Friday, March 11, 2011

Being Right or Making Money

On Monday night, I watched my foremost, The Last Word host Lawrence O’Donnell.
Whilst O’Donnell laudably attempted to focus the audience’s awareness onand hopefully very last, Charlie Sheen trainwreck interview, courtesy of the tragic undertow that threatens to pull Sheen beneath for fantastic, I was overtaken, not from the pulling about the thread, as well as the voracious audience he serves. It didn’t make me unfortunate, it produced me angry.

In the case of celebrities, we can be considered a heartless country, basking in their misfortunes like nude sunbathers at Schadenfreude Seaside. The impulse is understandable, to some diploma. It may be grating to listen to complaints from folks who take pleasure in privileges that many of us cannot even picture. In case you can not muster up some compassion for Charlie Sheen, who may make a great deal more cash to get a day’s get the job done than most of us will make inside of a decade’s time, I guess I cannot blame you.



Along with the speedy speed of activities online and also the information revolution sparked through the Web-based, it is very straightforward for the know-how market place to believe that it’s one of a kind: repeatedly breaking new ground and accomplishing details that no person has actually finished previously.

But you'll find other sorts of online business that have currently undergone a number of the identical radical shifts, and also have just as outstanding a stake from the foreseeable future.

Consider healthcare, for instance.

We frequently presume of it as a substantial, lumbering beast, but in fact, medication has undergone a series of revolutions inside previous 200 a long time which have been at the very least equal to these we see in technology and knowledge.

Significantly less understandable, but nevertheless inside the norms of human nature, is the impulse to rubberneck, to slow down and look at the carnage of Charlie spectacle of Sheen’s unraveling, but for the blithe interviewer Sheen’s daily life as we pass it within the perfect lane of our every day lives. To get sincere, it may possibly be tough for consumers to discern the big difference involving a run-of-the-mill consideration whore, and an honest-to-goodness, circling the drain tragedy-to-be. On its own merits, a quote like “I Am On the Drug. It is Called Charlie Sheen” is sheer genius, and we cannot all be anticipated to consider the full measure of someone’s everyday living each time we listen to one thing amusing.

Swift forward to 2011 and I am endeavoring to take a look at will mean of being a little more business-like about my hobbies (for the most part songs). By the stop of January I had manned up and started off to advertise my blogs. I had produced quite a few unique weblogs, which had been contributed to by good friends and colleagues. I promoted these pursuits by Facebook and Twitter.


Second: the minor abomination the Gang of 5 on the Supream Court gave us a year or so ago (Citizens Inebriated) really comprises a bit bouncing betty of its personal that can rather perfectly go off while in the faces of Govs Wanker, Sacitch, Krysty, and J.O. Daniels. Considering that this ruling extended the idea of “personhood” to each corporations and unions, to try to deny them any perfect to run inside of the legal framework that they had been organized below deprives these “persons” on the freedoms of speech, association and movement. Which means (after once more, quoting law college educated spouse and children) that possibly the courts need to uphold these rights for your unions (as particular person “persons” as assured by the Federal (and most state) constitutions, or they've to declare that these attempts at stripping or limiting union rights should apply to key businesses, also.


Fed staff members, such as Brian Sack, the New York Fed official in charge of carrying out the bond buying, have argued the total amount, or stock, of securities the Fed has announced it will make has more impact on longer-term interest rates than the timing of those purchases. That’s a view now held by several members on the Federal Open Market Committee, including the chairman.


“We learned in the first quarter of last year, when we ended our previous program, that the markets had anticipated that adequately, and we didn’t see any major impact on interest rates,” Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told the Senate Banking Committee during his March 1 semiannual monetary-policy testimony. “It’s really the total amount of holdings, rather than the flow of new purchases, that affects the level of interest rates.”


Fed Vice Chairman Janet Yellen supported that perspective, saying at a monetary policy forum in New York last week that “the stock view won out over the flow view.”



The idea that Brian Sack, a 40-year-old economist with a PhD from MIT, is winning the day in the argument of "stocks over flows" is somewhat troubling to me.  MIT is a quantitative shop, home to some very brilliant people, but how markets will actually respond is another specialty altogether, one that requires a bit of on-the-street experience.  Markets have a bad habit of not being logical, not fitting neatly into tidy formulas, and ignoring things like 'stocks and flows.'


