Archive for February, 2008
Feb
5
Posted in Stocks
Today was a sad day for the NYSE. The DOW closed down 370 points, the biggest one day percentage drop since February 2007. Personally, I suffered major losses. I bought 500 shares of both NWA (Northwest Airlines) and ABK (Ambac) on news that oil prices dropped and a recovery plan is in the works for the bond insurers, respectively. However, they both closed down around unch, but I bought too high mid-day when they were both on an upward trend, so I suffered major losses by the end the day (don’t want to name specifics, but I lost in the $X,XXX).
Market plummeted because Federal Reserve Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker dropped the “R” word in a speech today. What is the “R” word? Recession. And that obviously scared the bee-Jesus out of investors. Not to mention poor financial sector reports and other misc. bad news. Heck, I was just watching CNBC, and they declared today as “Terrible Tuesday”. Boy, they were sure as hell right.
As they say, you win some and you lose some. So far, my stock portfolio over the past month still has a 4% increase, even after today’s substantial losses. And I’m pretty sure we’ll bounce back tomorrow. Markets have been declining heavily for a few days now. It’s about time for investors to regain their confidence and buy some damn stocks. How does “Winning Wednesday” sound to you?
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Feb
4
Posted in Internet
The creation of a strong image is what brings success to individuals, partnerships, and even corporations. People need to know who you are, what you do, where you do it, why you do it, and how you do it in order to be interested in what you have to offer. And interested people means WoM (word-of-mouth), which means more sales and more traffic. It’s a damn domino effect!
On the Internet, branding is no less aggressive as it is in the real world (TV, newspapers, trade shows, etc). With the intense competition for publicity as the over-saturated Internet ad market grows, companies sometimes go a long way (with increasingly deeper pockets) in order to get the word out on their new releases. The traditional methods of advertising no longer work: Internet users have turned a blind eye to the boring standard IAB spots we’ve been using for years. Aligning products and services with high traffic websites is the new thing, and effective branding is the key to doing it.
There are a three main ways of implementing branding successfully online:
3. The “we’re better than them” method - the company flexes its muscles and makes users feel as though there is no competition; that the company is superior, no questions asked. Effective in viral WoM.
Ex. Microsoft blasts Gamespot.com’s PS3 section homepage with Xbox 360 wallpaper and super-leaderboard-size ads.
2. The “we care about our partners” method - the company tries to show that they care for a service (such as a website) by aligning themselves in a personal way. Effective in spreading positive reaction towards the advertiser in a large community.
Ex. Axe purchases “presented by” statement on PSP3D.com’s logo, and performs a site ad spot takeover.
1. The “we are really rich” method - the company slams the target audience with a large amount of advertising, and likewise, press attention in order to create an “in-your-face” effect which imprints an image in user’s heads. Effective in getting users to remember said product/service, as well as spreading WoM.
Ex. Storm Warning Unrated DVD performs full site takeover (wallpaper + roadblock + logo). The works.
As you can see, the advertising techniques presented above are, simply put, ruthless. Some viewers would call them annoying, others would call them marketing masterpieces. But the gist of it is that the early techniques for advertising are obsolete. With interstitial, video pre-roll, and other types of interactive advertising popping up all over the Internet, webmasters are trying their best to make more room for more ads, and advertisers are trying their best to better allocate their ad dollars to achieve the biggest bang for the buck.
In 2008, it’s all about the branding. The 468×60 banner of yesteryear is worthless.
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Feb
4
Posted in Hobbies
Time to show off the whip! Let me start off by saying that I don’t think my ride kicks serious ass. It’s not a fast car, but a luxury car. It’s extremely comfortable, responsive, and the handling is just simply unheard of in its class. Ever since I’ve owned this car, I’ve developed a deep taste for Audi engineering: this car is amazingly fun to drive even if it’s barely pushing 180 HP stock.
Anyways, I picked up this 2005 Audi A4 1.8T used from HBL in Tysons Corner, VA about six months ago (after totaling the previous whip, which was badass). I haven’t done any exterior aesthetic modifications really, I’d rather save my $ for a better car in the near future.
But here are the performance mods:
- Stage 1+ GIAC flash
- TT fuel injectors
- Forge SplitR diverter valve
- RS4 sway bars
- And… that’s it…
Pushing about 230-240 HP. It’s MUCH better than stock, but still, slower than most made-for-speed cars on the road.
