Soda Popinski

7/30/08

Big news at Brilliont today as one of the interns is leaving on Friday and her summer project presentation is today (you can see her blog at http://brilliont.com/blogs/hotcommodity/).  I am definitely looking forward to her analysis later today.

There is not a single niche that can’t be profited off of, and I was glad to find a cool one today.  I saw on Gizmodo today an article about Menino Design Studio’s external hard drive covers.  Now my external  hard drive is pretty snazzy, so I have no real reason to want to cover mine up.  (Granted, mine is portable and doesn’t sit at a desktop all day long).  I am not exactly sure how products like this take off, or what makes them cool because having an external hard drive that looks like a huge pack of cigarettes, a Pulp Fiction character, or a cereal box makes it even more conspicuous.  Regardless I would buy an external hard drive just to get one…

To expound on the niche comment I made earlier, I am always annoyed at airports when screeners find things in my bags are cannot fly and there is a United States Postal Service (or similar mailing company) stand at the end of the screening area.  These stands are usually pretty full service (without an attendant usually) and people can mail whatever the screeners have deemed dangerous to home or their destination.  The prices for this service are ridiculous (not to mention sending shampoos and toothpaste), but there must be a demand since it is provided.

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

7/29/08

For those who have traveled internationally and required (and blindly took) numerous shots before flying, there is now a site that acts as the “Global Disease Alert Map” called HealthMap.  On it you can select various health feeds, the latest alerts, alerts by country, and track some big diseases in the past 30 days.  The map is a bit crowded but it provides a great means of quickly judging where the highest concentrations of different diseases are.  I’d hate to see the concentration of dots near any major campus…

Now as a follow up to my article yesterday on Cuil, well it was not very “cuil” at all.  The site kept showing errors for most of the day, and any site that intends to compete with Google better have more servers.  For more hilariousness on Cuil, check out my coworkers blog.

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

 7/28/08

Since Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the algorithm for Google in the late 1990s, things have been going smoothly.  (In fact they tried selling their search engine algorithm to Yahoo!, who already had what was considered the best search engine at the time.  Yahoo! declined the offer).  Google has the highest market capitalization of any American company not in the Dow Industrials according to their Wikipedia site.  They have the largest search engine, a rumored competitor to iPhone in the works (the Google Phone), a successful social networking site in India and Brazil (Orkut), blogging and wiki platforms, and a wildly successful (if not wildly turbulent) stock price.  But…

An article on CNN.com today discussed Anna Patterson, a former Google employee who apparently came up with  last search engine which Google bought in 2004.  Ms. Patterson quit Google in 2006 to make an even more powerful search engine, and is now armed with $33 million in venture capital money to push her search engine called Cuil (pronounced “cool”).  She is confident her algorithm is superior because it searched through three times the web pages (120 billion versus Google’s 40 billion), will have an even more user-friendly format, and will not store user search histories or search patterns as Google does currently.

Ms. Patterson felt that Google was becoming stagnant and happy with their position as a market leader.  She feels that her product is far superior, even if Google has become a cliche for web surfing (or web research).  Is she a traitor?  Or an innovator?

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

7/24/08

It’s hard enough to compile all of the information needed for our various S&P 500 analyses here at Brilliont and a complete look at the S&P 500 is regularly interrupted when companies buy each other.  (An example is Teva Pharmaceuticals buying Barr Pharmaceuticals)  With so much money being made in pharmaceuticals, and the pending generics that result when the patents run out, an article in the Economist explores the reasons for so many mergers in this industry.

It seems that when companies are jockeying for greater market share in an already over saturated industry, mergers are inevitable.  In generic pharmaceuticals, as in airlines or fast food, prices can only go so low before mergers seem logical for expansion and survival.  I do not feel that setting a goal of $20 billion in revenues by 2012 (double current revenues) by Teva Pharmaceuticals is necessarily a smart move, since synergies between merging companies may be forgone in order to reach such a lofty goal.  Oftentimes companies may expand through M&A instead of organically because it seems easier to do for short term goals to be met.  From the surface, it seems that the pharmaceutical companies are growing in the most logical way in a saturated market.  But with new generics being formed, such as the “biosimilars” mentioned in the article, are there new markets being opened?

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

7/24/08

I read a great quote today in The Economist’s article on the “twin sisters”:  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“If you cannot let firms fail in a bust, then you must contain them in the boom.”

That quote is also so appropriate for the Bear Stearns collapse earlier in March.  Essentially, the government promised to back up the additional debt that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac needed to raise in order to make investors feel comfortable in buying more stock in both.  If they had not shown support, both companies would have failed immediately.  Why does there seem to be little accountability and no downside for large government backed organizations in this country?  Would we have a more stable economy is we trimmed the fat every now and then?  I do not know the answer to those questions but I wonder how many more companies the government will essentially fool Americans into having faith in (aka buying stock) to keep the status quo when there should be little reason for optimism?

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

7/23/08

“A real entrepreneur is somebody who has no safety net underneath them.”

-Henry Kravis

There is something to be said for web creativity or web curiosity.  Let me explain.  We all hear how the internet and  staying on the computer (and not “doing”) is making “us” lazy.  But I think one of the best web features is the Google Mail scrolling header (I’m not sure of the exact definition) that seemingly “reads” our mail and sometimes posts targeted articles and advertisements based on the content in our emails.  Oftentimes these links lead to some interesting topics that I never considered pursuing, such as my find today:  naming a startup.

