The Online Investing AI Blog

It’s been said that resourcefulness is the ultimate resource. I think that for companies, innovation is the ultimate resource. Especially after seeing this screencast from Gregg at Envy Labs on Dan Pink’s blog. It really got me thinking about how innovation creates success for companies.

How awesome is that! They created a cute and funny video that people see when they unsubscribe. I don’t know if it has really reduced the unsubscribe rate. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it has.

What else is awesome about the Punish Derrick video?

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Business Strategy, Internet, Success flow, fun, groupon, innovation, punish derrick, Success, unsubscribe, work

Pic by Peter Zoon @ Flickr

Americans know how to market.

From the pet rock to Milli Vanilli, Americans can package and promote the most unlikely products. It’s nothing new. Gone with the Wind made the Civil War sexy. The Wizard of Oz let people look over the rainbow in the depths of the Great Depression.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But, a preoccupation on marketing is weakening product development. Companies, for instance, are spending more time and effort promoting products than conceptualizing and creating them.

It’s become a global obsession.

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Accelerating Technology, Internet, Money, Online Investing AI, Success, US Economy global, ideas, innovation, internet marketing, market, marketshare, products, value

Depression is more than just a name for sliding GDP numbers. True, it may be an economic condition; but, it can also be a mass psychological effect that turns into an dire economic feedback loop.

People are depressed and the economy suffers; the economy suffers and people get more depressed. And so on. Think of Japan in the 1980s.

Forget profits and jobs. We know they have been damaged. What is more frightening–and far more devastating–is that the psyche has been damaged because of the recent financial turmoil. Factories can be rebuilt and jobs can be created, but when people stop believing, the chances for recovery are slim.

There’s one more sign that our collective conscious is slipping into a deeper funk.

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Business Strategy, Dreams Come True, Money, Online Investing AI, Success, US Economy depression, innovation, invention, patents, recession

Somewhere.

As you read this post, there are dozens of aircraft circling, thousands of feet in the air, with very little human intervention. Computers are taking in dozens of inputs–speed, weather conditions, altitude, direction, etc.–and piloting multi-ton metal machines.

Would Orville and Wilbur Wright have ever envisioned this?

Automated Trading systems, which have been part of the financial world for years, are still cloaked in a layer of misconception that early aviation pioneers would have understood.

This is due to three factors: media perception, the current reality, and the vision of the technology’s potential.

When it comes to financial innovations, the media is guided by fear and a lack of understanding. While healthy skepticism is good in our reporters and editors, this excessive worry about the future has indoctrinated people into fearing ALL that is new. The media should be educating users on how to embrace innovations, like Automated Trading, intelligently.

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Accelerating Technology, Automated Trading, Internet, Investing, Money, Online Investing AI, US Economy Automated Trading, finance, innovation, Investing, pioneer, wealth

Dr. Evil would be proud.

The Mike Myers character always dreamed of sharks equipped with laser beams. The Lawrence Livermore Lab’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) may make laser-tipped great whites look like exotic gold fish.

NIF is strapping 192 lasers together with 60 miles of mirrors and fiber optics, crystals and light amplifiers to zap a tiny bit of hydrogen. But, theoretically, the intense blast of light energy with create fusion, turning the hydrogen into helium and release a lot of energy.

How much energy? Say this with your pinky finger next to your mouth, Dr. Evil style, to get the full effect–5 trillion watts of energy! That’s 1,000 times more energy that the U.S. makes in a year.

And, if it’s successful, it should be enough to totally destroy the energy cartels that currently hold a stranglehold over the world’s development.

I’m not surprised. Here’s why.

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Accelerating Technology, Money, Online Investing AI, US Economy electricity, energy, fusion, fusion energy, innovation, laser, Livermore Laboratory, OPEC, singularity

Timujin, a Mongolian child, had been the victim of a string of bad luck.

His father had been murdered. The tribe he belonged to abandoned him on the brutal Mongolian steppes in winter. His family was close to starving.

He wasn’t supposed to live, or become a Khan, let alone become a Khagan (emperor).

