Bill Gates Has Started a New Company, bgC3

Bill Gates has started a mysterious new company, called bgC3, possibly to be focused on creating catalyst business ideas to spin off to Microsoft, the Gates Foundation or elsewhere. Little is known about the company, which doesn't appear to have a public web page, but a fair number of details have been ferreted out by the Seattle area tech reporters Todd Bishop, Eric Engleman and John Cook.

The three well-known tech and venture capital writers posted the story to launch their new tech blog TechFlash. It's a sweet scoop by a group of former mainstream reporters bravely striking out into the blogosphere.

TechFlash says that "whatever the ultimate role of the company, the circumstances surrounding its creation provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the new era of Gates' life." The company has a federal trademark as a think-tank and is classified under broad terms that include "scientific and technological services," "industrial analysis and research," and "design and development of computer hardware and software."

Sources told Bishop that the small office near Gates' home is filled with high-tech Microsoft paraphernalia, including one of the touch-screen tables used as a guest book.

We're excited to see what Gates does with the company and we'll be watching these top-notch reporters' coverage as it unfolds on their new site.

Bloggers Reminded To Exercise Caution

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 23 (Bernama) -- Bloggers were today reminded to exercise caution when posting articles as cyberspace was not a licence to write as they wished.

Member of Parliament for Jelutong Jeff Ooi Chuan Aun, a blogger himself, said bloggers must respect the laws of the country so as not to get into trouble.

"New bloggers especially must take note and not get carried away as there is no "absolute freedom" in cyberspace," he told Bernama when met at a forum on blogging organised by the Bar Council here tonight.

"More so in a plural society like Malaysia, care must be taken not to offend the sensitivities of the people. In the borderless world of the Internet, mistakes can be costly," he said, adding that particular care neeeded to be given to sedition laws and those on defamation.

-- BERNAMA

Portfolio B @ 25-October-2008

Eddy said:

My Portfolio B individual investments losses ranged from 29% to almost 40%. Portfolio B loss is at 33% level.

IPower's trading volume volatility were exceptionally high recently with some million shares involved in off market deals. Looking forward for announcements.

Goldman's stake in Pelikan stood at 8%+ and reducing. Tabung Haji already obtained 30%+ of the Pelikan. Drastic drop of the share price makes privatization and other corporate exerciseS easier if that's what in their minds.

While the Malaysia's government still hypnotizing itself the possible 5% GDP growth in 2009, many of the Asian countries already panicking about recessions and taking more pro-active measures to reduce the possible economic damages. So far, yet no useful actions being taken by BNM.

Like I mentioned in the earlier Portfolio post, the worser the situation in the shortest possible period of time the better we shall see the recovery. Dragging and bragging is NOT the way to go.

Regarding IOICorp involvement in derivatives trading, it's just a common corporate risk management practice to reduce volatility risks if they don't use it as a gambling instruments. But the situation seems so deteriorating that many of the top financial officers in the company resigned, it really put up the impressions of a gambling practice at the back.

AirAsia, Genting and Maybank are highly likely to be in trouble with their skewed level of debts and wrongly timed investments.

Who's said our real property sector is not a busting bubble? We shall see.

Lastly, DIGI and BAT are among counters not YET hitted by the turbulence. Careful, global market risks are not something that can be diverted.


I have added a Crude Oil Price dashboard on the right of this blog for easy access.

Happy Deepavali.


Transaction Costs are excluded.

1600 unit of Pelikan
Avg Buy Price = RM 2.47, Market Price = RM1.57, Unrealized Gains/(Losses) = (RM1440)

16000 unit of IPower
Avg Buy Price = RM0.190, Market Price = RM0.135, Unrealized Gains/(Losses) = (RM880)

Realized Profit/(Loss)
1. Uchitec (RM340)

Sometimes it's better to be a defacement

Saw the main page of LowYat.Net turned out to be a kiddie page with a cute white rabbit. Man, it's stinks and reminds me of the act-cute japanese culture that's disgusts me (Anyway there are many bunches of other who loves it). I sincerely pray that it was a defacement rather than a legitimate maintenance notice posted by the administrator. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, sure it is.

