verdatel

MIT's technology review is a pretty good magazine for the newer research that is "stirring" the pot. They also review the latest papers on "ArXiV".. a service for researchers to put up pre-prints of their working papers.

www.technologyreview.com

Such a simple heuristic, but I think with far-reaching consequences. Last week, NNT posted a link to a news article with talked about a new law in an Indian state that required headmasters to taste the food that was served in the school cafeteria. This was initiated after a bad case of contaminated food and deaths resulting from it.

its about the opportunity cost for me. An hour of my time spent doing actual research versus prettifying my slides is a no-brainer.

I'd use this as an academic tool.. I have presentations to give quarterly to representatives from funding agencies.. Typically around 8-12 slides in my presentations.. the slides I see/ use are really boring.. whenever I see a well done presentation, I perk up and pay attention. If you use this as a potential niche.. some high quality graphing work etc. would be nice..

Index funds are great when you want to do direct deposits every month.. the don't have front-load costs so you can just set up an automatic transfer.

If you invest in ETF's which are traded like stocks then you have to contend with trading fees. The rule of thumb (I've garnered from reading blogs/ literature) is that if your portfolio is < $50,000, then set up automatic payments for all index funds.. however if you have a larger portfolio then it would be worth getting a discount brokerage account and using that to invest in ETFs. This is because having a larger portfolio means that your brokerage house will offer you a discounted trading fee. The advantage of ETFs is generally a lower management-expense ratio than index funds and more importantly you get access to things like REITs and other non-standard financial vehicles.

just did a startup weekend in Vancouver.. brilliant experience.. you should definitely do it. Will open up your eyes to a lot of possibilities.. you don't necessarily have to be an engineer/developer/designer.

thats a great recommendation. Thanks murtza

EDIT: Also.. just a quick market survey.. would you pay for this? Let's say a subscription-based service.. what would you pay for the capability to get sentiment about a stock ticker and related terms in a social media feed.

what are the legal hurdles you envisage? A simple recommendation based on social sentiment is what I'm thinking about.