First, my apologies to those of you who are not geeks (and just wish you were).
Because… it’s a good time to be a geek. Tech stocks are performing well, and there is no one better to take advantage of this rally than fellow geek investors like you. Even the NASDAQ is back with a vengeance.
There is a lot of talk these days about a new tech stock rally. Below are just a few of the reasons tech stocks are getting so much attention these days.
Last week we heard the news that Google would pay $1 Billion for 5% ownership in AOL. Here are some bullet points from Google’s press release:
- Creating an AOL Marketplace through white labeling of Google’s advertising technology – enabling AOL to sell search advertising directly to advertisers on AOL-owned properties;
- Expanding display advertising throughout the Google network;
- Making AOL content more accessible to Google Web crawlers;
- Collaborating in video search and showcasing AOL’s premium video service within Google Video;
- Enabling Google Talk and AIM instant messaging users to communicate with each other, provided certain conditions are met; and
- Providing AOL marketing credits for its Internet properties.
Below is an excerpt from a conversation that Chris and I had last night. It concerns emerging markets, and some thoughts on how best to enter them. I’ve just posted the conversation as is, not even bothering to modify for typos and mispellings. In a few weeks, I’ll post more thoroughly on this topic, as it interests me, and deserves my full measure of attention. Also, this is just an aside, and not a substitute/cop-out for my weekly article, that will follow sometime tomorrow.
On Tuesday, Chris tried to explain the “media convergence” that is becoming more of a reality everyday, a daunting task to say the least. Chris described the scenario made possible now by Apple’s video iPod: downloading a television show through your computer at work (over lunch) to watch on your TV at home (over dinner).
Two things have become clear to me:
With growing legions of users watching TV programming on their own schedules, and ultra-high bandwidth soon being pumped to every home, the dawn of digital media convergence will soon arrive, and Yahoo! and Microsoft are well positioned (and priced) to give investors a real bang for their buck.
What’s this convergence thing?
So imagine this: you’re at work and you just realized that you missed your favorite show last night. But you’re not worried. You log onto the web and download last night’s episode in digital quality for under a couple bucks. Within minutes it’s on your media player, and after you get home, you plug your media player into your home TV, and are watching it without the need to sit through all those darn commercials.
