Capitalogix

Turning a Profit: See How Quickly Tech Giants Build Wealth

Do you want to know how much Apple earns in a minute? What about Twitter or Google?

Here is an interactive graphic that highlights how quickly these businesses are making money.

 

Click image to open interactive version (via WorldPay Zinc). 

 

The results are surprising.  Here is an example showing how much revenue and profit these tech giants make per minute.

 

 

Here Are Some Links Worth Reading This Weekend

 

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• Multi-Dimensional Thinking – The Key to Dynamic Innovation. (InnovationExcellence)
• Inflated Praise For Your Children:  An 'Incredibly' Bad Idea? (BPS)
• Best, Brightest and Rejected: Elite Colleges Turn Away Up to 95%. (NYTimes)
• Death Spiral:  Harvard Professor Predicts Half of U.S. Universities May Fail In 15 Years. (ZH)
• Scientists Discovered A Way To Reverse The Process Of Aging. First Successful Organ Regeneration in a Living Animal. (Discover)

 

Trading Links:

• Did President Obama inadvertently engage in insider trading? (ComplianceX)
• 5 Dirty Secrets About the U.S. Economy. (Harvard Business Review)
• Record Numbers Renounce U.S. Citizenship---And Many Aren't Counted. (Forbes)
• Who Is Afraid of High-Frequency Trading? (FinAlternatives)
• This Graduation Speech Teaches You Everything You Need To Know About Economics In 297 Words. (Vox)

It Is the Rubik's Cube's 40th Anniversary - Can You Solve It Yet?

The Rubik's Cube just had it's 40th anniversary of invention. 

It is, arguably, the world's best-selling toy, having sold over 350 million units.

Here are a few things you might not know about it.

1.  The Rubik's Cube was invented by Erno Rubik, a Hungarian professor of architecture and design, who wanted a working model to help explain three-dimensional geometry to his students.

2.  The toy was originally named the Magic Cube. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Rubik admitted that it was strange to refer to his creation as a "Rubik's cube" and says that he calls it "my cube." Rubik introduced the toy as the Magic Cube in Hungary, named for his theory of "magic cubology," but the Ideal Toy Corp. dubbed it the Rubik's cube in 1979.

3.  All possible Rubik's cube combinations can be solved in 23 moves. No matter how the cube starts out, its colors can be perfectly rearranged in 23 or fewer steps. See here.

 

Toys aren't just for Kids.

 

CubeStormer 3, built from Lego mechanical and robotics parts and powered by a Samsung Galaxy S4, shattered the world record by solving a Rubik’s Cube in only 3.253 seconds – considerabley faster than the fastest human time of 5.55 seconds.

You can watch the robot break the world record yourself below:

 

 

 via YouTube.

The smartphone acts as the brain of the robot. It uses a custom app that uses the camera to make note of what the scrambled cube looks like, then sends instructions to eight Lego Mindstorm EV3 bricks, which then in turn manipulate the arms of the robot to move the cube.

“We knew CubeStormer 3 had the potential to beat the existing record but with the robot performing physical operations quicker than the human eye can see there’s always an element of risk,” Gilday said in a statement, “In the end, the hours we spent perfecting the robot and ensuring its motor and intelligence functions were properly synchronized paid off. Our big challenge now is working out if it’s possible to make it go even faster.”

Related articles

On 40th anniversary of Rubik's Cube invention, Google posts a playable version of the world's ...

Erno Rubik celebrates the 40th anniversary of his famous cube

Here Are Some Links to Start Your Weekend

Informational Presentations aren't usually funny.  This one at least tries to be.

 

via YouTube.

 

Clever.

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• How To Avoid Your Own Brain's Biases | Errors We Live By. (BigThink)
• How to Have an Honest Data-Driven Debate - Michael Schrage. (Harvard Business Review)
• Gibberish-Loaded Fake Papers Are Flooding Academia. (TechDirt)
• The Best Time to Book a Plane Ticket, According to New Study. (HuffingtonPost)
• Inside the Most Expensive Home For Sale in America. (Bloomberg Video)

 

Trading Links:

• The Astounding Power of "Economic Elites". (Yahoo Finance)
• Greed Is Good: A 300-Year History of a Dangerous Idea. (The Atlantic)
• A Simple Way to Sidestep High-Frequency Traders. (Daily Reckoning)
• Amazon Offers Workers $5,000 to Quit, But It’s Not Crazy. (Yahoo Finance)
• The Plug-and-Play Luxury Home. Futuristic features to woo the Jetson set. (Wall Street Journal)

Here's a Look Into How the Average U.S. Consumer Spends Their Money

Where does the money go?  This chart breaks it down.

 

via Daily Infographic.

 

Interesting to look at "average" spending patterns.

Related articles

Mark Zuckerberg vs. an Average 30-Year-Old Man

How Much Stuff Do We Have on Average?

How Much House Will a Million Dollars Buy In Your City?

