is also much safer than the conventional Lithium Ion battery (as in the laptop battery recall incidents recently).

Categories: battery, pack, electronic, devices, adapter, problems, solution, business, ideas

Neville's Financial Blog: Business Ideas - Make Money with No Money

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 10:01:00 +0000

I've been rather impressed with the ideas this dude has collected and recorded since 2005. His post containing business ideas for the broke is pretty neat. Check it out.

Categories: business, idea, money, broke, blog

Everything tastes like chicken

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 06:56:00 +0000

WARNING: THIS IS ONE OF THOSE APPETITE DESTROYING POSTS.

Recently I received a forwarded email that alleged that somewhere in China eateries are cheating customers by serving deep friend rats as chicken. The email even serves up the steps in the culinery process. Unbelieveable? Check these pictures out. Personally I don't think the finished dish looks like chicken so it's also likely that the eatery sells it AS Fried Rats...

BURNING THE HAIR OFF THEM

WASHING THEM BEFORE COOKING

CUTTING THEM UP INTO PIECES THAT SIMULATE CHICKEN PARTS

PREPARED FOR DEEP FRYING

WELL SEASONED TO TASTE GREAT!!!!

ALL DONE AND READY TO EAT!!!

CLOSER LOOK

THE OTHER "WHITE MEAT"

Categories: rat, chicken, taste, con, china, restaurant, appetite

How Youtube began

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 06:43:00 +0000

The Youtube story is another classic fairy tale. Recently acquired by Google, Youtube's simple beginning must be a lesson to learn. Solve a problem, one small step at a time. Here's the Straits Times' account:

ALL Mr Chad Hurley and Mr Steve Chen wanted to do was share some videos from a dinner party with a half a dozen friends in San Francisco.
It was January last year, and they could not figure out how to do it. They tried sending the clips by e-mail but they kept getting rejected because the files were too big. Posting the videos online was a headache, too.
So last February, the two buddies got to work in Mr Hurley's garage, determined to design something simpler.
What they came up with was a website called YouTube - and the rest is Internet history.
BusinessWeek, in its April 10 issue this year, told this story of YouTube's young founders - Mr Hurley is 29 years old and Mr Chen, 28.
They met at an online payment service PayPal where they were among the first 20 hires during the second half of 1999. They became good friends and part of a tight-knit PayPal clique that remains close till today, said the magazine.
In fact, their venture money came in part through their connection to Mr Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital, a top venture capital firm and early backer of Google. Mr Botha had been PayPal's chief financial officer.
Mr Hurley, YouTube's chief executive, also had an entrepreneurial streak from the start. He grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and tried to sell paintings from his front yard at the age of five, said the magazine. He studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and landed at PayPal after reading about it in Wired magazine and asking about a job via e-mail.
During his interview he designed a new logo for PayPal, one that the company still uses today. He left after PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002, working with a few companies as a design consultant.
Mr Chen, YouTube's chief technology officer, has been a maths and science geek since high school, said BusinessWeek.
He threw himself into programming and computers at Illinois Mathematics & Science Academy and went on to study computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
During his last semester, he was recruited by Mr Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and a former classmate. Mr Chen remained at PayPal until early last year to help finish launching the company's expansion into China.
By the time of the fateful dinner party last January, the two men were both between jobs and carrying substantial credit card debt.
They founded YouTube in February as a classic Silicon Valley garage start-up with another friend, Mr Jawed Karim. Mr Karim left the company just before it got its first round of funding in November last year to go back to full-time study at Stanford University.
Mr Chen, the programming expert, used Adobe's flash development language to let users stream video clips on their browsers. Mr Hurley, the user interface expert, designed ways to let users easily share the videos they liked and put descriptive remarks or 'tags' on their favourite clips.
They let users paste YouTube clips right on their own Web pages - a trick that led to the exploding popularity of YouTube, especially on another popular website, MySpace.
In an interview yesterday, Mr Hurley told Reuters that he and Mr Chen gave in to Google, after rebuffing other offers, because of its resources and assurances of independence.
They get to keep on running the company and YouTube retains its name and its own corporate offices. The Google stock they will get in a deal worth more than US$1 billion (S$1.6 billion) must have been hard to resist, too.

