Eating Technology

NYCBigApps & Travel

2011-04-18T23:08:00.000-04:00

Pretty cool, 2nd year running NYC has hosted NYC BigApps - a contest for developers to write applications on the new data provided by nyc datamine.

One of the winners this year (recently announced) was NYCPlanIt (and rather poor video here). The app is very simple (you wont find yourself using it), but nevertheless an interesting approach likely to encourage future development. I think what's important is it's use of totally free and updated data sets... which is a game changer.

Data sets used:

Art facilities

Historical signs

Museums

Historic houses

Events

Zoo

Ice skating

Nature centers

Playgrounds

(Side note, if you have never checked out data.gov its an interested initiative from the fed govt to open up data.)

Online to Store: Online Advertising Drives Offline Sales

2011-04-09T09:08:00.000-04:00

Have you tried an Internet-Enabled TV yet?

2010-12-27T15:19:00.002-05:00

@Samsungtweets

It's a totally new experience.

My parents just bought one from Samsung. Immediately I felt it was much like a smart phone experience, (ie: using an Android or iPhone), yet in the comfort of laying on my couch and interacting with a 55 inch screen. Thus, I think it creates a great user experience - this market is really going to take off.

Samsung has created their own app store (accessible through the TV and web), with all of the major apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, Picasa, YouTube, and Google Maps. There were entertainment apps from Blockbuster and Netflix, and news apps from Accuweather and USA Today. Their app store on the web is here.

The Facebook app was the worst of the apps, nothing loaded correctly or fast. I thought the Picasa app was the best by far allowing you to easily see your picture albums on the big screen.

Implications?

It's an entirely new medium which we'll all be interacting with. I don't think I was ever skeptical about Internet-Enabled TV in the past, I had just never used it before on my own couch. It adds a whole new element to being a couch potato and I like it.

Yet there were exercise apps too, for when you need to burn some energy.

A pic of the TV:

A Look at New York State's CIO Initiatives

2010-12-24T12:18:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine sent me a link to the New York State Senate's CIO page - http://www.nysenate.gov/department/cio.

To be honest, this was really the first time I've checked out the State's technology and information office. From what I've seen I must applaud their efforts at transforming government to allow information to be more open, accessible, and interactive. Though as a Albany outsider - it seemed most of the initiatives were too much of a "technology solution" and not enough of a "people solution". They have new communication platforms, accounts on social networks, etc, but there can be much better user engagement.

On the Senate's page there were two things that stood out and that I didn't know existed:

Open Legistlature - A NYS site that publishes all bills, meetings, transcripts, etc for the public to view and comment on. This is amazing for obvious reasons - but the public doesn't know about this - we have to do a better job getting this out there.
BillBuzz - allows you to receive updates on legislation when the public posts comments on Open Legislature.

There is also a link to a video from "Capital Camp" a NYS summit on technology and information hosted in August 2010. The video is 3 hours long, a little too long, I skimmed parts of it out of curiosity.

1:00:00 (an hour into the video) - finally is an overview of what the State CIO office is doing. It's a good for about 10 minutes.
Do you know who the New York State CIO is? She is Dr. Melodie Mayberry-Stewart. Try watching from 1:10:00 (an hour and 10 minutes into the video).

My criticisms - these efforts I've seen are all great, but it seems like the government is still years behind the curve with their "conversations" with people. Do they really get how to interact with the public? Does a 3 hour YouTube video do much good? Can the build better themed YouTube channels to keep the public continuously engaged? Can they build collaborative sites specific for "Capital Camp" and get people excited to attend? Are too focused on the "technology platforms" and not focused enough on building "conversations" with people? This is something I hope will improve over the coming years.

This has all gotten me more interested the state's tech initiatives, and have now found the CIO office's official website. http://www.cio.ny.gov. There are lots of other initiatives on this page, such as "Empire 2.0" and "Enterprise IT Acquisition." There is also a 4 year CIO report which I'm going to read next, it can be found at http://www.cio.ny.gov/assets/documents/4-year-retrospective-report.pdf.

REPOST: Google Mobile Ads Blog: Media companies: stop thinking about mobile and st...

2010-12-23T18:10:00.000-05:00

Google Mobile Ads Blog: Media companies: stop thinking about mobile and st...: "Last week I attended the L.A. Mobile Entertainment Summit which brought together some of the leading media companies such as Weather.com and..."

REPOST: Play of the year

2010-12-23T18:00:00.001-05:00

Play of the year: "Over the last 13 weeks, we've seen over 2000 submissions pour in from people around the country, all looking to have their play make it onto ESPN's SportsCenter. We've thoroughly enjoyed the incredible catches, buzzer beaters, game-winning goals, and most of all, the indomitable displays of competitive spirit. That's what sports on YouTube is all about!

Along those lines, we're thrilled to announce the winner of the YouTube | ESPN Your Highlight Presented by AT&T, as determined by community voting, is this video of Jay Fleming of Nashville, TN, shot by his father:

Jay's inspirational video beat some tough competition - these are the 2nd, 3rd and 4th place finishers, respectively:

We'd like to thank everyone who viewed and voted upon videos. And to everyone who submitted a video, we say: well played.

Andrew Bangs, Sports Manager, recently watched 'SLAP Magazine 'One in a Million' 2010 Episode 7'.

REPOST: 10 of our favorite AdWords innovations from 2010

2010-12-23T17:11:00.001-05:00

10 of our favorite AdWords innovations from 2010: "As 2010 comes to a close, we’ve been reflecting on the ways that AdWords and online advertising as a whole have evolved over the past year. From the launch of new search ad formats on Google.com to Search Funnel reports that illustrate search behavior leading up to a sale, 2010 saw a number of new developments that we hope have made AdWords an even more powerful and effective way to reach your customers.

Here are 10 of our favorite new ad innovations from 2010:

AdWords Campaign Experiments: Experiment with bid, keyword, ad group and placement changes, then measure how they impact your campaign performance.
Search Funnels: Understand the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion.
Product Ads: Highlight your most relevant products with pictures and prices directly on the search results page with Product Listing Ads and Product Extensions.

Product Listing Ads

Product Extensions

AdWords Call Metrics: Include a Google Voice phone number in ads that appear on Google.com, and measure the number of phone calls generated by your AdWords campaigns.

Call Metrics

Click-to-call Phone Extensions: Make it easier for potential customers to reach you by including a clickable phone number in ads that appear on mobile phones with full Internet browsers.

Click-to-call phone extensions

Display Campaign Optimizer: Save time and increase conversions on the Google Display Network with this new automatic bidding and targeting tool.
Enhanced CPC: A bidding option that automatically adjusts the Max CPC bids that you’ve set based on the likelihood that your ad will convert, leading to more conversions and higher profit.
Broad Match Modifier: A keyword match type giving you more potential traffic than phrase match with comparable ROI.
AdWords Automated Rules: Save time by scheduling automatic changes to your AdWords account based on criteria that you specify.
Remarketing: Show your ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse sites across the Google Display Network.

You’ll always find the latest features at Google Ad Innovations, a place to explore new Google advertising technologies, watch short video demos, and try out select new tools. We have even more in store for 2011 and look forward to sharing these innovations with you soon!
Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

REPOST: Dear Facebook, Please Return Our Social Networking Space

2010-12-22T12:27:00.001-05:00

Dear Facebook, Please Return Our Social Networking Space: "
The following is a guest post by David Dalka. Dalka is a digital business strategist and keynote speaker who was a member of BlackRock (BLK) during its hyper-growth phase of 80 to 800 people. He is a top ten contributor to CrunchBase, strategist to senior executives on how digital marketing tactics are transforming business strategy and revenue generation, blogger and is currently working on a nonfiction business book proposal. According to TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington, Dalka currently lives in a location of “horrendous weather eight months out of the year”. (Editor’s note: Maybe you can entice him to move somewhere else? Seriously, we really do pity him.) Photo courtesy of 2010 Internet Hungary conference.

About a month ago there was a loud outcry when Facebook inexplicably introduced a smaller font size to its News Feed. The lack of communication from Facebook while making a significant change is sadly nothing new. You could tell that the angry and highly upset Facebook users that day knew instinctively that this event was not in their best interest.

A month later, hidden behind all the public relations hoopla regarding Mark Zuckerberg’s chat with former President Bush and appearance on 60 Minutes, I finally realized the motive for last month’s text size reduction. It appears that the smaller text size was set up to pre-condition users for the larger coverage area of ads on the screen by making the ad columns wider, thus allowing more ads to be shown above the fold and closer to your newsstream. Do they actually disrespect your personal space that much? Is this how little (pun totally intended) Facebook thinks of you, their userbase? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be yes.

This conversation is about much, much more than Facebook. Linkedin reducing your ability to search your social network, Yelp reportedly using high pressure tactics to sell ads, Twitter’s promoted tweets, etc. Only you have the power to end this cycle of abuse by social networks and it is time for the web community to stand up and shout that they are sick and tired of constant terms of service changes, privacy changes, steps backward in usability that degrade our mutual experience, comfort level with the sites we use and our enjoyment of the web. Some people like Shel Israel have asked that Mark Zuckerberg step down as CEO of Facebook. That is not the point of this post. The point of this post is to help social media users understand how startups lacking well thought out and viable data, business and revenue models are the root cause of the symptom of constantly oscillating user experiences. It is my hope that you will reject the new profiles.

It appears that the changes in screen real estate usage are between the old Facebook profile and the new Facebook profile are significant. TechCrunch techs estimated the pixel usage changes for this purpose. It’s tricky to measure the differences — with the new profile Facebook has actually adjusted the total size of the profile (increased by around 20 pixels), and has tweaked all of the profile elements, including photos and the Wall, and there’s also the issue of how much whitespace to measure. But what is clear is that there has been a significant reduction in your social media experiences with your friends.

In the old version, the ads had a photo with text underneath and now the text is alongside the photo. The old edition had an ad width of about 160 pixels while the new edition now clocks in around 245 pixels, a ~53% increase in ad width – yikes! The ads are now around 140 pixels high compared to around 230 pixels previously. While the overall size of the ads has not changed very much, they appear denser and more of them can now be seen above the fold. Amazingly, the new ad sizes have been mentioned favorably in certain circles.

Even more interesting is that the ad text size is the same as before while your wall font is smaller, which means you are more likely to be distracted by the ads. An offline analogy might be when a television channel turns down the volume of their shows, while keeping the volume of commercials higher.

As I stated in a recent podcast interview with Peter Clayton, regardless of whether you are an individual or managing a business, you do not own your terms of service on a social networking site. Think of it this way, a social networking profile is like an apartment, while a web site built on a domain you own is property that belongs to you. You don’t see too many people rent an apartment and then invest $20,000 in remodeling the kitchen do you? This is because the improvement in property is not owned by the individual and the future values of the improvements are highly uncertain.

The same is true of social networking sites. This is typically not seen as a problem by individuals. It also goes unnoticed by most traditional brand marketers as they are used to expiring, non-measurable media in the pre-Internet era of marketing and often not held accountable by senior management. Once fully understood by senior business executives, the microeconomics of marketing channels has emerging implications for enterprise business strategy, marketing budget resource allocation and eventual redefinition of the skill sets required to lead businesses into the future successfully.

The first phase of the web focused too much on business ideas without technology execution, the web 2.0 phase was skewed towards technology without a tight correlation with business results. For our economy to thrive and the USA’s standard of living to be maintained, it is important that the proper balance between business monetization model and technology to ultimately occur sooner rather than later.

Here is a brief list of concepts that should be considered to make our society conserve scarce capital and allocate funding resources efficiently:

- Users should demand that social networks stop abusing their rights – with constant nontransparent terms of service and user experience changes, social media users are being whipsawed. This is not sustainable. It starts with you demanding better treatment not only from Facebook but also from all social networks.

- Venture capital should require viable revenue model path explanations – The Businessweek article, The “Lost Decade” for Venture Capital states,

Unfortunately, they ran into a giant negative coin flip—everything was delayed a lot longer than they expected. Thus all the money-eating startups, and the general reluctance of VCs to stick their neck out.

It is my belief that is a symptom of certain venture capital professionals not focusing tightly enough on data models and potential revenue models prior to funding rounds. If I’m ever a limited partner at a venture capital fund, one of the questions I’ll be asking is “Please explain three to five potential revenue model paths that could work with your concept?” I don’t expect them to be right and I don’t actually expect them to be the one that works out. What I would expect is for the entrepreneur to have a focus on executing with low cash burn rates and have a passion for solving the monetization problem.

Stated another way, if they aren’t focused on building a sustainable revenue model as a core passion before the venture capitalist writes a check, when will they ever be? Think about more companies like TC40 company mint.com. Companies should have their data and potential monetization paths organized prior to funding events occurring. To be clear, these do not need to be implemented on day one; however the infrastructure of the startup should be properly designed to enable this data and revenue generation vision from day one.

Yes, there are exceptions to this rule. For example, Sergei and Larry likely never envisioned Adwords when they started Google, but that was a one in a billion exception. My point is that it is the exception, not the norm. Valuations not based on actual cash flows and/or audited revenue numbers need to be viewed with a much higher level of scrutiny.

“Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ebay will buy it ” is likely NOT a valid business model any longer – eBay bought stumbleupon.com for $75 Million then spun it off for $29 million two years later. eBay also disposed of a large chunk of Skype after not meeting the acquisition objectives for it. TechCrunch has written in detail about this previously. Kudos to eBay CEO John Donahue for recognizing the issues and having his management team take swift action to put closure on the issues. It would appear that the days of eBay buying things without revenue models is now behind it.

The ongoing drama involving MyBlogLog and Delicious could also be attributed to lack of a viable monetization model before acquisition or Yahoo’s inability to change the data model to create one after acquisition. Delicious, once the data was normalized and reconfigured, had realistic potential to be an awesome blog content relevancy engine. Unless something major changes, it would appear that Yahoo! will not be buying any non-revenue generating start ups anytime soon.

Google walked away from buying Digg as reported by TechCrunch. Could it be that Google’s acquisition team saw a Stumbleupon or Delicious type scenario on the horizon? We’ll never know for sure, but it’s an interesting question to revisit at this juncture.

To prevent future situations like this, the startup community should encourage the design and funding of companies with long term sustainable data and revenue models that respect the user experiences, companies capable of standing on their own two legs and having viable initial public offering (IPO) potential that could withstand the test of a financial audit.

- For the same reasons, Google should resist overreacting to social media – To be clear, this problem affects many established companies investing in new projects.

Nick O’Neil wrote a post in August entitled, The Center of the Google vs. Facebook War: The Like Button, he stated,

By now it has become well known that Google is planning a competitor to Facebook. While many believe that it may be too little too late for Google, the reality is that it’s a matter of survival for the company at this point.

Sometimes social media hype prevents analysis of the actual facts. Google appears on track to exceed $8 Billion dollars in net income, an increase over 2009’s $6.52 Billion in net income audited by Ernst & Young. One of Google’s risks is new innovation from within that disrupts its primary cash cow and as such, Google will likely survive just fine regardless of anything Facebook does and Google doesn’t match with a reaction. In fact, it likely has a higher chance of survival.

To be clear, investments in startups without a focus on monetization from the start are having cross over effects in the mainstream business community. Executive leadership teams in companies both large and small need to align their business strategy and marketing budgets to the new realities of content and communication in our society to prevent future business failure. Corporate marketing budget allocation and executive team skill selection are way behind these emerging realities. This needs to change.

When a start up focuses on viable revenue models and provide a valuable, long term service from inception everyone wins – users, businesses, investors and the overall economy. It is vital to a focus on funding concepts with potential long-term revenue models capable of creating sustainable value to customers and long term cash flows that can withstand a financial audit, provide a valuation based on valid fundamentals of finance and capable of becoming companies capable of initial public stock offerings. The alternative path is a never ending cycle of takeover, heartbreak and destruction.

CrunchBase Information

David Dalka

Information provided by CrunchBase

New in Public Data Explorer: Visualize the US Budget

2010-12-19T18:50:00.001-05:00

Sent to you by Mike via Google Reader:

New in Public Data Explorer: Visualize the US Budget

via Google Public Policy Blog by Google Public Policy Blog on 12/1/10

Posted by John Lyman, Public Data Partnerships

We launched Public Data Explorer in Google Labs nearly a year ago to help make the world's public data more easily accessible and useful. Since then we've added a number of interesting datasets from U.S. government agencies, including the Census Bureau, Energy Information Administration, Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis. Recently, we made another addition: the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The OMB's mission is to help the President of the United States prepare the budget and oversee its application to federal agencies. As a result, it is also the central clearinghouse for U.S. budget data -- statistics that are now available for the first time in Public Data Explorer.

So what does the data show? Check it out and you'll find a number of interesting things. For example, below are the OMB's historical and projected net outlays (i.e., money spent) for the federal government. Note the line for "interest on national debt," which will outpace the Social Security Administration and Department of Defense by 2015.

Net outlays as a percentage of GDP is also interesting:

Finally, have you ever been curious how the US Budget gets funded? The chart below shows the distribution in 2009.

As always, there are a number of caveats to this data, and we encourage folks to follow up with experts to better understand what it truly means. That said, like all of our public data visualizations, we hope these simple charts will help inform the public debate and illuminate trends and key insights. We encourage you to explore the data, and stay tuned for more!

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Transparency on Foreign Aid

2010-12-18T13:08:00.000-05:00

Obama administration has created a platform (foreignassistance.gov) to provide transparency on foreign aid allocations. It's really interesting, for example check out how we are allocating $68.7 million towards Russia in 2011, http://www.foreignassistance.gov/OU.aspx?OUID=197&FY=2011.

The Key To Technology & Operations Outsourcing Success

2010-11-14T15:46:00.000-05:00

I wanted to post something for all on the basics of what makes technology and operational outsourcing services succeed. After working in the industry, I've seen a fair amount of success and failure which has been largely dependent upon the basics covered below.

Some quick background info:

I am not focusing this post on the micro/macro economic or social pros/cons of outsourcing, rather the post focuses on how you should shape your mind to ask the tough questions if you think your business or department is ready for outsourcing.

Outsourcing does not necessarily imply offshoring. Rather outsourcing services is simply having a vendor/supplier perform a functional task for your business. An outsourcing vendor could be based in your local area/region (called nearshoring), they could use an onshore and offshore hybrid model, or they could be completely offshore. It's also important to understand the different types of outsourcing, some include: IT, BPO, KPO.

I have specifically not focused on building the "relationship". Building a solid relationship with the vendor is critical, but it's my believe that a trusting relationship with the vendor will fall into place when the "rubber hit's the road" if the below can be achieved.

Let's get started... Let's assume you are ready to explore outsourcing of IT and/or operations. This could be for a specific function or for total full-service outsourcing.

Rule #1 : Expectation Management

This sounds simple but it's really not, the biggest factor in determining the success of an outsourcing relationship is setting and managing the correct expectations. Expectation management is required from both you and the outsourcing vendor. Let's think more about this...

You (as the company seeking outsourcing services) needs to understand that the vendor will never know your business as well as you do. This is important, no matter how sophisticated the vendor is, their success is also your success, so it's up to you to train them and help them succeed.

