A blog about the web including the machines, markets and learning required to advance it.
3 things twitter *needs* in it’s web interface -
Secondary markets for private companies. SecondMarket.com is the first to go beyond Accredited Investors - service available to all sellers
Sony’s answer to my - so far unique - Facebook app
Manhattan Auction - does this actually help shift equity?
Nice rebuttal of Google Analytics criticism
Backing up my post on Wednesday
Stocks dived from their recent range at the top of this week, largely for reasons unknown.
While the usual sources of financial infotainment were puzzled at the pullback - citing an absence of negative macroeconomic news - this is in fact a telegraphed “the rally has run out of steam” message. Trader sentiment changes as a function of time, and it is this inability to read the same data consistently that has the greatest impact on market direction beneath the long-term trend. So people have had enough of drinking the government-led recovery Koolaid for now.
What we then look to are combat indicators giving us signs of whether indeed everyone sees this and are still prepared to presevere with a contrarian rally - “climbing the wall of worry”. In such an event watch for a sharp drop as sellers get out quick followed by an equally sharp rebuttal as traders look to get in on the next leg of the rally.
The 2nd scenario is that this is indeed the end of the current rally, whether it then plays out to be a bear market one or the first phase of a recovery would remain to be seen.
So keep an eye on this throughout the week, my thinking at the moment is we’re seeing the beginnings of a summer pull back based on low volume and lack of strong recovery numbers.
Just finished release 1 of a nice and simple Facebook app that allows you to show off your Playstation Portable ID to your network. It shows among other things your last played online game and your trophy list including a breakdown across platinum, gold, silver & bronze.
Here is mine as an example
This gucci Portable ID that displays trophy count is only available from Playstation’s EU community site and so this is why Gamer Tag instructs the user to register there. The process is quite labourious but to help there is a great step-by-step guide at iTrophies.
As my first Facebook app I was surprised at the incomplete nature of documentation available, especially on the official dev site itself. Although concepts became less hazy by the time I fleshed out the full application life cycle it took a while for the building blocks to fall into place. The multi-dimensional nature of developing for the Facebook platform - i.e. working across 3 domains each with their own specific script or markup language - made for a trial and error development experience.
There are a lot of different paths into a facebook app and thus the challenge comes in creating a bullet-proof application that will withstand the many methods users will find to get to my little app. Storyboarding the various steps in signing up users helps immensely and can be safely broking down into a number of discrete steps.
This is definitely something that merits further discussion so look out for a tutorial somewhere in the not-too-distant future.
You can try it out for yourself here.
wolfenstein 3d javascript port cum flickr mashup
My hosting provider just granted universal unlimited space and traffic for a few quid a month. Interested? Sign up here
We need an animoto for video - something that will cut according to audio, action, soundtrack, ‘whitespace’, etc automagically. The technologies bound to be there and it’d make for instant polished moving pictures publishing, allowing viewers to follow in near realtime and participants to get on with the event.
more on the vc funding thing
more attack of the suits
Making a bit of a splash (no more I swear) online, Google Wave has been trumpeted as the replacement of ’60s’ email and IM applications. It’s also got friends in high places at Google Towers.
This could be a turning point on the web.Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering VP
On seeing a screenshot my first thought was ‘Facebook news feed’.
It’s got a similar albeit primitive system of inline comment right now. While it’s a nice to have, it’s not ‘killer’ and some of the Wave features (every character typed is spewed out in realtime as if participants were viewing the same terminal) will turn a lot of people off straight away. Indeed I’ve a few ideas of my own regarding ‘next generation’ communication, and they don’t involve greater intrusion. While the inline editing is a good thing I don’t regard it as a big enough win to justify moving onto a new platform, cloud or no cloud. What would be wrong with sticking this kind of functionality into Google Docs? We need smarter comms not more of them.
First quality flame post appears to be at Gigaom…
Free wifi is good. Lots of places do it. McDonalds is the big one, providing wifi in it’s outlets all over the country.
