GOOG Archive

4

Sirius Is Still My Mistress

By
Gino Lattarulo
– May 17, 2011
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By: Gino Lattarulo

Well what can I say. Even the most careful people can be suckers for a sexy long shot. I mean, I am a monogamous conservative with my trading; working solely from  good solid chart patterns and steady companies. But, I confess, Sirius (NASDAQ:SIRI)  has been my mistress for almost seven years now.  She has punished me, rewarded me, made me sweat, made me sing, and made me so mad that I swore her off for good. She has been the best single malt scotch I have ever had and has caused headaches worse than a tequila hangover on New Years Day. But,  in the last two years Sirius has really made some terrific money for those who truly believed in the product. So how does the  firecracker of Wall Street measure up these days? I think this girl is still smokin’ hot and the charts agree.  At the beginning of May Siri plowed right the $2.00 mark and peaked just over $ 2.40  after the earnings report.  In typical fashion many Wall Street analysts scrambled to adjust their price targets  to avoid looking stupid for failing to do any meaningful research.  Profit taking is now moving the stock down to steadier levels so it can form a new base.  We can see that the price action is near the 20 day  average and  it may retest the    $ 2.00 mark before settling down completely.   If you pull up a weekly chart on Siri you will see the 50 MA starting to thread through the 200 MA, which is exceptional. The next long term resistance point is around $4.00 so unless the world actually ends in 2012, Sirius should be stretching those long legs again and continuing the climb.

NOTE:  Getting into the market right now is very dicey . The leading averages seem to be holding while many stocks are selling off.    Some of the bell weather stocks like  Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) , Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) all seem to be slipping back to  support levels.  Right now I am 95% in cash and avoiding buying stocks  until we see where things are heading.

As we always said in the military, ” Stand By To Stand By “

Peace

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3

Google Aims A Cannon At Skype

By
Gino Lattarulo
– August 30, 2010
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By: Gino Lattarulo

Google-KingWhen I was in the military during the early 90′s I can remember racking up disturbing amounts of long distance charges talking with my family and girl friend (mostly my girl friend) each month. Cell phone plans were still in their infancy and each minute cost more than a gallon of gas. Remember the “Brick” phone? Yeah, that baby cost four grand when it first came out. Nowadays cell phones plans are so cheap they are replacing traditional landlines. I admit it, I have no traditional  ”home” phone. Phone companies like Verizon (NYSE:VZ), AT&T (NYSE:T), and Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) who had recognized this trend began offering unlimited home Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) plans, and voila, Talk is literally cheap.

Enter Skype:  Well, actually Skype is one of the pioneers of the VOIP revolution and is one of the main reasons phone companies had to jump on board in the first place.  In 2004 when VOIP became commercially accepted as a viable source of communicating, companies like Skype and Vonage became innovators in marketing the service to consumers.  Vonage (NYSE:VG) went public a few years ago with their broadband modem format and now Skype is jumping on the IPO bandwagon with their proprietary software based system. Skype to Skype calls are free while traditional calls are pennies per minute.

Enter Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG):  Once again it looks like the mega giant of the Internet is doing everything to continue its omnipotent presence. As Skype nears IPO status, Google has recently launched a free VOIP service from within Gmail that offers free calling to any phone or phone number in the United States and Canada.  Perfect timing don’t you think?  Although  Google Voice will have little effect on the Google’s income structure, if embraced widely enough it will almost certainly pose a disturbing threat to Skype who charges $.02 per minute for domestic calling and relies on those charges to support their business.

As  Google continues its path toward world domination, it will be a mind bending experience to say the least to see which companies it simply gobbles up and which ones are just pounded into dust.  With pockets so deep they have mold growing on the cash, Google can pretty much do what it wants.  And it does.

Disclosure: No positions in GOOG and VG

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0

The Future Of Digital Music Pt. 2

By
Gino Lattarulo
– June 15, 2010
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By: Gino Lattarulo

Caveman_300Referring to Part 1 of ” The Future Of Digital Music”

So Who , or what, is going to win the digital music wars?  Will digital downloads from the likes of Apple iTunes (NASDAQ:AAPL) still be around in 10 years or will everything be self contained in a “Cloud” structure.

Lets look at the pros and cons of each and then I’ll give my .01 cent opinion.

