Category Archives: Business

The Borg-Yahoo merger wont work.

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It&#8217-s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they&#8217-ll run faster.

Fake Steve Jobs

The cultures will never fit together. And the deal is too big. It&#8217-s not manageable. And it&#8217-s completely anathema to Microsoft. It&#8217-s totally out of character for them. It goes against everything the company has ever stood for.

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Psstt&#8230- On a related note&#8230- If you haven&#8217-t seen yet the Fake Steve Jobs address at the Crunchies 2008, (an &#8220-acceptance speech&#8221- he gave coz Apple didn&#8217-t send any representative at the event), you should. Hilarious.

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • No Trades (other than at the start) —-> Not a reliable predictor, as of today
  • How you should read Midas Oracle
  • The best prediction exchanges
  • “There will be no media consumption left in ten years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.”
  • Hillary Clinton won’t be on the Democratic ticket. — It’s not going to happen. — N-E-V-E-R. — Not a chance. — Period.
  • Suggestion for WordPress — Subscribers’ Capabilities
  • This is why I said that those who believe that Hillary Clinton has a chance to be on the Democratic ticket are “clueless”.

Think Tanks = $$$ + Research + Spin

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No Gravatarthink tanks

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Would be fun to have the equivalent for event derivatives.
  • “We’ll be eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow.” “Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals,” said Turner, 69. “Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state —like Somalia or Sudan— and living conditions will be intolerable.”
  • QUESTION TO THE READERS: Could anyone guess what Nassim Nicholas Taleb would think of the prediction markets?
  • YouTube Videos on Prediction Markets
  • The Prime Minister of Ireland has just said he will resign, but neither InTrade nor BetFair would give the first fig.

Why Indian Software Outsourcing Companies are Outsourcing to China

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White Paper

Paul Denlinger:

This white paper examines some of the unique challenges Indian software companies are facing:

  • The decreasing talent pool-
  • Rising costs-
  • Insufficient infrastructure and-
  • Not enough time to train and build infrastructure

It then shows how China is the answer to their problems because:

  • It has only talent pool which is large enough to compare to India’s-
  • The local talent pool is still largely untapped in the second-tier cities-
  • Ten cities have targeted software development as part of their development initiatives-
  • Good universities provide strong training and basic skills-
  • English and communication skills are swiftly catching up.

This white paper is free &#8212-provided that you register on Paul Denlinger&#8217-s site.

The Formula for Internet Site Success

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Jakob Nielsen:

The formula for website success is:

  • B = V ? C ? L

Where:

  • B = amount of business done by the site-
  • V = unique visitors coming to the site-
  • C = conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who become customers)- (Note that the concept of conversion applies not only to e-commerce sites, but to any site where there is something you want users to do.)
  • L = loyalty rate (the degree to which customers return to conduct repeat business).

Read the previous blog posts by Chris. F. Masse:

  • Hilarious.
  • Prediction market sessions of the O’Reilly Money-Tech Conference suffer fatally from the absence of the world’s most knowledgeable, most innovative and most trustworthy prediction market expert.
  • Bet2Give Presidential Widget —REDUX
  • Professor Leighton Vaughan-Williams becomes embroilled in BetFair blog controversy.
  • Bet2Give Presidential Widget
  • Did the BetFair blog use trading data from InTrade to hint at BetFair’s accuracy??
  • WordPress powers the MSM’s blogs: NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time and People.

Davos – World Economic Forum

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Hey, Davos starts on Monday.

WEF website

And they have a blog, of course. :-D

Twenty20 = Sure Bets and Wildcard scenarios to the year 2020. Nothing on that website, yet, but I&#8217-ll be monitoring it.

Read the previous blog posts by Chris. F. Masse:

  • Hilarious.
  • Prediction market sessions of the O’Reilly Money-Tech Conference suffer fatally from the absence of the world’s most knowledgeable, most innovative and most trustworthy prediction market expert.
  • Bet2Give Presidential Widget —REDUX
  • Professor Leighton Vaughan-Williams becomes embroilled in BetFair blog controversy.
  • Bet2Give Presidential Widget
  • Did the BetFair blog use trading data from InTrade to hint at BetFair’s accuracy??
  • WordPress powers the MSM’s blogs: NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time and People.

