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[Marketing] 2006 Global Brand Rankings

January 30, 2007 in Professional by Ray | 2 comments

brands

I’ve always had a keen interest in marketing, thanks to Dr. Lutz and his great marketing class at University of Florida (in fact he’s a favorite professor of BusinessWeek and featured in the article Not the Usual Drill). I’ve recently stumbled accross brandchannel.com, an independent weekly magazine for branding produced by Interbrand. They just published their online study of the top global brands in 2006, and the results are quite interesting. Here are the top 5:

  1. Google
  2. Apple
  3. YouTube (!)
  4. Wikipedia (!!!)
  5. Starbucks

Surprising isn’t it? Jump to see more details and thoughts.

Read the rest of this entry »

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The 10/20/30 Rule of Presentations

January 7, 2007 in Professional by Ray | No comments

From the venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, here’s a good general tip for creating presentations with slides:

“A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.”

Now I am a big fan of short, to-the-point presentations, even presentations without slides. Bloated slides take audience’s attention away from the presenter, and thus defeating the whole point of making a presentation - it’s not a reading session, but a time for you to showcase your subject matter expertise and/or convenience the audience to take the next action step, not that you can put together some PPTs.

Link to article

Housing

December 28, 2006 in Professional by Ray | 1 comment

To further demonstrate my point of housing hitting the bottom and rebounding, here’s a great article with housing data that just came out today:

U.S. Existing Home Sales Rose 0.6% in November to 6.28 Mln Rate - Bloomberg

Conclusion: I’m bullish as I always was.

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Math Will Rock Your World!

December 26, 2006 in Personal, Professional by Ray | No comments

A large part of my job is to gather huge amounts of raw data and draw conclusions from these raw data. In a sense, I predict the future based on mathematical models. That is why I find myself relating to everything this article represents. In my opinion, Math Will Rock Your World is one of the best articles of 2006, and the missing link to Friedman’s The World Is Flat.

Check out the article here: HTML with discussions, PDF

BusinessWeek_Math.gif

Commercial real estate / CMBS looking attractive, jumps in (Update 2)

November 28, 2006 in Professional by Ray | No comments

*Updated on 11-28-06*

*Update 2, fund up: RWX*

Here’s a snap shot of my updated Global Markets Notes/Outlook regarding real estate. Yes, everyone’s saying how the “bubble” (if there really is one) is bursting, but commercial real estate is a completely different ballgame and is more attractive than ever. I’m eager to see the first international real estate ETF go live soon.

  • Real Estate
    • Real estate did not and is unlikely to rise/fall with equity/FI market
    • Localization
    • Bloomberg REIT index up 20%+ YTD (11-20-06)
    • ‘07 forecast: 50/50 (11-20-06)
    • Residential (11-26-06)
      • Housing market will be affected by seasonality
      • Residential RE constructions down 17.4% Q3, most since 1991
      • Existing home sales down 12.7% Q3 YOY
      • Foreclosures up 42% since Oct. 05
      • Prices down 1.2% - NAR - underestimated
      • Rising income/cheaper fuel offset declining home values
      • Volume down but prices up in coastal areas
    • Commercial (11-06)
      • Not highly correlated w/ residential RE: rental/leasing up when construction/new home sales down
      • Rising rents & tighter vacancy rates in future due to:
        • White-collar jobs are growing
        • Institutional investors’ demand growing for higher return than treasury & lower volatility than equity
      • Blackstone LBO of Zell’s $20B trust (11-20-06)
        • Largest takeover of RE company
        • More M&A to follow as Blackstone reserves $13B for real estate (11-26-06)
        • Zell accepted 8.5% premium, eager to sell
      • CMBS (11-9-06)
        • Started in early 90s & currently in high growth mode w/ deals up to $2B
        • High growth & preferred financing structure in South Africa w/ $0.5B underwriting within last 12 months by Growthpoint (11-06)
        • Not highly regulated industry
        • Delinquencies declined Q1~Q3 ‘06, largest drop in hotels (61%) due to improved sector health

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