June 1, 2009
· Filed under Uncategorized
Our democratic system is being challenged. Our system is what I refer to as “modern-day feudalism”. My children have a good grasp of feudalism and when I talk to them about our Government and the democratic system of today even they see the similarities:
- a small number of very wealthy supported and pandered to by those who aspire to reach their position or at least benefit from the association
- a corrupt and dishonest group of representatives in Parliament who are overpaid and hugely influenced by the small number of wealthy and powerful
- a vaste majority who are tied to their properties and to their jobs by large mortgages and overall indebtedness
One major difference is that the power of the Church has been replaced by the power of the large Corporation.
What is challenging this system?
When I first came across the Internet in 1994 and purchased a pair of jeans from the US using Compuserve I saw not only the power of this medium to change business forever but also the much more fundamental change that is Governments worst nightmare – freely available information that is uncontrolled and uncensored and available to all those with a computer and Internet connection. Anyone with the time and motivation can now learn more than ever before and extend their horizons beyond anything that a traditional education can bring – this is the era of the autodidact!
The democratisation of information is the one major event of the last century that will give back power to the people. Bring it on!
How will easier access to information bring change? Well, we have already seen, with the publishing of MPs expenses, a public outcry against elected members who are abusing the system. We have also seen a rise in social networking, a phenomenon that encoruages more transparency. One the of the major issues though, as we have seen with 9/11 is also the rise of conspiracy theories – yes, when information is easily created and distributed then the truth can sometimes suffer. Exactly how and to what extent the Web changes our society will be intriguing to see – my feeling is that information is power and the more we all have access to it the better for the majority.
May 22, 2009
· Filed under Did you know, Web 2.0
Firstly iPhoto – don’t use it except for de-duping the photos. I had 19k of photos of which only 4k were unique – the others werre spread across various files on my PC and were copies. I used Duplicate Annihilitor, an iPhoto plugin to do the job. Watch out though – when you move your photos from your PC to your Mac (assuming your computers are on a network this is drag and drop – I use my wi-fi network – plugin and play easy) make sure that, before you show import into iPhoto that you have gone into Advanced Options under iPhoto preferences and unticked the box that asks whether you want iPhoto to import into its file system – say no. Then anihilate away. Why shouldn’t you use iPhoto for the long-term? To print photos you need to use exclusively Apples photo print service. I use Photobox and don’t want to be locked in to Apple’s service. The only feature that I will miss is the face recognition in iphoto that is really good indeed. You can search by person without filing the photos. Picassa is brining out this feature shortly (I hope).
Safari is rubbish – limited cool plugins, lots of sites that aren’t configured for Safari and don’t work well and limited in functionality compaed to IE and Firefox. I use Firefox because it does have a huge collection of 3rd party plugins (my favourite is StumbleUpon – browse the web serendipitously according to your preferences!).
May 7, 2009
· Filed under Did you know, Web 2.0 · Tagged apple, mac, moving to mac, pc to mac
A dear friend of mine just repaid an old debt by buying me a Macbook. I unwrapped the sleek packaging, took out the Macbook and switched it on. Within 2 minutes (slow on the first boot as I had to run through the basic configuration wizard) I was connected via my Wifi and could see all my PCs on the home network. I set-up my email (1 minute) and retrieved my emails. I then connected my iPhone and synchronised my contacts and calender. Installing Office for Mac took about 20 minutes. I was then up and running.
There are no gotchas if you have an iPhone – if not then it is indeed quite tricky I believe to import all those contacts and calender items from your PC.
What surprised me most was the ease with which I was able to connect to the home network and pull files as I needed them from my PCs. I had anticipated many hours of laborius transfer by memory stick!
My other great surprise was that I can share calender events with Outlook users although not via a Blackberry.
I am using all the standard Mac applications for the moment – there is an advantage in that Apple have put together a nice suite of applications that do in some instances integrate quite nicely. This is something that one loses going for best breed i.e. separate vendors for each application. For instance, in iMovie I can use photos from iPhoto in my movies and vice versa.
iPhoto is a pleasure to use and the face recognition takes a lot of the pain out of finding photos of a particular person. One issue I have though is that I can’t use Photobox – Apple has tied iPhoto into their own service – my feeling is that this is short-sighted.
Has anyone had experience of moving to mac – I would love to hear what your experiences have been!
April 22, 2009
· Filed under The Credit Crunch, The Economy · Tagged bail-out, banking crisis, credit crunch
Anyone who questions the way the banks were saved is asked by the incredulous interviewer whether it was better to let the banking system fail. Well, the only response to this question is clearly no. This does not mean that there wasn’t a better way.
Did you know that on 15% of RBS’s balance sheet relates to UK commercial and consumer lending?
I recently pointed this out to the opposition Treasury spokesmen and have sent a note to the Economist. My email asked the simple question, if we want to ensure that UK commercial and consumer banking is saved then why not focus on the 15% that this represents not bail out the 85% that it doesn’t?
Corporate law and Government powers would have enabled the Government to let all banks that couldn’t survive go into administration. Of course this wouldn’t have been done without giving depositors 100% loss protection. Once in administration the Government would have nationalised the UK commercial and consumer banking operations and let the administrator and subsequently the liquidator sort out the rest.
