Reading Time: < 1 minute Apple and Cisco settled the dispute around the iPhone trademark, according to Mac News. One interesting comment I can not stop laughing is:  “if Apple leaves the table smiling, you better check your wallet.” Seriously, I agree with the author Cisco guys are smart too. “Consumers are so with Apple these days, it would have

Reading Time: < 1 minute Found this through my friend thesunsfinancialdiary. I briefly went through their F1 prospectus. I had to admit I’m not in best position to evaluate their business: they have 5 divisions providing services from creating adverstisement to customer research. I can think of a St. Louis based privately held company called Maritz which does something similar: they organized conferences for other companies, send

Reading Time: < 1 minute New Oriental (EDU, based in Beijing): every Chinese student came to US for study knows that, no need to say anymore.  Home Inns (Rujia, HMIN, based in Shanghai): my friend in my hometown told me about this in summer 2004. He is a small business owner and he thinks that Rujia is clean and economical. He would stay there when he visits Shanghai as long as

Reading Time: < 1 minute From Yahoo, this is the link, by Dory Devlin: My take on this: if your tax situation is straightford, go ahead and use the free software. But on the other hand, if you buy and sell stocks, have a home business, changed jobs or moved last year,…you will be better off use the paid version.

Reading Time: < 1 minute I listened to Crocs earning call this evening. The numbers look good, it beats the Street expecation as I expected. They also raised Q1 2007 and 2007 full year guidance. Some of the interesting developments: 1) Nascar cross licensing (cross sell). Since they started Disney relationship in summer 2006, they expanded to NFL, NCAA football, NHL

Reading Time: < 1 minute I am not talking about the tips in the restaurants; I am talking about the stocks going up after we sell them, doesn’t that happen all the time? Just like it goes down after we bought it? My most recent example is New Oriental (EDU, it seems to me the traders did not take too

Reading Time: 2 minutes There are two ways to reserve a room in Home Inns (Rujia) Or other China Economy Hotels: by phone (400 820 3333 or 800 820 3333) or use the web (or ask your friend as a 3rd way). For Home Inns, my experience is reserve 2 weeks in advance for some of the “hot” locations such as

Reading Time: < 1 minute There are lots of Crocs Knockoffs on the market these days. I found some on Payless and Target. The price is about half as the real ones. Don’t know the quality and the customer wearing experience though. Also, I found this CrocFan blog. I added the link under “Blogroll” at the right. And this article on seekingalpha is

Reading Time: < 1 minute   Source: Google CN and Yahoo China (Why did not baidu come up with something?) I noticed Yahoo (US version) has lots of pictures about Lunar New Year. While Chinese young generation are embracing the western holidays such as Christmas and Valentine’s Day (in some ways western holidays are overshadowing the most important Chinese holiday), western world

Reading Time: < 1 minute I used to sell used books, mostly textbooks on Half.com, an eBay subsidirary. Half does a decent job for me and their commission is reasonable (about 10%?). But I have not enjoyed much success selling books there lately. It could be one of the two reasons: My books are unpopular; Half.com is not popular anymore. I started