Europe gives hope to PS3

Consumer’s Psychology towards PS3

Sony was not only hurt by poor sale performance of PlayStation 3 but its brand was also affected. Sony PS3 continuously receives many negative comments from blog articles and consumers feedbacks from the internet. Many prospect PS3 consumers around the world are having 2^nd thought whether PS3 is a good choice or not.

Technically PS3 is the best - Europe

The PlayStation 3 is doing well in Europe. In fact, the PS3 console won the best home entertainment device from European Imaging and Sound Association (EISA). They believed that PS3 is truly an entertainment and media center.

The price of PS3 is also not an issue to European gamers. Sony’s Europe president David Reeves previously announced that they had no plans to lower the price of PS3 in the region. Instead, the company will introduce new bundles with different games to help drive sales.

More PS3 games please!

Sony doesn’t have much option but to release many hit games before the Christmas season. This is their only way to gain a market share from Nintendo Wii. The capabilities of PS3 were not yet totally explored therefore Sony still have a chance.

The Power of DBPedia2.0

The DBPedia2.0 is an open data project (free like wikipedia). In DBPedia blog it is said that they released a new dataset:

“The renewed DBpedia dataset describes 1,950,000 “things”, including at least 80,000 persons, 70,000 places, 35,000 music albums, 12,000 films. It contains 657,000 links to images, 1,600,000 links to relevant external web pages and 440,000 external links into other RDF datasets. Altogether, the DBpedia dataset now consists of around 103 million RDF triples.”

According to petermr’s blog (a scientist affiliated with Unilever Cambridge Center for Molecular Informatics, Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge ):

“This will revolutionise reference chemistry. We have recently shown - and will be demoing at AHM2007 - how we can extract semantic chemistry from eTheses. That means that any student writing a thesis can increasingly link - painlessly - to WPedia for their lighweight ontological resource. Authors will know they are using the terms correctly - readers will know what the terms mean - and much more.”

“So I predict that with a few years DBPedia will become the semantic resource for chemistry. Every entry in WPedia enhances it - you never go backwards. We’ll be able to combine fundamental information for compounds such as colour, melting point, density, etc. There will be enough semantic data that a machine could rediscover the periodic table.”

Amazing!

DBpedia2.0 might be useful in various disciplines. This might be the start of the “new structured data/information evolution”. I don’t know how DBPedia wanna be competitors will react with this. Google and Yahoo! are you interested to compete with them? Or how about purchasing the entire project? lol

The Damage of Pulte Homes

Pulte Homes (PHM) damaged a 200-year-od Pennsylvania farmhouse. Pulte used a track hoe to remove part of the stone in William Moore House. Unfortunately, the process resulted to severe damages.

Pulte got a 1,029-house development approval from township officials. However, part of the agreement is to preserve the 200-year-old farm house.

Source: National Trust for Historic Preservation (9/11/07)

Pulte Home (PHM) might face lawsuits from 5,000 homeowners that are dealing with defective plumbing system. However, Pulte is now offering to repair the defective plumbing systems. It is said that they are forcing homeowners to sign a waiver for them to avoid construction defect lawsuits.

Action News obtained a document that shows how widespread is the problem. The majority of the affected houses are in exclusive communities in Anthem and Aliante.

Source: Action News (8/23/07)

Estrada is guilty for plunder - insider trading

Joseph Estrada, former president of the Republic of the Philippines, has been found guilty beyond reasonable doubt of plunder by the Sandiganbayan (anti-graft court). He has been sentenced to life imprisonment.

The anti-graft court ordered the freezing of Estrada’s accounts. It is estimated at $87 million. The funds, including protection money from illegal gambling operators, embezzled tobacco taxes, and commissions from insider trading, will be forfeited.

The Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) is a very small trading market therefore investors expect that it will be managed efficiently. The PSE as well as the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission need to be more proactive in detecting insider trading.

Retrenchment in US. Hiring in Philippines.

Expansion of Financial Outsourcing in the Philippines

DPC DATA

DPC Data, a municipal bond archiving company in New Jersey, decided to outsource its operations in the Philippines. Noypips.com, a small financial services outsourcing company, is now named as DPC Data Philippines. The company planed to have two sites in the Philippines; in Pasig City (Luzon) and in Cebu (Visayas). Its operation in Pasig City is 24/7.

Thomson Financial

Thomson (TOC), Canada’s multi-billion information provider, expanded its operations in the Philippines. Thomson Financial Philippines is now too big wherein the management decided to rent a new office space in another building (Multinational Bancorporation Building) along their head office (Ayala Life-FGU Building). Almost all of Thomson’s data from securities to hedge fund database were being done in the Philippines. Its operations in Makati City are 24/7.

Search engine optimization or manipulation

Internet related marketing services is a growing outsourcing trend in low-cost labor countries like Philippines, India, and may be in China. It is evident in the number of jobs available for SEO companies in these regions. These are some of the notable jobs from these companies:

§ Internet marketing specialist – They might be the one responsible for my e-mail spams!

§ Blog writer - The articles from your favorite site might come from some proxy blog authors.

§ Horoscope writer – Your grandma’s daily horoscope might only be written by some teenager part-timer.

§ Weather forecaster writer – Thanks God, they are not hiring a weather forecaster.

Companies involved in internet marketing services might be accompanied in web analytics manipulation. However, it is not only the rankings that their clients are paying for; it is their capacity to help their clients to generate money.

If you are an investor, you might consider in putting up an SEO company in the Philippines or in India. With the growing demand and cheap labor – there is a money on it!

HP will surprise you!

Hewlett Packard’s mobile phones will be the next hype in market. HP had already tested launching a low-priced, WiFi capable, and Windows Mobile 6.0 smart phone. Then they are coming up with new phones (iPAQ 600 and iPAQ900) that had powerful features. It will be the newest in the list of new generation iPhone and BlackBerry phone killers.

HP (HPQ) is seriously competing with Nokia, SonyEricson, and Samsung in mass marketing of mobile phones. HP has a silent but aggressive move in increasing market share in the mobile phone industry. It is something that investors should watch out because HP had a very good chance of making a fantastic profit from it.