Another reality which sounds simple but is often not managed correctly is that vendors will not be able to walk in one day one (or even the first year) and fix all of the problems you want fixed. All service levels and functions the vendor will provide should be discussed openly and analysed with them. You will have to develop both quick wins and long-term goals for the outsourcing relationship and create a deliverable plan which you and the vendor can both work towards achieving.

What are your true goals? Do you want to lower costs? Do you want the vendor to execute strategic projects because of their expertise? Do you want staff augmentation to accommodate operational bandwidth changes? These needs should be openly discussed.

Openly express your "dream outsourcing structure". What do you want the relationship to look like in 1 year, 2 years, or in 5 years? Time moves quickly, by setting and managing both your tactical and strategic expectations with your vendor you'll give them the insight to work towards both your immediate and long-term goals.

The vendor obviously has to set and manage expectations correctly as well. The vendor should not "over-sell" you... and you must question them and ask the tough questions to get to the bottom of their true capabilities.

What questions to ask and understand?

There are three separate factors that vendors must excel at for your outsourcing relationship to be successful.

The key factors:

Industry Expertise - Does the vendor really have "industry expertise"? Don't just listen to what they tell you. Ask the tough questions, ask to speak to multiple members of a specialized practice and ask to speak to the members of the first project. Will the vendor be using "SMEs" (subject matter experts) on the project? If so, make sure that you understand their background and how long they can be committed to your project. Does the vendor have SMEs in-house or will they contract SMEs from the market on a short-term basis? How big is the vendor's client base in your industry? What types of outsourcing have they done in your industry? What expertise can they provide to help you excel in your industry? How can you use the vendor as a competitive advantage in your industry?
Technical and Operational Capability - What types of technical and operational skills does the vendor? The vendors team may not need to be as great as your internal team, but they need to be savvy. How much depth does the vendor have in your specific technology or ops process? What percent of consultants in the vendors organization specializes in your needs? Test and check the vendor's capabilities. How will the vendor staff the project? Will the vendor use full-time employees or will they use contractors? How is the vendor employee attrition? How does the vendor manage it's growth and how does it allocate technical and operational consultants? How is the vendor investing in employee training and career development programs? What plans does the vendor have to expand it's technical and operational capability?
Outsourcing Experience - What type of references can the vendor provide? Have they done it before? How long has the vendor been in business? What type's of processes and procedures do they have in place? What are some major outsourcing problems the vendor has solved with other clients? What is the vendor's strengths and weaknesses? Where do they think they can improve and how are they working to improve this capability? Get a sense of the mix of their current volume of work. Does the vendor have the capability to take on an additional client at the current time? How important will you be to vendor? How long has the account management team been in place? How long has the senior management been in place? How is the vendor continuously innovating to improve their outsourcing capability?

What to think about next?

Most importantly, this process is iterative. You will have to continue to manage and plan the expectations of the vendor relationship as well as continue to review the capabilities of the vendor. Never stop asking the tough questions but never push your vendor to terms they won't be able to deliver on and you'll succeed.

Questions? Feel free to ask.

NYC BigApps 2.0

2010-11-14T00:16:00.000-05:00

NYC's software application contest to build transparent applications that will allow the public to use the city's data in useful ways. http://nycbigapps.com/

Planting a Million Trees in NYC

2010-10-31T15:58:00.000-04:00

http://www.milliontreesnyc.org

For you photo loving editors, try:

2010-10-22T15:15:00.000-04:00

http://www.picnik.com

[Re-post] Product vs Feature: The Lesson of XMarks

2010-10-21T18:22:00.002-04:00

A re-post of Marc Cuban's Blog Maverick. Sound advise for technology businesses on a mistake I see made all too often.

