6 AM Pacific

Joost - Internet TV for Real

I got an invite for Joost and tried it out yesterday. It rocked.

Joost, for those who haven’t heard about it yet, is basically internet TV. Full screen, high(er) quality, mainstream TV content streamed to your computer over broad band. The guys behind it are Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, the same duo that did Kazaa and Skype. With their backgrounds you have to take Joost seriously.

And it doesn’t disappoint. Yesterday, I downloaded the beta version of the client software and settled down to try it out. My verdict - this was vastly superior to any other video on the internet and ‘acceptable’ when compared to regular TV. Every program started with a few seconds of rickety video but once the buffering kicked-in, it was smooth sailing from there on. More »

Don’t Believe Everything You Read

On May 16, Engadget, a blog on consumer electronics, posted breaking news that Apple’s iPhone and Leopard OS were going to be delayed. This was based upon an internal Apple email that they had been able to lay their hands on.Within a few minutes, AAPL had lost 3% off its market cap. Techcrunch has a blow by blow account here. Paul Kedrosky has another interesting take on the episode here.

My interest in this episode is in connecting it with other recent developments in text analysis based algorithmic trading to see what this might augur for the future. More »

The real deal with offshore captives

Recently Forrester Research released a report that says that offshore captives, which have been much in vogue for the last three years, are “imploding”. A blog post here makes for interesting reading, especially the comments. More »

More insiders being recruited as CEOs

A few months back I had written on Runaway CEO compensation after the Bob Nardelli/Home Depot fiasco. My sole recommendation on the way out of the CEO compensation mess was - better succession planning. More »