October 5, 2011

September 21, 2011

  • hp : Leo replaced by Meg ?

    Apple Watch:  $412.14 Wednesday 09/21

    AAPL Tuesday’s High: $422.86 (09/20)

    …and now back to our regulary scheduled program:

    HP board may oust Apotheker for Whitman

    September 21, 2011: 11:16 AM ET

    The troubled technology giant is weighing a major shakeup that could see CEO Leo Apotheker replaced by former eBay boss Meg Whitman.

    By James Bandler and Matt Vella

    leo_apotheker_hp

    FORTUNE — Hewlett-Packard’s board is weighing a shakeup that would include replacing its current CEO Leo Apotheker after barely a year on the job, according to a person familiar with the matter. The troubled technology giant plans to offer the top spot to former eBay boss Meg Whitman. Whitman is a current HP director and a strategic advisor at Kleiner Perkins.

    The situation appears to be fluid; HP’s (HPQ) board plans to meet this afternoon. When reached for comment, an HP spokesperson decline to say anything about the matter. HP’s stock jumped on the news, up around 8% to 24.24.

    The move would come at a pivotal time for HP, which has struggled to find a path forward. In mid-August, the company announced a vast planned overhaul of its business, agreeing to buy software maker Autonomy Corp. for $10.3 billion, canceling its TouchPad tablet and deciding whether to sell or spin-off its hardware division. The plan, in other words, called for the unraveling of the much-debated 2002 merger with Compaq Computer that helped turn HP into a technology behemoth.

    Since taking over in November 2010, Apotheker has faced his share of reversals. A mere five months before announcing the latest plan, he had touted the company’s WebOS tablet operating system and promised it would ship with every Hewlett-Packard computer as well as a robust line of phones and tablet computers. In August, he pulled an abrupt about-face, announcing the cancellation of HP’s TouchPad tablet and the effective discontinuation of WebOS, which it got as part of a $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm last year.

    Such moves might have been expected given Apotheker’s resume. In putting the former CEO of German software giant SAP (SAP) in charge, HP’s board effectively asked an executive with enterprise software expertise to go toe-to-toe in the low-margin PC business, not to mention a high-risk play to outflank Apple (AAPL) in smartphones and tablets. Apotheker’s moves to divest in both businesses came when PC sales slowed and the tablet failed to catch on.

    What would HP get in Whitman? A seasoned executive with a long history in Silicon Valley — not to mention one familiar with the company. Whitman, 55, has been an HP director since early this year. After stints at Bain & Co., Disney (DIS), Procter & Gamble (PG) and Hasbro (HAS), Whitman was eBay’s president and CEO from 1998 until 2008. She transfored the tiny e-commerce startup with just 30 employees and $4.7 million in revenue into a giant with some 15,000 employees and almost $8 billion in revenue. (Whitman was Fortune’s Most Powerful Woman in Business in 2004 and 2005.) She eventually left, making a hard-fought but failed bid to become California’s governor.

    Pressure is mounting on HP’s board to get something right. Before today’s news, its stock has been hammered, down over 40% from the beginning of the year. HP was widely criticized over the 2010 departure of former CEO Mark Hurd amid a scandal involving a personal relationship with a company contractor. (Hurd is a co-president at Oracle (ORCL).) Now, Apotheker’s tenure looks slated to barely outlast his 10-month run as CEO of SAP, which ended amid clashes with German unions and declines in revenue. As the board meets, HP’s long string missteps is surely foremost in mind.

    Story is developing, please refresh for updates.

     
     

August 22, 2011

  • Is Traditional Physical Media Dead??? – Andreessen says “Software is eating the world.”

    Damon sent me an interesting read from the Wall Street Journal Today.  The article made me ponder the state of physical media like magazines, books, newspapers, CD’s and DVD’s.  I’m a traditionalist and really love the feeling of physical media in my hands.  I love the idea of framed paintings, sculpture, installation and street art, album cover art, vinyl records and old leather bound parchment. These are all things you can hold or touch with your hands.  The visceral is very different from the digital.  Maybe this is why I’m still obsessed with boxing, electro-mechanical pinball machines, and purely mechanical American Muscle Cars like the Shelby Cobra.  There is an absence of that which can be digitized.  You are either connected and there or you are not.  Seeing a picture of boxing, a pinball, or cobra is not the same as experienceing it in the ring, when the quarter is in play, or when the engine is roaring and you are sitting in the driver’s seat.

