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FANG, an acronym created by TheStreet's Jim Cramer a few years ago, is representative of four of the most popular and best-performing tech stocks in recent memoryBeware the FANG, and other quirky stock market indicators
The FANG? It’s among the latest in a long line of quirky predictors, funky barometers and other theories that contribute to the noise surrounding why stocks go up and down. Some indicators are tied to the calendar, while others track presidential elections, the Super Bowl and horse racing’s Triple Crown. The FANG is an acronym for four high-flying stocks that are investor favorites: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. Never mind that Google is now called Alphabet.Comment: Image source. None are in our portfolio but I may do a future investment of about $ 2200:
Does Netflix's stumble show we've reached peak FANG? Maybe not. https://t.co/SgktjX06od
— Jim Cramer (@jimcramer) July 18, 2018
Google Discontinues Free Tier of Google Apps
Excerpt:
If you’ve been on the fence about switching your small business over to the free “small team” version of Google Apps, Google just made the decision for you. Before, groups under 10 people in size could sign up for a basic version of Google Apps gratis, but today, the company announced that the free tier has been discontinued. In fact, it’s already been scrubbed from the Google Apps website.Comment: We use the “small team” version at jrpeet.com
Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Lost to Tax Loopholes
Excerpt:
Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.
Google’s income shifting -- involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” -- helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries.
“It’s remarkable that Google’s effective rate is that low,” said Martin A. Sullivan, a tax economist who formerly worked for the U.S. Treasury Department. “We know this company operates throughout the world mostly in high-tax countries where the average corporate rate is well over 20 percent.”
The U.S. corporate income-tax rate is 35 percent. In the U.K., Google’s second-biggest market by revenue, it’s 28 percent.
Google, the owner of the world’s most popular search engine, uses a strategy that has gained favor among such companies as Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. The method takes advantage of Irish tax law to legally shuttle profits into and out of subsidiaries there, largely escaping the country’s 12.5 percent income tax.
If a corporation will face significantly lower taxes in another location, it will move there. It will also grow and become more profitable, so that it pays a larger total amount in taxes at a lower rate than it had been paying at a higher rate. If the U.S. wants to discourage corporations from leaving the country, it should make its corporate tax structure more appealing by abolishing corporate income taxes entirely.
Why abolish them instead of cutting them? Because then we could get rid of our exceedingly complex corporate tax law. If corporate tax rates were slashed from 35% to 25%, corporations would still have to pay for an army of accountants and lawyers to comply with the tax law and make sure they don't pay any more than required. It's not an easy task to discern what should be "taxable" income for a corporation – especially, what should be a deductible expense. Is interest on debt a legitimate expense? How do you calculate depreciation of assets? Should these vary from industry to industry? What about the CEO's high salary? According to J.Scott Moody, The Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation stated in 1927 that "It must be recognized that while a degree of simplification is possible, a simple income tax for complex business is not."
And that's very true. A "simple" tax code wouldn't take into account certain factors which make it unfair to some. But a complex code just gives creates opportunities for corporations to dodge taxes through myriad breaks and deductions.
The blogger formerly known as Jane Galt wrote in 2002,"The Corporate Income Tax brought in $204.9 billion in 1998. My tax professor (a Democrat) estimated the cost of corporate compliance in that year to be $300 billion. That's just the direct cost -- what corporations paid tax lawyers and accountants." So according to this professor, it cost corporations $500 billion to pay the tax, though the government received barely $200 billion. And the tax code is much larger today than it was in 1998. While the professor's estimate may have been too high, there is undeniably tremendous waste of labor and money that the corporation could have used to grow their business.
Instead of this waste, we could simplify the system by letting the entire tax fall on the shareholders instead. After all, they are already taxed on their dividends, capital gains, and interest from their investments; these are part of their personal income taxes. The entire corporate tax structure does nothing but create a complicated and expensive layer of tax law on top of it on top of what shareholders are already paying in individual income taxes. In other words, when corporations pay taxes, that means less income for its shareholders, which means they effectively paid the tax anyway. Why don't we just have them pay it without the corporate tax rigmarole?
