CodyWillard.com Moves to Fox (or, Am I Just Another Sell Out?)

People tell us that we play too loud
But they don't know what our music's about
We never listen to the record company man
They try to change us and ruin our band.

That's why we don't wanna be good
That's why we don't wanna be good
We're prisoners of rock and roll.

When were jammin' in our old garage
The girls come over and it sure gets hot
We don't wanna be watered down
Takin' orders from record company clowns.

That's why we don't wanna be good
That's why we don't wanna be good
We're prisoners of rock and roll.

We're prisoners of rock and roll. - Neil Young

CodyWillard.com is, alas, becoming cody.blogs.foxbusiness.com.

Am I just a classic sell out at this point? I have to wonder exactly that if I can flatter myself for a minute, don’t I, as the move is made…

The whole of my blog, starting with TheCodyBlog.com or even the original TelEconomist.com days, is something which frankly I’ve come to associate my self-identity with, at least in some part. And it is now fully engulfed by a mainstream media outlet… The Man. Hmm.At any rate, rest assured that there will be absolutely no change in the the thrust of the content and what I write and say around here. I'll not pull any punches -- none that I'd not pull on my own anyway at least, you know. I'll still write in exactly the same voice, calling it exactly as I see it, Flipping It as best as I can (though I suppose being as fully part of a mainstream media company, a giant conglomerate makes my trying to Flip It [Flipping It - a term I've trademarked and defined as doing or thinking exactly opposite conventional wisdom] a bit more challenging by definition, doesn't it?) and basically being exactly who I've always been as best as I can.

I’ll post lots of stock, economic, and societal analysis and commentary, lots of music, personal stories and home videos and photologs and whatever else I want, whenever I want, however I want...as long as the technology's supported and all that, which, come to think of it, means one change to the blog will be that I won't be able to embed videos any more until FoxBusiness.com chooses to greenlight that ability. Sigh, the control starts even as I say it won't, doesn't it?

Well, at least they can't stop me from writing that the control starts, can they?

We're Prisoners of Rock n Roll, but let's keep on rockin' in the free world, eh?

Yes, ironically, you'll have to click on the link below since I can't embed the video since I've sold out and now don't have the control I did if you want to scream with the Godfather of Grunge himself.

All that said, as far as my media career is concerned, you guys do realize I started off with a telecom stock website called TelEconomist.com and got a break from Jim Cramer and TheStreet.com by responding to one of his columns back in 2000 and now, yes, my blog is moving to Fox? I am pretty proud of that too, you see!

See you on the other side then.

Happy Hour 4.07.08

We have the following guests booked for this evening:
-John Huddy

-Lama Pema, Monk

-Dan Mchugh, VP of Budweiser & Bud Light

-Don Peebles, Peebles Corp. Chairman & CEO

-Bruce Vincent, Swift Energy President

-Steve Grasso, Stuart Frankel

-Kirsten Haglund, Miss America

-Tiernan Ray,Barron's

Join Cody and Rebecca Gomez for a live Happy Hour at the Bull and Bear at 5:00–or at 5:00 and 11:00pm on FB

Click HERE to find out where you can See Happy Hour where you live.

Google Time Travel

I think I'll just link to this one for now...

Introducing Gmail Custom Time^TM

Be on time. Every time.^*

Google's all about empowering that end user, eh?

PS.  I still say Google's a screaming buy below $500 these days.

Moto Mojo Gonna Lead to Momo, or, Buy MOT Below $10

Icahn's down pretty huge on this Motorola trade as far as I can tell, and he's gonna need it back to $15 or so to make any money on it, again as far as I can tell from having been following his activism in this name over the last few years.  But he's finally getting a large part of what he's been looking for, as Moto finally announces that it's going to be spinning off its handset division from the rest of the company.

The handset division, in case you haven't been around anybody in the developed world in the last few years, peaked at about the same time the Razr was featured on HBO's Entourage in 2004 or so...it's been all down hill from there as Motorola and its supposed and now-departed savior Ed Zander bet the next half-decade on the Razr form factor somehow convinced that tapping on a 12-button phone platform that'd been around since the punch phone replaced the dial phone a quarter-century ago was a good idea as convergence made smartphones king.  In other words, the Razr was great in 2004, but it sucks in 2008 but Moto's idiots were still hoping it'd catch back on.

The good news is that Moto's finally going in all kinds of new directions, and they're going to be rolling out some really great phones this year and next.  On top of that, the spin off will probably squeeze out some market value further.  And the rest of the company's undervalued so long as the economy stays steady as she still is.

Will talk about this more on Happy Hour tonight, but the upshot is that Moto's a darn good looking investment (and even several-month-long trade) here below $10, just about 10% above its recent lows and still 50% from its highs last year.

