Today is my last day at Brilliont, and considering how hectic this past has week, I have not been able to blog as much as I have in past weeks.  I was happy to see the number of responses to my Pandamonium post earlier this week.  It is nice to know that people are actually reading this blog other than the friends and family whom I have repeatedly sent links of my blog to.

With a daily check on Springwise, I found another great entrepreneurial idea.  Roomorama is a site that lets users find and post short-term stays.  I have a feeling that sites like Craigslist dominate the market for the posting of any sort of housing arrangements, but since Craigslist provides such a wide variety of services, having a niche sight like Roomorama that is a bit more snazzy that Craigslist’s website might be a little bit more appealing to some.  On the same note, the company AirBed & Breakfast provides people a way to travel cheaper by actually staying at homes and staying on an AirBed or something similar rather than staying at hotels.

Well this has been a great summer at Brilliont where I learned quite a bit about the consulting world and of course tried getting my hand at blogging for the first time in my life.

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

Well I only have one more week left here at Brilliont, and the summer has just flown by.  I live in an interesting part of Brooklyn, where quasi-hipsters have inhabited the previously dangerous areas of Williamsburg (an area of Brooklyn).  On Saturday there was an organized event known as Pandamonium, where people dressed up in panda outfits and partied in the streets from Union Square in Manhattan to Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg.  I only witnessed the events at Bedford Avenue, and that was Pandamonium and the NYPD started to clash, and you can see videos on the website.  The apparent goal of the organizers was to “take back” Williamsburg, in a show of disapproval for the new high rise condos and other wealth in the area.  From what I could tell, the people in the demonstration were rioting against what they had created, and it was all very confusing.

My eyes were immediately drawn to the title of an article on Bloomberg entitled “Bernanke Tries To Define What Institutions Fed Could Let Fail”.  Is our financial future so delicate and the Fed so powerful that they can decide the path that our economy is headed?   One passage in particular caught my eye:

Under Bernanke’s predecessor Alan Greenspan, the Fed drew a clear line against using its portfolio to influence specific markets. An internal study published in 2002 warned that “the favoring of specific entities” might “invite pressure from special-interest groups.”

I could not agree more.  With the credit markets tightening up big time in the past year, shouldn’t distressed institutions who did not accurately prepare (or have a diversified enough portfolio) be allowed to suffer?  Why is it that Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae are allowed to continue on or be saved?

Finally, according to Popular Science, over 1/3 of the amphibian population is dying out.  This sounds similar to the story of the honeybee population starting to dwindle.  I am not going to make any unfounded claims here about the reasons, but I’m sure the overwhelming claim is that global warming and destruction of habitats has something do with these phenomenons.

- Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

With all the talk of using alternative fuels and biofuels, there are researchers in Taiwan who are trying to tap a source as ubiquitous as sunlight to power motorcycles. Using compressed air seems like such a cool idea, but as always there are considerations to be made. The motorcycles will still need an energy source to compress the air, which will need to be provided by power plants. So it is still unclear whether or not there will be any pollution decrease by using this new compressed air technology, but it just shows that some of the best ideas are often the simplest. Now if only there was someway to use wind energy to power the batteries to compress the air to run the motorcycles (or solar energy instead of wind energy). The obvious step for the future is to improve the efficiency of the naturally occurring energy sources (water, wind, solar), because without it we will always be shackled to power plants.

Even if the dollar is slightly gaining strength again, the penny has been an afterthought for as long as I can remember. However it seems that retailers, in an effort to bring parents and children in for back-to-school shopping, are offering ridiculous discounts on school supplies like 8 pencils for a penny. The term for selling items at a loss is called “loss leaders” and it is done in an effort to bring consumers to the store and buy more expensive items. Saving a few dollars in one area seems to compensate for spending more in another area. I often feel this way whenever I use a coupon, return an item, or purchase a less expensive item. The difference in the price I should have spent and the price I did spend is still in the back of the back of my mind and is always used as an excuse for spending more. I wonder if there is more information on this…

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

I still vividly remember the 1992 Dream Team crushing every other basketball team at the Summer Olympics in Barcelona, and the world basketball dynamic has changed considerably since then.  American and European NBA players are leaving for Europe this year along with recent high school graduates with dreams of playing in the NBA but not wanting to wait a year playing in college before getting drafted.  Basketball is a simple game, and it’s explosion around the world is not entirely surprising.  Even Kobe Bryant and Lebron James have been quoted as saying that they would leave for Europe to play for $50 million per season.  With the U.S. dollar staying weak against the Euro, European basketball teams are able to offer ridiculous sums of money.  NBA players have been treated like rock stars at the Olympics, and what is a better way to prove European leagues are legitimate than to bring in American NBA players to be the face of their leagues?  This is similar to what Major League Soccer did when bringing in David Beckham.  Would NBA players really leave grilled cheese for gyros?

I found an interesting article in the McKinsey Quarterly that ties in a lot to the work we are doing here at Brilliont.  I like this quote by one manager for the article:

We typically spend 80 percent of our time figuring out how to squeeze the economics, and only 20 percent on actual strategy, without numbers to back our decisions.

Companies that are public need to work about total shareholder return, so short-term decisions are often made to help the company presently.  Splitting up a company into many groups seems to be a reasonable way to monitor each one’s value to the overall company.  General Electric is even considering selling the lighting business, which was started by it’s founder Thomas Edison.  Managers must feel that this division is not up to par with the rest of this conglomerates businesses.  Long-term projects for a company can only be achieved through increased R&D and marketing expenses while keeping overall expenses down.  Efficiency is the key.