    I digress.  I would guess that hp divests its investments in the PC, mobile, and tablet business and moves aggressively into software.  I heard hp paid billions for Autonomy Analytics.  It would not surprise me if their current CEO considered merging or acquiring another enterprise software company.  In any case, the article below highlights innovative and sustainable American companies.  I wish I had more capital to put into a fund which invested in most of the companies mentioned in Marc Andreessen’s essay.  Happy reading…

     

    Why Software Is Eating The World
    By MARC ANDREESSEN

    This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I’ve observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.

    In short, software is eating the world.

    More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of Webvan and Pets.com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, “Isn’t this just a dangerous new bubble?”

    I, along with others, have been arguing the other side of the case. (I am co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, which has invested in Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare, among others. I am also personally an investor in LinkedIn.) We believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses.

    Today’s stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies. Apple, for example, has a P/E ratio of around 15.2—about the same as the broader stock market, despite Apple‘s immense profitability and dominant market position (Apple in the last couple weeks became the biggest company in America, judged by market capitalization, surpassing Exxon Mobil). And, perhaps most telling, you can’t have a bubble when people are constantly screaming “Bubble!”

    But too much of the debate is still around financial valuation, as opposed to the underlying intrinsic value of the best of Silicon Valley’s new companies. My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.

    More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.

    Why is this happening now?

    Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.

    Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago, when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded. In the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.

    On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries—without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees. In 2000, when my partner Ben Horowitz was CEO of the first cloud computing company, Loudcloud, the cost of a customer running a basic Internet application was approximately $150,000 a month. Running that same application today in Amazon’s cloud costs about $1,500 a month.

    With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired—the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.

    Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon. In 2001, Borders agreed to hand over its online business to Amazon under the theory that online book sales were non-strategic and unimportant.

    Oops.

    Today, the world’s largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company—its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software.

    Today’s largest video service by number of subscribers is a software company: Netflix. How Netflix eviscerated Blockbuster is an old story, but now other traditional entertainment providers are facing the same threat. Comcast, Time Warner and others are responding by transforming themselves into software companies with efforts such as TV Everywhere, which liberates content from the physical cable and connects it to smartphones and tablets.

    Today’s dominant music companies are software companies, too: Apple’s iTunes, Spotify and Pandora. Traditional record labels increasingly exist only to provide those software companies with content. Industry revenue from digital channels totaled $4.6 billion in 2010, growing to 29% of total revenue from 2% in 2004.

    Today’s fastest growing entertainment companies are videogame makers—again, software—with the industry growing to $60 billion from $30 billion five years ago. And the fastest growing major videogame company is Zynga (maker of games including FarmVille), which delivers its games entirely online. Zynga’s first-quarter revenues grew to $235 million this year, more than double revenues from a year earlier. Rovio, maker of Angry Birds, is expected to clear $100 million in revenue this year (the company was nearly bankrupt when it debuted the popular game on the iPhone in late 2009). Meanwhile, traditional videogame powerhouses like Electronic Arts and Nintendo have seen revenues stagnate and fall.

    The best new movie production company in many decades, Pixar, was a software company. Disney—Disney!—had to buy Pixar, a software company, to remain relevant in animated movies.

    Photography, of course, was eaten by software long ago. It’s virtually impossible to buy a mobile phone that doesn’t include a software-powered camera, and photos are uploaded automatically to the Internet for permanent archiving and global sharing. Companies like Shutterfly, Snapfish and Flickr have stepped into Kodak’s place.

    Today’s largest direct marketing platform is a software company—Google. Now it’s been joined by Groupon, Living Social, Foursquare and others, which are using software to eat the retail marketing industry. Groupon generated over $700 million in revenue in 2010, after being in business for only two years.

    Today’s fastest growing telecom company is Skype, a software company that was just bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion. CenturyLink, the third largest telecom company in the U.S., with a $20 billion market cap, had 15 million access lines at the end of June 30—declining at an annual rate of about 7%. Excluding the revenue from its Qwest acquisition, CenturyLink’s revenue from these legacy services declined by more than 11%. Meanwhile, the two biggest telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon, have survived by transforming themselves into software companies, partnering with Apple and other smartphone makers.

    LinkedIn is today’s fastest growing recruiting company. For the first time ever, on LinkedIn, employees can maintain their own resumes for recruiters to search in real time—giving LinkedIn the opportunity to eat the lucrative $400 billion recruiting industry.

