Liberty

And the reaction from EBIX: http://www.rttnews.com/Content/QuickFacts.aspx?Id=1657368&SM=1 Rather than increase share buybacks to 75m (which was 3x more than they originally asked for this year) like they had mentioned previously, they're increasing them to 100m.

Here we go again: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-30/ebix-inflated-earnings-as-software-maker-ignored-bad-debt-lawsuit-alleges.html

It's starting to look like the 'fat pitch' days for this business might soon be over. Nobody knows what the stock will do in the short term, but I wouldn't be surprised if it kept going up for a while because: Thurso is getting closer to operations, the company confirmed in the last call that things were on track there, and they've started buybacks (small, but a signal - they issued stock in the 50s a few months ago and now they're buying it back in the 30s right before their earnings are set to explode, that should provide nice returns). There are also persistent rumors about a new acquisition at Lebel-sur-Quevillion in Quebec. The mayor there told a journalist they might be able to make an announcement in the next month. I trust Chad wouldn't do a deal if it wasn't on very good terms, so hopefully this turns out well. I just feel fortunate to have been able to get a significant stake with an avg cost around 33, because I doubt we'll see those kinds of prices again once Thurso ships and/or if there's a second DP plant in the pipeline, unless Mr. Market goes uber-bear and everything goes down (but if that happens, FTP will have the cash flow for buybacks and more acquisition of distressed assets, so it's win-win).

Mostly speed and battery life, and because they think HTML5 is the ascending tech right now. Steve Jobs wrote an open letter in reply to Adobe complaining a while ago: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

My bad. I wasn't following this story very closely (I don't own any of these stocks, except maybe indirectly through BRK) and didn't notice that this was about debit card fees and not credit card fees.

Any idea why AXP only went up 2.58%? (I mean, is it Mr. Market just being weird, or is it because AXP makes a smaller % of it's profits from these fees?)

Anyone knows when the annual report is coming out this year? It was around this time last year, but I couldn't find any info about it..

Thanks for sharing, DCG. Crazy that they still don't have a site that works on all platform and with all browsers... That's like web 101. Is there any one who doesn't hate that kind of crap and then feels manipulated? I'm sure they do it because lots of people don't see the fine print and end up making an account before they notice, so they might get some hits, but it's a great way to ruin any goodwill the person might have had...

From the WIRED piece that I posted above:

Indeed, they keep busy. But there's a popular misconception about Google, that they are scattered and spend a lot of resources on stuff that doesn't provide much revenue... Most of their projects start out as the personal project of 1-5 engineers (or of a small startup that gets bought), and they build them because they think it's going to be cool and/or useful (a lot of bottom-up initiatives, from what I can tell). They release lots of it as beta, and when some of it gets traction they sometimes shift in higher gear and start putting resources into it (GMail was a side project of a developer for a while, for example). But the vast majority of their resources are in search and ads, with a smaller amount into strategic platforms/products (Android, Chrome), and then a bunch of handfuls of people working on small projects (often in their 20% time). I think that social can now be included in strategic stuff, now that Larry is CEO and has created a 'social' org inside the company. We'll see how they do..

GOOG unveiling some social stuff today: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html http://mashable.com/2011/06/28/google-plus/ WIRED has a huge article: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/inside-google-plus-social/

Interesting post, as always, VAL. I think you might be underestimating Google Apps, though, because we're so used to that model by now. Think of a world where it never came out; would microsoft be doing Office 365? Would the average person be using as many web apps? I think it helped open the door wide for what's happening right now, and I think that giving people exactly what they require to do most of what they need to do was a good strategy. Office software is pretty mature - it's been around for decades - and I doubt that there are many big breakthroughs left to be had except for collaboration, which as you pointed out Google (and the startups it bought) helped make happen. I think if they had offered a completely different interface just for the sake of being different, that would have been a disservice to their users and limited their appeal. Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it accessible to as many people as possible. Google Apps does that well; your documents are searchable, available from any computer you have, you always have the latest version of the software and your docs are secured in the cloud (Google has a much better track record than any small user at backing up and preventing security breaches). Before that people were putting their files on USB drives and emailing them to themselves, trying to keep track of versions, losing them in crashes, loading software that takes hundreds of megs of RAM just to write a letter, all of this while their web browser was always open anyway. In fact, many people probably still do that, but I have my important docs in a bookmark folder in my browser. At anytime I can open them with one click from any computer (because Chrome syncs bookmarks too..). Much better than the old model IMHO. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I'm not sure what I would have done differently...

