Obama, Medvedev, iPhone, TrimTabs

Here is the week in Preview:

1. Will Barack punch his ticket on this second version of "Super Tuesday" in which Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island hit the polls? Barack and Clinton square off in what should be the deciding battle of the race for the Democratic candidacy.

If Barack Obama defeats Hillary Clinton in Texas or Ohio tomorrow, he will take control of a unified Democratic Party and enter the race against John McCain with an already-established reputation as a political giant- killer.

Hat Tip: Bloomberg

2. Putin's hand-picked successor Dmitry Medvedev wins the election:

Dmitry Medvedev won Russia's presidential election, giving him a mandate to succeed Vladimir Putin. Russian monitors complained of election-law violations. Medvedev had 70.2 percent of the vote with 98.1 percent of returns counted at 7:30 a.m. in Moscow today, according to the Central Election Commission. The Commission will announce the result at 10 a.m.

Medvedev, 42, became the favorite after Putin named him as his chosen successor on Dec. 10. Putin then enjoyed approval ratings of more than 80 percent. A week later, Putin agreed to serve as Medvedev's prime minister, keeping a pledge to retain influence and setting the stage for a dual leadership that's unprecedented in modern Russian history.

Hat Tip: Bloomberg

3. Is Apple opening up the iPhone on Thursday?

Apple has invited the media to an event Thursday at the company's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, where it plans to present an "iPhone software roadmap." One of the event's highlights will be a software-development kit that will let independent programmers build iPhone applications, according to Apple's invitation.

Hat Tip: WSJ

4. Labor Market Friday - The first Friday of the month should give us a taste of how many jobs we gained in February. But, thanks to Barry Ritholtz we've learned to not trust these numbers. After all the NFP data did overstate job growth by 14.4% in 2007. The more accurate data point is probably from TrimTabs:

TRIMTABS, which estimates employment growth using data from an online job index and an analysis of income tax withheld versus job creation rates, has been far more accurate than the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For example, in 2006, the government’s initial estimates of employment growth came in at 1.52 million jobs. But the bureau revised that data upward in February 2007, for a total of 2.24 million.
By comparison, TrimTabs’ estimates of 2006 employment growth, using real-time data, totaled 2.39 million jobs. The firm reported those figures to clients contemporaneously.

Last week, TrimTabs told clients it estimated that 77,000 jobs would be lost in February; Wall Street economists are calling for a gain of 30,000 for the month.

Since October 2007, TrimTabs estimates, the economy has lost about 175,000 jobs, the first sustained employment drop since early 2003.

Hat Tip: CR

Next Generation Search Technology

True Knowledge is still in beta, but the idea of "semantic search" is an interesting one:

How Many Transistors Can you Fit in Your Dot?

It may be because I don't follow Intel too closely but I was surprised that I didn't know that Intel had already rolled out a chip based on the next generation 45-nanometer manufacturing process. You can almost see the smile behind the mask of this Intel engineer holding a 45-nm wafer that has roughly 1.9 billion transistors (do you think he double checked that count just to make sure?). Intel is planning to spend $8 billion to upgrade factories to design the chips.

Just last week I wrote a blog post showing how a gig just isn't what it used to be. In that same post I wrote that it could be 15-20 years before transistors reach the size of atoms. Now Intel is saying they'll have 32-nanometer chips in production in 2009. To be sure the transistors on a 32-nm fab are not the size of atoms. But just how big are they? Stacy over at GigaOm breaks it down for us:

The different nodes measure the size of the chips, with the 32-nanometer node containing 4 million transistors in a dot the size of a period.

Okay so if the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every 2 years we have the following 15 year schedule starting in 2008:

Year 1: 2009 - 4 million transistors in a dot the size of a period

Year 3: 2011 - 8 million transistors in a dot the size of a period
Year 5: 2013 - 16 million transistors in a dot the size of a period
Year 7: 2015 - 32 million transistors in a dot the size of a period
Year 9: 2017 - 64 million transistors in a dot the size of a period
Year 11: 2019 - 128 million transistors in a dot the size of a period
Year 13: 2021 - 256 million transistors in a dot the size of a period
Year 15: 2023 - 512 million transistors in a dot the size of a period