But.
Laptops still consume too much energy. For those of us who refuse to drop our netbooks in favour of phones, this presents a problem. Happily though there are free wifi hotspots that whether unwittingly or not also supply publicly accessible plugpoints.
Here is my attempt to map them out - everyone is free to contribute. Only add locations that have both free wifi & power points. Insert a green placemark if wifi is unfettered, red if there are restrictions such as site blockers or excessive time limits (instant arbitrary decision: anything under 12 hours). Give a description of wifi provider & location of plug point.
You’ll find FreeMap here.
Sometimes the embedded (chromeless) YouTube player will fall silent on video playback for an apparently unexplained reason, with no immediate way to fix. I think it has to do with YouTube/flash caching muted sound settings from youtube.com or other non-chromeless player and somewhere along the way these are carried over to your chromeless video.
Just include these two calls in the javascript player prior to calling playVideo():
player.unMute();
player.setVolume(10);
thus guaranteeing sound playback regardless of previous state. Similar solution for Actionscript. Further API details at http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/js_api_reference.html
Addition to provisional blogroll
erlang better suited to rapid development of distributed high availability systems than c++
and it’s going to win the war soldier…
Integrate feedburner & google analytics statistics?
I want this guy for my game music
Continue reading ‘Delayed What’s Been On My Mind’
The winners were announced this week and while it’s difficult to justify naming any one single site as being ‘the best of the web’ in any category such is the disparity of perspective on the web today, no doubt there are some nice designs & apps at work in this year’s awards.
Here’s my personal Webbys in no particular order and in no particular year - these are among my favourite sites on the web period:
finance - minyanville.com
sport - ourweecountry.co.uk
tech - slashdot.org
user content - flickr.com
hack - hackaday.com
gaming - escapistmagazine.com
tees - splitreason.com
books - amazon.co.uk
At the beginning of last month I surmised the likelihood was that this bounce would not last. However I thought there was enough optimism in the market mood in the short term despite a dark macroeconomic climate. The 8700 mark the Dow was at that day turned out to be the low for the rest of the month and the index has since consolidated above it.
Ignoring the earnings reports which ‘beat forecasts’ - when you have analysts dropping expectations to nothing that is not an argument to buy shares - the reasons I believe are twofold: An outbreak of Obamamania together with a fall in dollar Libor.
3-month Dollar Libor stands at 1.02 percentage points. It’s fall has been inversely proportional to the rise in the stock market. It may be that bank share prices have been hit so bad their market cap was having a direct effect on their liquidity, maybe even solvency. So the rising tide floating all boats scenario we have seen unfold over the past month has allowed the interbank lending rates to come down. Although it has much to fall to get to the perceived normality of 22 basis points prior to the crunch.
Obama has weathered the storm of expectation and disappointment in his first few months quite well. His finance team seem to be blundering along ok, accompanied by the rest of the Wall St walking wounded. Nobody seems to have wrapped on the general bail out everything at all costs world consensus. That seems to be doing the trick.
But for how long will this sense of benign calm last? The automakers are racing for bankruptcy sometime this summer, the banks look nowhere near ready to remove themselves from their recapitalising drip feed & economic numbers aren’t getting any better. There is also a whole host of other issues with game-changing potential. I believe Libor & consumer sentiment are leading indicators but while they have no doubt improved they are still bad.
From a trading point of view there will be plenty of time to catch the resumption in bear-related activities. Likewise if the governments really have managed to shock the economy back to life with their debt mountains the return to pre-Crunch levels (Dow 9000 for me) will not be a quick one. Lets just sit this one out for now.
Update: The eventual failure of this rally appears to be telegraphed by most reliable commentators. I’m sure many are looking to the stress test report out next week to maybe provide a catalyst for a reversal. I don’t think this will happen. The expectation is that it will require more bank fundraising. No surprises there. And surprises are what will take this market down.
|