But Timujin, or Genghis Khan as history would call him, overcame all those challenges before him to become the emperor of the largest contiguous empire the world had ever seen.

How he did this–and how you can overcome  your own financial challenges–is through guidance based on a set of principles that helped minimize risk and maximize rewards.

This wisdom rests in three simple, but vital ideas.

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Business Strategy, Internet, Investing, Online Investing AI, Success financial industry, genghis khan, history, innovation, Investing, Online Investing AI, patterns, stock picking, wisdom

We’ll explore one more mistake people make to forge the chains of wage slaves–people who give their time for money.

Wage slaves don’t believe their ideas matter.  During the day they’ll have dozens of ideas that can range from time-saving methods to money-making concepts. But they rarely act on them.

They’re just ideas they think. And ideas are a dime a dozen. Plus, these ideas are the boss’s property. He or she deserves them.

Each day, they use their brains to solve problems and seize opportunities to make someone else money. But they never try to turn that knowledge into money.

After all, anyone can do what they do.

People who have freed themselves from wage slavery know this is not true.

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Business Strategy, Dreams Come True, Online Investing AI, Success ideas, innovation, invent, invention, wage slavery

When you and your group of entrepreneurs are faced with a problem, or are looking for new product idea or business strategy, you should consider a “brain jam.”

The brain jam, according to an article in the Investor’s Business Daily, is a brainstorming session that is more like a jazz jam session than an idea-collecting event. Usually, this creates static and stale sessions with staff competing against each other, not cooperating with each other.

Brainstorms usually have individuals pitching their own ideas, but a brain jam builds on ideas and gives people the freedom to mash up ideas and collaborate on idea generation.

Here’s how to start:

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Accelerating Technology, Business Strategy, Internet, Online Investing AI collaboration, cooperation, idea collection, idea generation, ideas, innovation, jazz, solo

When I was in school, lots of people borrowed my notes. It wasn’t that my handwriting was great… I enjoyed going to classes–for the most part–and was able to condense a lot of knowledge and categorize the lecture.

I also had an ability to understand the professor or teacher’s vocal cues to recognize what information might be included on a test. And I would note that with a star or underline that statement.

My friends usually hated taking notes.

Now, Study Blue, an online company, is rewarding students that can take notes. Students get paid to take notes and share these notes with other members of Study Blue.

Study Blue is a great idea for students, but it also may represent a step in the direction of collaborative intelligence and collective intelligence, which we call “CI” at Online Investing AI.

Collective intelligence, CI, crowdsourcing, or whatever else you want to call it, is a way to tap the massive potential among groups of people, especially people directed toward one goal. And, before I start sounding like some type of Maoist collectivist, the idea uses some of Adam Smith’s primary directives, like the division of labor.

By breaking tasks into specific, small duties, crowdsourcing starts to resemble an army of ants that can dissect a picnic in no time at all.

Study Blue might just be a brief glimpse into the synergistic power of collective intelligence and technology in the future.

Online Investing AI CI, collaboration, collective intelligence, innovation, notes, students, study blue

I had a chat with a friend last week.

It was quick because he told me he was on the way to meet some potential partners for a new business. He’s got big ideas about mobile phone technology.

“Starting a business in this economy?” I asked, somewhat surprised, even though we’re doing the same thing.

He said, “Great ideas don’t read the papers.”

Wow. That blew me away.

I don’t believe in big media. I really don’t believe in big corporations. The layers of yes-men and yes-women form a barrier to innovation.

There’s only one thing worse than big corporations and that’s the biggest corporation in the world: the United States government. If corporations make innovation difficult, a myriad of mini-corporations called departments and agencies, form an impenetrable swamp to the entrepreneur. What’s worse is that a corporation with an unsound business model will eventually collapse; a poorly-performing agency is given more money.

What I do believe in, however, is my friends and their ideas. There are a lot of smart people out there who have the courage to pursue their visions, no matter what challenges arrayed against them. We should not hamper them.

Unlocking free minds is the soul of innovation and the only cure to our economic ills.

Business Strategy, Dreams Come True, Online Investing AI business, government, ideas, individual, individuality, innovation