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Stephen Pickering

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  • Considering an Investment in Pandora ($P) in Light of Spotify, Rdio, and Songza

    I really fell in love with Pandora a year or two ago. I think the market cap was treading around 2 billion. I told myself that if the Market Cap hit 1.5 billion, I’d make an investment. Well, I haven’t logged it, but it seems like it must have bounced off 1.5 billion about 7 or 8 times in the last year and a half. Seems like it’s bounced between about $9.50-and $11.50 about the same many or more times during this period. From that perspective it seems it would make a great “Channeling” stock, as the traders call them.

    But then, a couple months ago, I subscribed to Spotify, and from a consumer point of view I haven’t looked back. I love it so much. I thought I might still use Pandora occasionally for “discovery” but since then Spotify has launched their own “Radio” feature. So, for myself, I literally can find no reason to use Pandora anymore.

    Still, I have Pandora (P) on my “Stock Watch” list. I still believe it’s part of the bigger paradigm of all media moving to the digital. So I still think it would probably be a good investment, just on the general paradigm itself. It’s hard for me to make an investment in a product that I don’t use, though. If, however that changes, and they launch some new features that make me want to use it again, I’m sure I’ll even be more excited.

    Being in this state of wondering whether to invest or not, I was happy to come across this GigaOm article today: Despite New Competition Pandora Grows It’s Users

    The take away is that Pandora is still growing fast in registered users and total minutes per month of listening, but the number of minutes per registered user is actually decreasing, which is weird, until I think about it: I’m a registered user, and my usage has dropped to Zero because Spotify finally picked me off. Back when I was in love with Pandora, I thought, I’d never pay a subscription, but I think seeing Spotify constantly in my Facebook Newsfeed finally wore me down. Like Ogilvy said about advertising: The first time you see an ad, you curse it. The tenth time you see it, you’re writing a check out for the product. Anyway, the GigaOm post inspired me to comment on his site, which I copy and paste here:

    “I was a big Pandora fan last year, and I told myself I’d make an investment at a 1.5 billion market cap, which it’s close to now, and has bounced off of several times, but since I’ve become a Spotify Subscriber, or actually since Spotify launched their “Radio” feature, I don’t see any need to go back to Pandora. That’s what keeps me from making an investment, myself. I don’t use it. But I do believe it will grow with the whole digital revolution, as you mention. It definitely had a head start on mobile and has brand recognition.
    Once crucial feature of Spotify and Rdio, which seems so vane and egotistical, yet very potent, is the sharing what you listen to to Facebook. I mean even if I own an album, I usually will prefer to listen to it on Spotify, to show everyone what I’m listening to, especially if the record or artist is considered “hip.” I guess Pandora has this feature, but I never see it in my feed. I constantly see Rdio and Spotify in my feed though, which obviously is also free and invaluable advertising for them too. I don’t know why Pandora doesn’t copy all of Spotify’s features (assuming they can) just as Spotify has copied one of the crucial features of Pandora: Discovery.”

  • Rackspace Cloud Sites Advantages: Pages that Load in under 2 Seconds

    pingdom load testAnd as you can see from the photo to the right, you sometimes even get Millisecond loads! And keep in mind that is all the way from Amsterdam to Dallas/Ft. Worth.

    I would be remiss if I didn’t mention CloudFlare here too. I use CloudFlare connected to my Cloud Sites account. And they are at least partially if not the majority reason one gets such fast load times. They do a lot of things to optimize every aspect of your site as well as protecting it from botnets, scrapers, hackers, and email harvesters.

    Oh, and did I mention CloudFlare is free? I mean they do have a paid version, but the free version, which I’m using, gives you all these advantages I’m talking about. Never has a company built up such good will in my brain. I’ll probably end up paying for the “Pro” version just because of the amount of “Goodwill” they’ve built up in my brain.

    This company should be one of Seth Godin’s “Case Studies.”

    Anyway, the advantage of Cloud Sites is simply that you get the best in managed hosting, best equipment, facilities, data center, Cloud Technologies, 24×7 fanatical maintenance. The “best in class” nature of the facilities combined with Cloud Technology, allows for two additional things: Superior Uptime and the ability to handle all the traffic that can be thrown at it.

    Now you can step up to a dedicated server, or even a Cloud Server, but the performance you get with Cloud Sites + CloudFlare for the price and the level of management, I believe, is unmatched.

    To me, Cloud Sites is like the Apple of hosting. You know you’re getting the ‘best’ but it’s also easy to use. You feel safe, and you don’t feel like you have to be a geek to use it. Although if you are a geek, and there’s nothing wrong with that (I’m at least part geek), it’s still a lot of fun to work with.