    Software is also eating much of the value chain of industries that are widely viewed as primarily existing in the physical world. In today’s cars, software runs the engines, controls safety features, entertains passengers, guides drivers to destinations and connects each car to mobile, satellite and GPS networks. The days when a car aficionado could repair his or her own car are long past, due primarily to the high software content. The trend toward hybrid and electric vehicles will only accelerate the software shift—electric cars are completely computer controlled. And the creation of software-powered driverless cars is already under way at Google and the major car companies.

    Today’s leading real-world retailer, Wal-Mart, uses software to power its logistics and distribution capabilities, which it has used to crush its competition. Likewise for FedEx, which is best thought of as a software network that happens to have trucks, planes and distribution hubs attached. And the success or failure of airlines today and in the future hinges on their ability to price tickets and optimize routes and yields correctly—with software.

    Oil and gas companies were early innovators in supercomputing and data visualization and analysis, which are crucial to today’s oil and gas exploration efforts. Agriculture is increasingly powered by software as well, including satellite analysis of soils linked to per-acre seed selection software algorithms.

    The financial services industry has been visibly transformed by software over the last 30 years. Practically every financial transaction, from someone buying a cup of coffee to someone trading a trillion dollars of credit default derivatives, is done in software. And many of the leading innovators in financial services are software companies, such as Square, which allows anyone to accept credit card payments with a mobile phone, and PayPal, which generated more than $1 billion in revenue in the second quarter of this year, up 31% over the previous year.

    Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation. My venture capital firm is backing aggressive start-ups in both of these gigantic and critical industries. We believe both of these industries, which historically have been highly resistant to entrepreneurial change, are primed for tipping by great new software-centric entrepreneurs.

    Even national defense is increasingly software-based. The modern combat soldier is embedded in a web of software that provides intelligence, communications, logistics and weapons guidance. Software-powered drones launch airstrikes without putting human pilots at risk. Intelligence agencies do large-scale data mining with software to uncover and track potential terrorist plots.

    Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming. This includes even industries that are software-based today. Great incumbent software companies like Oracle and Microsoft are increasingly threatened with irrelevance by new software offerings like Salesforce.com and Android (especially in a world where Google owns a major handset maker).

    In some industries, particularly those with a heavy real-world component such as oil and gas, the software revolution is primarily an opportunity for incumbents. But in many industries, new software ideas will result in the rise of new Silicon Valley-style start-ups that invade existing industries with impunity. Over the next 10 years, the battles between incumbents and software-powered insurgents will be epic. Joseph Schumpeter, the economist who coined the term “creative destruction,” would be proud.

    And while people watching the values of their 401(k)s bounce up and down the last few weeks might doubt it, this is a profoundly positive story for the American economy, in particular. It’s not an accident that many of the biggest recent technology companies—including Google, Amazon, eBay and more—are American companies. Our combination of great research universities, a pro-risk business culture, deep pools of innovation-seeking equity capital and reliable business and contract law is unprecedented and unparalleled in the world.

    Still, we face several challenges.

    First of all, every new company today is being built in the face of massive economic headwinds, making the challenge far greater than it was in the relatively benign ’90s. The good news about building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient. And when the economy finally stabilizes, look out—the best of the new companies will grow even faster.

    Secondly, many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There’s no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.

    Finally, the new companies need to prove their worth. They need to build strong cultures, delight their customers, establish their own competitive advantages and, yes, justify their rising valuations. No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It’s brutally difficult.

    I’m privileged to work with some of the best of the new breed of software companies, and I can tell you they’re really good at what they do. If they perform to my and others’ expectations, they are going to be highly valuable cornerstone companies in the global economy, eating markets far larger than the technology industry has historically been able to pursue.

    Instead of constantly questioning their valuations, let’s seek to understand how the new generation of technology companies are doing what they do, what the broader consequences are for businesses and the economy and what we can collectively do to expand the number of innovative new software companies created in the U.S. and around the world.

    That’s the big opportunity. I know where I’m putting my money.

    —Mr. Andreessen is co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz. He also co-founded Netscape, one of the first browser companies.

