kenneth cohen

Oh how I have missed BF5. This is amazing.

The greatest thing to come out of an IE commercial in a long time

David McCullough Jr.

(NYT link)

You know you have it pretty good when 23% YoY growth is considered an off quarter. 

via splatf:

But the big-picture story is that this is a slower period ahead of the expected new iPhone and potential new iPad this fall (and maybe someday, a television). Apple’s 23% year-over-year revenue growth was its slowest since 12% growth in the June 2009 quarter, and was almost down at Google’s 21% level!

..yet Google is the one trading at 18x earnings, while Apple is hovering around 13.5x.

Mac growth: pretty low, but this is expected by now.

iPad growth: not bad, but margins here are minimal. Even with the introduction of an iPad mini, I don’t expect huge contributions to profit just because the cost of production is so high.

iPhone growth: disappointing, but expected. This is where the money is made and this is the product that everyone is waiting for. As MG Siegler said yesterday, people actually care about Apple products and are just waiting to buy the next big thing. iPhone 5 sales will be the driver behind a monster six months for Apple.

http://www.splatf.com/2012/07/apple-jun12earnings-charts/

There are few activities in life I enjoy more than cooking. I have fallen in love with (almost) the entire process; from researching recipes and piecing together meals, to looking for the freshest ingredients at the store, and of course, the actual cooking. The only part I hate is cleaning the dishes, but that’s what friends (and dishwashers) are for. 

I rarely cook a meal without meticulous research for every dish going into my meal. When I am rushing home from work, I either head to a blog (try Food52 to start) or Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything: Vegetarian iPhone app. When I have a bit more time, I usually mull over a few cookbooks and look for something new. I love that blogs are limitless and I can immediately know whether or not others have enjoyed a recipe. That being said, I will always be a sucker for having a real cookbook filled with sauce-stained pages where I can modify and flag some of my favorite recipes.

My hope is that some day (soon) we will be able to build an online community around cookbooks while never losing the physical cookbook. Just a few things I want to see:

—I would love to see an app+cookbook pairing when buying a cookbook

—Recipes should be more interactive, with videos showing some of the more complicated techniques involved

—Chefs/authors should be able to add to their existing cookbooks in order to keep their content relevant and make changes according to the community

Just waiting for someone to innov(ate). 

Cool look into Kickstarter projects in the NYT today. Great design leads to lots of funding. (Taken with instagram)

Taken with instagram

It’s not every day that your baking idol actually comments on something you made. Thank you, Joanne Chang of Flour Bakery for making my year:

And then came this:

Now life is really complete. 

Santa Monica (Taken with instagram)

Taken with instagram

Somebody That I Used To Know (ft Kimbra) by Gotye

shared from exfm

Congratulations to Highlight on a mention in a NYT article today:

Some apps, like Highlight, even allow people to “bookmark” people they enjoyed meeting and will remind them of that interaction the next time they cross paths, even if it is a year later, in a restaurant across the country.

“We now have an architecture built around the Web that allows for a new kind of services,” Mr. Davison said. Facebook and Twitter have become ubiquitous, he said, as has the presence of always-on, location-aware smartphones that work in tandem to “create a sixth sense that surfaces data and information that already exists around you.”

It will definitely be interesting to see which of these geo-location friend finders comes out on top (if any at all). 

I am officially on a TED talk binge. Naturally, any TED talk involving food + health is going to blow my mind. 

Taken with instagram

technical or fundamental? hmm.. (Taken with instagram)

I came across this article by Robert Shiller yesterday right after talking with a peer about what appears to be asymmetric information about the performance of the stock market.

Via NY Times:

Yet only about half of all American adults have money in the stock market, directly or indirectly. So maybe something else is going on. If people can’t figure out the financial markets on their own, they can entrust their money to professionals or heed professional advice. The real problem may not be that many people lack investing savvy or smarts. Perhaps what they lack is trust, or confidence in whom to trust.

While companies are now churning out consistently strong results, it seems as though these numbers are still not enough to convince the average investor that we are in a safe market. Many times, the negative public sentiment towards large corporations is completely justified. However, we cannot apply this feeling to the market as a whole. There are companies out there with competent management that are undeservedly being dragged into the slums. For this reason, I believe now is a great time to seek out these companies and begin investing with confidence once again.