Dr. Doom & Black Swan: You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet

CNBC anchors asking the stupidest questions imaginable in the following interview w/ Roubini (my former boss @ RGE Monitor) & Taleb (the author of Black Swan):

Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb are widely credited with predicting the current financial crisis, and both told CNBC they see more rough waters ahead.



Even if we play our cards right, said Roubini, chairman of RGEMonitor.com, it will take at least 12 months to get out of this recession.

“If you don’t do everything right, and I think there’s a large probability that’s going to happen, then we may end up in a multi-year stagnation or near depression like the one that Japan had,” he added.

Roubini said there is still a 20 percent downside risk to U.S. global equities, and he advises investors to stay in cash until there is a real bottom.

“Officially the write-downs have been about $1 trillion; I see another $2.6 (trillion) coming up,” he said. “…Losses are mounting and this severe recession is going to get only bigger.”

Nassim Taleb, advisor to Universal Investments and author of The Black Swan, is not as bearish as Roubini but also sees more trouble ahead.


“If I follow my logic to the end, what I thought would happen was anything fragile…would break, namely the banks and people who have a lot of debt and private equity," he said. "This is just happening. It’s not finished yet; it hasn’t probably started."



Paul Krugman's Take:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/nouriel-roubini-and-nassim-taleb-on-cnbc/

TAKKLE bought by Alloy Media (NASDAQ:ALOY)

Some GREAT acquisition news on my previous start-up Takkle.com:

Alloy Media and Marketing, the NYC-based public (NASDAQ:ALOY) online youth-focused company, has acquired Takkle.com, a high school sports recruitment website also based in NYC. Takkle will become part of the Teen.com Network, Alloy's content and ad network, the companies said, though the site will remain separate for now. Teen.com's network includes its flagship Alloy.com, Gurl.com (which Alloy bought from iVillage, Teen.com, and Channelone.com. No financial details were released, but Alloy has bought More to come?

Takkle, founded in 2006, had raised about $12 million in two rounds, and was backed by Time Inc's Sports Illustrated, the New York City Investment Fund, WMG Investments, the investment arm of Wasserman Media Group, Greycroft Partners (our previous investors), IJ Smith Enterprises, and Jack Schneider, Managing Director at Allen & Co.



PRESS RELEASE:

#1 Teen Web Community Expands Audience Reach With Addition of Leading Online Resource and Recruitment Website for High School Athletes and Coaches

NEW YORK, Feb. 4, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Alloy Media + Marketing (ALOY), a leading provider of youth-focused innovative media, today announced it has acquired TAKKLE.com (www.takkle.com), a prominent online resource and college recruitment website for high school sports. Effective immediately, TAKKLE.com joins the TEEN.com Network, Alloy's youth focused distributed media content and advertising network that ranks as the #1 community for teens, according to comScore's MediaMetrix audience report(1).

"Alloy's TEEN.com Network delivers extensive reach into the youth audience, with the advantage of targeting by gender and by top consumer category channels," commented Matt Diamond, Co-founder and CEO of Alloy Media + Marketing.

"The acquisition of TAKKLE, together with our recent purchase of teen girl community, gURL.com, demonstrates Alloy's ongoing commitment to developing youth-focused digital media assets that offer teens superior content, while also providing marketers with a high quality and highly populated environment to engage this consumer segment. gURL.com solidifies our network's unparalleled concentration of influential teen girls and with TAKKLE, we also secure a dynamic share of the millennial male market."

TAKKLE, the largest online resource focused on high school athletics, provides a platform and tools for high school athletes to create player and team profiles, share videos and photos, track and view statistics, and allows students to connect with team coaches and college sports recruiters for advancement opportunities. The site has drawn a monthly audience of close to one million athletes(2), both male and female, and has attracted an impressive array of advertisers, including Procter & Gamble's Tampax brand, Gatorade, and Spalding.

TAKKLE Founder David Birnbaum commented, "We are thrilled to join Alloy, a company that has clearly distinguished itself as a leader in the youth market. We look forward to leveraging the many opportunities that being a part of the Alloy family offers, and to continuing to develop TAKKLE with their management team."

Mr. Diamond added, "TAKKLE has built an impressive community that not only embodies the spirit and passion of young athletes, but offers them important and unique utilities to showcase their talents and leverage opportunities to further their careers. It is a superb complement to other properties in the TEEN.com Network."

In connection with the acquisition, Alloy assumed substantially all assets involved with the operation of TAKKLE.com.

Alloy Media + Marketing's TEEN.com Network now reaches a total audience of over 20 million(3). The network includes popular youth- targeted web properties; www.alloy.com, www.gurl.com, www.teen.com, www.channelone.com and www.takkle.com, among other well known youth focused brands that offer appealing content and social utilities, along with dedicated fashion, health and beauty, sports and entertainment channels. Current TEEN.com Network clients span a wide range of product categories, and include advertisers such as Sears Holdings, Paramount Pictures, Pentel and LG Mobile.

About Alloy

Alloy Media + Marketing (AM+M) (ALOY) is one of the country's largest providers of media and marketing programs reaching targeted consumer segments. Alloy manages a diverse array of assets and services in interactive, display, direct mail, content production and educational programming. Alloy works with over 1,500 companies including half of the Fortune 200. For further information regarding Alloy, please visit our corporate website at www.alloymarketing.com.