In early 2006 I partnered in starting a tutoring business in Dallas called DFW Tutors, and choosing the name seemed important enough but I do not remember us laboring over the decision.  I found some interesting articles that supposedly have the keys to naming businesses, and since we all love lists, they have them in list form.  With titles proclaiming “8 Mistakes To Avoid When Naming Your Business” or “The 10 Commandments of a Great Business Name” I was definitely hooked.  Lets have a quick look at the first article’s pointers:

Mistake #1: Getting the “committee” involved in your decision.

Mistake #2: Employing the “train wreck” method of creating a name.

Mistake #3: Using words so plain they’ll never stand out in a crowd.

Mistake #4: Taking the atlas approach and using a map to name your company.

Mistake #5: Turning your name into a cliche. 

Mistake #6: Making your business name so obscure, customers will never know what it means.

Mistake #7: Taking the Campbell’s soup approach to selecting a name. 

Mistake #8: Choosing the wrong name and then refusing to change it. 

Some of these mistakes seem pretty generic and mistake #5 seems to have worked well for Google or Kleenex.  Let’s look at the second article:

1. Take Naming Seriously

2. Avoid Word Play Dangers

3. Don’t be an IBM

4. Be Focused

5. Stay Out of Court

6. Think Beyond Local

7. Avoid ME Inc

8. Ask Others to Spell it

9. Be Web Friendly

10. Check AvailabilityOnce again these all seem pretty generic, but I am definitely more interested when the information is given in a list.

The name of a company does have a lot to do with how curious we might be in  the products or services delivered.  I wonder what the writers of the two articles would think of Springwise, my new favorite site?

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

7/21/08

Obviously summertime is when the majority of blockbuster Hollywood films are released, and the main driver of success of the movie seems to be the opening weekend numbers of the film.  It seems that each year a film opens that tops the previous record of highest opening weekend gross (in North America that is).  This got me thinking because one small project was adjusting prices of stocks to take into consideration splits and dividends (and try to mimic Yahoo!Finance’s methods as accurately as possible)…

So this past weekend, the biggest movie was obviously The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, which grossed $155.3 million, and beat out Spiderman 3 which grossed $151.3 million just last year.  So I began to do some research into how impressive the feat really was (and by “research” I mean that I Googled “what are the highest adjusted grossing movies of all time”).

At http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/ I found that when grosses for movies are adjusted for inflation, the already lofty grosses of some classic movies become even loftier.  For example, Titanic, which grossed just over $600 million in its run nationally in 1997-1998, would have grossed $886 million in today’s dollars.  Thats almost a 50% increase!  Inflation has something to do with that, but ticket prices could also be to blame.

Considering all moves, Gone with the Wind grossed the most adjusted money of all time with $1.2 billion dollars.

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

7/17/08

There were few things that confounded me as much as Capri Sun drink pouches.  If you did not pierce the pouch carefully with the straw, then there was a chance that the straw would go alt he way through and juice would flow through.  However TerraCycle has no problem with Capri Sun and actually will pay for your used drink pouches, cookie wrappers, energy bar wrappers, yogurt containers, corks, and soda bottles.  They take this waste and turn them into cool products that are available to buy on the site, such as Capri Sun tote bags.  This company is definitely doing their bit to try to recycle our waste into products that have long lives.

Following business news, and finance in particular, is a relatively new thing for me, but going to business school has really helped me understand so much of the financial world.  It seems that Google’s earnings this past quarter were below analysts expectations and the stock has taken a hit today.  I have never seen a stock that is so volatile, and I really don’t know if I would ever invest in such a wild stock.  It seems as though the future performance of Google drastically changes daily.  (According to Yahoo!Finance, the stock has traded between $412.11 and $747.24 per share in the past year.)

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

7/16/08

There is a Finnish non-profit company that has found an alternative to simply buying electric cars.  Sähköautot - Nyt!, or “Electric Cars Now!” in English, is trying to find Toyota Corolla owners who want to get a conversion kit to fit onto their cars.

For those that are interested, the site http://www.springwise.com/ is a site dedicated to innovative ideas and start-up companies from around the world.  The site not only includes the companies, but includes pictures and small write-ups.

-Amit Kooner

akooner@brilliont.com

*By the way if you have no idea what the title of this article means, please refer to a English-Finnish translator.

7/14/08

At this point it should be blatantly obvious that I have just learned of the tool that allows me to insert pictures into my blogs.  For the first two weeks of blogging here at Brilliont I was simply typing my blogs into Microsoft Word and then copying and pasting them into our blog editor.

I found an interesting article in the New York Times today about the reaction to a trailer for the upcoming movie “Beverly Hills Chihuahua”.  It seems that a lot of dog lovers have posted videos of themselves on YouTube watching the trailer to the movie in disgust.  This article really struck me for reasons other than Hollywood has clearly run out of movie ideas.  Sites like Google and YouTube have really allowed people to be creative in such new ways.  I think that Google lets us be creative and answer questions for ourselves that we may be too embarrassed to ask others.  With Google’s simple start page we are not distracted and can just search for the information we crave.  YouTube lets video posters be “stars” and watchers be voyeurs.  Google’s algorithm and YouTube’s user interface are really innovative because they have been able to dominate their respective marekts even though there have been search engines and video posting sites for many years.

Speaking of innovation, there are scientists at MIT who are experimenting on how to make solar cells more efficient and economical for wide-spread use.  The biggest hindrances to solar cells are clouds and rain, so these scientists have invented a luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) which uses dye to trap sunlight for the solar cells directly.  While there are issues with this innovation presently, it is certain that the energy crisis will lead to more ideas flowing on alternative energy sources.

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com