Sponsor My Son's Cast!

Saturday morning, my 6-year old son fell from the monkey bars and broke his arm. It was kind of a crappy way to start a weekend, but I think that there is a silver lining to this. Every year, there are 40,000 monkey bar accidents resulting in emergency room visits. I'd like to start a trend of having private companies help fund the costs associated with healthcare in America. Imagine your uncle Bob's, who might die without his pacemaker, getting all costs covered in exchange for wearing a Visa t-shirt everywhere he goes? Maybe Grandma needs a new hip, how about covering the cost of that in exchange for getting her car wrapped with Actonel banner. I see this as a larger trend beyond casts, but casts, especially a full arm cast like my son will get on Monday, should be prime real estate for key advertisers. I've flown this idea past my wife and she was surprisingly on board. We'll consider most advertisers suitable for a 6-year old with the only caveat being that there is a spot for his friends to sign their names. I envision characters with text blocks underneath them for his friends autographs.  I'll let your creatives come up with something. The technology on how to wrap this is up to the advertiser and would need to be approved by our orthopedist. I suspect that some type of sticker will be appropriate, but I don't know how it will stick to the fiber glass. That's up to you. Ideal advertisers that we are thinking about include Pokemon, Bakugon, Nintendo or Golden Palace (seems like this would be up their alley). The kid is going to have a full arm cast for at least 8-weeks starting tomorrow.  This is an option for a single advertiser. He is in school for 4-hours a day (kindergarten), with 25 kids in his class.  He interacts a lot with other kids in the rest of the school.  I'd guess that he gets direct / indirect interaction with over 100 kids a day.  He spends a lot of after school time with his friends and other kids in our neighborhood.  We'll permit limited, approved PR for this opportunity. My wife and I are serious about this, but also consider any type of sponsorship to be college money for him.  Like a lot of parents, we have high hopes for our kids.  In other words, think Stanford not state school. If you're interested in this opportunity, please contact me directly via this blog.
Tagged Featured Fun & Dumb Money & Philanthropy advertising arm broken arm casts sponsorships

Contextual Ads Gone Bad

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Sad for an American institution.  Not so much when this train wreck has been visible for the past 15 - 20 years.
Tagged GM Money & Philanthropy ads bailout yahoo finance

WebEx & the Human Network

Cisco spent a whole bunch of their $20B in cash today and purchased WebEx for $3.2B.  This is especially touching to me as I was an early employee at WEBX and still have a bunch of friends over there.  I'm very excited for them as I think that this is a great deal for both Cisco & WebEx. First, Cisco owns the router business.  A significant portion of Internet traffic is going through Cisco routers, but they aren't making any dough on that traffic.  While the growth of the router industry for the next couple of years is going to be decent, I can't imagine that it is going to set any records.  With the exception of a big pop last August, their stock has been pretty flat for the past 3 or more years.  This would explain their buying binge over the past couple of weeks.  Cisco needs these content providers like WebEx & FiveAcross in order to generate a more recurrent / predictable / growing revenue stream.  In the grand scheme of things, WebEx's $380M a year in revenue won't make a huge dent in their $30B in revenue a year, but 10 WebEx's, will. I tend to agree with Om Malik's opinion in that they may be doing acquisitions like this in order to compete with everyones favorite frenemy, Microsoft.  It does seem like a great deal for the WebEx guys as now they have a hella deep pockets to extend their already majority market share. The thing that is really amazing to me is the valuation that they received.  Coming from a company that was just acquired for $3.2B, I look at this deal of selling for almost 10x revenue and really think that we got a raw deal.  I look at YouTube being acquired for an unknown multipler and wonder if I should really be focused on selling software or get back in the Web 2.0 space. Congrats, WebEx guys!!!
Tagged Hyperion Internet Mobile & Technology Money & Philanthropy

Clearly I Was Absent This Day

While I wasn't the best student, I don't recall ever seeing a course on how to get fired and still collect $210 million. As a HomeDepot share holder, I'm pretty pissed about this. I don't mind CEO's getting insane money when they increase the value of the company, but in 5 years, HD stock is down 20%. Am I the only one that thinks that the board giving him $210 million is fucked up? Why didn't West Chester offer a class on this? Can someone please point me in the direction of where I can learn to do this? If I get fired, I get nothing and like it.


It is insane and time for boards to be sued for allowing this type of stuff to happen.