Rabbits have infested LowYat.Net and unplugged it from the Internet. We will be back after the exterminators arrive. Meanwhile play around in our chatroom.

Oxford University faces £30m Icelandic bank losses

PA

Oxford University could face losses of up to £30 million which is tied up in Icelandic bank accounts, a spokesman confirmed today.


The university has admitted 5% of its cash deposits are invested in three banks and has now called on the regulator of universities to help solve the crisis.

Oxford is faced with the biggest loss as one of 12 universities across the country that had a total of £77 million in Icelandic accounts.

The money was deposited in crippled institutions Landsbanki, Glitnir and Kaupthing Singer and Friedlander. Some of the cash belonged to its 17 individual colleges, which put their money in a central fund controlled by the university finance committee.

Oxford's director of finance Giles Kerr said that colleges should be assured that the university's cash pool has more than sufficient liquidity to meet their requirements. He also said the university will make every effort to recover deposits in Iceland in full.

Oxford has £600 million in cash deposits and an overall endowment wealth of around £3.4 billion.

Mr Kerr has written to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) urging it to do all in its power to help protect the higher education sector from the impact of the crisis.

He said: "It is important that we get co-ordinated action and I know that HEFCE, DIUS (the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills) and the Treasury are well aware of the challenges faced by the sector.

"We expect them to do all they can to protect the position of higher education institutions, which are vital to the country's future prosperity."

The university said it has made no Icelandic deposits in the last 18 months and the existing ones were made with institutions with fully assessed and approved creditworthiness.

It added that its policy has been, and remains, to have a wide portfolio of deposits to spread risk, and to review them regularly.

Mr Kerr said: "This is clearly a difficult time across the economy, and no one is immune. However, the finance committee is monitoring the situation closely and we are taking all necessary and available steps."

Oxford University is the latest public body hit by the Icelandic banking crisis.

Around 100 local councils, police forces and hospitals could also lose millions of pounds after investing in Iceland's troubled financial institutions.

New York official seeks to recover AIG bonuses

By Jonathan D. Glater and Vikas Bajaj

NEW YORK: The New York State attorney general is demanding that American International Group recover bonuses and other payments from its former executives, lest he take formal action against the insurer.

Recently bailed out by the federal government, AIG is afloat only because of billions of dollars in government loans. With more and more taxpayer money committed, lawmakers and others have expressed outrage about high pay in general at financial firms and in particular at some of the perks that have come to light at AIG. The attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, made his demand in a letter to AIG's board, citing "unwarranted and outrageous expenditures" by the company as contrary to New York law. The letter, which described a lavish golf outing and an overseas hunting trip that cost nearly $100,000, follows other recent disclosures of excess by corporate America.

The threat against AIG, which Cuomo announced Wednesday, seeks to recover multimillion-dollar payments to Martin Sullivan, AIG's former chief executive, and Joseph Cassano, who ran the unit blamed for the losses that pushed the company to the brink of collapse.

"AIG's belief is that they had the party, and the taxpayers will have the hangover," Cuomo said, addressing a sidewalk throng of reporters, camera crews and tourists. He added that his office could bring civil charges if AIG did not work to recover big bonuses paid to executives.

His actions are reminiscent of the sweeping attacks on Wall Street by Eliot Spitzer, who was the attorney general before his brief term as governor, which ended in scandal.

U.S. stocks finish lower as Bush urges patience amid more signs of slowdown
Public anger has grown the past few weeks over executive compensation. Lawmakers in Washington last week criticized the $442,000 that an AIG subsidiary spent on a weeklong resort retreat for top sales staff members within days of receiving government aid. The U.S. Treasury Department, in the midst of engineering a multibillion-dollar bailout of the financial industry, has announced that it would limit compensation to top executives whose companies took advantage of federal aid.

"People are outraged that these large businesses have shafted the shareholders - that's why were seeing this," said Kenneth Klee, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. "And rightly so."

An AIG spokesman, Nick Ashooh, said the company had received Cuomo's letter and "will of course fully cooperate with the attorney general's office, and it will get the immediate attention of the board."

Two weeks ago, long before Cuomo's letter was sent, the company began reviewing all expenses and activities, Ashooh added.

