It's Rishi

A few months back I posted about how hydrogen fuel cell cars actually are significantly less fuel-efficient than current gasoline-powered cars due to the fact that producing hydrogen fuel is itself a horribly inefficient process given the present methods. Ed Ring, editor of EcoWorld, recently published an article titled “The Hydrogen Hoax” explaining his belief that hydrogen research should take a back seat to further development and implementation of technologies which are commercially viable today: clean diesel cars, serial hybrid cars, and battery powered cars.

Will scientists figure out someday how to store hydrogen in practical, economical ways? Will they ever figure out how to build cheap, safe and durable fuel cells? The answer to these questions is yes, but probably not before they figure out how to develop ultra-capacitors or cheap batteries with extremely high energy densities.

It’s a short editorial, give it a read if you get a minute.

Curious?

There were some scary rumors floating around that AllOfMP3.com was shutdown after the site was “down for maintenance” for a few days. Well, the good news is that they are back up. Phew! The funny thing is, if in fact AllOfMP3.com was shutdown, I simply would have downloaded more albums off of BitTorrent. So instead of paying ~$1.50 for an album, I’d pay nada. RIAA: take your pick. =) I should note that I spent more money on music last year than probably the preceding 3 years combined. The difference is that between buying music on AllOfMP3, my Y! Music Unlimited sub, and buying discounted used CD’s from Amazon and GEMM, I feel as though I’ve gotten tremendous bang for my buck.

While I do actively manage my personal investment portfolio, I still consider myself to be a fairly green investor. I own just a few individual stocks that I’ve held long positions in. Most of my money is invested in about 15 mutual funds. One aspect of trading that I’ve always been curious about, but never actually tried was options trading. I understand the mechanics of options but I never understood if, when and how I should be utilizing this form of trading.

A college buddy of mine, Kevin Chou, recently launched FinanceHuddle where he discusses his investment strategy and his own trading activities. I asked Kevin if he could summarize options trading and contrast it with buying/shorting stocks. He graciously did so in his latest post, Using Options – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I had to read it a couple times over to fully digest what he wrote, but having done so I feel like I have a much better understanding of options trading. Thanks Kevin!

Ever since I discovered Robert Farago’s automotive news and editorial site, The Truth About Cars, I’ve been an avid reader. Farago’s editorials combine his deep knowledge of the auto industry with sharp, frank analysis. Furthermore, even though he writes many articles criticizing the Big 3, especially GM, he isn’t just Detroit-bashing like many journalists do. For every criticism he makes, he usually puts forth his own alternative ideas.

Whether you follow the auto industry or not, you may have noticed that Ford has ditched “Built for the Road Ahead” for a new marketing campaign called “Bold Moves”. The first glimpse that the general public got of this new campaign was a new 60 second commercial featuring Kelly Clarkson which aired during American Idol a couple weeks ago. (watch the commercial on YouTube) They also caused a stir in TV land by announcing that they will be making a reality TV show where contestants will be involved in design projects.

In a recent editorial, Ford: Bold Moves Sink Ships, Farago focuses on the discrepancy between Ford’s new marketing message and their vehicle lineup. The marketing message is encouraging the consumer to be bold and fresh by buying a Ford but all of the company’s new cars (except for the Mustang and now-extinct GT supercar) are conservative and generic. As is taught in Marketing 101, the best way to make a marketing campaign succeed is build a great product. Great products market (and sell) themselves. Ultimately, the market itself will be the major influence for how your product is positioned.

Favorite line in the editorial:

In fact, Ford’s Bold Move message borders on self-parody: be bold and buy a vehicle from a car company struggling for survival.

Brilliant! Come on Ford, this is do-or-die time for the company. With dwindling sales, a non-existant passenger car lineup, and only a couple brightspots in the pipeline, the company truly does need to take intelligent, drastic steps to emerge victorious. You can’t sell the consumer just with bold marketing. You sell the consumer with bold products that meet their needs and fit their wallets.

There’s a new networking event for local folks in the tech entrepreneur community called Stirr. I’m usually not a big fan of going to such events, not because I don’t like talking with people (anyone that knows me knows that if there’s one thing I absolutely do like is to talk) but because loud, crowded environments such as these don’t usually promote much meaningful conversation. By the end of the night, I have a bunch of business cards and a voice that’s shot to hell. Some people probably think that a stack of business cards equals victory but for me the only thing tangible I get out of going to these types of events is meeting other entrepreneurs who share the same spark that I have. It’s inspiring to me and often serves as that extra glass of Kool-aid that I need to stay optimistic about entrepreneurship. Anyways…. one thing unique about Stirr is that they allow a few companies at each events 60 seconds to pitch their company and live demo their product(s) throughout the night. The companies that participated tonight were:

3Jam – Text message a group of friends at once. Definitely a nifty tool when you need to engage in a conversation with multiple contacts on your cell phone. The problem is that this is a feature, not a business. They can either charge users a nominal fee per use or add advertising to the messages. A lot of people text message so this should be good revenue right? Wrong. If this becomes popular, you can bet that carriers will implement this simple functionality on their own and add it to their own list of paid services. It’s unlikely that carriers, who are notoriously snobby, will agree to some sort of joint marketing/revenue partnership. Carriers also have the resources to better integrate such functionality into the phones themselves.

