This week in the app revolution

Here's what you have to know if you want to know what's "appening" in the app revolution right now:

Dude Records “Eye of the Tiger” Using Only an iPad - Music video.  Done very well. A modern one man band?  Awesome.  And the music itself ain't bad.

Full review of iPhone 4 after seven weeks of love. Exclusive and very insightful, helpful (and funny) review of her iPhone 4 from AppConsumer's own Nathania Johnson. Pics, videos and good details from someone who's actually been using the phone for weeks.

Revolution Investing Newsletter: Appetite for apps ($) - My newsletter last week details some of the most important app revolution and their impact on some of the biggest tech stocks.  (Subscription required.)

MOMA iPhone App a Worthy Work of Art - Very cool concept and beautiful app. I've had several friends visit the MOMA recently and tell me I need to go.  I guess I'll go.  But I'll get the MOMA app first.

Voice Actions for Android Looks Very Suh-weet! - Another cool video.  I'm going to start playing with this still wildly futuristic technology asap.  Killer app: spoken text messages. Count me in.

Network neutrality explained - I break it down for you in real world terms...and explain why Google's YouTube is the big winner in the death of net neutrality.

Evidence Mounts for Verizon iPhone - Last year I predicted that Verizon would have the iPhone by Christmas 2010.  Getting down to the wire.

Only Nokia, Apple and Google have reached critical mass in the smartphone wars. - Gotta love it! “Cody, You are a CROOK reviewer. Stop with the FAKING reviews FOOL. iphones are garbage, stop with the LIES"

iPhone vs Android - everything you need to know - My first in what will be many reviews to come.  Got good traction on this one, picked up by AOL.com's home page, on MacDailyNews (who critiqued my critique), and others.  Let me know what you think.

The app revolution: the biggest market in the history of the planet - Another article by me...Within ten years, more than a billion people will have bought their first app-enabled smartphone.  Trillions of apps will be have been downloaded. Think about it. Get involved.

Let's tackle net neutrality

Let's tackle net neutrality.  Net neutrality, as I'm sure you've read, means that the telecom/cable/satellite/wireless networks that connect you to the Internet have to allow you to access anything on the Internet equally, without making it easier to connect to one site vs. another.  And that matters, not only to the companies and websites that you use right now and might someday use in the future, but it matters hugely to you too. More on that in a minute.

But first, let's break network neutrality down into a real world example.  Say you've just launched a website that focuses on delivering the best reviews and news about apps, games and devices.  Pretend you call it AppConsumer.com, like I did mine. Let's say the traffic is going thru the charts in just the first few days, blowing away even your highest expectations for the site.

And then let's say since you use Google Ads and since Google searches are starting to drive traffic to your awesome app review site that somebody at Google says, "Hey, we should get into the app, game, and device reviews and news business like those guys at AppConsumer.com."  Google also knows just how huge the growth in searches for app reviews and news that I've cited on here many times lately is.

Anyway, the point is, let's say Google decides to start a direct competitor to your company.   Google starts adding lots of very expensively-developed technologies to their app reviews website, but the networks are clogged because of people still coming to your site and other small-business-owned app reviews and news websites, so Google says to Verizon and the other carriers:

"Look, we'll pay you if you'll carry our content and make it work better on your networks than anybody else's.  Especially those damn rebels at AppConsumer.com!" (Okay, maybe I made up them saying that last part for effect.)

And that's where the fissure starts. Network neutrality might be good for competition which might be good for you, the consumer.  But then again, if Google's invested in new technologies that can only be delivered if they get the extra broadband on the networks that they're now paying Verizon for, then why would we want to suppress that?  Don't you, as a consumer, want access to the very best technologies, and if you've got a problem with companies like Google that bribe the people selling you access to the Internet, then don't use Google products and try to only use networks that remain net neutral.  It's a free country, right? (ha!)

On that note, isn't this arrangement between Google and Verizon a lot like the illegal payola arrangements of the music industry?  You're not allowed to pay to get your music content on the radio, but you can pay to get your web content on the network?

And finally, maybe it's up to us at AppConsumer, as a competitor of Google's, to figure out ways to build on top of their new app reviews technologies to enhance the experience of my users and also thereby gain access to Google's preferred network status at Verizon et al?

One of the main reasons for Google abandoning their former positive-on-net-neutrality stance is because they want to kill off any chance of anybody ever competing with YouTube as the de facto standard for delivering user-gen video on the Internet.  With this agreement with Verizon, Google's formally announced it's game over for YouTube competitors.

And there's the point of this article for Google investors and for followers of my Revolution Investing newsletter.   What if I told you that Google could pay millions of dollars to ensure that YouTube never loses to a competitor, ensuring that all user-gen content creators (and any small business and most medium and large businesses, including media/entertainment companies) would use it and therefore creating a perfect virtuous cycle.  Not this year, but ten years from now, when we're all consuming almost all of our content wirelessly with apps on our smartphone/devices and YouTube will deliver the vast majority of it.  Can't you see Google search type market share here? say 60-70%? of video delivered on smartphones?

That business, supported with ads and search and all the other things that Google does, will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.  I've said before that I can see a Google $2000 price tag before 2020. This emboldens me on that prediction.  Google, via YouTube, wins big with the death of net neutrality.

In the meantime, stick with Google the stock and help support a small business content provider while they still exist - http://appconsumer.com, the best reviews and news of apps, games and devices on the net.

XXX Smartphone apps are coming - a guide for investors, parents, kids, and the rest of us

It's going to be a trillion dollar market.

The "it", that I am referring to is the coming onslaught of XXX apps that will be hitting the smartphone marketplaces in coming years.  Porn. Sex. And smartphones, oh my.

And no, we don't have any porn app reviews up on my new app reviews and news website AppConsumer.com.  We're not planning to either, ok?

And yes, unfortunately for the remarkably safe, secure and Puritanical iPhone/iTunes App marketplace whether the high-minded well-intentioned folks at Apple want it or not.  Think of it this way -- what kind of social networks for it are already being built utilizing the new iPhone video cam?

I mean, I'm watching Law & Order: SVU the other night and they're trying to catch a serial rapist who uses an app called "Quickies" or something like that, an app for people who want to connect and have quick anonymous sex.  I don't consider myself prude, but holy STD, batman, that episode freaked me out.  And more importantly, got me thinking about such applications being built right now for the latest smartphone technologies.

Yes, with the advent of the iPhone's real-time video calling, people are already, shall we say, "opening up" to the possiblities.   Just as chat rooms, instant message services, myspace, craig's list, ebay, facebook --- even plain ol' email, have long been exploited by people with bad intentions, so too shall it be with what will soon be a normal reality of video chat rooms and video social networks.

Long ago, I trademarked the term "They can't stop the revolution", meaning that nobody can stop these technological revolutions that are built upon the networks and the technologies employed by those networks from building their own revolutions.  The demand is there, so the market will deliver it.

For concerned parents, as always, be smart, be aware and communicate the dangers.  For kids, please be careful and listen to what your parents are warning you about...the dangers are real.  And for the rest of you, same thing -- be careful. But for the rest of you, have fun too.  You'll also have tons of high-brow applications for these same smartphone technologies.

For investors -- and this is where I get really interested in the topic, for the record, all right? -- as usual, playing the guys selling the shovels to those doing the digging is the way to go.  We've had Riverbed Technology, a company that sells equipment that makes all these new video chat, video conferencing, etc technologies work on all these networks, in the Revolution Investing portfolio from much lower levels, but it's recently pulled back a little bit, and I'd look to get in for a long-term investment.  Same goes for another stock oft-highlighted in my newsletter -- FFIV, another equipment vendor who makes this stuff happen.  Cisco, Juniper, are good plays on this too, though in a more "rising tide lifts all boats" kind of way, as usual.

Porn. Sex.  XXX.  These are going to be huge markets and will drive demand for Riverbed and F5 equipment. There I said it.

What?

Here's a walkaway prediction: In ten years from now, the biggest app markets will be, in order:

1. Enterprise
2. Entertainment
3. Gaming
4. XXX
5. Children

My suggestion is to stick with the non-XXX markets.  I'll remind you that they will entail billions of people using trillions of apps.  That's where AppConsumer.com will be focused.

Here's to the future.

Why I'm launching AppConsumer.com, an app reviews and news website

You know I love to find revolutions that are changing the marketplace and exploding in growth and enable us to ride their wave to big profits over time.  I've talked about the China Middle Class revolution, the food-consumption revolution, the Internet video revolution...and my favorite of all for a while has been the App Revolution. Yes, the App Revolution is worthy of capitalization.

More than 100 million people will buy their first app-enabled smart phone this year.  More than a quarter billion people will buy an app-enabled smart phone this year.  There will be more app-enabled smart phones sold than PCs next year.  There will be more than one billion app-enabled smart phone users on the planet within the next three years.  And by the year 2020, more than one billion people will buy an app-enabled smart phone every year and more than one-third of the world's population --more than two billion people -- will be using apps on their smart phones. (All these estimates come from Gartner, RBC Capital Markets and Willard Media Ventures).

That's a market I want to play in, and while we've already got some great publicly-traded investments in the Revolution Investing model portfolio, I want way more exposure to this industry that will be exploding like no other in our history.  So I've started AppConsumer.com which I hope will become the de facto standard resource for app reviews and news.

App wasn't a household term just three years ago, but with the advent of the iPhone and then the Android, not to mention the latest rounds of Blackberry, Palm, Nokia and Windows phones, everybody knows about apps now.  Take a look at the growth in searches for "App Reviews" from Google Trends:

Or even the explose growth in even just the word "app":

I've been looking at growth charts for twenty years now, and I don't recall ever seeing such consistent, clear and straight up pure growth in any industry like we are about to see in the app world.  The growth in those charts are just getting started.

We're talking about a target market of billions of people using hundreds of billions of apps reading literally trillions of articles about apps, app reviews, app news, app devices, app games, app-anything.

And on that note, I've also founded AppConsumers.com, the social network of the app world, and AppWikipedia.com, the wikipedia of the app world.  I always tell people the best investment they can make is to invest in themselves and to start their own businesses in a growing industry that they have passion about.   Well, I'm putting my money where my mouth is, and as I continue to search for the best publicly-traded themes to play this unique app-world explosion opportunity, I'm going to go full-speed in making AppConsumer.com the only place people think of when they want to find all the best app reviews and news from around the Internet.

I guess you could say I'm consumed with apps?  (I hope my mom, at least, will like that play on words.)

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.

Pre-Emptive Strike: Worked so Great in Iraq, Our Government Tries It with the Economy

As Ben Stein so eloquently put it in this weekend's NYTimes, the fact is that by any standard definition of "recession" (typically defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth) that we're not in one.  Yet, we've already thrown hundreds of billions of dollars of your tax money into the banking system through intraday liquidity injections, risk shifting of billions of losses from companies like Bear Stearns' balance sheets, and so many other outright bailouts from our Fed and the Republicans and Democrats in charge.

Recall also that this "recession" we're wasting so much of your money trying to stop from happening is indeed happening anyway.  Recall also that the last two recessions that we dealt with lasted a total of about eight months each.

And now we're hearing buzz that the governments and central banks of the developed world are thinking of colluding to manipulate the value of their currencies...because as Bloomberg states for some strange reason:

For the first time in 13 years, people who trade currencies say confidence in the markets to determine exchange rates is dwindling.

The crisis that may bring the so-called Group of Seven nations to coordinated intervention is the result of a sinking U.S. economy, the weakest dollar since 1971 and the biggest currency fluctuations this decade.

"Crisis"??!!  The economy and the markets have turned down a little bit, just as they always do over time.   What's with all the pre-emptive strikes around here?  They aren't working anyway!

Live from Willet’s Point, It’s Happy Hour Auto Show

They asked me to go to the NYC Auto Show. I think they meant that high-falutin, tax-dollar subsidized NYC Auto Show from the Javitz Center. Instead, I headed up to Willet's Point, where there are no sidewalks or sewers, for a kept-real Pimp-My-Ride Auto show from the streets. As I ask in the video, I wonder just how much these people's lives could be improved with that $286 million of taxpayer money that's going into the pockets of Bear Stearns shareholders even though the shares are otherwise worthless.

The ultimate car at this auto show...Buick Sable? Rock on indeed.

Happy Hour 3.21.08

Fanatical Friday this week.....We have the following guests booked for this evening:

- A segment with Cody and Cars   --- hilarious ---

-Dan North, Euler Hermes ACI

-Nikki Dryden, Human Rights Lawyer, Fmr Canadian Olympic Swimmer

-Lance Cottrell, Anonymizer Founder(Remote)

-Aaron Ferstman, Youtube Spokessperson

-Felicia Day, Youtube Contest Winner

-Tay Zonday, My personal HERO, oh and hes a Youtube Contest Winner

-George Linardos, Nokia

-Don Foley, Progressive Automotive X Prize Execuitive Director

-John Shore, Progressive Automotive X Prize Senior Execuitive Director

-Lynda Fassa, Green Babies

-Brock Kreitzburg, US Olympic Bobsledder

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.

Little Brothers in Tibet Watching Every Move Big Brother in China Makes

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
Ill be watching you - As if you don't know that's the Police

The flare up in Tibet is already worrisome and saddening, but the Dali Lama, despite the NYTimes strange insistence on hidden political motivation on his part and the similarly strange refusal to take his statements at fair value, seems to be doing his best to keep the peace and allow for some semblance of order in the way forward for Tibet, whatever way forward that might be.

But, reading these articles and seeing the sweeping crackdown by China, makes the stomach drop as you realize this could turn into a lot of violently vicious cycles in a hurry if the guns get going. We'll hit on this subject tonight on Happy Hour, btw, as it matters to all of us in a lot ways -- from the impact on relations with China, business with China, Olympics in China, etc, and mostly of course because it matters to all us as citizens of this world.

Please keep the reports and information coming, Little Brothers in Tibet who are watching every move Big Brother in China is making.

How To Trade This Market: Near-, Short-, Intermediate and Long-term (Yes, all that in under 800 words!)

I keep hearing people confusing yesterday's stock market rally with an "all clear" signal for this financial crisis. While I do think the free market forces combined with this trillion dollar bail out for Wall Street have put us on a path for strong growth during the 2nd and 3rd quarter of this year, I'm far from thinking we're through with the ramifications of the real estate bubble popping. Hell, maybe all of Wall Street's still a bubble...those brokerage and bank stocks are still up a bunch from a few years ago and Goldman's earnings have gone from $6 to $25 a share since 2002. That's gotta be bubblicious if not out right bubbled.

Anyway, the way I see the set up here right now is this:

1. Very near term, I'd be neutral. I was pounding the table here on these pages on Monday and Tuesday that you had to be long and strong into the Fed meeting. That trade's over, and always remember that a trade is a trade is a trade. Take the trade and move on.

2. Short-term, say, the next few weeks will get everybody panicked as earnings in light and warnings come in heavy. See Sony Ericsson's warning for example today. Let that panic settle back in again and then start scaling into the long side again.

3. Intermediate term you gotta be bullish for the next few months, especially since everybody explains to you that you should be bearish for the next few months since earnings will supposedly be bad...that's most likely a headfake, as everybody will be looking backwards at the last quarter's reports, which will indeed be bad. Recall that back late last year, when stocks were 20-50% higher, that EVERYBODY promised those same earnings reports would be great. They were looking backwards back then too. Looking forward rather than backward, we see a tsunami of stimulus and asset inflators hitting in the next few weeks and months. They won't change the long term, but they'll inflate things for a while.

4 . For the long term, we've still got binary outcome possibilities. With all the bubble inflating and deflating going on in this country for the last couple decades, we're most likely headed into yet more bubble territory for the next few years (see my repeated predictions for an Echo Techo Bubble in 2008 and beyond) or we're headed for the depression that the politicians and all their meddling cause even as they and most of the mainstream media continually try to explain that all this meddling prevents such depressions.

Government policies cause depressions and bubbles. Natural market forces allow for steady growth in nuanced boom and bust cycles.