Filed under: Launches, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Time Warner (TWX)

Time Warner Inc.’s (NYSE:TWX) AOL unit recently announced the availability of a beta version of BlueString, a free site that enables users to easily upload, store, manage, create and share many kinds of digital media. It will centralize and act as a backup for photos, videos and music stored externally for users.

BlueString provides the ability to manually (or even automatically) upload personal media and to create rich multimedia shows that can be shared with family and friends. An innovative feature called “String it” makes it easy to collaborate, allowing several people to add media assets to one show.

BlueString offers up to 5 GB of free online storage and, beginning this fall, any user with an active email address from any provider can easily register to use this product for free. An upgrade to preserve online media with the ability to upgrade to 50 GB is available at $99 per year. Users can also invite private groups of friends and family to view their personal media collection or even embed their media on a Website or blog. This concept was created by AOL and is to be powered by the Xdrive operations.

It sounds like the real winner will be Joe Q. Public. Once free storage is offered by one content provider it tends to happen rapidly elsewhere. In fact, this is somewhat an evolution of the obvious — but a cool obvious. This entire push will probably go outside of AOL, beyond what is already available. Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has YouTube, Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) has its Briefcase and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has Live. Now the competition will likely boil down to which company one-ups the others.

This online media storage and quasi-available-to-public feature is also going to continue the fight against Getty Images (NYSE:GYI) for smaller end-user media buyers.

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Filed under: Walt Disney (DIS), Viacom (VIA)

QuickPlay has certainly been moving fast. In fact, this week the company announced that it snagged $15 million in venture capital. The investors include Ventures West, General Catalyst, J.L. Albright Venture Partners and Up Capital Ltd.

Basically, QuickPlay has a platform that allows for video on mobile devices, such as the BlackBerry. Some of the customer’s include Disney’s ESPN and MTV.

So far, the market is still in its infancy. But the growth rate is substantial - and the smart money is taking positions in the space.

A key part of QuickPlay’s success is its on-demand approach. This makes it fairly easy for content operators to launch new offerings - and yes, to start generating new revenues streams.

Also, if you want to check out more venture capital fundings, click here.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

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Filed under: Launches, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Apple Inc (AAPL), General Electric (GE)

NBC, a division of GE (NYSE:GE), announced late today that it would offer free downloads of its popular TV shows. The programming will be available for PC viewing. TV commercials will remain in the shows and cannot be skipped.

According to The New York Times, the shows can be downloaded for one week after they are broadcast. “The NBC service, called NBC Direct, will begin a testing period in October with plans to be operational in November.”

Perhaps it is a coincidence, but the programs will only work on Windows-based PCs. NBC cut its ties with Apple (NASD:AAPL) iTunes at the beginning of the month.

PaidContent writes that eventually, users will be able to freely subscribe to pre-selected NBC programs, which will be sent to their computer right after the first broadcast airing. NBC’s plans for the next year may include the ability for consumers to own the content permanently instead of having a file that expires a week after a show airs.

The move by the network, which is likely to be followed by other large content owners, may well be an effective way to break the strangle-hold that iTunes has on digital content. NBC did not want Apple to set the pricing for its shows. Offering the content for free would seem to trump that.

Steve Jobs will not be able to check out the new competition. The offering will not work on his Mac.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 247wallst.com.

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Filed under: Newspapers, Personal finance, Housing

It’s a sad tale. According to a piece in today’s New York Times, hedge fund managers and private equity titans aren’t spending big for palatial mansions like they did just a few months ago.

The problem? The threat of increased taxation on private equity could mean a sharp decline in paydays. In addition, hedge funds have provided lackluster returns of late and there is a growing realization that the enormous fees make it very difficult for most to outperform the market.

The recent draw-downs have shaken the confidence of some managers: When your fund is trailing the market, you might feel weird going out and buying a $70 million penthouse. Even though they’re still fabulously rich, their confidence and swagger is gone: it’s a psychological thing.

Some large funds even have psychologists/psychiatrists there to help their traders/managers!