Endless Google Domination

I must have written hundreds of articles and blog posts for RealMoney.com, on these pages, for The Financial Times and elsewhere for the last few years about how Google's dominance will grow for a long time.

Take a look at the Tech page on NYTimes.com today.   It's really all about Google, isn't it?  Fastest growing company in the history of capitalism.  Still a screaming buy below $500 even if I'm not jumping up and own about it like I was when Whoopi was on Happy Hour and said she was bummed about owning it at $415...

What Would Grandma Susie Do?

The other night I'm at a charity event with a friend. After the event, we're in a car service headed downtown for drinks. She's got two Blackberries (Blackberrys?) out and is tapping away. After a couple minutes, I ask who's she's texting. She names a hook up friend of hers, and adds that she'd just texted her parents too. I feel the Negativity well up inside of me and I sit there putting it out towards her.

She senses it of course, even as she's still texting and asks me what's up.

I tell her that you get from the universe what you put out into it. (Yeah, I really said that. Sigh.) And now I can tell I've upset her too. She presses about it, but I quickly drop it and we move on and actually continue to have a nice non-romantic, friendly night out.

I wonder sometimes what our grandparents would think of our standards of social norms. I'm starting a weekly series on this blog this summer that'll be called Mind Your Digital Manners (or something like that) that'll be an Emily Post series for the always-connected world we live in (I'll answer how many good byes does it take to end an IM conversation...how quickly you have to answer text messages from ex-colleagues and ex-lovers on the weekend, etc).

The fact is, it's rude to text anybody when you're out in a one-on-one setting with a friend (squeeze in a quick text in the bathroom if you must, but better to just be out and living the night, frankly).

But you know, my reaction wasn't proportional to the social infraction. No, I knew at the time and know now that the greater part of my Negativity was the echoes of my recent trashing and the lies that surrounded it, even as it seems to me most of my friends think I shouldn't be bothered by any of it. I've got some bitterness about it -- anger is probably a more accurate description at present -- and that came out as my friend texted her lover.

I'd add that what really sucks is that there's nothing I can do about it just now, but to let it process. Again. I wish I could ask Grandma Susie, from whose Emily Post book we used to read at our dinner table, what she thinks of dating and hanging in NYC in 2008.

Time Warner, AOL and Bebo: Yawn

Heard of bebo? It's huge in England and in some of its former colonies. One former British colony where it's not huge is in that little economy/society called the US. Here, MySpace.com rules.

Remember when the folks I now work for stepped up and bought MySpace.com for about half a billion dollars. At the time everybody called it another bubble.

That was before News Corp was guaranteed a cool billion in cash from Google for the right to advertise and provide search on the MySpace network. Good trade by my bosses, and one that I've cited before as a reason I admire the business savvy of these guys.

And so today, two years later, the super-slow-mo guys at Time Warner and/or AOL or whatever they want to call this company these days, announce they're buying also-ran Bebo for $850 million or so. I do think it's a good purchase for AOL and, maybe just maybe, they'll finally remember that they're supposed to be monetizing their assets.

Bet on winners. That ain't AOL.

Hulu Competes Against Cable…not YouTube

Not a coincidence that YouTube's making a bunch of news announcements and opening up much more of its inner workings to developers on the day that NBC and the guys I work for at Fox roll out Hulu.com.

Hulu's not supposed to compete with YouTube per se, though YouTube does want to compete with Hulu. Yes, even though YouTube is by far the most dominant video site on the net, it's the one who wants to compete with Hulu here.

Hulu's the first shot serious mainstream attempt at delivering a decent library of decent quality content for free over the Internet to the consumer.

Think there might be a market for that? Uh, yeah.

Google and Apple are still very much the best conduits. The content owners like News Corp and GE's NBCU are the best content plays -- content is king!. And yes, the cable companies are still the best shorts as their cable broadcast conduit can't compete with "Freely pulled over the Internet".

PS. We do talk about this on Happy Hour all the time, btw. And of course you can search this site or TheStreet.com or the Financial Times and read hundreds of thousands of words or analysis and predictions and what not that I've written about this Internet Video Revolution for the last five or seven years or so.

Lost in and Lost on Lost in the Revolution

I didn't see the first season of Lost until after James Altucher had convinced me it was the "perhaps the greatest television program ever" and I went on the DVD buying binge to make up for lost video ownership years.

So I watched a good half of the first season during what started out as a three day weekend of endless work, sorta in the background until I found myself glued to the 109" projector in my office. As the series bounced back and forth from the perspective of each character, both from before and after they'd found themselves plane crashed on this island, I think I might have watched about 9 episodes in row without barely leaving the room.