Was thinking about going Stage 2 and throwing in a K04 turbo, as well as getting a TIP flash, but may not do that as I really do plan on selling this car within the next 6 months for something a lot better (especially since it’s nearing 50K miles). Even with a warranty up to 100K miles, I don’t like messing with aging German cars, I have heard some horror stories in the past.
I also have a nice audio setup. Two Alpine Type R 12″s in a sealed box, powered by two Alpine M650 amps. Powerful setup, but this car shakes a shit ton when the bass is maxed out, unfortunately. Oh, and the car IS Quattro (Audi’s all wheel drive system), even though the bumper lacks a “Quattro” tag under the “1.8 T” tag. I got rear-ended a month ago by some idiot, and when they replaced the rear bumper/trunk, they forgot to put the badge up.
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Feb
2
Posted in Business, Stocks
With Yahoo!’s market shares losing nearly 40% of their value just in the past three months, and no immediate recovery plan in sight (at least anything announced publicly to analysts and investors), there doesn’t seem to be much light at the end of the tunnel. The 50% increase in stock value on 2/01/2008, upon news of Microsoft’s offer, only goes to show how bad Yahoo!’s situation is: the buyout is the only way they can potentially recover, unless they take some drastic measures to curb their losses. And by drastic, I mean revolutionary. Something that can best Google’s offerings. Something that will change the face of the Internet as we know it. Otherwise, at this rate, Google will continue to absorb users, advertisers, and effectively, potential cash from Yahoo!.
On a personal note, I have recently stopped using Yahoo!’s publisher advertising program, as their RPC (rate per click) has plunged since the program’s onset. Their lack of support for the big publishers, and extremely limited advertiser pool has sent that program down the tubes. I know many fellow webmasters who have also flocked back to Google’s Adsense for their contextual ad serving needs; Yahoo!’s just not cutting the check anymore.
There are a few precedents of technology corporations taking over competitors. The Sprint acquisition of Nextel was one such monumental failure of a purchase. Sprint, with a mindset to use Nextel’s failing network (famous for the push-to-talk walkie-talkie fad) to expand their own network, and hopefully boost their customer reach and better overall service, literally dropped like a rock after reeling Nextel in. After reaching a 52-week high of ~$24 a share in stock value just after the purchase (which falsely boosted investor confidence), Sprint Nextel has plummeted to the point where, just the other day, Sprint announced they are writing off most of Nextel’s purchase value (near 30 billion dollars). Check out their one year stock performance:
This doesn’t necessarily mean that Microsoft will tank if they buy Yahoo!. If they manage to work on Yahoo!’s search algorithms and promotion, and refine advertising stances as well as vastly improve Yahoo!’s publisher advertising network (which is still in BETA even after years of development), they might have something which could potentially take a chunk out of Google’s market (which creates most of its respective revenue from the Adwords/Adsense program as well as sponsored search results).
Lets not forget, however, the main difference between Microsoft and Yahoo! structure: they operate and create their main revenue from two totally different markets. Microsoft has been for years developing and producing a tangible retail product (Windows, of course), and successfully selling it to billions of consumers all around the world. Microsoft has a solid growth plan with multiple layers of fiscal protection, not to mention it’s backed by the richest man in the world, Bill Gates. Sure, Microsoft has been also spending R&D money on improving their presence on the Internet, but so far, all progress has proved lackluster. Heck, the only reason “Live Search” gets any traffic is because IE’s homepage is MSN.com. When a monopoly still fails to compete against Google, you know you’ve got some issues.
Microsoft’s budget appropriation over the past few years has been extremely poor, and their innovation in the world of technology has been near nil. The Zune was poorly accepted by public as it featured no major incentives for iPod users to switch over (not to mention the branding factor that Apple’s marketing dept. did a hell of a job on, which Microsoft utterly failed to reproduce), Vista was void of any real-world improvement to give corporations a reason to re-train staff and spend thousands on new licenses for PCs, and various web ventures like Live.com failed to even barely entice Internet browsers to change their homepage from Google. IE 7? A joke compared to FireFox, king of the browsers in this day.
