I’m going to post some charts of “my book” over the next few days. I may post things from my watch list, and I will try to post updates on these as needed.
First up is Activision Blizzard (ATVI), which I bought last year basically so I could own a piece of Blizzard.
Blizzard is the Pixar of videogames. Everything is a hit. I also think they are pretty smart about how to expand the business of videogames… by encouraging Star Craft as an esport and other things.
So, here is a six …
Trefis Puts Facebook at $74 Billion
Trefis provides some great reports that show up in my Etrade account. Their analysis is very thorough. I especially like how they break down different business units and how much of a stock’s share price is tied to each unit.
Trefis values Facebook (based on the limited pre-IPO information they have) at $74 Billion, based largely on their advertising business and growth via a growing user base (from 800 million to 2.6 billion) and increased ad revenues from video and music services Facebook is working on.
Here is the report.
They go into …
Super Wine Search is Back Baby
Last Fall, Google retired their “Googlebase” product which we used to get results for our wine shop search engine Super Wine Search.
We had plenty of heads up, but due to lack of time and some uncertainty about which API was the true successor to the Googlebase one, we had to take the site down for a while.
Well, it turns out that Google’s “Search API for Products” is a good successor and I had a bit of spare time… so Super Wine Search is back! I’m excited to try a bunch of searches to see how well the database has expanded. (Be sure to flag search results that come back funny so we can tweak our processing to improve our algorithm.)
The new API is actually very easy to work. I was able to swap things out pretty seamlessly.
There are a couple of things we had to nix. The Search API doesn’t include “size” and “vintage” data as a separate field like the Googlebase API would sometimes. So we are only able to grab this data if it is passed in the product title. Also the new API doesn’t seem to allow us to limit searches to “wine products” like we could before. These features shouldn’t be missed too much though because many merchants (most actually) didn’t provide this information. So we couldn’t count on them anyway… and we didn’t.
Super Wine Search was also used to gather pricing information on wines in your log. You may notice updates to your wine prices and cellar values.
I hope you’ll give Super Wine Search another try. This very simple technology, which basically wraps a bit of WineLog data around the Google shopping search is very powerful and competes well with the more robust wine search engines out there.
Facebook IPO Best and Worst Case Scenarios
Facebook released their numbers in preparation for an IPO, showing 2011 revenue of $3.7 Billion and profits of $1 Billion. Speculation is the IPO will be valued as high as $100 Billion.
This would be a P/E of 100. That’s high, but then P/E’s are not as significant an indicator for young companies with a lot of growth potential. So can Facebook grow enough to justify a $100 Billion price tag? I’m not so sure.
The easy justification goes like this:
Facebook has been focused on user growth and they were still growing 100% …
Penny Stock Trader and Entrepreneur Timothy Sykes at Mixergy.com
I’m enjoying the interview with Timothy Sykes over at Mixergy.com. Love the energy.
Grab it while it’s free there.
Don’t Break The Code
Last Saturday at WordCamp Philly, I ran a session on “Building a Plugin in One Night”. Together, with about 50+ attendees, we brainstormed ideas for a new WordPress plugin that I could code that night.
The brainstorming went great, coming up with some good ideas… like plugins to:
- Help first responders after a disaster (Big Idea!)
- Add VIM (a Linux editor) shortcut commands to the Visual Editor
- Disable the Visual Editor on a per-post basis (The Winner)
- Allow users to create pages from the front end
- Add easy donations
- Log into WordPress via Google+ (Brian did it!)
- Add syntax highlighting to the Visual Editor (Chris did it!)
The concept that the audience voted for me to work on was a way to disable the Visual Editor tab on a per-post basis. The motivation for this is the fact that the autoformatting of the Visual tab will sometimes break a complicated (or not so complicated) HTML structure ruining your code. Folks wanted a way to say, “Hey, WordPress, back off on this page/post”
And someone (you introduced yourself to me later, but I forget your name) came up with a kick ass name: Don’t Break the Code. It explains the purpose and also harkens back to my days at Haverford College, which has a strong social/academic honor code.
…
Why I’m a Buyer of Netflix Stock
Sometimes you look at a stock like Netflix when it was trading at $300+ and think “Here is a great company in a market with super growth, but how can I justify the price?â€
Well, it turns out you don’t have to justify the price because the market is beating the shit out of the stock. It’s trading after hours right now at around $86, and who knows where the market will take it.
Hip Egg had the next level of support at around $60, so I would look for the price …
CharityGoal.com Launches, Support our Cause
I’m happy to announce the launch of CharityGoal. This is a site we built for a client whose goal is to enable anyone to raise money for any (legal) cause. CharityGoal gives you an easy way to accept donations online, a beautiful landing page, and quick access to social network sharing.
For those interested, the site is built on top of WordPress. “Causes” are custom post types. A custom plugin we developed allows users who have signed up to create new causes through a front end form and to manage that cause. The checkout code was pulled from the Paid Memberships Pro plugin (also developed by us and GPL) and tweaked to work specifically for this site.
So take a look. While you at it, I’d appreciate a donation to our cause:
Yes You Should Refinance. But How?
With mortgage rates dropping like a brick, it’s becoming a no-brainer for us to refinance our home loan. Even though we just got a 30-year loan 2 years ago at 5.875%, we can get 30-year loans now for around 4.5% or lower. You might be in a similar situation.
Rule of Thumb
The rule of thumb I hear thrown around a lot is that if you can drop 1% off your mortgage rate, you should refinance. To get a more precise idea …
WBC11 Rioja Crawl Checklist
Hello, Wine Bloggers Conference. I hope you are going to enjoy the Rioja wines and look forward to a chance to win some Rioja wine or a trip to the region… with Pia!
This is a little hacked together, but I hope it helps you log the wines and keep track of where you are. Logging the wines here and marking of the paper Pia gave you should get you entered into the drawing twice. Here are the steps:
- Signup for WineLog. You may want to link up your Twitter account from the account page.
- Visit the Rioja Microsite or just search for riojacrawl. Check the wines off as you drink them.
- Visit your Wine Log. You will be awarded the Rioja Crawl badge.
- Click where prompted to share on Twitter and Facebook please.