Startup Strategy: Innovate What Big Companies Are Commoditizing.

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Startup Strategy: Innovate What Big Companies Are Commoditizing

Read the previous blog posts by Chris. F. Masse:

  • Hilarious.
  • Prediction market sessions of the O’Reilly Money-Tech Conference suffer fatally from the absence of the world’s most knowledgeable, most innovative and most trustworthy prediction market expert.
  • Bet2Give Presidential Widget —REDUX
  • Professor Leighton Vaughan-Williams becomes embroilled in BetFair blog controversy.
  • Bet2Give Presidential Widget
  • Did the BetFair blog use trading data from InTrade to hint at BetFair’s accuracy??
  • WordPress powers the MSM’s blogs: NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time and People.

We don’t know whether Google approach to management, and in particular its approach to innovation, is a cause of its success or a product of its success.

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Good point.

[…] Many of the most innovative and successful of Google’s new ser­vices are, in fact, ones it has acquired rather than created. Those include the hugely popular video-sharing service YouTube, the Weblog publisher Blogger, the virtual globe Google Earth, the online word processor Writely (renamed Google Docs), the wiki developer JotSpot, the news syndication service Feedburner, and the Internet phone service GrandCentral. When it comes to innovation, Google is starting to look less like a sower than a harvester, less like an inventor than an exploiter. […]

There are signs that Google is coming to recognize this problem. Over the past year, its management has begun tightening the reins on its organization, imposing some restrictions on the company’s freewheeling and free-spending culture. Late in 2006, in what CEO Schmidt called “a big change in the way we run the company,” it ordered its innovation teams to focus on fewer initiatives and reduce the overall number of products under development by 20 percent. An exasperated Sergey Brin admitted that he “was getting lost in the sheer volume of the products that we were releasing.” And when the company announced disappointing earnings for the second quarter of 2007, Schmidt put the blame on overhiring and announced that the company would be more conservative in expanding its staff in the future. Google is hardly staid, but it is growing up. […]

Why InTrade-TradeSports and BetFair-TradeFair need to set up a corporate blog

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No GravatarRobert Scobble&#8217-s book co-author interviewing the Dell Computer blogger:

[QUESTION] 5. Can you give me some statistics on the blog? How many uniques? How many comments? Growth?

[ANSWER:] We’ve been tracking at about 1 million page views per week. Unique visitors have reached as high as 300,000 per month.

One of the most important metrics is the change in the tonality of the conversations. In 2006, at the low point, almost 50% of the conversations about Dell were negative. Today, we are at about 23%. I don’t attribute all that success to our digital media initiatives, but it’s clear that they have accounted for part of it.

[QUESTION] 6. As you know, many enterprise decision makers are fearful of being shouted at [*], lack of adequate measurement tools, loss of message control, leaking secrets and of course&#8211-no clear ROI. How would you address each of these?

[ANSWER:] I think all of those issues are reasons why corporations stay away from joining conversations. I would argue though that the benefits of being part of the conversation outweigh all the risks. In my view, it’s really about facing the reality of the changes that are happening in front of us. Companies need to admit that control is shifting toward customers. More and more customers are talking about companies they either like or dislike. Those conversations happen with or without companies being actively involved. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that those conversations have more influence over perception than much of the marketing material and PR messages that companies produce.

We wrestle with measurement tools and ROI all the time for a couple of reasons:
– This is a new, but maturing field, and that means it will take time to develop tools and metrics that mean something on a broad scale
– Proving ROI in social media almost always involves looking at a topic over an extended period of time

In my view though, the real value in social media is that it has the potential to change customer perception in ways that just weren’t possible before. Just because that’s hard to measure doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. Time will tell, but it seems to me that not being part of the conversation is a far riskier proposition.