Lawyers for Sullivan, who was ousted in June, and Cassano, who resigned in February, did not return calls Wednesday.

What could be wrong with the new Maybank2U.com?

Looks like the team at MBB decided to switch on back their previous version of the site for temporary interim solution while they "fixing" the performance issues. Man, the old one looks so efficient now compared to the new boy.

Well, I read somewhere about the cost of the new site is around MYR5 Million.

Does the new Maybank2U.com value added to the bank? Frankly speaking, I'm not sure because I can't tell what else differentiating the versions besides the intended Web 2.0 facelifts which turned out to be a "plastic surgery" disaster at the moment.

Does the new one supports more transactions per user, per second, per day or per account?

Does it promises a lower total costs of ownership (TCO) over next 5 years?

Can it scale better to support more concurrent transactions or users?

Are users happier? Better user experiences?

Is the Maybank brand stronger?

....

From a pure business point of view, I really need to quantify the costs and benefits of this. Would you pay 40k extra for a new model of Toyota Vios which merely a facelift from last year model? Not me.

The worst case scenario from unnecessary spendings/expenditures is the consumers need to bear the consequences, in other words, the cost is transferred to us!!! Do we still remember the day when MBB almost imposes A RM10 i-forgot-what-kind-of-fee for the usages of Maybank2U.com. Given the current circumstances, I believe the probability of imposing such non-interest fee to us is changed from "likely" to "highly likely".

Sad. 5 Million for this and another 8+ Billion for BII....

Another way, let's jump out from the mud of business conspiracies and make some educated guesses about what could be wrong with Maybank2U.com technically.


1. Hardware Sizing issues
They might have made unrealistic sizing benchmarks using previous version performance data. This might due to underestimation of overhead of selected platforms and methods. This problem is easiest to solve: Plug in more juices would do. More RAM, More CPU and More HDD/Disk Controller, even more cluster members. Of course, care must be taken to identify the bottleneck currently.

2. Networking issues
Related to sizing. Unexpected loads on routers, backbones, swicthes might causes performance trashes. It could also be configuration issues on the networking components that results in erroreous or inundated communication overheads between members in the network.

3. Messaging issues
Not sure what kind of messaging facilities are in used in the environment but the new system might be making some messaging assumptions that are not optimized for the existing messaging infrastructures.

4. Software issues
Web server, application servers, containers and others might need to be further tuned. Design limitations of certain servers/components of the server might be problematic when the system requires more than permitted. For example, some version of application server may be have a 2GB JVM memory limit which could causes performance trouble when the application is badly designed that it requested more than the limit most of the time. Thread pools, Process pools, Block sizes and many other factors may within consideration.

5. Framework issues
SOAP listener ports or any AJAX request receivers must be properly tuned. Apache Struts framework performance enhancing features should be considered. Seggregation of static components and dynamic components of the application in clustered web servers and application servers is recommended. Server Caching facilities can be utilized. Logging facilities and other development stuffs should be turned off to suit production environment.

6. Human issues
Sabotages? Less likely.

Performance issues and troubleshooting after roll-out is usually difficult in the sense that when the team turned on the benchmarking, log tracing, monitoring and diagnostic tools, you can expect a more drastic performance degradation until the point that the system is virtually usable from a user point of view and yet you might be crossing your fingers hoping the true problems are identified.

It is so entertaining to see how a Web 2.0 application (Expensive one too) undresses its pretty covers and shows cast the obstreperous of Web -1.0 and ignites the wrath of peasants.

Good luck and make sure you doesn't miss out a ZERO in my checking account balance.

Portfolio B @ 17-October-2008

Eddy said: Cool. Losing around 25% of the value in my portfolio B in just 1 week. Good, bend with the wind.

Transaction Costs are excluded.

1600 unit of Pelikan
Avg Buy Price = RM 2.47, Market Price = RM1.86, Unrealized Gains/(Losses) = (RM976)

16000 unit of IPower
Avg Buy Price = RM0.190, Market Price = RM0.15, Unrealized Gains/(Losses) = (RM640)

Notes:
Bought IPOWER last week 2000 unit@0.16
Bought PELIKAN yesterday 200 unit@1.90

Realized Profit/(Loss)
1. Uchitec (RM340)

Maybank2U.com is darn slow

My colleague clicked around the site after login and hitted the exception stack trace.