Accomplice – According to Accomplice, their product is “a simple, intuitive application that integrates an efficient personal organizational tool with the ability to quickly pull together a team. With Accomplice, busy professionals can be effective, save time, and execute on all of their personal and work activities using a single system.” Ummm.. Yeah. Your guess is mine. I did see a demo of their product from a distance and it seemed polished but from what I’ve seen, most people end up sticking with very simple – often crude- solutions to organizing their personal information rather than using fancy PIM’s. I’m not saying Accomplice is bad but if I can’t understand what it is and how it’ll simplify my life in 15 seconds, that’s a problem. But who knows, maybe my life just isn’t busy enough?

JumpCut – Edit videos online. I haven’t personally used their service yet but I was impressed by the demo they were showing. I don’t see these guys surviving as a standalone service. They will need to be able to integrate with other video services such as YouTube to directly access, modify and then save videos stored elsewhere. Otherwise, it’ll be too much of a pain in the ass to upload your video to JumpCut, modify it, download it back and then upload it to YouTube. And this is when the service is free. Presumably, JumpCut will want to earn some money so that will further deter users. Video sharing communities like YouTube will either build thier own tool (which of course will have much better adoption even if it’s not as good) or buy JumpCut. I could definitely see a big player like Y!, Google, MS, Fox Interactive buying these guys to bolster their respective video sharing offerings. Again, I have not actually used JumpCut so I don’t know how good it is.

LogSavvy – The dude who spoke about LogSavvy roused the most interest from the audience by talking about how relational DB’s do not allow applications to easily mine the data to discover relationships between …. eh, I sort of lost him in the middle. Their website is similarly vague. From what I can tell they have software/systems to analyze web server logs, db logs, and other logs to form custom reports and views. Being able to poke and prod your data to optimize your product for your customers is becoming ever-more essential to success especially as not only user data but also user behavior is logged. So, I could imagine the demand for this type of software is high. I guess we’ll have to wait for something more tangible to understand what they’re up to.

TheMintPages – Review site for female beauty products. As the host of Stirr reminded the audience, the female beauty product market is huge. Review sites for every day products don’t really exist so I could definitely see a niche site focused exclusively on the needs of this consumer catching on. Of course, this is basically a social content play so the key to success is all about not only reeling users into the site, but hooking them into creating content for the site – whether that means writing a product review or replying to other user’s comments. I personally did not like their site design though. It’s way too Web2.0 which gets the thumbs-up from the geeks but geeks (usually) don’t buy makeup.

I was browsing LinkedIn today and noticed something: the advertisements on their site seem to be horribly targeted. For the AdSense ads, I repeatedly got ads for self-storage companies and real-estate search services. I’m not sure what content on my profile and other pages indicate that I might be interested in either of those two categories, but the ads that Google served to me were exclusively those. In LinkedIn’s own “Sponsored links” there’s more crappy ads like for mortgage rates and corporate surveys. It also appears as if LinkedIn has having trouble selling their (non-AdSense) ad space since many pages seem to have less than the max number of ads and the same couple of ads just keep repeating.

In this day and age of Internet advertising, such untargeted ads are pretty appalling. Hey, LinkedIn, do you guys wanna make money? In a recent article, MySpace said that they will be using user profile and behavioral data to better target ads. LinkedIn can and should already be doing the same thing. An easy first step would be to use AdSense’s own section targeting support to focus advertising based on people’s profile summaries. From my profile you can immediatley see key words indicating that I’m a software engineer, founder of a tech startup, a blogger, where I went to school, etc. That’s a lot of valuable data to help improve ad relevancy presented to me. Moreover, if I’m searching for someone in my network with J2ME programming experience, why not serve up ads relevant to Java/wireless development. In this latter example of a search, I have a clear intent for being on the site as opposed to just casual browsing. LinkedIn must make sure to monetize this type of activity.
There may even be some more interesting profiling that can be done by not only looking at people’s own profiles but also looking at the profiles of 1st or even 2nd degree connections.

Anyways, I just found the whole thing pretty shocking. Sites such as LinkedIn generate huge numbers of pageviews yet they generate such small revenue. You’d think that LinkedIn would have done everything possible to maximize the value of their ad space. It seems instead that they’ve already accepted that it sucks and are focusing on premium services. Oh well…