Thought Garage

Microsoft’s Augmented Reality in Bing Maps (Windows Live Maps). Going beyond the street view. Crowd sourced Photographs, photographs through the timeline and augmenting real time video, awesome. And if you just look up in the sky, you can all constellations in that space at that time. Wonderful.

iPad is now official and awesome. And in my view, there are two categories of products that will suffer a great deal if not completely get ignored in the market: Netbooks and e-Book readers (like Kindle).  iPad will be a real break-through not because hardware (despite gigantic touch screen) or for software, but for great and intuitive user experience in consuming content. Finally, consuming content on web feels like reading a book or magazine, close to your heart. Something I always wanted. Hmm, I will be poor by at least another $500.

The fact that any of those 140K apps that run on iPhone or iPod touch run on iPad without any modification is quite irresistible. And for those who already have an iPhone or iPod touch, using iPad is just natural and hence nothing exciting. It not only looks and feels like a gigantic iPhone or iPod touch, but powered by the same software core.

YouTube has announced an exclusive deal to broadcast live online the entire cricket season of the upstart Indian Premier League this year. [This is] the largest and most extensive live streaming that weve ever done, I think thats ever been done on the internet before, Shailesh Rao, Managing Director, Google India said yesterday. The season will be shown everywhere around the world except inside the United States.

Via Readwrite web

It sounds quite alarming that 8-18 year olds on average spend about 7.5 hours a day on entertainment media (that includes cell phone, TV, Music players and computers). But considering the fact that some of those devices being an integral part of our lives (like cell phones), use of them for entertainment may be over quoted.

A national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that with technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth. 

Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week).  And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

Source : Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds

Also quoting from the survey, the same set of people surveyed say that about 55% of people are scoring B+ (mostly As or Bs + mostly As) grades in school. That definitely has something to say about how the new generation is using those gadgets.

If you are investing in stock market, it pays to understand how a company (that you love to invest in) works. Like,  how does a company makes money: what kind of products/services it sell, where it is making money, what markets it operate and what are its strategies for both short term and long term revenue generation.

Easier and the cheapest way to understand where the money is made, is to look through the Financial statements. But, sifting through 100s of pages of SEC filings and financial statements is not easy and decipher the meaning hidden in complex market jargon.

If you are looking for a simpler way, meet Trefis.

Its a nice tool, that will help understand the revenue part, in a way that is quite intuitive and easy to understand. It breaks down revenue stream as a % of each product/service a company is offering. Another wonderful part of this tool is it will let  you forecast each of those based on your understanding of market conditions. For instance, you can forecast whether more iPhones will be sold in the next quarter or lesser. And the tool takes that input and predict a fair market value of the share price.

And you can also see how others are predicting for the same company.

I found it quite useful. If you are interested, give it a try. http://www.trefis.com