I'll go even further. I'll take the other side of that bet and opine that the flows are much more important than the stocks, because it is the flows that support the continued budget deficits of the US government — which, it should be noted, will still be with us each and every month long after June 2011.  Those deficits are baked into the cake and will require in excess of $125 billion in new Treasury sales each and every month.


Who will buy all the Treasury bonds after the Fed steps aside?  That is unclear.  If there are not enough buyers at these artificially inflated prices, then the price will have to fall until sufficient buyers can be found.  Falling bond prices are at the other side of the financial see-saw from rising bond yields; one goes down while the other goes up, and the Fed has been pressing firmly down on yields for a while via the QE II program.  When that's over, pressure will be reduced and yields will rise.


So what to do? For those concerned enough about this possible scenario to consider taking action, please see Part II of this article (free executive summary; paid enrollment required to access). In it, I predict the extent to which stocks, commodities, Treasury bonds and precious metals prices may be impacted in the near term.  I also detail the key indicators to look out for in order to determine if and when this scenario is unfolding - as well as recommended strategies to preserve capital during this corrective phase.


Click here to access Part II. 




Of all the interesting new tech that seems poised to garner a lot of buzz in 2011, near field communication (NFC), is probably the most exciting. If it takes off, it will transform the ways we communicate, share, and make payments with digital devices. This will likely take years to happen, but the groundwork is being laid right now. And RFinity is one of those companies at the forefront.


While Google and Apple are responsible for generating much of the buzz about NFC at the moment, the technology goes far beyond simply having the right type of chip in your mobile device. For example, how do you handle different types of data transfers being made from one device to another? And how to you ensure that they happen as quickly as possible? And most importantly, how do you ensure that they happen securely? Those are the things that RFinity is thinking about.


The company has just raised $4 million from Horizons Ventures in Hong Kong. And the space has gotten so red hot, in fact, that we hear they’re already out raising another round.


And it’s an easy bet for investors to make not only because of the space, but because of where the project originated: The U.S. Department of Energy. Specifically, RFinity was born when a bunch of infrastructure security experts working for the government were assigned to find all the vulnerabilities in cell phones. Through software they came up with, they were able to quite easily eavesdrop, manipulate SMS messages, and even compromise LAN security. Then they set out to figure out a way to stop people from doing those very things. That work led directly to RFinity.


Work originally began in the person-to-person and person-to-vendor sales space by way of mobile applications that route transactions through RFinity’s own secure servers. But now that NFC appears ready, RFinity is making sure they’re ready for it. The idea is that their technology could cut out the middle man here: themselves.


Obviously, the company isn’t going to share all the details on how they secure NFC transfers. But the basic overview is that they verify an incoming NFC signal and ask for a user’s permission before taking any action. Further, if the action is a transaction, it requires a PIN, just as you might do an ATM withdrawal. That’s all pretty standard. But the key is one-time-use transaction codes that RFinity creates on the fly along with complex cryptographic signatures. These ensure that an transaction is secure since it means that every transaction can only happen once. Even if those numbers were intercepted by a hacker, they would be useless beyond the one-time payment.


And even if your phone is lost or stolen, a thief couldn’t do anything without your PIN. And you can remotely shut down your NFC capabilities via RFinity. It’s enough to make me wish I could throw out all my credit cards right now. “Today’s identification and transaction systems are based on what? A magnetic strip on the back of a card, based on a 1950’s technology that relies on a base station to read the information embedded as a series of simple magnetic markers in plastic tape,” writes Josh Jones-Dilworth, who is working with the company to bring them to market.


Again, NFC as a technology is great and potentially game-changing. But the software is still needed to make it actually work. And some of the big guys began realizing that early on as companies like PayPal, Bank of America, and even Subway have been testing out different things with RFinity for some time. In fact, RFinity has actually been doing field tests of the software end of their technology since 2009 in places like Idaho, well before most people in the U.S. had ever thought about NFC.


But now people are starting to care. And soon, they could be caring a lot more. NFC is already built-in to Google’s new Nexus S device — and the company has put out a call for developers to start using the tech. Rumors have the next iteration of the iPhone gaining the technology as well. In other words, I suspect we may be seeing acquisition rumors starting to fly around RFinity in about six months or so. Provided their technology proves up to the NFC challenge, of course.




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