Categories: youtube, beginning, google, choosing, problem, startup, entrepreneur, chad, hurley, steve, chen, video, sharing, solution, paypal

Choosing the problem

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 04:47:00 +0000

I chanced upon an (almost) interesting paper on the result of an experiment, to test the business ideas of undergrads, sort of.

One of the issues raised is that smart people are trained to solve problems but not spot the right problem s to solve ("right" being defined as a start up idea).

The article is rather long but here's the beginning and the end:

This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of new startups. It's an experiment because we're prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. That's why we're doing it during the summer-- so even college students can participate.

We know from Google and Yahoo that grad students can start successful startups. And we know from experience that some undergrads are as capable as most grad students. The accepted age for startup founders has been creeping downward. We're trying to find the lower bound.

The deadline has now passed, and we're sifting through 227 applications. We expected to divide them into two categories, promising and unpromising. But we soon saw we needed a third: promising people with unpromising ideas.

...

The good news is, choosing problems is something that can be learned. I know that from experience. Hackers can learn to make things customers want. [6]

This is a controversial view. One expert on "entrepreneurship" told me that any startup had to include business people, because only they could focus on what customers wanted. I'll probably alienate this guy forever by quoting him, but I have to risk it, because his email was such a perfect example of this view:
80% of MIT spinoffs succeed provided they have at least one management person in the team at the start. The business person represents the "voice of the customer" and that's what keeps the engineers and product development on track.
This is, in my opinion, a crock. Hackers are perfectly capable of hearing the voice of the customer without a business person to amplify the signal for them. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them "engineers." Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted? It seems to me the business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who obligingly flew Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started.

The hard part about figuring out what customers want is figuring out that you need to figure it out. But that's something you can learn quickly. It's like seeing the other interpretation of an ambiguous picture. As soon as someone tells you there's a rabbit as well as a duck, it's hard not to see it.

And compared to the sort of problems hackers are used to solving, giving customers what they want is easy. Anyone who can write an optimizing compiler can design a UI that doesn't confuse users, once they choose to focus on that problem. And once you apply that kind of brain power to petty but profitable questions, you can create wealth very rapidly.

That's the essence of a startup: having brilliant people do work that's beneath them. Big companies try to hire the right person for the job. Startups win because they don't-- because they take people so smart that they would in a big company be doing "research," and set them to work instead on problems of the most immediate and mundane sort. Think Einstein designing refrigerators. [7]

If you want to learn what people want, read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. [8] When a friend recommended this book, I couldn't believe he was serious. But he insisted it was good, so I read it, and he was right. It deals with the most difficult problem in human experience: how to see things from other people's point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself.

Most smart people don't do that very well. But adding this ability to raw brainpower is like adding tin to copper. The result is bronze, which is so much harder that it seems a different metal.

A hacker who has learned what to make, and not just how to make, is extraordinarily powerful. And not just at making money: look what a small group of volunteers has achieved with Firefox.

Doing an Artix teaches you to make something people want in the same way that not drinking anything would teach you how much you depend on water. But it would be more convenient for all involved if the Summer Founders didn't learn this on our dime-- if they could skip the Artix phase and go right on to make something customers wanted. That, I think, is going to be the real experiment this summer. How long will it take them to grasp this?

We decided we ought to have T-Shirts for the SFP, and we'd been thinking about what to print on the back. Till now we'd been planning to use
If you can read this, I should be working.
but now we've decided it's going to be
Make something people want.

