"finance" entries

Four short links: 12 June 2012

Four short links: 12 June 2012

Amazon Royalties Suck, Learn Electronics, Microtasks, and Finance Considered Harmful

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | June 12, 2012
  1. Amazon’s Insanely Crap Royalties (Andrew Hyde) — Amazon offers high royalty rate to you, but that’s before a grim hidden “delivery fee”. Check out Andrew’s graph of the different pay rates to the author from each medium.
  2. SparkFun Education — learn electronics from the good folks at SparkFun.
  3. TaskRabbit — connects you with friendly, reliable people right in your neighborhood who can help you get the items on your To-Do list done. Lots of people and projects sniffing around this space of outsourced small tasks, distributed to people via a web site.
  4. Henry Ford on Bootstrapping (Amy Hoy) — Amy has unearthed a fascinating rant by Henry Ford against speculative investment and finance. I determined absolutely that never would I join a company in which finance came before the work or in which bankers or financiers had a part. And further that, if there were no way to get started in the kind of business that I thought could be managed in the interest of the public, then I simply would not get started at all. For my own short experience, together with what I saw going on around me, was quite enough proof that business as a mere money-making game was not worth giving much thought to and was distinctly no place for a man who wanted to accomplish anything. Also it did not seem to me to be the way to make money. I have yet to have it demonstrated that it is the way. For the only foundation of real business is service.

Visualization of the Week: 30 years of tech IPOs

How Facebook stacks up against other tech IPOs.

by Audrey Watters | @audreywatters | +Audrey Watters | May 25, 2012

This week's visualization comes from The New York Times and compares the last 30 years of tech IPOs (hint: watch for the big blue dot).

Four short links: 21 May 2012

Four short links: 21 May 2012

Objectivist C, Robotrading, Meme Culture, and Mobile-controlled Peripherals

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | May 21, 2012
  1. Objectivist C — very clever. In Objectivist-C, each program is free to acquire as many resources as it can, without interference from the operating system. (via Tim O’Reilly)
  2. Zynga and Facebook Stock Oddities (The Atlantic) — signs of robotrading, a reminder that we’re surrounded by algorithms and only notice them when they go awry.
  3. The Final ROFLcon and Mobile’s Impact on Internet Culture (Andy Baio) — These days, memes spread faster and wider than ever, with social networks acting as the fuel for mass distribution. But it’s possible we may see less mutation and remixing in the near future. As Internet usage shifts from desktops and laptops to mobile devices and tablets, the ability to mutate memes in a meaningful way becomes harder.
  4. Oh Mi Bod — I was impressed to learn that one can buy vibrators that can be controlled from an iPhone. Insert iBone joke here. (via Cary Gibson)
Four short links: 13 April 2012

Four short links: 13 April 2012

Being Contrary, Microsoft Tools, JOBS Doom Warnings, and Fibre ROI

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 13, 2012
  1. Change the Game (Video) — Amy Hoy’s talk from Webstock ’12, on being contrary and being successful. Was one of the standout talks for me.
  2. Rise4Fun — software engineering tools from Microsoft Research. (via Hacker News)
  3. Why Obama’s JOBS Act Couldn’t Suck Worse (Rolling Stone) — get ready for an avalanche of shareholder suits ten years from now, since post-factum civil litigation will be the only real regulation of the startup market.
  4. Socio-economic Return Of FTTH Investment in Sweden (PDF) — This preliminary study analyses the socio-economic impacts of the investment in FTTH. The goal of the study was: Is it possible to calculate how much a krona (SEK) invested in fibre will give back to society? The conclusion is that a more comprehensive statistical data and more calculations are needed to give an exact estimate. The study, however, provides an indication that 1 SEK invested over four years brings back a minimum of 1.5 SEK in five years time. The study estimates the need for investment to achieve 100% fibre penetration, identifies and quantifies a number of significant effects of fibre deployment, and then calculates the return on investment. (via Donald Clark)
Four short links: 12 April 2012

Four short links: 12 April 2012

Financial Data, 21C Learning for Parents, IQ Battles, and Etsy Hacker Grants

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 12, 2012
  1. Big Data in Finance (PDF, 9M) — Algo trading systems have begun to resemble an arms race. Competition, data, and the race for real-time.
  2. A Parent’s Guide to 21st Century Learning (Edutopia, free registration required to download) — What should collaboration, creativity, communication, and critical thinking look like in a modern classroom? How can parents help educators accomplish their goals? We hope this guide helps bring more parents into the conversation about improving education. (via Derek Wenmoth)
  3. Chess Intelligence and Winning — survey of IQ gaps between contestants needed to win competitions. We could view cops and killers as being involved in a grim contest. In the USA around 65% of all murders are solved. That converts to an average “murder” ELO rating difference between police and murderers of 108 ELO points. It is also known that the mean IQs of murderers and policemen are 87 and 102, respectively. So successfully solving murders is a puzzle then the “a” coefficient is 0.041, and each IQ point difference is worth 7.2 ELO points. I suspect this is masturbatory math extrapolation rather than anything significant or predictive, but the cops-vs-robbers IQ contest was an interesting angle. (via Dr Data’s Blog)
  4. Etsy Hacker Grants: Supporting Women in Technology — Today, in conjunction with Hacker School, Etsy is announcing a new scholarship and sponsorship program for women in technology: we’ll be hosting the summer 2012 session of Hacker School in the Etsy headquarters, and we’re providing ten Etsy Hacker Grants of $5,000 each — a total of $50,000 — to women who want to join but need financial support to do so. Our goal is to bring 20 women to New York to participate, and we hope this will be the first of many steps to encourage more women into engineering at Etsy and across the industry.

Data for the public good

From healthcare to finance to emergency response, data holds immense potential to help citizens and government.

by Alex Howard | @digiphile | +Alex Howard | February 22, 2012

The explosion of big data, open data and social data offers new opportunities to address humanity's biggest challenges. The open question is no longer if data can be used for the public good, but how.

Strata Week: The Megaupload seizure and user data

Megaupload's demise raises data questions and Bloomberg opens up its market data interface.

by Audrey Watters | @audreywatters | +Audrey Watters | February 2, 2012

In this week's data news, Megaupload users face data deletion, Bloomberg opens its market data interface and Pentaho changes its licensing for Kettle.

Visualization of the Week: The big chart of money

Randall Munroe's new visualization puts money (almost all of it) in perspective.

by Audrey Watters | @audreywatters | +Audrey Watters | November 25, 2011

In an audacious new visualization, Randall Munroe of xkcd takes on money — where it comes from, where it goes and what it buys.

Strata Week: 4.74 degrees of Kevin Bacon

Facebook says we're closer than we thought, Gnip targets finance, and eBay grabs Hunch.

by Audrey Watters | @audreywatters | +Audrey Watters | November 22, 2011

Facebook research questions the "six degrees of separation" rule, Gnip gets into the real-time financial data business, and eBay looks to put Hunch's recommendation engine to use.

Four short links: 7 November 2011

Four short links: 7 November 2011

City Finances, Low-Power Computers, Future History, and Learner's Mindset

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 7, 2011
  1. California and Bust (Vanity Fair) — Michael Lewis digs into city and state finances, and the news ain’t good.
  2. Tonido Plug 2 — with only watts a day, you could have your own low-cost compute farm that runs off a car battery and a cheap solar panel.
  3. William Gibson Interview (The Paris Review) — It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.
  4. Zen and the Art of Making (Phil Torrone) — thoughts on the difference between beginners and experts, and why the beginner’s mindset is intoxicating and addictive.