Never have I been more inundated with more startups. It’s as those someone somewhere opened a giant faucet and they all came flooding out.
Most of them are software driven. Simple ideas. Simple apps. Three driving factors:
1. Ease of writing new software.
2. The existence of app delivery mechanisms, like Apple’s App Store.
3. The explosion of broadband and WiFi.
4. Computing power to rent in the cloud.
5. The new belief that you can really improve your service and corporate productivity with apps that make life easier and friendlier for your customers.
It’s a great time to form your own business and stop with this stockmarket agita.
Tell your children to get with it. We need them to make us rich.
Two pieces I’d like you to read this weekend:
+ Debt Burden Lifting, Consumers Open Wallets a Crack. The New York Times.
+ A third industrial revolution. The Economist’s fascinating Special Report.
Want some blood in the streets? Spanish equities have fallen dramatically:
Writes Business Insider:
Spain’s IBEX 35 index-which tracks the largest 35 stocks in the Bolsa de Madrid by market capitalization-is down a whopping 19.36 percent year to date.
But this is nothing in comparison to how fall it has fallen since 2007. That index is down a full 9,037.6 points since hitting a high of 15,945.70 on November 8, 2007. Since that time, the index has lost about three-fifths of its value.
The index is not far off its multi-year lows either-if it sees losses of more than 1.31 percent tomorrow then it will be below the crisis low of 6,817.40 set on March 9, 2009.
Ugly stuff.
Spain’s economy is in shreds. Unemployment is high. BUT the blood if flowing in the streets. Undoubtedly a good time to buy EWP? Here’s its ten-year chart:
Freaked by the $10,000 cell phone bill. Remember the Wall Street Journal article about enormous cell phone charges traveling overseas? Click here.
Strikes me when you turn your auto-synching, auto-downloading phone on anywhere, it eats bandwidth. I fiddled with my iPhone this morning and couldn’t figure out how to shut it off, except to turn on Airline Mode. Maybe that’s the solution.
Amazon’s important new service. Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace launched yesterday. It’s an “app store” for cloud computing. It offers cloud-based business application software and developer tools as a pay-as-you-go service. But instead of downloading the apps to your computer, you run them “in the cloud” on Amazon.com’s servers. Within 5 years, writes Steven Schoen, the best software guy I know, “This probably will also become the standard way to deliver consumer apps.” Click here.
Apple fell 3.4% yesterday. Fscal second-quarter earnings report is due late next Tuesday. Some people are freaked that Verizon just reported lower smartphone sales. But some Apple analysts think Apple is picking up iPhone sales in other places, like China. Hence what Apple actually will report next Tuesday is a a gamble
It was the seventh down day in the last eight trading days for the stock. The down trend started on April 10, after Apple hit an all-time high of 644 intraday. Apple closed last night at 587.44. It’s down 9%. Here’s the chart this year featuring my famous rendline:
The Internet is bursting with Apple stories — “Why The Verizon data freaked Apple shareholders.” Click here. Apple’s Stock Is Getting Mauled. Business Insider.
My stop loss on Apple is 10%. I’m almost there. I do have, (perhaps misguided?) faith.
Harry Newton who uses his bicycle for trips to the bank and meetings, and tennis. What wonderful days to bike. This glorious New York Spring (now that the Claritin has finalll kicked in..
Taken from my bicycle on Sixth Avenue with my iPhone 4. Looking through the new skyscrapers to the Empire State building, bristling with new cell phone antennas pumping out 4G/LTE.
Hi Harry,
Go to “Settings”, “General”, and then “Network”. There you should have some options to turn of data roaming, 3G and Cellular Data..
Hope this helps.
“Tell your children to get with it. We need them to make us rich.”
The insurance premiums, taxes, lack of family wage paying jobs, greedy ultra-rich, and out of control tuitions, have wiped any thought of that out. Many of the twenty and thirty year olds I know are barely making it. Let alone try and make their parents rich.
In addition, most kids I knew did not get anything but luggage when they turned 18. Let alone a free ride to college, financial support, vacations, and cars. Keep the rose glasses on. If you took them off you would not be able to stand what you see.
How / why are these startups “inundating” you? As part of an Angel network, or investment circle? Or directly contacting you?
Harry, save yourself a couple % and tighten your $AAPL stop. It's over. (Sure, AAPL will still do well, even with $800 iPhones. But the chance to sell a share for $600 is now gone for good.)
“But instead of downloading the apps to your computer, you run them “in the cloud” on Amazon.com’s servers.” — Oh wow… Amazon has re-invented Google Docs. I've been using Google Docs for three years as a great way to share and mutually develop documents. Your software guru is right about cloud computing, but don't give Amazon all the credit!
I wouldn't worry too much about Apple. The major executives of the world have decided that the iPhone is going to be the standard platform for communicating among themselves, and even a long-time Windows user such as Yours Truly is planning on moving over to an all-Apple computing platform (Mac, iPad, etc.) as soon as possible. Just the ability to develop apps for the Apple market alone is worth it.