Ged Carroll

Search results for: “yahoo”

  • The number

    Whilst catching up on my backlog of mails I came across this from CBS Marketwatch on Yahoo! making the number. The number is the consensus that market analysts think that a company will make in a given quarter:

    NOT MUCH SHOUTING GREETS YAHOO EARNINGSYahoo shares (YHOO) got the boot after the company kicked off a fresh earnings season for the online-media group by only just measuring up to expectations, demonstrating what American Technology Research analyst Mark Mahaney called a mantra: “in-line quarters don’t cut it for Internet stocks.”

    Ok, basically what this guy Mahaney is saying that because Yahoo! managed to get their profit for the quarter in line with what a number of market anlaysts expected them to be (based on a guestimate set maybe 90 to 180 days back) then they deserve a kicking.

    Unbelievable, accountancy despite the use of numbers is not an exact science, why?

    • Bills and sales are constantly coming in and out of a company
    • What does a sale really mean? If you sign a 3 year deal for online advertising, should Yahoo! claim that as a sale all at once or claim as the money comes in
    • When is the money in? When you invoice for it, or when it sits in your bank account
    • Is the capital gains made on the building you own and work out of profit?
    • If you had a bumper quarther this time but you know that the next quarter will be soft, should you avoid booking all the sales in to give you an income cushion next quarter?
    • How should you write off the depreciating value of computer equipment, chairs or a forklift truck? There can be more than one way of doing it that will affect the figures

    With this in mind, I would recommend that you read The Number by Alex Berenson, which takes you through the insanity of it all in greater depth.

  • Sleeping problem

    Japan has a sleeping problem. On the face of it, you might think that the sleeping problem was that people were getting too much sleep. It is a high trust society, so you occasionally see drunks safely left alone where they are to sleep. A drunken salary man can rent a catacomb like sleeping capsule to crash out, if they can’t make it home. You see people sleeping on the commuter train in the morning.

    But that is only half the story of sleep in Japan. In a society famous for its neon cities, long office hours, high stress levels and horrendous commutes. Since the start of the economic miracle there were some who indulged in even more methamphetamine abuse than an Australian roadtrain driver. And some parents enroll offspring in cramming programmes for infant schoolchildren.

    You may expect insomnia to be a problem. You’d be right.

    Its also big business, Matsushita (the mega-corp behind Panasonic, Technics and JVC) will be launching later this year a ‘sleeping room package’ that consists of a plasma screen TV, a tricked-out bed and ambient sound recordings. This is expected to sell for about 20,000 GBP.

    In the UK we have an assortment of reality TV shows to send us to sleep. For more Japan related content click here.

  • Microsoft security spin

    I read a classic piece of spin in The Business, Microsoft races to stop bank account hackers by Tony Glover. Tony who has been shortlisted in a category for Business Journalist of the Year wrote “Technicians at the US software giant Microsoft are working flat out to prevent a new security threat that this week could give criminals access to computer systems used worldwide by banks and governments.”

    The general threat that Tony outlined called phishing has been covered for quite a while by national newspapers, something that wasn’t made clear in the article. In fact eBay, HBOS and Barclays customers have all been exposed to phishing attacks. The article was an excellent piece of PR work (my hat goes off to the members of the Microsoft press team) that failed to point out:

    – Phishing has been going on for quite a while now, though the vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer is new. It is one of many security vulnerabilities in the product and phishing as a security risk is well understood

    – Microsoft was trying to plug yet another security gap in their software that facilitates phishing? . Despite repeated promises to get tough security, Microsoft have failed to do so

    – Using an alternative browser like Opera can help prevent the risk of phishing (though nothing in IT systems can be labeled foolproof)

    – It is yet another good argument against software bundling like Microsoft (and increasingly Apple) have been doing and is an excellent riposte to critics of the EU competition commissions case against Microsoft. Bundling of software restricts the ability of competition to spur innovation and improvements in both quality and service

    Free Internet calls move a step closer on page six goes on to talk breathlessly about a new feature in Microsoft Office that provides Internet calls. Its not that big a deal, I know of people who used Skype and before it Net2Phone and other over the net software phones. In fact Stephen Waddington, managing director of geeky PR firm Rainier was quoted in a newspaper case study talking about his firms uses of voice over the ‘net for international conference calls a few years ago.

    In addition, many instant messenger programmes such as Yahoo! Instant Messenger, AIM and iChat offer audio and video calls between users. Another fallacy in technology circles is the concept of ‘free’, you’d think that technology marketers would be mature enough to realise that nothing ever comes for free, even ‘free’ pirated MP3s or DiVX movie files via a P2P network is partly financed by banner advertisements, spyware and adware in the P2P software itself. Freeware is often produced for altruistic reasons, even if it is to build a community of users or make ones mark with an elegant solution to a problem. In the case of ‘free internet calls’ it will help increase sales of broadband connections, where calls leave the domain of a connection between IP addresses over PCs some sort of ‘interconnection charge’ will be due. Its not new, its history repeating.

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