Here's how it could be done. First, tax dividends, capital gains, and interest all at the same flat rate, so that corporations and shareholders wouldn't let taxes affect their decision-making on when to buy or sell stock or pay dividends. Second, devise a system similar to employer withholding of the income tax on wages, applying it to the paying of dividends. This ensures that foreign investors have also paid the tax, and it deters tax evasion. Third, for the same reasons, devise if possible similar withholding taxes for interest income and long-term capital gains, making sure they are indexed for inflation.
By replacing an army of high-priced lawyers and accountants with a few clerks to handle tax withholding for dividend checks, Corporate America will save hundreds of billions of dollars – money with which they can expand their business and provide jobs, lower prices, or return to shareholders, where the money will be taxed. It will also lower the cost of production, making American goods more competitive overseas.
Google ordered to defend against age bias lawsuit
Excerpt:
Google Inc (GOOG.O), which runs the world's most popular Internet search engine, was ordered to defend itself against a lawsuit by a former manager who said he was fired for being too old, clearing the way for a trial.
The California Supreme Court unanimously agreed that a trial court erred in dismissing a complaint by Brian Reid, who was hired in 2002 as a director of operations and engineering, and fired less than two years later at age 54 after being told he was not a good "cultural fit."
Thursday's ruling upheld a state appeals court decision that the trial court erred in dismissing the lawsuit, and said the trial court should have considered "stray remarks" from Reid's colleagues, including that he was an "old man" and "old fuddy-duddy," that might be seen as evidence of bias.
The ruling means the case returns to the trial court.
"Brian Reid was not laid off based on his age," said Andrew Pederson, a spokesman for Mountain View, California-based Google, in an emailed statement. "We look forward to demonstrating in court the legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons why Mr. Reid was let go."
Google Hangs Up on Its Nexus One
Excerpt:
Google says it has received its last shipment of Nexus One phones, which are touchscreen devices that carry Google's brand and are powered by Google's Android operating system. In May, Google said it would shutter its Web store selling the handset once supplies were exhausted.
The Nexus One's demise stands in contrast with other phones running Google's Android software. Demand for Motorola Inc.'s new Droid X has outstripped inventory in Verizon Wireless stores. The phone, which went on sale last week, is backordered to July 27.
Nexus One, released in January, was seen as a bold experiment by Google to sell phones directly to consumers over the Web—with or without a cellphone contract. It failed amid what some industry executives said were poor sales, as well as complaints about customer service.
It’s Apple vs. Google in the battle over the future of computing
Excerpt:
... the most advanced smart phone on the market is arguably not the new iPhone 4 but rather an Android device called the EVO 4G, made by HTC, a Taiwanese company. That phone has front and rear cameras, and shoots hi-def video, just like the new iPhone 4. But the EVO has a bigger display, its camera shoots in higher resolution, and it can turn itself into a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot, something the iPhone 4 can’t do.
Geeks can, and do, argue over the merits of these phones. But the fact that the two are close enough to be compared side by side is what should have Apple worried. And these are early days. My sense is that over the next 12 to 18 months, Android will surge past Apple the way Microsoft Windows surged past Apple in the 1990s.
Is Google Voice a Threat to AT&T?
Excerpt:
In short, what Apple and AT&T have accomplished with their heavy-handed, Soviet information-control style is not to bury these useful apps. Instead, Apple/AT&T have elevated them to martyr status—and, in effect, thrown down a worldwide challenge to programmers everywhere.
"Get around THIS," they're saying.
But guess what? It won't take long. They've put a rock in the river, but the water will just find a way around it.
Already, Google says it is readying a replacement for the Google Voice app that will offer exactly the same features as the rejected app—except that it will take the form of a specialized, iPhone-shaped Web page. For all intents and purposes, it will behave exactly the same as the app would have; you can even install it as an icon on your Home screen.
What's Apple going to do now? Start blocking access to individual Web sites?
Microsoft’s Request: Use Bing, Don’t Google It
Excerpt:
Bing, the name Microsoft gave to the new search service it unveiled Thursday, is its answer to Google — a noun that once meant little but has become part of the language as a verb that is a synonym for executing a Web search. After months of, uh, searching, Microsoft settled on Bing to replace the all-too-forgettable Live Search, which itself replaced MSN Search.
