Geist hits SOPA/PIPA out of the park

Posted: February 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Tuesday’s lecture was all about Michael Geist and his work concerning digital piracy, including SOPA/PIPA. We watached one of his lectures/speeches where he looks at the history. One of the first things we looked at is how there is different layers of protection in the digital world, according to Geist. The 1st laywer is copyright. The 2nd layer  is digital lock rules, technology rules. An example Geist gives is region coding to DVDs, which locks certain TVs to certain countires. The 3rd lwayer, is legal protection for the lock itself, thus any attempt to get around the lock is infringement. Making the mere act of infringement is breaking laws.

The stock market and the big tech companies

Posted: February 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

This was by far my favourite class. We combined two of my favourite things, the stock market and technology, by looking at the big three players in the tech industry, Apple, Google, and Microsoft to see how they are doing in their fight for market share. The first thing we examined was a chart comparing the social networks Google+ vs. Facebook. Today, with Google+ around 100 million  users and Facebook at 800 million users and counting, the compairison isn’t even close. However, it took Facebook 44 months to get to 100 million users while Google+ has done this under a year, in about 8 months. Interesting. So it could be argued that Google+ has a lot of room to run, especially as they push it across their other platforms YouTube, Blogger and Andrioid phones.

For the rest of the class we would go through more charts of data about the companies. It was revealed through the data that Apple’s success and distince in market cap with Google is primairly due to the Iphone and how this additional another revenue stream has added to their bottom line. It’s no surprise why then that Google is trying to counter by purchasing Motorola Mobility last year for $12.5 B to try and close this distance.

Strangelove pointed us to the failings of Microsoft as an internet company, with their search engine Bing well behind Chrome (I believe 65% to 20% market share in the U.S.) and how they continually lose money, quarter after quarter in the online space. To air some of my disagreement with this, I went to talk to him after class.

One on one we were able to discuss my views on Microsoft, my hope for a RIM bounceback,  Apple, Google, Gold, and Warrent Buffet. It was good being able to unload. Looking forward to more next week.