My Reading Highlights 11/11 - 11/17

I haven't had much time to catch up on many interesting articles this week.   Here are a few that I found interesting.

Is Trend Following Dead

This was a pretty lengthy read which probably suck all the available time I had to find other interesting topics but I thought it was an interesting discussion on Managed Futures.  In other terms predictive analytics.  This article comes from an commodity investment point of view and provides some valuable thoughts in following the trend line and when trends are not the best indicator due to volatility   

Now THIS is the 'Right Way' to Start a Company

Having started my own business and knowing all too well the pains that go along with it I found this Business Insider post pretty spot on.  I agree with the characteristics they pointed out as the right approach when talking about a new start up called Percolate:

There are a few things Gross and Brier did in their startup's earliest days that set them up for success.

• They each worked for marketing companies before founding Percolate.
• When they had enough knowledge and industry connections, they quit.
• They bootstrapped until they proved their model.
• The used outside capital to step on the gas.

Interesting Interview on Predictive Analytics - CUE

Last year I was using Friday quite a bit. Friday basically logged your day from the use of your mobile phone.  The idea is that if you know how you spend your time you can optimize what you do in a better way.   It is billed as a personal assistant sometimes but the power is in the analytics it performs.  It did give me some insights that were interesting but I'm not sure I got the full potential out of the idea.

I recently bought a Nexus 7 with Jelly Bean installed.  It has a great new feature called Google Now which I really like.  It basically provides you "cards" that anticipate what you want to know.  It is invasive and requires you to give it access to your other Google services e.g. Calendar and Chrome searches, but it works pretty well.  I'll blog about that more later.

I came across another similar tech called Cue.  It is only available for the iPhone.  Here is an interesting YouTube interview from Scoble that is worth watching.  There are some interesting discussions on the topic of predictive analytics to help you with your day.