YouTube and theyTube

Recently I had a number of academic publications accepted on my work with youtube in the financial markets. The results were highly encouraging and extremely interesting.

My paper prooves this wrong convincingly, however the question still often comes up, "...so can you take something like youtube really serriously?" Isn't it just a bunch of home PC camera amateurs trying to get attention on a silly website!!?

...the answer is no! I've come accross the Google History page today (i recommend a read of the timeline, certainly fascinating) and it might struck you that in December 2007 the Queen of England launched the Royal Channel on YouTube, to be the first monarch to establish a video presence this way. In January 2009 the Vatican launched a YouTube Channel to provide updates from the Pope and Catholic Church.

These are marked as milestones among top achievements of Google - certainly significance is carried here...

The Flu effect this Winter

Information is power, and power is information! We can extract patterns and insightfull features and make extrapolations about the future. We may not realise this but without breaking any terms of acceptable data use or data protection, Google inc. has access to aggregated dataset on search querries. Surprisingly this offers a lot more than one would imagine. Each querry can be associated with a geographical location, precise time, simillar querries made, previous pages the user was on before visiting google, the browser or even operating system used... and even much deeper demographicall knowledge based on user profiles (in case the user is logged into google-mail or for that matter any of the many google services).

Google inc. naturally realised this and started to make serrious use of aggregated search querries data. See this page for google's stand on this. They recently partnered up with U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to research influenza trend forecasting using their querry datasets. The website is available here, check it out.

On google.org an analysis for the future flu season is provided. What is interesting however is that the influenza season in Australia and New Zealand is not really that bad and when past flu seasons are incorporated into the overall picture one can gain the strong impression that this comming flu season will not be all that bad!!

and in the US:

See and judge for yourself

Web 2.0 Business Model

During my 'traditionally irregular' web surfing this morning, I came across a blog article that focussed on CRM (Customer Relationship Model) and how it will look under the use of web 2.0 concept.

The diagram above is self explanatory - hint, read from the top (customers form partnerships & and provide self-service) to the bottom right (community generated collective intelligence), and go back up on the left side of the diagram.

I like this diagram because it is simple illustration of not just customer intelligence but the general web 2.0 model (with a little imagination of-course). Youtube or flickr are basically based on this model. I am convinced that many more companies with these simple models will follow the example of illustratory stock start ups. Something to keep in mind in many ways when valuing businessess.

News Tweeting

I never really followed the Twitter.com phenomenon. I did join up thought and have had an account for some time now. I remember when twitter was still in its obscurity, not many people knew about it and I thought what a funny concept to share one line thoughts with random web surfers. 

Recently a study by Pear Analytics classified twitter talk and discovered, based on their statisticall classification that around 40% of all twitter posts is pointless blabber, they also found that the count of poststwhich could possibly be classed as news related was minimal (below 10%). 

Chris Matyszcyk submitted an interesting opinion. He suggests that the blabber itself is off value to many people and is actually quite usefull way of accumulating new knowledge. See for yourself, on his blog.

Interesting I thought... any opinions welcome, just drop me an email or comment!!

Recession RECOVERY is here!!!

French & German GDP figures for the second quarter show it clearly - black on white, finally the economic growth substantiated. Technically this means Germany and France are out of the recession, yuppiii, yep yey, you might think.

This is not quite the case thought. It seems most of the growth was spawned by govermental rescue packages and incentives that initiated good levels of consumer spending (i.e. old car exchange incentives). Export levels in germany have indeed increased, however imports have fallen which in fact inflates the GDP figure with a certain uncertainty.

Let us hope the largest shrinking of worldwide economies is over soon, but maybe getting too excited too quickly will be a mistake.

Web 2.0 and Mass Collaboration

Hey folks, its been a while since my last post! Today I would like to talk about web 2.0, it is a hype word most of you would have heared in the recent years, either used by your friends or somewhere in the media.

Web 2.0 is not a new version of the internet, it is rather a different paradigm, it basically stands for a web that is editable by everyone. In the past, a website administrator would be responsible for updating and editing a websites online content. However now it has become much more common for everyone to update online content, applications such as wikipedia, youtube, flickr or facebook are great examples of web 2.0 systems. 

The problem we are currently facing is to gain a better understanding of how this affects user behaviour on the internet, and for me especially, it is interesting to investigate ways in which content that resulted from a form of mass collaboration (that is; all users updating content with a certain goal in mind, this could be to inform, compete, or simply share) can be used to an advantage. In this regard, we just recently had a publication on the use of web 2.0 system youtube in financial news publication (http://www.ieee-sofa2009.org/). We found some interesting results and another two papers have recently been published on work stemming from this investigation.

To finish on an entertaining note, a recent study looked at facebook use and relationship jealousy. Seems like worth a read for all you out there with girlfriends/boyfriends and partners.

News never settles down...

When rivals battle it out, news never tends to settle into the stock prices that much. In my post from Wednesday, July 8, 2009, I mentioned that Google is planning to develop an operating system and this might be strongly perceived as a long term risk to Micrsoft (as this is Microsofts core business). Since then, Microsoft has announced that it will offer Office application online and for free from 2010, further it seems that a yahoo takeover by Microsoft is agressively in the making.

J. O'Neil, the well known author and investor states that in his investigations he has found that usually news, as it comes out, creates an effect on the prices over an arbitrary period, however within some time price always tends to return to the a-priori (before) news price. Googles plans are hence maybe not so real towards microsoft shares as some people might want to think.

With Microsoft I would currently expect a drop in share prices over next few weeks. Factors: yahoo take over, Google's plans, smaller revenues if Office is to be offered for free. However over the longer term (months and next few years) I can see Microsoft on a steady footing, as Google's threat is really just more psychological than real, and Microsoft has other profitable branches that show a lot of promise, unless hindered by monopoly regulation.

Tech Companies...

According to news released yesterday, GOOGLE is planning to built an open source operating system under the name GOOGLE Chrome OS (following its successful free Chrome browser). The OS will be based on a UNIX kernel, it will however be build from the ground up. Some speculate this could have a drastic negative effect on Microsoft shares over future years.

GOOGLE certainly represents a very capable and potentially extremely dangerous competitor, especially if it taps into Microsofts' core products' business revenues.

Markets are on a big move!!

Most main markets are very highly correlated (correlation is a statistical measure, it indicates strength of relationship between data). Specifically, the big falls and rises tend to happen in tandem. DAX and CAC, or FTSE and DowJones on a daily basis on average might move by differing magnitude and direction. However, what correltion tells us is that there are some moves that tend to co-occur. A simple analysis of the indices data shows that it is the large moves that tend to co-occur most often.

Today the 6th July (Monday) is one of those days, a large and negative move throughout all main markets has pertruded world markets. Also on a larger granularity, over March, April, May FTSE market has steadily increased in value, and a negative trend is clearly emerging during June and July! Dow Jones, DAX, CAC, NYSE, etc... show all the same pattern, not surprising since mass psychology affects every market participant to a degree.

In my opinion, July will with certainty see some decrease of valuation over all major indices. Reasons??! A number of them: Macroeconomic figures, Company outlooks, political, environmental stability and most Technical Analysis points towards investors' uncertainty surrounding recent price advances.

Rescue Package(s)

It is somewhat ironic and maybe even perversely funny... the credit crunch is mostly consequence of over spending above our abilities. Basically countries and individuals were taking on too much debt and credit for a number of reasons, that certainly are significant and for sure logical, in a way just like it is happening again. Governments are increasing their spending and hence debt again (think - rescue / bailout packages)!

BBC prepared some nice overview graphics of the current crisis