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Daily Dopeness
The ramblings of a currency speculator. I am also the founder and ceo of stocktwits
Oct 07
Oct 06
Oct 05
Sep 27
Sep 24
“ The bailout package that is about to be rammed down Congress’ throat is not just economically foolish. It is downright sinister. It makes a mockery of our Constitution, which our leaders should never again bother pretending is still in effect. It promises the American people a never-ending nightmare of ever-greater debt liabilities they will have to shoulder. Two weeks ago, financial analyst Jim Rogers said the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made America more communist than China! “This is welfare for the rich,” he said. “This is socialism for the rich. It’s bailing out the financiers, the banks, the Wall Streeters.” That describes the current bailout package to a T. And we’re being told it’s unavoidable.
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Sep 23
StockTwits Closes Angel Round
Howard Lindzon announced today that we partnered with Soren, Howard, Roger, et al, to get involved in Stocktwits. Howard calls it an angel round, which I suppose it is, though we also like to think about things strategically as to how this fits within the betaworks not-a-fund approach. This one has some really great people involved but also fits squarely in one of the two main areas that comprise our network - those applications or services that take unstructured data and structure it, in a way that provides value to a user, advertiser or publisher (or all three).
Our wholly unoriginal thought is that the world of “media” is combining, or becoming closer, with user content, to form a new kind of media. One of the implications of user content is that there is “data exhaust” that results therefrom - data that is, as a result of being user generated, definitionally unstructured.
Stocktwits takes financial related data - using Twitter today as the content production platform (continuing the march of Twitter from application to platform, as Scott Rafer once told me) but easily applied to many places - and structures it, by stock, user, reputation, etc., thereby adding value at multiple steps of the way, to multiple participants. Thus, using this new platform, a new form of content is created, which can be used in new ways. We believe there is alot of value in that model.
There are a bunch of other things in the betaworks network that take a similar approach - outside.in and Lookery are examples - so in our minds Stocktwits is consistent, but really it’s a great group of people, which is why we jumped in when the chance opened.