The New York Times has a wonderful post that illustrates the web of debt weaved in Europe.

To read the full post, click here.

Oil and Gas MENA produced a very interesting infographic that breaks down the buyers of Iranian Oil – and other interesting information.

To read the full post, check it out here.

9gag.com has recently put out a nice infographic that illustrates, pretty nicely, the differences between Public Relations, Marketing, Advertising and Branding.

The Wall Street Journal recently had an article about the Fed getting ready to start off-loading the $1.1T worth of mortgages they bought during the crisis (in an attempt to save the banks).

From the article (note, I added emphasis):

At $1.1 trillion in holdings of mortgage debt guaranteed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, the Fed owns roughly a fifth of all these outstanding instruments.

Some Fed officials are pushing for a more aggressive approach. In April, Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, called for monthly sales of $15 billion to $25 billion to eliminate the Fed’s mortgage holdings within five years. “It is likely the Fed will have to sell a nontrivial amount of its MBS holdings,” he concluded. Some Fed policy makers—among them Charles Plosser of Philadelphia, Jeffrey Lacker of Richmond and Kevin Warsh at the Fed board—are sympathetic.

At first glance, so much money has been thrown around in the media that 1.1 Trillion Dollars seems like it’s not so big. To put it into perspective, let’s look at some prospective buyers and see how much they would be able to buy and how long they would last:

• Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) – According to Google Finance, Warren Buffet’s investment company had approximately $30.5B in cash and short-term equivalents at the end of the last fiscal year. Assuming they have the same amount of cash (which is probably inaccurate, but just simplifying), and also assuming that Warren Buffet wanted to buy as many mortgage backed securities from the Federal Reserve as he could get his hands on, and also assuming that he was prepared to use all of his cash to do so…he could only participate in a maximum of 2 months (let’s call it 1.5months) worth of sales by the Fed – before he runs out cash. So that’s one large investment company down, with only 58.5 months of sales to go.
• Goldman Sachs (GS) –  had approximately $38.21B in cash and short-term equivalents. So they would be able to participate for 2 months. So only 56.5 months to go.
• The largest hedge funds in the World – with total assets under management of approximately $530B, if they were able to ‘magically’ liquidate their holdings and purchase from the fed…that entire process would take between 21.2 – 35.33 months. So only 25 more months to go (assuming some middle ground between both values is chosen).
• Google (GOOG) – had $24.5B cash on hand. So they can play ball for approximately 1 month.
• Microsoft (MSFT) – had $31B cash…so they can last 1.5 months as well.
• Coca-Cola (KO) –    Only has $9B, so they can’t even sit at the table and participate (again, this assumes one company per month, to get the shortest time of getting rid of the mortgages as possible).
• Apple (AAPL) – Has $24B, so they can participate for 1 month.

Only 21.5 more months to go.

I know this is a major simplification, it’s just an interesting exercise to look at. Especially in this media climate with hundreds of zeroes thrown all over the place. Also note that I have not included large pension funds, retirement schemes, etc. that typically have very large wads of cash…mainly because those funds tend to be abstract to most people. When you see companies constantly in the news, it’s easier to visualize how big the Fed’s balance sheet is.

Hope that puts it into perspective.

Another thing I have been thinking about lately, is the part of the proposal that will regulate the financial industry (I am pro reform) that creates a ‘bailout kitty’. i.e. the liabilities of large financial institutions will be taxed and stored in this kitty. What I am wondering is this: Where will that money be invested and who will manage it? If they (the managers of said kitty) ‘play it safe’ by investing in sovereign debt, which country’s debt? Won’t that create some perverse incentive for countries to keep running fiscal deficits because they have a literal ‘large pot of gold’ sitting down at their disposal that will allow them to finance any program they want to finance? i.e. moral hazard of the political sort.

Not saying the liabilities shouldn’t be taxed, and the kitty not created…just saying…it might have unintended consequences that are not currently being discussed. However, that might be the subject of another post.

P.S. Image courtesy of Mykl Roventine on Flickr.

 

Idea: Scratch and win.

Concept: Give consumers free stuff (on a very consistent basis) and give advertisers more brand engagement. Think woot.com but with free, quality, stuff (or actually even deeply discounted – per the coupon in the win).

Existing Competitors: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scratch-off-now/id358970551?mt=8 & www.scratchoffnow.com

That’s the idea in a nutshell. Here are some more details:

This app would be free in the App Store. Naturally, this idea would work best with folks that have existing relationships either with an ad agency (or agencies) or with brands and other advertisers.

The graphics would be holding a simple coin, and you use your real finger to scratch the ticket with the coin.

Game mechanics could be included, so points could be accumulated that users can redeem for some discounts (think Visa, American Express, Airlines, etc. kind of points).

The trick is to start with a bang, say giving away 500 – 1,000 iPads in the first 48 hours.

Then, once you have the momentum going you continue to provide small wins for the users even when they don’t ‘win’ a major prize (supplied by a vendor or brand).

The app can even be branded (charge for impressions above the results of the prize, or the prize itself is sponsored by some other brand).

Build functionality to allow users to ‘share points’ with others. Add a social aspect to it, so I can send 1,000 points to my sister so she can do whatever she wants with it.

Integrate it with Facebook Game Developers (like Zynga) where points and ‘tickets’ are hidden in the games – work out some sort of kickback commission with them. This can also be extended to other game platforms – like World of Warcraft, HeyZap, etc.

Implement scavenger hunts for ‘golden tickets’, where each ticket is a guaranteed prize – this comes back to the game mechanics idea earlier.