Categories: choosing, problem, smart, people, train, experiment, paper, business, idea, management, customers, startup, entrepreneur

Apple Bytes

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 04:11:00 +0000

Just when my Apple shares were back in the black, Apple decides to get caught up in an options backdating scandal. The Financial Times:

"Shareholders in Apple Computer on Thursday took a wait-and-see approach in the first day of trading after the company said an internal investigation had cleared Steve Jobs, co-founder and chief executive, of any wrongdoing in options backdating at the computer maker.
Shares in the company fell 0.7 per cent on Thursday to $74.83, a day after Apple said a group of independent directors found Mr Jobs was aware of "a few instances" of improper options backdating between 1997 and 2002. The company's investigation had concluded that Mr Jobs was unaware of the accounting implications of backdating and had not benefited personally from it.
The independent directors behind the investigation are understood to include Al Gore, the former US vice-president, and Jerry York, former chief financial officer of IBM and Chrysler. Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, joined the probe after he became a member of the Apple board in August, according to a person familiar with the matter. Apple declined to comment.
Analysts on Thursday expressed cautious optimism that Mr Jobs might emerge unscathed by backdating, a practice in which the grant dates of stock options are manipulated to coincide with low points in the value of a company's shares."

Steve Jobs nicely acknowledges that he was aware of these naughty deeds but claims to be unware of the "accounting implications". Sounds like a set up for the defence of bona fides which is rather lame if you ask me... or anybody else. See Can Ignorance Put Apple's Jobs in Clear? By MAY WONG and Apple: Rotten at the Core by the Motley Fool.

Think I shall dump my shares. Fast.

Categories: apple, shares, options, backdating, scandal, steve, jobs, accounting, implications, legal, defence

12 ideas from Business 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 02:23:00 +0000

Check out Business 2.0 Magazine's list of 12 startup ideas.

Some of 'em are pretty interesting.

1. Build cheap Wi-Fi networks for Brazilian resorts.

2. Become a biodiesel producer in Argentina.

3. Create an ad network for India's mobile content developers.

4. Launch an exclusive social network for Russian millionaires.

5. Open an American-style restaurant in one of China's fast-growing cities.

6. Remodel homes for China's burgeoning middle class.

7 Flip mining claims in Bolivia.

8. Export the planet's next great wines - from Greece.

9. Import fine wines to upscale restaurants - in India.

10. Export gourmet coffee from Rwanda.

11. Become a social entrepreneur in South Africa.

12. Be among the first to invest in the new Libya.

Categories: cheap, Wi-Fi, networks, Brazilian, resort, biodiesel, producer, Argentina, mobile, content, developers, Russian, millionaires, restaurant, China, India, Flip, mining, claims, Bolivia, wine, Greece, upscale, gourmet, coffee, Rwanda, social, entrepreneur, South, Africa, Libya

Forum Forrays

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 04:04:00 +0000

There has been quite some hype about bloggers making loads of money from advertisements. See Blogging for big bucks. The formula is simple. Write enough interesting stuff, people will read your blog. Enough people read your blog, advertisers will pay you for some advertising space.

But (good) blogging is hard work. Fail to accomplish Step One and there's no gold at the end of the rainbow. Enter the forum. What's more clever (and interesting) is having a website which content feeds itself or is fed by its readers. The money-making formula for online forums is similar to blogs' save for Step One. Instead of writing interesting stuff, you choose an interesting topic that begs discussion and market your website as THE place to have these discussions. Once established, the readers provide the content, the traffic snowballs and advertisement money floods in.

Two examples that come to mind are www.sgcarmart.com and www.singaporebrides.com. Both have established themselves as virtually THE place to go to check out the latest information.

SG Carmarts is now synonymous with online used car classifieds in Singapore. SingaporeBrides is where frenzied brides-to-be go to discuss where better to splurge on (some would say unnecessary) frills for that Big day. The beauty is that the public provide the content while the site owners rake in the dough.

Another key example is www.hardwarezone.com. I think just about anyone in Singapore (and possibly Asia) wanting to build his own pc or check up the latest prices and reviews of techno gizmos goes there to read fellow consumers' reviews on the product discussion forum. I just read today that its owner Hardware Zone Pte Ltd has been bought over by Singapore Press Holdings for a whopping S$7.1m.

How do I install a forum feature on this blog?