Sent to you by Mike via Google Reader:

Product vs Feature: The Lesson of XMarks

via blog maverick by markcuban on 9/30/10

Xmarks is a really good service that I have used since it first came out. What it does is synchronize your browser bookmarks. Add a bookmark on your laptop and boom, it will be added to your desktop browser. Great feature.
Which is the problem.
Many companies start out with what they think is a great product because it adds a valuable feature to an existing product. Or it is a standalone product that differentiates itself from a competitor by a couple unique features. Xmarks was conceived as both.
The problem for Xmarks and for any product that merely adds a few features to an incumbent product is that the incumbent product, in this case every browser on the market usually isn't deaf, dumb and blind. They see the value in the features of the competitive product and they realize they have to add the feature to their own product. And they do.
In this case, all of the browsers have added bookmark synchronization to their newest versions.
Today, XMarks announced they were closing their doors after 4 years in business.
Before you ever release any product or service and try to build a business around it, you always have to ask yourself :
"Is this a real, stand alone product, or can the competition add my differentiated features to their own product and put me out business ?"

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Love it

2010-10-21T17:54:00.000-04:00

The one place to find everything new from Google. Google new.

Tagxedo.com

2010-10-19T16:46:00.000-04:00

This is really cool and worth checking out - http://www.tagxedo.com. They turn bodies of text in word clouds. Try it.

Mobile on Wall Street

2010-10-18T23:30:00.000-04:00

Mobile app adoption on Wall Street has been slow to say the least. As one would predict, consumer facing brokerage apps have gotten the most attention although firms offering mobile apps are still in the minority.

The most notable first adopter was Etrade's mobile app. For the more sophisticated investor, Citi released CitiFX Pro Mobile (for the foreign exchange market).

I look forward to seeing business intelligence and productivity tools released for the institutional sales and trading desks... Adoption by these users would really mark a significant move away from the desktop and would signify the sophistication level of mobile.

Another game changer may come from start-ups targeting Wall Street. Firm's such as StockTwits have created vertical micro-blogging to exchange investment ideas.

Here is a recent video in Wall Street & Technology on mobile apps:

Emerging Markets - The Next Bubble?

2010-10-15T20:16:00.000-04:00

I'm not Nouriel Roubini pessimistic, but try Googling "emerging markets bubble".

There are sings that suggest global emerging markets are entering the next bubble. Aprox $825 billion will flow into emerging market securities in 2010, up 30% from 2009. Bond markets in Latin American countries have been souring and countries like Brazil have even taken measures to increase the tax on foreign inflows to control growth. If the U.S. turns it's economy around will the flight to offshore investment slow down? Will this cause a new bubble to pop?

Recent links:

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/international/americas/2010/10/12/275781/Fears-grow.htm

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/emerging-markets-bonds-raise-bubble-concerns-2010-10-15?dist=afterbell

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fc2d9398-d23c-11df-8fbe-00144feabdc0.html

Pics from a few good days at Cuse

2010-10-09T22:59:00.000-04:00

Had a great trip up to Syracuse for recruiting this week Met a lot of great candidates from the iSchool. Some pics from the cell phone:

High Demand in the NYC Tech Job Market

2010-08-05T16:32:00.000-04:00

It seems to be a good time working in IT in the NYC area. Wall street banks seem like they have bounced back in terms of their IT spend and demand for technology staff. At Headstrong, we have certainly seen this trend over the past 6 months. Below are some data points I just saw that validate our current growth and what seems to be the demand at large.

Financial IT Jobs Growing; C Developers In DemandBy Penny CrosmanAug 5, 201010:44 AM ET

Career site eFinancial Careers reported yesterday that there were 24% more postings for financial IT jobs in July 2010 than in July 2009. This is part of a trend — further numbers the site editors gave me show that although new financial IT jobs were down by 12% in January and by 13% in February compared to last year, they ticked up in March by 3%, and then skyrocketed to a 37% increase in April, a 27% rise in May and 38% growth in June. This is cheery news for any out-of-work bank IT executives out there and for those who care about them.

Even more interesting is what the job listings show about which skills are in demand in the world of bank technology. eFinancial Careers shared the numbers of financial job listings mentioning specific IT skills (below) as of yesterday (the numbers change every day). Most coveted are programmers who know C, C++ and C#. This reflects the fact that, generally speaking, programs written in C are still faster than those in any other language. But Java developers are also being hired, and database administrators and those with risk management expertise have strong prospects.

