Posts from — April 2008

It’s no secret that I love golf. I can’t get enough of it. I love going out and enjoying the weather, course, friends and excercise. The problem I have with golf is that it takes entirely to long to play. Courses have been saturated with players, especially since the enhanced visibility of the game that Tiger Woods has provided. The thing that frustrates me the most is that this problem can be simply solved in a couple of steps. It is a given that the course has to be decent.

If every course would install GPS units it would go a long way in speeding things up. I know there is a cost involved, but I can guarantee that the economics of getting people off in an orderly manner and getting more players per day would help recoup the initial cost that the courses would undertake. It is a long shot to think this would work, but it seems like there is a market for someone creating a low cost alternative. GPS has gotten so cheap that it shouldn’t cost much for even meager courses to have a simple solution.

The second step is for people to get up and hit their ball. If you shank one into the thick stuff, you have a minute to figure out where your ball is. Otherwise you are dropping a ball and hitting. It just doesn’t make sense if you are spraying the ball around that you sit and look for your ball for an hour. The course could make this rule standard by giving some cheap balls to the players. Have a ranger or two look around for balls to recycle, or not. Balls are cheap when you buy the range balls. Again the economics of having more people playing would pay for itself.

So here is to praying that courses will start to be more radical with its approach to enhancing the golfing experience. Pace of play makes me play better.

I am having my first experience with the Wii this week. I am amazed at how simple the interface is, along with the repeat play value. I love it. I know that tons of people have wrote about this. The biggest thing that gets overlooked with the Wii is the audience that it appeals to. My parents love it. The kids love it. My brothers love it. It has a universal audience.

This is an important concept to its success. I once read Jack Welch’s autobiagraphy and he talked about how one of his companies was stagnating and they were desperately trying to increase market share. They finally found a solution to their problems by expanding what the market was that they were going after. This concept is exactly what Nintendo has established with the Wii. They have expanded the gaming market into not only the gaming household, but to the common household regardless of demographic.  Effectively expanding the market for the product. Combine that with what has to be an artificial decrease in supply, and you have a winner.

Sheer genius from Nintendo.

I must have slept through finance class in business school, because I never remember us talking about the rule of 72. Yet, here it is on wikipedia: RuleOf72. I did get a chance in business school, however, to learn and memorize lots of formulas that have long since been forgotten. A lot of them probably would come in handy when I am looking at corporate numbers for my investments, but maybe not. I wish my teachers would have taught us more about the rule of 72.

Why? It’s simple. Really it is just simple. I love things that are super simple for me to understand, but express a lot. This concept does just that. It goes like this:

if you were to invest $100 with compounding interest at a rate of 9% per year, the rule of 72 says you should divide 72 by the compounding interest rate of 9 which gives you 8 years required for the investment to be worth double what it is. The math is easy enough and it allows me to do it in my head. An exact calculation with an abacus or calculator shows that it would be 8.0432.

So to me, everything with investing my money boils down to increasing either a.) your investment, or b.) that interest rate per year. Nothing else matters.

I know, it isn’t easy to figure out how to maximize that interest rate you are receiving per year, but at least I know what the ultimate goal is. People spend a lot of time getting lost in the details. A simple concept like this helps make it easy for you to keep your eyes on the prize and wonder aloud if you are thinking about something that doesn’t really make sense to worry about.

I have some holdings in my portfolio that I am having significant trouble parting with. I invested in a bunch of smaller companies a couple years back. I have some winners and some loosers, but one of them in particular has been really successful for me. It is a company called GNK. I didn’t know a lot about them when I purchased them at 6 bucks a share, but now they are up over $66. So the problem I am having is that I get the feeling it is time to sell, but they have a dividend payout coming soon, that I have to wait for. How do I know I should sell? Well, I am not completely sure. In selling companies I don’t really have an exact formula. I know what I am looking for when buying. I analyze a companies products, their balance sheet, web buzz factors, and other soft indications that this company is moving in the right direction. This doesn’t seem repeatable on the opposite end. Tell me what are your signs to look for when exiting a value play position? Maybe you can help me maximize my investments.

With a product like Evernote, you find something very important to most successful products. Their ability to scale into realms that weren’t probably intended or thought of when they first dreamed up version 1. You see this kind of thing in a lot of places, one example of which is Crocs. They probably didn’t dream up seeing their shoes on the feet of every chef and cook in america, or having their product have useful medical applications especially in diabetics. What this usually translates into is unintended revenue streams, which usually allows the business to grow quickly.

Evernote is allowing me to streamline all kinds of information flow that they never intended. For example, I now take pictures of every wine bottle I drink and send the picture to Evernote through my phone’s email. Then I add what I thought about it. By simply enabling this service through my phone, email, etc, I am most likely going to be a smarter consumer because of it when making wine purchases. Probably something they weren’t going for with simply allowing you to take notes. I could go on and on about the possibilities.

How Evernote will turn this into revenue will differ exponentially from Crocs, the but the core idea is the same. Have an evolutionary product that scales well.

Good stuff.

I am long Evernote.

I admit it. I have a really hard time keeping track of the amount of information that I am bombarded with on a daily basis. It is a constant struggle for me to know what it is I need to get done from a personal perspective. At work, it is easier because you have email, constant conversations about products you are working on, expectations, etc. Those kind of things don’t exist for my personal life when it comes to things like home improvements, insurance rates, investments, childcare, etc. I have tried tons of things over the years but what I have been using lately is a moleskine notebook that I carry around to jot notes in and ideas. But with everything I am figuring out its pitfalls. Enter Evernote.

Evernote is a well written piece of simple software that lets you take notes from you desktop, web, or mobile phone, interconnecting all of the worlds you live in. This is going to be the first post of a multipart series about the software and how I am using it to make my life simpler.

One of the biggest shortfalls of my moleskine system is finding things easily. I have a hard time when I am reading ANY physical media not subconsciously pressing the control-f or command-f to open a search window to find what I want. With Evernote, this task is now made trivial. If I am ever around where I don’t have my blackberry handy or laptop, I enter notes into my notebook. Once I am back to my desktop, I take a quick picture snapshot note of the page of notes that I was looking at. I do the same thing with post it notes that are laying around my office. Take snapshots of them, and now I have a nice collection of the information flow that I thought was important enough to write down.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

With the image recognition software built into evernote, it indexes my handwritten pages into notes that I can search through. Very simple, and very, very elegant. Below I was searching for the words “out” and “note”, obviously:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Stay tuned as the next post I am going to show how it can help you make smarter wine purchases…

Yes, yes, I know I missed this whole “blogging” boat. I actually have attempted several times at various interests of mine, but as is with all hobbies interests wain. Instead I have decided to focus my blog on building on my online presence. If at some point in the future someone wants to know something about me or read about what I am all about, this might be a good place to start. So you are going to see posts that reflect my thinking as it pertains to a lot of different topics.