Microsoft invested billions of dollars in those services and failed to slow Google’s rise, so a new name certainly can’t hurt.
Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on “The Sopranos” but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the “aha” moment when a search leads to an answer.
The name is meant to conjure “the sound of found” as Bing helps people with complex tasks like shopping for a camera, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group.
And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”
Some branding experts said choosing the name Bing was a good start, but also the easiest part of the challenge facing the company, since most people turn to Google without even thinking about it.
Google Yourself—And Enjoy It
Excerpt:
Clearly, you no longer have to be a paparazzi-plagued star to be misrepresented on a worldwide stage. Anyone can say anything online (it's estimated that 1.6 million blog posts are created daily), and dozens of new gadgets, as well as more-powerful search engines, give us easy access to all those indiscriminate bits of information. This convenient yet terrifying reality has created a whole new brand of damage control: Internet reputation repair. ReputationHawk out of Baton Rouge, La.; Washington, D.C.'s International Reputation Management; ReputationDefender in northern California, and Los Angeles's Done! SEO specialize in managing your online legacy, and business is booming. "Anyone can have their image tarnished on the Internet, no matter how good a person they are," says Jeff Henderson of Done! SEO, a search-engine optimization company that claims business increased tenfold when it introduced reputation-management services in 2006. "We're the next generation of public relations. From here on out, you need to own your first few Google pages."
For those of us who still don't know the difference between megabytes and RAM, "owning" online search results seems as elusive as harnessing vapor. But these rep agents for hire can push offending material down off the first couple of pages—which is a page beyond where most users venture. They do it by creating hundreds, even thousands, of links between third-party Web sites and positive content about you or your business. The labor-intensive service runs anywhere from $4,000 to $30,000, and it takes about six months to see all those negative hits clear off the first page. There are no guarantees, but according to John, who went with Done! SEO in November, "things are already moving in a better direction."
ReputationDefender of Menlo Park, Calif., offers a less-expensive and less-complicated service: it hunts down the host of the offending material and asks that the information be removed.
Comment: Why I am not concerned: I died in 1859! Compare Colossians 3:3, "For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God".
Facing Free Software, Microsoft Looks to Yahoo
Excerpt:
Now comes a new rallying cry: software wants to be free. Or, as the tech insiders say, it wants to be “zero dollar.”
A growing number of consumers are paying just that — nothing. This is the Internet’s latest phase: people using freely distributed applications, from e-mail and word processing programs to spreadsheets, games and financial management tools. They run on distant, massive and shared data centers, and users of the services pay with their attention to ads, not cash.
While such services have been emerging for years, their rapid adoption has been an important but largely overlooked driver of the $44.6 billion hostile bid that Microsoft made to take over Yahoo this week.
That proposed deal would give Microsoft access to Yahoo’s vast news, information, search and advertising network — and the ability to compete more squarely with Google.
But a merger would also allow Microsoft to adapt its empire to compete in a world of low-cost Internet-centered software.
Yahoo’s huge user base could provide the audience and the infrastructure for Microsoft to change how it distributes its products and charges for them.
Comment: I doubt that corporate american will adopt "cloud computing" in my career life. Every workstation at ________ (where I work) has Office Professional. For my personal life, I am aiming for "cloud computing". Although just this week I upgraded Kathee and my MacBooks to Office 2008.
Microsoft and Google Duke It Out For the Future
Excerpt:
Google President Eric Schmidt thinks that 90 percent of computing will eventually reside in the Web-based 'cloud.' Microsoft faces a business quandary as it tries to link the Web to its existing desktop business — 'software plus Internet services,' in its formulation. 'Microsoft will embrace the Web while striving to maintain the revenue and profits from its desktop software businesses, the corporate gold mine, a smart strategy for now that may not be sustainable,' according to the article. Google faces competition from Microsoft and from other Web-based productivity software being offered by startups, and it is 'unclear at this point whether Google will be able to capitalize on the trends that it's accelerating.' David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School, says the Google model is to try to change all the rules. If Google succeeds, 'a lot of the value that Microsoft provides today is potentially obsolete.' Microsoft used to call this 'cutting off their air supply."
