Hashemian Blog
Web Tools, Financial Markets, Technology
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
RegFD Snags Siebel
It’s hard to imagine a company, much less a large and reputable one, breaking any obvious SEC laws these days. After witnessing so many companies and executives disgraced in public, you’d reckon that companies would go above and beyond their means to keep integrity at the top of their priority list.
But oh no, in the words of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, and corporate memories seem to always have acute Alzheimer's. Such is the recent case of Siebel Systems who has gotten itself in a bit of hot water by allegedly breaking the SEC’s RegFD.
RegFD (Regulation Fair Disclosure) forbids companies from disclosing non-public and material financial information to select groups. It appears that last year Siebel was telling rosy tales of company’s performance to a select number of investors, while publicly painting a slow-quarter picture for the public. The result: those select investors bought in the stock cheap and locked in profits when the rumors began to hit the street.
The stunning part of the story is that Siebel was fined for the same misconduct in 2001, so they should have known better to repeat the same mistake. This time it appears that the SEC is ready to handle the matter in court and it could cost Siebel millions.
Please guys, add a little Ginko Biloba to your daily nosh.
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// posted by rh
Monday, June 28, 2004
Storage Out of Thin Air
It was bound to happen. Not long after Google started its one-Gigger Gmail service, other free email providers followed suit and raised their storage quotas by some unimaginable multiples. Just take a look at these three popular providers:
Yahoo – from 6 MB to 100 MB
iWon – from 6 MB to 125 MB
Hotmail – from 2 MB to 250 MB
I’m sure most users don’t even care how or why this has happened. They’re just happy to be given the extra storage. And it’s a good move for the providers to keep their user bases loyal. I was itching to migrate from Hotmail to Gmail. Now I am reconsidering the move. As one of the Hotmail guys pointed out, they have taken the storage issue off the table.
Of course I am not the one that would just take the good news and rejoice. My cynical personality is always in search of some sinister motive.
How could the stingy Hotmail that was offering a measly 2 free MB for years suddenly offer 125 times that amount? Did the storage gods suddenly blessed them with a hard disk monsoon? And how all these providers could offer such colossal capacities simultaneously?
So where did all this excess storage come from? I suspect some of it was there to begin with, but in an effort to convert freeloaders to paying customers, these companies were just holding back on us. Until Google figured out a better way to monetize the service while giving the users the freedom to breathe.
And the rest is just a statistical game. Odds are Hotmail and other providers do not have enough storage to accommodate all their users at maximum capacity. What they probably count on is that most users will not utilize all of their allotted capacity and trim their message folders often. Even a messy person like me wouldn’t want to have an entire Gigabyte worth of emails strewn about his email folders.
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// posted by rh
Thursday, June 24, 2004
The Skin Grid
Back in the old days in Engineering school, I remember setting my digital multi-meter (a souped-up voltage meter), to the most sensitive voltage level, press the leads against my skin and marvel at my body producing tiny and erratic amounts of voltage.
Today Microsoft took that concept one step further by patenting a technology to use skin to transmit power to devices attached to the human body. If you think about, it makes perfect sense. Like it or not, we are becoming more Cyborg-like. People now have devices hanging from every belt-loop and each device requires power and a way to communicate with other devices. As we move into the wearable device age, the skin is a perfect conduit to power these devices and move data between them.
It remains to be seen how useful and reliable a conductor the skin is. For example, would ultra-dry skins or overly oily skins cause grid disruptions? Will microsoft introduce a new body soap to enhance skin’s data transfer rates? Will natural body voltage and brain waves ever be harnessed to power Personal Area Networks?
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// posted by rh
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Gmail: Spammer’s Paradise?
Gmail, the high capacity free e-mail service from Google, is reaching more people everyday. Google made a smart move by gradually adding subscribers rather than opening the Gmail doors and letting the masses stampede all over its systems. So far so good.
The most notable feature of Gmail is the one Gigabyte storage capacity. By today’s standards that is a giant amount of storage to be given away for free. Of course Google’s plan is to capitalize on all this by displaying relevant ads and getting people to click on them as they read their e-mails.
But I wonder if Google will provide an effective spam blocker with Gmail. I imagine that they may resist the idea. They may decide to keep to a basic spam blocker to satisfy most users and stop there. The reason? Deleting too much spam will cut down on the potential content that could be paired with ads. For example, a Viagra-touting spam could be paired with a number of banners advertising erectile dysfunction treatments and Google may not want to miss out on those clicks.
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// posted by rh
Thursday, June 03, 2004
A Future Without Oil
With the insatiable appetite of the world for fossil fuel, it's no wonder people are so nervous about the recent jumps in oil prices. Today the world economy is so tightly linked to oil and its byproducts, that living without it is plain unimaginable.
It's difficult to believe that the human race up to very recently didn't even know what oil was. Life just went on without this precious commodity just as normally as it does today with a steady flow of the liquid gold. People ate, slept, kept warm, fought wars, and made love just the same.
Now flash forward a few centuries when oil supplies are all but exhausted and the human race is once again free of its dependence on oil. Atomic energy, the Sun's endless fire, or perhaps an as of yet undiscovered means will provide the fuel for those generations of humans who will inhabit the Earth or some other body in space.
It's not a hypothetical scenario, but a certain reality. People will eat, sleep, keep warm, fight wars, and make love just the same. And perhaps they will also chuckle at the foolishness of our generation.
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// posted by rh
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