Categories: internet, forum, blog, money, advertisement, content, provider, member, sg, carmart, singaporebrides, hardwarezone

Vending Machines

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 09:28:00 +0000

Check out this guy's idea for a Drycleaning ATM, which some of his readers claim is already available in Japan.

I tried to find pictures of these dry cleaning ATMs on the net but failed. Maybe it's not actually been done yet.

The vending machine industry in Japan is so innovative and huge that they have a "Japan Vending Machine Manufacturers Association" (JVMA). See some vending machine pics here.

Here's a thought. Why don't we start the rage in Singapore? Buy a couple of the weirdest vending machines from Japan and plonk them around town...

Categories: Drycleaning, ATM, vending, machines, japan, jvma

Latest IPO - Energy Stocks

noreply@blogger.com (zen42) — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 09:10:00 +0000

Got this off Dow Jones Newswire:

SINGAPORE (Dow Jones)--Chemoil Energy Ltd., a U.S. marine fuel supplier, expects to raise up to US$374 million from an initial public offering in Singapore, according to a prospectus filed Tuesday.

The company is offering about 439.5 million shares at a maximum price of US$0.85 each, according to the prospectus posted on the Monetary Authority of Singapore''s Web site.
The offer comprises 366,240,000 new shares and 73,248,000 existing shares.

So... Anyone interested? I think this will be a good one - if you can afford it. Will post something on the energy sector if I can find the article online.

Categories: Chemoil, Energy, marine, fuel, supplier, offering, ipo

Not enough money? Start an Investment Club!

noreply@blogger.com (zen42) — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 09:05:00 +0000

Was at the National Library yesterday when I stumbled across the Idiot's Guide to Investment Clubs. That got me wondering - what the hell is an investment club anyway??

Here's a Fool.com description of Investment Clubs:

Investment clubs have been around for decades, and tens of thousands exist in America today. They've been growing in popularity in recent years, partly due to the best-selling books by the Beardstown Ladies.

Members of investment clubs, often groups of friends or co-workers, typically meet once a month to discuss companies and make decisions about which stocks to buy and sell. At meetings they each contribute a small sum of money that is deposited in a joint account. Members take turns researching and reporting on promising companies in which they might invest or companies in which the club is already invested.

The National Association of Investors Corp. (NAIC), established in 1951, has set forth guidelines for running successful investment clubs. It urges members to:
Invest money regularly, regardless of market conditions

Reinvest all dividends and capital gains
Buy stock in companies that are growing faster than most of their peers
Diversify investments, not putting all the communal eggs into one basket

These guidelines are fully Foolish and quite sensible. (Of course, hang around Fooldom online and you'll glean much more guidance. We run a bunch of real-money portfolios, modeling a variety of investing strategies for you.)

Successful investment clubs focus on learning as well as doing. There's often an education officer elected and guest speakers invited. Club members seek to explore new ideas and discuss investing issues. One month a member might present her findings on the value of screening for low P/E stocks. Another month, a member might report on a book he read about a great investor like Warren Buffett or Ben Graham. In the early sessions of a club's life, education components might be very introductory, covering how to read a balance sheet or an earnings report. A year or two later, the club might be learning new ways to value stocks or discussing an interview published with a successful equities analyst.

Investment clubs today hold a total of more than $175 billion worth of equities in their portfolios -- rivaling the largest mutual funds. Each month investment clubs add more than $50 million. This is big business -- and exceedingly Foolish, too.

Categories: investment, club, capital, gains, members, money, mutual, funds

The Penis Restaurant

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 03:49:00 +0000

If you are a dude and you are planning to have breakfast, lunch or dinner in the next half hour, come back and read this post after your meal. Make that half an hour after your meal.

Someone is lopping off the totem poles of dogs, donkeys and tigers and making a fortune by serving them as gourmet delicacies.

"We are in a cosy restaurant in a dark street in Beijing but my appetite seems to have gone for a stroll outside.
Nancy has brought out a whole selection of delicacies.
They are draped awkwardly across a huge platter, with a crocodile carved out of a carrot as the centrepiece.
Nestling beside the dog's penis are its clammy testicles, and beside that a giant salami-shaped object.
"Donkey," says Nancy. "Good for the skin..."
She guides me round the penis platter."