If I were Bill, I’d be wary of this deal. $44.6 billion dollars is a lot of money, especially for a web-based company. The web bubble continues to grow with each and every over-priced dot com sale. The poor spending habits as of late will surely come back to haunt them in the distant future. Microsoft surely won’t go out of business, but they may be in for some hard times ahead if they go through with this deal. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.
Digg: http://digg.com/business_finance/Yahoo_Is_Microsoft_Trying_To_Catch_A_Falling_Knife
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Feb
2
Posted in Internet
Whelp, what a day! The blog landed on the homepage of both Digg.com and Fark.com, two of the leading Internet community news/content sharing websites. Thanks guys!
A few people have mentioned I need a server upgrade. Well, yes and no. I own a few dedicated servers for all the websites I run; I am not running off some shared hosting crap that some have suggested. This blog currently runs on a Intel Xeon 3060 Dual Core Conroe Processor with 4 GB of registered RAM. Today’s downtime was not bottlenecked by a connection overload, but actually, a CPU overload. Memory usage maxed out at 93.6%, with the highest recorded server load at 121.06 (cPanel experts, you should know what I’m talking about).
Reason? Well, since I haven’t used WordPress in a while, I kinda over-estimated its efficiency at processing large requests of data. It really stinks. Probably one of the worst pre-made CMSs that I’ve had to deal with. Furthermore, this blog actually runs on the dedicated server of one of my other, rather large, forum websites, which also has a poorly coded CMS (vBulletin). I wasn’t really anticipating the immense scale of attention that the stories received, so I didn’t get a chance to properly prepare the server for heavy load (minimize useless services, enable caching, etc).
So yeah, there you have it. In an effort to protect the uptime of my other site, which is a money maker (this blog makes peanuts; I can’t sacrifice real sites for the blog unfortunately), I was basically forced to temporarily suspend this blog (hence the 404, 403, 550 errors people were complaining about) so as to ensure the main site’s uptime.
I pay unlimited bandwidth for my rack of servers, and as much as I appreciate hordes of people informing me the blog is down, I don’t appreciate derogatory comments regarding my server and administration of the server thereof. I have complex load-balanced, multi-server setups for some really big sites. My point? I’m no amateur, I’ve been running high-traffic websites for years and have dealt with the ‘Digg Effect’ many times successfully.
People tend to be overly-stereotypical that teenagers don’t know jack about servers and all the advanced techniques needed to properly maintain a website. But I consider my age is a bonus, not something to be shy about; Internet is my turf and ain’t no one gonna call me an amateur without proof to back it up!
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Feb
2
Posted in Stocks
So I’ve spent the past few days experimenting with afterhours trading. For those who have no clue what that term is, it’s basically trading stocks after the market closes (standard 9:30 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. EST). A lot of fellow investors have previously warned me about the high risks associated with afterhours trading, but I decided to take it for a spin. Can good money be made on futures?
Not really, unless you’re really damn good. Allow me to explain why afterhours trading is so risky:
1. You don’t have the inside scoop - with the NYSE/Nasdaq filled with tons of traders located in NYC itself, amongst the brightest of investors in the world, coupled with a handful of advanced prediction/news tools not available through the standard online brokers, any money to be made is usually grabbed up by the elite traders in the afterhours arena.
2. You’re trading directly with other shareholders - there’s no middle man. Trading afterhours is literally trading between other shareholders that use online brokers. Investors set the bid price, shareholders set the ask price, just like day trading. The catch is that since the actual company’s monetary status is not involved in affecting stock prices, afterhours trading makes no affect on the “real world” value of the stock. It’s all in your mind, really.
3. Low trade volume, poor liquidity - low trade volume (especially on micro/small/mid-cap stocks) makes for an extremely illiquid platform for investing. There’s no guarantee that you will be able to find a buyer for your shares at your asking price: there’s simply not enough people to assure each trade goes through, even if you set your sell order under the lowest ask price!
4. Green futures doesn’t necessarily mean a good day to come - since your dealing with virtual value of stock, essentially your just dealing with investor confidence. Though most companies tend to release big corporate fiscal news after normal trading hours, the actual impact on the real world stock value often cannot be felt till the next day of trading. Not to mention oil prices, Fed news, etc which can easily sway what happens to the stocks closing price the next day.
