toddfearn.com

Gartner, What Is The Future Of IT On Wall Street?

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:58:36 -0500

Yesterday I attended the “Hot Technologies in 2012 Local Briefing” for the financial services industry hosted by Gartner. The venue was primarily for CIO’s of large financial firms.

They discussed a few interesting trends that I believe are very important for the street.

IT is losing control.

IT budgets are being cut or stagnated and being moved outside of the CIO’s control. According to Gartner, by 2014 25% of the average firms tech budget will be outside of a CIO’s decision. By 2018 it could be double that.

Mobile will dominate.

By 2016 there will be 920 million tablets in the market, that’s 1 out of 8 people on the planet.
By 2014 iOS and Android will have an installed base of more than 50% of operating systems in the world.
By 2014 only 1 in 4 IT projects will focus on the PC platform.

So where are all of these mobile developers going to come from? I’m not sure. Also, where is the IT budget going to come from? Gartner suggests that the budget will come from outside of IT, perhaps the chief marketing officer and other business groups.

Another question, why is the street continuing to focus on the PC platform and web apps if this is retro technology?

The cloud is huge.

Cloud technology is finally being adopted by the street, forcibly so. Because of budget constraints on IT departments, many are being forced into the cloud because of the tremendous cost efficiencies.

However, Gartner claims “beware of cloud providers that might not be cloud providers in the future”. Economies of scale and sinking server/component costs will drive many providers out of this commodity business in the future.

The consumerization of IT.

There is a consistent theme in all of this and it has to do with the continued empowerment of the consumer/employee and the consumerization of IT.

What is the Best Way to Distribute an Ad-Hoc iPhone Release?

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:54:11 -0500

Distributing ad-hoc releases of your iOS apps used to be a real pain. However, recently we’ve been using a product called TestFlight (http://testflightapp.com) that’s made it a cake walk.

Here’s how it works:

Create a team of users. All you need is a name and email address for each user.

Testflight will send each member a link to the TestFlight iOS app. When the member installs the app, the UID of the device is sent back to the Team manager.
The Team manager takes each device UID and adds them into the Provisioning Profile for the app.
Then simply generate an ad-hoc release (.ipa) and upload it to TestFlight.
Choose the team members that should receive the app and you’re done.

The primary pain this free service solves is the acquisition of UIDs from your testers. If you’ve ever done this without TestFlight, you typically receive a bunch of invalid UIDs from your testers.

And the management facility is nice, as long as you’re using Safari (I guess they’re using some HTML5 constructs that Firefox does not yet support).

Online Brokers Could Learn a Few Things From 8 Securites

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:04:30 -0400

At TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing today, 8 Securities showed off a financial dashboard for trading that’s different than anything that I’ve seen. Simple to use, social and very fast. Take a look.

Why Don't Android Phones Get Updated?

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 09:50:08 -0400

This is a great post from the understatement. Check out the chart below on the fragmentation of OS’s on Android devices:

This chart represents the manufacturers support of the latest OS for each smartphone device. And it doesn’t look pretty for Android devices.

So why don’t Android devices get updated?

According to Michael Degusta, “Obviously a big part of the problem is that Android has to go from Google to the phone manufacturers to the carriers to the devices, whereas iOS just goes from Apple directly to devices.”

“In other words, Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one.”

Will the Nokia Lumia Windows Phones Go Big or Bomb?

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:35:00 -0400

This is what many Microsoft groupies have been waiting for. Can the Microsoft/Nokia alliance pull MSFT out of the past in the smartphone business? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Steven Overman, who heads up Nokia’s marketing strategy, said during the keynote that Nokia needs to drive demand for the product by making these consumers lust for for the Lumia devices. I’m not sure what’s to lust for, does it seem that revolutionary?

The problem I see with this is the number of apps. Compared to the 600,000 iOS apps and the 500,000 apps in the Android Market, the “thousands” of apps in the Windows Phone 7 marketplace are nearly negligible. Since apps are the main selling point for smartphones, that’s a big problem.

But according to John Biggs via Techcrunch, he writes:

By breaking with MeeGo and Symbian, Nokia has ensured that IT departments will look at Nokia phones seriously again. Windows Phone may not seem popular, but rest assured that once Windows 8 hits it will be an important part of the Microsoft ecosystem. As fanboyish as we are here, I well understand the impact of Windows on the tech landscape and once Windows 8 and Windows Phone merge, Nokia’s profile will improve immensely.

We’ll see, MSFT is way behind in this game.

Very Soon, Every Person At Facebook Is Going To Be Working On Mobile

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:43:00 -0400

The the recent Web 2.0 Summit, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor claims “A few years from now, most every single person at Facebook who works there is going to be working on mobile almost exclusively.”

Should CTO’s take note. I think yes.