    In an interview with WSJ’s Kevin Delaney, Groupon and LinkedIn investor Marc Andreessen insists that the recent popularity of tech companies does not constitute a bubble. He also stressed that both Apple and Google are undervalued and that “the market doesn’t like tech.”  <video link to interview here>

     Links to companies mentioned in this post and their closing stock price on 08/22/2011 :

    Hewlett-Packard, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=HPQ $24.45
    Google, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GOOG $498.17
    Motorola Mobility, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=MMI $38.04
    Facebook, IPO Feb 2012?
    Groupon, IPO 2011-2012?
    Twitter, not public
    Zynga, not public
    Foursquare, not public
    LinkedIn, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=LNKD $74.95
    Apple http://finance.yahoo.com/quotes/AAPL $356.44
    Exxon Mobil, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=XOM $70.18
    Amazon, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AMZN $177.54
    Netflix, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=NFLX $205.21
    Spotify, not public
    Pandora, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=P $12.15
    Rovio, not public
    Electronic Arts, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=ERTS $19.60
    Nintendo, not traded on US market?
    Disney, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=DIS $32.02
    Living Social, not public
    Foursquare, not public
    Skype, part of Microsoft Acquistion
    Microsoft, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=MSFT $23.98
    CenturyLink, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CTL $33.99
    AT&T, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=T $28.45
    Verizon, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=VZ $34.82
    Wal-Mart, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=WMT $52.19
    FedEx, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=FDX $73.00
    PayPal, not public? probably part of EBAY
    Square, not public? is this supposed to be Square-Enix Japan?
    Salesforce.com, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CRM $110.86
    Android, OS for Google Tablet/Mobile
    Oracle, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=ORCL $25.06
    eBay, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=EBAY $27.36

     

August 8, 2011

  • Predictions, Infatuations & Obsessions, and the Stock Market…

    Nostradamus was great at forseeing the future.  I failed to write down my 2011 #predictions early on in the year but it seems that some are already coming true. 

    Work:

    • 2 people will leave the group
    • The team will be organized differently

    I’ll leave off my personal goals for the time being but the major one for 2011 is happily on-track.

    #Infatuations & #Obsessions

    I’m currently infatuated with this track from Estelle.  It makes it to the #2011 Top 3/10 Tracks for the year.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShAmaOPK1h4

    In no order of importance:

    Stock Market

    Today is absolutely dismal for the stock market.  It’s down over 400 points today near 11,000. When it’s under 11,000 i’m hoping that the floor is at 10,500 and it will be safe to move money back into AAPL, GOOG, HPQ, UPS, MRO and SAP.  New companies I’d actively consider would be RNOW and CRM. 

    • Apple: 360.29
    • Google: 555.30
    • Hewlett-Packard: 31.30
    • UPS: 63.14
    • Marathon: 23.82
    • SAP: 52.17
    • Right Now: 125.63
    • SalesForce.Com: 27.00

    Precious Metals:

    Equities are deceptively simple.  I have no idea how to jump on to the precious metals (run-away) train…

    Errata

    Over the weekend, Lynette and I were happily surprised to attend South Lake Tahoe’s Hot August Nights 25th Anniversary.  We got to see a bunch of Classic American Muscle Cars and Hot Rods.  I got to see 3 examples of my favorite object of desire: The Shelby Cobra !

    One of which was local to South Lake Tahoe: a 1965 Cobra red with white racing stripes CA License Tag 1965ASP

    My next major frivolous purchase goal will be a Shelby Cobra by 2021.  I hope this current dip in the stock market leads to the bounce that helps me get this trophy by 2016 or sooner…

August 7, 2011

July 10, 2011

  • Up in the air…

    I’m anxious to get back home to the Bay Area. I’m also tempted to take a second voucher for $400 for additional flight credit on United by volunteering not to fly on this flight. If i was alone this is a no-brainer. That would make it a total of $1600 in flight vouchers for missing the last two flights! We’ll settle for the $800 and just get home today!

June 16, 2011

  • …Another Hole In My Head…Joining Tumblr…

    Austin was home tonight. He was burning CD’s for his new baby, an RX-7.  Fortunately for me he couldn’t get them to play in his ‘new’ CD player.  So I grabbed one that had “Drake” on it.  After the gym, I loaded up the CD and was enamored by track number 5…

     

    Drake’s Show Me a Good Time (Don Cannon Remix) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDDLa4CxbZA

    I’ll give the rest of the CD a listen later.

    There’s a bunch of “new” artists that define this generation’s music, Lil Wayne, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, and definitely Drake. I leave out many artists but these 4 are definitely the hotness.

     

    As usual, I digress…

    I’m joining Tumblr. For no apparent reason, other than 3 folks who I’ve befriended via social networking circles are on there and I’m compelled to comment on some of their posts.  In order to do so you need an Tumblr account.  I’m jamesguanzon.tumblr.com

    Welcome to the newest hole in my head.  I hope it’s not another site I’ll have content on (i.e. meaningless dribble). But it definitely has many pluses that xanga does not have.  Hopefully, the walled garden that is xanga allows more of the social networking integration with Facebook, Twitter, and mobile platform posting.  This all seems to be easier and cooler looking on Tumblr.