That’s all I can think of right now, and many people might ask…why don’t I do it. Well, to be honest, I am quite busy right now and I am not a big fan of the advertising model (i.e. working with brands and advertisers…it’s just not my forte. I am not bashing it…just saying it’s not my thing).

Hope this sparks some ideas and someone wants to run with it, that would be awesome. I would definitely download the app (provided it can work on my iPod Touch 2Gen).

You are free to take the idea and run with it. If you do run with it, some credit would be nice 

I have some additional ideas on other possibilities, so if you would like me to be involved in any way, feel free to reach out to me. You don’t have to…just saying.

P.S. Image courtesy of meddygarnet on Flickr.

 

Ok…hate is such a strong word. I don’t exactly hate them…I don’t hate anyone actually (not that I can think of ). However, the image below illustrates why they have fallen from grace, and shows what is fundamental wrong with them.

To explain, I just finished doing a fresh install of XP for a friend and am installing the pre-requisite stuff. Acrobat (PDF reader) was one of them, just because I needed something to read PDFs and that’s the first thing that comes to mind. So I google ‘Acrobat Download’ and am given a link that takes me to their download page. I click download and the screenshot captures what happens next (click to view fullscreen):

As you can see….they force me to download ‘Adobe Download Manager’ plug-in by ‘getPlus’ (who the hell is getPlus? – That’s rhetorical, I don’t know and don’t care they are also in my bad books) for Firefox. Then, I have to restart Firefox, which then loads Adobe Download Manager, which then hits me with a ton of banner ads that slide from side to side (that I can’t close or block) and, while downloading Acrobat – which I then have to install. On top of that, once acrobat is installed, they also installed ‘Adobe Air’. It could have been that they gave me the option to opt-out, but I was so pissed by this install process that I glossed over it, but it just made the entire process even worse.

Is Adobe joking? This reminds me of some shady ‘third-party’ app site. I will not be going through that process again, that’s for sure.

The worst part is, Acrobat isn’t even the best free PDF reader. Next time I will go with my usual default.

Adobe…stop worrying about Apple’s 3.3.1 change in their iPhone TOS and start focusing on your own customers and improving their experiences and lives. Maybe if you did that, and made Flash better people wouldn’t allow Apple to get away with the shafting they are now giving you and many other developers.

As a follow-up to my last piece about Jason F. & DHH being wrong about one thing, which generated a bunch of chatter (surprisingly more on twitter than on HN) and commentary, I have confirmed that they are indeed right about at least one other thing (I am sure they are right about many things, but I have solid proof for this one).

In their latest book, Rework [Amazon], one of their many principles are ‘pick a fight’. They also talk about having a point of view. So that’s exactly what I did. I read their book, was impressed by how they followed their own advice, and while I agreed with most of their points there was one that I strongly disagreed with. That is their notion that companies should stay small and not aim to grow. I believe we have a moral obligation to grow the companies/ideas that have the ability to do so. Be sure to check out the comments, as the discussion continued.

I can only assume that the reason they say you should pick a fight or have a point of view is that you stand out and get attention (because many companies don’t take sides/positions). If I am wrong, DHH or Jason, please feel free to correct me.

As a result of my fight picking, I saw a huge bump in traffic. I submitted the article to HN and nothing much happened – I had expected a bigger bang, but it puttered out the gate and fizzled in the HN-upcoming story graveyard. Then as a last ditch effort to generate some traffic I simply sent out a tweet, and both DHH & Jason Fried responded. JF retweeted it, and DHH responded on the actual article.

Here are my traffic graphs:

 

I don’t understand why the bulk of the traffic referrals come up as ‘direct’ when I know that many of them came from either twitter or the bit.ly URL created by Jason Fried and tweeted out.

So, once you have a point of view, and someone else to pick a fight with…doing so can get you some amount of attention.

P.S. Image 1 courtesy of Kay Vee.INC on Flickr.

 

I have been stumbling across many of these infographics lately, and I couldn’t not share them here.

Intac.net recently put out an awesome infographic that illustrates the companies that dominate the internet (in terms of number of servers). Guess who is the leader, by a long shot. It’s quite staggering actually.Make sure to read the disclaimer at the bottom though….there’s always a disclaimer. Still informative and quite telling.

To check out the full post, go here.

P.S. Image 1 courtesy of Patrick H Lauke on Flickr.

Gizmodo recently put out a very interesting infographic that illustrates the many product spaces that the big three are directly competing with. Oh how I love free markets. Competition is one the of the best mechanisms ever!

To check out the full post at Gizmodo,go here

P.S. Image 1 courtesy of Dunechaser on Flickr.

Sometimes it is easy for us to get sidetracked by the ‘larger’ challenges that Obama is tackling, that we miss the little things before our very eyes. Americans won’t see the effects of health care reform for another few years, easily. The same would apply to financial reform and a carbon cap/trade/credit law.

However, there is a little bill that was passed in May 2009 that I, personally, have directly seen the effects of. 

Below is one of my credit card statements as of February 2010:

Nothing majorly significant. All it shows is previous balance, summary of payments or purchases, finance charges minimum payment, etc. I grayed out information that could possibly be used for nefarious purposes (not you wonderful people reading my blog…the other dishonest people on the interwebs).

Contrast that with my statement from March 2010:

March is COMPLETELY different. Breaking down how much I will pay total if I stick with the minimum payment or if I paid a higher amount. It doesn’t matter much to me, because I always pay more than my minimum, but it just jumps out at you how much you are paying in interest.

That, is change I can believe in!

P.S. Image 1 courtesy of Andres Rueda on Flickr.