The way I see it, Microsoft should keep dominating with Office 'power users' for the foreseeable future, but Google has a good opportunity with the vast majority of people who never used more than 5% of the features in Office (and probably couldn't even find most of them in the menus and sub-menus...). Most of the moat around Office was based on two things: 1) Switching costs: If you wanted to try something else, you had to buy one or many licenses for hundreds or thousands of dollars, install it with floppy disks or CDs, and then learn a new interface and retrain your people. 2) Network effect: For the longest time, files saved in one word processor couldn't be opened in another, so it was normal for everybody to standardize on the most popular format. MS changed formats every couple years and kept them as opaque and undocumented as possible to make it as hard as possible to reverse-engineer them. But now... With cloud, apps switching costs are much lower, you can sample the competition with a few clicks. Google has free versions of all its apps, and they have only the most used features so the interface is very intuitive and you basically can start using it right away. It can also open MS Office documents and save files in Office formats, making the network effect less important. So I'm sure Office will be a great business for a while longer, but the moat is eroding, and I doubt they'll keep their margins. While the majority of users of office suite products don't use more features than what's included in Google apps, Google will no doubt keep adding more advanced features as it keeps pushing for more enterprise customers. I think it was smart of GOOG to start downmarket and move up as mindshare builds. It has much more chances of success than coming out with an unproven full-featured office suite and trying to sell it to big corporations for hundreds of dollars per license from the start... Google Docs launched publicly in 2007. Who knows what it'll look like in 2015.

The way I see it, it's more Google that went after Microsoft's core business by creating all these 'Office' apps in the cloud a few years ago, and now Microsoft is trying to play catch up by doing the same. In my day job, we've been doing everything (shared documents, spreadsheets) in Google apps for a few years and it's been working well. I'm curious to see what Microsoft's offering is like, and if it's going to eat into their traditional Office revenue stream because they have to make it cheaper to compete with what is already offered online. I'm also curious to see if microsoft will make it work as well on all platforms and in all browsers or if IE and Windows will be preferred citizens in that ecosystem.

I don't really trust analyst projections, but for what it's worth: http://business.financialpost.com/2011/06/27/googles-mobile-business-to-grow-to-us14-billion-by-2015/

Video will grow for sure, and probably faster than text for a while until it matures more, but many things will remain - as I said - better with text. Looking for which fridge to buy? You'll do a text or voice search, and peruse text pages to read up the specifications, prices, look at photos, reviews, etc. Will there be video reviews? Sure, there are now. But it's a complement to text. Text is non-linear and easily scannable. You can stop paying attention and come back without pausing. You can read much faster than someone can read the text out loud to you, which is why scanning news in text format is so efficient compared to waiting for someone to read them to you in video format. The gazillion of bloggers and journalists out there won't all become expert video producers (though I'm sure some will). Video will always be harder to do right than text, and always be more expensive and time-consuming (if you do it right), and most people will probably remain too self-conscious to release public videos of themselves. My point is not that video won't become a huge deal, because clearly it will (and GOOG is a leader in that). I'm just saying that text isn't going anywhere, because it has inherent advantages over video for many applications. But in some areas, there will be great synergy (text search for cars, click on ad and land on a page that has lots of video info, reviews, etc).

If you're talking about bandwidth/terabytes/etc, sure, video will dominate. But that's a different metric from what I was talking about. A short Youtube video probably takes more disk space than most novels, but it doesn't mean that people will spend as much time on it as on a book... People will keep consuming a lot of text because it's the most efficient and convenient way to do many things, and because it is much easier to produce than video (even if the camera, bandwidth, and editing software is free, it's much harder to make a video that is fun to watch than to write something that is worth reading).

I seriously doubt that. As good as video is for some things, it isn't as good as text for many other things. Both types of content will exist side by side for the foreseeable future.

I've been watching, reading, and listening to a lot of stuff about Google lately (conference calls, conferences, speeches, interviews, etc) and found this part where Dr. Eric Schmidt talks about him and Larry & Sergey going to visit Warren Buffett to get his insights about company culture. Nothing we don't already know, but interesting to me nonetheless that they identified Buffett as a "very smart" person that they should go ask advice to:

Indeed, but daily volume is very low and Altius is limited to buying only 9.2K shares per day as per their buyback program. I wish it was more, but as long as they opportunistically deploy capital well, even small sums, I'm happy.

Very little cash. I should probably have more, but I keep seeing things that I like, that are cheap-to-fairly-priced, and that are very well protected on the downside, so I can't resist. This could be one of my main weaknesses as an investor. I have a hard time resisting when I see one of the handful of companies that I like sell cheaply, and I hate making macro predictions, because there are too many variables and it's almost always possible to make plausible-sounding scenarios for the market going up, down, or sideways... What makes me sleep well at night is that I don't invest in cigar butts, so if things go down, chances are I'll see a big paper loss and miss an opportunity to invest at low prices, but I shouldn't see permanent capital losses because I only buy companies with little or no debt and usually substantial cash, a strong balance sheet and earning power, and a proven track record of allocating capital well during downturns. So while I might not have lots of dry powder, the companies I own usually do, so during tough times they could do buybacks, acquisitions, gain marketshare when the competition stumbles, etc. That being said, I've been planning to raise more cash for about 6 months, but I always end up buying something with it before it has a chance to pile up very high... :-\ Anybody else has a similar experience, or is it just me?

Nice, they got them pretty close to the recent bottom too.

Got some more GOOG today. Actually sold out of another of my positions because I liked this one better.. Update: some stuff about Google's Ad Exchange (which I forgot to mention in my other post above -- it will turn into a nice profit generator, IMO): http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/06/23/google-display-chief-makes-pitch-to-publishers/

Has LRE ever talked about listing in the NYSE?

http://ir.wrberkley.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=586605