Comment: I've heard but cannot confirm that Intuit will soon offer an Internet based personal financial manager - think Quicken on the Internet. For light computing, Google apps provides a Word-type application and an Internet-only spreadsheet. All this is "the cloud" of computing's future.
The full NYTimes article:
Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft
Excerpt:
Still, Google Apps aren’t anything other than a natural step in Google’s march to deliver more computing capability to users over the Internet, Mr. Schmidt says.
“For most people,” he says, “computers are complex and unreliable,” given to crashing and afflicted with viruses. If Google can deliver computing services over the Web, then “it will be a real improvement in people’s lives,” he says.
To explain, Mr. Schmidt steps up to a white board. He draws a rectangle and rattles off a list of things that can be done in the Web-based cloud, and he notes that this list is expanding as Internet connection speeds become faster and Internet software improves. In a sliver of the rectangle, about 10 percent, he marks off what can’t be done in the cloud, like high-end graphics processing. So, in Google’s thinking, will 90 percent of computing eventually reside in the cloud?
“In our view, yes,” Mr. Schmidt says. “It’s a 90-10 thing.” Inside the cloud resides “almost everything you do in a company, almost everything a knowledge worker does.”
When E-Mail Is Outsourced
Excerpt:
In the world of e-mail, outsourcing means two things: Google or Microsoft. Both have been marketing Web-based messaging services to small businesses, nonprofits and other groups, and they’ve focused more intensely on the higher education market over the past year. Besides services that are completely free and interfaces that are familiar to students, they offer a wide array of features, tools that let people collaborate in real time — and of course, the cool factor.
The availability of viable options outside of the university IT department has forced administrators to consider the consequences of abandoning their in-house e-mail systems. Does it make financial sense to keep spending resources on aging proprietary software when it’s available on the Web? Do colleges’ services still offer advantages over those reflexively preferred by students? And in offloading a primary function of the campus information technology infrastructure, what role would remain for administrators who previously oversaw e-mail services?
----
Many students have come to demand e-mail access at close to real time, integrated chat and several gigabytes of space because that’s what’s freely available from such competing services as Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail. The ad-supported offerings have taken advantage of massive economies of scale to effectively make storage limits and e-mail clients a thing of the past. At the University of Pennsylvania, where 2 of the 12 schools are phasing in Microsoft’s Live @ edu, there was no comparison between the old 75-megabyte limit and the five gigabytes now available, said Ira Winston, the executive director of computing and educational technology services for three of the schools.
“We just can’t keep up with the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo,” he said. Since students are already coming in with their own accounts, and with 30 percent of them forwarding their college mail to personal inboxes, the debate wasn’t whether to partner with one of the Web services — it was “who to outsource to.”
The outcome of that decision didn’t necessarily weigh heavily on Winston. Since Google and Microsoft’s contracts are relatively short-term and non-exclusive, choosing a provider won’t lock in a college indefinitely, and different units within an institution can potentially use separate e-mail systems. Students can still always forward their e-mail. For Winston, the most important element was “providing the best services to our students and not constraining them to any one provider,” he said. “It almost doesn’t matter who you pick.”
Comment: Outsource your email and your users will be happy (imagine 5 gigabytes of email space instead of 10 or 20 megabytes!) and there will be no Exchange servers to be upgraded, have a BCP plan, etc.
Google Docs Beta
PC Mag Conclusion:
If you've been thinking of online services such as Google Docs as a possible replacement for a desktop-based office suite, you're likely to be disappointed by even the best of these services. But if you understand that an online service provides a quick, efficient, available-anywhere way to create, edit, and share small to medium-size documents, you'll be as impressed as I am with the way Google does things. Among online document-creation services, Google Docs is an obvious Editors' Choice.
Comments: Works well for small documents.
Free wireless internet through your toilet. I'm not sure how long this link will be active but find it here
Excerpt:
Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.
Google fools: Web service through toilet
