Hope over fear

America shouldn't be in this economic and social decay. We are where we are due to the bad decisions WE allowed our government to make. Let's not continue to be quiet. We can be and do better. Let's change now before our problems become bigger.
Don't let apathy decide our future. Go out and vote.
Vote for change in the White House. Vote for change in America.
Vote to change how the world views America. Vote for Obama.

Time for a downgrade?

Is it just me or are people getting so frustrated with Vista that they are seriously thinking of going back to XP, and I am not talking about expert users only, I am seeing more average users complaining about Vista being a resource hog and how its all a 'con$piracy' to make them buy more memory. Take my dad for example, he is an accountant and uses Quickbooks often. 7 months ago he got an HP laptop and since day 1 he didn't like Vista. Now he is asking me (I am kind of the techie guy in the family) if I have a copy of XP so I can 'downgrade' his OS. Two more family members have asked me the same exact thing and several friends complain about how Vista's flaws are more than its benefits. I myself haven't upgraded to Vista. I had the opportunity to beta test Vista's RC1 & RC2 and have used Vista Premiun quite a lot but there hasn't been anything to sway me to change. In fact I am hoping I can wait until Microsoft's next OS or maybe I will just make the change to Ubuntu.
In any case I hope more retailers realize this and start offering XP as an option again, dream on, right. It is obvious more and more PC's are running Vista but that is because they all come preloaded. I really wonder, would Vista be profitable for Microsoft if they gave the consumer the choice? Enough with my Vista rant. The market will speak.
Benchmarks speak louder than words.
Check out this comprenhensive Benchmark from Tom's Hardware.

A.I. learned financial modeling

The holy grail for certain financial analysts is to be able to develop a comprehensive economic model that will take-in massive amounts of data and improve their odds at making forecasts. In order for this models to be meaningful we must enter the world of AI. Neural networks, genetic algorithms and extensive data mining are some of the tools needed to build such a daunting application. Typically it is very expensive to develop something meaningful, but there are some alternative options out there for the serious individual investor. Recently I found an application called RapidMiner which seems to be very powerful, modular and Open Source. I am currently trying to figure it out and brushing up my XML & JAVA in order to understand some of the concepts. It is very interesting, for example you can feed it data from TraderXL in order to construct your models.
Although it is not very encouraging that Goldman Sachs darling, the Global Alpha fund(9 billion) which trades are determined by computers and mathematical models, is down 16% for the year last time I checked, I have faith that computer modeling is a valuable tool for conducting meaningful forecasting.

Looking for a HIT (or to SCORE)

Hitwise is a powerful and valuable online marketing tool. It allows the researcher to analyze online usage data from 25 million people interacting with over 1 million websites in 160+ industries.
Among its many products, it offers :
'Rankings lists' which track market share of visits.
'Charting' allow for customizable chart based on online usage data.
'Clickstream' which analyzes where users come from and go to.
'Search intelligence' let's you explore successful keyword driven traffic.
'Demographic and lifestyle' helps you understand profiles of Internet audiences.
I find it extremely interesting and exciting that businesses can have almost real time information about consumer behavior, usage and searching patterns. It definitely helps those businesses looking for an additional edge in their industry. If properly used, this information will pay for itself time and time again. It will help you solidify your online presence, it will help you understand what the competition is doing, it will give you and idea of where you stand in your industry and it will give you many other benefits that should be part of your SWOT strategy.
Comscore is another company that 'measures the digital world' and is apparently somewhat more extensive than Hitwise. In any case they both offer services that will definitely be an asset to have.