It seems that VC’s are also telling portfolio companies to focus on mobile first, web second.

Mobile Social Escalates, 40 Million Americans Access Daily

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:43:00 -0400

Here’s more evidence of the mobile/social revolution.

comScore estimates that nearly one-third of all U.S. mobile users are now accessing social media services, and that close to 40 million Americans are doing so on an almost daily basis.

Mary Meeker Says iPad Growth Leaves Siblings in Dust

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 09:47:00 -0400

Mary Meeker made some interesting points at the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday in San Francisco. One to note is outlined in the graph below.

Take a look at the acceleration of the iPad versus the iPhone and iPod, shown in shipments per quarter. Apple currently controls 74% of all tablets sold in the United States, said Tim Cook at a recent Apple Keynote.

I find this hard to believe, but facts are facts. I like my iPad, but it doesn’t seem as useful as a smartphone. My iPhone is always with me, my iPad isn’t. And I can’t replace my desktop with an iPad, I’ve tried. But maybe that’s because of what I do for a living.

Now, checkout this slide on Android acceleration.

When you compare Android and iPhone shipments, the acceleration of the Android platform dwarfs the iPhone.

Here’s her complete presentation.

iOS5 Twitter Integration Increased Twitter Signups 3x

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:28:05 -0400

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo yesterday at a Web 2.0 dinner stated that “the recent iOS 5 Twitter integration has notably increased signups 3x”.

This means that many of the companies that have popular iPhone apps have already implemented the iOS 5 Twitter features.

That’s what I thought at first. But after further investigation, I realized that most of these additional signups are probably coming from users simply configuring the Twitter settings that are now baked right into iOS 5. From the Settings app you can easily setup your Twitter account.

Additionally, from a developers point of view, Twitter’s single sign-on feature alleviates a lot of issues. Twitter integration is now a piece of cake. Check out this blog article on how simple it is to integrate Twitter into an app under iOS 5. This makes the older solutions look like a nightmare, using OAuth or packages like MGTwitterEngine.

iPhone 4S Sales Top 4 Million First Weekend

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:51:00 -0400

I think the most impressive figure noted in this article is the fact that 25 million Apple devices are now running iOS 5.

This means 21 million people have gone through the painful task of attaching their device to a PC to update the OS.

I wonder if, like me, they were hoping for Siri as part of the upgrade.

Android App Number to Exceed iPhone by Summer

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 08:00:05 -0400

Xyologic, a startup that searches and indexes through App Store data, recently published some interesting data regarding the App space.

According to Xyologic projections, by August 2012 there will be an equal number of apps available for the Android as there are for the iPhone, at roughly 680,000 apps available for both platforms.

Also, according to Xyologic, the total app downloads for Android will surpass the iPhone sometime in May 2013, at roughly 84 billion.

All of this makes a lot of sense with Apple’s 3 devices competing against Androids many manufacturers and many devices.

I wonder if Apple’s free iPhone 3GS will make any impact on these numbers.

Why don't I See Siri on my iPhone 4?

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 09:40:00 -0400

I was all excited last night when I downloaded iOS 5.0 for my iPhone 4. I was really wired to use the new Siri technology, but to my dismay apparently Siri is not available for the iPhone 4, only the 4S.

I guess it makes sense for Apple to leave out this feature for “legacy” phones. Here’s a thread from the Apple support community on the topic. It makes me want to upgrade when before last night I was perfectly happy with my iPhone 4.

If your phone is jailbroken, there’s good news on the way. The popular iPhone hacker known as iH8sn0w and John Heaton (@Gojohnnyboi) have started to work on porting the Siri feature on iPhone 4.

Some are also saying that Siri won’t work on the iPhone 4 because it really needs the dual-core A5 chip.

iOS 5.0 Killer Feature is ARC

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 09:51:00 -0400

Apple finally realized that the masses of newbie iOS programmers out there, most coming from the Java world, really don’t get it.

iOS memory management is just too difficult for most of these developers that have never coded in C, C++ or Objective-C, beyond maybe a college introductory course.

According to Apple:

Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) for Objective-C makes memory management the job of the compiler. By enabling ARC with the new Apple compiler, you will never need to type retain or release again, dramatically simplifying the development process, while reducing crashes and memory leaks.

They chose not to call it a garbage collector for good reason. It’s not a garbage collector. It’s a compile time, not a run-time, driven memory management model. Meaning the memory management is built into the binary code.

Apple was really forced to implement this feature. Apple must compete with Java on Android and this is a critical feature.

UBS Problem: Access to Data?

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:57:35 -0400

This is crazy. The latest news is that the CEO resigned over the weekend and the CIO takes over as interim CEO.

The straw that broke the camels back? The $2.3 billion loss last week by rogue trader.

