Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Fortune Small Business' business plans contest
Categories: business, idea, contest, fortune, small, business
Buy property from struggling companies, and then lease it back to them at a premium.
Business 2.0 Magazine --
"Jeff Hayden preys on smallish companies on the brink. Not because he's a vulture investor seeking to turn around a struggling business. He just wants its real estate. And he wants it cheap, so he can then rent it back to the company for a juicy profit.
His strategy is a new twist on what's known as a buy-to-leaseback - a deal that's long been used by big companies such as Walgreens that want to get real estate off their books and raise cash.Plenty of investors are glad to have healthy, household-name companies like Walgreens as tenants, so they purchase their properties and then lease them back.
But Hayden is striking deals with companies that big real estate investors ignore, and his approach could mark the emergence of a wide-open multibillion-dollar opportunity."
Read more at Be a landlord of last resort.
Categories: landlord, lease, premium, business, idea, buy-to-lease-back
Monday, October 23, 2006
Red Hat Shares - Worth a look?
The drop has largely been attributed to rumours that Oracle may soon be throwing its own hat in the linux ring. For details read Oracle Rumors Surface Once More, Spooking Red Hat Shareholders, By Rick Smith, LocalTechWire. Excerpts:
"On May 8, Red Hat shares hit a 52-week high of $32.48. The surge in stock price came after Red Hat announced the acquisition of Atlanta-based JBoss, an open source software developer for servers. The move struck a positive chord at the time as Red Hat seemed to be broadening its product capabilities.If the Oracle rumours are, simply, rumours, this lowpoint in Red Hat prices may be worth exploiting.
But the JBoss deal caused heartburn in a number of different quarters, apparently including in the executive suite at server giant Oracle. Ever since the JBoss deal, Oracle’s Larry Ellison has taken potshots at Red Hat, including in the pages of the prestigious Financial Times. Maybe Oracle, which has worked with Red Hat in the past, needed its own Linux version, Ellison said.
Red Hat chief Matthew Szulik responded in those same pages, writing that Red Hat really wasn’t challenging Oracle. And IBM, another Red Hat partner that relies heavily on server business, issued warm and fuzzy words about the JBoss deal.
But the Oracle-Linux rumors persist. Egbert’s report only exacerbated them,
"(O)ur independent checks in the past two weeks indicate that Oracle seems to be close to introducing its own software 'stack.’,” she wrote. Egbert proceeded to cut her target price on Red Hat to $21 from $24.
Not everyone concurs that Oracle will go the Linux route. But Ellison could choose to partner with another Linux developer, wrote Tim Beyers for The Motley Fool.
“My problem isn't with analyst Katherine Egbert's sources, or her conclusion that Oracle is talking with the makers of Ubuntu Linux about working more closely together. My problem is that she believes the collaboration could result in an Oracle-branded Linux appliance. Frankly, I think that's crazy,” Beyers said.
Not so, others say. On Slashdot.org, the website bible for all things Linux, a poster picked up on the Oracle theme on Tuesday:
"There have been rumors floating around of Oracle working on their own distribution of Linux. If this is true, it is widely believed that this enterprise edition of Linux would be in direct competition with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. What is spurring the rumors? Well, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said, 'I'd like to have a complete stack. We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux.' I know that Oracle has been doing a lot more than databases recently, will they go the extra mile and create their own stripped down Linux kernel? If they do, will companies switch to database solutions that are running Oracle only software for the benefits of support and (hopefully) stability?"
Meanwhile, some people continue to doubt the wisdom of the JBoss buy.
Peter Goldmacher, writing in the Wall Street Transcript’s “Enterprise Application Software” issue, blasted Red Hat.
“Open source is very interesting, because the poster child for open source has been Red Hat (RHAT), and it seems like Red Hat is losing their grip on their market because they have branched out into incremental functionality that they only needed some of their larger partners for. So if their larger partners feel like they want to get back into the business that they had previously allowed Red Hat to do for them, I think Red Hat could be in trouble.”
The Oracle rumors and recent sell-off have ruined a rebound for Red Hat. Shares dropped a whopping $6.11 on Sept. 27 after a third quarter earnings report that was regarded in many quarters as “weak”. The news sent RHAT to $20.12 as 62.7 million shares - 10 times the daily trade average – changed hands."
Categories: red, hat, oracle, stocks, shares, tech
Thursday, October 19, 2006
How to be great
1. What it takes to be great
2. How one CEO learned to fly
del.icio.us tags: greatness, practice, hardwork, talent, success
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Sun Microsystem's New Black Box
In an attempt to bounce back into the tech limelight, Sun Microsystems has come up with something that may actually work.Computing Data Centres in a box that can fit into a parking lot. Saving corporations time spent building their IT systems and, more importantly, saving rent on prime real estate, these black boxes are a simple yet innovative way to use existing contraptions to solve a problem worth solving.
For more on these black boxes, check out these articles in the New York Times and Physorg.com.
Categories: sun, microsystem, data, centre, problem, solution, business, idea, innovation, IT, tech, space, rent, real, estate
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Money on the Internet
Categories: money, internet, ideas, blog
Monday, October 16, 2006
Technology that help startups compete with the big boys
"Once upon a time it was easy to tell the difference between a small business and a large competitor: Big firms had access to more capital, diverse markets, better technology, and economies of scale; small companies had to make do with whatever they could afford. But as technology has advanced, that distinction has blurred. Just as mainframe computers gave way to cheap PCs on every desk, Yellow Pages ads are being replaced by low-cost websites, and regional sales forces by search terms purchased from Google and Yahoo. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen cites overnight shipping as another of history's great leveler, giving smaller manufacturers the ability to send parts across the globe in less than a day and robbing big firms of a competitive advantage.
The past couple of years have ushered in a new wave of tools for entrepreneurs who want to play big, as software and service providers have begun to adapt their offerings-previously available only to large firms-for small businesses. "The attitude used to be, 'We're going to take this product we have for enterprise, strip out a lot of functionality, and small business is going to have to use it,'" says Chris Hazelton, senior analyst at IDC, an IT market-research firm based in Framingham, Mass. "Now companies are either building products specifically for small business or making the products modular so they're lower-priced and scalable."
The result: startup multinationals. Small firms with bigtime online security. Low-profile companies using high-powered software to perfect their websites. No-name startups with big-name shipping partners. Over the next several pages you'll meet entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of new technologies and strategies and learning a powerful lesson: It's never been easier to play big."
- From this interesting article on some interesting examples of big corporation efficiencies now available to startups.
Categories: startup, entrepreneur, software, tool, big, multinational, corporation, compete, logistics, VPN, startup, website, efficiency
