Fat Louis, one of Neville and Molly’s cats, perfectly adapted to his surrroundings.
Has Google peaked?
Barron’s, the influential US financial publication, seems to think so. Excerpt from an interesting piece:
INVESTORS HAVE BEEN FIXATED on Google the past few weeks, as its shares have tumbled nearly 25% from a peak of $475 — and the fact is, there could be a lot more tumbling ahead. The share price could well be cut in half over the next year as the Internet giant grapples with growing competition from Microsoft and Yahoo!, increased pricing pressures in its online ad sales and mounting concern about what’s known as click fraud.
Barron’s thinks that Google stock is overvalued by at least a factor of two. Reasoning:
To get a sense of what might happen to the stock, we gave one über-bull’s 2006 revenue estimate for Google a 20% haircut, trimmed his projected expenses by 5% (but no further, because bulls greatly underestimate Google’s costs), deducted stock-based compensation and, generously, gave the company credit for the considerable interest income on its cash. The result: Earnings would be 30% lower than the bull’s projection, at $6.28 a share. If the stock were to maintain its current multiple of 41 on those lowered earnings, it would be worth $257. It’s more likely the multiple would shrink to as low as 30, in line with the slower growth. That would make the stock worth $188, versus its recent $360.
Since I don’t own any shares, it’s all theoretical to me. But it goes to show how overheated the Google stock-hype (with some people fantasising about a share price of $2000) could turn out to be.
Common sense on free speech
Terrific piece by philosopher Onora O’Neill in today’s Guardian…
Yet even committed liberals don’t seriously think that rights to free speech are unlimited or unconditional, although they seem to be unsure about which limits should be set. They are often torn between an aspiration to justify free speech as minimal and uncontroversial, and a contrary belief that free speech matters because it is not minimal but powerful. This double vision is well reflected in contemporary tendencies to construe freedom of speech as freedom of expression. Freedom of expression sounds so harmless: merely a matter of expressing oneself, seemingly no more than an aspect of individual privacy. Yet most speech acts are not merely expressive. They are intended to communicate, and may affect, even harm others. The nursery jingle “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me” is palpably false.
Prosper.com
It’s funny what the Internet makes possible. After FON. com comes Prosper.com, a service described by the New York Times as “a mixed brew of eBay, Friendster and the local bank.”
On Prosper.com, prospective borrowers register with the site and allow the company to review their credit history. Then borrowers post a loan request of up to $25,000, along with an upper limit for the amount of interest they are willing to pay. Loans are not secured by collateral and are paid off over three years at a fixed rate, with no prepayment penalty.
Lenders essentially deposit their money with Prosper — which holds it in an interest-bearing account with Wells Fargo— and either review the loan requests individually or fill out a form permitting Prosper to allocate money to borrowers who meet certain criteria.
Chief among those criteria is the borrower’s rating from the credit reporting bureau Experian, but borrowers can also join or create groups with defined interests or characteristics that, they hope, will make them more attractive to some lenders.
Among the groups on Prosper are aficionados of the Porsche 914 model, associates and employees of a Berkeley cafe and Vietnamese-American students. Borrowers, who typically post their loan requests and any group affiliation, along with a description of who they are and why they need the money, then wait a maximum of two weeks for lenders to bid in ever-lower interest increments for the right to issue the loan.
Quote of the day
News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising.
Reuven Frank, former head of NBC News, quoted in the Economist, 21 January 2006
Footnote: Bill Thompson points out that the quote was attributed many years ago to Lord Northcliffe, a famous British newspaper proprietor. And then, of course, there’s Evelyn Waugh’s definition in Scoop:
News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that, it’s dead.
Brown study
As regular readers will recall, I’ve thought from the outset that David Cameron’s ascendancy spelled big trouble for New Labour if they continue with the plan of anointing Gordon Brown as Tony Blair’s successor. Last week’s catastrophic by-election defeat in Dunfermline has really underlined that. Andrew Rawnsley writes about the fallout in today’s Observer…
The difference on this occasion is that bad news for Blair is not good news for Brown. It has been repeatedly said that the byelection was in the Chancellor’s backyard. Actually, it is more like his living room. The Chancellor’s Scottish home is in the seat. If he ever has a problem which needs the attention of his constituency MP, he will now have to ring a Lib Dem to help sort it out. The Chancellor regards himself as the king of Scottish politics. His repeated interventions in the byelection were an investment of his personal political capital.
It is going too far to say that this was a referendum on Gordon Brown, but it has to be wounding. Worse, it raises the question that he most dreads: if he cannot secure a Labour victory in his native fiefdom, how attractive will Prime Minister Brown be to the rest of the United Kingdom? If he can’t woo them in Fife, what are his prospects of swinging it in southern England?
As I said, boredom is the problem. The British electorate has a longish attention span, but Labour are reaching the end of it. If they plump for Brown, they are doomed. Must see if I can put some money on this hunch.
Share and share alike
This morning’s Observer column…
If Google, eBay and two leading venture-capital firms have put £12m into Fon, they must think it’s a viable proposition. Maybe it is, but there are some tiresome details to be sorted first. To take just one obvious problem, Fon aspires to operate over a wide range of legal jurisdictions, each of which has its own ideas about this stuff. As I understand British law, for example, it is legal for me to share my wireless bandwidth with a neighbour, but it would be illegal for me to charge him a fee for the service. And I don’t know what the fine print of the agreement with my ISP says about sharing the connection. My guess is that it prohibits it, and I’m sure most ISPs will take a similar view.
Truly, the road to world domination is paved with petty niggles. Besides, as one wag put it last week, if you can do it with Wi-Fi, why can’t we do it with bathrooms. I’m thinking of setting up Pee.com. Subscribers can use bathrooms all over the world. Slogan: never pay to use a public toilet again. Wonder if Google would invest?
Ndiyo live in Bangladesh!
My colleague, Seb Wills, has recently returned from Bangladesh, where he set up a multi-screen Ndiyo internet cafe (called a Community Information Centre) using mobile phone technology to provide the internet link. Given that the lack of connectivity is supposed to be a showstopper in developing countries, this is a really significant step forward. More details here.
1 plus 1 equals, er, let me see…
James M writes:
Our government insists that “Standards in English and maths are at their highest levels ever … “. This is persistently contradicted by the universities that receive the students.
The reason the government believes that the standards are high is that it sets the standards. That they are set so low is the real problem.
Quite.
A carnival of stupidity
Fantastic piece by Neal Acherson on OpenDemocracy.Net about the Islamic cartoon fiasco. Made me feel ashamed that I hadn’t dug below the synthetic outrage of British media coverage. Excerpt:
The most curious thing about the affair is why the fuse burned so slowly. It was on 30 September 2005, more than four months ago, that Jyllands-Posten in Copenhagen published the cartoons of Mohammed (heavily unfunny, but extremely rude). The newspaper was barging into an already running story, about the reluctance of Danish illustrators to contribute to a life of Mohammed for children. Jyllands-Posten is a rightwing paper, in tune with the present Danish government in its resentment of Muslim immigrants, and it meant to make trouble. There followed some small demonstrations, and several death threats to the cartoonists.
None the less, the trouble could have been contained. The fatal element was the insistence of the prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, on posturing as a friend of liberty who knew how to stand up to repressive aliens. He brushed the protests from Danish Muslims aside. He then refused to receive the ambassadors of Islamic nations, who were demanding the prosecution of the newspaper. They reported back to their own publics on “Danish intransigence”…