I don’t have all the inner details of what went on here, but there is one common theme I’ve seen over the years of working with IT for financial firms. The real issue is that many of the internal IT systems within these big banks don’t speak to each other.

In this case, I would assume that the UBS risk systems that were in place did not integrate with the systems that the rogue trader was using. My assumption: by the time the risk department picked it up probably via an insider tip on e-mail, it was just too late.

I had a quick conversation with Eric Best last week at a luncheon at the Strata conference in NYC. He’s consulted with some CIOs at the largest wall street firms.

We spoke about IT and what is needed most within these firms. It’s access to data, raw data. Most developers in financial firms shelter data within applications or a database and don’t expose this data to outside systems. This is dangerous.

A simple proposal to CIOs: All data for all applications within the entire firm should be exposed, at a minimum, to internal applications via REST or well defined web services.

And the next step, go external.

Tumblr Rocks, but $800m Valuation?

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:35:00 -0400

I use Tumblr all the time, in fact this blog runs on Tumblr. WSJ reported an $85 million investment from a series of investors including Sir Richard Branson. According to insiders, this puts the value of the company around $800 million.

Apparently there are 30 million blogs on Tumblr now, an impressive number. No wonder my blog slows down at times during the day, especially in the evening.

General Assembly, Good Stuff!

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:36:00 -0400

I just attended my first General Assembly presentation tonight in NYC and I was truly impressed. If all of the presentations are this good, I’ll be attending more in the future.

Tonight, the topic was “The Business of Big Data” by Brad Gillespie, Ben Siscovick (IA Ventures). How do companies harness and leverage the massive amounts of data being produced via the Internet and Smartphones, apps, etc?

Eric Schmidt was quoted recently “From the dawn of civilization up until 2003 human civilization created 5 exabytes of data. We now create 5 exabytes of data every 2 days”.

And it’s exponential. Why are companies now collecting more data on customer activity than ever before? Because it’s cheap.

Storage, bandwidth and CPU costs are declining while network access is increasing.

Some companies produce data and others consume it. Some tweak it and resell it. This slide represents where companies fit in the “big data” landscape.

Many companies are in one than one market with multiple products (i.e. LinkedIn - creating data and providing a data-driven product).

After tonight’s presentation, I tried to give them the pitch for Finster. They were intrigued, but had to give way to the mob of entrepreneurs pitching ideas.

No worries, we’ll keep plugin away. :)

Our Latest App. Finster, A Social Check-In App for Stocks

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:54:00 -0400

This project was a lot more work than we had originally anticipated, especially on a part-time basis. Many thanks to all to all that participated!

Check out the quick 2 minute video below.

So why a check-in app for stocks? I believe the concept of sharing stock picks and market ideas with followers via a social network is very cool.

Using Finster you can quickly express your views on a stock, option, index or just about any security listed on an exchange.

I just need Jim Cramer to start using it and we’re all set. :)

Download it and try it out, available in the App Store. Give me some feedback.

Almost Free, HP TouchPad Dropped to $99

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 13:58:00 -0400

I wrote an article a few weeks ago entitled “Message to HP CEO: Give Away the TouchPad or Lose”.

I’m not sure why anyone would buy one, even at $99, now that HP has declared they are basically getting out of the business. I suppose people are assuming that someone will buy the beleaguered division and all will be fine.

If they continue at $99 or less, maybe it will.

GOOD, Replacing Blackberry Devices on Wall Street

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:50:03 -0400

There’s a trend going on right now that doesn’t help RIM with their cherished Wall Street clients.

I’m seeing this all over the place. People are tired of carrying two mobile devices, a corporate Blackberry and a personal Android or iPhone. Many IT departments on Wall Street are incorporating technology from GOOD to solve this problem. And saving big $$$ for the company.

If you haven’t heard of GOOD, think of it as a self-contained corporate Outlook for your Smartphone. It’s a secure e-email / calendar / browser / contact manager /etc app. All data is encrypted, and if the device is lost the application data can be wiped remotely.

If your company supports GOOD, you typically have the option of disposing of your corporate Blackberry and installing the GOOD app on your Smartphone. Given the option, everyone I know is doing the latter.

GOOD isn’t the greatest technology, and will most likely become irrelevant with iOS 5.0 (more on that later), but given the option I would rather carry just one device and that would be a Smartphone, not a Blackberry.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 11:23:00 -0400

I just finished this book by Carlota Perez, written in 2002, and I highly recommend it to anyone that is interested in how technological revolutions play out over time.

A couple of months ago Fred Wilson mentioned it on his blog and it was out of print. I had to buy it used. But probably due to his recommendation it’s now available new on Amazon.