[*]

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Michael Gerber – The E-Myth Revisited
  • Changes to TradeFair prediction markets
  • Eric Zitzewitz, laughing all the way to the bank
  • Michael Bloomberg: I’m not running… but, beware, I am a King maker.
  • Meet the 3 Iowa Electronic Markets co-founders: George Neumann, Forrest Nelson and Robert Forsythe.
  • When Markets Beat The Polls – Scientific American Magazine
  • GLOBAL COOLING

Leading capitals of the world: BetFair-TradeFair HQs location ranks #1.

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Leading Capitals of the World

Author Profile&nbsp-Editor and Publisher of Midas Oracle .ORG .NET .COM &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s mugshot &#8212- Contact Chris Masse &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s LinkedIn profile &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s FaceBook profile &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s Google profile &#8212- Sophia-Antipolis, France, E.U. Read more from this author&#8230-

Read the previous blog posts by Chris. F. Masse:

  • the yellow sphere = a cobalt atom
  • In spite of their inherent complexity, Jason Ruspini’s tax rate prediction markets show some liquidity.
  • Shoot Down USA-193. Mission Accomplished.
  • Too early to call David Pennock’s prediction markets a nuclear disaster
  • The green area in this NASA image shows a plankton bloom in Lake Titicaca in South America.
  • SCANDAL: BetFair Poker signs up a convicted cheater.
  • The End of NYC’s Off-Track Betting

IG Group buys HedgeStreet for $6,000,000.

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Just as predicted by our Deep Throat in early October 2007 &#8212-&#8221-They are packaging HedgeStreet for a closing/fire-sale.&#8221-

RTT News.

U.S.-based sed HedgeStreet, which has operated the HedgeStreet Exchange, has liabilities of approximately $1 million and operating costs of approximately $325,000 per month. Currently, the company is not generating any revenue.

Hemscott:

IG Group chief executive, Time Howkins, said the acquisition gives the company the necessary regulatory approvals, technology, personnel needed to operate an exchange for US retail clients to trade in binary options. The company said it plans to re-launch the exchange around the end of its current financial year, after making some modifications, mainly the range of contracts offered.

IG Group:

Corporate Profile

IG Group Holdings plc offers speculative investment products to a retail and professional client base, through a number of well-known brands.

The group&#8217-s principal businesses give clients the ability to trade on financial markets. Our longest established business is financial spread betting, where we are the world&#8217-s leading provider (based on turnover), servicing a retail client base, primarily in the UK. Our rapidly growing Contracts For Difference and foreign exchange business services retail clients and market professionals around the world from offices located in the UK, Australia, Singapore and Germany. The group also offers spread betting on sports, entertainment and political events and binary betting on both financial and sports markets. More than 90% of the group&#8217-s client transactions are executed electronically.

2006-7 headlines

– Revenue up 36% at ?122.0 million
– EBITDA up 34% at ?70.4 million
– Strong EBITDA margin of 57.7%
– Diluted earnings per share up 33% at 14.52p
– Final dividend 6.5p per share- total dividend 8.5p per share
– EBITDA margin improvement from 54.5% in H1 to 60.3% in H2
– Successful launch of TradeSense in UK and recent launch in Australia
– Launch of PureDeal dealing platform
– Current trading is strong

The group&#8217-s business has grown rapidly since the late 1990s, with revenues having grown at a compound annual rate of roughly 40% over the past nine years. We have also developed IG Group into a significant multinational operation.

&#8212-

Note: IG Group does not accept bets from customers based in the United States.

Author Profile&nbsp-Editor and Publisher of Midas Oracle .ORG .NET .COM &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s mugshot &#8212- Contact Chris Masse &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s LinkedIn profile &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s FaceBook profile &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s Google profile &#8212- Sophia-Antipolis, France, E.U. Read more from this author&#8230-

Read the previous blog posts by Chris. F. Masse:

  • Barack Obama is the 44th US president.
  • We already have prediction markets in future tax rates. It’s called the municipal bond yield curve.
  • DELEGATES AND SUPERDELEGATES ACCOUNTANCY
  • O’Reilly – Money-Tech Conference
  • Google Profiles
  • Event Derivative Exchange HedgeStreet is baaaaaaaaack… from the grave.
  • Sports Derivative Forum