Using GoogleFinance()

Stock information can be pulled via the simple formula GoogleFinance(ticker, attribute) and pushed into a GoogleDocs spreadsheet. It is a very easy way to access real time data and create financial models.
The following types of market data are currently available:
price: market price of the stock - delayed by up to 20 minutes.
priceopen: the opening price of the stock for the current day.
high: the highest price the stock traded for the current day.
low: the lowest price the stock traded for the current day.
volume: number of shares traded of this stock for the current day.
marketcap: the market cap of the stock.
tradetime: the last time the stock traded.
datadelay: the delay in the data presented for this stock using the googleFinance() function.
volumeavg: the average volume for this stock.
pe: the Price-to-Earnings ratio for this stock.
eps: the earnings-per-share for this stock.
high52: the 52-week high for this stock.
low52: the 52-week low for this stock.
change: the change in the price of this stock since yesterday's market close.
beta: the beta value of this stock.
changepct: the percentage change in the price of this stock since yesterday's close.
closeyest: yesterday's closing price of this stock.
shares: the number of shares outstanding of this stock.
currency: the currency in which this stock is traded.
Hopefully this list will expand in the future and access to international market data will also be supported.

Google Docs, an alternative to MICRO$OFT Office?

In order to fulfill one of my Business 188 'Individual Technology Assignments' and continuing with the Open Source solutions for businesses, lets take a look at Google's Google Docs as an alternative to Microsoft's Office.

There is no need to introduce Microsoft's Office, on the other hand not everybody is aware of Google Docs features. Google Docs spawned out of Google Labs and is one of their 'graduate' tools. It is a 'free' Web based office productivity suite which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. In order to access Google Docs you must have a gmail account to sign in. Once you sign in at Google Docs you will be able to create, edit, upload and organize your documents, spreadsheets and presentations. It has a very intuitive and simple interface. It supports (opens & saves) MS Office formats (doc, xls, ppt). It allows for real time collaboration, meaning that multiple users with an Internet connection can view or edit files simultaneously; additionally it has a chat feature for real time communication. The word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation applications have most of the features their MS Office couterpart offers, but it does lack some of the most advanced features some users utilize. Besides the lack of advanced features, security may become and issue since not every user may want to keep their sensitive documents in Google's servers (although there is a save to disk alternative). Additionally, size limitations do exist for the documents created and uploaded. Overall is very efficient and appealing, average users won't miss Office (specially the 2007 version) and if collaboration is a priority you must try it. Businesses, like these, that don't need all the 'power user' features will find it very valuable.
A very valuable feature for those of us in the field of finance is that we can construct spreadsheets to conduct stock analysis where we can use real time data from Google Finance with a function called GoogleFinance(symbol, attribute), where 'symbol' equals the stock's ticker symbol and 'attribute' can be price, volume, beta, Market Cap, etc...
Here is a cool video about Google Docs...

Lowering Small Business costs with Open Source

I have always agreed with those that say that 'there's no such thing as a free lunch', especially in the business environment. But using Open Source applications to lower your small businesses operating costs, is as close as 'free' gets. In the last decade we have witnessed the evolution of the Open Source movement. What started as an elite group of idealist programmers has become a global movement and today is a force to be reckoned with. When small businesses select their software infrastructure they often look for hassle free integration with their hardware, compatibility, intuitive interfaces and continued support. In the past this requirements have been the weakness of Open Source developments; but not anymore. Today we have a slew of software that have nothing to envy the big ticket 'closed system' programs.

The change from licensed software to the open source alternatives has been somewhat slow in the small business community and although it may not be for everyone to make the leap, I believe any possible reduction in costs is worth exploring. For starters we may want to turn to the Linux environment to replace our operating system. Ubuntu is a very solid alternative to XP and Vista. Open Office does an outstanding job at replacing MS Office, and GoogleDocs is also worth looking at. For those looking to substitute Quickbooks or similar accounting programs, SQL-Ledger ERP is a double entry accounting/ERP system that satisfies most of the needs of any small and even some medium sized businesses. Bigger businesses may want to take a look at Compiere, a very complete Open Source ERP and CRM solution that is truly first class.
If you own your own business server and haven't heard or tried LAMP yet, you may be missing out. LAMP is not a single application, but a group of technologies (Linux+Apache+MySql+Php)that run your server.
The previous are just some of the alternatives that I suggest every small business owner should pay close attention to. There are innumerable Open Source applications for your business and even the most specialized segments would be pleasantly surprised to find an Open Source solution for their needs. It is just a matter of finding the right 'free' product, so go ahead and do your own research.