This would have cost a fraction of the supposed £200bn that the IMF suggests that the bail-out will cost the Government. Why has this not been discussed? I can make a few guesses.
March 13, 2009
· Filed under Big IT, Future society, New business models, Software · Tagged Oracle dead, tags
www.fluidinfo.com is a new database where anyone can add data – hence “a writable world”. Think of data being the underlying data and the meta data – in Terry’s world the two are dealt with the same way – an article and a rating, a film and a comment. Anyone can write to the database and if that data is public then anyone can search on it.
The big difference here is that the database does not have complex tables and schemas – any filds can be added and then searched upon. In a typical database the developers have to design the schema to be able to anticipate what you will be adding or searching for.
Show me all the web articles that I have liked that my Facebook friends like? Facebook would need to update their database, expose this information through their custom API and then another developer would need to create a database of information ralating to your favourite articles so that the search query could combine and search across the two sets of data. Data would sit in proprietary silos and our freedom to connect information would be limited to what was exposed via the applications various customer APIs.
Terry’s approach allows all applications to use the same API (Fluidinfo’s) and for us to search across this data in ways that don’t have to be anticipated in advance!
Sounds great – watch the video – http://www.kyte.tv/ch/6118/284808
March 6, 2009
· Filed under Investment, The Credit Crunch, The Economy · Tagged credit crunch, printing money, quantitative easing
Sorry to say but this one won’t work either. If the Government is a net purchaser of Government bonds (what they sell less what they buy is negative) then they are indeed increasing the cash available for purchasing other assets. Let us assume that the £75bn of Government purchases over the next few months does indeed result in a net inflow, what will happen to this cash? Will it indeed result in greater lending to consumers and corporates?
The problem is that there are too many ways that this cash can be employed without lending to consumers and corporates increasing. Government bonds are liquid – selling them is quick and easy. If the problem facing banks was that they needed to realise cash from liquid investments and couldn’t then this form of quantitative easing would solve the issue. Unfortunately the issue for banks is the extent of their non-liquid investments, so called level 2 and level 3 assets. Level 1 assets can always be sold and turned into cash.
February 26, 2009
· Filed under The Credit Crunch, The Economy · Tagged banks, Brown, credit crunch, RBS
For those who don’t agree or haven’t grasped my arguments for letting the banks go I want to have another try!
Let’s take RBS as an example. The bank has a £2.2 trillion balance sheet. A very small fraction of that relates to UK retail and corporate lending – circa £350bn.
My question is simple, in order to protect the core banking activity – i.e. managing deposits, allowing payment and withdrawal of cash and lending to consumers and corporates, why shore-up £2.2 trillion when this activity only relates to 15% of this amount? Read on……… Read the rest of this entry »
February 6, 2009
· Filed under Future society, Iran, Islam, World politics
February 6, 2009
· Filed under Investment, Saving money, The Credit Crunch, The Economy
One of the most amusing investment strategies that I hear today is to buy incrementally. The logic is that you won’t be able to call the bottom so invest gradually and you will at least average down if the market falls further and be in the market when the bounce happens. This investment strategy assumes firstly that the market is within 10% to 20% of its bottom and that when the bottom comes there will be a bounce of at least 20% that anyone not in the market will miss.
Anyone following this strategy should be take into account the following:
Read the rest of this entry »
February 6, 2009
· Filed under Management, The Credit Crunch, The Economy
On Radio 4 last night we had the pleasure of hearing from Chris Nicholson – http://www.linkedin.com/in/oraca . Chris is an equity analyst focusing on telecoms and media. His view is that banks should pay bonuses to encourage continued creativity and to ensure market efficiency. This is an extraordinary claim in light of recent events, here’s why.
Efficient markets are important. How efficient they have to be is open to debate. Banks have been spending a fortune on IT and on motivating staff over the last couple of decades and the result has been that the best can win more. The result has not been a better allocation of capital as Chris suggests.
Creativity is important. Motivating people to so creative that they package up junk mortgages and resell tranches as triple A rated securities to pension funds is certainly creative. unfortunately this has also been the cause of the demise of the finanical sector.
Chris also mentions the allocation of capital to risky enterprises. Well, Chris, you are very out of touch. There are almost no venture capital firms or VCTs investing in anything approaching early-stage and this has been the case for many years. 3i, the stalwart of early-stage investment did so well out of its leveraged late-stage deals (notably Go) that it leveraged its balance sheet and focused almost exclusively on leveraged deals!
Explain to me Chris how the creativity and efficiency of the markets has helped finance entrepreneurs in the UK over the last 20 years?
I have managed three companies over the last 10 years and in my last company I had to cut costs – we were losing money and I was brought in to turn-around the business. I refocused the business, changed the product offering and let 60% of the people go.One thing that I know is that if the leadership articulate the issues and the vision for resolving them then freezing salaries is not nearly as painful to the business as those insiders think.
High street banks must focus on their main tasks, UK consumer and corporate banking and if they won’t do it then find someone that will!
