I can live all day inside the Internet. I can talk to my friends, listen to music, watch TV, trade stocks, play games, do work – all on the Internet. From 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. every day I can spend on the Internet and it would be a day well spent.
But run for the hills when it comes to advising clients to invest in the Internet.
The days of infinite margins, 1,000% productivity gains, and growth of market throughout the universe are long over. Internet companies now should be …

Too much money has been chasing too few great start-ups

ONE of Silicon Valley’s biggest success stories is doing his bit to lift the gloom hanging over America’s venture-capital (VC) industry. On July 6th Marc Andreessen, who made his name in the 1990s as the co-founder of Netscape Communications, the firm behind one of the earliest web browsers, announced that he and a partner, Ben Horowitz, had raised $300m to back promising start-ups. The fund was heavily oversubscribed and attracted money from several other tech luminaries.
His is not the only …

Greentech Media has released data that shows venture capital investment in renewable energy sectors has risen 50% in the second quarter of 2009.

In Q2, $1.2 billion USD was invested through 85 deals in renewable energy sectors. This is a sharp rise from the $836 million USD that was invested through 59 deals in the first quarter of 2009.
The data also shows there was more balanced investing between the renewable energy sectors. Solar energy was the largest investment sector, receiving $330 million. (Read more at: E BOOM Finance)
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{Photography by pfala}

It’s wildly popular – and thought to be losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Now questions are being asked about the future of YouTube. Rhodri Marsden investigates a mystery of digital-age ‘freeconomics’

It must surely rank as the most mundane business launch in history. Jawed Karim, one of the founders of YouTube, shuffles timidly in front of a video camera while standing in front of a group of elephants at San Diego zoo, with precious little idea of what he was starting. “The cool thing about these guys,” …

The New York Stock Exchange quietly announced last week that it would end its practice of requiring companies to report all their program trading — a move that helps shield large investment banks, particularly Goldman Sachs, from public scrutiny.
The new rule means the public will no longer be able to tell if large investment banks are manipulating the stock market for their own gain, says Matt Taibbi, the journalist whose Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs’ role in asset bubbles over the past century has rocked the financial world. …

These are the companies with the right mix of the right stuff — business acumen, a great plug-in product and a marketing plan. Don’t be surprised if at least one of these companies becomes as big as (or bigger than) General Motors. (Read more at: mnn / Mother Nature Network)
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{Photography by Ed Callow/TorqueSkeak}

You know the economy is in trouble when the good news is unemployment increased at a slower rate and pending home sales stood basically still all month. Brace yourself because it looks like the “good news” is going to get much worse, too.
Home prices appear to be approaching a valley, though no one can know for sure if they are near a bottom or if they have further to drop. However, credit is still hard to come by, and it is becoming more expensive as interest rates rise on …

Up until about two weeks ago, Matt Taibbi’s favorite Goldman Sachs’ market observers, the folks over at the Zero Hedge blog, had been continually commenting over the past six-plus months about how Goldman had all but cornered the market on program trading within the NY Stock Exchange. (Program trading is the automated stock trading via computers by firms specially authorized by the NYSE to facilitate same.) Clearly, according to Zero Hedge publisher Tyler Durden, something was up.
A couple of months ago, we also learned through Zero Hedge that Goldman …

Veteran sports bettors and bookmakers are not prone to fantastic notions. They like to think that everything new is just something old in a fashionable suit.
But this fall, the stereotype no longer fit. Years of studied cynicism gave way to breathless talk. Las Vegas had a mystery on its hands.
Each Thursday morning at precisely 10 a.m. Nevada time, every major casino sports betting operation in the world from here to Costa Rica was being simultaneously pounded by thousands of bettors wagering millions of dollars on the same few college …

. . . Doubling reward again from B to C, though, brings significant incremental risk. . .   Read more at: The risk/reward confusion (Seth’s Blog)
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Water, water everywhere, and you’re entitled to a drop.