  • How to Kill a Task or Force Quit an Application on the Galaxy SIII

    Coming from iPhone, everything is taking a learning curve, but less than you might imagine, as each year, Android gets better and better, and this Galaxy SIII, as I write seems to be the phone of the moment.

     

    Not that I understand the rationality behind how the pages are ordered or where they put the icons on the page or even the concept of “Widgets”, but out of the box, which is pretty much the way I’m using it now, if you “swipe” enough pages you’ll come across an icon that is “gear shaped” called “Settings.” On mine its at the bottom of the page, bottom right, to the right of “All Share Play” “S Memo” and “Gallery.”

     

    So you click settings and about half way down the page is “Application Manager,” and then that shows you all of your apps running. Click any app and you can click “Force Stop,” which will do the trick.

     

    I don’t know about you, I mean I love spotify, but there seems to be something buggy about the app, both on iOS and Android. Especially when switching between Wifi and Mobile data. It’ll just stop working. Doesn’t handle the hand off for some reason. And then it’s like you have to kill the app and re-open it. ANNOYING!

    What’s weird is, even before I learned how to “kill an app” on Android, the Spotify app would suddenly come on and go off seemingly at will, for no reason that I could think of. The bars on my Wifi would be full (I’m not 10 feet away from the wifi router) and one minute Spotify would act like there’s no connection and then 10 minutes later as I’m working on something else, having forgotten about it, it would suddenly come on. I tend to think it’s a Spotify issue, as I had similar issues even on iOS with it.

    Love Spotify though, just hope they’ll fix this bugginess soon.

    Oh, I’ll put some screen shots up of this whole process once I figure out how to do that on Android.

  • The Natural Gas Revolution and How to Play It.

    Update 7/17/12 – I saw Wilbur Ross, the famed Billionaire investor who made a lot investing in Coal and getting out with perfect timing, I’m assuming when the Nat Gas Revolution kicked in, he mentioned EXCO Resources Inc (XCO) as his main Natural Gas play. Of course, he is a director. But Richard Grasso, a member of the Fast Money Panel also agreed with him about Exco. I don’t know what the price is when you read this, but as I type it’s $7.07 with a 1.53b market cap.

    But I must confess, I don’t know personally whether I’ll ever invest in this industry. I just can’t get my head around it. I like companies that have zero debit and are making a net profit after tax. If you look at the financials of some of these energy companies, especially the “exploratory” ones like XCO, boy you see a lot of red ink. I know it’s normal in this type of industry, especially with a young company, but man it just doesn’t make me feel comfortable, and I can’t seem to get my head around it. I’ll probably do some more reading and investigating in my spare time. Maybe I’ll change my mind.

    I was watching “Fast Money” but not on cable or Dish, mind you, but rather late at night on my iPad. There’s another major trend, the Cloud, “Cord Cutting” et. Think Apple, Roku, Amazon, Google/Youtube, Facebook, et. al, which of course a sub component of the larger “All Media is Moving to the Web” (Think the infrastructure plays that are continuing to build that out (EZCH, RAX, etc.) but also think: Get your own website! And preferably buy your hosting on $RAX’s “Cloud Sites, through me, here: http://rackspacereseller.com/Plans.html (As Cramer would say, “Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy!” hahhahahahahhahhah!

    But anyway, back to the topic at hand. Another trend has been brewing for the last few years: Natural Gas. I’ve been mostly concentrating on Tech lately, but this episode of “Fast Money” reminded me of the Natural Gas trend. I believe it was either Dennis Gartman or perhaps the Chairman of (WTR) whom they had on who said, “In 10 Years the Whole Economy will be powered by Natural Gas.”

    That took me aback. That’s a powerful paradigm. Dennis Gartman said that the best way to play it is through Chesapeake Energy (CHK). Wow I noticed they are down 6.5% today. I think the issue of the moment is that Nat Gas is very cheap right now because so much has been found and developed (via new “technology”) and yet the economy as a whole is just in the burgeoning phases of changing its infrastructure to utilize it for things other than your heat during winter. (Nat Gas cars, etc.)

    One interesting point brought up was that the price for Nat Gas in Europe and other places is about 5 times higher. So there is a market for shipping, exporting it. The problem is that is a very expensive thing to do. So Gartman pushed back a bit on Cheniere Energy (LNG) which is the company building the ships (or are they purchasing the ships and then selling the shipping?) because of how expensive it was to do so. But then Grasso pushed back on him, saying that he was long ING because they were the only one doing it, the only ones with the permits, regulations, technology to do it, and so they had a monopoly on shipping the stuff. In the end Gartman agreed that LNG was a good way to play the paradigm in the long run. I believe he just had short term misgivings about the expense.