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Filed under: Analyst upgrades and downgrades, Deals, XM Satellite Radio (XMSR), Sirius Satellite Radio (SIRI)

Sirius Satellite Radio (NASDAQ: SIRI) and XM Satellite Radio Holdings (NASDAQ: XMSR) have finished the day down 4.29% and 5.53% respectively following a downgrade to Neutral from Buy at UBS. UBS analyst Lucas Binder lowered his FY 2008 loss per share estimates for Sirius to $0.42 from a $0.40 but upped the price target to $3.90 from $3.75. XM fared a little better as Binder increased his estimate of loss per share to $1.61 from $1.68 and moved his price target to $16 from $15. The analyst believes the current stock prices reflect most of the fundamental upside.

Well, some investors may look at today’s declines as an opportunity to get into the stocks. I wouldn’t. It may be worth nothing that while both radio companies are valued nearly always similarly, many favor Sirius, saying it can only come out a winner regardless of how the dice rolls on the proposed merger of the two. Should the merger go through, all the better; if it doesn’t, then Sirius is the faster growing and the better positioned one of the two.

Continue reading Sirius (SIRI) and XM (XMSR) hit by a downgrade

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Filed under: Competitive strategy, Small business

When it comes to running a tight ship, new airline Skybus seems to have learned RyanAir’s lesson on operating lean. According to an article by Marla Matzer Rose of the Columbus Dispatch, the startup is currently serving 80,000 passengers a month with only 5 planes.

The ultra-efficient service shuffles these planes through 11 airports each day on 28 separate one-way trips, for an average of 13.2 hours of flight per plane per day. The worldwide average for the A319 that Skybus uses is less than 9 hours. In the U.S., United and America West, using the same model, fly 11.9 hours a day.

Of course, starting with brand-new planes give the Skybus an advantage in this department, allowing them to shrink the turnaround time between arrival and departure to only 25 minutes.

As an example of this tight scheduling, the article follows the daily journey of one plane:

• Leaves Columbus 6:55 a.m.
• Arrive Portsmouth N.H. 8:39 a.m.
• Leave Portsmouth N.H. 9:04 a.m.
• Arrive Columbus 10:53 a.m.
• Leave Columbus 11:18 a.m.
• Arrive Oakland 1:16 p.m.
• Leave Oakland 1:41 p.m.
• Arrive Columbus 8:57 p.m.
• Leave Columbus 9:38 p.m.
• Arrive Kansas City 10:14 p.m.
• Leave Kansas City 10:33 p.m.
• Arrive Columbus 1:10 a.m.

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Filed under: Magazines, China, Russia, Economic data, Politics, Eastern Europe

This week (Sept 15-21) in The Economist –

Chinese struggle with pork problem, too — Apparently, a huge portion of the worrisome growth in Chinese consumer prices (up 6.5% in August, year over year) can be attributed to its pork shortage. New prosperity has driven up demand for pork, causing the government to dip into its strategic pork reserve. The Economist points to the inflationary pressures such price increases bring, and suggests it could be an important topic at the upcoming party congress.

The northeast African country of Niger has rich uranium deposits that could be very alluring as the world returns to nuclear power. However, these potential riches could make the ongoing rebellion even more difficult to resolve. Add to this the rumor of Qaddafi’s involvement and the U.S.’s desire to root out terrorism in the Saharan region, and this situation could be moving to the front burner.

Union negotiations are news in the U.K. as well as the U.S. There, public employee unions are chaffing at new Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s praise for union-busting Margaret Thatcher. An autumn of walkouts and dissension seem to be in the offing.

The magazine has an interesting piece about the European Economic Union, questioning how well it is serving its avowed raison d’ etre. The piece uses the difference in energy strategies as an example of self-serving fragmentation — the French are set on consolidation, while other countries, led by Denmark, are determined to follow the free market strategy. In this instance, all eyes are pointed east at Russia’s growing power in the natural gas and oil markets.

Finally, the magazine compares the growth in the U.S. housing values to other countries, and interestingly finds that a number of them seem to have more inflated values, including Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Greece, Spain and Sweden. However, none have lending practices as liberal as ours.