5. Quotes are just unreliable - with no actual trading floor in session, a low volume of traders, and a plethora of technical issues with the online cross-broker trading, you never really know what the stocks realtime value is. Quotes are often delayed heavily, and lots of orders are not followed through. Remember to set a limit price; setting a sale/purchase at market price in afterhours could cost you.
Have I made money afterhours? Yes, a little. But with a relatively small cash account (no, I don’t have millions lying around to invest), there’s really no point stressing over the pocket change.
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Feb
1
Posted in Internet, Real World
Well, it’s kinda early in the morning to make a blog post, and I gotta run, but I awoke to 300 emails (200 from WordPress CMS informing me of unapproved comments, and another 100 from individuals supporting my case). Seems like my last blog post regarding FCPS’s crackdown on my proxy has sparked quite a debate (predominately one-sided, in my favor) online regarding student rights. I’d like to take a second to thank visitors from Fark.com for providing me with a blast of support and publicity regarding this issue.
Most everyone is suggesting I contact a lawyer and sue for libel/slander/rights. I will attempt to contact the various student rights organizations (ACLU, FIRE, EFF) and see if they can give me a hand in this. I will also try to acquire a copy of the email that was sent to nearly all the staff in the school and I will post it publicly when I get a chance to do so.
Here’s a part of the FCPS Student Rights And Responsibilities which seems to be of interest to the handful that believe FCPS does have some say:
“FCPS information systems are operated for the mutual benefit of all users. The use of the FCPS network is a privilege, not a right. Users should not do, or attempt to do, anything that might disrupt the operation of the network or equipment and/or interfere with the learning of other students or work of other FCPS employees. The FCPS network is connected to the Internet, a network of networks, which enables people to interact with millions of networks and computers. All access to the FCPS network shall be preapproved by the principal or program manager. The school or office may restrict or terminate any user’s access, without prior notice, if such action is deemed necessary to maintain computing availability and security for other users of the systems. Other disciplinary action may be imposed as stated in the Fairfax County Public Schools Student Responsibilities and Rights (SR&R) document. FCPS implements Internet filtering on all FCPS sites in accordance with the federal Children’s Internet Protection Act. Schools will continually educate students on personal safety practices and effective techniques for identifying and evaluating information and its sources.”
and
“• Help maintain the integrity of the school information system. Deliberate tampering or experimentation is not allowed; this includes the use of FCPS network and resources to illicitly access, tamper with, or experiment with systems outside FCPS.”
My thoughts regarding this:
1. I did not attempt to disrupt the learning environment and/or network/equipment of the school. They could have easily just blocked my proxy (which, they have done so now, after the accusation) and called it a day. It’s not my responsibility to make sure students don’t access proxies while in class. Hell, this is what the IT dept. is paid to do, right?
2. I did not make the proxy while on school grounds, did not use any FCPS equipment to put the proxy online, and did not take any measures promote my proxy as a means for accessing denied sites in school. I simply put a website up on my private server in my free time at home, and told two friends about it (outside of school). They told a few others, who told some other students, who told the whole school, not me.
A few people have also suggested that though I am right, I am a “brat” for making such a monumental case out of this. Please do keep in mind that I did not try to instigate this case in any way; I did not tell people about the proxy while in class (until I was accused by the administration), I actually did not setup the proxy to bypass filters in school, and I may fail out of one of my tech classes because of my restricted computer access. Not to mention I now get looks walking down the hallway.
Speaking of looks, yesterday I went to the library to print out an essay for one my classes. As I sat down and used my friend’s account to access my email and print out the essay, a librarian, who definitely does not know my name/information (as I rarely go to the library, pft), walked over and asked me what my name was. I responded “Robert” and she told me I had to get off the computers now and leave the library. True story. No idea how she knew who I was, I wonder if my “mugshot” was included as an attachment to the mass email. You never know.
Many people have requested contact information for my school/school system (here is the website). As much as I am frustrated over this case, I really don’t want to disturb the personal lives of the administrators and IT staff of the school, and will not name names publicly, as I am almost done with high school anyways and I don’t need any reason to not graduate. Feel free to help me by expressing your discontent with the decisions of the administrators, but please, no threats and no drama.
When I was pulled into the office and accused, I made sure to let the administrator know that I will get the masses of the Internet to support me on this. “Go ahead and do that”, she said, with a smug grin. Thank you all for making this fight for rights and respect easier.
More updates soon.
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