    Another interesting Company brought up was Aqua America Inc (WTR), which is a Water Company in general, but a growing part of their business is supplying the water for the “Hydro Fracking” I believe they call it process. This company seemed to be a solid company overall, not just because of their Nat Gas exposure, and indeed the Nat Gas business was only adding about a penny a share in earnings at the moment, but was considered to grow substantially over the coming years.

    Just as an afterthought, it wasn’t mentioned on the show, but a company my brother told me about Mcmoran Exploration Co (MMR), whom I haven’t taken the time to sit down an research, so I don’t know exactly what they do (although I know it’s in Nat Gas) They have been in my iPhone finance app though, and they haven’t done really anything as far as price movement (between $11-12 for most of this time) but you have to considered how dramatically Nat Gas has dropped over the last year or so too.

    I remember like a year ago, listening to the Bloomberg Podcast app on my iPad and this analyst was highly recommending the Nat Gas ETF: United States Natural Gas Fund, LP (UNG) because in his opinion Natural Gas was priced for “Nirvana” and that any disruption would cause a spike. Glad I didn’t take his advice. I think the price is down 50-75% since then. So what’s next after “Nirvana”?

    But anyway, will I invest in any of these? I don’t know. I’m so immersed in the tech field that I really “feel” its paradigms, and I don’t have a good “feel” for what’s going on here. But I do think I’ll do some investigating, because I like that sort of thing, and I like Paradigm shifts, and also it would be nice to diversify my portfolio a bit.

    CHK, ING, WTR

  • Resources For Building, Optimizing, Growing Facebook Pages

    1. The Choose Yourself Era – How to Get 100,000 Facebook Fans– James Altucher – Man, this is an incredible post by one of the Co-Founders of Buddy Media, which recently sold to Salesforce.com for 800 million. And from my understanding there business was and is about helping big brands with their marketing efforts using Facebook Pages.
    2. 7 Easy Ways to Increase Your Page’s EdgeRank – Post Rocket
    3. Facebook Timeline for Business Pages – 21 Key Points To Know – MariSmith.com – Boy this Mari seems to be the Goddess of the Facebook Fanpage! How did I find it? I needed to know that the Masthead image for a Fan Page should be 851 x 315 px, and as I thought the profile image is square and has to be at least 180 x 180. (I’ll probably make a 360 x 360 one.) But man, there is a ton of info on this page, and I get the feeling that her whole blog is about Facebook Fan Page Marketing.
    4. 12 Tips to Optimize Facebook Page for Maximum Reach and Brand Visibility – Wchingya.com
    5. A Simple 6 Step Plan for Creating a Facebook Page that Works – NetWitsThinkTank.com
    6. You’ve Got Facebook Fans, Now What? Booshaka Raises $1M to Ensure Your Posts Earn You Money – TechCrunch.com

  • How Metaphysics and Physics are Coming Closer Together

    There’s always those quotes that bypass the Ego gate and strike a chord deep within what Jung might call your “Collective Unconscious,” and this was one of them for me. One reason this strikes me is that it seems to relate or come very close in a metaphysical way to the Physical Scientific Fact that all of us have wave functions that fill up not just the entire Universe but also the infinite number of Quantum Multi Verses, as well as all of time past and all of time future, forever and ever without end. That sounds Metaphysical, but it’s actually a Scientific fact. It almost feels like how they built the railroads in the 19th century, one group working from the West Coast inwards, the other from the East, and then they met in the middle. It seems like the more Science discovers or rather “uncovers” the more the images seen in the telescopes and the microscopes seem to resonate with the images of Metaphysics, Mythos, and what is coming out of the Collective Unconscious.

    The great barrier in the Metaphysical picture painted above is the Ego, which is symbolized by Dragons, serpents, and other creatures that are cutting off this natural flow of “Cosmic” energy. In the Fairy Tale and Myth, “Slaying the Dragon” is symbolic of “Slaying” your own “Ego” which by its very nature of seeing itself as separate from “Nature” and the rest of the World and Universe, destroys Spirit. For in this picture, “Spirit” like the bloom on a flower is the by product of Nature, something created by nature, not something separate or to be imposed on nature.

    Makes me start to think that the Wave Function is the equivalent of “Consciousness” as in the famous Vedic expression: Being> Consciousness> Bliss (Sat, Chith, Ananda in Sanskrit) So, the second of that Trinity. “Being” seems to be the initiator of a great track opening up. But what is “Being”? That seems to be the great mystery and key.