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Filed under: Products and services, Launches, Dell (DELL)

Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) has rolled out what it is calling a “budget supercomputer” in a London event. The computer maker wants its newer and cheaper supercomputer offering to be used in research dealing with custom cures for cancer as well as searching for universe origins in all the radio wave data that spills into the earth these days using large collection dishes.

Is this a move into a new area of computing or a publicity stunt? Neither, but it is Dell’s attempt at some good press, something that has been lacking for the company in recent years. With commodity computer parts available to just about anyone who wants them, Dell will once again be assembling commodity machines (supercomputers) to sell to large clients that need a lot of processing power to sift through all the data available to them. Dell’s entrance (if it can be called that) is not really all that unexpected, as both competitors Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ) and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) have been in the supercomputer field for a very long time. Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) made the practice of stringing together many standard PCs to make a supercomputer popular years ago as well.

Dell’s new ‘Legion’ system will have the processing power of 3,000 desktop PCs and will target those who need cheap computing power available from commodity components without spending a fortune on proprietary systems and parts in the process. As Dell basically defined the role of commodity computer supplier in the last decade and a half, it should be primed to fill this role while giving in to the need of “adding value” to what could be seen as a boring commodity market. If Dell can bring more and more cheap supercomputing to the field and compete against International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM) (which leads all others when it comes to built supercomputers), then it may just have something.

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Filed under: Management, Insiders, Coach Inc (COH)

Coach, Inc. (NYSE: COH) has taken investors’ calls for greater disclosure to heart. While all public companies are required to file form 4’s with the SEC after an officer or director makes a transaction involving the company’s stock, Coach has gone a step further: their officers will tell you why they sold.

According to The Wall Street Journal, “In recent disclosures, Coach Chairman and Chief Executive Lew Frankfort told investors that he was holding on to shares because of his confidence in the company’s future. Reed Krakoff, the company’s executive creative director, reported that he was selling millions of dollars’ worth of Coach stock to fund restorations to two of his homes.”

The disclosures at Coach have generally cited real estate purchases as the rationale behind sales. While the company’s transparency is admirable, and something I wish more companies would do, I doubt it really does much good: Since executives are always going to do something with the money from stock sales, they can just list that as a reason.

If the SEC ever does require that companies explain the motivation behind sales, I expect we’ll see a lot of “CEO … sold $124 million worth of stock to fund his retirement and diversify his portfolio” or “CFO … sold $11.4 billion to fund his son’s education at a private kindergarten”.

I somehow doubt we will ever see any company, including Coach, issue a Form 4 saying that “CEO… has sold substantially all of his stock because he believes that the company has very poor prospects, and overvalued stock, and significant accounting irregularities”.

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Filed under: Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Apple Inc (AAPL), China, Halliburton (HAL), Aetna Inc (AET), CIGNA Corp (CI), Lockheed Martin (LMT), Politics, Presidential elections

What if politics was like the stock market and you could buy politicians you like and sell the ones you didn’t without envelopes of sequentially numbered small money orders in the same Chinese handwriting or cold cash hidden in the freezer?

For those rich enough — they can buy a politician or two. The rest of us probably could rent a couple minutes of time with a big campaign contribution, and get lots of promises from a politician. Knowing the integrity of politicians and the value of political promises I am not sure how good of an investment politicians turn out to be.

Maybe you are one of the people smart enough to pick up a couple of bucks around the office at election time with bets on who is going to win. I have to admit I lost the last political bet I made. Good thing it was only a buck. What if there was a stock market where you could buy and sell shares in the candidates? The candidates would move up and down every day and those of us who are financial analysts could quantify the likelihood of people winning based on how bets are placed.

Now I am not into horse racing, poker or sports betting; but I do have to check up on the political bets every once in a while. With real money on the line there is a big incentive to be right. If you do not like the odds you can jump into the market and take the other side of the action. So what do the bookies think is going to happen in the coming election? Well it appears that Clinton is the favorite for the Democratic nominee with 67.8% and the Republican Rudy Giuliani leads the GOP with 35%.

Continue reading Is President Hillary 43% likely? You can bet on it!

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