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Tagged Money & Philanthropy

Microfinance Pioneer Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier in the week for his work as the founder of the Grameen Bank in India. Grameen split the prize. Grameen Bank focuses on micro-finance & micro-credit, the process of providing 3rd world inhabitants small business loans as a way to wipe out poverty. I became interested in micro-finance via Dave McClure's site and his support of Micro-Finance and Kiva in particular. While I still haven't bought in 100% to the concept, friends and relatives will most likely get Kiva gift cards for the holidays so that I can try it out on a small scale. It will be cool to see what my network does and who they fund. I have to admit, when I first read about Kiva and MF, I kind of thought that it was a bit like Sally Struthers asking to send $1.00 a week or whatever to support little Starvin Marvin. As I've done a deeper dive on MF, I'm finding that the process is more of the 'teach a man to fish' concept. In short, MF is a small loan, typically less than $100, that is given by one individual to another in order for that person to start or help build their own business. In the case of Kiva, you can lend money to someone in Uganda to open a store or someone in Cambodia to build their food services business or any number of other loans. These are no-interest loans, but impressively, Kiva boasts a 100% return rate. In fact, MF has a 97% return rate for it's loans. This money can then be rolled into other businesses or withdrawn. Global poverty is a major issue. It's great to hear about Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Richard Branson & Bono (the four horsemen of the apocalypse?) trying to do something about global poverty, but there isn't a lot of opportunity for the average joe to drop a few billy on solving this problem. Plus, it's easy for someone to say 'Screw it, the Dollar Bills have got that one covered and I'm having a tough enough time making rent and covering my Escalade payments.' Micro-finance makes it simple and relatively risk free to help someone out. To use the cliche, it isn't a hand out, it's a hand up and odds are, when you get your $25 bones back, you'll want to lend it to someone else so that she can build her Honduran fish mongering practice into a business to feed her family and her village.
Tagged Money & Philanthropy

Gringo Burritos

Aside from the fact that it is white Mexican food, I don't know why Alarm:Clock hates Chipotle so much. Perhaps because they are a McDonalds spin-off? But this was an out of character tirade this morning. Funny, but somewhat out of character for A:C. Will Tech Beat Gringo Burritos? As for a tech IPO happening that will beat the GBIPO (Gringo Burrito IPO), why bother dealing with the SEC and all the hassles of IPO when YouTube & Facebook are getting $1B+ valuations for acquisition? As for true tech, the big money (at least for a pre-ipo / acquisition valuation) is in content these days. Pure technology plays either just aren't sexy enough (remember Akamai's IPO?) or just don't have a big enough market share (remember Rambus?) to command the type of run that the McDonalds of burritos would. Create a mobile service that doesn't drop my connection on 280 just before 92 and you may have something valuable.
Tagged Dining Internet Mobile & Technology Money & Philanthropy

Light the Night

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am walking, with a bunch of Yahoo's, in the Light the Night walk to fight blood cancers. It is a great cause and I'm really proud to be taking part in the event. I've raised some money thus far, but I'm still a bit short of my goal. Therefore, from now until the walk or I double my goal, I'm going to put up a big, obnoxious ad unit at the top of all of my posts. Hopefully this will inspire all 2 of my readers to make a generous donation to such a great cause. Hopefully, it will also drive readers that find this page via a search to learn more about this cause and make a donation.
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So please, if I've made you laugh or think or introduced you to something new, please make a donation to this great charity. Thanks.
Tagged Money & Philanthropy

Time to Sell Your Stock

Remember in 1999 when everyone from taxi drivers to homeless people were offering up stock tips and getting rich because of something that they heard from someone who heard something from someone? Well, I've noticed that it is starting to happen again. Yesterday, in the Yahoo cafeteria, I overheard two of the chefs arguing about which city had better city wide WiFi: Mountain View or Sunnyvale. First off, I didn't know that Sunnyvale even had WiFi for the city, but since I only show up here for work and use Yahoo's WiFi, I guess that would explain that. I didn't want to appear overly nosey, but the feeling from one of the chef's was that while Sunnyvale's system was $7 a month, it was ad free. The other chef seemed to feel that $7 a month for WiFi was no bargain when he is getting it for free (from Google). Both felt that it was fast enough to meet their needs. While it isn't quite 1999 again, I have a feeling that we are starting to get close. When chef's are arguing about free WiFi services, can stock recommendations be far behind? When I hear them trading tales about getting in on the MeeVee IPO, then I will become truly worried.
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Light the Night Walk