Hottest Bank Technology Skills

1. C, C++, C# — 123
2. Java/J2EE — 75
3. DBA/Database Administrator — 71
4. SQL — 58
5. Unix — 50
6. Linux — 48
7. Risk Management — 44
8. Project Manager — 41
9. Perl — 37
10. Oracle — 35

Summer 2010 Pics & SIFMA

2010-07-26T16:16:00.000-04:00

SIFMA Tech Conference 2010

Some notable comments from the conference:

Visualization software picking up - graphical visualization of markets and securities - few new products there - they look great
Buzz word of the conference: "ultra-low latency"
Web services (market data by xignite, or streaming data via http sockets) - there were a few providers really pushing this space
Mobile apps - offering analytical, business intelligence view via mobile app. - this seems to have popped up this year - dont remember that level of mobile sophistication last year
Compliance with social media - a few providers offering enterprise compliance on facebook, linkedin, and twitter

Headstrong Picnic

Internet Week - NYC!

2010-06-09T13:17:00.001-04:00

It's Internet Week here in NYC. (From June 7th to June 14th). It's the 3rd year of the event and it continues to get bigger and bigger. Each day there are conference panel discussions, sponsored sessions, and networking parties around the city.

Some of the sessions that look pretty good are:

How Social Media Marketing is Driving Business Result

NYC Startup Weekend

Building NLP Semantic Web Applications for Financial Services

Hope you all enjoy Internet Week. :)

Oil Spill Wildlife Donations - Text "WILDLIFE" to 20222 to donate $10 to the National Wildlife Federation

2010-06-05T20:22:00.000-04:00

http://www.nwf.org/Wildlife/Wildlife-Conservation/Threats-to-Wildlife/Oil-Spill/Mobile-Giving.aspx

It's been way to long since my last post.... An Update on Wealth Management Technology Trends

2010-05-21T02:26:00.000-04:00

It's been way to long since my last post.... I want to catch up with a little bit about trends around Wealth Management Technology and some good articles I've seen.

On Wealth Management

Let me catch up on what's going on at Headstrong and more importantly what we've been seeing in the market. Vinod Gopinathan and I have been focusing our efforts on wealth management technology. We've been specifically focused on adviser desktops, CRM, reporting applications, and SMA / UMA platforms.

Trends in the market

Growth in Independent Financial Advisors - It's clear the IFA market is on the rise. Financial Advisers are seeing value (and major cost savings) by becoming independent. Why operate under a big name brand when your relationship with your client is the only thing that really matters? The beneficiaries of this FA movement seem to be Fidelity, Wells Fargo, LPL Financial, and Charles Schwab. Some news:

Demand for system scalability and a backlog in demand. Because of the lack of IT investment in 2009, firms seem to be investing heavily to catch up in their technology projects. Interest seems to be around application scalability or new revenue generating applications. There also seems to be a growing interest around platform based (Cloud / PaaS / SaaS) offerings from enterprise financial services firms who previously would not have considered such an option. Given the security and platform provider operational risks associated with Cloud/PaaS/SaaS, large financial services still seem to be in the evaluation phase of a long-term strategy. See: Waiting for the Cloudburst
Managed Accounts: SMA & UMA - Separately managed accounts are nothing new. But the efforts of the MMI & DTCC are poised to transform the industry. The MMI has released XML communication standards to improve the inefficiencies in the industry communication. The DTCC is developing MAS - Managed Accounts Services to act has a central communication's hub for the industries messages. More on the DTCC platform can be found at: DTCC MAS PDF.

Other Articles to Read

The Economist - Special Edition Article on Data
Mashable - Opensource Social Networking
FinanceTech - Investment Advisor M&A on the Rise
Jamie Dimon Speaks at Syracuse Graduation -
- NYTimes - http://tinyurl.com/35bcbp5
- NYMag - http://tinyurl.com/39l9evh

My next posts will cover cloud computing, mobile, and social networking in financial services.