How much housing you can buy with a million dollars varies based on the city you choose.

The chart below shows the number of square feet of housing that you can buy for U.S. $1,000,000 (based on the median price per square foot in each city).

 

via BusinessInsider.

 

With a median list price of $666 per square foot, in San Francisco, a million dollars only buys about 1,500 square feet.

On the other end of the spectrum, the median list price in Detroit is just $12 per square foot — which is 55 times cheaper than in San Francisco.

Considering all five boroughs, the median price per square foot in New York City is $424. However, if you are looking just at Manhattan, the price jumps to an astronomical $1,538 per square foot, leading to $1,000,000 buying just 650 square feet.

Talk about scarcity!

Related articles

5 worst cities to be a renter (unless you're fabulously wealthy)

South Florida housing: the boom, the bust, and the rebound.

What $1 million buys in San Francisco

Here Are Some Links to Start Your Weekend

In my opinion, facts are not beliefs or opinions.

 

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• 10 Famous Geniuses With Truly Weird Secret Habits. (Listverse)
• The Reflex of Character. (Michael Hyatt)
• 10 Jobs That No Longer Exist. (BoredPanda)
• 13 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do On Spotify. (JeoBox)
• 5 Social Media Metrics that your Business Should Track. (TheNextWeb)

 

Trading Links:

• Hedge Funds Have Worst Start Since 2008. (BusinessInsider)
• Will Last Year's Winners Be This Year's Losers? (BlackRock)
• On A 'Rigged' Wall Street, Milliseconds Make All The Difference. (NPR)
• CME Trading Outage Showed That Man Can Still Match The Machine. (Reuters)
• Biggest Credit Bubble in History Flashes Warning – ‘Seek Cover’. (NakedCapitalism)

What Shoulder Surgery Reminded Me About Technology

History is littered with tales of once-rare resources made plentiful by innovation. The reason is pretty straightforward ... scarcity is often contextual.

Imagine a giant orange tree packed with fruit. If you pluck all the oranges from the lower branches, you are effectively out of accessible fruit.

From that limited perspective, oranges are now scarce. But once someone invents a piece of technology called a ladder, the problem is solved.

 

Shoulder Surgery Isn't What It Used to Be.

 

 

I had shoulder surgery on Wednesday to remove some calcium deposits and bone spurs, and to clean out or fix some soft tissue damage.

 

Needless to say, I wasn't looking forward to it.  And not just to the needles and knives, I was dreading the rehab.

 

Turns out, shoulder surgery isn't what it used to be.  

 

Here is a picture from inside my shoulder (unlike years ago, they didn't have to rip me open to to gain access for the picture or the repair).

 

 

Less damage, less time, less drugs, less recovery.

Bottom-Line: I went in early, and was out before lunch.  Moreover, I was able to work and go to a reception the day after the surgery ... and go to the gym this weekend. 

Whether it is minimally invasive surgical instruments, or linking big data and elastic computing ... Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. 

Whether it is minimally invasive surgical instruments, or linking big data and elastic computing ... Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the 'once scarce' the 'now abundant' (or 'readily accessible') ... and a lot less painful.

Pretty Cool!

Don't Get So Comfortable Having Fun That You Forget About Risk Control

I spent part of the week in Miami.  While there, I had a great time talking about deals, opportunities, and how so many hedge fund pros are setting-up shop there.

 

 

Opportunity can be distracting.

Let's play a guessing game.  Who has two thumbs and forgot to wear sunscreen?

 

 

Meanwhile, the Markets have held up well.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average is trading near its highs.

 

 

However, the Russell 2000 Index is showing that traders are taking a risk-off approach to the smaller cap issues.

 

 

Investors have clearly had a preference for larger-cap stocks over smaller-cap ones for the past two months.

This type of Small-Cap negative divergence has been market-negative historically.  

Put that with the "Sell in May and Go Away" theory ... and what you have is another caution light (and a potential early indicator to watch for when the small caps start to out-perform the big caps again).

Here Are Some Links to Start Your Weekend

Do you believe that our Democracy was bought and sold a long time ago?

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• Why You Should Hustle Every Day. (TheNextweb)
• Discovering Two Screens Aren’t Better Than One. (NYTimes)
• You Could Read An Entire Harry Potter Book In Under 90 Minutes With This App. (HuffPost)
• 35 Expensive Things for Your Dream House. (Distractify)
• Military's 'Iron Man' Suit May Be Ready to Test This Summer. (LiveScience)

 

Trading Links:

• Remember Lotus Notes? It's Still a Billion-Dollar IBM Business. (WSJ)
• What Will Robots Do to Property Values? (Freakonomics)
• Can Emerging Market Bonds Help Us Predict the Next Bear Market? (FinancialSense)
• How Do You Rein In High Speed Trading? (Points and Figures)
• Welcome to the Odd World of Alternative Currencies. Believe it or not, they're coming. (Futures)