Cool trivia: Tech stocks tend to thrive in cold weather
13.10.11
The world is becoming increasingly automated — something that managers used as an argument for technology stocks back in the 1990s, at least until those stocks turned into little puffs of smoke.
As automation becomes increasingly real, however, tech stocks are worth a second look.
MORE: Index of Waggoner's Investing columns
First, a word of warning: If you haven't guessed already, tech stocks in general are volatile. Many companies have a short life span: Remember Palm Pilots? Kaypro portable computers? Wang word processors? Apple and IBM aside, many tech stocks are best viewed as intermediate-term trades, not long-term investments.
And the current revolution in tech may make some big tech companies look somewhat quaint in the next few years. That revolution is cloud computing, a mildly annoying term that means using the Internet to store data and software. Rather than storing your data on a hard drive at home, you can now store your data on a gargantuan server system and access it via the Internet.
Source: USA Today
Recreating Technology: If You Landed On Another Planet, Could You Make A Toaster?
10.10.11
A $6 toaster is a miracle of capitalism, and he was sure to have known that a lot went into it. Discovering just how much science and technology that entails - in making a piece of bread brown, mind you - is his story. He discovered that the modern toaster is a miracle of capitalism because he spent $1,837.36 of his, nine months of his life and it took him 1,900 miles of travel. Obviously the toaster was for his personal use and if he wanted to bring the cost down he could have made a lot of them and sold them
(1) . When CD burning became available for a realistic cost a friend of mine got a 1X CD burner for $5,000 because we wanted to sell a learning tool that could teach people sign language better than a book; you typed in a sentence and the person came on and showed you the signs (it was called "VisiTalk" but we'd have to update it to work now because we used VBasic 1.0 libraries - and ten million free programs do what it did so there is no point).
Source: Science 2.0