Given that "Organ Soup" (broth containing goats' penises) hit Singapore hawker centres years back, I guess I shouldn't be making a big deal out of this. But Organ Soup never sat well with me either.

It must be that at some primal level I find something objectionable about chewing on some other creature's manhood / beasthood. Afterall, I have no bone to pick with eating a chicken's rear leg...

Anyway, read more here if you have the stomach for it.

Some quotable quotes:

"It is cold and bland and rubbery."

"Not long ago, a particularly rich real estate mogul came in with four friends. All men. Women don't come here so often, and they shouldn't eat testicles,"

"What better way to secure a contract than over a steaming penis fondue."

Categories: Penis, Restaurant, dogs, donkeys, tigers, fortune, gourmet, delicacies, beijing, appetite, tesicles, organ, soup

Own a Sports Team

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 03:39:00 +0000

If you thought only the Abramovichs or the Glazers among us could own sports teams, check this out. Suddenly the dream doesn't look so impossible.

A league of your own

It's every fan's fantasy: Your office is a baseball diamond and the perks include hot dogs. One CEO shows how to make it big in the minors.

Excerpts:

"I was always a sports nut," says Stickney, who played hooky from school to watch the Indians win the 1948 World Series. "I never realized that the business side of it was just as interesting."
He made his first foray into the minors in 1986. He had just sold his medical specialty company and joined a group of investors led by actor Mark Harmon, paying $90,000 for a 30% stake in a team that became the San Bernadino Spirit.
Four years later the Spirit had become a farm team for Seattle and saw its first star, Ken Griffey Jr., pass through on his way to the Show.
But it was still bleeding money. Stickney had his own ideas about how to turn a profit, so in 1990 he spent roughly $500,000 to raise his stake to 60% and named himself GM.
First he ditched San Bernandino (the Spirit played on an ex-Little League field) and struck a deal with the city of Rancho Cucamonga, which was building an $11.5 million ballpark, one of the first in a wave of major league-grade, single-A stadiums.
He also had a revelation. "It's very simple: You can't depend on the baseball to sell your tickets," he says. He nixed ticket giveaways and instead began to draw fans with carnival rides, half-inning skits, promotions, and fireworks. Tremor the mascot was hatched out of an egg at the first game.
Stickney's timing was perfect. The 1994 strike drove disgruntled fans to the farm teams, pushing minor league attendance from 33 million in 1994 to 41 million in 2005. With an average of 3,950 fans per game last year, the Quakes have topped California League attendance every season for the past decade.
Meanwhile, Stickney teamed up with his son Ken and several other investors to found Mandalay Sports, which bought five other minor league franchises across the country. The teams - notably the Dayton Dragons and Texas's Frisco RoughRiders - have thrived following the lessons Stickney learned at the Epicenter.
One caveat for aspiring owners: In the minors, all on-field talent are provided and managed by the major league parent club, a lack of control that can be tough (the Quakes are now affiliated with the Angels). On the upside, the majors pick up salaries, workers' comp, and health insurance bills.
Minor league baseball teams are "great properties to have," says sports investment banker John Moag of Moag & Co. "They're almost like utilities: Most provide an annual dividend, they're established, they're fairly conservative, and they appraise well in value."
Last year, Stickney says, 40% of the Quakes' $3 million in revenue came from ticket sales, 40% from advertising, and 20% from sales at the park. Profit margins hover between 5% and 10%, and the team Stickney and his partners bought 20 years ago for $250,000 would sell for upwards of $7 million today.
"If you're looking for a quick buck, this isn't it," laughs Stickney. But, as Yankee slugger Phil Linz once said of baseball, it sure beats working for a living.

Categories: Abramovich, Glazer, baseball, sports, team, own, world, series, franchise, Yankee, slugger, Phil, Linz

Last Laughs

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 03:09:00 +0000

I was just saying to Zen42 yesterday how being the first to provide new products / services doesn't mean much, Google being the prime example of a latercomer who overtook the incumbent (Yahoo!).