So in fifteen years Intel should be squeezing 512 million transistors into a dot the size of a period? That sounds like a lot, but is it approaching the size of an atom? I'm not all too familiar with atoms, but it seems the diameter of an atom is around 10^-8 cm. This doesn't mean much to me as I'm sure it doesn't to you, so here are some comparisons I found on to make this problem a little easier to grasp:

• "An atom is a million times smaller than the thickest human hair."
• "Take a piece of spaghetti and divided it 12 times. That comes out to be 4,096 pieces of spaghetti. If you were to divide each of those pieces 30 more times that would be about the size of an atom."
• "If an atom were the size of a period, a person would have to be over 1000 miles tall."
• "A single carat diamond with a mass of 0.2 g contains about 10 sextillion (10²²) atoms of carbon."

Okay I give up, my brain just wasn't mean to understand atoms. Maybe one of my smart readers can tell me if 512 million transistors in the size of a period is getting close to the atomic level? I for one would love to know . . .

1 Gig Isn't What it Used to Be . . .

One gigabyte of computer storage (between 1 and 1.07 billion bytes depending on who you listen to) used to be a big deal (quite literally actually, see picture below). Nowadays flash disks do 1 Gig in about the size of your thumbnail and a single Blu-ray disc can hold 50 Gigs. Technological progress (in everything from transistor prices, processing speed, memory capacity, pixels per dollar etc.) is truly expanding in an exponential fashion. This is of course precisely what Intel co-founder Gordon Moore noted back in the 1960's when he noted that the number of transistors on integrated circuits was doubling every 2 years. The only limit to Moore's law will probably come when transistors reach the size of atoms, which could be in 15-20 years.


What does all this computing power mean? I love what Ray Kurzweil has to say:

"A $1000 of computing power is now somewhere between an insect and a mouse brain, it will intersect human intelligence in terms of capacity sometime in the 2020's . . . this is at an early stage, but you can show with the exponential growth in the amount of information about the brain and the exponential improvement in the resolution of brain scanning, we will succeed in reverse engineering the human brain sometime in the 2020's."

Scary huh?

Hat Tip: GagdetLite

Web 2.0 Bubble?

Last week we posted a video of Peter Thiel saying that there is absolutely no bubble in technology. This week we offer the opposite view. We think you will enjoy this one . . .



Hat Tip: Ritholtz

iPhone Launch a Success

After much anticipation the iPhone was released on Friday. Most reports indicate that the devices are running smoothly, although roughly 2% of subscribers reported problems with activation. The activation delays -- which rest squarely on the shoulders of AT&T -- led those effected to refer to the iPhone as the iBrick. All told however Apple moved between 500-550K of the devices over the first weekend with many of the stores selling out on Friday. Apple's stock seemed to take the busy weekend in stride. Though down in mid-day trading the stock is only off 0.25% at 121.74 and has stabilized after briefly nearing $120.

Four journalists got to preview the iPhone for 4 weeks prior to its release. If there experiences mirror that of the 500,000 new users then things bode well for Apple. In addition many now expect Apple to mimic its iPod success by releasing new versions of the iPhone in the coming years that both fix current glitches and offer more attractive price points:

The Chosen Four: The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, David Pogue of the New York Times, USA Today's Edward Baig and Newsweek's Mr. Levy. Their initial reviews came out Wednesday and, for the most part, the four were pleased with the job that Mr. Jobs had done.

David Pogue had to learn to "use the force" while tapping out letters on the iPhone's virtual keyboard, but overall gives Apple its due: "As the ball player Dizzy Dean once said, 'It ain't bragging if you done it.'"

Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret said concerns about the lack of a physical keyboard "turned out in our tests to be a nonissue." After taking the iPhone to Starbucks, airports, and Fenway Park, the verdict: "Despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer."

Edward Baig pointed out that the iPhone may not be for everyone: "It's pricey. It lacks certain features found on some rival devices… Your employer may prevent you from receiving corporate e-mail on the device." But he still reveres it as a "prodigy," and likes the idea of not having to schlep around with an iPod and a cellphone in your pocket.

Steven Levy was pleased he didn't have to crack a manual to use any of the iPhone features, and got a satisfying run of baseball scores, Neil Young concerts, YouTube videos and weather conditions before his battery ran out.

I am going to stick with my Blackberry for the time being. However, if Apple is able to make headway with getting the iPhone to work with corporate email and if I can stick with Verizon, I may be a late convert.