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

8/11/08

The 4×100 freestyle relay last night at the Beijing Olympics was the first time I’ve screamed at the television since football season last year. For those who have not seen the race, it is worth watching.

On Saturday I attended the All Points West Festival at Liberty State Park in New Jersey.  (The festival was actually from Friday through Sunday).  For those in the New York/New Jersey area, I highly recommend the festival in coming years. It was one of the most organized festivals I’ve ever been to, and the lineup was amazing, with bands like Radiohead, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Roots performing during the day.   The views of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline made it all worthwhile.

A quick check of Springwise today introduced me to a Dutch company dedicated to making stylish bike helmets called Yakkay. Even though there are such health risks associated with riding bikes without a helmet on, I find that I rarely wear one and I know most of the people whom I know bike do not either. A lot of bike helmets are clunky, and in a rare vain moment for me, look ridiculous. It is a shame that I put my vanity in front of my health but that is that. A quick Google search of stlylish bike helmets yielded little, so unless Yakkay can sell their helmets online, they can’t get my business.

Finally, in more news that Google may be becoming an “Evil Empire”, a New York Times online article is stating that Google’s own Wikipedia competitor, Knol, is getting a possible advantage in searches. For example, it seems that Knol’s pages are being places higher than more possibly relevant search results. I checked a few phrases, including the one in the New York Times article, “buttermilk pancakes”, and found the Knol result to be third on the list, and others to be near the middle of the page.

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

I know that I’ve been hearing that a worsening economy would lead to higher MBA applicants, and the Economist today confirmed the story.  So as corporate America is hurting, another business is thriving (the business of education that is).

With stores like American Apparel and Urban Outfitters profiting off of selling hipster merchandise in a store, they have totally destroyed the fun of shopping at thrift stores.  I remember going to thrift stores as a kid with friends and finding shirts with phrases that seem so out of place at school (but undoubtedly made sense to the previous owner).  But the American Apparels and Urban Outfitters of the world mass produce fake vintage shirts.  I was glad to find a company called Threadless that is a site for artists to design creative shirts and also sell prints of their artwork.  I am sure that I am the last person to have found this site, but I found it through my favorite site Springwise.  My list of frequently visited sites is short, but Springwise is quickly making its way to the top (along with New York Times, The Economist, and The Onion).

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

I think that if you ever get the feeling of embarrassment or shame for others, then you can feel pretty certain that you have a good heart. I always wonder why I feel embarrassed for others when they should clearly feel embarrassed for themselves. At least I learned a little bit about CERN from the video (I think).

-Amit

8/6/08

I’m just going to assume this sign was posted by a cuil.com employee.

There is a fascinating story in the New York Times online today about a tragedy on the mountain K2.  I’m unsure of how big of news this will make in the United States, though there were a few U.S. climbers in the group.  I still remember when there were eight climbers who perished on Mount Everest in the mid 1990s with the book Into Thin Air written about the event.  That might have made bigger news here because of the flamboyant Dallas doctor who was in the group.

Finally, in shocking news, Freddie Mac has apparently posted a fourth straight quarterly loss.  Let’s see how long investors hang on for this one.

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

Before coming to intern here at Brilliont for the summer I never considered the ramification of mergers and acquisitions.  I always trusted that due diligence was done prior.  There is obviously more to M&A than just increasing the scope of a company that needs to be taken into account.

Take for example Alcatel-Lucent, the company which was born out of the merger of French company Alcatel and American company Lucent.  (On a side note, I grew up no too far from an Alcatel headquarters which is currently a private high school.)  The merger seemed to make sense since they were both leading telecommunications equipment makers, but since August 2007, the stock has fallen close to 50% and has suffered its sixth straight losing quarter.  Stock prices are all about the current value of a companies future cash performance, and investors and analysts see some big problems.  It mentions in the Economist article I have linked that there were clear synergistic issues between the American and French managers in the company, and now a board restructuring is under order to try to fix the mess.  Who knew the French and Americans could not get along?

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com

Big news at Brilliont today as one of the interns is leaving on Friday and her summer project presentation is today (you can see her blog at http://brilliont.com/blogs/hotcommodity/).  I am definitely looking forward to her analysis later today.

There is not a single niche that can’t be profited off of, and I was glad to find a cool one today.  I saw on Gizmodo today an article about Menino Design Studio’s external hard drive covers.  Now my external  hard drive is pretty snazzy, so I have no real reason to want to cover mine up.  (Granted, mine is portable and doesn’t sit at a desktop all day long).  I am not exactly sure how products like this take off, or what makes them cool because having an external hard drive that looks like a huge pack of cigarettes, a Pulp Fiction character, or a cereal box makes it even more conspicuous.  Regardless I would buy an external hard drive just to get one…

To expound on the niche comment I made earlier, I am always annoyed at airports when screeners find things in my bags are cannot fly and there is a United States Postal Service (or similar mailing company) stand at the end of the screening area.  These stands are usually pretty full service (without an attendant usually) and people can mail whatever the screeners have deemed dangerous to home or their destination.  The prices for this service are ridiculous (not to mention sending shampoos and toothpaste), but there must be a demand since it is provided.

-Amit

akooner@brilliont.com