furiouslol

Nouriel Roubini, aka Dr Doom:

If Lehman collapses expect a run on all of the other broker dealers and the collapse of the shadow banking system

Sep 13, 2008

It is now clear that we are again – as we were in mid- March at the time of the Bear Stearns collapse – an epsilon away from a generalized run on most of the shadow banking system, especially the other major independent broker dealers (Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs). If Lehman does not find a buyer over the weekend and the counterparties of Lehman withdraw their credit lines on Monday (as they all will in the absence of a deal) you will have not only a collapse of Lehman but also the beginning of a run on the other independent broker dealers (Merrill Lynch first but also in sequence Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and possibly even those broker dealers that are part of a larger commercial bank, I.e. JP Morgan and Citigroup). Then this run would lead to a massive systemic meltdown of the financial system. That is the reason why the Fed has convened in emergency meetings the heads of all major Wall Street firms on Friday and again today to convince them not to pull the plug on Lehman and maintain their exposure to this distressed broker dealer.

I wouldn't be surprised if Goldman/MorganS snap up the likes of Wachovia just to stay competitive.

Ok. Deal is done. Acquisition sealed.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122142278543033525.html?mod=...

It's confirmed. Lehman to File for Bankruptcy Protection

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/lehman-to-file-...

Sitemeter just launched their new version - https://www.sitemeter.com/viewstats.php?site=sm1giantbikes

Definitely a lot "flash"-ier (descriptively & literally) than the previous version that was mainly text-based.

I'm honestly surprised by the rejection by the vocal community.

Any Sitemeter users here?

I thought his biggest mistake was thinking that he can sell millions of these keychains with ease. Since the only people capable of buying those volumes are the big retail chains and not those small mom-n-pop stores, he should have gauged the potential response from these retail chains prior to importing the key chains.

I would think that it would be obvious to the laymen that such a product would appeal only to the small novelty shops, so there is a ceiling to how much you can scale this business.

For small pieces of data, we can already use cookies as a client-side storage.

You practically said everything on my mind. Yammer is a better version of Twitter. Built-in tags, threaded view. It's just really well-done.

You guys are just being paranoid. Salesforce runs fine within the corporate environment. Besides, they copied the Salesforce IP restriction configuration for extra security. I'm betting that the corporations will embrace it.

Ok. I'm going to eat my words now.

He did get 3million visits per month.

http://www.quantcast.com/sourcetool.com/traffic (Change the period to All-Time)

Massive drop from 3million visits in April 06 to 100k in April 08 and now 10k in Aug 08.

Amazing if he attracted the 3 million people to his site purely with Adwords alone.

I wonder how many terms he has to bid for (> 100k?)

Maybe it's just me but I'm calling a major BS on the $155k/m profit claim.

1) Assuming he got 100k visitors per month

2) Assuming each arb gets him $0.10 per click.

3) Assmuning 50% of the visitors click 1 ad (and that's wildly optimistic)

His profit would be 50k x $0.10 = $5k/mth

If he were to get $155k in profit per month. he needs to get about 3 million visitors per month. I checked Alexa, Compete and his site is nowhere that figure.

Not sure what's his motive in inflating the profit figure though. He's only going to attract more competition to his field and kill his business in the process.

Maybe he's planning to write an ebook to convince people into believing that it is easy to earn that much with search arb and hence, he'll use the NYtimes article as evidence.

With each ebook selling for $99.99 and 100% profit margin, it'll take him only 1550 sales/month to meet his imaginary $155k profit claim. Now, that's a business plan!

Debugging a class with several levels of inheritance

Use this framework to split the equity pie. http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fd0n/35%20Founders%27%20Pie%2...

Obviously, your initial code base has some value to it. The above framework nicely value the past/future contribution of each party to remove much ambiguity.

Go with the cheapest - Interactive Brokers

Damn I hate their security device though. It's kind of irritating to have to enter the security codes every time i want to make a trade. And if you're a frequent trader, it'll get on your nerve (on the flip side, it prevents over-trading)

It probably accentuate the sell-off. Trading signals were probably fired after the initial drop-off.

According to their website, they have agreements with ISPs.

http://www.mailchimp.com/learnmore.phtml See: Deliverability

Here's a nice comparison of them vs IContact: http://www.mailchimp.com/compare/

On an unrelated note, i like the clean design on Newscred. (Yeah. Nothing to do with the post but just thought I let it out)

Use Icontact or Mailchimp then.