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I'm going to be pimping this cause a bit over the next couple of months. Any contribution that you can make, we would be grateful for. On October 18th, I will be taking part in the local Light the Night walk benefiting the National Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. I'd love to get your help in raising money to for this cause. Fortunately, I've been very blessed. I don't have a story about a close friend or relative that has suffered from this horrific disease, but I do have two awesome kids. I know all of their friends and all of their friends families and it would tear me up to see any of them go through what so many of these families go through and that is why I walk.
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For those that don't know, Leukemia and Lymphoma are cancers of the blood that typically affect kids and young adults due to their immature blood cells. In fact, it is a more common cause of death in children in the US than any other type of malignant disease. Now, think of a kid that you know having to go through this. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society is the worlds largest voluntary health organization dedicated to funding blood cancer research, education and patient services. The society's mission: Cure luekemia, lymphoma, Hodgkins Disease, and Myleoma and improve the quality of life for patients and their families. Each year they host national walks with all proceeds going to fulfill their mission. You can learn more about LLS at: http://www.lls.org. The overall objective of this walk is to raise money to help find a cure for these terrible ailments that affect so many kids. As a team, Yahoo has commited to raising over $75,000. My goal is to raise $500, but I think that I can easily triple that with your help. Anything that you can do to help would be greatly appreciated. You can make a donation to this cause at: http://www.active.com/donate/ltnSanJo/1856_schnaars Anything that you can do to help this very worthy cause would be appreciated by me and the entire Yahoo Light the Night Team. Thank you, Scott
Tagged Money & Philanthropy

It's Gettin Hot In Herre...

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...but just having come from the land of the obese (known in America as shopping malls), I'm glad that no one is listening to Nelly's advice, at least not yet.

Fuck.  I guess sometime in the past week, there was a major earthquake and the Bay Area, now sits directly on top of the earths molten core.  I just got in my car and the thermometer read 111.  Holly told me that it wasn't this hot when she lived in Ghana.  You know that it is hot when people are reminiscing about how temperate it was in Ghana. 

If you purchased an SUV this weekend, you're a dick.  Seriously.  If you purchased an SUV this weekend, in the midst of the hottest summer since the 1920's and a major crisis in the Middle East, I have to wonder, WTF?  How could you be so oblivious to what is going on in the world?  When have you ever seen anyone sweat at the British Open?  If you did purchase an SUV this weekend, I'm sure you had a good reason for doing so though.  Don't worry about the environment or the price of gas, it will all be good. 

Now on to the golf.  I wish that there was something to write aside from 'they should have given Tiger the trophy on Friday afternoon'.  It wasn't even too exciting to watch.  Sure DiMarco made it interesting at times.  Yeah, it was nice to see a guy from Japan that no one outside of his immediate family has ever heard of, but it wasn't a tournament.  It was less than captivating.   Plus, in my pool, I got spanked so bad that I was out of it on Friday.  So much for the Brits making a run at it.  Thanks, SI.

Are the only people left in the US that still wear suits to work in IBM commercials?  IBM, get a new ad agency that actually has a grip on what goes on in the work place.  No wonder nobody buys your stuff.  No one can look at your commercials and go 'Hey that looks like my company, maybe I should check their stuff out.'  People see IBM commercials and think 'Boy, that looks like a shitty place to work.'

One thing to be said for the heat is that it has to be fairly good for retail numbers.  I am sure that the people who run the shops in the mall are praying for this streak to continue.  Especially in the Bay Area where 'You really only need air conditioning for two weeks a year'.  Guess what, we're in it.  I have to believe that there are some really good economic numbers around record breaking heat indexes and an increase in retail sales.  The mall was packed.  Shopping malls generally give me a migraine because I am not good with lots of people all going in different directions.  It also pains me to see most of America continue to buy things that they don't need on credit that they don't have.  Especially when 100 degree temperatures have made everyone in the area a little loopy and a lot uptight.  However, I suspect that the high temperatures get people into the stores to buy stuff and if you watch the weather and you watch stocks, I bet you can find a direct correlation between rises in both. 

I took the kids to see Monster House in 3D.  Since I hadn't seen a 3D movie since Captain Eo with Michael Jackson in 1989, it was pretty cool.  You still have to wear the dumb glasses, but none the less, it was a neat experience.  It was a bit too scary for a 4 year old though, so I don't know if I would recommend it for that set.  Especially in 3D.  It was a little bit creepy to see a house reach out a snatch a little kid up.  Maybe I won't be getting that Father of the Year award after all.  Always 2007, maybe it will be cooler by then.

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