stlplaceA while ago Amazon launched Endless, its shoes and hand bags division. To promote its web site, Endless is giving away $5 for Overnight shipping. Maybe guys at Amazon learned that from Google Checkout promotion?
Zappos, the largest shoe store on the web, is continuing gain momentum. I used their service and was satisfied with them.
When I was in Shanghai in March, I watched a special program on China-CBN (Di Yi Cai Jing) talking about “school for migrant workers’ kids”. Not surprisringly, the schools’ condition usually are much inferior to same level schools attended by “city kids”. The Shanghai Municipal Goverment gave 60 m Yuan this year for the “migrant kids’ school”. This is nice, but not too enough to cover all the kids, because they are millions of migrants workers in Shanghai, and I believe there are at least one million kids attending those schools (so roughly 60 Yuan per kid).
I got some more Home Inns (HMIN) today. Nothing fundamental has changed at Home Inns, as I said in my previous post.
Separately, Ma Yun, the big mouth at Alibaba, speaks again. We all know he likes to brag about how great will Alibaba become, but this time he is saying “China does not have a pure Internet company”. Duh? How about Baidu?
This is a part of the deals reached during Ms. Wu Yi and Mr. Paulson’s talk today. Here is an excerpt from MSN.
“Under the agreement announced Wednesday, starting this year, U.S. carriers will be able to operate 13 new daily flights to China within five years. One new flight will be awarded this year and one in 2008, four new flights will be awarded in 2009, three more in 2010, and two each in 2011 and 2012.”
I also found the following very interesting, from Financial Times.
I believe most people would think that Postal Services is usually cheaper compared to UPS or Fedex, this is not always. Today I was about to send a parcel at US Postal Service (USPS), but there were 13 people ahead of me. Don’t want to wait for another 20 minutes, and also want to check out the Fedex Ground, I decided to leave. I went to their web site first. The rate was $16.95, which is lower than the quote I got from USPS web site.
After the comparison shopping, I sent the item via Fedex Ground at local Kinko (Fedex) store. One caveat in Fedex is the packaging material is more expensive than USPS. I packed the stuff using my own box so this is not an issue.
Mr. Greenspan (former US Fed chief), Jim Rogers (legendary investor), or Shang Fu Lin (Chairman, China Securities Regulation Committee)?
For me this is an easy pick (the latter two). But it seems people in the west believe in Mr. Greenspan better. Now after making comments in Feb (which partially caused the Feb. 27 crash), the old man speaks again. Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot respect for Mr. Greenspan regarding economy indicators, monetary policy, all the good stuffs, but not on the Chinese stock market.
His name is “Dai Tou Da Ge”, here is his blog at Netease (163.com). According to many sources, his blog was more popular than Ms. Xu Jinglei’s blog at Sina, although he only blogged for three months. Not surprisingly his topic is Stock Market. I read his first page, interestingly everyday he started first sentence with “the market did exactly as I expected,…”. I did not verify his claims but it seems many people believed it.
Anyway, I think the music in his blog is pretty good. Oh, that “Si Le Dou Yao Ai” is very popular in Shanghai these days 🙂
So $3 gas is back. Last time it was Katrina, this time I heard it was because some of the refineries were taken offline for maintainence. For us average consumers, since we can not trade in current (regular) car for hybrid, nor can we buy cheaper gas and store it somewhere. We have to fill up when the gas price is cheap (relatively). I found a good sign of gas price going up. There are two gas stations near my house: Shell and Exxon. Usually they don’t raise the price at the same time. So…when I saw one gas station already changed the price (up), I would go to the other one and fill up.
Here are the results. I listened to Home Inns Q1 conference call (see the scripts here).
Some of the positives:
1) Revenue growth 65% Year over Year. Profit did not follow because of foreign change loss, tax expense and share based compensation. Note the foreign exchange loss won’t be one time as they continue moving the IPO money (in USD) to China (RMB), and you know these days the USD depreciates (wrt RMB) non-stop.
I went to West County mall in the weekend, my first trip after coming back. Among all the St. Louis malls, I like West County the best because it has some of my favorite products (or stores): Apple store; Journeys, the shoe store has Crocs and Heelys; Dick’s Sporting Good has Crocs and Under Armour. Here is my impression on them.