JOBS Act

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a crowd-funding site that I use for some investments called Lending Club.  The basic premise being that investors can incrementally fund individual's loans for various purposes from car loans to debt consolidation.  The whole idea of crowd-funding or peer-to-peer lending has really taken off in the last couple of years, from both an individual level up to funding start-up companies.  While Lending Club aims to fund individuals, sites such as Angellist.com and Microventures.com try to provide funding to start ups, especially in the technology sector.

One of the drawbacks of sites such as Angellist, is that the SEC requires all investors to be registered as an Accredited Investor.  What this means is that you have to have at least $1M in assets outside of your primary residence, among a slew of other requirements.  This rule, obviously limits the number of people who can invest in these companies.  That's where the JOBS Act comes in.

The JOBS Act is trying to lower the bar for who can invest in small companies.  The idea being if you increase the amount of lending to new, innovative companies, who can hopefully create new, high-paying jobs and help get the economy moving.  The bill also increases the number of investors a company can have before having to go public from 500 to 1500, and reduces the regulations for smaller companies that go public.

I, for one, am very excited about this bill.  It will open up another type of investing people can use to diversify their portfolios outside of stocks and bonds.  On top of that, you can help the mom-and-pop shops get up and running, expand their business, and create jobs.

The law has just been approved by the Senate and is headed back to the House for another review before heading to Obama's desk.  Once signed, the SEC has 270 days to determine how to monitor the new markets, and ensure they investors are protected from fraud.  That means it'll be 2013 before we really see these types of investments open up to you and I.

One word of warning though is the risk associated with this type of investment.  When you loan someone money in Lending Club, if they stop payments, you have debt collectors that go after them, and try to recoup the money through bankruptcy and other avenues.  If you invest in a small company that then goes under, you don't have that kind of recourse.  If you invest in a company creating the next great app, most of your money is probably going to salaries and rent.  If they go out of business, there's isn't much to liquidate, so you're s*** out of luck.

Even considering the risks associate with these investments, I think this will create a great opportunity to diversify your portfolio, help small businesses, and hopefully make a crap load of cold, hard, cash.

Asus Transformer Prime

For quite a while not I've wanted to get either a tablet or a laptop to use at home.  For the most part I wanted something that I could use in the living room while watching my daughter Adeline play, so that I'm not sitting off in my office separate from her and my wife.  After doing a bunch of research, I decided that I wanted to purchase the Asus Transformer Prime.

I had seen the Asus Transformer when it first came out, but didn't pull the trigger because it was the first generation and I wanted to wait until it had gone through at least one evolution.  When the Prime was announced, I immediately knew that's what I wanted.  The Prime is the first tablet with the Nvida quad core processor.  In reality, it actually has five cores, the fifth being called the companion core.  The fifth core is a low power core that takes care of simple tasks so that the more power hungry cores don't need to spool up until necessary.  This helps the tablet achieve impressive battery life.

I purchased the 32 GB model (wifi only), though for $100 more there is a 64 GB model available.  The best part of the Transformer series, other than the badass name, is that for $150 you can purchase a full keyboard dock for it that turns it into a laptop.  The dock has a full QWERTY keyboard along with a bunch of Android specific buttons to help navigate the operating system.  If you're use to a full-sized keyboard, the chicklet keyboard can take some getting use to, but for anyone who has used a small laptop before, it feels great and is easy to type on.

Another great feature of the Transformer Prime is it's expandability in terms of memory.  The tablet itself has a microSD slot.  In stead of paying the extra $100 for the 64 GB model, I purchased a 32 GB microSD card from Newegg for $40.  The keyboard dock also has a full size SD Card slot which I threw another 32 GB card in.  Now I'm up to 96 GB for an additional $56.  The keyboard dock also has USB, which would allow you to throw in a USB thumb drive, attach an external hard drive, or even use a USB game controller. As a side note, you can actually use Bluetooth came controllers, such as the controller off your PS3.

