It’s once again a great pleasure to offer a guest post from our good friend Marriott, who works in the financial industry in Washington, D.C. Marriott last wrote about climate-ready crops in May.
In December 2008, kaChing received the blessing of the SEC to become a Registered Investment Advisor. kaChing is a social networking and investing website that allows individuals to create sample and fictitious portfolios. They can then share these portfolios with other individuals on the network and compare their successes and failures.
Now, in principal, this is a great feature of education that is much needed for the modern investor. Individuals can learn as they invest the money they wish they had, or they can follow other individual’s portfolios to see how they succeeded and failed. The idea of using play money to learn about investments is not original to kaChing. Over the years there have been several ways for individuals to test their investment ideas, methods and strategies before putting their life savings into play. That’s a great system.
kaChing’s recent move ruined what they had, in my humble opinion. By becoming a Registered Investment Advisor with the SEC, they have gone into the business of selling advice on investments. It works basically like this (my own spin is applied): if you are an 18 year old hotshot with some investment ideas and your allowance doesn’t provide you with the capital to make investments with real money, you can open a trading account through kaChing. If your ideas, no matter how crazy, actually start to do well and other social investors take notice, then you can charge a fee for the ability to track your portfolio. Of course, kaChing will take a small part of this fee for providing the connection services. Once people pay the fee to track your portfolio they can link their own grown up money accounts to your fictitious one and try to replicate your stellar returns.
Despite my beliefs in the free market, the survival of the fittest, and stupid is as stupid does, I have a few major problems with kaChing’s new business model.
Continue reading ‘Why Social Investing May Not Be Such A Good Idea’
There are a whole lot of companies and products trying to be “The Next Big Thing” in digital music. Apple’s iTunes is clearly dominant these days, a combined result of its deep (and sometimes exclusive) catalog offerings, easy-to-use software, and killer hardware lineup. Add to that the tight integration between those three, and you truly have a killer combo. Amazon seems to have posed the biggest challenge to the Apple machine so far, competing agressively with lower prices (around $0.79/track and $5.00/album as opposed to $0.99 and $9.99 respectively for Apple) as well as DRM-free tracks. One area in which both Apple and Amazon have failed to innovate, however, is universal accessibility to your music.
The Problem
First, let me describe my music set-up and listening habits:
- My music, currently totaling 4,415 tracks, lives on my laptop’s hard drive. That corpus of music is duplicated in its entirety in two other places: my backup hard drive, and on my iPod. I use my iPod primarily to play along with music on the drums, but also in the car through an audio-in jack.
- Using a playlist, I’ve designated a subset of that music (right now, 850 tracks, or about 20% of my total collection) to sync onto my iPhone; when I walked/bused/metroed for an hour every day in D.C., this came in handy. Now that I bike to work most days in about 15 minutes, I have a no-music commute.
- While I could take my iPod to work and have all my music on hand, I know that inevitably I’ll leave it there one night and want it for the drums, or it’ll run out of juice and I won’t have a cord, or something. And given that there seems to have been a rash of disappearing devices at work recently — including my G1 and a coworker’s iPod — I try to minimize the gadgetry I have (and perhaps accidentally leave) at the office. So, until recently, I would just fire up Pandora.
So the biggest question I’ve faced with regards to music is this: “How do I access my entire collection of music remotely without having to bring along a separate device?” Earlier this year, I tried a product from SimplifyMedia that let you listen remotely through iTunes (or the iPhone), but I encountered too much lag. For the past month or two, however, I’ve been trying out a new service called Lala. Lala is a completely web-based music jukebox and storefront. While that’s pretty standard, the real beauty of Lala can be found in two key offerings: the Lala Music Mover and web-only purchases.
Continue reading ‘Lala: Send Your Music To The Cloud’
As part of the redesign of the blog, we’re going to be testing out Google Friend Connect. Use the gadget over there in the right side bar to become a member of Tropophilia, allowing you to connect with us and other readers.
In the future, we may add some more social gadgets that take advantage of these connections… but right now, it just kind of throws your picture up there. It will be fun, though, to start to build a consistent community around this site.
(Note: I discussed Friend Connect, along with Facebook Connect, in this post a while back.)
Clive Thompson, a columnist for Wired, contributed a fascinating piece to Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You” examines the phenomenon of “ambient awareness” that has been developing alongside the evolution of the Web. Thompson brings a balanced perspective to the debate over the influence that the Internet has on our lives, a debate which recently has been dominated by alarmists who claim (often with little data) that the digital millennium will actually take us a step backwards as a race.
Ambient awareness is the term applied to the “incessant online contact” that characterizes the current developments on the Web. From the Facebook News Feed to Twitter, users are currently preoccupied with accessing an aggregation of tiny details to form a larger picture. The metaphor Thompson chooses is beyond perfect:
Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.
And so the mystery behind the obsession with keeping on top of our friends and their “updates” is revealed, even to those who think they had it figured out. It’s not the trees that fascinate us; it’s the forest. It’s on a level just beyond passive perception. We skim and absorb the information, choosing only to dive into the details only when something piques our interest.
So is this good or bad? A step forward, or a step back?
Continue reading ‘When I Heard The Learn’d Software Engineer’
Well, it’s been over two months since Facebook integrated chat into its offerings. In my preview post, I said that Facebook Chat “will probably have the most significant impact on the user experience since the introduction of the News Feed” and that it would “revolutionize the social networking experience.” Harping on the real-time notification feature rolled out with Facebook Chat, I wrote:
This is but one example of how Facebook wants to turn your asynchronous social networking experience into a synchronous one. By being able to instantly notify you of changes in and updates to your social graph, they give you the feeling that you are actively engaging and interacting with your friends. Your graph is no longer a snapshot, but a moving, fluid web of connections and content. Of course, by giving you that feeling they also want to attract you to stay online longer to see more ads. Genius.
Boy, did I have it wrong.
Continue reading ‘Mea Culpa: Facebook Chat Is, In Fact, Useless’
Subscribe by feed
Subscribe by email
Follow on Facebook
