Liberty

Time will tell, but in general having some control over what separates your customers from your products and encouraging an internet with open standards can only be good. And in the same way that search helped make ads more targeted, and thus more valuable, mobiel will make ads more geo-targeted and nicely profitable. Depends how they broke it down. But what matters most is the speed at which that number is growing. They've shown their stats about this at I/O 2011, you can see it in a video on their site. Basically, people search at work when they're at their desk, and then they leave for lunch, and mobile searches spike, and then desktop searches spike again, and then in the evening mobile spikes again. Weekends also show a spike when desktop searches would normally be down. Seems to be very complementary. Totally, but by helping drive the mobile revolution (and having some control over how it's done), it'll pull a lot of ad dollars to mobile advertising. If the capability isn't there, the ad spending won't be. And once they have hundreds of millions of devices running Android, they can figure out new ways to monetize them more (Eric S. said so at the annual meeting). Right now they're more focused on marketshare than anything else in mobile.

You're right, I misread and thought you mean the carriers. My bad. But you were wrong, the money goes to the app maker (70%) and the carrier + payment processors (30%). I'm not sure I trust those numbers (guesstimates from research firms have a habit of turning out to be numbers pulled out of a hat), but there's no doubt that the Android app market is still much smaller than the Apple store. That's because Apple had first mover's advantage, and that headstart kept it much more profitable to publish apps there than anywhere else. But now that Android is selling more than iOS, more and more developers and either moving over or writing for both platforms, so that store should be quite healthy in the future.

More rumors about FTP in LSQ.. something's going to be announced in "mid-july". http://www.abitibiexpress.ca/Economie/Ressources-naturelles/2011-07-05/article-2624286/La-renaissance-de-Lebel-sur-Quevillon/1 Not confirmed that it's FTP, though, so a rabbit could be pulled out of the hat and it could be someone else...

I wouldn't be surprised if MSFT did better in mobile than it did so far, but it could also very well to turn out to be the second coming of the Zune. Year zero was 2007, and since then both Google and Apple have shown they can execute. I'm still waiting for MSFT to show that (getting good reviews isn't enough - I don't know a single person who would choose a windows phone over the alternatives). But the fact remains that Google makes money from internet usage, whatever the device, while microsoft makes money from selling OSes and software applications. Google will make cash from Windows phones too, but if MSFT can't sell phones, they might still make nice money from patents, but they'll be irrelevant to consumers and developers, and eventually software can be rewritten around patents or patent reform for software can change the game.

We don't actually know if that's true. Google hasn't reported any definitive profit/loss numbers on Android. Indeed, I don't have any hard numbers. But I think I can still be approximately right.. The more internet-connected devices are out there, the better Google will do. They are very dominant in search on the two biggest platforms (iOS and Android), and devices with full browsers show people sites with google Adsense and Doubleclick ads. They have a terrific brand and even on devices that have other defaults, a large fraction of people will probably switch back to Google.

Thanks, always good to hear from uncle Warren ;D

Either way Microsoft will make tons of profit from this. Indeed, though not as much as Google (directly and indirectly).

Your facts are incorrect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Market#Priced_applications As for the size of the market, I don't have the latest numbers (not sure if they're released), but it's growing quite fast, with over 3 billions apps downloaded. Not at the level of Apple's store, but the trajectory is quite solid.

Handset makers make a lot of money form the Android app market, and Windows Phone is nowhere near that. Also, as long as consumers prefer Android to Windows phone, it'll be worth going with what sells and what has the best developer ecosystem (both for the OS and the apps). 500k Android phones are being activated every single day. How many Windows phones are being activated?

Looks like even Apple is having trouble with Google's ad moat: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-07/apple-s-iad-mobile-ad-service-said-to-cut-prices-as-clients-turn-to-rivals.html

Not a company I'd buy, but here's an argument for it being cheaper than in 2009 right now. I thought I'd add it to the pile here: http://www.gurufocus.com/news/138076/why-steven-romick-thinks-walmart-wmt-stock-is-cheaper-than-it-was-in-march-2009

The same thing happened with Google Buzz. As part of Gmail, it was HTTPS. They fixed that with Google+ by first redirecting outbound clicks to a non SSL URL.

Whoa, paying people to use your products? Reminds me of what Bing did for a while... http://www.winbeta.org/?q=news/microsoft-pays-university-250000-adopt-office-365

For an individual yes, but for an index fund or ETF to set this up there would actually be less transaction costs than a low cost index. All they would have to do would be copy every holding/transaction in the S&P 500 (or the Russel, or the Wilshire, or any index they are tracking) except for the airline stocks. Since they omit the airline stocks there would be less stocks and therefore less ongoing friction costs once the fund is set up. Even if it would add just 1% long term, it would be worth it as there is really no extra work once the index is set up. I was thinking about individuals, but yes, if an index was set up, that could work.

He answers that in the interview. ETF rules mean he would have to report his transactions too often and he feels that this would make his funds lose some of their added value.

Thanks smo001. Good to see they aren't using a spoon for the buybacks. 7.9m / 414k = average price of around $19. Another thing we need to remember is that EBIX can play this game for a long time. They generate a lot of cash and have HIGHLY recurring sources of revenue. Once the 100m is gone, if share are still cheap they'll just keep going.

Interesting. Isn't 2.5 percent of current GDP much bigger than 5% of 1970 GDP? A relative low, but still a lot of bills.

Apple cares about video calls because it helps them sell iPhones and iPads, so they'll probably interoperate their protocols with Google (hasn't Apple said it'll use open protocols? Can't remember). I doubt Microsoft will open Skype, though, but the free competition will certainly make it harder for them to make money directly with it.

Yep, it'll grow a lot. But I expect that Netflix, Hulu and Youtube (average video quality has been improving, and they do 1080p now, as well as live streaming) will still require more bandwidth than videocalls for a long time (bitrates are higher for both the sound and video with pro stuff, and even when video calls are available, people use them only a minority of the time, and most home connections are asymmetric, so that upload is much slower than download, limiting video quality).

That would definitely be interesting to do, but in the real world, friction costs would probably make this a lot less practical than a low-cost index.

I'm surprised that video calling is just 50% of skype's traffic. Voice calls are a few kb/s (depending on which protocol it uses, between 3 and 10) while video is probably at least an order of magnitude more than that, and even more for high-rez video.

So I did a bit of math and I'm at -7.30% YTD, but I feel very good about everything I own and am buying more of the stuff that went down. Update: And one day later I'm at -4.65%. Things are changing fast these days...

Very nice. Seems like a heavy-hitter who can get things done!

Don't give up, keep reading about it, DCG. Your questions are answered in various places/interviews/presentations (ie. paper money growing at a few percent a year even in countries where electronic payment is growing fastest, and because bills wear out and need to be replaced, you always need more. Paper money is also growing faster in the developing world, and if you have a technical lead, you can eventually take market away from competitors. As for wallpaper, it's still very popular in parts of Europe and Russia, and the non-woven kind is growing pretty fast, they're selling all they can make and want to increase production, and they're a low-cost producer). But the real future of FTP is dissolving pulp. I wouldn't be surprised if they made 1-3 acquisitions in next couple years.

I looked at this one a few weeks ago after finding it on ABC's list of new investments. It has some very interesting operational characteristics, but I ended up not going further because it didn't fit my criteria about quality of management. Maybe that's getting better, but I won't take the chance on it with a big position, and I don't really do small positions (8 stocks in my portfolio, with the top 2 representing almost 45%).