cbaxter

Share this post:

Tags: bailout, comic

Tonight I logged into my CafePress store, called BankerBullshit, and was surprised to see that sales are coming in for a few products! Hot items include Equities in Dallas shirts, Rainmaker Hats, and “Reach Out” shirts. I’m definitely surprised (but admit I bought a hat too).

Apparenly a global collapse in the field of finance and investment banking drives sales in related, niche retail.

I launched the store on the back of the Banker Bullshit Generator (crafted around 3:00am during my London banking days) and didn’t have any high expectations to generate sales. I was more curious about how the CafePress model worked from a resale perspective. Overall, I’m happy with it — but the UI / navigation is pretty terrible. And you guys are sending my checks to the wrong address (my fault)!

Share this post:

Tags: banker store, generator

Google released a contact / calendar synch for the iPhone. I’m fairly sure it works, but do I really want all of my gmail contacts on my phone? They have always struggled with contacts (missing the boat on social networking – except in Brazil) and, in my opinion, since having that ‘auto-add’ feature. The result is thousands of contacts and not all of them remotely useful. Do I really want the guy who subletted my apartment stored in my local directory?

I suppose the fault is mine for not wanting to scrub through the contact list. Not this week…

Share this post:

Tags: google, iphone, software

Google is rolling out Latitude, which is a location publishing service. Will be interesting to see how this performs across platforms. Will likely pull using contact numbers, since the Gmail contacts base is crude at best. Many companies will compete for this space and my guess is the best social network will win, since the technology is replicable but the social data is more difficult.

Share this post:

Tags: google, iphone, software

The NYT has a great graphic that lays out keywords on Twitter against a timeline. For those that don’t know, Twitter is a form of microblogging that is quickly gaining mainstream acceptance. Although the firehouse remains closed for now, the ability to collect and analyze the millions of tweets has a lot of potential — everything from breaking news to consumer insights.

Share this post:

Tags: superbowl, twitter

Photo gallery from Time Magazine. 

I remember being amazed in Cambodia that Angor Wat, such a once magnificent city, could fall off the planet, left to be overrun by the surrounding jungle. Seems it has happened in my own backyard. Causes are many, but the outcome can not be ignored. 

Detroit specific – it is highlights the importance of diversification with regard to urban planning and the risks associated with economies that are heavily tied to specific industries. Specialization comes with many benefits, but the associated risks cannot be easily mitigated.

My own opinion? The big three will fail. A bailout will only delay the cash burn. Bankruptcy is the clear option to break the union contracts and reset the cost-base. Management should be fired and the companies should be broken up. The economies of scale associated with volume are not enough to compete with foreign manufacturers, where business models are simply better. Some brands will survive, many will fail. New entrants, with quality and green angles  (Tesla) will be well positioned. 

More likely though, foreign manufactures will likely face a government competitor, one that will favor protectionism and competitive tax angles. Globalization and pure play capitalism will pause.

I wonder what will happen to Detroit, but I hope manufacturing will return to the US. We are not too good for it.

Share this post:

Tags: autos, detroit

On a lighter note, I came across this company called cherrypeel today. Essentially, it a social network for voting on upcoming music. The idea (same as reddit, digg, etc) is that popular music filters to the top through voting. This is a great idea (especially since you can tag by genre) and it’s like a breath of fresh air from the Billboard 100. Will be interesting to see if anyone is able to leverage social towards identifying new bands for labels — hit the front page and get signed, etc.

EDIT: Actually, this exists (in a number of forms) — watched a presentation by http://www.thenextbigsound.com/ at Entrepreneurship Idol. Model is great if you can get the scale and keep the community from being gamed.

Share this post:

Tags: music, web

With so much turmoil in the markets, it is easy to become distracted to the underlying causes of the situation. Cleary, markets are interconnected and there are “many factors at work”, but the bulk of this meltdown can be traced back to aggresive lending, a lack of transparency and a housing bubble that went pop.

For many years now, the mortgage industry has been largely unregulated. With banks developing increasingly risky products (i.e. a no income verified mortage that can gear up to 95%), the amount of money available to a home buyer seemed limitless. With housing prices continuing to climb, this seemed like a no-brainer investment to everyone. In fact, it was a great strategy to live outside of ones means on credit cards and then roll the balances into the mortgage through a refinance – extracting the gains you made that year on home appreciation.

The investment banks thought the same way. They could buy up huge pools of these mortgages (regardless of how they are traunched or diced) and leverage them up to 95%, pocketing the spread against the borrowed purchase proceeds. It was a very profitable stragegy, assuming asset prices continued to rise.

Then the bubble popped. Home prices began to fall at the same time as people found they couldn’t exactly make their re-setting mortgage payments. Defaults on the mortgages crushed the values of the pools of mortgages that the banks were sitting on. Considering they had very little equity invested, the losses started to pile on. You can only lose so many tens of billions of dollars before you go under.

The result on the finance community? We will likely see increased regulation that further caps the risks that banks can take and increases the transparency of their holdings. This will be legislation that we will live with for the next 30 or 40 years and it will likely take bankers 3-5 of those years to figure out how to surpass the legislation and make money again (with the attached risk).

Share this post:

Tags: markets

With the shackles of Blogger largely shed, I am empowered to leverage the minds of the open source plugin community to make this humble blog a bit more dynamic. WordPress has an interface for adding widgets/plugins, whether the blog is on their servers or self-hosted (as this one is). There are thousands of add-ons (even a way to generate an iPhone template for the site).

Two that I’m enjoying:

Lifestream

Here it is called Recent Activity on the main sidebar. As the number of web-services and communication platforms increases, it is harder to aggregate the information in a centralized point. Many platforms provide this feature (Facebook, FriendFeed, Google, etc), but each wants to monopolize the content within a gated community. Lifestream provides a similar service that can be self-hosted and is easily customized.

Disqus

I replaced the standard commenting platform with one that is more customizable and social. A key feature of the system is that you can manage and reply to online comments via email. I believe they are backed by Union Square Ventures (Fred Wilson) and I’ve been meaning to give it a go. So far, it’s been a great change from the stagnant comment management systems that Al Gore invented. 

Share this post:

Earlier today I had the opportunity to sit in on a Q/A session with Gotham Chopra, who was one of the co-founders of Virgin Comics. He’s had some incredible experiences and it was great to hear the entrepreneur’s take on the founding, and subsequent unwinding, of the comic book company.

I am impressed that the pair, who were not too seasoned, were able to bring on Richard Branson as an investor/partner (hence the naming). The story sold on an exposure angle into India (bundled with the Marvel/DC rights into the region). That region is set for retail explosion, with over a billion people and the majority checking the “under 20″ box. As the middle class continues to expand, so will the opportunities – barring any economic atom bomb.

The original vision for the comic venture was for creative content development in India (i.e. finding and growing the Superman or Batman for India). It was interesting to hear how this ambition was sidetracked as the business, which was now funded by Virgin, adopted a more ambitious and corporate driven agenda.

In the end, Virgin revisited their global strategy and discovered it needed to allocate more time to the established franchises (Atlantic, Money, etc). The end result was their exit from the venture and its renaming/rebirth as Liquid Comics. 

It will be interesting to see how the company repositions itself — maybe we will now see the Indian superheroes that were the original vision.

Share this post:

Tags: entrepreneurship