Friday 30 July 2010

Hedge Fund Holdings



Network map of some stocks which are held by at least two hedge funds.

The red nodes are the fund managers for each hedge fund. The bigger the size of the node of a stock (blue nodes) means that the stock are held by more hedge funds.

* Appaloosa Management (David Tepper)
* Baupost Group (Seth Klarman)
* Berkshire Hatheway (Warren Buffett)
* Blue Ridge Capital (John Griffin)
* Bridger Management (Roberto Mignone)
* Conatus Capital (David Stemerman)
* Fairholme Capital Management (Bruce Berkowitz)
* Greenlight Capital (David Einhorn)
* Harbinger Capital Partners (Phil Falcone)
* Lone Pine Capital (Stephen Mandel)
* Maverick Capital (Lee Ainslie)
* Pabrai Investment Fund (Mohnish Pabrai)
* Paulson & Co (John Paulson)
* Pershing Square Capital Management (Bill Ackman)
* RBS Partners (Eddie Lampert)
* Shumway Capital Partners (Chris Shumway)
* Soros Fund Management (George Soros)
* Third Point LLC (Dan Loeb)
* Tiger Global (Chase Coleman)
* Tiger Management (Julian Robertson)
* Viking Global (Andreas Halvorsen)

Tuesday 20 July 2010

3 Young Web Companies



Need to bookmark some names.
US entrepreneurs under 30. Young innovators and businesspeople.

It remains to be seen how they'll manage their businesses in the future. From now on, they are under my radar.


Posterous - dead simple blogging
Key people: Garry Tan and Sachin Agarwal
- heard about them more than 1 year ago,
- use it for my text columns, writing
- 5,1 million funding
- Y Combinator company
- 7 employees
- location: San Francisco


LivingSocial - online coupons
Key people: Tim O'Shaughnessy, Eddie Frederick
- heard on Facebook via app for them
- Employees: 220
- 2010 revenue: 100 million
- Washington D.C.
- Groupon and LS own 98 % of the market



iContact
- e-mail marketing
Key people - Ryan Allis and Aaron Houghton
- heard about them thanks to Google AdWords ads,
- Employees: 205
- 2010 Projected Revenue: $39 million
- Location: Durham, North Carolina

Wednesday 14 July 2010

Waiting For Virgin Web Business

Brand that never stops


Random Web surfing got me into research of the british Virgin Group. I admire Richard Branson, founder of the Group, very much. He's an inspiring entrepreneur.

Long-time plan is to read one of his books.

One particular moment struck me reading about his business ventures. Virgin brand never acctually made any meaningful success in the Web/ Internet business arena.

At the beggining of the millenium, Virgin was making inroads into direct Web selling of cars and bikes. Later, there wasn't any major investment into e-commerce ( if we don't count Virgin America's flight reservation ). Before that, Virgin got into ISP business and later sold the stake .

On the other hand, mobile telecom business was a success. Virgin Mobile was agressive and easy to use MVNO.

Which brings me to conclusion, Mr. Branson's having a lot of open space to try in the future with e-business ( Web / Internet ) in general.

My suggestion to him would be: Virgin Cloud - sort of utility for future cloud- computing, Virgin Wallet - mobile payment for everybody ( could be part of Virgin Money franchise ), Virgin Water - bottled water, water distribution made different, Virgin Apps - software distribution over the Web Etc.

Time to start following Sir Branson on Twitter.

Tuesday 13 July 2010

Facebook Data For Website Owners

Ask Facebook about your audience


Websites with Facebook widget where visitors can join the fan page ( example: Blackberry ) , could have a gold mine full with valuable information they could present to their advertisers.

I don't know whether Facebook shares this data with websites owners .

Just imagine the fan base of few thousands people who clicked '' like '' button. All these users share their personal information with Facebook and if shared, website owner could knew exactly their audiences.

No need for website owner to post polls, user surveys etc. The information is stored with Facebook.

The problem is that Facebook won't share it with websites, I presume. They will use it to drive advertising through Facebook platform.

Remember, Facebook’s advertising platform gives advertisers the ability to target their advertisements to Facebook users based on their demographic and psychographic information – including their likes and preferences.


Thought provoking article by Ed Dale.