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Empire Avenue: The Echo Chamber of Commerce?

May 3, 2011 By 2 Comments

Whenever you ask someone to think of stock trading, they always picture this image: men acting frantically with pieces of paper in one hand and a phone in the other while being surrounded by a gazillion screens displaying the latest risers and fallers.

The truth is that floor traders are threatened with extinction as computerized trading has increasingly replaced them. Computers don’t give a damn about the long-term outlook of a stock or a portfolio, but are programmed to react to minute price changes in microseconds. Systematic trading netted a guy like Dr. Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies a whopping $2.8 billion in 2008.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a rant against systematic trading. In fact, now there’s a way to relive the old days of trading. Sort of.

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Filed Under: Musings Tagged With: , ,

Google Buzz: Two Weeks In

February 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

What Is It?

Buzz is Google’s status update and messaging service that is built into Gmail. It focuses on staying in touch with the people you email with frequently. As a result, you won’t have to rebuild your social network. Instead, you rely on your existing address book.

In addition, it has no limit on message length, allows threaded discussions, and supports rich media. By commenting on the statuses of others, people also subscribe to those threads via email.

Of course, such a service isn’t something new. However, Google has been able to launch Buzz with great success overnight because of the large installed base it had with Gmail. The numbers are quite staggering as well. Google said there were nine million messages in the first 56 hours and 200 mobile check-ins per minute, and this was even before most people had access to Buzz!

With Buzz, Google has combined both data (contacts) and behavior (social sharing).

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Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: , , , , , ,