Basketball Diaries: Lakers/Warriors
Wonderfully entertaining Lakers-Warriors game the other night. The Warriors are a pesky team, and they brought great energy and were hitting their shots relentlessly in the first two and one-half quarters of the game.
The question was whether the Lakers would remain patient and poised, stick to their game (pound it inside) and ultimately make one of their patented “lockdown runs” that squeeze the life out of the competition.
Sure enough, looking like champions, they worked a 17-3 run in the 4th that turned a game that they were losing for all of about 2-3 minutes into a solid victory.
Two monster blocks by Kobe Bryant (on Corey Maggette and Anthony Randolph (click link to see video), and continued brilliance of Pau Gasol, who is becoming a solid anchor to the offense.
Side comment: Anthony Randolph got into Lamar Odom’s head all night, was brilliant for a young player, and is going to be REAL GOOD if keeps doing what he is doing. Very Lamar-like set of skills. Makes one wonder about Nelson’s old school doghouse where Randolph has spent a lot of time this season.
Obama: An Officer and a Gentleman
Funny comments the other night by Dennis Miller on Jay Leno about Barack Obama’s continued efforts to take the campaign to the people.
One, he suggested that half of America is sponsoring the other half of America in this bailout.
Two, he noted that the troubled McDonald’s worker in one of Obama’s town hall meetings is perhaps looking a bit too much at Obama as Richard Gere in ‘Officer and a Gentleman,’ expecting that Obama is going to carry him off to a happy ending.
I liked the inference that while our government has a role to play in stabilizing and supporting, we the American people can’t look to others to lift us up. We have to lift ourselves higher.
Miller noted this sardonically, quipping, “You work at McDonald’s until you don’t want to work at McDonald’s anymore. You build the skills you need, get out and then work somewhere better.”
FRONTLINE: Inside the Meltdown
It’s worth carving out an hour to watch the PBS FRONTLINE documentary, “Inside the Meltdown” (it’s online HERE). First off, it presents the best analog to explain what’s going on, comparing the crisis to systemic spasms that each time the spasms occur, they are getting worse.
Plus, it provides the most compelling argument I have read so far that the decision of the Fed to let Lehman fail was the seminal bad (but non-obvious) judgment call that infected the system, taking what could have otherwise been a contained event, and allowing it to become global and system wide.
Containment is a term you think of as being like a viral contagion or a nuclear threat, but it’s very apropos to what is going on.
The documentary helps you follow the bouncing ball of terms from “Mass Losses to the Financial System” to “Global Interconnectedness” to “Moral Hazard” (and how it shaped handling of both Bear Stearns and Lehman) to “Wealth Loss” (via home and stock portfolio value contraction) to “Leverage Contraction” to “Liquidity Stringency” to “Overnight Intra-Bank Lending” (as viscosity lubricant that must be kept flowing daily to avoid engine seize and instantaneous collapse of investment banks) to “Lender of Last Resort” to “Financial System Meltdown in a Matter of Days.”
The show raised a couple of questions for me. One is how to reconcile a bailout of global firms and assets, given national boundaries (the level of interdependency is jaw-dropping complex), especially in light of fact that there is lack of clear past precedent other than that you have to “do something.”
This paradox provides color to how Congress can in rapid fashion stupidly vote against a bailout and understandably struggle with a fuzzy plan attached to a blank check. It also (unfortunately) feeds the type of sanctimonious rhetoric that congress excels at, which unfortunately is at its most destructive right now.
Lastly, it raises a fundamental question of “What if the system is insolvent? What then?” If, for example, as we have seen, the markets trade on all sort of virtual bets on real assets, and do so at multiples far greater than the real assets themselves (e.g., oil markets trading 8X volume to the level of real oil being consumed), then perhaps the REAL losses to the underlying actual asset are logarithmic-ally smaller on the downside (1/8)?
In other words, the dollars lost are real, but perhaps there is a way to get back to intrinsic value by stripping out the derivative element and representing separately as a balance sheet item.
I am not even sure that I can explain that one fully (I am not a quant) but key point is that dollars, homes, mortgages and physical assets don’t just vaporize even if the markets surrounding them and the financial models supporting value assumptions collapse.
Pinch Media Analytics on iPhone Application Lifecycle
The title is self-explanatory but watch the slide show as it presents some interesting data for analyzing the moving parts of app usage lifecycle, pricing determinants (free versus fee) and ad monetization viability as a business strategy.
Worth noting is that while the data provides some valuable insight into the efficacy (or lack thereof) of ad support for most applications, what it doesn’t speak to is the integral-ness of free ‘lite’ versions in driving users to upsell themselves to the premium ‘full’ version of the app.
This is standard practice in the App Store universe and there is a lot of data that supports the marketing value of lite version/full version as a (paying) customer acquisition strategy.
The other thing that this data doesn’t speak to is the value of App Store as a distribution/monetization strategy for app builders relative to other channels.
My friends in the iPhone Developer universe that sell/sold their products through retail and other channels consider the iPhone App Store model to be manna from heaven in terms of margin, reach and control. To be clear, an imperfect channel, as all things are, but manna nonetheless.
See my post ‘Surplus, Scarcity and the iPhone App Store’ for more fodder on this topic.