    As a last note, I love LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem track and video.  Funny take on the zombie theme…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ6zr6kCPj8

    Ciao!

     

June 4, 2011

  • Expanding my horizons…

    Earlier this week I stopped into my local library to find a few books to share with my colleague Amit. This was inspired by my brother dropping off a copy of Esquire Magazine’s 2011 Big Black Book, after his stay at the Hotel Intercontinental in SF. I ended up with 3 books, two of which were what I was originally looking for and one that was by pure chance.

    On my way to check out, I stumbled upon the Jazz collection of CDs.  I immediately recognized Stan Getz and Miles Davis and picked up stuff from them.  One that I didn’t recognize but thought I’d give a try was from Lionel Hampton and Oscar Peterson.  A total of four CD boxed sets.  I listened to them over the course of the last few days and have discovered something truly amazing.  Miles Davis has yet to grow on me.  I listen to him in order to help me appreciate the brass I love from contemporary trumpeteers like Chris Botti. I’m in love with one track from Getz. A separate post later on Stan Getz. 

    Lionel Hampton’s “Tenderly” is beautiful and I’ve yet to find this somewhere on Youtube.  In my search, I found this footage from 1957, where Mr. Hampton performs “Flying Home”.  I’m in awe.

    /// <embed here>

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_rTICMVXQQ

    His passion for playing the vibraharp infectious.  Listening to the CD’s was amazing.  It was a completely different thing to watch him perform the piece live on this video.  He just rocks! What an amazing entertainer!  He just screams energy and passion on the stage.  More here from Youtube. If a time machine were available, I would go back just to be part of the scene where he was performing.  Although the US of the late 1950′s must have been some interesting times.  I couldn’t help but think that many of the things that I admire today are from that era: art (Pollock/Rothko), music (jazz/rock n’ roll), cars (Vette’s/pre-mustang), and architecture (mid-century modern).  Things just aren’t made the same way anymore.  Life seemed more simplistic and easier to understand back then.  I wonder what will be remembered of today, fifty years from now???

    Yes, my library is amazing.  I love this resource for the variety of things that are made available to everyone in the community.  If you haven’t been in to your local library, check it out!  There must be at least one thing there that will expand your own horizons!

May 13, 2011

May 12, 2011

  • Have More Babies & Go USA! on NPR / California Report

    This morning after my jog, I discovered an interesting ”new” feature of the iPod Nano that my son gave us for Christmas 2010: a radio!

    How novel! My first reaction was to check out NPR KQED 88.5 on the ipod radio “dial”.  I caught these two interesting stories, which by the way are today’s lead stories on the California Report for May 12, 2011.

    The first report was on the growing aging population of California and that there are 250 million fewer children between 5 and 14.

    http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201105120850/a

    Recommendation: Make Mo’ Babies California!!! But maybe this is a good thing that people are not having kids here, the educational system is desparate need of reform and improvement.  I still want to watch Waiting for Superman to help solidify that idea.

    I couldn’t find the actual 2010 California census data on the overall population, but found this link: http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/2010_census/cb11-cn68.html interesting to see that there are roughly 2 million people between San Jose and San Francisco. I finally found out that there’s 9.8 million people in Los Angeles County. Still clueless about the actual population number of California, which I assume is around 35 million.

    The second segment was on Rare Earth elements, which are used in different high tech gadgets like SmartPhones and Hybrid car batteries.

    http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201105120850/b

    It’s interesting to note that 97% of Rare Earth elements come from China.  California is home to 1 of 2 mines which are outside of China. Looks like there’s one mining company that can stand up against China’s dominance in this market. Feels like David versus Goliath. Go USA! Oddly, the report states that of the 300 jobs that could be created directly from this venture and reopening of the mine, many would go to folks in Las Vegas, Nevada, which is the nearest city to the mine at Mountain Pass. MolyCorp (MCP $65.16) is the company that is responsible for the mine.  I no longer have any positions in precious metals, this looks like it could be a potential candidate after some investigation.  Ideally, I’d like some physical gold, silver, and oil but that’s ridiculously impractical.  I guess I’ll have to stick to stocks for the companies involved in the production of these commodities.

    Other Errata: Google is releasing it’s own NOTEBOOK! http://www.google.com/chromebook/chromebooks.html (time to contemplate which direction the GOOG ($535.05) stock will go…)

    On a completely separate note, I had a great lunch with Badri! Thanks for stopping by the office for some chow, froyo, and a nice chat!