As scientists warn that the world’s fresh water supplies will soon run critically short, and companies scramble to privatize them, some researchers and activists say water should be considered a basic human right.
“Access to clean water, which is essential for health, is under threat,” write the editors of Public Library of Science Medicine in an essay published Monday.
In terms of intellectual coherency, the idea passes muster. Water’s just as essential to life as food, which makes an appearance in Article 25 …

Demand for fresh water is increasing around the world, especially in regions with rapidly growing populations and badly affected by long, drought seasons. Water is only going to become scarcer and many governments are looking at desalination and investing in this technology to supply water to their populations. These factors are driving the desalination market that shows a strong growth according to Frost & Sullivan.

The focus is particularly high in the Mediterranean region where in the last few years we have been witnessing an increasingly severe water scarcity. Frost …

Investors love a sure thing, and in this life, it doesn’t get more certain than death. So it’s no surprise that in recent years the market for investing in life settlements—buying a stake in someone else’s insurance and collecting the reward when they die—has grown tenfold to nearly $20 billion. Life settlements can offer legitimate value to investors and policyholders, but the industry remains largely unregulated. And just like the overcooked mortgage securities market, they’ve launched a flood of fraudulent policies—this time on people’s lives. (Read more at: The …

36 South Investment Managers Ltd., whose Black Swan Fund gained 234 percent in 2008, is raising money for a new hedge fund, betting that government efforts to pump money into economies could result in hyperinflation.
The Excelsior Fund targets returns that will be five times the average annual rate of inflation of the Group of Five economies — France, Germany, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. — should the rate exceed 5 percent, Jerry Haworth, co-founder of the firm, said yesterday. Raising $100 million for the fund would be a …

The revolving door of venture capitalists is swinging fast.
Not since the dot-com bust has the industry experienced as much turnover as it is now. Since the end of 2007, the number of venture-capital principals, who make investment decisions and are directors of start-up companies, has tumbled by more than 15%, according to the National Venture Capital Association.
The exits just in the past few months include a Who’s Who of firms and partners, say venture capitalists and recruiters. General partners and underperformers are being dumped by recession-wracked firms, some of …

China is “actively considering” buying up to $50bn of International Monetary Fund bonds, the country’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange has said.
John Lipsky, IMF first deputy managing director, confirmed the Chinese proposal, which follows one by Russia to buy $10bn (€7.1bn, £6.2bn) in IMF bonds.
Friday’s statement by China said any investment would be made according to its usual criteria of “safety and reasonable returns”, but made no mention of Beijing’s wish for more power in IMF decision-making, in return for financial support.
Safe, which controls almost $2,000bn of China’s foreign …

Read the transcript of the interview at TechCrunch .

Fundamentally the rally in the broad stockmarket from early in March is viewed as being the result of a combination of media hype, wishful thinking and short covering, but there may be more to it than that – it would appear that a sizeable proportion of the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) funds not thus far deployed have been used to drive up the stockmarkets in order to create a positive environment for the banks to issue secondary shares and thus raise equity. While this is perfectly understandable, it …

JPMorgan Chase & Co. stands to reap a $29 billion windfall thanks to an accounting rule that lets the second-biggest U.S. bank transform bad loans it purchased from Washington Mutual Inc. into income.
Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America Corp. and PNC Financial Services Group Inc. are also poised to benefit from taking over home lenders Wachovia Corp., Countrywide Financial Corp. and National City Corp., regulatory filings show. The deals provide a combined $56 billion in so-called accretable yield, the difference between the value of the loans on the …

This quote, from Newsweek’s piece on former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, strikes me as a bombshell:

Paulson–by his own admission–was not paying much attention to the way banks were slicing and dicing mortgages and selling them as complex securities. “I didn’t understand the retail market; I just wasn’t close to it,” he told NEWSWEEK.

If Newsweek won’t play prosecutor, I will: “Hank Paulson, you were Goldman’s chief executive as mortgage securities boomed in 2004-5. Your earned an incredible severance, partly because of it. And you say you didn’t understand …