Compelling Newsweek article about how the pendulum has swung away from adoration of the alpha male and toward the beta male (presumably the opposite of the alpha). In Hollywood, Beta Males Best Alpha Dogs - Newsweek Entertainment - MSNBC.com

Interesting premise: Hollywood is portraying more male heros and stars as “beta” males - guys who aren’t concerned with climbing the corporate latter the fastest, being the wealthiest or really even being competitive at all.

• Take Jim Halpert from NBC’s “The Office” for example. “He’s a guy who isn’t concerned with status,” says Justin Spitzer, a writer for TV’s “The Office.” “He’s more concerned with getting through the day and not engaging in a pissing contest with the alpha males around him.”

Reasoning: The article make the argument that the country is tired of chest-pounding alpha males that have gone too far and are embarrassing us as a nation. It cites:

• President George W Bush
• Don Rumsfeld
• Don Imus
• Mel Gibson
• Steve Carrell’s character on “The Office”, Michael Scott
• Stephen Colbert’s pseudo alpha-male character from the “Colbert Report” on Comedy Central
• President Bill Clinton (while he was serving as president)

And references Al Gore, present-day Bill Clinton and Jim Halpert from “The Office” as successful “beta” males.

Article from a US government study: Humans hard-wired to be generous

• “Altruism is something that makes people feel good, lighting up a primitive part of the human brain that usually responds to food or sex.”
• This was discovered in a study that is trying to find out if humans have some sort of built-in moral compass.

Excellent article in the June, 2007 Business 2.0.  Summary:

Kevin Ham is a domain hoarder in Canada with over 300,000 domains that run a combination of Google and Yahoo! ads for an estimated $70mm / year of revenue. He’s been collecting the domains since 2000 and has worked a deal many of the top level domain registrars to get first pick on expiring domains in exchange for paying 10x the regular price (still usually a massive bargain compared to some of their market values).

Interesting takeaways:

• Ham has often taken advantage of little known 30-day return policies on domains. Get the domain, run ads on it, drop the ones that don’t perform well.
• Was one of the first to buy up thousands of .cm domains - which are accessed when people misspell “.com”. Try beer.cm. Ads served by Yahoo!
• To capture more misspellings, he’s working on Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) . One must strike a deal with the government of the country in question to become the registrar for that TLD (top level domain).
• He’s quietly working on a new firm called Reinvent Technology that will invest money in businesses that can be built on his domains. Like a land owner looking for real estate developers.
• His network receives 30 million unique visitors per month (most of them probably accidental)
• He’s filed a patent application on the misspelling trick he pulled off with .cm (Cameroon)
• Many companies are looking to sue Ham over trademark violations related to the .cm scheme.
• Wrote scripts to compare lists of domains from Verisign then cut deal with them to buy the ones he wanted (at a 10x premium)
• Eventually he started his own registrar called Hitfarm
• Internet REIT is a a domain investment firm that has raised more than $125 million from private investors, including Maveron, the venture firm backed by Starbucks founder Howard Schultz.
• Ham’s current portfolio of domains has an estimated value of $300 million.
• He’s overpaying lately for a lot of domains. Some of the prices he’s paying would take 15-20 years to recoup the investment, assuming pay-per-click advertising tracks at the same pace.
  • This is why he’s starting the new firm, Reinvent Technology, to come up with mini media businesses on many of these domains. Sounds like an SEO play to me, which is also at the end of its arc.
• Ham: “If you control all the domains,” he says, “then you control the Internet.”

Business 2.0 Article: Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains - June 1, 2007

I don’t know why they don’t do this by default.

1. Click “Manage Calendars” on the left
2. Click “Add Calendar” Button
3. Click “Browse Calendars” tab
4. Click “Add Calendra” next to whichever country’s holidays you want.

Now how about a sweet blackberry Google Calendar application like the Gmail for blackberry?

I follow alternative energy stocks fairly closely.  In particular, solar cell producers.  Many of the large producers are based in China where the government today announced that they are increasing a key transaction fee investors must pay to do business in that country.  That caused a 6.5% drop in China’s stock market and took a good bite (5-10%) out of most of these solar stocks.

In the interest of full disclosure, yes, I doubled-down on TSL (Trina Solar).

Sector Snap: Solar Cell Makers: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance