Sunday, June 7, 2009

Recession Sing-A-Long!

The classic "West Side Story" is enjoying its Broadway revival. Now comes the remix, "Worst Slide Story."

Credit: Walter Handelsman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist and animator. Check out his blog for more fun.

http://www.newsday.com/opinion/walt-handelsman-1.812005/animation-recession-sing-a-long-1.831897

Job Losses and Gains by Geography

Check out this website for an interactive map on job losses and gains by major cities: http://tipstrategies.com/archive/geography-of-jobs/



We can play in 3 ways:
  • CLICK the play-button to start the map animation.
  • HOVER over a dot to see the city name and statistic.
  • CLICK on the time-line to navigate through the economic cycle at your own pace.

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Available New Home Purchase Tax Credit Funds Dwindle

In March the California State Legislature passed a law establishing a personal income tax credit for purchasers of a qualifying principal residence. The tax credit is capped at the lesser of $10,000 or 5 percent of the purchase price for the purchase of a principal residence that has never been occupied between March 1, 2009 and March 1, 2010.

Over the past two months homebuyers have reserved over $65 million in tax credits, with only $35 million in available credits remaining, according to the California Franchise Tax Board. It is important for buyers to be aware that the seller must file paperwork with the state within seven days of the sale for the buyer to qualify for the credit.

The credit provides in equal amounts ($3,333 for the $10,000 credit) over the three successive taxable years beginning with the year in which the purchase is made.

Qualifying residences must never have been occupied and must be eligible after purchase for the Homeowner's Property Tax Exemption. The taxpayer must live in the home as his principal residence for at least two years, or be subject to payback for any tax credits received.

Unlike the federal tax credit, the state has limited the total amount of credits that may be claimed to $100 million. Because of this provision buyers must make a tax credit reservation, and credits will be allocated on a first come first served basis.

The California Franchise Tax Board (FTB) is accepting applications (via form 3528-A) for allocation (reservations) of credit by fax only (916-845-9754). For more information about the credit reservations, applicable forms and the number of credits still available, please see this California Franchise Tax Board Web page.

President Signs Law to Limit Foreclosures

President Barack Obama last week signed into law S. 896, the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act, an NAR-supported bill that includes provisions to limit foreclosures and keep families in their homes. The bill seeks to help home owners by providing a safe harbor for mortgage servicers who make a good-faith effort to modify troubled loans, and it makes changes to increase the use of the Hope for Homeowners program, which encourages replacement of troubled loans with safe FHA-backed financing. The bill also strengthens oversight of FHA-approved lenders and it establishes a task force to investigate mortgage foreclosure fraud.

The new law loosens the Hope for Homeowners (H4H) program requirements to help homeowners refinance out of their troubled mortgages and into more affordable, fixed-rate FHA-insured loans. If refinance proceeds are insufficient to pay off existing liens, the existing lien holders must voluntarily agree to a short payoff, but a new inducement is an opportunity for them to share in the homeowner's equity. Other changes to the H4H program include monetary incentives for both the participating servicers of the existing loans and originators of the FHA refinance. Millionaire borrowers (with net worth over $1 million) are now excluded from the program.

Effective immediately, an REO lender or buyer who acquires title through a foreclosure sale must give at least a 90-day notice to terminate a bona fide tenant. The following shall be considered bona fide tenants:


• the mortgagor or the child, spouse, or parent of the mortgagor under the contract is not the tenant;
• the lease or tenancy was the result of an arms-length transaction; and
• the lease or tenancy requires the receipt of rent that is not substantially less than fair market rent for the property or the unit's rent is reduced or subsidized due to a federal, state, or local subsidy.

A 90-day notice to terminate is sufficient for a month-to-month tenant or if a new owner will occupy the property as a primary residence at the end of the 90 days. Otherwise, a tenant with a one year or other fixed-term lease with a remaining lease term exceeding 90 days can stay in the premises until the remaining lease term ends. This new 90-day notice requirement applies to foreclosures of a federally-related mortgage loan or residential real property, except for properties under rent control, rent-subsidized programs (such as Section 8), or other state laws that provide additional protections for tenants. This law expires on December 31, 2012.

Other provisions of the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act include a 4-year extension of the $250,000 FDIC deposit insurance to December 31, 2013, protection for loan servicers who establish qualified loss mitigation plans from liability for an alleged breach of duty to maximize mortgage values for their investors, $130 million for foreclosure prevention counseling and education, and $2.2 billion to strengthen homeless programs.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Stop the Flu - Sneeze the Right Way

Sneeze The Right Way

Don't spread the germ to other people in flu season; here are the right ways to sneeze and cough.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao7eyqoiIYs

Thursday, April 23, 2009

The Long Tail


The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

Chris Anderson, Hyperion (2008)

This is an insightful book with an empirical model to explain the long tail phenomena in many markets. The application is left for readers to think about.

Long tail refers to the shape of the demand curve, with products on horizontal axis and sales on vertical axis. The head of the curve represents hit markets, where a few popular products generate huge revenues. The tail of the curve represents niche markets. Long tail means the curve grows to the far right, but never hits zero. What it means is there are a huge number of niche products, each bringing in little revenue by itself but, when aggregated, they amount to a significant market.

Check out the Wikipedia definition of long tail.

Long tail is present in many markets. SaaS (software as a service) reaches the long tail of small and medium business (SMB). Salesforce.com, which offers sales related software through the web, is the poster child for SaaS. SMBs are spared from the pain of installing and maintaining the software; instead, they can hit the ground and run with pay-per-usage.

Google taps into long tail of advertising by offering self-service software AdWords and AdSense. Long tail advertisers can easily reach long tail publishers because software does all the work in between. These long tail users wouldn’t have had a chance to play in the traditional advertising market where big players dominate.

Difference Between Traditional World and Long Tail

Economics of scarcity rules in the traditional world: retail has limited shelf space, radio has limited broadcasting bandwidth, theatre has limited screen time. We try to predict who may be the best sellers so we can allocate scarce resources to them to maximize profits.

Long tail is the economics of abundance thanks to low distribution cost (e.g. downloading music from internet), virtual inventory (e.g. buying from Amazon Marketplace), and low marketing costs (e.g. advertising on Google platform). With internet, consumers are presented with infinite choices and are armed with powerful tools to help them find what they want. Ranking algorithms and recommendation engines influence consumer decisions.

Three Forces in Long Tail

New producers are formed as tools of production become increasingly accessible. YouTube turns everyone into a film maker as long as you have the creative interest. Blogging turns everyone into an amateur publisher as long as you have some topic to talk about. Amateurs occupy the long tail where passion and personal reputation are the main motivation to produce, while professionals occupy the head where business considerations rule.

New markets are formed as internet dramatically lowers the cost of distribution. eBay enables everyone to be a merchant as long as he/she has internet access. Amazon Marketplace incurs little cost for distribution because it lends the virtual store front to merchants without physically moving the inventories around.

New tastes are formed when consumers use recommendation engines and peer reviews to explore beyond the worlds they know. Netflix reviews, Amazon recommendation, Yahoo! music ratings, and Google PageRank are all intelligent and adaptive forms of on-line word-of-mouth. Consumers trust peers more than advertising machines and it’s “wisdom of the crowd” in work.

Long Tail Marketing

New marketing tools and strategies come up to reach consumers in the long tail. Viral marketing is prevalant in social networks where friends refer their friends and friends' friends which exponentially expands the user base with low cost. Buzz marketing relies on word-of-mouth, which today has taken many forms on-line, such as recommendation engines, ranking algorithms, and user reviews. These filters are not stagnant but are amazingly intelligent with new user feedback built into the model at real-time.

One hilarious and audacious example is the consumer driven advertising launched by Chevy Tahoe. It's voted to be one of the 101 Dummest Moments in Business in 2007 by Business 2.0, but the result was incredibly good in terms of increased sales of the vehicle.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Web 2.0, Tippy Market, and Tipping Point


The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Malcolm Gladwell, Back Bay Books (2002)
Check out the author's website for more interesting discussions.

This book was written well before the surge of web 2.0 but is often cited in web 2.0 related articles. It’s a page turner which examines sudden changes in many social issues: Why did teen suicide rate suddenly shoot up in Micronesia? Why did NY crime rate plummet? How did Hush Puppies become fashionable all of a sudden?

Malcolm thinks products, ideas, and messages can be contagious and spread like an epidemic. A tipping point, as he defines it, is that one dramatic moment when everything changes all at once. Three factors are involved in tipping an epidemic and Malcolm has plenty of case studies to explain each of them in detail.

Here’s a summary:
  1. Law of the Few – the specially gifted messengers who spread the message
  2. Stickiness Factor – the messages that stick to memory and move people to action
  3. Power of Context – the right environment to operate in

Law of the Few
Malcolm lists 3 kinds of people who, in a social epidemic, can bring new ideas and new products from visionaries to the mainstream, explaining innovations in a way that’s acceptable and understandable by the mass.

Connectors occupy many different worlds and have a special gift of bringing them all together. They seem to know everyone in a small number of steps (degrees of separation).

Mavens are info experts who not only collect info but also eagerly share it (e.g. do you have friends who are car mavens?).

Salesmen persuade. Great salesmen have a special charm to draw people into their rhythms and dictate the terms of interaction.

Stickiness Factor
In this info age, nothing seems to stick due to a vast amount of info bombarding us on a daily basis. “Stickiness engineering” deals with this challenge through simple changes in presentation and structuring of the info. A sticky message moves people to action in an epidemic.

Another great resource on stickiness:
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by the Heath brothers.


Power of Context
Human behaviors are influenced by immediate circumstances in a way more than we are aware of. One famous example is the Good Samaritan test conducted by Darley and Batson of Princeton University in 1973. The theory also explains that, under the right circumstances, events can take a dramatic change, like how NY crime rate plummeted after subway graffiti was cleaned up.

Tipping point allows us to do less and achieve more. However, we can't simply do what we think is right and hope the best for the result; we need to test out our intuitions in a trial and error process.

How do you think web 2.0 is related to the tipping point theory?

Web 2.0 Success Stories



Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations
Amy Shuen, O'Reilly Media, Inc. (2008)

Web 2.0 is a new business model which is still evolving when the book is being written. Nonetheless, Amy does a good job summarizing the strategies used by some successful web 2.0 businesses. It’s a very insightful book and well worth the time.

A few highlights:

Flickr is the poster child for collective user value and “prosumer” business model: users are producers as well as consumers. They upload photo images and enjoy other people’s contributions at the same time. Viral marketing leads to a rapid expansion of user base while incurring little up-front cost.

Google uses n-sided marketing to create and monetize on positive network effects (in this case, n = 2: both advertisers and users use the Google search platform). With each user search query or ad click-through, Google’s ranking algorithms feed the popularity and frequency info back into the system and increase the relevancy of keyword search. The more people use Google, the more valuable the system becomes. That’s the magic of positive network effects.

Facebook and LinkedIn are social networks built with minimal user acquisition cost. The more your friends use it, the more valuable it is to you. That’s a viral diffusion model. LinkedIn is more focused on professional connections and uses a “freemium” pricing strategy (free + premium): offering free access to build the critical mass and charging recruiters who wish to use the mass.

Web 2.0 also brings about a new wave of innovation when new technologies or markets combine with the old to create new ecosystem partnerships. Jajah, a web 2.0 telephony company, partners with local phone carriers and shares revenue with them, instead of threatening to replace them, as some if its peers do. Apple iPod is a great example of collaborating with media, production, and accessory partners.

There are more case studies on open source development, SaaS, corporate competence syndication, etc. At the end of each chapter, Amy posts strategic questions on: what if you are a CEO or CIO? What decisions will you make? It’s a thought provoking book for those who wish to start a new business or revamp their existing business.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Stress Management

Stress Management from a friend:

A lecturer, when explaining stress management to an audience, raised a glass of water and asked, "How heavy is this glass of water?" Answers called out ranged from 8oz. to 20oz. The lecturer replied, "The absolute weight doesn't matter. It depends on how long you try to hold it."

"If I hold it for a minute, that's not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I'll have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, you'll have to call an ambulance."

"In each case it's the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes." He continued, "And that's the way it is with stress management. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, as the burden becomes increasingly heavy, we won't be able to carry on."

"As with the glass of water, you have to put it down for a while and rest before holding it again. When we're refreshed, we can carry on with the burden."

"So, before you return home tonight, put the burden of work/life down. Don't carry it home. You can pick it up tomorrow."

"Whatever burdens you're carrying now, let them down for a moment if you can. Relax; pick them up later after you've rested. Life is short. Enjoy!"

And then he shared some ways of dealing with the burdens of life:

1. Accept that some days you're the pigeon, and some days youʼre the statue.

2. Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.

3. Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

4. Drive carefully. It's not only cars that can be recalled by their Maker.

5. If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.

6. If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.

7. It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.

8. Never buy a car you can't push.

9. Never put both feet in your mouth at the same time, because then you won't have a leg to stand on.

10. Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.

11. Since it's the early worm that gets eaten by the bird, sleep late.

12. The second mouse gets the cheese.

13. When everything's coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.

14. Birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live.

15. You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the world to one person.

16. Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once. (you betcha)

17. We could learn a lot from crayons. Some are sharp, some are pretty and some are dull. Some have weird names and all are different colors, but they all have to live in the same box.

18. A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

Have an awesome day and know that someone has thought about you today ! ! !

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Welcome to My New Blog!


This is Dr. Ho's Learning Center. Check out my other pages:

Health Care blog: http://DrHoHealth.blogspot.com

Real Estate blog: http://DrHoWealth.blogspot.com

Real Estate website: http://www.DrHoRealty.com

Thanks for visiting!