Today I read that Google isn't all that prime. See Google gets a new ad-versary by Erick Schonfeld and Jeanette Borzo, Business 2.0:

... It's not often that you find a startup CEO openly mocking Google (Charts). But Gurbaksh Chahal, founder of BlueLithium, thinks Google is a one-trick pony when it comes to Web ads. "They've miserably failed in the last year with display ads," he notes, "because they look at the world through text advertising." It's big talk -- and you'd be tempted to dismiss Chahal entirely were it not for his claim that BlueLithium has been profitable since its third month of operation and is on track to hit $100 million in revenue by the end of next year...

Categories: google, yahoo, latecomer, incumbent, startup, BlueLithium, overtake, first, newcomer

Sounds Right

noreply@blogger.com (Ingot Tree) — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 17:09:00 +0000

And I thought Bose only made good vibrations.

Amar Bose: Bose
From the Sep. 2004 Issue of FSB
By Brian Dumaine

Bose is known for high-end audio equipment and dedication to research. Founder Amar Bose, who still owns most of the $1.7 billion company, reinvests all its earnings into R&D. That approach has created cultlike fans and innovative products—its wildly successful Wave radio took 14 years to create. Now Bose has a new product that could shake up the car industry. (Hint: It's not stereo equipment.)

When I was 12 years old, in 1943, I bought a radio kit, and in building it I learned how to read schematic diagrams and repair radios. My father, an immigrant from India who used to sell imported mats and rugs, would go around to the hardware stores where he used to sell them and talk them into letting me repair the radios that their customers would bring in. It was a good business—no one was making new radios because of the war effort, and many of the radio repairmen had been drafted. As the business grew, I was working nights and all day Saturday and Sunday. I even hired a couple of employees.

In 1956, when I was at MIT finishing my doctorate, I bought my first hi-fi system based on the best specifications. I brought it home and played some violin records, and I couldn't believe it. The sound wasn't right (I had played violin growing up), but it should have been right based on everything I had been taught about engineering. So either the manufacturer was cheating on the specs, or the specs were not meaningful. It turned out it was both, by the way. So I started working in the MIT acoustics lab to find a solution.

My first product didn't come out until 1965. It was a speaker in the shape of an eighth of a sphere, which fit in a corner and reflected sound all around the room instead of in a direct beam as with conventional speakers. I was a professor and didn't know anything about business. I projected we'd sell $1 million worth of speakers our first year. We ended up making 60 units and sold 40. That sphere-shaped speaker eventually evolved into our 901 system, which we launched in 1968 and which was the product that really built the company. It was much different from anything that existed—I was able to patent it—but it was a hard sell at first. The 901 had no woofers and no tweeters, which every speaker was supposed to have. It was very small compared with the steamer trunk-sized things that were on the market at the time. When you hear live music, very little of it comes to you directly; most of it bounces off walls and ceilings first. A traditional speaker just blasts the sound directly at you. Like a live performance, the 901 blended both direct and reflected sound.

When we first launched the 901, it was a total disaster. None of the retailers had any idea how to demonstrate the product. One dealer in Santa Barbara loved the sound and put the 901 out in the middle of his showroom floor. One time, however, I was out visiting him and couldn't find the Bose speaker, so I asked him about it. He pointed up to a high shelf, and there it was in a corner, practically out of sight and not even connected. He said, "Look, I love your speaker but I cannot sell it because it makes me lose all my credibility as a salesman. I can't explain to anyone why the 901 doesn't have any woofers or tweeters. A man came in and saw the small size, and he started looking in the drawers for the speaker cabinets. I walked over to him, and he said, 'Where are you hiding the woofer?' I said to him, 'There is no woofer'. So he said, 'You're a goddamn liar,' and he walked out."

When I got back to Bose, I created a seven-minute audio demonstration to help dealers explain to customers how the 901 worked, and that really helped spur sales. [Editor's note: Bose doesn't release any figures, but the NPD Group, a market information firm in Port Washington, N.Y., says that Bose today is No. 1 in home speakers, with a 12.6% market share; its 901 speakers are still sold.]