The Future of C# (4.0)

I've recently ran into PDC2008 video of Anders Hejlsberg, the Chief Architect of the C# Language @ Microsoft, talking about the future of C#. One of my development teams uses C# extensively at work so this was relevant and actually turned out to be a very interesting talk.

First, here's the evolution of C# over the last 10 or so years:

- C# 1.0 (1998) Managed Code
First Release -- Just be happy that it works!

- C# 2.0 Generics
Similar to C++ Templates but w/ dynamic specialization, etc.

- C# 3.0 Language Integrated Query (LINQ)
Object-relational mapping (ORM)

- C# 4.0 (2009) Dynamic Programming
Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) that runs on top of the Common Language Runtime (CLR)

Given the rise of dynamically typed languages i.e. Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP(also loosely typed), it's no surprise that Hejlsberg re-evaluated the static-programming-only spiel that he's been preaching for years. Dynamic Programming is actually really neat and allows for a wide range of interoperability with other languages e.g. Python & Ruby:



"Strong typing is just like the little wheels you put on the side of a child's bike. They're reassuring, but once you know how to balance the bike, they get in the way and prevent you from gaining speed."

Dynamically Typed Objects:





Dynamic typing allows C# to dispatch JavaScript, Silverlight, Python, Ruby and COM code all from within C#. This is really neat

Other Improvements
- optional params to C# 4.0, which has been in place since .NET 2.0 w/ VB.
- named parameters (we can now shuffle parameter order)
- improved COM Interoperability (Just dynamic types & optional params alone are huge time savers when dealing w/ COM now)
- Co- and Contra-variance on Interface & delegate types

The Media Transformation -- Goodbye Print.

We all know that print media had recently near flat lined & is now pretty much dead i.e. in a recently released report, boutique investment bank Jordan, Edmiston Group estimates that between 88 percent of the publishing and advertising industry’s revenue growth over the next few years will come from four sectors: Database & Information, B2B Online Media, Consumer Online Media, and Interactive Marketing Services. In other words, it will be coming mostly from the Web.

1981: TV Report On Birth Of Internet News

"Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to see the day’s newspaper. Well, it’s not as far-fetched as it may seem."



"This is only the first step in newspapers by computers. Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer, but that’s a few years off."


2009: Ballmer Tells the Washington Post That Print is Toast

"There will be no media consumption left in ten years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form."

Sample Nikon D300 Photos

My CES 2009 Favorite: Palm Pre

The market is certainly reacting to Palm's CES announcement -- their stock has doubled in the last couple of days and is now trading close to $6.

My prediction: If Palm delivers on the Developer Network front then we'll see them carve out a large share of the smartphone market over the next 12 months.


Things I love about the new Palm Pre:

1. Contact & Calendar Sync: a pretty awesome way to sync data from multiple sources

2. Search: Great job on making things more intuitive.

3. Multitasking: The cards interface and dashboards are awesome. I never understood why Apple has never allowed multitasking.

4. Wireless Charging: Wireless charging via inductive technology.

5. A Physical Qwerty Keyboard: Looks great -- need to see if it feel as good as a RIM device. They've also got copy/paste unlike iPhone. Finally, a what looks like an awesome smartphone with power email users in mind.

6. Battery: It'll last you just as long as an iPhone and you can replace it.

Uncertainties:

1. Connectivity: Sprint's going to be the first carrier to sell the device and they are supposed to have the biggest 3G network (x3 times AT&T's size supposedly).

2. Apps/Developer Network: Palm has got to ensure that they have a large developer network to succeed. Most of these smart phones are now going to be only as good as the apps that are available for them. Pandora claims that it took them just 3 days vs. months on iPhone to get their application up and running on this platform -- this is a very positive sign. Palm claims that the applications are built using just JS/HTML. Time will tell what this really means (I really hope that it really is going to be that easy though!).

One more thing to note -- just like iPhone, Palm Pre runs a WebKit-based browser.

I'll most likely be trading my iPhone in for a Pre if Palm's developer network takes off.

Sermo's Flu Monitor is Down

While being down with a flu after a recent trip to London, I've been poking around the flu trends online, came across Google's Flu Trends and thought that it was a pretty interesting service. I then also recalled that I had learned about this service from a recent announcement made about a similar service that was recently launched by Sermo.com and wanted to check out their services.

Sermo's PR machine has been on a roll lately with a lot of announcements which generated quite a bit of buzz about the company. One of such announcements was the following: Sermo, Taking a Page from Google, Creates Flu Tracker

In any case, an MD friend of mine had sent me a screenshot of what what Sermo's Flu tracker looks like for a Google comparison:



This made it apparent that Sermo is obviously still struggling with some technical challenges. Sermo had raised close to $40M to date and can obviously afford to hire a good development team and some quality assurance people. The fact that they've got their PR machine to announce this feature makes one think that they would ensure that things are running smoothly but go figure. Additionally, Sermo has a very small (but obviously very targeted) amount of website traffic so it not likely to be a scalability issue:



Hope the folks @ Sermo work out the bugs. It must be pretty embarrassing for them to shout about a new future at the top of their lungs and then have it crash on their users.

*cough*