The other great thing about the keyboard dock is that it also includes and additional battery.  By itself, the tablet has 9-10 hours of battery life, but when you put it in the dock, you can get 19 hours of use between charging.  For someone who spends a fair amount of time in airports traveling, that extra battery life really comes in handy.  I'm no longer a slave to finding a power outlet and sitting in some nasty airport corner just to stay charged.  I can have a layover or two and still not worry about running out of juice.

The screen on the Prime is also fantastic.  It's called a Super IPS display and is over twice as bright as the iPad 2 display, which is great for sitting outside on the porch, drinking wine in the sun while stalking on Facebook.  Of course you can easily dial back the brightness while indoors in order to save battery life.

Overall I've been very impressed with the Prime.  When I'm just sitting on the couch reading the news, I can use it as a tablet.  If I plan on doing a lot of typing (such as writing this blog post), I can throw it in the dock and use it like a laptop.  I really like the fact that I can use my microSD and SD cards to expand the memory.  Now when I travel I can have an SD card with 32 GB of music, and another one with 32 GB of movies, and still have tons of room for pictures and other media.

Overall I would definitely recommend the Transformer Prime.  Lots of battery life, a great screen, expandable memory capacity, and an awesome keyboard dock.  What more could you want?

Mobile and Cable companies as data pipelines

This is yet another article pointing out how many of the companies in tech industry are not adapting fast enough to the internet revolution and their core businesses are struggling as a result.

Fast Company: Follow Up: Cell Networks Fight To Be More Than Mere Data Pipelines http://goo.gl/mag/xgoHl

It use to be that your cell phone carrier would make the vast majority of their money off of your text messages.  I read one article a year or two back that said SMS had a 3000% markup.  That's a lot of profit for very little data across a carrier's network.  With the proliferation of Facebook, Google Voice, and a handful of other services, folks can now message each other via Apps, and they don't use up their allocated SMSs per month.  This has a lot of the cell carriers worried as their cash cow starts to die up.  Last year, AT&T stopped offering their $10/month SMS package and now only offers the $20/month.  As people used SMS less, they were downgrading and AT&T was losing money.  Now you have no choice but to purchase the $20 package.

I never realized how few minutes and SMS I actually use each month until this week when I logged into my Sprint account and used the "Analyze Account" tool.  It turns out that on an average month I use 3 SMS messages and about 10 minutes of my 450.  Since I use Google Voice, all of my texts go over the data channel with the exception of pictures messages.  I also have unlimited mobile-to-mobile so that doesn't use up my minutes either.  Over the last few months though, my data usage has increased from about 800MB per month to over 4GB per month.

This puts the carriers in an interesting position, in that their original core products, SMS and voice minutes, are being used less and less.  They are turning into data conduits only, not phone companies.

With more and more users gobbling up data, most cell companies have moved to the capped data usage model, or at least throttling users speeds over a given GB allowance.  It's probably safe to say that we'll see higher costs on data in the near future, but hopefully in exchange for the higher rates they'll also raise the caps.

This transition from content provider to data provider isn't just for phone companies either.  The cable industry sees this happening and is equally distressed.  More and more people are cutting the cable like my wife and I and relying on the internet sites like Netflix and Hulu for all their TV consumption.  The cable companies are seeing their core business of content distribution transfer over to data distribution (even though I believe internet is a higher margin product than TV, for some reason they still don't like it.)

This is a very exciting time to be watching the tech industry.  More and more people are using phones as their primary means for accessing the internet.  More folks are cutting off cable television for direct distribution channels such as Hulu and Netflix.  The old guard media companies are dragging their heals and refusing to innovate, but luckily technology companies are stepping up and giving us the disruptive tech that we need.

I look forward to a year or two down the road when I can boot up my Google TV and watch HBO directly through the Android app, or when you can download the Modern Family app and watch every episode on my phone.