The book seems to be accurate and provides very good insight as to where we are now in what Ms. Perez calls the current revolution, the “microprocessor revolution”. According to her, the microprocessor revolution started in 1971 and is still playing out.

Each technological revolution takes roughly 50 years from beginning to end with a new technological revolution starting and overlapping the end of the previous.

It starts with the Irruption phase, where financial capital shifts from the previous revolution to what is the beginning of a new revolution.

What follows is a Frenzy. For the microprocessor revolution, think 1990’s, where huge amounts of investment moved into internet based companies. There is a divorce between real value and paper value (the paper millionaires of the late 1990’s).

Inevitably, a crash occurs. Ms. Perez calls this the Turning Point. In a follow-on response to an e-mail (see below), she claims that we are still in the Turning Point phase. This phase can go on for years, as it did in the “mass production revolution” from 1929 to 1940. And there can be multiple crashes within a Turning Point phase.

In the Turning Point, financial reform is also required to create a shift of investment methodology from short-term gain to long-term sustainable profits. Financial Capital (fast moving money, think hedge funds, private equity firms, large financial firms) realigns itself with Production Capital (investment capital, slow moving, usually in the hands of corporations, long-term investments for future profits).

Once the appropriate conditions have been created, we enter a gilded age. A period of near full employment and substantial profits for corporations. This phase is called Synergy and can last 10-20 years or more. The Synergy phase was last seen during the “mass production revolution” from 1940 to 1960.

Finally, we enter the Maturity phase. Fast-growing and highly profitable sectors of production capital begin to reach limits to growth. Financial capital begins to search for new investments in innovative technology, and a new technological revolution develops.

Ms. Perez outlines the 5 previous technological revolutions in this chart below:

Interestingly, I shared this book with Andrew Orobator, an intern that I have working with me on a project at Deutsche Bank. He was intrigued and sent an e-mail to Ms. Perez inquiring as if we were in the Turning Point. Here is her response:

Dear Andrew,
Thanks for your interesting question.
NOT ALL BUBBLES ARE MAJOR TECHNOLOGY BUBBLES
First of all, I want to suggest that you read my 2009 article ”The double bubble of the turn of the century”. If you have access to academic journals you can download it from the CJE website. If not, just download the CFAP/CERF working paper which is basically the same thing. The links are in my webpage.
Link: http://cje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/33/4/779
http://www-cfap.jbs.cam.ac.uk/publications/downloads/wp31.pdf

There you will see that not all bubbles are technology bubbles and not all technology bubbles are major technology bubbles. The only ones that define the phase of frenzy of each great surge are the major technology ones.

Figure 7.2 in the book shows many medium and minor bubbles that are relatively isolated and do not change the overall economic conditions. But of course each affects a sector and can ruin several investors while having made some millionaires.

THE CURRENT MINI-TECHNOLOGY BUBBLE IS NOT LIKE THE NASDAQ ONE OF THE LATE 1990s
It has been spurred by the prices paid by by Google and Microsoft and the others when making acquisitions. These giants are in the process of defining themselves and defining the conditions of competition among them. This is typical of turning points. I wrote a short note for a European journal explaining why this bubble is not like the NASDAQ. The link is in my webpage
http://theeuropean-magazine.com/275-perez-carlota/277-the-social-media-bubble

But of course whatever the origin, the social networking stocks are overvalued and at some point there will be a panic and the whole thing will come crashing down. After that there will be some survivor giants that will define the social networking market and others that will be swalloed or disappear. It is a self-contained mini-bubble affecting a specific sector and possibly the economy of Silicon Valley.

IN MY OPINION WE ARE NOT IN SYNERGY YET
We are indeed at the turning point. The major bubbles have crashed and many things can happen now depending on the policies applied. For synergy to happen we need to change the incentive system of finance. It should become less profitable to invest in the casino and more profitable to invest in the real economy That is how production capital gets to shape the direction of growth and innovation and how we get a full recovery in the real economy.Otherwise we will have jobless growth and successive recessions and crashes. A sustainable global golden age is possible with the current technological potential but it will require very intelligent and strong leadership on the national and global levels. You can watch a video about this in YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svRyx2qh-jo

BUBBLES AND THE IMPORTANCE OF VIEWPOINTS
If you are an investor what you want to know is whether the valuations in the stock market are inflated or not and whether you have to get out just before a bubble bursts or stay in if the values are right.
If you are a policy maker or central banker a strategist for a big corporation or an economist trying to understand where the economy is going you want to know whether the apparent prosperity in the market is going to suddenly crash and affect everybody.

Therefore, my answer to your question is:
It is defintely a bubble for investors (including Deutsche Bank), but
it is not a bubble for the US or world economy (as the NASDAQ and 2007-08 collapses were.

I wish you fun in the debate and great success at Carnegie Mellon.
Carlota Perez