The biggest crisis I ever faced at Bose hit in the early 1980s, when interest rates rose to 22% or so. Technology companies everywhere were going down, and banks were panicked, putting all sorts of restrictions on their loans. We were in the thick of developing our new car audio system for GM. The situation was pretty scary because it could have forced us to go public to raise capital, something I vowed I would never do. Going public for me would have been the equivalent of losing the company. My real interest is research—that's the excitement—and I wouldn't have been able to do long-term projects with Wall Street breathing down my neck.

How did we hang on? I told GM how our bank—it had given us a $14 million loan—was trying to constrain us. A couple of weeks later I got a call from Ed Czapor, who was head of GM's Delco Electronics. He asked me to fly out to Detroit. When I met him, all he said was, "I'd like to introduce you to our CFO." He walked me up to the 14th floor of the GM headquarters, introduced me to the CFO, and walked out. The finance fellow had heard our new audio system and loved it. He said, "I understand you have a financial problem." I told him about how our bank wanted to make us cut costs that would force us to wind down our R&D spending. The next day the CFO called up a bank he dealt with in Boston and told it to assume the loan from our bank with no constraints—just like that. That's what saved us. People just would not believe that a company as large as GM would do such a thing.

Around the same time, GM delivered $700,000 worth of production equipment to our factory in Massachusetts. I called Ed and said, "Seven hundred thousand dollars of equipment just arrived at our factory, and I didn't order it and I can't pay for it." Ed said, "Look, everyone comes to us with a widget in his hand and says, 'Here's my widget, and here's how much money I want.' You've been working with us for almost a year now, and you've never asked for a cent. You've gone your mile a long time ago; it's time we go our mile." Can you imagine this? Without GM's help, we might not be here at all.

Our latest product is a new car suspension system, which has been in development for nearly a quarter of a century. I first got interested in suspensions as a young man. In Paris in the 1950s I saw a sleek Citroen DS-19 C and immediately thought, "Oh, my God, I've got to buy one." Which I did when I returned to the States. The Citroen had a novel hydropneumatic suspension system that made you feel you were floating along the highway. Over the years I remained intrigued by it. In fact, I used to give my MIT students quizzes on it. In 1980 I started looking into the subject and realized that conventional suspensions, made with springs and shocks, acted differently for luxury and sports cars. Make the damper and springs stiffer, and you've got a sports car. Make them softer, and you've got a luxury car. But the slow roll of a luxury car can make you seasick, and the stiff ride of the sports car makes you want a chiropractor.

At this time people were looking to hydraulics for solutions, but they weren't getting anywhere. So we decided to start from scratch and throw out the old system entirely. After five years of working out some complex mathematical algorithms, we found we could get huge improvements on paper, but we didn't know what the hardware would be. What we ended up with is an electromagnetic motor installed at each wheel. When power is applied, the motor retracts and extends. One of the key advantages of an electromagnetic system is speed. The motor responds to conditions in the road quickly enough to counter the effects of bumps and potholes, maintaining a comfortable ride. The motor is also strong enough to put out enough force to prevent the car from rolling and pitching during an aggressive maneuver.

We've worked on this system and tested it for 24 years now, and are finally ready to show it to the auto companies. It will probably take several years before they adopt it; they'll want to do some of their own testing, but we've designed it so that it can bolt right onto the chassis of current production cars—they won't have to do expensive retooling to make this technology work. We'll probably first see it as an option in luxury cars—we don't know exactly how much it will cost, but as the suspension gets more widely adopted, the price will come down, and we'll probably see it in all but the most inexpensive cars, which is how ABS brakes developed. Oh, and the potential size of the market? We really have no idea. We just know that we have a technology that's so different and so much better that many people will want it.

Categories: amar, bose, beginning, startup, business, story, audio, equipment, engineering, research, design, immigrant, speaker, repair, crisis, capital, gm, hydropneumatic, suspension, system, technology