Cognitive Labs

Like cicadas emerging from the ground after a long developmental slumber and leaving their chitinous shell on the soil or in a downed, rotting tree trunk - rather than 17 years, however, this cycle was 79 years - i-bankers Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are going to be reclassified as integrated banks, allowing them to take deposits and make commercial loans. In 1929, just as Gatsby was muttering his last 'old sport' the bank holding company act of 1929 forbade investment banks from the bread-and-butter banking business, in an attempt to put a drogue chute on some of the sleight of hand financial practices that had created and amplified the roaring 20's.

Reversing this decision puts us back into the landscape of the Herbert Hoover administration. (Hoover test) All of these gyrations may create opportunities for smaller banks to bulk up and fill the gap left by the recently departed.

Morgan Stanley was the lead underwriter for UPS - in what (at the time) was the largest initial public offering yet. Stock held by founders and heirs and pre-IPO mgmt was set aside as Class A - a new class "B" was created for retail purchasers. Only around 10% of the equity was sold, with different voting rights than Class A. The previous largest offering was Dow Chemical co, and the subsequent largest was AT&T Wireless.

Labels: goldman, hoover, morgan, sachs, stanley

image (c) morgan, lewis, bockius


In web 2.0, there is a dichotomy between openness and protection. User generated content is often released without restriction and can freely be cited, mashed, indexed and referenced. This is often seen in sites that crawl content of encyclopedia services and create essentially the same thing, with a different css template. Free content is a good thing because it drives visitors who might eventually make a purchase, or register to become a valuable user. Novelists and writers are increasingly giving away e-books in this schema.(Of course it helps to have Oprah say "go to xyz.com and download this book...")

On the other hand, technologies with unique aspects are still protected by patents. For example, in our case we retain Morgan, Lewis, and Bockius in Palo Alto Square - which has done an excellent job in managing our portfolio of issued patents and trademarks, and worked with us to develop new I.P. It's a firm with extensive domain expertise in patent development and litigation, handling some of the biggest names out there. Even the secret formula for a vitamin or soda-pop (in addition to technology) can be safeguarded in such a way.

Labels: e-books, lewis, morgan, oprah

New home page look, now that soccer season is over.


Read up on the life of Hearst and the Julia Morgan created wonderland.(No fee for us involved)

Amazon.com:
The epic scope of historian David Nasaw's biography matches the titanic personality and achievements of William Randolph Hearst (1862-1951), who built "the nation's first media conglomerate" from a single San Francisco newspaper. Based on previously unavailable sources, including Hearst's personal papers, Nasaw's long but absorbing narrative gives a full-bodied account of the often contradictory mogul: "a huge man with a tiny voice; a shy man who was most comfortable in crowds ... an autocratic boss who could not fire people; a devoted husband who lived with his mistress." Wife Millicent Hearst and actress-inamorata Marion Davies also emerge with more complexity than in previous portraits like Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, whose factual inaccuracies Nasaw dissects. The author tempers the usual simplistic account of Hearst's political evolution from fire-breathing leftist to red-baiting conservative, calling him "a classic liberal" who believed in less-is-more government and deplored fascism as much as communism. Fresh insights and elegantly turned phrases abound in Nasaw's depiction of Hearst's activities as newspaper publisher, movie producer, and politician, but what's even more intriguing is the poignant personal drama of a man born "in the city of great expectations on the edge of the continent" who was buried 89 years later in San Francisco, "the place he used to know."

Labels: cambria, chief, hearst, morgan, neptune, sansimeon