By the time I'd finished the last episode of the first season, the second season was well underway. So I started downloading episodes on iTunes, since my G5 at my office was also hooked up the 109" projector. Though the difference in quality between the standard DVD and the iTunes episodes was marked, the quality of the content and the story itself was so good, I blew through most of the second season over just a few more weekends.

Then I think I started watching the third season on my personal MacBookPro. But I forgot it at the office one night and I wanted to watch get my Lost fix on, so I downloaded a couple episodes to my iMac at my apartment.

And then I watched a few episodes on my iPhone on that mostly disastrous trip to Italy (though in this digital age, I did just get "friended" by the Italian girl on Facebook, btw). But as I mention in this month's newsletter, I've run out of storage capacity on all my computers lately, and since I'd rather delete the $1.99 episodes of Lost than "priceless" personal photos, videos, songs, etc, I deleted all those shows.

And now I have no idea where to start again. I don't want to read those descriptions on iTunes because they usually ruin the first 40% of the episode. And frankly, it's been so darn long since I last watched Lost I can't remember where the story stopped anyway.

I often expound on the virtues of the Internet Video Revolution, including how sweet it is for ABC et al to have gotten me on board with Lost even though I've never actually seen the show broadcast on ABC to a television set.

But, man, do we need more storage more cheaply and do we need it now (again, as noted in this month's newsletter and often on Happy Hour, that means stick with Seagate and Western Digital and perhaps nowadays with Sandisk again too) as underscored above.

And while it's really nice that my iPod and iTunes now ask me if I'd like to download the purchased songs from my iMac to my MacBookPro's and vice versa when I sync it back and forth from one to the other, I'd really like to just have some sort of easy storage and organization of my commercial video content.

Best publicly-traded plays on organized commercial video content? Google and Apple still, of course silly. This is part of the vision of my RevolutioNetwork too.

Wish we'd get us there already. I'm losing it by being Lost without my Lost. And, please don't tell me what's happening on Lost right now!

Btw, I'll be sitting down with Mike Workman, the CEO of Pillar Data, on Happy Hour tonight, and we'll certainly be talking about the data storage aspect of this.

GOOG: Who needs a multiple anyway?

As much bulling as I've been doing on Google down here below $500 again, I was actually worried that Barron's would call it a value stock or something this weekend. And, see, as Barron's has been dead wrong on Google since it first came public and they were quoting dudes saying Google was fair valued at $25 a share.

As I've pointed out before, that'd be like buying it at 1x this year's (less than four years after it came public) earnings...good value, no? LOL. In fact, here's a thought that'll blow your mind --

Google's already earned almost as much since it came public as its entire market cap was when it came public. In other words, those who bought it the day it came public and held it through most of last year, as I did, have already seen more than 60% return on their investment through earnings themselves. The mulitiple on top of those earnings is, in this very rare case of such huge growth like this, in some sense just gravy.

That's why whenever somebody calls Google expensive you should take it with a grain of salt (or maybe you should pour the salt in your ears so you can't even hear them say spew that nonsense that Google is expensive). At $450 a share, Google's trading at somewhere between 15-18x next year's probable earnings. Ex out the nearly $20 billion in net cash on the balance sheet (say about $60 a share) and we're looking at an enterprise value (how much the market values the company minus the net balance in the company's checking account) to earnings mulitple of the stock right now is 13-15x next year. For the fastest growing company in the history of capitalism.

The biggest risk to Google in 2008 isn't earnings growth problems, but rather political and regulatory. I can see these guys getting in the cross hairs of the politicians, bureaucrats and other regulators who love to attack even natural market share dominance such as Google's established through its choice to become the only well-capitalized, mainstream site on the planet that is content source agnostic.

Luckily for us Google bulls then, we can rest assured that Barron's is sticking with their bear story on Google. Even quoting no less an authority on the name your favorite tech permabear and mind, Fred Hickey:

Google's Next Stop: Below 350?
Word Count: 1,026 | Companies Featured in This Article: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Coca-Cola
Review | Preview

Coca-Cola Looks Ready to Pause

GOOGLE LIKES TO DESCRIBE ITSELF AS A TECHNOLOGY COMPANY. But it is an advertising company focused on consumers, and in today's troubled economy that's a problem. Google (ticker: GOOG) makes money when an Internet user clicks on an advertisement shown on the company's Website or a site run by a member of Google's network. Revenues are vulnerable to reductions in both clicks and corporate ad budgets, which seem likely this year.

Google's shares, down 41% from their November high of 747 to a recent 433, reflect some of this concern, as well ...

And with that, I think I'll stop bulling Google for a little bit. I could be dead wrong, you know.