Digital downloads: Let’s face it, MP3.com changed the world.  As soon as music files became coded for quick transfer over the Internet, the whole place exploded.  The need for tangible CD’s quickly diminished and was replaced by digital players.  The sound files have an infinite shelf life, limited only by the condition of the actual player itself.  The consumer can purchase an entire album of songs for a lower price ( including artwork ) without ever having to leave their home.  Not only that, but the likes of pioneering file sharing sites like Napster provided the masses with as much free music as they could consume.  It was, and still is, a time of mass confusion and evolving.

Cloud Formats: Online radio has evolved into personal web libraries.  Sites like Grooveshark and even Youtube (NASDAQ:GOOG) allow you to pull up any song in the world and create unlimited playlists for your own custom library of virtually any song in existence.  We can’t really lump Pandora or Slacker into the cloud category because they are exclusive to radio style streaming, meaning that the user has no control over what plays other than the music genre.

So what does all of this mean for the direction of your music?  Personally I think the future lies almost entirely in the clouds.  So to speak.  It will take some time to realistically widen the scope of the Internet to allow for such an increase in web streaming.  The obstacle here is still buffering and streaming coverage for mobile users, but as more and more mobile devices and hotspots (like your car) become tethered to the internet we will see the direction shift.  Devices like Apple’s Sky Dock, which has an FM modulator and boost antennae built in, is made for Sirius / XM (NASDAQ: SIRI) and enables the user to stream their iPhone.  Although this device is seemingly proprietary, it gives us a glimpse of the what will happen in the coming years with Cloud streaming.

The main trade off with the Cloud structure versus actual downloads is sound quality.  Online streaming is pretty much maxed out at 192 kbps while digital downloads can be had at CD quality bit rates.  On the other hand, in the Clouds you have any song you want at your finger tips without having to pay for it and you can store the songs in an online virtual library.  The next ten years will definitely be very interesting.  When I was a kid ( I mean younger) I always wondered what would replace the CD.  I only wish I could see the evolution of music 100 years from now.

Of course,  If there is actually anything left after the governments of the world get done burning everything to the ground, we’ll be back to playing tiger skin bongos and bone flutes for entertainment anyway.

Peace.

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3

Motorola Droid Leader in Google OS Market/Nexus Future Cloudy

By
king1
– April 27, 2010
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features_droid_heroBy Relmor Demitrius

Mobile Ad Network AdMob released its monthly report yesterday on cell phone traffic.  In March, the Motorola (NYSE:MOT) Droid(TM) received 44% of the Google OS traffic, compared to 43% from HTC.  This study accounted for 3 different versions of the operating system.  The Google Nexus One(TM) only accounted for 2% of the traffic. With 8,000 new apps debuting in the month of March, upping the total now to 30,000, the popularity in the app world for this smart phone is only increasing.  With 2% of the traffic coming from the Google Nexus One, the news we received yesterday from Google is not surprising.

Google (NYSE:GOOG) announced yesterday that they are scrapping their plans to release their smart phone, the Nexus One, to Verizon Wireless.  Are they scrapping their plans with Verizon, and their 90 million customer base?  Or are they scrapping the Google Nexus altogether?  I believe with these new stats coming out from AdMod, the writing on the wall is here for the Google cell phone foray.  It appears to be a huge failure.  This should bode well for the Motorola Droid and HTC models, if HTC wasn’t currently being sued in two separate lawsuits on patent infringements on its versions of the Google OS smart phones.  That leaves Motorola with a chance to dominate the space.

The Google Nexus One problem isn’t the OS, although it does need extensive upgrades in its new version, its the phone.  Simply not selling well.  Whether its a good phone or a bad phone is irrelevant, if it’s not selling well it really doesn’t matter.

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1

Microsoft Software Continues To Bore

By
Gino Lattarulo
– March 28, 2010
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Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)  is in the beginning stages of testing their Internet Explorer 9 web browser for a probable final release in 2011.
Just for a hoot I decided to download the pre-beta version to get a glimpse of what may be in the cards for the latest and, ah, greatest release from Mr. Softie.

If you haven’t yet recognized my distaste for Internet Explorer versions Five through Eight, let me elaborate in detail… I think they suck.  Especially IE Seven. It crashes too much and pops up the  useless “send error report” message.  It forces the Bing toolbar on you like there was a gun to your head.  It clutters the Favorites folder with pre-loaded links.  It is so slow that you can go get a hair cut in the time it takes to load a page (I’ve done it), and installing version 7.0 or 8.0 on Windows XP holds every poor soul hostage to the constant “Security Warning” tool bar pop ups, making any sane person want to fly out to Redmond and punch someone in the nose.

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