Sir, a sample please?

If ever we got unlimited monies, processing powers, complete coverages and assuming no constraints at all, we can ignore the idea of sampling since by then doing sampling is like perfoming double works if we can actually work on the population itself.

Down to earth, in every business decision we faced the quintessential requirements to take some trade-offs between many constraints, i.e. budget and time. When deciding on business directions, strategy or even a daily routine task, it is imperative that the person to understand the nature of the problem before formulating a proper solution. To understand the problem in context, usually it involves actions such as monitoring certain characteristics of items, obtaining input from people and etc. If we can do the data gathering on every single item of interest, then we are working directly on the population instead of sampling part of it. Some problems mandate sampling because it is impractical to deal with entire population, if ever it is possible. For example, to find out the average height/weight of asian adult male, it is time consuming and might be impossible to capture the height information from every matched candidates. It may be the case that some of them are hiding somewhere in the jungle and therefore your data is incomplete. In other words, at best efforts, you are only approximating the population, i.e. sampling. Other sampling scenarios include production process control mechanism that check the product characteristics randomly at certain intervals, market research surveys that targeting certain stratum of some geographical locations and anthopological studies.

We now know that a sample is a subset or part of a population and a sampling process is basically drawing that part from that population. By having a representative, non-biased and sufficient sample, we could draw (i.e. infer) conclusions about the underlying population.

In the statement above, it is obvious that the conclusion might be misleading or totally wrong if the sample is "non-representative", "biased" and "insufficient".

So that's why some more complicated sampling techniques other than simple random sampling exists to reduce the effects of some of these, e.g. stratified sampling, cluster sampling and multistep sampling. But for you, just need to remember that all these techniques are just ways to draw items from the population.

Once you have a good sample, the next logical step you might want to perform includes organizing, describing and summarizing the samples quantitatively and graphically. The important milestone in this step is to get a grasp of the sample's probability distribution, i.e. the random variation pattern in the sample. From the probability distribution, you can infer about the population probability distribution. Only by confirming the distribution, you can be sure that your choice of analysis tools are compliant and consistent.

In terms of formal terms, statisticians use the word "statistic" for numerical characteristics of sample and the word "parameter" for similar characteristic of population. The common symbols used are different too, e.g. lowercase s for sample's standard deviation and lowercase greek letter sigma for population's standard deviation.

Some common probability distributions include hypergeometric, binomial and Poisson for discrete random variables and exponential and normal for continous randon variables, among others.

Well, all the above are fundamental knowledge, I'm just put it down in words. Easy right?

Blabbering Murmuring

Eddy said:

A tumultuous week for all the stoch exchanges, major investment regimes and center banks. How financial crisis in US turns out to be a disastrous maelstrom spinning everybody into the darkest side of financial practices. Hedge funds unwinding, foreign investments pull off, panic selling, force selling, margin calls amongst others which usually relatively harmless when acted invidually but at the intersection of every of them it could blow you off to Nevada's deserts.

Frankly speaking, I'm flattered and with all do respects not to meant sarcaism
to heavily loss inflicted people out there, excited to stand the chance to witness this turbulence myself and better still experience it since I made some equity investments too.

The sharper the decline in shortest time the better. Why? I want to see how people react to this phenomenon, how the authority take actions and what actions are they and most importantly to exploit possibilities for profit opportunities in a super bear market.

Another good reason for a timely market crash is to put pressure on sovereignty entities. I'm annoyed by "wait-and-see-first" attitudes and they have to understand that the longer they wait the more damages it could be.

It is not rational to make material decisions based on the results by mark to market your portfolio now (and cried out loud perhaps) in this currently irrational market. Two reasonable actions now might be clear position and take the cash out, or stay calm and average down when appropriate. Of course, averaging down is a high risk decision and due dilligence is needed to review your investment strategy and objectives. Think like an investor and act like one too. What Warren Buffett would do?

It's going to be the end of year 2008 soon and I hope this year will be a monumental year to me and everybody else.