Monday, January 7, 2013

Oddly Relevant Jan-7-2013


How the TV business got rich off the very thing that was supposed to kill it: Don’t get me wrong, tv cable for programs is dying, but simply put, we get our internet from the same people selling us the TV. Since 2005, total cable industry revenue is up 50%, 2/3 of the increase was from Internet. [Note: the lesson is that an entrenched player in a capital intensive industry can still chug along no problem]…Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/how-the-tv-business-got-rich-off-the-thing-that-was-going-to-the-kill-it-the-internet/266890/

Amazon’s cloud is bigger, more profitable than we think, report says: a $19 billion business if counted as a standalone, so Macquarie claims. With 8x revenue multiple it’d be worth $30 billion.Growing enterprise adoption will continue to feed the momentum. The low-margin, high volume business still has a lot of room to expand. [Note: It’s really just the tip of the iceberg. The true question is, will the capacity of tomorrow dwarf the investment made today?]…Source: http://gigaom.com/2013/01/07/amazons-cloud-is-bigger-more-profitable-than-we-think-report-says/

2013 could be the transformational year for gaming (console at least): the big new, in case you are not a gamer, is that Nvidia announced its entry into the gaming console market with Shield. To make the situation murkier, so is the upstart Ouya project, and PC game platform behemoth Steam’s consolve Steam box. All while Microsoft and Sony are blatantly developing Xbox 720 and PS4.

Note: I believe the age of $60 pop console game at Gamestop is about to change. Apple’s way of content distribution via the internet is surely the future. And honestly, we know that these gaming stuff are all going to merge into one hardware ultimately, and that could be our PC. I am bearish on gamestop.

A few facts about air safety: accident rate for airline now is quite low—that someone taking a flight a day could theoretically expect 14,000 years of trouble-free flying. It’s the safest in terms of distance travelled, but cars and trains are 3x and 6x safer when computed in numbers of journeys taken. Africa remains the worst in terms of safety—9x worse than the global average. [Note: Thanks to capitalism, our safety is ensured. Funny how that works]…Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/01/air-safety

Courtesy of the Dead Poet Society: "I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."~Henry David Thoreau

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