Sigma Designs Rollercoaster

I bought 1,000 shares of SIGM at 21.00. On 4/14, analyst Tristan Gerra with Baird & Co. came out with a "research note" stating that Sigma had lost a major contract with Motorola for Microsoft's next-generation IPTV set top box to Broadcom. SIGM sank to a 52-week low of 15.67. But something was fishy about the "research note". For one thing, no announcement about the "win" was forthcoming from MOT or BRCM. What up with that?

And the very same day, Microsoft announces their partnership with Sigma on their "next-generation IPTV set top box" right on their TV homepage at http://www.microsoft.com/tv/ .

Any way, sensing something was off, I bought 2,000 more shares of SIGM at around 15.82 level. In the past two days, plenty of news has come out to discredit Gerra's "news" and the stock has recovered nicely to 17.50 and climbing.

Happy me. ;-)

Switching to Gmail and Privacy Concerns

Recently I switched my personal email hosting over to Google's Gmail and I am so happy I did. It's fast, really easy to use, has excellent spam protection and is free (of course).

Some people are wary of Gmail because of the "sponsored links" that appear to the right of an email when you read it. They think that Google is mining your email to determine what ads to show you based on an analysis of the content of your emails. That's not the case!

What Gmail does is look at the content of the specific email you're looking at in realtime and show relevant ads based on that analysis. It's a subtle but very important distinction.

It's no different than the way sponsored links work when you perform a Google search. Google isn't storing or analyzing long-term information about the contents of your emails and never will. They only show you ads when you open an email to read it. Their ad servers decide what sponsored links should be displayed at that moment, then when you close the email, that's that.

I can understand the reason for concern and honestly I think Google could do a better job of explaining how Gmail ads work.

Adobe and Microsoft RIA... Who's gonna win?

Probably both. While I think Adobe's AIR and Flex 3 are going to dominate amongst "creative types" and consumer web apps, I think Silverlight will hold it's own in the business sphere. There are just too many .NET developers out there and they know that Microsoft makes the best tools for getting applications built quickly. I have yet to try Flex 3, but after watching a few video tutorials, I can see already that it's not as easy to use as Visual Studio 2008 with the Silverlight extensions.

The battle for RIA dominance isn't going to be over for a long time... Actually, it will probably never be over. I think the real winner's will be the major software-as-service vendors like Google and SalesForce.com. Their strengths are their amazingly fast and robust data layers.

The reality is, the UI is only half the battle. A rock solid, scalable cloud is the most important piece of the puzzle. What good is the most beautiful, functional RIA if the storage cloud is slow and unreliable? Google is by far the champion there. Microsoft can't even touch them at this point, not in terms of performance nor cost per transaction. It remains to see if Adobe is going to be able to compete on the "server side", but it seems unlikely as that's not an area they have a ton of experience... The credibility isn't there for them right now, but it may develop if applications like Photoshop Express and Buzzword really take off and perform well under heavy load.

Flextronics Stock

I bought a couple thousand shares of FLEX at 9.45. It's trading below book value. ValueEngine ranks it 5 stars and projects a 20% one year return... I'll be quite happy if I get 8%!

Water Online: Digital Marketplace for the water, wastewater, and stormwater industries

They say that water is a good place to invest, so here's a good place to research industry news, companies and terminology:

Water Online: Digital Marketplace for the water, wastewater, and stormwater industries

First Post

This is a test of my new Blogger.com personal blog.