You can always add your users' emails manually & create groups for them. So next time when you want to mass mail them, just send an email to that group.

Tried it. Works fine. Just a hassle to add the users' emails manually

You're asking the wrong guy man. I myself am waiting to try out the service.

My opinions about them were based on the demo they gave at TC50

I like it. It'll appeal to those who finds Yammer lacking (eg. no group features).

But if i have to make a choice, i'll go with Yammer because

1) I don't have a need for those advanced features that presentlyapp provides

2) Yammer feels more fun

If you come from an enterprise background, you'll find that most enterprises are really serious about controlling their network. So they will pay. $1/user is like tea break expense for them.

Fotonauts will appeal very much to the wikipedia crowd. Like wikipedia, I expect a small minority being responsible in generating most of the content.

In no time, Fotonauts will start attracting the masses in being a reference photo site. Eg. if I want to know more about tattoos, I won't go to Flickr. I just get pictures of tattoos at Flickr. At Fotonauts, I'll get to see the photos and relevant content about tattoos.

Fair enough. You made your point and it's a valid one.

But my observation is that it is very hard to beat the competition unless your product offers something compelling over theirs. Not impossible, but hard.

P.S. Chill out guys. It's not like as if i told menlopark to scrap his idea. I told him to change his game plan. To differentiate his product from the competition like what Fotonauts did.

Takeaway point is similar to what the others have said:

- Learn from your competition and differentiate yourself from them

- There are competitors all the time. So learn to live with them and out-execute them.

- Being late to the party is not a problem as long as you execute well (See dropbox)

Another good example is Box.net. They were in a crowded space. They were not first but they differentiate themselves from the competition by offering an easy + social UI that makes sharing fun. It all boils down to execution.

Good luck with your project!

Thanks for the sarcasm. I didn't know it was a side project. You didn't mention it in your first post. I thought it was a full-time thing.

Imagine you know a friend who quits his job to focus on his photo-sharing startup that you know will be exactly the same as Flickr.

What would you do? Would you just support him blindly or would you advise him to differentiate his product from the competition?

Yammer is Twitter for corporates done right.

Funny seeing how the blogosphere slams them for being a ripoff of twitter.

Hello! Facebook is a ripoff of Friendster. But Facebook is Friendster done right.

Yammer totally deserve the award. Everyone I ask (who's not a blogomaniac) thought Yammer was a great product in broadcasting news to a large group (beats mass-emailing)

Like i said, if his app brings something different to the table like Fotonauts, bring it on (read my first post: I said change the game plan only if it offers nothing different over the existing services. I didn't say forget about the idea).

It's just that I've seen too many startups doing photo-sharing sites (admit it. You've seen your fair share of them) promising something different but in the end, they offer nothing compelling over the current services.

It's like someone saying they want to build a craigslist killer because of all sort of cool features that they can't do with craigslist. And when they launch it, yeah they're right. There are some cool features that they can't do with craigslist like advanced filtering but these are not compelling enough to differentiate themselves.

Hey man. I didn't mean to discourage you. I just don't want to see you wasting your precious development time. The most precious thing to a developer is his time. So I don't want to see another developer spending a lot of effort on his baby and yet it doesn't gain traction. I would rather the developer devote his time to some project that is different and have a better chance of succeeding.

if your photo app is going to bring something radically different to the table, then i say 'bring it on'

I'm probably going to be the sole wet blanket here.

Ask yourself this question. Will your product be substantially different from this competitor's product?

If yes, you might want to do something else. Like what you said, this competitor has growing traction. It'll be difficult for you to break the momentum especially if you provide nothing different.

If you really want to fight with this competitor well, you must offer something different to the users. Eg. tumblr or posterous is like a super-easy lite version of wordpress. That's why they're gaining traction. There are probably XXX number of blogging systems out there that are similar to blogger/wordpress and they just can't break through. Those that broke through differentiate themselves well from these existing services.

dropbox is not like the hundred other online storage site. Their interface is brain-dead simple compared to the competition.

Will your product be so? That's the question you have to ask yourself.

I'm not saying this to be a spoilsport but to help you prevent wasting your precious development time.

Seriously? Yet another photo-sharing site?

Unless it's a game changer like fotonauts, you might want to change your game plan.